Positive Philosophy

Meditation as a Tool

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OLLI

May 2024

Day 1

Breathe.

Agenda

• Our Plan for the Next 4 Weeks
• What is Meditation?
• 3 General Purposes of Meditation
• Establishing an Anchor
• Meditation: Body Scan

OUR PLAN

OUR PLAN

1. What is meditation? Why do it?
• Attention to the breath. Cultivating the observer presence.
• Practice: Body scan meditation for relaxation.
2. Mindfulness of the Body.
• Emotional and physical feelings awareness. Emotions as information. Self-compassion.
• Practice: Working with pain and discomfort.
3. Mindfulness of Thoughts.
• Common cognitive distortions. Reality checking. Working with limiting beliefs.
• Practice: RAIN procedure.
4. Cultivating equanimity and peace.
• The 4 Divine Abodes: loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. Practice: Metta meditation.

WHAT IS MEDITATION?

Mindfulness

• Definition from researchers:
• cultivating awareness of everyday emotions and sensations and increasing your attention to your thoughts.

Mindfulness

• Definition from Jack Kornfield:

“Mindfulness is both healing and liberating. Learning to meet our complex world and our own changing mental states with mindful loving awareness and courage allows us to find spacious, clear and healthy responses to life, rather than be caught in habitual reactions and struggle.”

FROM ALTERED TRAITS…

The original aim of mindfulness “focuses on a deep exploration of the mind toward a profound alteration of our very being.”

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“Beyond the pleasant states meditation can produce, the real payoffs are the lasting traits that can result.”

“…there were methods that could transform our minds to produce a profound well-being.

We did not have to be controlled by the mind, with its random associations, sudden fears and angers, and all the rest – we could take back the helm.”

“The shift to insight meditation occurs in the relationship of our awareness to our thoughts. Ordinarily our thoughts compel us…but with strong mindfulness…we don’t have to be chased through the day by our thoughts.”

MINI-MEDITATION: �CULTIVATING THE OBSERVER

ENLIGHTENMENT

The second you become aware that you are thinking, you disrupt a lifetime of habitual reactions. You awaken. You become a bodhisattva.

FROM NO TIME TO LOSE…

Bodhichitta

“awakened heart”

”An intense desire to alleviate suffering”

“…longing…a heartfelt yearning to free oneself from the pain of ignorance and habitual patterns in order to help others do the same.”

FROM NO TIME TO LOSE…

“Bodhichitta is the desire to end the suffering of all beings, including those we’ll never meet, as well as those we loathe.”

Including ourselves.

“We can connect with the very best of ourselves and help others do the same.”

FROM NO TIME TO LOSE…

“Start with what’s manageable, doable, clear intention:

‘At the level of intention, we begin with what’s manageable and let our understanding evolve.’”�

FROM NO TIME TO LOSE…

��“Everyone in the dungeons of samsara is a candidate for awakening a compassionate heart."

ETHICS OF MINDFULNESS

• Mind and Life Institute’s mission is “to alleviate suffering and promote flourishing by integrating science with contemplative practice.”
• Mindfulness, in its original form, is a practice that ultimately alleviates suffering.
• The Buddhist tradition encourages an awareness of self and others that empowers each individual: mindfulness liberates us from our societal conditioning so we can have an experience of personal transformation.
• All religious traditions have these values.
• So does psychology as a field: the alleviation of suffering, the improvement of well-being.

POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

• Before WWII, the field of psychology had three goals:
1. Curing mental illness
2. Making the lives of all people more fulfilling
3. Identifying and nurturing talent
• After WWII, the field focused almost exclusively on curing mental illness, because of two things:
• The VA was established, and psychologists could get jobs working to cure mental illness in soldiers.
• NIMH was created, and psychologists could get grants to investigate mental illness.

POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

• Before WWII, the field of psychology had three goals:
1. Curing mental illness
2. Making the lives of all people more fulfilling
3. Identifying and nurturing talent
• After WWII, the field focused almost exclusively on curing mental illness, because of two things:
• The VA was established, and psychologists could get jobs working to cure mental illness in soldiers.
• NIMH was created, and psychologists could get grants to investigate mental illness.

POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

• So, Psychology as a field has been focusing on mental illness, or the negative, almost exclusively since 1946.
• To our great benefit – many illnesses are all but cured or can be managed with medication.
• Reinforced our “hardwired” tendency to focus on negative
• In 1999, Dr. Martin Seligman created a new goal for the field: building human strengths.
• Since then, there has been an explosion of studies regarding positive mental health and fulfillment.
• Simultaneously, research into the brain has also greatly increased, largely as a result of studies into Alzheimer’s, leading to the realization that the thoughts we have repeatedly change the very structure and function of our brains.

POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

• Neuroplasticity--or brain plasticity-- refers to the brain's ability to change throughout life, to rewire itself based on experience. The human brain has an amazing ability to reorganize itself by generating new neurons and by forming new connections between neurons.
• It was believed for a long time that, as we got older, the brain became "fixed." Now we know that the brain never stops changing, and that neuroplasticity is the capacity of the brain to change with learning, and that's why there's so much interest and hope around ways to harness that neuroplasticity to lead better lives, to enhance our brains, to delay brain health decline.

"Every man can, if he so desires, become the sculptor of his own brain" – Santiago Ramon y Cajal

So, what are you going to sculpt?

