The film What the Bleep Do We Know!? presents research on water crystals that leaves the viewer saying “Wow!” The premise of the research is that thoughts and intentions (even those in writing) can affect the structure of water and that this structure can be revealed by taking photographs of the water while it is thawing after having been frozen. I showed this film recently in my Health Psychology Course, and one the students had a copy of the book The Hidden Messages in Water. After reading this book, I felt compelled to debrief my students and to encourage them to keep an open yet skeptical mind about the findings of the book. This book is not a scientific treatise. His methodology is spelled out in only the most general terms; a quick search on the Internet has not yielded any information on replication studies. Towards the end of this short book, he provides some important information about his methodology. He says “when water samples are put into Petri dishes – we usually make 50 samples – the resulting crystals differ, depending on how the water is handled and on the thoughts of the researcher. And the condition of the fifty samples of water changes moment by moment … For each of the fifty dishes, we make graphs showing the number of crystals in each dish that are considered beautiful, hexagon, incomplete, and so on. For each pattern, we establish a coefficient, and given number values to the crystals. This gives us a clear picture of the characteristics of the crystals in each individual sample, and we then can classify the samples into categories of beautiful, hexagon, and so forth. Then we choose one crystal to photograph that best represent the characteristics of that particular sample” Emoto assumes the truth that thoughts can influence the crystals, and was describing these methods in the context of the experiments where written words were taped to bottles of water and the effects observed. Revealing in this description is the apparent selection process that occurs. It is not clear that the selector of the most representative crystal is blind to the condition the water was exposed to. Not being blinded in this way, the observer can be biased on what is selected in a direction that confirms the working theory. This is a well-established principle in research methodology.
What you will find in the book are the ramblings of what sound like a sweet Japanese man who is trying to foster a spiritual approach to life. Since he believes thoughts can affect water and since human bodies are 70% water, it therefore supports the notion that our thoughts can be efficacious. He says “I believe I am also starting to see the way that people should live their lives.” His recommendation is to embrace love and gratitude because these form the most beautiful ice crystals. Such an approach to life does have scientific support, as studies in neuroscience have shown the brain function underlying positive and destructive emotions (stay tuned for future blog entries on the brain effects of mindfulness meditation). But this support does not refer to hidden effects on water. Unfortunately, by presenting his work as scientific, he takes potential advantage of the general population’s lack of scientific understanding. Without more emphasis on methodology (as any scientist would), he resorts to pseudoscience.
We can easily fool ourselves. Take for instance, his suggested experiment to intend thoughts towards clouds so that they will break up when we concentrate on them. I would encourage trying this experiment as well. Here is why this might appear to work – there is variation in the way the clouds move. As he suggests, it will take some time to hone your concentration so that the clouds appear to move from your intention. Therefore, we discard the failed attempts and pay attention to the apparent success. Let’s say it takes twenty trials to get one success. That is, after nineteen times of concentrating and the cloud not moving as intended, on the 20th time, it moves as we intended. Wow! Right? Not so fast. We are looking at a ratio of 1 in 20 or 5%. In science, it is recognized that sometimes an observed outcome will happen by chance. Therefore, in statistical analysis this randomness is taken into account, and something must demonstrate that the likelihood of it having occurred by chance is low. One standard is to say that the probability of chance occurrence should be less than 5%. This tells us that we should expect 1 observation out of 20 to look like it is a legitimate phenomenon when it is not (a chance occurrence). In order to do the cloud experiment properly, we would have to demonstrate that the clouds appear to move more often than would be predicted by chance. To do this, we must take into account all the times it does not work. This, by the way, is one way to explain other amazing-seeming coincidences. For example, you were just thinking about this friend and she calls, or you were just thinking about something and it is mentioned on the radio. We’ve all had these experiences. Maybe there is a disturbance in the morphic field that explains these phenomenon, or maybe we overlook the fact that each moment holds the possibility for such a revelation, and the vast majority of these moments yield no such coincidence. To read the occasional correspondence as significant, then, seems like a form of potential self-deception, similar to the clouds. Looked at statistically, asuccessful outcome one out of every tens of thousands of possibilities is just not that impressive. Our minds tend to collapse all the misses and dismiss them when the hit occur, striking in its prescience. I will try the cloud experiment, the next mild day when I can lay in the grass and apprehend the sky. I don’t want to be closed minded, and I will keep diligent track of my failures and try not to get too taken in with my triumphs.
