Expedition: Shamatha

Article on the Shamatha Project in Buddharma magazine

A great article on the Shamatha Project by participant Adeline von Waning just came out - link here.  Enjoy!

First Shamatha Project Study Published!!!

Hello all, hot off the press from Cliff: the long-awaited first study to emerge from The Shamatha Project: here (twenty more in the pipeline, apparently).  For those of you (like me) who go a bit cross-eyed reading the science-speak, Cliff, the study's principle investigator, dashed off an email for me with his layman's summary of the study's findings here (drum roll please ... ):

Basically people's visual system changed and perception got more finely discriminating. That made differences between long and short lines pop out more after the retreat. This made the task easier - (we kept the short lines the same at the beginning and end of the 2nd retreat) and hence it was easier for determine long from short over the long time of the task. This shows up as better vigilance, less decrement in accuracy. To the extent people's perception improved, this measure of vigilance also improved. In the first retreat we did not see improvements in vigilance because we changed to short line to be at each person's perceptual threshold at each testing session. This resulted in the retreat group doing a harder task overall. It's of note that perceptual improvements were maintained at the follow-up testing if folks kept up a daily practice.

Or, in science speak:

Our results add to a growing body of evidence that medita-
tion training can improve aspects of attention (Lutz, Slagter,
Dunne, & Davidson, 2008), while specifically suggesting that
the enhanced sustained-attention ability that has been linked to
long-term meditation practice (Brefczynski-Lewis et al., 2007;
Valentine & Sweet, 1999) most likely reflects plasticity in the
adult brain. Our findings also add to reports of training-
induced improvements in other core cognitive processes, such
as working memory capacity and nonverbal intelligence (Jae-
ggi, Buschkuehl, Jonides, & Perrig, 2008; Olesen, Westerberg,
& Klingberg, 2004). Together, these findings suggest that it is
possible to produce general improvements in mental function
that can benefit daily activities.

Reflections on Mind and Life XIX: Educating World Citizens for the 21st Century

When Michelle and I went into retreat in 2007 as part of The Shamatha Project, most people reacted as if we'd decided to grow antennae on our heads.  We were surprised, coming out of retreat in 2009, at how attitudes had started to shift.  Case in point: last summer, I went to the Mindfulness in Education conference at the Omega Institute - and was happy to see 300 people from around the country, all

Inspiring Alan Wallace Article on Shamatha, in Tricycle Magazine

Alan Wallace just published this article in Tricycle Magazine, in which he outlines the profound implications of shamatha practice for the modern era. It's a great piece. I just returned from Phuket International Academy, which will include long-term retreat cabins and scientific labs, allowing the yogis and the scientists to partner in exciting ways.  The closing paragraphs from the article, with relevance to PIA:

The baby wallet photo ritual

On 8-8, the coming together of two perfectly symmetrical infinity symbols, we were blessed with the arrival of our twin girls.  There is, around these little girls, what neuroscientists might call a flood of oxytocin in the brain -- and what most of us might call a warm, happy overflowing of love.  I've been on both sides of the following dialogue:

INT. HALLWAY & STUDY

PERSON 1, with a baby cuddled in their arms, is mesmerized by tiny doll lips, button-nose, eyelashes.  Baby's fist tenderly holds onto PERSON 1's shirt, and coos, half-asleep.  PERSON 2 works on a computer nearby, brow furrowed, trying to meet a deadline, and equally enrapt by what's in front of them.

PERSON 1
(holding baby)

Can you stand it?  You have to look at what I'm looking at.

PERSON 1 waves PERSON 2 over insistently, they get up and look over PERSON 1's shoulder at baby.  Same cute baby, except PERSON 2 is mostly focused on meeting their deadline at this moment.

    PERSON 2
(heart not quite in it)
Wow.  She's so cute.

PERSON 2 returns to their work. PERSON 1 so enrapt by baby, they don't realize PERSON 2 isn't as moved in the moment as they are.