Martin Seligman

“The aim of positive psychology is to catalyze a change in psychology from a preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building the best qualities in life.”

Seligman, Father of Positive Psychology

Martin Seligman

“[A]s a therapist, once in a while I would help a patient get rid of all of his anger and anxiety and sadness. I thought I would then get a happy patient. But I never did. I got an empty patient.”

Seligman, Father of Positive Psychology

Abraham Maslow

“The science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative than on the positive side; it has revealed to us much about man’s shortcomings, his illnesses, his sins, but little about his potentialities, his virtues, his achievable aspirations, or his psychological height. It is as if psychology had voluntarily restricted itself to only half its rightful jurisdiction, and that the darker, meaner half.”

Maslow, Grandfather of Positive Psychology

Abraham Maslow

“Humanistic philosophy offers a new conception of learning, of teaching, and of education. Stated simply…the function of education…is ultimately the self-actualization of a person, the becoming fully human, the development of the fullest height that the human species can stand up to or that the particular individual can come to. In a less technical way, it is helping the person to become the best that he is able to become.”

Maslow, Grandfather of Positive Psychology

So,

• You get to approach this however you want.
• From a scientific, philosophical, or religious lens depending on your comfort level – they all say the same things.

So,

• We learn to harness the mind, then we can change our lives.

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• Meditation is the tool that helps us harness the mind.

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DEEP PATH AND THE WIDE:�4 LEVELS OF PRACTICE

FROM THE MYSTICAL TO THE PRACTICAL

• We find that we can become aware of our thoughts and emotions, put space between those thoughts and emotions and our actions, and make choices that foster a greater sense of well-being.
• The basic tenets of bodhichitta are aligned with CBT: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Meditation gives us a tool to cultivate this space and recognize our habitual patterns.
• An awakened heart disarms ego.

“This is the happiness of egolessness. It’s the joy of realizing there is no prison; there are only very strong habits, and no sane reason for strengthening them further.”

Doesn’t this sound lovely?

It isn’t always lovely.

It’s HARD.

Don’t try to sit like this.

3 GENERAL PURPOSES

For Beginners

• 3 things to focus on:
• Relaxation
• Directing Attention
• Observing the Content of Your Thoughts

Relaxation

Centering or grounding in the breath.

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Methods:

• Count the breaths
• Box breathing
• Feel the body
• Deep breathing

Let’s try it.

Connect to the breath.

Directing Attention

• Notice when you wander off in your head and redirect attention back to where you want it.
• Requires awareness and the realization that we have a choice.
• Long term, we use meditation or mindfulness in order to gain control of our attention: increase executive function and self-regulation.

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MEDITATION 101 FROM HAPPIFY

Directing Attention

• Use the breath and your attention together:
• Focus on specific areas of tension, send breath to that area to let go.

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Let’s try it.

Connect to the breath.

Notice a specific area of tension in your body.

Breathe into that area to relax it.

Directing Attention

• Other strategies
• Spotify, Calm App – nature sounds
• Calm App has bedtime stories
• Gratitude practice

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Observing Content

• Remember our first meditation: the observer?
• We cultivate the observer presence in many ways using our imagination.

Observing Content

• Big picture window.
• At a parade.
• Watching TV.
• In a movie theater.

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Observing Content

• Content includes both thoughts and emotions, stories, opinions, events of the day…the ego itself.

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Observing Content

• We don’t try to clear the mind – it’s impossible.
• “The mind creates thoughts like the taste buds secrete saliva.”
• We become aware of our thoughts.
• There are good reasons for our thoughts – bring curiosity to them.

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“[The ego] consists of thought and emotion,

of a bundle of memories you identify with as ‘me and my story,’

of habitual roles you play without knowing it,

of collective identifications such as nationality, religion, race, social class, or political allegiance.

It also contains personal identifications, not only with possessions, but also with opinions, external appearance, long-standing resentments, or concepts of yourself as better than or not as good as others, a success or failure.”

Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

Let’s try it.

Connect to the breath.

Whenever you notice a thought, gently bring your attention back to the breath.

Your breath is the anchor that keeps you in the present moment. Let’s work on establishing that anchor.

IN SUM…

In sum…

• Connect to the breath.
• The breath is your anchor to the present moment.
• We use the breath to relax, refocus our attention to where we want it, and to observe the content of our thoughts.

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NOTES FROM ALTERED TRAITS

“Practicing meditation can pay off quickly in some ways, even if you have just started.”

• Amygdala is less reactive.
• Increase in empathy and positive feeling outside the meditative state.
• Increased attention, better focus and working memory.
• Better physical health: improvement in molecular markers for aging.
• Lower blood pressure and incidence of heart disease and stroke.

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MEDITATION RX

1. Start with one minute every day for this week. Find any comfortable place in your home, or outside where you feel secure. Breathe deeply. Focus on the breath in your body. When your mind wanders, gently bring your attention back to the breath.
2. Focus on words like gentle, careful, joyful, calm, and peaceful. Non-judgement. Compassion.
3. Then, we’ll add a minute each week. You’ll be at 5 minutes by the end of May, 10 by the end of June, and 15 by the end of July if you keep going little by little. Most meditators I’ve heard from meditate 20 minutes/day, and they built up to that number.

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MEDITATION: BODY SCAN