Meditation, Mindfulness and Spirituality

3 Technological Innovations that Could Revolutionize Meditation Practice

November 3, 2013 by Kenji 13 Comments

Almost a century ago, H.G. Wells predicted that “It is quite possible that in contact with western science, and inspired by the spirit of history, the original teaching of Gautama [The Buddha], revived and purified, may yet play a large part in the direction of human destiny.”

Today, we’re seeing this cross-fertilization between science and mindfulness practice becoming a reality. It seems like you can’t scroll through a Facebook feed without coming across an article describing the latest scientific study about meditators reporting less stress, exhibiting higher pain tolerance, and behaving more compassionately. Through fMRI brain scanning technology and behavioral studies, science has managed to provide objective evidence that meditation does indeed work. Thanks to science, what once was dismissed as something only hippies and airy-fairy new agers did has now moved into the mainstream.

This is just the beginning. As I hope to illustrate in the examples below, science and technology will do more than provide us with empirical data suggesting that meditation has value; it will revolutionize meditation practice itself. It will provide us with the tools to help this ancient discipline become many times more effective than it has ever been.

Innovation #1: Mind Reading Technology

While “mind reading technology” sounds like science fiction, the tools that enable us to read brainwaves and record them have been around for more than 100 years. Admittedly, brainwave reading technology or Electroencephalography (EEG) was quite primitive at its inception; likening it to mind reading would have been like comparing stargazing to space exploration. Today, however, the technology has evolved to the point where someone wearing a relatively unobtrusive headset can manipulate objects on a screen using mind commands alone.

The Emotiv Headset

To me, the most exciting application of this technology is one that will help beginning meditation students improve their concentration, their ability to focus on one thing at a time without getting distracted. As concentration becomes stronger, meditators begin to notice the subtlest of sensations, like tiny biochemical reactions on the skin, or the very movements of one’s inner organs. Meditators use concentration to develop insights about the nature of mind and body, just scientists use electron microscopes or particle accelerators to understand the nature of the physical world.

A common meditation technique for students to develop concentration is to focus on the breath. A student will follow the sensations of the in-breath and the out-breath and will seek to stay focused on these sensations without getting lost in thought. This isn’t easy, and beginners often get lost in a stream of thoughts within the first few breaths. When this happens, the student is instructed to gently bring their attention back to the breath once they’ve realized their mind has wandered.

This is a frustrating process since many students won’t realize that they’ve been lost in thought until 5-10 minutes after the fact. To help shorten this period, Meditation teachers will speak up after 10 or 20 minute intervals of silence to remind students to go back to the breath if their attention has wandered. While this is better than nothing, wouldn’t it be nice if the teacher could tell a student to return their focus the very moment their mind wanders?

This is precisely what mind-reading technology can help us do. The soon-to-be-released app, BrainBot, for example, uses an EEG headset that connects to an iPhone through Bluetooth. During the course of a meditation session, the headset will monitor brain activity to determine whether or not you’ve lost focus. Once the Brainbot app detects that your mind has started chasing errant thoughts, your phone will tell you to refocus your attention. (Check out the TEDx talk from one of BrainBot’s founders.)

Giving meditators a nudge whenever they need to refocus, however, is just the beginning when it comes to the potential of mind reading technology—especially when it’s teamed up with…

Innovation #2: Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Broadly speaking, there are three levels of intelligence where software is concerned. The first, is the software that forms the majority of code written since people started writing code. It mindlessly does exactly only what it’s programmed to do and nothing more. A good example of this is your run-of-the-mill pocket calculator.

Second, there is “narrow” artificial intelligence. This is software built upon very complex algorithms meant to perform a specific task very well. An often cited example of narrow AI is that of Deep Blue, the computer that defeated the chess world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. While Deep Blue can simulate millions of possible chess moves per second, it can really only understand the rules of chess, and is (without significant modifications made by humans) completely useless outside the 64 square universe of a chessboard.

Finally, there is “general” artificial intelligence (also called universal AI). A general AI system can take in external inputs from the outside world and determine its own goals and objectives based on the situation at hand. A general artificial intelligence could figure out the rules of chess by studying videos of chess matches instead of being fed the rules through lines of code. Although we are a ways off from computers learning chess, we do have software that can play tic-tac-toe and Pac-Man, and can solve the Tower of Hanoi problem without being pre-programmed to do so. As we’ll see in the examples below, all three types of software (non-intelligent software, narrow AI, and general AI) have the potential to provide great benefit to meditation students.

Non-Intelligent Meditation Software
One doesn’t need to utilize AI technology in order to create incredibly powerful tools to aid a meditator in their practice. Oftentimes these solutions have algorithms that are much less complex than those in your average video game.

Take an app like the BrainBot example mentioned above. Here’s a very abstracted representation of the algorithm governing the function of the application:

Let’s go through this algorithm step by step:

First, the application starts and plays an audio recording encoded in a .wav file with some basic instructions for meditation.
Once the instructions are complete, a timer starts and gives the meditator 2 minutes to focus their mind.
When the timer runs out, the app then uses the information it receives from the brainwave scanning device to determine whether or not the meditator has lost focus.
When both the timer reads zero and the meditator’s brainwaves match what the app has predetermined as an “unfocused” mind, the reminder plays and the whole thing starts over again.