THE END

Or there's a more common example: the person eagerly showing their business colleague a wallet photo of their baby, the colleague cooing obligingly.  These interactions are great examples of how hard it is to communicate interior experience.  What Person 1 was really trying to show Person 2 was what was in their mind (that subjective experience of being flooded with love), what was in their brain (the flood of oxytocin).  In a sense, Person 1 wasn't trying to show Person 2 the baby any more than a junkie is addicted to heroine -- they're addicted to the neurotransmitters in the brain released because of the heroine injection.  And Person 2, in a different psychological space at the moment, isn't quite as flooded as Person 1.

This solipsistic gap creates a great challenge when it comes to sharing dharma, to sharing the value of meditation.  In meditation, there isn't even a baby.  There's just a person sitting cross-legged on a cushion.  The entire experience is locked inside your subjectivity.  Maybe that's not entirely true.  Spend time in the presence of practitioners and we might be stirred the effects of all that time on the cushion: their radiant smile and child-like joyfulness, the depth of their wisdom, their exceptional warmth and tenderness and attentiveness.  Or we might not be.  Maybe we dismiss them with the adjective that damns by faint praise: they're nice.  Maybe we pass them by, in the same way that the stressed-out pedestrian passes by a billboard.  For that pedestrian, the billboard never even existed.

We are a society of Person 2's -- busy, busy, busy achieving, making money to pay for the bigger, bigger, bigger, better meal, appliance, car, club, vacation,house, boat, plane, and now, space ship.  How to bridge the gap between Person 1 and Person 2?

The Shamatha Project - answering a few questions

Hello all, we're taking a brief semi-break from retreat, before we dive back in (and offline) for a good part of 2009.  Wishing everyone the best.

People have been expressing interest in the project - so let me try to answer some of the questions that have been coming up.

What's your day like?

A number of people have asked about what our days are like in retreat.

Ideally, the question'd be what's your day like - not what're your days like.  When things are going well and there are few distractions, every day's pretty much the same - no difference between weekdays and weekends.  It's basically meditation all day, every day, except for breaks to eat and do chores (during which you're trying to maintain an ongoing flow of mindfulness, so the practice is always at the forefront).  I'm practicing 10 hrs a day, sometimes more; Michelle's more like 12 hours.  To be more specific: I'll get 1-3 hours of practice in before breakfast, at 7:30.  Then I'll walk the dog and check in on our greenhouse (we're growing most of our own veggies, year round).  Then practice 3 hours or more before lunch.  Make a quick, simple lunch - soup and a sandwich or something - and do chores - batch cooking, vacuuming, laundry, pay bills once a month, chopping wood, etc.  Then back to practice, until dinner.  Then, you guessed it, about two hours of practice after dinner.  I'll also exercise almost every day - walks through the mountains, or visits to a tiny gym nearby (usually I'm the only one there - so it's not distracting) -- that's a nice way to break up the longer sits when restlessness kicks in.

I started this by saying "when things are going well."  We've found that there are nice long patches without distraction -- weeks at at time -- but when the distractions hit, they seem to come in waves.  The importance of "ruthless simplicity" is a lesson we've learned the hard way. Even a seemingly insignificant interaction with 'ordinary life' has a way of spiralling out into much more complication than you intended.  For example, you feel like you need a printer, to make certain tasks easier.  So you go online, to find a good, cheap one.  Maybe you get distracted, because there's a startling headline that pops up.  You buy the printer.  It doesn't arrive, so you have to track it down - FedEx accidentally dropped it off at your neighbor's house.  You get the printer.  Two months later, it breaks down, so you're trying to figure out how to fix it.  Then it's a call to the service center, and so on.

We started this retreat in a lodge at The Shambhala Mountain Center, with the other participants.  There, we had a staff cooking for us, taking care of issues like plumbing or electricity problems, etc.  Here, we don't have this kind of support, so we feel a bit like dolphins - we'll dive down into retreat for extended periods of time, then something will pull us up to the surface for a short period, then we'll dive back in for as long as we can ... When we first got to Crestone, we had a fixed idea of being fully in retreat, as we had been at the Shambhala Mountain Center, and we'd get frustrated when we kept getting pulled out of retreat.  After some time, we recognized that this was the rhythm of self-directed retreat, and that these distractions were in fact excellent exercises for bringing the heart-opening and mindfulness-enhancing practices off the cushion and out in the ordinary life - and for letting go of those distractions when it was time to come back to the cushion.

