Why Meditation is Hard

Hmm, learn to stop thinking.  We hear its meant to be good for you.  But I tried and ... [fill in the blank]. This is where many people get stuck.

As anyone reading my blog will know, I’ve developed a regular meditation practice over the last couple of years. 

What’s fascinating me right now is how the practice is evolving within me.  It’s a different experience than it was.

A facet of this occurred to me this morning. While I was waiting for the 1 train on the subway, a parallel hit me. Meditation is a skill, but one thing about meditation is different from any other skill. The classic Conscious Competence graph will help illustrate.

The unique part of meditation is what being conscious within meditation means.  In stages 2 and 3, during the conscious stages, we have to think about the act of non-thinking to do it.

This contradiction feels different than it does when learning other skills.  When we're learning to drive, for instance, the fact we think to ourselves, ok, clutch first, then gear, now release clutch, doesn't undermine our confidence that we're changing a gear correctly. We know it's just part of the learning process. 

Then after many miles of driving, when we become unconsciously competent, but occasionally stall the car because we're being absent-minded, we go back to consciously changing the gear, but we don't think we're worthless drivers. We know we were just abent-minded for a moment.

Something about meditation is different. The initial contradiction is unsettling. To think our way into a non-thinking pattern feels like we are screwing up the whole thing. We're thinking!, the very thing we're letting go. And when we inevitably stall the car, we tend to critique the entire concept of meditation in a more personal and fundamental language. We forget this is just a skill.

My own practice seems deeply rooted in conscious competence right now. About 75% of the time I think about each step. But occasionally I slip into this effortless stream, I experience a taste of how the skill is unfolding within me. And it's beautiful.

The key to getting this far, I think, has been to trust the process. There's a lot of good teaching out there. But we have to show up, have faith in the teaching, and keep at it. Like any worthwhile skill, it takes time.

From what I can tell, the more accurate graph might be the this one.

I like how this graph reveals a deeper complexity of skill development. While some parts of meditation flow for me now, other parts are just revealing themselves.

During my first year of mediation, I didn't have the community I do now to discuss my confusion and frustration. So I read a lot of books. But chatting to real people is better. I wish I'd had someone I could ask. If anyone reading this would like to discuss their journey, give me a shout. 

Peace and blessings.

Ideas on Meditation, Part 4 - Vipassanna

In Easter of 2016 I spent 10 days on a silent meditation retreat. That description alone, I’ve found, is enough to perplex most people.  You can see it in their eyes – ok, that is nuts.  But if you’re reading this blog about meditation, you must be interested in it (or a really good friend).

So let’s skip past the ‘crazy cult thing’ and move on to where I went, what happened, and what I thought of the experience.

Where did I go? I went to a Vipassanna center, which teaches a meditation technique that has a direct lineage to the Buddha’s teachings some 2500 years ago.  However, the teaching itself is not ‘Buddhist’ - it’s faith-neutral, and really a contemplative exercise in experiencing our lives in a deeper way.

Before my arrival, I was amazed that the entire set up - the accommodation, the glorious food, and the instruction itself, are all free.  It costs nothing.  The organization survives on donations from graduates, and it asks those graduates to only donate in line with the value of their experience, and their ability to make that donation.  Seriously.  There wasn’t a guilt-trip fund-raising sales talk to endure at the end.  Just a simple explanation of what they would use the money for, if you decided you wanted to donate and could afford to do so.  From a voluntary, donation-based finance structure, the organization has grown to 170 centres worldwide in the last 40 years (since its revival, which is too complicated a story for this blog). 

I knew it had to be good.

So what happens? First, a vow of silence with no books, no music, no writing paper, no drawing, no snacks, no musical instruments, and no exercise.  Just meditation, eating and sleeping, for the entire 10 days.

The schedule itself is even more intense:

4:00am		Morning wake-up bell
4:30-6:30am		Private Meditation
6:30-8am		Breakfast
8-9am		Group meditation
9-11am		Private Meditation
11-12		Lunch break
12-1pm		Rest and Private Questions for the Teacher
1-2:30pm		Private Meditation
2:30-3:30pm		Group meditation
3:30-5pm		Private Meditation
5-6pm		Dinner break
6-7pm		Group meditation
7-8pm		Teacher's Lecture in the hall
8-9pm		Group meditation
9-9:30pm		Group Question Time for the Teacher
9:30 pm		Retire to your own room--Lights out

The first evening starts with some basic instruction for the next day’s 12 hours of meditation, and off you go.  Some people had no previous meditation experience, but I’m glad I wasn’t one of them. 

