B. Alan Wallace

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Ethan Corey, The Amherst Student: B. Alan Wallace ’87 is not the typical Amherst alumnus. Author of more than 20 books on Buddhism and science and a practicing Buddhist monk for the entirety of his time at the College, he now goes on meditative retreats for months on end, performing psychological experiments in a lucid dream state to attempt to discover the true nature of reality, happiness and suffering.

Finding His Own Path

Wallace was born to a devoutly Christian family and spent his youth travelling the world with his Protestant theologian father. However, he was strongly interested in science from a young age …

Meditation improves emotional behaviors in teachers, study finds

March 28, 2012

Schoolteachers who underwent a short but intensive program of meditation were less depressed, anxious or stressed – and more compassionate and aware of others’ feelings, according to a UCSF-led study that blended ancient meditation practices with the most current scientific methods for regulating emotions.

A core feature of many religions, meditation is practiced by tens of millions around the world as part of their spiritual beliefs as well as to alleviate psychological problems, improve self-awareness and to clear the mind. Previous research has linked meditation to positive changes in blood pressure, metabolism and pain, but less is known about the specific emotional changes that result from the practice.

The new study was designed to create new techniques to reduce destructive emotions while improving social and emotional behavior.

The study will be published in the April issue of the journal Emotion.

“The findings suggest that increased awareness of mental processes can influence emotional behavior,” said lead author Margaret Kemeny, PhD, director of the Health Psychology Program in UCSF’s Department of Psychiatry. “The study is particularly important because opportunities for reflection and contemplation seem to be fading in our fast-paced, technology-driven culture.”

Altogether, 82 female schoolteachers between the ages of 25 and 60 participated in the project. Teachers were chosen because their work is stressful and because the meditation skills they learned could be immediately useful to their daily lives, possibly trickling down to benefit their students.

Study Arose After Meeting Dalai Lama
The study arose from a meeting in 2000 between Buddhist scholars, behavioral scientists and emotion experts at the home of the Dalai Lama. There, the Dalai Lama and Paul Ekman, PhD, a UCSF emeritus professor and world expert in emotions, pondered the topic of emotions, leading the Dalai Lama to pose a question: In the modern world, would a secular version of Buddhist contemplation reduce harmful emotions?

From that, Ekman and Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace developed a 42-hour, eight-week training program, integrating secular meditation practices with techniques learned from the scientific study of emotion. It incorporated three categories of meditative practice:

Concentration practices involving sustained, focused attention on a specific mental or sensory experience;
Mindfulness practices involving the close examination of one’s body and feelings;
Directive practices designed to promote empathy and compassion toward others.

In the randomized, controlled trial, the schoolteachers learned to better understand the relationship between emotion and cognition, and to better recognize emotions in others and their own emotional patterns so they could better resolve difficult problems in their relationships. All the teachers were new to meditation and all were involved in an intimate relationship.

“We wanted to test whether the intervention affected both personal well-being as well as behavior that would affect the well-being of their intimate partners,” said Kemeny.

As a test, the teachers and their partners underwent a “marital interaction” task measuring minute changes in facial expression while they attempted to resolve a problem in their relationship. In this type of encounter, those who express certain negative facial expressions are more likely to divorce, research has shown.

Some of the teachers’ key facial movements during the marital interaction task changed, particularly hostile looks which diminished. In addition, depressed mood levels dropped by more than half. In a follow-up assessment five months later, many of the positive changes remained, the authors said.

“We know much less about longer-term changes that occur as a result of meditation, particularly once the ‘glow’ of the experience wears off,” Kemeny said. “It’s important to know what they are because these changes probably play an important role in the longer-term effects of meditation on mental and physical health symptoms and conditions.”

The study involved researchers from a number of institutions including UCSF, UC Davis, and Stanford University.

The Best Buddhist Writing 2011

January 2, 2012

William Harryman

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Another year passes and it’s time for another issue of The Best Buddhist Writing, 2011, from Shambhala Publications. This is the seventh edition of what has become an annual treat of good writing for those who do not — or cannot — subscribe to the many Buddhist magazines or buy the many Buddhist books published each year.

