The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society

Understanding Your Mind

By Kathleen Mellen, Staff Writer, Daily Hampshire Gazette
Originally published on Saturday, August 27, 2005

 

 

Joseph Goldstein, who leads meditation retreats worldwide, told an audience at Smith College last week that said his first meditation teacher advised him that if he wanted to understand his mind, he would have to sit down and observe it.

 

No belief system, no rituals. It was just that simple, Goldstein said.

The first step is to 'calm the mind, collecting attention to the object of awareness - like the breath,' Goldstein told the group. 'Train your mind to stay on it. Understand how often our minds wander. The training is in the coming back.'

Once the meditator can maintain steady attention, the mind begins to settle, Goldstein explained. Then the conventional understanding of the body disappears, Goldstein says, allowing the meditator to turn his or her attention to the inner workings of the mind - to see conditioned patterns of thinking that are linked to judgments, hopes and fears.

 

'All harmful actions have their origins in the mind,' he warned. 'We create our own reality, then we live

it.'

 

But through meditation, he says, there is an increased awareness of the thoughts that roam unchecked through our minds.

 

'When thought is unnoticed, it has tremendous power - like little dictators of our minds,' he said. But through meditation, it is possible to step outside our conditioning and to notice our thoughts.

 

Then, Goldstein says, 'We see that a thought is little more than nothing. It has no power at all except the power we give it.'

 

The beauty of meditation is that we look directly at ourselves, Goldstein told the group. 'It's a great clearing out of all things stored.'

 

Then, he said, 'Because we see with more clarity, we make wiser choices.'

Open-minded: Educators say meditation, yoga make students more receptive to new information

By Kathleen Mellen, Staff Writer, Daily Hampshire Gazette
Copyright GazetteNET.com
Originally published on Saturday, August 27, 2005

yoga at the Summer Session

Photo by Kevin Gutting: Sunanda Markus of the Northampton-based Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, facing the group, leads professors from across the nation Friday in morning yoga at Smith College. The 32 teachers were attending a conference last week, sponsored by the center, to learn how to integrate meditation and yoga into their classrooms.

 

Our lives these days seem accompanied by an uninterrupted soundtrack: Televisions and DVD players entertain us, car radios and iPods ensure we never miss a beat, and the ubiquitous cell phone assures that we are instantly reachable, day or night.

We're in a fast-paced world, our lives are all about doing, says Patricia Mercaitis, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. 'It's about multitasking, doing things all at once. We're busy, busy, busy.'

So busy, she says, that learning in colleges and universities across the country is being compromised.

Now, Mercaitis is trying to change that, at least for her students. Her method: Introduce the use of meditation into her classroom - a way to quiet the mind and promote concentration.

On the very first day of class, Mercaitis, a communications disorders professor, asks her students to stow the accoutrements of their daily lives and sit for the next few minutes in absolute silence.

Silence, she says, cleanses the mind and is an important precursor to learning.

'They need to sit. Take time. Simply be,' said Mercaitis in a recent interview. 'To sit and simply be with yourself allows you to simply be with anything,' she said.

And, when students wonder what this has to do with the subject matter at hand? Well, she tells them, 'In order to be able to learn, you must be able to focus your mind. Contemplative practice, she says, is the best way she knows to do that.

The calming trend

Mercaitis is not a lone renegade from the 1960s. She is one of a growing number of professors at colleges and universities across the country who are incorporating contemplative practices - like meditation and yoga - into their curricula.

In the Five College area, for example, there are 35 courses offered, across all academic disciplines, in which the professors use such practices in their classrooms.

It's a trend that's growing nationwide, says Mirabai Bush, executive director of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, a non-profit organization based in Northampton that works to integrate the use of meditation and yoga into everyday settings.

For example, since 1997, the center in collaboration with the American Council of Learned Societies in New York City, and funded by the Nathan Cummings Foundation, also of New York, and the Fetzer Institute in Kalamazoo, Mich., has awarded 108 fellowships to professors at 80 colleges and universities in the United States.

Last week the center brought together at Smith College 32 professors from across the country to brainstorm with some of the fellows ways to fold these practices into their teaching. That the colleges support the effort is evidenced by the fact that, in most cases, the $400 tuition plus travel expenses were covered by the institutions, Bush says.

'[Higher education] is a prelude to everything that happens in the professions,' Bush said. The network of scholars that came together at the conference will help introduce meditation and yoga into mainstream American life - a move that she says has waxed and waned in the past, but is again picking up momentum.

