This guide approached meditation from both the scientific and the spiritual. The spiritual can augment understanding some of these concepts more than just cold hard facts and science. To really understand something, experience, metaphors and analogies are wonderful and this is where the spiritual side is useful. Sort of like electricity was at first discovered, it was and is useful, but we got a lot of things wrong and didn’t really understand it at first. It’s why we still draw electric schemes the wrong way round to this day for example.
What is meditation
Goal to meditation is to attain something called enlightenment or Moksha.
There are 3 Sanskrit words for meditation:
- Dharana
- Focusing, guided meditation, concentrating on breath/sounds
- Outcome is a more controlled, focused, mindful mind
- Dhyana
- State of mind that is achieved with Dharana
- Usually happens to the mind after 8-10 weeks of dharana
- Outcome is reductions in depression, anxiety
- Samadhi
- Next state from Dhyana. State of temporary enlightenment that leads to neuroscientific changes
- May lead to permanent changes in your life, personality
It is okay not to be able to focus when doing dharana. A wandering mind is a normal thing. In a sense, each time your mind wanders and you bring it back to focus, it is almost like a pushup for the brain.
It is important to consider that there is no singular meditation. It is an umbrella term that covers many different traditions, practices. Each person should practice meditating in a way that is tailored to them.
A lot of meditation dates way back and mostly come from spirituality and is linked with religion as well. A lot of the terminology used has also stayed and some of it has been twisted enough to be considered ridiculous and now seen as dated in a decreasingly less religious world. It is important to look past this and see the meaning behind these, sometimes cryptic, words and find value in them regardless of what we believe in.
Tantric origins
Tantrics discovered methods to harness the “power of the universe”, the “infinite cosmic consciousness”:
- Mantra
- Chants and sounds to create a particular effect.
- Yantra
- Symbols of power, when one meditates on them or draws the symbols to create a particular effect.
- Yajna
- Specific rituals to create a particular effect.
Yoga
Combination of mantra, yantra, yajna were combined into yoga to tap into the “infinite cosmic conciousness”. To reconvene, to go back into the sea of universe, leads to the loss of individuality but become one with the source/roots again.
Reaching enlightenment by:
- Bhakti
- believing and praying to a god.
- Karma
- by doing good actions.
- Jnana
- through knowledge, philosophy
- Raja
- through willpower and method
Buddha had a lot of raja yogis that teached him. Buddhism led to Zen, which led to the modern mindfulness. So following this path from tantric methods to yoga methods to buddha to zen to mindfulness we see that it is a very tiny fraction of meditation as a whole, even though mindfulness is talked about the most nowadays.
Science
Hormone are body wide effects, cortisol is the hormone that gets the body ready for a stressful encounter. More specifically cortisol prepares the body for a longer term stress. From an evolutionary perspective it comes from remaining vigilant after something dangerous has happened. So to not only release adrenaline in time of danger, but also release cortisol after to make us more alert in case the danger appears again.
Even worse that cortisol also preps the immune system because it gets ready to fight the bad stuff from scrapes, scratches and other wounds. But as the stressful event nowadays tend to be more mental than physical, there is nothing for the immune system to fight with, but since the immune system is “trigger happy” it starts attacking parts of the body itself.
In stress physiology it is said that we have this part of our body called HPA axis: the three parts of our body and brain that govern stress. Science shows that about 17 minutes of focused meditation is what is required to shut off the stress hormone (including cortisol) production in the HPA axis.
There can be too much stress that will worsen the mind and body, but there can also be too little stress. Humas strive on a balance of stress called eustress (related to the flow state).
Yin and yang, sun and moon, surya and chandra are old ideas related to the state of a person being ready for action and a state of calmness, chill. When looking at the autonomic nervous system (sympathetic, the survival system, and parasympathetic, the rest system), it almost perfectly matches that of the theories/beliefs described before.
