Mindful Eating for the Holidays

Savor your favorite dishes without food coma

by: Due Quach

The phrase “feast or famine” describes how I used to relate to food. As a kid, on the special occasions I was treated to my favorite dishes, I would compulsively eat it like it was my last meal on earth. If no one was watching me, I would eat the entire family sized amount all by myself. I would eat until I was so full, I couldn’t move and felt like I could die from bursting.

My entire life, I have had an irrational fear of running out of food. In hindsight, I suspect this fear and these compulsive eating tendencies could be linked to my family escaping from Vietnam when I was about six months old. I starved for several days when our boat ran out of food and experienced a long period of malnutrition during the one and a half years we lived in refugee camps in Indonesia before we were resettled in the United States.  

As I grew older, I developed more self-control and realized my favorite foods were not disappearing. Being surrounded by an abundance of food meant that I did not have to gorge on them like there was no tomorrow. Furthermore, getting sick from overeating enough times forced me to learn the capacity of my stomach.  

However, all these lessons flew out the window during the holidays. Something about the combination of holiday music and decorations, cold weather and snow, the rareness of gathering so many loved ones together, the specialness of holiday foods, having over-indulgence be socially sanctioned, and not wanting to waste any food would lead me to eat double, triple, or quadruple my normal meal size.   

Learning mindfulness changed everything by helping me understand the difference between eating mindlessly and eating mindfully. See table below.

The key to mindful eating is to be able to observe when my mindless eating habits start to kick in and then consciously choose to come back to the mindful eating practice. If while eating, I start to multi-task–meaning watching TV, doing work, or thinking about something else–my autopilot will naturally take over the process of eating, activating hardwired eating habits so my mind can do something else. The only way to not eat on autopilot is to actually pay attention and be present for every step of the eating process.

Mindful eating helps us develop our capacity for interoception, which can be broadly defined as the ability to sense signals originating within the body and also interpret them. Basically, interoception enables us to answer the question “How do I feel?” The interoceptive system is made of special nerve receptors that enable us to sense and assess our physiological condition by tuning in to internal vital signs, such as respiration, heart rate, hunger, thirst, and the need to use the bathroom, as well as our energy levels and emotional state.

Interoception activates the vagus nerve, which serves as the superhighway by which internal organs send signals to the brain. The vagus nerve is a key part of the parasympathetic nervous system, which governs our “rest-and-digest” functions. Interestingly, the fight-or-flight response deactivates the vagus nerve (and the parasympathetic nervous system); conversely, activating the vagus nerve helps the body shift from fight-or-flight to rest-and-digest mode. So tuning in while we eat can increase the activity of the vagus nerve and enable the digestive system to function more optimally.

 

Instructions for mindful eating

When you begin, it helps to eat slowly so you can feel all the micro movements and sensations involved in each step of eating.

• Engage your senses: sight, smell, touch, taste, and sound:
  • Notice what your food looks like with your eyes.
  • Notice how it smells with your nose.
  • Depending on what you are eating, if it makes sense, touch the food and notice its texture in your hands.
  • Notice the initial flavor and the sound as you bite into it.
  • Notice its texture in your mouth and how the texture changes as you chew.
  • Notice how different flavors get released as you chew.
• Observe each step of the process. Notice what muscle movements are required for eating:
  • How do your hands bring food to your mouth?
  • How do your body and head move as you eat?
  • How does your jaw work to bite and chew this particular food? How does the way you bite and chew vary with different types of food?
  • How does your tongue work to taste food and move it around in your mouth?
  • When do you swallow?
  • How do the muscles of your throat contract to swallow the food?
• Give yourself plenty of time to savor every bite. Wait until you finish each mouthful before reaching for the next portion.

• With each bite, send gratitude to all the people who were involved in some way in preparing the food you are eating.
• Tune in to sense and feel what it is like to be in your body. Pay attention to all the flavors that are released and all the sensations in your body as you eat (and drink).
  • Can you feel yourself becoming full?
  • Does your body tell you when you’ve had enough sugar, starch, fat, or salt?
  • What emotions do you feel?
    

You may find as you settle into the practice that your mind will have the tendency to wander off and automatic mindless eating habits may kick in. This is normal and part of the process, especially in the beginning. Simply notice this tendency and gently return to bringing mindful awareness to the experience of eating.

