How I Rescued My Brain

by David Roland

  One day I came across Anna standing by the sink, peeling potatoes. The late-afternoon sun was squeezing through the blinds, illuminating the stainless-steel benchtop. From the pile to her right, she picked up a potato covered in dirt, rinsed it, and began to peel it with a paring knife. The peeled potato was dropped into a pot of water. These actions were repeated. She was quick: her arms rotated back and forth.

  I came up behind her. My groin folded around her warm bottom. My chest pressed against the points of her busy shoulder blades. I rested my hands on the delicious curve of her waist.

  Yet I was met with a stiff back. Her arms didn’t stop. I nuzzled my face into her musk-scented neck, but her head tilted away. She didn’t say anything, her shoulder blades still pumping like pistons. Uncertain, I hovered longer; maybe my loving presence would soften her.

  ‘David, I need to get these on the stove,’ she said, turning to face me, her hands gripping the U-shaped handles of the pot.

  ‘Why don’t you want me around you?’ I asked.

  ‘I can’t compete with the pictures in your head,’ she said, referring to the images I had told her plagued me when thinking of sex.

  ‘But those are gone now,’ I replied impulsively. They hadn’t gone, but they were loosening their grip; I had hope. What else could I offer her? I was throwing out a lifeline to stop her from drifting away.

  ‘It’s too late, Dave. I don’t have any desire for you anymore. I’ve switched off. Too much has happened.’

  I had no reply. I walked away. I was confused by the lack of softness in her face, her steely logic, the sense of a cause lost. Now I knew what the thud of rejection felt like, what Anna must’ve felt.

  6

  SOON AFTER ANNA’S rebuff, I woke one morning with the thought, Is there a psychological insurance policy for life shocks — a policy that could restore me to how I was before the shock? What if the things largely outside my control, the ones that had knocked me around — the post-traumatic stress, Anna’s feelings towards me, Dad’s death — could wash over me and I could bounce back, instead of being left reeling?

  In cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), unhelpful thoughts are challenged and changed to realistic, more useful ones: a process called cognitive reappraisal. Wayne had challenged my view of myself as a failure, encouraging me to see that I could embark upon a new career phase that drew upon my past experience. He had also helped me identify behaviours undermining my recovery. His instruction for me to stop watching television news had been aimed at reducing the amount of human suffering and vicarious trauma I was exposed to: a way of lessening my fight-or-flight response and, consequently, improving my sleeping patterns.

  In my PhD research years before, I had developed an extension of the CBT approach to assist musicians in managing their performance anxiety — stage fright — so that they could replicate what they’d done in rehearsal in front of an audience. I’d consulted sports psychologists at the National Institute of Sport in Canberra about performance under pressure, read the latest research on mental rehearsal, and developed imagery techniques for performing artists. It had worked: most performers in my study felt calmer in performance, their heart rates were lower than prior to training, and they made fewer mistakes. I’d even written a self-help book, which ended up being published in four countries, describing the strategies I’d developed. It had been used in university courses, and I’d been asked to deliver many workshops to performance groups. And I’d drawn on the same strategies later on, when asked to help medical doctors taking their oral exams, nervous truck drivers taking their driving tests, and anxious public speakers. I used the approach myself when speaking in front of large audiences, and in radio or television interviews. So the idea of changing the mind with a training technique, such as mental rehearsal, wasn’t new to me.

  But despite the sessions with Wayne, I could still be overcome by tsunami-sized emotions. The cognitive defences I propped up would be washed away like fences in a flood. I needed a new approach.

  When I was nineteen, I had taken a course on transcendental meditation (TM) with my mother, and for the next three years I meditated twice daily for twenty minutes, and did some of the more advanced TM training. But as the years went by and I got busier, my regular practice lapsed. Now my thoughts turned towards meditation again: could I change my mind in some way — maintain an inner calm as I had learnt to do before with TM, but in the face of my challenging circumstances?

  And not only meditation: mindfulness was a concept being mentioned more and more often in the mainstream psychology literature I read and at the professional gatherings I attended. I didn’t fully understand it, but I did know that it was a different approach from CBT.

  I had read a professional book on the subject, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression by Zindel Segal, Mark Williams, and John Teasdale, the year before I’d closed my practice. They had devised a program to stop depression sufferers from experiencing repeated episodes: relapse prevention. They drew on research which suggested that while cognitive therapy was great for helping people get out of a single depressive episode — especially in conjunction with medication — it was less successful for people with long-term recurrences of depression, especially when these were due to difficult, unchanging personal circumstances.

  Their eight-week group program drew on the work of Doctor Jon Kabat-Zinn and the mindfulness-based stress-reduction program he had developed at the University of Massachusetts Medical School years before. I’d come across Kabat-Zinn’s approach for sufferers of chronic medical conditions briefly during my postgraduate training, when we’d had a seminar on the management of chronic pain. Kabat-Zinn offered a way for patients to live more contentedly. The aim was not to change their condition, but to change their relationship to it: to change their psychological response to physical pain.