There are a load of great blogs which go into more detail about the retreat, and how it all works, so if you’re interested, you might want to read this one, this one or this one.

What did I think of it?  It was challenging.  And one heck of an experience.  As my previous blogs have expressed, the purpose of meditation is not ‘stopping thinking’, but learning to harness our other senses.  Our sense of touch, taste, hearing and smell are so much finer than we realize – our bodies give us fascinating information all the time, but we’re normally too absorbed in thought to hear any of it.

Spending 10 days in meditation gave me an opportunity to really listen. 

One of the paradoxical things about meditation is that words can’t describe the experience. A faithful blog is impossible, and the purpose of this blog is to share my theory on this.

Right now, as you read this, we accept that you’re experiencing four dimensions: the three dimensions of space, plus time.  My crazy idea is that you’re actually experiencing more.  You have the space-time field you’re inside of (4 dimensions), alongside the layers of experience of those four dimensions - what you’re thinking, feeling, hearing, smelling, tasting and seeing.  

Could how you feel be a dimension of reality?

Hear me out.  We all experience a single reality. But the experience of this ‘single reality’ is different for everyone, and to each person their experience is real. Nowhere in the four dimensions is there happiness, sadness, hope or anxiety, or any storyline of thoughts about why those feelings exist.  In my mad little theory, we’re experiencing 6 dimensions, all the time - the normal four plus dimensions of thinking and feeling.

If you don't like the word 'dimension' for this, no problem.  Call it something else.  But I'm sure we agree that how we think and feel about reality makes our world immensely more rich and texturous and occasionally overwhelming.  We experience all these signals from the external world, plus our thoughts and feelings about the external world.  

Meditation is all about deepening our awareness of this experience.  The reason a blog cannot describe accurately is mathematical. 

A blog is linear.  As with all language, each word has to exist in a defined, grammatical sequence, one after the other.  The use of language is probably best described as two dimensions.  We have the word itself, one at a time, and what that word means to us.  But during this sentence, the blog cannot also create other layers of experience, the way reality can.  

Therefore, a blog cannot accurately describe a journey of all six dimensions, especially one like meditation.

Another great example of this is tickling and giggling.  I could blog about it until the end of time, but you’ll never understand tickling or giggling from a blog.

So what I got out of Vipassanna was a tickling introduction into what meditation is there to help us explore.  And tickling is a nice parallel, because being tickled is not completely fun, even though we giggle.  There’s something both wonderful and awful about it, at the same time.  We laugh and recoil.  Meditation is a little like that, full of duality.  Once you get good instruction and develop a diligent practice (unlike tickling, it’s not instantaneous – you have to work at it) one can really experience our universe in a wider, broader and yet somehow more precise way.  We can begin to see how things really are, right now.

There is a depth and breadth to life that is beyond our mind's ability to comprehend whilst merely thinking on its own.  There is a richer experience to be had when we use our entire experience, all six dimensions, to embrace the whole thing.  Some of it is disturbing.  Some of it is exhilarating.  A fascinating part is how differently even the notion of being 'disturbed' or 'exhilarated' becomes when one just starts to feel completely aware, starts to feel awakened.

This is what I got from the Vipassanna retreat. 

Ideas on Meditation, Part 3

My favourite source of intellectual popcorn fodder is science's exploration of the brain.  We've learned so much.  Just to think that only 50 years ago a surgical lobotomy, where doctors essentially inserted an ice-pick though a patient's eye socket into the pre-frontal cortex of the brain itself, and just wiggled the icepick around in the hope of doing something useful, that this was an accepted medical practice, is astonishing. And disgusting. Now, with advancements like fMRI, we can tell which part of the brain is doing what, where and when, and deduce why.

Combine this building body of research with some of the insights shared by meditation experts for the last 3,000 years and you have a recipe for the best playground 'told you so' taunt in human history. In this blog, I'm going to just share a few examples and links of how science is proving what meditators have known for a long time.

For centuries, science regarded the brain as being fairly fixed and unregenerative, having a linear development, that thinks clearly and consistently, with the odd exception of some hormone-induced flows which might, through the necessity of some 'fight or flight' stimuli, provide useful emotional reactions to encourage certain behaviours, but that overall provided an accurate depiction to the world. In just one little decade, all that has proven to be false.