Frontal lobes do things like impulse control, executive functions, planning. There is overwhelming evidence that meditation strengthens frontal lobes. The libmic system handles the emotions. Sometimes there can be kind of a push and pull between the frontal lobes and the limbic system: you feel anxious, but the frontal lobes tell you that “it’s all in your head, don’t worry!” Meditation helps to detach the frontal lobes from the limbic system, to regain control over the lobes and regain dominance over the limbic system so to speak. Note that this does not mean a loss of emotions, rather the emotions can be put into context better. Related to the frontal lobes are some other parts of the brain that relate to empathy, which is why meditating develops greater empathy and compassion.
Association cortices attach meaning to particular events. Meditating for a long time has been shown to separate us from out association cortices. In meditation there is a lot of talk about detachment or gaining distance from emotions/thoughts or “taking a step back to look at the bigger picture”. The ability to take that said step back is goverened by the association cortices.
The mind
The active and unconscious mind
The conscious/active mind is full of thoughts, the unconscious mind is the storehouse of information. The mind recalls things from the unconscious to the active and then writes stuff back into the unconscious. The calmer the active mind is, the more we are able to write into the unconscious. So for recall and studying, the best time is when the active mind is the calmest and there are not a lot of distractions. The environment makes the difference between wether it is possible to read a page and understand/recall it with ease or read it 5 times without anything sticking. In this sense it is not the information on the pages or the number of repetitions, but the calmness of the mind. That’s why studying should not be thought as just reading text, it is about that light bulb effect, really understanding it.
The yogis came to a conclusion that reading information does not mean that the mind will absorb it, rather it triggers pre-existing knowledge. That light bulb effect is making a connections between memories and prior bits from the warehouse of the unconscious.
It is pertinent to realize that the process of calming the active mind and writing stuff into the unconscious is different for everyone. No one method will make everyone able to study and focus for 8 hours every day. Some are naturally able to focus on command, some may use the early hours when their minds haven’t yet gotten to all the different distractions and thoughts, some may use the night, when they’ve already finished thinking about the daily things so to say. Actually this cycle of using the active mind and writing stuff into the unconscious is important to get right. This is where spaced repetition comes form. To really remember anything, we need to have information go through multiple writes into the unconscious. But we can only do so many cycles of this loop before we get tired or hit the limit of writing into the unconscious. We can never really study for 8 hours straight while retaining everything. This loops should be done in smaller increments (length varies person to person). Taking breaks, naps and getting enough sleep is very important to actually locking information.
Dawn and dusk are generally thought as very beautiful to generally every human. Partly that is because the human visual acuity is the highest at dawn and dusk. So evolutionarily mammals and thus humans are most active at dawn and dusk. This is also part of why we mostly categorize people into two groups: the late night owls and early morning larks. And which group we fall into is not set in stone, it can be systematically and habitually changed, the circadian rythm is quite malleable.
Mastering the mind
Yogis believed that the truest self is separate from the thinking mind. They found that we have all these emotions and thoughts and bips and bobs in the mind, but above all else we have the capacity to watch those things sort of from afar. This sort of mindfulness is called Sakshi Bhava, translated as witnessing attitude, the capacity to look at ourselves. They thought it as something separate because the observer and the observed are fundamentally different things, as such this self must be separate from the mind.
States of mental activity can be plotted on two axes. On one we have mental activity, the other consciousness. Then we end up with something like this:
- Unconscious + mentally inactive: Sleep
- Unconscious + mentally active: Dreaming and daydreaming
- Conscious + mentally active: Normal waking activity
- Conscious + mentally inactive: Meditating
Separating thoughts from the self is very important. This is why we say things like “take a look at the bigger picture” and “take a step back” when talking about some problems. Phsychosis and thought fusion describe a process where the self becomes combined with thoughts. In that case the thought become the reality and there is no way or it is very difficult to “take the step back” to evaluate. Cognitive behavioral therapy aims to do thought defusion, to once again separate thoughts from the self. This is also why meditation or mindfulness is described as the process of detachment.
