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Chapter Two

Breathing as if Your Life Depends on It

The Theory and Practice of Mindfulness Meditation

By non-doing, all doing becomes possible.

—Lao Zi

There is nothing mysterious about meditation. It’s really just mental training.

The scientific definition of meditation, as suggested by Julie Brefczynski-Lewis, is “a family of mental training practices that are designed to familiarize the practitioner with specific types of mental processes.”¹

Brain Boot Camp

Traditional definitions of meditation are very close to the modern scientific one above. The Tibetan word for meditation is Gom, which means “to familiarize or to habituate.” In Pali, the 2,600-year-old language of the earliest Buddhist texts, the word for meditation is Bhavana, which means “to cultivate,” as in planting crops. Even in ancient societies with long meditation traditions, meditation was not seen as something magical or mysterious—it was just mental training.

As the scientific definition of meditation above correctly suggests, there are many types of meditation designed to train different faculties of the mind. The specific type of meditation we are interested in for the purpose of developing emotional intelligence is mindfulness meditation, which was briefly introduced in the preceding chapter.

If meditation is about mental training, then what mental faculties does mindfulness train? Mindfulness trains two important faculties, attention and meta-attention. Attention is something we all understand. William James has a very nice definition for it: “taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form.”²

Meta-attention is attention of attention, the ability to pay attention to attention itself. Huh? Simply put, meta-attention is the ability to know that your attention has wandered away. Let’s say you are paying attention to an object, and eventually your attention wanders away to something else. After a while, there is something in your mind that “clicks” to let you know, hey, your attention has wandered. That faculty is meta-attention.

Meta-attention is also the secret to concentration. The analogy is riding a bicycle. The way you keep a bicycle balanced is with a lot of micro-recoveries. When the bike tilts a little to the left, you recover by adjusting it slightly to the right, and when it tilts a little to the right, you adjust it slightly to the left. By performing micro-recoveries quickly and often, you create the effect of continuous upright balance. It is the same with attention. When your meta-attention becomes strong, you will be able to recover a wandering attention quickly and often, and if you recover attention quickly and often enough, you create the effect of continuous attention, which is concentration.

Relaxed and Alert at the Same Time

The big secret of meditation, at least at the beginning stage, is it gets you to a state where your mind is relaxed and alert at the same time.

When your attention and meta-attention both become strong, something interesting happens. Your mind becomes increasingly focused and stable, but in a way that is relaxing. It is like balancing a bicycle on easy terrain. With enough practice, it becomes almost effortless and you get the experience of moving forward and being relaxed at the same time. You get where you need to be, and you actually enjoy the experience of getting there because it is relaxing.

With enough practice, you may even become able to bring your mind to that state on demand and stay in it for a prolonged period of time. When the mind becomes highly relaxed and alert at the same time, three wonderful qualities of mind naturally emerge: calmness, clarity, and happiness.

Here is the analogy. Imagine you have a pot of water full of sediments, and imagine that pot is constantly shaken and agitated. The water appears cloudy. Imagine that you stop agitating the pot and just let it rest on the floor. The water will become calm and, after a while, all the sediments will settle and the water will appear clear. This is the classical analogy of the mind in the alert and relaxed state. In this state, we temporarily stop agitating the mind the same way we stop agitating the pot. Eventually, our mind becomes calm and clear, the same way the water appears calm and clear.

Happiness Is the Default State of Mind

There is an extremely important quality of mind in the calm and clear state that is not captured by the above analogy. That quality is happiness. When the mind is calm and clear at the same time, happiness spontaneously arises. The mind becomes spontaneously and naturally joyful!

But why? Even after I found myself able to access that mind on demand, it did not make a lot of sense to me. Why should a calm and clear mind automatically be happy? I put that question to my friend Alan Wallace, one of the Western world’s top experts in the practice of relaxed concentration (a practice known as shamatha).

Alan said the reason is very simple: happiness is the default state of mind. So when the mind becomes calm and clear, it returns to its default, and that default is happiness. That is it. There is no magic; we are simply returning the mind to its natural state.

