PSY336H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Neuroplasticity, Buddha-Nature, Prefrontal Cortex
PSY336 Lec 10
Tuesday November 29, 2016
“He who feels punctured must once have been a bubble.” --- Lao Tzi
There’s no overarching understanding of meditation because there are so many types. But the
basic goals of meditation are essentially the same.
Recall COAL. When one is practicing COAL, he is building a brain circuitry for COAL. This
takes advantage of neuroplasticity.
You can think of meditation in the same way. It uses neuroplasticity.
There are 3 types of movements in consciousness that meditation achieves:
1. Concentration. If you want to be good at something, you need to concentrate on it. Ex.
Flow State. All systems of meditation really emphasize concentration. Concentration is
often step 1 in meditation, because it achieves the stabilization of one’s mind. This is
necessary for the person to be able to hold other things to come in meditation. To
concentrate is not easy. The maintenance of concentration over long term is really hard.
You can’t focus your mind for more than a few seconds at a time. We are not very good
at focusing on something without help. But if I give you a 2 hour good movie, then you
can focus. This means that unless the environment happens to line up for us, we are
incredibly vulnerable. This means we spent majority of our being reactive and being at
mercy of what’s happening to us. Meditation is designed to train our minds to work more
effectively. If you are not good at something, you need scaffolding. So meditation is the
scaffolding. If you go to a meditation class, most likely they will first tell you to adopt a
certain posture. This is important because “neurons that fire together wire together.” If
we wire “not caring, being inattentive, slouching, etc” (prof leaning against the wall
slanted) with meditation, that’s not good. We need to wire the good posture, which is
balanced and stable. Ex. You can do the cross-legged, tripod posture on a cushion. You
also put your hands somewhere so you are not moving your hands around or doing
random things. Prof likes to put his hands together. Because this is easy and subtle. You
take your dominant hand and put it underneath, so you are quieting your dominant side
down. You are also activating your less dominant side. You hold your thumbs together
with just enough force to hold a piece of paper in between them. If your thumbs are too
far apart, you are not paying enough attention. If your thumbs are too tightly held, then
you are trying too hard. So if you strive for a perfect balance, think of how focused you
have to be. To keep your thumbs balance, you have to be really concentrated. So you are
embodying (literally doing it with your body) the traits that you are trying to cultivate
through meditation (calmness, stability). If you can’t do that posture, it’s okay. It’s not
necessary. It’s just helpful. The posture is also strong: you are self-supporting and
balanced. You can find a balance point by first swaying in a circle, and then making the
circle smaller and smaller until you find the point. When you are balanced, you are also
less likely to get sore anywhere.
And then they will tell you to focus and balance your mind. They typically will tell you to
focus on your breaths. It’s not necessary to focus on breaths, you can technically focus on
anything. Prof knows a person who uses writing as an anchor to meditate. Another person
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was told to garden. Generally, for most of people, the breath is great, because we are
always breathing. We don’t need any tool to breathe. Breath is also always changing. It’s
also subtle. As your concentration refines, the ability to follow your breath gets refined.
As your attention gets better, you can follow your breaths better. Your breaths are semi-
reflective of your emotions. When you are sad/happy, you will breathe differently. So it
provides some insight into how your emotional state is. Now as soon as you start trying
to focus on your breaths, you run into problems. So they tell you to either focus on your
abdomen or nostrils or chest. Usually they tell you to choose a point to focus on and stay
on it for a while. Once you’ve picked it, your mind can now go on to do other things.
Your mind doesn’t have to stay on it anymore. This is actually how ritual works: give
you a “given,” so you don’t need to choose or make decisions or worry about anything,
so you can do other things. The essence of meditation is focusing, failing, and then trying
to focus again. Usually meditation practices in their early stages are relaxing. Many
minor things will come up and distract us. When this happens, we Stop, Observe, and
then Return. Ex. You noticed your hair sticking our. Stop = to stop thinking about your
hair sticking out. Observe = observe that you are noticing your hair sticking out. Return =
gently allow your mind to go back to breath. Invite/encourage your attention to go back
to the breath. It’s important to be gentle when you Return, because most of us are super
self critical. This is also practicing Self-Acceptance. Wherever your attention has gone,
it’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with you. You are not a bad meditator. You are not a
bad person.
And then, things get harder. When the outside world stops distract you, you run into
feelings: guilt, shame, etc.: “why are those people so inconsiderate.” Maybe you would
start to hate meditation. You might start to doubt the practice. You may think you are
wasting your time doing meditation. You should do the exact same thing – Stop,
Observe, Return. The practice is the same, even as the challenges get harder. Things will
get harder and harder, more and more subtle. Eventually, you run into big stuff – your
issues, because your frustration at a guy slamming the door turns into anger and self-
criticism and not feeling loved as a child. But you’ve scaffolded yourself by practicing
“Stop, Observe and Return” all the way through small to big challenges. You have to be
able to recognize the challenges, and then you have to let them go. Then you can start
living again. “Stop, Observe, Return” is how you live: to focus on things, and then stop
focusing on them when it’s not functional anymore.
Most people find this really hard. So they might give you more scaffolding. One of the
things is to Label. Label = putting a label on your feelings and emotions as they come up.
This helps you to identify the pattern of physio signals that come up with the feelings.
Labelling can also help a person to step out of a situation where he was stuck. If the
problem is that you are caught up in the catastrophe of what’s going on in your mind,
then having this top-down processing can really help you to recognize patterns. Last
week we talked about how sometimes we need to put aside top-down and use bottom-up
processing to notice the nuances in life, ex. Smelling flowers etc. Sometimes top-down is
helpful. When we put a label on it, ex. This is my passive aggressive pattern, this is
inadequacy, this is anger, etc. you become an outsider just observing it. Or you can just
label the stuff as “thinking.” All of us overthink. So you can notice your thoughts, and
label everything as “thinking,” and do “Stop, Observe, Return.” Then you get really good
at identifying when you are “thinking” and in that intellectual sterile land, and you also
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find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
He who feels punctured must once have been a bubble. --- lao tzi. There"s no overarching understanding of meditation because there are so many types. But the basic goals of meditation are essentially the same. When one is practicing coal, he is building a brain circuitry for coal. You can think of meditation in the same way. There are 3 types of movements in consciousness that meditation achieves: concentration. If you want to be good at something, you need to concentrate on it. Concentration is often step 1 in meditation, because it achieves the stabilization of one"s mind. This is necessary for the person to be able to hold other things to come in meditation. The maintenance of concentration over long term is really hard. You can"t focus your mind for more than a few seconds at a time. We are not very good at focusing on something without help.