Of course, this flowchart masks the complexity involved in processing the reams of data that the brainwave scanning device sends to the app. I imagine that thousdands of lines of code would be required to determine just what “losing focus” would mean to a machine. Human beings would have to measure the brainwaves of enough meditators to determine just what ranges of frequency and amplitude of alpha and beta (and delta and theta and gamma) waves would constitute a focused or unfocused mind. These parameters would have to be painstakingly measured, recorded, and spoon-fed into the app before it could even begin to answer the question: “Has the meditator lost focus?” So, although the idea behind the app is really quite brilliant, the app itself is not all that intelligent.

Narrow AI and the Virtual Meditation Teacher
Facial recognition systems in security cameras, self-driving cars, and programs that can “read” scanned documents and convert them into encoded text (often referred to as optical character recognition) are just a few examples of how narrow AI systems are making their way into our daily lives. If enough effort was applied in this direction, we wouldn’t be too far off from adding “providing meditation instruction” to the list.

The first time I was introduced to the idea of a virtual meditation teacher was in a Buddhist Geeks Interview with the meditation instructor and science scholar Shinzen Young. In the interview, Young mentions a project he has in the works, called “Virtual Shinzen,” whereby an automated program would periodically ask a student certain questions about his or her mental state and then prescribe a meditation technique appropriate to that state of mind in accordance with a “meditation algorithm.”

Narrow AI would take this concept one step further by helping to process the subtle ebb and flow of mind states just as Deep Blue would process the millions of potential moves on a chessboard. In order to develop something like this, students wearing EEG scanning devices would provide the raw data of their brainwave activity from a meditation session and then describe their experience to a human teacher. The teacher would then provide the appropriate advice for each shift in mind state. The narrow AI system, after getting enough data from students and instructions from teachers would develop certain heuristic guidelines, “rules of thumb” about the appropriate meditation advice to give a student depending on the brainwave readings the EEG scanners pick up. The more data the virtual meditation teacher collects from students, the better those heuristics will become.

Initially, meditation students taking instructions from virtual teachers will probably need to check in with human teachers at least once a month (probably once a day, for users of Alpha versions of this program). The students will describe their experience to the human teachers and the teachers will then examine the advice given by the virtual teachers for quality assurance. If the virtual teacher gives inappropriate advice (which will happen), the human teacher will provide a correction and the AI system will take that into account for future teaching sessions. Over time, these virtual AI systems could become complex enough that the teachings they provide could become virtually (pun intended) indistinguishable from those of the great masters. In fact, their teachings could even be better because the AI teachers would have the ability to monitor mind states in real time.

General AI and the “Cyberguru”
Depending on whom you ask, we’re about 50 to 100 years away from creating AI that would match (and then quickly surpass) human intelligence. This would have mind-boggling consequences for us as a species, our very extinction being one possible outcome. If we do manage to create an artificial intelligence that doesn’t kill us, however, it will most likely lead to a quantum leap in our understanding of the inner workings of our own minds, as well as meditation and mindfulness practices.

Meditation techniques are, boiled down to their essence, no more than algorithms—a set of instructions, rules and triggers that change based on certain conditions. A computer working through an algorithm cycles through a series of conditions and then performs actions based on those conditions. The benefit of narrow AI is that it can potentially digest existing teachings and techniques from the meditation masters, and then provide instruction comparable to those of the masters themselves—perhaps even better instruction because of the mind reading capabilities they would conceivably have.

General AI would take meditation one step further by formulating new solutions and meditation techniques from scratch. It would take the guidelines from the existing masters and then could gobble up massive amounts of data that meditators provide through use of EEG headsets. This would then help refine meditation techniques much faster than the slow evolution they’ve had over thousands of years.

In order to develop general AI, we must either write extremely complicated software which can exhibit intelligence, or we must create what is called Full Brain Emulation (FBE), whereby we simulate the workings of the human brain through electronics. At this point it seems like a toss-up which type of AI we’ll create first, but when it comes to mindfulness, FBE seems to have the greater potential. The development of FBE will be in large part due to…

Innovation #3 Neuroinformatics

In 2005 a group of scientists in Switzerland founded the Blue Brain Project with the goal of creating a computerized model of the human brain by 2023. The scope of the work is ambitious. These scientists aim to create 3D computerized models of billions of neurons and trillions of synapses which would then emulate the behavior of neurons and synapses observed in the brain’s neocortex (the “thinking” layer of the brain). Obviously this would take a lot of data and processing power. Just to give you an idea, one simulated second of what amounted to “half a mouse brain” (about 8 million neurons) took ten seconds of computing time on one of the fastest supercomputers in the world.

By creating a reliable computerized model of the human brain, we could answer a question that none of the meditation masters of the past could have answered: “What happens in the brain when we meditate?” Should Moore’s law continue to hold up and the processing power of computers continue to increase exponentially, we could simulate what amounts to 15 years of mindfulness meditation in a brain emulator using less than a year’s computing time. Hyperintelligent AI computers (even narrow AI computers) could then use their enhanced capability to recognize patterns within complex systems to determine just what conditions need to be present in the brain in order for its owner to experience that which the meditation masters call enlightenment: the complete cessation of suffering and a dissolution of the sense of self.

