How one scientist is blending ancient philosophy with modern neuroscience to fight addiction
by Michael W. Taft
Heart racing and fists shaking, I stood ready to fight. I was moments away from sparring with the top student in my karate class in Japan: a fast, coordinated monster who had defeated all challengers. But nanoseconds before the fight began, something shifted. Nervous anticipation disappeared and I snapped into total focus. The room, the other students, and everything else faded into irrelevance, leaving my awareness filled only with my opponent in his white gi. When the coach shouted, “Go!,” my body shot through the air like a lightning bolt, my fist connecting to my opponent’s ribs. Somehow I had scored a point against the best in the class, but paradoxically I didn’t care. All that mattered in that moment was that timeless flash when there was no sense of self, no me, just a body effortlessly flying through space toward the inevitable goal. That moment of being in a flow state remains one of the most powerful and beautiful things I have ever experienced.
Which is why, 25 years later, I find myself sitting in a tight blue cap with a 120 electrical leads wired to my head, while four scientists of the Therapeutic Neuroscience Lab scurry around me tweaking knobs, rattling keyboards, and testing gear. The clues these scientists hope to uncover are small steps in a massive project that could forever change the way we cure addiction, treat anxiety and depression, and even teach meditation—eventually making the flow state easily available to everyone, with potentially world-changing ramifications for the human race. I’m playing the role of lab rat in a groundbreaking test intended to teach us how to find that same state of flow on call using real time EEG brain scanning, state of the art signal processing, and theories from psychology, neuroscience, and Eastern religion. Those are the stakes, but getting there won’t be easy.
Flow vs. Daydreaming
A “flow state” means to be fully absorbed in an activity to the point of losing yourself in the joy that comes with doing it. Though it was first clinically defined by Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Chik-zent-mee-hi) in the 1970s, we have known about the flow state for millennia. There is a wealth of colloquial terms we use to talk about flow: being in the zone, on a roll, in the moment, in a groove, in tune, on fire, centered, in the now. Flow feels good—smooth, masterful, concentrated calm—and at its peak, it can be intensely pleasurable. Flow is also associated with the highest levels of human functioning and achievement. Top athletes and musicians, and even hackers, stockbrokers, and poker players all report taking advantage of this condition of peak performance, focus, and clarity. So why can’t we be in a flow state all the time?
I learned the painful answer to this question during the months of clobberings that followed that one magical day in karate class. I had done so well in that bout that now the teacher and other students expected me to perform at that level every time, never mind that I expected it of myself. The pressure was on, but something was wrong. It seemed like no matter what I did, I just couldn’t get back to that state of flow. Instead, I was over thinking every move, second-guessing all my instincts, and found myself utterly unable to perform. It totally sucked: a classic experience of choking. The reason that we can’t get into flow is because we get in our own way.
“Which is why, 25 years later, I find myself sitting in a tight blue cap with a 120 electrical leads wired to my head, while four scientists of the Therapeutic Neuroscience Lab scurry around me tweaking knobs, rattling keyboards, and testing gear.”
Getting in our own way, it turns out, is the condition of most people most of the time. A 2010 study[1] by Harvard’s Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert sent participants text messages at random times throughout the day, asking them what they were doing and whether they were thinking about that activity or something else. In a sample of over 2000 participants, the researchers found that people were daydreaming almost 50 percent of the time.
Daydreaming is the opposite of flow. In daydreaming—or “mind wandering,” as psychologists so aptly call it—we’re caught up in our fantasies, self-reflection, fears and desires. In a flow state, on the other hand, we’re totally focused on just the present moment.
We daydream so much that scientists call it the default mode—what the human brain is doing when it’s not focused on something in particular. The brain network responsible for daydreaming is named the default mode network (DMN). And much like letting your car idle will burn your fuel reserves, this “idling” activity negatively affects our daily happiness. The Harvard study, for example, discovered that people were the least happy when daydreaming. As Killingsworth summed it up, “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” Simply put, it feels good to be focused on the moment in a flow state and bad to be fantasizing about greener pastures, or the purple vistas of what might have been.
In extreme cases, this mental fantasizing can turn into rumination and recrimination, so it’s not surprising that default mode network activity is significantly correlated with depression, anxiety, and other psychiatric disorders. It can also be dangerous. A recent study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that daydreaming causes twice as many fatal crashes as texting.[2] Of all the aspects of the DMN, however, the most compelling and medically significant may be its connection with addiction.
