by Ruby Wax
Ruby: Can’t we stop the grasping?
Neuroscientist: Don’t we reward grasping, as a society? It shows that you’re ambitious, a go-getter. Rewarding a habit makes it hard to break. We have this myth that high achievement leads to happiness because we just ignore all the times that it doesn’t.
Monk: The reason people want to achieve success is to find happiness, so why not just cut out the middleman and be happy?
Neuroscientist: Well, achievement does lead to progress, but frantic achievement can come at the cost of burn-out. It’s hard to know if it’s worth it. When you look at an American pro-footballer who drives himself incredibly hard, when he’s young, he’s the king of the world, he’s the high-school hero. We worship these guys. There was a big spread in the New York Times magazine about this recently, and I almost wet myself when I saw it. Neurologists have been talking about this for a long time but we felt like no one was listening. The Times printed page after page of photographs of brain sections from National Football League players – that’s the top professional league in America. Out of 111 brains that they examined, 110 showed significant evidence of brain injury due to repeated concussion. Those guys hit each other with the same force as running into a brick wall at thirty miles an hour. Their brain injuries resulted in personality changes, depression, divorce and, in some cases, even suicide. There are a few years of stratospheric success, which most of us assume would bring them happiness. But, honestly, is it worth the decades of suffering that follow? How much should we pay for success?
Monk: That’s what I’m saying: that high comes at great cost. But with mindfulness you can find real, stable contentment.
Ruby: Someone’s going to read this book and think, Why is the monk always going on about mindfulness?
Neuroscientist: He does seem a bit obsessed …
Ruby: And he’s always at it. Sometimes when I’m coming down the stairs, he’s sitting there with his eyes shut, and I trip over him thinking he’s a fire hydrant.
Ash, if you had had a choice of being a neuroscientist or understanding mindfulness, which one would you have gone for? Would you have the inner smarts or inner peace?
Neuroscientist: I think I’d choose the inner peace. But it’s not easy, I grew up with the high-achievement thing too. The first time Thubten and I did mindfulness, I found the whole thing really difficult. I was doing okay but then, for some reason, I suddenly felt depressed. I don’t know what about. Then my back started to hurt and I felt desperate to move – actually, desperate to stop doing the mindfulness exercise. Then I started to feel like a loser because Thubten could sit there, and then I felt like a loser about being a loser.
Afterwards, I asked Thubten about that and he said that those overwhelming feelings were just thoughts. That was a big light-bulb moment for me, that my random little thought that I forgot to buy stamps wasn’t any different from my sadness that I haven’t won a Nobel Prize. For me, it was profound to realize that both are just brain activity.
Monk: Exactly, just thoughts with bells on.
Ruby: Okay, Thubten, I wanted to ask you about all those difficult emotions like anger or fear that we try to avoid. Have you ever been depressed?
Monk: Yes. I got depressed in my retreat. It was very serious and lasted for half the retreat.
Ruby: How long was that?
Monk: It was a four-year retreat. I remember crying a lot and feeling like a failure for being depressed. At times, it felt like a knife was twisting in my heart – it was physically painful. I felt suicidal and almost gave up the retreat. But part of me wanted to fix this thing, and there was nowhere I could go except to learn to engage properly with the meditations. I could leave, but I didn’t want to. Things clicked when I discovered how to drop the storyline and relate to the feeling in a compassionate way, just as you would sit with a frightened friend. The pain in my chest started to change and it turned into a kind of joyful feeling.
Ruby: Do you always have that joyful feeling these days?
Monk: I know how to access it.
Neuroscientist: It’s interesting that when you stopped pushing the emotions away, the physical pain lifted too. That’s a real resolution. We can push emotions to one side, but the body will remember.
Ruby: Where are the emotions in your body? Like, does your arm get depressed? Or your left foot has a bad-hair day?
Neuroscientist: Emotions aren’t in a particular place, they come out of the communication between your brain and body. And that’s a two-way street, so if you’re depressed, even your muscles work differently from when you’re in a good mood. For example, posture really affects emotions. Jonathan Miller, who is both a neurologist and a theatre director, tells a story about working with a talented soprano on an opera. Jonathan had a very precise kind of sadness that he wanted the singer to produce, but he couldn’t describe it to her. Instead, he slumped into his chair in a certain way, with his limbs dangling off the edges, and he asked the singer to copy his body posture. She was instantly able to sing exactly the sort of sadness he had in mind. Her body understood something that words couldn’t convey. I think that shows how emotion is very much a thing that the body does – it feeds information to the brain.
Ruby: Your body makes a phone call to the brain and says, ‘Hey, I’m miserable down here?’
Neuroscientist: Yes, that’s about it.
Monk: If you’re not pushing the feeling away, you’re allowing the body and brain to have that conversation without you getting in the way. Then there’s the possibility for transformation.
Ruby: I love the saying, ‘If you run away, the monster chases you but if you turn and face it, it runs away.’
You’ll find the relevant mindfulness exercises for emotions in Chapter 11.