In fact, belief among Americans in the value of these practices has grown significantly in the United States in recent years, according to a 2003 report in Time magazine. At that time, nearly 10 million Americans said they regularly did some form of meditation.

yoga at summer session 2

Photo by Kevin Gutting: A growing number of college professors, like those shown here at last week's conference at Smith College, weave their own meditation and yoga practices into their classroom teaching.

A few minutes of silence

Joseph Goldstein, author of 'Insight Meditation: The Practice of Freedom' and 'The Experience of Insight,' calls meditation 'A basic, systematic investigation of who we are and the nature of consciousness itself.'

Goldstein, co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, spoke last week at the only session of the conference that was open to the public.

'Sit comfortably,' Goldstein told the group of 145 who had gathered in the Carroll Room at the Smith College Campus Center.

'Feet flat on the floor, eyes closed gently. Relax your eyes, your shoulders ... connect with the feeling of each breath.

'Let your mind come to rest at the place where you feel the breath most distinctly. If your mind wanders, lost in thought, simply come back again to the breathing.'

'It's amazing what a few minutes of silence can do to the energy in a room,' Goldstein told the group after sounding a soft chime to end the meditation.

After beginning each day with group meditation like this, the professors - in fields such as education, mathematics, studio art and law - attended similar lectures, as well as small group discussions designed to help them learn to intertwine contemplative practices with their teaching.

From early each morning the teachers gathered in forums that offered broad descriptions of the contemplative movement in the United States as well as discussions about scientific discoveries that illustrate the benefits of meditation and yoga. There was even a session called 'Guerrilla Contemplation,' which investigated ways to introduce meditation into academic settings where it's not yet welcome.

UMass professor Mercaitis says she doesn't find much resistance in her own classroom. Most of her students, she says, quickly become accustomed to her teaching style - and see its value. She even offers group meditation before her exams to help reduce the stress of test anxiety.

A path for scientists

Bush says Mercaitis' educational approach can offer the same pluses in every academic discipline.

At Amherst College, for example, physics professor Arthur Zajonc, who is also the academic program director at the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, says the use of meditative silence as a teaching tool in science classes has potential for far-reaching benefits.

It can, he says, help scientists break patterns of conventional thought that have stymied them in the face of complex questions. Meditation, he says, can bring them to a state of concentration that allows them to see patterns and relationships that may have eluded them.

Through the cultivation of insight, inner calm, well-being and compassion, those who meditate are freed of biases, Zajonc says, and so become capable of making more accurate, reliable judgments.

Zajonc stresses that he uses meditation in the classroom as an adjunct to a traditional educational approach. 'Good science should include both,' he said.

'This is not a turning away from the academy, or a covert way to put religion into education,' Zajonc said. Meditation is not, he says, a means of telling people what to think; it's a way of offering options in how to think.

Benefits documented

That students and others, can reap broad benefits from meditation has been documented in numerous scientific studies. For example, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester, has found evidence in his research that it improves the immune system.

In a study done in 1995, Kabat-Zinn, a member of the Center for Contemplative Mind's advisory council, and others found that meditation increases levels of the hormone melatonin. Melatonin, the study pointed out, plays a role in 'many biologic functions important in maintaining health and preventing disease, including breast and prostate cancer.'

Since 1988, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), based in Bethesda, Md., has awarded millions of dollars to researchers to study the effects of contemplative practices on health, including regulating high blood pressure and reducing stress.

Reshaping the brain

Daniel Goleman, a member of the advisory board at the Center for Contemplative Mind and author of the book 'Emotional Intelligence,' has spent years studying neurological responses to meditation. Goleman, who lives in Williamsburg, holds a doctorate in clinical psychology from Harvard University in Cambridge.

In a talk at last week's conference, Goleman told the group that scientists have recently established the concept of neuroplasticity - that the physical brain is continually reshaped by one's life experiences.

Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure brain activity during meditation, researchers have determined that it can increase activity in the portion of the brain associated with feelings of happiness and well-being.

The more a person meditates, the studies showed, the less transient that effect is. In other words, Goleman says, the brain's 'set point' actually shifts, and that feel-good portion of the brain becomes increasingly utilized.

Professors Patricia Mercaitis and Arthur Zajonc say by introducing meditation to their students, they hope to help them become better learners, increasingly creative thinkers, more competent professionals and happier people.

'We have an obligation to teach the next generation - to introduce them to more balance in their lives,' Mercaitis said.