13 Altering Traits

 

 

In the beginning nothing comes, in the middle nothing stays, in the end nothing goes.” That enigmatic riddle comes from Jetsun Milarepa, Tibet’s eminent twelfth-century poet, yogi, and sage.1

 

Matthieu Ricard unpacks Milarepa’s puzzle this way: at the start of contemplative practice, little or nothing seems to change in us. After continued practice, we notice some changes in our way of being, but they come and go. Finally, as practice stabilizes, the changes are constant and enduring, with no fluctuation. They are altered traits.

 

Taken as a whole, the data on meditation track a rough vector of progressive transformations, from beginners through the long-term meditators and on to the yogis. This arc of improvement seems to reflect both lifetime hours of practice as well as time on retreat with expert guidance.

 

The studies of beginners typically look at the impacts from under 100 total hours of practice—and as few as 7. The long-term group, mainly vipassana meditators, had a mean of 9,000 lifetime hours (the range ran from 1,000 to 10,000 hours and more).

 

And the yogis studied in Richie’s lab, had all done at least one Tibetanstyle three-year retreat, with lifetime hours up to Mingyur’s 62,000. Yogis, on average had three times more lifetime hours than did long-term meditators—9,000 hours versus 27,000.

 

A few long-term vipassana meditators had accumulated more than 20,000 lifetime hours and one or two up to 30,000, though none had done a three-year retreat, which became a de facto distinguishing feature of the yogi group. Despite the rare overlaps in lifetime hours, the vast majority of the three groups fall into these rough categories.

 

There are no hard-and-fast lifetime hour cutoffs for the three levels, but research on them has clustered in particular ranges. We’ve organized meditation’s benefits into three dose-response levels, roughly mapping on the novice to amateur to professional rankings found in expertise of all kinds, from ballerinas to chess champions.

 

The vast majority of meditators in the West fall into the first level: people who meditate for a short period—a few minutes to half an hour or so on most days. A smaller group continues on to the long-term meditator level. And a mere handful attain the expertise of the yogis.

 

Let’s look at the impacts in those who have just begun a meditation practice. When it comes to stress recovery, the evidence for some benefits in the first few months of daily practice are more subjective than objective —and shaky. On the other hand the amygdala, a key node in the brain’s stress circuitry, shows lessened reactivity after thirty or so hours over eight weeks of MBSR practice.

 

Compassion meditation shows stronger benefits from the get-go; as few as seven total hours over the course of two weeks leads to increased connectivity in circuits important for empathy and positive feelings, strong enough to show up outside the meditation state per se. This is the first sign of a state morphing into a trait, though these effects likely will not last without daily practice. But the fact that they appear outside the formal meditation state itself may reflect our innate wiring for basic goodness.

 

Beginners also find improvements in attention very early on, including less mind-wandering after just eight minutes of mindfulness practice—a short-lived benefit, to be sure. But even as little as two weeks of practice is sufficient to produce less mind-wandering and better focus and working memory, enough for a significant boost in scores on the GRE, the entrance exam for graduate school. Indeed, some findings suggest decreases in activation in the self-relevant regions of the default mode with as little as two months of practice. When it comes to physical health, there is more good news: small improvements in the molecular markers of cellular aging seem to emerge with just thirty hours of practice.

 

Still, all such effects are unlikely to persist without sustained practice. Even so, these benefits strike us as surprisingly strong for beginners. Takehome: practicing meditation can pay off quickly in some ways, even if you have just started.

 

IN THE LONG TERM

 

Sticking with meditation over the years offers more benefits as meditators reach the long-term range of lifetime hours, around 1,000 to 10,000 hours. This might mean a daily meditation session, and perhaps annual retreats with further instruction lasting a week or so—all sustained over many years. The earlier effects deepen, while others emerge.

 

For example, in this range we see the emergence of neural and hormonal indicators of lessened stress reactivity. In addition, functional connectivity in the brain in a circuit important for emotion regulation is strengthened, and cortisol, a key hormone secreted by the adrenal gland in response to stress, lessens.

 

Loving-kindness and compassion practice over the long term enhance neural resonance with another person’s suffering, along with concern and a greater likelihood of actually helping. Attention, too, strengthens in many aspects with long-term practice: selective attention sharpens, the attentional blink diminishes, sustained attention becomes easier, and an alert readiness to respond increases. And long-term practitioners show enhanced ability to down-regulate the mind-wandering and self-obsessed thoughts of the default mode, as well as weakening connectivity within those circuits— signifying less self-preoccupation. These improvements often show up during meditative states, and generally tend to become traits.