Alan, in his deep wisdom, said that in his usual calm, joyful, and understated manner. But to me, that statement represents a simple yet deeply profound, life-changing insight. It implies that happiness is not something that you pursue; it is something you allow. Happiness is just being. That insight changed my life.

To me, the biggest joke is that after all that has been done in the history of the world in the pursuit of happiness, it turns out that sustainable happiness is achievable simply by bringing attention to one’s breath. Life is funny. At least my life is.

Meditation Is like Exercise

The traditional analogy of the pot of water filled with sediments is at least 2,600 years old. There is another analogy for meditation, which modern people may understand better, and that is the analogy of physical exercise. Meditation is exercise for the mind.

When you go to the gym, you are training your body so that it can gain more physical abilities. If you lift weights, you will eventually become stronger. If you regularly jog, your times will be faster and you will be able to run farther. In the same way, meditation is like training your mind so that it can gain more mental abilities. For example, if you do a lot of meditation exercises, your mind becomes calmer and more perceptive, you can focus your attention more strongly and for longer, and so on.

I joke that meditation is like sweating at the gym, minus the sweating, and the gym.

One important similarity between exercise and meditation is that, in both cases, growth comes from overcoming resistance. For example, when you are weight training, every time you flex your biceps in resistance to the weight of dumbbells, your bicep muscles grow a little bit stronger. The same process happens during meditation. Every time your attention wanders away from your breath and you bring it back, it is like flexing your biceps—your “muscle” of attention grows a bit stronger.

The implication of this insight is that there is no such thing as a bad meditation. For many of us, when we meditate, we find our attention wanders away from our breath a lot, and we keep having to bring it back, and then we think we’re doing it all wrong. In fact, this is a good exercise because every time we bring a wandering attention back, we are giving our muscles of attention an opportunity for growth.

A second similarity between exercise and meditation is they can both significantly change the quality of your life. If you never exercise and you put yourself on a regular exercise regime, a few weeks or months later, you may find many significant changes in yourself. You will have more energy, you can get more stuff done, you get sick less often, you look better in the mirror, and you just feel great about yourself. The same is true for meditation. After a few weeks or months of starting a regular meditation regime, you have more energy; your mind becomes calmer, clearer, and more joyful; you get sick less; you smile more; your social life improves (because you smile more); and you feel great about yourself.

Practice of Mindfulness Meditation

The process of mindfulness meditation is quite simple, as illustrated in the following diagram.

The process starts with an intention. Start by creating an intention, a reason for wanting to abide in mindfulness. Perhaps it is to reduce stress. Perhaps it is to increase your own well-being. Maybe you want to cultivate your emotional intelligence for fun and profit. Or maybe you just want to create the conditions for world peace, or something.

In fact, if you are really lazy, or really busy, or really both, you can declare your meditation done right here. The act of creating good intentions is itself a form of meditation. Every time you create an intention, you are subtly forming or reinforcing a mental habit. If you create that same intention a lot, it eventually becomes a habit that will keep arising in your mind in varied situations to guide your behavior. For example, if many times a day you create the intention of caring for your own well-being, then after a while, in every situation you are in or with every decision you make, you may find yourself (perhaps unconsciously) biasing everything you do toward actions or decisions that increase well-being, and because of that, your well-being may actually improve.

This is even more powerful when your intention is toward the well-being of others. Just by forming that intention a lot, and not doing anything else, you may find yourself gradually (and, again, sometimes unconsciously) becoming kinder and nicer to other people. Pretty soon, many more people may like you and want to hang out with you, and you may not even know why—you may just think they are attracted to your good looks.

After creating the intention, the next thing to do is to follow your breath. Just bring a gentle attention to the process of breathing. That is all.

