Why Can't I Stay Focused?!

In this episode of Dharma Lab, Cortland Dahl and Richard Davidson are joined by Center for Healthy Minds researchers Simon Goldberg, Polina Beloborodova, and Matt Hirshberg to examine the “shadow side” of meditation. When people report anxiety or other difficult experiences during practice, how can we tell whether meditation caused them? The group discusses what studies of meditation apps and mindfulness programs reveal, why intensive retreats are a different question, and how loneliness, support, and our expectations of practice shape what happens when we sit down to meditate. Enjoy!Watch on YouTube; Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.If these conversations are useful, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel.Referenced in this episode:Healthy Minds Program app — The free meditation app studied in the research discussed in this conversation.Beloborodova, P., et al. (2026). Prevalence and predictors of self-reported adverse experiences in digital meditation training: 2 randomized controlled trials. JMIR Mental Health, 13, e90602. https://doi.org/10.2196/90602Hirshberg, M. J., Goldberg, S. B., Rosenkranz, M., & Davidson, R. J. (2022). Prevalence of harm in mindfulness-based stress reduction. Psychological Medicine, 52(6), 1080–1088. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291720002834Baer, R. A. (2003). Mindfulness training as a clinical intervention: A conceptual and empirical review. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 10(2), 125–143. https://doi.org/10.1093/clipsy.bpg015Episode Field Guide with FlashcardsUpcoming Events:* The Restless Mind — November: A gifted online week from Dharma Lab and ServiceSpace, November 14–21, exploring how to meet everyday stress, distraction, and overwhelm with greater clarity and ease. Bringing together ancient wisdom and modern neuroscience, the week features leading contemplatives and researchers including Robert Sapolsky, Laurie Santos, Mingyur Rinpoche, Judson Brewer, Sharon Salzberg, Martin Picard, Cortland Dahl, and Richard Davidson.Learn more / registerIn This Episode:00:00 Intro - The Shadow Side of Meditation01:32 Meet the Researchers03:17 Why Study Meditation’s Side Effects?06:12 Difficult Experiences vs. Harmful Effects14:48 More Anxiety, or More Awareness?15:55 Loneliness and Social Support19:26 When Difficult Practice Can Be Helpful22:19 How Common Are Negative Experiences?26:40 What Controlled Studies Reveal30:24 Is Meditation Right for Everyone?34:07 What the Research May Be Missing35:51 When Practice Feels Like It’s Going Backwards39:55 Self-Compassion and Knowing When to Step Back41:00 How Expectations Shape MeditationWritten transcript for those who prefer to readLightly edited for readability from the supplied edited transcript. Chapter timestamps follow the edited recording, including the opening teaser. Spoken claims and figures are retained as stated.00:00 Intro - The Shadow Side of MeditationCort: There have been a lot of headlines coming out of a lot of the research that’s happened over the years about a supposed dark side to meditation. Does meditation put us at risk for difficult mental, emotional, perhaps even physical experiences?Polina: We found in this paper that about 30% of the participants across both of our studies did have some sort of negative experiences during their meditation training. Again, these may not have been caused by meditation training, but have been subjectively attributed by participants to the meditation training.Matt: What’s the view that people bring to meditation? What’s the conceptual understanding of what meditation is supposed to do? Because if your motivation is to not feel sad, and you believe meditation should be the absence of sadness, and you experience sadness in meditation, then your subjective experience of that is going to be very different than someone who feels like, “Well, my motivation is to train the mind and develop equanimity. And I expect that anything that can arise will arise in meditation.”And so when sadness arises, then, like you said, Cort, like people have just reflected, that actually might be an invitation to develop that equanimity.01:32 Meet the ResearchersCort: Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Dharma Lab. I am Cortland Dahl, your co-host, along with world-renowned neuroscientist Dr. Richard Davidson, who many of you probably know. We are here to have a really important and what I think will be a very interesting discussion about the shadow side of meditation.There have been a lot of headlines coming out of a lot of the research that’s happened over the years about a supposed dark side to meditation. Does meditation put us at risk for difficult mental, emotional, perhaps even physical experiences?This has been a major topic of research, including the research that we’ve done at the Center for Healthy Minds. So we’re going to unpack that a little bit. What does the science really say? There are actually some very surprising and even counterintuitive findings here, and we have an all-star panel to have this discussion.Here joining Richie and me are Polina Beloborodova, who is a social psychologist and a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Healthy Minds. We’ve also got Simon Goldberg. He’s an associate professor in counseling psychology at UW–Madison, also one of our colleagues at the Center for Healthy Minds. And finally, Matt Hirshberg, another colleague from the Center for Healthy Minds and a research assistant professor at the Center.All three of our colleagues, in addition, of course, to Richie, are some of the leading researchers on this topic. So, Richie, why don’t I turn it over to you? Maybe you could provide a little bit of context. Why is this even on the map of scientific research? And then we can dive into the specific paper that was published recently and some of what we’ve learned.03:17 Why Study Meditation’s Side Effects?Richie: Meditation and related practices today are being used in a wide range of contexts, one of which is with individuals with elevated rates of depression and anxiety and other kinds of psychiatric issues. Whenever we are dealing with interventions, particularly when they’re applied to patient populations, in addition to looking at the beneficial outcomes, we always want to monitor for side effects, if you will.This is something that is true of really all areas of clinical science, whether it’s a medication trial for a physical disease or a behavioral intervention for a psychiatric problem. We really need to, as researchers, be attentive to the possibility that, of course, although our motivation in utilizing these interventions is to benefit people, there are times when the interventions that we’re working with can actually either not have much effect or potentially even produce harm.It’s our obligation and responsibility to carefully and honestly characterize these potential side effects and publish them so that we can be alert to these possible dangers. Of course, one of the most important issues is: Can we predict who might be likely to have a possible negative effect and, in that way, ameliorate the possibility up front, if you will, so that we can tailor the interventions more specifically to those who are most likely to actually have benefit?So that’s the broad framing. In the area of meditation, there have been a number of scientists at very respectable institutions who have published some observations about possible negative side effects. It underscores the importance of taking this seriously, and this is something that we at the Center for Healthy Minds have been doing for quite some time. We really have the all-star team here.I’d like to first turn it over to Polina, who has published a very recent paper. She’s the first author of this paper on potential adverse experiences associated with digital forms of meditation training, something that has not been extensively examined in the past. So, Polina, please tell us what you found and give us some insights about … This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dharmalab.co/subscribe