The Lojong trainings (see the right hand column) were invaluable!

You're continuing for another year? You're certifiably nuts!

Hello friends, some of you have expressed interest in learning more about what we’ve been up to with the Shamatha Project, so I thought I’d post something here for the brave to wade into.  Getting ourselves set up for this year-long intensive, off phone and email, has taken a lot longer than we’d hoped, and we’ve committed to start full time tomorrow morning, so I’m going to try to knock this out quickly – forgive, if this isn’t the most coherent.

Also, I’m pulling liberally from many sources here, including Alan (our teacher) – and in the interest of time, I’m not going to footnote. 

I’ll try to answer a few key questions:

Update #6: Land-ho!

Hi guys,

Breaking my promise - I said Michelle would write the next e-mail, but thought I’d give you a sneak preview. I’m back at SMC, for my third and last set of trials, and have been able to see her a bit. You’ll hear from her next week … when she’s out!

Things are wild & crazy at the Mountain Center. Last time I was here, the center was hosting a cremation (an outdoor, all-night bonfire), which lent a certain solemnity and intensity to the staff’s mood. This week, the center’s between their winter and summer seasons, and things are a bit chaotic. Tents are going up, facilities are shifting around, meals seem to be in a different place each time, and the staff had a dance-party kegger the first night.

Things have loosened up in Rigden Lodge, too (where the retreatants and labs are holed up). The last week of the retreat is set up as a transition – a bit like the post-op recovery room. Tuesday (the day I arrived), they lifted the code of silence at meals. Apparently, this was like pulling a cork out of a dam. Lots to catch up on after three months!

When I passed by Rigden the first night, I saw the meditators gathered in the meditation hall. Except this time, you would’ve thought they were screening Caddyshack – instead of the usual silence, fall-out-of-your chair laughter kept bursting out of the hall’s windows.

Alan, like many advanced meditation teachers, has a child-like playfulness about him, and has let his instinct for poking fun of people run free, apparently (Michelle seems to be an target for quite a bit of ribbing). And the group generally seems pretty giddy, now that shore is in sight.

When I saw Michelle Tuesday night, she seemed like she was still adjusting to all the chatter and activity – not surprising – a bit like stepping out of a dark room into the glare of open sunshine. But she’s doing great.

There’s a whirlwhind of activity, so Michelle’s practice has been pretty broken up.

• The project team has drafted Michelle to help them restructure the September retreat’s org structure, so she found herself suddenly back in the Organizational Development game.
• They’ve been holding a series of meetings, like a long one last night titled “Compassionate Action” – an exploration of ways to take what they’ve gained from the retreat out into the world in practical ways.
• This morning, I whisked Michelle off to Fort Collins, to take blood and ship it back to our doctor in NY (we’re exploring IVF) – which meant a lot of racing around and logistical juggling – Michelle’s first time away from the retreat center (and into a bustling city) since March.
• I floored it all the way back, to get Michelle to her interview with the BBC, who are making a documentary on the project.
• A reporter from the Boston Globe is here, interviewing people for a book on attention, and she’s interviewing Michelle, too.
• Some people here have been drafting Michelle into a non-profit dedicated to bringing the practice to schools, so she’s been meeting with them.
• Michelle’s helping set up the good-bye banquet for the group.
• Etc.

So lots going on all of a sudden. Michelle really seems to be flourishing, has connected with a remarkable group of people – and will have lots to tell you in a few days.

See you all soon.

With hugs,

Nick

Update #5: The Home Stretch

Hi guys,

Sorry I've been so bad about relaying updates, things have been a little crazy with work.  Just got back from the lab in the sky, where I went for my second control group visit.  My update on Michelle’s a bit brief.  Her days are pretty much the same as ever, we continued to keep the conversation at a maddeningly superficial level (as I described in earlier entries : we can’t really talk about the practice; we’re not allowed to talk about the scientific trials we’re going through; and I can’t tell her day-to-day things that her mind’ll fixate on b/c they’ll ruin the practice) and we chose to see each other a bit less this time.  Instead of every night, every other night (although Sun was my birthday, so she kept cheating and coming over with little surprises).

