Well, I had a good run there, writing about science and mindfulness, digging the gems out of the mudslide of thousands of published studies. But these days I’m a bit distracted, thinking about what Devon and I are doing, and what it all means.

 

To sum up, in the last couple weeks we’ve been sending social media blasts about the upcoming workshops in Iceland and Ashland, planning a (for us) giant fundraising campaign to launch an online platform that will deliver mindfulness classes to anyone anywhere, finally officially incorporating as a non-profit, and, to top it all off, filming with a videographer we really love.

 

(Oh, and Simple Habit just put out my new meditation series, When the Shit Hits the Fan. So that’s fun.)

 

It’s been busy. Overwhelming at times. But not only that, it’s been interrupting the meditation retreat we were supposed to be on from April 1st to May 10th.

 

So I’ve been asking myself: What the hell are we actually doing here?

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There was a time in my life, a long time ago now, when I just couldn't enjoy much of anything. The world, it seemed to me, stood at arm's length, frozen, out of reach. Nothing touched me, really.

I remember a moment, for instance, sitting on a beach on the west coast of the Big Island of Hawaii, where I was living at the time. The sun was setting. The colors of the sky - red, orange, blazing yellow - danced on the silvery sweep of the incoming tide. 

"This is beautiful," I told myself. "This is beautiful." 

But it didn't matter. Because it didn't feel beautiful. And beauty, of course, is something that either touches us or doesn't. No amount of willpower opens the heart to a sunset.

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A year ago, on our way into our first little European teaching tour, I posted a blog about mindfulness, Iceland, and the art of transformational travel. (Click here for that original post.) In transformational travel, I wrote back then:

We scratch the surface, not only of the geographies we temporarily inhabit, but of our own selves. We let the landscape rattle us. We get a little dirty, build relations, end up eating things we should never . . . well, you get the picture.

And how do we open ourselves to transformation when we travel? 

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And now, to wrap up this six-part series on what we really know about the proven benefits of mindfulness, please allow me to present an account of my most favorite of empirically validated benefits of meditation practice: love.

Yes, love. 

No, not that sappy, sugar-coated, fickle, inconstant moon type of pop-song teenage love. Love as a stance. Love as practice. Or, as psychoanalyst Erich Fromm put it so sweetly so many years ago: "standing in love." 

Standing in love is more about a commitment to a way of being, less about a hapless joyride on the roller coaster of capricious affect. 

And we now know, based on a couple dozen gold standard studies, that meditation practice increases our ability to feel and express love.

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We've heard a lot about the efficacy of mindfulness for the treatment of anxiety and depression. In fact, dozens of studies have been published claiming to establish mindfulness as an effective treatment for mood disorders. 

But what if we apply the gold standard we've been using to separate the wheat from the chaff? Just what kinds of impacts does mindfulness deliver when we drop the correlational designs, the waitlist controls, the self-report measures?

What do the best studies actually show?

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All in all, inflammation is kind of a bad thing.

Inflammation in the body and brain have been linked to everything from Alzheimer's to heart disease to cancer and sleep disorders. Of course, there are plenty of anti-inflammatory prescription drugs. But, as always, those pharmaceutical solutions come with a host of side effects. So it would be a really good thing if there was some other way to curtail those pesky neurogenic flashes. 

As it turns out, there just might be. 

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Picture for a moment a group of about a dozen patients in disposable gowns, sitting together around a folding table in a locked unit in a major research hospital. Their faces are in various states of distress – some angry, some anxious, others drooping with despair. Some guy in a sports coat (okay, me) leads them through a five-minute meditation on the breath. Then they all open their eyes and look around.

What happens?

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As humans, we all have the natural born ability to direct attention.

For example, right now, with very little effort, you can place your attention on your right foot. You can feel the sensations of the right foot, know the temperature of the right foot, feel whatever it is the right foot is touching, whether the carpet or the texture of your sock. You can then place you attention on your tongue, or on a sound you are hearing. In fact, you can even place your attention on something and keep it there for a little while.

So far, so good, right?

But here’s the amazing part: This innate ability, known as attention regulation in the scientific literature, can be trained.

Italics added because, for the longest time, Western society didn’t seem to know this.

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