We often think of gratitude as a response to something good happening. But it’s also a skill we can practice.In this episode of Dharma Lab, Cortland Dahl and Richie Davidson explore how to notice and savor everyday moments of gratitude, and extend that appreciation to people we find difficult. They discuss research by psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky and her colleagues on why writing a gratitude letter can be especially powerful, and share small practices they use in their own lives.Enjoy!Sources:Regan, A., Walsh, L. C., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2023). Are Some Ways of Expressing Gratitude More Beneficial Than Others? Results From a Randomized Controlled Experiment. Affective Science, 4(1), 72–81. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-022-00160-3Watch on YouTube; Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.If these conversations are useful, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel.Episode Companion Flashcards:Upcoming Events:* The Restless Mind — November: A gifted online week from Dharma Lab and ServiceSpace, November 14–21, exploring how to meet everyday stress, distraction, and overwhelm with greater clarity and ease. Bringing together ancient wisdom and modern neuroscience, the week features leading contemplatives and researchers including Robert Sapolsky, Laurie Santos, Mingyur Rinpoche, Judson Brewer, Sharon Salzberg, Martin Picard, Cortland Dahl, and Richard Davidson.Learn more / registerIn This Episode:00:00 — Gratitude Is a Skill: A Preview01:12 — Welcome: A Celebration of Richie03:16 — What It Feels Like to Receive Gratitude07:56 — How Gratitude Spreads10:10 — Making Space for Appreciation11:16 — The Science of Training Gratitude13:57 — Why Writing a Gratitude Letter Helps15:12 — How to Practice: Start Where It’s Easy18:09 — Everyday Gratitude: A Moment with a Stranger19:54 — Recognizing and Savoring Gratitude22:22 — What Happens in the Brain?24:40 — The Insula and Feeling Gratitude in the Body27:11 — Why Expressing Gratitude Benefits You, Too28:56 — Intentional Practice: What Science Has Yet to Establish30:56 — Extending Gratitude Beyond Your Inner Circle32:19 — Gratitude Toward Difficult People36:10 — Richie’s Practice: Appreciation, Emails, and Constructive Feedback40:03 — Cort’s Practice: Finding Appreciation in Ordinary Things41:53 — Three Things: A Gratitude Ritual Before Bed43:11 — Closing GratitudeWritten transcript for those who prefer to read:00:00 — Gratitude Is a Skill: A PreviewRichie: Her work really convincingly shows that gratitude can be trained, that you can improve this by engaging in various intentional exercises to cultivate gratitude. And when you do that, it improves well-being more generally.Cort: The thing that I’ll always remember is an instruction I got from Mingyur Rinpoche. When he was teaching appreciation as a meditative practice, he was talking about these very mundane things. Like you can even start with yourself, just appreciate the fact that you brush your teeth, appreciate that you got out of bed in the morning. And I thought, “Rinpoche, come on.” It felt so mundane. I wanted some mind-blowing, transcendent experience or something.Cort: But when I practiced it, I realized actually that is precisely the power of it, because then it is everywhere. If you just get used to noticing that, that is the profundity of it. It’s just that it’s all around you.01:12 — Welcome: A Celebration of RichieCort: Welcome everyone to another episode of Dharma Lab. I am Cortland Dahl, your host, along with my co-host and dear friend and Dharma brother and world-renowned neuroscientist, Dr. Richie Davidson. Today we would talk about appreciation and gratitude, which is a very, very timely topic for us because we just came off a couple days where I would say in my entire life, actually, I’ve never had a few days that were so infused with gratitude. And the cause for that was Richie, actually. Some students of Richie from decades back made a plan actually years ago. I got an email actually two years ago, with a save the date for a celebration of Richie and his career and his life by some people who have been working with him for decades.Cort: And this culminated in these few days where we really were just sharing both our own lives and our own experience, but especially the many, many ways that we have all had our lives transformed and been benefited by you, Richie. So I’m kind of putting you on the spot here because it was also quite unique for you. You basically had three days or a few days, two or three days of just endlessly receiving the gratitude of others. And it was amazing. I’ve never experienced anything like this. I can’t imagine what it was like for you, Richie. But it was the kind of thing that I think a few of us were talking after the fact.Cort: Unfortunately, it’s the kind of thing that oftentimes only happens when somebody’s passed away, strangely. We oftentimes don’t say the things until, it’s sort of too late. And this was just a beautiful example where we didn’t wait. We took that opportunity to share the gratitude we all feel for you. And so maybe Richie, I’ll just start with what it was like for you to be on the receiving end of that and what your experience of this was.03:16 — What It Feels Like to Receive GratitudeRichie: Yeah, I mean it was humbling and a bit overwhelming at times. There was on Friday a three-and-a-half-hour data blitz where 26 of my former trainees, either graduate students or postdocs or collaborators, each gave seven-minute talks and talked about how their current work was influenced by the time they were in our center or lab. And I was asked to give some remarks. At the end, and I got up there, and I certainly wasn’t planning on this, but I just burst out crying. And really it took a while for me to gain my composure, but I just felt a deep sense of gratitude toward them for all they’re doing and for carrying on.Richie: This work and a kind of hopefully not an arrogant pride but a quiet pride in the work that they’re doing. I was really proud of them for all they’re doing and many of these people are doing cutting edge science that is really of great benefit to humanity. I have no doubt that the world is much better for their presence. It was so deeply moving to me people came from China, from Europe, from Mexico, from really all over the world I was just so incredibly touched You know, I think that there’s a community that was formed and I think all of us really felt that sense of community and one of the people who was there who was so close to me and I’ve known her for forty years was Roshi Joan Halifax.Richie: And for those of you who know something about Roshi, you’ll know what I’m talking about. For those of you who don’t, Roshi is someone who brings her practice to the world, to everyday life. And really has a very, very palpable, deep ethical core that you feel. That she brings to the work she’s done with people who are dying, with people who are incarcerated with people who have been living in adversity, who’ve been unfortunate victims of natural disasters, and the list goes on. And she is an embodiment of that and it was so beautiful to share this with her and with so many others.Richie : So yeah, I’m still feeling very much these ripples and people who weren’t there who couldn’t make it have been sending me videos. I just got one from Angela Duckworth like five minutes ago. Really beautiful. Recounting a very specific instance which I don’t remember honestly of an interaction between us and it was a beautiful interaction you know, from her description I can feel it. So I just truly feel very blessed and I’ll end here. I feel that all of this I think gave each of us a taste of the power of gratitude because we all felt that this was something that contributed to our collective flourishing.Richie : And I think it’s fair to say that everyone who participated in these three days of events they just their heart was really open and we all were incredibly connected, even those who were meeting… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dharmalab.co/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.dharmalab.coWhat happens to our drive when we stop looking to the next achievement for fulfillment?In our latest AMA, Cortland Dahl explores topics such as how to widen awareness when the mind feels contracted, why the motivation behind a practice matters, and how compassion can become the energy behind an engaged, creative life. Kim brought your questions, and Cort joined us for the hour while Richie was traveling.What’s inside* Three ways to widen the aperture of awareness: the body, the breath, and the mind* Shamatha and loving-kindness: why the same technique can serve different purposes* Meditation, autism, and ADHD: promising research, unanswered questions, and strengths worth recognizing* Career ambition and the shift to a different source of motivation* What we know—and still don’t know—about consciousness* A 2-minute guided practice led by Cort* Practicing with death, impermanence, and the moments before sleepThe full hour mapped below, plus the flashcards and the recording for paid members.Companion Flashcards At BottomYou don’t have to turn ambition offAn anonymous listener asked how to balance “the false promise of desire” with career ambition. If Buddhism teaches being, are we supposed to stop progressing and find contentment in the job we already have?Cort looked to the people who have gone deepest into the practice of being. The teachers he knows are productive, creative, and engaged. Learning to be has not left them sitting on the couch.We are not losing the energy and drive in our life. What we’re doing is we’re changing the energy source.