The Inevitable and the Optional

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Mindfulness-based stress reduction – MBSR – is an approach originally pioneered by Jon Kabat-Zinn for helping hospital patients deal with pain. Don't reject the pain – for rejection comes from fear of the pain, and fear exacerbates the pain. Instead, sink into the pain with full acceptance. Bring all your attention to the sensation itself. Simply be present to the sensation as the sensation is present to you. In that simple presence, the stuff the cingulate cortex adds about how much it all hurts tends to fade. With practice.

Research psychologist David Creswell has reviewed the many studies on MBSR and its effect on pain. Creswell says:

“Just by simply observing and noticing how you’re responding, you are actually enlisting resources to regulate that response.”

Bob Stahl, the founder and director of MBSR programs at three San Francisco-area medical centers, adds:

“Learning to be with pain may feel counterintuitive, but it’s a fundamental step in healing. Rather that investing your energy in fighting or resisting pain, learn to go with it. This is an ancient wisdom that goes back to the Buddha, who taught that whenever there is resistance to what is, there’s suffering.”

Whenever there is resistance to what is, there's suffering. Or, as is often heard at the Friday night practice of the Dancing Crane Zen Center:

“Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.”

Psychiatrist Dan Siegel has found that mindfulness practices produces structural changes in the brain. Mindfulness:

1. cultivates approach state;
2. improves the immune system;
3. enhances stability and clarity;
4. helps OCD, borderline personality disorder, drug addiction, depression;
5. improves empathy and reduces burnout.

Being mindful, the ego, and all its desires that are at the center of the brain’s fictional story, comes to be joined by an observing self that doesn’t pretend to want this, or be averse to that, or to have intended to do what you find yourself doing. This observing self is open and accepting, tuned-in, and curious about the experiencing self.

“MBSR has been taught to hundreds of thousands of people. Some 85 percent of them report that the practice has healed them in some way.”

Jon Kabat-Zinn says,

“My working definition of healing is coming to terms with things as they are.”

Healing is coming to terms with things as they are.

Judith Lief has been working for 20 years with mindfulness in her hospice work with dying patients. She has also found that mindfulness heightens our empathy and our connectedness with one another:

“The feedback I get from people being cared for by someone practicing mindfulness is that they feel seen as people, apart from the medical or mental problem.”

And writer Carolyn Rose Gimian concludes:

“Unless we can make friends with what occurs in our life, we are simply subject to circumstances and controlled by them.”

Carnegie Hall, New York City

"Make friends with what occurs in our life." Without control, without desire or aversion, with acceptance and the simple gift of presence, befriend each instant that presents itself. In bringing the gift of ourselves, our presence, we thereby become who we really are – not the story that ego is constantly fabricating.

You are not your thoughts, remember. You are, however, in this very moment, right here and right now, perfect, and beautiful, and whole just as you are. You are not a separated bundle of attachment, clinging to what is always flowing away from you, resisting what is always flowing toward you. You are, with everything, One.

How can you know that, down in your bones?
The same way you get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice.

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This is part 5 of 5 of "Making Peace with Your Brain"
Previous: Part 4: "You Post Facto Fabricator, You!"
Beginning: Part 1: "Your Brain Is Out to Get You"

You Post Facto Fabricator, You!

There is no central ego, no “I,” that generates intentions that then generate actions. Rather, a lot of different unconscious brain processes are working out what to do, moment by moment. It’s like a cacophonous parliament of competing impulses in there. When a sufficient coalition of unconscious impulses forms in support of a given action, out comes that action.

Your conscious awareness likes to pretend it’s the monarch in charge, and to protect that illusion of being in charge, it stays very busy taking in the data of what you have already decided to do, and weaving a made-up narrative about how that’s just what you intended to do. It is that fabricated story that is the source of the illusion of self.

The post facto fabricated story is a tale of a hero – you – venturing out and dealing with this and that – deciding what to do, and carrying out those intentions, confronting obstacles and heroically overcoming them, or sometimes tragically falling to them. It’s the grand drama of our lives – presented to us streaming live as it is concocted by the very talented master narrator.

Here’s the thing: the master narrator is only the court storyteller, not the queen, not the king, not the one who makes things happen. There is no unified self: there’s just a constantly shifting coalition of competing impulses.

Our brain does us wrong – it overstresses us, it runs two different operating systems at once, it has memories that are unreliable, forms beliefs that unreliable, it gives us more pain than we need – and it lies to us about who is in control.

What can you do? It might help to remember you’re not alone. Whenever your spouse, or your boss, or your child or your coworker – or the chair of a church committee you’re on – is getting on your last nerve – remember, they, too, are doing the best they can with a brain built solely for the purpose of keeping paleolithic hunter-gatherers alive and reproducing.

You can’t take over and reassert control – because, after all, the very idea that there is a unified “you” who could do that is itself a brain fabrication. What you can do – what the un-unified, highly disparate collection of impulses and misconceptions that goes by your name can do – is watch. Be present to all the mess of your life and all life around us. You can’t make it what you want, but it can be trained to love what it is.

