Why do we keep worrying even when we know it isn’t helping? What if happiness is about more than just feeling good? And what helps us meet an ordinary, messy day with a little more patience?

This November, we’re bringing together leading scientists and contemplative teachers to explore these questions in The Restless Mind, a free online summit from Dharma Lab and ServiceSpace, hosted by Richie Davidson and Cortland Dahl. There will be conversations to learn from, practices to try, and opportunities to reflect together.

Register free. Complete the application to join.

Meet the minds behind the week

Multiple New York Times bestselling authors. A MacArthur Fellow. A TIME100 honoree. The creator of Yale’s most popular course.

Your Hosts from Dharma Lab

A favorite from an earlier ServiceSpace Pod

As we get ready for this new week with ServiceSpace, we wanted to share a video we’ve especially enjoyed.

Recorded at the Awakin Retreat, this moving 23-minute talk by Richie was previously featured in ServiceSpace’s Born to Flourish Pod, featuring concepts from Richie and Cort’s book. It brings to life the ideas and discoveries behind the work they and their colleagues are pursuing.

What made 200 monks burst out laughing during a demonstration of brain research? Richie shares this heartwarming story before exploring our innate capacity for kindness, how easily we can begin cultivating well-being, and how its benefits ripple outward.

From babies’ preference for kindness to teachers whose five minutes of daily practice benefit their students, he shows why flourishing may be closer than we think. Touching encounters with the Dalai Lama and research on tukdam, a meditation state said to continue after death, extend the exploration to how we flourish even at the end of life.

With thanks to ServiceSpace and the Awakin Retreat for sharing this video with us.

Bringing the November summit into your own life

During The Restless Mind, we’ll turn to experiences many of us know well: the conversation we keep replaying, the worry that follows us to bed, the moment we wish we’d responded differently.

You’ll explore the science of stress and happiness, try contemplative practices, and share reflections with a global community. We hope you’ll find ideas that help you understand your own mind and small practices you’ll want to return to.

No meditation experience is needed.

Making room for the week

Nov 14, 2026: A live opening gathering at 8:30 p.m. ET (60 minutes)

Nov 15, 2026–Nov 20, 2026: Five self-paced modules with sessions, practices, and shared reflection (and a day for rest / catch up)

Nov 21, 2026: A live closing gathering at 10 a.m. ET (90 minutes)

Plan for about 5–10 hours across the week. Both live gatherings will be recorded, and materials will remain available for at least six months afterward.

We’re offering the week freely because we want anyone interested to be able to participate. We’d love to have you with us.

Register free. Complete the application to participate.

Warmly,

The Dharma Lab team

P.S. Want to partner, volunteer, or offer financial support for Dharma Lab’s work, or help in another way? Reply to this email. We’d be glad to hear from you.

Disclaimer: This is an educational gathering, not medical treatment.

In our latest AMA, Cortland Dahl explores topics such as how to widen awareness when the mind feels contracted, why the motivation behind a practice matters, and how compassion can become the energy behind an engaged, creative life. Kim brought your questions, and Cort joined us for the hour while Richie was traveling.

What’s inside

• Three ways to widen the aperture of awareness: the body, the breath, and the mind

• Shamatha and loving-kindness: why the same technique can serve different purposes

• Meditation, autism, and ADHD: promising research, unanswered questions, and strengths worth recognizing

• Career ambition and the shift to a different source of motivation

• What we know—and still don’t know—about consciousness

• A 2-minute guided practice led by Cort

• Practicing with death, impermanence, and the moments before sleep

The full hour mapped below, plus the flashcards and the recording for paid members.

Companion Flashcards At Bottom

You don’t have to turn ambition off

An anonymous listener asked how to balance “the false promise of desire” with career ambition. If Buddhism teaches being, are we supposed to stop progressing and find contentment in the job we already have?

Cort looked to the people who have gone deepest into the practice of being. The teachers he knows are productive, creative, and engaged. Learning to be has not left them sitting on the couch.

We are not losing the energy and drive in our life. What we’re doing is we’re changing the energy source.

—Cortland Dahl

He described the familiar mixture that powers a career: some care and purpose, some competition, some hope that success or status will finally make us feel fulfilled. Practice can change that mixture. We still need to make a living, and we can still want to accomplish things. But caring for our family, our community, and the wider world can become the driving force.

There can be an awkward stretch in between. The old motivation has weakened before the new one feels fully available.

It’s almost as though they’ve unplugged from the old energy source, but they’re just beginning to find the light socket for the new one.

—Cortland Dahl

Cort suggested learning about people who have navigated that transition. Their lives can help us recognize what a different motivation looks like in action. The energy may carry us further along our current path, or it may lead somewhere else.

The moment before you start meditating

Mary Beth asked what we are actually doing when we “widen the aperture,” and whether there are different ways to practice it.

Cort offered three entry points. With the eyes, let attention include the edges of the visual field. With the breath, notice the release that comes with an exhale. With the mind, sit as though you are about to meditate, but haven’t started yet.

You are a little more alert because you are getting ready. But you haven’t begun following the breath or running a technique. See whether you can remain in that small space of wakeful presence.

So if that feels like nothing’s happening, that’s perfect.

—Cortland Dahl

Even the thought “Am I doing it?” can show up. The invitation is to become familiar with being, without turning it into another task to perform correctly.

Cort recommended short doses: five or ten seconds, then return to whatever you were doing. These little moments can happen during meditation or in the middle of the day. With repetition, the opening becomes more familiar.

2-MINUTE PRACTICE LED BY CORT

In the recording, 01:25–03:04

2-minute practice: Wherever you are, if you’re sitting still, let your eyes close or remain gently open. Take a few slow, deep breaths and feel the breath moving in and out of your body. Allow the mind and body to settle. Then bring a little kindness and compassion into the moment. In words or images that resonate with you, form an intention that whatever good comes from this time might ripple outward—benefiting your own life, the people around you, and the wider world. Rest with that motivation for a few breaths.

The full hour, mapped

Read the gist below, then drop into the recording at any timestamp.

01:25 — Begin with a compassionate motivation. Cort leads the opening micro-practice: settle with the breath, then imagine the good from this time rippling outward. He uses this pause before meetings and other activities throughout the day.

03:49 — Three ways to widen the aperture. Mary Beth’s question opens a practical exploration of expansive awareness. Cort offers entry points through peripheral vision, the release of an exhale, and the shift from doing to being.

09:15 — Before the doing starts. Imagine you are about to meditate, but haven’t begun. Notice the alertness already there. Nothing special needs to happen; try a few seconds, then return to your day.

12:07 — Shamatha and loving-kindness. Maya asks whether these practices cultivate different capacities. Cort explains how loving-kindness can support absorptive concentration in some traditions, while others emphasize bringing kindness into everyday life. The motivation and purpose matter alongside the technique.

19:08 — Meditation, autism, and ADHD. Brenda asks about different neurotypes and long-term practitioners. Cort describes the research as promising but preliminary, with short training periods and limited longer-term evidence.

21:06 — Compared with what? Why a waitlist and an active comparison group answer different research questions. Cort explains why an intervention’s failure to outperform another treatment should not automatically be read as “nothing happened.”

25:28 — Strengths deserve attention, too. Cort asks what research might discover by examining how practice supports neurodivergent strengths. After a listener flags his earlier language, he acknowledges the correction and returns to the strengths-focused spirit of his answer.

27:46 — Awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. Rachel asks how these capacities relate to nervous system practices. Cort suggests thinking of them as possible ingredients across approaches, while emphasizing that he would need to know the specific method to say more.

30:38 — Career ambition and a different energy source. Can we practice contentment and still want to progress? Cort explores the shift from pursuing fulfillment through success to working from compassion, care, and purpose—and the uncertain transition between them.

37:24 — Does explaining the brain explain the mind? Dave’s question, prompted by Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop, leads into competing views of mind and matter. Cort argues for humility and openness about unresolved questions of consciousness.

44:28 — How shall I live, knowing I will die? Gwen asks about daily practice with mortality. Cort pairs appreciation for the opportunity of being alive with the recognition that we do not know how long it will last. “Today is the day to be kind.”

49:42 — The in-between states. Cort introduces the Tibetan concept of bardos, then describes how observing the transition into sleep and practicing lucid dreaming fit into that tradition’s preparation for death.

55:32 — Can someone near death sense our care? Sherry’s question brings a careful answer: Cort says he does not know scientifically. He distinguishes possible awareness without communication from traditional beliefs and family anecdotes about offering love and reassurance.

59:19 — A community built through questions. Cort closes with gratitude for the dialogue, the people joining each month, and the generosity that makes these gatherings possible.

Upcoming Events:

• Quiet the Restless Mind — November: A gifted online week from Dharma Lab and ServiceSpace, November 15–21, exploring how to meet everyday stress, distraction, and overwhelm with greater clarity and ease. Bringing together ancient wisdom and modern neuroscience, the week features leading contemplatives and researchers including Robert Sapolsky, Laurie Santos, Mingyur Rinpoche, Judson Brewer, Sharon Salzberg, Martin Picard, Cortland Dahl, and Richard Davidson.

  Learn more / register

  

Episode Companion Flashcards:

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Enjoy!

Watch on YouTube; Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

If these conversations are useful, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel.

Episode Companion Flashcards:

Upcoming Events:

• From Doing to Being: Effortless Meditation & the Lost Art of Doing Less with Dr. Cortland Dahl and Kasumi Kato, October 9–11 at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY. This is an independent Omega Institute program and is not affiliated with Dharma Lab. Learn more / register

• Quiet the Restless Mind — November: A gifted online week from Dharma Lab and ServiceSpace, November 15–21, exploring how to meet everyday stress, distraction, and overwhelm with greater clarity and ease. Bringing together ancient wisdom and modern neuroscience, the week features leading contemplatives and researchers including Robert Sapolsky, Laurie Santos, Mingyur Rinpoche, Judson Brewer, Sharon Salzberg, Martin Picard, Cortland Dahl, and Richard Davidson.

  Learn more / register

In This Episode:

00:00 Intro - Is your workout really meditation?
01:15 Training body and mind together
03:05 Is exercise really meditation?
07:51 Why intention matters
11:29 Flow versus meditation
13:19 Exercise and neuroplasticity
16:19 Should you meditate during or after exercise?
20:25 Can movement make meditation easier?
24:14 How Richie practices while cycling
27:26 Cort’s practice: Yoga, jogging, and attention
32:12 Interval training for the mind
33:32 What the research tells us so far

Written transcript for those who prefer to read:

00:00 Intro - Is your workout really meditation?

Richie: What I often hear when I give public talks, people often raise their hand and say, my jog is my meditation, or my bicycle ride is my meditation. And my response to that is always, well, maybe, but not necessarily.

Cort: It’s not just that your mind was a little more clear or a little more peaceful while you were exercising. In fact, actually that I would say is not at all the deciding point about whether it would or would not be meditation, but rather it’s that you’re doing something very intentional with your mind. You’re training your mind very consciously and very intentionally. So the promise of this all is that you basically can train your mind at the exact same time you’re exercising your body. And not only do you get the benefits of each of those individually, there’s at least the potential that there’s a synergistic benefit that’s greater than the sum of the parts.

01:15 Training body and mind together

Cort: Welcome everyone. I am Cortland Dahl, and I’m here with my dear friend and Dharma brother, Dr. Richard Davidson, who of course we all call Richie, one of the most eminent and respected neuroscientists on the planet. And today we’re going to discuss how we can train our minds in the same way that we train our bodies, and especially that we can do this at the same time. So there’s some really interesting science here, but before we get there, I just want to share my own personal experience, which is

I’ve been meditating for more than 30, well, more than well over three decades, probably about 35 years or so. And of course, sitting meditation is super important for me. But I noticed at a certain point that bringing meditation into my exercise routine actually has been incredibly powerful. And in some respects, I feel like some of the best meditations I have are when I’m jogging, for example. In the early days, I did yoga every day. I was

Kind of very diligently had a yoga routine up until my son was born, and that kind of fell by the wayside. But I was really doing, I was really meditating as part of my exercise routine. And it wasn’t necessarily a replacement for my formal practice, but it was really, really powerful. And I could tell in my own experience that there was some synergy between the physical movement and pairing that up with doing a very intentional training of the mind. So this is a very exciting area of science. I know we’re both passionate about this as one of the frontiers of kind of modern science in this area. But Richie, why don’t why don’t I just turn it over to you to share whether your your kind of opening thoughts or your own experience, and then we can kind of go back and forth both to share a little bit about the scientific promise of this, but also how we actually do it and how we personally do it in our own lives.

03:05 Is exercise really meditation?

Richie: Yeah. So thank you, Cort, and it’s great to be here together talking about this on this beautiful Sunday morning in Madison. so yeah and I’ve been meditating pretty much every single day for more than fifty years.

And I too have been really interested in exploring the relationship between meditation and physical exercise. and before we talk about the science, I think there’s a bunch of th other things to share, some of which just are personal and and

To begin with, I too have figured out ways of combining them for me that are really important and personally very meaningful. But before we get to that, I I wanna begin with what I often hear when I give public talks. Sometimes when we give public talks together, people often raise their hand and say, My jog is my meditation or my bicycle ride is my meditation. and my response to that is always, well, maybe, but not necessarily. and so I think it’s really important to make that very clear. And when we talk about meditation, we’re really talking about the intentional use of our mind in ways that promote human flourishing and if you go into exercise and your mind is all over the place and you’re not intentionally deploying your mind in that way then maybe it’s not so much that your exercise is your meditation and so i think that some people slip into that in a in a bit too cavalier a way. And so one of my aspirations is that in the next few minutes together we really can explore that and we can explore when your exercise might be reasonably thought of as your meditation and when it might not be. And so let me just share something personal that I do regularly. I’m a very avid bicycle rider, and particularly in the beautiful warm weather, I ride outside. And before I ride, I do something that I do before I meditate in the same kind of way, which is I and I do this, I really don’t take any extra time. So, you know, I ride a road bike and it requires you know putting on clothes and putting on special bicycle shoes. So there’s a lot of opportunity to reflect as I’m just engaging in the preparation activities for my bike ride. And during those periods I simply reflect on how riding my bike is beneficial to my health.

But it’s not just beneficial for me, but being healthy and having vitality is beneficial for all of those I interact with, for my work, for my for what I do in the world. and it takes on a a kind of

Sense of altruism or pro-sociality, that I’m doing it not just for myself. And what happens then is I mostly I ride alone. Maybe one day a week I ride with others, but the other times I ride alone. And particularly when I’m riding alone, I find that that reflection recycles spontaneously as I ride. And I come back to it many times.

And it just really energizes me, like I’m riding for humanity. I mean, it sounds a little corny, but you know, I do genuinely reflect on that as I’m riding And although I don’t have any evidence to suggest that it’s beneficial, it feels beneficial to me. and first of all, it motivates me to engage in these activities, which I think is.

good thing. know, I’m convinced that it does have other benefits as well, which we can explore later and may even change the biological effects of the exercise when it’s done in that kind of way. And so this is just one example of many of how these can be combined.

07:51 Why intention matters

Cort: Yeah, so so much to pick up on what you just said. we definitely, and maybe at the end of this, we can talk a little bit more about personally how we do this in our practice. So you gave one a great example of how you’ve linked these two. I should just say from the outset also that that Richie is kind of a legend in Madison for for his bike riding. I know people who ride with you, Richie, and pretty much everybody talk like can’t keep up with you. Like so so there’s a clearly

Whatever’s going on in your mind is you know, paired up with some very rigorous physical training. So it’s not as though you need to be I mean, you can do it while you’re in nice leisurely walk in the in the park, but you can do it with very, very intense exercise. In fact, I think for me as well, oftentimes it’s when it’s it’s most interesting actually, when you’re doing something quite vigorous and intense. But in any case, you can do it with any form of movement or exercise.

But one thing I wanted to pick up on goes back to this question that you raised and that we often get asked about this idea of exercise, you know, the the the person who says jogging is my meditation, or similarly people say, being out in nature is my meditation. And you and I, of course, have fielded this question so many times and responded so many times, as you said, together and and alone. But what you just said, I think l sheds some light on that, because in your case, you can see.

Perfectly that one of the key ingredients is intention. It’s not just that your mind was a little more clear or a little more peaceful while you were exercising. In fact, actually, that that I would say is not at all the deciding point about whether it would or would not be meditation, but rather it’s that you’re doing something very intentional with your mind, you’re training your mind.

very consciously and very intentionally. And in this respect, I would say it’s actually very similar to physical exercise. So for example, if I’m doing chores in my house, I’m going up and down my stairs, I’m, you know, moving around. You know, you could say that I’m doing a lot of the movements that are probably very good for my physical health, but I wouldn’t necessarily think of it that way. I wouldn’t, I mean, you’re certainly doing things that are beneficial for health, but

I wouldn’t in a normal day think, I did my exercise routine because I did chores for half an hour. In some respects, even though we rarely consciously think of it, exercise similarly needs intention. It’s something that we’re doing consciously, and we’re not just doing it for no reason, we’re doing it because we think it’s going to benefit our physical health. So it’s it’s really about flourishing and well-being, but in terms of our physical health. So again, it’s those two things. You’re doing it intentionally.

And you’re doing something with a clear outcome in mind related to your own well-being or physical health with meditation, it’s the same thing, except you’re just training your mind. And the outcome is mental well-being and emotional well-being and flourishing. And, you know, again, we might not think of this, but those two things together, it seems to me, are what creates, you know, a formal meditative practice versus you just felt better or you felt different while you’re doing it. So, anyways, you I felt like what you just shared.

just captures that perfectly. It was it was conscious and intentional and it’s very clearly linked to something that’s meaningful to you and that’s tied to your own vision for yourself and even of humanity of what it means to flourish. Would would you agree with that?

11:29 Flow versus meditation

Richie: Yeah, totally, totally. I think that yeah, and and when many people I think say that jogging is my meditation, you know, they have a flow experience during jogging, where they’re really merged with the activity in which they’re engaged, they’re totally present, but their mind is really not being deployed intentionally. it’s more of a passive kind of process and

You know, we’ve talked about this in another episode of Dharma Lab, but their flow can occur with or without meta awareness. and in a paper that

We wrote together number of years ago, we coined a term called experiential fusion, which is the kind of flow that occurs without meta-awareness, where you’re just you’re absorbed in an activity. and that is not necessarily meditation.

Cort: Yeah, absolutely. So we can get more into this, I think, especially with our own experience. Maybe we could talk a little bit about why you would want to do this. I mean, clearly we both have done this and have just naturally found it beneficial. But maybe we can tackle this from a a few different angles. I think there’s some interesting biological angles, even looking at things like neuroplasticity potentially, other biological capacities. But what do you think the potential benefits are?

relative to just doing one or the other independently, or just one or the other and not doing the other, like you just exercise and don’t meditate, or you just meditate and don’t exercise. What would you say? Do we

Richie: Mm-hmm.

Cort: is there a scientific case to be made for why you would do this?

13:19 Exercise and neuroplasticity

Richie: Yeah, so here the the science I think is really important. and

Exercise, physical exercise, particularly aerobic exercise, is probably the most empirically well-validated non-pharmacological strategy for increasing neuroplasticity. Having said that, neuroplasticity in and of itself is neutral with respect to our well-being. If we increase neuroplasticity and our minds are filled with toxic thoughts and beliefs or we’re in a a really toxic environment, it will actually make things worse because it will improve our learning of those toxic influences by increasing neuroplasticity. And sometimes I have this image, probably this is less the case today, but there was a time

When a lot of people in the US at least went to gyms and they were working out furiously on exercise machines and watching all this crap on television. And it was filling their minds, you know, with all this junk. And at the same time, they were increasing their neuroplasticity. And what a really concerning combination that is. It’s really a prescription for.

negativity. And so the opportunity to combine the exercise induced increase in neuroplasticity with something wholesome and positive and virtuous and intentional for our mind, that’s a winning combination. and I sure

Cort: Can I can I ask you, can I can I ask just to drill a little deeper on that before we move on? I’m curious with the so by increasing neuroplasticity, I think most people are probably familiar with that term, but essentially it’s just saying saying by exercising, it’s a strategy to make your brain more malleable. It’s gonna be more receptive to change, or it will change more easily. Is that a, you know, a simple way to say it?

Richie: Yes, it’ll it’ll change more easily. Th there are specific molecules. For example, a molecule that’s known as BDNF, it stands for brain derived neurotropic factor, and it’s a molecule that promotes increased neuroplasticity in the brain. And increased neuroplasticity is increased malleability of of the brain to form new connections as well as to grow new neurons and BDNF promotes both of those processes and exercise will increase BDNF in the brain.

16:19 Should you meditate during or after exercise?

Cort: So if you with the question I wanted to ask is there’s the the change, say like the capacity, the neuroplastic potential, I guess you could say. How much of that is happening in the session itself, like when you are actively exercising, versus it then is initiated and it’s for some period after, you know, it’s for a few hours or a few days or for for a few weeks. Like, does it carry out over, or is there some potency that’s actually in the session, like when you are actively exercising, that it’s even more enhanced. I I’ve always wondered that and haven’t heard anything.

Richie: I always wonder that too. the the I don’t think the answer is at all definitively known. and in part it’s due to the limitations in studies in humans. And yeah.

Cort: So how you would actually study that? I mean it would be hard to s you

Richie: Exactly how you would measure it. So there may be some things that change immediately, and other factors which are more prolonged over some period of time and what the right sort of combination is. So if you’re doing meditation and exercise, is it better to do them together? Is it better to do one before the other? If you do one before the other, what’s the optimal spacing between the two. We have no idea, absolutely no idea from a a scientific perspective. And, you know, I’ve often talked about the science of contemplative aerobics, but there I mean that’s an aspirational goal. It doesn’t yet exist, but these are the kinds of questions that I think need to be explored.

And we do have more tools today than we’ve ever had before to really begin a serious exploration of this.

Cort: The brain essentially becomes more malleable. You’re putting your own brain in a more receptive, malleable state through exercising, through these neuroplastic capacities that our brains possess. But it’s kind of like if you were taking steroids and then you just sat on your couch eating chips all day. You know, it’s like you’re you’re increasing some capacity for your physical, for physical changes to happen, but then you’re surrounding yourself with toxic influences, obviously.

those changes are not going to be good. and so I’m curious on the other side, is there any evidence that meditation or mental strategies also increase neuroplasticity? Is there any do we have any science on that side?

Richie: There’s a teeny bit.

I I would say a teeny bit. There’s there are a few studies that have found that meditation increases some of the molecules that promote plasticity, like BDNF. But that that really hasn’t been studied at on a large enough scale to be confident in the findings. also BDNF that we can measure in the blood, in the peripheral blood, does not necessarily reflect what’s going on in the brain.

and this is a limitation of human studies.

one of the ways this has been addressed is to look at changes directly in the brain to see if there are increases, for example, in the size of different structures that may be associated with neuroplastic changes. And this will be the subject of another Dharma Lab discussion. but those are also complicated and questionable in terms of what they’re really showing and they’re not immediate. You know, you have to put a person in an MRI scanner at and they’re they’re obviously not going to be exercising while they’re in the MRI scanner. So there are many limitations to existing methods and the work is really at an early stage now.

