Page 26 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 94, No. 1 Fall 2013

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In Silicon Valley, where mindfulness – a.k.a. meditation
– training has become omnipresent over recent years,
the emphasis, such as in Google’s “Search Inside Your-
self” course for employees, is to introduce “the new
caffeine, the fuel that allegedly unlocks productivity
and creative bursts,” writes Noah Shachtman in the
July 2013 Wired magazine.
“These companies are doing more than simply seizing
on Buddhist practices,” Shachtman continues. “Entre-
preneurs and engineers are taking millennia-old traditions
and re-shaping them to fit the Valley’s goal-oriented,
data-driven, largely atheistic culture. Forget past lives;
never mind nirvana. The technology community of
Northern California wants return on its investment in
meditation. ‘All the woo-woo mystical stuff, that’s really
retrograde,’ says Kenneth Folk, an influential meditation
teacher in San Francisco.”
While Folk and others may demean the mystical tradi-
tion of meditation, peace, not productivity, is more the
purpose of mindfulness moments as practiced at a school
that celebrates in its central philosophy the possibility
of spiritual transcendence, or, as some would say, a direct
communication with God.
Morning Chapel, explains Dean Spencer, always begins
with a minute of silence, with everyone “focusing on their
breath, being present to each other.”
“When the organ stops,” Spencer says, “the community
breathes together. The idea is not to do, but to be.”
After a while, Spencer and his colleagues in the Chap-
laincy weren’t sure if the students wanted the ritual to
continue, and so they asked the question in a survey
about Chapel practices.
“The response was overwhelming,” Spencer says. “They
loved the moment to breathe.”
His classes also begin with a moment of silence, as a
student “starts the singing bowl,” a sort of bell with
origins in Tibetan Buddhism but which has come to be
used widely in the West for its gentle sound to initiate
and end meditation. “People are rushing from one thing
to another here,” Spencer says. “The silent moment gives
space for transition.”
Is meditation the same as prayer? Spencer’s answer
is a qualified yes, at least for him: “I think prayer is a
discerning of how God is present in the circumstances
of my life in this moment.”
Meditation, he says, “is a practice that
makes you aware of who you are,
where you are, why you are.”
Practicing mindfulness
allows for “paying atten-
tion to what’s actually
happening as you live
this human life,” says
Margaret Fletcher,
an SPS community
member who studied
with Kabat-Zinn and
now teaches mindfulness-based stress reduction at the
Center for Health Promotion at Concord Hospital.
Tanisha Ekerberg, a staff member in the Admission
Office, is among SPS adults who have taken the course
with Fletcher. “I sleep better, throughout the night,”
she says. “The stress of the pace of life – you don’t
notice that so much anymore. And everything’s more
enhanced.”
Having life more enhanced, though, can be threat-
ening. “We have habits to protect ourselves from
experiences that are painful,” Fletcher explains. “If
something doesn’t feel good, we develop ways of not
feeling what we’re experiencing.”
“But life has a spectrum from the sublime to the
utterly painful,” Fletcher says. And meditation can
help you “become honest with yourself, to be willing
to make space for your pain, which can be a cour-
ageous step.” The alternatives to acknowledg-
ing pain, she says, are too often negative or
even destructive – trying to numb the
pain with distractions, “maybe grav-
itating to drinking, overworking,
over-anything. Then the pain
won’t be tended to.”
Part of the problem, she
says, is that modern humans
have taken the very use-
ful reactions to physical
threats provided by the
brain’s amygdala – our
fight/flight/freeze re-
sponses – and adopted
them for emotional stress,
with accompanying rises in
respiration and heart rate, which
are unnecessary for the situation
and, over years, unhealthy. The ben-
efits of meditation, she says, are quan-
tifiable, with significant improvements
demonstrated in relief from pain, stress, and
depression, among other effects.
As one explanation of such improvement, Fletcher
points out, studies have shown that meditating can
change the brain’s structure over time. In the January
2011 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, re-
searchers reported on alterations they found in the
brains of participants in Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness
course. As The New York Times summarized the study:
“M.R.I. brain scans taken before and after the partici-
pants’ meditation regimen found increased gray matter
in the hippocampus, an area important for learning and
memory. The images also showed a reduction of gray
matter in the amygdala, a region connected to anxiety
and stress. A control group that did not practice medi-
tation showed no such changes.”
Margaret Fletcher’s husband, Bill, who teaches music
theory, composition, and voice at St. Paul’s, leads sessions
MINDFUL E-MAILING
Take three breaths after typing an
e-mail or Facebook message, look again,
imagine how other people might receive it,
visualizing both their mental and emotional
responses, and then alter it if necessary.
– from Google’s mindfulness training course
S–T
One simple pra
pause in a busy d
you are overw
irritated or preoc
S- Stop. Simply paus
T- Take a few sl
Noticing the sensatio
O- Observe with cur
feelings and b
P- Proceed
you were doing
space and