The classical analogy of this process is a guard standing at the city gates watching people go in and out of the city. He does not do anything; he only watches people go in and out with quiet vigilance. In the same way, you can think of your mind as a guard vigilantly watching your breath go in and out. You may pretend to have a big stick if it makes you feel cool. A really beautiful alternative analogy, suggested by my friend and fellow Search Inside Yourself teacher Yvonne Ginsberg, is a butterfly resting on the petal of a flower while the gentle breeze lifts and lowers it. Your attention is the butterfly and the petal is your breath.

At this point, your attention may gather. You may find yourself in a state where your mind is calm and concentrated. You may even be in the flow, just being with your breath. With enough practice, this state can last a long time, but for most people, this may go on for a few seconds. And then we fall into distraction.

In that state of distraction, we may start ruminating, worrying, or fantasizing. Sometimes, I even fantasize about not worrying. After a while, we realize our attention has wandered away. The default reaction of most people at this point is self-criticism. We start telling ourselves stories about how horrible we are as meditators and, by extension, not particularly good people either. Happily, there is a skillful way to deal with this.

The first thing to do is to simply regain attentional focus by bringing attention back to the process of breathing. The second thing to do is to remember an important insight we discussed earlier in this chapter—that this process of bringing a wandering attention back is like flexing your biceps during your gym workout. This is not failure; it is the process of growth and developing powerful mental “muscles.”

The third thing to do is to become aware of your attitude toward yourself. See how you treat yourself and how often you engage in nasty gossip about yourself. If possible, shift the attitude toward self-directed kindness and curiosity. This shift is, by itself, another meditation. Once again, it is about forming mental habits.

Every time we create an attitude of self-directed kindness, we deepen that habit a little bit more, and if we do it a lot, we may overcome a lot of our self-hatred and even become our own best friend.

One beautiful way of doing this is to create what the Zen folks call the “grandmother mind”: adopting the mind of a loving grandmother. To a loving grandmother, you are beautiful and perfect in every way. No matter how much mischief you cause, you are perfect and Grandma loves you just as you are. It does not mean Grandma is blind to your faults, nor does it mean she allows you to hurt yourself. Sometimes, she even intervenes sternly to stop you from getting yourself into big trouble. But no matter what, you are perfect to her and she loves you.

The practice is to see yourself in the eyes of a loving grandmother.

And finally, return to following your breath and, whenever it is helpful, remind yourself of your intention. Welcome back.

Posture and Stuff

You can really meditate in any posture you want. Traditional Buddhism, for example, defines four main meditation postures: sitting, standing, walking, and lying down, which seems to cover just about everything. Those Buddhists are greedy.

When choosing a meditation posture for yourself, there is only one thing to remember. Just one. The best meditation posture is one that helps you remain alert and relaxed at the same time for a long period of time. That means, for example, you probably do not want a posture where you slouch, since that is not conducive to alertness, and you also do not want a posture that requires you to stiffen your back, since that is not conducive to relaxation.

Happily for us, a sitting posture optimized for both alertness and relaxation has already been developed over the thousands of years that people have been meditating. This traditional posture is sometimes called the seven-point meditation posture. In brief, the seven are:

1. Back straight “like an arrow”

2. Legs crossed in “lotus position”

3. Shoulders relaxed, held up and back, “like a vulture”

4. Chin tucked in slightly, “like an iron hook”

5. Eyes closed or gazing into space

6. Tongue held against the upper palate

7. Lips slightly apart, teeth not clenched

We do not have to go into details about the traditional posture. I found the formal forms of this posture to be initially difficult for most modern people because we do not sit on the floor much. Instead, we are so used to sitting on chairs or couches with backrests that the traditional posture feels a bit awkward for many of us, at least in the beginning. So my suggestion to you is just to be aware that a functionally optimized traditional posture exists. Use it as a guideline, and find whatever posture is comfortable for you and, most importantly, helps you remain alert and relaxed. For example, it does not really matter if you cross your legs or use a backrest. As long as you can remain alert and relaxed, that is good.

