For Stress Reduction, Meditate!

Doesn't that suggest that by focusing on breathing, you're simply not thinking any longer about your pain but shifting your focus to something else?

Actually, the instructions are exactly the opposite. I don't say, "Well, just fantasize something that will be so interesting that you'll forget about your body." I say, "Go into the body, go into the lower back, breathe with it and try to penetrate the pain with your awareness and your breathing. So it's the opposite of distraction.

Physiologically, does that reduce stress?

It certainly does. Stress is the response to the demands placed on your body and mind. The more you are in distress from pain or anxiety, the worse you'll feel, and that will have physiological consequences. If you can learn to be comfortable within the pain or anxiety, the experience will be completely changed. But you're not trying to make the pain go away.

This is a fundamental point that people sometimes misunderstand at first. They'll come to the stress thinking we'll make all their stress go away. But we actually move into the stress or pain and begin to look at it, and to notice the mind's reactions, and to let go of that reactivity. And then you find that there is an inner stillness and peace within some of the most difficult life situations. It's right in this breath, and it's right in this experience. You don't have to run away to get it someplace else.

When you said to your patients this morning, "Your mind has a life of its own," was that just a figure of speech?

No, that refers to mindfulness. If you spend a lot of time observing your thoughts and feelings, you begin to realize that your thought process is very chaotic—it's here and there and everywhere else. And when you try to focus your attention on one thing, very often the mind doesn't want to stay focused on it for very long and will go off and think about this or that. Your mind has a certain kind of energy that likes to go different places, and it's very hard to concentrate and reach a state of calmness.

When you told them to bring their minds back, I thought, "Well, there is an 'I' that is independent of the mind."

We don't know what that is but we do know that human beings have a capacity for awareness and self-observation. That is really what meditation is all about—cultivating and developing the capacity to attend from moment to moment.

Often we do what's called "selfing," where something comes up that we identify with so strongly that we think, "That's me." It takes many forms: "I'm a failure, I'm no good, I'm inadequate, I'm unworthy." Feeling unworthy is not a problem; unworthiness is a common human feeling. But as soon as you connect "I" to it, you classify it, and it becomes much more real, more concrete. Then you've got a real problem.

We often work with people who have panic attacks and extreme anxiety. If you have panic disorder and you say, "I'm afraid," and the "I" function identifies with the content in the mind that is fearful, then the fear takes on a reality of its own and begins to take over your life. But if you step back and just look at the fear and notice that it usually takes the form of thoughts and feelings in the mind, all of a sudden you become the observer: "Oh, there's that thought coming up. The content of it is fear, and it has a heavy-duty charge, but I don't have to get sucked into it."

Is that what you mean when you say, "I want you to become the scientist of your own mind and body?"

Exactly. To know about it from the inside. To become so familiar with its workings that when something comes up, you actually observe it, and you can say, "Wow, I haven't seen this one before."

But being the scientist of your own mind/body connection doesn't mean you have to control it. It's not as if we're trying to get hold of our superphysiological control knobs and tune up our immune system and tune down something else. What we're learning is a new kind of science and inner science in which you become more familiar with the workings of your own body. That doesn't mean you could write a scientific treatise about it. What it means is that you'll live more intelligently. You'll make decisions that are more apt to bring you in touch with the way things work for you in the world.

Is there a scientific basis for the work you're doing with meditation?

We're trying as best we can to deliver this intervention based on intensive training and mindfulness. At the same time, we're attempting to study it scientifically. What we've found is that there seems to be remarkable symptom reduction, both physical and psychological, over the eight-week course, and it tends to persist over time.