Michael Taft: Meditation and Mindfulness for Geeks

hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf Y, Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Michael W. Taft, author, editor, meditation teacher, and neuroscience junkie.

He is currently a meditation coach specializing in secular science based meditation training in corporate settings and one on one sessions. Michael is the author of several books, including Nondualism, A Brief History of a Timeless Concept and his new book, The Mindful Geek. Hey everybody, just a couple of quick notes before we get started. One is thank you for all of you who bought a T shirt. If you went out to the website and you saw that your size was sold out, feel free to go back because

we have ordered more inventory. So that's when you feed dot net slash t shirt. And I have one spot open for the fall coaching program, so if you are interested in that, send me a note to Eric at one you feed dot net. Thanks, and here's the interview with Michael Taft. Hi, Michael, welcome to the show. Hey Eric, thanks for having me. I'm really excited and pleased to be here. Yeah, I'm excited to talk with you for a variety of reasons. I really enjoyed your book, The

Mindful Geek Secular meditation for smart skeptics. I'm glad. Yeah, I really. I think it explores uh, mindfulness and meditation in a couple of really interesting ways. So I think we can have a great conversation about it. Before we do that, though, let's start as we usually do, with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside

of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops for a second and he thinks about it, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in

the work that you do. Well. I think it's such an interesting and moving parable. Like most parables, it's so simple and yet cuts right to the core of, you know, essential issues about human life. What I particularly like about this parable is the fact that there are things that we cannot control in life, all the stuff that's going to happen to us that you know, manifest from the outside, stuff that other people do, stuff that the world does,

catastrophes or blessings or whatever. And we really can't do very much to control that or change that. But what we can do is control our own, you know, reaction to it, the way that we respond to it, our own you know vital and compassionate and maybe intense way of reacting to that situation. And so I think that the story really points that out, Like you get to choose on a certain level how you respond to everything,

and for me, it's in a way the essence of everything. Yeah, I mean, and I think that the way that ties in so much too meditation, at least for me, is that the meditation has given me um the awareness of those choices more quickly. I think there's that old Victor Frankel quote where he says, between stimulus and response, there's a space and a lot of what I feel like, you know, meditation is done for me is increased that space so that I have time to make different choices

or to direct my attention in a better way. Yeah, it does do that, and it's proven to do that scientifically. It builds a kind of um space between something occurring and your response to it, and the space gets bigger and bigger, and especially subjectively, the space gets very large. So sometimes you know, I've been meditating for a while here, sometimes I'll hear a loud noise and UM, be aware that I'm going to have a startled response, because it's

a really loud, sharp, sudden noise. But there's this long gap, subjectively long gap anyway, between hearing that noise and knowing I'm going to have a response and the startle response actually occurring. And I mean, that's on, you know, a very deep level of brain wiring, that that kind of reactions going on. So it's you know, this has been many, many decades of sitting, but it's still surprising when that occurs.

And you know, to the point I was just making you say in the book, you when you use meditation to become more aware of what you're feeling, the unconscious or semi conscious flavors of emotional experience begin to come into focus. Your own motivation and drives become clearer, not just in a conceptual way, but in a way you can physically detect moment by moment throughout your day. This

is essence of emotional intelligence and its life changing. Yes, you know, one of the most amazing things that I've ever experienced is how meditation, mindfulness, meditation changed my relationship with my own emotions. Um, it took a little while to really get in there, but I eventually realized that most emotional salient sensations are in the body. You know, even though we do have a cognitive component to emotion, most of what's occurring is going on in the body.

