“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven.”
-John Milton
Have you ever thought about how you would react to being imprisoned or stuck in solitary confinement for years? I confess it’s one of the scenarios I rehearse more often than is good for me, even though I’m not expecting to be locked up any time soon. Fifty-two years ago I was locked up for one night in jail in Natchez, Mississippi, when I was hitchhiking with long hair from Cincinnati to New Orleans. The charge was “vagrancy,” or hippie vagrancy, and one call to my parents in the morning got me released. That was a long night.
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The scenario I dwell on these days is more like what the journalist Terry Anderson faced in 1986 when he got mistakenly picked up by Hezbollah in Beirut. He spent the next six years in a basement with no windows and no phone calls to nobody. And now I dwell on it every time I read about another black man discovered by the Innocence Project to have been wrongfully imprisoned and finally released after 20, 30, or 40 years in prison. That’s a lot of long nights. If I faced such an injustice, how could my mind make a heaven of that hell?
When Milton dictated this line about the mind being its own place for Paradise Lost, he had been impoverished and blind for years, two other forms of prison I fear. Over the past month I’ve been reading a book that gives me some comfort for my prison fears. Altered Traits by Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson (2017) offers a joint memoir by these two psychologists about their explorations of various kinds of meditation over the forty years since they met in graduate school. This book provides the most readable summary I’ve found of the current state of the art and science of meditation.
I’ve been wondering how much choice we have over the inner places our minds create. I read Altered Traits to learn what we know and don’t know about this ancient practice of training our minds to create an inner place that is, at least for a short while, more quiet, calm, or attentive than the restless traffic of our usual states of mind. Goleman’s career path steered him to journalism on psychology topics while Davidson’s steered him to an academic career at the University of Wisconsin where he has conducted extensive research on the psychology and physiology of meditation practices. Together they make a good team for translating the science into plain language for the lay reader.
A few of their themes raise some provocative questions. The first problem is how to define meditation in order to study it. Is meditation simply the effort to attend without judgment to the present moment? If so, how can we tell when a person is meditating or just daydreaming? Does meditation require achieving a certain brainwave pattern, or a change in respiratory rates? Most research settles for the person’s self-report of the time spent trying to meditate, whether they succeed or not. That seems soft to me, but it may be the expedient definition for now until a more quantitative measure develops.
The book title refers to the observation that occasional meditation achieves a transient state of mind but the regular practice of meditation eventually alters mental and physical traits that persist when we’re not meditating. “Beginners” are the large group who dabble in meditating when stressed out or for a few hours a week, generally for less than a total of 1000 hours. They may enjoy some of the experiences of meditating but don’t develop the traits that lead to the payoffs that come to the “long-term” daily meditators who fall in the range of 1,000-10,000 hours of total meditating time. At the top of the heap over 10,000 hours are the “yogis” who meditate because it’s their spiritual calling. Some are monks who spend many months or years meditating.
Davidson has studied these yogis, and compared them to the long-termers and the beginners. He has shown repeatedly that the benefits of meditation correlate with the total number of hours: the more the better. Less stress reactivity, faster stress recovery, lower respiratory rates at rest, higher heart rate variability, better sleep efficiency, better immune responsiveness and recovery—these are some of the measurable physiologic traits that develop with long-term meditation practice. It takes practice to create your own place.
Is the practice of meditation what gives monks their famous longevity of life? If you google this question, note how few scientific studies show up in the first few pages. There’s a common impression out there that it’s true, but relatively little good data so far. More likely meditation is one of many factors that contribute to longevity, but it’s intriguing to think of meditation as an antidote to toxic stress, a condition which in high doses shortens our telomeres and accelerates our biological aging. If toxic stress kills, can meditation save lives or prolong them? It’s possible that the doses of meditation required to counter toxic stress are much higher than most of us are willing to achieve, maybe in the yogi range, but who knows? Wouldn’t it be fascinating to see if the number and severity of chronic illnesses in meditators correlates with the number of hours of meditation? Altered Traits tells us the science is heading toward these questions, but it’s not there yet.
In the meantime, just in case, and because it feels so good, I try to add to my hours and alter my traits with 15 or 20 minutes each morning. I sleep better now, knowing that when my time in prison comes, I’m going to raise enough trouble to get me in solitary confinement. Then I can start my training to become a yogi master, practicing undisturbed 16 hours a day--my great escape to my own place.