—Cortland DahlHe described the familiar mixture that powers a career: some care and purpose, some competition, some hope that success or status will finally make us feel fulfilled. Practice can change that mixture. We still need to make a living, and we can still want to accomplish things. But caring for our family, our community, and the wider world can become the driving force.There can be an awkward stretch in between. The old motivation has weakened before the new one feels fully available.It’s almost as though they’ve unplugged from the old energy source, but they’re just beginning to find the light socket for the new one.—Cortland DahlCort suggested learning about people who have navigated that transition. Their lives can help us recognize what a different motivation looks like in action. The energy may carry us further along our current path, or it may lead somewhere else.The moment before you start meditatingMary Beth asked what we are actually doing when we “widen the aperture,” and whether there are different ways to practice it.Cort offered three entry points. With the eyes, let attention include the edges of the visual field. With the breath, notice the release that comes with an exhale. With the mind, sit as though you are about to meditate, but haven’t started yet.You are a little more alert because you are getting ready. But you haven’t begun following the breath or running a technique. See whether you can remain in that small space of wakeful presence.So if that feels like nothing’s happening, that’s perfect.—Cortland DahlEven the thought “Am I doing it?” can show up. The invitation is to become familiar with being, without turning it into another task to perform correctly.Cort recommended short doses: five or ten seconds, then return to whatever you were doing. These little moments can happen during meditation or in the middle of the day. With repetition, the opening becomes more familiar.2-MINUTE PRACTICE LED BY CORTIn the recording, 01:25–03:042-minute practice: Wherever you are, if you’re sitting still, let your eyes close or remain gently open. Take a few slow, deep breaths and feel the breath moving in and out of your body. Allow the mind and body to settle. Then bring a little kindness and compassion into the moment. In words or images that resonate with you, form an intention that whatever good comes from this time might ripple outward—benefiting your own life, the people around you, and the wider world. Rest with that motivation for a few breaths.The full hour, mappedRead the gist below, then drop into the recording at any timestamp.01:25 — Begin with a compassionate motivation. Cort leads the opening micro-practice: settle with the breath, then imagine the good from this time rippling outward. He uses this pause before meetings and other activities throughout the day.03:49 — Three ways to widen the aperture. Mary Beth’s question opens a practical exploration of expansive awareness. Cort offers entry points through peripheral vision, the release of an exhale, and the shift from doing to being.09:15 — Before the doing starts. Imagine you are about to meditate, but haven’t begun. Notice the alertness already there. Nothing special needs to happen; try a few seconds, then return to your day.12:07 — Shamatha and loving-kindness. Maya asks whether these practices cultivate different capacities. Cort explains how loving-kindness can support absorptive concentration in some traditions, while others emphasize bringing kindness into everyday life. The motivation and purpose matter alongside the technique.19:08 — Meditation, autism, and ADHD. Brenda asks about different neurotypes and long-term practitioners. Cort describes the research as promising but preliminary, with short training periods and limited longer-term evidence.21:06 — Compared with what? Why a waitlist and an active comparison group answer different research questions. Cort explains why an intervention’s failure to outperform another treatment should not automatically be read as “nothing happened.”25:28 — Strengths deserve attention, too. Cort asks what research might discover by examining how practice supports neurodivergent strengths. After a listener flags his earlier language, he acknowledges the correction and returns to the strengths-focused spirit of his answer.27:46 — Awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. Rachel asks how these capacities relate to nervous system practices. Cort suggests thinking of them as possible ingredients across approaches, while emphasizing that he would need to know the specific method to say more.30:38 — Career ambition and a different energy source. Can we practice contentment and still want to progress? Cort explores the shift from pursuing fulfillment through success to working from compassion, care, and purpose—and the uncertain transition between them.37:24 — Does explaining the brain explain the mind? Dave’s question, prompted by Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop, leads into competing views of mind and matter. Cort argues for humility and openness about unresolved questions of consciousness.44:28 — How shall I live, knowing I will die? Gwen asks about daily practice with mortality. Cort pairs appreciation for the opportunity of being alive with the recognition that we do not know how long it will last. “Today is the day to be kind.”49:42 — The in-between states. Cort introduces the Tibetan concept of bardos, then describes how observing the transition into sleep and practicing lucid dreaming fit into that tradition’s preparation for death.55:32 — Can someone near death sense our care? Sherry’s question brings a careful answer: Cort says he does not know scientifically. He distinguishes possible awareness without communication from traditional beliefs and family anecdotes about offering love and reassurance.59:19 — A community built through questions. Cort closes with gratitude for the dialogue, the people joining each month, and the generosity that makes these gatherings possible.Upcoming Events:* Quiet the Restless Mind — November: A gifted online week from Dharma Lab and ServiceSpace, November 15–21, exploring how to meet everyday stress, distraction, and overwhelm with greater clarity and ease. Bringing together ancient wisdom and modern neuroscience, the week features leading contemplatives and researchers including Robert Sapolsky, Laurie Santos, Mingyur Rinpoche, Judson Brewer, Sharon Salzberg, Martin Picard, Cortland Dahl, and Richard Davidson.Learn more / registerEpisode Companion Flashcards:

In this episode of Dharma Lab, Dr. Cortland Dahl and Dr. Richie Davidson explore how exercising your body can also become a way to train your mind. We asked Richie why exercise supports neuroplasticity, and why a more changeable brain isn’t necessarily a happier one. We also discuss what makes a workout meditation, and share how we bring these practices into our own biking, walking, and yoga routines.Enjoy!Watch on YouTube; Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.If these conversations are useful, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel.Episode Companion Flashcards:Upcoming Events:* From Doing to Being: Effortless Meditation & the Lost Art of Doing Less with Dr. Cortland Dahl and Kasumi Kato, October 9–11 at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY. This is an independent Omega Institute program and is not affiliated with Dharma Lab. Learn more / register* Quiet the Restless Mind — November: A gifted online week from Dharma Lab and ServiceSpace, November 15–21, exploring how to meet everyday stress, distraction, and overwhelm with greater clarity and ease. Bringing together ancient wisdom and modern neuroscience, the week features leading contemplatives and researchers including Robert Sapolsky, Laurie Santos, Mingyur Rinpoche, Judson Brewer, Sharon Salzberg, Martin Picard, Cortland Dahl, and Richard Davidson.Learn more / registerIn This Episode:00:00 Intro - Is your workout really meditation?01:15 Training body and mind together03:05 Is exercise really meditation?07:51 Why intention matters11:29 Flow versus meditation13:19 Exercise and neuroplasticity16:19 Should you meditate during or after exercise?20:25 Can movement make meditation easier?24:14 How Richie practices while cycling27:26 Cort’s practice: Yoga, jogging, and attention32:12 Interval training for the mind33:32 What the research tells us so farWritten transcript for those who prefer to read:00:00 Intro - Is your workout really meditation?Richie: What I often hear when I give public talks, people often raise their hand and say, my jog is my meditation, or my bicycle ride is my meditation. And my response to that is always, well, maybe, but not necessarily.Cort: It’s not just that your mind was a little more clear or a little more peaceful while you were exercising. In fact, actually