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When Yongey Mingyur
Rinpoche was a child living in Nepal,
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in the shadow of Mt. Manaslu,
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he had terrible panic attacks.
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I have lot of fear
about the snow storm
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and when the thunder comes,
and I fear for strangers.
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One day my father said,
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"Oh, you want to learn meditation, right?"
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The first meditation training
is he asked me to watch my breath.
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So, I watched my breath.
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That’s a common
mindfulness exercise.
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And soon, Mingyur was
a mindfulness meditation prodigy.
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Decades later,
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he built this monastery
in Bodh Gaya, India,
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the place where the Buddha
famously achieved enlightenment
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while meditating under a tree.
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He spent four years wandering
the Himalayas, practicing mindfulness
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and growing a beard.
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And then, scientists invited him
to Wisconsin,
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so they could look at his brain.
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They found that although he was 41,
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he had the brain of a 33-year-old.
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When they had him go in an fMRI machine
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and cultivate a sense of compassion
by meditating,
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the activity and his empathy circuits
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shot up seven to 800 percent.
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One of the researchers later wrote,
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“Such an extreme increase
befuddles science.
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The closest resemblance
is in epileptic seizures,
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but brains are seized by seizures
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in contrast to Mingyur's intentional
control of his brain activity."
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Mingyur Rinpoche had somehow induced
a prolonged attack of compassion
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in his own brain.
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When researchers studied the brain waves
of a whole group of long-term meditators,
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they found similar results.
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The moment meditation began,
there was a sudden rush of activity.
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Meditation causes big changes
in the minds of experts.
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But when beginners meditate,
not much happens.
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These observations seem to back up
a long-held claim
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that meditation can make you
a master of your own mind.
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Early Buddhist texts
say this can help end suffering.
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Modern headlines are a bit more clinical,
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claiming mindfulness
may cure anxiety, depression,
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and a whole host
of other health problems.
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So, what is real and what is hype?
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How can this simple practice
of watching your own breath
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change the way your brain works?
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And can that change your life?
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Bring your full attention
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to the ingoing and outgoing breath.
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Expansion on the in breath.
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Simply notice
you're breathing in.
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- Contraction with the out breath.
- Releasing all tension.
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Now, withdraw your attention
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from the external things
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and relax.
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There's many many different styles
of meditation.
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Literally, hundreds of different forms
of meditation.
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The word "meditation"
you can liken to sports.
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There are many different kinds of sports,
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there are many different kinds
of meditation.
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And strictly speaking,
most of them are not mindfulness.
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There's Transcendental Meditation,
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which The Beatles got into
while writing the White Album.
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The idea here is to repeat a mantra,
a word or sound,
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until you transcend thought entirely.
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Then there's Dynamic Meditation, which
is supposed to break old thought patterns.
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You may recognize it from coverage
of the Rajneeshpuram community.
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Most religions have some kind of practice
that could be called meditation,
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quietly contemplating scripture
or forms of ritual prayer
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intended to bring you closer to God.
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Some of the oldest forms of meditation
come from early Hinduism.
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According to tradition, around 500 BC,
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the Buddha studied these techniques,
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but then, he added his own spin.
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He systematically developed
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a new meditation technique
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that is called
the Satipatthana Meditation.
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This is the traditional form
of "mindfulness meditation,"
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one step on the eightfold path
to enlightenment
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that the Buddha taught his followers.
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The goal isn’t to get closer
to the divine or to empty your mind,
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it’s to pay attention.
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"Sati" means "attention."
"Upa" means "inside."
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And "thana" means "to keep."
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Satipatthana simply means
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"to keep your attention inside."
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Most of the time,
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most people actually don't know
what their minds are doing.
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We are pulled by all kinds of forces
around us,
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and we do stuff
that we're just not aware of.
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Things happen and we react.
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And so part of the practice
of mindfulness is
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bringing awareness to what it is
that our minds are actually doing.
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To explain this technique,
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Buddha told a story.
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One day, Mr. Turtle
and Mr. Fox met in the forest.
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Mr. Fox thought,
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"I'm going to have a good food today."
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And Mr. Turtle thought...
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"Oh, my goodness.
My enemy is out there. Shall I run?
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I'm not fast enough."
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So, he went inside his shell.
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Mr. Fox paced
round and round Mr. Turtle,
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but eventually he got tired of waiting
and went away.
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Every time
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you see a real fox in your life,
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like stress, tension, depression,
anxiety, sadness, worries...
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you should be like Mr. Turtle.
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That doesn’t mean running away
from your problems.
