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Happiness, 6.07 (V) Week 6, Video 7 - Motivational Obstacles To Mindfulness

6.07 (V) Week 6, Video 7 - Motivational Obstacles To Mindfulness

[MUSIC] Aloha my friend, and welcome back. In the last video, we discussed how it would be a shame if, despite all of this evidence showing the myriad ways in which mindfulness enhances our happiness levels, we fail to tap into the source within. So that's what we're going to do in the remaining few videos on mindfulness this week. That is, delve deeper into what it takes to practice mindfulness. I'm going to end the week with a particular type of mindfulness practice that my friend who invented it, his name is Vijay Bhat, calls presence practice. But before we get to that practice, let me first discuss some typical misconceptions that many of us harbor about mindfulness. Just like the negative misconceptions about happiness that I talked about in week one, these negative misconceptions about mindfulness makes us devalue the practice, and therefore, it prevents us from embarking upon it. In this video, I wanna focus on what I call motivational obstacles to mindfulness. As a result of these obstacles, many of us aren't motivated to start a mindfulness practice. First motivational obstacle, is that mindfulness is unscientific. That is, many of us believe that mindfulness is too woo. Hopefully, the discussion so far has dispelled this myth. As we have seen, mindfulness is merely an attempt to see reality, whether it is the reality inside your mind, your gate, or the reality outside of you, as it is emerging, without judging, commenting or clinging to any of it. That is, as I mentioned earlier, mindfulness is the attempt to connect with reality in a disinterestedly interested fashion. That is, without perceiving it through the filter of our mind. What can be more scientific than that? The only person who would find it woo-woo is one who's convinced that he already has a very accurate picture of reality and sees things exactly as they are. Such a person, in my opinion, hasn't really had a rich enough set of experiences to realize that the mind can be very deceptive. There are many studies, of course, which show how the mind can be deceptive, but here's a quick example first. Although we literally can't see what's in our blind spot, the spot in a visual field where some nerves connect to the retina, our brain fills in this gap, but you wouldn't know this from your experience. Likewise, as a variety of finding show, we are programmed to see patterns, even if they don't actually exist, leading us to infer meaning into totally random events. For example, many people saw a devil in the smoke of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Similarly, many of us are convinced that basketball players, as well as other sports people, go through this so called hot hands and cold hands, even when the player's performance is merely going through random cycles. Tom Gilovich, the psychologist from Cornell that I interviewed in the second week, even has a book on this topic called, How We Know What Isn't So. I highly recommend this book, by the way, if you believe that you see reality exactly as it is. What these studies show is that, to assume that whatever we believe in is the truth, and the only truth, is not to be aware of a major source of delusion, our mind. This is not to say that the mind is always delusional, it always deludes us. Rather it is to say that if a person unquestioningly accepts everything that his mind says, he won't be able to tell when his mind is deluding him from when it is not. On a related note, another objection that some people have to mindfulness, that it's a Buddhist practice or a Hindu practice. But ask yourself, is it only Buddhists or Hindus who have goals and thoughts and feelings? And are only Buddhists and Hindus privileged to observe things in a disinterestedly interested fashion. To me, mindfulness is no more Buddhist than say, singing in harmony, as the Benedictine monks do, as Christian. And if you deny yourself the opportunity to engage in mindfulness because you feel it's not your religion, then I think you're denying yourself a very powerful source of well-being by being closed-minded to that practice. Let me move on to the second objection to mindfulness that many people appear to harbor. Which is that the practice of mindfulness will make them soft and weak. One moment, they're practicing mindfulness, and the next moment, they're sentimental softies, addicted to the likes of Oprah and Chopra, spouting inane things like, make love not war, bro. Dan Harris, the ABC anchorman, makes this point really eloquently and humorously, by the way, in his book 10% Happier. I highly recommend the book, if you're looking for a good read on the topic. Now, as I discussed in the previous video, there is truth to the idea that the practice of mindfulness will make you more kind and compassionate. However, that doesn't mean that it's gonna make you soft and weak. Unless you equate being kind and compassionate to being soft and weak, which unfortunately, many of us do. This idea that being compassionate, or more generally, actually being ethical, makes people soft and weak seems quite firmly lodged in many people's heads. This is why many of us think that ethical products, for example products that are made out of biodegradable stuff, can't be as strong or as effective as my co-authors and I showed in a series of studies in the paper that you now see on your screen. But the truth is, it's possible to be both compassionate and strong. In fact, some of the world's most well respected leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, or Mandela, Mother Theresa, or Martin Luther King, are all the epitome of both strength and compassion. But maybe all of those examples won't convince you, so consider this. Even the US Army is exploring how mindfulness can benefit its soldiers. As you will hear from this short clip that I'm gonna play for you now. There is evidence that mindfulness training can help soldiers become sharper on the battlefield, and therefore, help them make better decisions. You'll first hear Ameeshee Zar who is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Miami talk. And then you'll hear John Kavadsen, Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, and who many people credit with bringing mindfulness to the attention of researchers in the West. See how his concern, John Kavadsen's concern, with taking mindfulness to the quote unquote dark side, to the army was mitigated when he realized how it could help save lives. Here's the clip, listen. » In the project