If we had a neuron-by-neuron map of the enlightened brain, we could then be able to find shortcuts that could help meditation practitioners achieve mastery much faster than anyone has been able to do in the 2,500+ years of this tradition. We could, essentially, “hack” meditation by having an objective, data-driven understanding of what meditation techniques are effective and what meditation techniques aren’t. From this understanding we could create new techniques and perhaps even create new meditation tools and software—a “BrainBot 5.o” if you will. We could perhaps even learn how to shut off the very neurons in the brain that work to produce the sense of self, thereby creating a technologically induced moment of Satori. I’m sure the possibilities don’t end there.

The Revolution has Already Begun
The technologies mentioned in this article are more than just science fiction. Mind reading EEG technology and narrow AI are very real and have many useful applications even today. Perhaps the most far-fetched of the three is the creation of a computerized brain model, as there are many who are still skeptical about the project, especially in light of recent news that the brain is much more complex than we had originally thought it was. What is evident to me, however, is that we are starting to see the most fascinating applications of recent technological advances to help us understand how to make mindfulness practice more effective.

What other advances do you envision that might revolutionize meditation practice? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Further Reference:
Hawkins, Jeff (Jun 23, 2008). “Jeff Hawkins on Artificial Intelligence.”
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oozFn2d45tg
Markram, Henry (2008). “Henry Markram: The Blue Brain Project”
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iDR8Z-e_GU
Markram, Henry (Jul 29, 2009). “A Brain in a Supercomputer.”
URL: http://www.ted.com/talks/henry_markram_supercomputing_the_brain_s_secrets.html
Modha, Dharmendra (Feb 17, 2012). “Dharmendra Modha of IBM on Whole Brain Emulation.”
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqeINGOzIZo
Muelhauser, Luke (2012). “Intelligence Explosion: Evidence and Import”
URL: http://intelligence.org/files/IE-EI.pdf
Sandberg, Anders (Jun 1, 2010). “Whole Brain Emulation: The Logical Endpoint of Neuroinformatics?” URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRB6Qzx9oXs
Young, Shinzen (Apr 18th, 2012). “Shinzen’s Blog: How to Enlighten the World.”
URL: http://shinzenyoung.blogspot.com/2012/04/how-to-enlighten-world.html
Young, Shinzen (Apr, 25th, 2012). “Toward a Science of Enlightenment.”
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZuxZ3BYvNM
Warren, Jeff (Jan, 2013). “How Understanding the Process of Enlightenment Could Change Science.” URL: http://www.psychologytomorrowmagazine.com/inscapes-enlightenment-and-science/

18 Little Known Facts To Challenge Your Views About Religion

March 11, 2013 by Kenji 11 Comments

Ever since I started practicing meditation about a year and a half ago, it has become a subject of regular study for me. After reading countless blogs, books, and listening to recorded talks on meditation, I had found that groups from every religion, not just Buddhism, practice some form of meditation or other. In fact, I learned that meditation was often the one most important part of a religious practice for many sects, whether you were an orthodox Jew or a Sufi mystic.

After having learned this one fact, I found within myself a deeper respect for other religions, even ones which I had regarded in the past as backwards, overly superstitious, or reactionary. I realized that if this one fact about meditation could challenge my preconceptions about what really makes up a religion, perhaps I could find others as well. This is why I have assembled a list of facts which aim to show that religions can’t be put inside a box, and that all of them have wisdom and insight that the world could definitely use.

This list was organized in no particular order:

1. Many Early Christians Believed in Reincarnation

Reincarnation was a widely accepted belief among the early Gnostic Christians. The idea that someone went to heaven or hell based on something they did in one lifetime was a doctrine developed by the Roman Catholic Church, most likely to establish more control over adherents to the religion. After all, if people got more than one chance to get to heaven, the laws of the church would then be rendered meaningless because sinners would get infinite chances to try again.

Further Reference: Adishakti.org

2. The Buddha Was Probably Not a Vegetarian

Many Buddhists are vegetarian because of the first Buddhist Precept: I undertake the training rule to abstain from taking life. This precept also includes the taking of any animal life. Interestingly, this doesn’t necessarily mean that all Buddhists need to become vegetarians. In the Pali Canon, a major Buddhist text, it was said that the Buddha would not eat meat from an animal killed specifically for him, but apparently didn’t have a problem eating meat bought from the marketplace and already dead.

Further Reference: Dhamma Musings

3. Jesus Christ is Mentioned 5 Times in the Qur’an more than Muhammad

Jesus is considered one of the great prophets of the Islamic religion, and is highly revered, though not as the son of God as Christians believe.

Further Reference: Islam 101

4. Hindus Can Also Be Atheists

Hinduism is generally viewed as a Polytheistic religion with a rich mythology. It is, however, quite possible to be both Hindu and Atheist. Although Hindu Atheists may not have the same eschatological beliefs as other Hindus, they do follow the same moral and ethical code.

Further Reference: Wikipedia

5. Judaism Evolved from a Polytheistic Religion

According to Mark Smith in The Early History of God, the Jewish God Yaweh was one out of four main Gods worshiped by the early Jewish people. The other three gods were El, Asherah and Baal. It was only later that Yahweh became the one and only God for the Jewish religion.