It's so cool.

Let's start at the beginning. The first idea was that the brain's abilities were, barring injury, fixed - home base for those misleading IQ tests. Then we began to map the brain, labelling one area for language, another for motor skills, a further for memory, and so on. 

Norman Doidge has written two fantastic books which enlighten some of these ideas, The Brain That Changes Itself and The Brain's Way of Healing.  In a nutshell, the areas of the brain are not fixed, regenerate constantly and develop continually. His books detail how they figured this stuff out.

Back in the 50s, Dr. Edward Taub was working as a PhD student and, as part of his research, had to deaffernate, or cut the nerve cords to, the arms of monkeys (the 'why' is a long story that isn't germane here, but yes, sounds crap for the monkeys).  In order to give his PhD a unique flavour, he restricted the good arm of the monkeys post operatively - to prove the deaffernation had rendered that appendage useless.  The deaffernatiion was old science, but restricting the good arm afterward was a new twist.  Nobody had done that.  To his shock, the monkeys gradually started using the arm he'd deaffernated.  Nobody understood how this was possible.  He'd cut the nerve cords.  But after a while, they began using that arm.  Many questioned him, his techniques, and his science, it took decades to unfold and it makes a good read in Mr Doidge's book. 

The upshot is that this one little experiment obliterated decades of scientific research and theory.

Fast forward, and we now know that because the good arm was restricted, the monkey's nervous system reorganised itself to have another part of the nervous system, a non-arm part, take over the deaffernated arm's nerve cells.  Like an anatomical pirate, the monkey's system re-wired itself to surf other nerve endings.  It was willing to do this because it couldn't use the good arm.  It had been restricted in a sling.  Since the monkey desperately needed an arm, the nervous system re-wired itself to solve the problem.

The ramifications of this experiment were massive.  If the nervous system could rewire itself, could the brain?  Taub decided to find out with stroke patients.  We know a stroke injury is in the brain, not in the nervous system, and stroke patients want all the help they can get. What he found was yes, in many cases, the brain can be taught to completely re-wire itself to overcome some pretty massive difficulties.  

How do we know this, for sure?

We'll use the example of someone who lost the use of their right arm due to a stroke. By restricting their left arm, so the person had no option but to use their immobile right arm, the brain would re-wire itself, it would comandeer a part of the brain officially designated for something else - the face, for instance.  And they know this because we can see it on an fMRI. We can see the stroke-damaged brain. We can see zero blood flow where the right arm movement should be. We can see a patient, after several weeks of recovery and therapy, move their right arm.  And we can see the blood flow through the 'face part' of the brain. It's amazing. 

I love this for two reasons. First, this random chance experiment goes wrong, and it ends up positively changing the lives of stroke victims, among others, all over the world - treatment and recovery are vastly improved.  And this random experiment opens up a whole new branch of science, Neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity is the study of the brain's ability to reorganise itself, to even fundamentally restructure itself. It turns our that our brains change all the time. Every millisecond of every day.  We think we're a constant, we perceive it that way, but we just aren't. And science is deducing so much cool stuff about this.

Among other things, Neuroplasticity is suggesting that age-related decline parallels the slump many people experience in learning.  Because the brain likes growing neural connections, because it wants to learn, if we get stuck in a rut for too long, when we stop learning, the brain starts to atrophy.  There's good evidence that getting older is precisely the time for old dogs to learn new tricks. Our brains want us to learn an instrument or a language, we're dying for it.  

Back to the connection with meditation.  One of the next areas that PhDs in Neuroplasticity began researching were psychological functions. If the brain could be re-wired to heal motor function issues, could it be re-wired to deal with anxiety, depression and OCD?

Dr Jeffrey Schwartz at UCLA decided to investigate, and guess what he used as his foundation? That's right - meditation. He taught some deeply disturbed patients to 'observe' their feelings, their compulsions, and try to avoid getting tied up in the story behind those feelings.  Instead, he asked them to notice, 'what else?' was going on in their experience. Not to deny their anxiety, or to label it as bad, but just to notice, 'what else?' was happening right now, just as true as those thoughts.  He asked them to focus on the sound of the rain, or the feeling of the wind on their skin, or any other part of the actual experience they were also having - many of the sensory ideas we shared in Part 2.

