But I also find this to be a transformative approach to intercessory prayer, which is a central part of my own spiritual life and daily pattern of faith.

For those who are listening or viewing, perhaps close your eyes if that's something you feel comfortable doing, and if not, you can leave your eyes open with a soft gaze.

And when we do this kind of procedural learning, we like to sit in a, a kind of upright and dignified posture, really to stay awake, uh, and to be present to the practice.

Uh, and so let's find a posture that is upright, but not too tight, not too loose, something that's comfortable.

And let's first begin with a moment of awareness, bringing our awareness into our bodies, into this moment.

And one of the things that we like to emphasize whenever we begin a period of practice, however short it is, is to reflect for a few moments on our motivation.

And let's see if we can find within us a place that, it has an altruistic motivation for our practice, recognizing that calming our minds and opening our hearts is beneficial not only for ourselves, but is beneficial for all of those others that we touch in our lives, either directly or indirectly.

I invite you to integrate some of these ideas with the procedural practice for the sake of insight into your own motivations, stories about yourselves, and your core identity.

Give me an example of what some of the research is showing for these shorter-term contemplative practices.

Yeah.

So that's one of the things that we talk a lot about in this new book and what is so exciting to us.

So one of m- my passions these days, in fact, it's really my central passion, is to figure out how to scale human flourishing.

I think most viewers would agree that the world is really in desperate need of increased flourishing and the skills that we associate with flourishing.

And so how can we increase these qualities even among people who are never gonna spend a lot of time meditating, ordinary people who are totally stressed in their work? And one of the groups that we've explored are school teachers, public school teachers who are reporting very high levels of stress.

They're abandoning the profession at higher rates than people are entering it.

Any specific practices you wanna leave our listeners with that they should be thinking about if they wanna build these things up?

... our wellbeing?

Yes.

So, um, thank you for, for asking all that.

Um, the emotional styles were described in a book that, uh, was m- uh, published in 2012, I believe, called The Emotional Life of Your Brain, uh, which I wrote, and that came from decades of neuroscientific research, uh, looking at differences among people in how they respond to life's slings and arrows, basically.

Uh, and gleaning from that, those decades-long, um, research, uh, we pulled out these six emotional styles that describe the broad range of, um, co- Responses that people show.

So I'll describe each of these emotional styles.

The first, um, we call resilience, and resilience is about how quickly you recover from adversity.

H- how is that mind able to change the body, like, physiologically like that? I mean, it's very interesting.

So maybe Richie, if you wanna speak to that, I'm happy to-

I'm happy to say a few words.

Um, Mingyur Rinpoche was the second long-term practitioner we had in our center.

The first one was Matthieu Ricard, who is a Tibetan Buddhist monk and actually has a PhD in molecular biology, molecular genetics.

A very unusual man, and helped to be a bridge between the realm of contemplative practice and science.

And Mingyur Rinpoche was the second long-term practitioner we had in our center, and he came to our center in 2002, and he's been to our center many times and has extremely generously offered his time, and he's probably been in an MRI scanner more than any Buddhist monk on the planet.

And we've learned an enormous amount from him.

But se- second thing I wanted to ask you is when you started to first place long-term meditators into these brain scanners, were you hoping to prove that meta awareness was a thing or were you simply curious enough to follow wherever the data led?

Can you tell me more about what your studies have found on the efficacy of the app?

Sure.

We've done several randomized controlled trials to give you one example.

We have been working with different sectors.

One of the sectors we've been working with are public school teachers.

And public school teachers are a group in the United States today that is very highly stressed for all kinds of different reasons.

The stress was especially exacerbated during COVID, and it really hasn't recovered fully by any means.

What did you find when studying the brains of monks?

It, it happens fast.

Yeah.

So, um, one of the really cool things that's happened over the last, really over the last decade is that our capacity to noninvasively measure the human brain has really dramatically increased.

And so we have these super sensitive measurement tools now that allow us to see Quite subtle changes.

And honestly, the rapidity with which those changes can be seen is surprising, um, and was initially quite surprising to us.

So to give you a very concrete example, we see changes in the brain that occur after two weeks of a person engaged in these practices for a total amount of time of less than, uh, seven hours over the course of the two weeks.

