Neuroscience of Mindfulness, Part 2
Siegel writes, "We have the possibility of creating a world of compassion and well-being and we have the capacity for mindless violence and destruction."
By practicing mindfulness and strengthening our brain's connections through neural integration, we can gain more control over the impact our thoughts have on ourselves and others. We can become more attuned to one another, empathize quicker, create acceptance, and connect with more than just ourselves.
In the second half of this episode, we welcome our first guest, Emily, to participate in some mindfulness strategies that we hope will give you insight into how mindfulness works, but also recognize that it isn't always easy... and that's okay.
Most findings in this episode come from Dan Siegel’s The Mindful Brain, as he’s spent decades studying this topic and founded the Mindfulness Awareness Research Center at UCLA. Additional resources can be found below.
Resources:
Dan Siegel, The Mindful Brain
Yi-Yuan Tang, The Neuroscience of Mindfulness Meditation
P. Zelazo, K. Lyons - “The Potential Benefits of Mindfulness Training in Early Childhood: A Developmental Social Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective“
General Outline of Episode
What we are talking about it
Expands growth in an area of your brain responsible for 9 important things 1)body regulation 2) attuned communication 3)emotional balance 4) response flexibility 5) empathy 6) self knowing awareness 7) fear modulation 8) intuition (registration of input from the information processing neural networks surrounding our viscera - heart/lungs/intestines) and 9) morality (connection to something bigger- best for the whole not just for oneself)
Zelaso” “Studies have shown that specific applications of mindful awareness improve the capacity to regulate our emotions, to combat emotional dysfunction, to improve patterns of thinking, and to reduce negative mindsets. Research on some dimensions of mindfulness awareness practices reveals that they greatly enhance the body's functioning; Healing immune response, stress reactivity, and a general sense of physical well-being are improved with mindfulness. Our relationships with others are also improved perhaps because the ability to perceive the nonverbal emotional signals from others may be enhanced and our ability to sense the internal world of others may be augmented. In these ways, we come to compassionately experience others feelings and empathize with them as we understand other people's point of view. We can see the power of mindfulness awareness to achieve these many and diverse beneficial changes in our lives when we consider that this form of awareness may directly shape the activity and growth of the parts of the brain responsible for our relationships, our emotional life, and our physical response to stress.”
Why do we care?
In each of us, there is a multitude of possibilities. “We have the possibility of creating a world of compassion and well-being and we have the capacity for mindless violence and destruction.” But we - because of neuroplasticity - can control that - we can change and impact this - and mindfulness is a huge key to this
Attunement with others - connecting us to the larger community of humans - we engage in everything from religion to sports to feel connected with others - to be a part of something bigger -
Attunement to others through neural integration - Episode 4 -Porges- reception of safety - nervous system evaluates threat or safety - activates the brainstem and automatic nervous system - response with openness or fight/flight or freeze. But Porages will also state that with attunement comes love without fear. “Internal attunement may activate the same neural circulatory involved in the myelination” Myelination- last episode - creates more rapid neural signal transfer - more rapid signal transfer we can have more of a break on fight/flight or freeze - assessing for safety with much more information much quicker - keeping us more in the state of being able to be open - to feel more love and less fear
Our brain focuses on what is bad - so that it can keep you alive. It tries to make sure you don’t do the stupid thing again, makes you afraid of the thing it thinks can kill you, and tries to predict what could happen so bad things won’t. “We shove sensation through the filter of the past to make the future predictable. In the process, we lose the present period but because the present is all that exists, we have lost everything in the bargain.
Fear is important to the brain - but remember we evolved faster than our brains did - afraid of everything - taxes, chemistry tests, the neighbor that looks different than you are - Fear is like a flashlight at night - it focuses light on one area but will also damage your existing night vision.
“Fear drives us to shine a focused beam of light onto what we think we must know, to keep us safe, to give us a sense of truth, of keeping the world the way we think it should be. …But the real truth is that those ‘cognitive contraptions’ help structure a neural attempt to make sense of a complex world, only to then entrap us into the very structure we have created - As we grow we run through our lives with those spotlights of attention that selectively focus on only what we need to be doing. Without the night's mind vision of being, we lose sight of the real and big picture. We lose the essence of being, the core of being present…beneath the layers of adaptation to survive in the world remains a powerful mind vision that enables us to be receptive to whatever is.
