"Science and meditation teachings are exactly parallel, but they don't speak the same language.
" Mingyur Rinpoche, new generation of Tibetan Buddhist Masters Did you know that a daily meditation practice soothes and awakens your brain's highest potential? Of course you did.
But how? No, really.
How? 1) When you sit down with the committed intention to meditate, you light up the frontal cortex - that's the part of the brain behind your forehead.
This engages your limbic system, which is really just a system of nerves and networks in the brain that controls your basic emotions and drives.
So when you sit down with your intention, the emotions get involved and you begin to have positive feelings.
Great start.
2) You are actually built to handle stress, but not chronic stress, and of course it's very difficult to be mindful when you're stressed.
Stress activates the monkey-mind tendencies inside you, which is all part of your flight or fight system.
This stress is connected to your sympathetic nervous system, and here you have the real power: You can calm down your sympathetic nervous system simply through consciously exhaling.
That's the trick.
Half a dozen long, slow exhales.
Your brain is then soothed and you feel balanced.
3) It's very important to feel safe in life, and meditation is the best place to practice this feeling.
For the most part we overestimate threats and underestimate opportunities & resources for dealing with threats.
Unfortunately.
But you CAN feel safer than you normally do.
You can feel less guarded, less braced, and more confident in your ability to meet life.
You know you can.
And practicing it in meditation rehearses it for life.
This sense of safety helps you to be present and conscious, because you cannot be internally self-aware if you are continually scanning for threats (worries, fears, mistrusts) and increasing your external vigilance.
4) Not that it's a given, but you typically experience a sense of necessary well-being in meditation.
And you want to continue to experience that as you go about your day.
Maintaining that focus requires holding it in your 'working memory', which is a kind of gate that is either open or closed.
Figures.
When it's closed, the content of it (a well-being feeling, for example) stays there.
That translates to you as a steady mind, a grounded or centred feeling, and you are able to stay with whatever you want to pay attention to.
This gate stays closed because of a steady drop of the brain transmitter, dopamine, BUT, the gate pops open when you get distracted, when you allow yourself to become guarded, or anything that sends the signal to the brain that you are no longer meditating.
Got it? Staying in the meditative state increases your memory of feeling, and that ripples out into your life.
Thank you, brain.
5) Another experience of meditation is the glorious feeling of boundless space - of weightlessness, limitlessness, flying, expansion.
This feeling activates the networks on the side of your head that are associated with mindful, open, and spacious awareness.
What I love, is that meditation moves you out of the typical mind state in the middle of the brain (which is busy planning, thinking about the past, using language...
and always with a strong sense of self or ego).
Don't get me wrong though.
It's important to function from the middle of the brain, but you probably tend to overemphasize the activities in your midline sections, and therefore get a strong buildup in those regions.
It takes training and practice to activate the expansive lateral networks.
You can do this through trusting in the process and flow of life, and by practicing non-attachment, but it's infinitely easier to practice this in meditation.
In meditation you can cultivate a sense of boundless awareness, of expansive bliss.
You can obtain and experience a bird's-eye, panoramic view and sense of the world, your life, and all things in it.
In its wholeness, your meditation practice stimulates a mindful attention, called neural substrates - but don't worry about that term.
I'm just trying to inject science into the meditative experience.
With an ongoing practice, you build up the substrates of compassion, self-esteem, resilience, insight, and deep concentration.
These build-ups actually make your brain thicker! Crazy, huh? It builds synapses, synaptic networks, and layers of capillaries, if you really want to know.
The pre-frontal cortex (behind the forehead, remember?) is the part of your brain that is involved in deliberately paying attention to something.
It's the executive control of attention, giving you more development in your concentration.
And, it gets thicker too.
I know.
And in meditation, when you're scanning your internal sense of your body, and becoming aware of your higher feelings of other people (or advanced empathy and self-awareness), you are causing the insula part of your brain to get thicker as well.
Okay, that's enough for now.
Or forever.
I get it.
TMI.
But here again, here are the basic instructions for how to meditate in 5 easy steps 1) Bring your awareness and focus to what you're doing (meditating) 2) Soften your thinking and your body by exhaling longer than your inhales 3) Drop your guard by allowing yourself to feel as safe as you reasonably can 4) Using your senses, open to the simple feelings of well-being 5) Become aware of the unlimited, expansive space And do all this for no other reason than to soothe and awaken your brain's highest potential.
