Fitness for the Mind

Excerpt from "Google's 'Head of Mindfulness' Speaks Out" by Jo Confino, NewsFactor Business Report, May 28,2014: 

Chade-Meng TanChade-Meng Tan's job description would never get past most companies' human resources departments. As the head of mindfulness training at Google, his role is to enlighten minds, open hearts and create world peace.

But he hopes that one day, his role will become commonplace. A growing awareness of the importance of our emotional fitness, he says, is mirroring the same journey of acceptance that physical exercise took in the last century. And he believes that scientific evidence of the benefits of the Buddhist practice of mindfulness will be instrumental into catapulting it into the very heart of the business world.

Tan, who is officially known as the search engine giant's Jolly Good Fellow, likes to live up to his image of joking around and points out that mindfulness is moving away from its association with mysticism -- or with people from San Francisco.

"If you are a company leader who says employees should be encouraged to exercise, nobody looks at you funny," Tan says. "The same thing is happening to meditation and mindfulness, because now that it's become scientific, it has been demystified. It's going to be seen as fitness for the mind."

More...

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See also:

• Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute
• Tan, C.-M. (2012). Search inside yourself: The unexpected path to achieving success, happiness (and world peace). New York: HarperOne. (SIY, library)

Born from Within

Baroque Library Hall at the Klementinum in Prague"Wisdom does not loom large in the modern psyche. It has been replaced by knowledge, which does not pretend to emotive value; in its least appealing forms, it even eschews such associations. It is strictly about things and the manipulation of them; and, unsurprisingly, it’s directed outwardly, towards the technologies of life and not their meanings. So we have many people who, externally speaking, are able but not wise; active but not prudent.

And perhaps this defines our society and our age as much as any other set of words: activity without prudence, or, imprudent doing.

To have prudence is to have foresight, to attend to. But attention is born from within, not from outward circumstances; and in the great esoteric traditions, as well as the traditional religions, attention is of a divine origin, not a worldly one."

~ Lee van Laer, on "Inner Wisdom," from Parabola Magazine, Spring 2014

Read the full article... 

Unmixed Attention

Lake Champlain, Willsboro, NY. August 7, 2011

Attention and Will
by Simone Weil, from Gravity and Grace

We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.

The will only controls a few movements of a few muscles, and these movements are associated with the idea of the change of position of nearby objects. I can will to put my hand flat on the table. If inner purity, inspiration or truth of thought were necessarily associated with attitudes of this kind, they might be the object of will. As this is not the case, we can only beg for them. To beg for them is to believe that we have a Father in heaven. Or should we cease to desire them? What could be worse? Inner supplication is the only reasonable way, for it avoids stiffening muscles which have nothing to do with the matter. What could be more stupid than to tighten up our muscles and set our jaws about virtue, or poetry, or the solution of a problem.  Attention is something quite different.

Pride is a tightening up of this kind. There is a lack of grace (we can give the word its double meaning here) in the proud man. It is the result of a mistake.

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

Lake Champlain, August 1, 2011

Qualities of Mind are Skills We Can Cultivate

"Evidence for the connection between happiness and attention is found in neuroscience: attentional control is located in the pre-frontal cortex. Those with a weak pre-frontal cortex also have an inability to inhibit their limbic system (to control their emotions).  Most major mental health conditions are associated with a weak pre-frontal cortex.

Neuroscience has also found evidence for 'experience-dependent neuroplasticity.'  In other words, our brains change with experience.  We get good at (and grow thicker neuronetworks to support) the mental activities we engage in repeatedly. The most powerful way to change your brain is not medication, but behavior, and in particular, mental behavior.

With physical exercise, we can tell which muscles have become the strongest through exercise. Our strongest mental habits are the ones most easily activated, that are quickly and effortlessly available to our consciousness...the good news from neuroscience is that positive qualities of mind such as attention, kindness, and compassion are skills we can cultivate through practice and training. Contemplative studies point to an array of these practices to grow new mental habits."

~ Carrie Heeter, from "Why A Neuroscientist Would Study Meditation," Jan. 12, 2014

See also: Britton Lab

Attention Training

Daniel Goleman from "Is Attention the Secret to Emotional Intelligence?" by Jason Marsh, Greater Good: Mind & Body, Nov. 14, 2013:

 “The Card Players” by Paul CézanneI think attentional skills are fundamentally under siege today. Never before in human history have there been so many seductive distractors in a person’s day, in a given hour, or in ten minutes. There are pingings and pop-ups and all kinds of sensory impingements on our attention that want to pull us away from what we’re trying to focus on.

So I think that a book on focus is all the more timely, particularly in helping us understand why it matters that we’re not able to sustain focus for as long as used to be the case, either on what it is we’re supposed to be doing or on the person we’re with.

Being able to focus on the other person rather than the text you just received has become the new fundamental requirement for having a relationship with that person. If you go to a restaurant these days, for instance, you see people sitting together, at the same table, staring at their video screens, their phone, their iPad, or whatever it may be—and not talking to each other. That’s become the new norm. And what it means is that the connection is being damaged to some extent—threatened by the fact that we’re together, but we’re not together. We’re alone together.

And I think this is another reason to develop a meta-awareness about where our attention has gone. I think we need to make more effort and cultivate more strength to detach [our attention] from that thing that is so tempting over there, and bring it back to the person in front of us.

I’m terribly worried about us as a species—particularly the young people who are growing up with this norm as the baseline. I don’t know what the consequence will be, but I can’t imagine it will be wonderful. We all have the potential to get better resisting, but we’ve never as a whole had to do this—never had to summon up the effort it takes.

For example, meditation is, from a cognitive science point of view, the retraining of attention—a bulking up of the neural circuitry that allows you to detach from where your mind has wandered, bring it back to the point of focus, and keep it there. That is the basic repetition of the mind in any kind of meditation. And that’s also what builds up the willpower to resist the pull of electronics and stay with the human world.

We’ve always had the capacity for this, but it’s also always been something that only a small minority of people bothered to do. I’m actually now in favor of making it part of the curriculum so every kid learns it. But I wouldn’t call it meditation; I would say “attention training.” It’s actually a very mundane application of what we’re learning in the science of attention about how to pay better attention—how to focus with more strength.

Read the rest of the interview...

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See also:

• Goleman, D. (2013). Focus: The hidden driver of excellence. [Amazon, library]
• Our Attention Is Under Siege "The Energy Project's CEO, Tony Schwartz, sits down with thought leader Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence, Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence) to discuss the impact of technology on our ability to focus, and how training attention can positively influence both our performance and our relationships."