20:25 Can movement make meditation easier?

Cort: You know, one other thing, w you know, going back to the the benefits. So one of these benefits is clearly these neuroplastic changes and that you’re essentially imbuing or immersing your mind in more positive mental and emotional states when it’s in this more receptive biological capacity. So you’re kind of harnessing your brain’s power and you’re just ensuring that you’re kind of creating the right influences. So those changes that happen are going to be positive versus negative or neutral, which, you know, if you

Or just doom scrolling on your phone all the time, or as you said, watching, you know, news, you know, listening to a news podcast or something. Another thing that I noticed in just in many years, both when I first started meditating and even now, is there’s something about the fact that you’re doing physical activity. oftentimes there’s a change in your surroundings if you’re biking or you’re walking or you’re jogging.

Even if you’re sitting still, like I remember doing yoga, your your physical posture is changing all the time. There’s something about that that just makes sort of the mind kind of naturally is shifting and calming. And I just have found it in a way easier to drop into certain meditative practices compared to just sitting perfectly still for long periods of time. And I think there’s a benefit to sitting still. There’s other benefits that come from that. In some respects, it’s probably because it’s harder.

That some of the benefit comes. You’re just face

Richie: Yes.

Cort: to face with your own mind and there’s no escape hatch. And that that, although it’s hard, is actually probably very beneficial. But I just remember easing into a yoga pose or jogging, and sort of, you know, I’m guessing that the default mode network in my brain is probably also naturally deactivating a little bit. And so it’s almost like it’s just a little bit easier when you link up a meditative practice.

with something like that. I don’t know if there’s my guess is there’s not a lot of science to suggest that, but I’m curious what your thoughts are.

Richie: Yeah, I mean I think it’s interesting. and I certainly have experienced that at times. I also think it’s likely something that varies across individuals. I think there are people who have experiences like your describing, Cort, but I suspect it may be different for other people. I think this is a case where one size really is not likely to fit all.

and also we know, you know, just like there are many, many different kinds of meditation, there are many, many different kinds of sports or physical activity. and so that may be an important variable here as well.

Cort: So the promise of this all is that you basically can train your mind at the exact same time you’re exercising your body. And not only do you get the benefits of each of those individually, there’s at least the potential that there’s a synergistic benefit that’s greater than the sum of the parts. Not to mention the fact that it’s just easier in the sense that you’re you’re already exercising or we want to exercise, and you’re just piggybacking, I think to use a term we often use. You’re piggybacking one wholesome positive activity on another.

Maybe we could round this out just by going back to some of the the how we practice. you mentioned motivation, and that’s something I do as well. It’s my guess is we’re gonna have a lot of similarities in the way we do this, but that idea of forming an altruistic inspiring motivation that’s that kind of makes you think of the greater good and then linking what you’re doing in a way that normally would not happen to what you’re doing. What do you do when you’re biking? Aside from r remembering that from time to time.

What what things come up? Do you do any practices like when you’re just there pedaling away and

24:14 How Richie practices while cycling

Richie: Yeah, it that’s it it’s really interesting. I’ve you know, reflected a lot about that. first it is the case that when I do this intention setting beforehand and set the motivation, it helps in having it naturally and spontaneously recycle as I’m riding The other thing though is that

I ride a road bike. I do like to ride fast and I never ride with with headphones in. You know, I’m I’m riding with my senses totally open. you know, in part it’s for safety. you know, I wanna be I wanna be able to listen if there’s a car coming or you know, I ride on the road a lot because I like to climb hills and and you don’t get that on bike paths. so you know I’m riding with it with my senses really open and

I actually find when I’m riding that I’m just really attentive to what’s going on. And I I don’t have a lot of spontaneous thought. I mean I have some, but I’m really attentive to what’s going on and

You know, my awareness is mostly pretty the aperture is pretty broad, and then it narrows when there are certain things happening. and I’m very aware of sort of the the opening and the constriction of that aperture. So, you know, when I’m when I’m riding on a on a road that is straight and you know in the two miles from my house I’m in beautiful farm country and it’s broad vistas and that’s conducive to this kind of panoramic awareness. but then you know there are times when I have to cross a very busy road and then you know I’m really focused on what’s going on. I my awareness is is contracted

I mean just yesterday I was bike riding and coming back from a a longish ride around 30 miles and I was riding through the University Arboretum on the way back to my house. this was around six o’clock at night, really beautiful time, and there were two deer in the road.

right in the road of the arboretum, a mom and a little baby, and I slow down and and just really took this in

And you know, just had this moment of appreciation that here, you know, are multiple species appreciating this beautiful place and cohabitating together. so all of those things are going on, but it’s really driven by sort of what’s happening right in front of me.

Cort: Hmm.

Richie: Yeah.

27:26 Cort’s practice: Yoga, jogging, and attention

Cort: Yeah,

I’ve I’ve had a very I would say that actually this has been a huge part of my personal practice and even my life as a whole. And it’s changed a lot actually over the years. So when I first started meditating back in the early 1990s, as I said, I was doing yoga. I I wanted to do some kind of physical training. And remember at the time I was debating between doing Aikido, which is a Japanese martial arts or yoga yoga. And yoga was just more convenient to me. There was a yoga place near.

Where I was living, which was in Minneapolis at the time. And at that time, the way I did this was very, very simple, but incredibly helpful and powerful, which is I viewed the physical movements really more as a meditative practice than anything else. I wasn’t really doing it as much for the physical exercise. And I would relax and do a pose. I would do yoga and and still do when I do yoga very, very slowly. I’m not one of these super, you know, flow.

Constantly moving, I would relax into poses. And then I would just rest my awareness on different parts of my body. And that was really it. So it was either just feeling the sensations that were going on. And of course, in yoga, you’re stretching and there’s a lot of strong sensations. I think the fact that they were strong made it easier to meditate because those strong sensations naturally grab attention rather than you’re putting it on something like the neutral, something neutral like the breath where, you know, your mind isn’t naturally going there.

Or in some cases, you’re trying to synchronize your breathing and the movement, in which case it felt like there was a natural, it just felt like very natural and easy to just rest awareness in my body. And that was all I was doing. But if I look at how much of the time of these sessions I was able to stay with that as a conscious practice versus my formal meditation, which were usually about

Mindful breathing, you know, just paying attention to my breath. I think I was much more present and aware during those yoga sessions. So that was kind of how I started out. And I think that was perfect for me at the time. I still do that. It’s still part of what I do. But now I would say actually it’s very different. And I do something very, very specific and intentional, especially when I’m walking or jogging. And I don’t even know where I developed this. but

What I do is I will pick something off in the distance and I’ll just note it. It’ll be, you know, an you know, a street sign or a big tree. It could really could be anything, just something that’s very visible and that’s a suitable level off in the distance. Usually something that would take me a minute or two to get to. And and then I will say, for until I get there, I will do something very specific with my mind. So sometimes

It’s just resting in open, effortless awareness. And I’m just in this very expansive state. And I’ll just jog. And it’s hard to even describe this, but when you do that, I’m sure you have it with biking. It’s like you’re jogging in space or something. I mean, it’s like you just have this very open, expansive view. Sometimes I’ll then, you know, I get to that tree and then I’ll reboot and I’ll pick another thing off in the distance. And then I’ll say, okay, now I’m in my body and I’ll just feel my feet hitting the ground or you know, the feeling of my breath. So I’ll actually cycle in no really predetermined way through all sorts of different practices. But the one thing that I always do is it’s shifting from some kind of light focus, where it’s on my body or the sounds around me or what I’m seeing, to something that’s very effortless and more open and expansive. And I’ll kind of sort of go in and out of that.

And then at a certain point, sometimes my mind just feels like it’s in this flow. And then sometimes I might just drop that for a while and it’s I’m just doing my thing. But I find that intentionality and kind of rebooting it versus I’m just gonna practice for an hour or half an hour or however long I’m exercising. The rebooting of it and shifting shifting of it actually for me I found really helpful. And it’s just interesting. It keeps it kind of like a light, playful thing. So, anyways, that’s how I.

currently practice in addition to the motivation piece that I also do of setting that that intention and coming back to that throughout.

Richie: Yeah, I mean it’s very similar to my experience ‘cause it for me the shifting of the aperture is something that I you know, I I play with and it’s it varies over you know, over time. so within if I’m riding my bike for, you know, an hour and a half, I’ll do that a lot over the course of

The hour and a half period.

32:12 Interval training for the mind

Cort: Actually, a great strategy I’ve found for many activities. I do it driving, for example. I mean, right now, as you know, Richie, I’m I’m up in the boundary waters of northern Minnesota. So I drive seven hours to get here. You can do it with driving. Like I’ll pick a street, like a sign way off in the distance, and then do the same thing. I’ve also found even if you’re watching a movie or TV, I do it sometimes with the edits. Like you have a scene where they they they will have a cut and just like, I’ll

So though usually we don’t notice those edits, but they’re actually a great little reboot for the mind. So I do it that way. even reading, you know, reading like a page or you know, a certain amount. So, anyways, those like little transitions I found are like great little entry points where it’s just like a reminder to come back to whatever. And then everything becomes practice as we talk about everywhere all the time. Anything anything can work. Exactly. I mean it is. Actually, I’ve I’ve had that thought.

Richie: Right. It’s like interval training for the mind. Yeah. Yeah.

Cort: So many times. I bet you anything, if you had an interval training paradigm for meditation, I bet you anything that would be more effective than like a just sit down for 20 minutes and try to be mindful of your breath. I’ve I’ve that has been in my mind forever. In fact, we should let’s note that. Let’s let’s do that study. That would be so cool.

Richie: Yeah, yeah. Yes. Yeah. I agree. Okay.

33:32 What the research tells us so far

Cort: So we’re I think maybe we can close it out here. We didn’t really talk about any of the actual research that has happened. And there is an emerging field of research specifically on this. Anything you want to say about that, just as a one of the frontiers of this whole field that we’re involved with?

Richie: Yeah,

I mean first it’s important to note that there is a little bit of research, but it really is quite little. there are a few studies that have explored the potential synergistic effect of exercise plus meditation, in producing beneficial outcomes. And the you know, the general finding is that there is some added benefit. So that if you look at both together, it’s better than either alone. But the the the research is pretty skimpy and it uses very small sample sizes and as we know

This has been a big problem in meditation research in general. And so I think the jury is still out. And as we discussed earlier, there are many fundamental questions that have yet to be seriously tackled in this kind of research. So I think, you know, one of the great things is that there are many more people paying attention to this, and over the next few years, I’m confident there’ll be more.

serious evidence in the scientific literature.

Cort: Yeah, it’s very exciting. And and for I think many of you listening have probably used the Healthy Minds app. And so you’ll know that all the the many practices you can do as an active practice as well as a sitting meditation. And this is yet another Dharma lab episode that we need to do, but there’s a lot of emerging research that those active practices are just as beneficial as at least at the early stages as formal sitting meditation. So this is clearly one one powerful way that you can do that. So

I have a feeling, Richie, we are gonna talk about this again. It’s something we’re both interested in and obviously things we do ourselves. so thank you everyone for tuning in and thank you, Richie, again for another wonderful discussion. So we’ll see you all in the next episode of Dharma Lab.

Richie: Thank you.

As we reflect on the past year, one of the things we value most about Dharma Lab is the community that has formed here. We share a curiosity about the mind and what it means to flourish, explored through both neuroscience and contemplative practice. Each of you brings your own perspectives, experiences, and questions to that ex…

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Welcome back to our Seminal Research Series. Each installment takes one landmark study from the Center for Healthy Minds and puts it in context: where it came from, what it found, and how it helped shape the field of contemplative science.

This time we turn to a study that gets at something close…

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Many of you have asked for more opportunities to practice and connect, both online and in person.

We’re delighted to share two gatherings coming up this fall. Each brings together ancient contemplative wisdom, modern neuroscience, practical tools, and the support of community.

1. From Doing to Being

October 9–11, 2026 · Omega Institute · Rhinebeck, New York
With Cortland Dahl and Kasumi Kato

So much of modern life trains us to do more, strive harder, and move faster. This weekend retreat explores another possibility: learning to rest in a way of being that is naturally present beneath all that effort.

Through guided meditation, practical teachings, and open dialogue, Cort and Kasumi will explore effortless awareness through the lenses of Tibetan contemplative practice and modern neuroscience. You’ll also learn simple ways to bring greater ease, clarity, and presence into daily life.

The retreat is open to experienced meditators and complete beginners alike.

Tuition: $355 for Omega members; $395 standard. On-campus housing is limited.

Learn more and register at Omega →

2. Quiet the Restless Mind

November 15–21, 2026 · Free · Online
Hosted by Richie Davidson and Cortland Dahl

What can we do when the world won’t slow down and neither will the mind?

Join us for a free, weeklong online experience exploring chronic stress, well-being, and our capacity to flourish. Richie and Cort will be joined by an extraordinary group of scientists and contemplative teachers, including:

• Robert Sapolsky

• Laurie Santos

• Mingyur Rinpoche

• Judson Brewer

• Sharon Salzberg

• Martin Picard

Each day includes a self-paced session, a practice, and an opportunity for reflection. Richie and Cort will also host live opening and closing gatherings to bring the community together.

Both live calls will be recorded, so you’re warmly invited to participate from anywhere in the world, even if you cannot attend live.

Apply to join for free →

We hope one or both of these gatherings will offer you a meaningful opportunity to pause, practice, and connect.

And we’d love to hear from you: What kinds of gatherings would be most useful in the future? Simply reply to this note and let us know.

Warmly,

The Dharma Lab team

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Upcoming Events:

• From Doing to Being: Effortless Meditation & the Lost Art of Doing Less with Dr. Cortland Dahl and Kasumi Kato, October 9–11 at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY. This is an independent Omega Institute program and is not affiliated with Dharma Lab.
  Learn more / register

• Quiet the Restless Mind — A gifted online week from Dharma Lab and ServiceSpace, November 15–21, exploring chronic stress and human flourishing through ancient wisdom and modern neuroscience, with leading contemplatives and researchers including Robert Sapolsky, Laurie Santos, Mingyur Rinpoche, Judson Brewer, Sharon Salzberg, Martin Picard, Cortland Dahl, and Richard Davidson.

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In This Episode:

00:00 Intro: Is It Good to Be Lost?
01:17 Experiential Fusion vs. Meta-Awareness
02:29 What Is Experiential Fusion?
04:55 What Is Meta-Awareness?
06:45 Why Being “Lost” Can Feel Good
09:09 The Default Mode Network and Temporary Relief
11:34 What Meta-Awareness Adds
13:21 Flexibility, Attention, and the Ability to Disengage
14:17 Responding Instead of Reacting
16:53 Can Startle Reveal Meta-Awareness?
19:39 Ancient Meditation Instructions for Meta-Awareness
21:11 How to Practice Meta-Awareness in Daily Life

Written transcript for those who prefer to read:

00:00 Intro: Is It Good to Be Lost?

Cort: We don’t like to ruminate. It’s a deeply unpleasant experience. But isn’t it good to be lost? What’s the problem with being absorbed in a good book or a movie? And would it be better if we had meta-awareness? Does that add anything in a moment like that?

Richie: My view of this is that it feels transiently good. In the movie theater or doing Sudoku, when it ends, we go back to our neurotic self and the default mode of the brain comes roaring back. And so it’s a transient state. Meta-awareness is very helpful, I think, in disengaging our attention and enabling us to be flexible.

01:17 Experiential Fusion vs. Meta-Awareness

Cort: Welcome everyone to another episode of Dharma Lab. I’m Cortland Dahl. I’m here with eminent neuroscientist, And we wanted to talk today about a really important question that you and no one else has ever asked, which is what is the difference between meta awareness and experiential fusion? And I guarantee that although you have not asked that question and probably nobody has ever asked that question, it is one of the most important questions you could ask because it has massive implications for mental health, for emotional well-being, and even for physical health. So these are two terms that we use a lot in our research. We publish papers that are defining these and have been exploring ways to measure them, but they’re just very central to a lot of the work that we do on human flourishing. So why don’t we just start off with, I think, the one that most of us are more familiar with, Richie, and maybe you can... Give some practical examples and share your own insights on this, but that would be experiential fusion. This is, I think, where a lot of us live our lives. So what is this and why should people care? Why is this so important?

02:29 What Is Experiential Fusion?

Richie: Yeah, so experiential fusion is a term that we came up with in a paper we wrote a number of years ago together, and it’s a term that’s used to convey the idea that we can get totally absorbed in an activity that we lose awareness We often call this a flow experience, but we are so completely immersed in the experience that we are no longer aware of our context. So one example of this would be going to a movie and being so engrossed in the movie that you no longer aware that you’re in a movie theater. And in many cases, you’re no longer aware that you’re actually watching a movie. You’re so engrossed in the plot that you’re just in the middle of this plot. That’s experiential fusion.

Cort: And it’s an interesting thing because it can be absorbed in an activity like movie theater example is perfect, a perfect example. You know, reading a really good novel or playing video games can be very absorbing. I think a very common one these days is doom scrolling. You’re just kind of totally caught up in this activity. So experiential fusion can be lost in thoughts, right? It can also be rumination where you’re just lost in your own thoughts. But the interesting thing about these examples, the movie theater example, doom scrolling, playing a video game, actually you’re attentive. It’s not as though you You’re distracted in that moment. In fact, you might be very, very focused on what you’re doing, but it’s as though the light of awareness dims a bit. It’s almost your attention is narrowed into whatever you’re doing and you’re absorbed in it and there’s a feeling of being lost in it. And I think the contrast is when there’s this feeling of almost like you’ve woken up from that. And it does almost feel like you’re waking up when you shift out of that state of absorption. So maybe we could just give the contrast now. So this is experiential fusion, which again, can be everything from you’re daydreaming, you’re ruminating, you’re lost in thoughts, or you’re absorbed in some engrossing activities. We gave these examples, but what’s the alternative? And then we can maybe compare and contrast the two.

04:55 What Is Meta-Awareness?

Richie: Yeah, so the alternative is meta-awareness, and meta-awareness refers to the capacity to know what our minds are doing. And to go back to the movie theater example, how would meta-awareness show up in a movie theater? Well, you might be totally attentive to the movie, completely undistracted, but you’re aware that you’re sitting in a theater, you’re kind of aware in the background. You can think of it as the Penumbra of awareness, the sort of edges of awareness. But you’re aware that you’re sitting in a movie theater, you’re aware that you’re watching a movie, but you’re also completely attentive. There’s no distraction. And that would be an example of meta-awareness. And so as it would apply to everyday life, you can be in a conversation with someone you know well, Be totally in the groove with them, be deep in conversation, but not be lost in the conversation. You can be aware that you’re sitting here, you may have just had breakfast together, and it’s Tuesday, and we’re having this conversation. So that That background is really supplied, if you will, by meta-awareness. Meta-awareness is this faculty of knowing what our minds are doing. And we think, for many different reasons, that meta-awareness is really key to being able to transform your mind. And one of the things I often say is that it’s very difficult to transform our mind if we’re not aware of what’s happening in our mind.

06:45 Why Being “Lost” Can Feel Good

Cort: So when it comes to experiential fusion, as we said, there’s a spectrum there, right? It can be being engrossed in a good book or a movie, or it could even be a conversation with a friend. You’re just totally absorbed in the moment. To the point that you kind of lose touch with everything else other than, you know, the narrow band of what you’re doing. And then on the other end of the spectrum is rumination, being lost in thoughts. I think most people would say obviously rumination is no fun. We don’t like to ruminate. It’s a deeply unpleasant experience. But isn’t it good to be lost? What’s the problem with being absorbed in a good book or a movie? And would it be better if we had meta-awareness? Does that add anything in a moment like that? When we’re reactive or ruminating, clearly we want some meta-awareness, but why would we want it in these other moments? Yeah.

Richie: So those are great questions. And I should just also add that You know, I think we need to ask ourselves the question, why is it that activities that produce this kind of experiential fusion, like going to the movie theater or, you know, some more extreme examples are where flow has been studied. For example, with rock climbers where they’re putting themselves in situations where if there is a lapse in attention, it could potentially be lethal. And they’re doing this voluntarily. And so why do people do these things voluntarily to put themselves in these situations where You know, at least we think most of the time, most people are in this state of experiential fusion. And so my view of this is that it feels transiently good to be in these states of experiential fusion. There are other kinds of states of experiential fusion That are very common as well. So for example, doing crossword puzzles, doing Sudoku, where you’re totally absorbed in an activity that is kind of neutral, is very popular. And so again, I think we need to ask the question, why is that attractive? Why do people voluntarily do that sort of thing?

09:09 The Default Mode Network and Temporary Relief

Richie: The reason is, I think, is because it transiently suppresses the default mode. So what does this mean? Well, we know that the default mode is active when our minds are wandering and when we’re ruminating. And just to be clear, the default mode is a network in the brain. This is like a constellation of brain regions, if you haven’t heard that phrase. Yeah, thank you, Cort. So this kind of activity is really effective in just transiently putting the brakes on this. And so for the time that we’re engaged in the activity, we’re not ruminating. And these kinds of thoughts are blocked, if you will, for the most part. But the thing is, when we stop whatever it is that activity might be, whether we’re rock climbing, In the movie theater or doing Sudoku, when it ends, we go back to our neurotic self and the default mode of the brain comes roaring back. And so it’s a transient state which does not lead to an altered trait to the best of our knowledge. But that’s why it’s experienced as pleasurable.

Cort: So that highlights one of the reasons why even though watching a movie, rock climbing, certain activities are pleasurable and pleasant in part because they’re deactivating the ruminating mind. It’s the part of ourselves that we don’t like to sit with. If you just sit alone in a room doing nothing, if you’re like most people, you’re just going to start thinking. And oftentimes the thoughts that are moving through our minds are not particularly pleasant. So if you can deactivate that, then it feels better than the alternative. But the point you’re making here, Richie, is that although that’s true, and it is a little vacation for

11:34 What Meta-Awareness Adds

Cort: You haven’t developed the ability to manage that yourself. You’ve basically put yourself in a context that is managing it for you. And I think this points to the other side of the question, which is, what does meta-awareness add to these moments? So even if you’re watching the movie and you might say... It feels good to be absorbed. I enjoy that. Why would you want to cultivate meta-awareness, generally speaking? I think it’s for this exact reason. It does two things. One, in my experience, it doesn’t inhibit the pleasant aspects of whatever you’re doing, if you are in one of those positive circumstances. So actually, you enjoy the movie more. It’s not like you enjoy it less. In fact, it’s like you’re aware of a wider spectrum of So if it’s something beautiful, it’s almost like you can appreciate the beauty even more in my experience. So it doesn’t inhibit the enjoyable features, but it brings on the capacity that you are in the driver’s seat of this experience. It’s not just the environment and the context that’s doing it for you. You consciously can do it. You intentionally can do it. And so to me, it’s like a win-win. It both feels good. It helps in a negative situation or a challenging situation. It enhances positive or even neutral situations. And it just puts you in the driver’s seat of your own mind. Is that safe to say? Is that your experience?

