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