by Harris, Dan
It wasn’t just corporations hopping on this bandwagon, but also schools, prisons, the U.S. Forest Service, and, of course, the marines, who were actively eyeing meditation as a way to effect a sort of psychological “regime change” among their own troops. The final stop in my field trip was Camp Pendleton, where I met the reluctant meditator, Private First Class Lindemann.
The marines were initially interested in mindfulness because they thought it might help them deal with an epidemic of PTSD, but there was also hope that meditation could produce more effective warriors. The theory was that the practice would make troops less reactive, and therefore less vulnerable to the classic insurgent tactic of provoking the types of disproportionate responses that alienate the civilian population. What a counterintuitive notion: meditation as a way to deal with asymmetric warfare. As the woman who’d convinced the marines to conduct this experiment—Georgetown professor Liz Stanley—told me, “There is nothing incense-y about that. There just isn’t.”
While there was resistance at first, many of the marines ended up liking meditation. Even PFC Lindemann grudgingly came around. He told me he now found it easier to calm down after stressful situations. “At first, I was kind of skeptical,” he said, “but then you kinda start noticing a little bit of change. As you go further into it, you start understanding it.”
After shooting all of these stories, I, too, experienced a sudden “vision.” It wasn’t as dramatic as Jon Kabat-Zinn’s, but it did come at an unusual moment.
The producers of weekend GMA had decided to wire up a rental car with cameras, pack the anchors inside, punch in some GPS coordinates, and call it “America’s Cheapest Road Trip.” The conceit: have the cosseted on-air types drive themselves hundreds of miles to a seaside campground, pitch their own tents, and cook their own food; hilarity ensues. There was even a patina of news-you-can-use value to this ratings stunt because the economy was still in the tank, and the piece would contain a few useful nuggets of advice about how to do family vacations on a budget.
Somewhere between New York City and our final destination in Maryland, we stopped at one of those roadside plazas that have gas, greasy food, and bathrooms with fossilized filth dating back to the Mesozoic era. While I was waiting outside for Ron and Bianna to finish up inside, I decided to do a little walking meditation. About three steps into it, a family passed by and stared at me. I clammed up and pretended to check my BlackBerry.
That’s when I had my vision. Nothing too elaborate; I simply flashed on a world in which doing a zombie walk in public wouldn’t be slightly mortifying—where meditation would be universally socially acceptable. I felt nearly certain that this world was actually not too far off. Mind you, I wasn’t predicting a Tolle-esque “shift in planetary consciousness.” Nor was I forecasting that society would be overrun by “stream-entrants” and “non-returners” of the Joseph Goldstein variety. Instead, I pictured a world in which significant numbers of people were 10% happier and less reactive. I imagined what this could do for marriage, parenting, road rage, politics—even television news.
Public health revolutions can happen quite rapidly. Most Americans didn’t brush their teeth, for example, until after World War II, when soldiers were ordered to maintain dental hygiene. Exercise didn’t become popular until the latter half of the twentieth century, after science had clearly showed its benefits. In the 1950s, if you had told people you were going running, they would have asked who was chasing you. The difference with meditation was that if it actually took hold, the impact would go far beyond improving muscle tone or fighting tooth decay. Mindfulness, I had come to believe, could, in fact, change the world.
Of course, I hadn’t gotten into the whole meditation thing to have a global impact. My interests were parochial; I wanted relief from the ego. Now, though, I found myself in the funny position of believing deeply in a cause. I began attending conferences with names like Wisdom 2.0, Creating a Mindful Society, and Buddhist Geeks. I made new friends, like the beer-drinking, backslapping congressman from Ohio who wrote a book about mindfulness, and the former JPMorgan banker (a guy so successful even my brother was impressed) who started a new venture capital fund specifically designed to “bring mindfulness to scale.” I experienced a surge of excitement as I strategized with my new friends about how to expose meditation to a wider audience. We had conspiratorial meetings and meals; we exchanged emails; we hugged a lot.
In my view, the biggest impediment to Kabat-Zinn’s—and now my—vision becoming a reality was meditation’s massive PR problem. It was still mildly embarrassing to admit to most people that I meditated. This was largely because the practice was popularized in this country by Beat poets, robed gurus, and hippies—and that cultural hangover persisted. Stylistically, the presentation of the average meditation teacher struck me as a bizarre cousin of the stentorian monotone that TV reporters employ—an affectation to which I had sadly not been immune. Just as we in the news business too often relied on shopworn language—“Shock and disbelief in [fill in the blank] tonight . . .”—Buddhist teachers had their own set of hackneyed phrases. Stories were “shared”; emotions were “held in love and tenderness.” While the secular mindfulness people had dropped some of this lingo, they had replaced it with a jargon of their own, replete with homogenized, Hallmark-ized, irony-free terms like “purposeful pauses,” “meditating merchants,” and “interiority.” These people needed a Frank Luntz, that pollster who’d helped the Republicans rebrand the “estate tax” into the “death tax” and recast loosened pollution laws as “the Clear Skies Act.”
