Nowadays, neuroscience states that thoughts and emotions are products of the mind, and that the mind is a function of the brain. What’s produced and created in the brain is actually recreated and made manifest directly on the body1 as a physical sensation or a symptom.
More specifically, anthropologically speaking, any particular symptom is a micro-narration of our internal disequilibrium. Hence, by listening to and learning our body language, we can understand what it has to tell us and bring to light the discomfort we have inside.
However, nowadays there’s little awareness (or none at all) of this language, and very often we don’t know how to “hear” or to understand it for that matter. The result is a deep sense of discomfort which we don’t seem to have the right tools to fix. Yet, spending our whole life inside our body, and being gifted with natural instincts as much as every other living being, we should be able to not only perceive the signals our body sends us but also understand what they mean and consequently how to act. Despite this, we seem to have completely forgotten how to “speak” this language at all.
But when did it happen? When did we lose this important ability that was so natural until only some time ago? Is there a way to recover it, or is it too late now?
Well, to understand what happened but, more importantly, to understand how to learn this language once again, we have to look to the past and let history teach us.
Everything started with Descartes.
Descartes, in his famous and paradigmatic phrase cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am), declared that our minds have power and sovereignty over all other parts of our existence (body, emotions, sensations, etc.). Over time, his theory gained great success, and it was embraced by society with the same level of conviction as that of the Earth being round or the existence of gravity. There was no doubt about it being true. This new way of looking at the human being and the human mind, however, made it possible for us to forget that, in truth, we are a holistic and integrated ensemble of mind, body and conscience. This is because Descartes, by separating the material world (res extensa) and the world of thoughts (res cogitans), led human beings to identify themselves with separations.
Indeed, his vision was founded on the idea that life on Earth was based on opposing dichotomous pairs (e.g., black and white, right and wrong, rich and poor, inside and outside) and that these pairs were absolute and vital. However, in truth, when we take these pairs for absolute truths and positions, without embracing the relativity of things and situations, we encounter great suffering. That’s because, as philosophies and disciplines that are much older than Descartes’ prove, virtue is in the middle.
Despite Descartes managing to persuade mankind of this unequivocal dualism, thanks to which we should be able to contain existence as a whole into given and ready categories and dismissing the uniqueness of life, there are techniques that are more than two-thousand years old that still provide physical proof that this way of seeing the world is highly negative and dangerous for our existence.
Legend says that the Buddha was the first to teach these techniques to monks. Today, it is known as Vipassana meditation, and it is a technique with which we can reach a focused, calm and open presence. Starting in India, this technique spread across the rest of the East, acquiring new names and characteristics, until finally becoming known as the vast range of practices, philosophies and disciplines that nowadays we call meditation and consciousness practices.
Through these practices, we learn to observe our mind’s processes with the intention of training our focus to come back to the present moment. This way, we manage to cease to identify ourselves with the processes and habitual thinking that our brain constantly suggests to us. This mental exercise is called disidentification.
Indeed, during our daily lives, we’re often stuck in the idle wanderings of our minds, and we believe ourselves to be the “movie” that our mind plays. So it’s said that we identify with our thoughts and our emotions, believing them to be the absolute truth of all things. Let’s make an example: if my mind tells me that “I’m a good for nothing” and I identify with this particular movie’s narrative, I’ll end up believing that it’s the truth, that I’m actually a good for nothing person. Hence, I’ll behave consequently with this conviction, for example, by not going to a job interview, not undertaking a certain type of career that would excite me so much, or not playing that sport that I love playing. In other words, letting this “story” determine my actions and my life.
In reality, that “movie” doesn’t exist here and now, but is instead the imaginary product of my mind that, because of a characteristic function, switches back and forth between the past and the future, generating a myriad of movies of all kinds.
Let’s be clear: this wandering of the mind, this going back and forth in the past and the future generating this myriad of movies (often incredibly sad and incredibly scary), is a very normal thing. It’s not a sign of a malfunctioning mind, nor of stupidity, all the contrary! It’s a characteristic function of the mind, which means it’s a mechanism that’s normal to be there, the same way that pumping is a characteristic function of your heart. Indeed, exactly like the heart beating, these movies often play without us even realising it.
