Expedition: Shamatha

Michelle Update #2: new friends, an electric hat, drool tests -- and silence falls ...

Hello FOM (Friends of Michelle),

Hope this finds you well.  Does anyone know where my wife is?

Bad news for us: Michelle has officially entered the tunnel.  Friday morning, the white coats performed their last test on her – drawing blood – and then the curtain of silence fell … The good news: I was able to speak with her a few times last week.  They had to let her adjust to the altitude (8,000 feet) for a couple of days before testing began, so Monday and Tuesday were mostly about orientation and allowing participants to get to know each other.

Shambhala Mountain Center is about a square mile of land, with most of the dorms and meeting facilities clustered together in a “town.”  The participants are staying in the Rigden Lodge, a brand-new facility.  I stayed there in July, it’s perfect (photos attached) – clean, simple, airy and on the edge of town.  The participants are separated from the rest of the Mountain Center’s goings-on – their meals, group meditation sessions, yoga classes are all in Rigden.  Rigden also has a small gym.  Michelle’s in a single, sharing a communal women’s bathroom (they assigned everyone chores; Michelle’s going to be cleaning the bathroom for the next three months).

Click on this thumbnail for photos of Rigden Lodge:

The participants’ daily schedule is pretty unstructured, at least relative to the Goenka centers we’re used to, where days start at 4:30am, include four one-hour (mandatory) group sits, and a couple dozen gong-rings a day (to keep you going with military precision during on-your-own sits).  No gongs here.  Michelle’s day goes something like this: breakfast at 7:30, the first group session after breakfast, and there are only two mandatory group sits during the day.  Alan will lead these (I believe), and three interns of his will lead additional sits during the day, which participants can attend, unless they’d prefer to meditate on their own.  Late morning, there’s a yoga class, held by one of several instructors who live on campus.  Participants are operating mostly by self-discipline (or, better, self-motivation).  Nightly, Alan will conduct group Q&A sessions, and weekly, one-on-one interviews.  When he was in his early 20s, Alan spent a summer in India, where he ended up staying with the Dalai Lama’s personal physician.  The physician introduced Alan to the Dalai Lama, recently exiled from Tibet, who began to train Alan personally, and took him under his wing, setting him up over the next thirteen years to train as a monk with dozens of the world’s leading Buddhist practitioners.  In 1984, Alan returned to the U.S., where he studied Physics, Philosophy and Sanskrit at Amherst and graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in three years.  He then led a one-year Shamatha retreat  (sorry, expedition) with a leading teacher, and went on to receive a PhD at Stanford in religious studies.  A long way of saying, Alan’s a remarkable guy and, as far as I can tell, is unique in combining deep practitioner’s skills with deep scholarship, both Eastern and Western.  For participants, getting this kind of personalized training from Alan is a bit like having a Nobel laureate as your college tutor. 

Michelle is crazy about the group involved with the project – participants, administrators and scientists.  It sounds like everyone is operating from a deep sense of mission and, as Michelle put it, “I’ve never been with a group like this before - everyone seems to be completely focused on helping everyone else.”  Demographics: 50%-50% male/female, a bell curve of ages from 20 to 70.  Interestingly, a high percentage of Mexican nationals, a testament, I suspect, to the strong community that Casa Tibet, in Mexico City has built.  Last October, Michelle went to a preparatory retreat with Alan in Santa Cruz, and she met a few women that she clicked with immediately.  They’re all there, and are in Michelle’s group: Jeannie (50s), a pediatric physical therapist, Bruni (50s), a fashion photographer pursuing a Masters in psychology, and Margaret (40s), a VP of a San Diego-based software company.  Generally, the participants seem to include a high percentage of people with advanced degrees, particularly in the sciences.

So Michelle’s first couple of days were mostly about getting set up and spending time with these people, including hikes through the mountains.  The landscape is breathtaking, of course, the Rockies at 8,000 feet (a photo tour available here).  A big part of the bonding has been about setting protocols – who’s going to observe strict silence, and who may try to speak to whom occasionally (Michelle’s all silent except if someone really needs help on something), when to/when not to flush the toilet in the middle of the night (the walls are thin), etc.

They measured Michelle’s head for her EEG cap (56 cm, now you know), and gave her a series of drool tests on Tuesday (drooling into tubes, to test for cortisol, the “stress hormone”, among other things).  Michelle confessed to a bit of drool anxiety going in, and was pleased to discover that she’s quite good at drooling, thank you very much. While we spoke, gobs of gel from the EEG cap were dripping off her head and onto the phone. All in the name of science ...

What Michelle probably looked like during the EEG test:

View this photo 

When I spoke to her on Tuesday, Michelle was also a little nervous about her first interview the next day, with Alan.  On the one hand, Alan couldn’t possibly be kinder, humbler, more open, or more welcoming.   On the other hand, he’s quite accomplished, and Michelle was a little intimidated.  It turned out fine, of course.  Alan asked questions about Michelle’s practice, and her aspirations (setting your motivation and expectations properly is critical to success in the training).  She spoke of her interest in bringing mindfulness training into the corporate environment, which sparked Alan to suggest that they reconnect on the subject at the end of the expedition – he’s involved in projects to do just that, including Cultivating Emotional Balance, another fascinating collaboration between leading Western psychologists (including Paul Ekman) and Buddhist practitioners.

Wednesday was a pretty hard day for Michelle.  When I spoke to her Wednesday morning, she sounded exhausted - nightmares kept waking her up, and at 3am she thought of something back at work that might go wrong, and worry kept her up the rest of the night (she ended up calling Sanofi and leaving someone a voicemail).  Wednesday was also a marathon of tests.  Because I’m part of the control group, I’m not allowed to know the details of these assessments, but generally it seemed to have included a 4 hour EEG session, a long series of questionnaires and behavioral interviews, and many of these tests were videotaped, I think.  When I spoke to Michelle on Thursday, it sounds as if Wednesday had been upsetting.  I don’t know what happened, but I can guess.  In prior EEG, EKG and other behavioral experiments on meditators, they’ve shown the participants videos with a wide range of subject matter, some pleasant and comforting, and others disturbing, including, for example, a video of surgeons peeling skin off a burn victim.  I suspect the 4-hour EEG included some rough videos. 