 

Shifts in very basic biological processes, such as a slower breath rate, occur only after several thousand hours of practice. Some of these impacts seem more strongly enhanced by intensive practice on retreat than by daily practice.

 

While evidence remains inconclusive, neuroplasticity from long-term practice seems to create both structural and functional brain changes, such as greater working connection between the amygdala and the regulatory circuits in the prefrontal areas. And the neural circuits of the nucleus accumbens associated with “wanting” or attachment appear to shrink in size with longer-term practice.

 

While in general we see a gradient of shifts with more lifetime meditation hours, we suspect there are different rates of change in disparate neural systems. For instance, the benefits of compassion come sooner than does stress mastery. We expect studies in the future will fill in the details of a dose-response dynamic for various brain circuits.

 

Intriguing signs suggest that long-term meditators to some degree undergo state-by-trait effects that enhance the potency of their practice. Some elements of the meditative state, like gamma waves, may continue during sleep. And a daylong retreat by seasoned meditators benefited their immune response at the genetic level—a finding that startled the medical establishment.

 

THE YOGIS

 

At this world-class level (roughly 12,000 to 62,000 lifetime hours of practice, including many years in deep retreat), truly remarkable effects emerge. Practice in part revolves around converting meditative states to traits—the Tibetan term for this translates as “getting familiar” with the meditative mind-set. Meditation states merge with daily activities, as altered states stabilize into altered traits and become enduring characteristics.

 

Here Richie’s group saw signs of altered traits in the yogi’s brain function and even structure, along with strongly positive human qualities. The jump in synchronized gamma oscillations initially observed during compassion meditation was also found, albeit to a lesser extent, in the baseline state. In other words, for the yogis this state has become a trait.

 

State-by-trait interactions mean that what happens during meditation can be very different for the yogis, showing up starkly when compared with novices doing the same practice. Perhaps the strongest evidence comes from the yogis’ response to physical pain during simple mindfulness-type practice: a sharp “inverted V,” with little brain activity during anticipation of the pain, an intense but very short peak during the pain, followed by very rapid recovery.

 

For most of us who meditate, concentration takes mental effort, but for the yogis with most lifetime hours, it becomes effortless. Once their attention locks onto a target stimulus, their neural circuits for effortful attention go quiet while their attention stays perfectly focused.

 

When the yogis meditate on compassion there’s a strengthening of the coupling between heart and brain beyond what is ordinarily seen. Finally, there is that tantalizing bit of data showing shrinking in the nucleus accumbens in long-term meditators, suggesting we might find further structural changes in the yogi’s brain that support a lessening of attachment, grasping, and self-focus. Precisely what other such neural shifts there might be, and what they mean, await deciphering in future research.

 

THE AFTER

 

These remarkable data points merely hint at the full flowering of the contemplative path at this level. Some of these findings have shown up through happenstance—as when Richie decided to check on the baseline data for the yogis, or to look at the most seasoned group compared to the rest.

 

And then there’s anecdotal evidence: when Richie’s lab asked one yogi to take swabs of saliva to assess his cortisol activity while he was on retreat, the levels were so low they were off the standard scale, and the lab had to adjust the assay range downward.

 

Some Buddhist traditions speak of this level of stabilization as recognition of an inner “basic goodness” that permeates the person’s mind and activities. As one Tibetan lama said about his own teacher—a master revered by all the Tibetan contemplative lineages—“Someone like him has a two-tier consciousness,” where his meditative accomplishments are a steady background for whatever else he does.

 

Several labs—including Richie’s and Judson Brewer’s—have noticed that more advanced meditators can show a brain pattern while merely resting that resembles that of a meditative state like mindfulness or lovingkindness, while beginners do not.2 That comparison of the expert meditator’s baseline with someone new to practice stands as a hallmark of the way altered traits show up in research, though it offers just a snapshot.

 

Perhaps one day an ultralong study will give us the equivalent of a video on how altered traits emerge. For now, as the Brewer group conjectured, meditation seems to transform the resting state—the brain’s default mode— to resemble the meditative state.

 

Or, as we put it long ago, the after is the before for the next during.