that we did with pre-deployment Marines, what we found was that getting this training, that Liz Stanley, the exceptional teacher that we had as a collaborator, offered, and doing as little as 12 minutes of practice a day actually helped these Marines keep their attention and working memory. This kind of added ability to pay attention over time, stable. If they practiced less than that, or didn't practice at all, or weren't offered the training, they all degraded in their functioning. So- » This is an important point actually, because I got into a big fight with Liz Stanley at some point because I was concerned that the meditation practice be misappropriated and used to actually create better killers. The usual thing is like, okay, would a mindful sniper be a better sniper, do you know what I'm saying? And she convinced me that actually, it probably saves lives, rather than makes people into better killers. Because this working memory capacity, which doesn't degrade in the Marines, that's exactly what you want when you're in a counter-insurgency situation. Nobody's wearing uniforms and saying, hi, we're the enemy, we're over here, but these women and children over there, they're innocent. So you've got a very, very rapidly changing, completely terrifying situation, and if you have experienced some kind of mental training that can keep you grounded, that may make the difference between just killing the whole bunch of innocent people and holding your fire appropriately. And so they're, morally speaking, and I think its important to bring this up, and ethically speaking, it's important to understand that these are complex issues, but that the argument can be made, that it's certainly not that all of sudden we've gone over to the dark side and we're trying to train people to be better killers. » So, as you just saw, even the military is using mindfulness to help soldiers make better decisions on the battleground. And you can bet that they wouldn't have dared to do this, if they feared that it would make the soldiers soft and weak. So why do we have this notion that mindfulness makes people soft and weak? One reason, as I said earlier, maybe because those who practice mindfulness become more compassionate and we mistakenly associate compassion with weakness. Another reason, which maybe actually more important one, and one to which Sam Harris alludes to in his book, Waking Up, has to do with the sort of people who take up the part of mindfulness. Often it is the people who can't quite cope with the stresses of life who turn to mindfulness. So we end up concluding that since it is the people who couldn't deal with stress who took up mindfulness, mindfulness must make people weak. So, in other words, we confuse the direction of causality to arrive at the wrong conclusion. So, to summarize the discussion in this video, many of us are reluctant to take up mindfulness because of two major misconceptions that we have about it. That it is unscientific, and that it will make us soft and weak, but as we have just seen, it is neither unscientific nor is there any merit to this idea that it will make us weak. So if you have been holding back on trying out mindfulness for either of these two reasons, hopefully you'll be less reluctant to try it out now. In the next video, I'm going to turn to some cognitive obstacles that keep us from trying out mindfulness. See you soon. [MUSIC]


6.07 (V) Week 6, Video 7 - Motivational Obstacles To Mindfulness

[MUSIC] Aloha my friend, and welcome back. In the last video, we discussed how it would be a shame if, despite all of this evidence showing the myriad ways in which mindfulness enhances our happiness levels, we fail to tap into the source within. So that's what we're going to do in the remaining few videos on mindfulness this week. That is, delve deeper into what it takes to practice mindfulness. I'm going to end the week with a particular type of mindfulness practice that my friend who invented it, his name is Vijay Bhat, calls presence practice. But before we get to that practice, let me first discuss some typical misconceptions that many of us harbor about mindfulness. Just like the negative misconceptions about happiness that I talked about in week one, these negative misconceptions about mindfulness makes us devalue the practice, and therefore, it prevents us from embarking upon it. In this video, I wanna focus on what I call motivational obstacles to mindfulness. As a result of these obstacles, many of us aren't motivated to start a mindfulness practice. First motivational obstacle, is that mindfulness is unscientific. That is, many of us believe that mindfulness is too woo. Hopefully, the discussion so far has dispelled this myth. As we have seen, mindfulness is merely an attempt to see reality, whether it is the reality inside your mind, your gate, or the reality outside of you, as it is emerging, without judging, commenting or clinging to any of it. That is, as I mentioned earlier, mindfulness is the attempt to connect with reality in a disinterestedly interested fashion. That is, without perceiving it through the filter of our mind. What can be more scientific than that? The only person who would find it woo-woo is one who's convinced that he already has a very accurate picture of reality and sees things exactly as they are. Such a person, in my opinion, hasn't really had a rich enough set of experiences to realize that the mind can be very deceptive. There are many studies, of course, which show how the mind can be deceptive, but here's a quick example first. Although we literally can't see what's in our blind spot, the spot in a visual field where some nerves connect to the retina, our brain fills in this gap, but you wouldn't know this from your experience. Likewise, as a variety of finding show, we are programmed to see patterns, even if they don't actually exist, leading us to infer meaning into totally random events. For example, many people saw a devil in the smoke of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Similarly, many of us are convinced that basketball players, as well as other sports people, go through this so called hot hands and cold hands, even when the player's performance is merely going through random cycles. Tom Gilovich, the psychologist from Cornell that I interviewed in the second week, even has a book on this topic called, How We Know What Isn't So. I highly recommend this book, by the way, if you believe that you see reality exactly as it is. What these studies show is that, to assume that whatever we believe in is the truth, and the only truth, is not to be aware of a major source of delusion, our mind. This is not to say