When Congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio invited me to travel to Washington, DC, to share our research on mindfulness training for active-duty service members, I immediately thought of Major Jason Spitaletta and Major Jeff Davis, the Marines I’d met back when they were both captains, during our very first study on mindfulness in the military. Jason was the one who’d warned “This is never going to work,” but who’d then thrown himself wholeheartedly into practice. Jeff, who was attentionally hijacked while on that bridge in Florida, says that mindfulness practice “saved his life.” I asked them to join me for the meeting with Congressman Ryan.
We met up outside a Metro stop near the National Mall. I hadn’t seen them in years, but they were as boisterous as I remembered, and launched right into catching me up on their lives. Jason, who had been midway through a PhD program in psychology when he deployed to Iraq, was so impacted by the mindfulness study he participated in with us that he changed his research focus when he returned. He was now studying distress tolerance—the ability to withstand aversive mental states. Jeff, now retired from the military, was pursuing his MBA at George Washington University. Their lively stories, zigzagging from training in Florida and grad school in DC to deploying to Baghdad, both captivated and transported me. Before I knew it, I was looking straight ahead at that iconic white building, the US Capitol. And then I noticed something odd. People were peering in our direction. At one point, two women in business suits powerwalking our way just stopped and stared right at us from across the street. What was going on?
I turned around, curious to see who might be behind us. No one. Jason laughed and said, “They think we’re your Secret Service detail.” Jeff chimed in, “Amishi, they’re trying to figure out who you are.” The sight of two brawny dudes in sport coats flanking a 5'2″ Indian woman was apparently odd enough to draw attention, even in DC. For the rest of our walk up Independence Avenue, they did not hold back razzing me about my “terrible situational awareness.” I had to take it on the chin.
We made our way to the congressman’s office in the Rayburn Building, and were led right in to see him.
“Please call me Tim,” Congressman Ryan said, towering over me as he shook my hand.
From the moment we all sat down together, I was struck by Tim’s full and unwavering attention. He was direct and probing, wanting to know about Jason’s and Jeff’s military experience, their journey with mindfulness, and thoughts on how mindfulness could be made more accessible to both active-duty and veteran service members. We discussed the results from the study with their unit and my lab’s ongoing research efforts. Twenty minutes later, a staffer knocked on his office door.
“They’re calling a vote on the House floor,” she said.
Soon after he disappeared from his office, Tim reappeared on the wall-mounted TV screen, delivering a short yet impassioned speech on trade. Then, in no time at all, he was back with us, excited to continue our discussion.
What stood out most that day was when Tim described the value of mindfulness practice in his own life. He humbly acknowledged that the battles he faced in DC were nothing like those that Jason and Jeff had endured during their military deployments. He conveyed that he had come to lean heavily on his daily mindfulness practice as mental armor. And it showed—his commitment to serving the public good was contagious.
On my flight back to Miami, many thoughts bubbled up. The congressman’s capacity to make us feel motivated, heard, and understood—even while he juggled other critical responsibilities—was remarkable. I hadn’t earlier made the connection that, exactly like warriors and first responders, leaders’ pressures and demands eat away at the very qualities they need most. Tim had learned for himself that clarity, connection, and compassion were trainable, and he trained daily. How, I wondered, could we get these tools to other leaders? How could we study their effects? As the plane landed, I felt energized—it was time to get back to work.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have constantly encouraged Americans to practice social distancing, keeping at least six feet of distance between ourselves and others to limit the spread of the highly contagious and potentially deadly SARS-CoV-2 virus. As many social psychologists were quick to point out, “social distancing” is a misnomer. More important for our physical and psychological health is that we remain physically distant while staying socially connected.
As human beings, we need social connection from infancy, and we’ll keep needing it for the rest of our lives. I’m not being dramatic when I say that without social connection we die faster. Loneliness and social isolation are risk factors for poor health as well as accelerated mortality. Social connection has been scientifically studied for decades across multiple fields and many perspectives, ranging from mother-child bonding and romantic attachment to team dynamics and social networks. And attention is one of the fundamental building blocks for all social relationships: it’s what shapes our moment-to-moment interactions with other people. In fact, the Latin root for the word “attention” is attendere, which means “to stretch toward.” In this sense, attention is connection.