 

IN SEARCH OF LASTING CHANGE

 

“If the heart wanders or is distracted,” advised Francis de Sales (1567– 1622), a Catholic saint, “bring it back to the point quite gently … and even if you did nothing during the whole of your hour but bring your heart back … though it went away every time, your hour would be very wellemployed.”3

 

Virtually all meditators execute a common series of steps, no matter the specifics of practice. These begin with an intended focus—but then after a while your mind wanders off. When you notice it has wandered you can make the final step: bring your mind back to the original focus.

 

Research at Emory University by Wendy Hasenkamp (an SRI alum and now director of science at Mind and Life Institute) found the connections between brain regions involved in these steps to be stronger among more seasoned meditators.4 Importantly, the differences between meditator and controls were found not just in meditation but in the ordinary “resting” state as well—suggesting a possible trait effect.

 

The lifetime hours measure offers a ripe opportunity to correlate that number with, say, changes in the brain. But to be sure such an association is not due to self-selection or other such factors requires another step: a longitudinal study where, ideally, the impact grows stronger as practice continues (plus an active control group followed for the same length of time who do not show those changes).

 

Two longitudinal studies—Tania Singer’s work on empathy and compassion, and Cliff Saron’s on shamatha—have yielded some of the most convincing data yet on the power of meditation to create altered traits. And then there are some surprises.

 

Take a finding from Tania’s research. She notes that some researchers had wondered why meditators who did a daily body scan (as in Goenka’s method) failed to show any improvement in counting their heartbeats, a standard test of “interoception,” or attunement to the body.

 

She found an answer in her ReSource Project. The ability to be aware of bodily signals like heartbeat did not increase after three months of daily practice of “presence,” which includes a mindful body scan. However, those very improvements began to show up after six months, with even bigger gains after nine months. Some benefits take time to ripen—what psychologists call a “sleeper” effect.

 

Consider the tale of a yogi who had spent years in a Himalayan cave on retreat. One day a traveler happened by and, seeing the yogi, asked him what he was doing. “I’m meditating on patience,” the yogi said.

 

“In that case,” replied the traveler, “you can go to hell!”

 

To which the yogi angrily retorted, “You go to hell!”

 

That tale (like the one about the yogi in the bazaar) has served for centuries as a cautionary tale to serious practitioners, reminding them that the test of their practice is life itself, not isolated hours in meditation. A trait like patience should leave us unflappable no matter what life brings our way.

 

The Dalai Lama told this story, clarifying, “There’s a saying in Tibetan that in some cases practitioners have the outward form of being holy people, which holds when everything is fine—when the sun is shining and the belly is full. But when they are confronted with a real challenge or crisis, then they become just like everyone else.”5

 

The “full catastrophe” of our lives offers the best durability test of altered traits. While a yogi’s superlow cortisol level on retreat tells us how relaxed he can get, his cortisol level during a hectic day would reveal whether this had become a permanent, altered trait.

 

EXPERTISE

 

We’ve all heard it takes someone 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill like computer programming or golf, right?

 

Wrong.

 

In reality science finds that some domains (like memorization) can be mastered in as little as 200 hours. More to the point, Richie’s lab finds that even among the meditation adepts—all of whom have put in at least 10,000 hours of practice—expertise continues to increase steadily with the number of lifetime hours.

 

This would be no surprise to Anders Ericsson, the cognitive scientist whose work on expertise—to his annoyance—gave rise to that inaccurate but widely held belief in the magical power of 10,000 hours to bestow mastery.6 Rather than just the sheer hours of practice put in, Ericsson’s research reveals, it’s how smart those hours are.

 

What he calls “deliberate” practice involves an expert coach giving feedback on how you are doing, so that you can practice improving in a manner targeted to your progress. A golfer can get pinpointed advice from her coach on exactly how to improve her swing; likewise a surgeon in training, from more seasoned surgeons, on how to improve medical technique. And once the golfer and surgeon have practiced those improvements to the point of mastery, the coaches can give them further feedback for their next round of gains.

 

This is why so many professional performers—in sports, theater, chess, music, and many other walks of life—continue to have coaches throughout their career. No matter how good you are, you can always get just a bit better. In competitive arenas, small improvements may make all the difference between winning and losing. And if you are not competing, it’s your personal best that notches upward.

 

The same applies to meditation. Take the case of Richie and Dan. We have continued to practice regularly over the decades, for many of those years doing a weeklong retreat or two. We each have sat in meditation every morning for more than forty years (except if something like a 6:00 a.m. flight disrupts the routine). While we both might technically qualify as long-term meditators, with somewhere around 10,000 lifetime hours of practice, neither of us feels particularly evolved when it comes to extremely positive altered traits. Why?