It sounds as if they’re getting every possible test done while the project is going.  The data set from this study is going to be extraordinarily rich – over a terabyte (a thousand gigabytes) of data –will be a major milestone in the field, and will provide fodder for years and years of analyses.  Apparently the BBC is making a documentary on the project too, film-makers were just arriving as I spoke to Michelle.

My last conversation with Michelle was late Thursday night, and now … silence.  We’ve agreed to speak next Sunday, which is just before I go for my five days.  While I’m there, I won’t be practicing (not allowed to, actually) – mostly working, using the internet, etc., with a couple hours here and there of getting tested.  I’ll be in a separate lodge, so we haven’t quite figured out yet how we’re going to interact.  The other couple in the study have decided not to speak at all when they overlap.  Hmm ….

Warning: what follows is a ramble on the subject of Samma – with apologies to non dog-lovers.  I feel like I caught a flash insight into the doggie soul the other night.  Background: it’s hard to describe how tender and connected Samma and Michelle are.  Every morning, Samma goes through the same ritual.  Just as Michelle’s alarm give a barely audible click and before even the first beep happens, Samma hops on the bed and cuddles up to Michelle.  She rests her head on Michelle’s chest, half-asleep, and when Michelle opens her eyes, she gives Michelle one kiss.  She proceeds to lay there, gazing into Michelle’s eyes.  This can go on for ten minutes.  When Michelle gets up, Samma, ever the glutton, lies in bed for a few more minutes of shut-eye, then, like clockwork, hops out of bed when Michelle’s half way through brushing her teeth, so she can plop her floppy, sleepy self between Michelle’s knees for a good head scratch.  Michelle gets dressed for her run, Samma springs to life, and soon the twosome are onto the running trail, Samma bounding silent “yippee leap” circles around Michelle.

In the evening, Samma waits dutifully by the same window every night for Michelle, then, when Michelle pulls into the driveway, leaps about ten feet into the air, bounds downstairs and greets her at the door (greets is understatement of the year).

Wednesday night, Samma lay in bed, in her hopeless sleepy “don’t bother me, I’m useless” mode.  At this point, nothing short of an atomic bomb (or a piece of cheese) will rouse her.  I decided to try an experiment.  Dog books suggest that an absent master leave clothes with their scent on it when they travel, so Michelle left some unlaundered t-shirts.  I pulled one out of the closet and dropped it on the opposite corner of the bed.  Samma started to get agitated.  Sure enough, she went over to the shirt, pressed her nose into it, and suddenly came alive, like she’d spotted a squirrel.  She jumped to the trusty window, straining to see what I have to imagine was Michelle.  She spent the next fifteen minutes going to other windows, then coming back to the one that usually works, but in vain.  No Michelle.  Then she got into her “itch she can’t scratch” mode.  Usually this happens if she really has to pee or has a stomach ache or her friends are assembling nearby and she really wants to go play with them.  Think “five year old on Christmas morning.”  She starts panting and her energy goes way up and she mouths the comforter out of excited frustration.   She started doing that, and kept looping back to Michelle’s shirt …  I think the books may be wrong on this one.  It’s not fair to tantalize Samma like that, and I’m not going to do it again.

Anyway, there it is.  Another update in a couple weeks.  Hugs, guys.

Your missing his wife husband,

Nick

QUESTION: "Why in the world would you do this?"

(outline to be filled in over time ... )

*BELIEF IN THE BROADER VALUE OF PROJECT

The practice is effective

1. Personal experience with meditation
2. Friends' experience with meditation
3. Intriguing validation of Buddhism's 2,500 year-old "outrageous claims" by science's cutting edge
4. Neurology/psychology
5. Physics

* SCIENCE CRITICAL TO BROADER ACCEPTANCE OF THE PRACTICE

* VALUE OF THE PRACTICE FOR PERSONAL AND SOCIAL FLOURISHING

* VALUE TO THIS MOMENT IN HISTORY

1. "The shape of history"
2. Golden Arches Theory and Samadhi
3. Meme theory
4. An unbounded religion
5. Dependent origination
6. Relationship to the natural environment
7. Affinity with science/empiricism
8. Example of Tibet before Communist era

* PERSONAL OPPORTUNITY

1. Connecting with a community
2. Privilege of Alan Wallace as teacher
3. LT value of practice's "trait effects" in the rest of our lives

NYT Article that Sparked Our Interest in Meditation

Finding Happiness: Cajole Your Brain to Lean to the Left

THE NEW YORK TIMES
February 4, 2003

By DANIEL GOLEMAN

All too many years ago, while I was still a psychology

graduate student, I ran an experiment to assess how well

meditation might work as an antidote to stress. My

professors were skeptical, my measures were weak, and my

subjects were mainly college sophomores. Not surprisingly,

my results were inconclusive.

But today I feel vindicated.

To be sure, over the years

there have been scores of studies that have looked at

meditation, some suggesting its powers to alleviate the

adverse effects of stress. But only last month did what I

see as a definitive study confirm my once-shaky hypothesis,

by revealing the brain mechanism that may account for

meditation's singular ability to soothe.

The data has emerged as one of many experimental fruits of

an unlikely research collaboration: the Dalai Lama, the

Tibetan religious and political leader in exile, and some

of top psychologists and neuroscientists from the United

States. The scientists met with the Dalai Lama for five

days in Dharamsala, India, in March 2000, to discuss how

people might better control their destructive emotions.

One of my personal heroes in this rapprochement between

modern science and ancient wisdom is Dr. Richard Davidson,

director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at

the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Davidson, in recent

research using functional M.R.I. and advanced EEG analysis,

has identified an index for the brain's set point for

moods.

The functional M.R.I. images reveal that when people are

emotionally distressed - anxious, angry, depressed - the

most active sites in the brain are circuitry converging on

the amygdala, part of the brain's emotional centers, and

the right prefrontal cortex, a brain region important for

the hypervigilance typical of people under stress.

By contrast, when people are in positive moods - upbeat,

enthusiastic and energized - those sites are quiet, with

the heightened activity in the left prefrontal cortex.

Indeed, Dr. Davidson has discovered what he believes is a

quick way to index a person's typical mood range, by

reading the baseline levels of activity in these right and

left prefrontal areas. That ratio predicts daily moods with

surprising accuracy. The more the ratio tilts to the right,

the more unhappy or distressed a person tends to be, while

the more activity to the left, the more happy and

enthusiastic.