To love what is. This is the spiritual task.

The popular word for it these days is mindfulness:

“Mindfulness is being purposefully aware. It is noticing what we are experiencing and our response to those experiences. It isn’t simply knowing we are eating an apple. It is paying precise yet relaxed attention to the sweet smell and to the crunch between our teeth; it is paying attention to the glossy red skin and the bruise near the stem.” (Andrea Miller, Shambala Sun, 2008 Sept)

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This is part 4 of 5 of "Making Peace with Your Brain"
Next: Part 5: "The Inevitable and the Optional"
Previous: Part 3: "I Meant to Do That"
Beginning: Part 1: "Your Brain Is Out to Get You"

I Meant to Do That

Our brains mislead us in a variety of ways. Perhaps the chief deception is the illusion that I'm in charge: that there such a thing as an “I”, and that I am in charge of making the decisions about what I do from one moment to the next.

My conscious brain makes up a story about what I'm doing. Key features of that story are that I am doing what I do as the result of a rational intention and deliberate decision. In fact, the vast majority of the things any of us do during a typical day were already decided before we knew we were going to do them. I'm not saying they were decided by fate, or extraterrestrial beings using mind-control rays. I mean that the unconscious brain took in the data, decided what to do, and put into motion our action. Conscious awareness actually trails the process by a few split-seconds.

Yes, brain studies have repeatedly confirmed that motor commands come from the brain before there is awareness of intention to move. My conscious awareness notices what I have already begun doing, and busily fabricates a story about how that action is exactly what I meant to do.

Benjamin Libet had subjects watch a clock and, at a time of their own choosing, move their right hand, reporting at what position the clock hand was when they first ‘felt the urge’ to move their hand. Electoencephalogram readings on the scalp showed that the ‘urge’ to move their hand occurred about .2 seconds prior to muscle movement. But the electrical activity in the brain regions that created the motion began at least one second before hand movement! Thus, brain activity is the cause of conscious intention and not the other way round.

Our conscious intentions occur too late to be the causes of our bodily expressions. In one experiment, electrodes in an arm muscle could make the muscle contract and make the arm move. The arm motion was entirely involuntary – the experimenter decided when to trigger the electrodes to make the subject’s arm move. Yet subjects often reported that they had, in fact, meant to move their arm. They were quite ingenious – and sincere -- in making up an explanation for why they would have wanted to move it – “it was starting to stick to the arm rest” or some such.

Those explanations were made up after the fact.

Have you ever done something unintentionally – like you made an unintentional pun, or you dollopped a bit more butter into the dish you were preparing than you would have thought a moment before that you would intend to. You may have noticed in yourself that impulse to believe that you meant to do that, or you intended that pun.

More likely, you’ll fool yourself, but a friend won’t be fooled. You’ll be: “I meant to do that.”

And your friend is like: “yeah, right.”

Have you ever had that happen?

Video: Pee Wee Herman "meant to do that"

Those are only the most blatant cases of what is actually going on all the time. Instead of being the cause of most of our day-to-day actions, the conscious feeling of intention or urge to act is an immediate by-product of the activity in the motor areas of the brain that actually instructed the movement itself. Conscious awareness trails the action, making up a story about it.

There are conditions under which conscious awareness – the story we construct about who we are and why we’re here – can feed back into the less conscious parts of the brain and can influence results. Under conditions of armchair reflection – when we’re really sitting back and thinking things through – our conscious story can affect what we later do. But for most of our ordinary, day-to-day movements and actions, the story of an intending self is an illusion.

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This is part 3 of 5 of "Making Peace with Your Brain"
Next: Part 4: "You Post Facto Fabricator, You!"
Previous: Part 2: "Don't Believe Anything You Believe"
Beginning: Part 1: "Your Brain Is Out to Get You"

Don't Believe Anything You Believe

Our brains, it seems, are not always on our side. First, the human brain is highly reactive -- it triggers a "fight or flight" reaction when neither physical aggression nor running away is at all helpful. Second, it's divided into very different left and right parts that often "don't play well together."

Third, there’s the way the brain makes memories. Memory does indeed play tricks on us. It’s so far away from being anything at all like a photographic record of what happens. The hippocampus is in charge of storing memories, and that’s part of the limbic system – the emotion system of the brain. In other words, you remember things when you’ve had an emotional reaction to them. You only remember what is colored and distorted by your emotions. Then you recall the memory at some point when your brain thinks that prior experience is pertinent – so the application of the past event to the context in which you are remembering it distorts it further. In fact, if the circumstances are right and the information is plausible, completely false “memories” can be implanted – and our brains tend to retain false memories longer than accurate ones.

Fourth, our beliefs across the board are shaped by many things other than reality. We’re more likely to believe what we’re told:

• by a family member, or
• by a someone with power and status, or
• by someone who’s attractive, or
• by a member of our in-group, or
• if it confirms what we already believed, or
• if we wish it were true.