Further Reference: Wikipedia

6. Meditation is not Limited to Eastern Religions

These days meditation, or the practice of increasing spiritual awareness through the cultivation of high states of concentration, is often associated with Eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism. It turns out, however, that every major religion has meditation techniques associated with them. There’s Christian Meditation, Islamic Meditation and Jewish Meditation. Within each of these religions are various meditation techniques which bear a striking resemblance to meditation techniques practiced in Buddhism and Hinduism.

7. New Religious Texts Continue to Be Discovered

If you’re the founder of a religion, people will write a lot of stories about you, many of which aren’t true. This is why the Bible has so many outtakes (See #14). Does this mean, however, that when new religious texts are discovered we should dismiss them as historical curiosities or should we examine them against our current beliefs? One good example of a text that warrants study is the Gospel of Judas, a recently discovered Biblical text that portrays Judas Iscariot, commonly seen as the Bible’s villain, as the one apostle who fully understood Jesus’ teachings and turned Jesus over to be crucified because Jesus asked him to.

Further Reference: BBC News

8. The Buddha was Canonized as a Christian Saint

A Buddhist text from the 4th century was eventually translated and retranslated until the story of the Buddha’s enlightenment was retold in the context of a prince named Josaphat who renounced the world and converted to Christianity. Apparently this story was so compelling that this Josaphat became a Christian Saint.

Further Reference: Wikipedia

9. Islam had the First Theory of Evolution in the 9th Century

While religion and science have been and continue to be at odds, one notable exception is during the height of the Islamic empire, when scientific ideas advanced significantly. Even the idea of evolution, an idea which still remains a difficult one to swallow by some fundamentalist Christians, was first advanced by a devout Muslim and scientist by the name of al-Jahiz.

Further Reference: salaam.co.uk

10. Non-Jews Can Get Into Jewish Heaven

According to Rabbi Sholom Lipskar “One does not have to be Jewish in order to be able to merit going to heaven in the afterlife and meriting all blessings of God.” There doesn’t seem to be many references to the afterlife in the Torah, but there seems to be agreement that the “righteous of all nations” will enjoy the blessings of an afterlife.

Further Reference: Wikipedia, Judaism 101

11. Even With a Literal Interpretation of the Bible, Homosexuality may Not be a Sin

In a recent talk, Biblical scholar Matthew Vines discusses whether or not the Bible actually condemns homosexuality, and provides a very convincing argument for why homosexuality should not be considered a sin, even with a literal interpretation of the Bible.

12. The First Buddhist Statues Were Made in the Greek Hellenistic Style

Greco-Indians living in the region of Gandhara were actually the first to carve images of the Buddha. The topknot hairstyle common in most Buddha statues today was probably borrowed from similar statues of the Greek God Apollo. The historical Buddha probably didn’t have this hairstyle.

Further Reference: Wikipedia

13. The World’s Oldest University was Established by a Muslim Woman

The Islamic religion has long been characterized as backward and misogynistic. This characterization is misleading, however, and there are many examples throughout history which have shown the opposite to be true. One of them is the University of al-Karaouine, founded by Fatima al-Fihri, the daughter of a rich merchant. At the university subjects like rhetoric and astronomy were taught alongside religious studies. By some accounts, this was the first school that handed out academic degrees.

Further Reference: Wikipedia

14. The New Testament has a Lot of Outtakes

There were many books of the Bible that didn’t make it into the new testament. After Jesus’ followers were left on their own, the early Christians wrote many stories regarding the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. Many of these stories were quite fanciful. The Gospel of Pseudo Matthew, for example, has a story of the young Jesus taming dragons (Chapter 18). Since early Christian writings often contradicted each other in terms of narrative and philosophy, it was up to the early fathers of the Church to decide which books of early Christian writings were to be deemed canonical and were reflective of official Church doctrine.

Further Reference: Wikipedia

15. Many of Our Great Scientists were Deeply Religious

Today with all the over-dramatized conflict between science and religion, it’s easy to forget that many of the greatest minds in science were actually devoutly religious. All you have to do is take a look at this list of Muslims and Christians who made significant contributions to our body of scientific knowledge to know that this is true.

16. Wearing a Veil is Not Required in Islam

While the Quran does require women (and men!) to wear modest clothing, nowhere does it specifically state that covering the face with a veil is required. The misconception that Islamic women are required to wear the veil probably comes from the fact that some fundamentalist Islamic thinkers have interpreted the need for modesty in women’s dress as the need for any woman going out in public to wear the hijab (head scarf).

Further Reference: Islam 101

17. Angels as we Know Them Today are Artist Inventions

Angels as originally described in the Bible, appear as 4 headed monsters or wheels that sparkled like topaz, or fearsome entities with 6 wings. It was only near the end of the 4th century CE that artists began to portray angels as the two winged bipeds as we know them today. This is just another example of how our interpretations of religious stories can change over time.

Further Reference: Wikipedia

18. Islamic Fundamentalism is a Pretty Recent Development

As shown by facts numbers 9 and 13, Islam was far from a backwards religion, but one that promoted the sciences. Not only that, but Islam was actually quite tolerant of other religions as well. Today, however, because of the rise of religious fundamentalism in the Islamic world, we’ve been led to believe that intolerance has been a part of the religion since its inception. Actually, it not until the 1950s that Islamic fundamentalism became a real force, helped along by radical Muslim thinkers like Sayyid Qutb.