Thoughts come from inside and outside. If I see a dog, I will start thinking about it, that’s outside. Interestingly populating thoughts always starts from exposure, the outside. It’s sort of like someone who is very into a game, they play it, the watch others play it, they discuss it with the friends and it soft of populates a significant part of their thoughts. Unpopulating thoughts then is reduced exposure, “out of sight, out of mind” as they say. The yogis believed that while changing the environment to reduce exposure helps it is not always possible and not the only way. They thought that it is possible to control what comes into the mind by being aware of it. The other way is from inside. Sanskrit word for the memories that they come from is samskaras. It is sort of like when we learn 1+1 and we can recall it when we need it later. Same works with when our parents tell us that we are bad when we are making too much noise in childhood and we retrieve this same feeling of feeling “bad” and inadequate when in similar situations in adulthood. The best things with the thoughts that come from the inside is that it is possible to shape and cultivate these ourselves. We can be the parent that lays the groundwork to how we think and what triggers these thoughts.
The self
Yogis believed that a lot of the suffering in life comes from not understanding who we truly are. From the perspective of Brahman, the cosmic consciousness, which coalesces into energy and energy into matter. They asked what combination of this energy and matter makes the human self. The usual suspects, what people usually point to as the self:
- The body changes, but self remains, it can not be the body.
- The mind also goes through a lot of changes and regardless of the state of mind and emotional state, there is still this underlying you-ness that transcends emotions.
- The identity or the ego, certain attributes and roles that people identify with also change over time. Without knowing the self that transcends all of these, the mind starts filling in what the yogis call the false self. That is mostly to do with the ego that people usually start to strongly identify with. And they thought that the more we identify with the ego, the more we suffer. Yogis believed that the real self is the observing self.
Panchakosha theory (pancha being Sanskrit for five, kosha a sheath) aka the five layer theory describes humans as having 5 layers:
- Annamaya kosha - physical layer
- Pranamaya kosha - energetic layer (Eastern theory of chi/prana, the vital life energy)
- Manomaya kosha - emotional layer
- Vijnanamaya kosha - intellectual layer, thoughts, analysis, the ego
- Anandamaya kosha - bliss layer, the soul, the you-ness that trancends the other parts of self, the observing self
To take care of these layers:
- Physical - Surya namaskara yoga, sunlight exposure, exercise, balanced diet
- Energetic - Pranayama and qi gong breathing exercises, yoga, Tai Chi
- Emotional - Psychotherapy, counseling, spending time in nature, journaling, self-reflective processes, meditation
- Intellectual - Pratyhara practice, controlling the senses/indriyas, reading, stimulating curiosity, learning new things
- Soul - Meditation, mindful self observance, find dharma/purpose/meaning
- For all of the above - Shuddhi practices, cleansing yoga
Confidence vs Ego
Some of the brighter kids are told a lot in their childhood that they are smart for being ahead of others, for grasping things fast etc. Usually this attaches to their ego the desire to be considered smart, to do things that would make others tell them how smart they are etc. It might work for a while in early school years for example when there is no real difficulty in the studies. But interestingly these smart kids may find it super hard once they get to upper secondary education or college where studying requires more effort. So the ego gets all confused “I am supposed to be smart, why do I have to put in effort. The ones who have to put effort in are not smart.” So they might start avoiding things that they do not immediately succeed in, world becoming narrower and narrower. The identity revolves around being smart and grasping things without effort and anything that does not fit this is considered almost like a threat to the identity of the false self.
Confidence is the ability to face uncertainty. Confidence does not come from success, it comes from surviving failure. Stacking the odds in ones favor, trying to play it safe, taking things from a distance may seem like methods to achieve a goal, but usually comes from insecurity and risk avoidance. The more we try to remove uncertainty the more it feeds insecurity, the less confident we are. This is where cheting in games comes from, there is no confidence in skills. Cheating removes all uncertainty from victory, the end goal, but the method comes from insecurity. Confidence comes from within, not from others. Confidence is a sense of value that is derived internally, ego is a sense of value that is derived from the outside, from others. Interestingly social media amplifes the outside signal of people’s estimation and rattles the ego even more (Why finding a partner is so hard in the internet age). Ego, ahamkara, comes from comparison, and social media makes comparison amazingly simple and endless. Social media fosters ego, encourages comparison, decreases confidence.