Richie: Yeah, I mean, that certainly consists with my experience. But the question you’re asking is a great question. And I don’t really think that we have the adequate scientific evidence to sort of definitively And so I think there’s still work to be done to explore what is the added value of meta-awareness in these situations.

13:21 Flexibility, Attention, and the Ability to Disengage

Richie: I think primarily the added value really is in And, you know, meta-awareness also is very helpful, I think, in disengaging our attention and enabling us to be flexible. And flexibility, both emotionally and cognitively, is an important marker of our skills at cultivating meta-awareness, I think. And so it’s often the case that when we get sort of really intensely focused on an activity, it’s sometimes hard to disengage if we need to do something else. Meta-awareness, I think, will provide the underlying foundation for being able to flexibly shift among various alternatives in our behavior.

14:17 Responding Instead of Reacting

Cort: And, you know, one of the things that I’ve noticed just as an example of that, I mean, meta-awareness by definition, as you said earlier, Richie, is you just know what’s happening in the present moment. You know what’s happening in your mind. You know what’s happening in your body even. You’re more attuned to what’s going on in your environment. And I remember an example of this that I’ll never forget just because the circumstances were so strange. You might have been in the room too when this happened, Richie. I was leading a guided meditation at a retreat that Mingyu Rinpoche was leading. I was kind of doing the guided meditation sessions and it was in Madison. And I was leading this meditation and Jon Kabat-Zinn was there, who’s a friend of ours, a very old friend of yours, Richie, and he was in the front row. And I’ll always remember this just because I was leading a guided meditation to Jon Kabat-Zinn, which is just, it was just like an odd experience. He’s like the godfather of mindfulness and I’ve listened to his meditations a million times. So it was just kind of strange and ironic to be leading a guided meditation. But what happened was behind me, there was like this huge kind of What do you even call it? Like a banner type thing. It was right behind me and it fell down in the middle of the guided meditation and it was literally right behind me and it came like crashing down. And it just so happens that in this guided meditation, I think we were, it was something like I, when that happened, I had this I remember just not flinching because I was totally aware like the moment the sound started happening and then my body and normally, you know, you jump up or something. And it was just very interesting to see just to see the very different reaction in my mind and body just from being in this very meta aware state. Like it gave me some capacity. Of course, if it had something I needed to run out of the room or, you know, there was some real danger, I could have done that. But it was clear that just something had fallen. And I didn’t even know what it was at the time. It wasn’t until later when I looked back and was like, oh, that was that big thing. But it was just interesting to me, just the circumstances because of that. I think I’ll never forget that. But it just shows it just gives you a capacity to notice your own reactions and to respond rather than react when you need to. And when you need to react like that, you can. But a lot of times we don’t need to react like that. And a more thoughtful response is much healthier.

16:53 Can Startle Reveal Meta-Awareness?

Richie: You know, it’s a great example. And, you know, I also think you’re pointing toward a way to potentially differentiate between experiential fusion and meta-awareness, because I would expect that in experiential fusion, you would show a startle response. Well, for sure, you would show a stronger startle response. Yeah.

Cort: And maybe just explain, because this is a scientific measurement that, you know, is used commonly. Could you just explain, like, how you measure that? Like, what is a scientific measurement tool?

Richie: Yeah, so, I mean, startle is something that we show in response to an event that, you know, is often loud or intense in whatever domain it’s in. In the auditory domain, it’s a sound that has a very fast rise time, you know, so it doesn’t slowly ramp up, but it ramps up immediately. And that rise time is really what Triggers the startle and you know we can show startle in even just limited parts of our bodies so one of the ways it’s measured in experimental research is just with the eye blink and so if I did that you know many viewers might just blink their eyes or just show a little bit of something and we can harness that as a measurement tool and actually measure the strength of the eye blink with It measures the muscle around the eye called the orbicularis oculi muscle. And so it turns out that it provides a really useful readout of systems that are important in this regard. And so, you know, in the case of experiential fusion, because it’s more difficult to disengage attention and there’s less flexibility, if there were this loud sound made by the banner falling, it would much more likely elicit a startle response. Whereas if your awareness is really, if the aperture is really big, it would include Whatever is happening in your sensory domains. And so, you know, if there’s a loud sound, there’s a loud sound, but you’re not going to show the same kind of startle because you’re not disengaging your attention from something and allocating to something else. Your attention is already engaged.

Cort: That was it. My attention was wide enough that all that stuff, I was hyper aware of everything that happened. Right. But it wasn’t, you know, locked in here. And then it suddenly had to shift to, you know, to something else. Yeah, it was very interesting.

19:39 Ancient Meditation Instructions for Meta-Awareness

Cort: So it just reminds me, maybe as a final thought on this, some of the most classic teachings from the Buddhist tradition, if you go back to the Buddhist sutras, which are the actual recordings of what the Buddha is said to have taught, there are these lines that are basically meditation instructions. They’re the most boring thing you could ever read. But as meditation instructions, they’re very powerful. And they’re basically meta awareness instructions. So it’ll say things like breathing in a long breath. I know that I am breathing in a long breath. And you just go through all these long lists of all the conceivable things that could be happening in your body and mind. And it’s just, and I know that that’s happening as it happens. And I know that that’s happening. And this is basically him essentially guiding people in meditation. Just know what’s happening in your mind as it’s happening. Know what’s happening in your body as it’s happening. And that’s meta-awareness. And he basically was teaching them meta-awareness as one of the most foundational skills for the entire meditative path. I mean, this goes back thousands of years. It’s really quite interesting.

21:11 How to Practice Meta-Awareness in Daily Life

Cort: Well, that’s great. So any, you wanna close with maybe a final tip, like things you do, maybe we could each just share a way we put this into practice in our own lives. Is there anything that you do that you find helpful to connect with meta-awareness and shift out of experiential fusion?

Richie: Yeah, sure. I mean, for me, I go back to this very frequently, many times a day, just in the course of my everyday life, taking it off the cushion, so to speak. And so, you know, one opportunity to do that is whenever you’re waiting on a line for something, you know, often our attention gets constricted, you know, we’ll Dr. Davidson, Can smile at them, do a little loving kindness for them, just open it up. And, you know, I find myself doing that many times a day in situations just really explicitly widening it as a way to sort of touch in with meta awareness.

Cort: That’s so helpful. Yeah, I do a lot of that as well. Another thing that I do, I’ve mentioned this on other Dharma Lab episodes, I think probably because it was one of my starting practices, it’s still one of my go-to practices. And I think for me, one of the best triggers for meta-awareness is Which is really to feel what’s going on in my body. And sometimes it’ll be very simple. I’ll start with something very obvious, like the feeling of my feet on the ground and just feel that for a few moments. And sometimes from there, a little awareness through my body. Usually I’ll notice, you know, sometimes I’ll notice a little bit of tension in my shoulders and they’ll relax a bit or some tension in my jaws. I just naturally feel like my body just opens and relaxes a little bit. Which is always interesting to me after more than 30 years of doing this, that the body is just holding a lot of tension all the time. And awareness itself has this relaxing quality. So just the fuel, what I’m feeling in my body for me is just a very simple kind of anytime, anywhere, everywhere, all the time kind of practice. So that’s one of my go-to practices. So Both of those are great experimentation points. Those of you listening, if you haven’t tried these, I’m sure you have yours as well. If you have your own practices that spark meta-awareness for you, we’d love to hear about it. So maybe you could mention in the comments or share the practices and insights you’ve had. But in any case, great conversation, Richie. Thank you not only for sharing your insights, but for all the research you’ve done on this. You’ve been the pioneering researcher in this area. And I imagine we’re going to have many, many more conversations about meta-awareness and experiential fusion. So stay tuned to future episodes of Dharma Lab if you found this helpful. So take care.

I come from a family of world-class blushers. Something about the Scandinavian complexion makes it impossible to hide. The blood rushes up, the cheeks burn, and everyone can see it. But this time there was no reason for it. I wasn’t embarrassed about anything. I was just ordering a cup of coffee. Yet there it was, this sudden flood of vulnerability, and a surge of embarrassment that caught me completely off guard.

That small moment turned out to be the beginning of something that followed me for months. And to explain how I got there, and how it played out, I have to go back a little.

A New Kind of Practice

This whole coffee shop episode happened back in 1999, when I had just moved to Boulder, Colorado to start a Master’s Degree program studying Buddhist meditation and philosophy. By then I had been meditating seriously for about six years. I had spent time in Asia, done some immersive retreats, and was meditating a lot, usually at least an hour or two every day. But almost all of that practice had been mindfulness, especially body scan meditation and mindful breathing.

Boulder was where I encountered the Tibetan tradition for the first time. I met some remarkable Tibetan lamas, and I started experimenting with practices that were completely new to me. The one that made the greatest impact was a form of meditation linked to kindness and compassion called tonglen in Tibetan, which means “sending and taking.”

It is one of the strangest practices I know, at least from the standpoint of ordinary common sense. On the out-breath, you share all the things you value and cherish. You imagine giving away your happiness, your good qualities, anything you hold dear. You send it out into the world, sometimes to one person. Sometimes to someone you can’t stand. Sometimes to all beings everywhere. Then, on the in-breath, you take in all the things you resist and fear. You breathe in other people’s suffering. You imagine taking on their illness, their hardship, their anxiety, imagining it as a dark, heavy, toxic vapor flooding into you.

It sounds insane. And it is insane, if you’re operating from your usual mindset, the one where the whole project of life is to secure your own well-being and protect whatever fragile happiness you’ve managed to scrape together. Tonglen runs directly against that.

The logic underneath it is that at the deepest level we are already whole. There is a fundamental well-being in us that nothing can touch and nothing can deplete. So when you give everything away, you don’t end up empty. The giving actually puts you in closer contact with that inner abundance. And when you breathe in the world’s suffering, it doesn’t overwhelm you. It dissolves the fear that you can’t handle hard things. What it produces, paradoxically, is a kind of fearlessness. You can give, you can help, you can take things on, and instead of burning out, you feel more in touch with a strength that doesn’t run dry. It’s almost impossible to believe until you feel it for yourself.

Vulnerability

This was the practice I was experimenting with when the blushing episode happened.

You might expect that doing a meditation focused on kindness, love, and compassion would be all warm and fuzzy, but this was not what happened at all. My reaction took me completely by surprise. In part, I was fascinated. It was like being handed a map to terrain I hadn’t known existed. But it took me way out of my comfort zone as well. The first thing it showed me was how much my practice had been about me. My needs, my preferences, what I wanted, what I was avoiding. And here was a practice built entirely around others. Not even just the people I knew, but “all beings”, the phrase you hear constantly in the Tibetan tradition. I was suddenly doing my small daily meditation in service of something enormous, and it forced me to look at a question I had never really asked: what is my actual motivation, not just for meditating, but for everything I do? I was a little stunned to realize I had gone that long without examining something with such huge implications.

Then came the harder thing, the part that started in the coffee shop.

That unexpected blushing episode was not a one-time event. It spread. Within a short time it was showing up in every interaction I had. Passing conversations with friends. Small talk with strangers at a store or a restaurant. All those tiny human exchanges you normally never think about were suddenly soaked in this feeling of exposure, and the instant, visible flush that came with it. I felt like an open wound.

I know how minor this sounds. Blushing is certainly not a major life crisis. But imagine that every single interaction you have, all day, every day, carries a low hum of awkwardness and embarrassment. That was my life for a few months, and it was painful.

The intense feeling of vulnerability dropped me right back in the social anxiety I struggled with in my late teens, and I could feel exactly where it wanted to take me. It made me want to stop interacting with people altogether. I knew the pull toward avoidance well, and I knew where it led. It meant indulging my most introverted tendencies. I’m genuinely happy alone and can go a long time in solitude without a problem. But in this case, the temptation to withdraw wasn’t a retreat to the peace of solitude. It was retreat as escape, pulling back from people just to avoid uncomfortable feelings.

But I was well into my meditation by this point, so I did my best to practice with it.

The first approach I tried was my old standby: mindfulness of the body. To just feel what I’m feeling. I would bring awareness right into the body, into the burning cheeks, the rising heat, the urge to bolt, and instead of trying to fix any of it, I’d just let it be there. Not letting it take over, but holding space for it while the energy moved through.

The second was tonglen, and this is the one that truly changed things, the one I still lean on most when life gets hard. When the feeling came up, or even just the memory of it, there was always that instant flinch, the unconscious wish to be rid of it. Tonglen takes that flinch and turns it inside out. Instead of pushing the feeling away, you pull it in. You ask for more. I would think: it isn’t only me. So many people know this exact shame and awkwardness, and far worse. May I take all of it in, everyone’s, breathing it in. And whatever scrap of ease or confidence I have, I won’t hoard it. I’ll send it out. Let them have it, even if I’m left with nothing. May everyone else feel calm and steady.

It was not overnight. But this opening of the heart turned out to be every bit as much of a revolution as the mindfulness practice had been years earlier.

Twenty-Five Years Later, in Kathmandu

It has now been more than 25 years since I first practiced tonglen, and it still feels as alive and useful to me as it did in those first strange months. I find endless occasions to use it.

A recent one: I was in Kathmandu for a three-week retreat with one of the great masters of the Tibetan tradition, Tai Situ Rinpoche. Near the end of it, I ran into a health scare.

It started with my feet. They were badly swollen, and then came a tightness in my chest and shortness of breath for no reason I could point to. That last part frightened me, because my family has a serious history with heart disease. My father nearly died from an enlarged heart at about the age I am now, and other people close to me have faced heart failure and blood clots. So these particular symptoms are very familiar to me, and I know they can signal very serious health issues.

I let it go for about a week before getting it checked, and it turned out I had mild pulmonary edema, fluid in the lungs, along with critically low levels of the proteins that keep blood from clotting. And I was stacked with clot risk factors all at once: high altitude, heat and humidity, an immune system worn down by sitting in a large group where a cold was tearing through everyone, digestive trouble from the food, and long hours sitting still.

The symptoms came and went. Sometimes at night. Sometimes right in the middle of a session, while I was sitting there meditating.

But the hardest part wasn’t the symptoms. It was not knowing. Was this just my body reacting to a perfect storm of adverse conditions - unpleasant but ultimately benign? Was it something I could relax into and ride out? Or was it the warning signal of something that needed urgent attention? That uncertainty, the not-knowing, is so often the most difficult thing to sit with.

So I did what tonglen had taught me 25 years earlier. First, just feel it. Notice the fear, the racing inner narrative, the sensations in the chest and the feet. Don’t push it away and don’t feed it. Let it be there.

Then, sending and taking. I thought about everyone I know who is dealing with something like this, some of them facing far worse. And beyond them, the countless people I’ll never meet who live every day with chronic pain or serious illness or fear about their own bodies. I imagined breathing all of it in, and wishing them free of it. Whatever health and steadiness I have, can I share it with them? May they have it.

It did not change my symptoms. It didn’t erase the fear or hand me an answer about what was happening. But the space around all of it changed completely. It connected me to a sense of meaning, and to a strange, steady confidence that whatever came, I could handle it. A few breaths like that could move me out of brace-and-resist and into open-and-explore. It gave me the inner space to respond with care and self-awareness instead of getting swept up in the energy of self-preservation and blind reaction. But more importantly, it dropped me into the space of feeling deeply connected with others. That whatever is going on, I’m not alone, and others who are suffering are not alone. We are part of a vast web of life, and I can let that feeling of connectedness carry me through a scary moment.

Try It for Yourself

That, more or less, is what these heart-opening practices can do. Not only on the cushion, but in exactly the moments when we tend to contract and pull back from the rough edges of being human. And tonglen is only one entrance. The inner landscapes of insight, of wisdom, of purpose and meaning, are all just as worth exploring, and just as helpful for navigating the ordinary ups and downs of a life.

If you’d like to experiment with this practice, here are some simple instructions.

Step 1: Prepare your mind and body

Find a comfortable posture, close your eyes if you like, and bring a light awareness into your body.

Take a moment to notice how you’re feeling. Are there areas of tension or discomfort? Places where you feel relaxed or at ease? There’s nothing to change—just notice what’s present and rest with your experience for a few moments.

Step 2: Taking In

Next, reflect on your life these days. Is there something you’re struggling with or finding a little challenging? To begin, choose something that isn’t too overwhelming. A situation that’s mildly stressful or frustrating is perfect.

Bring it to mind and simply notice what happens. What thoughts arise? What emotions? What sensations do you feel in your body?

Now widen the lens.

Think of other people—people you know and people you don’t. Some may be facing similar challenges. Others may be dealing with difficulties far greater than your own.

Hold all of them gently in your heart with a simple wish such as:

May they all be free from suffering.
May they all find peace.

Or use whatever words feel most natural to you.

Next, imagine that with each in-breath you are breathing in their suffering and challenges. If it helps, picture it as dark smoke or vapor. As you breathe it in, imagine being completely fearless. Imagine that you’re breathing it into the deepest part of yourself—the part that cannot be harmed, damaged, or poisoned.

With every breath, allow yourself to feel more confident, resilient, and strong, and imagine that those you’re thinking of are completely relieved of their suffering, as though your compassion is genuinely supporting them.

You can stay with this part of the practice as long as you like. From time to time, feel free to pause and bring awareness into your body, or simply rest in effortless awareness for a minute or two before continuing on.

Step 3: Sending Out

If you’d like to include the second half of the practice, begin breathing out your own positive qualities.

Imagine sharing your resilience, kindness, wisdom, health, joy, or whatever goodness you have to offer. You might visualize it as radiant light flowing out in every direction, touching others and helping them reconnect with their own courage and inner strength.

Step 4: Breathing In, Breathing Out

Finally, you can put these steps together. Breathe in all the pain, suffering, and negativity, and breathe out goodness, positive feelings and circumstances, and joy. You can use whatever naturally comes up in your experience as an opportunity to extend even further:

• If you notice fear, breathe in the fear of all those who feel afraid.

• If you notice resistance, breathe in resistance.

• If you notice confusion, breathe in confusion.

• Whenever you feel calm, confident, joyful, or strong, breathe those qualities back out into the world.

There is no need to be rigid. Let the practice unfold naturally in whatever way feels meaningful.

Step 5: Rest

When you’re ready, let go of the visualization completely.

Simply rest in open, effortless awareness, as though you’re quietly holding space for a dear friend. Allow whatever is happening in your body and mind to unfold naturally, without trying to change anything. Give yourself a genuine opportunity to simply rest and be present.

As with any meditation practice, keep it light and playful. If at any point it feels like too much, simply take a break. Over time, however, you may discover, as I have, that this becomes one of the most rewarding and transformative practices you can do.

As always, I’m sharing this in the hope that it adds a little something to your day. Maybe you already do these practices and have your own experience with them. Maybe this is entirely new ground for you. Either way, I’d love to hear it. If you’ve practiced tonglen, how has it shown up in your life? And if it’s new, what does it stir up, doubt, curiosity, resistance, interest? Tell me in the comments.

Wishing you all the very best for your journey,

Cort

Our free 1-week online summit providing insights for understanding and Quieting A Restless Mind is coming up in November. More details and link to register below.

What’s inside

• Why your brain constructs reality the way it builds a dream

• Why controlling the mind backfires

• TMS: is it cheating?

• Why open awareness loosens pain

• The neuroscience of grief and regret

• A 2-minute guided practice (free, led by Cort)

• A preview of our upcoming November summit

• The full hour mapped below, plus the flashcards and the recording for paid members

Companion Flashcards At Bottom

Your brain builds reality like a dream

A listener named Linda asked about acceptance, and about the idea, drawn from Anil Seth and Lisa Feldman Barrett, that reality is a construction of the mind. Cort answered first, and reframed where suffering actually comes from.

Cort was clear it is not erasing expectations. It is seeing that they are there and that they are out of step with what is happening, bringing them into the light of conscious experience rather than letting them run under the hood.

Then Richie discussed how the brain networks that build our beliefs and expectations are the very networks through which we perceive. He used the dream as proof.

His image for the practice came from Mingyur Rinpoche: caught in the middle of a river, you are swept along by the turbulent flow. Become aware of the thoughts and expectations driving your perception, and it is more like sitting on the bank, watching the water move without being pulled in. Cort added a pointer for anyone who wants the science firsthand, calling Anil Seth’s TED talk one of the best he has seen.

The picnic and the four police officers

Victoria asked why open awareness loosens physical pain. Richie described what his lab calls “stickiness,” the attachment or aversion that makes an emotion reverberate long after the thing that caused it is gone. In open awareness, the reverberation drops away.

That fast return to baseline, he said, is a neural signature of resilience. Cort then told a story from the Tibetan tradition that ties to this. Imagine you drive to a park for a picnic, thrilled to be there. Then four police officers walk up and tell you that you are ordered to stay in this park all day, that they will block you if you try to leave.

The mind works the same way. The harder we clamp down on a feeling, the more it strains to escape. Open awareness runs the other direction. Cort called it a practice of trust, close to the opposite of control.

FREE · 2-MINUTE PRACTICE LED BY CORT

The full hour, mapped

Read the gist below, then drop into the recording at any timestamp.

03:46 — “Grandpa!” and the end of the sitting.

Twelve minutes into an early-morning practice, Richie’s two-and-a-half-year-old grandson opened the door. He let the formal session go and kept practicing as grandpa. Anywhere, anytime meditation; everywhere, all the time.

08:32 — Active practice is as powerful as the cushion.

The Healthy Minds research finds the benefit of active practices comparable to formal sitting. Cort put his son down for nearly every nap for three years and came to see those as the real practice.

09:59 — Acceptance and the gap.

Suffering tracks the gap between reality and our expectations. The shift is not dropping expectations but seeing them clearly.

13:54 — Your brain constructs reality like a dream.

Anil Seth, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and the river metaphor. Perception is built by the same networks that build belief.

17:40 — So how do we share a reality at all?

Rob from Toronto asks about controlled hallucination and shared social realities. Richie on entrainment, cooperation, and why it remains “a shared illusion of a sort”.”

20:18 — Why open awareness loosens pain.

Stickiness, reverberation, and the larger-but-faster response that marks resilience. We are not creating emotional zombies.

27:00 — The picnic and the four police officers.

Why control backfires in a park, in a relationship, and in the mind. Open awareness as trust.

29:40 — TMS and the urge to hack the mind.