Looking Back: My First Year as a Meditation Practitioner

June 25, 2012 by Kenji 26 Comments

Meditation Cushion

Ever since I started meditating regularly last year, one question I continued to ask myself was: “Am I happier?”

For the first three months, my answer was “no.” Contrary to my expectations, I often felt more emotional turmoil than I had before. It seemed as though any event, no matter how trivial, would set off a wave of depression, or sometimes an unstable rush of euphoria, the comedown from which was never fun. I’ve always considered myself to be emotionally sensitive, but this was ridiculous.

The reason for this intensification of emotions was not apparent to me until just recently. Much of it had to do with the meditation techniques that I practiced, techniques which were supposed to raise my awareness of every physical and emotional sensation, thus grounding my attention in my body and in the present moment. As a side-effect, it also made emotions feel stronger, and thus much harder to ignore.

Most every day, sometimes for one hour, oftentimes for two, I would sit on a cushion with my eyes closed and attend to any sensation, be it painful or pleasant, that manifested in my body, and would endeavor to remain detached from them. If a certain area in my lower back ached, for example, I focused all my attention on the ache, and tried to experience the pain without labeling it as either “good” or “bad.” In the clearest moments, thoughts and judgments about the pain became hushed and subdued to the point that I could regard the pain as nothing more than what it was: sensation. Although it wasn’t the goal, the pain itself would often subside not long thereafter.

Because I worked to improve my awareness of sensation, it was only natural that the physical sensations that characterize emotions like anxiety, sadness, or melancholy would be felt much more strongly than they had been before. Sometimes some small misfortune would trigger an unpleasant emotion and because I was more sensitive to this emotion, I felt as though meditation, rather than improving my overall sense of well-being, worsened it.

In reality, the emotions didn’t change. What changed was how I experienced them. The more I practiced, and the more I read about the practice, I realized that meditation was not meant to purge our minds of negative emotions or thought patterns, but rather meant to help us experience them without judgment. We were to let go of our resistance to pain at the deepest level and understand that we suffer not because pain is bad, but because our mind labels it as bad.

Neurological research on meditation seems to support this idea. The big “aha” moment for me came when I watched a talk by Psychologist Kelly McGonigal, at the Buddhist Geeks Conference, who shared her insights on the latest research on mindfulness meditation and the effect that it has on the brain.

The research helped me understand the subtle shift in my experience in day to day life as I continued to practice. Essentially, the shift can be explained by changes in two systems in the brain: the “evaluation system” and the “experiential system.”

The evaluation system is essentially the brain’s “default” setting. It’s the endless stream of mental chatter by which we judge our current situation by comparing them to (often better) memories of past situations and imagined (often worse) future situations.

The experiential system, on the other hand, is more about the sensations themselves, removed from any thoughts or judgments about them. The physical sensations that come with each emotion and how we feel them in our bodies is part of this experiential system.

When we feel an emotion like stress, we’ll feel the stress hormones cause a rise in nervous energy. Our muscles tense, our jaws clench, and our breath becomes shallow. This is our experiential system at work. Our evaluation system kicks in when we decide that these sensations are bad and to be avoided.

In my experience, what meditation does is strengthen the experiential system. If, for example, I feel anxiety, I am much more aware of the physical manifestations of this emotion, so much so that it becomes hard to ignore or suppress it in the way that I had often done in the past with distractions like television, video games, work, alcohol, facebook, etc. The problem is, just because the experiential system is strengthened doesn’t mean that the evaluation system has become weaker. Instead, I’ve had the tendency to feel emotions more strongly and judge these emotions as pleasant or unpleasant as much as I had done before.

What meditation has done for me, however, is make the emotions feel so strong that I’ve found the only thing that helps is to face them directly, to dive into the unpleasant emotions and immerse myself in the physical sensations, to watch them with an unflinching eye. When I do this, I find that while the feeling of sadness, anxiety, or depression becomes stronger, the unpleasantness of the sensations become much less pronounced. My guess is because I commit myself to devoting 100% of my mental resources to the experiential system, the evaluation system quiets down. In time, I expect it to become much less dominant from lack of use.

As I see it now, the key to freeing ourselves from suffering lies not in avoiding emotions but in experiencing them more fully. This is not something that we can do overnight but a habit that we must cultivate. As I near my one year anniversary of practicing meditation, I realize that I should not ask myself how happy I am but rather how attached am I to happiness. How much do I judge my self-worth based on how happy or sad I feel? How much of my identity is invested in my thoughts and emotions? How much do I experience and how much do I judge? These are the questions that I use to gauge my progress now.

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For those who haven’t seen it, I highly recommend watching the talk by Kelly McGonigal Mentioned above. For Your convenience I’ve embedded it below. It’s 20 minutes so be sure to bookmark it and watch when you have some spare time:

What I Learned From 10 Days of Silence and Meditation

July 20, 2011 by Kenji 21 Comments

The morning gong woke us at 4:00AM. We were to get up and sit: spine straight, chin tucked, hands in our laps and direct all of our attention to the breath flowing in and out of our nostrils for two hours until breakfast time.

The first morning’s meditation was a struggle, not just because of an overall grogginess but also because of a never-ending stream of reminiscences, regrets, recriminations, resentments, assessments, aspirations, apprehensions, speculations, machinations, anxieties, fantasies and other errant thoughts–one after the other.

