It’s worth considering that your relationship mental health is paramount to lasting happiness. In this post, I will explore my personal relationship with mindfulness meditation and how it has positively impacted my life. The promise of mindfulness is increased focus, acquiring an inner calm and agency, and at the expert end– complete awareness of the biofeedback mechanisms that can overcome desired behavior.

As a meditator, I can recall over 25 years ago to my first experiences in martial arts classes. In Kenpo classes, we would kneel at the end of hour long dynamic drills, form a diamond with the index and thumbs of our two hands, and place our forehead between the shape on the floor. The instruction was minimal, but silence was enforced and occasionally instructions given to focus on our breathing. Even at an impressionable age, the stimuli of the day’s bustle would fade, a gradual and deep calm would settle in, resulting in a new deliberateness that would permeate the rest of the day. It was a powerful effect, perhaps amplified by the plasticity inherent in a young brain. Meditation suited me and I spent late insomniac nights wrapping myself into a full lotus (a long lost skill) while playing with a wavering attention. These experiences I would take for granted as childhood’s whirlwind of school exams, music lessons, and soccer games swept along.

In college, I joined the Brown University Taekwondo team to moderate success jumping a few ranks, but I found the mental tradition lacking compared to the perhaps Zen-infused tradition in Kenpo. It would take my classmate Satoshi’s* investigations into mindfulness meditation that would launch the formative but nascent childhood experiences into an adult investigation. Mindfulness is a huge modern topic. The Mayo Clinic defines mindfulness meditation as, “meditation in which you focus on being intensely aware of what you’re sensing and feeling in the moment, without interpretation or judgment.” The introductory definition doesn’t begin to describe the objective and technique pioneered over millennia to achieve a seemingly simple goal.

As with most technical topics, a primer text covering introductory technique can supercharge the learning curve of a mindfulness practice. The Mind Illuminated by Dr. John Yates is an excellent introduction. The key metaphor is this– as a neophyte, one’s mind is like a turbulent sea. The first objective is to become aware of the turbulence. The techniques in the Yates primer equip one to observe the turbulence of our inner turmoil, and by observation, placate the perturbations. At over 700 pages, the text brings a pupil through distinct stages of adeptness in recentering focus and deepening the meditative tranquil, ultimately burnishing choppy seas to a placid mirror lake.

At the adept level, the investigation forks in several ways, and it’s important to hold these different meditative paths in the socio-historical context, if not at least to enjoin your experience into a tradition instead of drifting in a random walk. If we were writing about the historical tradition of meditation in a revisionist sense, we could facetiously call it the solution of the world’s oldest “first world problem”. Most historians would point to the emergence of the prince Siddhartha Gautama in the ancient Northern Indian Shakya civilization as a central seminal figure. Gautama started his meditative tradition in equal view of the opulence of the palace juxtaposed with the most indigent untouchables. Undoubtedly, his practice gave him deep meaning beyond any material goods. In the religious meditative tradition, a distinct stage of meditation is achieved after enormous practice, usually known as enlightenment or Nirvana. Without dwelling on religious connotations, the usual descriptive results are the complete absolution of pain and suffering, a suspension of physical perception of time, complete agency, and the general perception of the illusory sensory components of reality. Whew! It’s safe to say many will not reach final mastery, but auxiliary benefits of meditation are available well along the path, such as parasympathetic nervous system regulation as thoroughly examined by Western science.

One meditative path emphasizes the performance benefits, whether it be in athletics or broader competition. The most sublime expression can be traced to the warrior-philosophers of the Samurai class of Edo Japan. Classic texts describe the techniques such as the Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi with a Zen Buddhist tradition forming the substrate for mental optimizations. Such performance centered meditative practices dovetails and informs the recent examination of “flow” mental states. While a deep and admirable tradition, it remains a narrow practice that doesn’t treat more general aspects of civilian life, is repetitious and gauche for intellectual enjoyment, and perversely counteracts original loftier objectives.

flow Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Great traditions think alike?

In a civic-oriented approach, progenitor Chinese practices to the Zen methods examine temporal moderation. In particular, the translation of the Golden Flower by Dr. Thomas Cleary corrects the mangled interpretation by German sinologist Richard Wilhelm with equally botched introduction by Carl Jung. In the methods described by Cleary, we’ve moved markedly into an intermediate practitioner’s territory. If an introductory practice has not been established, the text will be hopelessly mired in the “pointing at the moon” problem identified by Gautama at the outset. As a meta description, the intermediate practice examines the result of recursive attention upon attention training, both in practical execution, accompanying qualia, and objectives. At the very minimum, the ability to control one’s attention admits a quantum state change, especially in this distracted modern life.

If the putative benefits have piqued some interest, let’s at least touch upon the journey. In Siddhartha’s Brain by James Kingsland, the author interviews and reviews medical imaging studies performed by scientists on expert monks. The evidence showed meditation had re-wired the activity of expert-level meditators. To estimate the number of meditative hours of practice, the master monks would practice over eight hours a day for six days a week over the course of 30 years of adult life– equivalent to over 75,000 hours of practice. The number of training hours can be demanding to reach the pinnacle of the art. The effort required raises the question of whether it’s worth starting. In light of the benefits and what’s at risk, the question is: can you afford not to start?

sidd In Siddhartha’s Brain: Unlocking the Ancient Science of Enlightenment, East meets West.

*name changed to preserve anonymity

1 Mayo Clinic