The editor of the series, Melvin Mcleod, who is also the editor of The Shambhala Sun, does his typically nice job, with the assistance of his fellow editors at the Sun, of selecting a representative sampling of writing from many well-known and lesser-known writers and teachers. The usual names are here, the names that sell each year’s edition, such as His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Jack Kornfield, Lin Jensen (an editor at Tricycle), Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, Matthieu Ricard, and Pico Iyer, to name only a few.

Title: The Best Buddhist Writing 2011
Author: Edited by Melvin McLeod
Publisher: Shambhala
ISBN: 978-1-59030-933-9
Available from: Shambhala, Amazon.co.uk, and Amazon.com.

Interestingly, there is nothing from Pema Chodron this year, nor is there anything from Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche (leader of the Shambhala lineage) — two figures closely associated with Shambhala Sun. There also is nothing from B. Alan Wallace or Robert Thurman, two prolific authors who bring a more academic flavor to these collections.

As a reader, the absence of some of the big names makes room for newer writers — such as Susan Piver, Joanna Macy, and others — who are a pleasure to read and who bring a distinctly Western flavor to this year’s edition.

Many of the pieces in this volume are about real life, about finding the lessons in the mundane and the unexpected. The first article, “Hand Wash Cold” by Karen Maezen Miller, recounts her meeting of her future husband in a restaurant in Florence, Italy. But the piece is really about dishes, a dishwasher, and how a couple learns that “marriage is a lot like a silent meditation retreat.” Both marriage and the retreat can bring us “face-to-face with the most unlovable aspects” of ourselves, all the ways we are unpleasant, selfish, and want to run when things get tough.

Near the end of the volume, a piece called, “This Is Getting Old,” by Susan Moon, deals with the mother-daughter relationship, when the daughter is already sixty-three years of age. Even while the elder woman introduces the author to her friends as “my Buddhist daughter from California,” the author still is learning from her mother about being in the present, “because that’s important in old age.”

I am drawn to these teachings more than the traditional dharma teachings—probably because much of my practice is in being mindful in the moment, whatever moment that is. But there are some good articles in the traditional teaching model as well.

Kathleen McDonald’s “Awakening the Kind Heart” is an excellent introduction to loving-kindness meditations, from a nun in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Likewise, “Taming the Mind,” by Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche and Khenpo Tsewang Dongyal Rinpoche, offers a clear, short teaching on how we might tame the mind, but for this reader it feels like a view from 30,000 feet, not as down in the muck of everyday life as the first two articles I mentioned.

Another example may be Thich Nhat Hanh’s “The Child Within,” which is an excellent article (especially for a new psychotherapist such as myself), because it presents a Buddhist slant on a topic that is central to a lot of trauma work: that we have wounded child parts who need love and attention. Still, as important as this article is, the feeling one gets is that it is more removed from everyday living, more abstract.

On the other hand, the article that precedes it, Susan Piver’s “The Wisdom of a Broken Heart,” starts with the immediacy of loss, triggered by a basket of jalapeño cheddar-cheese cornbread. The ex-boyfriend loved that food, and the author is immediately plunged back into the grief that follows a break-up, crying in a bathroom stall and trying not to be heard, which only “leads to a bulbous nose and Mount Rushmore-sized headache.” She learns not to fight the loss, but to befriend it (much as Pema Chodron might teach). More importantly, however, she speaks directly to the reader about the embodied experience of loss, how it feels in the right-now.

Reading the volume, there is a sense that Western Buddhism, whatever that may or may not be, is developing a different set of teachings than the traditional Eastern teachers, and even different from those first pioneers who brought Buddhist teachings to West in the 1950s and 1960s.

The current generation of authors who are writing about Buddhism do so from the lived experience of daily life, raising a family, navigating relationships, earning a living, and so on. Theirs is not a Buddhism acquired in monastic life, in pilgrimage to study with Tibetan lamas, or from some other context removed from what was once known as being a householder. This emerging Western Buddhism feels like an embodied Buddhism, a way to live the teachings in the context of a postmodern technological society.