But why does our brain act this way? Why does it play these movies?
When it developed, at the time of our cave ancestors, these “movies” helped us to stay alive. A potential bear at the bottom of the cave, or fear of being excluded from the tribe and being alone and starving, were all stories that the brain would constantly tell to Homo Sapiens to help him survive. Of course, nowadays these dangers don’t exist anymore, or at least not in the same form, but even in the most wealthy and least harmful societies, our brain keeps working as it has alway done because this is its way of functioning.
The difference is whether we believe these movies or not. Indeed, when we choose to pay attention to them, our mind’s thoughts become intrusive and generate a condition of suffering that, if pathological, leads to conditions such as depression or anxiety, and an ego that is not capable of carrying out its coordinating function.
When our minds wander constantly, we are living unconsciously, and therefore outside the present moment, and this leads us to carry out oscillating existences, living at the mercy of our moods, which really are “an ensemble of thoughts, emotions, physical sensations and impulses” linked tightly together and at times hard to distinguish.
And here meditative practices can help. Thanks to them we can train our conscious attention (which develops precisely during the meditative state), learning day after day how to “tame” the mind, and calm it.
This is because we learn to observe its processes and products, separate the complexity of thoughts, and identify the parts that compose them, hence reducing their strong emotional grip2.
But how can a practice like meditation have this kind of effect on the mind? The answer is to be sought, once again, in the way our brain functions.
The brain is the most important part of the nervous system: it constitutes just 2% of our body mass and consumes 25% of all the oxygen we breathe. It receives information from the external world, elaborates on it, stores it (if necessary), and fires off an answer3. This response is sent rapidly through the amygdala thanks to neurons, neurotransmitters and synapses.
The neuron is a functional unit of the nervous system: it is a “cell that is highly specialized to receive, elaborate and transmit information” to other neurons or muscular and glandular cells through chemical and electrical signals4.
To send information from one cell to the other, there are tiny chemical messengers known as neurotransmitters. The points of contact between each neuron occur at the synapses, where we store content that, in the long run, becomes our habits.
Within the range of the many habits we can develop during our lives, we identify as “unhealthy” those that are put into action as an automatic response to a situation that we recognize as a stressor, or a stressing agent, which is any situation that stimulates the organism to activate and enter into a state of stress.
The fundamental role is played by the amygdala, which is a bit like the inspector of the brain when it comes to threats. Putting it in very simple terms, this gland decides if something is a danger or not and, consequently, it sparks a series of neuronal “communications” that we just described, inviting the body to fight, fly or freeze, all in an effort to survive. In a nutshell, it’s the amygdala that decides whether to sound the red alarm.
Practically speaking, meditation teaches us to become aware of these reactions of the amygdala, allowing us to train our minds to not sound the alarm when there’s no need to, or to learn to recognize when an alarm has been given but without a good reason so that we can act differently from the way our body is inclined.
Indeed, as we said, thanks to contemplative practices, we learn to observe with ever-growing awareness the thoughts and emotions that determine our behaviours, thereby regaining our ability to choose whether to turn them into action or not.
But there’s more. If we stand as observers, we can also notice that when we live a situation mentally, we automatically evaluate it, often as right or wrong, precisely in relation to that survival instinct still so alive in our brains.
Let’s make a more concrete example: if the mind recalls an old, bad experience, we automatically worry that it will happen again in the future (stressor). So, the brain activates a response through the amygdala to either attack, freeze or flee, and then it produces an emotion (fear, rage, sadness) that manifests through a physical sensation (increased heart rate, shortness of breath, flushing of the skin, screaming and yelling). At this point, not distinguishing between an imaginary situation and a real one, we react.