Up until now there had always been something to distract me, something to silence that stream. For me it was usually work, hulu, twitter, facebook, reading, writing, coding, or beers with friends. These activities kept me from recognizing just how scattered, how unfocused and untamed my mind really was. In the past few years, however, even the distractions didn’t seem to work. I might have been watching one of my favorite shows on hulu, but for the life of me I couldn’t seem to watch it the whole way through. I’d pause it at the ten minute mark and check twitter/facebook/email/my phone/whathaveyou and then go back to the show (given that I wasn’t distracted to do something else after that).

I knew that I wasn’t the only one with a shattered attention span. One only has to look at the proliferation of productivity apps, guided relaxation tapes, and blog posts like this to know that people are desperately searching for ways to stay focused.

Personally, I had found certain guided meditation mp3’s to be most the helpful for regaining focus. I would close my eyes and count from 1 to 10 after every breath. After about ten minutes or so I’d let go of the count all together and focus only on the breath. It usually worked. If I was in a good or even neutral mood at the time of meditation I’d find that just 20 minutes helped me stay focused and present throughout the day.

If I was in a foul mood, however, the meditation would provide me with a feeling of well being at first, and then after an hour or so the negative thoughts and emotions would start to creep in, and before I knew it I was upset, distracted, or stressed out again. It felt as though my occasional 20-minute sessions of meditation provided only a temporary relief, like I was snipping away at the branches of the tree while getting nowhere near the roots.

Who Teaches the Technique?

About a year ago, Creighton, a friend of mine, told me about a 10-day retreat at a “Meditation Center” in Onalaska, WA (one of many worldwide). Onalaska is a rural town about halfway between Seattle and Portland. This center, among the many others, are built and maintained by an organization founded by S.N. Goenka, who also teaches the technique of Vipassana meditation to all the students through audio and video recordings of his instructions and discourses. “Vipassana” means to see things “as they really are” and is allegedly the meditation technique that the Buddha taught at his own meditation centers in India more than 2500 years ago.The pure technique was all but lost nearly everywhere but in Burma where it had been passed undiluted from teacher to student until the present day.

The organization that runs the centers is nonsectarian and people from all faiths are welcome to attend the retreats to become established in the technique. There is no course fee and all costs of the retreat are covered by donations which students can make after completing the course.

After hearing about the course, and reading about my friend’s own experience on his blog, it was only a matter of time before I had decided to make a commitment myself and enroll.

Course Rules and Timetable

On the night of our arrival, we were assembled in the men’s section of the dining hall for orientation. Distractions during the retreat were to be kept to a minimum. We were forbidden to have any cell phones, reading materials or writing materials on us and were to turn them in for safe keeping at the beginning of the course. Men and women were to be segregated at all times except when we gathered in the meditation hall. We were forbidden to talk with, touch or make eye contact with any of our fellow students (questions for the assistant teachers were allowed during prescribed times, however). Finally, we were expected to keep to the course timetable, which meant nearly 10.5 hours of meditation per day. They served breakfast and lunch but no dinner ( the best meditation is done on an empty stomach!), although we did get an hour break at 5:00PM for tea and fruit.

Days 1-3: Clearing the Mind and Sharpening Focus

The meditations in the main hall were guided by recordings of Goenka himself who led us step by step through the technique. For the first three days we focused on “Anna Panna” or “Awareness of Breathing” meditation.

Of all days the first was the most difficult. I was already in a state of agitation when I had arrived at the center and focusing on my breath with eyes closed only seemed to amplify this restlessness. I had expected the meditation exercise to have a calming effect, since that had been my experience with most “awareness of breathing” exercises I had tried in the past. There was one major difference, however. We weren’t allowed to use any visualizations, mantras or counting to help focus our awareness.

Counting my breath had always made meditation easy. When I did this I could usually clear my head of most thoughts within the space of ten to fifteen minutes. I came to realize, however, that counting the breath was essentially the crutch that kept me from developing a deeper, more sustainable level of focus.

Counting is a crutch because it only clears the conscious mind (the thoughts and feelings we’re currently aware of) while it does nothing to clear the subconscious mind, the wellspring of those thoughts. If the mind was to be likened to a room, and our muddled thoughts was steam fogging up that room, we’d find that the subconscious would take up nearly the whole space.

In this room the conscious mind, or all the surface thoughts and emotions that we’re aware of, would probably be the size of a medicine cabinet mirror on the wall. To focus on one’s breath while simultaneously counting from one to ten would essentially be like wiping off the steam from the mirror. The conscious mind may be clear for a day or two, but eventually the fog starts to creep back in, and then we’re back where we started.

To focus on the breath without counting is like opening the door to the room. The steam flows out of the room but the mirror remains fogged up. Because the conscious mind is the only part of the mind that we are aware of, it appears as though we’re making no progress, when in truth we’re making significant progress.

The first day of meditation felt very much like this. I don’t think I’d be able to count how many times I found myself diverted or distracted from the breath by this or that random thought. Even when I was able to focus on the breath, there was always chatter in the background. For me it was usually the song “Barlights”, (particularly the “I feel alive” refrain). I’d like to count myself as one of the lucky ones though, because on the last day of the retreat when Noble Silence was lifted, I found out that one guy had the theme song from Gilligan’s Island in his head, while another guy had the Apples and Bananas song.

