Paying Attention

Mindsight lifted Jonathan's dark moods, got Stuart in touch with his feelings, filled the emptiness Anne felt, and helped Allison heal from trauma. There are meds for these sorts of things: for instance SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors) help the brain be more flexible, adapt more smoothly to changes. Dr. Dan Seigel’s approach opted instead for mindfulness: “intentionally paying attention to the present moment without being swept up by judgments.”

He began with patients doing a body scan: sitting still and carefully noticing the feeling of the top of the head, face, neck, and so on, surveying the entire body, section by section. It’s the beginning of training focused attention on what’s there – noticing sensations, cultivating your inner observer. Siegel would typically progress his patients to a walking meditation – a slow walk with attention focused on the soles of the feet -- and then to a seated silent mindfulness meditation. Sessions with Siegel combined meditation and meditation instruction with counseling conversation inviting articulation of stories and feelings.

The details about how each patient was helped – and just what brain mechanisms were trained and strengthened – differed from case to case. Part of the training was learning about how the brain works – it helps to know the story about how mindfulness and mindsight are working.

The brain's middle-prefrontal cortex – just behind the eyes – is located close to just about everything. The middle-prefrontal cortex regulates the flow of sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts through the brain. Stepping back from the feelings and thoughts and watching them strengthens those middle-prefrontal regulatory neurons.

Mindsight promotes these middle-prefrontal functions:

• Bodily regulation (keep heart and intestines working well)
• Attuned communication with self and others
• Ability to have emotional balance (gives live meaning and energy – without too much emotion, which is chaotic, or too little, which is rigid.)
• Extinction of fear
• Flexibility – pause before respond
• Insight into self
• Empathy with others
• Morality: to realize we are part of a larger whole, and we can imagine a greater good and can act for it
• Intuition.

Watching your mind at work – being present to what comes up, neither being carried away with it nor suppressing it – actually strengthens the neural pathways by which the middle-prefrontal cortex regulates an array of brain functions. The myelin sheaths on the neuron’s axons grows thicker, which helps them function better, and that middle-prefrontal area gets more neurons to fire along with it. The cacophony of 100 billions neurons begins to approach a higher, or deeper, kind of harmony.

Maybe, like Einstein, you have a natural integration and awareness that separation is a delusion, that the reality is that we, all together, consititute one organism. Or maybe, like Jill Bolte Taylor, a traumatic brain accident woke you up. But for the rest of us, we won’t get to Carnegie hall by practicing every once in a while. We won't arrive at equanimity and empathy by meditating half an hour a week. It takes practice every day. To become who you are: practice, practice, practice.

Amen.

Video: Dan Siegel on Mindfulness and Neural Integration. 18:27

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This is part 4 of 4 of "Mindsight."
Previous: Part 3: "Perceiving, Not Just Having, Thoughts"
Beginning: Part 1: "Practice, Practice, Practice"

Perceiving, Not Just Having, Thoughts

Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke shut down her left brain and allowed her to see in a flash of awareness that, as she put it:

“We are the life force power of the universe with power to choose to be at one with all that is. The more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemisphere, the more peace we will project into the world and the more peaceful our planet will be.”

Taylor appeared on Oprah, where she said:

“Pay attention to what you’re thinking. Pay attention to what you’re thinking.
And you are not your thoughts. Your thoughts are created by a tiny, tiny, little group of cells about the size of a peanut sitting in your left hemisphere. And many of us let that little peanut rule our lives. And you have to recognize that it’s just a group of cells that is designed to tell stories so that we feel safe in the external world. You are not your thoughts. So pay attention to what you’re thinking – and then decide if those are thoughts that are creating the kind of life that you want created, and if it’s not, then change your thoughts.”

That may be easy for her to say. How do we actually develop the ability to perceive a thought – not just have one? This is the question of how to be receptive to the mind’s riches and not just reactive to its reflexes. It’s the question of mindsight: seeing what your own mind is actually doing.

Sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts arise. Freedom lies in recognizing them, and neither indulging nor repressing. “Mindsight,” Dr. Dan Siegel, professor of psychiatry, explains in his book, Mindsight:

“actually frees you to become less self-absorbed, not more. When we are not taken over by our thoughts and feelings, we can become clearer in our own internal world as well as more receptive to the inner world of another....By harnessing the power of awareness to strategically stimulate the brain’s firing, mindsight enables us to voluntarily change a firing pattern that was laid down involuntarily.”

Dan Siegel tells about some of the patients he worked with.

Sixteen year-old Jonathan had dark moods, bouts of crying that came out of nowhere, bursts of rage.

Then there was Stuart, age 92, had apparently never had an emotional life. Lived in his head, and been a highly successful attorney. Late in life, his detachment had finally reached a level that his son brought him in for counseling, even though Stuart insisted he didn’t need it.

And there was Anne, age 47, a doctor and mother of 11-year-old twin girls. Said her life just felt empty. As a child, Anne had had a distant father, a mother who died when Anne was three, and subsequently a step-mother who was a harsh disciplinarian who criticized Anne relentlessly. At age 11, after one particularly painful dressing-down, Anne promised herself "she would never feel anything again.” It was a protection mechanism that lasted into adulthood – that Anne hadn’t recognized, and didn’t know how to turn off.

Allison, age 31, had persistent relationship problems, eventually revealed as connected with having been assaulted as a teenager in a way that was so traumatic she had no conscious memory of it.

Mindsight profoundly changed the lives of each of these people.