TMS stands for “transcranial magnetic stimulation”, and Richie explains that TMS belongs to a broader family of methods designed to modulate brain function relatively non-invasively. There is growing interest in whether these tools could affect meditation, but he emphasizes that we do not yet know whether they meaningfully support practice. The Center for Healthy Minds has also been exploring neuromodulation and meditation more broadly. Cort shares about neuromodulation as one more entry point into an interdependent system.

37:37 — Where does awareness live in the brain?

Edith’s question. Visual cortex, anterior cingulate, and the honest answer: no single location, no single switch

40:24 — The unresponsive who were actually aware.

Melanie Boly’s work: patients thought to be vegetative held more awareness than we credited, unable to communicate it. A communication problem, not an awareness problem.

45:18 — The neuroscience of grief that doesn’t fade.

Amygdala and hippocampus jammed together, and reconsolidation: a memory is a reconstruction that changes each time it is recalled, not a photograph.

51:20 — When grief opened into gratitude.
Cort on his father’s sudden death four years ago, holding the feeling fully in the body, and the sadness opening, unbidden, into gratitude.

57:38 — A free November summit.
A free online gathering through ServiceSpace this November, with Sharon Salzberg, Jud Brewer, Robert Sapolsky, Martin Picard, Mingyur Rinpoche, and Laurie Santos.

November 2026 Free Online Summit with Legends of Neuroscience and Practice

Read more

In Dharma Lab’s first guided practice hour, Dr. Cortland Dahl and Dr. Richard Davidson took us from talking about wellbeing to actually practicing it. Drawing on the Healthy Minds framework of awareness, connection, insight, and purpose, shaped through years of research and practice connected with the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Humin (formerly Healthy Minds Innovations), they led participants through four short practices designed to make each capacity directly experiential. The session explored a central idea running through their work: meditation is less about fixing ourselves than learning to recognize and cultivate qualities of wellbeing that are already present.

Keep Practicing — Upcoming Events

If you’d like to continue exploring these practices, the free Healthy Minds Program App offers guided practices and learning across awareness, connection, insight, and purpose, with Cortland Dahl, Richard Davidson, and other teachers.

Our next “Ask Me Anything”with Richie and Cort is live on Tuesday, August 25th, 8pm ET. Please send us questions in advance by replying to this email or dropping a comment.

We have an exciting lineup of guest speakers for a free online summit in November to explore the restless mind. More details to come, but check out initial info at the bottom of this email and registration details here. Please share widely!

Thank you for your support and we hope to see you at these future events.

—The Dharma Lab Team

November Online Free Summit

Watch on YouTube; Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

If these conversations are useful, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel.

Reminder: We have a FREE 1-hour live practice session on Wed Aug 19th, 7pm CT with Richie and Cort discussing how different meditation practices map to the four pillars of well-being (Awareness, Connection, Insight, and Purpose). More details and register here!

Companion Flashcards

In This Episode:

00:00 Taking Back Control of Attention

01:21 Why Focus Feels So Hard

02:51 Are We More Distracted Than 50 Years Ago?

05:15 Why the Brain Is Wired for Distraction

09:03 How Our Attention Gets Hijacked

13:20 Why Surprise Captures the Brain

16:35 The Reinforcement Loop Behind Endless Scrolling

17:44 How Emotion Disrupts Self-Control

21:24 Rebuilding Control Over Attention

25:53 Attention as a Practice of Intention

29:46 Digital Hygiene: Designing Your Environment for Focus

Written transcript for those who prefer to read:

00:00 — Taking Back Control of Attention

Richie: Now we have basically ceded control to the forces around us, and it has led to a kind of impairment, a collective impairment in prefrontal function that we’re all suffering from. There are data to suggest that we are indeed more distracted today than we were 50 years ago. It’s not just a kind of subjective impression.

Cort: I would say if there’s one word that captures the heart of this as a practice, I would say intention. And simply being intentional about what’s going on with my attention. Just choose. Before your mind gets pulled somewhere, I just got an alert. I’m going to choose to do that. And I noticed the pull, but I’m going to actually ask myself, do I want to check this message right now? Or I just heard a sound. I’m going to actually choose. Do I want to keep my attention with what I’m doing? Or do I want to You know, turn and look to see what was happening over there, like actually just making a choice. Like you were saying, the reps, you can do a thousand of those a day easily.

01:21 — Why Focus Feels So Hard

Cort: Welcome everyone to another episode of Dharma Lab. I am Cortland Dahl, one of the co-hosts here, and of course I’m here with Dr. Richard Davidson. Richie, to all of us who know him well, one of the preeminent neuroscientists on the planet. And today we’re gonna discuss one of the most common problems that probably every human faces, which is how incredibly hard it is just to stay focused. Now, I must admit, maybe this is an embarrassing admission, given that I’m supposedly one of the experts who’s talking about this stuff. But there’s a lot of days where I’m sitting, getting stuff done, answering emails or focused on some project. And it’s just really hard to not get pulled in to other things. You know, I’m answering emails and suddenly I’m shopping online or I’m working on a report and then I’m checking my emails. It’s just it feels like There are so many things in our life that are just pulling us in a million different directions. And I thought today we could just answer two very simple questions. One, why is it so incredibly hard to stay focused? And two, what can we do about it given this chaotic world we’re living in? So maybe we can just I can just turn this over to you, Richie, and you can kick this off however you want to. But I’d love to hear specifically from a neuroscientific point of view at some point. But yeah, what does this spark for you?

Richie: Yeah, well, first it sparks familiarity.

02:51 — Are We More Distracted Than 50 Years Ago?

Richie: So, you know, I think that it’s true. I often say we’re all participants in a grand experiment for which none of us have provided our informed consent. And that’s, of course, referring to the exposure that we all have to this extraordinary amount of information through Our online activities through social media, all of that. And that’s a huge source of distraction. And so, you know, I think that one, I certainly think that it’s inevitably true that one major reason why people experience more distraction perhaps today than they did And there are data to suggest that we are indeed more distracted today than we were 50 years ago. It’s not just a kind of subjective impression, but inevitably I think it’s at least in part true that it’s because of our exposure to this information that is so readily available. So we’re clearly not going to change that. We don’t have the power To influence the tech companies to do the kind of regulation that might be needed. So, you know, we’re left, I think, with the inevitable conclusion that really the only thing we can change is our own minds. And so that, I think, is an important opportunity. And so here’s another case where the kind of, quote, And us being so distracted can also be the opening for real change and transformation. And in the language that you and I have used, Cort, in our book, Born to Flourish, and at other times in Dharma Lab, we can think of distraction itself as an affordance, distraction itself as a moment of awakening, if you will, because the moment we recognize we’re distracted, That’s a moment of awakening and can really be helpful in the process of changing your mind.

05:15 — Why the Brain Is Wired for Distraction

Cort: I’m curious about the neural mechanisms for why we are so easily distracted. I think the experience is, it’s like our attention is like a restless puppy that just gets excited and is rushing off after any bright, shiny object. It sees a squirrel on a tree outside and it’s banging itself against the window and then hears something in the kitchen and goes racing off. And it feels like that sometimes. I mean, it feels like that, you know, even for me having 35 years of meditation under my belt and done all these long retreats where I’m very specifically training my attention. And I feel like in some respects have, you know, have developed A strong attentional skill set, so to speak. And yet I still feel that when I’m in a meeting like this, I could be talking to you and then I see a notification on my computer or something happens in my environment. It seems like the mind and brain are just... Really wired actually for that to happen. I mean, it clearly, you know, happened spontaneously and effortlessly countless times every single hour. So what’s going on in the brain? I mean, is it as it seems that this is sort of how we’re wired? I imagine there’s evolutionary reasons why this is this is likely to be the case.

Richie: I think it is in part how we’re wired. We are wired to detect surprise, to detect discrepancies, to detect rare events, because those often are events that have more salience. For example, our Sensitivity to danger and to cues that may signal danger. Those are the kinds of things that are relatively rare, but they’re super important. So we want to be primed, if you will, to notice those. And the problem is that that machinery that evolution has provided us with can be harnessed or hijacked by all these other things around us. But I think I can pretty much guarantee based on everything we know that if you receive the identical information, say something surprised you that drew your attention, if that thing were repeated 10 times, by the 10th time, you’re no longer going to pay attention to it. And that process habituation is something we know very well. And so the masters of technology have very much figured out how to capture our attention. By providing us with, in many cases, more and more extreme examples of things that are of interest to us. And the increased extremity has all kinds of, I think, really unfortunate consequences. But one of them is that it will capture our attention. But it can also serve to further reinforce and reify certain kinds of extreme beliefs that we might have, which can of course be a key driver of divisiveness.

09:03 — How Our Attention Gets Hijacked

Cort: I wonder if we translate this into a very practical tool. I could see this understanding of the way the brain works, and especially the things that tend to capture our attention, the things that can be easily hijacked, as you said, for people who want to... If the objective is to keep people in your app as long as possible, if you imagine a lot of social media platforms these days, that’s what they want. The product is actually not what we’re doing. Actually, we are the product. It’s our attention that’s being sold. And so in a way, what they want, you know, they’re harvesting our attention in a way is what’s going on. And so they’re designing for that. And it’s an interesting question, you know, in the, you know, the way you’re framing it, because it’s sort of the question is, What loopholes in our brains are they exploiting so they can get more of our attention? And for me, having studied this and explored this myself, I can see understanding that actually is very empowering because now I know the game. I can see what they’re doing. You know, for example, if I’m on social media, I can actually see the way the algorithms work like, oh, if I watch that video a little longer, and I swipe past this other one, I know in a few in a moment or two, two or three videos later, I’m going to see something So maybe we could just zero in on that for a moment because it is, as I said, quite empowering. What are some of the things that are exploited? If you could give a little mini class, what would you look for so you can be conscious of it versus unconsciously, unwittingly pulled in by it? What would you look for, like the things that are going to capture your attention?

Richie: Yeah, so you’re asking what would we look for in the brain itself? Yeah,

Cort: what are the brain mechanisms that are being hijacked and how might we be conscious of what’s happening versus it just happening to us and we’re unconscious of it?

Richie: Yeah, that’s super important. So the hijacking of attention can happen in a number of different ways. One of the most fundamental ways in which it happens Is that there’s an interaction between the brainstem and specifically a part of the brainstem that is rich in norepinephrine and it’s called the locus cerulein. And it has projections that are very widespread to many different regions of the cortex. And basically what happens is that when something captures our attention, as opposed to us directing our attention to it voluntarily, but being captured unwillingly, if you will, or unintentionally. It just grabs our attention whether we like it or not. Right. What’s happening is that there is a transient increase in activation the locus coeruleus, which is this site rich in norepinephrine. And then there are these very widespread projections to the entire cortex. And so there’s a transient increase in cortical arousal that’s pretty broad, even if the The event that occurred, the stimulus was, say, just the sound. It would be broader than just the auditory part of the brain, just broader than just the auditory cortex. It would really be all over the brain. And this is the kind of thing that would capture our attention. But if it’s repeated, if the identical event is repeated a few times, It would show what we call habituation, where you would not respond to that. And so, you know, that’s one of the most basic mechanisms for attention capture is this kind of rare or surprising event.

13:20 — Why Surprise Captures the Brain

Cort: And so is sorry, just to to pause for a second there. If I’m uh building some new product and I want to harvest people’s attention and I come to you as one of the world’s leading experts in this area and I just say okay richie I want I want to hijack this exact neural loop that you just talked about like what are the best strategies like what could I design like what could I build into this new app or this new product whatever it is what would be the most effective ways to hijack this system surprise you kind of mentioned one is surprise something that’s Shocking or surprising or unexpected.

Richie: That sounds like that’s one of the... Yeah, and so to create that kind of unexpected burst, if you will, the most effective way of doing it is presenting a set of events which are all repetitive and very similar and then follow it by something totally novel and surprising. It’s the oddball. Yeah. And so there’s a very famous experimental paradigm in neuroscience and psychology called the mismatch negativity, which is a version of this. And basically what a mismatch negativity is, is if I present a series of tones of a certain pitch, and then it’s followed by a tone of a different pitch. So if we do something like this, Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, boop, beep, beep. Your response to the boop would be totally, your brain would just automatically... Um, detect that and it would be, uh, and there’s a very well characterized signal in the brain that displays that. Um, and it’s, it’s very difficult, even I should say in long-term meditators, um, Although we do have some evidence to suggest that there are some alterations, but at least in moderate term meditators, this is so basic, it’s very hard to override. So it doesn’t change.

Cort: We still, no matter how much you’ve meditated, your mind still gets... Yeah, although there are,

Richie: you know, if I did it instead of with simple tones, if I did it with words, for example, where I presented words of a certain category like zebra, tiger, monkey, elephant, flower, rabbit. Where the discrepancy is semantic in that case and not the auditory features themselves, that’s much more likely to be something that can be overridden, if you will.

16:35 — The Reinforcement Loop Behind Endless Scrolling

Cort: So it seems like one of the takeaways, this is super interesting, and actually I can already see this in the endless swiping of social media, that if you’re advising, you would say, okay, what you don’t want to do is have too much repetition. You don’t want For example, if I watch a cat video and I watch the whole thing and the algorithm is like, okay, this guy clearly likes these cute cat videos. You don’t want to just show me 10 cat videos at that point because you’re just going to get habituation. What you want, and I think this is exactly what it does, is you want at random intervals, like maybe you have to swipe through five things to get a cat video and then you don’t see one for 10 videos and then it’s after two. It’s sort of unexpected and you get it, but you never know when you’re going to get it. Is that right? Like if you’re advising like that... I think this is actually how it is. If you pay attention, you’ll actually start seeing these patterns, especially in social media.

Richie: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, in the psychological literature, that’s called the variable interval reinforcement schedule. And, you know, that’s extremely addicting in terms of its attentional capture.

17:44 — How Emotion Disrupts Self-Control

Cort: And what about emotion? I mean, you talked about surprise, obviously. Another very interesting thing, again, I’m sort of fixating on social media here, but I think you could look at other forms of distraction as well. But it’s very interesting to look at What’s pulling attention in relationship to the emotions it provokes and the strength, both the kind of emotion and the valence, whether it feels more uplifting or a fear or more negative. What would you say about that? Again, if you’re our key neuroscientific wizard architecting how to distract us.

Richie: Yeah, I mean, certainly emotion and different kinds of emotion are going to be absolutely key in producing distraction. We know that emotion can disrupt the prefrontal cortex. And so the prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that is a key zone for the central executive network, for the network that is guiding behavior.

Cort: So it’s the opposite of the hijacked. It’s the part that’s saying, here’s where I want to go and I’m going there.

Richie: Right, self-control. And emotions will disrupt the prefrontal cortex. And so there’s a continuous dance between the emotional centers of the brain and the prefrontal cortex. And there’s bi-directional communication. So there is communication about emotion from subcortical regions up to the prefrontal cortex. There’s also... Top-down influences from the prefrontal cortex to these subcortical emotional regions that can help regulate them. But this is actually the role of the prefrontal cortex and all this is super important because, and this is speculative, but in our evolutionary past where we had many fewer Episodic, phasic influences on our behavior like we do today. The prefrontal cortex can put into operation a plan which then gets executed over some long period of time. Where there were many fewer at least external distractors. And I think that it’s, and here’s the speculative part. I think that the conditions of modern life today are such that we’re starting from a much lower baseline in terms of our prefrontal skills. In our evolutionary past with many fewer distractors Sort of external stimuli that were bombarding us. We relied on the prefrontal cortex more to guide our behavior. Now we have basically ceded control to the forces around us. And it has led to a kind of impairment, a collective impairment in prefrontal function that we’re all suffering from.

21:24 — Rebuilding Control Over Attention

Cort: That’s a good segue. Maybe we could have our concluding part of this discussion to put our actual hats on. I guess we’ve been playing a role that we would never normally play because, of course, we want to do the opposite of hijacking attention. We want to do what you’re talking about now, which is how can we re-energize and build up the skill set with the prefrontal cortex. And our ability to manage and consciously be in the driver’s seat with our attention versus it being hijacked. So let’s kind of shift gears and now share some of the strategies that put us back in the driver’s seat. So what would you say there? We certainly can talk about our Experiences meditators, but from a brain and from a neuroscientific point of view, anything that you think is some key insights about the brain that would guide how we should view this and how we can do it in daily life?

Richie: Yeah, I mean, I think that some of this is both from knowledge of the brain, but also from kind of practical everyday experience. And that is that I think that just as we do physical exercise and benefit from reps, so to speak, we can benefit from reps with our mental health. And neural capacities. And so, you know, one way to do this is, and we’ve talked about this at various points in the past in different ways on Dharma Lab, but every time you feel an urge to take out your phone, instead of immediately taking out your phone and looking at it, simply be aware of the urge. And make a decision about whether this is actually a time when you need the phone and you should take it out, or whether it’s a time to simply acknowledge the urge and let it rise and fall away like the clouds in the sky. And so there actually is a choice that we can make at that point. But we need to be aware to begin with. That really is a necessary condition for this. If you’re not aware of the urge in the first place, it will immediately hijack your behavior and you’ll just automatically pull out your phone. That’s what we do most of the time. And the invitation in this path that we are talking about and promoting here on Dharma Lab is that there is another way to operate in the world And it’s a way that is infused with this gift of awareness that we all have. And so this is really a way to strengthen the capacity of the prefrontal cortex to self-regulate. Really simple. And we know from some really fantastic longitudinal research that learning to self-regulate early in life is a huge predictor of later adult life outcomes that are beneficial. And kids who have a hard time with self-control early on end up, if there’s no intervention, end up worse off than kids who are better at self-control.

Cort: And there’s, you know, that particular research is super interesting. And it’s also, there’s a whole body of research, which of course, Richie, you’re well aware, just to paint out kind of the other side of the picture, which is that if you’re the kind of person who—I would have been a kid for sure, you know, if we had had the marshmallow test, which is one of these classical tests, like, you know, you imagine putting a marshmallow in front of a kid and say, don’t eat it. For me, I would have, you know, two seconds, that marshmallow would have been down the hatch. I would have for sure been one of those kids. And yet, you know, I’ve spent a lot of my time developing that skill. And so there’s a lot of hope, even if even if we’re the kind of person who might be starting out more on the deficit side of things.

25:53 — Attention as a Practice of Intention

Cort: So I wonder if maybe we could talk about some of the practical things, because I when I think about my life and things I do, I would say if there’s one word that captures the heart of this as a practice, I would say intention. And simply being intentional about what’s going on with my attention. And it was funny because actually, as you were explaining this, I had a practical example of this. I’m, I’m actually sitting in the boundary waters of Northern Minnesota in an Incredibly remote location and there’s a lake very within, you know, basically I could throw a rock into the lake from where I am right now, but it’s very remote and there’s very few boats. There’s not many people. And a boat went by actually as we were, as you were speaking, Richie, and as I was listening to you and you were actively talking about, you know, like how attention gets pulled away and noticing that. And it was, that was like literally happening to me there. I could feel the pull to look at the boat. And it’s a rare occurrence and, you know, and there’s not many people, so I might know those people. But and then I was consciously aware of that, just like you were talking about the cell phone, like you’re aware of it before you follow the impulse. And so I could actually feel the impulse literally as you were talking about this and just choose exercise the intention muscle and just say, I’m going to resist that impulse or just stay with my focus here on what Richie is saying. Noticing the pull of distraction and releasing attention. We could have a whole episode just on releasing attention. That’s kind of its own thing. But just the directing of attention. Just choose. Before your mind gets pulled somewhere, I’m going to choose to bring my attention to my email inbox or I just got an alert. I’m going to choose to do that. And I notice the pull, but I’m going to actually ask myself, do I want to check this message right now? Or I just heard a sound. I’m going to actually choose. Do I want to keep my attention with what I’m doing? Or do I want to, you know, turn and look to see what was happening over there? Like actually just making a choice. Just that intentionality to me is kind of the heart of the practice. And you can just do that, like you were saying, the reps. You can do a thousand of those a day easily.

Richie: Yeah, I think that’s so important. And, you know, to our viewers, this is something that would be, I think, interesting and fun to tinker with in your own life. And one of the things that I often do is I have an Apple Watch. And so when I get certain kinds of messages, it will give me a haptic signal. And I’m very aware that in certain kinds of meetings, like if it happened right now, I would notice the haptic signal and I would not look at my watch. I would be focused on our conversation here. And there are many times in meetings where I will do the same thing. I feel the haptic signal, but I’m making a conscious choice to Keep my attention focused on the meeting. There are other times if I’m in something that’s not in a meeting or something really casual where it would be okay if I looked at it for some reason, if I was expecting something, I might look at it. But there is the distinct opportunity to see it as an opportunity to make a choice.

29:46 — Digital Hygiene: Designing Your Environment for Focus

Cort: And that, and to me, it seems like the intention, intentional aspect, and these are great example of the kinds of things that pull our attention away so many times. One of the areas I would say, which is just a very rich area to practice because it’s happening all the time is like what happens when the distractor is happening, like the haptic signal happens or the sound happens, or in my case, you see something unexpected, it’s happening. And then there’s kind of what you do in that space and being intentional. In some cases, you can choose to go with it. Or in many cases, it’s just noticing that your mind is pulled elsewhere and you just choose to stay with whatever you’re doing, which I think is in most cases that kind of the healthier thing to do. But I think there’s another realm of intentionality, which is actually preemptive. And you can be intentional about what’s going on in your environment so less of those things are happening. I mean, to some degree you can’t control these things, but sometimes you can. I mean, we all have phones, or almost everybody does. I, for example, have just deleted apps from my phone. There’s certain apps that I just felt like these are just not I don’t ever feel good coming away from using this app. And I just remove the app. In some cases, I actually change the settings. So I have no notifications like my phone. As much as it annoys all my family members and anybody tries to contact me, my phone is always muted. My phone is almost never on. And so I check my messages and I have the notifications off on almost every single app. So I go check the things when I want to check them, not because it grabbed my attention. So in that case, it’s almost preemptive. Like I know the things that can and have in the past pulled my attention. And I’m almost architecting my life. So I’m just not going to be, you know, as exposed to those. So it seems like we could almost we can both when it happens, what do we do, but also preemptively, you know, build your life to the degree that you can so that you’re not just constantly exposed to these things, which which just simply can be overwhelming at times.

Richie: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that all fits in a category that I would call digital hygiene. And I’ve been an advocate for creating a curriculum for digital hygiene that would include contemplative practices to help us actually regulate our attention and have that curriculum start with kids. I think it’s really important.

Cort: Yeah, I 100% agree. Well, this has been a great conversation, Richie. I think we would love to hear, for those of you watching this in the comments, we’d love to hear what you do. What are the things that you find distracting? What are the strategies and the methods you found that help you find a little more balance? And maybe we can have a little dialogue offline as you reflect on your own life. But in any case, thank you, Richie, for sharing your insights as always and for you for listening. We hope to see you soon for another episode of Dharma Lab. Take care.