Imagine yourself speaking to someone on the phone. If the cell phone signal is glitchy, perceptual details will be lost. If you get distracted, your attention may be diverted. You’ll have both a poor mental model and poor situational awareness of the conversation.
Conversations rely on shared mental models. These are cocreated by both speakers, and dynamically updated as the conversation progresses. So, on your imagined call: lousy input and processing may have led to a lousy shared model, and most likely a lousy experience for you both. We’ve all been there! Contrast this with speaking to an attentive and undistracted conversation partner on a good cell phone connection. Her words are crisp and clear, her attention is locked on you, and there is a long and rich shared history of content and warmth during the call. Under these conditions, our shared mental models will be stable and vivid, heightening our feeling of connection. We will feel cognitively attuned as we are transported into a (mental) space of our own shared making.
High-quality interactions require high-integrity mental models. And to make them, we need to draw on all our attentional skills: Pushing the flashlight where we want it to be. Resisting or correcting the pull of salient distractors. Simulating but also dropping the story when the mental model is wrong—when it doesn’t match up with the other person’s. (If you’ve ever used the phrase “not on the same page,” you know what that feels like.) And finally, you need that meta-awareness piece to implement it all.
All the skills we’ve been practicing come into play here: Directing the flashlight. Simulating the other person’s reality. And watching to make sure the entire interaction stays on track.
Human interactions are nuanced and complex. They can be fun, stress-relieving, entertaining, rewarding, productive. They can also be tense, challenging, adversarial. Every day, we have interactions with people that we look forward to, and ones we may dread. Yet we have to show up for all of them. And when things go astray with these interactions, it can seem as if the problem is insurmountable, or foundational, or maybe “just the way people are.”
Like so many of the other challenges of living, a lot of the problems we run into in these interactions come down to something more basic and more fixable, or, as we have been discussing throughout this book, trainable. Think about a recent challenge you experienced connecting, communicating, or collaborating effectively—I’m willing to bet that distraction, dysregulation, or disconnection were at play, with one or both of you. How does this relate to your attention and working memory?
While I said “you,” I’m not suggesting that you blame yourself. It takes two to tango. It’s entirely possible, in fact, likely, that in any moment failures of attention are not yours alone.
Many of these issues arise due to challenges we experience when trying to direct our voluntary attention or when we suffer from depleted working memory. There are many deleterious consequences of having depleted working memory. There are fewer mental resources to engage in emotion regulation strategies (for example, to reframe or to reappraise). Our whiteboards function as if they are “smaller” because we are more prone to distraction, leaving fewer cognitive resources to engage in the kind of mental work we need to do in emotionally challenging circumstances. Sadly, a recent study examining parental behavior and working memory capacity found that parents with lower (vs. higher) working memory capacity were more likely to engage in verbally or emotionally abusive behavior toward their children.
In addition, lapses in meta-awareness can get us into hot water when it comes to our interactions with others. We can make assumptions and have stories (mental models) that are not shared by others or are entirely inaccurate. This can lead to a cascade of errors, including wrong-headed decisions and actions. No matter the cause of challenging interpersonal interactions, the result will be the same: the interaction is unfulfilling and unsatisfying at best, and aversive or damaging at worst.
Some people hear the term “regulation” and think “robotic”—that’s not what we mean at all. We mean having a proportionate response. This entails having emotional responses to events that scale with what is actually occurring. If somebody bursts into tears because they get fired, I’d call that an appropriate, even proportionate response. But if they burst into tears because they spill their coffee? Well, something’s up.
We’ve all been there. These moments of emotional overwhelm creep up on us, sometimes when we least expect them and aren’t really ready to handle them. At work, with our friends, kids, or parents, in romantic relationships—we respond in ways we might later regret. We feel out of control, out of proportion, out of sync with events. If you’ve felt this way, it’s because you are human—and some of the challenges you face are likely, at least in part, attention- and working memory–related.