By taking readings on hundreds of people, Dr. Davidson has

established a bell curve distribution, with most people in

the middle, having a mix of good and bad moods. Those

relatively few people who are farthest to the right are

most likely to have a clinical depression or anxiety

disorder over the course of their lives. For those lucky

few farthest to the left, troubling moods are rare and

recovery from them is rapid.

This may explain other kinds of data suggesting a

biologically determined set point for our emotional range.

One finding, for instance, shows that both for people lucky

enough to win a lottery and those unlucky souls who become

paraplegic from an accident, by a year or so after the

events their daily moods are about the same as before the

momentous occurrences, indicating that the emotional set

point changes little, if at all.

By chance, Dr. Davidson had the opportunity to test the

left-right ratio on a senior Tibetan lama, who turned out

to have the most extreme value to the left of the 175

people measured to that point.

Dr. Davidson reported that remarkable finding during the

meeting between the Dalai Lama and the scientists in India.

But the finding, while intriguing, raised more questions

than it answered.

Was it just a quirk, or a trait common among those who

become monks? Or was there something about the training of

lamas - the Tibetan Buddhist equivalent of a priest or

spiritual teacher - that might nudge a set point into the

range for perpetual happiness? And if so, the Dalai Lama

wondered, can it be taken out of the religious context to

be shared for the benefit of all?

A tentative answer to that last question has come from a

study that Dr. Davidson did in collaboration with Dr. Jon

Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Mindfulness-Based Stress

Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical

School in Worcester.

That clinic teaches mindfulness to patients with chronic

diseases of all kinds, to help them better handle their

symptoms. In an article accepted for publication in the

peer-reviewed journal Psychosomatic Medicine, Drs. Davidson

and Kabat-Zinn report the effects of training in

mindfulness meditation, a method extracted from its

Buddhist origins and now widely taught to patients in

hospitals and clinics throughout the United States and many

other countries.

Dr. Kabat-Zinn taught mindfulness to workers in a

high-pressure biotech business for roughly three hours a

week over two months. A comparison group of volunteers from

the company received the training later, though they, like

the participants, were tested before and after training by

Dr. Davidson and his colleagues.

The results bode well for beginners, who will never put in

the training time routine for lamas. Before the mindfulness

training, the workers were on average tipped toward the

right in the ratio for the emotional set point. At the same

time, they complained of feeling highly stressed. After the

training, however, on average their emotions ratio shifted

leftward, toward the positive zone. Simultaneously, their

moods improved; they reported feeling engaged again in

their work, more energized and less anxious.

In short, the results suggest that the emotion set point

can shift, given the proper training. In mindfulness,

people learn to monitor their moods and thoughts and drop

those that might spin them toward distress. Dr. Davidson

hypothesizes that it may strengthen an array of neurons in

the left prefrontal cortex that inhibits the messages from

the amygdala that drive disturbing emotions.

Another benefit for the workers, Dr. Davidson reported, was

that mindfulness seemed to improve the robustness of their

immune systems, as gauged by the amount of flu antibodies

in their blood after receiving a flu shot.

According to Dr. Davidson, other studies suggest that if

people in two experimental groups are exposed to the flu

virus, those who have learned the mindfulness technique

will experience less severe symptoms. The greater the

leftward shift in the emotional set point, the larger the

increase in the immune measure.

The mindfulness training focuses on learning to monitor the

continuing sensations and thoughts more closely, both in

sitting meditation and in activities like yoga exercises.

Now, with the Dalai Lama's blessing, a trickle of highly

trained lamas have come to be studied. All of them have

spent at least three years in solitary meditative retreat.

That amount of practice puts them in a range found among

masters of other domains, like Olympic divers and concert

violinists.

What difference such intense mind training may make for

human abilities has been suggested by preliminary findings

from other laboratories. Some of the more tantalizing data

come from the work of another scientist, Dr. Paul Ekman,

director of the Human Interaction Laboratory at the

University of California at San Francisco, which studies

the facial expression of emotions. Dr. Ekman also

participated in the five days of dialogue with the Dalai

Lama.

Dr. Ekman has developed a measure of how well a person can

read another's moods as telegraphed in rapid, slight

changes in facial muscles.

As Dr. Ekman describes in "Emotions Revealed," to be

published by Times Books in April, these microexpressions -

ultrarapid facial actions, some lasting as little as

one-twentieth of a second - lay bare our most naked

feelings. We are not aware we are making them; they cross

our faces spontaneously and involuntarily, and so reveal

for those who can read them our emotion of the moment,

utterly uncensored.

Perhaps luckily, there is a catch: almost no one can read

these moments. Though Dr. Ekman's book explains how people

can learn to detect these expressions in just hours with

proper training, his testing shows that most people -

including judges, the police and psychotherapists - are

ordinarily no better at reading microexpressions than

someone making random guesses.

Yet when Dr. Ekman brought into the laboratory two Tibetan

practitioners, one scored perfectly on reading three of six

emotions tested for, and the other scored perfectly on

four. And an American teacher of Buddhist meditation got a

perfect score on all six, considered quite rare. Normally,

a random guess will produce one correct answer in six.

Such findings, along with urgings from the Dalai Lama,

inspired Dr. Ekman to design a program called "Cultivating

Emotional Balance," which combines methods extracted from

Buddhism, like mindfulness, with synergistic training from

modern psychology, like reading microexpressions, and seeks

to help people better manage their emotions and

relationships.

A pilot of the project began last month with elementary

school teachers in the San Francisco Bay area, under the

direction of Dr. Margaret Kemeny, a professor of behavioral

medicine at the University of California at San Francisco.

She hopes to replicate Dr. Davidson's immune system

findings on mindfulness, as well as adding other measures

of emotional and social skill, in a controlled trial with

120 nurses and teachers.

Finally, the scientific momentum of these initial forays

has intrigued other investigators. Under the auspices of

the Mind and Life Institute, which organizes the series of

continuing meetings between the Dalai Lama and scientists,

there will be a round at the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology on Sept. 13 and 14. This time the Dalai Lama

will meet with an expanded group of researchers to discuss

further research possibilities.

Good 2004 Article on the Project

Meditation study aims to leap over mental barriers

Volunteers will spend one year exploring minds.