And, uh, if-- And we've done other kinds of work where people are practicing five minutes a day for a month, which is, you know, just a little bit over two hours of total training, and we see changes in the brain that are occurring with even that short amount of practice.

Is there anything you do specifically to start or finish your day that you find very valuable for yourself?

It's also about God's character and who he is ultimately, right? And is he a good God? Is he trustworthy or not? Can we trust this God with everything? And so how does the investigative judgment actually even get—not even get turned back on him as if that's something that happened to God, but rather is also a way in which he is exposing all of his decision-making and who he is to the world?

Yeah.

Well, I think we go to some of these sample pre-judgments, mini-judgments, and we find that they're referring to God as well.

For example, Job, Job chapter 1 and 2, where the heavenly counsel comes and God says, uh says if you considered my servant job and so satan is there and what does satan do he says well you've just put a hedge around him you know you've just you've just uh protected him you you've given him the goodies you're bribing him he doesn't really serve you because you're a god that can be trusted but only because you you do good things for him and so really the charge is against god And the whole book of Job is God revealing who he is, the God who cares, the God who redeems, the God who is the creator and so forth.

I think ultimately we've got to go back to Ezekiel 28, where you have the way that sin started in the universe.

And it describes Lucifer as the covering cherub there in the middle of the chapter as it moves into the heavenly realm.

And it describes him first without blemish.

Can you explain what the Tamid is for our listeners, Dr.

You're even better.

Because there's, uh, very good evidence, including some of our own work, showing that there are influences, uh, that are prenatal, uh, that begin to shape the function and structure of the brain.

Uh, and a mother's demeanor, her emotional balance during pregnancy, is a significant influence on early infant brain development.

And so we've actually done, um, empirical studies looking at the relationship between mother's, uh, experience during pregnancy and infant brain outcomes, where we, we put the babies in the scanner and scan them over the course of the first two years of life.

Uh, and we see very strong associations between the mother's-Uh, emotional style and, uh, emotional balance during that period, particularly the, the second trimester of pregnancy and, um, subsequent, uh, brain development.

But let me just, um, say that there are really, uh, three major periods that we call sensitive periods that have been very well documented.

The first is around birth, but that would include the prenatal influences.

[chuckles]

Mm-hmm, yeah.

"And as our intercessor, He executes His self-appointed work, holding before God the censer containing His own spotless merits, and the prayers, confessions, and thanksgiving of His people, perfer- perfumed with the fragrance of His righteousness.

These ascend to God as a sweet savor.

The offering is wholly acceptable, and pardon covers all transgression.

To the true believer, Christ is indeed the minister of the sanctuary, offer- officiating for him in the sanctuary and speaking through God's appointing, appointed agencies." And he, she goes on to say, "He stands in the presence of God saying, 'Father, I take my upon myself the guilt of that soul.

It means death to him if he's left to bear it.

If he repents, it shall be forgiven.

[upbeat music]

Can you unpack that for us or what you've discovered and how that could correlate to consciousness itself?

Yeah.

So, uh, in the Tibetan tradition, there's a very unusual state called Thukdam in Tibetan, which means the clear light stage, and this is a stage of, um, of being that some individuals enter into, uh, when they die.

Uh, uh, and these are people who have, um, met the standard Western clinical criteria for death.

They're no longer breathing.

They no longer show a heartbeat.

Uh, we've put electrodes on their head and their brain activity to the best that we can tell, at least at the time that we measured them, and that's a whole other story.

I would love for you to, if you wanna share anything more about the four, but y- specific or simple practices, just so people can get a real grounded taste of what's being invited in the book, and we'll talk more about that.

Richie Davidson is the founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and he's one of my oldest friends in the field.

People who are better able to use their bodily cues to make inferences about their psychological states in general have higher levels of well-being.

And so having, in some sense, a more coherent connection between the mind and the body is something intrinsically beneficial.

Even if you are stressed out, so to speak, it is better to be more connected to your own body.

Richie says that having information about our bodies can lead us to make better decisions about when and how to take care of ourselves.

If you're not accurately perceiving certain symptoms, that may lead to a certain kind of neglect of those symptoms.

And on the other hand, if you are misperceiving or exaggerating the body signals, that too can be pathological, as for example in panic disorder, where you may misinterpret a bodily cue and perceive it to be a life-endangering threat, in which case that can lead to a kind of spiraling negative consequence.