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It means observing your reaction
to those problems
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instead of engaging with them,
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appreciating that these feelings
are passing products of your own mind
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and you can control
your relationship to them.
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You can make friends
with other emotion,
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the difficult situation in our life.
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You don't need to fight.
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You don't need to surrender
for the problem.
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Make friends.
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You can bring
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this quality to anything.
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Whatever we do throughout the day,
it has to be done with mindfulness.
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According to one text,
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the Buddha told his followers to be aware
of their minds and bodies
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while looking around,
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eating, drinking, chewing, tasting,
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walking, standing, sitting,
even when obeying the calls of nature.
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Mindfulness meditation
is just a way to practice this skill.
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Slowly, slowly...
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train our mind, like going to gym.
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When you go to the gym
and you do exercise,
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develop your muscle,
you become more fit.
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So, mind become more healthy
and developed.
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You can think of a mindfulness session
as a training ground.
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Every Tuesday evening
at six o’clock,
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at the Moran Medium Security Prison,
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a group of inmates gather in room eight.
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Mindful of this moment,
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I feel as light and free
as the clear blue sky.
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Awakening here, now,
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in room eight... I smile.
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I was definitely
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skeptical about it.
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You couldn't tell me that meditation
by breathing, that it's going to help you.
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Breathing in,
I know that I'm breathing in.
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Breathing out,
I know that I'm breathing out.
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Then, within a few seconds,
their mind will begin to wander.
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Our teacher said that's the nature
of the mind at the beginning.
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At the beginning,
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I just felt like my mind
is just racing a million miles an hour.
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When your mind wanders
like this, it’s usually time traveling.
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I'm thinking about
what happened in the past.
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Oh, I'm thinking about the future.
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And we can see that activity
in brain scans,
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lighting up something called
the Default Mode Network, or DMN.
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It's what allows us to call up memories
or imagine the future,
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but it also lets us endlessly ruminate
about regrets and fears.
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It's what some Buddhists call
the “monkey mind.”
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If your mind goes out
a million times, be mindful
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and kind enough to bring it back
to the present moment a million times.
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You can tame the monkey mind.
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That noticing of distraction,
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of noticing that your mind is lost,
is so important
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because it's a moment of awakening.
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In that moment,
when you direct your attention
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back to your breath,
a part of the brain lights up,
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the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
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It’s one of those brain regions that
sets us primates apart from other animals,
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part of the control center
that helps us focus.
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Meditation strengthens its connection
to the DMN,
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and in brain scans of expert meditators,
their DMNs are less active.
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This could be the mental muscle
that meditation sessions develop.
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We are simply practicing the quality
of paying attention
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over and over again.
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Today, thousands of schools
in dozens of countries
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are offering mindfulness classes
to students.
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I just want you to be aware
of your breathing.
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The corporate world
has embraced it too.
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There are mindfulness rooms
on all 61 floors
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of the headquarters of
the company Salesforce.
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After construction was completed,
Salesforce's CEO explained his reasoning.
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I think this is really important to
cultivating innovation in your company.
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We’re in this always-on economy.
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Here we are on a panel,
you’re gripping your phone.
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But that phone, it turned out,
was also a vehicle for mindfulness.
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- I have a mediation app here. Headspace.
- Okay...
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- Well, that's amazing, isn't that...
- Yeah, I do it every day.
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The Headspace app offers
ten-minute mindfulness sessions.
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As you breath out,
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just watching the body soften.
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More than a million people
around the world subscribe to that,
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and the Calm app, its competitor,
has attracted another million subscribers.
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In 2019,
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the two companies were valued
at 320 million and one billion dollars.
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But mindfulness only took off in the West
after almost disappearing in the East.
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By the time Marco Polo visited China
in the 13th century,
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Buddhism has spread to almost
every corner of Asia.
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But mindfulness meditation
had mostly fallen out of practice.
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Most Buddhists never meditated.
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It was just for
especially dedicated ascetic monks.
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That changed when the British invaded.
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A passionate monk named Ledi Sayadaw
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saw this occupation as a threat
to Buddhism’s very existence,
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so he encouraged
everyday people, everywhere,
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to practice mindfulness meditation.
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Ledi Sayadaw taught many students
and inspired other Buddhist teachers
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who taught more students, including a few
from Europe and the United States.
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In the East,
mindfulness was quickly spreading.
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But it took decades to gain purchase
in the West.
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For many Americans,
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this 1993 Bill Moyers special was their
first glimpse of mindfulness meditation.
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Fully present...
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with the breath...
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with the body.
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This guy is Jon Kabat-Zinn.
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And he’s not at a monastery,
he’s at a hospital.
