In an early morning hour when I sit in meditation, I can list how nearly a decade of practice has already altered my life; I’m more even keeled, not so reactive, naturally flexible in situations, and less likely to remain hung up on petty matters once I’ve had some silence to sit with them. Meditation has led me to a regimen of only a few glasses of wine on any night, and eventually took the place of substances in the past that messed with my brain.
It’s also allowed me to understand that life’s ride is notable in its collective moments, and how remaining in the present through sitting can be some of my calmest minutes of existence. In the ten-day courses I try to take every year, I’ve realized in silence that human beings are interconnected, that when it comes to our emotions we are very much alike. We’re made up of fear, excitement, joy, and pain, and it’s taken me eight years (and counting) to have a handle on this. Meditation, the least linear education I’ve participated in, is a constant mental ride of up and down, but the vicissitudes move more like a ripple now. It’s also made it tolerable to delve deep into the real me, beyond the limitations of my ego or my fears, and has enlightened me just enough to know that substances are no longer a requirement before I can let go on any dance floor. However, this holistic effort to maintain body and mind takes a daily practice, and in order to keep from traveling down the turbulent corkscrews of life’s roller coaster, I like to meditate at least one time a day. And while I can track the obvious benefits from being on my spiritual path, I’ve often wondered about the lasting effects of meditation on my brain.
Before meditation, I would tell friends that my brain felt like it had the Swiss cheese effect, which is what my brain resembled while memories slipped through self-created holes. I hypothesized that I had indeed done permanent damage to my brain, and the media seemed to confirm that. Friends would bring up past scenarios and conversations that I couldn’t remember, and when it came to my short-term memory, I felt like my grandmother at the end of her life. But after years of meditation, I started to notice an increased capacity for retaining information, as if my brain had become a vault for life’s minutiae. So was it possible that meditation had the ability to repair my brain’s Swiss cheese holes?
A few weeks ago, I attended a talk entitled, Meditation and the Brain, given by Dr. Philippe Goldin, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University and long-term meditator. The discussion was hosted by Down to a Science, a free monthly discussion where leading scientists present their research to an interested audience in a bar over a few drinks. I ran up and sat in the front like the college student I had never been.
Goldin’s research interested me since he tested the effects of the mindfulness meditation on the brain by using a process called Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to see which areas of the brain meditation activated. He laid the participants in a MRI scanner while he flashed negative self-beliefs on a screen that read, “I am incompetent,” “No one will like me,” “I’ll always be alone,” messages that I might think on a bad day (or a few days before my period). Then he asked the subjects to rate their emotions in that moment. Goldin told the participants they should implement one of three tools to cope. They could 1) shift their attention to the physical sensation of the breath, the first step of mindfulness meditation, 2) count backwards from a three-digit number, or 3) they could reinterpret the meaning of that negative belief to make the belief less toxic in their mind. Goldin explained how we all did this in our minds throughout the day, and I had to agree, focusing on my own breath helps during crazed minutes on certain days. He said that with mindfulness meditation we could train ourselves not to react so much to these incompetence statements, while learning how to master our emotions and our minds.
What fascinated me the most in Goldin’s talk were the series of events he described that cascaded through the brain while enrolling other areas of the body for support, igniting the mind-body connection. For example, when Goldin flashed the statement, “People think I am socially incompetent,” a domino effect reverberated throughout the brain. The fMRI scans showed firing of neurons that triggered the language, emotion, and thinking circuits of the brain, which then lightened the left amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for emotion detection and generation. These circuits also have the ability to ask the body to send more oxygenated blood to this part of the brain in action.
It was hard to believe that all of this was happening in the brain while the participant lay focusing on one negative belief. I thought back to my first ten-day courses in silence, and how my brain had hurt while spinning on similar concepts—until I strengthened my ability to observe those thoughts as moments that would always pass, just like my breath.
Goldin concluded that after two and a half months of a daily meditation practice while using any of the three strategies in stressful moments, the participants’ minds became more flexible, which Goldin coined “the WD-40 effect.” In other words, he saw that mindfulness practice made the mind more fluid and less stuck. He said it might lead to greater emotional awareness and allow people to become more emotionally flexible, which was exactly what I had witnessed for myself in my practice.
After a break, I explained to Goldin that I had experienced the same results. I told him that my boyfriend, who had practiced mindfulness meditation for almost four years and had initially benefited, ultimately had a hard time with meditation in the end. I told Goldin that I was a writer searching for answers, and that my boyfriend had taken his own life last January, and so I wondered if mindfulness meditation was really for everyone.
He spoke about skillfulness in a meditation practice, and how we needed to have the awareness to ask ourselves, “Do I have the cast iron mind space, or the ability to hold the experiences that come up when I do deeper meditation practice?” Ultimately, his answer was the one I had been searching for all along.
Later, the woman sitting next to me handed me a folded piece of paper and said to me, “This isn’t from me; it’s from another women who just left.” On the front it read, “To a writer who will write a book I will read.” I opened the note from this mystery woman and read, “I came tonight thinking I would take my life. I won’t now because of you. Thank you.” I gasped. Once again, I became reminded of how we were all interconnected. My quest for truth had taken my breath away.