By Carrie Peyton Dahlberg -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 am PST Monday, November 29, 2004

For more than a year, researchers at UC Davis have been trying to find the best way to frame a provocative question: How good can human beings get - how focused, how calm, how kind?

In seeking the answer, they plan to use an audacious tool. Think of it as a little like brain science meets reality television.

They will gather 30 people for a yearlong meditation retreat and then watch what happens. With electroencephalogram (EEG) caps, attention measurements, emotion testing and a form of meditation practice called Shamatha, researchers hope to answer a key question about the brain systems that regulate attention and emotion. How much can those systems change with effort, how much - in the Silly Putty neuroscience term applied to our malleable brains - is plasticity at work?

"Is attention plastic? We have a hunch that it's trainable, but there is very limited research on training of attention," said Clifford Saron, an assistant research scientist at UC Davis' Center for Mind and Brain.

Saron is coordinating the project, which at this early stage is already a simmering esoteric brew.

There is the encouraging note from the Dalai Lama's personal secretary. There is a French filmmaker who wants to chronicle the effort for her "Monks in the Lab" documentary. There is seed money from the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, which got it through a donation from actor Richard Gere.

And there is interest from other researchers, who have seen the project mentioned in the journal Science or heard about its scope through the grapevine.

"We have people clapping us on the back,' " said G. Ron Mangun, head of the Center for Mind and Brain. "It's like when you say, 'Well, I want to go to the moon,' and they say, 'Well yeah, it's gotta be done. ... Good luck, pal.' "

Dr. Bennett Shapiro, who follows meditation research as a board member of the Mind and Life Institute, a collaboration of scientists and Buddhists, calls the upcoming study "pioneering work."

It's uncommon to sequester 30 people for a year and probe them so intensively, said Shapiro, a retired physician.

At least another 30 people will be monitored equally closely as a control group, although they won't be taken away from their daily lives.

Researchers will look for differences between the groups as meditators are trained in a technique of refining their attention that has its roots in India and is known in Tibet as Shamatha.

The claims for Shamatha - that its practitioners can increase the stability and vividness of their attention as a way to improve their emotional balance - makes it especially fascinating for some neuroscientists.

Attention is vital to who we are and how we cope with the world.

The act of paying attention to something, picking it out of the stream of sensations that bombards our brains, is critical to remembering it, said Ewa Wojcuilik, a UC Davis assistant professor who specializes in visual attention.

But paying attention can be tough. Give people something simple and boring to do, and their distractibility zooms. Ask them to be alert to small, sporadic changes in a stream of data, and they manage for 10 or 20 minutes, then fumble badly.

But is this truly the best we can do, or can some specially trained individuals go further, breaking through mental barriers the way Olympic athletes surge past physical ones?

"Within the science of attention, we have formed certain ideas about what our limits are," Wojcuilik said. "If the cognitive apparatus can be pushed beyond what we expect ... we are on to a new beginning."

She is among more than a dozen researchers who have met regularly to design the Shamatha project, a collaboration of a half-dozen arms of UC Davis and the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies.

While the group's primary focus is on attention, it also will explore whether meditators become calmer, kinder and more compassionate, as tradition holds.

Phil Shaver, who chairs the UC Davis psychology department and specializes in the study of emotions, will look at how quickly meditators get their equilibrium back after viewing upsetting movie scenes, whether disturbing words disrupt their focus and whether their health seems to indicate lower stress.

With the team still nearly two years away from its target start date of Sept. 22, 2006 - the autumnal equinox - many details remain to be resolved, but some general outlines are emerging.

B. Alan Wallace, who has trained as a Buddhist monk and has a doctorate in religious studies from Stanford, will take 30 people to some quiet corner of California.

There, they will rise at 6 a.m. for cycles of group and private meditation that continue until 10 p.m., punctuated by silent meals and a couple of two-hour breaks of unstructured time.

Their goal will be to cultivate a stable, vivid attention, because "this is going to bring you to a much, much higher platform of mental balance, mental well-being," Wallace said.

Wallace, who heads the Santa Barbara institute, has recruited participants from shorter retreats he leads in Europe, Mexico and the United States.

They will be people with a contemplative bent, eager to pay $1,000 a month to be sequestered for a year, away from homes and jobs, family and friends, to explore the reaches of their own consciousness.

As often as every two weeks, live-in research assistants will take some study participants to an on-site lab to probe their minds and hearts, their health and behaviors.

Their performance will be tracked on standard attention tasks and on some created specifically for the project.

Sometimes, they'll be plugged into EEG caps that monitor electrical impulses in their brains, listening to the simultaneous firing of millions of nerve cells. Their blood or saliva will be checked for stress hormones and their immune systems subjected to allergens to see how robustly they respond.

And in a twist that brings a whiff of being voted off the island, they may be asked to report on each other, assessing who is the most compassionate or how fellow participants' behaviors change over time.

With so many measures, over so many months, "you're going to have a very, very rich data set," said Emilio Ferrer, an assistant professor whose specialties include quantitative psychology.

First, though, the research team has more groundwork ahead, in refining the experimental design, conducting pilot studies and nailing down funding. The team is hoping to raise $1.5 million to $2 million from foundations, the National Institutes of Health and donors.

While the thrust of the project is pure science, simply to learn what a highly trained brain may be capable of, it someday could have implications for attention deficit disorders or other ills - if the project finds that training can make a difference.

It is a big if.

"Most research comes to naught. That's the rule. Getting definitive results is the exception," said Paul Ekman, an expert on emotional expression and deception.

"This is really an extremely exciting adventure that UC Davis is taking," he said. "This collaboration between top-rank neuroscientists, psychologists concerned with behavior and a Buddhist scholar and practitioner is in many ways quite unique.

"We don't know if it's going to be productive, but if you knew it was going to be productive, then it wouldn't be exciting."

