Mindfulness Redesigned for the Twenty-First Century -- my new favorite book

A quantum experience led me to a book that I'm loving a lot, Mindfulness Redesigned for the Twenty-First Century, by Amit Sood, M.D.

More precisely, it was an absurd mention of "quantum" in another book that led me to Sood's creative re-imagining of what mindfulness is all about.

There I was, semi-happily reading Loch Kelly's Effortless Mindfulness, which I wrote about in a recent blog post, when I came to a passage that caused me to give up on the book.

Self-essence is an invisible source, prior to energy. In turn, Self-energy is both wave -- flowing, boundless dynamism with relational qualities -- and particle -- active, compassionate, embodied, and full of vitality. The waves and particles are made of the invisible potential of the quantum field of Self-essence.

Those incomprehensible words violated one of my current Book Commandments: thou shalt not invoke quantum theory in an area where it has no application. Like, awareness and mindfulness. 

I then headed to Amazon to reinvigorate my brain by searching for a book that took a genuinely scientific approach to mindfulness. After a bit of browsing I came across Sood's book, and ordered it. 

I'm enjoying it a lot.

I intend to discuss Sood's approach to mindfulness in some detail in future posts. But for now I want to share a section where Sood describes how he came to an understanding that the ancient Asian Indian spiritual teachings he grew up with needed to be updated for the 21st century. 

Sood came to the United States in 1995 from India. Here's his "About the Author" bio on Amazon:

Dr. Amit Sood is a Professor of Medicine at Mayo Clinic. He directs the Mind-Body Medicine Initiative, and is the creator of the Mayo Clinic Healthy Living Resilient Mind Program. He is the author of the books, The Mayo Clinic Guide to Stress-Free Living, The Mayo Clinic Handbook for Happiness, and Immerse: A 52-Week Course in Resilient Living.

Dr. Sood received the 2010 Distinguished Service Award, the 2010 Innovator of the Year Award, the 2013 Outstanding Physician Scientist Award and the 2016 Faculty of the Year Award from Mayo Clinic. He was honored as Robert Wood Johnson Health Care Pioneer in 2015. The Ode magazine selected Dr. Sood as one among top 20 intelligent optimists helping the world to be a better place.

In 2016, he was selected as the top impact maker in healthcare in Rochester, MN - a community of over thirty-thousand dedicated health care professionals. Personally, he loves power naps and dark chocolate, detests flossing, likes love and logic, and cares a lot about children - all the children. Dr. Sood lives with his lovely wife of twenty-five years, Richa, and their two princesses, Gauri and Sia, in the occasionally frosty, but always caring and compassionate, Rochester, MN.

Impressive guy. Here's how he came to embrace a scientific approach to mindfulness, as described in his book's "Guilty and Back" chapter.

Feeling Guilty

Challenging an age-old practice was extremely difficult for me. If you understand my background, it will make sense to you.

Meditation practices and teachers are highly respected in Asian Indian families. Many teachers are revered as spiritual leaders of the society. 

Their images are placed in each room. In daily prayer, people bow to the images, decorate them with flowers, and light incense sticks in front of them. People see their teachers in dreams to solve personal problems.

In families with a faith-based practice, these teachers are considered a conduit to God. Annoying or disbelieving them or their instructions would be considered worse than heresy.

I have met several teachers who indeed deserve a high pedestal, but some do not. Nevertheless, if a teacher is caught committing nefarious practices, as has happened numerous times, instead of lowering the pedestal, the unsuspecting students often reframe by saying that the teacher is testing their spiritual resolve by creating the drama.

With this cultural perspective etched within me, my guilt, conflict, and anxiety grew along with the doubts I shared in the previous chapter. I felt vulnerable. 

Will these doubts bring bad luck, illness, or curse to my family? I thought. The scientist in me conflicted with myths and rituals I had learned as a child. A master at overthinking, I did what I do best with such conflicts. I stopped thinking about it and tabled the idea.

Overcoming guilt

I didn't stay put with the idea for very long. My return journey started when I heard about people with no meditation experience who were perceiving the deepest samadhi states as a result of acute stroke. I read about brain tumors and seizures causing sacred visions and spiritual experiences.

