Meditation – Page 2

Meditation: an update on doing zen meditation for three years

meditation-raccoon It’s a good time to review my meditation practice. My first essay about meditation was published in early 2013. An update came in late 2014.

The important lessons and insights haven’t changed. There just don’t seem to be any new wow moments:

It’s still most enjoyable to meditate in the morning (when it also has the greatest benefit for my mood and productivity)
Ten to fifteen minutes is still my sweet spot. Anything longer, and I create excuses to not do it. Anything shorter, and its effects aren’t as noticeable or consistent.
I still practice a simple form of meditation: what could best be described as zen meditation, also known as seated meditation or zazen. I sit down and empty the mind, allowing thoughts and feelings to arise and depart without judgment or attachment, until my iPhone timer rings
I still worry that even as meditation minimizes the emotional lows, it also dampens the highs and, possibly, through this mechanic, curtails your ambition, reduces your energy, numbs your healthy urges…

That’s not to say the time has been wasted. There have been a few new realizations about meditation as a daily habit:

Research shows that meditation dampens activity in your pre-frontal cortex, which is the brain region that creates a boundary between yourself and the world around you. Maybe this is why, after a good session, I feel a strong bond with everything around me: trees, strangers, the fresh air. It’s similar to the effect of certain drugs, but cleaner and more peaceful
Meditation’s impact is mixed. Some days are good, most days are meh, and some days feel wasted. But occasionally, on the great days, very occasionally, the impact of meditation is instant and obvious and washes over me like a two hour swedish massage. My eyes will be closed. I’m trying to relax. Suddenly, instead of seeing a vast void of blackness, suddenly, I’m looking right in front of me, at the here and now of the darkness, right at the front of my eyes, the back of my eyelids. This is often accompanied by visualizations – dim shifting and fractal patterns of light – even as my mind and body slide into a deep calm
The moments of stillness, of being centered, of feeling at peace, that sometimes come in the session and stay for hours…when your rushing thoughts and bubbling doubts and frantic scurrying leave your mental house and the door’s shut firmly behind them and they can’t get back in…that’s what makes it all worthwhile
I’m not a fan of guided meditation. Yes, I agree that it’s probably better than no practice, but, if you’ll excuse this ragged analogy, guided meditation is like learning to appreciate silence by listening to classical music. And by substituting a “good enough” solution, without a plan to remove that crutch, you deny yourself the chance to experience something deeper, purer, more powerful
Jerry Seinfeld has done transcendental meditation for decades. In an interview, he compared a session of meditation to a great nap where you awaken and feel refreshed and recharged
Human beings are animals. In a way, meditation is an absolute denial of our animal nature. Instead of thinking, we unthink. Instead of feeling, we don’t feel. Instead of moving, we are still. We simply be. And if meditation’s benefit comes from denying our animal nature, then logically, if we push this thinking further, maybe any activity that challenges and opposes our animal nature – such as fasting or celibacy or religious devotion – will achieve the same results, push us toward the same spiritual, divine, uniquely human unknown

Finally, perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned in recent years: your mind is like a young dog. It can bark at friendly strangers. Chase pigeons wildly and chew up sandals (yes, my dog does all of these, sigh). But meditation is useful because it trains your mind, the crazy dog that it is, through repetition and effort and growth, to become calm, to control itself, to separate real from fake threats, to conserve energy for important things, like cuddling with its human.

And if a habits genie granted wishes on my daily routine, wish #1 would be to guarantee that I meditate for 30 minutes every morning. Without fail. Alas, no such luck. But the benefits would be tremendous…

Thanks for reading, as always. Love to hear from you if you meditate or have any reactions to this essay. Thank you!

The wisdom of Yoshida Kenko: on women’s laughter, painful hangovers and the 7 friends to avoid

It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met. — Yoshida Kenko

Essays in Idleness is a remarkable reminder of how things that are true stay true…even after 900 years.

Here were my favorite bits from his nearly-300 short essays:

I cannot bear the way people will make it their business to know all the details of some current rumour, even though it has nothing to do with them, and then proceed to pass the story on and do their best to learn more.

Desire is limitless, while money is finite. You cannot use limited resources to fulfill unlimited craving.

Aroma, for instance, is a mere transient thing, yet a whiff of delightful incense from a woman’s robes will always excite a man…

People will not take much issue with an invented tale if it shows them in a good light.

If someone new comes visiting, the boorish and insensitive will always manage to make the visitor feel ignorant by exchanging cryptic remarks about something they all know among themselves, some story or name, chuckling and exchanging knowing glances.

Even a deceitful imitation of wisdom will place you among the wise.

‘A beginner should not hold two arrows,’ his teacher told him. ‘You will be careless with the first, knowing you have a second. You must always be determined to hit the target with the single arrow you shoot, and have no thought beyond this.’