Jocelyn Sy, left, and Dorothee Heipertz apply a co nducting gel to an EEG cap worn by David Horton, 22, at the University of California, Davis. The Nov. 22 experiment is part of a larger brain systems study on meditation: how it affects the powers of concentration and whether it lowers stress levels in volunteers. Sacramento Bee/Renée C. Byer

Links to Info on the Shamatha Project

http://www.alanwallace.org/profile.htm -- Alan organized the Project and is leading the retreat

http://sbinstitute.com/research_Shamatha.html -- Alan founded SBI; here's their (shorter) description of the Project

www.mindandlife.org -- The Shamatha Project emerged from a number of studies inspired by the MLI's work.

http://www.shambhalamountain.org/shamatha/ - brief blurb on the site of the facility that's hosting the study

Original Proposal Describing the Shamatha Project

A Proposal for a Longitudinal Study of the Cognitive-Behavioral, Neural, and Emotional Effects of Sustained, Intensive Meditative Attentional Training

Aims and Overview | Background | The Study | Dissemination | Personnel | Status

Aims and Overview

To the Western mind the promise of ancient knowledge from Eastern philosophies has been an enduring lure. Perhaps the most captivating topic has been that of how meditation may affect mental and physical health. There is currently renewed and vigorous interest in these questions and modern tools from a host of disciplines are aimed at understanding whether meditation holds the keys for self improvement on all dimensions. In this proposal, we describe an ambitious project – the Shamatha Project – that brings together leading authorities in social and cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging, and Buddhist meditative practices to conduct a longitudinal study of how a specific form of meditation affects human perception, cognition and emotion. 

Background

Over the past 30 years there have been numerous studies of the psychological and physiological effects of meditation training, but most of such studies have been based on fairly simple pre-post (rather than longitudinal) research designs; focused on state rather than trait (i.e., long-lasting) changes in mental abilities; focused on physiological changes, such as indicators of relaxation, rather than cognitive, sensorimotor, neurological, emotional, and ethical changes; and were conducted before the advent of contemporary social-cognitive and brain-imaging techniques, which allow researchers to track changes in the mind and brain associated with meditation training. In addition, the meditation techniques under study were often not firmly grounded in a deep understanding of ancient meditation traditions and not conducted over an adequate period of time by an experienced instructor. For these reasons, we still do not know a great deal about how professionally administered meditation training of a particular kind, followed over an extended period of time (as is common in the traditions from which the meditation techniques are drawn), affects attentional, sensorimotor, and emotion-regulation skills or ethical responses to human suffering.

We propose here a unique study designed to remedy many of the shortcomings of previous studies – a detailed longitudinal examination of the neural, cognitive, and socio-emotional effects of intensive training in a specific class of Buddhist meditation techniques called shamatha (meditative quiescence) meditation, aimed at enhancing the stability and vividness of attention. Our research team includes experts in the cognitive and neuroscientific study of attention, visualization, cognitive control, and sensorimotor processing; emotion and mental health; compassionate, prosocial behavior; longitudinal statistical analyses; and Buddhism. Several of the investigators are skilled in the use of modern, noninvasive neuro-imaging techniques; most have been engaged for years in conferences, seminars, and work groups related to establishing conceptual and methodological connections between Buddhism, psychological science, and neuroscience. The proposed meditation teacher, Dr. Alan Wallace, brings to this project decades of experience as a scholar, translator, and contemplative in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, including many years of collaboration on various projects pertaining to the scientific study of meditation. He is also the founder and president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, which is co-sponsoring this project. The proposed research project, the Shamatha Project, will be  coordinated by  the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis, headed by Dr. George R. Mangun, an international leader in the cognitive neuroscience of attention, and involves the collaboration of the UCD Department of Psychology, chaired by Dr. Phillip Shaver, one of the world’s foremost social psychologists, and the UCD Imaging Research Center, directed by Dr. Cameron Carter, a renowned expert in cognitive neuroimaging in mental health.  The meditation training itself will take place at a retreat facility organized by Alan Wallace in California. The study will take place over one year, as 30 full-time trainees devote themselves to 8-10 hours of meditative attentional training every day. Dr. Clifford Saron of the Center for Mind and Brain will serve as research coordinator for the project.

According to the Buddhist tradition, which includes very detailed descriptions of training for and attaining shamatha, the achievement of meditative quiescence involves a state of sustained, voluntary attention, characterized by unusual stability and vividness and free of even subtle excitation and laxity (all terms and concepts that are carefully described in Buddhist literature). The achievement of shamatha is not unique to Buddhism, but over the past 2,500 years that tradition has developed techniques for refining attention that can be utilized by anyone, regardless of their philosophical beliefs or religious orientation. The techniques could therefore be used in a wide variety of educational, personal development, and clinical contexts.

The proposed research project would involve assessment of both cognitive and socio-emotional variables at several points in time across the one-year study. The cognitive tests would assess sustained and selective attention, sensory discrimination, and mental efficiency, using both behavioral tasks and brain-imaging procedures. The socio-emotional tests would assess mood, emotion-regulation, compassion, and personality changes. There would be more assessments early in the year, when changes might be more rapid and dramatic. Assessments would be staggered, and more numerous for some participants than others, so that we can evaluate the effects of repeated testing, as distinct from actual change (a common problem in longitudinal studies). Behind the specific assessments lay two major questions:

• How plastic, or subject to training, are the cognitive and socio-emotional skills we assess behaviorally?
• What measurable brain changes underlie the behavioral (performance) changes?

We are also interested in the trainees’ subjective experiences and self-understanding over the course of the year, so we will ask them to keep daily journals (perhaps using computerized survey techniques) that can be coded in various ways later on and analyzed in conjunction with their more objectively assessed cognitive, behavioral, and socio-emotional development.

The Shamatha Project is expected to have a number of benefits for the study participants, other people who take advantage of what we learn from the study, and for an array of psychological and neuroscientific disciplines that study attention, emotion, emotion regulation, and personal development. Some of these anticipated benefits are outlined briefly in the following sections.

Anticipated Benefits for the Participants and for Human Beings Generally

The intensity and duration of the 12-month Shamatha Project can be compared to the training of athletes. Only a small number of individuals have the time and inclination to devote themselves to such training, which can appear at first glance to have little relevance for the diverse practical problems facing humanity today. But research on serious athletes has yielded many valuable insights concerning diet, exercise, and human motivation that are relevant to the general public. While the training of athletes is focused primarily on achieving physical excellence, the Shamatha Project is concerned with achieving optimal levels of “mental excellence," via improved attentional performance, defined specifically in terms of stability and vividness. "Stability" refers to the ability of the mind to focus unwaveringly on an object or sequence of objects as when performing a complex task. "Vividness" refers to the degree of brilliance, focus, and precision of attention. This kind of training is traditionally held to be of great benefit in terms of enhancing not just cognitive performance but also emotional health and well-being.

