Brain-Training-with-Buddha_3P.indd

by Eric Harrison

  muscle tension, it is easy to start releasing much of it. To give

  the body more attention than usual, as we do when we medi-

  tate, accelerates the self-corrective feedback mechanisms, and

  this effect pervades the whole body (see chapter 5).

  The breath meditation, by contrast, is more effective than

  the body scan at lowering arousal. It works through the vis-

  ceral organs and the autonomic nervous system rather than

  through the musculature. Breathing is intimately connected

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  to heart rate, blood pressure, and the secretions of adrenaline and cortisol. These are all governed by what is called the HPA

  axis (the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland, and the adre-

  nal gland). High arousal increases glucose availability in the

  bloodstream and the rate at which we burn energy. We call this

  the “stress response” as opposed to the “relaxation response.”

  We can’t control the stress response directly. We can’t con-

  sciously lower blood pressure and heart rate, but we can do it

  through a proxy. If we consciously relax the breath, this will

  have an immediate ripple effect on the other components of

  the stress response as well. A sigh or yawn, for example, not

  only relaxes the breath. At exactly the same time, it slightly

  reduces blood pressure and heart rate. They are that closely

  connected. (We’ll look more closely at the “miraculous sigh”

  in chapter 4.)

  The breath meditation is traditionally regarded as a tran-

  quility practice ( samadhi). It tends to have a soothing, even

  sedating effect, and many people use it to fall asleep. The

  body scan, on the other hand, makes the mind slightly more

  alert and discriminating. You know where you’re at, aches

  and pains and all, when you scan your body. It is more of a

  mindfulness practice ( sati).

  The breath meditation is popular for many reasons. The

  breath is comfortable and soothing to focus on. The gen-

  tle ebb and flow literally massages the internal organs. The

  breath gives us good immediate feedback on how wired up or

  relaxed we are. Tight grabby breaths indicate tension. Long,

  releasing breaths show we’re relaxed. We also get our first

  conscious taste of physical stillness and mental silence in the

  gap between the out-breath and the in-breath.

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  The breath is a good anchor for other practices. It is transparent and accommodating. While focusing on the breath, we

  can easily scan the body or say a mantra or monitor thoughts

  or listen to sounds or do a visualization as well. Despite its

  apparent simplicity, the breath meditation is a practice that

  matures over the years and can last a lifetime. It is a straight-

  forward entry point into the body schema. If you just did

  this one practice well and allowed it to evolve naturally, you

  wouldn’t need anything else.

  HOW TO DO THE BREATH MEDITATION

  First, you choose your posture. Lying down or using a reclin-

  ing chair is quite okay if you want to relax quickly and don’t

  mind falling asleep. Sitting in a padded upright chair or on the

  floor will give you better focus and mental control. Start with

  two or three energetic sighs and a rapid scan of the body. It is

  remarkable how much tension you can shed almost immedi-

  ately if you do this.

  Now focus on the breath in a precise location in the body.

  Some people just “think” the breath, or ride up and down on

  it, but that approach is too vague. It is better to settle the mind

  down in one particular place so it doesn’t drift. It doesn’t mat-

  ter where. It could be at the nostrils, the throat, the chest, the

  diaphragm, or belly. It is best to focus on the place where the

  breath is most vivid for you.

  Good focus is not static. It involves a sense of gentle,

  moment-by-moment inquiry. This quality of quiet, steady

  investigation, called dhamma-vicaya in the Sutta, is integral to mindfulness. Your brain is intuitively seeking what feels

  most pleasant and satisfying. With a little practice, you will

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  gradually notice the breath in much more detail than you

  normally would.

  In the Sutta, the Buddha described the process this way:

  “When the monk is breathing in, he knows, ‘I am breathing

  in.’ When the monk is breathing out, he knows, ‘I am breath-

  ing out.’” You should also be able to recognize when your

  breaths are short or long, smooth or irregular, comfortable

  or awkward. See if you can notice the split second when the

  breath seems to stop, and the split second it starts. These are

  indicators that you are really focused and are not getting dis-

  tracted. Another sign of good focus is that time seems to slow

  down. You step out of twenty-first-century cybertime into

  the natural rhythms of body time, which hasn’t changed in

  millennia.

  Healthy breathing is naturally irregular and variable.

  The breath will intuitively find its own rhythm appropriate

  to circumstances and the person. For this reason, Buddhist

  practices usually don’t try to control or shape the breath. This

  makes them quite different from many of the breathing exer-

  cises in yoga.

