A few days ago, some brain scientists announced that meditating changes your brain. The anxiety and stress section of your brain actually thins out if you meditate regularly. The article on the topic, was the most emailed story on the New York Times all week. So I went to learn more about meditation.
Rodney Smith teaches classes for the Seattle Insight Meditation Society I went to his house and when I got there he has in his hand, a copy of that New York Times brain story. He was excited because Americans don’t like useless, exotic navel-gazing.
“They think of meditation as some sort of Eastern product that’s sort of weird and woo-wooey,” said Smith.
But when brain scientists sign on, that gets our attention.
I asked Rodney what’s so great about meditation, and the first thing he told me was, ‘You and I take our thoughts way too seriously.’
When you meditate, you learn to notice all these stray thoughts that ping around in your head, and take you out of real life.
“We’re constantly wrapped up in everything we think. We don’t really see what we’re seeing. We see what we’re…