Imagine if you were sitting in your living room and when you turned on the television the movie Terms of Endearment came on. It wasn’t just any part of the movie, it was the moment where the mother watches her daughter who had been struggling with cancer pass away. If you don’t know this movie, it’s one of the greatest tearjerkers of all time.

Earlier this year, Farb and colleagues (2010) conducted research called Minding One’s Emotions: Mindfulness Training Alters the Neural Expression of Sadness that did a variation of this with two groups of people, those trained in mindfulness meditation and a waitlisted control group in order to see any different activity in their brains. Past research, along with this …