Richie: Thank you so much.

In our 11th AMA, Kim read your questions while Cort made his way back from a retreat with Mingyur Rinpoche. Richie spoke to a study where strangers could tell who the meditators were, from a photo alone.

What’s inside

• Full recording and transcript for paid members

• The photo study: what strangers saw in the faces of long-term meditators

• You are not your beliefs: a simple two-step practice to see them clearly

• A 2-minute guided practice (free, led by Dr. Richie Davidson)

• The full hour mapped below, plus the flashcards and the recording

Strangers could tell who the meditators were

This came up during a question about moods. Richie’s point was that one consequence of long-term practice is that people generally end up in a more positive mood. To show it, he described a study his lab published.

Whenever they studied long-term meditators, they routinely took a picture of everyone, both the meditators and age- and gender-matched controls, without telling them what it was for. Then they gave all the pictures to random people who had no idea where they came from, and asked them to rate each face: how friendly the person is, how much you trust them, how happy they are.

The long-term meditators were judged, in Richie’s words, “whoppingly more positively” than the controls. The raters had no idea where the pictures came from. He called it a powerful, unobtrusive measure that there is something about an enduring mood that gets expressed on the face and that people pick up on.

The study: Goldberg, Hirshberg, Tello, Weng, Flook, Davidson (2019), “Still facial photographs of long-term meditators are perceived by naïve observers as less neurotic, more conscientious and more mindful.”

You are not your beliefs

Another listener asked about the difference between a belief and an ordinary thought. Cort put it this way: thoughts are the words and images moving through the mind, the inner commentary, and they are an expression of deeper beliefs about the world that are often not conscious.

Richie added the distinction he and Cort work with: when we hold beliefs, especially about ourselves, we misconstrue them as a description of who we actually are. He calls it experiential fusion. Most of the time we are not even aware we hold the belief; it just feels like the narrative of our self. Meta-awareness, or metacognition, is having an awareness that we have these beliefs, which lets us recognize we are not necessarily the same as them.

Cort framed the aim in the Tibetan approach he practices: we are not trying to fix ourselves, but to get in touch with the parts that were never broken. Then he gave a two-step practice. First, simply observe your thoughts, like watching a wild animal in its natural habitat, from behind a tree, just watching what it does. Then pause and ask what assumptions, beliefs, and expectations underlie the thought. The point is not to change anything, just to bring the unconscious up to the conscious level.

“We’re not trying to fix ourselves. We’re really trying to get in touch with the parts that were never broken.” — Cortland Dahl

Try this 2-minute practice from the AMA (free, led by Richie)

Prefer to read it? Bring awareness into your body. Then bring to mind one person who first introduced you to practice, who opened this door and shined a light where you had not looked before. Hold them in your heart and let appreciation, gratitude, even love bubble up. Carry that glow into whatever comes next.

The full hour AMA, mapped

Read the gist, then drop into the recording.

04:39 — Is it only meditation that slows brain aging? Compared to athletes or chess players, we don’t yet know. But Richie’s informed conjecture: an altruistic motivation may add a biological benefit over and above the activity itself.

09:12 — What childhood trauma does to the brain. The well-replicated finding of reduced hippocampal volume, and the honest unknown of how far practice can reverse it. Cort on memory reconsolidation.

13:55 — Can practice move your brain’s asymmetry? Functional asymmetry can shift (the first randomized trial of MBSR, 2003), but temperament tends to persist. The masters keep their color; they are not emotional zombies.

20:27 — Belief vs. thought, and how to loosen a harmful one. Experiential fusion vs. meta-awareness, Mingyur Rinpoche’s burnt-rope image, and the two-step practice of watching thoughts and inquiring into the belief beneath.

30:59 — Moods, and the photo study. Why moods differ from emotions, why long-term practitioners carry a positive baseline, and the study where strangers read it off their faces.

38:33 — A stroke, and the beauty in the pauses. For a listener living with brain injury and stroke: being over doing, the sky that stays when the clouds go, and Ram Dass, whose long word-finding pauses Richie found beautiful.

47:28 — After an awakening, why the crash? The four families of retreat experience (body and energy, emotional upheaval, perception, sensing energy), and why to treat them all as passing clouds, not permanent, not the point.

56:16 — What happens in the brain at death. The flatline, why biology is analog and not digital, and the early reports of gamma oscillations near death, the same signature seen in long-term meditators. Plus how the traditions prepare.

Upcoming Events

Save the date: a free practice and meditation hour with Richie and Cort on August 19th at 7pm Central. Register free.

events.dharmalab.co

Episode Companion Flashcards:

Read more

As the science has evolved, researchers have shifted their focus. What changes in the brain? Which changes matter most? And why might some structural changes grow, then recede, as expertise develops?

In this conversation, Richie and Cort explore what decades of neuroscience have taught us, what scientists have gotten right, what they’ve gotten wrong, and where the research is heading.

Enjoy!

Watch on YouTube; Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

If these conversations are useful, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel.

Reminder: We have a FREE 1-hour live practice session on Aug 19th, 7pm CT with Richie and Cort discussing how different meditation practices map to the four pillars of well-being (Awareness, Connection, Insight, and Purpose). More details and register here!

Episode Companion Flashcards!

In This Episode:

00:00 Does Meditation Really Change the Brain?

03:16 Brain Function vs. Brain Structure

05:41 The Gray Matter Studies That Started It All

11:45 Why the Gray Matter Evidence Changed

15:20 White Matter and Brain Connectivity

18:01 What the Research Actually Means

21:40 Brain Health, Neuroplasticity, and Human Potential

Transcript for those who prefer to read:

Richie Davidson:

There’s no question that meditation changes the brain.

We’re talking here about both the function and the structure of the brain. There’s no question that meditation changes the brain, and there is overwhelming evidence for that.

Structural changes, like increases in gray matter in specific regions of the brain after short amounts of meditation, however, are a different story. The evidence for those findings has really not held up.

Even more interesting, some of the effects that have been reported are actually the opposite of what we might expect.

Cortland Dahl:

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Dharma Lab. I’m Cortland Dahl, and I’m here with Richie Davidson, one of the pioneering neuroscientists who has helped us understand the relationship between the mind, the brain, emotions, and how we can train ourselves to flourish.

Today we’re diving into one of the biggest scientific questions in meditation research: does meditation actually change the brain?

When I think about my own life, I can point to experiences that feel like a clear before and after.

When I started meditating more than thirty years ago, I had a genuine phobia of public speaking. It wasn’t just that I got nervous. I had a severe fear of speaking in front of people.

Years later, not only do I no longer get anxious, I actually enjoy it.

I’ve even measured my physiology with devices like my Oura Ring. My heart rate and other biometrics actually shift into a deeply relaxed state when I’m speaking in front of a crowd, something that would have been unimaginable twenty or thirty years ago.

Whether or not my brain changed, it seems difficult to imagine that such a profound transformation could happen without the brain changing in some way.

At the same time, we often see confusing headlines.

One day the headline says, “Meditation changes your brain.”

The next day another study appears suggesting the opposite.

Even the phrase “changes your brain” can mean different things. Are we talking about how the brain functions? Are we talking about the physical wiring of the brain? Are we talking about changes in structure?

Richie, you’ve done some of the most important work in this area, and I think this is one of those topics where the headlines often miss the nuance.

How should we think about it?

Richie Davidson:

You set this up beautifully by distinguishing between functional changes in the brain and structural changes.

Functional changes refer to differences in how the brain is operating. We can measure those by looking at patterns of activity in different brain regions.

Structural changes are different. They refer to the physical characteristics of the brain itself.

That includes gray matter, which consists of the cell bodies of neurons, and white matter, which consists of the axons that connect one region of the brain to another.

It’s entirely possible for the brain to change functionally without changing structurally.

If structural changes occur, they almost always imply changes in function as well.

One of the reasons this field became so exciting was that, about twenty years ago, several early studies suggested that people who completed an eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course showed increases in gray matter in regions such as the prefrontal cortex.

Those findings generated enormous excitement and headlines claiming that meditation could literally grow your prefrontal cortex.

Cortland Dahl:

Before we go further, why would someone even want a larger prefrontal cortex?

Richie Davidson:

The prefrontal cortex is central to what we call the executive network.

It’s involved in planning, goal-directed behavior, regulating attention, forming healthy habits, and inhibiting behaviors we want to change.

If you’re making a grocery list, planning your route to the store, or intentionally directing your attention toward something important, the prefrontal cortex plays a major role.

It also allows us to think about the future and reflect on the past.

That’s incredibly useful, but it’s also one of the reasons humans worry so much.

As Robert Sapolsky famously described in his book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, zebras don’t spend time worrying about tomorrow. Humans do, largely because we have this remarkable prefrontal cortex.

So it’s an extraordinary gift, but it can also contribute to suffering.

Returning to the research, those early studies suggested that relatively short periods of meditation increased gray matter in regions like the prefrontal cortex.

Many additional studies followed.

Then, in 2023, a meta-analysis concluded that Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction produced structural brain changes.

However, the story didn’t end there.

The journal later retracted that meta-analysis because important data had been omitted. When those missing data were included, the reported effects disappeared.

Around the same time, our own research published in Science Advances found no structural gray matter differences between people who completed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and carefully designed control groups.

So when it comes to gray matter increases after relatively short periods of meditation, the evidence has simply not held up.

There’s another finding that’s particularly intriguing.

Some studies have examined whether people with more meditation experience show greater structural changes.

Interestingly, the relationship appears to go in the opposite direction.

The more meditation people have practiced, the smaller the structural differences often become.

When you think about expertise, that actually makes sense.

If gray matter simply kept increasing forever, eventually we’d have bumps sticking out of our heads.

That’s obviously not how biology works.

Instead, expertise in many domains appears to involve temporary structural changes that later become more efficient as skills mature.

There may be a period where gray matter increases, but as expertise develops, those changes may naturally recede.

Cortland Dahl:

So the story is much more nuanced than simply saying meditation makes your brain bigger.

Richie Davidson:

Exactly.

And that’s where white matter becomes especially interesting.

White matter reflects the connections between different regions of the brain.

Across many different kinds of learning, white matter appears to be much more responsive to experience than gray matter.

For example, beginning jugglers can show measurable white matter changes after only about an hour and a half of training.

Those changes are dynamic.

If you stop practicing, they may recede.

We’ve found similar results with meditation.

In the same study where we found no gray matter changes, we did observe white matter changes in pathways related to self-regulation after roughly twenty to thirty hours of meditation practice.

We also have new research, not yet published, suggesting that about five minutes of daily practice for a month is associated with white matter changes.

These findings suggest that changes in brain connectivity may occur very early in meditation training and may be especially important.

Cortland Dahl:

One thing I’m hearing is that we often oversimplify what it means for the brain to change.

We hear phrases like “meditation grows your brain,” but perhaps that’s not even the right way to think about it.

If we compare meditation to physical exercise, we might expect some increase in muscle mass when someone first begins training.

But muscles don’t simply continue getting larger forever.

Nor would we necessarily want them to.

Much of what matters is how efficiently the body functions.

It sounds like the brain may be similar.

The important changes may involve relationships between different brain regions, increased efficiency, and improved coordination rather than simply greater volume.

Richie Davidson:

That’s a very good way of putting it.

There’s another aspect of brain health that’s becoming increasingly important, and that’s inflammation.

We know that many forms of meditation reduce inflammation throughout the body.

Evidence is beginning to suggest that meditation may also reduce inflammation within the brain itself.

That’s especially important because neuroinflammation appears to contribute to neurodegeneration and forms of dementia.

Researchers are only beginning to develop reliable ways to measure neuroinflammation using MRI, so this is likely to become an exciting area of research over the next several years.

Stepping back, though, the most important point remains simple.

There’s no question that meditation changes the brain.

Whether those changes are functional, structural, or both is still being actively explored, but the overall conclusion is remarkably clear.

Many years ago, the Dalai Lama told me that he sometimes reflects during meditation on the fact that his own brain is changing because of his practice.

I think that’s a beautiful reflection.

The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that our brains can change through intentional mental training.

That means we have tremendous potential for transformation.

In fact, humans may have a greater capacity to intentionally reshape the brain than any other species.

That’s an extraordinary gift.

The invitation is to use that gift wisely.

Cortland Dahl:

What a hopeful message.

For many years, people thought the brain was essentially fixed.

Now we understand that change and transformation are built into our biology.

As the science continues to evolve, we’ll undoubtedly return to this topic with new discoveries.

Richie, thank you for another fascinating conversation, and thank you for all the pioneering research you’ve contributed to this field.

And thank you to everyone for joining us. We’ll see you next time on Dharma Lab.

“Get out of your comfort zone.”

It’s one of the most common pieces of advice you’ll hear if you want to grow. We say it about careers, relationships, exercise, and learning new skills. But what if we’ve misunderstood what it really means?

For most people, getting out of your comfort zone means doing something outwardly challenging. Giving a presentation. Starting a business. Having a difficult conversation. Taking a risk.

My own experience taught me something very different.

The most uncomfortable experience of my life didn’t happen while climbing a mountain or taking some big leap of faith. It happened in complete silence, sitting cross-legged on a meditation cushion in a small monastery in Myanmar…

Join Cort and Richie for a FREE MEDITATION / PRACTICE HOUR

On Wednesday, August 19 at 7 PM CT, Richie and Cort are hosting a free hour on Zoom — how different meditation practices map to the four pillars of well-being, with guided practice throughout. All are welcome.

Save your seat →

A Month of Struggle

In the late 1990s, I decided to do my first month-long meditation retreat.

Up until then, I had done plenty of weekend retreats and even a few that lasted a week. But I wanted to see what would happen if I really immersed myself in practice.

There was just one problem: I was a graduate student living on a shoestring budget, and the retreat centers I found in the United States were far beyond what I could afford.

Then a friend told me about monasteries in Asia where foreigners could do long retreats on a donation basis. A few months later, I packed a backpack, bought the cheapest ticket I could find, and flew to Myanmar.

I had no real idea what I was getting myself into.

The schedule was relentless.

We practiced twelve to fifteen hours a day, alternating between sitting meditation and walking meditation from before dawn until well into the evening. There was a simple breakfast, a modest lunch, and no dinner. Beyond that, there was little to do except meditate.

For the first few days, I practiced mindful breathing to settle my mind. Then my teacher instructed me to begin a traditional body scan meditation.

The practice sounds deceptively simple.

You place your attention on the top of your head, noticing whatever sensations are present. Then, very slowly and methodically, you move your attention downward—across the forehead, face, neck, shoulders, arms, chest, abdomen, hips, legs, feet, and finally the tips of your toes.

Simple, but not easy.

Within a few days, I felt like I was crawling out of my skin.

Years earlier, I’d been in a couple of car accidents that left me with chronic back pain and recurring headaches. Sitting motionless for hour after hour brought all of that roaring back to life. My knees ached. My back burned. Muscles I didn’t even know I had began protesting. My mind rebelled with equal enthusiasm.

Every sitting session felt like an endurance contest.

I would watch the clock, convinced that at least twenty minutes must have passed, only to discover it had been three.

Over and over again, I found myself fantasizing about leaving. I imagined walking out of the meditation hall, finding a taxi, heading straight to the airport, and getting on the first flight home.

The Insights that Followed

Looking back, it’s almost funny. If someone had walked into that monastery and asked me whether I was enjoying myself, I probably would have laughed. It was not peaceful. It wasn’t blissful. It wasn’t even relaxing. It was, by almost any ordinary standard, a miserable month.

I’d love to tell you that halfway through everything suddenly became effortless. That I broke through some invisible barrier and spent the rest of the retreat floating around in perfect serenity. That isn’t what happened. The retreat remained difficult almost from beginning to end.

And yet, something else was happening beneath the surface. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, I began to notice things about my mind that I’d never seen before. I saw the difference between pain and suffering. Until then, I’d assumed they were basically the same thing. But during those endless hours on the cushion, I began to see that while pain is an unavoidable part of being human, much of what we call suffering comes from something else entirely. It comes from resistance, from wanting things to be different than they are, from fighting reality instead of meeting it.

I also noticed the enormous gap between my expectations and my actual experience. I wanted the retreat to be peaceful. I wanted my mind to settle down. I wanted profound meditation experiences. Instead, I got sore knees, a throbbing back, endless restlessness, and a mind that seemed determined to think about absolutely everything except meditation.

It slowly dawned on me that much of my suffering wasn’t coming from the retreat itself. It lived in the gap between the experience I was having and the experience I thought I should be having.

I also saw something even more unsettling. Much of my striving—the relentless effort to control my mind and force myself into becoming a better meditator—was rooted in a quiet but persistent belief that I wasn’t good enough as I was. That if I just tried harder, practiced more, controlled my experience a little more successfully, then I’d finally arrive somewhere better. And it was about much more than just meditation. It was how I viewed my entire life. My entire conception of my worth as a human being was tied to doing and achieving. That realization has stayed with me ever since.

The Biggest Lesson of All

The biggest lesson came years later, when I looked back on that month with a little perspective. What struck me wasn’t how difficult it had been. It was where all the real growth had happened.

Nearly every insight that fundamentally changed the way I understood myself, meditation, and life had emerged from the moments I least wanted to experience.

Not despite the difficulty.

Because of it.

Self-discovery and inner transformation is often born from adversity.

Now, before going any further, I want to make one thing clear. I’m not suggesting that all adversity leads to wisdom. Sometimes hardship is simply too much. Trauma, chronic stress, abuse, or overwhelming loss can push us beyond our capacity to cope. When that happens, adversity doesn’t necessarily foster growth. It can leave us feeling frightened, disconnected, or deeply wounded. Healing often requires safety, support, and time before insight becomes possible.

But there is another kind of difficulty. A kind that stretches us without breaking us. A kind that invites us to discover strengths we didn’t know we possessed. Over the years, I’ve become convinced that this is where much of our deepest growth takes place, not only in meditation, but in every part of life.

And yet, it’s exactly the kind of experience we spend most of our lives trying to avoid.

Chasing a Mirage

In many ways, this is totally understandable. Modern life is built around the pursuit of comfort.

One of the great triumphs of civilization has been our ability to reduce unnecessary suffering. Most of us no longer spend our days worrying about where our next meal will come from or whether we’ll survive the coming winter. We heat our homes in the winter and cool them in the summer. We have medicines that cure diseases that would have been fatal just a century ago. If we’re bored, lonely, or curious, we can reach into our pocket and instantly connect with almost anyone or anything in the world.

None of this is bad. Indeed, much of it is extraordinary.

But somewhere along the way, many of us form the unconscious belief that if we do all the right things, eat the right foods, get our exercise routine just right, find the perfect partner, the perfect job…we’ll be able to eliminate discomfort altogether.

We organize our lives around convenience. We avoid awkward conversations. We distract ourselves from boredom before it has a chance to teach us anything. We numb emotional pain. We treat uncertainty as a problem to solve rather than a condition of being human. Even death, once something that unfolded in the center of family life, has largely been moved behind the closed doors of hospitals and funeral homes, tucked away from everyday experience.

Without even realizing it, we begin to equate comfort with well-being.

Meditation points in a very different direction.

The goal of meditation isn’t to become more comfortable. It’s to become more resilient, more wise and caring, and more capable of meeting whatever life brings.

That doesn’t mean seeking out suffering or pretending that pain is somehow noble. If we can prevent unnecessary suffering, we should. But when discomfort finds us, as it inevitably will, the question shifts from “How do I get rid of this?” to “How do I relate to this wisely?”

The Three Buckets of Experience

Over the years, I’ve found it helpful to think about my experience in a very simple way.

Almost everything we encounter in meditation, and in life more broadly, falls into one of three broad categories.

First, there are the experiences that nourish us.

These are the moments that remind us why we’re alive: a quiet morning with a cup of tea, feeling deeply understood by someone you love, watching your child laugh, sitting beside a lake at sunset, or a moment in meditation when the mind becomes effortlessly still. Feelings of gratitude, wonder, connection, joy, peace, and purpose all belong here.

These experiences energize and inspire. They heal. They remind us of what’s possible, and give us the strength to keep going. They fill the tank, so to speak. We need them. They’re not a luxury; they’re essential.

Second, there are the experiences that challenge us without breaking us.

These are the difficult conversations we’ve been avoiding, the grief that follows losing someone we love, the anxiety that surfaces when we try something new, the frustration of sitting still while the mind races, or the disappointment of failure. They’re uncomfortable, sometimes intensely so, but they remain workable. They’re difficult enough to stretch us without completely overwhelming us.

Looking back, almost every significant insight I’ve had about myself has come from challenging experiences like these. Not because suffering is inherently valuable, but because challenge has a way of exposing the habits we normally don’t see. It reveals where we cling, where we resist, where fear quietly runs the show, and the stories we tell ourselves without ever stopping to question them.

This is the fertile soil where wisdom grows.

Finally, there are the experiences that simply overwhelm us.

Unlike the challenges that stretch us, these push us beyond our current capacity to respond skillfully. Instead of creating space for insight, they collapse that space. We become consumed by anxiety, grief, rage, shame, or despair, and our nervous system shifts into survival mode. Rather than expanding our capacity, this kind of adversity depletes it.

Unfortunately, we don’t get to choose which category life places us in. Illness doesn’t ask permission. Neither do loss, betrayal, trauma, or sudden tragedy. Sometimes we’re simply overwhelmed, and in those moments our first task isn’t growth. It’s healing.

The Skill of Discernment

I’ve come to think of these three categories as the three buckets of experience: nourishing experiences, healthy discomfort, and overwhelming discomfort.

One of the most valuable skills I’ve developed over the years isn’t the ability to avoid overwhelming discomfort, or even healthy levels of discomfort, nor is it to have more nourishing experiences. It’s the ability to recognize which of these three I’m in. Once I can see my experience more clearly, it becomes much easier to respond with wisdom instead of simply reacting out of habit.

That, I’ve come to believe, is one of the central skills of meditation, and one that extends far beyond the meditation cushion.

Of course, understanding these three categories is only half the battle. The real practice is learning how to relate to each of them with wisdom.

One of the biggest mistakes we make is responding to every experience in the same way. We cling to the pleasant ones, resist the difficult ones, and feel defeated by the overwhelming ones. But each category calls for a different response, and learning to recognize those differences is one of the most practical skills meditation has to offer.

Let’s start with the nourishing experiences.

The shadow side of these uplifting and energizing moments is that we naturally want them to last. When life feels joyful, peaceful, or deeply meaningful, we tighten our grip. We start hoping the experience won’t end, and when it inevitably begins to fade, we look for ways to get it back. Sometimes that longing is quite subtle. Other times it becomes the driving force behind compulsive striving or even addictive behavior.

The practice here isn’t to hold these experiences at arm’s length. It’s the opposite. Let yourself enjoy them fully. When something beautiful arises, pause for a moment and acknowledge it. You might simply say to yourself, This is wonderful. This is nourishing.