He also presents a number of rather fantastic ideas such as the water on the earth arrived from an extraterrestrial source, and that “The human body requires the circulation of water, and we can conclude that this is what the universe also requires. If large volumes of water flow in only one direction, toward the earth, the circulation of water in the universe will ultimately come to a standstill.” Should we be worried about this? In fairness, Dr. Emoto has another book soon to be released, The True Power of Water, and I'll take a look at that when it is available
Tuesday, April 26, 2005
Saturday, April 16, 2005
Bloviated Rhetoric
In his magnum opus, Coming to Our Senses, Jon Kabat-Zinn cautions against “bloviated rhetoric” and offers an approach to living based in mindfulness. I hold a great deal of respect and affection for Jon Kabat-Zinn. I am part of a movement he founded, or perhaps it was the Buddha who founded this movement, some 2500 years ago. And it is not a movement at all. At least not in the typical sense we understand a movement to be. I first met Jon Kabat-Zinn in Boston during the summer of 1993. He spoke at a Harvard conference on mind-body medicine. What he said made perfect sense to me. I’d been meditating Vipassana for several years by then. Mindfulness-based stress reduction. Of course. Eight years later, I bumped into him again. Not him specifically, more accurately what he had set in motion – the Center For Mindfulness. By 2001, Jon had retired to work on Coming to Our Senses and continue to speak, write, and research about mindfulness. I did the Professional Internship Program at the Center For Mindfulness, and after this experience decided to take Exquisite Mind into the community, instead of just corporate environments. The following year, I attended the first annual Mindfulness in Healthcare, Medicine, and Society conference. While there, I had the chance to meditate and do yoga with Jon, and to speak with him briefly. I told him how I appreciated all that he has done, as did, I am sure, the hundreds of others in attendance at the conference. At some level, I understand him intuitively (after all we are fellow Jewbhus), and at another level, he is an enigma – solid and transparent at the very same time. He is that rare person who can eschew notoriety and maintain an impeccable presence. Very curious. Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) started as a demystified and stripped down, Worcester, Massachusetts version of the Buddha’s teachings. In the ensuing years since 1979, the sense that MBSR teaches dharma has become more accessible.
I went to Barnes & Noble one evening to purchase Coming to Our Senses. I didn’t expect it to be a tome – some 656 pages! I got intimidated and left the store empty handed (after all, look how many other books I already have cracked open). I just read the cliff notes version in an excellent article appearing in the Shambhala Sun.
Principle 5 of my 7 Principles of Applied Mindfulness comes directly from Jon and his example – teach what you can own. Jon taught by learning. He makes it very clear that in order to teach MBSR one should have a daily sitting practice and have sat at least two 10-day retreats. I have two such retreats under my belt (ignoring the fact that I kicked and screamed throughout each of the 20 days!). The Center For Mindfulness has not trademarked MBSR. I teach a version of it, as do hundreds of other professionals worldwide. And I suspect we each teach it with our own imprimatur. My imprimatur is the Strident Self (and future blog entries will be devoted to this important topic).
I went to Barnes & Noble one evening to purchase Coming to Our Senses. I didn’t expect it to be a tome – some 656 pages! I got intimidated and left the store empty handed (after all, look how many other books I already have cracked open). I just read the cliff notes version in an excellent article appearing in the Shambhala Sun.
Principle 5 of my 7 Principles of Applied Mindfulness comes directly from Jon and his example – teach what you can own. Jon taught by learning. He makes it very clear that in order to teach MBSR one should have a daily sitting practice and have sat at least two 10-day retreats. I have two such retreats under my belt (ignoring the fact that I kicked and screamed throughout each of the 20 days!). The Center For Mindfulness has not trademarked MBSR. I teach a version of it, as do hundreds of other professionals worldwide. And I suspect we each teach it with our own imprimatur. My imprimatur is the Strident Self (and future blog entries will be devoted to this important topic).