Meditation has the power to make dramatic changes in your physical and psychological health

April 5, 2011

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Many people see meditation as an exotic form of daydreaming, or a quick fix for a stressed-out mind. My advice to them is, try it.

Meditation is difficult, at least to begin with. On my first attempt, instead of concentrating on my breathing and letting go of anything that came to mind, as instructed by my cheery Tibetan teacher, I got distracted by a string of troubled thoughts, then fell asleep. Apparently, this is normal for first-timers. Experienced meditators will assure you that it is worth persisting, however.

“Training allows us to transform the mind, to overcome destructive emotions and to dispel suffering,” says Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard. “The numerous and profound methods that Buddhism has developed over the centuries can be used and incorporated by anyone. What is needed is enthusiasm and perseverance.”

It all sounds very rewarding, but what does science have to say on the subject?

Stories abound in the media about the transformative potential of meditative practice, but it is only in recent years empirical evidence has emerged. In the past…

decade, researchers have used functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI) to look at the brains of experienced meditators, such as Ricard, as well as beginners, and tested the effects of different meditative practices on cognition, behavior, physical and emotional health and brain plasticity.

A real scientific picture of meditation is now coming together. It suggests meditation can indeed change aspects of your psychology, temperament and physical health in dramatic ways. The studies are even starting to throw light on how meditation works.