  People commonly use mental props to stay on the track

  of the breath. These aren’t essential, but they are excellent

  training wheels. You could try to silently count three or four

  breaths in a row, saying the count at the end of the out-breath.

  If you still get distracted, you could double-count, say-

  ing the number on both the in-breath and the out-breath:

  in-breath, “one”; out-breath, “one”; in-breath, “two”; out-

  breath, “two”; and so on. If you don’t like counting, you could

  just say “in . . . out” repeatedly as you breathe. These were the

  Buddha’s instructions.

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  Alternatively, you could silently say an affirmation such as “let go” or “slow down” or “be still.” You would say one word

  on the in-breath and one on the out-breath. If you used a sin-

  gle word, such as “relax,” you would say it on the out-breath.

  Saying affirmations tends to have a more soothing effect than

  counting.

  NAME THE DISTRACTION

  Counting or saying affirmations may seem absurdly simple,

  but you shouldn’t underestimate the power of your habitual

  thoughts to derail you. While focusing on the breath you still

  have to monitor the peripheral mental activity and respond to

  it as necessary. Most thoughts are light and trivial. They will

  just cruise by and disappear, and you get better at shrugging

  them off. Sometim
es, however, you need a stronger strategy.

  It goes like this. When you get distracted, don’t get

  annoyed with yourself. It happens to everyone. I still get dis-

  tracted after nearly half a century of meditation. Instead,

  stop and deliberately ask: “What is this?” “Naming the dis-

  traction” is like a micro-mindfulness technique inserted into

  your session.

  You “hold the distraction in mind.” You become “mind-

  ful” of that thought. You then name the content: “Food, TV,

  Josephine, sex, work,” or whatever. To name a thought means

  you have to step outside the ongoing conversation and see it

  under its general category instead. To become fully conscious

  of the distraction in this way gives you more power over it.

  To name or label something objectifies it somewhat and

  gives you the chance to evaluate it: Shall I stay with this

  thought or not? Most emerging thoughts can be abandoned

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  on the spot once you are fully mindful of them. Others can be postponed or “shelved” or “boxed up” or put in the distance.

  (We’ll talk more about this naming technique in chapter 6.)

  No one can meditate well unless they have good, con-

  scious strategies for managing distractions. Any distraction

  will always have more emotional charge and allure (“pay

  attention to me!”) than focusing on the breath, which can

  seem quite pedestrian in comparison. Big distractions are

  most unlikely to fade away if you just try to ignore them.

  BE MINDFUL OF THE RESULTS

  While focusing on the breath, you should feel your body relax-

  ing. This is one reason that you are meditating, after all. Your

  body may feel heavy or still or numb or even light. You may

  notice tingling or warmth or pulsing on the skin. You feel mus-

  cles continuing to relax. You may well feel your tiredness and

  aches and pains coming to the surface. Enjoy these sensations.

  They all confirm that you’re on the right track.

  Don’t forget to monitor your mind and mood as well. The

  Buddha called this being mindful of your state of mind (see

  chapter 18). Are you focused, or is your mind drifting? Are

  you falling asleep and losing control, or are you fully tuned in

  to what is happening? Do you feel at home in your body and

  accepting of your mood, or are you unconsciously resisting it?

  When you finish the breathing meditation, ask yourself:

  “Was that worth doing or not? Is my body relaxed? Is my

  mind calmer and more in control?” If you’re not sure, or if the

  results were mediocre, or if the answer is “no,” you probably

  won’t have the motivation to continue. A meditation has to be

  sufficiently rewarding to justify the time you spend doing it.

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  FOR HOW LONG SHOULD I MEDITATE?

  There is a good reason why a Standard Meditation Practice

  takes fifteen minutes or longer. It usually takes two to three

  minutes for you to break the habit of compulsive thought and

  actually start to feel the body schema. At some time within five

  to ten minutes, the body is likely to touch the point of sleep.

  You are definitely relaxing, and you know it!

  However, the mind takes longer to truly settle. When the

  body relaxes, the mind typically gets sleepy. Every meditator

  knows the feeling of bobbing in and out of sleep. These few

  minutes of recovery sleepiness are often necessary, especially

  after a long day, but grogginess is hardly an ultimate goal.

  Fairly soon a more satisfying state of mind should emerge.