that I would say is not at all the deciding point about whether it would or would not be meditation, but rather it’s that you’re doing something very intentional with your mind. You’re training your mind very consciously and very intentionally. So the promise of this all is that you basically can train your mind at the exact same time you’re exercising your body. And not only do you get the benefits of each of those individually, there’s at least the potential that there’s a synergistic benefit that’s greater than the sum of the parts.01:15 Training body and mind togetherCort: Welcome everyone. I am Cortland Dahl, and I’m here with my dear friend and Dharma brother, Dr. Richard Davidson, who of course we all call Richie, one of the most eminent and respected neuroscientists on the planet. And today we’re going to discuss how we can train our minds in the same way that we train our bodies, and especially that we can do this at the same time. So there’s some really interesting science here, but before we get there, I just want to share my own personal experience, which isI’ve been meditating for more than 30, well, more than well over three decades, probably about 35 years or so. And of course, sitting meditation is super important for me. But I noticed at a certain point that bringing meditation into my exercise routine actually has been incredibly powerful. And in some respects, I feel like some of the best meditations I have are when I’m jogging, for example. In the early days, I did yoga every day. I wasKind of very diligently had a yoga routine up until my son was born, and that kind of fell by the wayside. But I was really doing, I was really meditating as part of my exercise routine. And it wasn’t necessarily a replacement for my formal practice, but it was really, really powerful. And I could tell in my own experience that there was some synergy between the physical movement and pairing that up with doing a very intentional training of the mind. So this is a very exciting area of science. I know we’re both passionate about this as one of the frontiers of kind of modern science in this area. But Richie, why don’t why don’t I just turn it over to you to share whether your your kind of opening thoughts or your own experience, and then we can kind of go back and forth both to share a little bit about the scientific promise of this, but also how we actually do it and how we personally do it in our own lives.03:05 Is exercise really meditation?Richie: Yeah. So thank you, Cort, and it’s great to be here together talking about this on this beautiful Sunday morning in Madison. so yeah and I’ve been meditating pretty much every single day for more than fifty years.And I too have been really interested in exploring the relationship between meditation and physical exercise. and before we talk about the science, I think there’s a bunch of th other things to share, some of which just are personal and andTo begin with, I too have figured out ways of combining them for me that are really important and personally very meaningful. But before we get to that, I I wanna begin with what I often hear when I give public talks. Sometimes when we give public talks together, people often raise their hand and say, My jog is my meditation or my bicycle ride is my meditation. and my response to that is always, well, maybe, but not necessarily. and so I think it’s really important to make that very clear. And when we talk about meditation, we’re really talking about the intentional use of our mind in ways that promote human flourishing and if you go into exercise and your mind is all over the place and you’re not intentionally deploying your mind in that way then maybe it’s not so much that your exercise is your meditation and so i think that some people slip into that in a in a bit too cavalier a way. And so one of my aspirations is that in the next few minutes together we really can explore that and we can explore when your exercise might be reasonably thought of as your meditation and when it might not be. And so let me just share something personal that I do regularly. I’m a very avid bicycle rider, and particularly in the beautiful warm weather, I ride outside. And before I ride, I do something that I do before I meditate in the same kind of way, which is I and I do this, I really don’t take any extra time. So, you know, I ride a road bike and it requires you know putting on clothes and putting on special bicycle shoes. So there’s a lot of opportunity to reflect as I’m just engaging in the preparation activities for my bike ride. And during those periods I simply reflect on how riding my bike is beneficial to my health.But it’s not just beneficial for me, but being healthy and having vitality is beneficial for all of those I interact with, for my work, for my for what I do in the world. and it takes on a a kind ofSense of altruism or pro-sociality, that I’m doing it not just for myself. And what happens then is I mostly I ride alone. Maybe one day a week I ride with others, but the other times I ride alone. And particularly when I’m riding alone, I find that that reflection recycles spontaneously as I ride. And I come back to it many times.And it just really energizes me, like I’m riding for humanity. I mean, it sounds a little corny, but you know, I do genuinely reflect on that as I’m riding And although I don’t have any evidence to suggest that it’s beneficial, it feels beneficial to me. and first of all, it motivates me to engage in these activities, which I think is.good thing. know, I’m convinced that it does have other benefits as well, which we can explore later and may even change the biological effects of the exercise when… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dharmalab.co/subscribe

In this episode of Dharma Lab, Cortland Dahl and Richard Davidson unpack the difference between experiential fusion, being so absorbed in an experience that awareness narrows, and meta-awareness, the capacity to know what your mind is doing while you’re doing it. They explore why activities like movies, video games, rock climbing, Sudoku, and even doomscrolling can feel good in the moment, how they temporarily suppress the brain’s default mode, and why that does not necessarily translate into lasting change. They also discuss whether meta-awareness actually adds something to positive experiences, how it may increase cognitive and emotional flexibility, and a few simple ways to practice it in everyday life. Enjoy!Watch on YouTube; Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.If these conversations are useful, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel.Episode Companion FlashcardsUpcoming Events:* From Doing to Being: Effortless Meditation & the Lost Art of Doing Less with Dr. Cortland Dahl and Kasumi Kato, October 9–11 at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY. This is an independent Omega Institute program and is not affiliated with Dharma Lab. Learn more / register* Quiet the Restless Mind — A gifted online week from Dharma Lab and ServiceSpace, November 15–21, exploring chronic stress and human flourishing through ancient wisdom and modern neuroscience, with leading contemplatives and researchers including Robert Sapolsky, Laurie Santos, Mingyur Rinpoche, Judson Brewer, Sharon Salzberg, Martin Picard, Cortland Dahl, and Richard Davidson.Learn more / registerIn This Episode:00:00 Intro: Is It Good to Be Lost?01:17 Experiential Fusion vs. Meta-Awareness02:29 What Is Experiential Fusion?04:55 What Is Meta-Awareness?06:45 Why Being “Lost” Can Feel Good09:09 The Default Mode Network and Temporary Relief11:34 What Meta-Awareness Adds13:21 Flexibility, Attention, and the Ability to Disengage14:17 Responding Instead of Reacting16:53 Can Startle Reveal Meta-Awareness?19:39 Ancient Meditation Instructions for Meta-Awareness21:11 How to Practice Meta-Awareness in Daily LifeWritten transcript for those who prefer to read:00:00 Intro: Is It Good to Be Lost?Cort: We don’t like to ruminate. It’s a deeply unpleasant experience. But isn’t it good to be lost? What’s the problem with being absorbed in a good book or a movie? And would it be better if we had meta-awareness? Does that add anything in a moment like that?Richie: My view of this is that it feels transiently good. In the movie theater or doing Sudoku, when it ends, we go back to our neurotic self and the default mode of the brain comes roaring back. And so it’s a transient state. Meta-awareness is very helpful, I think, in disengaging our attention and enabling us to be flexible.01:17 Experiential Fusion vs. Meta-AwarenessCort: Welcome everyone to another episode of Dharma Lab. I’m Cortland Dahl. I’m here with eminent neuroscientist, And we wanted to talk today about a really important question that you and no one else has ever asked, which is what is the difference between meta awareness and experiential fusion? And I guarantee that