Then gently remind yourself that, like everything else in life, it won’t last forever.

Far from diminishing the experience, this perspective allows us to appreciate it more deeply. The less tightly we cling to the good things in life, the more fully we’re able to enjoy them while they’re here.

Healthy discomfort calls for an almost opposite response.

Our habitual reaction is to avoid it, distract ourselves from it, or simply wait for it to pass. But if we’ve correctly recognized that we’re in the second category—not overwhelmed, but simply being stretched—then the invitation is to lean in with curiosity instead of pulling away.

That doesn’t mean pretending the experience is pleasant. Healthy discomfort is still discomfort. Pain is pain. Grief still hurts. Anxiety still feels agitating. The point isn’t to convince yourself that difficulty is somehow good. It’s to recognize that this may be one of those moments that has something to teach you.

When I’m in the middle of a challenging experience, I often ask myself a simple question: What might this experience have to teach me?

Sometimes the answer comes quickly. More often it doesn’t. But the question itself changes my relationship to what’s happening.

Instead of focusing exclusively on getting rid of the discomfort, I become interested in it. I start noticing the stories my mind is telling, the ways I’m resisting reality, the fears underneath the surface, and the habits that are quietly shaping my reactions. Curiosity creates just enough space for insight to emerge.

The third category is the trickiest because the line between healthy discomfort and overwhelming discomfort isn’t always obvious.

The simplest question I know is this: Do I still have enough space to observe what’s happening?

Can I notice my thoughts and emotions as they’re unfolding? Is there enough inner space to reflect on what’s happening, even if only a little? Or have I been completely swept away by the current?

Ironically, if you’re able to ask those questions, there’s a good chance you’re still within the realm of healthy discomfort. When we’re truly overwhelmed, that reflective capacity often disappears altogether. We’re no longer observing our experience; we’re completely overwhelmed by it.

When that happens, the practice changes.

Rather than asking what the experience has to teach us, our first priority becomes restoring enough stability that learning is possible again. This isn’t the time to force ourselves to be courageous or to push through at all costs. It’s the time to simplify, to ground ourselves, to seek support if we need it, and to bring as much kindness and compassion to our experience as we can.

Often we can’t change the circumstances that are overwhelming us. But we can begin to shift our relationship to what’s happening inside. We can notice the body. We can soften around the places where we’re holding tension. We can take one conscious breath. We can remind ourselves that this moment, difficult as it is, won’t last forever.

Even if those moments of awareness last only a few seconds before we’re pulled back into the current, they make a difference. They’re the beginning of finding our footing again.

The Importance of Curiosity

If I could boil this entire approach of working with the three buckets of experience down to a single quality, it would be curiosity.

Curiosity helps us appreciate nourishing experiences without clinging to them. It helps us discover what healthy discomfort has to teach us. And even during periods of overwhelming discomfort, the simple act of becoming curious can be the first sign that we’re beginning to find our balance again.

Whenever you don’t know what to do, get curious.

Get curious about your own mind. Get curious about your reactions. Get curious about the stories you’re telling yourself and the assumptions you’re making. Curiosity won’t eliminate pain, but it transforms pain from something that merely happens to us into something we can learn from.

In my experience, it’s one of the greatest companions you’ll ever have on the path of self-discovery.

Growing through Challenge

If this way of thinking about meditation sounds familiar, it’s because this is the operating system of nature has developed.

Take the immune system. It’s tempting to think that the healthiest life would be one in which we never encountered germs at all. We wash our hands, disinfect our kitchens, and try to avoid getting sick whenever we can. That’s perfectly sensible, but our immune system doesn’t actually become stronger by living in a perfectly sterile environment. It becomes stronger by being challenged.

Like so many biological systems, the immune system grows through manageable stress. Too little challenge and it has no opportunity to adapt. Too much, and it becomes overwhelmed. The healthiest immune system isn’t one that’s never tested, but one that’s challenged enough to become stronger without being pushed beyond its limits.

Biologists have a name for this principle: hormesis. Many living systems become stronger when exposed to manageable challenges, but weaker when they’re protected from all stress—or when the stress exceeds their capacity to adapt.

As I look back over more than thirty years of meditation practice, I think our inner lives work in much the same way.

The goal of meditation isn’t to create a life that’s free from discomfort. It’s to gradually strengthen our capacity to meet discomfort without being consumed by it. That’s why I find it helpful to think of meditation as strengthening what we might call our mental, emotional, and even spiritual immune system.

We don’t develop courage without fear. We don’t develop patience without frustration. We don’t discover resilience without setbacks, compassion without encountering suffering, or wisdom without uncertainty. These qualities aren’t possessions that magically appear one day. They’re capacities that develop because life calls them forth.

The irony is that we spend so much of our lives trying to avoid the very experiences that enable us to cultivate them.

Making Suffering Part of the Journey

Of course, none of this means we should seek out suffering. Life is already remarkably good at doing that for us. As Mingyur Rinpoche often says, problems are universal. You don’t need to make an appointment for them. They’ll come to you whether you like them or not.

The real question is what happens when they arrive.

Looking back, I wouldn’t want to repeat that retreat in Myanmar, but I’m also grateful that it happened.

That month in Myanmar changed the course of my life. Not because I became a better meditator or finally learned how to sit without pain. It changed me because it fundamentally altered the way I understand adversity itself. I stopped seeing discomfort as something that had gone wrong. I began seeing it as part of the path.

In the end, I don’t think the goal of meditation is to become more comfortable. It’s to become the kind of person who can meet both the joys and the hardships of life with greater wisdom, compassion, resilience, and love.

And that’s a journey well worth taking.

—Cort

UPCOMING EVENTS

Monday, July 27th 7pm CT - AMA with Richie and Cort HERE

Wednesday, August 19 7pm CT - FREE PRACTICE HOUR HERE

Sharon reflects on why she often thinks of metta as connection, a way of remembering that our lives are part of a much larger network. She points to the people who help us do our work, the strangers who grow and transport our food, and the “neutral people” we may pass by without really seeing.

At a time when many people feel lonely, cut off, or pulled into habits of criticism and competition, Sharon offers a simple experiment: pause, notice who makes your life possible, and see what happens when appreciation becomes part of daily life.

Sharon Salzberg is a meditation teacher, New York Times bestselling author, and co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. She has written fifteen books, including Lovingkindness and Real Happiness. Her upcoming workbook, Living Lovingkindness, is available for pre-order and will be released in January 2027.

Enjoy!

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Episode Companion Flashcards

The full conversation is below, lightly edited for readability.

Chapter List

• (00:00) A true icon, and a first story

• (03:33) The Dalai Lama and the crutches

• (09:35) What actually trips people up

• (13:33) Why Sharon prefers the word “connection”

• (18:30) A guided reflection

• (21:26) Vulnerability, and the neutral person

• (28:10) Attention, and what the science shows

• (36:26) The obstacles, and where to start

• (46:46) Little rituals, and eating as practice

• (52:00) Parting thoughts

Try this 2-minute Micro-Practice from Sharon Now

(00:00) A true icon, and a first story

Cort Dahl

Hello, welcome everyone to another episode of Dharma Lab. I’m very honored and excited to be here with our two guests. Of course, I’m here with Richie Davidson, who many of you already know, one of the most well-known neuroscientists on the planet. And we’re here with a true icon of the world’s meditative tradition, Sharon Salzberg, who’s also a dear friend, and truly one of those people who, when the history books are written about the manifestation of these meditative traditions in the modern world, played an incredibly important role.

Just before this started, we were all chatting, and Sharon, you were mentioning that this is the 50th anniversary of the Insight Meditation Society. IMS, as it’s commonly referred to, is certainly one of the first and one of the most important centers for Buddhist practice and meditation in the modern world. Sharon is one of the co-founders of IMS, back in the 1970s. It’s hard to believe it’s been 50 years.

She has written some of the most well-known books in the meditation world. Loving-Kindness — she literally wrote the book on loving-kindness, and has been the main proponent of it as one of the main forms of meditation coming out of the Buddhist tradition, traditionally known as metta. She also has a podcast, Metta Hour, which both Richie and I have been on. And she’s written many other books, including her first children’s book, Kind Carl.

Richie Davidson

I read it to my six-year-old granddaughter, who loved it, absolutely loved it, and wanted more copies to give to all her friends.

Cort Dahl

And many, many other books — Real Life, Real Love, Real Happiness, a whole series. Loving-Kindness, the book I mentioned first, is really a modern classic. It was one of the first books I read back in the nineties when I was starting to meditate. So, Sharon, you’ve been an inspiration to so many of us — through your writing, through co-founding IMS, through your endless teaching all over the world. It’s an honor to have you.

I thought we could start with a story I’ve heard a few times and always found moving: His Holiness the Dalai Lama visiting the United States for the first time, and your interactions with him. Let’s start there, and see where the conversation goes.

(03:33) The Dalai Lama and the crutches

Sharon Salzberg

Sure. And I’m so happy and honored to be with the two of you, truly. We co-founded the retreat center — Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein and I — in 1976. It’s in Barre, Massachusetts, about 40 minutes from Amherst. In 1979 we heard the Dalai Lama was coming to Amherst, so, being young and bold, we wrote a letter to his private office and said, maybe you’d like to visit us too. And to our amazement, we got a letter back saying, yes, he’ll come.

It was an incredibly zooey day. We had sheriffs and people patrolling the roof with guns, the street blockaded. A very intense day. And I’d been in a car accident a few weeks before — I had a broken bone in my foot and was using crutches, which I was not very skilled with. So I was standing way at the back of about a hundred people. His car pulled up, he got out, and he did something I’ve seen him do many times since, but it was the first time. It’s almost like he has a kind of radar for who in a crowd is suffering the most, and that was me. He cut through a hundred people, took my hand, looked me in the eye, and said, what happened?

Standing there in the back, I’d been thinking, I’m so stuck back here, this is terrible — I helped start this place, and here I am at the back. But if I go up front I’ll fall on my face, because I’m so bad with the crutches, so I’d better stay in the back. And he just dissolved that with that one gesture. It sort of redefined compassion for me, because he certainly couldn’t have made the injury not happen, or made me any better with the crutches. But that horrible feeling of being so alone, so unseen, so stuck in the back — it just dissolved.

There’s another story from that visit, and there are many. We had a retreat going, about two weeks in, and the Dalai Lama asked to go into the meditation hall and give a talk. Then he asked for questions. A young man raised his hand and said, I’ve been meditating for about two weeks and I realize it’s not going to work for me. I can’t do it. I don’t have the capacity to grow or learn or get more loving or more mindful. I just can’t do it. And the Dalai Lama looked at him and said, well, you’re wrong. You’re just wrong.

He went on to talk about buddha nature — one’s capacity, which it’s believed is never ever destroyed. A capacity for growth and understanding and change. It may be covered over, it may be hard to find, but it’s never ever destroyed. And the funny thing is, after the talk, all these people came up to me and said, the Dalai Lama shouldn’t have said that. That’s bad pedagogy. You should never tell anyone they’re wrong. But you know who got a huge amount out of it? The young man, for whom it was such an important message. You should have a little more faith in yourself, and in the possibility of change.

Cort Dahl

That’s so beautiful. The image of the Dalai Lama cutting through all those people — at a moment where most of us would be on autopilot, this is what you do in this situation, you shake hands and wave. And he didn’t. He was just utterly human, and could see beyond the dynamics. I’ve always found that story so beautiful.

Richie Davidson

I love that story too. I have this image of our detectors, our antenna, for suffering, that can actually be developed. And the Dalai Lama is such an extraordinary exemplar of that. Wherever suffering is occurring, he makes a beeline for it.

Cort Dahl

And the human element is something I really think about with you as a teacher. I was just having lunch with my wife, Kasumi. We’ve been together thirteen, fourteen years now. When we first met, she was about to go on a retreat with you — you were visiting Madison — one of her first retreats. You’ve been a huge influence in her life. Over lunch I said, I’m going to be talking to Sharon, what would you ask? And she said something that’s so true, something I’ve heard from many people and know from my own experience: you talk so candidly about your own experience, and the human experience, in a way that’s quite uncommon. Just being fully human and sharing your experience. Because it’s so easy to see someone at the front of the room teaching meditation and imagine, wow, they’ve got it all figured out, this perfect life — and here I am, a distracted, anxious mess.

I think that’s one of the reasons your teachings resonate so deeply. With all these decades of working directly with people, hearing from thousands of them, what are the things that either trip us up — the common stumbling blocks early on — or the things that inspire and unlock us when we hear the right thing at the right time?

(09:35) What actually trips people up

Sharon Salzberg

Well, I think we — including myself — bring some of our greatest patterns into the meditative process. Especially a kind of harsh self-criticism, which I’ve seen over and over. Even people in really difficult situations, really hard diagnoses, something hard to bear. Sometimes I listen and think, give yourself a break — this is hard, look what you’re going through. That’s one of the reasons I found loving-kindness practice, and the understanding that we can grow in other ways rather than punishing ourselves for our mistakes. We can move on. We can learn to begin again. There’s resilience there. I’ve found that a huge help for a lot of people.

Somebody asked me the other day whether I wanted to teach Buddhism or better mental health. And I said, mental health is not that high right now. So many people feel broken and lonely and estranged and confused. Of course we always do to some degree, but it feels so exaggerated now, so emphasized. For people to have a sense of not being so alone, and caring about themselves and about one another, having a greater sense of community — that seems to be what we can offer these days.

Cort Dahl

That’s so helpful. Richie, any thoughts from you, having explored the same territory yourself, both personally and in your work?

Richie Davidson

In terms of the situation today, it really is true. I often say we’re all part of a grand experiment for which none of us have provided our informed consent. It’s a challenging time, and a lot of it is simply outside of our control. The one thing we have at least the possibility of exerting a little more control over is our own mind. So that’s a great place to start.

One of the things I love about your work, Sharon, and would love to hear more about, is that — at least I’ve found, being with different kinds of public audiences — giving them a simple taste of very ordinary but really nourishing connection, like a little hit of appreciation. Bring someone into your mind and your heart who’s been helpful to you, and just observe what happens. Being able to taste that little hit is really an elixir for the soul. And it’s very accessible. We don’t have to go to any special place or be in any special posture. We can do it anywhere, anytime — a phrase Mingyur Rinpoche uses for one of his programs. I’ve renamed it, everywhere, all the time, why not. I’d love to hear your reflections.

(13:33) Why Sharon prefers the word “connection”

Sharon Salzberg

There are many layers I want to respond to. One is that I’ve so appreciated your work and your use of the word connection. I’ve been struggling to translate metta, the Pali word for loving-kindness, because loving-kindness is such an odd term. You wouldn’t necessarily be in a coffee shop and hear the people at the next table talking about loving-kindness, except maybe in a hyper-religious context. My concern is that it makes the quality seem somewhat arcane and removed from day-to-day life, precious in the negative sense.

Translators and scholars have said to me, stop being so cutesy, just say love — that’s what you mean. And that of course is a complicated term. What do we mean when we say love? How often is it a medium of exchange, or, I’ll love myself as long as I never make a mistake — something so fragile and breakable. My favorite translation is connection. There’s a classical translation as friendship, but my concern with friendship is that the development of qualities like loving-kindness or compassion doesn’t mandate a certain kind of action. When I think of friendship, I think, let’s go to the movies, let’s spend time together. And it may be that your heart is genuinely full of loving-kindness or compassion for someone, and discernment, wisdom, understanding is saying, don’t go there — it’s not safe, or it’s not appropriate. There’s such a great fear that if I develop more metta, more loving-kindness, I’ll have to say yes, I have to smile, I have to give in. And we don’t have to do anything. So I really prefer the word connection to any other word.

I love the idea of appreciation, just for a moment. It’s part of what I like to teach if I’m going into a company or an organization. There are two reflections. One is, can you express appreciation to somebody, anybody? Because we’re also culturally tuned to feel we’ll feel better about ourselves if we can put other people down — a kind of culture of degradation.

Richie Davidson

And that’s particularly true in the university, by the way.

Sharon Salzberg

That’s scary and sad. People get into that, and there’s a lot of loneliness right there — hyper-competitive, constantly putting other people down. So I see all of Dharma practice as an experiment. Are you willing to step out of those familiar ruts — go into work and express some appreciation for somebody? The other reflection is interconnection. My favorite question in a group of people who work together: how many other people have to do their job well for you to do your job well? Sometimes that doesn’t resonate, so I say, do you commute? Do you ever think about the bus driver, the engineer, the car mechanic? And if you don’t commute, there’s certainly some technology involved. And if that doesn’t resonate — have you eaten today? You don’t grow all your own food. Just think about that: our lives, truly, realistically, are part of a network. We can feel so alone and cut off, but the truth is we’re connected. So let’s make an experiment, do these reflections, and see what happens.

Cort Dahl

I realize I skipped a step that Richie and I do every single time. Usually before we hit record, we do a little practice to set our motivation — to be of benefit, wanting whatever comes of the work to help people. Richie talked about having a little taste. Sharon, would you be willing to lead a little practice, just to give us an experiential taste of what we’re talking about, and then we can keep going?

(18:30) A guided reflection

Sharon Salzberg

Sure. I’ll do a reflection based on what I just said. You can sit comfortably, close your eyes or not, however you feel most at ease. We’re just going to spend a few moments bringing to mind anyone who has somehow had a role in your being here right now. Somebody told you about their meditation practice, or the science, or this podcast. Somebody read you a poem or played you a piece of music. There was some opening somewhere. Maybe you’ve never met these people who come to mind. Maybe you were inspired from afar. Just see who comes up.

Every time I do this reflection, I think about the Board of Regents of the State of New York, which gave me a scholarship, which was how I was able to go to college, which is how I ended up in India as an independent study project, which is a big reason I’m here now.

Sometimes I do this reflection and think about those people whose actions have really hurt me — not the ones I just found annoying, but the times I felt I was at an edge and had to find a different way to live or think. Because they’re part of why I’m here right now too.

Just who comes to mind.

And you can extend a sense of recognition to all of these different beings, because this moment in time is a confluence of connection, relationship, influence, interaction. However alone we sometimes feel or cut off, this is the truth of our experience.

And you can open your eyes, or lift your gaze, and we can end that reflection.

(21:26) Vulnerability, and the neutral person

Cort Dahl

So beautiful. Thank you, Sharon. When I first started these practices, I’d been doing mindfulness for probably seven or eight years. Then I encountered some teachers, and for me the first practice more in this heart-connection space was sending and taking, often referred to as tonglen, very much in the space of loving-kindness and compassion. It was very interesting what it did. One of the first things I noticed was that it brought up an intense feeling of vulnerability. The way it manifested was, I’d be having a conversation with somebody, and out of the blue I’d start blushing. And I come from a long line of Olympic-level blushers — Scandinavian complexion, maybe. It’s very visible, there’s no hiding. This went on for months. Almost every interaction, for no reason at all, I’d feel this naked vulnerability. And it was just connecting with people, actually. I didn’t see it at all until that moment. But when I started these practices, I started to see how guarded I was a lot of the time — a weird protective mechanism I hadn’t even been aware of. That feeling of vulnerability, which weirdly manifested as blushing, was just genuine connection with people, but in a raw way I wasn’t used to. It was actually hard. Not easy for me. Inspiring, and I was seeing things about myself I hadn’t seen before, but challenging territory, and totally unexpected. So I’m wondering if you could talk about vulnerability, and the power of working with it in practice despite the discomfort.

Sharon Salzberg

It’s a really fascinating thing to explore — the components. I don’t know that this was your experience at all, but it’s common for people to feel somehow responsible for fixing a situation if someone else is expressing pain. Not only do we feel it with the kind of sensitivity you’re describing, but it enters us in some strange way, things get distorted, and we get this hyper-sense of responsibility — I’ve got to fix it. We’d call that a real imbalance. Maybe there’s a lot more compassion for someone else than there is for us, or maybe there’s not enough wisdom for correct boundaries or discernment. The combination of the sensitivity with the wisdom, we’d call equanimity. It’s a kind of balance.

We are conditioned, by and large, to look the other way in terms of other people’s situations. And my favorite part of loving-kindness practice, actually, is loving-kindness for a neutral person — someone we don’t especially like or dislike, someone we feel kind of neutral toward. Usually people pick somebody like the checkout person at the grocery store, someone they see but have no real sense of connection to. I love it, because over time, here’s someone we usually objectify, overlook, look through instead of look at — and as we do the practice, offering them attention, may you be happy, may you be peaceful, something actually grows inside us. People come back with incredible stories. Like, I fell in love with my dry cleaner. I said to this woman — well, I didn’t say it, she could see it on my face — I thought they were dating. And she said, no, no, not romantically. He’s my neutral person in my practice. Every day I call him to mind and wish him well. And now I go into the store and it’s like we’re on the same team. So you’re also confronting all that conditioning of, look the other way, they’re not really people, they’re just utilities — not to mention bias or prejudice, which fits in there too, the other who doesn’t count. The more we tune into people and realize they do count, that we’re part of this whole, we’ll have the effect of that. But that effect needs to be balanced.

Richie Davidson

The piece about neutral people is so powerful. One of the greatest teachings for me has been being with the Dalai Lama at major formal events, where there are, quote, lots of important people around. And then he’ll go out through a side entrance, and he’ll stop and greet all the custodians, all the kitchen people, the security people, and he treats them exactly the same as the important people. Absolutely no difference whatsoever. When you see that in practice — when you see him stopping and holding them and asking how they’re doing — it’s such a powerful reminder that this really is accessible, and it can totally change our life. Our everyday life becomes all of these really nourishing moments of connection.

(28:10) Attention, and what the science shows

Sharon Salzberg

You’re reminding me that so many times we can understand connection, or loving-kindness, or compassion, as an emergent property of paying attention. If we’re more present and listening, that’s where the connection is born — which is a nicer way of realizing it, rather than thinking I’ve got to drum up some feeling I don’t really have, and manufacture it.

Cort Dahl

That’s what stands out to me about the story of you on the crutches — it wasn’t as though he’d memorized some rulebook of elevated compassion. He was totally tuned in to what was going on in the moment, and who was in front of him. And conversely, the vulnerability I felt was seeing how many of my interactions are governed by a script — this is what I say or do in this situation — rather than being fully there, authentic and spontaneous. There was something in that Dalai Lama story that felt like that spontaneity of really being there and seeing what’s actually happening. You don’t have to have some feeling or thought or impulse; it’s just a natural response, because you’re fully tuned in. It’s so beautiful. But getting there, from where a lot of us live, is kind of awkward, honestly. We’re relearning how to be human and connected without that rawness where we feel threatened or awkward.

Sharon Salzberg

That’s another reason it’s reassuring to have a sense of community. You’re not the only one making this experiment. And I’m curious — do you still blush, or is that over?

