Equanimity: Recognizing the Spark
Before the Flame
Much of our emotional experience consists of gusts of negative feelings blowing through the brain. The feelings torture us without being intrinsically related to experience. "Emotions are not actually facts," explains Davidson.
The perturbations often function as our own worst enemies, clotting our minds, keeping us from seeing and responding clearly. In other words, they diminish our capacity to live our lives. Negative emotions are so distressing, studies show, that given a choice many people would rather endure great physical pain—say, high-voltage electric shocks.
Nevertheless, folks freely gorge on oversize portions of mental anguish, what Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky calls "adventitious suffering—the pain of what was, what will be, what could be or what someone else is experiencing." Sapolsky has shown that over time such extra helpings of mental suffering can damage the parts of the brain involved in learning and memory, as well as the immune system.
Decades before Sapolsky's studies, pioneering cognitive psychologist Albert Ellis put forth the then-radical idea that painful emotions spring more from people's beliefs than from reality itself: Thoughts alone could lead to anguish. Today cognitive behavioral therapists, including an aging Ellis, counsel patients to relieve emotional distress by changing the content of their thoughts—challenging their beliefs and testing new possibilities.
Buddhist meditation addresses the same issue a bit differently. It changes your relationship to your emotions more than the emotions themselves. It allows you to see mood fluctuations moment to moment so that you can navigate around them. "You become more like the sky than the storm," says Kabat-Zinn. You can avoid the mental "grasping" of judgmentalism or an impulsive need to act.
The approach appears to be effective. In a study led by psychologist Zindel Segal at the University of Toronto, meditation successfully prevented relapse of depression in patients with a history of recurrent mood disorder.
Meditation becomes a kind of "dashboard for your emotions," Wallace says. It enables you to check the gauges and objectively decide if you're about to overheat, so you're not caught by surprise when steam begins to rise from the engine. The "engine," in this case, is what is often called the limbic system—or the emotional brain—which is connected to the prefrontal cortex. Through its actions on the prefrontal cortex, meditation can dampen affective arousal from a limbic system kicked into alarm mode by fear or anger.
Perhaps I could have recognized that my urge to yell at my son as he dialed 911 was useless. Yet this kind of clarity is difficult to achieve. For most of us, the lag time between provocation, impulse and action is shorter than a heartbeat—just a quarter of a second between the trigger event and the response of the amygdala, or fear center. In that fraction of a second, our emotions have time to swamp our judgment—and often do.
Meditation, however, promises to break this apparent chain reaction by allowing us to recognize "the spark before the flame." Through many hours of quietly observing the customary tyranny of the emotions, you may gradually familiarize yourself with the quiet of your mind—the part that one day might choose not to be tyrannized. Says Ricard, "You become familiar with the way emotions arise, how they can either overwhelm your mind or vanish without making an impact."
Compassion: Like Riding a Horse
Meditation is a process of cultivating intimacy with one's own states of mind. "Mindfulness is a form of intrapersonal attunement," says UCLA's Seigel, which makes it the perfect tool for interpersonal attunement—in other words, compassion. "The ability to see your own mind," Seigel notes, "allows you to see others' minds."
As every parent of a teenager knows, compassion can often be hard work. It takes effort to summon warm feelings for someone who snarls at you while asking for money. Some parents find they have to play tricks on their own minds, such as forcing themselves to remember the teen as a cuddly baby.
In meditating, Buddhists do something similar. "You simply have to do it again and again," Ricard insists. "It's not so sophisticated." Imagine someone you already love, wish for her well-being and gradually extend that feeling to others. This should include people you may think of as enemies.
The next step is to extend that feeling of compassion to all beings, letting the feeling "grow and grow and invade your mind so that every single atom of your self is loving kindness and compassion and benevolence," Ricard says. "You let that linger and linger and become more and more part of your mindstream, and you do it again and again. Eventually it becomes easier, faster and stronger the rest of the time too, not just when you're meditating. It's like riding a horse. In the beginning you have to be very careful not to fall off, but pretty soon you even forget you're on a horse."
Neurobiologically we seem wired for empathy. Over the past few years, scientists have found that the human brain has a system of mirror neurons, activated both when we perform an action and when we observe similar action by others, including the facial expression of pain or joy. Such activation allows us not only to infer others' feelings but to actually share those feelings as well.
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