I wasn’t sure that I was the right Luntz for this job, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to pitch in. Ever since Bangor, I’d been obsessed with finding stories I liked and figuring out how to make them interesting to other people. Mindfulness, I now realized, was the best and potentially most impactful story I’d ever covered. In many ways, it was my craziest act of gonzo journalism. If it could help a monumental skeptic like me, I could only imagine what it could do for others, and I thought that if I could find a way to make it more broadly appealing, that would be a real service.
One-on-one preaching to my friends and family was still definitely a bad idea, but finding new ways to get the word out to a wider audience somehow seemed less obnoxious. To succeed, though, would require finding fresh ways to discuss the subject. It brought to mind a former colleague of mine from local news in Portland, Maine. He was a reporter named Bob Elliot, who used to post lists on the wall of the newsroom of what he called “lose ’ems,” clichéd words or phrases that were showing up too often in our newscasts. If any of the rest of us used a “lose ’em,” Bob would shoot us with a rubber band.
I took my first little stab at addressing meditation’s PR problem when World News aired my story on the increasing embrace of mindfulness in counterintuitive locales. We showed a graphic of a brain, illuminating the regions that, to use Diane’s words, got “plumped up” as a result of meditation. We used a sound bite from Rivers Cuomo, the lead singer of Weezer, who credited the practice with curing his stage fright. I explained how simple meditation was—and that there was no need for robes, chanting, incense, or joining a religious group.
When I walked off the set after my live shot, members of Diane’s team were abuzz. Was it really that simple? How many minutes a day did they need to do to change their brains?
The next morning I got an email from Diane herself, who expressed an interest in learning more about meditation. If I could hook someone like her, it felt like a pretty good start.
As excited as I was about the notion of popularizing the practice, the concerns of some of my old-school Buddhist friends, including Mark Epstein, did give me pause. The traditionalists did not appreciate the irony of capitalists and marines embracing a practice with a history of disdaining violence and accumulation of wealth. They worried that mindfulness would simply create better baby killers and robber barons. They pointed derisively to the proliferation of books such as Mindful
ness for Dummies, The Mindful Investor, and The Joy of Mindful Sex. Critics had a term for this phenomenon: “McMindfulness.” There was something important being overlooked, they argued, in the mainstreaming of meditation—a central plank in the Buddhist platform: compassion.
While I’d digested enough dharma books and lectures to know that Buddhists were always going on about compassion, I had long figured I could ignore the issue, the same way I did with karma or reincarnation. It was true that mindfulness had made me calmer and less reactive, and that I now felt the urge to spread the word as far as I possibly could, but still, my goal was not to be Mother Teresa.
Despite my powerful experience of being snot-soaked and supine while doing compassion meditation on retreat, I had not subsequently pursued metta in my daily practice. My resistance was based, in part, on the fact that compassion meditation was a little annoying—but more significantly, it stemmed from a deep-seated suspicion: that we each have a sort of kindness set point, the result of factory settings that could not be altered, and that mine may not be dialed particularly high. I was a good enough guy, yes. I loved children and animals, etc. If no one was looking, I might even get misty during a rom-com. But the Buddhist concept of boundless compassion seemed out of reach.
Once again, science—and a well-timed personal encounter—would shatter my assumptions.
Chapter 10
The Self-Interested Case for Not Being a Dick
The international avatar of compassion marched briskly into the room and declared that he had to relieve himself.
“First duty!” said His Holiness the Dalai Lama, as he bustled off toward the bathroom. He seemed sprightly, but certainly not, as decades of relentlessly positive publicity might have led one to believe, trailing pixie dust. Moreover, the members of his entourage—often a reflection of the person they serve—were uniformly stern and unsmiling.
I came into this interview with a bad attitude. Most of my friends in the meditation world revered the Dalai Lama, but to me he represented the part of Buddhism with which I was least comfortable. What I liked about the dharma was its rigorous empiricism and unyielding embrace of hard truths. Here, though, was a guy in robes, anointed at the age of two because some government monks claimed to have seen special signs, like a rainbow in the sky near his childhood home. Fast-forward a few decades and he was buddies with the Beastie Boys and Richard Gere, invited to guest edit Vogue, featured in Apple ads, and the subject of adoring movies by the likes of Martin Scorsese (who reportedly said he could feel his heart beat more keenly in the Dalai Lama’s presence).
My contrarian impulses were heightened by the fact that I’d just watched a bunch of scientists here at Emory University fawn all over the Dalai Lama. As the academics presented the results of their research on the effects of meditation, they leaned forward, literally on the edge of their seats, while obsequiously calling him “Your Holiness.” Meanwhile, he sat there wearing an oddly inappropriate sun visor (presumably to protect his eyes from the overhead lights).
Once His Holiness had emptied his bladder, he was back in character, the smiley guy we know from gauzy hagiographies. The Emory conference had just wrapped up, and we were going to do the interview backstage. I started by asking about his long-standing support for scientific research into meditation. “There’s a risk,” I said. “What if scientists discover something that contradicts your faith?”
“No—no risk. If a scientist confirm nonexistence of something we believe, then we have to accept that.”