And once you can get ahold of it like that, once you realize that it's physical sensations like tightness in the belly or you know, a feeling of upliftment in your chest, or a lump in your throat, or some kind of maybe tension or squint in your face, that that actually is the you know, somatic or body component or expression of emotion, and that you can meditate on

that sensation. Suddenly you have a handle on emotions that you never had before and you can begin then to work with them in a new way because they're not some kind of nebulous concept or you know, um spiritual quality, their actual physical events that you can monitor and track

and have you know, a way of coping with. And it gives unparalleled ability to both handle overwhelming emotion, you know, when emotions too big, you can work with being able to handle that gigantic nous and also an unparalleled like sensitivity so when emotions incredibly small, and this when you learn to tune into these very fine emotions, it gives you a kind of almost like um intuition or even kind of a sixth sense about what you're going to

feel where you know, where these very small emotions that are coming into awareness. So it works in a lot of different ways to get you more in tune with your emotions and all so give you the ability to handle them more effectively. Yeah, and I'd like to really dive into the sensory experience part of this here in a couple of minutes, But I want to start with when you say the word meditation, what do you mean

by that? And then further from that is when we talk about mindfulness, how is that a more specific form of meditation? Like what are the differences and how do you talk about those two things? Right, So, meditation is a very broad and general term, and it can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. And some of the things that meditation means to different

people actually sound really opposite. So you know, for some people, meditation is concentrating on a single object without deviating from that concentration, so kind of super intense focus, whereas for other people, meditation is about not um focusing on anything in particular at all. So something that sounds completely the opposite.

Another example would be, for some people meditation means having no verbal thoughts in awareness, whereas for other people who do mantra meditation, mantras are verbal thoughts, and in muntre meditation you're keeping those continuously in awareness. So you know, in the one case it's zero verbal thoughts, in the other case it's continuous verbal thoughts. Again, something that sounds

completely opposite. So how can we unite all these different, completely opposite seeming ideas under one umbrella of the term meditation? And for me, as you saw in the book, UM, I use a kind of a psychological definition of a technique that helps to make elements of the unconscious conscious for the purpose of improving your life. Now, that's an incredibly general way of talking about it, and would would

include things like psychotherapy and so on. But I think it it's broad enough to cover um the aspects of meditation that arose, you know, all around the world at various times in human history, from very different cultures and very different religions. So we we need a term that that's that is that broad in that general. When we talk about mindfulness, though it becomes very specific UM. In general mindfulness is about, you know, enhancing present moment sensory

awareness without judgment. So we are, you know, specifically meditating on sensory experience in the present moment, which I think is a that clause is sort of unnecessary since present, since sensory experience is always in the present moment, and doing that non judgmentally, we're looking into our own experience and trying to just allow it. And this in current American English or you know, uh, in Western cultures is

called mindfulness. Traditionally it would be called the pasana or insight meditation, and mindfulness would be one of the qualities of the meditation. You talk about a couple of myths in mindfulness or meditation in general, and I'd like to explore those a little bit because they certainly hung me up for a long time. Umu, they hang a lot of people. Yeah, yeah, no. And I find it over and over when I talk to people about meditation that these two things, I feel like I'm I'm always helped

trying to help people clarify. So let's talk about the first myth. Okay, So, the first myth is that you're going to have no thoughts and specifically, usually by verbal thoughts. So you know the dream of consciousness in verbal thinking is going to somehow cease. And you know, this is a very pervasive idea. I run into it constantly, and there's a lot to say about it. But the quick and dirty is, um, that's not true. You're probably going

to have a lot of thoughts. And you can be an incredibly advanced meditator with a very deep practice whose life is being dramatically improved every single day through this meditation practice, and you're still having a lot of verbal thinking. It's true that if you're on a long meditation retreat, or if you are doing certain types of practices, your verbal thinking can get very still. We're very quiet for a long time, and you know, there's no doubt that's pleasant.

I started meditating mainly because I had anxiety, but also because I just couldn't stand my own mind. Meaning, you know, those verbal thoughts were really busy and unpleasant and sort of driving me nuts. So all of us um would probably feel a lot better if our verbal thinking ceased. But if you go into the meditative endeavor imagining that you're going to stop your thinking, you're going to be disappointed.