Craving in the Default Mode Network
Could heroin junkies one day use flow to overcome their addiction? Judson Brewer, an MD-PhD who until recently ran an experimental addiction clinic at Yale, thinks so. Now in charge of the Therapeutic Neuroscience Lab at the UMass Medical Center, Brewer is a small, bearded man with a balding head and intense eyes behind wire-rimmed circular glasses. He is one of an elite cadre of neuroscientists attempting to find radical new medical interventions through the understanding of how the brain functions during the flow state.
Brewer’s research centers on a region of the brain known as the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), which is a major node in the default mode network. The PCC is one of the most active and densely connected areas of the brain, involved in emotion and memory processing. It also turns out to be very good at interfering with the flow state. In a 2013 paper published in the Frontiers of Human Neuroscience, Brewer noted that the PCC gears up when we are daydreaming and are caught up in DMN activity.[3] When the PCC calms down, on the other hand, we become more mindful of our immediate experience, making it easier to enter a flow state.
But here’s the real clincher. Numerous studies have linked PCC activity to the sensation of craving and have demonstrated the role it plays in addiction.[4] That is, daydreaming and addiction are linked. In fact, addicts who develop lesions in the PCC (thus rendering it ineffective) report an immediate loss of craving and addiction. Brewer noticed this correlation and wondered whether it might be possible to craft an intervention based on these findings. If he could teach addicts to voluntarily dial down activity in the PCC, would that give them a leg up in overcoming their addiction?
The answer from his experimental trials is a clear yes. The intervention Brewer found to deactivate the PCC was mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness, which simply involves bringing one’s awareness to the sensations of his or her present-moment experience, seems like a natural way to bring us out of the mind wandering state. The whole point is to ”be here now,” as the saying goes, and Brewer had a hunch that doing just that might be able to reduce PCC activity in the brain.
Brewer’s personal interest in mindfulness meditation began decades ago with a horrible breakup. In his early twenties, he thought his life was all set—he had just graduated from Princeton and was engaged to be married to his college sweetheart. But just before beginning medical school, his relationship fell apart. Upset and unable to sleep, Brewer started listening to Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness meditation instruction tapes and found that they helped him do more than just pass the time. The training in concentration and relaxation he received helped him make it through his breakup, and subsequently get through medical school. After that, Brewer was hooked.
Having experienced the benefits of mindfulness firsthand, Brewer began to wonder if it could also influence the addicts he was working with. “During my residency, I noticed a correlation between how junkies talk about addiction and how Buddhists describe the human condition. They were using the same language, which is all about craving, clinging, desiring. I thought that was interesting, so we did some trials to see if mindfulness meditation could help with addiction.”
Investigating this question wouldn’t be easy, but the difficulty of the challenge was matched by the enormity of its possible benefits. After some promising initial results with cocaine and alcohol dependence[5], in 2009 Brewer created an experiment at Yale’s Therapeutic Neuroscience Clinic using mindfulness practice to treat smoking addiction.[6] Since nicotine is harder to kick than even heroin, smokers made great guinea pigs.[7]
“During my residency, I noticed a correlation between how junkies talk about addiction and how Buddhists describe the human condition.” ~ Judson Brewer, MD
The study pitted the American Lung Association’s Freedom from Smoking program—the current gold standard in smoking cessation treatments—against simple mindfulness practice in a population of 88 smokers. After four weeks, only 15 percent of the FFS smokers had quit, versus 36 percent of the meditators. Mindfulness appeared to be twice as effective. After 17 weeks, the FFS group had dropped to six percent, while the meditators stayed at 31 percent.
Brewer explains this impressive result: “It’s not that the deactivation of the PCC directly reduces craving in the moment. The actual seat of craving is probably elsewhere, such as the nucleus accumbens or insula. The role of the PCC is to link that craving to a behavior, to translate the urge into an action.” In other words, when a craving arises, such as the desire to smoke, and you start to feel that “if I don’t have a smoke right now my head is going to explode!” the PCC automatically engages and launches you into a behavior, such as lighting up a cigarette. “Mindfulness training allows you to disengage the clutch, as it were, by deactivating the PCC. So you feel the craving, but don’t automatically do the behavior. Over time, this leads to a deconditioning of the behavior, and a reduction—maybe even extinction—of the craving itself.”