In my last e-mail, I noted:

Saw Michelle last night.  She’s doing amazingly well, really flourishing.  As she put it: “I’m happier than I’ve ever been, happier than I ever thought I could be.”  She asked Alan Wallace how much of that might be attributable to the fact that she’s in a beautiful environment, away from work, and with a group of people that she loves.  His response: “Certainly, this is a environment is conducive to a successful practice.  But plenty of people could have all those things and still be miserable.  What you’re experiencing is coming from within you.”  That, in some sense, gets to the heart of the matter.

That night, Michelle also noted that she was lucky: while most people were experiencing unpleasant nyams (see earlier), hers were almost all pleasant. Well, apparently the meditation gods ruled hubris on that one, and right afterwards rained a shower of nyams down on her – so when I saw Michelle last night, she’d just been through a 48 hour horror show, the whole psycho-physiological firestorm, and was pretty drained.  So much for the bliss trip. 

(Warning to any fellow Shamatha participants who may have stumbled across this: I’m going to mention some of the trials in the paragraph that follows).

One note on the scientists: what has come through for me these past two visits is how intensely focused and committed they are to the project, and how careful and thorough they seem.  They built the labs inside the Rigden Lodge in a couple of weeks, and are working 14 hour days, 7 days a week.  Last time I was there, Michelle mentioned that she’d lost hearing in one ear since she’d arrived (which actually helped the meditation by blocking out distractions!).  She said a doctor (fellow participant) had told her that she might have punctured her eardrum, and that there was nothing she could do except wait for it to heal.  When I went in for my trials, at one point they set me up for a (particularly unpleasant) trial where they put earplugs into my ears and, over the next half hour, shot bursts of static into my ear at high volume (at random, while I watched a slideshow that began pleasant – a dolphin playing, kids, etc. – and quickly turned into a barrage of the most horrific photos imaginable – graphic images of war, car accidents, maimed animals and people, etc.).  So I figured that this was where Michelle had developed her problem and I mentioned it to the scientists – thinking her issue was no big deal and, as Michelle noted, her eardrum would heal naturally.  Over the next few hours, half a dozen scientists must have come up to me, explaining that the decibel level was well below the eardrum-bursting threshold, but they were going to take Michelle away to the clinic the next morning to check, just to be safe.  Sure enough, it turned out that the experiment had pushed wax into her ear canal – this is why she’d lost hearing – and the eardrum was fine.  Michelle left the clinic with her hearing restored.

Last night, Michelle mentioned that the BBC was making a documentary on the Shamatha Project and that they were supposed to come film the last week, but hadn’t been able to get funding yet, so Cliff Saron (the project’s lead scientist) was going to shoot some video for them.  I mentioned at breakfast to one of Cliff’s colleagues that I had a little experience as a shooter, and would be happy to help out if I could be useful (that’s the week I’ll be there).  Cliff walked by, and when we brought it up in front of him, his face fell.  He was disturbed that participants were chattering and explained that there was no way they could ask me to do that, as it would put me in a different position from the rest of the participants.

When Cliff sat down and joined us, we started to talk about another meditation study -- by a leading group of highly respected scientists -- which has gotten some attention.  He and his colleagues proceeded to dissect the study – noting all sorts of places where the team hadn’t been as rigorous as they could have been.  A lot of the things Cliff and his team are doing – matching the retreat group & control group along a host of parameters, doing all kinds of pre-screening, measuring participants from numerous angles (they're going to have 3 terabytes of data by the time this is done), keeping groups separated and communication to a minimum, continuing this study over a long period of time, etc. – are ground-breaking, and, with any luck, should lend a new kind of credibility to the field.

Anyway, back to Michelle.  More than anything, she seems focused on making the most of the last stretch – she only has a few weeks left.  I’ve had to switch my last visit b/c of work conflicts, and am heading back on the 29^th.  We’ve decided not to speak until then.   But the good news is that I get to bring her home from that one. At last. Let me write that again, becuase it's so fun to say: I get to bring her home. At last!

Warmest to you all,

Nick

Update #4: cruising down the turbo speedway of Shamatha

Hi guys,  Michelle called last night.  Trend seems to be continuing in the same direction. She sounds terrific, exceptionally so.  April is re-coloring the landscape daily, "magical" by Michelle's description.