Could these states and visions just be a product of the brain's electrical activity? I asked myself. If that is the case, will it be worthwhile to spend my entire life seeking such experiences?

Then I read about swamis who had obtained these experiences but were doing very bad things. I heard stories about self-styled gurus who claimed to be adept at awakening people's kundalini (and many of their followers felt their "energy" and saw the "light" with their help) but were nothing but greedy, immoral charlatans.

They were illegally usurping money and property, abusing women and children, and committing other unspeakable crimes. 

I saw a few of them get caught, was amazed at how low they could go in trying to defend themselves, and could clearly see the selfish psychopath beneath the long hair and saffron color. My uninformed faith in some of these traditions began to crack.

That worked wonders on my guilt. (I should mention that not all swamis are fake. I have personally met several masters of meditation who I deeply respect, who are humble, selfless, and kind, and are truly living each day to help the world.)

Looking deeper

With my blind faith unblinded the more I studied, the deeper I looked and the more learners I worked with, the more convinced I became that most mindfulness programs in their current form need editing  before they can optimally help twenty-first-century brains.

In our effort to make mindfulness simpler, despite our good intentions we have misrepresented some of its constructs. 

Further, some of the language and philosophy is 2,500 years old. It simply needs to be refreshed. What is old and practiced for thousands of years doesn't always have to be perfect or even right.

After all they anointed cow dung on umbilical cords that caused tetanus, didn't believe in pasteurization, practiced child labor, and bad-mouthed any woman who stepped outside the house to join the workforce. (Unfortunately all of these are still happening in some parts of the world.)

The result of my deeper search was freedom. While I still revere the timeless wisdom of many scriptures, I have largely escaped my childhood blinders, partly because I feel confident in the new tool we now have to study the truth: science.

Using the scientific method polished with common sense I came up with a few key ideas for how to better align our understanding of mindfulness with twenty-first-century challenges so it can better serve resilience.

Few ideas

Here is what I thought was needed:

-- Integrate twenty-first-century neuroscience to help better understand the human condition. Philosophy alone isn't enough.
-- Offer skills that emphasize uplifting emotions and not just attention training.
-- Have more explicit focus on compassion, gratitude and forgiveness.
-- Abbreviate the training time.
-- Offer practices that are shorter and more relevant to people's lives.
-- Enhance focus on relationships to decrease perceived loneliness.
-- Integrate hope, inspiration, and courage in the program.

In addition to above, I felt adding humor to the program (and life) was vital. Fun and laughter are great sources of bonding and inspiration, and if we keep the training and the skills dry, they will remain inaccessible, particularly to the younger generation.

I debated and doubted these thoughts for months but couldn't negate any one of them. As a next step, I considered a three-part solution:

(1) Educate people about their brains, emphasizing how our neural traps generate negative emotions and hurt our attention.
(2) Offer different (briefer and deeper) attention practices that are easier to practice and adopt, that provide uplifting emotions, and that center on relationships.
(3) Return mindfulness to its ecosystem in the company of compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, relationships, hope, inspiration, and courage.

I strongly believed I was moving in the right direction, but received pushback from some old colleagues in the field. Pushbacks often demoralize me and they worked their magic this time also. But each time I saw someone struggling whom I couldn't optimally help, the thoughts creeped up again.

I needed one final push. Then His Holiness the Dalai Lama came to my rescue.

Comments

[Spence Tepper]

Dr. Sood writes
"Could these states and visions just be a product of the brain's electrical activity?"
Yes, just as the aha moment of every great invention or symphony, or the pure joy of a sunset, and the warmth of a friend's smile . Every wonderful invention, every work of art.

All of it comes through the brain.

Unfortunately, just as a work of art is a very complex interaction of history, skill, biology, and environment, and could not be adequately explained by biochemistry, the same is true for mystical experience, particularly those that are the result of years of practice, and which can be repeated at will.

The problem of dismissing any internal experience in this way runs a terrible risk. It enables those who like to say "or doesn't exist"

But if Dr. Sood and others work with long term meditators, then in time the opportunity exists to replicate the experiences through biochemical means. Probably at the same time that modern biochemistry will enable memory transfers, personality and entire PhD educations with a single injection.