It worked.  Or to be more precise, over time, even deeply disturbed patients began to feel significant relief from a combination of meditation and drugs that exceeded the effects that drugs alone had. The cool part for us science geeks is how.

Neuroplasticity has two founding axioms - neurons that 'fire together wire together', and neurons that 'fire apart wire apart'. It's the Pavlovian response at the level of thought. The wire together thing is why people can get so phenomenal at chess or skateboarding or just anything, and the wire apart thing is why people, usually, think they can not do something that, if they tried hard enough, they probably could.

If we take these ideas into the universe of the mentally ill, Dr Schwartz explains that each time a patient stays with a thought, any thought, the thought wires together. The more we think that thing, the more deeply it gets wired. Mentally ill patients have wired a lot of neurons together in destructive paths. Unfortunately, well-meaning therapies such as psychotherapy and Cognitive Therapy have one thing in common - they ask an afflicted patient to continue to analyse their afflictions, to discuss them, to come up with strategies to overcome them, to be sure, but ultimately to wire together those neurons even deeper, to have them continue to fire together, each time they 'deal' with them.  Dr Schwartz believes this strategy just isn't effective very often or very quickly.

When we meditate, something else is happening.  We are wiring neurons to experience all our senses again, as we talked about in Part 1.  Ever notice that experienced meditators often have the joyful look of children in their eyes?  That's because experiencing all our senses is natural to us - we did it as children.  But we forget.  As we age we start to become reliant on the brain and ego.  We become less sensitive to touch, to taste, to smell, to everything other than the importance and validity of our own thoughts.

We've stopped firing the neurons of these sensations. So they're less sensitive.  

Part of what meditation is doing is firing them again, becoming more sensitive to our sense of touch, for instance, when we focus on the breath.  But the brain/ego wants to take over, to keep us from ignoring it.  Within moments, we find ourselves thinking about the breath instead of just feeling the breath itself, thinking about the activity, whether we should be doing it, what we had for lunch, what we need from the shops, and like that the brain is off solving the world again.

So we focus on the breath because it's here and now.  The focus on the breath is the first step to keeping ourselves in this moment, experiencing right now.  Remember - thoughts aren't bad.  They're part of it, too, we're just learning to make them a part of our world, instead of running our world.

This focus on the our senses builds new neural networks, like in the monkey's arm.  Literally.  Via the axioms of neuroplasticity, we are building up the brain's awareness of touch to start, but over time, we learn to do this with all of our senses. These sensory networks becomes vastly more intertwined, as can be seen on fMRI scans of people meditating (we're getting to this part, below).  

This is where the concerns about meditation are missing the point so badly.  

We try to focus on the breath. Really, we do. But we think we're avoiding 'dealing' with our problems. We think meditation is meant to provide some nice peace and quiet to allow us to see our problems clearly, make some resolutions, and fix whatever our ails happen to be.  We go along with the 'breathing thing' at the start, assuming this is the warm up, but what we really wonder is when the problem solving part starts.   

That's missing the point.  Meditation expands our awareness of reality so we see our troubles in a broader context.  We still have troubles.  We still have to do something about them, outside of meditation.  But when it's time to work on our troubles, meditation has set us up to be more capable at handling them in a balanced, peaceful way.  We can be more effective, because we see the situation more clearly.

Consider the science.  Below is an image of two brains under an fMRI scan.  The one on the left is just a normal, healthy person's brain. The one on the right is an experienced meditator and has increased activity, increased sensitivity, except in the areas of anxiety and panic, which is decreased.  This is what greater awareness looks like.

Healthy Brain                                       Meditator's Brain

Greater awareness isn't some hippy clop-trop cliche.  It means literally becoming more aware of our reality.  Using more of our brain, but not to think. When we meditate, we're kicking up our neural activity.  We're teaching our brains to have more connections, to be closer to our universe.  When people say things like, 'meditation allows us to connect with our deeper, truer selves', it is scientifically defensible. 

Now let's look at the scan of a normal person compared to a depressed person. During my bouts of depression, my thoughts felt big and heavy, like they were filling my head, and going round and round 1000 times a second, on this horrible theme park ride.   It felt overwhelmingly busy. 

It's an irony that the heavy feeling of depression is correlated to using less of our minds.  We're less aware.  We see this with all sort of mental illnesses.

These are different types of scans, but they show one thing.  Using less of our mind is correlated with mental illness, and using more is correlated with meditation. And we can deduce that the opposite of mental illness can be mental health.