The good news is that Michelle’s sleeping well – averaging 5 hours a night, deep sleep, and all she needs by her account.  She’s stopped eating dinner, which apparently has made all the difference to her practice, and, she suspects, to her ability to sleep.  At the Goenka center we’ve gone to a few times, which operates by traditional Theravadan code, returning students don’t eat anything after noon.  Goenka’s explanation for this rule is that, over the centuries, it has been found to be helpful to the practice.   It's no coincidence, I suspect, that many religious traditions associate fasting with a period of introspection.  Interestingly, Michelle has come to the same conclusion by her own experience.  One more note on this: when Michelle and I were in Cambodia, we found that many Cambodians only ate one or two meals a day (including those in the city, who were employed and well educated).  I suspect that "three meals a day" is relatively new to our species, ushered in by the era of the super-rich West.

An interesting anecdote: a yoga instructor noticed that Michelle was collapsing on one side during a particular move, and recommended that she see the massage therapist, to get rid of the tightness on one side of her lower back.  The therapist not only succeeded, he noticed that one of her ribs was caught under her diaphragm, and he popped it out.  It was a revelation for Michelle.  As long as she can remember, she’s had a constricted feeling on deep breaths that she thought was normal.  She says she feels like she’s doubled her lung capacity.

The good news is that Alan has counseled people to cherish these days as an precious opportunity to practice – not read.  Michelle has taken this to heart, and doesn’t sound concerned with playing academic catch-up anymore.  Michelle and I are used to the Goenka retreats, which operates by monastic rules: no speaking, no passing notes, no eye contact, no mixing of men of women.  People are there to practice, and you see intensity of purpose grow during a 10-day, as people's movement slows down, becomes more balanced, and their mind turns deeper and deeper inward.  When I went into Rigden Lodge a few times (for testing) a few weeks ago, I was struck by how casual things seemed, relative to Goenka.  Don't get me wrong - it was pretty quiet.  But people didn't seem to carry themselves with the same sense of solitary focus.  Their stride was more casual, somehow.  If they passed you, they'd nod, smile.  Now, it sounds like things are starting to trend more towards Goenka-like focus - people are really hooked into the practice, and are letting go of the talking, the note-passing.

Michelle's spending most of her time in the third of the three key practices, which is called “Shamatha without a Sign.”  There are 10 clearly delineated stages along the path of Shamatha (each successive stage entails a higher degree of relaxation and attentional stability and vividness).  In the first three stages, where your ability to focus is weak, Wallace recommends the first of the three practices, called “Mindfulness of Breathing”.   Mindfulness of breathing is probably the most popular technique in the West, and entails trying to keep your focus on (you guessed it) your breath.  The second key practice is the one I described in my last update, called “Settling the Mind in its Natural State.”  Here, sharpened awareness and a higher degree of relaxation allow you to turn to the subtler game of focusing on “Mental Objects” – thoughts, feelings, inner voices and images, etc.  This second practice is supposed to be a fast lane to the tenth stage (acheiving Shamatha).  The third practice, “Shamatha without a Sign,” entails an even subtler object of focus: your awareness itself.  Awareness of being aware.  One way to think of it: imagine that you’ve just had a few espressos, and you go into a perfect sensory deprivation chamber: no sense of touch, smell, sight, sound, taste.  You’re lying there, and you’re paying attention to your thoughts (that’s “Settling the Mind in its Natural State”).  Now imagine that your thoughts calm down.  What are you left with?  Awareness itself.  This is the object of your attention.  If this idea sounds trippy, it is.  I wrote those words (adapted from Wallace), but I’m not sure I completely understand what they mean.  The key point: it’s a breathtakingly subtle practice.  And if “Settling the Mind in Its Natural State” is supposed to be the fast road to Shamatha, then this practice is supposed to be the turbo speedway.  So Michelle is cruising.

Another note: those nyam I referred to in the last post - it sounds like they're descending on the retreatants in full force now.  The scientists have shuttled a few people to the health clinic, concerned about the physiological effects they're seeing, like high blood pressure.  Things are getting pretty crazy in Rigden Lodge.