Our brain-imaging and behavioral findings should be useful for treating people with a variety of cognitive and emotional disorders, such as ADHD, excessive anger, anxiety, depression, and insomnia. All of these mental problems are closely related to the ability to control attention and regulate emotion. We expect that relatively soon after shamatha training begins, measurable changes will occur in these abilities, suggesting that certain aspects of the training could be relatively easily incorporated into daily life situations for persons outside a retreat setting.

It will be of great value to determine ways in which attention can be refined—through enhanced stability and vividness—that may be useful in the workplace, educational settings, and interpersonal relationships. For many human endeavors, it is vitally important to be able to direct one’s attention to a particular object, situation, or task, and this project will reveal ways in which people can cultivate this ability. It is also extremely important to be able to focus on one’s own and other’s needs, avoid being overtaken by destructive emotions, and carry prosocial actions through to completion. By obtaining reliable and valid data from a group of 30 shamatha trainees over a 12-month period, we will gain considerable insight into the nature of attention, attentional plasticity, and their relation to emotions and social behavior.

Benefits for Scientific Understanding

Few scientific studies of attentional and emotion-regulation processes are based on highly trained individuals. Almost no neuroimaging studies have been done on this topic. Thus, the proposed study will look closely at the plasticity of processes (e.g., maintaining attention, controlling emotional reactions to frustrations and disappointments) that cognitive and affective neuroscientists know are important but which have not been studied in connection with deep training.

A further benefit of the proposed project is training a group of individuals to become expert witnesses of their own mental states while developing skills for engaging in a variety of demanding mental tasks that go beyond the abilities of average subjects. Behavioral psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists commonly rely upon relatively untrained subjects—often student volunteers from introductory psychology courses—that they recruit to perform various tasks and then report on their firsthand experience. While these scientists bring great levels of theoretical and technological sophistication to their research, the subjects on whose participation and observations they rely are usually amateurs. This implies that scientific conclusions about a wide range of mental strategies and emotional processes have a partially non-scientific basis, namely the participation and reports of non-scientists who bring few if any professional skills to their participation in the research. The people who have successfully completed this training program can be called upon by psychology and neuroscience laboratories to collaborate in unprecedented research into a wide range of mental processes. With the introduction of sophisticated first-person participation in scientific research in mind/behavior and mind/brain correlations, whole new fields of research into the human mind may open up.

Benefits for Contemplative Understanding

Shamatha can be practiced regardless of one’s religious, philosophical, or scientific beliefs. These practices were first developed in ancient India, but over the centuries they have spread throughout Asia and become associated with a wide variety of ideologies. Thus, this training serves as a bridge among all contemplative traditions, enhancing the efficacy of other practices that are unique to these many traditions. Whether religious practitioners are primarily concerned with supplicatory prayer, discursive meditation, the contemplative use of mental imagery, or formless meditation, the attentional skills developed in shamatha practice are certain to be of great value.

Benefits for Global Cultural Enrichment

The specific shamatha techniques to be used in this study are drawn primarily from Theravada and Tibetan Buddhist contemplative traditions. The 20th century witnessed a Buddhist holocaust at the hands of communist regimes in many Asian countries, resulting in the destruction of many centers of contemplative inquiry. It is our hope that the successful completion of the Shamatha Project will contribute evidence concerning the practical and scientific value of the Buddhist contemplative heritage.

The Study
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Participants (Trainees and Controls). The study requires the participation of men and women who are willing and able to commit themselves to a one-year intensive training and assessment project. While conducting shorter-term retreats over the past year, Alan Wallace has already identified more than 80 interested individuals, so we know it will be possible to recruit the 30 needed for the Shamatha Project. We will also recruit 30 control participants who are matched on age, gender, SES, etc. (We expect that the control participants, on average, will not show significant changes in attention or emotion regulation during the year-long study.) We can also recruit additional controls for particular experiments or assessments from the large college-student subject pool at UC Davis.

Over the proposed 12-month period, participants will reside in a contemplative research facility optimally suited for scientific and contemplative research. Alan Wallace will serve as their resident instructor, providing them with ongoing instruction and guidance in meditation training. They will also receive instruction on physical exercise that is conducive to such mental training. The 12-month training program will include:

• training in mindfulness of breathing to induce relaxation of the body and mind and begin to calm compulsive thinking and sensory distraction;
• training in observing mental events, as a more advanced technique for enhancing attentional stability and vividness, while cultivating greater emotional balance;
• training in observing the nature of consciousness as a means of perfecting the stability and vividness of attention, while illuminating the cognitive ground from which all mental phenomena arise.

Behavioral, questionnaire, and neuro-scientific evaluations will occur before the training begins (for both prospective trainees and controls), at regular intervals throughout training, and at the end of the training period (for both prospective trainees and controls). The evaluations will include measures of:

• attentional stability and vividness
• ability to allocate attention even when distracters are introduced
• mood (as assessed with the PANAS mood scales)
• ability to evoke emotional memories and then set them aside mentally when instructed to do so
• empathy and compassion
• personality traits related to mental health (e.g., attachment security, openness to experience, neuroticism or negative affectivity)
• stress hormones
• immune functioning

Some of the evaluations will be based on behavioral measures of cognitive functioning, such as accurate task performance and fast reaction times; others will involve EEG and fMRI measures of brain activity. Some of the evaluations of socio-emotional functioning will be based on self-report measures and performance on tasks; others will involve surface psychophysiology (e.g., heart rate, blood pressure, . . .) and brain imaging.  Stress hormones  will be assessed through various means, e.g., cortisol measures.  Immune functioning will also be assessed.

Dissemination

The study’s findings will be submitted for publication in major, international scientific journals such as Science, Nature, and major APA psychological journals. Articles in these journals and presentations at major professional societies will reverberate throughout the popular media, bringing the findings to a wide international audience. A study website will also make the study and training materials widely available.

Project Personnel

The Shamatha Project has been conceived and organized by B. Alan Wallace, President of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. Psychological and neuroscientific evaluations will be made by researchers at the Center for Mind and Brain, the Department of Psychology, the Center for Neuroscience, the Department of Psychiatry, the Department of Neurology, the Research Imaging Center, and the Center for Genomics at the University of California, Davis, in addition to collaborators at the University of California Santa Barbara.