A man should be brought up so as to avoid being the butt of women’s laughter.

A man without stable means is a man whose heart is unstable.

One who considers himself superior through birth, skill or eminent forebears, even if he never expresses this, is full of error in his heart.

You should carefully consider which among the main things you want in life is the most important, and renounce all the others to dedicate yourself to that thing alone. Among the many matters that press in on us on any day, at any given moment, we must give ourselves to the most productive

The man who claims not to really understand is more likely to be thought a true master of his art.

It is very nice when a friend simply drops in, has a quiet talk with you, and then leaves. It is also wonderfully pleasing to receive a letter that simply begins, ‘I write because it’s been some time since I sent news,’ or some such.

On a moonlit night, a snowy morning, or beneath the flowering cherry trees, it increases all the pleasures of the moment to bring out the sake cups and settle down to talk serenely together over a drink.

Sigh:

I cannot understand why people will seize any occasion to immediately bring out the sake, delighting in forcing someone else to drink. […] A genteel man will quickly be transformed into a madman and start acting the fool; a vigorous, healthy fellow will before your very eyes become shockingly afflicted and fall senseless to the floor. What a thing to do, on a day of celebration! Right into the next day his head hurts, he can’t eat, and he lies there groaning with all memory of the previous day gone as if it were a former life. He neglects essential duties both public and private, with disastrous effects. It is both boorish and cruel to subject someone to this sort of misery. Surely a man who has had this bitter experience will be filled with regret and loathing.

Sorta get it:

The one thing a man should not have is a wife. No matter who the woman may be, you would grow to hate her if you lived with her and saw her day in day out, and the woman must become dissatisfied too. But if you lived separately and sometimes visited her, your feelings for each other would surely remain unchanged through the years. It keeps the relationship fresh to just drop in from time to time on impulse and spend the night.

There are seven types of people one should not have as a friend. The first is an exalted and high-ranking person. The second, somebody young. The third, anyone strong and in perfect health. The fourth, a man who loves drink. The fifth, a brave and daring warrior. The sixth, a liar. The seventh, an avaricious man. The three to choose as friends are – one who gives gifts, a doctor and a wise man.

A life hack:

One shouldn’t put new deer antler to the nose and sniff it. There is a tiny insect in it that will enter through the nose and devour the brain.

I’ve re-written a favorite Kenko passage here, if you’re curious.

1-Page Cheatsheet: David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Gladwell’s storytelling is better than ever. While Tipping Point had a greater influence on how I view the world, and I found Outliers more engrossing because it featured entrepreneurs like Ron Popeil and Bill Gates, David and Goliath [Amazon Kindle] is a pure expression of Gladwell’s desire to tackle Big questions and answer them in an entertaining, breezily analytical way. He’s like a kind, witty 21st-century Socrates, pushing us to think big and think different.

His arguments and stories are so nuanced, so artfully woven together, that it would have been impossible for me to write an accurate summary without everything being a vulgar generalization. My goal, instead, is to showcase a small selection of his insights and stories. If the book is a 12-course meal at a 2-star Michelin restaurant, this is like the amuse-bouche before drinks are served. I should just call it the 1-page amuse-bouche instead…

David had a gun and Goliath was partially blind

Eitan Hirsch, a ballistics expert with the Israeli Defense Forces, recently did a series of calculations showing that a typical-size stone hurled by an expert slinger at a distance of thirty-five meters would have hit Goliath’s head with a velocity of thirty-four meters per second—more than enough to penetrate his skull and render him unconscious or dead. In terms of stopping power, that is equivalent to a fair-size modern handgun.

What many medical experts now believe, in fact, is that Goliath had a serious medical condition. He looks and sounds like someone suffering from what is called acromegaly—a disease caused by a benign tumor of the pituitary gland. The tumor causes an overproduction of human growth hormone, which would explain Goliath’s extraordinary size. And furthermore, one of the common side effects of acromegaly is vision problems.

Underdogs change the rules, usually because they are outsiders

David refused to engage Goliath in close quarters, where he would surely lose. He stood well back, using the full valley as his battlefield. The girls of Redwood City used the same tactic. They defended all ninety-four feet of the basketball court. The full-court press is legs, not arms. It supplants ability with effort. […] You have to be outside the establishment—a foreigner new to the game or a skinny kid from New York at the end of the bench—to have the audacity to play it that way.

Smaller classes don’t mean better students; better teachers do

Fifteen percent find statistically significant evidence that students do better in smaller classes. Roughly the same number find that students do worse in smaller classes. After sorting through thousands of pages of data on student performance from eighteen separate countries, the economists concluded that there were only two places in the world—Greece and Iceland—where there were “nontrivial beneficial effects of reduced class sizes.”