This is your brain on meditation.
Any questions?
" Mingyur Rinpoche, new generation of Tibetan Buddhist Masters Did you know that a daily meditation practice soothes and awakens your brain's highest potential? Of course you did.
But how? No, really.
How? 1) When you sit down with the committed intention to meditate, you light up the frontal cortex - that's the part of the brain behind your forehead.
This engages your limbic system, which is really just a system of nerves and networks in the brain that controls your basic emotions and drives.
So when you sit down with your intention, the emotions get involved and you begin to have positive feelings.
Great start.
2) You are actually built to handle stress, but not chronic stress, and of course it's very difficult to be mindful when you're stressed.
Stress activates the monkey-mind tendencies inside you, which is all part of your flight or fight system.
This stress is connected to your sympathetic nervous system, and here you have the real power: You can calm down your sympathetic nervous system simply through consciously exhaling.
That's the trick.
Half a dozen long, slow exhales.
Your brain is then soothed and you feel balanced.
3) It's very important to feel safe in life, and meditation is the best place to practice this feeling.
For the most part we overestimate threats and underestimate opportunities & resources for dealing with threats.
Unfortunately.
But you CAN feel safer than you normally do.
You can feel less guarded, less braced, and more confident in your ability to meet life.
You know you can.
And practicing it in meditation rehearses it for life.
This sense of safety helps you to be present and conscious, because you cannot be internally self-aware if you are continually scanning for threats (worries, fears, mistrusts) and increasing your external vigilance.
4) Not that it's a given, but you typically experience a sense of necessary well-being in meditation.
And you want to continue to experience that as you go about your day.
Maintaining that focus requires holding it in your 'working memory', which is a kind of gate that is either open or closed.
Figures.
When it's closed, the content of it (a well-being feeling, for example) stays there.
That translates to you as a steady mind, a grounded or centred feeling, and you are able to stay with whatever you want to pay attention to.
This gate stays closed because of a steady drop of the brain transmitter, dopamine, BUT, the gate pops open when you get distracted, when you allow yourself to become guarded, or anything that sends the signal to the brain that you are no longer meditating.
Got it? Staying in the meditative state increases your memory of feeling, and that ripples out into your life.
Thank you, brain.
5) Another experience of meditation is the glorious feeling of boundless space - of weightlessness, limitlessness, flying, expansion.
This feeling activates the networks on the side of your head that are associated with mindful, open, and spacious awareness.
What I love, is that meditation moves you out of the typical mind state in the middle of the brain (which is busy planning, thinking about the past, using language...
and always with a strong sense of self or ego).
Don't get me wrong though.
It's important to function from the middle of the brain, but you probably tend to overemphasize the activities in your midline sections, and therefore get a strong buildup in those regions.
It takes training and practice to activate the expansive lateral networks.
You can do this through trusting in the process and flow of life, and by practicing non-attachment, but it's infinitely easier to practice this in meditation.
In meditation you can cultivate a sense of boundless awareness, of expansive bliss.
You can obtain and experience a bird's-eye, panoramic view and sense of the world, your life, and all things in it.
In its wholeness, your meditation practice stimulates a mindful attention, called neural substrates - but don't worry about that term.
I'm just trying to inject science into the meditative experience.
With an ongoing practice, you build up the substrates of compassion, self-esteem, resilience, insight, and deep concentration.
These build-ups actually make your brain thicker! Crazy, huh? It builds synapses, synaptic networks, and layers of capillaries, if you really want to know.
The pre-frontal cortex (behind the forehead, remember?) is the part of your brain that is involved in deliberately paying attention to something.
It's the executive control of attention, giving you more development in your concentration.
And, it gets thicker too.
I know.
And in meditation, when you're scanning your internal sense of your body, and becoming aware of your higher feelings of other people (or advanced empathy and self-awareness), you are causing the insula part of your brain to get thicker as well.
Okay, that's enough for now.
Or forever.
I get it.
TMI.
But here again, here are the basic instructions for how to meditate in 5 easy steps 1) Bring your awareness and focus to what you're doing (meditating) 2) Soften your thinking and your body by exhaling longer than your inhales 3) Drop your guard by allowing yourself to feel as safe as you reasonably can 4) Using your senses, open to the simple feelings of well-being 5) Become aware of the unlimited, expansive space And do all this for no other reason than to soothe and awaken your brain's highest potential.
This is your brain on meditation.
Any questions?
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