Cort Dahl

Occasionally I do. One of the few times I blush these days is actually when I tell that story. But it was a great practice, because it went on for months and was so inescapable. It was very clear: I could either go lock myself in my room and isolate, which clearly wasn’t healthy, or I was going to have to apply the practice I was learning. It was two things. One was to allow myself to feel what I was feeling, and, as you said, go easy on myself — I’d had a lot of social anxiety and thought I was past it, and then here it was again. So, not beating myself up, and really just feeling it fully. And then staying in that space of connection where the vulnerability was almost a practice of staying in the rawness of it — being human, being my messy self, and not having to fix anything. That was the practice, rather than, I will transcend this and no longer feel it. It was, no, okay, maybe this is the rest of my life, I’m just going to have this. So it was less about whether I blush anymore and more a comfort with the whole cascade — okay, I can let this play out, and it’s fine. But that took practice. The universe gave me a lot of opportunities.

I wonder if we could shift gears a little. You wrote Loving-Kindness and started teaching this back in the nineties, when mindfulness wasn’t even a thing yet — it became the big thing decades later. This was a pretty new practice coming into the more secular meditation world, and even in Buddhist circles it wasn’t nearly as well known as it is now. For a lot of traditions, it feels like there’s a sequence — you start with awareness or mindfulness practices, then move on to these. Richie, maybe you could tee this up, since it’s also a scientific question.

Richie Davidson

Sure, and thank you for teeing it up, Cort. Some of this emerged in the context of the book Danny Goleman and I wrote, Altered Traits, published in 2017. When we wrote it, we reviewed the scientific literature on meditation. There were, and still are, many more studies on mindfulness-type practices than on loving-kindness and compassion practices, but a scientific literature was beginning — and Sharon, I know you yourself have contributed to that, in work you’ve done with various scientists. One of the things we observed was that there was evidence of benefits measured with very short periods of practice. And it seemed then, and I believe it’s still the case, that on a variety of standardized measures — some of which you might think of as objective measures, meaning they don’t depend on a person’s own self-report — benefits emerge with loving-kindness and compassion practices pretty quickly. At least there’s some evidence for that.

In the work Cort and I have been doing, in developing our Healthy Minds Program, which includes practices of awareness as well as connection and others, one of the things we notice is that some people prefer to start with connection. In the standard sequence, as Cort mentioned, we typically invite people to do awareness or mindfulness practices first. And the last piece — then I’ll stop and love to hear your thoughts — is just to acknowledge that one size does not fit all. There are many different paths, and it’s probably a bit of hubris to think there’s a single path that’s best for everyone. So I wonder what your thoughts are, given the range of your teaching experience — if there are essential insights you can share.

(36:26) The obstacles, and where to start

Sharon Salzberg

I often think one of the greatest obstacles to practicing loving-kindness — and I teach it in a pretty classical way, repeating phrases, making that offering to yourself and to others — is even believing it’s not stupid. Having some sense that it’s a powerful way of being, rather than the doormat endlessly smiling at nothing. That’s a particularly Western problem, I’ve found — people think it’s a gift: you’ve either got it or you don’t, and if you don’t, you’re out of luck. Whereas in the East it certainly can be trained, because it’s an emergent property of how we pay attention, and we know attention can be trained. That’s exactly what meditation practice does. If people don’t get stuck on those issues, many find it an easier practice to begin with. It’s meaningful, it’s opening, and it’s often easier to concentrate — the breath can be a bit of a soporific and then you’re asleep, but here you’re making an offering, there’s imagery, something very alive about that sense of connection. People may come from a faith tradition that has the principles, if not the practices, embedded in it, so it feels like coming home to something precious. And they say the Buddha taught it as the antidote to fear. As a remedy for anxiety, it’s the exact parallel for our time, which is a pretty anxious time. So I’ve found many people do find it easier, if they can only trust it.

Cort Dahl

Do you have a sense of the easiest entry point? These days there’s a lot of talk about self-compassion, and it’s even, I wouldn’t say controversial, but in more traditional formulations sometimes it’s not a thing at all. In the Tibetan tradition you go to a loved one, a neutral person, difficult people, all beings — and you sort of bypass the self. And these days so many of us have so much self-hatred or fear toward ourselves. In all your years teaching, what have you found to be the easiest entry point for people just getting going, if this is new territory?

Sharon Salzberg

Funny that you say that about neutral people. I’ve always wondered about the social etiquette of telling somebody after a retreat, you were my neutral person — I found you totally neutral, really kind of indifferent to you. Anyway. Some of it is a sense of — which is hard if you’re teaching via an app, reaching a large number of people — sensing the person, and also receiving feedback. I was once doing a program with Barbara Fredrickson, who had done research into loving-kindness meditation. We were on stage, and she said she felt it was very important for people within a couple of weeks to have some sense of the effect of the practice, or they’d get too discouraged and stop. And she said it’s especially hard because you start with yourself — which, in the Burmese or Theravada tradition, you do; you start with the offering of loving-kindness to yourself, then move on to someone who’s helped you. And she said it’s especially hard because you start with yourself, and that’s so hard for so many people. So I said, why don’t you change the order? Just change the order. And she said she felt at the time — though I know she’s changed her mind since — that she couldn’t, because of scientific research needs for things to be in the same sequence. I realized at that point we had two different goals. I’d change the order in ten seconds if someone was in front of me and it was too much of a struggle. You do start classically with yourself, offering loving-kindness to yourself, but you don’t have to.

I find there are problems all along the way, truly. It takes a sense of investigation and experimentation, and not feeling so alone in your practice. People have said to me, I don’t have any benefactors — that’s the classical term for those who’ve helped us — I don’t have anybody. Somebody said, I had an unprotected childhood, I’ve never had people on my side. And you think, well, that’s a problem too. Even though we say, just move to the benefactor, it’ll be all shiny and you’ll feel there’s love in the universe — not always. So it’s a process of figuring out where that entry point is. As a growth experiment, it takes time and repetition. And the openings, which are genuine and real and liberating, may not be evidenced in your formal meditation practice. They’re shown in your life, which is where it counts — because that’s where we actually need it, but we don’t always think to look there. People think, I still don’t have these great waves of loving feeling. And it really doesn’t matter, because when we’re interacting with a stranger, or we’ve made a mistake and see how we speak to ourselves, we start to see the shadings of difference. That takes great patience too. How do you know if it’s working? It depends on where you look to see the effect.

It’s a practice that isn’t formulaic, even though you’re repeating phrases. It’s very creative. The principle I was taught when I did it intensively in Burma was that it needs to be done in the easiest way possible. And that’s hard. If it’s too hard to offer loving-kindness to yourself, move on to someone else. There’s another category in the sequence, over time — a difficult person. And it’s said to best be a mildly difficult person, not the person at first, not the one who’s harmed us horrifically or behaved so terribly on the world stage — that’s nearly impossible. Start with someone who’s just a little bit of unease, and over time move on. But I’ve found this is often a place — it certainly was in me — where people don’t like it. They say, don’t you think I can do the real thing? Why, do you think I’m a coward? What about this horrible person? That tendency to do something in the hardest way possible doesn’t really fit this approach. So that’s a whole concept of learning as well.

Cort Dahl

I love the playful experimentation. That’s the challenge — you read a book or hear a teaching, it’s presented in some way, and there’s a sense of, I should fit myself into that progression. What you’re saying, which I can see — not necessarily in the way the Tibetan approach is presented, but you can intuit how it evolved — is that they found something that worked for them culturally. In Tibet, the way it’s often presented, they start with a loved one, and specifically your mother. In Tibet, mothers are like deities, revered like no other culture I’ve seen. So it makes perfect sense to start there — there’s a natural sense of gratitude and connection and nurturing. And of course, whatever you want to say about other cultures, certainly here in the US we have some complexity in our experiences with our parents. I think that’s the first thing the Tibetans learned — that people aren’t responding in that intuitive way. But what you’re saying is, you look for the in, the connection point. Where is it easy? Where is it natural? And you nurture that. Where can you get the spark? If it’s not happening, you don’t just keep doing something that’s clearly not working. Once you have the spark, you keep it alive and extend it to something gradually more challenging. Most of us hear a teaching and think, that’s the right way, now I need to do it that way, and if it’s not working, somehow it’s my fault. It’s not easy. Richie, do you remember your early experiences with these practices, and what resonated with you?

(46:46) Little rituals, and eating as practice

Richie Davidson

First, I think this last bit of conversation is so important — this theme of not fighting with your mind, approaching it with curiosity and openness, and exploring what might be the natural opening, the natural door you can go through. It’s not going to be the same for each person, and that’s fine. That’s the nature of being human. We’re different. I really love that, and it resonates deeply with the approach we often take.

For me, when I first discovered these practices of loving-kindness and compassion — I’m just naturally a touchy-feely guy, and I needed this. I needed my heart to be nourished.

Cort Dahl

For the record, that is an understatement. In the best possible way.

Richie Davidson

So it was really important to me. One of the things that’s been such a blessing is developing little rituals I bring to my everyday life, where these practices are so much a part of what I do every day. From making tea in the morning for my wife, to — when we had cats; our kitty recently passed away, so it’s no longer a ritual — but I used to scoop the cat litter every night and do it as a practice. It’s just a little shift of mindset, and what might ordinarily be a yucky chore became something I actually looked forward to. It was beautiful — done as an offering, an appreciation.

You alluded to this earlier, Sharon. One of the things we humans do pretty much every day is eat. And it doesn’t take much reflection to recognize how unbelievably interdependent we are. To get food on our plate requires this extraordinary village. That sense of appreciation for interdependence — we talk about this in our book; there’s a chapter on developing daily habits by piggybacking them onto activities of daily living, like eating. To use a bit of psychological jargon that conveys something important — the term is affordance. Eating is an affordance for the expression of appreciation and the recognition of interdependence. The very moment you’re sitting down to eat, it automatically arises. And being able to do this in your everyday life, a few times a day, every day — it changes you. It’s why we’ve come to the view, and we actually have evidence now to support this, that it’s easier than you think. It doesn’t take much to get these circuits of the mind going, or circuits of the heart, because this is who we are. This is our nature. We’re just recognizing it.

Sharon Salzberg

It’s beautiful. One of my students, to my eternal amusement, coined the phrase micro-dosing loving-kindness — for exactly that. You sit down to a meal and spend a few moments. Or I have a friend who looks at all the little faces in the boxes of a Zoom meeting and thinks, may you be happy. You have to be silent in a lot of those circumstances, but you make that offering, and then you start the meeting.

(52:00) Parting thoughts

Cort Dahl

I can’t believe we’re already at the end of our time. It feels like we could go for a few more hours. Maybe to end — if you have any parting thoughts. To state the obvious, we’re in an era pervaded by a feeling of division and a lack of connection. We might have connection with our close circle, but so much division outside of that. Any parting thoughts, individually or collectively, on how we can bring more of this into our lives, wherever we are on the path?

Sharon Salzberg

I love what Richie was just saying. We can do it, and we don’t have to think of it as this monumental task. It’s just, okay, this meal, this moment. It really makes a difference.

Cort Dahl

On that note, we’ll end with a note of gratitude to you, Sharon, for all the incredible work, the tireless effort to share these practices and ideas with so many people. I know it’s made a huge impact on our lives, even our scientific work, and on so many others. It’s been an honor to have you on for this conversation. I’m truly grateful for everything you’ve done and continue to do.

Sharon Salzberg

Well, thank you so much.

Richie Davidson

Deep bows, deep bows. One of the things we didn’t mention is that Sharon taught the very first meditation retreat for scientists at IMS, sponsored by Mind and Life. That was a pivotal moment for sharing these practices with the scientific community. I’m just so grateful for your dedication, and your indefatigable effort to bring the Dharma to the West. So thank you.

Sharon Salzberg

Thank you. Thank you both.

Cortland Dahl

To be continued. We hope to have you on again sometime. Thank you, Sharon.

Read more

• A placebo changed dopamine levels in a historic study, and Richie’s take

• Why the essence of meditation is simpler than you think

• A 2-minute guided practice (free, also below)

• The full Q&A, flashcards, and recording (members, very bottom)

Read more

That was the premise of the Big Joy Project, a citizen-science experiment led by our dear friend, the brilliant scientist Dr. Elissa Epel and her team at UCSF. Together with colleagues around the world, they invited people to try one tiny act of joy every day for a week. Over 17,000 people, from 169 countries, initially signed up. They weren’t monks on retreat or wellness influencers. They were everyday people, juggling families, jobs, stress, and uncertainty.

The results were striking.

After just seven days of micro-practices such as: writing a gratitude list, celebrating someone else’s joy, or pausing to watch something awe-inspiring; participants reported higher well-being, more positive emotions, greater agency over their happiness, and significantly less stress. They even slept better.

But what really surprised researchers: the people who gained the most were not necessarily those with the greatest social and economic advantages. It was the opposite. Those experiencing greater financial, social, or emotional strain often showed larger improvements.

One of the take-home message of this research is really inspiring: Joy is not only possible when things are going well. It’s within reach for all of us, even when we’re stressed out, overwhelmed, and struggling.

The Science of Small Acts

Most well-being programs are long, complicated, or designed for people who already have resources and time. This study was different. The Big Joy Project asked for only 5–10 minutes a day, for seven days.

The practices were simple, but not superficial:

• Celebrate another’s joy – ask someone to share a proud or happy moment, and celebrate with them.

• Shift your perspective – reflect on a recent challenge and write three unexpected positives that came from it.

• Do something kind – plan a small act of kindness for someone you’ll meet that day.

• Tune in to what matters – choose your core values and reflect on how they show up in your life.

• Make a gratitude list – name up to eight things or people you feel grateful for.

• Dwell in awe – watch a short awe-inspiring video and notice how it affects your body and mood.

• Be a force of good – reflect on how you can contribute to the well-being of others.

None of these require expensive apps or hours of meditation. They are reminders of what makes us most human: connection, perspective, kindness, and meaning.

Micro-Supports: A New Frontier

For us, this project is a powerful example of what we call micro-supports. You can think of them as micro-doses of well-being: short, tiny practices that take just a few minutes, or sometimes no extra time at all, that can have an outsized impact on our well-being.

Micro-supports are exciting because they don’t require us to stop life to feel better. They can be woven into the flow of our daily routines, gently shifting the emotional climate of our lives without feeling like another task on an endless list. The Big Joy Project shows just how potent these micro-doses of joy can be, especially for those carrying the heaviest burdens.

You’ll see in the data below from Dr. Epel’s lab that emotional well-being, positive emotions, happiness agency were up on a post-mean basis, and to a lesser degree self-reported health as well as sleep quality. While perceived stress was reduced.

Study results from the Big Joy Project:

Why This Matters

For decades, science has shown that emotional well-being is not just a nice-to-have. It protects against depression, lowers risk for chronic illness, and even extends lifespan. But many large-scale interventions have failed to reach people outside privileged circles.

This study flips the narrative. It suggests that joy is not a luxury, it is a public health tool. And it shows that micro-practices, or micro-supports, can ripple outward, improving not just moods but lives.

As we often say: well-being is a skill. Skills can be practiced. And even a few minutes a day can make a measurable difference.

An Invitation

If seven minutes could change the emotional baseline of 17,598 people across the world, what might it do for you?

This week, try one act of joy:

• Make a short gratitude list.

• Ask a friend what they’re celebrating and share their joy.

• Take a walk in nature and open up to the beauty of your surroundings.

• OR get creative and come up with your own micro-support.

Here are a few things on my personal gratitude list:

• I’m grateful for my wife Kasumi, who inspires me everyday with her fierce compassion.

• I’m grateful for my son CJ. I smile just thinking about him.

• I’m grateful for the Boundary Waters of Northern Minnesota (my favorite place on earth…where I’m sitting as I write this).

• I’m grateful for you and everyone else who is interested in making the world a better place.

What’s on your list?

When you add brief moments of joy, connection, and awareness to your day, make a mental note of how it affects you. Does it carry forward into whatever you do next? Does it shift how you relate to other people, or yourself? Get curious and explore what happens when you try different things.

And if you do, hit reply or leave a comment. Share what you tried, and what you noticed. We would love to hear from you.

Warmly,
Cort

Sources:
Guevarra DA, et al. Scaling a Brief Digital Well-Being Intervention (the Big Joy Project) and Sociodemographic Moderators: Single-Group Pre-Post Study

J Med Internet Res 2025;27:e72053

In this episode of Dharma Lab, Dr. Richard Davidson and Dr. Cortland Dahl explore how stable differences in brain activity may shape the ways we engage with the world. Richie explains how early research on brain asymmetry revealed distinct styles associated with qualities such as optimism, introversion, social anxiety, and our tendency to approach or withdraw.

They also discuss what meditation can change without erasing the qualities that make us who we are, why one neurological style is not inherently better than another, and how meta-awareness can help us uncover the potential strengths within our natural disposition.

Enjoy!

Watch on YouTube; Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

If these conversations are useful, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel.

Episode Companion Flashcards!

In this episode

00:00:00 – Finding the hidden superpower in your natural disposition
00:01:04 – Individual differences in brain asymmetry
00:02:07 – Why we compare ourselves to other people
00:05:32 – The early science of brain asymmetry
00:08:37 – What an EEG experiment is actually like
00:12:00 – A surprising discovery in the resting brain
00:13:41 – How stable are our neurological tendencies?
00:15:29 – Approach-oriented and more cautious styles
00:17:12 – Does one brain style lead to greater happiness?
00:18:08 – Seeing our perceived weaknesses as superpowers
00:20:45 – What does Richie’s own brain reveal?
00:22:20 – What meditation changes and what remains
00:24:56 – Richie on anxiety, anger, and transformation
00:27:07 – When neuroscientists were told to try marriage counseling
00:28:12 – Does meditation change your personality?
00:29:43 – “Exactly the same, only more so”
00:33:15 – Are differences in brain asymmetry inherited?
00:35:03 – Heritability does not determine whether we can change
00:35:18 – What handedness reveals about the brain
00:38:26 – Finding the strength in your natural predispositions
00:39:09 – Meta-awareness and experiential fusion
00:40:45 – The skill at the heart of flourishing

Earlier Posts on Brain Asymmetry:

Written transcript for those who prefer to read

00:00:00 – Finding the hidden superpower in your natural disposition

Cortland Dahl:

The fact that I have zero discomfort just locking myself in a room for weeks on end with a pile of books, and I’ll just be a happy camper.

At one point, I thought that was a curse. Now I feel like that actually has been such a blessing in my life.

It seems like one of the lessons here is that, within any of these styles or patterns, or even looking at brain asymmetry and whatever natural predispositions are going on in our brains, it’s about leaning into that and asking: Where is the hidden superpower in this particular configuration that I have?

Rather than saying, “I wish I could be more like that. I could be more optimistic, or less anxious, or more anything,” it’s leaning into these potential superpowers that are just waiting to be tapped into.

00:01:04 – Individual differences in brain asymmetry

Cortland:

Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Dharma Lab. I am Cortland Dahl. I’m here with Richie Davidson, one of the most respected and well-known neuroscientists on the planet.

We’ve been having an amazing series of discussions about Richie’s early work, going back to the late 1970s and proceeding through the ’80s and ’90s, which was really some of the most pioneering work on the neuroscience of emotions.

Specifically, we’ve been talking about what is known as asymmetry and how the different hemispheres of the brain have some really important and fascinating differences.

We’re going to continue that discussion. If you haven’t kept up with the previous discussions, that’s totally fine, but you can go back and catch up on them.

Today, we’re going to discuss a very interesting nuance, which is the individual differences we find when it comes to this topic of asymmetry.

00:02:07 – Why we compare ourselves to other people

Cortland:

To lead into this, Richie, I wanted to share a story because I think it highlights some of the key points we’re going to capture today.

As you know, we started Tergar, which is Mingyur Rinpoche’s meditation community, back in 2009. For those of you who don’t know, Mingyur Rinpoche is a meditation teacher whom both Richie and I have studied with.

I was kind of new to teaching meditation at that time. I had been teaching for a while, but not that much. I started teaching with a group of three other instructors.

One of them was Myoshin Kelly, whom you know well, a really brilliant meditation teacher. I started teaching with her, and I immediately noticed that she was so grounded and warm, just the embodiment of care and empathy.

I felt like I was maybe more conceptual. I had been coming from a very academic training, you might say. I was judging myself against her and feeling like I needed to be more like Myoshin. I needed to be somehow more empathetic and less heady and conceptual.

I was evaluating myself relative to what I saw as her strengths. That was going on in my mind for the first few years.

We talked together more and more, and at one point we had a kind of heart-to-heart. We were very close, almost like family. She told me that she was kind of doing the same thing. She appreciated my clarity and some of the precision I brought to the teachings.

I was shocked by that. I was like, “Why would you want to be more like me? You’re the perfect teacher.”

She was shocked that I was thinking that about her, and something really unlocked in that.

I started to see that it was wonderful that we were different. Rather than feeling like I needed to be more like her, or she needed to be more like me, I started to see that I was bringing something unique to this, and it was helpful.

I don’t need to be everything. She was obviously bringing something utterly unique and helpful. It was more of a complement.

It shifted me out of this mindset where I was constantly critiquing myself against any range of idealized versions that I thought I should be. Instead, I leaned into the natural skill set I had and where my mind, and in this case my teaching ability, naturally went.

I immediately remembered that when we were talking about asymmetry and some of what we’ll capture today.

Maybe I’ll turn it over to you. You can remind us a little bit about some of these key findings with asymmetry.

Then, specifically, we can talk about individual differences and how the default we have, which is usually to be very judgmental about ourselves, can be shifted. We can use these findings to have a very different perspective on our own brains, how they function, and even our own minds.

I’ll turn it over to you, and you can kick this off however you like.

Richie Davidson:

Thank you, Cort. It’s a beautiful story, and it particularly warms my heart because I know both of you very well. I experience each of you as amazing teachers who are very different and totally complementary.

Cortland:

You knew us at that time, too, so you were probably observing this whole thing.

Richie:

Yeah, so it was great.

00:05:32 – The early science of brain asymmetry

Richie:

For those of you who weren’t with us when we first started talking about this early work in brain asymmetry, I want to go back and review a couple of key points.

When we began this work, it was prior to the availability of MRI to probe the human brain noninvasively.

Pretty much the only way we had to probe the human brain noninvasively was with EEG. EEG stands for electroencephalography, and it involves electrodes. They’re little sensors that are temporarily glued to the scalp surface, not with superglue, but with a gel to make contact.

We can pick up electrical signals from the scalp surface that are generated within the brain.

This was really the only technique we had at the time, but it continues to be used, largely because there is generally a trade-off between the spatial and temporal resolution of methods used to interrogate human brain function.

Methods that tend to have really good spatial resolution have poor temporal resolution. Methods that have very good temporal resolution tend to have poor spatial resolution.

