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tionary theory, spent years looking for an explanation for
the diversity of species. When Isaac Newton (1643–1727) was
asked about how he achieved his miraculous year of scientific
and mathematical discoveries in 1666, he said he thought
about nothing else for months at a time.
Koestler’s second stage, incubation, loosely correlates to
what we have called embodied thought. Wallace lay for weeks
in a fever before his insight into evolution through natural
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selection dawned upon him. For Newton, the moment of
insight is captured in the legend of the falling apple. For both
these scientists, however, years of verification and testing had
to follow. You can’t automatically trust an insight! Intuitions
are frequently wrong.
The Buddha certainly understood this process. The Sutta
is a systematic training of the mind in preparation for deep
thought, and for the flashes of insight that knit it all together.
Sitting meditation is the first part of the first of the four foundations of mindfulness. The pursuit of insight, on the other
hand, is the last part of the last of the four foundations.
Another Pali text describes the process: “When his concen-
trated mind is thus purified, bright, unblemished, malleable
and steady, the monk devotes himself to investigating the Bud-
dha’s dogma.”2 For example, in the Sutta: “The monk reflects
on the Four Noble Truths that lead to nirvana. He understands
by direct experience that: Life is suffering. The cause of suffer-
ing is desire. Desire can be extinguished. The Eightfold Path of
training extinguishes desire and leads to the end of suffering.”
In other words, the Buddha is asking the monk to think in
depth about the nature of life. The Buddha was a much more
rational, nonmystical thinker than we give him credit for. In
the texts, he repeatedly sets up his premises and argues his
point from many different angles on concepts such as inter-
dependent origination, the three characteristics of existence,
the five aggregates, the six sense bases, and so on. It is fair to
say that he regarded at least some degree of rational analysis
as a crucial prerequisite to awakening.
He still knew that thought alone was not enough. We can
easily give our assent to a philosophy without a deep convic-
tion that it is true. The Zen student knows that she is already
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enlightened, but she doesn’t quite believe it. We know that overeating is bad for us, but it doesn’t feel that way.
Insights, however, are more potent and embodied. They
go deep and carry a lot of weight. A bright idea or a break-
through insight typically consolidates much of the rational
analysis that has preceded it. It can irreversibly shift the
thinker’s internal orientation to that issue, or it may simply
be a big step along the way. Afterward, an insight can seem
blindingly obvious, and easy to take as a given. (When
Darwin’s colleague T. H. Huxley read Darwin’s foundational
text on evolutionary theory in 1859, he exclaimed, “How
extremely stupid not to have thought of it!”)
Nonetheless, insights don’t have to be earth-shattering
to qualify as such. We can regard an insight as any bright
or potent idea that stands out from the usual run of mental
chatter. They are the best part of your mental activity, so it is
useful to be mindful of them. If you have an insight, I suggest
you do the following:
Stop your mental flow and hold the insight in mind. Hold
it still and feel it. How true or deep does it seem to be? Is it
going to hold up in different circumstances? Evaluate it and
remember it. I frequently go for long philosophic walks. At
the end I typically ask myself, “What were the best three or
four ideas?” Other people might write them down. I deliber-
ately lodge them in memory.
Making big decisions is a lonely activity. The rule books
usually don’t work, and simple nostrums are deceitful. As
the journalist and satirist H. L. Mencken famously put it,
“For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear,
simple, and wrong.” Aristotle regarded “practical wisdom”
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( phronesis) as the ability to make good judgments in situations of uncertainty and inadequate information. He saw this
as one of the fundamental skills of a mature adult.
The Western term “enlightenment” means being able to
think and determine the truth for yourself, based on the evi-
dence, without reliance on political or religious authorities.
The Sutta is a comprehensive mind-training discipline that
aims at just this kind of self-reliance and mental vigor.
The Buddha’s methods for improving our judgments
are sophisticated and thorough. Meditation grounds us,
and embodied thought is a type of cognition based on con-
stant cross-referencing and feedback mechanisms using all
parts of the body and brain. Over time, this can lead us out
of childish, habitual, “confirmation bias” thinking toward a
more intelligent and open-ended way of relating to the world.