although you have not asked that question and probably nobody has ever asked that question, it is one of the most important questions you could ask because it has massive implications for mental health, for emotional well-being, and even for physical health. So these are two terms that we use a lot in our research. We publish papers that are defining these and have been exploring ways to measure them, but they’re just very central to a lot of the work that we do on human flourishing. So why don’t we just start off with, I think, the one that most of us are more familiar with, Richie, and maybe you can... Give some practical examples and share your own insights on this, but that would be experiential fusion. This is, I think, where a lot of us live our lives. So what is this and why should people care? Why is this so important?02:29 What Is Experiential Fusion?Richie: Yeah, so experiential fusion is a term that we came up with in a paper we wrote a number of years ago together, and it’s a term that’s used to convey the idea that we can get totally absorbed in an activity that we lose awareness We often call this a flow experience, but we are so completely immersed in the experience that we are no longer aware of our context. So one example of this would be going to a movie and being so engrossed in the movie that you no longer aware that you’re in a movie theater. And in many cases, you’re no longer aware that you’re actually watching a movie. You’re so engrossed in the plot that you’re just in the middle of this plot. That’s experiential fusion.Cort: And it’s an interesting thing because it can be absorbed in an activity like movie theater example is perfect, a perfect example. You know, reading a really good novel or playing video games can be very absorbing. I think a very common one these days is doom scrolling. You’re just kind of totally caught up in this activity. So experiential fusion can be lost in thoughts, right? It can also be rumination where you’re just lost in your own thoughts. But the interesting thing about these examples, the movie theater example, doom scrolling, playing a video game, actually you’re attentive. It’s not as though you You’re distracted in that moment. In fact, you might be very, very focused on what you’re doing, but it’s as though the light of awareness dims a bit. It’s almost your attention is narrowed into whatever you’re doing and you’re absorbed in it and there’s a feeling of being lost in it. And I think the contrast is when there’s this feeling of almost like you’ve woken up from that. And it does almost feel like you’re waking up when you shift out of that state of absorption. So maybe we could just give the contrast now. So this is experiential fusion, which again, can be everything from you’re daydreaming, you’re ruminating, you’re lost in thoughts, or you’re absorbed in some engrossing activities. We gave these examples, but what’s the alternative? And then we can maybe compare and contrast the two.04:55 What Is Meta-Awareness?Richie: Yeah, so the alternative is meta-awareness, and meta-awareness refers to the capacity to know what our minds are doing. And to go back to the movie theater example, how would meta-awareness show up in a movie theater? Well, you might be totally attentive to the movie, completely undistracted, but you’re aware that you’re sitting in a theater, you’re kind of aware in the background. You can think of it as the Penumbra of awareness, the sort of edges of awareness. But you’re aware that you’re sitting in a movie theater, you’re aware that you’re watching a movie, but you’re also completely attentive. There’s no distraction. And that would be an example of meta-awareness. And so as it would apply to everyday life, you can be in a conversation with someone you know well, Be totally in the groove with them, be deep in conversation, but not be lost in the conversation. You can be aware that you’re sitting here, you may have just had breakfast together, and it’s Tuesday, and we’re having this conversation. So that That background is really supplied, if you will, by meta-awareness. Meta-awareness is this faculty of knowing what our minds are doing. And we think, for many different reasons, that meta-awareness is really key to being able to transform your mind. And one of the things I often say is that it’s very difficult to transform our mind if we’re not aware of what’s happening in our mind.06:45 Why Being “Lost” Can Feel GoodCort: So when it comes to experiential fusion, as we said, there’s a spectrum there, right? It can be being engrossed in a good book or a movie, or it could even be a conversation with a friend. You’re just totally absorbed in the moment. To the point that you kind of lose touch with everything else other than, you know, the narrow band of what you’re doing. And then on the other end of the sp… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dharmalab.co/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.dharmalab.coHow much of what we experience comes from the world itself, and how much comes from our expectations about it? In our latest AMA, Richie Davidson and Cortland Dahl explore how the brain constructs perception, why the gap between reality and expectation can amplify suffering, and what changes when we begin to notice that process as it happens. We had a few moments of technical issues with frozen screens or background noise, but they don’t last long.What’s inside* Why your brain constructs reality the way it builds a dream* Why controlling the mind backfires* TMS: is it cheating?* Why open awareness loosens pain* The neuroscience of grief and regret* A 2-minute guided practice (free, led by Cort)* A preview of our upcoming November summit* The full hour mapped below, plus the flashcards and the recording for paid membersCompanion Flashcards At BottomYour brain builds reality like a dreamA listener named Linda asked about acceptance, and about the idea, drawn from Anil Seth and Lisa Feldman Barrett, that reality is a construction of the mind. Cort answered first, and reframed where suffering actually comes from.It’s actually the gap between reality and our expectations of what should be happening. However big that gap is, that’s like the size of suffering in that moment.—Cortland DahlCort was clear it is not erasing expectations. It is seeing that they are there and that they are out of step with what is happening, bringing them into the light of conscious experience rather than letting them run under the hood.Then Richie discussed how the brain networks that build our beliefs and expectations are the very networks through which we perceive. He used the dream as proof.Just as in a dream, we can feel those emotions in our body, and there are documented changes in our heart rate and breathing, and yet there’s nothing out there. It’s all in our mind. It turns out that’s actually the way it works with the real world. That’s how our brains construct reality.—Richard DavidsonHis image for the practice came from Mingyur Rinpoche: caught in the middle of a river, you are swept along by the turbulent flow. Become aware of the thoughts and expectations driving your perception, and it is more like sitting on the bank, watching the water move without being pulled in. Cort added a pointer for anyone who wants the science firsthand, calling Anil Seth’s TED talk one of the best he has seen.The picnic and the four police officersVictoria asked why open awareness loosens physical pain. Richie described what his lab calls “stickiness,” the attachment or aversion that makes an emotion reverberate long after the thing that caused it is gone. In open awareness, the reverberation drops away.In some of our own research, the response in sensory regions is actually larger when you’re doing open awareness. It’s not diminished. But there’s no reverberation. It happens and comes back to baseline. We’re not creating emotional zombies.—Richard DavidsonThat fast return to baseline, he said, is a neural signature of resilience. Cort then told a story from the Tibetan tradition that ties to this. Imagine you drive to a park for a picnic, thrilled to be there. Then four police officers walk up and tell you that you are ordered to stay in this park all day, that they will block you if you try to leave.Even though you wanted to go there in the first place, suddenly everybody’s trying to think how they can get out. Life does not like to be constrained and controlled in any way.