Sogyal Rinpoche, a world-renowned Tibetan Buddhist teacher, suggests a fun and useful way to find your own posture. He recommends sitting like a majestic mountain. The idea is to think of your favorite mountain, say Mount Fuji or Mount Kilimanjaro, and then pretend to be that mountain when you sit. And there you are, Mister (or Miss) Mount Fuji, majestic, dignified, and awe inspiring. The nice thing is if you sit in a way that you feel majestic, dignified, and awe inspiring, it may also be the same posture that helps you become alert and relaxed, and it is kind of fun. Try this out and see if it works for you.

Another simple but useful suggestion comes from Search Inside Yourself instructor Yvonne Ginsberg:

Take a deep breath, lifting the rib cage. Letting go of the breath, let the shoulders drop while the spine stays gently in place. Thus embodying the flow of a river and the stability of a mountain, simultaneously.

One question I get asked a lot is whether your eyes should be open or closed when you meditate. The funny answer is: either, both, and neither. The real answer is, each has its upsides and downsides, so it is good to understand and play with the options.

Keeping your eyes closed during meditation is good; it helps you stay calm and keeps away visual distractions. The problem is it becomes easy to fall asleep. If you keep your eyes open, you have the reverse problem. You do not drift into sleep so easily anymore, but you get distracted by visual objects. What to do? What to do? There are two compromises, one temporal and one spatial.

The temporal compromise is to start with your eyes closed and then open them occasionally when you start drifting toward sleep. The spatial compromise is, if you can, keep your eyes half open. I like to joke that this is easy for me because I am Chinese. But really, the idea here is to open your eyes slightly, look slightly downward, and gaze at nothing in particular. In my own experience, this last option is the optimal one. I suggest trying each option out to see what works for you.

Often in our meditation, we get distracted by sounds, thoughts, or physical sensations. I suggest a four-step plan to work with such distractions:

1. Acknowledge.

2. Experience without judging or reacting.

3. If you need to react, continue maintaining mindfulness.

4. Let it go.

Acknowledge

Just acknowledge that something is happening.

Experience, Without Judging or Reacting

Whatever it is that you are experiencing, just experience it. Do not judge it to be good or bad. Let it be, let it be, as a famous song suggests. If it is possible, try not to react to it. If you have to react (for example, you really have to scratch), try to take five breaths before reacting. The reason to do this is to practice creating space between stimulus and reaction.

The more we are able to create space between stimulus and reaction, the more control we will have over our emotional lives. This skill that you develop here during sitting can be generalized to daily life.

If You Need to React, Continue Maintaining Mindfulness

If you need to react, for example you need to scratch or to stand up, maintain mindfulness over three things: intention, movement, and sensation. Remember that the goal of this practice is not keeping still; the goal is mindfulness. So as long as you maintain mindfulness, anything you do is fair game. This means, for example, that if you need to react to an itch on your face, first bring attention to the sensation of itching, then to the intention to scratch, and finally to the movement of your arm and finger and the sensation of scratching on your face.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

Let It Go

If it wants to be let go of, let it go. If not, just let it be.

Remember that letting go is not forcing something to go away. Instead, letting go is an invitation. We generously allow the recipient to choose whether or not to accept the invitation, and we are happy either way. When we let go of something that distracts our meditation, we are gently inviting it to stop distracting us, but we generously allow it to decide whether or not it wants to stay. If it decides to leave, that is fine. If it decides to stay, that is fine too. We treat it with kindness and generosity during its entire presence. This is the practice of letting go.

Finally, if you do not remember a single thing you read in this chapter so far (maybe because you do not care about this book but your wife made you sit down and read it), happily, Jon Kabat-Zinn has a one-phrase summary of this entire chapter:

Breathing as if your life depends on it.

If you can only remember a single phrase in this chapter, remember this, and you will understand mindfulness meditation.

Sitting Time

Now that you have learned about the theory and practice of mindfulness meditation, let us now spend a few minutes sitting in mindfulness.