It’s a tricky paradox: Strong emotions can capture our attention, can invade and take over our working memory. They can cause us to dredge up off-topic, and sometimes distressing, memories and thoughts; they provide fuel for the “loop of doom.” Meanwhile, we need those very same working memory resources to be able to proactively deal with the emotions that arise. There’s a “driving down” effect, a kind of negative spiral: poor mood degrades working memory, and a degraded working memory causes more poor mood. So how do we pull out of that cognitive nose dive?
To start, you strengthen the capacities that will protect against distraction, dysregulation, and disconnection by engaging in mindfulness practice. Any of the core practices we’ve already covered will help. And by cultivating meta-awareness, as we discussed in the previous chapter, we can have higher-quality access to the contents and processes at play in our moment-to-moment experiences. We need to be aware of our emotional state so we can intervene to regulate it, as needed.
When I first began practicing mindfulness, I noticed that having an awareness of my emotional state helped keep my overreactions at bay. And when I overreacted (such as yelling loudly out of frustration), I apologized more quickly than I would have previously. I wasn’t quite able to prevent the yelling. It bubbled out of me too fast. But I was able to watch the anger rise. I could track it and really feel the flushed feeling in my cheeks, the lump in my throat, the tingling in my arms, and then I could hear my (too) loud voice, yelling. Seeing this play out may not seem like an improvement, but it was. Sure, not yelling in the first place would have been better, and we’ll get to that. Apologizing faster, however, meant less distress for me and the person I was yelling at. It also meant that I wouldn’t have to follow my yelling with brooding or (internally) shouting at myself for fifteen minutes, regretful of my overreaction. To me, being able to apologize faster was a big win. It meant I was on my way. I could break the reactivity cycle.
You can change the way you orient to an experience, even if it initiated an overwhelming emotion. Here’s what I mean by that: The other day, I came home very late from a long day at the lab—many back-to-back meetings, and a deadline looming the next day that still needed my attention. I felt preoccupied and exhausted. And when I walked through the door leading from our garage into the kitchen, I saw something that immediately spiked my blood pressure: the blender, still coated in that morning’s smoothie at 9:00 p.m. and swarming with fruit flies.
My face got hot. I felt a swell of anger. My thoughts went immediately to Michael, my husband, who’d been home with the kids. It would have taken him a minute at the most to just rinse the blender out after using it. And I’d talked to him about the blender before—it really bothered me, and he’d promised to try to remember. My mind started leaping to conclusions: He doesn’t really listen to me! He doesn’t really care! In a matter of seconds, it was about much more than an unwashed blender.
At this point I had a couple of different options: (A) march into his office and yell at my poor husband, (B) suppress my anger and carry on as if I were just fine, (C) reappraise the situation, or (D) decenter.
All these options would have required my attention and engaging my working memory, but some more than others. Options B and C especially would. And B, suppression, doesn’t work very well long-term—my anger over the blender would likely bubble up in some other situation. Suppression is fueled by executive attention and working memory, and it requires these resources to continue to do the suppressing. While you’re actively suppressing, it leaves less cognitive bandwidth to do much else.
Which brings us to option C: reappraisal. Reappraisal means changing the way we think about a situation, by reevaluating or reinterpreting it in order to change its emotional impact. This is, thankfully, what I managed to do. Standing there, looking at those fruit flies dancing around my kitchen, I reframed my way of thinking about it: Michael has been holding down the fort here at the house all day while I’ve been working. He’s had a lot to manage! But the kids are healthy, fed, and safe. This is a small blip relative to all that is good right now. By reappraising, we reduce the intensity of negative emotion, allowing us to take a clearer look at the situation and assess whether the impact is as negative as we initially assumed. This isn’t actually that big of a deal—nothing is ruined or broken. I can just ask him to wash the blender, or simply wash it myself.
The strategy I use most often nowadays is option D: I decenter. You can go to the bird’s-eye view, as we did earlier, or you can try something even faster: stop, drop, and roll.
