The Buddha Pill: Can Meditation Change You? by Farias Miguel & Wikholm Catherine

Author:Farias, Miguel & Wikholm, Catherine [Farias, Miguel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: The Buddha Pill: Can Meditation Change You?
ISBN: 9781780288819
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2015-05-26T04:00:00+00:00

LET’S THROW IN COMPASSION

Let me quickly recap on what appear to be the central implicit beliefs of the mindfulness-based therapy movement: you’re more likely to find happiness within yourself than elsewhere, and what you experience through meditation is fundamentally true. A few paragraphs ago I wrote that I ‘hoped psychology would come in and lend a hand to dispel an obvious fallacy’. Generally speaking, psychology has been doing exactly that for a very long time, at least since Freud. Psychologists have worked hard to determine and describe how we are biased not only in our thoughts, but our very visual perception of the world (for example, depending on which culture you come from, you tend to focus more on specific objects in front of you, or take a more holistic approach to what shows up in your visual field)32.

Experience is very much like an autobiography – the story you tell of yourself is not what exactly happened. Furthermore, how you understand your own life’s experiences actually changes with time. Over the course of your life, you’ll retell the same childhood episode in different ways, according to the shifting perspective of your age, understanding and experience. Psychologists are acutely aware of all this; however, those studying mindfulness have, almost without exception, forgotten it.

Scientists introduced mindfulness as a method of experiencing reality without judgment: achieving ‘bare attention’ became not only an interesting concept, but a reality. Now the focus has moved on to a slightly different level. Mindfulness meditation seems to work for the individual – it alleviates pain and stress – but how does the mindful person act towards others? If some Buddhist moral precepts were added to the mindfulness technique, it wouldn’t be a non-religious practice anymore. The solution: to add more experience to it. So, scientists have begun incorporating other Buddhist meditation techniques that focus on extremely positive feelings towards others – namely empathy and compassion.

This strand of research would not only show that meditation experience can change people, but that it can change them for the better. It would also silence the critics who looked down on secular mindfulness as self-absorbing or individualistic. And, apparently, the results show that it works: leading psychology journals have published a number of studies with titles such as ‘Loving-kindness meditation increases social connectedness,33’ ‘Compassion meditation enhances empathic accuracy and related neural activity,34’ or ‘Loving-kindness meditation training decreases implicit intergroup bias.35’

Let me give a close-up of a study. In May 2013 one of the top experimental psychology journals, Psychological Science, published an article co-authored by Richard Davidson, one of the leading meditation scientists. Davidson and his colleagues studied the effects of compassion meditation on altruistic behaviour and brain activity36. The experimental design was elegant: participants were randomly allocated to either a compassion meditation condition or a control group of cognitive reappraisal. For 30 minutes a day for two weeks, they would either focus on feelings of compassion or reinterpret negative feelings associated with a personal stressful event.

If you were in the compassion meditation group, you began the training by thinking of a time when a friend or family member was suffering.

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