  Segal and his colleagues found that their program reduced the likelihood of those who’d had three or more previous depressive episodes falling back into depression by 50 per cent, when compared with the conventional relapse-prevention methods of medication and CBT. This was a startling result.

  I pulled Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression off my bookshelf and re-read it, to find out what was different about their approach. They viewed conventional CBT as a ‘doing’ approach; it tried to problem-solve a way out of depression, anxiety, or other undesirable states of mind. But if the circumstances triggering the depression or anxiety were unchanging and outside the sufferer’s control, how could one problem-solve their way out of that? Mindfulness, on the other hand, was a ‘being’ approach, they said; it encouraged acceptance, a sense of equanimity in the midst of a person’s circumstances. This took the pressure off having to change disturbing thoughts, uncomfortable feelings, or unpleasant bodily sensations such as pain. The mindfulness tradition came out of Buddhism.

  I had used their approach with one client who had a history of depression, not long before I’d closed my practice. He was concerned that he might have a relapse. I told him that it was a new approach — he’d tried everything else — and he agreed to give it a go. We started with the raisin exercise: you take a raisin in your hand and look at it as if it is the first time you’ve ever seen such a thing. You rub it between your fingers to get the texture and weight of it. You smell it. Then, you put it in your mouth and eat it slowly, taking in every sensation about it that you can. I gave him the instructions for the breathing meditation described in the book. He did the exercises and the homework for four weeks, but then he had to discontinue his sessions due to personal circumstances. He liked the exercises, but unfortunately it was too early to observe how much of a difference they made.

  I had also attended a daylong workshop given by a clinical psychologist who spoke of mindfulness in the context of treating anxiety and depression. He had found it useful personally, saying that he’d always had a very active mind and neede
d something to slow it down. He had invited a PhD student, and she spoke of her research with adolescents who had obsessive–compulsive disorder. She’d trained her subjects to see their obsessive thoughts as the flotsam and jetsam of the mind — things they didn’t need to place importance on or act upon. She found that her adolescents reduced the ritualistic behaviours they usually engaged in to relieve their anxiety.

  The clinical psychologist gave us each a CD with his recording of a breathing meditation, a walking meditation, and a body scan. The walking meditation encouraged the focus of attention to the feet’s contact with the ground, while the body scan cast the mind’s eye to the sensations in every part of the body. I tried these out at home, but his brief teaching of the mindfulness concept and the exercises didn’t do much for me. Still, I remained excited about its possibilities, and had always meant to look into it further.

  Could mindfulness and meditation — whatever the connection between them was — be the insurance policy I was looking for? If I could get the hang of them, they seemed to promise mental composure in the face of my circumstances.

  THE CEILING DREW my gaze up to a diamond-shaped skylight at its apex. I was in a vast circular building at Sydney’s Olympic Park. Before me was a broad stage, behind which hung long paintings of Buddha-like figures in yellow and gold. An elevated seat dominated the centre of the stage. To the right and left of it, monks and nuns in maroon, grey, black, or brown robes sat cross-legged on cushions.

  I was sitting in the middle of a row close to the stage. I didn’t know anyone. The people around me looked decidedly ordinary. Some had a glassy-eyed look of devotion; many talked excitedly, filling the auditorium with a human hum.

  I had come for a five-day course, Stages of Meditation. I’d seen it advertised a few months before, and it sounded like it would take the attendee progressively through the different levels of meditation practice. And it was being taught by the Dalai Lama: a man I admired for his compassion and wisdom.

  There was movement behind the monks and nuns. A slightly stooped figure, wearing square-rimmed glasses and maroon robes, emerged from behind them. It was the Dalai Lama. He bowed to monks and nuns on his way to the front of the stage, taking their hands in his, sometimes touching his forehead to theirs. Great respect was evident among them. When he got to the front, he acknowledged us with palms raised together. There was loud applause. He climbed onto the seat and sat cross-legged, securing a microphone, the kind that pop stars and motivational speakers wear, to his head. ‘Good morning, everybody.’

  We had begun.

  After some introductory remarks, he said, ‘We have this marvellous brain, with that special intelligence … Intelligence and education do not necessarily bring inner peace. Throughout human history, people have been trying to find different ways of obtaining inner peace, particularly in difficult situations … Hope is necessary to face helplessness or difficulties beyond our control.’

  Yes, I had come for hope.

  By day’s end, however, it had become clear to me that this was not a course on meditation but an in-depth teaching on an ancient Tibetan Buddhist text, a translation of which we had in our booklets. I found it difficult to remain alert during the Dalai Lama’s long monologues in Tibetan, followed by the translator’s soporific voice. But it had been a huge effort to arrange seven days away, including accommodation and flights. I wasn’t going to leave.

  I was staying in cheap dormitory-style accommodation in an ex–army barracks within walking distance from the venue. Everyone at the barracks was attending the teaching. This gave the place, despite the spartan surroundings, the feeling of a retreat. My room housed twenty men. In the bunk adjacent to mine was a retired farmer with a bushman’s beard and a disarming smile. He identified as Buddhist. ‘My missus is not into it; she thinks it’s mumbo jumbo,’ he told me. ‘But she doesn’t mind. “As long as you do your business in the shed,” she says. The shed’s pretty well set up.’