It feels like it's just a perception of what's happening.

Exactly.

And this, as you said before, Court, which is so incredibly true, is that this is not just occurring in patients with frank damage to their brain.

This is happening in all of us all the time.

And this is the way our minds work, the-- it creates a story about the world, and it's from that story that we operate.

It's not from some, you know, veridical perception of things in the world.

There's no such thing as that.

Hmm.

So I'm wondering if you can give an example of how you take the four skills that this whole, uh, flourishing is organized around, and how do y- how would you guide someone who's really stuck in a lot of anxiety right now to use these, uh, skills of flourishing?

Yeah.

Um, so, uh, a-all four skills are relevant to that, to anxiety.

And so, um, uh, to just step through each pillar, uh, and how it might be used to help with reducing anxiety, uh, beginning with awareness.

Um, it's, uh, often helpful to simply tune into our bodies and notice what's going on.

And even though our bodies may be contributing in some way or may be reflecting our anxiety, to actually become aware of it, um, rather than to push it away, uh, uh, or to avoid it, uh, is actually, uh, uh, paradoxically beneficial.

Uh, and so by simply being aware of our bodies, being aware of our breathing, uh, and using our bodies to support our awareness, uh, can be calming and can, um, uh, really help to restore, uh, some balance.

So how do we cultivate that? And, and, and, and also speak to the difference between compassion and empathy, if you will.

I like gardening instead," they might be okay? Really? We might be okay?

okay?Um, really, that's true.

And, you know, when we are honest with ourselves, I think we recognize that, um, however much we may aspire, um, for this to change, the, the majority of the world's population is not gonna meditate.

Uh, and, you know, I think that the, the data there are overwhelming.

Um, and so what can people do if they're not formally meditating? Well, we're offering them a formula, uh, if you will, prescription that we know from our hard-nosed randomized controlled trials really can be effective.

Our data show that if you elect to do these practices as active practices where you are piggybacking them onto other activities of daily living like commuting or, uh, doing, uh, gardening or doing the dishes, uh, the efficacy of these practices is comparable.

There's absolutely no statistical difference between the benefits that accrue, whether you're doing them formally as meditation or, uh, combining them with these activities of daily living, at least in these initial stages of practice.

I think this is the hardest one to succinctly communicate, but go for it, friends.

So how do we operationalize connection and take it beyond sort of bland exhortation?

Yeah.

I'm happy to jump in.

Connection, again, we would say is easier than you think.

Let me actually just back up and first say that in twenty twenty-three, we had a really visionary attorney general of the United States who issued a health advisory, the first time a public health official ever issued a health advisory of that sort in our country, on the epidemic of loneliness and social isolation.

And in that report, Vivek Murthy showed evidence that loneliness is actually a greater risk factor for mortality than is smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.

So loneliness and social isolation is not just a subjective quality of the mind, but it also affects our biology in ways that seriously affect our health.

Richie, what do you say?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So just to continue with the brain oscillations, I talked about delta.

The next brain, the next faster brain rhythm is theta activity, which is roughly between five and seven hertz.

Um, theta activity is often seen, uh, during transition from wakefulness to sleep.

Uh, and it's associated with these, um, uh, as you were saying earlier, these liminal states.

It's also been associated with certain kinds of meditation.

Mm-hmm

And I wonder if you could say some more about these and how you observe them in relation to adolescent minds.

Yeah.

So this other book, The Emotional Life of Your Brain, came out, as you said, more than 10 years ago.

And it was a summary of really 30 years of work that I've done in what has become known as affective neuroscience or the neuroscience of human emotion.

And distilling across many, many years in research studies, I came up with these six styles, if you will.

Every person has all six of these styles.

We differ in where along the continua we fall within each of these styles.

wherever they may be,

And he was like, "I gotta remind you, for the vast majority of people, meditation is, in fact, safe."

I would say for the average person, the risk for psychosis of meditation is not greater than the risk of walking down the street and producing psychosis.

We just don't have good evidence either way."

I think the kind of evidence you would need is hard to come by, uh, and that would be having a sufficient number of cases where you can actually get recordings from them during these periods of decompensation.

It, it's very challenging to do that kind of research.

Um...