This approach keeps me agile, open, and receptive. It also keeps my working memory freed up, since I don’t have to spin new frameworks or stories to make myself feel better, as I did with reappraising. With stop-drop-and-roll, I have confidence that I will have access to more data regarding the situation, am aware of what my story is and open to the possibility that it may be incomplete or inaccurate, and am certain that my emotional state will shift as I allow my thoughts and emotions to come and go without holding on and looping them.
By the time I approached Michael, who was at his computer busy with an emergent work demand that had no doubt maxed out all of his working memory capacity, I wasn’t feeling angry anymore. I was grateful that I had these tools.
Our days, our lives, are full of “fruit flies in the blender” situations. Sometimes they’re relatively minor. Other times they’re bigger. And sometimes they’re huge—moments of crisis or decision where a great deal hangs in the balance for you and for others. Even the minor events are impactful—since a lot of tiny instances of dysregulated emotional responses can erode our most valued relationships.
The ability to have proportionate responses affects all your interactions with others. Your ability to connect, collaborate, and communicate also hinges on your attentional stability.
Lieutenant General Walt Piatt arrived in Kirkuk, Iraq, to broker a meeting between three leaders of local tribes that had been in conflict. As the newly arrived general from the US, he had to host these three factions and try to find a way forward. At one point they had all banded together against one common enemy, ISIS. But now that ISIS was gone from the region, they were clashing with each other, and all were furious at the US. The tension in that room was—to put it mildly—high.
The meeting started like a bonfire, with the tension and acrimony building rapidly. The three leaders aired their grievances about each other and about the US’s involvement in their region. It might have been easiest to shift quickly into problem-solving mode, or even defensiveness. Walt decided that he was going to let them talk. He was simply going to listen. He tried to bring all of the attentional presence he had to the moment, to keep his focus on each leader as he spoke, to be completely open to what they had to say.
When each person was finished, he said, “Here’s what I hear you saying.” And he repeated back, with precision, what they had just expressed.
Walt didn’t solve the big issues that day. He didn’t come up with any grand solutions to all the thorny, difficult problems raised in that meeting. Yet, something more happened. The entire dynamic changed. The local leaders felt heard, and they felt respected.
“You could see it on their faces,” Walt said. “You could see them thinking, ‘This is someone we can work with.’”
The meeting ended up being a productive one. The three factions were able to talk to each other. And at the end of the meeting, one of the leaders approached Walt. He was wearing a strand of prayer beads on his wrist—beautifully decorated with a silver inscription. He unlooped it from his arm and handed it to Walt, saying, “This would not have been possible without you.” A beautiful gesture of appreciation.
It’s easy to think of “listening” as a passive thing. In fact, it’s quite active and demanding, if you do it well. It takes your attentional control, your emotional regulation, and your compassion. It takes focus, meta-awareness, and decentering. It’s not passive at all. It’s heavy lifting. And it’s extraordinarily valuable. To listen, really listen, is often the “action” we most urgently need to perform. This story of how attention changed the course of a conflict gives me hope. It shows us what presence—so simple, yet so difficult—can actually achieve.
Conventional wisdom tells us that if we want to be better communicators, we should practice communicating. But here is an important insight: to be a great communicator, you need to be able to listen, really listen. When you do, you will have more information regarding what to say next: what is most appropriate, kind, and strategically useful.
Here we go:
Set the stage: Choose a question to ask a close friend or family member. Pick something such as “What would you like to do this weekend?” You want something they can talk about, uninterrupted, for two minutes. (I encourage you to let them know that they are part of this exercise with you before you begin.)
Step 1: Convey the question to them.
Step 2: For the entire two minutes, make the person’s response the object of your attention. Anchor to it. If you notice your mind wandering, return it back—just as you would do with any of the core practices. This is also a practice.
Step 3: Take one minute to write down any details about what you heard, and then convey it back to them.
Step 4: Switch places and ask them to listen to you for two minutes.
Debrief: When you are done, answer the following reflection questions:
How did it feel to give this person your full attention while you listened to them?
How did it feel to have this person’s attention while they listened to you?