Status

This project is currently in the advanced planning stage. A suitable contemplative training facility has been located, and the team of investigators has met numerous times over a period of one year to develop ideas for the design, measures, and statistical analyses. We currently are in a fund-raising stage. To help the Shamatha Project please see http://mindbrain.ucdavis.edu/content/ShamathaSponsor

http://mindbrain.ucdavis.edu/content/ShamathaInfo#background

Dropping Michelle off at Airport

Well, I just did it. I dropped Michelle off at the airport. For six months, we’ve known that we were going to parajump into this adventure together, but man, it’s a whole other thing when the day arrives and the cargo door opens and the leap is right in front of you. Will the parachute open?

A few up-front comments. First: the title of the ‘blog – which I’ve stolen from a comment by Alan Wallace (who's leading the retreat, and is the project's originator). I’ve never been a big fan of the word retreat – with its implications of failure and giving up, as in: “I can’t deal with reality anymore, I’m going into retreat.” That notion couldn’t be farther from the spirit of this journey, which is about running straight into reality. As Bhante Gunaratana (a leading Western teacher) writes:

Meditation doesn’t insulate you from the pain of life but rather allows you to delve so deeply into life and all its aspects that you pierce the pain barrier and go beyond suffering … [It] is a practice done with the specific intention of facing reality, to fully experience life just as it is and to cope with exactly what you find. It allows you to blow aside the illusions and free yourself from all the polite little lies you tell yourself all the time. What is there is there. (from Mindfulness in Plain English).

In fact, Vipassana meditation, often translated as Insight meditation in fact means, by its etymology, “perceiving reality with clarity and precision," to pierce all the way to its most fundamental qualities. And a three-month journey into these depths is going to take more than a little discipline and courage. Expedition’s as good a metaphor as I know. And, as Wallace notes, the word – derived from ex and ped – implies "moving your feet from", removing them from where they’re stuck – which also gets to the heart of the endeavor (in fact, Getting Unstuck: Breaking Your Habitual Patterns & Encountering Naked Reality is the name of a book by Pema Chodron, another leading Western meditation teacher).

Second, forgive the rambling ahead. Many of you have asked questions (“What in the world are you guys thinking?” for example), which I’ll try to answer along the way (I'll also add links to background information on the Project in separate posts). Also, for personal reasons, I’d like to record the journey for both of us, and so I’m going to use this ‘blog as a forum to do so at times. And, yes, maybe I’m using this exercise as a bit of a crutch while Michelle’s gone. To make things easier for those (most?) of you who want to skip the ramblings and cut to the Michelle parts, I’ll bold those. I’m only going to get half a dozen connects with Michelle until June, so I won’t bug you with too many updates in any case …

Now, to the relevant part: Michelle.

She's going off in great shape. She’s well prepared, has everything she needs (startlingly little), and most of all, she feels like she has full support from the people she cares about. That makes such a huge difference, and will be like a guardian angel in moments where the journey gets rough. Going into an intensive practice is a bit like performing surgery on the mind. Except you’re wide awake and you’re actually the one wielding the scalpel. And the complexes you’re hoping to uproot have a nasty way of hanging on for dear life, kicking and screaming. All to say, the operation can get rough, which is why the mental equivalent of a clean room – a tranquil, monastic environment – is so critical to a successful practice. The good news is that Michelle has that monastic environment. But even so, if you go in with negative reactions from loved ones reverberating in your brain, it’s a bit like bringing a nasty bacteria into the operating room. It can really infect everything you’re trying to do, and rattle around in your head and make you crazy (-er). So it means a ton to Michelle that she’s going in with all your support, and her practice will really benefit. Even people who she was a bit nervous to tell about this have turned out to be terrifically encouraging.

We went for a beautiful run in the dawn mist with Samma, and then headed off to the airport. At Laguardia, a terrific moment together having breakfast in the Food Court. Maybe it was Pavlovian, but sitting here I felt like I was about to go on the journey with her. We’ve sat here together before: the day we came back from France and bounced up to Toronto, and just before we left for Cambodia last year, another life-changing journey. Before I met Michelle, I lived in the same place and worked in the same job for ten years. I guess that’s what happens when you marry into the long history of wandering Limantour adventurers (at least this time, there’s no risk of getting drunk, running aground off the coast of California and having a beach named after you) … 

Yesterday, we had a terrific, quiet day together. If one of this process’ goals is to develop a deep-seated equanimity, free from destructive impulses, then it seemed to backfire a few times yesterday. Pangs of fear and sadness definitely hit, and the reality of the next few months sank in …

We were going to go out for dinner, but decided that we had to include Samma in our plans, so we stayed home. Samma is so closely bonded to her morning running partner. There’s something particularly heartbreaking about not being able to explain the whole thing to her. Over time, I’ll more or less get my brain around the concept that Michelle’s gone for three months. But as much as Michelle has tried to explain to Samma that she isn’t leaving for good, it’s not clear the words have sunk in …

Will Samma be sad? Hard to say. Out of sorts, maybe. Samma’s a Shepherd, she takes her job description pretty seriously, and we’re the closest thing she has to sheep. And each night, when Michelle comes home, you’d think by the kisses and leaps of joy and figure 8's around Michelle that she likes having her Mom around. So at the very least, Samma won’t have those moments of joy for a while. Normally, Samma sleeps up in our bedroom. If she’s true to form, she’s going to park herself in the kitchen for the next few nights, waiting for Michelle to come home.

This morning, I was happy to see that Michelle had let her hair do its natural curly thing. Whenever she works in a corporate environment, she straightens her hair rigorously every morning. When we lived in France, she let the Boticelli curls spring to life. For the next few months, the unstraightened Michelle is back.