As we progressed onto Day 2 we narrowed our focus to the “touch of the breath.” This meant that we were to concentrate only where the breath brushed past our upper lip and the entrance of our nostrils.

This required much more concentration on my part. While the song in my head didn’t completely go away, it did recede into the background. By the end of the week, the background noise was reduced to mostly instrumental music; it seemed that my attention had focused to the point that there was no room for me to subvocalize lyrics in my head.

On Day 3 we kept our attention on the triangular area beneath the nostrils and above the upper lip, but this time we were to observe whether or not we could pick up any sensation other than the breath. This could be any sensation: heaviness, lightness, contraction, expansion, pulsating, itching, or any other subtle sensation which we weren’t able to name. By the end of the night I’m pretty sure I felt all of the above. When I collapsed at the end of the day and released my attention from that narrow area, it seemed as though anywhere my attention went that every nerve ending ignited with energy. Random showers of sparks beneath my skin. It was almost as though I was witness to a fireworks display within my own body.

Day 4: Learning the Vipassana Technique

A very high level of focus is needed just to begin learning the technique of Vipassana meditation, and so, for the first three days, we were required to do awareness of breath meditation just to prepare for it. I had read beforehand that it was a body scanning technique, and because I had already observed strange and subtle sensations all across my body without even looking for them, I felt confident that I was ready to learn.

On Day 4, we were instructed to direct our attention from the top of the head to the tips of the toes and while some parts of my body (hands and feet especially) pulsed and tingled, I found other parts (like the middle of the back and certain places around the ears and scalp) to be blind, blank and devoid of any sensation whatsoever. I found it very frustrating, especially considering how cocky I felt before we had begun.

We were told that whenever we came across a blind spot to accept the fact that we were not able to pick up any sensations there and to spend a minute or two focusing on that area until we became aware of any sensation, be it subtle or gross. After that we were to move on to an adjacent part.

But Vipassana is not only an exercise in sharpening one’s awareness of sensations; it is also an exercise of increasing one’s equanimity to sensations. We had to learn not to judge or react to any sensation, be it pleasurable or painful. In order to develop this quality we were to hold the same posture for the duration of each sitting. Because holding the same posture for an hour can be very painful, it was an opportunity to observe the pain directly, objectively, and learn not to react to it or judge it. Unfortunately, this was not something I was able to do the first time around. I gave in to the pain at around the 40-minute mark and changed my posture.

Days 5 – 6 Refining the Technique

The first time I tried Vipassana was disappointing, but we had more than enough time to practice and refine the technique. Eventually, I was able to move my attention freely through every part of the body, even to the point where I was able to achieve a feeling of free flow from top to bottom. It was like a subtle wave of electricity coursing through my skin.

There also came a point where I was able to focus my attention directly on the intense pain that welled up from my knees. The truly difficult part was to maintain enough presence of mind to continue scanning the body while bearing the pain.

There were short windows of time when I was able to look at the pain objectively and in those moments the pain lost its control over me. For minutes at a time, the part of the mind that judges, that divides things into categories of “good” and “bad”, “pleasant” and “unpleasant”, “painful” and “pleasurable” went dormant, and I was finally able to see the pain without judging it, without thinking of it as a “bad” thing to be avoided. It was only then that I truly understood what Shakespeare meant when Hamlet said “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” at an experiential level.

These moments came and went. The judging, reactive part of the mind would resurface and the pain would become pain-ful again. The intervals of clarity, however, lengthened as I continued to practice. There was one instance where I had been sitting for around an hour and fifteen minutes, when I found myself in the grip of a pain that wouldn’t go away. I grimaced. I swayed back and forth and there arose within me an “I give up” sensation. It felt as though my whole body was going to wilt under the mental pressure. Somehow, however, there was a part of my mind that still held on to a shred of deeper awareness. I thought: “Let’s see what’s on the other side of this ‘I give up’ feeling.”

And that’s what I did. My body did buckle over, but I waited, only a second or two it seemed, and suddenly that wilting, “I give up” sensation which I had thought was coming from within me, now seemed like a wilting flower more than 20 feet away. After that point the pain didn’t bother me at all. My mind was still and clear, and I was actually disappointed that I couldn’t sit longer when I heard the gong ring for tea time.

It was that breakthrough that helped me understand why we were asked to maintain the same posture during a sitting. For me, it helped put space between me and the sensation I experienced. In moments of clarity I no longer thought: “I am in pain.” But rather I thought: “I am aware of a very strong burning sensation.” Because I was detached from the pain in this way, I no longer reacted to it.

Not only was I able to develop a sense of detachment from physical pain, but from emotional pain as well. Through meditation, I was able to see very clearly that emotions were nothing but sensations in the body, albeit more subtle than a strong pain in the knees. Worry may manifest itself as a tight throbbing in the chest. Elation may feel like a shower of sparks rushing through the arms and legs. Whatever the emotion, there was a corresponding sensation.