Gain confidence:
- Face uncertainty, don’t stack odds in your favor as a way to reinforce insecurity.
- Survive and learn from failure
- Focus on the internal not external value
- Spend time with people, especially the ones you care about, avoid letting randoms in your life (like exposing yourself to too many opinions of others in social media)
- Spend time in nature, where comparisons pretty much don’t exist, just you and nature existing
Karma Fal / Action vs Outcome
In Hindu tradition Krishna explains to Arjuna that humans don’t deserve any kind of fruit from actions. All humans are entitled to are actions themselves (The Power Of Now - enlightenment). This is pretty much opposite to the modern outcome oriented thinking which leads to a lot of suffering. How many likes did something get? What grade did you get? How much money do you make? All questions regarding the outcome, not the action or process. And if the outcome does not match with our expectation, it shatters motivation. Krishna tells that we should devote ourselves to actions not outcomes. Focusing on the outcome is an endless loop if we define success by outcome because there is always a higher goal to achieve.
Framing goals based on outcome actually makes the brain work against us. Brain is incredibly good at behavioural reinforcement, if things work out a particular way consistently the brain will reinforce that as a belief. If something does not get the desired result, the brain discourages that behaviour in the future. If we set goals with outcomes in mind and we don’t reach those goals then the brain sort of sees it as futile and useless. Reframing goals as little constituent components, a series on tasks broken down from a single abstract outcome is a way of focusing on actions.
Motivation
Motivation is usually thought of as desire. That a highly motivated person just wants something more, that is why they are motivated. But a person might still want something very much without taking action, so it seems desire and motivation are separate. Habit is automatic thought and motivation is intentional thought. Motivation is the ability to hold a thought persistently in the mind. Yogis call motivation the concentrated or one-pointed mind. Then loss of motivation is when a lot of different thought occupy the mind and focus is lost on the thing that we wanted to focus on initially. To be motivated on something, it has to occupy the mind and thoughts in a large part. There is no lack of motivation, it is that the motivation is directed somewhere else.
Sanskrit word sangha, means community. Building the right kind of community shapes thinking in a way, thinking shapes actions. It is not possible to take action without thought. So to influence actions we must master thoughts. Humans are very social animals, so who we spend time with influences our thoughts and beliefs a lot. There are always certain things communities encourage and discourage, do those things align with the things we agree with? What effect do people have on my motivation? What do they get me to think about?
Shuddhi / Cleansing
Optimal mental and physical performance comes from a clean body and mind. Yogis in ancient India discovered that shuddhi, or cleansing is crucial to developing a good meditative practice. It comes from things like brain fog or feeling sluggish which yogis thought as something to clean out of the body and mind.
Showering itself is actually conducive to profound mental thinking (showerthoughts are a popular example). Tied to the feeling of invigoration, clear-headedness and refreshness after a shower. It’s related to clinical correlation between depression and cleanliness of the home/personal room. Research has shown that clean environments lead to more optimal mental function. It has to do with the outside stimulus that comes from the senses. If there are more things to sense then there are more things to focus on. Even if it just the background, the brain will keep note of things around us and that takes mental energy.
Sleeping is cleaning too, one of the most important part of sleeping is the clearing of a neurochemical called adenosine from our cells. It is a waste product that accumulates and is cleaned only during sleep. A lot of neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, dementia etc come from an inability to clear out these proteinaceous materials, waste products.
Psychotherapy is sort of emotional cleaning. Trauma, repressed memories etc can be thought of as emotional waste.
Cleansing comes from:
- Personal hygiene - showering, brushing teeth, doing laundry
- Space cleaning - keeping the room clean, letting fresh air in, using incense
- Mental cleaning - keeping the inboxes empty, cleaning the desktop, psychotherapy
Samskaras / Mental Programming
The Western concept of personality is captured in the East by a collection of samskaras or mental programming. This mental programming can result in things like self sabotage in relationships or progress in life.
