Category Archives: brain

Direct knowledge

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Today’s post is taken directly from my subscription to Ocean of Dharma quotes from Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. How timely! His writings are so clear and elegant.

In the study of Buddhist philosophy, from the start one tries to transcend concepts, and one tries, perhaps in a very critical way, to find out what is. One has to develop a critical mind that will stimulate intelligence. If one cultivates intelligent, intuitive insight, then gradually real intuitive feeling develops, and any imaginary or hallucinatory element is clarified and eventually dies out. Finally, the vague feeling of discovery becomes very clear, so that almost no doubt remains. Even at this stage, it is possible that one may be unable to explain one’s discovery verbally or write it down exactly on paper. In fact, if one tried to do so, it would be limiting one’s scope and would be rather dangerous. Nevertheless, one finally attains direct knowledge, rather than achieving something which is separate from oneself. This can only be achieved through the practice of meditation, which is not a question of going into some inward depth, but of widening and expanding outward.

In other words, you can know about something and you can experience something, and they are not the same. Critical mind and intuitive insight are code for left and right hemispheres of the brain, in my opinion. Much of the growth from meditation is actually experiencing more right-brain awareness, which is, hmm, not encouraged in most of our modern educational systems and workplaces and culture.

The yoking of left brain intelligence and right brain intelligence is perhaps a “side effect” of yoga and meditation. Or perhaps the real purpose. Who can say?

If you want more brain balance, you can start with a pranayama practice, nadi shodhana, alternate nostril breathing. 

To subscribe to Ocean of Dharma quotes, go here:  http://oceanofdharma.com.

To learn how to do nadi shodhana, there are small distinctions, but this video teaches the gist of it in two minutes: http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1849263/breathing_practice_for_stress_nadi_shodhan_pranayama/

Grokking

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My intent while sitting is whole body awareness. Start with body scan of my whole head. Then upper torso and arms, then lower torso and legs. I sense each region as a whole.

Then I bring my awareness to my whole body. And when my attention falters, I bring it back. And bring it back. And bring it back.

I develop my anterior cingulate cortex by doing this, according to Buddha’s Brain.

May my awareness of my whole body be steady.

What’s interesting to note is how wholeness shows up elsewhere in my life.

  • In something as simple as typing a 7-digit number as a whole, all at once, instead of typing the first four digits, and then the last three digits.
  • In something as profound as walking into a room and consciously experiencing it as a full, whole impression.

The first months of meditation were like opening a door to a new space, entering and wandering around, exploring.

Now it’s a little more like holding my attention on one painting.

Grok. I like that word. Take in the whole and be transformed.

From Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein, 1961:

Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience.

Book review: Buddha’s Brain by Rick Hanson

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I finally finished reading this book. It’s not long or particularly difficult to read, I just had a lot of other things going on. I started reading it the first week of July, so it’s taken about 3-1/2 weeks to finish. Not bad for nonfiction, in my opinion.

The full title is Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love & Wisdom, by Rich Hanson, Ph.D., with Richard Mendius, MD. Daniel Siegel wrote the foreword, and Jack Kornfeld wrote the preface. Big names in American Buddhism.

I expected something more related to Buddha’s teachings. Instead, it combines neuroscience with meditation and Buddhist practice. The book has a lot of brain science in it, but it’s written at a level that almost anyone who’s had a biology course in college (or a bright high-schooler) can understand. People who don’t like science can skip over those parts and still get a lot out of it.

The book contains four sections, on the causes of suffering, happiness, love, and wisdom. Each chapter has a nice summary of key points.

The book also contains an appendix on nutritional neurochemistry, that is, how you can support your brain’s functioning through skillful nutrition. It was written by Jan Hanson (whom I take to be the author’s wife), L.Ac.

This information has already influenced my diet and supplements.

Some fundamentals that underlie the rest of the book are:

  • The mind depends on the brain. Actually, the mind is what the brain does.
  • The brain evolved to help you survive, but its three primary strategies — separation, stopping change, and grasping pleasure/avoiding pain — make you suffer.
  • The path of awakening is described as uncovering your true nature that was always present, as transforming your mind and body, or as both.
  • Small actions every day add up to large changes over time — you are building new neural structure.
  • Wholesome changes in many brains could tip the world in a better direction.

I learned a lot and recommend this book for anyone interested in the meditating brain and fully awakening their body/mind.

Report on playing The Journey to Wild Divine

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It’s fun! There are various tasks to perform that you control with your state. One task requires you to either breathe quickly or laugh — which raises your heart rate enough to pass to the next task.

I discovered the cable from the fingertip sensors to the blue “stone” wasn’t plugged in all the way, so I don’t have to  use hand lotion to get good skin conductance after all.