Because I had developed the faculty to see physical pain for what it was and bring space between my sense of self and the sensation that my body was having, I found that I was able to do this for emotional pain just as easily. As I write this, I’ve already had come across several situations that have triggered a “negative” emotional sensation. Because of an increased level of awareness I was able to recognize those sensations the moment they arose. Also, because of a more developed sense of objectivity, I no longer identified myself with the emotional sensation. If I felt anger, I no longer thought “I am angry” but rather, “There’s a a tension rising up from the chest.” I chose not to react to the sensation, and also chose not to identify myself with it. Because of this it passed away just as quickly as it had come. There were no angry thoughts, no angry words spoken, just a ripple in the water and then everything was as still as it was before.

Days 7 – 10: Catharsis

We were told that when we stopped reacting to situations as they happen, the negative emotions from the past would start to bubble up to the surface. The explanation for this that made the most sense to me was that suffering was akin to a fire burning, and that every time we react negatively to a situation we add fuel to the fire. Because we continue to have negative reactions to situations, we continue to add fuel and the fire never burns out. If we stop reacting, however, the fire will consume all the emotional baggage of our past.

On an experiential level, it seemed to me that negative emotional patterns tend to “lodge” themselves in some part of the body. For me, all the career related anxiety I’ve had over the past two years probably manifested as a pain in my right shoulder that ran up my neck to the right side of my face. The more minor negative emotions were so subtle, however, that I only noticed them on the body during meditation.

I imagine that there is only so much room in the body for negative emotions to manifest. The rest probably get stored up in the subconscious as psychological complexes waiting for some trigger to pull them up into our conscious awareness. It seems only natural that if we work to eliminate these emotional reactions that are currently lodged in the body, that our body will naturally attract the old baggage like a magnet. To put it another way: a clean sheet of iron will gather more rust than already rusty sheet.

By the 6th or 7th Day I began to feel those negative emotions welling up. The emotional pain didn’t seem to bother me, however, because I was able to distance myself from it. Like my burning knees the pain was there but it was no longer pain-ful. I felt the stress, the anger, the fear and the grief rise up within me and pass away as soon as it had come. It really did feel like I was throwing up the demons of the past. This purging of negative emotions continued until even after the course had ended. It wasn’t a pleasant experience, but it was an incredible catharsis.

On the final days of the retreat we were instructed to direct our awareness to the body when we weren’t formally meditating, to observe all sensations as we walked, ate, showered, and in bed as we were about to go to sleep.

On my meditative walks I found myself overwhelmed by the beauty of my surroundings. For the first time since I was five-years-old, there was no barrier of thought or judgment between me and what I observed. Little things like raindrops hanging from stalks of the tall meadow grass, or the quiet of the forest in the morning actually brought me to tears.

Practicing meditative awareness before bed also had incredible effect. I remember having a dream where I was on a pirate ship and was forced to walk the plank. My eyes opened and the first thing I was aware of was a shower of cold sparks running down the length of my body. I then realized that I was awake and shortly thereafter I was able to identify the sensation as fear. I don’t think I remember being so aware, especially just after waking up. I went back to sleep and the next morning when the gong rang at 4:00AM, I woke up energized.

Practicing meditative awareness while walking, eating, showering etc. seemed to amplify the effect of our formal meditation sessions. Eventually I was able to perceive a uniform flow of subtle sensations up and down my body. This didn’t happen all the time, as we were told that a high level of awareness will tend to bring old emotions to the surface. These old emotions would manifest themselves as blind spots on the body. Sure enough, the sessions I had after experiencing incredible flow were replaced by a complete dullness. Observing these blind spots triggered strong emotional reactions whose cause might have been a year ago, ten years ago, or even more. The emotions were sensation alone, so who’s to say?

After the Retreat

The retreat ended on the morning of the 17^th, and even though we were allowed to talk to the other students on Day 10 in order to re-acclimate to the outside world, I still felt hypersensitive to everything around me. Other than calling my parents to tell them I was alive, I made no other contact with the outside world. I didn’t even power up my laptop. I think it would have been difficult to go out and meet anyone that day because some particularly strong emotions were welling up and I needed all my attention on them to ensure that I wasn’t overcome by them. I spent the rest of the day meditating in my apartment and writing down notes about my experiences.

In the days since returning from the retreat I’ve noticed that I’ve been able to maintain an incredible level of focus. I’ve been able to devote nearly all my time to the tasks which matter most to me without being diverted by twitter/facebook/email/hulu/whathaveyou. Perhaps most notable of all, is a sharpening of all my senses. One example: I remember that shortly after having my first cup of coffee near the end of the retreat, I could feel the caffeine snake through my veins and capillaries of my left arm. Food tasted better, and I could feel the texture of every grain in each mouthful of my favorite granola cereal when I came back home. The incredible new level of perception was intoxicating.

If you’ve read my last blog post, you know that I write this in a period of transition, but I can’t help but feel optimistic about the future. I have so much energy, so much focus now that I really (really) do feel like I can do anything without having my motivation sag along the way. Because of this, I feel positive about making meditation a permanent part of my daily routine.

Meditation Resources

If you’re interested in meditation, but are unsure about making the commitment for a 10-day retreat, I highly recommend checking the mp3’s from Free Buddhist Audio. One track that had been especially helpful for me before the retreat was the 20-minute awareness of breathing meditation. There’s also a 40-minute version if you need extra oomph. Try this and other forms of meditation and see if it provides any benefits. If it does, you may find the motivation you need to commit to a 10-day retreat.