Each of us has these automatic thoughts and reactions - samskaras - to events and situations in life. It is learned behaviour the mind has retained and reinforced. It is like psychological scarring, similar to physical wounds that from a scar tissue that is protective, maybe not as functional, but more protective and rigid. Our mind is the same way in response to negative emotions, the psychological wound gets covered by this protective inflexible scar tissue that leaves the mind a little bit more inflexible. Samaskara is this ball of emotional energy that was adaptive at some point but over time has gotten so inflexible that it has become maladaptive and counterproductive.
In psychiatry there is a psychological defense mechanism called regression. Essentially under a period of stress we might regress to a prior age. This can be thought of as the mind transforming into an age which the samskara was formed. It may not seem logical, but it makes sense when considering that at the time of forming the samskara, things and thoughts were different, so at the time the mind was playing by a different set of rules. The samskara might not make sense in the context where it was later activated, so it ends up self-sabotaging. When not intervened, these samskaras can be reinforced to be evene stronger on each activation, this might lead to things like the borderline personality disorder.
Interestingly the mind prefers familiar over good. So even if we might recognize some bad samaskaras then we can find it super hard to do anything about them as the mind wants to default back to these familiar thought patterns.
The first step to dealing with samskaras is to find and define them. It is important to catch the samskaras in the act and see how they affect us. It might be quite though as the mind wants to transform and go back to the time when it was formed, that includes the thoughts and strong feelings from that time as well. But if we are able to take a step back and observe them then we can take it apart, deal with it or let it pass.
Vidya and Jnana / Knowledge
Sanskrit has two words for knowledge:
- Vidya - information, facts, objective, transmissible knowledge.
- Jnana - understanding, wisdom, subjective knowledge.
It is very important to make a distinction between these things as the first is very easy to transmit, but transmitting jnana is very difficult. How would someone describe how they got sober, how they got to undestand how they make food, how did they find their success etc? How do you explain that one day you woke up and suddenly understood exactly what you needed to do? Difference between knowledge and understanding is sort of like the difference between reading science articles and romance novels vs actually being in love. To really understand love, you have to be in love.
Same is with addiction. We can reference a million articles and the smartest doctors while saying that smoking is bad, bit that won’t get anyone to stop. It is not until a person realizes, like really gets to the light bulb themselves, that they can give it up. It is not that some people are magically more disciplined, just that they have come to their own jnana. There is no willpower involved if understanding itself has changed the way of thinking about something, no discipline.
To find your own subjective jnana, it has to be discovered, it is internal, it is founded in experience not information.
Dukkha / Suffering
Dukkha, or suffering, which is born of our attachments. Many of us seek particular things – whether it be a relationship, a job, money, or worldly prestige – thinking it will lead us to happiness. But as it turns out, there are many things we can do that may be painful, but bizarrely may lead us to peace. And that if we live a life of pleasure seeking, we’ll still feel discontent.
Unhappiness is the mind telling “oh, I’m missing something!” When this is satisfied, for a few days the mind is fine, but then when thinking about other things it starts wanting the next things and so on. Even worse for very successful people. For example Buddha, who was a king, very powerful, respected, had a wonderful accomplished wife, so it seems like he was screwed because what else was there to satisfy? He still ended up feeling dukkha. Buddha realized that every human is entitled two things in life:
- Dukkha
- Death
A lot people try to seek pleasure and avoid pain. But even very successful people seem to feel this lack of contentment. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna explains to Arjuna that this suffering has nothing to do with any situation itself, but the personal attachment to the situation, the expectations about the situation. Important to note that dukkha is not on the axis of sadness vs happiness, someone without dukkha can still be happy or sad, it is more on the axis of peace vs suffering. To explain this attachment, think about high school for example. At the time, everything - the grades, what to wear, crushes, gossip, being popular or whatever - seemed so significant. But a couple of years after graduation those things seem a lot less significant. Nothing changed about high school, but you became more detached from it, so it does not bother you any more.
Dharma / Duty
Sanskrit concept of dharma or duty. The yogis discovered that the antidote to dukkha or suffering, was doing one’s duty. Instead of running away from pain, dharma is what allows us to embrace it. So much of our life is controlled by our aversion to pain, and if we can tap into dharma we can choose the more difficult road in life far more easily.