I read the user manual and discovered that pressing the “m” key will display a map of the territory.

My favorite task so far is stacking rocks. A rock floats out above another rock, and only being steadily relaxed allows it to lower onto the rock below. When I got distracted, the rock would float up. Good way to learn steadiness of mind.

The task I’ve had the most difficulty with is Zen archery. I can pull the arrow back in the bow but haven’t figured out how to aim at the target. Got lucky once and hit the bull’s eye, but so far haven’t replicated that. You do use the mouse sometimes. I will figure it out with experimentation.

The user manual says there’s about 10 hours of play at a minimum, and then there’s an expansion pack.

It’s pretty exciting to play a video game and know that you are training yourself to achieve and maintain various states of consciousness in order to proceed!

I’m wondering how my 10-year-old granddaughter will like it. She’s used to the fast-paced Nintendo games. I think she’ll like the mythological setting of this game more than Mario Bros., but it may seem really slow to her. This may be more for adults.

The Journey to Wild Divine

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The Journey to Wild Divine is a computer video game. The game basically takes you on the hero’s journey.  Ho hum, right? I’m not much of a video game player.

The novelty of this game, thought, is that it comes with three devices you clip onto the fingertips of your non-mouse hand. The devices read your heartbeat and galvanic skin response (bioelectricity), and you progress through the game by changing your state.

If nothing else, I can learn how to change my state more easily. It promises to make that fun.

http://www.wilddivine.com/servlet/-strse-72/The-Passage-OEM/Detail

I installed it last night. There’s a screen where you can see its readings of your heartbeat. My skin was a little dry. After putting hand lotion on those fingertips and replacing the devices, I got a strong reading.

I started to play the game but got an error, and it was bedtime. Will debug when I have time.

Getting it was a lot of fun! The NLP meetup was Tuesday at Unity Center on Dessau Rd. Unity Center has been sold and will be taken over by a bunch of labyrinth-loving Baptists in September. The bookstore there, Sacred Shelf, is going out of business. The game, which sells for $300, had a sticker for $160. I’d checked my bank balance earlier that day and had the money, so I decided to buy it. It’s been on my wish list for at least a year.

Then I learned at the register that it was marked down 50%, so I got it for $80. I love bargains!

It felt like it was meant to be, me and The Journey to Wild Divine.

New sense of purpose

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I’ve been mostly playing and experimenting with the direction my meditation teacher gave me back in late December, whole body awareness, off and on for this whole year. I’ve tried different approaches. It hasn’t come easily, and I haven’t given up.

Early on, my intuitive way to experience my whole body at once was by using the breath, just attending to the whole body sensations (or as much as I could) of each breath.

I notice how easy it has been for my attention to be drawn to this part or that part, usually because of sensations such as pain or the pleasure of my chakras opening. My attention would flit from body part to body part, switching unbidden into internal dialog and losing all awareness of my body, then deliberately returning it to my body upon becoming aware.

I’ve tried visualizing my whole body, seeing myself sitting from various perspectives and then uniting the visualized self and the felt self by having the image merge into “me.”

I’ve had a sense that “whole body awareness” is always present even if not in the foreground of attention, that it is actually much closer to my consciousness than I would have thought.

I read in Buddha’s Brain that whole body awareness is simply right-brain awareness, which is visual, spatial, and likes gestalt. Well, then, that explains why it seems so close! Duh! It’s just my right brain.

And all these experiments with whole body awareness are nice images, words, sounds, and feelings projected upon the big screen, Awareness. Or maybe it’s all shifting between Big Awareness and small. Everything is awareness!

I’ve had more of a sense of purpose in my meditation lately, more determination to be able to maintain my awareness of my whole body for longer than a few seconds at a time. Once again, breathing helps.

I learned from yoga that each inhalation activates the sympathetic nervous system, and each exhalation activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Inhaling stimulates, exhaling calms. I tune in to my whole body to attempt to discern this.

Not really, not yet, but something is different, and practicing this does hold my attention on my whole body for longer than before.

I’ve also gotten some nice Alex Grey-like images of my nervous system all lit up inside my physical body and energy body, and of sitting inside a sort of bubble of energy or light. If you’re not familiar with the name, you’ve probably seen something like this image: http://webpages.shepherd.edu/fmahooti/IMAGES/AlexGrey.jpg.

My image of myself is kind of like that, only without the grid, mountains, fire. The halo is just part of the bubble. It is from a perspective that seems to combine looking at myself and being in my body, a visual/kinesthetic synesthesia.