  You feel alert, calm, and controlled. This tends to happen

  ten to fifteen minutes into a meditation. This is the ideal

  state: body relaxed, mind relatively calm and controlled. It

  still takes some effort to maintain, but it can be enormously

  rewarding. Once you’ve got it, how long should you continue?

  You will normally stop, as you should, when it intuitively feels

  right to do so, but it is good to have an approximate target.

  I was trained to do meditations that were one hour, two

  hours, and sometimes three hours long. I now see that as

  having a monastic rationale: the longer you withdraw from

  the temptations of the world, the safer you are. My belief is

  that for most people the law of diminishing returns sets in

  after twenty or twenty-five minutes. A one-hour meditation

  is only slightly more profitable than a twenty-minute session.

  Long meditations can be truly beautiful, but they are also

  far more prone to sleepiness and mental wandering. People

  who only do long meditations may be unconsciously training

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  themselves into states of relaxed fogginess rather than mental clarity. Long meditations may actually increase, rather

  than decrease, the time people spend in pointless, low-level

  rumination. If you have the time, short frequent sessions usu-

  ally work better than single long ones.

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  4

  The Miraculous Sigh

  Meditation involves two skills. The first is physical: learning

  to relax rapidly. The second is cognitive: learning to pay

  attention. It does take a certain amount of time, about ten to

  twenty seconds, to significantly relax, but we can and do become

  mindful in an instant when we need to. This chapter will show

  you how to combine relaxation and attention into a powerful

  short exercise that you could easily do many times a day.

  Some people think of relaxation as a state close to sleep.

  I’d like to propose a more sophisticated definition. We are

  “relaxed” when we have the optimal baseline levels of mus-

  cle tone, arousal, and attention for whatever we happen to be

  doing. Conversely, we are “tense,” “anxious,” or “stressed” when

  our muscle activity and arousal are higher than necessary.

  The baseline changes continuously as we shift from one

  activity to another. Walking requires more lower-body tone

  and higher arousal than sitting. Talking requires more mus-

  cle tone in the face than being silent, but every activity will

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  have an optimal baseline. When we’re at the baseline, we feel relaxed, in control, well-paced, and mentally online.

  If we check (and know what to look for), we will usually

  find we are a little, or a lot, more tense than we need to be for

  much of the day. To “relax,” therefore, means dropping back

  to the optimal baseline for that activity. Once you know how,

  it rarely takes more than a minute to do this, but the benefits

  can be colossal. If we don’t, we will mindlessly maintain those

  levels of excess tensio
n and energy expenditure, and we usu-

  ally crank them up further as the day goes by.

  Relaxing quickly also has a huge cognitive payoff. If we’re phys-

  ically tense, our minds scatter and become too speedy to function

  well. If we’re relaxed, however, we can give good, self-monitoring,

  economical attention to whatever we are doing. We will also be

  able to turn the quality of our attention up or down as required.

  We will know when to be extra sharp and focused and when we

  can safely cruise on “high-functioning automatic.”

  We really can become mindful in an instant, but sus-

  tained, good-quality attention depends on being close to the

  optimal baseline for much of the day. That’s where we have

  to start. So how can we relax rapidly when we’re habitually

  out of whack? We can use the breath to do it, as described in

  chapter 3, but here are some technical details to expand on

  that discussion.

  Sympathetic arousal is a state of elevated blood pressure,

  heart rate, breathing rate, and secretions of adrenaline and

  cortisol. This arousal increases the rate at which we burn

  energy, and it makes us feel speedy. The only part of this auto-

  nomic nervous system network that we can control directly

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  is the breath. Fortunately, if we consciously relax our breathing, that relaxation simultaneously slows down all the other

  aspects of arousal.

  Here is a curious little fact: When we breathe in, our blood

  pressure and heart rate go up. When we breathe out, they

  go down. They go up and down over a single breath! This

  explains why, when we habitually hold the breath in (as we

  do when we’re tense), arousal remains high. Conversely, when

  we let the breath go, as we do when we sigh or yawn, we relax.

  The following are markers of tense breathing and high

  arousal: short, frequent breaths; longer in-breaths than out-

  breaths; breathing from the chest rather than lower down

  in the body; and holding on at the top of the in-breath. Con-

  versely, the markers of relaxed breathing are these: longer,

  slower breaths; longer out-breaths than in-breaths; breathing

  from lower in the body; and usually (but not always) a space

  at the end of the out-breath. Once you can recognize these

  markers, it is easy to check. Just ask yourself at any time: “Do