4
The Body
My relationship with my body has not been a good one. I acknowledge it only on a casual basis and think of it as a shopping trolley that carries around my head. My body works wonders for breeding and excreting but, otherwise, I feel it lets me down, especially when I’m among other bodies. In a yoga class, for instance, if I’m surrounded by seventeen-year-olds, I’ll beat myself up because I can’t get into the extreme Vernashakaka Nozrama Vinhasma pose that they achieve without a flicker of pain. I draw the line at going into that oven and doing what they call Bikram yoga. (Mr Bikram must be laughing at all these Caucasians frying themselves.) Try as I might, I just can’t get my ankle round my neck and into my mouth while standing on my head.
My Story
No, my body and I have never got along. When I was a teen, I declared war on my breasts, which were microscopic. Now they’re far too big. Why are they doing this to me? And I don’t think I’m the only one who’s not happy with the way things are down south. Most of my friends complain about their thighs, behinds, ankles, feet and genitals. No body part goes without scrutiny; every cellulite deposit is noted.
Brain/Body
At the same time as learning mindfulness, I’ve become aware deep down in my now large breasts that your body can teach you as much as your mind, maybe more. Your brain and body are one and the same; every thought, emotion and action is a two-way feedback loop from brain to body, and vice versa. If you change your thoughts, feelings and actions, your body changes. Neurons in the body (yes, they’re not just in your noodle) detect the movements in joints, muscles and bones and especially in the ‘big boy’, the spinal cord, which feeds back to the brain what’s going on everywhere in the body like a spy. The brain can then coordinate movement and navigate you through space. (Not Brian Cox space but normal earthly space.)
If you pay attention to the sensations in your body, you get a full readout of the emotional state you’re in. When, for example, you’re frightened, your body will tell you and if you lower your periscope and look in, you’ll probably be tight in the shoulders, your stomach will be clenched and your heart and head pounding (the fight-or-flight response). Your body is making decisions way before you even think about t
hem. It knows how to deal with situations even before your thoughts translate them.
I used to think that emotion was just another aspect of the mind, like language or hearing, but it turns out that it’s a combination of body and brain. If you make a pancake out of eggs, flour and milk, you don’t ask which ingredient is the pancake; it’s the combination. We tend to separate the ingredients but, in reality, the whole organism experiences an emotion.
If you’re attracted to or like someone, check what your body’s doing. You’re probably leaning towards them, mimicking their moves, smiling, and your pupils have become enlarged. This tells the other person you like them so, if you think you’re trying to be subtle, forget it.
However when you’re mindful in your body, you can recognize the instant you’re on autopilot. When I tune in, I usually notice that I’m walking at top speed, even if I’m just taking a stroll with no destination. I live my life as if I’m in a race with myself. Probably the reason I scuttle is because I’m distracting myself from the chaos in my brain. The problem is, you can’t out-scuttle your mind.
Ed, on the other hand, is completely unaware when he’s gone from manual to autopilot while he’s eating. He wolfs down his food, totally oblivious that he’s doing it. When I point it out and ask him why, he tells me it’s because they didn’t give him enough food at public school. I remind him he’s not there any more but he just keeps wolfing.
Body Learning
I’m going to use the expression ‘body learning’ for when you let your body give you an internal weather report. Don’t think it’s always about slowing down and ‘vegging out’. If you need to hit a deadline or are about to take an exam and your body feels like heavy glue, you can choose to wake it up. (Then you can jump, run, take a cold shower.)
If you’re furious with someone, and about to let the reptile rip, you know the expression ‘bite your tongue’? It exists for a reason. Notice when you feel that physical impulse to pounce. This isn’t your imagination, the impulse originates in your motor cortex. The noticing is your pause button. You’re giving yourself a few crucial seconds to think about your reaction and find a more suitable alternative to going berserk. If you stand back and notice the impulse, you have time, during the pause, to make a choice, to decide either to attack or to send focus to a bodily sense or your breath and metaphorically bite your tongue. This is ideal as a strategy when you’re about to push ‘send’ on your ranting email. Just like the man on the Tube tells you, you need to ‘mind the gap’.
More Body Learning
On the physical side of things, if you practise becoming attuned to how your body feels in each area, you’ll be more adept at recognizing when everything is working smoothly, even the subtlest of changes. When friends get chronically ill and tell me they never knew anything was wrong, I always wonder, didn’t they have even a slight indication that something didn’t feel right? Wasn’t there even a twinge? With an ability to scan your inner landscape, you gain the ability to intuit early when something is out of kilter.
If you learn how to look down that periscope, you’ll know pretty much everything there is to know and what’s coming around the corner. I always think it’s like women who tell me they’re surprised at a late stage in life to find out their sons or daughters are gay. I think, Didn’t you notice anything earlier? Were you asleep at the wheel? I mean, there are clues.
Evolution Again
Neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert believes that the reason the human brain developed in the first place was to resolve the problems we encountered when we began to move around in our environment. Plants didn’t have to move because everything was done for them: they’re pollinated by bees, fed by the soil, rained and shined on. So why would they need to develop thinking? Animal behaviour hasn’t changed much since the beginning; what worked for them then still works today. If killing, defending themselves and mating is all they ever had to do to survive, why change the habit of a lifetime?