There's several other ways science has backed up the benefits of meditation, but this blog is already longer than expected.  Enough for now.  Still, science has made a good contribution today. Thanks, science!

The bad news is science doesn't help us one tiny bit.  It's meaningless. We can only learn science at the level of thought, and we have to experience a deeper connection with our senses, if we're going to enjoy the benefits of meditation.  It's not enough to know it, it's not enough to believe it, we have to experience it if its going to help us.

This is why I went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat last Easter.  It was pretty intense.  We were allowed no phones, no technology, no books, no pen/paper, not even music.  Nothing but meditation for 12 hours a day, for 10 days.  

In the next blog, I'm going to share what I experienced.

Ideas on Meditation, Part 2

In the last blog, I shared some ideas which helped me realise I'd misunderstood meditation my whole life.  Essentially, my 'why to' start doing it.  In this one, I'm going to share more of an introductory 'how to' guide (experienced meditators may want to skip this post).

These ideas are an amalgamation of those gleaned from the books listed at the bottom of this blog. I'm not claiming any of it as original, although I can't remember what I got from which source.

So we sit to meditate, and we're meant to 'calm' our thoughts. But what the heck does that mean, and how do we do it? 

The idea that first helped me was to reconsider the role thinking plays in our lives. Most of us consider our thoughts as our real 'selves', and our five senses as the subordinate antennae of that thinking self. If only as a game, let's juggle this up. Consider our thinking self to be just one of our six senses. So we'd have thinking, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching and hearing as our senses. Consider each as equally important. Each has its own unique connection to the universe, and reflects reality in a different way. Meditation, this idea goes, is our daily opportunity to experience the world differently by allowing another sense to dominate our focus. We just focus on what that sense is revealing, without using the mind to interpret whatever it is the sense reveals (which is the hard part).

Many meditation techniques focus on the sense of touch because its the easiest to disassociate from our mental interpretations. For instance. If we meditate and focus on our hearing, that's fine. We try to listen to the sound without naming the sound, or what the sound means to us. If we hear a police siren, for instance, we listen to the pitch and tone of it, without speculating anything else about the police, or remembering previous adventures with police or speculating about current ones. As I live in a city full of sirens, and have had a few adventures with police, this one is off the table for me.

So let's say we're focusing on the sense of touch. This focus may be on our breath, the inhale and exhale within our lungs, or the feel of our skin, and its contact with the air, our clothes or the ground. For this blog, let's focus on the breath example. This is reportedly what the Dalai Lama does every morning, and is universally regarded in mindfulness and meditation circles as base camp. 

So just to be super clear, the foundational technique of meditation involves just sitting still, and focusing on the sensation of one's breath. That's it. 

When we really try this, pretty soon, two things are going to happen. First of all, we're going to think WTF?  I'm supposed to sleep better, have better relationships, find peace and harmony, and reach spiritual enlightenment; all by focusing on my breath?!?  The second thing, is that we're going to realise we're not focusing on our breath any longer, and that we only managed to stay focused on our breath for about 10 seconds before worrying we were being bamboozled in some sort of massive cultural prank, and that any moment random people might jump out of a corner, laughing at us for falling for this meditation malarkey.

When this happens, as it will, the instruction here is simple. With a smile, we laugh at ourselves for not lasting longer than 10 seconds at such a simple task, say silently the word 'thinking' to ourselves, and re-focus on the breath. Inhale. Exhale. Repeat. For the next few minutes (or hours) of meditation we will then wonder how we lasted 10 whole seconds, as we continually get distracted by thought after thought after thought, often in less than 10 seconds of focus on the breath. 

It feels like an exercise in futility.

But this is good news. It's working. Two things are happening. First, we've realised how little control we have over our own minds. This is key. We tend to think of our thoughts as less random and moody than they are. Becoming more deeply aware of this is different for anyone, but revealing for everyone. This helps us start to expand the perception of, and relationship to, our thoughts. More on this later.

Second, we've just spent all that time teaching our brain that our thoughts are not sacrosanct. Each time we halt our mental flow, we are noticing how our minds work. The idea goes that if we want to create peaceful harmony in our lives, we have to learn to stop the mental train of anxiety, judgement or resentment, etc, BEFORE they build up steam. We need to interrupt ourselves. Those imposters, triumph and disaster, are truly all in our minds. We must teach ourselves, coach ourselves, that all our trails of thoughts are not inviolate treasures to be trusted. They are sometimes helpful, sure, but before we do or say things we wish we hadn't, we have to think them. 