Neuroscientist and author of Welcome to Your Brain, Sandra Aamodt is not so sure about all this. “The idea that mindfulness training could reduce cravings is intriguing but preliminary. So far, it’s been tested in a relatively small number of people, and most studies have not been randomized, which is the gold standard for evaluating treatments.”
Clearly, Brewer is onto something when it comes to using flow to treat addiction and other conditions. But in following this thread, things go much further, and get much weirder, than that.
Losing Your Self
Csikszentmihalyi’s classic definition of the flow state includes the possibility of a loss of reflective self-consciousness. The more involved you are in an activity, the more it feels like the activity is sort of doing itself, and “you” disappear into the easy bliss of flow.
As you might guess, the pleasurable loss of self that comes with flow hasn’t gone unnoticed. Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism have traditionally put a lot of emphasis on the flow state, referring to it with phrases like “doing without doing,” “becoming one with things,” and “no-self.” The main way to get into the flow state, according to these traditions, is the practice of meditation. As a practicing Buddhist, the idea that the experience of no-self could be linked to the flow state was irresistible to Brewer.
Brewer since has proven that this loss of reflective self-consciousness actually occurs in the flow state. In a study, he asked 12 long-term meditators to engage in three different types of meditation while in an fMRI scanner. What Brewer found surprised him: meditation didn’t seem to activate any particular region of the brain, but it clearly deactivated the PCC. Other researchers, such as Guiseppi Pagnoni and Veronique Taylor, have found very similar results in separate studies: long-term meditators were dialing down the activity of the PCC much more than normal subjects. While there is no single “self spot” in the brain, the PCC appears to be a vital node in the network that generates a sense of self. In other words, the more PCC activity, the more ego is happening in the moment.
Having found the fMRI signature associated with experiencing a strong sense of self, Brewer became interested in making this feedback easily available—both for addiction cessation and for meditation instruction. However, fMRI is costly, uncomfortable, and hard to pack up and move about, so it was a non-starter for a meditation app. Electroencephalography (EEG), on the other hand, is cheap, portable, and easy to use. Could EEG be used to detect the relative activation of the PCC? Brewer’s team at the TNL is working to find out by isolating a useable EEG signal of the PCC, and they seem to be getting somewhere with it.
As a longtime meditator with over 10,000 hours of practice under my belt (and an amateur neuroscience fanatic), I’m fascinated by the search for the neural correlates of meditative states. Over the past ten years I’ve met an unlikely hodgepodge of philosophers, doctors, Buddhist monks, and lab geeks all attempting to hunt down the verifiable traces of deep meditative states in the brain. I thought I had seen it all, but when I learned what Brewer was doing, I realized he was onto something unique and incredibly important—a practical way to train people into the no-self state. I jumped at the chance to visit his lab, with no real idea what I was getting myself into.
The Therapeutic Neuroscience Lab had all the hallmarks of Silicon-Valley-style entrepreneurship: the tabletops were strewn with electronic gear, computer guts were lying outside the casing, and empty fast food cartons were everywhere. There were stand up desks and huge monitors galore, but almost no art, plants, photographs, or other decorative touches, excluding a hastily taped-up Buddha or two on the walls. Newly empty cardboard boxes were stuffed under every desk, and there were barely any chairs to be found. I was warmly greeted into this Spartan atelier by Dae Houlihan, a young neuroscience grad student newly moved to Massachusetts—just one of the several crack brain-research team members Brewer has assembled to crack the EEG puzzle. He offered me some fine herbal tea, which I eagerly sipped. Brewer, hearing that I hadn’t eaten, opened a Tupperware tub and handed me a peanut butter sandwich, which must have been his own lunch.
The team quickly whisked me into one of the test rooms, sat me in a chair, fitted me for a cap, and put it on my head with what seemed like micrometer precision. It all happened so fast that I kept expecting someone to say, “This won’t hurt a bit.” I eyed the hammers, drills, and other power tools lying around nervously. However, the next step wasn’t trepanation, but instead the application of glue, or something that felt like it, to my head. Actually, the substance was electrically-conductive gel, which they squirted with fat syringes (the kind found at hobby stores and usually loaded with epoxy) into each of the 120 holes in the cap. They then attached 120 leads to my head, which ran to their signal processing equipment.