 

For one, the data suggests that meditating for one session daily is very different from a multiday or longer retreat. Take a finding that emerged unexpectedly in the study of seasoned meditators (9,000 hours average) and their reactivity to stress7 (see chapter five, “A Mind Undisturbed”). The stronger the connectivity between the meditators’ prefrontal area and amygdala, the less reactive they were. The surprise: the greatest increase in prefrontal-amygdala connection correlated with the number of hours a meditator had spent in retreat but not with home hours.

 

Along these lines another surprising finding was from the study of breath rate. A meditator’s hours of retreat practice most strongly correlated with slower breathing, much more than daily practice.8

 

One important difference about meditation on retreat is that there are teachers available who can provide guidance—like a coach. And then there is the sheer intensity of the retreat practice, where meditators typically spend up to eight hours (and sometimes much more) a day in formal practice, often for many days in a row. And many or most retreats are at least partially in silence, which may well contribute to building intensity. All of that adds up to a unique opportunity to amp up the learning curve.

 

Another difference between amateurs and experts has to do with how they practice. Amateurs learn the basic moves of the skill—whether golf, chess, or, presumably, mindfulness and the like—and very often level off after about fifty hours of improving through practice. For the rest of the time their skill level stays about the same—further practice does not lead to great improvements. Experts, on the other hand, practice differently. They do intensive sessions under the watchful eye of a coach, who suggests to them what to work on next to get even better. This leads to a continuous learning curve with steady improvements.

 

These findings point to the need for a teacher, someone more advanced than you are, who can give you coaching on how to improve. Both of us have continued to seek guidance from meditation teachers over the years, but the opportunity occurs sporadically in our lives.

 

The Visuddhimagga advises practitioners to find as a guide someone more experienced than they are. This ancient list of potential teachers starts at the top with, ideally, direction from an arhant (the Pali word for a fully accomplished meditator, someone at the Olympic level). If none is available, it advises, just find someone more seasoned than you—at the very least, they should have read a sutra, a passage from a holy text—if you have read none. In today’s world, that might be the equivalent of getting instruction from someone who had tried out a meditation app—it’s better than nothing.

 

BRAIN MATCHING

 

 “Your program,” Dan wrote to Jon Kabat-Zinn, “could spread throughout the healthcare system.” Little did he know. The year was 1983, and Jon was still working hard just to get doctors at his medical center to send him patients.

 

Dan was encouraging Jon to do some research on the program’s effectiveness—perhaps a small seed of the hundreds of such studies on MBSR today. Dan and Richie, with their thesis adviser at Harvard, had come up with a soft measure of whether people experience anxiety mainly in their mind or in their body. Pointing out that the MBSR program offered both cognitive and somatic practices, Dan suggested Jon study “which elements work best for which type.”

 

Jon went ahead with that study; one finding was that those at the extreme for worries and anxious thoughts (that is, cognitive anxiety) found most relief from doing the yoga in MBSR.9 This raises a question for all types of meditation—and the more widely deployed user-friendly versions that derive from them: Which forms of practice are most helpful to which people?

 

Matching the student to the method has ancient roots. In the Visuddhimagga, for instance, meditation teachers are advised to carefully observe their students to assess which category they fit in—“greedy” or “hateful” types being two examples—all the better to match them to circumstances and methods most suitable. The matches, which might seem to modern sensibilities a bit medieval, include: for the greedy (who, for instance, first notice what’s beautiful), bad food and uncomfortable lodgings and the loathsomeness of body parts as the object of meditation. For the hateful (who first notice what’s wrong), the best food and a room with a comfy bed to sleep and meditate on soothing topics like lovingkindness or equanimity.

 

A more scientifically based optimal matching could start by using existing measures of people’s cognitive and emotional styles, as Richie and Cortland Dahl have proposed.10 For example, for those prone to ruminating and worrying about themselves, a helpful starter practice might be mindfulness of thoughts, where they learn to regard thoughts as “just thought,” without getting wrapped up in their content (or yoga, as Jon found). And, perhaps, feedback from their sweat response, a measure of emotional hijacking by thoughts, could further help. Or a person with strong, focused attention but a deficit in empathic concern might begin with compassion practice.

