Presence of Mind: A Practical Introduction to Mindfulness & Meditation

For having such a wise father, I was surprisingly bad at embracing his wisdom.

I remember getting dinner with Dad the summer after graduating from college. I was finally old enough to order a beer, but still naïve enough to think I could write an entire book while applying to graduate school. My dad listened to my plans and offered encouragement, but also tried to gently temper my expectations by framing it as a good learning experience. I thought to myself: I can probably skip straight to the writing a great book part.

Years later (still without a book in hand), my dad reminded me that we can write best about the things we’ve taken the time to master. But I’d been obsessed with mindfulness for a few years, so I was pretty sure I was ready.

Years later (still no book), my dad mentioned that his success as a writer was thanks to having spent years learning how to express ideas in simple language that anyone could understand. How hard could that be, I thought.

I wonder what it was like to watch through my dad’s eyes as I disregarded so much of his advice only to slowly and painfully learn the same lessons on my own. Will Ruby take the same path, ignoring my advice while I wait patiently for her to discover it?

Ten years after that dinner with my dad, the book is finally here. I can’t help but laugh thinking about the younger version of myself convinced I could easily crank it out in a year. Nothing about this book came quickly or easily. It emerged painstakingly, line by line, and only at the rate that I was willing to reexamine my own life based on the ideas I hoped to express.

My dad passed away before I even finished the first chapter. I wish he could read the book, but I think the fact that he won’t is an ironically happy consequence of my taking at least one piece of his advice. He would often work tirelessly on academic papers long past when his colleagues were ready to submit, often saying “I’m not proud of it yet.” Those words have echoed through my mind for years as I’ve worked to write something that I feel proud of—and that I hope he would be proud of too.

Maybe in the end we have to learn our own lessons, but I still think it helps to hear about each other’s. Although I didn’t intend for it to be, this book became a compilation of the most important lessons I’ve learned throughout my life. In one way or another, they all circle back to recognizing the power we have to use attention to shape what we experience and how we experience it. I’m persuaded this is among the most important yet unappreciated skills we can develop, and this book is a comprehensive guide for cultivating that skill and using it to improve your life.

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Something That's Good For Everything

The scientific literature on mindfulness is growing exponentially, with a new peer-reviewed article now published nearly every day. Mindfulness is evidently good for almost everything. It seems to improve our health, relationships, happiness, ability to think clearly, and dozens of other things that matter in our lives. How is this possible?

The far reaching relevance of mindfulness hinges on its ability to influence our attention. In any moment, there are countless things occurring in our environment, body, and mind. Attention acts as a filter so that we become consciously aware of only a tiny fraction of the things we could experience. When attention operates effectively, we become aware of the things that deserve further consideration while everything else slips past unnoticed.

This filtering of experience is true not only of what we see and hear, but also of what we think. We have vast storehouses of memories, all immediately available to fill the limited space of our conscious minds. Many things we could think about rarely if ever enter our minds. And of the nearly constant stream of thoughts that do arise, we elaborate and entertain only a small proportion.

Attention is a natural ability that allows each of us to navigate our environments and our lives. Attention accomplishes small wonders each time you drive or hold a conversation. Yet almost no one uses attention optimally. Can you focus on what you like, when you like, for however long you like? How might your life be different if you could more skillfully guide your moment-to-moment experience? Mindfulness uses attention to influence what we experience and how we relate to those experiences, so it has the potential to impact almost everything in our lives.

Changing one habit at a time is like pouring water into a leaky bucket

Conventional thinking about changing one’s behavior focuses on working on one thing at a time. This is also the way most science is done — manipulating just one thing and observing the effect. But real changes in people’s lives don’t occur in a vacuum. In a recent study we just published, we wanted to see how much change is possible if you help someone improve many dimensions of their life simultaneously.

It's often more effective to make two or more changes simultaneously, especially when those changes reinforce one another. It’s easier to drink less coffee if at the same time you get more sleep. Our intervention extended this logic by helping people make progress in many ways, which can create an upward spiral where one success supports the next.

We found parallel improvements in more than a dozen different outcomes that truly matter in our lives—strength, endurance, flexibility, focus, reading ability, working memory, self-esteem, happiness. Part of what distinguishes this work is finding such broad improvements across so many different domains, particularly given that the effect sizes were so large. Large effect sizes signify that the results were not only statistically significant but also indicative of substantial changes. Many of these effects were very large—larger than you tend to find in studies that focus on changing only one thing.

We predicted that the intervention would lead to substantial improvements in health, cognitive abilities, and well-being, but we didn’t know how long they would last. It seemed possible that some of the benefits wouldn’t extend beyond the training. So I was surprised that even without any contact and support, participants maintained significant improvements across all measures at the six-week follow up. In future studies we would like to see what happens six months or six years down the road. The best intervention would set someone on a whole new trajectory and help them reach a kind of escape velocity from the bad habits of their past.

Countless experts, coaches, and bloggers claim that the best way to change is one small habit at a time, maybe even taking a month to establish the habit before moving on to the next. I'm all for getting clear about your priorities, but if your habit for this month is taking a multivitamin when you wake up, then what are you doing the other 23h59m of your day? Because every moment counts.

