Even 20 years ago the old adage that “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” was widely held. However, the concept of neuroplasticity, that the brain is capable of changing in rather substantive ways throughout one’s life has exploded in this century. The thousands of studies on the effects of meditation have shown rather dramatic changes not only in behaviors but in the brains of many people.
In actuality, every choice we make changes our brain. However, this was known by people long before the concept of neuroplasticity.
Wisdom from many sources
There is a saying attributed to a Cherokee elder who tells her granddaughter that two wolves live inside of us: the wolf of hate and the wolf of love. When the granddaughter asks “which wolf wins,” the grandmother replies, “the wolf you feed."
Thich Nhat Hanh elaborates on this brief saying:
“Your mind is like a piece of land planted with many different kinds of seeds: seeds of joy, peace, mindfulness, understanding, and love; seeds of craving, anger, fear, hate, and forgetfulness. These wholesome and unwholesome seeds are always there, sleeping in the soil of your mind. The quality of your life depends on the seeds you water.
If you plant tomato seeds in your gardens, tomatoes will grow. Just so, if you water a seed of peace in your mind, peace will grow. When the seeds of happiness in you are watered, you will become happy. When the seed of anger in you is watered, you will become angry. The seeds that are watered frequently are those that will grow strong.”
The Rules for Being Human
This short essay comes from Cherie Carter-Scott.
1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it's yours to keep for the entire period.
2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time, informal school called life. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant and stupid.
3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial, error and experimentation. The "failed" experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that ultimately "work".
4. Lessons are repeated until they are learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can go on to the next lesson.
5. Learning lessons does not end. There is no part of life that doesn't contain it's lessons. If you're alive, there are still lessons to be learned.
6. "There" is no better than "here". When your "there" has become "here", you will simply obtain another "there" that will again look better than "here".
7. Other people are merely mirrors of you. You can not love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.
8. What you make of your life is up to you. The answers lie inside you; all you need to do is look, listen and trust. You have all the tools and resources you need—what you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.
9. When you are born, you will forget all of this. You can remember any time you wish.
Groundhog Day
The script for the movie Groundhog Day was written by a Zen Buddhist and is really about karma and choice. David Loy writes that “karma is not something the self has; it is what the sense of self becomes as it becomes entrenched in its roles. Habitual tendencies congeal into one’s character—and one ends up bound without a rope.” And we see Bill Murray being bound up by the rope until he 'learns his lesson" and then he becomes unbound.
The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay knew this phenomenon well: "It's not true that life is one damn thing after another -- it's one damn thing over and over."
How this works
The Buddha describe a cycle that we experience thousands of times every day. Bringing mindfulness to this cycle can unbind us. A visual depiction of this process is in a file called “A framework for the psychology of Buddhist meditation” in the RESOURCES file on my website.
The first five steps of this cycle happen almost simultaneously: (1) something happens, (2) we almost immediately identify/name what happened, (3) our minds label what happened as pleasant/unpleasant or neutral, (4) various thoughts/emotions/stories arise, and (5) almost instantly we feel the impulse to act. This happens in a flash.
An example: You are in the living room and your partner is cooking dinner, and you suddenly hear a crash. You quickly identify what it was: a dish or plate crashed to the floor. You don’t know what it is, but it’s not pleasant. You hear your partner yelling that it’s your fault for not putting the dishes away properly. You feel a rush of thoughts, emotions, and stories in your mind/heart. Depending on you and your relationship, you might feel the move to anger or defensiveness or you might feel the move to shame or apology. Then you act.
These first five steps happen in a flash:
(1) an event: a noise
(2) you need to identify it: something broke
(3) your feeling about it: uh oh, not good
(4) mental activity: anger, shame, compassion
(5) the impulse to action: defense, apology, compassion
In reality, your first opportunity for mindfulness is deciding how to respond. If you have fed the wolf of love, your response will be different than if you have fed the wolf of hate.
Responding instead of reacting
Victor Frankl once said: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Many meditation teachers have said that mindfulness enables the space between stimulus and response to become longer and longer. When the space is longer, we recognize that we often have many choices other than the one we might jump to as a result of our conditioning.
Neuroplasticity
What neuroscientists are finding is that when we choose the wolf of love, when we water the seeds of love, compassion, kindness, etc., our brains change in significant ways. Old habitual pathways fade and new pathways form and get stronger.
And it’s a process. Over my forty plus years of practicing mindfulness and meditation, I have found some of my less desirable old habits have changed dramatically and others have been slower to change.
To borrow from another poet:
"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
(When I remembered that space between stimulus and response),
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."