True Meditation with Mingyur Rinpoche & Richard Davidson

thank you all so much and I want to thank Sauron and Jeff Weiner and Scot and Linkedin for all the inspiring work that you're doing and it was so wonderful to see the compassion Award winners and the fact that there is a compassion award is just we've come a long way and it's really heartening so it's just very auspicious to be here for that occasion we have a short session and in this session we hope to share a little bit about the science and practice of meditation and I thought we would begin by sharing a little bit about first how I met minge Rinpoche I met Meegeren Pichet in 1995 and this was at the meeting in Dharamsala India with His Holiness the Dalai Lama where the Dalai Lama grabbed me by the arm and said I want you to take the practices from our tradition turn them into a form that anybody can practice in to a more secular form investigate them with rigorous tools of modern science and if you find them to be valuable disseminate them widely and that has been my assignment for the rest of my life [Applause] so fortunately minggu rinpoche was there to hear his holiness and minge rinpoche at that time I think was 19 and was just beginning to teach in the West and one of the things that became very clear to us early on is that in order for this work to proceed we needed to work with practitioners who had some familiarity with Western culture and also who appreciated the role that science might play in promoting the more widespread distribution of these kinds of practices and beginning in around 2000 we turned our attention to this area in a major way and minge Rinpoche first came to our lab in Madison in 2002 and has made regular visits since then for which we are very deeply appreciative and when we first began this work we wanted to work with people like Ming your initiate because these were people who devoted literally at that time when Rinpoche was first in our lab we do this very detailed structured interview to estimate the number of lifetime hours of meditation practice and back in 2002 when we first tested minger and piche that number was about 62,000 hours and so we decided to start there because if we didn't see anything different in the brains of people who spent so many years cultivating their mind the likelihood of seeing things and more novice practitioners was not very hopeful so that's where we began and we did see some remarkable things very early on and they helped us to appreciate wisdom and compassion that themes that are so central to wisdom 2.0 into the convene today so with that is a little introduction maybe rimpau shake and you can say a little bit about about the collaboration and then perhaps lead us in a short practice to give us a little taste for what what this is that we're speaking about and then we can go back and forth for the rest of the time thank you thank you very much so I went to the laboratory 2002 and there's a lot of discussion about the meditation and science so what I found is there are three important things the first is neuro plasticity so twenty years before neuroscientist doesn't believe that brain has capable of change right so if you are born with unhappy then you have no hope rest of your life will be unhappy but then neuroplasticity says there's hope right can change and not only that now there's no Road Genesis neural pathways so there's a wonderful and in the meditation tradition we also talk about how our mind is pliable walkable through the meditation so everybody can transform there's nothing that witches cannot be transformed if we practice if we apply this meditation techniques and second thing is this transformation is not only for the mind become more happy but also it's a lot of physical benefit right so good for health and the third is so happy mind healthy body is good for life isn't it so that not particular from your research but I'm assuming so there was some wonderful anyway so how this meditative tradition we try to transform ourselves actually what vehicle is self transformation South antidote South liberation so we are not trying to use antidote something from outside actually the problem is solution so what we believe that we all have this basic goodness our true nature our true nature is wonderful awesome pure present calm and always there within us really but how many of your believed raise your hand oh good first time very select audience first time when I hear this from my I learned this from my father you know when I was nine years old I don't believe he said oh you have wonderful measure your nature is perfect I thought he is just sweet-talked you know that time I was having panic panic attacks I have panic when I was seven eight years old I was not happy and my father said oh you have this wonderful matter with you ah another you know another so we talked but then as I practice and try to connect with this what we call awareness compassion love wisdom which is within us all the time so once you try to connect with that then you can discover aha you know each time there's the aha so maybe I would like to introduce you awareness v1 so awareness meaning knowing how many of you can see my hand yeah so you know my him so there's awareness awareness meaning knows what you are thinking know so what you're doing what are you feeling what you are seeing that's all but that awareness is always together with thought feeling emotion memory so many things comes together but awareness itself is beyond awareness is not taught awareness not emotion emotion comes and goes when the emotion gone event is not gone so normally what vehicle awareness is like sky and the thought emotion is like cloud so cloud comes and goes normally what happened for us is we are lost in the cloud and we don't see