By clarifying our everyday decisions, mindfulness can help
us become insightful, independent thinkers. It can make us
enlightened, in the Western sense of the word.
In this book we have now traversed from sitting medita-
tion, which is the first part of the first foundation, to embodied thought and insight, which is the last part of the last
foundation. This chapter marks the end of my analysis of
the Sutta. The remaining four chapters discuss the modern
understanding and applications of mindfulness.
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P a r t F o u r
Modern Applications of Mindfulness
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23
The Scientific Evidence
Tens of thousands of studies on mindfulness and medita-
tion have appeared since I started teaching in 1987. Many
of these are of questionable quality, but the general drift is
clear. Mindfulness seems to have positive effects for people
suffering from anxiety, depression, pain, stress, insomnia, sub-
stance abuse, and eating disorders. It helps with medical con-
ditions such as cancer, hypertension, postoperative recovery,
diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, skin condi-
tions, and poor immune function. It seems to work in all popu-
lations, from children to the elderly, and across a great variety
of occupations.
Mindfulness has gone from strength to strength in recent
years, but the research is still struggl
ing to describe how it
achieves the results that it does. Let’s look at some of the most
plausible hypotheses: namely, relaxation, enhanced body
awareness, attention and thought control, and emotional reg-
ulation.
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RELAXATION
Most people would describe relaxation as a major reason for
meditating. The most uncontroversial aspect of the research
is that meditation enhances parasympathetic activity (the
so-called relaxation response described on page 50). This alone
is enough to explain its beneficial effects on heart rate, blood
pressure, immune function, digestion, pain tolerance, and
sleep quality. Learning to relax quickly and frequently during
the day has the potential to permanently lower baseline levels
of arousal and stress.
So is relaxation part of the answer to alleviating mental
distress? Not at all, according to some psychologists. From
the start, the psychological literature has devalued the idea
that relaxation could be useful as part of a treatment strat-
egy. The pioneering writers constantly downplay its poten-
tial as an agent of change and describe it as a pleasant side
effect at best. They say this despite the fact that some degree
of physical relaxation is virtually guaranteed in any medita-
tion, while achieving a state of nonjudgmental acceptance is
far less certain or measurable, even subjectively. I have yet
to see any study that attempts to assess mindfulness in isola-
tion from the confounding influence of relaxation. I’m sure it
would be easy to design.
Psychology has a long tradition of devaluing what hap-
pens in the body in favor of purely mental dynamics. I won’t
argue the obvious—that being able to consciously relax is cru-
cial, and that doing so is both pleasant and good for you—but I
suggest that you keep in mind the prejudice against the value
of relaxation in the psychological literature. You can easily
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read dozens of scientific reports and not find a single reference to relaxation as a possible causative factor.
ENHANCED BODY AWARENESS
Meditation invariably enhances body awareness (and induces
relaxation), whether that is the intention or not. This has many
well-documented advantages. Enhanced body awareness leads
to a conscious awareness of one’s emotions. It acts as an early
warning device to pick up signals of overreactivity. It helps
us to recognize our biological needs and limits long before
crisis point. It seems to enhance our ability to accommodate
unpleasant moods and sensations. It has the potential to
increase empathy through the recognition of the body signals
of others.
Enhanced body awareness also alters the way that we think
of ourselves. Our sense of self-identity operates through two
distinct systems. The “narrative” system relies on language,
memory, and a sense of purpose. This is “doing” mode: “This
is me, my history, and what I do.” The “experiential” system
relies on nonverbal, immediate interoception, and our sense
of location in space. This is “being” mode: “This is how I feel
in this moment.”
Meditation strengthens this bodily sense of self at the
expense of the narrative sense, and it consequently weak-
ens excessive thought. If we feel grounded in our body, we
are more able to see a thought as being “out there,” outside
the body. Each time we do so we implicitly give more value to
embodiment and less to mental chatter. Doing this thousands
of times can train us to automate the response, and so reduce
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the tendency toward rumination and self-referential verbal narratives.