Mindful eating is like re-learning how to eat by appreciating your food and tuning in to your body. It can take time because you are slowing down each step of the process to pay full attention to it. But as you get used to appreciating each bite and tuning in to the signals from your body, you can start to eat mindfully at a more “normal” pace. Over time, mindful eating becomes intuitive. It becomes your natural way to eat.

I hope this article helps you mindfully enjoy your meals this holiday season!

Happy Holidays!  

Mindfulness Explained by a Mind-hacker

An explanation grounded in neuroscience and direct experience

By Due Quach, Founder of Calm Clarity
Featured Image: “Self Reflected in Violets” courtesy of artist Greg Dunn

 

The fact that my first taste of mindfulness meditation in college was a complete disaster helped spur me years later to take up the challenge of developing a mindful leadership training that uses neuroscience to make meditation practices more understandable and concrete. My own initial confusion makes it deliciously gratifying when my clients share that Calm Clarity was the first program that enabled them to really understand what mindfulness and meditation involve.

In 2000, during my senior year of college at Harvard, I took a documentary film-making course and for our final project, we had to make a biography. My partner and I chose as our subject the most interesting person we could find: Aba-la, a Radcliffe scholar who defied categories. She was a Jamaican-American civil rights activist who had since become a Tibetan Buddhist nun. As part of the project, we accompanied her to the Shambhala Center in Boston to film her activities there.

At the center, she asked us to give her some peace and quiet so she could meditate and to our surprise, she challenged us to sit quietly alongside her. I completely failed. The issue wasn’t that my mind was restless — I was used to my racing mind. The problem was that my body couldn’t sit still. In a few minutes, my legs fell asleep and I spent the rest of the meditation miserable and trying hard not to distract the rest of the group with my fidgeting. I quickly concluded that whatever we just did wasn’t right for me. I wouldn’t bother trying meditation again for another decade.

Then around 2010, after reading about brain imaging studies that showed that meditation and mindfulness practices enhanced brain functioning, I became intrigued. As a brain geek, the neuroscience was too compelling not to explore further. In 2012, after being frustrated with unsatisfactory attempts to learn meditation from watching videos online and from teachers who couldn’t explain it in a logical and concrete way, I bought a one-way ticket to Dharamsala, India to get a more direct experience by doing several meditation retreats there. If I still couldn’t make sense of meditation after that immersion, I would simply give up and move on.

Due (first row, second from left) with her retreat group at Tushita Meditation Center, April 2012

 

To my surprise, what I experienced in those retreats enabled me to take mind-hacking to a whole new level. It was astonishing the degree to which my interior world transformed because these retreats enabled my brain to re-wire and break habitual neural pathways at an accelerated rate. I got so fascinated, I kept going deeper and deeper. By the end of 2013, I had developed a prototype for a new science-based approach to teaching and explaining meditation, which I named the Calm Clarity Program.

To provide some context, mindfulness is the English translation of a Buddhist concept called “Samma Sati” in Pali, the original language believed to have been spoken in the region where the Buddha lived in northeast India 2,500 years ago. In the 1970s, when the founders of the Insight Meditation Society adapted meditation teachings for an American audience, they placed a strong emphasis on the concept of mindfulness as “an innate human capacity to deliberately pay full attention to where we are, to our actual experience, and to learn from it” (Jack Kornfield). Then later when Jon Kabat-Zinn created the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program for secular, clinical, and academic settings, he defined mindfulness as “ moment-to-moment awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally.”

The conventional way of teaching mindfulness involves instructing people to sit quietly, usually crossed-legged on the floor, and focus their attention entirely on their breathing. Inevitably, the mind will wander, so in this type of meditation, practitioners have to vigilantly keep guiding their attention back to the breath. It’s hard for beginners not to feel like a failure because they find no matter how hard they try to focus on the breath, the mind jumps all over the place. This is what is called the “monkey mind.”

As a brain geek, I found it interesting that the standard instructions don’t explain that the mind is supposed to wander. In fact, researchers have found that the typical mind wanders within 12 seconds and hypothesize that mind wandering evolved as a way to give our executive functioning neural pathways a break to refuel and to allow creative insights to emerge to the surface of consciousness.

