Meditation Odyssey, MBSR Week 2 - You can change your brain!

In a Washington, DC Metro Station, Joshua Bell, one of the world’s greatest violinists, played a beautiful, intricate, moving piece on violin…. During the 43 minutes he played, 1,097 people walk by. Only seven stopped to listen, and even those seven paused for only a few minutes. Two days before, Joshua Bell had played the same music to a sold-out audience in Boston where the seats averaged $100 each. His minimum fee for playing a public concert was $75,000. How could so many people have walked by?

That so few people stopped was not a demonstration of the cluelessness of these commuters, but how the busyness of our daily life can sometimes prevent us from noticing the beautiful and miraculous world all around us. How many amazingly beautiful things do we miss in a day, simply because of the pace of our lives and the intense focus on getting to the next thing?

These two paragraphs are taken directly from the Week 2 section of palousemindfulness.com, because I'm in Week 2 of following that program - and I have completed the “classwork” which starts with said paragraphs.

When I read them, I said to myself, well, music really moves me so I don’t think I would have walked by, and I’m pretty sure I would recognize Joshua freaking Bell.

Right after I thought those things, I watched a video for Week 2 called The Monkey Business Illusion, and I had never seen it before. It’s here:

Plus I learned a few more things about the day Joshua Bell played in the DC subway. He wore a baseball hat and non-descript clothes, and it was rush hour.

So yep. I take it back. Good chance I would have bustled right by like almost everyone else. If you watch the vid, I suspect you’ll be able to guess why I changed my mind about my observation powers.

I failed the video. I can’t tell you why exactly because that would be a “spoiler,” but, again, you’ll know if you watch. Maybe you’ll fail it too.

I’m glad I watched it because it adds to my resolve for this class and incorporating meditation into my life. Meditaiton may be the step change we need to make us, the human race, better. It’s at least part of it. If we’re aware, there’s a better chance we’ll stop wrecking the planet and each other. If we start with ourselves, start paying attention, one by one we improve the whole. Yeah?

Ok. Preachy. Blick.

So about this week’s teachings and what a week’s worth of the Body Scan has done for me.

Body Scan
What appears to be true is that I am completely out of touch and out of sync with my body. Drop down into your body. Feel your body. Be in your body. Yeah. No. I have learned I do not compute these phrases. I don’t know what they mean. I am way into my head. Way in. I need to break out of there. So it’s a good thing in Week 2 I am to continue with the Body Scan alternating with the Sitting Meditation. I also find the Body Scan is much better if I don’t fall asleep. I know. Mind blowing. Literally it turns out. Today I did not fall asleep, and I was consciously aware of the many times I was taken away by own thoughts. Like 100 bazillion times. But I was able to bring myself back to my breath each time, although the time it took to get back varied. But this is something.

Week 2 Teachings
This week’s stuff shares more about the science / psychology of why meditation is good which I, for one, appreciate. I need to be reminded of the benefits. Otherwise I get wrapped up in my shit, forget what I’m doing and why, and my commitment recedes. So I watched the vids and read the articles.

Shauna Shapiro was back, this time with Mindful Meditation and the Brain, followed by Measuring Mindfulness with Judson Brewer, then Life Is Right Now and Coming to Our Senses with Jon Kabat-Zinn, who I am now madly in love with, and All It Takes Is 10 Mindful Minutes with Andy Puddicombe which, I am happy to report, is a Ted Talk I had seen before but that I had forgotten, which I am less happy to report.

They’re all on the palousemindfulness.com site and on youtube:

Here are the things that struck me as important to call out:

You can change the very structure of your brain.
Until very recently commonly held belief was your adult brain can’t be changed. Ok. I think I had heard about this somewhere. (If you’re saying to yourself, yeah, everyone knows that, my retort is, look, I was an international studies and French double major which was very rigorous and that I was busy not going to class or studying for. So I did not get to take many elective classes like psychology 101. I bemoan this, because it turns out I am far more interested in psychology, and pretty much everything else, than politics but that’s spilt milk.) If it were true, the implications for our not being able to change our brains are big and grim, particularly since this belief led to two logical but erroneous conclusions that had not been debunked until just recently thanks to a study conducted by Richie Davidson, PhD, at University of Wisconsin Madison.

The first of these is that each person has a happiness “set point,” and no amount of joy or tragedy can prevent the return to that set point. This was news to me, and I’m glad I didn’t know about this until now because I would have been more depressed more often knowing I has no chance of altering my state of general malaise. For naturally happy, non-neurotic people, this is not upsetting. For the rest of us, it can be quite upsetting. Even worse than learning you would not be a Crawley in Downton Abbey had you lived then, but rather the help, for example.