—Cortland DahlThe mind works the same way. The harder we clamp down on a feeling, the more it strains to escape. Open awareness runs the other direction. Cort called it a practice of trust, close to the opposite of control.FREE · 2-MINUTE PRACTICE LED BY CORT2-minute practice: Wherever you are, settle into a comfortable posture. Let your eyes stay gently open or close them. Take a few moments to simply feel the breath moving in and out of the body. Notice the sounds around you, or the silence. Then open the heart a little by bringing to mind the many challenges in the world right now, the suffering so many are carrying, and form a quiet intention: that whatever good comes from your practice might ripple outward and ease the suffering of others. Rest there for a few breaths, then carry that motivation into whatever comes next.The full hour, mappedRead the gist below, then drop into the recording at any timestamp.03:46 — “Grandpa!” and the end of the sitting.Twelve minutes into an early-morning practice, Richie’s two-and-a-half-year-old grandson opened the door. He let the formal session go and kept practicing as grandpa. Anywhere, anytime meditation; everywhere, all the time.08:32 — Active practice is as powerful as the cushion.The Healthy Minds research finds the benefit of active practices comparable to formal sitting. Cort put his son down for nearly every nap for three years and came to see those as the real practice.09:59 — Acceptance and the gap.Suffering tracks the gap between reality and our expectations. The shift is not dropping expectations but seeing them clearly.13:54 — Your brain constructs reality like a dream.Anil Seth, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and the river metaphor. Perception is built by the same networks that build belief.17:40 — So how do we share a reality at all?Rob from Toronto asks about controlled hallucination and shared social realities. Richie on entrainment, cooperation, and why it remains “a shared illusion of a sort”.”20:18 — Why open awareness loosens pain.Stickiness, reverberation, and the larger-but-faster response that marks resilience. We are not creating emotional zombies.27:00 — The picnic and the four police officers.Why control backfires in a park, in a relationship, and in the mind. Open awareness as trust.29:40 — TMS and the urge to hack the mind.TMS stands for “transcranial magnetic stimulation”, and Richie explains that TMS belongs to a broader family of methods designed to modulate brain function relatively non-invasively. There is growing interest in whether these tools could affect meditation, but he emphasizes that we do not yet know whether they meaningfully support practice. The Center for Healthy Minds has also been exploring neuromodulation and meditation more broadly. Cort shares about neuromodulation as one more entry point into an interdependent system.37:37 — Where does awareness live in the brain?Edith’s question. Visual cortex, anterior cingulate, and the honest answer: no single location, no single switch40:24 — The unresponsive who were actually aware.Melanie Boly’s work: patients thought to be vegetative held more awareness than we credited, unable to communicate it. A communication problem, not an awareness problem.45:18 — The neuroscience of grief that doesn’t fade.Amygdala and hippocampus jammed together, and reconsolidation: a memory is a reconstruction that changes each time it is recalled, not a photograph.51:20 — When grief opened into gratitude.Cort on his father’s sudden death four years ago, holding the feeling fully in the body, and the sadness opening, unbidden, into gratitude.57:38 — A free November summit.A free online gathering through ServiceSpace this November, with Sharon Salzberg, Jud Brewer, Robert Sapolsky, Martin Picard, Mingyur Rinpoche, and Laurie Santos.November 2026 Free Online Summit with Legends of Neuroscience and Practice

Dharma Lab’s First Guided Meditation HourIn Dharma Lab’s first guided practice hour, Dr. Cortland Dahl and Dr. Richard Davidson took us from talking about wellbeing to actually practicing it. Drawing on the Healthy Minds framework of awareness, connection, insight, and purpose, shaped through years of research and practice connected with the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Humin (formerly Healthy Minds Innovations), they led participants through four short practices designed to make each capacity directly experiential. The session explored a central idea running through their work: meditation is less about fixing ourselves than learning to recognize and cultivate qualities of wellbeing that are already present.Keep Practicing — Upcoming EventsIf you’d like to continue exploring these practices, the free Healthy Minds Program App offers guided practices and learning across awareness, connection, insight, and purpose, with Cortland Dahl, Richard Davidson, and other teachers.Our next “Ask Me Anything”with Richie and Cort is live on Tuesday, August 25th, 8pm ET. Please send us questions in advance by replying to this email or dropping a comment.We have an exciting lineup of guest speakers for a free online summit in November to explore the restless mind. More details to come, but check out initial info at the bottom of this email and registration details here. Please share widely!Thank you for your support and we hope to see you at these future events.—The Dharma Lab Team This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dharmalab.co/subscribe

In this episode of Dharma Lab, Dr. Cortland Dahl and Dr. Richard Davidson explore why attention feels harder to control than it used to, how modern technology exploits basic mechanisms in the brain, and what we can do to regain more choice over where our attention goes. They discuss why we may be more distracted than we were 50 years ago, how novelty and emotion capture attention, and why simple acts of intentionality can function like reps for the brain. Enjoy!Watch on YouTube; Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.If these conversations are useful, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel.Reminder: We have a FREE 1-hour live practice session on Wed Aug 19th, 7pm CT with Richie and Cort discussing how different meditation practices map to the four pillars of well-being (Awareness, Connection, Insight, and Purpose). More details and register here!Companion FlashcardsIn This Episode:00:00 Taking Back Control of Attention01:21 Why Focus Feels So Hard02:51 Are We More Distracted Than 50 Years Ago?05:15 Why the Brain Is Wired for Distraction09:03 How Our Attention Gets Hijacked13:20 Why Surprise Captures the Brain16:35 The Reinforcement Loop Behind Endless Scrolling17:44 How Emotion Disrupts Self-Control21:24 Rebuilding Control Over Attention25:53 Attention as a Practice of Intention29:46 Digital Hygiene: Designing Your Environment for FocusWritten transcript for those who prefer to read:00:00 — Taking Back Control of AttentionRichie: Now we have basically ceded control to the forces around us, and it has led to a kind of impairment, a collective impairment in prefrontal function that we’re all suffering from. There are data to suggest that we are indeed more distracted today than we were 50 years ago. It’s not just a kind of subjective impression.Cort: I would say if there’s one word that captures the heart of this as a practice, I would say intention. And simply being intentional about what’s going on with my attention. Just choose. Before your mind gets pulled somewhere, I just got an alert. I’m going to choose to do that. And I noticed the pull, but I’m going to actually ask myself, do I want to check this message right now? Or I just heard a sound. I’m going to actually choose. Do I want to keep my attention with what I’m doing? Or do I want to You know, turn and look to see what was happening over there, like actually just making a choice. Like you were saying, the reps, you can do a thousand of those a day easily.01:21 — Why Focus Feels So HardCort: Welcome everyone to another episode of Dharma Lab. I am Cortland Dahl, one of the co-hosts here, and of course I’m here with Dr. Richard Davidson. Richie, to all of us who know him well, one of the preeminent neuroscientists on the planet. And today we’re gonna discuss one of the most common problems that probably every human faces, which is how incredibly hard it is just to stay focused. Now, I must admit, maybe this is an embarrassing admission, given that I’m supposedly one of the experts who’s talking about this stuff. But there’s a lot of days where I’m sitting, getting stuff done, answering emails or focused on some project. And it’s just really hard to not get pulled in to other things. You know, I’m answering emails and suddenly I’m shopping online or I’m working on a report and then I’m checking my emails. It’s just it feels like There are so many things in our life that are just pulling us in a million different directions. And I thought today we could just answer two very simple questions. One, why is it so incredibly hard to stay focused? And two, what can we do about it given this chaotic world we’re living in? So maybe we can just I can just turn this over to you, Richie, and you can kick this off however you want to. But I’d love to hear specifically from a neuroscientific point of view at some point. But yeah, what does this spark for you?Richie: Yeah, well, first it sparks familiarity.02:51 — Are We More Distracted Than 50 Years Ago?Richie: So, you know, I think that it’s true. I often say we’re all participants in a grand experiment for which none of us have provided our informed consent. And that’s, of course, referring to the exposure that we all have to this extraordinary amount of information through Our online activities through social media, all of that. And that’s a huge source of distraction. And so, you know, I think that one, I certainly think that it’s inevitably true that one major reason why people experience more distraction perhaps today than they did And there are data to suggest that we are indeed more distracted today than we were 50 years ago. It’s not just a kind of subjective impression, but inevitably I think it’s at least in part true that it’s because of our exposure to this information that is so readily available. So we’re clearly not going to change that. We don’t have the power To influence the tech companies to do the kind of regulation that might be needed. So, you know, we’re left, I think, with the inevitable conclusion that really the only thing we can change is our own minds. And so that, I think, is an important opportunity. And so here’s another case where the kind of, quote, And us being so distracted can also be the opening for real change and transformation. And in the language that you and I have used, Cort, in our book, Born to Flourish, and at other times in Dharma Lab, we can think of distraction itself as an affordance, distraction itself as a moment of awakening, if you will, because the moment we recognize we’re distracted, That’s a moment of awakening and can really be helpful in the process of changing your mind.05:15 — Why the Brain Is Wired for DistractionCort: I’m curious about the neural mechanisms for why we are so easily distracted. I think the experience is, it’s like our attention is like a restless puppy that just gets excited and is rushing off after any bright, shiny object. It sees a squirrel on a tree outside and it’s banging itself against the window and then hears something in the kitchen and goes racing off. And it feels like that sometimes. I mean, it feels like that, you know, even for me having 35 years of meditation under my belt and done all these long retreats where I’m very specifically training my attention. And I feel like in some respects have, you know, have developed A strong attentional skill set, so to speak. And yet I still feel that when I’m in a meeting like this, I could be talking to you and then I see a notification on my computer or something happens in my environment. It seems like the mind and brain are just... Really wired actually for that to happen. I mean, it clearly, you know, happened spontaneously and effortlessly countless times every single hour. So what’s going on in the brain? I mean, is it as it seems that this is sort of how we’re wired? I imagine there’s evolutionary reasons why this is this is likely to be the case.Richie: I think it is in part how we’re wired. We are wired to detect surprise, to detect discrepancies, to detect rare events, because those often are events that have more salience. For example, our Sensitivity to danger and to cues that may signal danger. Those are the kinds of things that are relatively rare, but they’re super important. So we want to be primed, if you will, to notice those. And the problem is that that machinery that evolution has provided us with can be harnessed or hijacked by all these other things around us. But I think I can pretty much guarantee based on everything we know that if you receive the identical information, say something surprised you that drew your attention, if that thing were repeated 10 times, by the 10th time, you’re no longer going to pay attention to it. And that process habituation is something we know very well. And so the masters of technology have very much figured out how to capture our attention. By providing us with, in many cases, more and more extreme examples of things that are of interest to us. And the i… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dharmalab.co/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.dharmalab.co(The full AMA recording plays in the video pane above, for Dharma Lab members.)In our 11th AMA, Kim read your questions while Cort made his way back from a retreat with Mingyur Rinpoche. Richie spoke to a study where strangers could tell who the meditators were, from a photo alone.What’s inside* Full recording and transcript for paid members* The photo study: what strangers saw in the faces of long-term meditators* You are not your beliefs: a simple two-step practice to see them clearly* A 2-minute guided practice (free, led by Dr. Richie Davidson)* The full hour mapped below, plus the flashcards and the recordingStrangers could tell who the meditators wereThis came up during a question about moods. Richie’s point was that one consequence of long-term practice is that people generally end up in a more positive mood. To show it, he described a study his lab published.Whenever they studied long-term meditators, they routinely took a picture of everyone, both the meditators and age- and gender-matched controls, without telling them what it was for. Then they gave all the pictures to random people who had no idea where they came from, and asked them to rate each face: how friendly the person is, how much you trust them, how happy they are.The long-term meditators were judged, in Richie’s words, “whoppingly more positively” than the controls. The raters had no idea where the pictures came from. He called it a powerful, unobtrusive measure that there is something about an enduring mood that gets expressed on the face and that people pick up on.The study: Goldberg, Hirshberg, Tello, Weng, Flook, Davidson (2019), “Still facial photographs of long-term meditators are perceived by naïve observers as less neurotic, more conscientious and more mindful.” You are not your beliefsAnother listener asked about the difference between a belief and an ordinary thought. Cort put it this way: thoughts are the words and images moving through the mind, the inner commentary, and they are an expression of deeper beliefs about the world that are often not conscious.Richie added the distinction he and Cort work with: when we hold beliefs, especially about ourselves, we misconstrue them as a description of who we actually are. He calls it experiential fusion. Most of the time we are not even aware we hold the belief; it just feels like the narrative of our self. Meta-awareness, or metacognition, is having an awareness that we have these beliefs, which lets us recognize we are not necessarily the same as them.Cort framed the aim in the Tibetan approach he practices: we are not trying to fix ourselves, but to get in touch with the parts that were never broken. Then he gave a two-step practice. First, simply observe your thoughts, like watching a wild animal in its natural habitat, from behind a tree, just watching what it does. Then pause and ask what assumptions, beliefs, and expectations underlie the thought. The point is not to change anything, just to bring the unconscious up to the conscious level.“We’re not trying to fix ourselves. We’re really trying to get in touch with the parts that were never broken.” — Cortland DahlTry this 2-minute practice from the AMA (free, led by Richie)Prefer to read it? Bring awareness into your body. Then bring to mind one person who first introduced you to practice, who opened this door and shined a light where you had not looked before. Hold them in your heart and let appreciation, gratitude, even love bubble up. Carry that glow into whatever comes next.The full hour AMA, mappedRead the gist, then drop into the recording.04:39 — Is it only meditation that slows brain aging? Compared to athletes or chess players, we don’t yet know. But Richie’s informed conjecture: an altruistic motivation may add a biological benefit over and above the activity itself.09:12 — What childhood trauma does to the brain. The well-replicated finding of reduced hippocampal volume, and the honest unknown of how far practice can reverse it. Cort on memory reconsolidation.13:55 — Can practice move your brain’s asymmetry? Functional asymmetry can shift (the first randomized trial of MBSR, 2003), but temperament tends to persist. The masters keep their color; they are not emotional zombies.20:27 — Belief vs. thought, and how to loosen a harmful one. Experiential fusion vs. meta-awareness, Mingyur Rinpoche’s burnt-rope image, and the two-step practice of watching thoughts and inquiring into the belief beneath.30:59 — Moods, and the photo study. Why moods differ from emotions, why long-term practitioners carry a positive baseline, and the study where strangers read it off their faces.38:33 — A stroke, and the beauty in the pauses. For a listener living with brain injury and stroke: being over doing, the sky that stays when the clouds go, and Ram Dass, whose long word-finding pauses Richie found beautiful.47:28 — After an awakening, why the crash? The four families of retreat experience (body and energy, emotional upheaval, perception, sensing energy), and why to treat them all as passing clouds, not permanent, not the point.56:16 — What happens in the brain at death. The flatline, why biology is analog and not digital, and the early reports of gamma oscillations near death, the same signature seen in long-term meditators. Plus how the traditions prepare.Upcoming EventsSave the date: a free practice and meditation hour with Richie and Cort on August 19th at 7pm Central. Register free.events.dharmalab.coEpisode Companion Flashcards:

