My first article, “The Investment of a Smile”, started with a story that began around 20 years ago when I was just ten years old. The quality of the mindfulness I’ve reached today has its roots even earlier. This time I want to tell this story and the reasons why I think that mindfulness can improve our life. You might wonder why it took me so long to write this article, and why it deals with both, mindfulness and meditation. While writing it, I found that personally I can’t really separate these topics from each other. That is why I wrote this article with both topics considered together.
I was only eight when I visited Tibet, India and Nepal, deeply spiritual countries, for a trip through the Himalayas. It was six weeks of incredibly exciting experiences, not only because I was a kid, who get excited quickly, but because the area itself is simply stunning. You have literally the world’s biggest mountains, vast valleys, glaciers and monasteries built into open caves. Everything is so colorful, and the cities are full of so many people! Finally, I had the great joy of having my ninth birthday near Mount Everest, at 5,600 meters, looking down into a valley. I will never forget this view.
You might think that this was the highlight of the whole tour, but no. In the small hotel where we wanted to meet with the other attendees something even greater happened.
We stayed for two days in said hotel to acclimate with the very high air pressure and low oxygen levels. On one of the two evenings we spent there, it was announced that a “guest” was invited for dinner. It felt odd to me that the adults were so excited about this guest. The only thing one could see, besides a large amount of sand in this steppe-like place, was a little bush and rocks. Who would visit us in the middle of nowhere? Would one of these bushes roll in for a special appearance?
It so happened that this guest was his Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. My father, a fan of Buddhism and a practitioner of Tai Chi, had educated me about the spiritual leader beforehand. Nonetheless, as a small child I would have only been impressed by something like meeting the president. A child could not truly grasp what all the fuss is about this guy who looks a lot like your grandpa in a suit. Well, this special grandpa was different, not only because he wore no suit. Following a, as far as I know, Tibetan tradition he blessed little strings that we attached later to our backpacks to keep us well on our trip, and then we had dinner together. To this day, I can very clearly remember this evening, even though I was only eight back then. How he stood there, making a short speech and greeting all of us, even including unimportant and overwhelmed little me. The memory of this evening comes back to me frequently till today somehow.
Since that time, all of Buddhism was rather fascinating to me. Those fully dedicated monks living in the mountains, training for years, offering very….disgusting tea (forgive me I was a child and nobody told me It’s a tradition to have your cup full all the time. So I emptied it, the monk filled it and we repeated the process several times. Only after something like seven cups did someone lean over and tell me I can stop drinking more of it because it was traditional to keep the cup full).
Why do I even tell you this story? Well, if we ask Wikipedia about, then “Mindfulness is derived from Sati, a significant element of Buddhist traditions, and based on Zen, Vipassanā, and Tibetan meditation techniques” and to me, Buddhism and this experience will always be related to mindfulness.
Buddhism can teach many interesting things. One of those I love the most I’ve heard from Matthieu Ricard. He is a fascinating scientist with a Ph.D. degree in cell genetics. What’s so fascinating about him, you might ask. It’s the fact that he moved to the Himalayan region in 1972 and has been living there for the past 45 years, eventually becoming a Buddhist monk! Thus he has experienced “both worlds” in a manner of speaking. He stated in an interview with Wolf Joachim Singer, a German neurophysiologist and emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, the following:
“It is said in the Buddhist teachings that there is no task so difficult that it cannot be broken down into a series of small, easy tasks.”
Doesn’t that sound a lot like methodologies that can be found often in business strategies?
These Buddhist monks are basically the masters of mindfulness and meditation. They spend a lot of time meditating and entering a state of mindfulness which is probably hard to understand for most people when they first deal with the topic. But Matthieu Ricard and Joachim Singer collaborated to approach scientifically what meditation does to our brain. That gives us the opportunity to learn scientific facts about why meditation can improve our lives.
These two are by far not the only researchers dealing with the topic. Inventions in technology have allowed neuroscience to proceed further in recent decades and reveal some astonishing results! These include, for example, restoring paralyzed people’s ability to walk with an electrical implant. Further, several neuroscientists in the last couple of years have researched meditation and mindfulness. We have people like Dr. Sara Lazar who proved in an experiment that meditation actually changes our brain structure! They scanned the brain of participants who never meditated before. Then they had them involved in an eight-week meditation course. After these eight weeks only, MRI scans already showed evidence for changes in brain structure. Isn’t that crazy and understandable at the same time? If we would train any other muscle beside the brain, we would expect results for sure after eight weeks. Still, we tend to forget that the brain is also a muscle. To fully understand these experiments, let us take a quick look at what happens when we experience “distress”.