Letting go of “top-down’ influences - “ This fear,.. without …we lose our minds, go insane, fall prey to attackers, and die.” – but this overgeneralization of the brain to try to preempt bad things will also negatively impact us - it is the thing that creates us/them dichotomy - in letting go of it we open ourselves up to more
Also knowing what is the brain and what is you help create acceptance. We are afraid - that is in our brain - - that is real - and we can be not integrated and when we are we ‘flip our lids’ have frightening behaviors - with mindfulness we can reflect and separate - this helps us understand experiences, not explain it away. “Rather than rationalizing excuses for inappropriate behavior, such neural insights seem to actively help us have more compassion and discernment both for ourselves and for others. We can come to a clear seeing about the nature of our mental reality, the more reflective coherence and empathetic relationships we can promote for each other.”
Connection to more than ourselves -
Einstein said in a letter to a rabbi who requested help on what to say to his daughter who was coping with the accidental death of his other daughter, her sister “human being is part of the whole, called by us universe, apart of limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is the kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. No one is able to achieve this completely, but striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security
“Matthew Ricard a former research microbiologist
now a longtime Buddhist monk,
book on happiness
does being happy make you kind or does just being kind makes you happy?
Ton of research on happiness and how to lead a meaningful life
being considerate and caring for others = deeply rewarding way of life
Kindness= well-being in yourself
“But what gets in the way of such mindful living? Why isn't the world just full of human beings discerning all over the place, reflecting on life, sharing kindness with each other day by day? The secondary influence of memory and identity can lead to an automatic way of living in which beliefs are seen as ultimate realities and create motivational drivers to enact the worldviews onto others. People can become impulsive and destructive. There's no awareness that these beliefs are activities of the mind, no discernment of deeper primal sense beneath fear and projection, hostility and hatred.”
Mindfulness gives us discernment
“When we feel our lives are threatened… we intensify … classification of whom we deem members of the in Group and therefore cherished and whom we see as a part of the outgroup and worthy of suspicion and attack. It is an intensely activated neural structure of threat, our limbic regions influence cortical reasoning and we come to believe without a doubt that we are right in our assessments and they are wrong. When the stakes are high in these internal times of tyranny and technological advances, a mindful awareness of the neural mechanisms and the reflection necessary to determine from their automatic reflexes are desperately needed. Reflection is no longer a luxury it may be necessary for our survival”
What do we do about it?
It should be said here that as well as mindfulness is much more than a relaxation technique. We can become stable and clear, and we can become engaged and ready for action. It is the sense of presence, not relaxation, that embodies the essence of mindfulness awareness.
Not easy - feels like it should be easy - so its easy to get frustrated
Brain muscle - don’t expect to go into the gym and lift 200lbs over your head - this is the same - every time you practice this you get better at it - and we know that from brain scans!
One minute of mindful sitting - focus on just being - monkey mind - focus on breath - if you have thoughts come into your mind, gently acknowledge them without judgment - (mark down)
Mindful eating -
Body check-in (pulse or heart rate, breath - where and how, stomach, muscle tension, thoughts)
See
Hear
Smell
Touch
Taste
Body check-in (pulse or heart rate, breath - where and how, stomach, muscle tension, thoughts)
May I be safe and protected from harm. May I be happy and have peaceful and joyful heart. May I be healthy and have a body that supports me with energy. May I live with ease that comes from well being.