For years, headlines claimed that meditation could actually grow parts of the brain. But what if that’s not the most interesting question?As the science has evolved, researchers have shifted their focus. What changes in the brain? Which changes matter most? And why might some structural changes grow, then recede, as expertise develops?In this conversation, Richie and Cort explore what decades of neuroscience have taught us, what scientists have gotten right, what they’ve gotten wrong, and where the research is heading.Enjoy!Watch on YouTube; Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.If these conversations are useful, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel.Reminder: We have a FREE 1-hour live practice session on Aug 19th, 7pm CT with Richie and Cort discussing how different meditation practices map to the four pillars of well-being (Awareness, Connection, Insight, and Purpose). More details and register here!Episode Companion Flashcards!In This Episode:00:00 Does Meditation Really Change the Brain?03:16 Brain Function vs. Brain Structure05:41 The Gray Matter Studies That Started It All11:45 Why the Gray Matter Evidence Changed15:20 White Matter and Brain Connectivity18:01 What the Research Actually Means21:40 Brain Health, Neuroplasticity, and Human PotentialTranscript for those who prefer to read:Richie Davidson:There’s no question that meditation changes the brain.We’re talking here about both the function and the structure of the brain. There’s no question that meditation changes the brain, and there is overwhelming evidence for that.Structural changes, like increases in gray matter in specific regions of the brain after short amounts of meditation, however, are a different story. The evidence for those findings has really not held up.Even more interesting, some of the effects that have been reported are actually the opposite of what we might expect.Cortland Dahl:Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Dharma Lab. I’m Cortland Dahl, and I’m here with Richie Davidson, one of the pioneering neuroscientists who has helped us understand the relationship between the mind, the brain, emotions, and how we can train ourselves to flourish.Today we’re diving into one of the biggest scientific questions in meditation research: does meditation actually change the brain?When I think about my own life, I can point to experiences that feel like a clear before and after.When I started meditating more than thirty years ago, I had a genuine phobia of public speaking. It wasn’t just that I got nervous. I had a severe fear of speaking in front of people.Years later, not only do I no longer get anxious, I actually enjoy it.I’ve even measured my physiology with devices like my Oura Ring. My heart rate and other biometrics actually shift into a deeply relaxed state when I’m speaking in front of a crowd, something that would have been unimaginable twenty or thirty years ago.Whether or not my brain changed, it seems difficult to imagine that such a profound transformation could happen without the brain changing in some way.At the same time, we often see confusing headlines.One day the headline says, “Meditation changes your brain.”The next day another study appears suggesting the opposite.Even the phrase “changes your brain” can mean different things. Are we talking about how the brain functions? Are we talking about the physical wiring of the brain? Are we talking about changes in structure?Richie, you’ve done some of the most important work in this area, and I think this is one of those topics where the headlines often miss the nuance.How should we think about it?Richie Davidson:You set this up beautifully by distinguishing between functional changes in the brain and structural changes.Functional changes refer to differences in how the brain is operating. We can measure those by looking at patterns of activity in different brain regions.Structural changes are different. They refer to the physical characteristics of the brain itself.That includes gray matter, which consists of the cell bodies of neurons, and white matter, which consists of the axons that connect one region of the brain to another.It’s entirely possible for the brain to change functionally without changing structurally.If structural changes occur, they almost always imply changes in function as well.One of the reasons this field became so exciting was that, about twenty years ago, several early studies suggested that people who completed an eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course showed increases in gray matter in regions such as the prefrontal cortex.Those findings generated enormous excitement and headlines claiming that meditation could literally grow your prefrontal cortex.Cortland Dahl:Before we go further, why would someone even want a larger prefrontal cortex?Richie Davidson:The prefrontal cortex is central to what we call the executive network.It’s involved in planning, goal-directed behavior, regulating attention, forming healthy habits, and inhibiting behaviors we want to change.If you’re making a grocery list, planning your route to the store, or intentionally directing your attention toward something important, the prefrontal cortex plays a major role.It also allows us to think about the future and reflect on the past.That’s incredibly useful, but it’s also one of the reasons humans worry so much.As Robert Sapolsky famously described in his book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, zebras don’t spend time worrying about tomorrow. Humans do, largely because we have this remarkable prefrontal cortex.So it’s an extraordinary gift, but it can also contribute to suffering.Returning to the research, those early studies suggested that relatively short periods of meditation increased gray matter in regions like the prefrontal cortex.Many additional studies followed.Then, in 2023, a meta-analysis concluded that Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction produced structural brain changes.However, the story didn’t end there.The journal later retracted that meta-analysis because important data had been omitted. When those missing data were included, the reported effects disappeared.Around the same time, our own research published in Science Advances found no structural gray matter differences between people who completed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and carefully designed control groups.So when it comes to gray matter increases after relatively short periods of meditation, the evidence has simply not held up.There’s another finding that’s particularly intriguing.Some studies have examined whether people with more meditation experience show greater structural changes.Interestingly, the relationship appears to go in the opposite direction.The more meditation people have practiced, the smaller the structural differences often become.When you think about expertise, that actually makes sense.If gray matter simply kept increasing forever, eventually we’d have bumps sticking out of our heads.That’s obviously not how biology works.Instead, expertise in many domains appears to involve temporary structural changes that later become more efficient as skills mature.There may be a period where gray matter increases, but as expertise develops, those changes may naturally recede.Cortland Dahl:So the story is much more nuanced than simply saying meditation makes your brain bigger.Richie Davidson:Exactly.And that’s where white matter becomes especially interesting.White matter reflects the connections between different regions of the brain.Across many different kinds of learning, white matter appears to be much more responsive to experience than gray matter.For example, beginning jugglers can show measurable white matter changes after only about an hour and a half of training.Those changes are dynamic.If you stop practicing, they may recede.We’ve found similar results with meditation.In the same study where we found no gray matter changes, we did observe white matter changes in pathways related to self-… This is a public episode. 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