“Time spent earnestly investigating the nature of your mind is bound to be helpful,” says Clifford Saron at the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis. And you don’t need a Buddhist or spiritualist worldview to profit from meditation. “One can be an empiricist (in meditation), just by working with the nature of your experience.” Saron should know. He’s leading the Shamatha project, one of the most comprehensive scientific studies of meditation ever.
In 2007, Saron and a team of neuroscientists and psychologists followed 60 experienced meditators over an intensive three-month meditation retreat in the Colorado Rockies, watching for changes in their mental abilities, psychological health and physiology. Participants practiced for at least five hours a day using a method known as focused attention meditation, which involves directing attention on the tactile sensation of breathing. The first paper from the project was published in June 2010 (Psychological Science).
Headed by Katherine MacLean at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Md., the study measured the volunteers’ attention skills by showing them a succession of vertical lines flashed up on a computer screen. They then had to indicate, by clicking a mouse, whenever there was a line shorter than the rest. As the retreat progressed, MacLean and her colleagues found that as the volunteers became progressively more accurate and increasingly easy to stay focused on the task for long periods.
Other researchers have also linked meditation with improved attention. Last year, a team led by Antoine Lutz at the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior, which is part of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, reported that after three months of training in focused attention meditation, volunteers were quicker at picking out different tones among a succession of similar ones, implying their powers of sustained concentration had improved (Journal of Neuroscience).
In 2007, Lutz’s colleague Heleen Slagter, now at the University of Amsterdam, published results from a study involving a combination of focused attention and “open monitoring” or mindfulness meditation, which involves the constant monitoring of moment-by-moment experience. After three months of meditation for between 10 and 12 hours a day her subjects showed a decreased “attentional blink,” the cognitive processing delay, usually lasting about half a second, that causes people to miss a stimulus such as a number on a screen when it follows rapidly after another (PLoS Biology).
The suggestion that meditation can improve attention is worth considering, given that focus is crucial to so much in life, from the learning and application of skills to everyday judgment and decision-making, or simply concentrating on your computer screen at work without thinking about what you will be eating for dinner. But how does dwelling on your breath for a period each day lead to such a pronounced cognitive change?
One possibility is it involves working memory, the capacity to hold in the mind information needed for short-term reasoning and comprehension. The link with meditation was established recently by Amishi Jha at the University of Miami-Coral Gables. She trained a group of American marines to focus their attention using mindfulness meditation and found that this increased their working memory (Emotion).
Feeling better
Along with enhancing cognitive performance, meditation seems to have an effect on emotional well-being. A second study from researchers with the Shamatha project concluded that meditation improves general social and emotional functioning, making study participants less anxious, and more aware of and better able to manage their emotions.
The ability to manage one’s emotions could also be key to why meditation can improve physical health. Studies have shown it to be an effective treatment for eating disorders, substance abuse, psoriasis and in particular for recurrent depression and chronic pain.
Last year, psychologist Fadel Zeidan, at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, reported that his volunteers noticed a decreased sensitivity to pain after just a few sessions of mindfulness meditation (Journal of Pain). He believes meditation doesn’t remove the sensation of pain so much as teach sufferers to control their emotional reaction to it and reduce the stress response. He is now using fMRI in an attempt to understand why that helps.
“There’s something very empowering about knowing you can alleviate some of these things yourself,” he says.
A gym for your mind
The suggestion people can become more empathic and compassionate through meditation practice has prompted psychologist Paul Ekman and Alan Wallace, a Buddhist teacher and president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, to float the idea of mental training “gymnasiums.” Like physical exercise gyms, but for the mind, these would allow people to drop in and learn to improve their emotional balance, develop their capacity for compassion and even measure their stress levels.
Others have suggested meditation could become an alternative to medication. Although this seems like a good idea, Saron is dubious. He worries thinking of meditation as a quick fix will smother some of the subtleties integral to successful practice. “When you are returning your mind to the object in hand, you have to do it with a sense of gentleness and authority, rather than develop a sense of failure when your mind wanders.”
Anyone can do it
The great thing about meditation is anyone can practice it anywhere. What’s more, you don’t have to be an expert or spend five hours a day at it to reap the benefits. The novices in Zeidan’s pain experiment reported improvements after meditating for just 20 minutes a day for three days. In a second experiment he found that similarly brief sessions can improve cognitive performance on tasks that demand continuous attention, such as remembering and reciting a series of digits (Consciousness and Cognition).
“It is possible to produce substantial changes in brain function through short-term practice of meditation,” says Richard Davidson, director of the Waisman Laboratory. He says data from a new unpublished study by his lab shows “demonstrable changes in brain function” in novice meditators after just two weeks of training for 30 minutes a day. “Even small amounts of practice can make a discernible difference.”
Tribune Media Services
How to meditate
You needn’t be an expert to reap the benefits of meditation.
There are numerous meditation styles, but the two most commonly studied by researchers are focused-attention meditation, in which the aim is to stay focused on a chosen thing such as an icon, a mantra or the breath, and mindfulness or open-monitoring meditation, where practitioners try to become aware of everything that comes into their moment-by-moment experience without reacting to it.
n For focused-attention meditation, start by sitting on a cushion or chair with your back straight and your hands in your lap and eyes closed. Then concentrate your mind on your chosen object – say your breathing, or more particularly the sensation of your breath leaving your mouth or nostrils. Try to keep it there. Probably your mind will quickly wander away, to an itch on your leg, perhaps, or to thoughts of what you will be doing later. Keep bringing it back to the breath. In time this will train the mind in three essential skills: to watch out for distractions, to “let go” of them once the mind has wandered, and to re-engage with the object of meditation. With practice, you should find it becomes increasingly easy to stay focused.
n In mindfulness meditation the aim is to monitor all the various experiences of your mind – thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations – and simply observe them, rather than trying to focus on any one of them. Instead of grasping at whatever comes to mind, which is what most of us do most of the time, the idea is to maintain a detached awareness. Those who develop this skill find it easier to manage emotions in day-to-day life.

Roundtable: meeting of the minds

December 5, 2010

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Tricycle Magazine: Tricycle sits down for a free-ranging discussion with several pioneers of the dialogue between science and Buddhism.

Since 1987 the Dalai Lama has met biennially with small groups of Western scientists to talk about the nature of mind and reality, and to plan collaborative research between science and Buddhism. These sessions, organized by the Mind and Life Institute, are designed to explore not only what Buddhism and modern science can learn from each other but also what they can learn by working together. Studies sponsored by Mind and Life are beginning to unravel the brain mechanisms underlying contemplative practice, providing scientific validation of the beneficial effects of meditation practice.