ATTENTION AND THOUGHT CONTROL
Attention is the essential skill in meditation, and it consists of
a variety of sub-skills. Learning to focus and sustain attention
on the body is the antidote to the jumpy, anxious, scattered
mind. Learning to switch attention away from a thought or
behavior (“Let go and focus on the breath”) breaks the opposite
tendency to fixate and ruminate. Learning to split attention
appropriately increases mental efficiency and coping skills.
Anchoring the mind in the body helps inhibit the second-
ary elaborative processing of the thoughts, sensations, and
emotions that arise while we meditate. Learning to “name” or
“label” thoughts guarantees metacognitive awareness and is
so beneficial that we find it in many therapies. The emphasis
that mindfulness-based stress reduction places on devaluing
thoughts indiscriminately undoubtedly helps many patients
also. This ability to take a more detached stance in relation to
one’s thoughts and feelings is called “decentering” or “defus-
ing” or “reperceiving” in the psychological literature.
These terms all suggest a general tendency to devalue
thoughts per se. This is a common meditative strategy, but I
prefer the Buddha’s approach. Sati-sampajjana is “the con-
scious perception and evaluation” of something. Being con-
scious, it evaluates a thought accurately, as it deserves, rather than automatically downgrading it. This is closer to the older
cognitive behavioral therapy term “reappraisal” than to
“defusing” or “decentering.” This may be the most important
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mindfulness skill in managing anxiety and depression.
The research also suggests that even a very brief mindful-
ness intervention can enhance our sense of self-control and
discrimination. The reappraisal of any thought or impulse
doesn’t even need to be conscious. A two-second “stop and
look” pause is enough time for an implicit reappraisal.
EMOTIONAL REGULATION
Meditation lowers physiological arousal. This contributes to
lower heart rate, blood pressure, and cortisol and adrenaline
secretions while you are meditating. This may not change your
underlying emotion, but it definitely turns down the volume.
Meditation also weakens thought, thereby reducing the verbal
amplification of any situation. It also requires that we sit still
for several minutes, which means that we inevitably disarm our
musculature and are less primed to act impulsively. This non-
action is a profound signal from the body to the mind. It says,
“No great urgency. No need to act right now.” It undermines
the primary role of emotion, which is to initiate some kind of
physical action.
Psychologists speculate that poor emotional regulation is
a primary driver of anxiety and depression. Conversely, they
see a strong correlation betw
een self-reported mindfulness
and good emotional control strategies. Mindfulness seems to
help through mechanisms such as early intervention, reap-
praisal, exposure, and the extinction of habitual responses.
Paradoxically, trying to see things nonjudgmentally invari-
ably results in a reevaluation of the object. Most commonly
we down-regulate its emotional charge. We see it as less
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important and therefore requiring little or no response. Some researchers now see positive reappraisal, not acceptance, as
the key mediator of therapeutic change.
The pioneering mindfulness writer John Teasdale explains
how even a few seconds of conscious perception are bound to
result in an automatic reappraisal. To be mindful holds an
object in working memory for long enough to recontextual-
ize it. Just a second or two of mindful attention to an emo-
tional situation gives plenty of time for memories of similar
past situations to arise. Since the mind automatically evalu-
ates any new information and updates its assessments within
milliseconds, being mindful of something will invariably
modify the initial rule-of-thumb judgment about it.
Good meditators gradually learn to automate a more tol-
erant approach toward unpleasant stimuli, so they no longer
need to cognitively control the process. Mindfulness thus
contributes to our largely automatic reappraisals of moment-
by-moment experience. Practiced regularly, this produces a
stable, dispositional tendency to be mindful.
Finally meditation enhances emotional control through
brain mechanisms that are now well understood. Focusing
and language are left-lateralized prefrontal cortex functions.
Meditation thus results in front-back, left-right, “reason-
emotion” inhibitions. Although both hemispheres always
work together, focusing enhances left-hemisphere dominance
over the right. The left hemisphere is analytical and rational
and is associated with self-control and “positive” emotions.
Conversely, the right hemisphere is more inclusive but is also
more vulnerable to emotional confusion. Dampening the right
hemisphere thus improves mood and a sense of control.
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