What does my nervous system have to do with meditation? Or “Get this monkey off my back.”

Do you replay things in your mind that happened yesterday, last week, years ago? Or maybe you awaken in the night to rehearse what you will do if such-and-such happens in the future? If so, you know the effects of thoughts-gone-wild: muscle tension, headache, stomachache, anxiety, sleep disturbance, increased blood pressure, and more. The fight-or-flight chemicals that allowed cavemen to outrun saber-toothed tigers still surge today, with many of us able to do little more than hold on for dear life in the midst of our incessant mind chatter (aka “monkey mind”).

This is not helping.

Mindfulness practice involves dropping beneath monkey mind to simply be with things as they are; it’s a practice of “coming back” to what the moment actually entails. Do you remember home base in the game of hide-and-seek? “Coming back” during the practice of mindfulness is like making it to home base: we’re still in the game, but we’re relating to it from a totally different vantage point than from when we were hiding or running around trying to avoid being caught.

And avoiding being caught is so very natural for us; we’re hardwired to scan the environment for threats, and the nervous system supports us in this. When an event is perceived as a threat (whether that event is, say, being followed by someone in a dark alley or being belittled by someone in a business meeting), the autonomic nervous system (ANS) kicks it up a notch, releasing stress hormones into the bloodstream. The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) then responds by preparing us to fight, flee, or freeze. 

This is a brilliant system. If we are in fact being followed in a dark alley, we need increased heart rate, rapid breathing, more blood flow to the muscles, adrenaline rush, and so on; it’s time to run away! But in a business meeting? There’s the rub. We’re almost never in imminent danger, yet many of us are in a state of autonomic dysregulation, feeling as though our SNS switch is stuck in the “powered up” position. This can make it feel as though even when things are going okay, it’s certainly only a matter of time before the ball drops again.

I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened. 

                                                                                                            -Mark Twain

Enter mindfulness practice, which, again, allows us to return to the present moment. One practice of mindfulness involves coming back, again and again and again, to the sensation of breathing as a way to be present. This repeated coming back can be about as exciting as brushing our teeth at times. But just as our desire for good dental health keeps us brushing, the desire for good mind-body health can keep us practicing mindfulness meditation. With this return to the breath, we learn to return to the present moment, without the accompanying pain, anger, anxiety, depression, and myriad of other monkey mind outcomes. The parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS) can serve to return us to a sense of calm. 

A favorite "coming back" spot at Karme Choling, Vermont

Without this ability to come back, we have no choice but to continue to spin our story lines until we pop back to the moment by happenstance. Mindfulness meditation is the practice of attending to the moment fully and intentionally, not by happenstance. Unlimited choice exists in the little gap of clear-headedness that comes from realizing that we’re lost in thought, at which point we’re no longer lost at all. Of course we also have the choice to go right back to letting our story lines about past and future spin themselves and pull us around like puppets, but ideally we choose to stop thinking our life and get back to living it. 

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.

-Viktor Frankl

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This 12-minute video features a BBC correspondent who describes his initial skepticism at being asked to participate in an 8-week mindfulness course: “I was totally phobic about beards, sandals, incense, and anything to do with Eastern mysticism.” Hear how once he understands that these things have nothing to do with taking a mindfulness course (and that even Marines practice mindfulness), he takes the course and finds himself quite transformed (also see what his brain scan shows after he participates in the course). And hear a woman with chronic pain talk about what the practice of mindfulness does for her.

Challenge: See if you can identify the female reporter’s misunderstanding of what occurs during mindfulness practice (listen to what she says beginning at the 9:13 mark).