Wildmind is a Community-Supported Meditation Initiative. Click here to find out about the many benefits of being a sponsor.

Meditation boosts attention span

July 15, 2010

The life of a Buddhist monk may seem far-removed from the busy, gadget-packed daily buzz most of us experience. But new research suggests daily meditation can give us a piece of the peaceful life, as the focused practice boosts attention spans.

“You wonder if the mental skills, the calmness, the peace that [Buddhist monks] express, if those things are a result of their very intensive training, or if they were just very special people to begin with,” said Katherine MacLean, who worked on the study as a graduate student at the University of California – Davis.

To find out, MacLean and colleagues had a group of 30 people with an average age of about 49 go on a three-month meditation retreat in Colorado, while a second group of 30 waited their turn (and were used as a reference with which to compare results from the first meditation group). The second group went on the retreat three months after the end of the first retreat.

All participants had been on at least three five-to-10 day meditation retreats before, and on this occasion they studied with B. Alan Wallace, one of the study’s co-authors and a meditation teacher and Buddhist scholar.

The participants completed various tests. For instance, at three points during the retreat, participants took a 30-minute computer test in which they watched the screen as lines flashed on it. Most lines were the same length, but every now and then a shorter one would appear, and the volunteer had to respond by clicking the computer mouse when this happened. The task was meant to measure visual attention span and the ability to make fine visual distinctions.

As meditation training progressed, participants got better at discriminating the short lines, which in turn made it easier to sustain attention. The result meant improved performance on the task over a long period of time. The performance improvement lasted five months after the retreat (the length of the follow-up period), particularly for those who continued to meditate every day.

“Because this task is so boring and yet is also very neutral, it’s kind of a perfect index of meditation training,” MacLean said. “People may think meditation is something that makes you feel good and going on a meditation retreat is like going on vacation, and you get to be at peace with yourself. That’s what people think until they try it. Then you realize how challenging it is to just sit and observe something without being distracted.”

The set of experiments done by MacLean and a team of nearly 30 researchers with the same group of participants is the most comprehensive study of intensive meditation to date, the scientists say. Some of the results are published in the June issue of the journal Psychological Science.

Future analyses of these same volunteers will look at other mental abilities, such as how well people who meditate can regulate their emotions and their general well-being.

[via LiveScience]

UC Davis study finds that practicing meditation can improve perception

July 2, 2010

Wildmind's meditation blog

Om mani padme hum.

Repeat the ancient mantra—Om mani padme hum (“Hail the jewel in the lotus”), om mani padme hum—again and again until the chaos of your thoughts quiets, the thump of your heart becomes clearly evident and your attention turns to the easy movement of breath through your nostrils … in and out … in and out. You’re no longer lost in thought. You’re not spaced out. You’re paying attention to what’s going on in the present moment. You’re meditating.

Buddhists have been practicing meditations like this one and hundreds of variations for more than 2,500 years. It’s only in recent years, though, that the contemplative practice has moved into the mainstream. In 2007, more than 9 percent of Americans were meditating according to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. The fascination with meditation continues perhaps driven by a desire to gain health benefits, find spiritual comfort or to say “no” to high-velocity lives that leave us disconnected from ourselves and others.

Over the past 50 years, scientists have also been asking questions about the human mind and attempting to figure out the benefits of training it through meditation. Type “meditation” into the PubMed index, and it returns nearly 2,000 published research articles on the subject. Much of the early work is today considered too deeply flawed to be meaningful. But recent work provides evidence that meditation can offer relief for conditions such as anxiety, stress, depression, pain and insomnia. Functional MRIs reveal changes resulting from prolonged meditation in the brains of Buddhist monks.

Now, led by UC Davis researchers, the longest and most complex study of meditation ever undertaken is beginning to publish its first results after more than two years spent analyzing mountains of data.

The Shamatha Project sought to discover whether anyone can achieve the remarkable calm, focus and joyfulness that monks and yogis display often in the face of great hardship and suffering. It’s a question that hounded Clifford Saron, associate research scientist at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain and leader of a team of 25 prominent neuroscientists and psychologists working on Shamatha, since meeting some of these extraordinary people through a study he organized in the 1990s.