I have a hunch that really experiencing whole body awareness and being able to keep my attention there is going to be amazing, and it seems so close, just a tantalizing shift away…a shift I haven’t fully made yet.

Buddha’s Brain says that whole body awareness supports singleness of mind, a state in which all aspects of experience come together as a whole and attention is very steady. This is probably high-frequency  gamma waves.

For once, I know a little something about the direction I’m heading toward. And once on the zafu, I can forget that. Staying open to my actual experience – being present – is still the means.

Wonder/no wonder

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Paraphrasing from the book Buddha’s Brain:

Whole body awareness is right-brain activity. Internal dialog is left-brain activity. You can’t do both at the same time, so awareness of the body suppresses left-brain monkey mind.

When you sense the body as a whole, you further activate the right hemisphere.

Start with the breath. Experience it as a single, unified gestalt of sensations. It will crumble; recreate it.

Expand awareness to include whole body. When it crumbles, restore it.

You’ll get better with practice.

Whole body awareness supports singleness of mind, a meditative state in which all aspects of experience come together as a whole and attention is very steady.

~~

Aha! So this is where Peg is leading me!

Craniosacral therapy, brain waves

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Confession: I am a brain geek. I’ve been lucky enough in this lifetime to have worked for 3 years with Nina Davis, craniosacral therapist extraordinaire, and I can’t thank her enough for sharing her work with me.

CST is usually subtle. The one time it wasn’t subtle was when she worked on my locus ceruleus, a “blue spot” in the brain stem that is affected by trauma. When it opened up or unfroze or however it changed, I experienced profound, deep relaxation with no internal images or dialog. Just deep black restful awareness. It was like bliss.

I recommend CST for all trauma survivors. Trauma rewires the brain in a dysfunctional way, and your full recovery depends on you (with whatever help you can get) rewiring it back to a healthy state.

(Besides this, Nina has shown me how acutely a person can develop her sensory acuity, to the point where she’s aware of tiny structures and processes inside her own brain and body and in mine as well, using her fingertips and awareness. She’s just brilliant, like a Bene Gesserit from Dune. I have some perception of my energy body and can feel shifts, but she’s got the detailed inner anatomy down.)

I’ve read articles about scientific studies of long-time meditators that concluded that  meditation affects your brain waves in a positive way. I  believe it, based on 6 months of daily meditation. I experience my energy field differently, although my physical body is feeling pretty good too these days. It’s as if my brain waves are oscillating in more synchrony than before, which is pleasant and self-reinforcing.

I am very curious about brain waves. They are bioelectricity, and there are machines that give you visual feedback of your brain activity. Here’s what I know (from reading A Symphony in the Brain and Wikipedia):

  • Brain waves correspond to mental states, and we usually experience a mixture of states.
  • Delta waves predominate when you’re asleep. They’re at the lowest hertz, 0-4.
  • Next higher, theta waves occur in the hypnogogic state, when you’re falling asleep or waking and your mind feels pleasantly fuzzy and untethered to waking life. When you visualize something, and when you inhibit/repress, you’re in the theta wave range, 4-7 hertz. Associated with relaxed, meditative, creative states. Healing of trauma occurs in this state, where you unrepress traumatic memories by reimagining the trauma as a witness, not a participant, which makes it safe(r).
  • Alpha waves, 8-12 hertz, were discovered first, thus alpha. You can access the alpha state by imagining space inside your body, such as the space between your eyes, or bringing your attention to how your body feels. Occurs with relaxation. More accessible with your eyes closed; opening your eyes can bring you out of it.
  • Beta state, 13-30 hertz, is often referred to as normal waking consciousness. These waves anre active when you are mentally aroused, or having a conversation, or feeling anxious. Ask someone to solve a math problem, and they’ll be experiencing beta waves (so will you, probably). Interestingly, people with ADHD have too much theta in proportion to the amount of beta waves that they have. Retraining consists of lowering theta and raising beta from 9:1 to 3:1. Body movement usually takes you out of beta.
  • The new kid on the brain wave block, gamma waves (25-100 hertz), weren’t measured until people began using digital rather than analog EEG equipment to read brain waves. Studies of Tibetan monks with over 10,000 hours of meditation experience conclude that gamma waves correlate to transcendental meditative states. Also occurs during synesthesia (feeling a color, seeing a sound, etc.). Gamma may signify “binding” of neurons into a network. (Hmm, I’ve heard  that neurons that fire together, wire together. Could gamma be where they wire together? If so, it’s prime territory for learning.)

I would love to have a portable EEG machine and electrodes like Ken Wilber uses in the YouTube video where he shuts down his brain waves. It would be fun to play with and learn from. One researcher claims that each hertz is associated with specific mental activity. That would be fun to experiment with!