Oftentimes, the instruction to pay attention to the breath in a way that is not grounded in neuroscience tends to give people a misguided notion that mind wandering is a problem, so they start wrestling with their wandering minds. This struggle then becomes a distraction that may prevent a person from experiencing the essence of Samma Sati, which can be more accurately translated as “higher consciousness / remembering.”

As a mind-hacker, I intuitively realized that the aim of Samma Sati could not be to fight against how our brains are evolved to function. For me, Samma Sati involves becoming familiar with how the mind wanders and accepting that we don’t actually control what unfolds inside our minds. Thoughts are really nothing but neural circuits firing. The monkey mind is essentially a chain reaction of neural circuits firing in response to thoughts already in our mind and sensory stimuli triggering associated neural circuits to fire.

The mind has a tendency to weave stories out of whatever neural circuits get activated, which in turn, continuously fuels a tornado of mental activity into which we get lost inside our heads. Often, the voice inside our head projects a fantastic narrative that is far removed from what is actually unfolding right in front of us in the present moment. By getting swept away in our internal ramblings, we become ungrounded from our bodies and spin out into the past or the future. Because of these mechanisms, we spend much of our lives lacking presence.

In the Mahasatipaṭṭhāna-sutta (which means The Great Discourse on the Establishing of Mindfulness), the Buddha explains Samma Sati (which is the 7th component of the Eight-Fold Noble Path). To give a quick synopsis, he is essentially teaching people how to develop the ability to unpack perception, so we can attend to the raw sensations that come in through our sense organs and distinguish these sensations from our mind’s reaction to and interpretation of them.

For me, Samma Sati involves two key components: metacognition and interoception. The word metacognition etymologically means the ability to think about thinking. It involves awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes and the ability to steer and regulate one’s thinking. Interoception refers to our ability to tune into what it feels like to be inside our bodies. The interoceptive system is made of special nerve receptors which enable us to sense our physiological condition and vital signs, such as respiration, heart rate, hunger, thirst, the need to use the bathroom, as well as our energy levels and emotional state.

Practices to cultivate Samma Sati essentially develop metacognition and/or interoception. In these practices we learn to feel the raw sensations that come into our sensory nervous system, notice what they trigger in terms of emotions, feelings, memories, ideas, concepts, and other sensations, and notice what stories arise in our minds in response to the sensations and what gets stirred up within us. Eventually, by being able to observe how perception unfolds and see that sensations, thoughts, and feelings continuously arise and pass away, we lose our attachment or aversion to these phenomena. We eventually gain equanimity and inner freedom by developing detachment from the stories woven by the voice inside our heads. As the tornado of activity inside the mind calms because we stop fueling it, this allows us to be in tune with the present moment and experience a higher consciousness.

With metacognition, I’m able to recognize sensations as sensations, feelings as feelings, thoughts as thoughts, stories as stories, and as a result, I’m no longer lost in a whirlwind of mental activity. Tuning into my interoceptive system naturally grounds me in my own body into the present moment. Together, metacognition and interoception enable me to create space for calmness and clarity to emerge. For me, the experience of Samma Sati is like having the mind become a white canvas on which the brush strokes of my inner wisdom can clearly be perceived and appreciated.

In designing the Calm Clarity Mindful Leadership Program, I intentionally “hacked” traditional mindfulness practices to give people a taste of Samma Sati. After I guide people to directly experience what that inner freedom feels like and how it enables them to respond more effectively to what’s in front of them, they are naturally inspired to continue the practices on their own. When people experience what’s it like to connect to their inner wisdom / higher self, they naturally want to maintain that connection.

It would be wonderful if we all could simply read about Samma Sati and understand it. But unfortunately, Samma Sati is not something that can be learned from reading other people’s accounts. It can only be genuinely understood from direct experience. If you are intrigued by what I have shared, I welcome you to experience Samma Sati for yourself at a Calm Clarity Weekend Retreat.

The Calm Clarity Forgiveness Challenge

Forgiving means empowering yourself.

The year-end holidays are a time to celebrate life. For me, this involves cherishing the present, honoring the past, and dreaming the future. But is it  possible to usher in a new year with open arms if we hold on to past resentments and grudges?  Science shows we have to let go so that we can heal and move on.

Forgiving means releasing negative emotions like anger, bitterness, resentment. Forgiveness is not easy because it’s not a skill that we are taught how to do. For most of us, the ability to forgive is forged from hard-earned wisdom gained from bittersweet life experience.