That's not going to happen. Yeah, you're gonna be disappointed and you're going to think that you're absolutely doing it wrong and you can't meditate. You know, somebody said that to me recently. I can't meditate, but you know, I sit down in my mind still full of thoughts and I was like, well, it's you know, like you just said, that's not exactly um the point we talk about just being aware of the fact that the thoughts are happening. That's right, and in fact, it's also coming from an

entirely different style of meditation. So in mindfulness meditation, any amount of verbal thinking that's arising is fine. If we're doing more concentrative meditation or Johnna meditation of a very specific style, it can be the case that thoughts get greatly reduced. But that's not even the style we're doing, not the goal. It's not the goal, and in that particular way of working, it almost always requires like long months of monastic retreat where you're not speaking to anybody yet.

So second misconception, the second misconception comes. It's not as common, but I still run into it, and that is that your meditation experience is always supposed to be happy and light and sweet and blissful. Um. Sometimes it's even here, you know, I'm I'm not having an ecstatic, blissful, you know, rapture, so I'm doing something wrong. Um. But usually we run into it in the form of like, well, I had a bad time, that was difficult, some difficult emotions came up,

and you know that's going to happen forever. The goal of meditation is not to turn you into you know, a teal tubby where you're just completely you know, like it was. I would do it a lot more meditating all the time, you know, but that's not any way to live life, Like oh my dog just got hit back. Are I'm completely happy? You know? Um, it's just inappropriate to think that somehow you're going to be blissful and

light at every moment um. In mindfulness meditation, it's much more about accepting whatever emotions are arising in the moment and working with them skillfully, whether they're difficult or don't. Um. And we're not sitting down with the intentional goal of like having a happy time necessarily. Instead, we're going to connect with what's really going on. Yeah, this was another big one for me because I you know, I've I've meditated on and off for you know, twenty five years, um,

and a lot of off. And what would happen would be that I would do it for a while and I just wouldn't. My meditation sessions were rarely pleasant. It's not for me whatever. You know, Sometimes it's pleasant, but a lot of times it's I'm restless, or I'm I'm in the mood to get up, or I'm thinking a lot.

I just wasn't having really pleasant experiences. And when I pivoted my mindset to looking at meditation being uh, something more like um, brushing my teeth or going to the gym, in that it could really give me benefits the other twenty three and a half hours of the day, that's when it got better for me. And and once I stopped expecting either of those things to happen, it actually got easier, um, for both those things to happen, for me to be me to enjoy meditation more and to

have a little bit quieter thoughts. But it was only when I kind of gave that up as a goal or expectation, that's right, Eric, I mean the idea that you're going to sit down and have a good time almost preclude sitting down and having a good time. It just makes it so hard and that's not the goal anyway. So I love to compare it to weightlifting. You know, um, I weightlift. I really enjoy weightlifting, But it's not like every single time you know, you're bench pressing or something

that it's like a great feeling. Sometimes it really hurts, sometimes my joints hurts. Sometimes it goes wrong. Sometimes it's difficult. But every one of those experiences is building the muscles, right, It's building your muscles, even if it's a difficult experience. Sometimes the difficult heavy experiences are building your must even

more so. You know, if you look at it in that light, by letting go of this misconception that it's always supposed to be blissful or happy, suddenly you realize you can be making progress, whether it's a quote happy meditation or a difficult one. Yeah, Chris often screams through his whole meditation, so I can't tell how it's it's a new it's a new type of meditation he's working and he wanted to talk to you about it after

the show. And now the rest of the interview with Michael Taft, one of the things that I like about your book and I like about um shin Zen Young, who is a teacher that I know you have have done some work with, is that there are different ways to approach meditation. I spent probably fifteen now I probably spent twenty of those twenty five years thinking that my only approaches to meditation were to follow my breath or

to repeat a mantra word. And for whatever reason for me, my breath is just not the most useful anchor for me. And when I started to do some of the things you describe in the book, and I'd like to walk through what those are. When I started to go towards paying attention to sounds or sensory experience or my current moment experience, meditation changed for me dramatically. And I really like how in the book you're laying out a variety

of different approaches and styles. Yeah, it turns out that sensory experience doesn't have to be just feelings in your body or words in your head. There's pictures in your head, there's external sound in sight. Even thinking can be considered a kind of internal sense, and there's a really wide array. I mean, Sinzen is great, uh for creating a taxonomy of all this that's super useful. And I have to say that his work is the basis of all the