(Video of Dan Siegel on "The Power of Mindsight." 24:21)

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This is part 3 of 4 of "Mindsight."
Next: Part 4: "Paying Attention"
Previous: Part 2: "Neither Repressing Nor Indulging"
Beginning: Part 1: "Practice Practice Practice"

Neither Repressing Nor Indulging

My preparation for professional ministry included a year of CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) – working as a chaplain intern. Day after day I held the anguish of the hospitalized and their families – and was grilled by my supervisor to identify the feelings that were in me. You can’t walk the heart path with others if you can’t locate your own.

That same year I began meditating – on my own once a day, and meeting with a meditation group once a week. This path of spiritual discipline appealed to me instrinsically. I also had an extrinsic motivation: as a ministerial aspirant, I wanted to be able to say I had a spiritual practice. It’s a good thing I had the extra extrinsic motivation, because the meditation didn’t seem to be doing anything at first, and I’m not sure the intrinsic motivation alone would have been sufficient for me to stick with it. I’ve since learned that meditation does have a cumulative effect – it’s just very slow, at least for me.

I was working on self-awareness. What emotions were there? What images, what metaphorical narratives suggested themselves? These were questions my CPE supervisor and the fellow chaplain interns were pushing me over and over to look into. And it’s what I was also looking into in the stillness and the silence.

You see, spending time every day being quiet and still isn’t about turning the mind into a blank. It is about setting aside each thought as it comes up – so that you notice the next thought. It’s about developing the inner observer who sits at the hub of the wheel and is aware of the sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts that come up at the rim.

Without regular practice at that, the thoughts come up, and run our lives. We can either let them carry us along, or, if we don’t like them, we can suppress them – in which case, they pop up in unconscious ways. The practice is all about being with what comes up – as I learned to be with the patients in the hospital, and what they brought up – neither repressing nor indulging. Just watching. It is an awareness of being more awake to our lives – of awakening the senses and also compassion and conscience and vision.

Meditation is a safe method of awakening. Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor’s awakening came in a much riskier way: she had a stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. Taylor’s stroke was unusual in that it shut down only the main functions of the left hemisphere and not other parts of the brain. The logical, linear, linguistic left brain generates the constant chatter of our mind’s inner commentary: I like this, I don’t like that, do this, I should do that, I wish they would do this – on and on. For Taylor, that chatter was suddenly turned off like a switch. In the silence, the awareness of right brain – an awareness which is always there but usually buried beneath the noise from left brain – came out the way that stars come out when the sun goes down. This is what she reported it felt like for her:

“There is no reality except the present moment – the eternal NOW – right here, right now. I am an energy being, connected to the energy all around us. We are energy beings connected to one another as one human family. Right here, right now, we are brothers and sisters on this planet, here to make the world a better place. And in this moment, we are perfect, we are whole, and we are beautiful. As soon as left hemisphere says, ‘I am,’ I become separate. With left hemisphere shut down, I could no longer define where I begin and end. I felt my spirit surrender, and knew I was not the choreographer of my life. My spirit soared free like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria. I had the thought, there’s no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormity of myself back into this little body.”

(Video of Jill Bolte Taylor's TED Talk. 18:42)

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This is part 2 of 4 of "Mindsight"
Next: Part 3: "Perceiving, Not Just Having, Thoughts"
Previous: Part 1: "Practice, Practice, Practice"

Practice, Practice, Practice

You have heard, no doubt, the old joke. A tourist in New York stops a passerby to ask, "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" The passerby, who happens to be a musician, answers, "Practice, practice, practice." For a musician to qualify to perform in prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall requires a lot of practice.

What happens with all that practice? We know that better today than we ever have. Brain scans show certain clumps of neurons getting larger with practice. Violinists show

“dramatic growth and expansion in regions of the cortex that represent the left hand” (Daniel Siegel)

– because the left hand has to finger strings very precisely and rapidly.

If you put up a scan of Itzhak Perlman's brain and my brain, side-by-side, someone who knows what to look for will be able to tell which brain belongs to a highly trained musician, and which brain can strum a few chords on a guitar. All that practice, practice, practice actually builds up neurons.

And just as violin practice changes your brain – and changes what you can do – spiritual practice also changes your brain – and changes what you can do. So it’s also the case that if we had a brain scan of my brain 15 years ago, and today, I’m pretty sure there’d be some differences. Some of those would simply reflect the aging process. Other changes though would have been produced from the last 10 years of spiritual practice.

I’ve moved toward a greater integration. Obviously, I have some areas for further growth -- and always will. But if you’d known my brain 15 years ago . . . well!

I was raised by solid rationalist, humanist parents. They were academics: Mom’s field was chemistry, Dad’s was English. His specialty was 18th-century British literature: the age of reason. So for me the arts and the sciences all pointed to reason. I was their first born. Wanted to please, and lead in the values my parents represented. Was on my high school debate team -- Georgia state champion. Went on to go into the family business: college teaching. I lived in my head, and trusted thinking more than feelings. Especially under stress, I trusted intellectual analysis – the strength of my arguments -- to get me through.

As in many mythic narratives of the spirit journey, the breaking up of hubris and the beginning of wisdom requires a descent into failure. Mine came when I didn’t get tenure as a philosophy professor. Despite approval from the faculty committees reviewing my performance, the President’s office cited institutional need – the slot I’d been hired into had essentially gotten filled when, in my third year, the academic dean gave up deaning and returned to full-time teaching. His field just happened to be philosophy, and the small school and tiny philosophy department didn’t need another full-time philosopher – a fact for which I’m deeply grateful . . . now.

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This is part 1 of 4 of "Mindsight."
Next: Part 2: "Neither Repressing Nor Indulging"