The one thing that all educational researchers agree about is that teacher quality matters far more than the size of the class. A great teacher can teach your child a year and a half’s material in one year. A below-average teacher might teach your child half a year’s material in one year. That’s a year’s difference in learning, in one year. That suggests that there is much more to be gained by focusing on the person at the front of the classroom than on the number of people sitting in the classroom. The problem is that great teachers are rare.

Nature is run by the Inverted-U; our brains tend to ignore it

Psychologists Barry Schwartz and Adam Grant argue, in a brilliant paper, that, in fact, nearly everything of consequence follows the inverted U: “Across many domains of psychology, one finds that X increases Y to a point, and then it decreases Y.…There is no such thing as an unmitigated good. All positive traits, states, and experiences have costs that at high levels may begin to outweigh their benefits.”

Here’s my write-up on that paper.

Being a bigger fish in a smaller pond can be better for your career

The very best students at a non–top 30 school—that is, a school so far down the list that someone from the Ivy League would grimace at the thought of even setting foot there—have a publication number of 1.05, substantially better than everyone except the very best students at Harvard, MIT, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, and Chicago.

Imagine two black law school students with identical grades and identical test scores. Both are admitted to an elite law school under an affirmative-action program. One accepts and one declines. The one who declines chooses instead—for logistical or financial or family reasons—to attend his or her second choice, a less prestigious and less selective law school. Sander and Taylor looked at a large sample of these kinds of “matched pairs” and compared how well they did on four measures: law school graduation rate, passing the bar on their first attempt, ever passing the bar, and actually practicing law. The comparison is not even close. By every measure, black students who don’t go to the “best” school they get into outperform those who do.

An underdog’s early difficulties can serve as the source of later strengths

Sixty-seven percent of the prime ministers in her sample lost a parent before the age of sixteen. That’s roughly twice the rate of parental loss during the same period for members of the British upper class—the socioeconomic segment from which most prime ministers came. The same pattern can be found among American presidents. Twelve of the first forty-four U.S. presidents—beginning with George Washington and going all the way up to Barack Obama—lost their fathers while they were young.

Losing a parent is not like having your house bombed or being set upon by a crazed mob. It’s worse. It’s not over in one terrible moment, and the injuries do not heal as quickly as a bruise or a wound. But what happens to children whose worst fear is realized—and then they discover that they are still standing? Couldn’t they also gain what Shuttlesworth and the Blitz remote misses gained—a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage?

Underdogs have less to lose and can take bigger risks

Dyslexics compensate for their disability by developing other skills that—at times—can prove highly advantageous. Being bombed or orphaned can be a near-miss experience and leave you devastated. Or it can be a remote miss and leave you stronger. These are David’s opportunities: the occasions in which difficulties, paradoxically, turn out to be desirable. The lesson of the trickster tales is the third desirable difficulty: the unexpected freedom that comes from having nothing to lose. The trickster gets to break the rules.

Germany’s Blitz bombing of London backfired

So why were Londoners so unfazed by the Blitz? Because forty thousand deaths and forty-six thousand injuries—spread across a metropolitan area of more than eight million people—means that there were many more remote misses who were emboldened by the experience of being bombed than there were near misses who were traumatized by it.

More punishment may not lead to less crime; it may be an Inverted-U

Prison has a direct effect on crime: it puts a bad person behind bars, where he can’t victimize anyone else. But it also has an indirect effect on crime, in that it affects all the people with whom that criminal comes into contact. A very high number of the men who get sent to prison, for example, are fathers. (One-fourth of juveniles convicted of crimes have children.) And the effect on a child of having a father sent away to prison is devastating. Some criminals are lousy fathers: abusive, volatile, absent. But many are not. Their earnings—both from crime and legal jobs—help support their families. For a child, losing a father to prison is an undesirable difficulty. Having a parent incarcerated increases a child’s chances of juvenile delinquency between 300 and 400 percent; it increases the odds of a serious psychiatric disorder by 250 percent.

In the mid-1990s, the IRA was organizing daily bus trips to the prison outside Belfast, as if it were an amusement park. “Almost everyone in the Catholic ghettos has a father, brother, uncle, or cousin who has been in prison,” the political scientist John Soule wrote at the height of the Troubles. “Young people in this atmosphere come to learn that prison is a badge of honor rather than a disgrace.”

Trivia

Citizens of happy countries have higher suicide rates than citizens of unhappy countries, because they look at the smiling faces around them and the contrast is too great.

The psychologist Jordan Peterson argues that innovators and revolutionaries tend to have a very particular mix of these traits—particularly the last three: openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. Innovators have to be open. They also need to be conscientious. But crucially, innovators need to be disagreeable.

Thanks for reading! And thanks to those who have emailed me comments, questions, book recommendations, and even cool research papers. I love to nerd it up.