Fortunately, research now provides valuable insights on therapeutic forgiveness. Controlled scientific studies have validated that people who forgive are much healthier and happier than those who don’t. One of the leading experts in this field, Dr. Everett Worthington, has developed a clinically tested 5-step technique called REACH.

R is for “recall”—remembering the hurt that was done to you as objectively as you can.

E is for “empathize”—trying to understand the viewpoint of the person who wronged you.

A is for the “altruism”—thinking about a time you hurt someone and were forgiven, then mentally and emotionally offering the gift of forgiveness to the person who hurt you. (This takes place internally and doesn’t require your confronting the other person).

C is for “committing”—documenting that you have forgiven the person who wronged you

H is for “holding on”—not forgetting the hurt, but reminding yourself that you made the choice to forgive.

Calm Clarity has adapted the REACH technique into a short 10-minute forgiveness meditation that ends with the compassion meditation practice.  During the holidays, we are providing this meditation as a public service.

The Calm Clarity Forgiveness Meditation

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We hope you find this beneficial.

Happy New Year!  May you be blessed with love, wisdom, happiness, health and prosperity!

Positive emotions broaden our minds

According to Dr. Barbara Frederickson’s research, positive emotions open our minds and enable us to see the bigger picture.  When we feel positive emotions, it’s like a water lily opening at sunrise, nourishing our minds to expand our perspective and enabling us to see interconnections. Positive emotions enhance our ability to collaborate and develop creative solutions to pressing problems.

Dr. Frederickson also discovered positive emotions transform us at the cellular level.  On average, at the cellular level 1% of our cells are renewed each day, so the human body is regenerated every 100 days or the length of a season. One of the most effective ways to increase our “daily diet” of positive emotions is to practice the loving-kindness meditation, which Dr. Frederickson has studied.  When loving-kindness meditation is practiced for 3 months, it leads to profound transformations in our mindset and well-being, which also come through at the cellular level.  The degree to which people experience positive emotions determine whether they languish or flourish!

Another recent study found that people who practice loving-kindness meditation over a long-term period have chromosomes with longer telomeres, a marker associated with longevity and lower risk for cancer.

Studies on the benefits of Loving-Kindness Meditation on health, longevity, and trauma recovery

How positive emotions build physical health: perceived positive social connections account for the upward spiral between positive emotions and vagal tone.

Psychol Sci. 2013 Jul 1;24(7):1123-32. doi: 10.1177/0956797612470827. Epub 2013 May 6. Kok, Beth E & Frederickson, Barbara L.

The mechanisms underlying the association between positive emotions and physical health remain a mystery. We hypothesize that an upward-spiral dynamic continually reinforces the tie between positive emotions and physical health and that this spiral is mediated by people’s perceptions of their positive social connections. We tested this overarching hypothesis in a longitudinal field experiment in which participants were randomly assigned to an intervention group that self-generated positive emotions via loving-kindness meditation or to a waiting-list control group. Participants in the intervention group increased in positive emotions relative to those in the control group, an effect moderated by baseline vagal tone, a proxy index of physical health. Increased positive emotions, in turn, produced increases in vagal tone, an effect mediated by increased perceptions of social connections. This experimental evidence identifies one mechanism-perceptions of social connections-through which positive emotions build physical health, indexed as vagal tone. Results suggest that positive emotions, positive social connections, and physical health influence one another in a self-sustaining upward-spiral dynamic.

The Biology of Kindness: How It Makes Us Happier and Healthier

Loving-Kindness Meditation practice associated with longer telomeres in women.

Brain Behav Immun. 2013 Aug;32:159-63. doi: 10.1016/j.bbi.2013.04.005. Epub 2013 Apr 19.  Hoge, Elizabeth A.