the sky but the sky is there all the time even the sorry yeah even the sky is full of cloud dad fuzzy stone rim it doesn't change the nature of sky right so same as our awareness yeah so should I ask you some little exercise for your hand so please raise your hand so how many of you know you're raising him shake your hand okay there's awareness and how many of you feel there's a sensation in your pump cool sensation shake your hand okay there's also awareness warm sensation shake your hand as awareness and no sensation shake your hand there's also awareness awareness knows there's no sensation so now how many of you have pain here so that is awareness that's what we got unpleasant sensation so put your hand down how many of you feel relief there's also awareness so what we call pleasant sensation so for the awareness it doesn't matter cool warm no sensation or Pleasant unpleasant it doesn't matter so cool warm no sensation Pleasant unpleasant it's just like cloud they comes in awareness they are in the awareness that dissolved back to the wellness awareness always there okay so now we will do simple meditation technique which is okay which one okay I will ask you to choose two choice sound meditation and breathing meditation which one you like sound raise your hand breathing okay I think we don't have special Bell here but can you hear anything now you can hear right great so any so they have something yeah yeah good wonderful thank you okay so uh yeah thank you very much oh it's nice how many of you can hear the sound raise your hand mmm good good finished sound meditation [Applause] you understand oh no got it yeah awareness I asked you can you hear the sound or you all raise your hand right so this is our awareness very simple one way when the when the ear hear the sound your mind just listen so and you don't need to have special focus you know how I'm going to merit it on sound [Laughter] no need no matter what I call when you say no pizza you would think of pizza more isn't it so same thing for the meditation you don't have to block any talk you're just connected with awareness so listen to the sound and if you not forget the sound you can have pizza - pizza three pizza 10 piece that comes around you no problem and pizza with the sound not only pizza happy ok not happiest ok panic ok not penny ok penny with the sound joy with the sound just not forget the sound ok good so now we're going to practice this together so please keep your spine loosely straight and the relaxed muscles in your body and you can use the your back lay on the the a chair they got this yeah what do you want this they go back rest yeah whatever they're one you know you know what I mean right okay so now close your eyes so first we're going to set the intention now so you want to do this meditation actually that is the love that is the compassion you have this kind and care to yourself which is sometimes we are not realized so today record instead recognize that you have this compassion there that with you so appreciate that your own compassion and also normally we want to share this to our friends family coworkers so now said the intention that today I'm going to practise practise this meditation to benefit for others now please relax the muscles in your hat phase name shoulders back chest and stomach arm and legs and if you cannot relax okay allowed that you cannot relax when you allowed that you cannot relax that means you're relaxing now relaxes oh okay no releases okay and you don't know you're releasing or not also get these olá in the awareness and whatever sensation there in your body is okay pleasant okay unpleasant it's okay now please listen to sound [Music] [Music] and of course you cannot listen to sound too long that's okay you will forget again sound okay so okay that's totally normal [Music] [Music] [Music] now you can listen to any sound sound of air conditioned people are chatting outside coughing anything and when you listen to this sound maybe Pisa comes no problem Pizza to do this deadline oh I remember now normally I'm not remember now I meditate I remember as long as if you not forget the sound doesn't matter let them come let them go now please slowly open your eyes and just be your mind just let be as it is and now we're going to dedicate from this meditation whatever piece whatever recognition of awareness may this practice brings happiness to myself my friends my family coworkers and to the world may all beings peace may all beings be happy Oh can't finish Thank You Rinpoche ah so one of the really intriguing findings in scientific research on these practices relates to resilience and we think of resilience as how quickly a person can recover from adversity when you recover quickly you are more resilient and it turns out that we can measure this in really interesting and hard-nosed ways including measuring it in the brain measuring into the body and the speed with which a person recovers from adversity turns out to be a remarkably important predictor of all kinds of interesting things in recent data that we are working on this is in a very large national sample we find that for people in their 70s the speed with which they recover from adversity is a really robust predictor of longevity so it's not only psychological well-being but as Rinpoche was a leading alluding to earlier it actually affects our physical condition our physical health a second thing to point out here is when we're doing a practice like this and we are listening to sound at the same time we are aware in the background that pizza is coming into our mind or whatever else our monkey mind is generating we're cultivating something that scientists call meta awareness and met awareness is a kind of monitoring function of the mind and we know something