EEG has very good temporal resolution, but not such good spatial resolution. That was what we had available at the time, and it was certainly good enough to make inferences about the functioning of different hemispheres of the brain.

We were doing studies where we recorded electrical activity from people’s brains and gave them different emotion tasks that elicited emotion, including perceiving emotional faces.

One of the things we always did with EEG was record a baseline before people started and before we began to present the tasks.

In the early stages of this work, we used the baseline to make sure the instruments were calibrated and the signals looked as they should. If any electrodes needed to be fixed, we monitored that during the baseline period and corrected it.

We didn’t primarily collect this period for any scientific purpose. It was for the strictly methodological purpose of ensuring that the recordings were doing what they were supposed to be doing.

00:08:37 – What an EEG experiment is actually like

Cortland:

Richie, maybe you could share what the experience was actually like. Imagine somebody sitting in the chair.

I remember all the time it took to get the EEG net on the head. There was a whole process around that. Then you would sit there for the resting state and look at emotional faces.

What would the experience of somebody sitting there actually be like?

Richie:

That’s helpful.

We had this giant net with 256 electrodes. Some of you have probably seen pictures. There’s an iconic picture that was taken in our lab and appeared on the cover of National Geographic, showing a monk wearing this 256-channel EEG net.

It looks like something from outer space. Each of the sensors or electrodes has a wire connected to it, so there are 256 wires coming out of this thing. It looks like this mass of spaghetti wire coming off the net on the head.

As you’re alluding to, Cort, it takes a while to put this on.

Cortland:

I remember all this gel being all over my head. It was pretty funky.

Richie:

We would squirt the gel with a blunt syringe. It didn’t hurt. It wasn’t piercing the skin. It was just a way to inject the gel into the electrode sitting on the scalp surface.

Doing that with 256 electrodes takes some time. It was at least 45 minutes of preparation before we were ready to begin recording.

The tasks we used in those days varied, but they included looking at emotional pictures.

In some of the work, particularly work we were using to probe positive and negative emotions, we would present positive pictures, like a parent hugging their child. There was a whole series of iconic pictures of that sort.

Correspondingly, there were negative pictures, which we often described as images of human suffering. For example, a burn victim with clear scars on the face, or an accident victim.

They’re the kinds of images we see in the media all the time. We’ve become a little overexposed and habituated to these images. Nevertheless, in the context of seeing both positive and negative images, they clearly elicited some emotion, and we monitored the changes that occurred in the brain.

In some of our work, we also used video clips. They weren’t just static images. The clips included sound in some of the work.

That was the kind of experimental setup we had.

00:12:00 – A surprising discovery in the resting brain

Richie:

Going back to the setup, we had this period where we were collecting data during the so-called resting baseline, when people were not exposed to any of these images or video clips.

Then we would present the video clips.

After a few years, and it really took us a few years of doing this work for reasons that were initially just methodological, we began looking at what was going on during the baseline.

We saw that some people started out at very different places.

If you look at a measure of asymmetry in the prefrontal region of the brain, which is the region where we found these variations associated with emotion, and you take a large group of participants and compute the asymmetry score, it is essentially the activation difference between the same region in the left prefrontal cortex and the corresponding region in the right prefrontal cortex.

You can express it as a difference score or a ratio.

It turned out that there was a bell-shaped curve. It was normally distributed.

Some people showed extreme right-prefrontal activation. Other people showed extreme left-prefrontal activation. There was a big hump in the middle.

Cortland:

Most people are in the middle, and then you have small groups that are out on these extremes.

Richie:

Exactly.

00:13:41 – How stable are our neurological tendencies?

Richie:

When we first saw that, we decided it was critical to determine whether this was actually a reliable difference, or whether it was associated with how much sleep people got that night, what they ate for breakfast, their mood, or other transient differences.

We began studies where we brought people back after a week and after a month. We tested them again by having them sit and rest without doing any task.

Sure enough, we found, quite remarkably, that this was incredibly stable. It was really more stable than most other physiological signals that people had studied. It was a big surprise to us.

Once we established that this was reliable in a statistical sense, it meant that if you showed strong left-prefrontal activation today and I brought you back a month from now, you would likely show strong left-prefrontal activation a month from now.

We then set out to explore what these variations were associated with.

Were there differences in personality associated with these variations in brain asymmetry?

It turned out that there was indeed a whole constellation of differences associated with these variations in brain asymmetry that were quite interesting.

00:15:29 – Approach-oriented and more cautious styles

Richie:

If I can succinctly summarize it, people with stronger left-prefrontal activation had more of an approach orientation to the world.

By that, we mean these are the kinds of people who are ready to jump out of bed in the morning and take on the world. They’re actively engaged. They’re more likely to be extroverted and optimistic. They have this active, engaged stance.

Others who were more right-prefrontally activated were more shy. They might be a little more socially anxious or introverted.

It’s not that one is better than the other. There are advantages and disadvantages to being extreme on either side.

One thing that’s important to keep in mind, as you mentioned earlier, Cort, is that most people are in the middle. Most people are not at one extreme or the other.

This was an important observation and led us to publish many papers associated with it.

We initially thought that left-prefrontal activation was somehow associated with greater happiness and well-being. But after many years of study, it turned out that this was simply not true.

00:17:12 – Does one brain style lead to greater happiness?

Richie:

It’s more associated with a style of interacting with the world.

Introverted people can be just as happy as extroverted people. Our well-being and flourishing probably have more to do with the match between our style and the environment in which we find ourselves than with the characteristics of the brain itself.

That’s a critical insight.

Each person would benefit from knowing more about their own style and not necessarily trying to change it so much as being aware of it and arranging their circumstances so that they’re most conducive to the kind of style they express.

00:18:08 – Seeing our perceived weaknesses as superpowers

Cortland:

I love this. To me, this feels like the key point.

It runs counter to what naturally happens in many of our minds. It’s similar to what I shared earlier with Myoshin, feeling like, “Why can’t I be more like that?”

We look at somebody else’s superpowers and wish we had them. Then we see whatever is going on in us as deficits rather than seeing those qualities as potential superpowers.

I very much feel like this has been the story of my life.

I’m very introverted and was very much on the shy side. On this spectrum, I don’t know how extreme I would be, but I would probably be somewhere toward one side.

Now I feel like those things have been incredible assets in my life.

My meditation practice, obviously, has benefited. I love solitude, and that has served me so well. I’ve done so much retreat, and it has brought so much to my life, my creative work, writing, and other things.

The fact that I have zero discomfort just locking myself in a room for weeks on end with a pile of books, and I’ll just be a happy camper.

At one point, I thought that was a curse. Now I feel like it has been such a blessing in my life.

It seems like one of the lessons here is that, within any of these styles or patterns, or even looking at brain asymmetry and whatever natural predispositions are going on in our brains, it’s about leaning into that and asking: Where is the hidden superpower in this particular configuration that I have?

Rather than saying, “I wish I could be more like that. I could be more optimistic, or less anxious, or more anything,” it’s leaning into these potential superpowers that are just waiting to be tapped into.

It seems like that might be one of the key points here.

Richie:

I think it very much is.

If we go back to our four key pillars of well-being, awareness, connection, insight, and purpose, the dimension of asymmetry is, to use a technical term, orthogonal, which means independent.

It’s not directly associated with any one of those pillars.

You can have left-sided activation or right-sided activation and still cultivate all four pillars of flourishing. They will look different. They won’t look the same in a person with strong left-prefrontal activation and a person with strong right-prefrontal activation.

Nevertheless, both of those people might be truly flourishing.

00:20:45 – What does Richie’s own brain reveal?

Cortland:

I have a whole laundry list of questions here.

First, I might put you on the spot a little bit. Did you measure your own brain? Did you ever look?

Anybody who knows you might think it’s not hard to guess where you are on the spectrum, but I’m curious whether you did that.

Richie:

I’ve done it a few times. I’m left-sided, but not extremely left-sided. I’m in a place on the curve where there are a lot of people, so I’m not at the far extreme.

Cortland:

You’re clearly comfortable with solitude. You’re obviously very social by nature, but you’re also comfortable with solitude.

Richie:

I actually regard myself primarily as an introvert.

Compared to my wife, I’m much more introverted than she is. I’m quite comfortable with that.

I can be extroverted in certain circumstances, but I’m aware of activating that part of myself in a way that is not my default disposition.

00:22:20 – What meditation changes and what remains

Cortland:

One interesting thing we can both talk about at a personal level is what has changed over the course of our lives and what hasn’t.

If I think about my own life, anxiety was a huge theme in my early life, back in my 20s and the early 1990s, when I was in college and starting to meditate.

The thing that has changed dramatically for me is the discomfort in certain situations.

There were times in life when being at a party, even with people I really liked and knew well, was not only challenging but actually uncomfortable.

I would have this feeling that I immediately wanted to leave the moment I entered the situation. I had this impulse that I would rather be somewhere else. It was just not fun for me.

Things like public speaking were complete nightmares. There was a whole gradation of social experiences, some mildly unpleasant and some almost unbearable. I would have done anything to avoid them at that time.

If I look at what has changed, that discomfort element has almost disappeared.

There are very few social situations that make me uncomfortable. Even public speaking, which was among the most uncomfortable, causes almost zero discomfort now. In some cases, I actually enjoy it.

But the thing that has not changed is what I might think of as energizing and depleting.

I can be at a party with people I love and thoroughly enjoy being around, but I find it tiring. I find being on my own energizing and nourishing.

It’s like being in a video game where you can see the energy meter going up and down. My energy meter goes up when I’m alone. Even if I’m doing something I love with people I enjoy being with, it goes down in social settings.

It isn’t necessarily uncomfortable. I don’t dislike it, and I certainly don’t try to avoid it. But that part hasn’t changed at all.

Maybe it’s less intense because the emotional side of it can be extremely depleting. Then it’s like your energy meter enters the death zone very quickly. Perhaps the speed at which it goes down is different.

But it’s interesting that this hasn’t changed at all, while the discomfort has changed dramatically.

I’d be curious what your experience has been with this.

00:24:56 – Richie on anxiety, anger, and transformation

Richie:

I would say there are two dimensions that have noticeably changed for me.

One is also anxiety. I used to experience a lot of public-speaking anxiety, and that has completely dissipated. I don’t experience that anymore.

The other is a kind of volatility.

I used to get angry much more than I do now at work. If someone did something wrong, incompletely, or not as well as I thought it should be done, I had very high standards.

I still have high standards, but I recognize that we’re all human, and sometimes they’re not always going to be met.

I used to have a much stronger reaction to that than I do now.

People around me who have known me for decades would notice and comment on those two elements.

The things that haven’t changed are my vibrant commitment, energy, enthusiasm, and passion for what I do. Those have been consistent.

The way they are expressed is a little different now because they don’t have the same kind of volatility.

Cortland:

That’s so helpful.

I remember when you first told me you used to fly off the handle and get upset at times in a workplace setting. That was inconceivable to me.

I moved here in 2012. We knew each other for a few years before that, but we started working together very closely then.

It’s hard for me to imagine. It’s so night and day from how you are now that it’s almost hard to believe. Of course, I believe it, but it just shows that transformation.

00:27:07 – When neuroscientists were told to try marriage counseling

Richie:

One of the people I worked closely with in the early days was Cliff Saron. Some of you may know him.

He’s one of the neuroscientists who started the Shamatha Project with Alan Wallace. He’s done some important meditation research and is a Dharma brother.

I’ve known Cliff for more than 50 years, so we go back a very long way.

We used to scream at each other. Just scream at each other.

Cortland:

Wasn’t he your lab assistant? It’s amazing. He’s one of the most eminent researchers in the field now.

Richie:

A couple of people suggested that we go for marriage counseling just to work together.

Fortunately, we’re still very close friends, and we’ve been through a lot together. That was just this crazy style that we evolved.

Cortland:

It sounds like you were both pretty fiery at that time.

Richie:

Yes, we were both really fiery.

00:28:12 – Does meditation change your personality?

Cortland:

Another example of this, which we were discussing before we started recording, is the far extreme of people who are exemplars of the meditative traditions.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Mingyur Rinpoche, Khandro Kunga Bhuma, and Khandro Tseringma are examples.

We were both just in Nepal a month ago with a female teacher who is like an alien in the best possible way. She is just a remarkable individual.

One of the things that is so fascinating about people who have taken their meditative training to depths we can’t even imagine is that they are completely different.

It’s not as though the training flattens things out and they all become peaceful and emotionally flat. They are dramatically different from one another.

00:29:43 – “Exactly the same, only more so”

Cortland:

What captures or summarizes this for me is what happened when Mingyur Rinpoche came out of retreat.

Several years ago, he did a five-year wandering retreat. In the middle of the night, he suddenly left his monastery in rural India.

I think many people knew he was going to do this at some point, but he didn’t tell anybody when. He literally jumped over the wall and left in the middle of the night.

He didn’t even tell his closest attendants. Then he disappeared for about five years. Nobody knew where he was.

When he came back, everybody was asking, “What is he like now? Is he different?”

Our friend Paul MacGowan, who is a documentary filmmaker, summed it up perfectly. He said, “He’s exactly the same, only more so.”

I thought that was the perfect distillation, because it was true.

You couldn’t say he wasn’t different, but somehow he was different in exactly the same way. It was as though what made him who he is had been amplified in a beautiful way.

These are examples of tapping into your superpowers rather than trying to self-correct toward some idealized version of a person.

Richie:

This little exercise you just laid out is a really important teaching for me.

You and I have talked about this offline periodically. Each of these people is an exemplar of the further reaches of human flourishing. They’ve all put in enormous amounts of practice and led remarkable lives.

Yet each of them is really different. They have distinctive personalities.

The idea that if you meditate long enough, your emotions will somehow subside is just not true.

Each of these people has meditated an enormous amount in their life, way more than even you have, and you’ve meditated an enormous amount, Cort.

Yet they are uniquely different. There are aspects of their personality and marks of their demeanor that remain similar, so you can recognize them even after, as with Mingyur Rinpoche, a five-year retreat.

They’re still there, except more so. That, to me, is really interesting.

At least to some extent, the asymmetries we talked about at the beginning are like that.

They do move around some. They may particularly move around with someone who is depressed and does certain things to improve their depression. But at more advanced levels, they don’t seem to move very much.

They may partly reflect relatively enduring qualities, aspects of demeanor that differ among people.

There’s a reason people are different and have different kinds of superpowers. We need those differences to be maximally helpful.

Different teachers have different styles, and they can appeal to different kinds of people. In other areas of life, those same differences would also be adaptive.

00:33:15 – Are differences in brain asymmetry inherited?

Cortland:

Around the time you were doing this work, there was a lot of amazing research on heritability, including twin studies.

At the University of Minnesota, where I did my undergraduate degree, one of my first classes was with Tom Bouchard. Some really interesting work was done there, and I got a bit of a front-row seat to it.

Was there ever any work that you or others did on the heritability of these individual differences in asymmetry?

Do we know how much is due to our genetic predispositions?

Richie:

There has been some work, and we did some twin studies.

Asymmetry with twins is actually a bit complicated. It would take us down a whole tangent to explore it deeply because there is a phenomenon in certain groups of twins called mirroring, where co-twins have opposite patterns of asymmetry.

It has even been expressed in systemic anatomy, where organs are on different sides of the body in co-twins. It has to do with how cell division works and basic issues in embryogenesis.

Cortland:

Really? This is even with identical twins?

Richie:

Yes, even with identical twins.

There is a lot of complexity, and you have to account for that complexity. But putting all of that aside, there is evidence for heritability.

This could be the subject of another Dharma Lab. We should pin this.

00:35:03 – Heritability does not determine whether we can change

Richie:

Just because something is heritable doesn’t say very much about its modifiability.

Cortland:

Usually, even if things are heritable, it’s 40 to 60 percent. There aren’t many things that are entirely determined that way.

Richie:

Exactly.

Typically, behavioral characteristics, or things related to behavioral characteristics like this, are influenced by many genes, even hundreds of genes.

It’s not a simple, single genetic contribution, as with a disorder like Huntington’s disease, which is due primarily to a single gene.

Because of that, it’s also more complicated.

00:35:18 – What handedness reveals about the brain

Richie:

One of the things we wanted to mention is handedness.

I noted in the previous Dharma Lab recording that all the work we’re talking about was done with right-handed people.

Right-handed people account for roughly 85 percent of the population.

Left-handed people are more variable than right-handed people. Among right-handed people, virtually all of them, 99-point-something percent, speak with their left hemispheres.

Among left-handed people, it’s not the case that the right hemisphere is always associated with language. It’s much more variable, and there is more bilateral representation of function among left-handed people.

There are many interesting things associated with that.

It may be that certain groups of left-handed people are actually better at tasks requiring integration between the two hemispheres because they have more bilateral representation.

Cortland:

Some left-handed people may have an increased ability in synthesis or things that are cross-hemispheric?

Richie:

Yes.

To give you an example, I looked at this a while ago, and I’m not sure it’s still true. But at one point, if you looked at the membership of the American Institute of Architects, there was a much higher percentage of left-handed architects than left-handed people in the general population.

That is an example of an occupation that may benefit from the cognitive style that is more prevalent among left-handed people.

Cortland:

Are there other professions or similar things where you see an overrepresentation of left-handed versus right-handed people?

Richie:

I don’t know the recent findings on this.

We can do another episode of Dharma Lab after I poke around in the most recent research. There might be, but I’m not sure.

00:38:26 – Finding the strength in your natural predispositions

Cortland:

As usual, every time we have one discussion, we somehow create five more discussions that we need to have.

Maybe we can round this one off by returning to the key point about how this insight can help us at a personal level.

It seems to be about identifying and leaning into the natural predispositions we have rather than viewing them as weaknesses.

It’s about finding the buried superpower within things we might otherwise think of as a problem or a deficit.

I know that has certainly been true in my life.

Do you have any final thoughts along those lines, Richie, or any practices that have helped you?

00:39:09 – Meta-awareness and experiential fusion

Richie:

One of the things we talked about earlier was what changed in our lives and what may not have changed and remained consistent.

One of the big things for me is the presence of meta-awareness. That is simply knowing what is going on in my mind.

I would say my earlier years were characterized by a term that Cort and I invented and wrote about in an earlier paper. We call it “experiential fusion.”

I was totally fused with the emotions I was experiencing. I didn’t have this background awareness that was a container for it all and provided an opportunity to look at it with curiosity.

That itself is a highly stabilizing and regulatory capacity that all of us have.

I think that is really important.

Whatever our style is, there is a lot of reason to respect different styles. We need people with different skill sets and different superpowers.

If we can cultivate meta-awareness so that we are aware of these differences rather than simply being in the river and carried away, I think that is really helpful.

00:40:45 – The skill at the heart of flourishing

Cortland:

It’s funny you say that.

If the question is how we tap into these latent superpowers, and I think back on my own life, I would say that was certainly the starting point and, in many ways, one of the key ingredients, especially in my early years of practice.

It was simply being more aware of what was going on within me: my mental and emotional habits, my thoughts and emotions, and how those played out in my life and relationships.

It was leaning into that and exploring it.

Meta-awareness is the vehicle for doing that. You can’t do it without meta-awareness.

That was profoundly transformative.

We talk about flourishing as a skill and well-being as a skill. In many ways, meta-awareness may be the critical linchpin for the whole thing.

Richie:

I would 100 percent agree with that.

Cortland:

Such a beautiful thing.

Hopefully, if you’re still with us, you found this dialogue enjoyable. Please tune in again. We will certainly continue this discussion and pick up some more of these threads.

Thank you, Richie. As always, it’s a joy.

For everyone who joined us, thank you for tuning in.

Richie:

Wonderful to be here. Thanks, Cort.

A Moment in the Lab

There are rare moments in science when the data do not merely confirm a hypothesis. They rearrange the boundaries of the imaginable.

One of those moments occurred in our laboratory at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the early 2000s. Antoine Lutz, then a postdoctoral fellow in the lab, and I were examining the raw EEG recordings from Mingyur Rinpoche during meditation. We were not looking at polished statistical summaries or averaged waveforms. We were looking directly at the ongoing electrical activity of the brain in real time.

What we saw made us pause and look again.

The traces revealed extraordinarily powerful high-frequency oscillations sweeping across the scalp with remarkable synchrony. The signal was so large that our first instinct was skepticism. Could this be artifact? Muscle contamination? A technical error?

But the deeper we looked, the clearer it became that we were observing something biologically real—and something profoundly important.

At that moment, we realized we might be seeing evidence that long-term contemplative practice could fundamentally alter large-scale brain dynamics.

That work would eventually become our 2004 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: “Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice.”

Looking back now, I believe this paper marked one of the founding moments of modern contemplative neuroscience.

Before Meditation Entered Mainstream Neuroscience

It is difficult to remember now how little was known about meditation and the brain twenty years ago.

Meditation research existed largely at the margins of mainstream neuroscience. A handful of studies had reported changes in slower brain rhythms such as alpha and theta activity, often associated with relaxation or concentration. But there was little persuasive evidence that intensive contemplative training could produce enduring changes in the brain’s intrinsic functioning.

More importantly, there was little serious engagement between first-person contemplative traditions and modern neuroscience.

The prevailing scientific assumption was still that most psychologically important traits were relatively fixed by adulthood. Attention. Emotional style. Compassion. Baseline wellbeing. These were often treated as stable characteristics rather than trainable capacities.

The contemplative traditions claimed otherwise.

For centuries, Buddhist practitioners had asserted that systematic mental training could transform the mind at its deepest levels—not temporarily, but enduringly. Yet neuroscience had no clear mechanism through which to understand such transformation.

Our 2004 study began to change that.

The Discovery of Gamma Synchrony

The paper made three major contributions.

1. The first clear neural signature of long-term meditation training

The practitioners in our study had accumulated between approximately 10,000 and 50,000 hours of meditation practice over decades of training. One of the practitioners included in our sample was Mingyur Rinpoche himself.

During the generation of what Tibetan traditions call nonreferential compassion—a state of unconditional loving-kindness and compassion without fixation on a specific object—we observed dramatic increases in high-frequency gamma oscillations and large-scale synchrony across distributed brain regions.

These effects were not subtle.

Indeed, in the paper we noted that the amplitude of these gamma oscillations was, to our knowledge, “the highest reported in the literature in a nonpathological context.” In other words, it was off the charts!

For the first time, we had compelling evidence that extensive contemplative training was associated with measurable alterations in brain function

2. The introduction of gamma oscillations into contemplative science

At the time, gamma oscillations were becoming increasingly important in neuroscience.

Researchers such as Francisco Varela, Wolf Singer, and Giulio Tononi were exploring the possibility that synchronized gamma activity helps bind distributed neural processes into coherent conscious experience. Gamma rhythms had been linked to attention, learning, working memory, perceptual integration, and awareness itself.

Our study suggested that meditation might directly engage these integrative mechanisms.

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