  We laughed. I loved the vision of him retiring to his shed to chant and meditate, and I guessed that meditation wasn’t the only reason he liked to spend time there. I told him that the course was not turning out the way I’d thought; I’d come to learn mindfulness meditation. He explained that what I was after was called calm-abiding meditation.

  On the second day, I let go of trying to understand everything the Dalai Lama said; instead, I closed my eyes and allowed the sound of his voice to resonate through me. It was surprisingly soothing. At the end of the day he answered audience questions in English, and I perked up. He was funny, injecting humour at surprising moments. I was touched by his compassionate nature, and impressed when he spoke of his cooperation with neuroscientists who were investigating contemplative states.

  The next morning before the teaching, I went in search of good coffee, entering a nearby hotel. As I sat sipping it in the foyer, I noticed that a group of people who looked to be from my course were forming a semi-circle off to one side of the reception desk. A woman or a man — I couldn’t quite tell which — in maroon and yellow, with a shaved head, stood at the head of the line. Next to her was a man in a wheelchair. They seemed to be waiting for something. This looks interesting, I thought, so I joined them.

  Soon, men in dark suits and earpieces appeared from a doorway behind reception. Then we saw the Dalai Lama materialise, following them. When he approached the group, he came up to each person, greeting them in turn. Soon he was up to me. He took my palms in his, and, looking into my eyes, said something I didn’t catch. Then he moved on.

  I couldn’t believe it — I’d just missed what he’d said to me! Of course I was pleased with this chance meeting — how many of the other attendees would have liked it? — but I was kicking myself: had I missed something insightful, something of personal significance, or had he given me a kind of blessing that he gave to everyone? Afterwards I rolled the sounds he’d made around in my mind, hoping they’d gel into something meaningful, but they didn’t. I hoped my chance to gain some understanding of the mechanics of inner peace wasn’t passing me by.

  EACH MORNING, MONKS and nuns from different Buddhist traditions gave guided meditations in the auditorium. A nun from the Thai Forest Tradition instructed us to attend to the sounds around us without holding on to any particular sound and without making judgements. Another teacher asked us to count our exhalations up to ten and then repeat this cycle. If we lost our way before we got to ten, we were to start back at one. A third teacher asked us to visualise different colours on the inhale and the exhale. There was no one way to meditate, it seemed, and no one had yet spoken specifically of mindfulness. I understood that all of these techniques were connected to enhancing mindfulness, but I wasn’t sure how.

  During the long lunch breaks, we could line up for an interview with one of the nuns or monks. There was always a queue, but on the second-last day I joined it. I wanted to ask what I could do as a regular meditation practice at home.

  Finally, I got to sit across from a middle-aged monk who said he was a youth worker. In answer to my question, he told me to focus on the image of my guru. I didn’t have one, I said. He suggested Chenrezig, the embodiment of compassion: an image associated with the Dalai Lama. I should begin with three prostrations: he demonstrated by joining his hands together in prayer pose, throwing himself onto the floor, and repeating this twice more, panting heavily. This was alarming; I couldn’t see myself doing this at home. I looked around, feeling a little embarrassed, but no one seemed to take any notice. After doing that, he said, I was to visualise Chenrezig, and with time the image would become clearer in my mind.

  So, yet another meditation technique. I felt a surge of irritation. This was so confusing. I wished there was a course that a beginner like me could do that covered all the basics. These Buddhists needed to get their act together — to agree, somehow, on what the essentials were. I sensed that the Buddhist teachers had a depth of experience
from which I could learn, but I missed the clarity that the clinical psychologist had exuded in the workshop on mindfulness and meditation.

  Although not quite convinced by the monk’s instructions, I went to one of the stalls selling icons and bought the smallest and cheapest Chenrezig statue I could find. I would give it a go.

  That night, after eating out, I came back to find most of the men hunched around the small television in our tiny living area: it was one of the big footy games of the year. They were barracking and cursing. I smiled — and here I was, wondering that I might have been getting myself into some kind of Buddhist cult, with prescribed forms of behaviour. I joined them for a while before heading into my dorm.

  A young builder from New Zealand occupied the bed above me. He got up at six o’clock each morning to do prostrations on the porch; in my half-sleep, I would hear the thumps on the floorboards. A general practitioner, with three children similar in age to mine, slept in the bunk above the farmer. The next morning, he talked of the need for health professionals to use more ‘heart communication’. He taught meditation in his local community and to some of his patients.

  I liked these men; they were straightforward and seemed genuine. I was the novice, but I didn’t feel excluded. They didn’t show any trace of trying to force their beliefs onto me.

  That afternoon, as the rows of seats were being vacated at the end of the course, I turned and saw an older man with a stringy frame and silver hair. He was looking vacantly but calmly at the stage. I caught his eye. ‘Hello. How’s the week been for you?’

  ‘I’ve got a few things I can take home,’ he said, nodding.