Relatively short telomere length may serve as a marker of accelerated aging, and shorter telomeres have been linked to chronic stress. Specific lifestyle behaviors that can mitigate the effects of stress might be associated with longer telomere lengths. Previous research suggests a link between behaviors that focus on the well-being of others, such as volunteering and caregiving, and overall health and longevity. We examined relative telomere length in a group of individuals experienced in Loving-Kindness Meditation (LKM), a practice derived from the Buddhist tradition which utilizes a focus on unselfish kindness and warmth towards all people, and control participants who had done no meditation. Blood was collected by venipuncture, and Genomic DNA was extracted from peripheral blood leukocytes. Quantitative real time PCR was used to measure relative telomere length (RTL) (Cawthon, 2002) in fifteen LKM practitioners and 22 control participants. There were no significant differences in age, gender, race, education, or exposure to trauma, but the control group had a higher mean body mass index (BMI) and lower rates of past depression. The LKM practitioners had longer RTL than controls at the trend level (p=.083); among women, the LKM practitioners had significantly longer RTL than controls, (p=.007), which remained significant even after controlling for BMI and past depression. Although limited by small sample size, these results offer the intriguing possibility that LKM practice, especially in women, might alter RTL, a biomarker associated with longevity.

Loving-kindness meditation for posttraumatic stress disorder: a pilot study.

J Trauma Stress. 2013 Aug;26(4):426-34. doi: 10.1002/jts.21832. Epub 2013 Jul 25. Kearney, David J.

Loving-kindness meditation is a practice designed to enhance feelings of kindness and compassion for self and others. Loving-kindness meditation involves repetition of phrases of positive intention for self and others. We undertook an open pilot trial of loving-kindness meditation for veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Measures of PTSD, depression, self-compassion, and mindfulness were obtained at baseline, after a 12-weekloving-kindness meditation course, and 3 months later. Effect sizes were calculated from baseline to each follow-up point, and self-compassion was assessed as a mediator. Attendance was high; 74% attended 9-12 classes. Self-compassion increased with large effect sizes and mindfulness increased with medium to large effect sizes. A large effect size was found for PTSD symptoms at 3-month follow-up (d = -0.89), and a medium effect size was found for depression at 3-month follow-up (d = -0.49). There was evidence of mediation of reductions in PTSD symptoms and depression by enhanced self-compassion. Overall, loving-kindness meditation appeared safe and acceptable and was associated with reduced symptoms of PTSD and depression. Additional study of loving-kindness meditation for PTSD is warranted to determine whether the changes seen are due to the loving-kindness meditation intervention versus other influences, including concurrent receipt of other treatments.

How meditation practices change the brain

There is now a sizable body of scientific research capturing how spirituality, especially meditation practices, propel neuroplasticity in the remodeling of the brain.  A lot of this work is being done at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Spirituality and Mind and the Center for the Integrated Study of Spirituality and the Neurosciences, under Dr. Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman.  I was introduced to the above video lecture by Waldman at a meditation workshop and decided to read their book, “How God Changes Your Brain”.  It turns out to be less about God and more about how thinking of God and spiritual practices activates the brain and molds brain structure (and vice versa).

I have excerpted some of the most interesting paragraphs on the mechanisms:

“The cultural evolution of God follows the neurological evolution of the brain. The circuits that generates images of a wrathful God are closely tied to the oldest structures in the brain, and the circuits that allow us to envision a compassionte and mystical God are in the newest part of our brain. We can’t get rid of our old limbic God, which means that anger and fear will always be part of our neural and spiritual personality. However, we can train the new structures in our brain to suppress our biological tendency to react with anger and fear. (p. 123)

“The emotional circuits of our limbic brains have less plasticity than the frontal lobe. For example, we all get angry or frightened in the same way, but everyone experiences love in surprisingly different ways. Still, it’s not fair to call our reptilian brain primitive, for it too has co-evolved with the frontal lobe and now as the ability to adapt and respond with increased appropriateness to new situations and stress…(p. 123-124)

“To bridge the gap between our “old” and “new” brains, a special structure appears to have recently evolved–the anterior cingulate…it connects our emotions with our cognitive skills, playing a crucial role in emotional self-control, focused problem-solving, and error recognition. Most important, it integrates the activity of different parts of the brain in a way that allows self-consciousness to emerge, especially as it applies to how we see ourselves in relation to the world.” (p. 124)

“Based on our research and that of others, it seems the more you activate your anterior cingulate, the less you’ll perceive God as an authoritarian or critical force.” (p.126)

“Since meditation stimulates this circuit, we believe there is also a coevolution of spirituality and consciousness, engaging specific neural circuits that allow us to envision a benevolent, interconnecting relationship between the universe, God, and ourselves. The circuit that extends from the frontal lobe to the limbic system has a rich interconnection of neurons centered in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is activated whenever we see someone who is suffering, and this allows us to feel empathy and compassion…” (p. 124)