 

One day those match-ups might be based on a brain scan that helps point people to the optimal method. Such matching of medicine to diagnosis already goes on in some academic medical centers with “precision medicine,” where treatments are tailored to an individual’s specific genetic makeup.

 

TYPOLOGIES

 

Neem Karoli Baba, the remarkable yogi Dan met on his first visit to India, often stayed at Hindu temples and ashrams dedicated to Hanuman, the monkey god. His followers practiced bhakti, the yoga of devotion dominant in the parts of India where he stayed.

 

While he never talked about his own practice history, bits leaked out now and then. Word had it he had lived for a long time as a jungle yogi; some say he also practiced in an underground cave for years. His meditations were devotional, to Ram, the hero of the Indian epic Ramayana; he could sometimes be heard reciting “Ram, Ram, Ram …” under his breath, or counting the mantra on his fingers.

 

He was also said to have traveled to Mecca in the 1930s with a Muslim devotee. To Westerners he praised Christ. For two years he took under his wing, and became close friends with, Lama Norla, who had fled Tibet for India in 1957, long before there were settlements for such refugees. (Lama Norla was a retreat master in one of the very meditation lineages that Mingyur Rinpoche has practiced in.)

 

If someone was following a given inner path, Neem Karoli always encouraged it. From his perspective the main point was that you do your practice—not try to find the “very best.”

 

Whenever Neem Karoli was asked about which path was best, his answer was “Sub ek!”—Hindi for “They are all one.” Everyone has different preferences, needs, and the like. Just choose one and plunge in.

 

In that view contemplative paths are more or less the same, a doorway beyond ordinary experience. At a practical level, all forms of meditation share a common core of mind training—e.g., learning to let go of the myriad distractions that flow through the mind and to focus on one object of attention or stance of awareness.

 

But as we get more familiar with the mechanics of the various paths, they divide and cluster together. For instance, someone silently reciting a mantra and ignoring everything else deploys different mental operations than does a person who mindfully observes passing thoughts.

 

And at the finest-grained level, each path in its particulars is quite unique. A student of bhakti yoga who sings devotional bhajans to a deity may share some aspects, but not others, with a Vajrayana practitioner who silently generates an image of a deity, like the compassionate Green Tara, along with trying to generate the qualities that go with that image.

 

We should note that the three levels of practice well studied so far— beginner, long-term, and yogi—are grouped around different kinds of meditation: mainly mindfulness for beginners, vipassana for long-term (with some studies of Zen, too), and for the yogis, the Tibetan paths known as Dzogchen and Mahamudra. As it happens, our own practice history has followed this rough trajectory, and in our experience there are significant differences among these three methods.

 

Mindfulness, for instance, has the meditator witness whatever thoughts and feelings come and go in the mind. Vipassana starts there, then transitions into a meta-awareness of the processes of mind, not the shifting contents. And Dzogchen and Mahamudra include both in early stages—and a host of other meditation types—but end in a “nondual” stance, resting in a more subtle level of “meta-awareness.” This raises a scientific question about the vector of transformation: Can we extrapolate insights from mindfulness and apply them to vipassana (a traditional segue), and from vipassana to the Tibetan practices?

 

Taxonomies help science organize such questions, and Dan attempted one for meditation.11 His immersion in the Visuddhimagga offered him a lens for categorizing the bewildering mélange of meditation states and methods he encountered in his wanderings through India. He built a classification around the difference between one-pointed concentration and the more free-floating awareness of mindfulness, a major divide within vipassana practice (and also in the Tibetan paths, but with very different meanings—it gets complicated).

 

A more inclusive—and more current—typology by Richie with his colleagues Cortland Dahl and Antoine Lutz organizes thinking about meditation “clusters” on the basis of a body of findings in cognitive science and clinical psychology.12 They see three categories:

 

·       Attentional. These meditations focus on training aspects of attention, whether in concentration, as in zeroing in on the breath, a mindful observation of experience, a mantra, or meta-awareness, as in open presence.

·       Constructive. Cultivating virtuous qualities, like loving-kindness, typifies these methods.

 

·       Deconstructive. As with insight practice, these methods use selfobservation to pierce the nature of experience. They include “nondual” approaches that shift into a mode where ordinary cognition no longer dominates.

 

Such a widely inclusive typology makes glaringly clear how meditation research has focused on a narrow subset of methods and ignored the much larger universe of techniques. The bulk of research has been done on MBSR and related mindfulness-based approaches, and there have been many studies of loving-kindness and TM, plus a handful on Zen.