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Allow Me to Forgive You
My good friend and colleague, Dr. Sam Standard, lectured in both my Health Psychology course and Introduction to Clinical Psychology course at UVM yesterday. We heard about his dissertation research conducted while obtaining his Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology at Stanford. Forgiveness has been an underappreciated yet critical variable in health and self-perception. His research has shown the detrimental effects of not forgiving, or of being in a state of unforgivingness.
Forgiveness is not excusing, condoning, or letting the offender or situation off the hook. As Huston Smith said “it is not letting the past dictate the present.” This reminds me of the story of 2 Vietnam War POWs (recounted by Thich Nhat Hanh, I believe). At a reunion many years later, one veteran who had worked through a forgiveness process asked his POW companion, “have you forgiven our captors?” The other veteran said something to the effect of “I’ll never forgive them.” To which the forgiving veteran said, “then they still have you in prison.”
This imprisonment is more than psychological; it has measurable physiological effects. During one research protocol, subjects were asked to think about an event for which they had not forgiven. They did so for 5 minutes. For this mere 5 minutes worth of negative focus, they experienced an 8 to 12 hour climb in the stress hormone cortisol. Chronic cortisol activation leads to a host of health problems, as much research has identified. These effects include increased blood pressure, cholesterol, atherosclerosis, blood clotting, heart attack, suppression of the immune system, insulin resistance, loss of bone minerals, loss of muscle protein, and atrophy of brain cells. When we are focused on the unforgiveness narrative our heart variability resembles that of a person with advanced heart disease. However, a 5-minute heart-focused meditation (focusing a warm feeling in the region of the heart) creates a heart pattern that is markedly different (smooth as opposed to jagged).
The Stanford Forgiveness Project had subjects undergo a forgiveness intervention. The Stanford Forgiveness Project used a 3-step approach to creating and resolving grievances, which involved moving away from 1) taking events personally, 2) blaming others for our feeling overwhelmed (our rules being broken), and 3) creating the grievance narrative or story. This group-based mutltiweek intervention helps people to work through the process of being unforgiving to forgiving, drawing on cognitive behavioral principles. The steps involved in transforming a grievance included enhancing the ability to cope, which included working with physiological activation via relaxation, shifting rule-bound thoughts to preferences, and rewriting or retelling the grievance narrative. Measurable changes in stress physiology and negative affect were found for these subjects. Another forgiveness processs model (Worthington) involves recalling the original hurt, empathizing with the perspective of the transgressor, giving the altruistic gift of forgiveness (even if they don’t deserve it), making a public commitment to forgiveness, and then working to hold on to forgiveness.
While the forgiveness research does not explicitly refer to Buddhist philosophy, there exists a natural fit between forgiveness and mindfulness. Mindfulness meditation is a tool for managing physiological reactivity and automatic forms of narrative thinking, which are the two main components of the forgiveness intervention. Mindfulness helps us to become intimate with our thought patterns. This intimacy can help rules such as“people need to do what I expect ... or else!” yield to preferences, such as “I would prefer if people did what I expected, but I am not going to get bent out of shape about it if they don't.” To move into forgiveness we must let go of our suffering-inducing narratives of how we were hurt or wronged. One forgiveness researcher (Enright) defined forgiveness as “a willingness to abandon one’s right to resentment, negative judgment, and indifferent behavior toward one who unjustly hurt us, while fostering undeserved qualities of compassion, generosity and even love toward him or her.” This sounds like lovingkindness meditation! Sam notes that "mindfulness is a skillful means through which we can lay the foundation for cognitive restructuring. It provides the natural contrast medium so that we can better see the stridency of our rules for others. Plus, mindfulness of body allows one to literally feel unfogiveness, and to open to positive alternatives."