That’s all I know for now.  Michelle sends her love, as always.

Warmest,

Nick

Michelle Update #3: My first visit to the laboratory in the sky

Hello all,

Here’s my update on Michelle, from when I was in Colorado a couple weeks ago. Sorry for the delay.

So … how is Michelle? Let me begin by saying that this meditation business is doing strange things to my wife. I learned the first night that Michelle has neither gone for a run nor eaten chocolate since she’s been at the center. You heard that right. As far as I’m concerned, case closed: meditation is a radically transformative process. They can end this crazy experiment and send everyone home. Especially my wife.

Before I ramble, here are the Michelle headlines: she says she’s doing great, she’s glowing, and seems like she’s flourishing.  She sends you all her love – and thanks for your words of support.

I arrived, after the full-day gauntlet of trains, planes and shuttle buses, on Tuesday evening, March 27^th. I settled in that evening in my room, in the Shambhala Lodge. The geography was a bit tantalizing. Just a few feet away, I could see the neighboring Rigden Lodge, where Michelle and the other retreatants are sequestered – pretty much everything they do is there: dining hall, meditation hall, their rooms, the testing labs.

The set-up couldn't be better for Michelle and the retreatants - the scientists and staff are completely focused on being supportive to the meditators' practice, the accomodations are excellent, the grounds couldn't be more quiet. And the expansiveness of the landscape provides a nice stretching exercise for the mind that's spending most of its day looking inward. As Alan Wallace wrote in his welcome letter to us: "I have meditated in many places on three continents, but never have I found a more conducive place to practice than this."

I've set up Flickr account here, where you can see some pics of Michelle and the landscape.

Crazy as it sounds, Michelle’s schedule’s quite packed, and I was only able to see her for an hour in the evenings. She’s practicing 8 hours plus a day – mostly in group sessions. In the morning, Alan leads a session, his interns lead sessions throughout the day, and Alan leads one in the evening, followed by Q&A. Everyone gets a weekly one-on-one interview with Alan. On top of the practice, she performs her daily chore – cleaning the women’s bathroom – plus she participates in the daily yoga class (important not only for exercise and to deepen the practice, but also to avoid injury), plus she has reading on the practice (a terrific list of books), plus she participates in the scientific trials, which includes filling out a long (read: endless) nightly journal/questionnaire. My schedule was pretty jammed while I was there – juggling work by remote (which, between having to dial 30+ digits to get a line out, phone lines going down in flash floods and intermittent internet, was kind of a nightmare) plus the study trials, and we agreed to see each other each night after her last session. She would come over at 8:30, and we’d have an hour together, before she had to go back to her dorm to work on her nightly questionnaire and produce a saliva sample.

We’d agreed to meet the first night and go for a hike up the mountain, to the stupa, a magnificent meditation hall, recently spruced up to honor a visit by the Dalai Lama.

Other nights, Michelle came over to the Shambhala Lodge to see me. I was so excited to see her each night, and I’d wait, heart skipping every time footsteps passed my door around the appointed hour, but I have to confess that seeing her was hard. We’re already stretching the study’s guidelines by spending time together. A few weeks ago, I spoke to a friend, who, with her boyfriend, are the only other couple in the study, and learned that they’ve gone cold turkey: they’ve chosen for him not to know when she was there for her control group visits, and have planned on not speaking until the retreat’s over. As I described in my earlier report, interactions, even benign ones, throw off the practice, and make it almost impossible to keep going deeper. When you go into retreat (dang it – expedition), you starve the brain of the daily stimuli it’s addicted to, and it can grow desperate, greedily devouring any scrap it can find. Give the hungry brain a conversation, and words’ll rattle around and around and around (and around and around …) for the following day’s sessions. To try to soften this problem, I’ve censored what I tell her – basically, no chit-chat, give her very little specific daily life info to grab onto -- no headlines, no news on friends, no … well not much. Furthermore, she can’t talk about her inner experience except in a generic way (this is not only important for the study, it’s important generally for one’s practice), and as part of the study’s guidelines, I’m not supposed to talk about my experience in the trials with any other participants, Michelle included. Which means that we have to keep our conversation to a pretty superficial level.