We then spent several hours zeroing in on the EEG signal of reduced PCC activity. Their rig was impressive, and afterward I couldn’t help wondering if someday in the near future I would be using an iPhone app based on this technology to deepen my meditation practice.
The possible applications of such a portable rig would be immense. Imagine a lightweight headset, something like a pair of headphones, that could plug into your smartphone and feed brainwave data into an app to give you real-time feedback about the amount of self-reflective consciousness (i.e. getting in your own way, non-flow, daydreaming) going on in your brain moment by moment. Because the device would actually measure the activation of the PCC, there would be no guessing about how much of a sense of self was present: it would be clear when the feedback was in the red versus the blue.
If successful, such a device could not only help people suffering from anxiety, depression, and addiction, it could shave many years off the laborious process of learning meditation. Here would be concrete and easily accessible insight into the state of flow that’s so hard for teachers to describe and for students to understand. A “no-self” app could set off a revolution in meditation instruction and practice worldwide. As Brewer recalls, “Some of our novice subjects were able to make their PCCs look like those of advanced meditators after only nine minutes of real-time neurofeedback. They would get out of the scanner and ask how soon they could come back and do it again. I wish I had that ten years ago when I was striving my butt off trying to learn to meditate.”
Will applications like Brewer’s usher in an era of technologically-mediated neurofeedback allowing people on the street to walk around in a deep state of ecstatic absorption centered around their everyday activities? Will doctors and psychologists soon be prescribing a half hour a day with a “flow machine” app to people suffering with everything from alcohol dependency to severe depression? The answer isn’t yet clear, let’s just say that if it does come to pass, I will be first in line.
Learn how to enter a flow state at will with meditation.
——–citations
[1] http://news.sciencemag.org/2010/11/daydreaming-downer
[2] http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811737.pdf
[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3788347/
[4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23422198 is just one example.
[5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19904666
[6] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3191261/
[7] http://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/29/magazine/nicotine-harder-to-kickthan-heroin.html
Different forms of meditation have different affects on the default mode network.
Mindfulness, as you point out, has an effect of reducing mind-wandering.
TM, on the other hand, was *explained* by TM founder Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in terms of allowing the mind to wander freely in the direction of greater happiness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjem4YfJGQI
Perhaps unsurprising, the practice of TM activates the DMN very strongly
Coincidentally, the EEG of TM is very unlike the EEG found during mindfulness/concentrative practices. Alpha EEG power and coherence tends to go up, especially in the frontal lobes, while gamma power is considerably lower:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19862565
In contrast, alpha power and EEG coherence in the frontal lobes is markedly lower during mindfulness/concentrative practices, while gamma power is considerably higher:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4106862/
note the graphs for the various practices:
EEG Power: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4106862/figure/pone-0102990-g005/
EEG coherence: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4106862/figure/pone-0102990-g006/
By the same measures, TM would be an enhancement of normal resting, rather than a reduction of resting measures.
Long-term practice of mindfulness techniques, as you note, leads to a reduction of sense-of-self.
With TM, on the other hand, long-term practice leads to the emergence of an enhanced sense of self: alertness/awareness and sense-of-self are perceived as the same property. This tracks quite nicely the emergence of a more TM-like EEG pattern during all forms of mental and physical activity.
When this EEG pattern becomes strong enough, this alertness-sense-of-self becomes present at all times, whether the person is waking, dreaming or in deep sleep. Physiological and psychological research on people who report this situation continuously for at least a year has been published. Such people are considered to be in the beginning stage of of enlightenment. This review article discusses the theory and the published research on the physiological/psychological correlates of people in this state:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.12316/full
.
The bottom line for utility of meditation practices in the modern world is heath and happiness.
Last April, the American Heart Heart Association reviewed all recent (99% of all mindulness studies fit within their timeframe) research on the effects of alternate therapies on hypertension. In the section on meditation, the authors concluded that TM could be given a passing grade (Class II, Level of Evidence B): TM can be considered a valid secondary treatment by doctors to prescribe to their patients for the treatment of high blood pressure, while all other mental practices, including mindfulness [MBSR] received a not-passing grade (Class III, Level of Evidence B), and are not recommended pending further research.
The AHA released a revised version of their statement this year, but the section on meditation/relaxation remained the same, despite the publication of another 250 studies on mindfulness practices.