There are a number of ways you can do this. The simplest is just to extend the two-minute mindfulness exercise from the previous chapter. First, sit in a meditation posture that allows you to be alert and relaxed at the same time. Then whenever you are comfortable doing so, you may practice the Easy Way (which is to pay attention to the process of breathing and gently bringing attention back every time it wanders away), or the Easier Way (which is to sit without agenda and simply shift from doing to being). If you like, you may switch between Easy and Easier anytime. Do that for maybe ten minutes, or as long as you would like to. That will be your meditation practice.

If you prefer something more formal and structured, you can apply the Process Model of Mindfulness Meditation discussed earlier in this chapter. Start by sitting in a meditation posture that allows you to be alert and relaxed at the same time. Once you are comfortable, invite an intention to arise, one that is based on why you are sitting here, which will encourage you to continue your practice. Bring your attention to the process of breathing. If the mind is calm and concentrated, abide in that mind. If the mind gets distracted by a sound, a thought, or an itch, acknowledge the source of the distraction, experience it without judging it, and let it go if it wants to be let go. If you need to move, maintain mindfulness of intention, movement, and sensation. Gently bring your attention back to your breath. If self-criticism or self-judgment arises, invite a thought of self-directed kindness to arise, if it wants to. If not, just let it be; everything is fine. Do this for ten minutes, or as long as you would like to.

MINDFULNESS MEDITATION

Let us begin by sitting comfortably. Sit in a position that enables you to be both relaxed and alert at the same time, whatever that means to you. Or, if you prefer, you may sit like a majestic mountain, whatever that means to you.

Let us now take three slow, deep breaths to inject both energy and relaxation into our practice.

Now, let us breathe naturally and bring a very gentle attention to your breath. You can either bring attention to the nostrils, the abdomen, or the entire body of breath, whatever that means to you. Become aware of in breath, out breath, and space in between.

(Short pause)

If you like, you can think of this exercise as resting the mind on the breath. You can visualize the breath to be a resting place, or a cushion, or a mattress, and let the mind rest on it, very gently. Just be.

(Long pause)

If at any time you feel distracted by a sensation, thought, or sound, just acknowledge it, experience it, and very gently let it go. Bring your attention very gently back to the breathing.

(Long pause)

If you like, let us end this meditation by inviting joyful inner peace to arise.

Breathing in, I am calm.

Breathing out, I smile.

This present moment,

Wonderful.

(Short pause)

Thank you for your attention.

Dude, Where Is the Science?

Meditation has at least one important thing in common with science: its heavy emphasis on the spirit of inquiry. In meditation, there are two aspects to the spirit of inquiry. First, a lot of meditation is about self-discovery. Yes, we start with training of attention, but attention is not the end goal of most meditation traditions; the true end goal is insight. The reason we create a powerful quality of attention is to be able to develop insights into the mind. Having a powerful attention is like having a powerful torchlight—it is fun to have, but its real purpose is to allow us to look inside the dark rooms of the mind and ourselves so that we can, well, search inside ourselves. And because it is ultimately about developing insight, the spirit of inquiry—at least of internal inquiry—has to be an essential component of one’s meditation practice.

The second aspect of this spirit of inquiry extends beyond the internal and into the external world. Because meditators are so used to inquiry, we have also become very comfortable with science and scientific inquiry into meditation itself. This is true even for classically trained practitioners within ancient meditative traditions, such as Buddhism. To many of my friends, the most stunning example of this comfort with science was when the Dalai Lama said, “If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.”³

With this in mind, let us take a quick glance at some of the peer-reviewed scientific literature surrounding meditation.

One of the most telling of all research studies on meditation was conducted by two pioneers in the field of contemplative neuroscience, Richard Davidson and Jon Kabat-Zinn.⁴ The study was eye-opening for many reasons. It was the first major study conducted in a business setting, with employees of a biotechnology company as subjects. This makes it highly relevant for somebody like me who operates in the corporate world. The study showed that after just eight weeks of mindfulness training, the anxiety level of the subjects was measurably lower, which is nice but not surprising, since the name of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s training program is Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.