 

But the many varieties of meditation beyond these may well target their own range of brain circuitry and cultivate their unique set of particular qualities. We hope that as contemplative science grows, researchers will study a wider variety of meditations, not just a small branch of the entire tree. While findings so far are encouraging, there could well be others that we have not yet even a hint of.

 

The wider the net, the more we will understand about how meditation training shapes the brain and mind. What, for example, might be the benefits of the meditative whirling practice in some schools of Sufism, or the devotional singing in Hinduism’s bhakti branch? Or of the analytic meditation practiced by some Tibetan Buddhists, as well as by some schools of Hindu yogis?

 

But whatever the particulars of a meditation path, they share one goal in common: altered traits.

 

CHECKLISTS FOR ALTERED TRAITS

 

About forty reporters, photographers, and TV camera operators were packed into a small basement room, part of the crypt below the main floor of London’s Westminster Cathedral. They were there for a press conference with the Dalai Lama, who was about to receive the Templeton Prize—more than a million dollars given each year to recognize an “exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension.”

 

Richie and Dan were in London at that press conference to give reporters a backgrounder on the Dalai Lama’s lifelong pursuit of scientific knowledge, and his insight that both science and religion share common goals: pursuit of the truth and serving humanity.

 

In response to the last question at the press conference, the Dalai Lama announced what he would do with the award: immediately give it away. He explained he needs no money—he’s a simple monk, and besides, he’s a guest of the Indian government, which takes care of all his needs.

 

So the moment he gets the award he promptly gives one million–plus dollars to Save the Children, in appreciation of their global work with the world’s poorest children, and for having helped Tibetan refugees when they fled China. Then he gives what remains to the Mind and Life Institute, and to Emory University for its Tibetan-language program to educate Tibetan monks in science.

 

We’ve seen him do the same over and over. His generosity seems spontaneous and without the least regret or holding on to even a tiny bit for himself. Generosity like this, instant and without attachment, marks one of several qualities found in traditional lists of paramitas (“completeness or perfection”; literally, “gone to the other shore”), virtuous traits that mark progress in contemplative traditions.

 

A definitive work on the paramitas, called The Way of the Bodhisattva, was written by Shantideva, an eighth-century monk at Nalanda University in India, one of the world’s first places of higher learning. The Dalai Lama frequently teaches this text, always acknowledging his debt to his own tutor on it—Khunu Lama, the same humble monk Dan met in Bodh Gaya.

 

Among the paramitas, embraced by the practice traditions of the yogis who came to Richie’s lab, are generosity, whether material, like the Dalai Lama giving away his prize money, or even simple presence, giving of oneself; and ethical conduct, not harming oneself or others and following guidelines for self-discipline.

 

Another: patience, tolerance, and composure. This also implies a serene equanimity. “Real peace,” the Dalai Lama told an MIT audience, “is when your mind goes twenty-four hours a day with no fear, no anxiety.”

 

There’s energetic effort and diligence; concentration and nondistraction; and wisdom, in the sense of insights that come via deep meditation practice.

 

This notion of actualizing the very best in us as lasting traits resonates broadly across spiritual traditions. As we saw in chapter three, “The After Is the Before for the Next During,” Greco-Roman philosophers heralded an overlapping set of virtues. And a Sufi saying has it, “Goodness of character is prosperity enough.”13

 

Consider the tale of Rabbi Leib, a student of Rabbi Dov Baer, an eighteenth-century Hasidic teacher. In those times students in that tradition mainly studied religious tomes and heard lectures on passages from the Torah, their holy book. But Leib had a different goal.

 

He had not gone to Dov Baer, his religious mentor, to study texts or hear sermons, Leib said. Rather, he went to “see how he ties his shoes.”14

 

In other words, what he sought was to witness and absorb the qualities of being his teacher embodied.

 

There are intriguing dovetails between the scientific data and the ancient maps to altered traits. For example, an eighteenth-century Tibetan text advises that among the signs of spiritual progress are loving-kindness and strong compassion toward everyone, contentment, and “weak desires.”15

 

These qualities seem to match with indicators of brain changes that we have tracked in earlier chapters: amped-up circuitry for empathic concern and parental love, a more relaxed amygdala, and decreased volume of brain circuits associated with attachment.