We know this. We've all thought things which have been crazy or stupid or angry when not appropriate. Later, we think to ourselves, how could I think that!? But in the moment, when we're having those thoughts, it's hard to stop having them. In the moment, they feel like the right thoughts to have.

Each time our thoughts run away from a focus on the breath, we're doing what happens every day all the time. And each time we smile, silently whisper 'thinking' to ourselves, and come back to the breath, we're teaching ourselves its ok to derail ourselves, to observe our thoughts, to build a little awareness of a part of ourselves that is not always very reliable.

The fact our thinking is so capricious isn't a bad thing. It just is. Let's return to the randomness of our thoughts, and the mental exercise of our six senses. We don’t blame our nose when there is a bad smell, we don’t blame our tastebuds when there’s a bad taste, and we can learn not to blame ourselves when we have moaning or hurtful or selfish thoughts. They happen. But we do tend to judge ourselves for our thoughts. Instead, we can learn to contextualise their surface nature, laugh at their absurdity, accept they happen, to everyone, accept that all they reveal is that we're human, not some hidden meaning that Freud would have us explore endlessly, and move on to the next moment.

Meditation shows us just how inconsistent our thinking is. When we observe ourselves, we find ourselves having diametrically opposed views quite often, sometimes within the same minute! This is the ugly underbelly of thinking that we worry is unique to us individually, but isn't.

This helps us to start appreciating some of the deeper benefits of meditation. If we can have certain sorts of thoughts, and not worry that such thoughts are 'proof' of anything, it's a big step to having compassion for ourselves. And when we can develop this compassion for ourselves, seeing that our thoughts are not who we really are, it becomes easier to have compassion for others, because their thoughts aren't who they really are, either. They're just thoughts. Which are as impermanent as everything else.

In the last blog, I talked about consciousness. The idea was that meditation is meant to help us connect to our deeper consciousness, our deeper connection to each other, and the universe. This focus on the breath, after a while, seems to lull the thinking brain into a bit of a coma or something, like the magical lyre Mercury used to bewitch Apollo. The space created allows the consciousness to expand. It's not something we can force. It's only something we can create the right conditions to allow to unfold. 

Because it's not something you do, but allow the space for, it's a paradox we have trouble embracing. "I'm going to meditate now for... er... no purpose whatsoever..."  It just doesn't roll off the tongue. 

The analogy used is that our consciousness is the sky, and our thoughts are the weather. Regardless of what we do, we will have good and bad weather, but the sky will always be there. When we meditate, we find that the sky reveals itself whenever the weather clears. It also teaches us that when the weather won't clear, observing our thoughts without judgement, and coaching ourselves to be willing to abandon our own lines of thinking, keeps our thinking from leading us down the garden paths of triumph and disaster. It keeps us from clinging to or avoiding the weather.  The weather just is.

So are we.

Just focusing on the breath can feel like a silly exercise. And in this blog, I haven't shared any of the experience one encounters when one is actually able to remain focused on it for more than 10 seconds. That's the point. Even when we think nothing is happening, there's some really cool ground work being laid that helps us experience other things later on. 

In fact, the constant distraction our thinking throws at us, and the continual instruction to say 'thinking' with a smile, and come back to the breath, this continual struggle is what is meant by being a 'Spiritual Warrior'. It often feels like a battle. But this is the battle to fight, moment by moment, so say the experts, to find our way to happiness, joy and contentment. 

A fascinating part of this is how science is now, several thousand years after the invention of meditation, starting to catch up. In the next blog, I'm going to share some insights being developed by one of the newest branches of science: Neuroplasticity. It seems the reason everyone from the US Army to Goldman Sachs now has mindfulness* training as part of their regiment is that science is proving not just that it works, but how. 

Books that influenced this blog.

• Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity
• Elkhart Tolle, The Power of Now
• Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart (so amazing, I read it 3x last year..)
• A Path With Heart, Jack Kornfield
• The Headspace meditation app.
• My yoga practice with Sangye Yoga

*for the record, meditation and mindfulness are the same thing, just that some people associate some baggage with the word meditation, and its Buddhist heritage. They needn't. It is just a brain exercise.  Unless their religion is against breathing.