Until then, the mystery can be unraveled more practically in bringing to light the health advantages of practice.

[Tim Rimmer]

Brian some thoughts re the Loch Kelly book -
‘The waves and particles are made of the invisible potential of the quantum field of Self-essence…..
thou shalt not invoke quantum theory in an area where it has no application. Like, awareness and mindfulness’. 

I got the impression on reading your post with info from Kelly that he/she were angling towards a bigger picture/foundational view - hence Self-essence with a big S. Sounds pretty flowery but possibly a reasonable term for the ‘what is’. Most folk taking a scientific approach to meditation must surely come to how ‘awareness’ exists/is. Taking a purely physical view, when you keep breaking it down smaller and smaller, what we get to are energy fields, behaviour of which can be explained by quantum theories. It would seem to me therefor that awareness and one process to access/develop such (mindfulness), could well be inherent within quantum mechanics, well that’s my take on it.

‘In families with a faith-based practice, these teachers are considered a conduit to God. Annoying or disbelieving them or their instructions would be considered worse than heresy’.

I think Sood describes the cult-like approach and deeply ingrained beliefs around guru status etc well. It fits with the view of many of the commentators on this blog.

‘when I heard about people with no meditation experience who were perceiving the deepest samadhi states as a result of acute stroke’.

I’ve certainly heard of visions/experiences people have particularly during serious illness.
I would be interested to hear more about the nature of the ‘perceiver’ he describes by those having acute stroke - deepest samadhi??

‘Using the scientific method polished with common sense I came up with a few key ideas for how to better align our understanding of mindfulness with twenty-first-century challenges so it can better serve resilience.
Educate people about their brains, emphasizing how our neural traps generate negative emotions and hurt our attention.

Me - Pretty basic psychological stuff. Be good to see what he means by ‘neural traps’ and how he describes this (if he does) in terms of neuroscience.

(2) Offer different (briefer and deeper) attention practices that are easier to practice and adopt, that provide uplifting emotions, and that center on relationships.

Briefer and deeper - again wonder what he has in mind here. Going deep quickly may not be the best thing for some people given that they may gain insight into the nature of their ‘self’ (small s) and not have the tools/training/help to deal with it.
Be interesting to see what he presents in regard to a brief, deep practice that results in uplifting emotions and is centered on relationships - some sort of combination of moving meditation with gospel singing? :-) What sort of relationships is he on about?

(3) Return mindfulness to its ecosystem in the company of compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, relationships, hope, inspiration, and courage’.

Yes adoption and then application of these terms are great for supporting resilience. Their interaction could be described as an ecosystem. Yet they can all be generated in ways other than use of mindfulness. Also, they are attributes that arise through the practice of mindfulness imo, and each in itself (or most of them) can be a particular focus in mindfulness practice as in Buddhist teachings.

One of the most interesting and insightful takes on the process and its outcome was posted recently by AP they wrote:
“as the practice of "effortless mindfulness" deepens, one begins to discover subtler and subtler layers of conception in the mind, all the way down to the levels that construct so-called "physical reality." At that point, the mind becomes free of the illusion that physical reality can be responsible for the construct we commonly describe as "consciousness." This freedom comes not by inference, but by direct insight”.

This is both purpose and outcome of meditation in my view. A ‘briefer and deeper’ practice that can safely/sanely give ‘that’ - would be really useful- though probably not for meditational dabblers.

Best wishes

[Jesse]

This Amit Sood guy sounds sane. A rare quality these days. Sadly, he had to use the title "his holiness" when he should have just called the dalai lama guy by his name, Tenzin.

That quantum quote is hilarious. I got the feeling from the parts of that book you quoted in the other article that it was a bit new-age, but "the quantum field of Self-essence" really outdoes the other stuff.

Google just recently created some super powerful quantum computing system that is going to be used to kill millions of humans someday, like all technology does, which will make the word quantum a lot less funny in the future. Let's laugh while we can.

[Todd]

Jesse, you seem to have a perverse obsession with peoples' names, even the names they get from their parents.