Of course, as we’ve said, the brain imagines threats that, one might say, don’t exist anymore. Hence, what we perceive is not only an incredibly strong emotion and an often unbearable physical sensation, but also the need to calm this emotion and sensation. So, to switch off the physiologic activation of stress, what happens is an automatic reaction in the form of a maladaptive habit. This is a behavior such as biting our nails, compulsive eating, lighting up a cigarette, watching hours and hours of TV, or any similar action that goes to calm the stress activation and give us relief. However, in the long run, this unconscious process becomes chronic and takes the form of illnesses that emerge in places where the emotion had initially manifested, first as a sensation (i.e. the sensation that we must do something to calm the stress) and then as a symptom (biting our nails, smoking, and so on). What’s another example of a maladaptive habit that helps us to calm the stress caused by an absent mind, one that constantly tells us terrible stories about how everything is a threat, and to which, most importantly, we choose to believe? Buying things, especially if we don’t need them.
Indeed, our contemporary consumerist and capitalistic society has pushed mankind to cure the internal discomfort not through self-observation and self-awareness but through the consumption of goods, generating a massive increase in the production and consumption of products. As soon as the instant, though fleeting, sense of peace from our latest purchase has passed, it becomes lost in an exponential accumulation of ultimately wasted goods, all of which, in the end, do nothing to satisfy the inner void that led us to buy those things in the first place.
This is why purchasing items that we don’t need (sometimes even compulsively) is one of those unhealthy habits we develop to relieve stress. It’s not the object that we’re buying that gives us relief but rather the act of buying itself, one which follows a similar pathway of addiction, gratification and habituation to that of taking drugs. And we are truly not exaggerating!
Indeed, everything done with the intention of relieving the trio thought-emotion-sensation is a drug, because it’s the result of a coercive action that is done by our mind’s habit, a default behaviour in which the subject reacts by always repeating the same scheme instead of responding with a new action that could open other possibilities.
We often hear that “inside and outside are the same,” but what does that mean?
I’m going to ask you a question then: at this point, don’t you think that all this mental, emotional and physical pollution is the mirror of the pollution that we humans dump onto our society, our relations with others, our relationship with the Earth, or with material goods?
There’s no doubt really that a mental chaos and clutter (so an internal one) corresponds to material chaos and pollution (so an external one).
What’s more, all of this presents aggravating circumstances. This capitalistic drug relies on burdening the Planet’s ecosystem, especially the increased number of products that come from oil manufacturing. The single-use product paradigm, often made of plastic, gets imposed and reinforced, a paradigm which is linked to (and nourishes) a strongly individualistic social vision based on competitiveness, capitalization, and emotional disconnection from one another and the world.
By destroying the Planet, we’re destroying ourselves, for a reason that’s also very evident: we are a microcosmos connected to the Earth, which is itself the macrocosmos, and we depend on it.
At this moment, most of us are internally polluted due to paying attention to thoughts and emotions that lead to the creation of unhealthy habits, and instead of training new and healthy ones, we keep externally manifesting our old ones with strength. If, instead of practicing kindness, we practice its exact opposite, in the long run we’ll end up igniting a surge of negative emotions in those around us as well.
To manage these unhealthy habits, we put into action maladaptive behaviours and we consume ephemeral goods that we then unload onto the Earth reflecting our internal pollution outside.
Both our unhealthy habits and the many ephemeral goods that we continually purchase and immediately throw away are wasteful, highly polluting trash, especially if we leave them in a corner in the darkness of our minds and the world.
With meditation.
By meditating we can bring to light our unconscious parts, which cause behaviours of which we are unaware because they’re directed by the autopilot of the mind.
Bringing to light means to gain awareness and perception of our internal disequilibrium, and choosing to lead a healthy and harmonious life between the parts that compose mankind and humanity. But not only that.
Widening the concept of equilibrium, bringing to light also means to recognise again how the existence of we human beings alone doesn’t guarantee life for the future: indeed, our existence is strongly tied to that of the Earth and of all the living beings on it. We’re all related by an extremely tight bond of interdependence. A harmonious existence is the result of a balanced relationship between parts and it is the only way to succeed in living a healthy life.
If we think of our brain like a garden, what we do when we meditate is it to realize the presence of many plants – as well as the impossibility of eliminating them – and to constantly trim them so that they do not end up covering the whole space of our thoughts. At the same time, we nourish the more healthy seeds, like compassion, loving-kindness, gratitude, brotherhood, solidarity, allowing these qualities to blossom, becoming so pervasive that they also will begin to involve those around us.
by Jasmine Di Benedetto
Bibliography
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