Listening is a powerful practice. It provides us with the opportunity to get comfortable being receptive. And we can even practice this simply by watching. As Yogi Berra said in his madcap way, “You can observe a lot by just watching.”
My daughter, Sophie, had a “no homework” night from school recently, and when I asked her what she wanted to do with her evening, she said she wanted to bake something. But she was specific: she wanted to bake with me. She wouldn’t let my husband help—she banished him from the kitchen. It was going to be a mother-daughter baking project, she insisted: just the two of us.
We found a recipe for cookies online and got going, spreading all the ingredients out on the counter, greasing the pan, preheating the oven. This wasn’t a recipe we’d done before, so I had it pulled up on my phone to check and double-check the instructions. Every time I touched my phone, she was upset. “Why are you on your phone?!” she kept exclaiming whenever I so much as glanced at it. I was baffled at first—why was she overreacting? Then I realized that I’d been exceptionally busy, spending a lot of time with her brother discussing his college admissions and summer internship prospects, in addition to several late nights at the lab. It was obvious that she felt I hadn’t been available to her.
I felt a pang of guilt and sadness about what she might have been feeling these past few weeks before snapping back to the present moment. I asked myself two important questions: What was needed right now, and what mattered? Baking these cookies with her, both of us together, that’s what mattered. What could I do right now for what mattered most? Give her my full focus. It was all she wanted. Later that evening, after too many cookies had been consumed and Sophie was in bed, I reflected on how this evening might have unfolded differently when I was in the midst of my attention crisis—when I was far less attuned, less receptive to all that was happening around me. I would have likely missed what Sophie needed from me, and if I had figured it out, I’m not sure I could have given her what she needed. I didn’t even have my full focus, which meant I certainly didn’t have it to give.
What was different now? It felt like my mind was more present-centered, available, and pliable. I smiled, realizing: this is what a peak mind feels like. To me, a peak mind is not about perfection or being at some imaginary pinnacle, like you might see on a “successory” poster: woman on mountaintop, arms flung in the air relishing her peak experience. A peak mind is not about striving to get somewhere else. It’s simpler, more elegant, and doable. I think of it like a triangle: the base is the present moment, and the sides are two forms of attention—one side, receptive attention so we can notice, observe, and be, and the other side, concentrative attention so we are focused and flexible.
Attention, both its receptive and concentrative forms, is not only a precious brain resource—it’s a currency, one of our most valuable currencies. The people in our lives notice what, where, and who we spend it on. Attention, in a lot of ways, is our highest form of love.
In addition to attention, for us to fully connect with another person requires a unique and complex set of skills. Many of the moments of connection we want to show up for are positive and loving, but we also need to show up for those interactions that are difficult or adversarial. A whole spectrum of human relationships exists out there, and some of them are exceedingly difficult to navigate.
In 2012, Sara Flitner, a strategy and communication consultant, made a life-altering decision: she was going to run for mayor. She enjoyed her work running her own company, and she loved applying her skills, like critical thinking and empathy, to solving complex problems. Sara saw a lot of issues in her community—Jackson, Wyoming (commonly known as Jackson Hole), which is adjacent to the tourist meccas of Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. Jackson had one of the highest socioeconomic divides in the nation, and with that came issues of high rates of depression and substance abuse, homelessness, high stress, and more. Sara thought she might be able to make a difference through her leadership and by influencing policy. She felt passionate about trying to move the needle from inside the system. Her goal, she says now, was to “infiltrate positions of power with compassion, civility, and basic decency and regard for fellow humans.”
And how did it go?
She laughs. “I walked right into the eye of the storm.”
She won the election, and once in office, Sara was confronted with the reality of how divisive politics are, even at the local level. When she ran for reelection two years later, the campaign got particularly nasty. The first time around, both Sara and her opponent had run clean, straightforward campaigns. This time, her opponent went negative. She had to decide, every day, how to respond to rhetorical attacks. She would get up every morning and do a mindfulness practice, first thing. No phone, no news, no social media. She says the practice “gave my brain rest” and allowed her time to ground herself in “what really mattered to me.” She’d decided early on in her campaign that she wasn’t going to “go dirty,” and she held to it—even when she lost.