I wonder what we would see if both Nina and I were hooked up to EEG machines when we were doing craniosacral therapy. What happens when I’m doing yoga, meditating, drawing, petting my cat — what states occur?

I’ve also learned that you can get a “brain tune-up”. A company called Brain States Technology (with three affiliates in Austin at present) uses a new strategy for working with EEG readouts and improving brain functioning. Rather than using a medical model (specifically retraining the brain not to have epileptic seizures or ADHD), they simply show you how to optimize your brain waves, right to left and front to back. So, for instance, you might have less delta and theta when awake, and more beta in the left hemisphere and more alpha in the right.

I’m gathering information and considering doing it.

I’m interested in increasing my gamma waves, which may signify a mental state called “unity of consciousness.” The jury is still out on this (and scientific juries take a notoriously long time to agree on things).

In the meantime, the man who brought us the Delta Sleep System CD has now created one to optimize gamma waves, Gamma Meditation System. I’m ordering it.

Book: Buddha’s Brain

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I’m reading the book Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love & Wisdom by Rick Hanson PhD and Richard Mendius MD and can’t resist sharing something I just read. It’s about how meditation affects the body/mind. It cites studies (which I won’t do here) showing that meditation does the following:

  • Increases gray matter in the insula, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex.
  • Reduces cortical thinning due to aging in prefrontal regions strengthened by meditation.
  • Improves psychological functions associated with these regions, including attention, compassion, and empathy.
  • Increases activation of left prefrontal regions, which lifts mood.
  • Increases gamma-range brainwaves (above beta, optimal cognitive functioning) in experienced meditators.
  • Decreases stress-related cortisol.
  • Strengthens the immune system.
  • Helps a variety of medical conditions, including cardiovascular disease, asthma, type II diabetes, PMS, and chronic pain.
  • Helps numerous psychological conditions, including insomnia, anxiety, phobias, and eating disorders.

The key is to develop a regular daily practice, no matter how brief. Even one minute before sleep makes a difference, if done consistently.

Get some sleep so you can wake up!

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The quote below caught my attention yesterday as I was reading a post from elephantjournal.com on Facebook. The author is Ricardo das Neves, who is described as a writer on spirituality and humor and a yoga teacher in Seattle, writing about how to fall asleep (both falling asleep and awakening are prerequisites to awakening):

As someone who dips his toes in the meditation pool, I also notice that if I’m lying awake thinking, it’s invariably rehashing the past or planning the future. In the present, there’s only awareness, silence. So to enhance my awareness of thoughts, I locate where in my brain I’m thinking. I notice that it’s mostly top-and-left-of-center, though occasionally it’s back-and-in-and-left. Now I “move” the thoughts over to my right brain. That is, I pretend to feel them coming from the right side of my brain. There’s no question I’m aware of thoughts at this point if I have to push them over to that location. Next, while exhaling slowly, I place short words in my right brain. “Sleep” is a favorite one. It’s not a command; it’s just an exploration of what happens when I say “sleep” every now in my right brain and then perceive all kinds of images that come up out of the blue. That’s the right brain’s language. I notice those random, fleeting images. I keep placing simple words in my right brain. I get images. Words in the right brain. Images. Wordszzzzzzz….

To read the entire article, go here.

I played with this technique this morning at Sunday service at Appamada. We sit for several 30 minute sessions with 10 minute walking sessions in between. Plenty of time to play with your meditation!

Like this: Imagine the word “word” (or pick another word–it doesn’t matter). Imagine it in your mind’s eye as being projected in front of you from your left brain. You get to pick your favorite font. It could be bold, outlined, italic, red, cursive, blocky, whatever you choose. You see a word in front of you coming from your left brain.

Now slide that word over so that in your mind’s eye it is projected from your right brain, and notice what happens.

Do this now before reading on.

For me, the word becomes pure image without meaning, and the letters begin morphing, become covered with fur, or snow. They may change color, dance, unravel and become new shapes. It’s slightly (or majorly) hallucinogenic, and harmless. It’s fun!

This morning during zazen, I also spent time noticing what I saw with my eyes closed. I was facing a window in the zendo (hey, rhyme!), which had morning light flooding through. I let the light in and noticed how my visual centers were stimulated to create vague changing shapes, like phosphorescence. This was fascinating to watch.

Even though I didn’t visualize the word “sleep”, by the time of the reading, I was so deeply relaxed, I caught myself falling into sleep a couple of times. I pulled myself out.

Sit and be still for 30 minutes sometime, if you don’t already. You  may notice that rather than being boring, the opportunities that arise to have fun and be creative are endless!