Tag: daniel goleman

A meditation compendium: learnings and esoterica on the benefits and practice of meditation

I’ve done bits of meditation for 10+ years, but my standards are laughably low: I consider 5 minutes a day as an achievement :)

And thus I’m always reminded of the saying, “if you don’t have time to meditate for 5 minutes, then you should meditate for 10 minutes”.

Guess I’m not wise enough yet!

All the below is copied verbatim from various sources, but mistakes mine:

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Brain changes. People who meditated showed increased activity in the left-anterior part of the brain. Increased activity in this area is associated with positive feelings and emotions. This suggests that meditation makes changes in the brain that help us feel better.

Immune boost. The meditation group also had a stronger response to the flu vaccine. They produced more antibodies against the flu, and their bodies are better equipped to fight off the virus compared to the non-meditators

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Meditation like a massage for your brain

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a state of profound meditation called samadhi. When meditation becomes very deep, breathing becomes slow, steady, and even, and the windows of the senses close to all outward sensations. Next the faculties of the mind quiet down, resting from their usually frantic activity; even the primal emotions of desire, fear, and anger subside. When all these sensory and emotional tides have ceased to flow, then the spirit is free, mukta –at least for the time being. It has entered the state called samadhi. Samadhi can come and go; generally it can be entered only in a long period of meditation and after many years of ardent endeavor. But one verse (5: 28) adds the significant word sada, “always.” Once this state of deep concentration becomes established, the person lives in spiritual freedom, or moksha, permanently. This is extremely rare.

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Consider washing the dishes the most important thing in life. Washing the dishes is meditation. If you cannot wash the dishes in mindfulness, neither can you meditate while sitting in silence.

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Human beings are animals; meditation is one way (among many) to deny our animal nature and perhaps reach a higher spiritual plane

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The eighth-century Buddhist adept Vimalamitra described three stages of mastery in meditation and how thinking appears in each. The first is like meeting a person you already know; you simply recognize each thought as it arises in consciousness, without confusion. The second is like a snake tied in a knot; each thought, whatever its content, simply unravels on its own. In the third, thoughts become like thieves entering an empty house; even the possibility of being distracted has disappeared.

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The dev bites / bytes code guy email about meditation advice
– Meditation is uninteresting repetition, again and again, no matter the technique. It’s only natural to find it uneasy.
– This is not a race. It’s the opposite of a race. The faster you try to go, the slower you will progress. Yet efforts will lead to results. You have to be motivated without avidity, and it’s not an easy balance to find.
– There is a huge difference in effects, between a casual practice (a few minutes, some of the days) and a robust practice (long sessions every day).
– It’s a long term work. It’s, in fact, a life work. Our teacher jokes that at the center, we are at “Vipassana Kindergarden”. We are just beginning. Now we have to carry on and on. Half of the secret of success is simply showing up, every day.

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I have been practicing meditation for 15 years, sometimes in batch of 100 hours.

The more I practice, the more the time slows down. Not just while meditating, but after the fact as well. Although it fluctuates and I’m not back to my kid self, it feels that I have tremendously more time now than a few years ago.

I suspect that it’s tied to how much present you manage to be.

When you are a kid, you are deeply immersed in whatever you are doing, and less and less so after that, especially in our age of distractions, multitasking, and intellectual work loads.

I think that the more you are immersed in the daily boring stuff, like just walking, doing chores, or taking your shower, the more you register the time you spend doing said activity, and the time seems to pass slowly.

In fact, I am sometimes under the impression my minutes, not just feel longer, but actually contain more, because I do so many things and then looking at the clock, it hasn’t moved much. This sensation increases when I meditate a lot.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29109066

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to meditate each morning is a radical act of love, take that time, take care of yourself – Jon Kabat Zinn

Jerry Seinfeld has done transcendental meditation since 1972

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Other lifestyle interventions #
Meditation (mean rating = 5.8), bright lights in the morning (5), cold shower (4.7), and masturbation abstinence (4.1) also got impressive to pretty good ratings.

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When all these sensory and emotional tides have ceased to flow, then the spirit is free, mukta –at least for the time being. It has entered the state called samadhi. Samadhi can come and go; generally it can be entered only in a long period of meditation and after many years of ardent endeavor

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The Buddha withdrew for six years, then returned for forty-five. But each year was likewise divided: nine months in the world, followed by a three-month retreat with his monks during the rainy season. His daily cycle, too, was patterned to this mold. His public hours were long, but three times a day he withdrew, to return his attention (through meditation) to its sacred source

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The right brain is in charge of present-moment awareness, and this is the part of the brain that meditation takes to the gym. Essentially, the longer we meditate, the more we’re able to balance the right and left hemispheres of the brain. The result of this is more attention, awareness, and computing power for the task at hand.