She jokes now that she went into her two-year term as mayor saying, “I love people!” and came out saying, “I hate people!” In all seriousness, though, she feels her time in office was valuable to her and that she was able to move the needle—even though it was a painful, difficult, even disillusioning time. Her mindfulness practice threw her, she says, “a lifeline,” in large part because of the way it helped her connect with others and get things done—especially when those interactions were adversarial and fraught with conflict.
Thorny or difficult encounters with others can become situations where emotional reactivity gets the better of us. Or we try to escape, and find the quickest way out of the interaction. Neither strategy is great for attention or psychological health in the long term: unresolved issues, questions, and doubts become conflict states that draw your thoughts into ruminative loops. And interpersonal strife can also drain attention—disabling us from navigating a tough situation gracefully or productively.
“It’s heartbreaking to see the kind of suffering we’ll lay on each other when we act like there’s some kind of budget for compassion or empathy,” says Sara. “We have this attitude of, I’ll save my compassion for the people I like, not for you. It’s primitive brain reasoning, when we have—right here in our own heads—much more advanced technology available to us.”
During a difficult interaction, take a moment to pause. It can be the length of one breath. Or, before a difficult interaction, take a moment and picture this person. Then, remind yourself: “This person has experienced pain, just like me. This person has experienced loss, just like me. Joy, just like me. Was born from a mother, just like me; will die someday, just like me.” If these phrases don’t resonate with you, feel free to substitute with other phrases that emphasize the common humanity we share with others.
When Sara Flitner finished her term as Jackson’s mayor and left office, she wasn’t done trying to shape her community for the better. She founded an organization, wittily named Becoming Jackson Whole, that is dedicated to training leaders across all arenas—community service, health, education, business, law enforcement, and more—in the kinds of evidence-based mindfulness skills that help build resilience and enable people to thrive personally and accomplish more professionally.
I met Sara in 2019, when her organization brought a hundred members of the community together for a research summit. I was one of the researchers invited to present my lab’s mindfulness findings. In my presentation, I described the research and training that Scott Rogers and I had been doing, offering MBAT to many different groups across our various projects: teachers, business professionals, military spouses, medical professionals and trainees. After learning how adaptable MBAT was for various groups, and that it could be started in person and continued with us remotely, she invited us back to Jackson to launch it. Sara and her team assembled community leaders to participate, specifically targeting people at various levels within their respective organizations—so, alongside the CEO of the hospital system, a nurse; alongside the sheriff, a junior officer. “Just being able to focus your attention on ‘the other,’” Sara recalls, “the progress was incredible. They were only there, in person with us for two days, but the kind of connections that mindfulness practice primed would never have been possible otherwise.”
Sara credits her mindfulness practice for the entire existence of her organization, as well as her ability to get all these people—a lot of them busy, high-ranking professionals—in one room to begin with. Connection and compassion practices, she says, have been the bedrock of her career since the beginning. When she wanted to launch MBAT for community leaders, she needed to be able to call up the top CEOs in Jackson and say, I need two days. “And they said yes because my relationships with them are good,” she reports. “When I say, ‘Prioritize this, and you’ll have success,’ they trust me. They know their time will not be wasted.”
She concludes: Connection is not “squishy.” It’s not a soft skill. It’s absolutely foundational. It’s not about being nice, or “getting along” with everybody. It’s about using emotional literacy skills and relationship-building skills. For Sara, when it comes to navigating tough interactions, it’s a question of seriousness: How much do you want to contribute? Are you going to rely on being the loudest person in the room, or “carrying the biggest club?” Or are you going to hone the connection and collaboration skills you need to operate at the highest level?
“Without them, I don’t care what your other capacities are; you won’t be successful,” Sara says. “You could have the cure for cancer, but if nobody will listen to you, it’s not worth a thing.”
