Breathing in Compassion

Last night I watched the documentary "Happy." It was a marvelous weaving of topics from my Psychology of Happiness certification program and Eric Weiner's book The Geography of Bliss.  The movie left me feeling warm inside.

In the day since I watched it there was one part that touched me deeply enough that they have colored my day today.  I'd like to share it. Featured in the film was a professor, who has done brain scans on meditators--master, such as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, and relative newbies--to see what impact their practice has on their brains.

His research has determined that in as little as two weeks of doing a mindfulness meditation that focuses on love or compassion, newcomers to meditation can reprogram their brains to similar levels as the monk.

For years I did something similar.  Back in the late mid-90s, I had a transformational experience.  It felt like my body dematerialized into love.  To this day, I can close my eyes and breathe in what that experience was like and feel my whole body tingle with the love that connects all of us, as it did in the transcendent experience. I used my memory of that experience as the focus of my mindfulness meditation for years, just breathing the memory in and then breathing it out again.

In no small part due to those meditations, I was totally calm in those years.  Nothing ruffled my feathers.  Nothing. At that time, I had a dance partner who was a very good dancer and fun to dance with. (Those two things don't always go together.)  He had a horrible temper though, and the least little thing would set him into a rage.  I never really knew what that anger was about, but I was sure it had nothing to do with the dance.

One time our dance teacher, who had witnessed several of these explosions followed by my compassionate responses, said to me, "How to you do it?"  All that would come to me was that these meditations had built such a reservoir of love in me that the anger just floated by.

Then, insisting that no one can learn on their own, someone tried to teach me how to meditate, focusing me on the breathing and a mantra in one case.  Another talked through the meditation.  I am not sure exactly when I stopped my love-focused mindfulness meditation, but I am certain that I have not achieved anything close to that level of peace since.  And, I have also not consciously recalled that experience of being love very often since then either.

In recent years the technology of brain-scanning and the exploding field of neuroscience has demonstrated just how "plastic"--neuroscience-speak for we can change fairly quickly--our brains actually are. While watching this documentary, and listening to the scientist describe the impact of mindfulness meditation focusing on love and compassion, the memory of my old style of meditation before I knew how "to do it right" triggered.

I wonder, I thought, after all these years, could I call that back?  Well, my beautifully plastic brain confirmed that I could.  I did my old-style-before-someone-taught-me-to-do-it-right meditation last night, this morning, and again this evening.  I can already tell a profound impact.  I've been totally at ease today, ticking off things on my list that normally might have been agitating.  I was just calm.  I have had the sense that I have been smiling all day.

"Happy" describes a psychological phenomenon called "hedonic adaptation."  As we pursue, and then get, more material satisfaction, recognition, or whatever flips our personal switches, initially we are happier, but quickly we adjust to that level of gratification.  To be happy again, we need to notch it up a level: we continue adapting and needing more and more gratification to produce shorter and shorter periods of happiness.

With today's little experiment, I've been able to be happy all day, even during a rather contentious business meeting, with no external gratification. I came home and cleaned my house--not my favorite thing to do--and I was consciously aware that I was relaxed and happy while I was doing it. I expect that the many years that I did this kind of meditation made it quicker for me to plug into the part of my brain that still remembers it, but the research would indicate that anyone could do it in two weeks. We don't need the hedonic pleasures. Happiness lies within us.  It is there for the cost of just loving.