Just how long or often someone would have to engage in meditative practice to gain these characteristics remains unanswered, although 60 people enrolled in two groups in the project appear to have made strides toward achieving enhanced states of calm, focus and joyfulness after three months of intensive meditation training at the Shambhala Mountain Center in Colorado. Progress was assessed using a variety of state-of-the-art measures, including electrophysiological testing using EEG/ERP and other standard psychological assessment tests.

The first official findings released from the Shamatha Project uphold a claim by meditators that the practice improves perception. An article published last month online in Psychological Science reports that study participants became better at making fine visual distinctions and sustaining attention during a 30-minute test.

Lead author Katherine MacLean, who also works at the UC Davis Center and whose work on the project formed the basis of her doctoral dissertation, derived her tests from those used to assess vigilance in radar operators. It’s a lot more complicated than this, but simply put: People watched lines appear on a screen and clicked a mouse each time they spotted one that was shorter than the others. By midway through the study, those who meditate had become better at identifying a smaller difference between long and short lines and at sustaining attention.

Adults are usually lousy at paying vigilant attention, especially when the task is monotonous or boring. Most begin making mistakes on this test within 10 minutes. But as it became easier for meditators to pick out the shorter lines, they were able to sustain their attention for longer periods.

“To show that in just a month and a half of intensive mental training, that is a pretty remarkable feat,” MacLean said. “It’s encouraging to see that there can be changes well into adulthood.”

What does all this have to do with whether or not ordinary meditators can achieve the kind of joyful compassion that Saron witnessed in yogis and monks who’d spent a lifetime in meditative training?

Most of us have trouble tapping into what we’re thinking and feeling in the moment, or a few minutes later, or even hours or days later. That’s understandable since more than 99 percent of our experience is not in our conscious awareness. But what if through meditation we were able to rest between our thoughts and feelings long enough to identify them as they occur? We then might be able to gain control of our thoughts, learn to regulate our emotions, and improve our ability to act with kindness and compassion.

This is the potential some believe mediation has for transforming our lives. It’s what the Shamatha Project set out to examine: How does meditation practice affect people’s lives in the world?

Although the Shamatha Project was first conceived by Buddhist scholar B. Alan Wallace of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies years ago, it didn’t officially begin until early 2007. That’s when two groups of 30 people ages 21 to 70 with varied experience with meditation—one served as a control group and later also took the training—were recruited. During the three-month experiment, they spent on average five hours a day practicing an array of meditation techniques taught by Wallace, including a focus on breath.

Did intensive practice help participants regulate their emotions or increase compassion? The scientists assessed emotional responses by showing the meditators graphic scenes of human suffering and recording the minute changes in facial expressions that reveal emotions. They will compare these observations with how the retreatants said they felt when viewing the images to evaluate awareness of emotions.

To get at emotion regulation and compassion from another angle, researchers showed documentary footage of soldiers bragging about getting psyched up to shoot Iraqis. These were followed by images of suffering—including children—and soldiers describing the difficulty of the war. Preliminary findings indicate that those who had been practicing intensive meditation were less likely than controls to show emotions that may be interpreted as distancing themselves from others.

In addition to the improvements in what Buddhists call “attentional vividness,” those receiving the intensive training overall experienced greater well-being and less anxiety than those who did not undergo the training. Reports that tie results together will be forthcoming.

Saron, who doesn’t maintain a regular meditation practice today but has participated in many retreats over the past 35 years, described observing the openness, warmth and joy among participants toward the end of the study as one of the high points of his life. He concluded: “I didn’t need any scientific evidence for the utility of seriously investigating one’s mind. But that’s me.”

[Nancy Brands Ward, NewsReview.com]

For more information on the Shamatha Project, go to the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain website at https://mindbrain.ucdavis.edu, or to www.shambhalamountain.org/shamatha.

Visual perception heightened by meditation training

May 13, 2010