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Chen: For the overwhelming majority of Asian Buddhists, Buddhism is a devotional practice. Bowing to images of deities, burning incense, worshiping at an altar — those are all fundamental elements of Buddhist practice. There is this acknowledgement of worshiping higher beings. Meditation was not at all a mainstream lay practice in Buddhism

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“Meditation is a high interest savings account for your time”

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As a novice monk, several times a day I had to light incense to offer on the altar of the meditation hall. I was taught to pick up the stick of incense with both hands, the left hand on top of the right hand, which picks up the stick of incense. A stick of incense is very light. Why do you have to use both hands? The idea is that you have to invest one hundred percent of yourself into this simple act of picking up an incense stick.

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“meditation is a non-pharmaceutical Ritalin” – Daniel Goleman

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“meditation is as deep and as powerful a tool as we have” – Waitzkin

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Meditation is not about feeling good. It’s about feeling what you’re feeling with good awareness. Plot twist: Eventually that makes you feel good

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Meditation has been linked to reduced activity in the default mode network, which is associated with self-referential thoughts and mind-wandering. This reduction can lead to an enhanced ability to focus on the present moment and increased self-awareness.

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I’ve come out of (non-psychedelic-enhanced) meditations crying. I’ve sat and stared at the traffic outside my window for as long as I might normally have watched a TV show. I’ve had profound creative unlocks I’ve never experienced without drugs or other extreme state changes. I’ve even had brief moments of the fractal vision and plants breathing (IYKYK). It is not the same as a psychedelic experience, but they’re neighbors

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Your best decisions come from stillness. Stillness is amplified in nature & meditation.

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People who exercise, meditate, or do yoga to get high usually report that their experiences get better and better over time, which is a great contrast to the reports of heavy users of drugs.

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Every time you meditate is like making a deposit in a bank (Maharishi)

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Even the gods envy those who are awakened and not forgetful, who are given to meditation, who are wise, and who delight in the repose of retirement (from the world).

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There’s concrete evidence that meditation calms your brain similar to valium. Actual structural and measurable changes within brain itself

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Intensive meditation, even after only one day, can also affect gene regulation in your brain through similar mechanisms. Attending a monthlong meditation retreat reduces the expression of genes that affect inflammation, and experienced meditators can reduce inflammatory genes after just one day of intensive meditation.

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Hindu meditation practices have long understood the benefits of sound, especially through the chanting of “Om.” This sound, central to many Hindu traditions, is more than a symbol; it’s a powerful tool that engages the vagus nerve, known for its role in regulating stress and relaxation responses. The act of humming, inherently part of chanting Om, creates a gentle, soothing vibration. This process not only brings a physical dimension to meditation but also enhances the spiritual experience, as the sound of Om is said to represent the universe’s primal sound.

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And some of my previous writings on meditation:

Daniel Goleman on the value of focus and empathy

I started watching this 1-hour lecture with low expectations, but was blown away by Dan’s info-packed, beautifully-articulated talk on the importance of focus and empathy and the psychology and science behind them.

I generally avoid the nonfiction bestseller lists these days, but I just downloaded samples of Emotional Intelligence and Focus. My Kindle queue hates me…

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” – Herbert Simon

My notes:

  • two groups of people were asked to give speeches; one group on the Good Samaritan parable; on their way to the lecture hall, people in each group “accidentally” bump into a stranger that needs their help; it didn’t matter whether the good samaritan parable was their speech topic (and thus on their minds) or another unrelated, control topic; what mattered was how much time pressure they were under (boy can I relate to this)
  • your intuition, your gut instinct is what one scientist calls “somatic markers”
  • there are 3 types of empathy:
    • cognitive empathy – knowing what another person knows
    • emotional empathy – immediately feeling what another person feels; reading and processing their emotions
    • empathic concern – “I know how you think and how you feel, and I’m pre-disposed to help” (Goleman believes this is a defining quality of leaders)
  • what matters in meditation is not focus, it’s bringing your mind back when it wanders; the “bringing it back” strengthens connectivity in your attention circuitry
  • before puberty, parents are primary in a kid’s life; after, it’s all about friends and peers
  • First-Person Shooter games strengthen a kid’s vigilance (ability to detect threats, process stimuli quickly) but also their hostile attribution bias (if another kid bumps into them, they will think it’s on purpose)
  • a study in the UK showed attention control (how focused you can be on the task in front of you) was more correlated with career success than family background or education level
  • in that famous study of whether kids could resist eating one marshmellow to be rewarded for their patience with two marshmellows, there was a 200 point difference in SAT scores when tracked over time; the crazy part? the kids all attended Bing Nursery School at Stanford, so I presume most were children of Stanford parents or faculty and admin — which means they had access to, on average, plenty of academic resources and parental attention
  • emotions are contagious and spread by:
    • expressivity of person
    • power and hierarchy
    • stability of emotions (which is why a monk can calm an angry person)
  • Goleman asks, why is it that a culture defaults to giving a pill to solve what is essentially a skill deficit? (attention, for example, is a skill that can be taught and practiced and improved)
  • behavioral inhibition, aka being “shy”; researchers thought it was genetic, but found a strong tie to parenting style: there are parents who publicly say things like “oh, she’s shy” and inhibit their kid from taking risks, and then they wonder why their kids don’t like public speaking and aren’t so outgoing; the parents that tell their child to “go ahead and try it anyway” raise more outgoing, more extroverted children