Although the outcomes from this intervention were broad and substantial, I think it’s only a preview of what will ultimately be achieved through future interventions that draw on continual advances in science and technology. The true limits of cognitive and neural plasticity remain a mostly unexplored frontier of scientific understanding.

The Violence of Comparison is the Worst

When I was in high school, I read an article in a men’s magazine on how to most effectively compliment a woman. The advice was simple: tell her she is better than other people she knows. Tell her she is the most beautiful of all her friends. Tell her she has a better sense of style than anyone else in the office. As a young kid, I was impressed by the simplicity and power of this strategy—even if part of me knew that it looked ripe but was rotten inside. I started noticing these compliments everywhere. One night driving back from my girlfriend’s ballet performance, her mom told her that she was more poised than any of her friends on stage. I knew her friends, of course. I was glad they weren’t in the car.

Comparisons are usually made at someone’s expense, and I call this the violence of comparison. Even a heartfelt compliment can have unintended consequences when it is formed as a relative evaluation. When we want to offer someone a meaningful compliment, it is natural to want to tell them how much they stand out from others. After all, one of the most gratifying compliments to receive is being told that we are the best. These words speak to the part of each of us that needs reassurance and that thinks in terms of being better or worse than others. But when someone is the best, all others must be relatively worse. A compliment to one person can inadvertently be a criticism to many others. Even for the recipient, this kind of compliment can reinforce the tendency to think in terms of relative position—perpetuating the implicit belief that our value depends on being more or better than others.

Much of the time, the violence of comparison gets directed at ourselves. It shows up whenever we compare ourselves to those who have something we want. Unfortunately, this often means that the people who can teach and inspire us also tend to trigger our self-criticism. And the violence of comparison is especially pernicious because we can make highly selective comparisons to only certain aspects of another person. This was memorably illustrated to me by one woman’s experience in a yoga class. She would find the one person in the room with leaner arms and feel insecure by comparison. She would also find the one person in the room with a better downward facing dog. And the one with a more stylish outfit. In a room full of people, it’s easy to find at least one person with more flexible hamstrings. No big deal. Yet because these relative comparison are deeply ingrained in our thinking, we can get trapped in dissatisfaction anytime anyone has more than we do. If you hadn’t noticed, someone is always going to have more.

You Simply Cannot Focus on Your Breath for an Hour Without an Extremely Good Reason

Culadasa is a meditation teacher who recently published a compelling and systematic guidebook to meditation.  One important contribution of this book is its explanation of the link between meditation and motivation. It’s easy to see that meditation cultivates our skill in directing attention. This is important, yet it’s also not the whole picture. Meditation is also an opportunity to cultivate the various motivational forces governing our minds. In fact, progress in meditation depends crucially on working with motivation.

Consider the experience of watching an engaging film versus watching the breath. Many can direct unwavering attention to a film for two hours with minimal effort and yet struggle to pay attention to the breath for even two minutes. The film is captivating—artfully designed to unlock our intrinsic motivations and keep us rapt. As the product of years of effort and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars, a great film is an exception in a world that barely holds our attention at all. The breath, on the other hand, can seem rather boring. It’s easy enough to pay attention to the sensations of breathing for a few seconds, but it’s not long before we start to drift away.

Culadasa suggests that the natural tendency for attention to fluctuate is a product of evolution and diminishing marginal returns. To relate effectively to our environment, it helps to be aware of the many things occurring around us. After having focused your attention for a few seconds to the horizon, you’ve seen what there is to see for now. And so attention fluctuates between sights, sounds, tastes, scents, sensations, and thoughts—constantly updating our awareness of the world within and around us.  

For the mind to stay focused on the breath for an hour, it will need an extremely good reason. You have to provide it. Culadasa suggests a couple strategies that I wholeheartedly recommend:

First, take some time at the beginning of every meditation to recount your reasons for meditating.

Culadasa recommends that you embrace your reasons whatever they may be. I would go further to suggest that you should actively develop a compelling list of reasons. I use a process called associative conditioning where I reflect on all the most important ways I stand to gain from developing my meditation practice. In both the short and long-term, what joys and pleasures will arise? What pains and challenges will be avoided? Take some time outside of meditation to get very clear about all this. Ideally, you would craft and memorize a couple sentences that are imbued with all the excitement and emotion you can generate around meditation—then recite these to yourself every time you practice to reconnect with your conviction to practice wholeheartedly.

Second, stay attuned to the pleasure and joy of meditation.

Meditation is not always enjoyable, but it has produced some of the happiest moments of my life. The more effectively you practice, the more you enjoy it. The joy and calm you experience during meditation can then accelerate your progress. Not only do they encourage you to keep meditating, but the pleasure itself begins to naturally capture your attention. Ajahn Brahm describes this as the beautiful breath, which becomes so beautiful and enjoyable that you cannot help but pay attention to it. Noticing, embracing, and even fostering this enjoyment will help you cultivate a powerful motivation that will deepen your practice.