“The anterior cingulate also contains a class of spindle-shaped cells called von Economo neurons, which are found only in humans, great apes, and whales. These neurons have an extensive array of connections with other parts of the brain and are believed to be intimately involved with the development of social awareness skills by integrating our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. They guide us toward positive emotions and away from negative ones.  But they are also disrupted by stress. If you expose yourself to ongoing stress, their functioning is reduced,  but if you place yourself in an enriched environment–with a lot of love, communication, and sensory and intellectual stimulation–you strengthen the effectiveness of the von Economo neurons and the anterior cingulate. Since meditation simultaneously reduces stress while stimulating activity in the anterior cingulate, this supports our premise that spiritual practices enhance social awareness and compassion.” (p. 124-125)

“For example, in one recent study, advanced meditators were shown to have superior skills at discerning subtle changes in the environment… The majority of studies also have found that even brief periods of meditation significantly improve your ability to cope with a wide variety of psychological problems and physical disease. Perhaps this may explain why the practice of meditation has increased in popularity in recent years. in 1993, five million people said they meditated. By 2003, the numbers soared to ten million, and in 2007, fifteen million. Church involvement in America is declining, but spiritual practices are on the rise.” (p. 128-129)

“Today, for many people, God has become a metaphor for our search for ultimate truths and our ability to imagine a better future for all. And as a recent UCLA study found, this search for meaning is usually viewed as a spiritual pursuit, not a religious one.” (p.123)

“The funny thing is that the philosophy behind New Thought religion and materialism comes very close to several fundamental neurological truths:

• Your thoughts clearly affect the neurological functioning of your body.
• Optimism is essential for maintaining a healthy brain.
• Positive thoughts neurologically suppress negative thoughts.
• When you change the way you think, you begin to change your outward circumstances.
• Consciousness, reality, your mind, and your spiritual beliefs are profoundly interconnected and inseparable from the functioning of your brain.”  (p. 123)

“Our neurological findings have shown that different types of meditation and prayer affect different parts of the brain in different ways, and each one appears to have a beneficial effect on our neurological functioning and physical and emotional health. Some techniques increase blood flow to the frontal, parietal, temporal and limbic areas of the brain, while others decrease metabolic activity in these areas. Intensive meditation may also trigger an unusual form of neural activity–deafferentation–in which one part of the brain ignores the information being sent to it by other parts.  When this happens, we radically alter our everyday perception of the world.” (p. 63)

“By manipulating our breath, body, awareness, feelings, and thoughts, we can decrease tension and stress. We can evoke or suppress specific emotions and focus our thoughts in ways that biologically influence other parts of the brain. From a neuroscientific perspective, this is astonishing because it upsets the traditional view that we cannot voluntarily influence non-conscious areas in the brain. Only human being can think themselves into happiness or despair, without any influence from the outside world. Thus, the more we engage in spiritual practices, the more control we gain over our body, mind, and fate.” (p. 63)

The embodiment of thinking, flourishing, and the 8-fold noble path

Dr. Seligman and my favorite book of his.

This post is dedicated to a personal hero, Dr. Martin Seligman, whose contribution to the field of positive psychology and books have been a pivotal inspiration in the development of the Calm Clarity Program.  I would also like to personally thank him for graciously making time to meet me yesterday, signing my copy of Flourishing, and giving me his blessing to share his research and techniques in the Calm Clarity program.

In 2012, I took a personal sabbatical year to understand meditation and how it works, and how to harness the benefits that were being covered in the mainstream press.  I decided to go straight to the heart of the teachings, Dharamsala, India, the home of the Tibetan Buddhist community-in-exile. I spent about a month in three different retreat centers: Tushita, Thosamling, and the Vipassana center. Although up until that point, I was agnostic about religion and had a skeptical attitude towards all dogma and blind faith, I tried to be as open and curious as possible to figure out this phenomena. I was attracted by the Dalai Lama’s portrayal of Buddhism as reasoned faith rather than blind faith and his open dialogue with scientists.

My Tushita Class in April 2012

Yet when I was going through the introduction to Buddhism course at Tushita, I found the Buddhist concept of logic and reasoning to be quite circular. The most perplexing was the Four Noble Truths, the cornerstone of Buddhist theology / philosophy.