One of her bags is this big, leather bag a scam artist in Florence sold to friends, they gave it to us as a gift. I rib Michelle about going to a Buddhist retreat with a leather bag. One of the most interesting things to me about Buddhism is the fact that it’s an ethical framework grounded not on commandments dictated from without, but on the empirical observation of direct inner experience – a direct inner experience that turns out to be universal. A good example of this ethics-from-within is Buddhism’s attitude towards all living beings, including animals.  This attitude is grounded in large part on direct, inner experience.  One of the first things you realize when you try to meditate is that, well, you’re crazy. The task sounds so simple – focus attention on your breath -- and turns out to be maddeningly difficult, impossible. You’re trying to attend to something that’s happening in the present, and the mind flops all over the place, into memory, anticipation of the future, all the things you want and don’t want. So they teach you a helpful technique: begin the practice with what’s known as metta, lovingkindness. In essence, you evoke an intention of kindness, directed first towards yourself, then outward in concentric circles to loved ones, acquaintances, strangers and so on, until your intention spreads to all creatures great and small.  Ethics is inner practice, and, magically, this practice acts like a balm. It soothes the mind. You’re still more or less crazy, but it’s a few degrees easier to practice now. In fact, the first of the three steps towards a successful practice – before you even hit the meditation cushion – is sila, ethics. Not ethics because someone said you should. Ethics because living by ethical intention sets the condition that allows the cultivation of an exceptionally stable mind which can then be turned, like an electron microsope, inward.

At the Food Court, there were rifle-toting soldiers everywhere. None of their patches looked familiar – I wasn’t even sure they were American – and we asked one soldier who looked like he was about fourteen years old what the patch was. It’s his unit’s symbol, he explained. We thanked him for everything he’s doing, and his face lit up. “Thanks,” he said, “I don’t think many people look at it that way.”

We procrastinated as long as we could (I have to confess that a part of me hoped Michelle’d miss her plane and we could wait on standby together … ). At the security line, I almost got myself shipped off to Guantanomo for stepping across the line to give her one last kiss.

A sweet man in his sixties, grizzled hair and barely five feet tall, saved me from having to stand there and watch her fade down the security line by showing up at my side. "It's the craziest thing," he started in. "We came in for her six o'clock flight but they decided to go through all my wife’s stuff, and by the time she got through, they'd just closed the door on her." She was on her way down to her aunt’s funeral, in Atlanta. "She's only gone three days," he said. "Boy, I'm gonna miss her …” They’d been married forty-five years. He was a building contractor, she was a caterer. He talked about his life, growing up in a project in Jersey City. “Things were different back then,” he said, sounding like a cliché from a Ken Burns documentary about civil rights. Except he meant the opposite. “We used to keep our doors unlocked.” He reminisced about how everyone in the neighborhood used to know the local beat cops as friends, and now, because of the drug war, cops had to look at everyone like an enemy and come at you aggressive. He’d just been to a school meeting where they’d warned the community not to flash back their highbeams when someone flashed theirs at you. Local gangs were using that as an initiation ritual. If you flash back, the initiant is tasked with murdering you. True? Hard to know, but the fact that it’s credible enough for a school meeting is disturbing. I asked him what he thought about legalizing drugs. He saw the logic in it, and admitted that it would put the drug gangs out of business, but he said he was Christian and couldn’t condone allowing something so wrong as doing drugs to be legal.

He introduced himself, Al was his name. He held up a plastic grocery bag half full with change. "She had this in her pocket book.” Every time she sees her grandkids, she always gives them change. That’s why she couldn’t get on the plane.

“Flying’s a little different than it was a few years ago, huh?”

“Yeah, flying’s not so fun these days,” I said. There was something touching about the sweetness and naivte of a pocketbook full of a nickels and quarters, juxtaposed against the sinister reasons for the heightened security.

That led to a discussion about what a big contributor airplane pollution was to climate change, and how with flying such a pain and things like free videophones, maybe people will choose to fly less (scout’s honor – it wasn’t me who brought that one up). Al was convinced that we’d have much more fuel efficient cars if it weren’t for greedy oil and car companies lobbying against it. “Everything’s so different today,” he said. “When I was growing up, people went to church, they feared God. There was a sense of community. Today, we’ve made God dead, and things, I don’t know, they go downhill when you do that. I mean, growing up, my father, he was home every night. I found out – I mean long after I was married – that he had some things going on the side, but I mean, he was there every night. He was a real father, you know?”

Michelle was out of sight now and Al watched his wife disappear through the metal detector. “She’s a perfect lady for an imperfect guy,” he laughed, shaking his head. “I’m busy. I’m workin’ on two jobs. I’ll just get my work done these next couple days, I guess.” Amen.

Michelle called. She made it onto her plane. Damn. I mean: good for her. Al and I said good-bye. It was nice talking to him, I was thankful for a buddy in that moment.

The first stepping stones into Buddhist philosophy are known as the Four Noble Truths. The Pali and Tibetan languages are to mental states and philosophical concepts what Eskimo languages are to snow. When original texts get translated into English, subtle gradations are invariably lost. A classic example, as Wallace and others note, is the first of these Noble Truths, often translated as: “Life is suffering.” A more accurate translation: “Tainted (i.e. unenlightened) experience includes dukkha (i.e. a broad range of unpleasant elements, from mild annoyances all the way up to the grand afflictions of sickness and death).”

I drive home. I hit a half-hour dead stop at the Triboro tolls. The rumor going up and down the line as people got out of their cars was that a prisoner had escaped from a nearby institution. Wow.

So there it was. To my left, Manhattan.  A pile of money has fallen onto this town in the last twenty years, everyone seems stylish and on the move, and every twenty feet, a fancy boutique or cafe has opened.  Today began with Michelle, a sunrise run through morning mist and a blissful breakfast moment and, as she left, a chance connection with a kindly stranger.  My belly's full and outside, fifty degrees and clear blue skies, the first glimpse of spring.  Even on the Triboro, you can hear birds chirping.  Not yet ten o’clock, and already the day has brought hints of: delusion, in the form of an unfounded Hollywood-sounding belief quickly accepted by a cranky group of commuters waiting for tolls to open; war; adultery; gang murder; corporate greed; addiction; a prison population that’s off the charts relative to other countries; a climate of fear and security searches created among other things by a gaping disparity between extreme wealth and extreme poverty and rabid fundamentalists in the Levant traditions.  And a husband missing his wife.  As beautiful a morning as you could imagine, and, nibbling at the edges, hints of Dukkha.

I come home and turn the key in the door, a lump in the throat.  I'd signed up to moderate a panel discussion this afternoon on climate change at a local community center, which I was grateful for.  Like Al, my goal is to keep myself as busy as possible while my morning running partner's away ...