about the brain mechanisms that are associated with meta awareness and met awareness is is knowing what our minds are doing and how many of you have had the experience of reading a book where you're actually reading each word on a page and you may read one page may read a second page and after a page or two you have no friggin idea what you've just read and and the moment we realize that is a moment of awakening a moment we're met awareness is present and so this quality of met awareness is we think really important for any kind of transformation and there's more and more evidence to suggest that the cultivation of met awareness will benefit many other kinds of skills because it's strengthening this really basic quality that everybody has but we don't recognize we have it and when we recognize that we can become more familiar with it we can nurture it and we can come back to it rest in it in a more spontaneous way so one of the really intriguing scientific studies that is relevant to this was done a number of years ago by a group of psychologists at Harvard this was done in the United States with several thousand people and what they did is they took advantage of the fact that most of us these days carry around smartphones and they texted people of course with their permission and asked them essentially three questions the first question is what are you doing right now and people had to check off from a list of activities what they were doing second question where is your mind right now is it focused on what you're doing or is it focused elsewhere and the third question is right at this moment how happy or unhappy are you right now and here's what they found the average American adult spends 47% of her or his waking life paying attention to what they're doing 47% of the time and when people are not paying attention to what they're doing they are significantly less happy even if what they're doing is kind of a mundane task of daily living and the title of this scientific paper is a wandering mind is an unhappy mind and this is I think really important and the kind of practice that we just did is a really simple practice that we can sprinkle through our everyday life to help nurture these capacities which as Rinpoche described we think are already there so to speak what we are so pulled by all this external information in our environment that we don't recognize that we don't bring our awareness to it and so it goes unnoticed so I want to now talk a little bit about a notion that Rinpoche spoke about earlier which we call innate basic goodness and we use this phrase innate basic goodness very intentionally to suggest that goodness and kindness and related characteristics very much are like the way scientists think about language we know that each of us is born with a capacity for language but in order for that capacity to be expressed we need to be raised in a normal linguistic community which nurtures that quality and there are case studies of children who are raised in the wild feral children they don't develop normal language and it may very well be the same with kindness and with compassion that these qualities are actually there from the start and this is one reason why the nurturing of these qualities may actually not be that difficult because we're recognizing an intrinsic part of our own minds and so what's the scientific evidence for this and let me just share a little bit of this this is a growing corpus of scientific evidence that really is fascinating it turns out that if a six-month-old baby is presented with a little scenario with puppets and in one case the puppets are behaving in a very warm-hearted and cooperative way and in a second case the puppets are behaving very selfishly and aggressively and then if you ask a six-month-old baby which it prefers now of course we have to figure out how to ask a six-month-old baby that question so there are a couple of ways we could do that one is if we're dealing with puppets we can actually and the puppets may look physically different in the way this has been done scientifically is the puppets simply have different colors and this has all been carefully randomized and control so it's not the color that's producing these effects I can promise you that if the baby is offered a puppet that was behaving in a warm-hearted way and a second puppet that was behaving in a selfish way which do you think the baby will reach for more than 90% of six-month-old babies reach for the puppet that was warm-hearted and cooperative and there are many other experiments in this same genre that suggests the same thing and we can use other methods to make inferences about the babies preference one of them is simply smiling if you look at the incidence and duration of smiling in the six-month-old babies that baby smile a lot more to the warm-hearted interaction compared to the interaction that was selfish and aggressive and you know it's kind of obvious all of you come to a meeting like this you wouldn't come to a an event which taught you how to become more angry it's a part of our nature we we all have a wish to be happy and to be free of suffering and one of the things that we discovered when Dan Goleman and I wrote the book altered traits and we surveyed the scientific literature on meditation one of the things that was quite striking when we looked at the data in aggregate is that practices that are designed to nurture this kind of basic goodness turn out to produce impact on behavior and on physiology much more quickly than simple quote mindfulness practices and it may be because this basic goodness is really so innate and very much a part of who we are and it doesn't take that much to nurture these qualities and if we do this on a regular basis we can really recognize this feature