Self
Benefactor
Neutral
Difficult person in life
We are asked to offer and ask for forgiveness. I ask you for forgiveness for anything I have done or said that caused you harm or painful feelings
A reflective exercise
it's helpful to be able to become aware of your own mind. That can be a very useful awareness to have. Yet not so much happens in life that lets us come to know ourselves. So we're going to spend a couple of minutes now doing just that. Let yourself get settled. It's good to sit with your back straight if you can, feet planted flat on the floor, legs uncrossed. If you need to lay flat on the floor that is OK too. And with your eyes open first, try this. Try lining your attention go to the center of the room.... And now just notice your attention as you let it go to the far wall.... And now follow your attention as it comes back to the middle of the room period... And then up close as if you're holding a book at reading distance. Notice how
your attention can go to very different places. Now let your attention go inward. You might let your eyes close and as they close get a sense inside you of your body in space and where you're sitting in the room period and now let yourself become aware of the sounds around you. That sense of sound can fill your awareness. Let your awareness now find the breath wherever you feel it most prominently, whether it's at the level of your nostrils, the air going in and out, the level of your chest as it goes up and down, or the level of your abdomen going inward and outward. Perhaps you'll even just notice your whole body breathing period wherever it comes naturally, just let your awareness ride this wave of urine breath, and then your out breath. When you come to notice, as often happens, that your mind may have wandered and become last in a thought, memory, a feeling, a worry, when you notice that, just gently take note of that inside and gently, lovingly return your awareness towards your breath wherever you feel it and follow that wave of the in breath and out breath. As you follow your breath I'm going to tell you an ancient story that's been passed through the generations. The mind is like an ocean. And deep in the ocean, beneath the surface it is common clear. And no matter what the surface conditions are, whether it's flat or choppy or even a full Gale storm, deep in the ocean it's tranquil and serene period from the depth of the ocean you can look toward the surface and just notice the activity there, as in the mind, where from the depth of the mind you can look upward toward the waves, your brain waves at the surface of the mind, Where all that activity of the mind, thoughts, feelings, sensations and memories exist. You have the incredible opportunity to just observe these activities at the surface of your mind. At times it might be helpful to let your attention go back to the breath, and follow the breath to ground you in this deep tranquil place period from this depth of your mind, it's possible to become aware of the activities of the mind and to discern that those are not the totality of who you are, that you are more than just your thoughts, more than just a feeling. You can have those thoughts and feelings and also be able to just notice with them the wisdom that they are not your identity. They are part of your minds experience. For some naming the type of mental activity like feeling or thinking or remembering or worrying Ken help allow these activities of the mind to be noted as just mental events that can gently float away and out of awareness. One more image I'll share with you in this inward time is one that you may find helpful. Perhaps you'll consider it something you want to use as well. You can think of your mind structure as similar to the wheel of awareness, imagining the wheel of a bicycle where there is an outer rim and spokes that connect the rim to an inner hub. In your mind's wheel of awareness, anything that can come onto your awareness would be one of an infinite points of the rim. One sector of the rim may include our five senses of touch taste smell hearing insight, though senses that bring the outside world into our minds. Another sector of that rim it's the wheel is the sense of the body, the feeling in our limbs, our facial muscles, and the feeling of the organs of our to so, our lungs, our heart, and our intestines. All of the body brings its wisdom up to our minds and this bodily sense these six cents if you will, adds another texture to what we can become aware of. Another set of points on the rim are what the mind creates directly, like thoughts and feelings, memories and perceptions, hopes and dreams, and this segment of the rim of our minds is also available fully to our awareness, what you call our seventh sense, our capacity to see the mind itself, in ourselves and in the minds of others. We may also be able to feel felt with our eight cents as we feel attuned relationships resonate with ourselves of others. We can choose if we want to pick one segment and send a spoke out to that point of the rim. We may choose to pay attention to the feeling in our bellies and send spoke there. Or we can choose to pay attention to a memory, and send a spoke to that area of our seventh sense to see that part of the mind. so these folks represent focusing on a point on the rim. And the spokes animate from the depth of our mind, which is the hub of the wheel of awareness. As we focus on the breath, we can develop the spaciousness of the hub. As the hub expands, we develop the capacity to be receptive to whatever arises from the rim, to give ourselves into the spaciousness, to the luminous quality of the hub that can receive any aspect of our experience, just as it is. Without preconceived ideas or grasping into judgment, this mindfulness awareness, this receptive attention, brings us into a tranquil place where we can be aware and know all immigrants of our experience. The above our minds like the depth of an ocean of our minds is a place of tranquility on inquiry where we can explore the nature of the mind with equanimity energy and concentration. This hub of our minds is always available to us right now. And it's from this hub that we enter a compassionate state of connection to ourselves and feel compassion for others. Let's focus on our breath for a few more moments together. Opening that spacious hub of our minds to the beauty and wonder of what is. When you are ready you can take a more voluntary and perhaps deeper breath if you wish and get ready to gently let your eyes open, sensing the depth of your mind and will continue this dialogue together.
thing is just this. Whatever is here, we you may our patients students relatives friends strangers adversaries can contain the fullness of experience and ride the waves of our streams of awareness within the reflective spaces of the hub of our mind. The spaciousness can be shared, the wheel of awareness can be a collective group experience filled with awe and the illusion of our separateness revealed for what it is a creation of our minds and neural invasion. Kindness is to our relationships on this precious and precarious planet with breath is to life. With reflection we can nurture in each other and access to a self deeper than personal identity, that ipity of being all that we share period from this mindful practice there may be a path towards healing our global community one mind one relationship one moment at a time