Sanskrit describes raga and dvesha, attraction and repulsion respectively to certain things by the mind. But because the mind is wired for survival, not happiness or contentment, the things it is attracted to might not be the things that are good for us. Why study when I can lay in the grass? Why spend time creating a balanced meal when I can grab a pizza? Dharma is what allows us the pick the path we need with ease despite our raga and dvesha. It is the difference between running to cover when a gun is pointed at us, but running in front of the gun if it is pointed at our child.
Karma
Dharma is intrinsically linked to karma, finding ones duty has a lot to do with chance and circumstance. You can not know ahead of time when duty presents itself, it is determined by karma. Actually dharma is everchanging and getting these nudges from karma all the time.
Erik Erikson said life is divided into stages of dharma. For example:
- Teenage years - primary dharma is to figure out who we are
- Retirement years - primary dharma is to look back and figure out if we’ve done enough
In Eastern philosophy there are Ashrams:
- Brahmacharya Ashram (first 20-25 years)- learn, aquire skills, study, learn how to be capable individual
- Grihastha Ashram - householder phase, apply skills and knowledge, travel, benefit yourself
- Vanaprastha Ashram - transition phase, benefit others
- Sannyasa - give up material life, detach and devote to self understanding and enlightenment
Practices
Mantra
So the conventional idea of mantras, repeating something to achieve an effect is only part of the truth. The goal of mantra has nothing to do with telling or internalizing yourself something, it has everything to do with calming the mind. The first stage is then: by repeating something, the mind becomes calm. The second, after the mind is clear and calm, is to plant what we want in the mind.
Nadi Shuddhi - alternate nostril breathing
Balances your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. It also provides enough attention to the mind to keep your mind from wandering too much. In this meditation we will block one nostril, breathe in through the other nostril, and then switch sides to breathe out.
Practice Instructions:
- The spine should be straight for meditation so this practice can be done sitting up straight, standing up, or laying down
- Block/press down on your right nostril with your thumb or index finger using your right hand
- Inhale through the left nostril
- Now block/press down on the left nostril with your ring and middle fin
- Exhale through the right nostril
- Then, inhale through same the right nostril
- Block the right nostril with your thumb or index finger using your right hand
- Exhale through the left nostril
- This completes one round
Anuloma Viloma - alternate attention breathing
Practice Instructions:
- No using fingers, just focusing the attention on inhalation and exhalation in the contralateral nostril.
- As you inhale, focus on your left nostril - feel the air flow through it.
- As you exhale focus on your right nostril - feel the air flow out.
- Inhale again, but this time focusing on your right nostril.
- Exhale through you your left nostril to complete one round.
Prana Shuddhi - attention breathing
Practice Instructions:
- Now that you can detect the breath in each nostril, now detect them going up both nostrils
- Feel your breath and imagine the flow as an inverted “V” going to the eyebrow center (space between your eyebrows)
- Exhale from your eyebrow center outward
Following the Breath
Following the breath is an inquisitive practice. Some practices are about doing something, while others are about discovering something. Some of us have minds that don’t like to obey but love to explore. This is fine for meditation as well. Subtlety is a key pan of meditative practice. At the start, we notice just the gross things, the visible things, and the apparent things. As we practice meditation, we begin to notice the subtle things - the creeping bit of ego that dictates our actions, our cognitive biases, our defense mechanisms, our rationalizations. We begin to find the subtle roots of our fears and anxieties, understand where our self sabotaging patterns come from. So train your mind in subtlety in order to detect the very minor things. To be able to detect the slightest flow of breath is a training in subtlety.
Practice Instructions:
- Observe your breathing
- Notice the temperature of the breath
- Can you feel it?
- Is it cold? Warm?
- Does it vary during inhalation or exhalation?
- Now that you have found the feeling of breath, now see where it goes
- Scan different parts of your body
- Pay attention to: the tip of your nose, nasal passages, back of the throat, down into the lungs
- Now look in other places… very unusual places
- Follow the sensations of coldness, warmth.