By wishful thinking, we’d convinced ourselves that my presence wouldn’t have too big an effect on her practice, but of course it did. Michelle admitted that her practice had been pretty shallow since I’d arrived -- which tinged our time together, knowing that I was doing neither her nor the study any favors. And the whole time we’re together, I’m keeping a corner of my brain on the time, like someone on the other side of the glass in a prison’s family room.

A long way of saying, I don’t have a ton to tell you beyond what I have already. It sounds as if Michelle, and everyone in the retreat, has been on a pretty wild ride. Michelle did make one comment, that people were experiencing what in Tibetan are called nyam (in Pali: sankharas) – crazy psycho-physiological experiences considered to be a rebalancing of your neuro-muscular system and possibly a flushing out of your deepest mental complexes. I’m obviously no psychologist, but my layman’s interpretation of these nyam is that when you meditate, you trick the brain, in some sense, into behaving as if you’re dreaming, and it starts to flush out all kinds of crazy fears, memories and desires from the limbic system (i.e. the primal brain). Here are some examples of nyam, (taken from various sources, including The Vajra Esssence, a seminal text on the practice) to give you a feel for what Michelle might be going through:

· The impression that all your thoughts are wreaking havoc in your body and mind, like boulders rolling down a steep mountain, crushing and destroying everything in their path;

· An ecstatic, pleasant feeling, as if your entire body has dissolved into microscopic bubbles and you experience everything with complete equanimity and clarity, as if you had been viewing the world through frosted glass previously, and now someone has pulled the frosted glass away;

· A sense of panic flowing through you as if from without, combined with dramatically increased heart rate and sweating and muscle twitching;

· The experience of visions, which you know to be hallucinations, but which are as vivid in the mind’s eye as if they were real. Often these visions take on frightening forms, such as skeletons, giant spiders or venomous snakes;

· The sensation of external sounds and voices of humans, dogs, birds, and so on all piercing your heart like thorns;

· Unbearable anger due to the paranoia of thinking that everyone around you is gossiping about you and putting you down;

· The perception of all phenemona as brilliant, colored particles;

· Such unbearable misery that you think your heart will burst.

Michelle didn’t stay with me at night, although she tried once. The problem is that she’s going through fitful, restless nights, only getting three or four hours of sleep a night. I should qualify my comment earlier: Michelle is glowing, but she's glowing the way someone halfway up Everest might be glowing - this isn't an easy journey. I was supportive of the idea that she sleep in her own bed at night, for her, and for the study. But at a primal level, there’s something a little unsettling about your wife leaving your bed …

Sleeplessness is a very common side effect of the practice (compounded, I suspect by the 8,000 foot altitude). It sounds as if many people in the retreat group are facing this issue. Sometimes, this sleeplessness can be a very pleasant experience, akin to the second bullet point above. At other times, the sleeplessness can be less pleasant, closer to garden variety insomnia – full of discomfort and nightmares. It sounds like Michelle’s had both kinds of sleeplessness. Unfortunately, for the past ten days or so, she’d had more of the latter. The good news is that she says maintaining equanimity in the face of these nightmares – watching them as if they’re moving on a screen but not reacting to them – remaining calm, peaceful. Nightmares in sound and image, but not emotional content.

In fact, Michelle had her first lucid dream a few days before I got there. Lucid dreaming, well-studied in the West and a long tradition in Tibetan practice (where it’s called Dream Yoga), is when you dream, but know you’re dreaming. It’s a pretty common side-effect of Shamatha practice and is a crazy experience (I’ve had a couple lucid dreams, although both times I got so excited when I realized what was going on that I woke up pretty quickly). As you examine the dream world, it seems completely real – tables are solid, windows cold to touch, people rich with idiosyncrasies and emotional subtleties and knowing and saying things you can’t imagine have come out of your own psyche. You actually have to convince yourself that you’re a body lying in a bed in some so-called reality (there are specific techniques to help you do this). Besides being a really cool, exciting experience, lucid dreaming can play an important role in the practice. Essentially, it allows you to continue your meditation while you’re sleeping.