1. The truth of suffering (Dukkha)

2. The truth of the origin of suffering (Samudāya): The root of all suffering being unsatisfiable craving (Tanha) and delusion.

3. The truth of the cessation of suffering (Nirodha): extinguishing craving and delusion by understanding impermanence and emptiness and cultivating compassion.

4. The truth of the path to the cessation of suffering (Magga):  The 8-fold noble path: Right Understanding, Right Thought, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration.

At the 4th truth, I was completely lost with the word “Right,” because the history of civilization is the story of human beings arguing, fighting, and warring over who is right and who is wrong.  Is there even a way to objectively prove or demonstrate (without force) that anyone’s understanding is more right than that of another person?

During the 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat, I had a long opportunity to ponder on these so-called 4 Noble Truths. I wondered how the practice of meditation has been a keystone in Buddhist practice and education, yet is not explicitly mentioned in the Four Noble Truths. As I sat there quietly focusing on my breath for 3 days and then scanning my body for 7 days, I had a visceral direct experience of impermanence, how thoughts, feelings and sensations arise and pass away. I began to cultivate equanimity by observing without attachment and by adopting a sense of curiosity to the subtle sensations I started to become aware of: the pulsing of blood vessels, the vibration of breathing through my wind pipe, the temperature of air going in and out of my nostrils, how I carried tension in various parts of my back and shoulders. It was fascinating. Then I started to observe how thoughts and sensations triggered an associative cascade of memories and emotions.  By observing my own associative cascade and ideomotor reflexes, I understood how my thinking was embodied.  Then I started to see what I had considered my “identity,” the story I told myself about who I am, unravel and untangle, until I experienced a sense of being pure consciousness without baggage.

I understood then that somehow my mind-brain-body intuitively and viscerally knew what was “right understanding” and “right thought.” I also realized in terms of terminology, it would provide more clarity to differentiate thoughts as “positive and negative”, rather than “good and evil” or “right and wrong”.  A positive thought evokes positive feelings like happiness and bliss and boosted physical health. A negative thought sets off a cascade of stress and negative emotions like anxiety, fear, worry, and anger, which can weaken health.  A person who is in tune with herself can literally feel this bio-feedback mechanism happening within. This is the underlying premise of lie detection machines, that people cannot fool their own bodies. After 10 days of Vipassana, I finally became mindful of this intrinsic bio-feedback mechanism.  That was the first clue to the mystery of the 8-Fold Noble Path.  Later, when I opened the Dhammapada, I found this insight captured in the opening verses of the first chapter:

“1. All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage.

2. All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him.

3. “He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me,”—in those who harbour such thoughts hatred will never cease.

4. “He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me,”—in those who do not harbour such thoughts hatred will cease.

5. For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule.”

Now the question was, how does one find validation for this insight?

As I started to read Dr. Seligman’s books, I realized scientists had already done the heavy lifting and packaging.  Dr. Seligman’s research provided clear evidence on the benefits of optimism, hope, engagement, meaning, and social connections with achievement, well-being, life satisfaction, and longevity.  The research by Dr. Emmons and Dr. Seligman proved that gratitude provided cognitive, emotional and physical benefits and strengthened relationships. The research by Dr. Frederickson, Dr. Losada and Dr. Gottman showed that sharing positive verbal and non-verbal communication resulted in healthier, warmer, and more robust relationships at home and at work, and that healthy relationships increased productivity, performance, and achievement.  Research on forgiveness led by Dr. Worthington demonstrated that people who practice forgiveness lead healthier, happier lives.  Research on altruism demonstrated that the “helper’s high” manifests as improved mental, emotional, physical health and longevity. And as captured in my earlier post, Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy developed by Dr. Ellis demonstrated that when people become upset in response to an adverse event, their negative emotions are not caused by the event but by their perception of the event, framed within their personal belief system.

Further, the research in psychoneuroimmunology, epigenetics, neurogenesis and neuroplasticity are unveiling the potential mechanisms for how “Right Understanding” and “Right Thought” cascades into mindfulness, well-being, and flourishing.  The truth of the cessation of suffering is under our noses.

It is a beautiful time to be alive and thinking positive thoughts.  I am so grateful for the contribution of all these scientists and researchers.  I am also grateful to be able to integrate these insights and share them with the world to enable people everywhere to achieve a state of Calm Clarity.

Dr. Seligman, thank you for your research, your books and your blessings.