However, since this was first posited, we have become besotted with the Dalai Lama and Buddhism, and Western science and Eastern philosophies have joined forces to bring very helpful, hopeful information into the light including that we too can change our brains.

The rub is no external force or thing can change our brains for us. No amount of money, or kitchen gadgets, or tech toys, or vacations in the Seychelles can change our brains and make us happier. Only we ourselves can change our own brains through, surprise!, mindfulness / meditation.

We are always on our way to someplace else literally and figuratively.
We are in the past or the future, worrying about something we did, will do or might do, or planning for some other time, some potential eventuality most of the time. With fear of stating the obvious, this means we are missing the moments we are in, in favor of the ones that may happen. We are missing our lives.

All I have to say about this is, yep, ok, and I am very interested in finding my moments.

Our educational system conditions us to think, and think critically, very well.
So? Yes, that's good, but.... What is that getting us? Per Jon Kabat Zinn, quite a lot of questionable thinking charged with emotions we don’t understand and on which we put way too much value. Since I have been reading about meditation, I have noticed how frequently my emotions, and my desires, change and change wildly, sometimes minute to minute, sometimes hour to hour. It’s crazy, but at the same time, it’s not, not really. It’s actually very normal for many of us, particularly the pubescent, testosterone-soaked male, and the peri-menopausal, estrogen depleted female like me. Emotions are largely chemically induced by hormones, and they make us do really stupid shit unless we’re aware of them and know they’re mucking about our brains and bodies and causing us great confusion.

Since hormones fluctuate so do emotions, and therefore both are unpredictable and unreliable. Is that an oversimplification? Sure, but almost everything is an oversimplification because life is very complex, and in order for us to operate in it, things need to be boiled down from time to time. Yes, this can be problematic but put that aside for the moment. The point here is emotions swing even within the same set of circumstances. Emotions are not truth tellers or indicators or predictors. They are quite the opposite and often completely untrustworthy. Yet they are responsible for countless decisions we make each day. Yikes! I can attest that I have acted on my emotions many times, and I am lucky I am not extremely poor or extremely dead as a result.

That all said, there’s nothing wrong with thinking and emotions can be wonderful. These things have defined and progressed humanity. We simply need to balance out the thinking and the emotions with awareness for them and their impacts on us so we can be present in our own lives…because our lives are fleeting.

We are lost in thought 47% of the time. That’s being lost half our lives.
Andy Puddicombe leads with this but does not get into what we’re doing the rest of the time. Could I be lost in my thoughts 100% of the time, and therefore wholly lost? Probably not but I bet I’m lost more in my thoughts than your average Josephine, and they aren’t that great the majority of these thoughts, so I’d just as soon not be.

And here’s thing, skeptics and /or critical thinkers. What is the downside to acknowledging even some of this is true and giving meditation a whirl? Seriously. What is it? You may “waste” 30 minutes of your day? Well I waste 30 minutes of my day dicking around on Pinterest collecting recipes I will never make so I’m jostling my pressing recipe-collecting and Netflix-watching activities around a bit to accommodate some sitting and scanning. If you’re heterosexual woman with kids, a super-charged job and a husband, you are off the hook. You probably need the meditation, so if you squeeze in two minutes of stillness, you’re my hero. If you can’t, well you can’t. If you’re a heterosexual man with the above, swapping out husband for wife, get over yourself. This may be judgmental and a generalization, but you are not doing a 1/16th of what your spouse is. You can work it in if you want.

OMG that is so badgering. I will beat myself up later for it if it’s any consolation. In the meantime, I am off to practice compassion for self and others and meditate.

If first time reader, this is a series. Background maybe be helpful. See below.

I started what I’m calling the meditation odyssey on Sun., Oct. 1. For those of you who have not read anything to date, which is most if not quite all of you, I will briefly recap what I’m doing and why.

To work with / understand / come to terms with my current dissatisfaction with life and self, I’m going to travel inwards on a “meditation odyssey” so I can be a person I like, or like the person I am (these are not the same thing) and live my life as fully and wholly as possible. Or at least know I tried. We’re only in this particular life once, and I’d like to make the most of it. And if reincarnation does exist, it doesn’t hurt to have accumulated a little wisdom in the life before...evolve one’s karma and all that so as to avoid winding up as a male praying mantis or such in the next go round.

So…… I’m following the “free” meditation course here https://palousemindfulness.com/ that mirrors the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program founded by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. It’s online, self-guided and “taught” by certified MBSR instructor Dave Potter (I called him Jeff Potter in my first intro post which I have since corrected. I do apologize Mr. Dave Potter!)

It’s an eight week program, and my goal is to share what I learn here on SteemIt and ultimately complete the thing and make meditation and mindfulness a life-long habit. I’ve had this goal before. I’m trying again.