of our minds and it becomes more familiar and available more spontaneously so maybe now we can ask grandpa Shea to say a little bit more about basic goodness and perhaps lead us in a practice that helps us recognize this we need rim fishes microphone on yeah okay good good yeah now basic goodness coming so normally what we call like awareness compassion love wisdom so these are the quality of colleges of the basic goodness and these are with us all the time so I already introduced you about the awareness right so mmm maybe we will do one examination examination of awareness okay so you will not fail because of the awareness so don't worry about the answer is correct or not correct so you can give whatever answer that you want to say you can say okay now how many of you recognize awareness raise your hand how many of you not recognized awareness raise your hand good how many of you maybe yes maybe no not sure raise your hand good so now I will give you the ah the great ever recall result yes resourceful answer the answer is hmm the answer is all of your past got it yeah how how possibly all of your past we are aware or whatever answer yeah so you answer if you answer no I know Rihanna's awareness it means you know right you know that you're not her own eyes so there is awareness and if you are confused maybe I recognize we have you know you know you're confused right so that is also awareness so for the awareness it doesn't matter you recognize you're not recognized you're confused or you're happy or you're not happy it doesn't matter all these are the clouds the awareness is transparent awareness not bloom - yes not a balloon - no not belong to convince it's free but the important is we need to connect with that awareness we have to recognize a brochure how to recognize a step-by-step practice so once first step one of the first step is listen to sound that we already did right then eventually you can recognize awareness through what you see smell test sensation thought emotion there in the end awareness be itself without support without focus be itself so there's step by step process so I hope you can do this in the future so now another things that I would like to say about the love and compassion that we all have this love in a compassion right so how many of you agree that raise your hand and not agree that raise your hand and maybe yes maybe no so all of this our love and compassion if you answer yes also coming from loving compassion if you answer no also coming from loving compassion if you understand maybe maybe not also loving compassion so what is love love is looking for something looking for happiness looking for good genuine nice meaning so that is Allah and compassion is wanting to free from problem free from suffering free from obstacle so that is compassion actually these two are just one size of no true size what you call two sides of one point two sides of the same coin true size of same coin thank you but this basic motivation basic feeling with us all the time isn't it yes or no it doesn't matter the gravity is always there whether you believe or not so I see that you are here you know some of you do like this if someone you don't like so when you do like this and front there's another person comes you cannot see the speaker as cause of suffering you know like this or happy a little bit and suddenly this person like each movement is looking for happiness to avoid the suffering to free from problem so your movement your easy eyes blink your breath always looking for happiness to avoid suffering so basic fundamental nature with us is this love and compassion with all the time so we need to recognize that so maybe we're going to do simple practice together that please everyone I keep your spine loosely straight and touch your both feet to the ground and close your eyes and remember that why you do this it's coming from love coming from compassion you came here all the way that you want to learn that means you care you have salt compassion appreciative and now close your eyes and feel the body and relaxed muscles in your body and you are allowing yourself try to relax that is low there is a compassion also so I appreciate that also now please people in this room all of us have some feeling like you looking for happiness every moment every breath and wanting to free from suffering so send your love and compassion to all the people in this room so breathe breathing in now breathing out send your love and compassion to all of us and breathe in receive love and compassion from all of us reading our send love and compassion breathing in receive love and compassion and you can expand not only in this world in this room in this hall in this town village city you can expand to the entire world reading I'll send your love and compassion to all beings reading in receive love and compassion from all beings may all beings be happy may all beings free from suffering now please slowly open your eyes and just be your mind rest as it is oh okay thank you so when human beings evolves on this planet we were not all brushing our teeth when we first started and everyone in this room and virtually every person on the planet spends a few minutes a day brushing their teeth because we recognize this is important for our personal physical hygiene if we spent even as short the time as we do brushing our teeth nurturing our mind in using a practice just like this this world would be a different place so please join us on this journey and let's change the world together thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Wisdom 2.0

Views: 57,607

Keywords: richard davidson, Mingyur Rinpoche, mindfulness, wisdom, compassion

Id: sJwwH5r1eOw

Length: 41min 40sec (2500 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 18 2020