We didn’t get any of those animal add-ons they have – to climb, leap or stretch their necks to get bananas from the upper branches of the trees – so we had no choice but to learn to think. Now equipped with the new thinking expertise, we could build ships to import bananas from Jamaica. When we could no longer walk those challenging distances to find food, we invented cars to take us to restaurants. Now, with delivery services, we only need to use our brains to choose between the Peking duck and the sweet-and-sour pork with egg rolls on the side … oh, and seaweed.
Embodiment
By moving our focus back into the body, we can learn to bypass hurtful thoughts or emotions, nipping them in the bud before they do their worst. Usually, with mindfulness for emotions, you direct your focus to where you sense them in the body. With mindfulness for thoughts you pull focus to the body or the breath (a top-to-bottom approach).
Some people don’t like to sit while practising mindfulness, but the great thing is you can do it while moving around in your daily life but still focusing on the body sensations. You’ll become aware where those stuck emotions reside; maybe noticing that your shoulders are tense and held, your heart is pounding or that you are holding your breath. If you calm the body, it will calm the emotions, which in turn calm the thoughts (bottom-up approach).
Other people say they don’t have time to practise mindfulness and that, if they do have any spare time, they’d rather exercise their bodies than sit and do mindfulness exercises (which probably won’t tighten their bum). Exercising aerobically does improve blood flow, strengthens muscles in the body and the heart and tightens the bum. We need to stretch our bodies so they don’t seize up, and a flexible muscle is a happy muscle.
The Problem with Multitasking while Exercising
No question, all physical exercise is good for you, unless you go to extremes. (Many gym-goers have ended up in a neck/knee/back brace from over-pumping or overstretching.) Here’s the deal: you don’t have to stop exercising, just learn to do it mindfully by sending focus into the area you’re stretching/contracting/moving. Not only will you be aware of any potential damage, you’re also improving your brain. It’s noticing that you’re mind-wandering then bringing focus back to specific sensations in your body and doing it again and again that bulks up the insula and reduces stress. You can ‘have it all’: a tight bum, tum and a fit brain.
Things like t’ai chi and other martial arts incorporate and embody mindful movement. If you practise them, you become aware that your physical movements and your mental states are one and the same. But any activity – swimming, walking, lifting light weights, dancing – can be used as mindfulness in motion.
Nutrition: What Does It Mean?
I know, I know, I haven’t mentioned diet. What you eat is who you are and how you are. This, unfortunately, is not my area of expertise, but there are about 2 million (contradictory) books out there that can tell you what to put in your mouth better than I.
I think, if it’s green it’s good; if it’s chequered, don’t eat it. I am in a continual state of confusion. I’ve gone through my vegetarian phase and, because I can’t cook, I just ate nuts and berries, like a rodent. And I don’t always trust food companies that shove the word ‘organic’ on the label. They’re too expensive, it’s like eating the Prada of the fruit and vegetable world. Fasting doesn’t work for me, I get hungry. A few years ago, I just juiced. I shovelled pounds of vegetable and fruit into that blender and then vomited for a week. Someone told me later that, because the ingredients reduce so much, I didn’t notice that I had drunk the equivalent of three football fields. Now, I’m on the Paleo diet so I eat everything that once had a pulse, hoof and horn. I’ve helped the world rid itself of cows because they’re all going into me. So get out there and pick yourself up a book on nutrition and go nuts with the choice.
The Monk, the Neuroscientist and Me
It’s time to turn to my experts, who may be more enlightened on the subject of the body.
Ruby: Ash, how do you see your body? How do
you relate to it?
Neuroscientist: I grew up as a skinny Indian boy around a lot of big white Midwesterners. When I was young, I just wanted to look like one of the guys on the football team. I didn’t like my body at all. I pumped iron and drank those disgusting protein shakes, and I even got one of those jackets with the high-school letter on the side.
Ruby: Those honcho jackets where they put the letter of your football team on it? That’s sad.
Neuroscientist: Yeah, well, I did it so I could meet girls.
Ruby: Did it work?
Neuroscientist: Not really. I mean, the letter jacket was from the debate team, it didn’t have the same effect as the football jacket.
Ruby: What about your body, Thubten? Do you like your body, if you can find it under those robes?
Monk: Well, my relationship with my body has changed a lot. When I was young, I was really into looking good, but I always felt sort of disassociated from my body. I was caught up in my head all the time. When I got seriously ill at twenty-one, I would talk about my body as if it wasn’t mine. I would say, ‘The heart isn’t good,’ as if it was someone else’s. I think that’s why I got sick. A total mind–body split. My appearance sort of fell apart when I became a monk. I’m quite chubby now.
Ruby: Do you miss being buff?
Monk: I think being healthy is good but being buff is pretty pointless. The mind is so much more interesting. Nowadays, my relationship with my body is about using it as a support for mindfulness, and that feels great. There’s not much point having a ‘hot’ body and a rotten mind.
Ruby: Ash, I want to know how the body and mind are really connected. Is there some kind of spider’s web made out of neurons from the head to the toes?