We all know the word “stress”, described as “an organism’s response to a stressor such as an environmental condition”, quoting Wikipedia again here to keep it simple. And probably most of you have heard about “distress”, an “aversive state in which a person is unable to completely adapt to stressors and their resulting stress and shows maladaptive behaviors”. This is probably more known to English speakers. In Germany, I’ve almost never heard anyone talking about distress. And now comes the third one, “eustress”! Did you know about that one, too? Eustress is so-called “beneficial stress – either psychological, physical (e.g. exercising) or biochemical/radiological. These terms were coined by Hans Selye (MD, Ph.D., DSc, FRS and sometimes referred to as the “Einstein of medical research”).
So, what happens if our body gets “distressed”? How stress emerges in our body is important to understanding why mindfulness and meditation are deeply related to this reaction.
If we experience high stress or a potentially dangerous situation, our brain decides if we are in real danger or not. The locus coeruleus (also: blue core) produces noradrenaline which activates our sympathetic nervous system (SNS). This significantly increases activity inside the amygdala. The SNS is responsible for stress management and is relied upon to give an immediate reaction. As a consequence, our pulse and breathing increase noticeably. Blood pressure rises and the heart beats faster, pumping more blood through our body, supplying more oxygen to our brain. Put simply, our system boots up!
The activation of the SNS, in turn, activates the adrenal medulla which eventually releases adrenaline. Although this process seems long and complicated, it happens in fact very quickly. Without any delay, we’re ready for “fight or flight”.
What I want to point out is the following. If we experience stress and the activity of the amygdala spikes up as a result, it takes a certain time until it goes back down to the normal level. But if we experience another stress event, it goes up again. If this happens too often, we develop a bodily habit of “staying stressed”, simply called chronic stress. This kind of stress bears serious medical risks and can lead to symptoms like the infamous “Burn-Out Syndrome”. This welcomes the thought that it would be awesome if we could control by will to lower the activity of the amygdala and “shake off the stress reaction”, right?
The evidence that this is quite possible exists. If we come back to our western monk. we can observe the results of very unique research. Dr. Singer scanned our monk while he was meditating and opposed to several different “stress triggers”. The reaction of Dr. Matthieu Ricard was most often the same as observed on any other participant, a bit lower on some triggers. But when the stress trigger was gone, the activity of his amygdala returned much faster than usual to normal levels! So we can conclude that a “mindful” mind is naturally more resistant to stressors. More importantly, after the experience of a stressor, the brain and the whole body return much faster to normal levels of functionality.
This naturally increasing resistance to permanent stress is not the only benefit of practicing mindfulness and meditation. If you want to be super effective you can, of course, also mindfully meditate. The important thing is that the practice of mindfulness increases our emotional intelligence as well. It allows us to deal in a more controlled way with our emotions. We won’t suddenly grow suspiciously long ears and greet everyone with a Vulcan salute. But the continuous training of awareness fosters our ability to empathize with those we interact with. Therefore, we can noticeably improve our communication.
The Vulcans, along with some psychologists, believe that emotions are the most powerful trigger for actions. Mindfulness gives us the chance to decide how we react to these triggers. It establishes something like a layer between external impressions or events and the actions that you convert them into. For example: Danger is real, but fear is only in our mind! If we consider a fearful thought with calm and discipline, we can react much better and more controlled to it. This makes sense, doesn’t it?
Let me offer a word of warning here. The whole experience of learning meditation and mindfulness became a lot easier after I learned about the following. If you start practicing, you might feel like suddenly everything gets worse. More “bad things” happening around you and more “bad feelings” that seem increasingly unbearable. This is a natural side effect of “becoming more aware” of everything! Of course, this means that you’re becoming more aware of negative things, too. It’s very important that you don’t get overwhelmed in the beginning! Seek out help and talk to someone you trust whenever you feel the need to! Verbalizing these feelings and impressions can help a lot. I can tell you this from my own experience.
So, let me assure you, mindfulness, as well as meditation, can improve our daily life. It boosts the way we think and how we deal with stress. Even five minutes before an important meeting can help a lot if you’re trained enough. It also fosters emotional intelligence so that we can interact and communicate better! Now isn’t that awesome, guys?
I will post more teachings and exercises for a mindful mind in the next weeks. If you found this article or the exercises helpful, please let me know. If not, I want to know your feedback even more. I really appreciate it wholeheartedly!