Forgiveness is not excusing, condoning, or letting the offender or situation off the hook. As Huston Smith said “it is not letting the past dictate the present.” This reminds me of the story of 2 Vietnam War POWs (recounted by Thich Nhat Hanh, I believe). At a reunion many years later, one veteran who had worked through a forgiveness process asked his POW companion, “have you forgiven our captors?” The other veteran said something to the effect of “I’ll never forgive them.” To which the forgiving veteran said, “then they still have you in prison.”
This imprisonment is more than psychological; it has measurable physiological effects. During one research protocol, subjects were asked to think about an event for which they had not forgiven. They did so for 5 minutes. For this mere 5 minutes worth of negative focus, they experienced an 8 to 12 hour climb in the stress hormone cortisol. Chronic cortisol activation leads to a host of health problems, as much research has identified. These effects include increased blood pressure, cholesterol, atherosclerosis, blood clotting, heart attack, suppression of the immune system, insulin resistance, loss of bone minerals, loss of muscle protein, and atrophy of brain cells. When we are focused on the unforgiveness narrative our heart variability resembles that of a person with advanced heart disease. However, a 5-minute heart-focused meditation (focusing a warm feeling in the region of the heart) creates a heart pattern that is markedly different (smooth as opposed to jagged).
The Stanford Forgiveness Project had subjects undergo a forgiveness intervention. The Stanford Forgiveness Project used a 3-step approach to creating and resolving grievances, which involved moving away from 1) taking events personally, 2) blaming others for our feeling overwhelmed (our rules being broken), and 3) creating the grievance narrative or story. This group-based mutltiweek intervention helps people to work through the process of being unforgiving to forgiving, drawing on cognitive behavioral principles. The steps involved in transforming a grievance included enhancing the ability to cope, which included working with physiological activation via relaxation, shifting rule-bound thoughts to preferences, and rewriting or retelling the grievance narrative. Measurable changes in stress physiology and negative affect were found for these subjects. Another forgiveness processs model (Worthington) involves recalling the original hurt, empathizing with the perspective of the transgressor, giving the altruistic gift of forgiveness (even if they don’t deserve it), making a public commitment to forgiveness, and then working to hold on to forgiveness.
While the forgiveness research does not explicitly refer to Buddhist philosophy, there exists a natural fit between forgiveness and mindfulness. Mindfulness meditation is a tool for managing physiological reactivity and automatic forms of narrative thinking, which are the two main components of the forgiveness intervention. Mindfulness helps us to become intimate with our thought patterns. This intimacy can help rules such as“people need to do what I expect ... or else!” yield to preferences, such as “I would prefer if people did what I expected, but I am not going to get bent out of shape about it if they don't.” To move into forgiveness we must let go of our suffering-inducing narratives of how we were hurt or wronged. One forgiveness researcher (Enright) defined forgiveness as “a willingness to abandon one’s right to resentment, negative judgment, and indifferent behavior toward one who unjustly hurt us, while fostering undeserved qualities of compassion, generosity and even love toward him or her.” This sounds like lovingkindness meditation! Sam notes that "mindfulness is a skillful means through which we can lay the foundation for cognitive restructuring. It provides the natural contrast medium so that we can better see the stridency of our rules for others. Plus, mindfulness of body allows one to literally feel unfogiveness, and to open to positive alternatives."