In fact, this study, combined with the effect mindfulness has to reduce the restful brainwave pattern associated with mind-wandering, helps explain the ambiguous finding of the AHA:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24798861
“Parallel to the reduction of stress levels after 1 year, the intervention-group additionally showed reduced catecholamine levels (p<0.05), improved 24 h-mean arterial (p<0.05) and maximum systolic blood pressure (p<0.01), as well as a reduction in IMT (p<0.01). However, these effects were lost after 2 and 3 years of follow-up."
Mindfulness practices reduce the ability of the brain to rest, as seen by changes in EEG patterns, and this is reflected by long-term reductions in effectiveness in using it to treat hypertension.
The ultimate measure of unhappiness is likely PTSD, especially found in displaced war refugees who fled violence in their own countries to live in complete desolation in one of the poorest countries in the world. Extreme experiences include being gang-raped by your husband's murderers while your children watch.
This website contains interviews such war refugees before and after they learned TM and cites the results of two pilot studies on PTSD and TM:
http://www.davidlynchfoundation.org/africa.html
The results of the two tiny studies are dramatic enough that already international relief agencies are conducting their own independent research to see what is what.
Closer to home, PTSD in schools can be devastating for students.
James Dierke won the National Association of Secondary School Principals' 2009 Middle School Principal of the year for the changes in his school that he says were brought about by everyone learning TM: http://kenchawkin.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/a-quiet-transformation.pdf
"Most of the students in our school have a family member who has been shot, who did the shooting, or who saw a shooting."
Bob Roth, Executive Director of the David Lynch Foundation, recounts a recent incident at this school, where a little girl showed up breathless for her morning meditation, with a dress covered with red paint. When the teacher pointed out that she couldn't stay at school with such a dirty dress, the girl started crying, explaining that it wasn't paint, but her uncle's blood. They had been standing at the bus stop when some drove by and shot him.
The girl was breathless because she had run to school so she wouldn't miss her morning meditation. She trusted her own reaction to TM that much.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ew3r7Xy5Vdg#t=800
Coincidentally, despite the ongoing violence in the neighborhood around the Visatacion Valley Middle School (9 shootings occurred in December 2013 alone), the school was found to be 'the happiest school in San Francisco" according to a survey done for the California School Board by WestEd.
Not bad for a technique that enhances mind-wandering.
Perhaps the research you cite is too limited in scope, eh?
The research you present quite is interesting. Thanks for sharing it. Given that you seem committed to proving the worth/superiority of one particular practice (TM) and one individual teacher (Maharishi Mahesh Yogi), it’s amusing that you tease me about being “limited in scope.” I have done a tremendous amount of mantra practice (for other readers, this is the essence of the TM technique) in my time, and found it quite useful. So I’m glad that there is a bit of research which shows that it is helpful in certain circumstances. I don’t feel that this comes at the “expense” of mindfulness, however, which seems to be the thrust of your comment. These two techniques (mantra and mindfulness), and many others worthy practices, are not in conflict or competition with one another—although teachers and groups which depend on expensive initiations rites and retreats for their income may very well be. I see different practices as supporting and uplifting each other, not somehow battling it out for which one is the “true and real” practice. If there were one “best” meditation technique, it would have taken over the world of spiritual practice long ago, and all the others would be gone. Instead, it is the case that there are a plethora of meditation practices, each good for various applications, for some people, some of the time. And that’s a good thing, in my opinion.
I suspect that in the long run, as more and more scientific research weighs in, we will come to a more complete understanding of the range of possible effects of various practices. Then we will consider which technique—from a long menu of techniques—is best suited to a particular person’s goals and needs at a particular time. Then the days of one “real” practice and one “true” teacher will be, thankfully, far behind us. This is not to diminish the value you have found in TM. Just the opposite. I think that mantra meditation will find its rightful place, among a wealth of other practices in the human spiritual panoply, and we will all be better off for it.
All the best, and thank again.
Correction, the AHA gave a Class IIB, Level of Evidence B to TM and a Class III, Evidence C to mindfulness and all other forms:
Summary and Clinical Recommendations
The overall evidence supports that TM modestly lowers BP. It is not certain whether it is truly superior to other medita- tion techniques in terms of BP lowering because there are few head-to-head studies. As a result of the paucity of data, we are unable to recommend a specific method of practice when TM is used for the treatment of high BP. However, TM (or medi- tation techniques in general) does not appear to pose signifi- cant health risks.32 Additional and higher-quality studies are required to provide conclusions on the BP-lowering efficacy of meditation forms other than TM.
