When tested for resistance to pain, Zen meditation practitioners showed a higher pain threshold than non-meditators.
Researchers studied their brains in an MRI to see what was going on.¹
There are two sets brain regions that tend to work together. There’s the “experiential brain” — the areas of the brain that are involved in experiencing the world.
Then there’s the “evaluative brain,” which is constantly thinking about the past and future and giving a running commentary on everything that’s happening. All. The. Time. This is known as the “default mode network.” Or, “monkey mind.”
Normally these two sets of brain regions are strongly coupled. But meditation practice slowly trains the brain to decouple them.
When long-time practitioners were exposed to intense physical sensation, their experiential brain lit up even more strongly, while the evaluative brain, along with the areas associated with experiencing pain, remained quiet.
Think about this. They were more attentive to the sensation, while suffering from it less than others.
This held for emotional pain, too. They brought more awareness to the feelings while experiencing less pain or suffering from them.
This was seen only in experienced practitioners. When those relatively new to meditation (four days into their practice) were tested, they didn’t show the same degree of resilience.
And the relatively successful ones were using the exact opposite strategy: trying to block out the experience itself. They were avoiding / ignoring / distracting themselves from the experience.
Their brains had not yet developed the ability to decouple the experiential mind from the evaluative mind.
Long-term meditators show us one path to partaking of life more fully while feeling less anguish. This arises directly from developing the ability to quiet the monkey mind.
This is what Pema Chödrön meant when she said, “It isn’t what happens to us that causes us to suffer; it’s what we say to ourselves about what happens.”
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Previously Published on Medium
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