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Kabat-Zinn had studied Zen Buddhism
while getting a molecular biology PhD.
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He also learned from several ambassadors
of the Burmese School of Meditation.
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He re-branded those teachings
to appeal to a secular Western audience
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with a program called
“Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction.”
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Years later, he wrote,
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“I bent over backward to avoid being seen
as Buddhist, New Age, or plain flaky."
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He explained his reasoning in that
breakout episode with Bill Moyers.
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We had no idea, and this had never
been tried before in a medical center,
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whether mainstream Americans
would go for meditative disciplines.
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"Give me a break.
What are you talking about, meditation?"
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But Kabat-Zinn
made a tantalizing promise
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right there on the cover of his book.
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Mindfulness could help you
cope with stress, pain, and illness.
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It sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
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And it probably didn’t hurt sales
that Hollywood in the 90's
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was getting really into Buddhism.
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His holiness
the Dalai Lama would like to meet you.
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The 14th Dalai Lama.
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To learn is to change.
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That’s Keanu Reeves playing Buddha.
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In real life, the Dalai Lama had become
a celebrity face of Buddhism.
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He was so popular
he was invited on Larry King,
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where he discussed one
of his life-long interests: neuroscience.
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I think the modern science about brain,
about nerve system,
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and about human psychology
seems now just is starting, beginning.
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In the fall of 1992,
I first met His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
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He invited me and asked me to bring
a few other scientists.
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He challenged me and he said,
"Look, you've been using
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tools of modern neuroscience to study
stress and anxietyand depression.
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Why can't you use those same tools
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to look at a person
and see what's right with them?"
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At the time, there were only
a few dozen studies on meditation.
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But Richie and his colleagues
changed that.
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Now, more than a thousand studies
come out every year.
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But not all of them are reliable.
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One review of over 8,000 studies
of meditation’s impacts on health
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found just 47 of them were designed
well enough to trust the results.
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And there wasn’t good evidence that
mindfulness could affect substance use,
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eating habits, sleep, or weight.
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Today, we see
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people using these practices
to treat diseases,
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both psychiatric illnesses
and medical illnesses.
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And there isn't a whole lot
of scientific evidence
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to suggest that it's useful in those ways.
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But there is evidence
that the turtle and the fox story
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has some truth to it.
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Mindfulness seems to change
how we relate to our own feelings,
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which in turn can change
how we relate to the world.
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Studies show that expert meditators
have a higher tolerance for pain.
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Experts still feel burning, for example,
with the same intensity as beginners.
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They just rate it as less unpleasant.
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When the heat comes,
I aware of heat.
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Be aware of heat.
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So for me, the heat sensation
is very clear.
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When most of us anticipate
getting burned,
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our brains' pain centers react
as if we were already suffering.
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And this reaction is so strong,
when the pain actually arrives,
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not much changes.
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Once the pain is over,
that mental anguish slowly subsides.
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But expert meditators
react much less in anticipation,
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then they feel the pain very intensely,
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and then activity falls much faster.
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Something similar is seen
in the emotional center of the brain,
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the amygdala.
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Beginners have a lot of activation there
when anticipating pain, but experts don't.
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There's no
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kind of like rumination.
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It’s as if long-term meditators
view pain as a neutral event,
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not an emotional ordeal.
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In 1963, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk
named Thich Quang Duc
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set himself on fire
to protest the ruling regime.
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A reporter wrote,
“As he burned he never moved a muscle,
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never uttered a sound.”
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00:14:49,221 --> 00:14:51,432
When most of us see
a disturbing image like this,
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our amygdalas light up and tell us this
is something that we should focus on.
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00:14:55,686 --> 00:14:58,939
But a study found that the more
meditation experience someone has,
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the less their amygdalas react
to these kinds of images.
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That could be because the connection
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between the emotional part
and the regulatory part of the brain
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has been strengthened
by mindfulness training.
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00:15:10,034 --> 00:15:12,369
Expert meditators, like all of us,
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can’t fully control what happens
in their lives,
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but they have much better control over
how they respond.
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00:15:18,626 --> 00:15:22,129
And that can be a powerful tool
when tensions are high.
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How can you
have something happen and...
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00:15:25,466 --> 00:15:30,679
create enough emotional space
to make a choice that isn't...
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the reaction that's going to get them
into trouble over and over again.
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Breathing allows you
to think about
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which way you want
to handle this situation.
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00:15:39,980 --> 00:15:43,651
You need a job, things ain't going to be
all happy hunky-dory.
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00:15:43,734 --> 00:15:45,945
The boss says something I don't like,
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you don't want to come in the next day
pissed off or mad.