The writing group conferred to TM a Class IIB, Level of Evidence B recommendation in regard to BP-lowering effi- cacy. TM may be considered in clinical practice to lower BP. Because of many negative studies or mixed results and a pau- city of available trials, all other meditation techniques (includ- ing MBSR) received a Class III, no benefit, Level of Evidence C recommendation Thus, other meditation techniques are not recommended in clinical practice to lower BP at this time.
Great article – But very surprised you don’t know that such a device just came on the market and is selling right now! It is not a lab level device, but provides just this kind of real time feedback along with an app to help train meditation and calmness.
The company is Muse: choosemuse.com. It is already selling on amazon with some great reviews – so I am quite curious.
Here is a detailed review on Tim Ferris’s blog:
http://fourhourworkweek.com/2014/09/12/muse-interaxon/
Thanks for your comment. I am, of course, aware of the Muse device, but it is much less powerful than the (currently fictional) device I’m describing in the article. The Muse only measures “surface” EEG, the signal at the scalp. The signal described in the article occurs deep in the brain (where the relevant structures are located) and requires advanced signal processing to detect.
Furthermore, it requires sophisticated math that requires a lot more electrodes than the MUSE uses.
These kinds of signals are analyzed using the same kind of math that is used by auditory engineers to isolate the source of a sound. To isolate where a sound is coming from when all your microphones are far from the source, you need a lot more microphones than if the source is close to them. And of course, the math becomes harder as well.
Ok – wasn’t sure since you said “Imagine a lightweight headset, something like a pair of headphones, that could plug into your smartphone and feed brainwave data into an app to give you real-time feedback about the amount of self-reflective consciousness (i.e. getting in your own way, non-flow, daydreaming) going on in your brain moment by moment.” but did not mention the current market activity in the area 🙂 Emotiv is another company in this space but they don’t seem to market to the calmness/meditation audience just yet.
Even if the mechanism is different (and less sophisticated), isn’t the cause and effect of such a device more material in the end ? people are reporting good success in achieving pretty decent states of calmness and reduction in stress. Would be very interested in a review from your perspective too.
Do you think that the calmness or mindfulness induced by such a device could be of a very different (and much shallower) depth compared to feedback from deep brain measurement ?
I forgot to mention Spire, not an EEG company but a device I am still awaiting more validation and reviews on when it finally ships. I have been very curious about breathing tracking and Spire is first company to commit to it. Combining some form of EEG based practice along with a constant breath feedback system would be a pretty powerful combination to re-train the brain’s pathways. It is an exciting year for mindfulness related technology.
So in other words TM seems not to be optimal for enhancing flow state?
Then, Mindfulness meditation would be the way to go if one works as say an musician or painter where getting in flow state, becoming highly focused is a very good thing!
Or, Have I misunderstood it?
All the best!
KR
RD
Actually, mantra repetition can be good for achieving a flow state, if done properly (i.e. with focus).
What a wonderful discussion, thank you Michael! Also, “mantra” and mindfulness meditation can be combined and both involve a certain level of noticing intruding thoughts and returning to the object of meditation, an example of this is the Orthodox Christian practice of the “Jesus Prayer” that combines “watchfulness and prayer”. Though prayer can be differentiated from some forms of mantra repetition, TM in particular, in that you know what the “mantra” means, it is not just a “sound,” and you mean it with all your heart mind and soul every time you say it (prayer without watchfulness and truly meaning the prayer can get you into trouble, also if you practice the Jesus Prayer outside the Orthodox Church without a teacher you can get yourself into trouble). The vast myriad of contemplative practices are just beginning to be studied by science and any conclusions made so far just barely scratch the surface. I agree with Michael all forms of contemplative practice are incredibly useful and who can say which one is the “best” when some work better for different people at different times of their life and at different stages of practice, promoting one as the be all end all is a bit naive, one might be better at lowering blood pressure, the other at curing addictions. Also, thinking all contemplative practices are the same and lead to the same “state of mind” and that all traditions are different paths to the top of the mountain may be naive, maybe they are different, equally as lofty mountains that allow different vantage points from the same immeasurable height. There is beauty and richness in diversity where everything is the best under certain conditions and in a certain context for certain people.