 

The yogis who came to Richie’s lab all had practiced in a Tibetan tradition that proffers a view that can sometimes be confusing: that we all have Buddha nature, but we simply fail to recognize it. In this view, the nub of practice becomes recognizing intrinsic qualities, what’s already present rather than the development of any new inner skill. From this perspective, the remarkable neural and biological findings among the yogis are signs not so much of skill development but rather of this quality of recognition.

 

Are altered traits add-ons to our nature, or uncovered aspects that were there all along? At this stage in the development of contemplative science it is difficult to weigh in on either side of this debate. There is, however, an increasingly robust corpus of scientific findings showing, for example, that if an infant watches puppets who engage in an altruistic, warmhearted encounter, or ones who are selfish and aggressive, when given the choice of a puppet to reach for, almost all infants choose one of the friendly ones.16 This natural tendency continues through the toddler years.

 

These findings are consistent with the view of preexisting virtues like an intrinsic basic goodness, and invite the possibility that training in lovingkindness and compassion involve recognizing early on a core quality that is present and strengthening it. In this sense, practitioners may not be developing a new skill but rather nurturing a basic competence, in much the same way that language is developed.

 

Whether the whole range of qualities said to be cultivated by different meditation practices is best viewed in this way or more as skill development will be decided by future scientific work. We simply entertain the idea that at least some aspects of meditation practice may be less like learning a new skill, and more akin to recognizing a basic propensity there from the start.

 

WHAT’S MISSING?

 

Historically, meditation was not meant to improve our health, relax us, or enhance work success. Although these are the kinds of appeal that has made meditation ubiquitous today, over the centuries such benefits were incidental, unnoted side effects. The true contemplative goal has always been altered traits.

 

The strongest signs of these qualities are in the group of yogis who came to Richie’s lab. This raises a crucial question for understanding how contemplative practice works. Those yogis all practice within a spiritual tradition, in the “deep” mode. Yet most of us in today’s world prefer our practice easy (and brief), a pragmatic approach that tends to borrow what works and leave behind the rest.

 

And quite a lot has been left behind as the world’s rich contemplative traditions morphed into user-friendly forms. As meditation migrates from its original setting into popular adaptations, what has been abandoned is ignored or forgotten.

 

Some important components of contemplative practice are not meditation per se. In the deep paths, meditation represents just one part of a range of means helping to increase self-awareness, gain insights into the subtleties of consciousness, and, ultimately, to achieve a lasting transformation of being. These daunting goals require lifelong dedication.

 

The yogis who came to Richie’s lab all practiced in a Tibetan tradition that holds the ideal that, eventually, people everywhere can be freed from suffering of all sorts—and that the meditator sets out toward this enormous task through mind training. Part of this yogic mind-set involves developing more equanimity toward our own emotional world, as well as the conviction that meditation and related practices can produce lasting transformation—altered traits.

 

While some of those who follow the “deep” path in the West may themselves hold such convictions, others who train in those same methods do so on a path to renewal—a kind of inner vacation—rather than a lifelong calling. (That said, motivations can change with progress, so that what brought someone to meditation may not be the same goal that keeps them going.)

 

The sense of a life mission centered on practice numbers among those elements so often left on a far shore, but that may matter greatly. Among others that might, in fact, be crucial for cultivating altered traits at the level found in the yogis:

 

·       An ethical stance, a set of moral guidelines that facilitate the inner changes on the path. Many traditions urge such an inner compass, lest any abilities developed be used for personal gain.

·       Altruistic intention, where the practitioner invokes the strong motivation to practice for the benefit of all others, not just oneself.

·       Grounded faith, the mind-set that a particular path has value and will lead you to the transformation you seek. Some texts warn against blind faith and urge students to do what we call today “due diligence” in finding a teacher.

·        Personalized guidance. A knowledgeable teacher who coaches you on the path, giving you the advice you need to go to the next step. Cognitive science knows that attaining top-level mastery requires such feedback.

·        Devotion, a deep appreciation for all the people, principles, and such that make practice possible. Devotion can also be to the qualities of a divine figure, a teacher, or the teacher’s altered traits or quality of mind.

·        Community. A supportive circle of friends on the path who are themselves dedicated to practice. Contrast that with the isolation of many modern meditators. A supportive culture. Traditional Asian cultures have long recognized the value of people who devote their life to transforming themselves to embody virtues of attention, patience, compassion,

and so on. Those who work and have families willingly support those who dedicate themselves to deep practice by giving them money, feeding them, and otherwise making life easier. Not so in modern societies.