More surprisingly, when the electrical activity of the subjects’ brains was measured, those in the meditation group showed significantly increased activity in the parts of their brains associated with positive emotions. The most fascinating finding had to do with their immune function. Near the end of the study, subjects were given flu shots, and those in the meditation group developed more antibodies to the influenza vaccine. In other words, after just eight weeks of mindfulness meditation, subjects were measurably happier (as measured in their brains) and showed a marked increase in developing immunity. Remember that this study was not conducted on bald guys wearing robes living in a monastery, but on ordinary people with real lives and real high-stress jobs in corporate America.

A later study conducted by Heleen Slagter, Antoine Lutz, Richard Davidson, et al., focused on attention.⁵ Specifically, it explored meditation in relation to an interesting phenomenon known as “attentional-blink” deficit. There is a very simple way to explain attentional blink. Let’s say you are shown a series of characters (either numbers or letters of the alphabet) on a computer screen one at a time, in quick succession (with about fifty milliseconds of delay between letters, which is half of one-tenth of a second). Let’s say the entire series is made up of letters, except for two numbers. For example, let’s say the series is P, U, H, 3, W, N, 9, T, Y. There are two numbers within the series of letters. Your task is to identify the two numbers.

Attentional Blink Task

Here is the interesting part: if the two numbers are presented within half a second of each other, the second one is often not detected. This phenomenon is known as attentional blink. Somehow, after the first salient target is detected, mental attention “blinks,” and it takes a while before the brain can detect the next one.

This attentional blink has previously been assumed to be a feature of our brain’s wiring, and therefore, immutable. Slagter’s study shows that after just three months of intensive and rigorous training in mindfulness meditation, participants can significantly reduce their attentional blink. The theory is that with mindfulness meditation training, one’s brain can learn to process stimuli more efficiently, hence after processing the first salient target, it still has the mental resources to process the second.

This study is a fascinating glimpse into the possibility of upgrading the operating efficiency of our brains with mindfulness meditation. So if your job depends on your ability to pay attention to information for a prolonged period of time, maybe this meditation thing can help you get a raise.

There are many more interesting scientific studies of meditation. We’ll just point out a few more salient ones.

Antoine Lutz showed that adept Buddhist meditators are able to generate high-amplitude gamma brain waves, which are often associated with high effectiveness in memory, learning, and perception.⁶ Better still, these adepts exhibit higher gamma-band activity even at baseline, when they are not meditating, suggesting that meditation training can change your brain at rest. If you pump iron a lot, you will have bulging muscles even when you are not working out in the gym. Similarly, when you do a lot of meditation training, you will have strong mental “muscles” of calmness, clarity, and joy even when you are just hanging out.

One early study in this field by Jon Kabat-Zinn revealed that mindfulness can greatly accelerate the healing of a skin condition known as psoriasis.⁷ The methodology was simple. All participants were given the usual treatments, but for half of them, tapes of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s meditation instructions were played to the participants during the treatment, and just playing the tapes significantly accelerated the healing process. While I find the results fascinating, what is compelling about this study is that psoriasis is something tangible and visible—a skin disease characterized by red spots that grow larger as they get worse. So when you talk about how meditation can help you heal in this context, it’s not just woo-woo talk by some New Age person; it is something so tangible, you can see it and actually measure it with a ruler.

Finally, there is a study that suggests meditation can thicken your neocortex. This study, conducted by Sara Lazar, took MRI snapshots of mindfulness meditators and non-meditators, and showed that meditators have a thicker cortex in brain regions associated with attention and sensory processing.⁸ Of course, these measurements show correlation, not causation, which means it is entirely possible that people with a thicker cortex in those brain regions just happen to be meditators. However, the study also showed that the longer the meditation subjects have been practicing meditation, the thicker those parts of their brains are, which suggests that meditation practice is causing those observed changes in the brain.

The above was just a snapshot of some of the research in the last twenty-five years. It is remarkable that mindfulness helps improve everything from attention and brain function to immunity and skin disease. Mindfulness feels almost like MacGyver’s Swiss Army knife—it is useful in every situation.

Remember, if Meng can sit, so can you.