Our final core practice in this book is a connection practice. In the tradition of contemplative training, it’s often called “loving-kindness meditation.” Yet this practice is not focused exclusively on people you love—though it can often begin that way. The purpose here is to cultivate your ability to connect and offer goodwill toward others—and yourself. We start with someone you’re close to, and then expand out. Shining your flashlight out into the world onto others with well-wishes is the next way we practice using our attention.
CORE PRACTICE: CONNECTION PRACTICE
May I be happy
May I be healthy
May I be safe
May I live with ease
The phrases and their order are not important. Some people may say, May I be free from suffering instead of May I be safe. Others may wish to say, May I find peace instead of May I live with ease. The important thing is that you choose phrases that resonate with you and that convey a feeling of goodwill to the recipient.
May you be happy
May you be healthy
May you be safe
May you live with ease
The instructions are straightforward, and the potential implications are profound.
A growing body of research has been examining the effects of this practice on the brain and body, such as improved positive mood and feelings of well-being, as well as the improved ability to take the perspective of someone else, which is needed for positive social emotions. Most recently several studies have reported that this connection practice provides a powerful antidote to one’s implicit biases. More research needs to be done in this arena, but early results are very promising.
As you probably gathered, this practice differs quite a bit from the suite of mindfulness practices we have been doing throughout this book until now. I am offering it here for a few reasons, above and beyond the well-established benefits it has for positive mood and stress reduction. As the name indicates, this practice increases our sense of connection and reduces loneliness. Why would that be? Isn’t this a solitary activity, after all?
The brain, remember, is a fantastic simulation machine. Subregions of the default mode network that we use to remember episodes from our lives are also used to project ourselves into the past and future. And these same regions can also be used to project ourselves into the minds of other people. Doing so allows us to simulate experiencing the world from their perspective. Perspective-taking empowers us to understand others’ motivations, and therefore to extend empathy. By sending well-wishes to individuals across a full range of “closeness,” as we are guided to do in this practice, we offer ourselves the experience of extending both care and concern. Granted, this is all done in the privacy of our minds, but as we have been discussing, the mind is a powerful virtual-reality simulator. Extending care can increase our feelings of connection to others in the same way receiving it can.
I experienced this firsthand when I attended a loving-kindness retreat. When it came time to select a “neutral person” as the target of this practice, I selected an administrator in my department at the University of Miami, Dr. Richard Williams. Richard was neutral in that I didn’t have strong feelings for or against him. In fact, I had no real connection to him at all. I saw him every now and again when my grant budgets needed to be reviewed or when I had to make a large purchase. I’m not sure why I chose him, but I did.
A note about doing this practice daily as opposed to on a retreat: The connection practice you were asked to do can be completed in fifteen minutes, as you cycle through silently repeating the selected phrases for about three minutes for each of the recipients. In contrast, on a week-long silent retreat, somewhere between 100 and 150 retreatants congregate daily for meditation in a large meditation hall from early morning to late at night. The practices are to be done in silence, and no ongoing guidance is given, other than the instructions the meditation teacher provides at the beginning of each day. Practices are divided into forty-five-minute sessions, with short breaks between them and longer breaks for meals. The sessions alternate between sitting meditation for forty-five minutes, followed by walking meditation, followed by sitting, and so on for the entire day. In the evening the meditation teacher presents a formal talk. On my retreat, instead of spending three minutes repeating the phrases for a neutral person as I would at home, I spent an entire day.
On day three of my loving-kindness retreat, I went to work repeating the phrases and extending the well-wishes to Richard. May you be safe, may you be happy, may you be healthy, may you live with ease. It felt like not much was going on. After all, I didn’t know Richard well. I knew nothing about his life, his interests, his hobbies. Truth be told, the day felt really uneventful. The only thing I recall noticing was that my concentrative focus and commitment in wishing him well grew clearer and stronger over the course of the day. When I returned home from the retreat, I resumed my typical daily mindfulness practice, and on the rare occasion that I completed the connection practice, I continued to include Richard as my neutral person. But I didn’t give it too much thought.