that the mind is always delusional, it always deludes us. Rather it is to say that if a person unquestioningly accepts everything that his mind says, he won't be able to tell when his mind is deluding him from when it is not. On a related note, another objection that some people have to mindfulness, that it's a Buddhist practice or a Hindu practice. But ask yourself, is it only Buddhists or Hindus who have goals and thoughts and feelings? And are only Buddhists and Hindus privileged to observe things in a disinterestedly interested fashion. To me, mindfulness is no more Buddhist than say, singing in harmony, as the Benedictine monks do, as Christian. And if you deny yourself the opportunity to engage in mindfulness because you feel it's not your religion, then I think you're denying yourself a very powerful source of well-being by being closed-minded to that practice. Let me move on to the second objection to mindfulness that many people appear to harbor. Which is that the practice of mindfulness will make them soft and weak. One moment, they're practicing mindfulness, and the next moment, they're sentimental softies, addicted to the likes of Oprah and Chopra, spouting inane things like, make love not war, bro. Dan Harris, the ABC anchorman, makes this point really eloquently and humorously, by the way, in his book 10% Happier. I highly recommend the book, if you're looking for a good read on the topic. Now, as I discussed in the previous video, there is truth to the idea that the practice of mindfulness will make you more kind and compassionate. However, that doesn't mean that it's gonna make you soft and weak. Unless you equate being kind and compassionate to being soft and weak, which unfortunately, many of us do. This idea that being compassionate, or more generally, actually being ethical, makes people soft and weak seems quite firmly lodged in many people's heads. This is why many of us think that ethical products, for example products that are made out of biodegradable stuff, can't be as strong or as effective as my co-authors and I showed in a series of studies in the paper that you now see on your screen. But the truth is, it's possible to be both compassionate and strong. In fact, some of the world's most well respected leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, or Mandela, Mother Theresa, or Martin Luther King, are all the epitome of both strength and compassion. But maybe all of those examples won't convince you, so consider this. Even the US Army is exploring how mindfulness can benefit its soldiers. As you will hear from this short clip that I'm gonna play for you now. There is evidence that mindfulness training can help soldiers become sharper on the battlefield, and therefore, help them make better decisions. You'll first hear Ameeshee Zar who is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Miami talk. And then you'll hear John Kavadsen, Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, and who many people credit with bringing mindfulness to the attention of researchers in the West. See how his concern, John Kavadsen's concern, with taking mindfulness to the quote unquote dark side, to the army was mitigated when he realized how it could help save lives. Here's the clip, listen. » In the project that we did with pre-deployment Marines, what we found was that getting this training, that Liz Stanley, the exceptional teacher that we had as a collaborator, offered, and doing as little as 12 minutes of practice a day actually helped these Marines keep their attention and working memory. This kind of added ability to pay attention over time, stable. If they practiced less than that, or didn't practice at all, or weren't offered the training, they all degraded in their functioning. So- » This is an important point actually, because I got into a big fight with Liz Stanley at some point because I was concerned that the meditation practice be misappropriated and used to actually create better killers. The usual thing is like, okay, would a mindful sniper be a better sniper, do you know what I'm saying? And she convinced me that actually, it probably saves lives, rather than makes people into better killers. Because this working memory capacity, which doesn't degrade in the Marines, that's exactly what you want when you're in a counter-insurgency situation. Nobody's wearing uniforms and saying, hi, we're the enemy, we're over here, but these women and children over there, they're innocent. So you've got a very, very rapidly changing, completely terrifying situation, and if you have experienced some kind of mental training that can keep you grounded, that may make the difference between just killing the whole bunch of innocent people and holding your fire appropriately. And so they're, morally speaking, and I think its important to bring this up, and ethically speaking, it's important to understand that these are complex issues, but that the argument can be made, that it's certainly not that all of sudden we've gone over to the dark side and we're trying to train people to be better killers. » So, as you just saw, even the military is using mindfulness to help soldiers make better decisions on the battleground. And you can bet that they wouldn't have dared to do this, if they feared that it would make the soldiers soft and weak. So why do we have this notion that mindfulness makes people soft and weak? One reason, as I said earlier, maybe because those who practice mindfulness become more compassionate and we mistakenly associate compassion with weakness. Another reason, which maybe actually more important one, and one to which Sam Harris alludes to in his book, Waking Up, has to do with the sort of people who take up the part of mindfulness. Often it is the people who can't quite cope with the stresses of life who turn to mindfulness. So we end up concluding that since it is the people who couldn't deal with stress who took up mindfulness, mindfulness must make people weak. So, in other words, we confuse the direction of causality to arrive at the wrong conclusion. So, to summarize the discussion in this video, many of us are reluctant to take up mindfulness because of two major misconceptions that we have about it. That it is unscientific, and that it will make us soft and weak, but as we have just seen, it is neither unscientific nor is there any merit to this idea that it will make us weak. So if you have been holding back on trying out mindfulness for either of these two reasons, hopefully you'll be less reluctant to try it out now. In the next video, I'm going to turn to some cognitive obstacles that keep us from trying out mindfulness. See you soon. [MUSIC]