Other principles by which our brains are predisposed to operate include:

• I am luckier than most other people.
• Other people think pretty much as I do.
• Any event that happens near and soon after some other event was caused by the first event.
• Inanimate objects have person-like qualities.
• My senses aren’t merely triggered by external events but actually map and mirror the outside world accurately.
• Things in my memory actually happened.
• The information that happens to catch my attention is also the most relevant and the most accurate.
• The more anger I have when I express a belief, the more justified the belief is.
• The vividness of detail with which I imagine a possible future event is proportional to the probability the event will occur.

Our brains are so unreliable at forming beliefs that you really can’t believe anything you believe.

Fifth, pain. Our brains are out to hurt us more than we really need to hurt. Pain has both a sensory component and an emotional component. We feel the hurt – and that will often also trigger an emotional reaction, and in particular it’s the fear centers that are triggered. It’s the fear, the aversion of the sensation rather than the sensation itself that constitutes our suffering. “Nerve fibers carry pain signals up the spine to a key branching point in the brain called the thalamus.” From the thalamus, the signal is split and sent to two places. It goes to somatosensory cortex which tells you where on your body the pain is: foot, hand, rib, wherever. And the thalamus also signals the cingulate cortex – a part of the limbic, emotion system -- which tells you it hurts. “People with damage to the cingulate cortex often report that pain doesn’t hurt. The cingulate gives the pain sensation an urgent quality that demands attention.”

Our earlier ancestors needed that – and sometimes we need that. But once we’re already doing everything appropriate to address the cause of the pain, we don’t need it to keep screaming at us like it does.

All those are ways that our brain does us wrong. On top of all that, it then creates the illusion that we’re in charge: that there is such a thing as an “I”, and that "I" am in charge of making the decisions about what I do from one moment to the next.

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This is part 2 of 5 of "Making Peace with Your Brain."
Next: Part 3: "I Meant to Do That"
Previous: Part 1: "Your Brain Is Out to Get You"

Your Brain Is Out to Get You

“Imagine a Stone Age hunter who falls asleep by the glowing embers of a campfire one night. When he opens his eyes in the morning, he is lying on a sidewalk in Times Square.” (Daniel Gardner)

That’s basically our situation. We inherit a brain that evolved to work well for the Stone Age. Our brains were made for days that were mostly uneventful. Without romanticizing the hunter-gathering lifestyle, it’s fair to say that prolonged portions of their days were bucolic and placid. Then, when something did need to grab attention – a charging mastodon, a raid from an enemy tribe – or a dangerous place where some sort of threat might lurk – our brains had good systems for grabbing our attention. Adrenaline and cortisol, the stress hormones, kicked up, and gave us the energy for fight or flight without which we would not have survived as a species.

It was a system that worked very well for the way our ancient ancestors lived. It works less well for you and me, as our blinking and confused hunter-gatherer brains try to cope with our world of computers, and cell phones, and GPSs, and everyone seems to want everything, and they want it from you, and they wanted it yesterday.

I think the last time I actually needed either to fight or to run away was in 7th grade. Yet I’ve got this biology that gears me up for physical aggression or speedy evasion whenever I’m in traffic and someone cuts me off, or I get a certain kind of email, or I hear certain political opinions expressed on the news.

Our world has gotten faster-paced. Knowing that fear grabs our attention, the news, politicians, and advertisers unleash a barrage of things to make us scared. If we don’t take some intentional action to lower our stress response, it’s easy in this modern world for the stress response to be almost constant. Chronic stress is a threat to our health in a variety of ways.

That’s just one way our brains are out to get us.

A second way our brains are out to get us, or at least confuse us, is that our brains are divided into a left side, which is very analytic, and breaks things down into parts, and a right side, which is holistic. They don’t automatically integrate very well. Which side is really more reliable? The left side is good at analyzing detail and catching things the right brain would miss. But when it comes to overall things like face recognition, that’s really hard for left brain to do: “Well, the eyes are just so, and the nose is like that, and the mouth has that shape . . . it must be friend, Bill.” That’s how left brain would have to do it, and it would be really hard. Right brain has the holistic sense, and it just instantly knows, “that’s Bill.”

Even a super-high-powered left-brain-type system, like a souped-up computer, can’t keep up with the accuracy of holistic right brain in some ways. Andrew Newberg gives an example:

“Does holistic thinking offer a more accurate or integrated view of the world? A few years ago, our radiology staff had a chance to test this hypothesis in a very particular way. We compared the differences between human and computer evaluations of brain scans, thinking that a computer might more accurately quantify which parts of the brain were not functioning normally, leading to a more precise diagnosis. To our surprise, humans, using their intuitive holistic skills, did slightly better than the computer, most likely because we derive information from various patterns in the entire scan that help us in our diagnosis.” (Why We Believe What We Believe, 2006, 94)

Because your left brain has the language, it likes to tell you that it’s perceiving reality – but it’s more fabricating it that perceiving it. Sometimes left and right brain provide helpful “reality checks” for each other. Generally, though, they're each off in their separate worlds, from which each occasionally lobs a bomb at the other.

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This is part 1 of 5 of "Making Peace with Your Brain."
Next: Part 2: "Don't Believe Anything You Belive"