A month or so after my retreat, I was back in the psychology department building on the University of Miami’s campus, where Richard had his office. I was there to hear a student’s thesis defense. After the defense was over, I decided to walk over to Richard’s office. I merely wanted to say hello. He seemed surprised to see me and wondered if he had neglected to mark our meeting on his calendar. I assured him that he had not—I was just there to say hi. I’m sure he thought it was a bit odd. What was even odder was my internal experience on seeing him. I was filled with a kind of quiet joy and interest. I noticed his kind eyes, the shock of white in the hair that framed his face, that he looked a bit frail. The content of our interaction was quite ordinary. I had no sense of wanting or needing anything from the interaction. There was no lingering feeling, either.
Over the subsequent few years, I saw Richard several times for grant-related tasks. And each time, I felt that joyful connection to him. It didn’t really matter to me if he didn’t act any differently toward me. He was the same kind and competent administrator he had always been. If this sounds strange, I agree—it is unusual. But it gave me a glimpse into what might be happening in the minds of some exceptional people: the Dalai Lama, for one.
I remember meeting the Dalai Lama on stage when presenting our research findings at a meeting hosted by an organization that has helped catalyze the field of contemplative science, the Mind & Life Institute. He greeted each speaker, and when it was my turn, I was overcome by the feeling that I mattered to him, not because of anything I had done but just because “I matter.” His attention felt intimate and interested, yet not personal or lingering. As our session was being introduced, I could see him scanning the meeting room, locking eyes, and offering a warm smile to individual audience members. And on their faces, I could sense the impact on them having received his compassionate attention for that brief moment. The experience brought to mind the many recent studies I had read reporting that in those who briefly practiced loving-kindness meditation (versus a comparison group that did not), there was a reduction in implicit racial bias.
I have no doubt that the Dalai Lama is an extraordinarily special human being, for many reasons. But perhaps his unbiased offering of care and kindness to everyone he meets is not the result of his disposition alone. Maybe it is a result of his daily compassion practice. Like Congressman Tim Ryan, the Dalai Lama too trains his mind for clarity, compassion, and connection. Maybe we all can?
Throughout this book, I have asked you to consider the brain and brain processes not as broken and in need of fixing, but instead as trainable and capable of being optimized. And now that you understand how to do so, consider asking yourself another important question:
WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH YOUR PEAK MIND?
Think about it. But don’t use your standard analytical thinking. Try applying meta-awareness to “see what is,” and try decentering to “drop the story,” all while holding your attention steady and receptive.
Sadly, Richard Williams died recently. And I felt heartsick. In my grief, I questioned the value of having developed a sense of connection with him. Wouldn’t I have been better off staying disconnected? Why bother getting close to anyone—aren’t they just another potential heartache? I know that many people feel this way.
After some time, here’s my answer: no, I would not have been “better off.” Richard, even without his knowledge, gave me a great gift. He reminded me that life is not a zero-sum game. And extending care, concern, and kindness need not be transactional. It is part of what gives our lives meaning. And without it, as I said at the top of the chapter, we just die faster and less fulfilled.
Perhaps your motivation to learn about the brain science of attention and mindfulness was to uplift the lives of others you feel connected to, whether they be family members, co-workers, members of your community, or people you lead. How can you do this?
Answer: start with yourself.
“Having your own practice is the first, most important thing you do,” says Sara Flitner, the former mayor from Wyoming. “As mayor, I spent time before every public meeting in some form of reflection. When things were very conflict-laden in our community, it was absolutely essential for me to be the best version of myself I could be.”
When you start with yourself, you can be present “in the midst of chaos,” or stress, or uncertainty—and that can make an enormous difference not just for you, but also for the people you love, the people you work with, even those you interact with once and never see again. And it means that you can be in a difficult situation, fully, and know that you have the cognitive resources to get through it. It works only if you do the practice.
Something we know for sure: learning about attention helps. Still, it’s not enough. If you want to reap the benefits of mindfulness training, you’ll need to give yourself a certain “dose” of mindfulness practice. Mindfulness practice actually changes the structure of your brain in ways that are beneficial to attention . . . if you do it often enough.
So what is enough?