Monday, April 11, 2005
The Form of Meditation
Easter weekend I sat a 1-day Zen sesshin at the Shao Shan meditation center in East Calais, Vermont. Taihaku Gretchen Priest, who is an ordained Roshi in the Soto Zen tradition, founded the center and led the retreat. Shao Shan is a cozy practice center, built in the Japanese style. One interesting feature is that it does not have electricity. This appears to facilitate a very peaceful atmosphere. Most of my sitting practice has been in the Vipassana, Theravada Buddhist tradition, and I have done little in the Zen tradition. In Zen, the custom is to sit facing the wall with the eyes open gently and gazing at the wall. There is emphasis on the sitting posture -- erect with the fingers of the left hand resting over the right hand with palms facing the upwards, and the tips of the thumbs touching forming a bridge. There is a dignity and discipline to sitting in this way. We sat in cycles of 40 minutes sitting meditation followed by 10 minutes of walking. This is an atypical schedule. Most sesshins have 2.5 hour sitting intervals. The strict emphasis on form brings a different flavor to practice. I noticed that my seat -- the physical and psychological posture of sitting was more prominent. I recently read about a Zen practitioner named Tenkai (in the book, The God Gene). When asked what he does when he meditates, he said, “I sit.” When pressed for details, he again stated, “I sit.” Having sat in Zen, and experiencing the emphasis on form, I can understand this comment. Sitting and the seat (see “seat” in the explore mindfulness section) have an added meaning. Indeed, Taihaku provided little in the way of instructions or guidance throughout the day, with the exception of items of protocol and etiquette. I found this emphasis on form refreshing, and I have noticed a renewed emphasis on form in my daily sitting since the retreat. I always deemphasize the physical posture when teaching meditation to my patients and participants in mindfulness-based stress reduction classes. I have found that too rigid of an emphasis on external forms can make approaching initial practice forbidding. With experience though, putting energy into form can be facilitative. One evening after clinical practice, I was sitting in the studio alone. I usually sit in a half-lotus posture. This evening, I slipped into a full lotus and sat this way for nearly the entire 40 minutes I meditated. It was unusual to be so relaxed for so long in the full lotus.
Zen has two main branches: Soto and Rinzai. To simplify, Soto aims for a gradual awakening and Rinzai a more abrupt and sudden awakening. Rinzai more heavily relies on Koan practice and strict discipline such as being struck by a stick to remain awake and sitting erect through extended practice. There are close to 1 million pages on Zen to be found on the Internet, and any google search can keep you entertained for hours. To reach the Shao Shan Spiritual Practice Center, please call 802.456.7091. Taihaku will be in Japan during April and May, and there will be no programs. There is also a Zen Center in Shelburne Vermont.
Zen has two main branches: Soto and Rinzai. To simplify, Soto aims for a gradual awakening and Rinzai a more abrupt and sudden awakening. Rinzai more heavily relies on Koan practice and strict discipline such as being struck by a stick to remain awake and sitting erect through extended practice. There are close to 1 million pages on Zen to be found on the Internet, and any google search can keep you entertained for hours. To reach the Shao Shan Spiritual Practice Center, please call 802.456.7091. Taihaku will be in Japan during April and May, and there will be no programs. There is also a Zen Center in Shelburne Vermont.
Saturday, April 09, 2005
Greetings and Beginnings
Where to begin? At the beginning I suppose! And that beginning takes its start in the present moment. It is, perhaps, a wonderful thing that what I've been involved with for the past 22 years now has some cultural cache and even cliché connotation -- wherever you go, there you are ... I'd rather be here now ... ! I know very little about web logs or blogging. Despite my naivety, there is an intuitive appeal to this as a form of public journal keeping to disseminate the benefits of mindfulness, and as a motivation towards a writing commitment. I see the blog as an extension of the newsletter. The newsletter will continue with the blog serving as the source material. It is an exciting time for Exquisite Mind, and it seems like the right moment to venture out into the world to communicate in this way. I feel a certain gravity and responsibility for this project. I invite you to come to this space on a regular basis to read, reflect, and link in ways that will deepen your understanding of mindfulness and inspire action. I beg your patience with this venture, as it may take a while to find the rhythm of this medium, and for those inevitable days when a posting does not appear. I am excited for this to be a journey into mindfulness for myself and for everyone who honors me with their eyeballs and their attention for a few minutes each day.
What will you find on this blog? As with the newsletter, entries may have a themes related to incorporating mindfulness into daily life. There may be a poem, I've read or written that reflects this theme. I will present research articles I am reading on the effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions, and I will present excerpts from the books I am writing, and from books I am reading. The Blog library will be an expanding compendium of lists, links, and resources regarding this journey. Click below to see the blog library.
What will you find on this blog? As with the newsletter, entries may have a themes related to incorporating mindfulness into daily life. There may be a poem, I've read or written that reflects this theme. I will present research articles I am reading on the effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions, and I will present excerpts from the books I am writing, and from books I am reading. The Blog library will be an expanding compendium of lists, links, and resources regarding this journey. Click below to see the blog library.
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