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You gotta find a way
to deal with these emotions.
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Can I be aware of myself?
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00:15:54,286 --> 00:15:58,499
Can I manage what's happening inside
of me, so that I can manage my behavior?
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The possibility is to start to...
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create a different vision of themselves.
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Meditation may help you see
your sense of self, your ego,
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as just another product of your mind,
like pain or emotion.
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What we're really talking about
is decreases in the...
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00:16:16,517 --> 00:16:18,686
rigidity of the self.
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00:16:18,769 --> 00:16:20,479
After all, our sense of self
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00:16:20,562 --> 00:16:23,065
mostly comes from thinking about
our past and futures,
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00:16:23,148 --> 00:16:27,361
the job of the DMN, which is turned down
in expert meditators.
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00:16:27,528 --> 00:16:31,448
For people with depression and anxiety,
the DMN is often turned up,
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00:16:31,949 --> 00:16:34,827
which may be why mindfulness can help
with these disorders.
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When I was young,
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I had these panic attacks.
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00:16:38,247 --> 00:16:41,291
And my father said,
"No, don't fight with the panic.
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You have to say welcome to panic."
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00:16:43,961 --> 00:16:45,671
I'm not going to get rid of my panic.
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You can use anything as support
for your meditation.
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00:16:48,424 --> 00:16:49,633
So, I use my panic.
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00:16:50,050 --> 00:16:51,051
I watch my panic.
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"Hello, panic. Welcome."
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So, in the end, me and my panic
become good friend.
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00:16:56,390 --> 00:16:58,183
Some studies show
that mindfulness
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00:16:58,267 --> 00:16:59,935
doesn’t help as much as medication,
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00:17:00,019 --> 00:17:04,815
but it could be an option for people
who want to avoid side effects of drugs.
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00:17:05,649 --> 00:17:08,736
As meditation quiets
your self-absorbed monkey mind,
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00:17:08,819 --> 00:17:11,697
it might free you up to focus more
on other people.
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00:17:12,281 --> 00:17:15,659
Another translation of the word “Sati”
is “to remember”.
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00:17:16,160 --> 00:17:18,620
What is being remembered is
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00:17:18,871 --> 00:17:24,710
the consideration of other human beings
as having intrinsic goodness.
340
00:17:25,210 --> 00:17:28,088
The consideration
of other human beings as...
341
00:17:29,131 --> 00:17:31,842
having the same wish to be happy
and to be free of suffering.
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00:17:32,468 --> 00:17:36,555
The purpose of meditation
is to make you kind.
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00:17:36,638 --> 00:17:39,433
Mindfulness by itself is insufficient.
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00:17:39,516 --> 00:17:42,519
Before practice of meditation,
there is one step.
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00:17:42,603 --> 00:17:44,730
That is called morality.
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00:17:44,813 --> 00:17:48,984
If people can benefit from meditation
in a secular way,
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00:17:49,068 --> 00:17:52,988
that is also fine, but it's not going
to give you the complete freedom.
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00:17:53,197 --> 00:17:55,925
There are guys in here
who certainly are just taking this class
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00:17:55,949 --> 00:17:59,411
because they might get a few days off
of their sentence.
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00:17:59,495 --> 00:18:01,580
But even those guys, I think...
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00:18:02,498 --> 00:18:05,000
get a little bit of something out of it
in terms of...
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just, "Oh, right.
I can take a breath here."
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This is the way in.
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It's the only way in.
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00:18:12,800 --> 00:18:15,594
Ultimately, you're sitting with yourself
in your cell.
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00:18:15,719 --> 00:18:19,473
If you're not happy in here, you're not
going to be happy on the outside either.
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00:18:19,556 --> 00:18:22,142
So, how do you figure out
how to be happy in here?
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00:18:22,267 --> 00:18:25,229
It's not about fixing anything,
it's simply about
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00:18:25,312 --> 00:18:29,233
helping them change their relationship
to their circumstances.
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00:18:29,441 --> 00:18:31,235
I mean, it's a lot of things,
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00:18:31,318 --> 00:18:33,570
different, simple things that you notice.
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00:18:33,904 --> 00:18:36,907
I notice the air.
You know, I look into the sky.
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00:18:36,990 --> 00:18:39,535
If I'm on the phone in the yard,
I tell my family,
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00:18:39,618 --> 00:18:41,787
or whoever I'm on the phone with,
my loved ones,
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00:18:41,912 --> 00:18:44,915
"It is beautiful out here."
And that's not things I used to do,
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00:18:44,998 --> 00:18:46,708
'cause I didn't really notice it.