To understand Lucid Dreaming’s significance, it helps to be familiar with one of the key practices on this retreat, known as “Settling the Mind in Its Natural State.” This practice entails turning your attention to what might be called the ‘movie screen’ of the mind.  You watch ‘mental objects’ (thoughts, emotions, images, sounds, etc.) arise and pass in the mind without reacting to or getting carried away by them. It’s like letting a movie play on a TV screen while making sure that your awareness is bigger than the frame of the screen – you keep your attention on the whole room, perceive the sound and images playing across the TV as sound and images without meaning, and you don’t get caught up in the movie. You don’t let yourself get lost in the story, the characters, the reactions to happy or sad moments – you watch these images and sounds like an impartial scientist, in a viewing booth above the lab. Lucid dreaming is the nighttime analog to “Settling the Mind in its Natural State.” You watch the dream, but your awareness is bigger than it – you know it’s just a dream playing across the screen of the mind. With a key twist: you can choose to get involved in the story, with the bonus of knowing that it’s only a dream, so there’s no downside. Forgive the cheesy analogy, but for those of you who’ve seen “The Matrix,” it’s a bit like Neo’s constant reminder to himself that “there is no spoon.” Once he’s convinced of this, he’s able to fly and do all sorts of other groovy things. Same concept here. In the dream world, you can bend the rules in trippy ways, once you've convinced yourself that you’re in a dream. And most importantly, when demons and monsters and other unpleasant characters arise (presumably manifestations of your deepest anxieties), you can turn and face them with total equanimity and kindness, and dissolve them. Which is what Michelle did with her lucid dream. She half woke up from a normal nightmare, full of anxiety, then slipped back into it, knowing it was just a dream. And she stayed in the dream, and faced the demons – whatever they were – head on, without fear, anger, or other ugly nightmare stuff. Pretty wild. And, I suspect, healing.

I mentioned the daily yoga class. Three of the retreat’s participants are leading them – two different styles of yoga, and one that is actually Qigong (not completely sure what that is, except that it’s Chinese and Tai-Chi like). Michelle’s loving this part of the daily routine – physical exercise that connects closely to the practice – and is particularly fond of Qigong.

One thing I worry about a little bit about in the way Michelle talks about the experience is her tendency to be a bit hard on herself. Michelle and I are definitely among the least advanced in our practice and in our scholarship around it. Every night, Michelle sits in a Q&A session where she’s reminded of how much other people seem to know. I think she feels a bit like she’s playing catch-up – and is working extra hard, especially on the reading. Unfortunately, working extra hard can be counterproductive in this practice, because it can bring up tension. It’s a bit like golf, where you hit the ball farther by relaxing and not trying to hit the ball harder. She seems to be doing so well for now, I hope she doesn’t set herself up for a cycle of frustration.

One humorous side-note: I have a little bit of a running joke with Michelle, ribbing her for her enjoyment of clothes shopping (not because she’s much of a shopper, but because she’s so self-conscious about it when she does go shopping). There’s a little store on the grounds, open for all of two hours a day (apparently French work rules apply in the Rockies), and I went in one day to get shampoo, and there was Michelle, in the clothes section, sorting through the racks. She gave me a big, embarrassed “whoops!” look and I burst out laughing. So busted. Turned out the joke was on me: she was standing at the men’s t-shirt rack and she was trying to surprise me with a gift ...

What else can I tell you about Michelle? Can I see the effects of the practice? Yes, of course. She’s still my wife, thankfully. But there’s something … different. Elation, but without the nervousness that usually defines that state. Elation grounded in exceptional calm.

Sunday morning, Michelle snuck out for a few minutes to see me off. She said something that I’ve kept with me. The long questionnaire that Michelle has to fill out each night includes a page that says at the top: “Today, I generally felt …” and then lists 42 emotions. She has to rate the emotions from 1 (Disagree strongly), to 7 (Agree strongly). “One of the emotions is grateful,” Michelle said. “Every night, I put a 7.”

She sends her hugs to all.

Plenty more to write on, especially about all the crazy trials she – and all of us – have been going through, but there’s my update for now. Again, sorry to take so long to get this out. I've getting a little crushed by a couple of work projects.

Warmest,

Nick

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.

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 ...