“So if scientists come up with something that contradicts your beliefs, you will change your beliefs?”
“Oh yes. Yes.”
Reassuring answer. I wondered to myself, though, whether this policy applied to the issue of rebirth. If scientists could prove that he wasn’t the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama, it would erase all his religious and political power, leaving him just one more old man in a visor.
Next litmus test: “Is your mind always calm?” I asked.
“No, no, no. Occasionally lose my temper.”
“You do?”
“Oh yes. If someone is never lose temper then perhaps they may come from another space,” he said, pointing toward the sky and laughing from the belly, his eyes twinkling beneath his thick glasses.
“So if somebody says to you, ‘I never lose my temper,’ you don’t believe them?”
“No. And some people say this is some miracle power—I don’t believe.”
Within minutes, he had already proven himself more reasonable than either Eckhart Tolle or Deepak Chopra.
As I sat there, surrounded by cameras, my crew, the Emory PR people, and His Holiness’s Tibetan retinue, it dawned on me that the Dalai Lama was yet another person I’d prematurely misjudged. After all, even if he subscribed to a metaphysical program I didn’t share, he had actually played a key role in jump-starting the scientific research into meditation, providing both inspiration and funding. What’s more, I realized, one should probably not overlook that whole thing where he responded to the Chinese invasion of Tibet—from which he barely escaped with his life—with repeated requests for forgiveness and nonviolence.
As the interview progressed, my posture—both internally and externally—changed. It’s not that I was feeling my heart beat more keenly, à la Scorsese, but, like the academics I’d scorned at the conference, I, too, was now leaning forward in my chair, with the closest my face can come to a beatific expression. Meanwhile, I was relieved to find the Dalai Lama seemed to be pretty engaged himself. I’d read that if he leaned back in his chair, that meant he’d lost interest. But he was still inclined toward me, eyes bright.
Toward the end of our twenty-minute interview (the Tibetans, like Tolle’s people, were very strict about time) came an exchange that fundamentally changed my view on compassion. I brought up something he’d posted on Twitter. (The fact that he had a Twitter feed was another reason to like the man—although I was pretty sure his staff managed the account.) “You have a quote that I love. You say, ‘Most of one’s own troubles, worries, and sadness come from self-cherishing, self-centeredness.’ But don’t we need to be somewhat self-centered in order to succeed in life?”
“Self-cherishing, that’s by nature,” he said (by which I assumed he meant it’s “natural”). “Without that, we human beings become like robots, no feeling. But now, practice for development of concern for well-being of others, that actually is immense benefit to oneself.”
A light went off in my head. “It seems like you’re saying that there is a self-interested, or selfish, case for being compassionate?”
“Yes. Practice of compassion is ultimately benefit to you. So I usually describe: we are selfish, but be wise selfish rather than foolish selfish.”
This was an entirely new spin for me. Don’t be nice for the sake of it, he was saying. Do it because it would redound to your own benefit, that it would make you feel good by eroding the edges of the ego. Yoked to self-interest, the compassion thing suddenly became something I could relate to—maybe even something I could do.
After the interview, the Dalai Lama placed a white satin scarf around my neck and gave me a blessing. As our crew was packing up to leave, he called me back over one more time and said that if I was really interested in Buddhism, I should read his favorite book, by an ancient sage named Shantideva. The PR people from Emory breathlessly told me this must mean he really liked me.
Ultimately, I couldn’t get through the book—but that notion about being nice for selfish reasons, that I kept.
There was cutting-edge science to back up the Dalai Lama’s advice about the self-interested case for not being a dick. Right there on the Emory campus, in fact, scientists had been studying regular people who were given a brief course in compassion meditation. The subjects were then placed in stressful situations in the lab, including having a TV camera pointed at them (a detail which, for me, was particularly rich). The scientists found that the meditators released significantly lowe
r doses of a stress hormone called cortisol. In other words, practicing compassion appeared to be helping their bodies handle stress in a better way. This was consequential because frequent or persistent release of cortisol can lead to heart disease, diabetes, dementia, cancer, and depression.
You didn’t even have to meditate to derive benefits from compassion. Brain scans showed that acts of kindness registered more like eating chocolate than, say, fulfilling an obligation. The same pleasure centers lit up when we received a gift as when we donated to charity. Neuroscientists referred to it as “the warm glow” effect. Research also showed that everyone from the elderly to alcoholics to people living with AIDS patients saw their health improve if they did volunteer work. Overall, compassionate people tended to be healthier, happier, more popular, and more successful at work.
Most compelling for people like me who were not naturally overflowing with loving-kindness, there was evidence that compassion meditation can actually make you nicer. The leading scientist in this area was a Jew-Bu named Richie Davidson (Harvard via Brooklyn) who now ran a large lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, called the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds. His team had done studies showing that people who were taught compassion meditation displayed increased brain activity in regions associated with empathy and understanding. They also found that preschoolers became more willing to give their stickers away to strangers. My favorite study, done at Emory, asked subjects to wear tape recorders for days at a time, which captured their conversations. The meditators were more empathic, spent more time with other people, laughed more, and used the word “I” less.