·       Potential for altered traits. The very idea that these practices can lead to a liberation from our ordinary mind states—not just selfimprovement—has always framed these practices, fostering respect or reverence for the path and those on it.

 

We have no way of knowing how any of those “left-behinds” might actually be active ingredients in the altered traits that scientific research has begun to document in the lab.

 

AWAKENING

 

Soon after Siddhartha Gautama, the prince-turned-renunciate, had completed his inner journey at Bodh Gaya, he encountered some wandering yogis. Recognizing that Gautama had undergone some kind of remarkable transformation, they asked him, “Are you a god?”

 

To which he replied, “No. I am awake.”

 

The Sanskrit word for “awake,” bodhi, gave Gautama the name we know him by today, Buddha—the Awakened One. No one can know with absolute certainty what that awakening entailed, but our data on the most advanced yogis may yield some clues. For instance, there’s that high level of ongoing gamma, which seems to lend a sense of vast spaciousness, senses wideopen, enriching everyday experience—even deep sleep, suggesting an around-the-clock quality of awakening.17

 

The metaphor of our ordinary consciousness as a kind of sleep, and an inner shift leading to becoming “awake” has a long history and wide circulation. While various schools of thought contend on the point, we are not prepared nor qualified to wade into the countless debates about what “awakening” means exactly, nor do we contend that science can referee metaphysical debates.

 

Just as math and poetry are different ways of knowing reality, science and religion represent disparate magisteria, realms of authority, areas of inquiry and ways of knowing—religion speaking to values, beliefs, and transcendence, and science to fact, hypotheses, and rationality.18 In taking the measure of the meditator’s mind we do not speak to the truth-value of what various religions make of those mental states.

 

We aim for something more pragmatic: What in these processes of transformation from the deep path might be extracted that has wide universal benefit? Can we draw on the mechanics of the deep path to create benefits for the widest numbers?

 

IN A NUTSHELL

 

From the beginning hours, days, and weeks of meditation, several benefits emerge. For one, beginners’ brains show less amygdala reactivity to stress. Improvements in attention after just two weeks of practice include better focus, less mind-wandering, and improved working memory—with a concrete payoff in boosted scores on a graduate school entrance exam. Some of the earliest benefits are with compassion meditation, including increased connectivity in the circuitry for empathy. And markers for inflammation lessen a bit with just thirty hours of practice. While these benefits emerge even with remarkably modest hours of practice, they are likely fragile, and need daily sessions to be sustained.

 

For long-term meditators, those who have done about 1,000 hours or more of practice, the benefits documented so far are more robust, with some new ones added to the mix. There are brain and hormonal indicators of lowered reactivity to stress and lessened inflammation, a strengthening of the prefrontal circuits for managing distress, and lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, signaling less reactivity to stresses in general. Compassion meditation at this level brings a greater neural attunement with those who are suffering, and enhanced likelihood of doing something to help.

 

When it comes to attention, there are a range of benefits: stronger selective attention, decreased attentional blink, greater ease in sustaining attention, a heightened readiness to respond to whatever may come, and less mind-wandering. Along with fewer self-obsessed thoughts comes a weakening of the circuitry for attachment. Other biological and brain changes include a slower breath rate (indicting a slowing of the metabolic rate). A daylong retreat enhances the immune system, and signs of meditative states continue during sleep. All these changes suggest the emergence of altered traits.

 

Finally, there are the yogis at the “Olympic” level, who have an average of 27,000 lifetime hours of meditation. They show clear signs of altered traits, such as large gamma waves in synchrony among far-flung brain regions—a brain pattern not seen before in anyone—and which also occurs at rest among those yogis who have done the most hours of practice. While strongest during the practices of open presence and of compassion, the gamma continues while the mind is at rest, though to a lesser degree. Also, yogis’ brains seem to age more slowly compared to brains of other people their age.

 

Other signs of the yogis’ expertise include stopping and starting meditative states in seconds, and effortlessness in meditation (particularly among the most seasoned). Their pain reaction, too, sets the yogis apart: little sign of anticipatory anxiety, a short but intense reaction during the pain itself, and then a rapid recovery. During compassion meditation, yogis’ brains and hearts couple in ways also not seen in other people. Most significant, the yogis’ brain states at rest resemble the brain states of others while they meditate—the state has become a trait./.

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