While people have believed for thousands of years that meditation works, the search for scientific proof is just beginning. The team at Greater Good Science Center assesses the current state of the evidence — what we do, don’t, and might know. During the past two decades, we’ve discovered a lot about mindfulness. Specifically, there have been many studies of meditation, [...]
What Meditation Can’t Cure
Meditation wasn’t designed to heal early psychological wounds, explains Debra Flics. She cautions us not to look to it as a replacement for psychotherapy. Many Westerners, when they come to dharma practice, come looking for psychological healing—but this is not what meditation was designed to do. As meditation has become mainstream, it has been marketed as a way to address [...]
How Meditation Changes Your Brain — and Your Life
When neuroscientists tested expert meditators, they discovered something surprising: The effect of Buddhist meditation isn’t just momentary; it can alter deep-seated traits in our brain patterns and character. Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson tell the story of this revolutionary breakthrough in our understanding of how meditation works. One cool September morning in 2002 [...]
Can you measure compassion?
In a new paper, researchers have proposed a scale for measuring the Buddhist virtues of loving-kindness and compassion. Academics from the psychology departments at three universities in South Korea have created a scale to measure loving-kindness and compassion — two of Buddhism’s four immeasurables, or brahmaviharas. Loving-kindness (fondness or goodwill for oneself [...]
The “Difficult Person” Exercise
Karen Kissel Wegela introduces a tool that helps us skillfully focus on and work with one particular challenging person in our lives. “You're not helping me. Nothing you tell me does any good. You are the worst therapist I’ve ever seen! No matter what I tell you, you don’t get it. All you do is criticize me. I’m trying as hard as I can, and you’re never satisfied.” I am [...]
The Human Instinct for Altruism
In this classic essay from 2006, brain-science writer Daniel Goleman describes how we are hard-wired from kindness—and why that impulse is sometimes short-circuited. Our brain has been preset for kindness. We automatically go to the aid of a child who is screaming in terror; we automatically want to hug a smiling baby. Such emotional impulses are “prepotent”: they elicit [...]
Buddhist researchers find that religious chanting reduces stress
Researchers at Hong Kong’s Center of Buddhist Studies say the power of chanting is effective when dealing with psychological suffering. The same Buddhist researchers who published findings earlier this year pointing to a connection between mind and heart have now published findings that suggest religious chanting can reduce stress. “We found out the power of chanting is [...]
Understanding the Worst in Human Nature
In this classic interview from our archive, originally published in 2008, Andrea Miller speaks to psychatrist Robert Jay Lifton about understanding the worst elements of human nature. Genocide, totalitarianism, atrocity—psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton studies the worst in human nature to help us bring out the best. Among his seminal works are The Nazi Doctors: [...]
The Scene of the Accident
In moments of shock we might find that we are suddenly free of our habitual ways of perceiving. These are moments when we might readily tap into our inherent goodness. A few days ago I was in a line of traffic waiting to make a left turn. There was a car in front of me and two others were behind me. It was bitterly cold, the road was icy, and everywhere the landscape was [...]
The Wisdom in Dark Emotions
Grief, fear and despair are part of the human condition. Each of these emotions is useful, says psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan, if we know how to listen to them. I was brought to the practice of mindfulness more than two decades ago by the death of my first child. Aaron died two months after he was born, never having left the hospital. Shortly after that, a friend [...]