stuff in the book the minfael geek Um. But when we look at this greater taxonomy of all the different possible things to meditate on, in the different ways of approaching meditating on those things, there's something for everyone. There's definitely something that anyone can get interested in meditating on and get, you know, real progress out of doing the practice. With you talk about within meditation, there are three components that ideally are present in some degree or other um concentration,

sensory clarity, and acceptance. And this is one of the places where I made a major departure from Shinzhen because he would call the third one equin amity UM, but I just preferred to use the more secular term exceptence. And so can you walk as briefly through what those three things mean to you and how they factor into meditation. Sure, the two that most people who are familiar with meditation

are familiar with are the concentration and acceptance pieces. So to do any form of meditation, some amount of concentration is usually going to be required. UM. For many traditions and many practices. The concentration aspect is the meditation just bringing your focus back to a single object over and over again. That's the essence of meditation for many people. That would be the sort of Johnic style meditations I

was describing earlier. And even in meditation that supposedly isn't so focused on concentration, like mindfulness and even some forms of non dual meditation, concentration still plays a part. You are, you mean, be focusing on any particular object, but you're concentrating on where your attention is going, or even on your attention itself. So um concentration always plays a role. And what's so amazing and beautiful about concentration is it's

a cultivatable skill. It's something that the more you do it, the better you get at it, and the better you get at it, the better it feels. So this is the whole area of psychology called flow with the work of Chicks and Mahi, who you know, describes the flow state. What he's really talking about with a flow state is um a concentrated state. You know what in meditation would be anything from the way anything from light concentration to

a pretty deep state of focus. The fact that you can say his name, it shows me that you have got some advanced mental skills. My girlfriend is Hungarian, so I've been school did this um he Um is just wonderful at really unpacking how excellent it feels to focus. And there's something that I, um, you know, I'm just one of these people with a personality that in meditation, I just for decades just tried hard and tried hard and tried hard, because the harder you try, the better

you do, right. And it turns out that that's not such a good style to have to to do well in meditation. UM at least perseverance, you know, pays off eventually. But what I did learn is that, especially with concentration, UM, it's something that you want to have a lightness of touch with. You know, it's um uh. We have that image of Rodan's statue, you know, the thinker and the guy is like concentrating so hard, and he's like looks like he's bashing himself on the head with his concentration fist.

It's just so intense. But the more that you work with concentration, the more you realize that it's a lightness of touch where you're just very gently, very gently guiding yourself back over and over in this kind of repetitive cycle that gets you the most bang for your buck. There. You want to really just kind of um gently come back over and over and realize that it is a kind of coming back. Concentration representsive returning to the focus object.

And so I mean, I had this idea that concentration would be like a laser beam, that it never leaves the focus object, and then you get I would get frustrated over and over because it tends to leave and go on to other objects. But when you realize that's going to happen, and you allow it to happen, and and and and build in the idea that that's going to happen, and then just gently guide your attention back,

it becomes much easier. Yeah, I think the other thing with that is that exactly your point, when you expect that it will happen, and when you actually realize that that constant tration is wandered and then bringing it back that is to a certain degree, that is a big part of the practice. When you're doing that, that's actually you know, you are building that muscle. It's not a failure. It's the fact that you found it, noticed it, and

brought it back is the point. It's the practice. And I always get amazed when people call their dog and call their dog, and they get more and more frustrated when the dog doesn't come back. And then finally the dog comes back, and what do they do because they're frustrated, They beat it, you know, it's like they hit it because you know, they're so mad at it for running away in the first place. And I always think, man, you're going to train your dog to never come back,

you know, like this behaviorism. You know, he comes, what do you expect. But it's the same thing with the way people work with concentration. It's like if if every time you bring your concentration back, you're all frustrated and angry at yourself that you lost your concentration and now you know, damn it, I gotta bring it back, and

you get tense up and you get angry. You're you're subtly teaching your like deep mind to really dislike concentration and to feel tense and upset while you're trying to concentrate.

So that's why this kind of really loose, really friendly like, oh, let's just bring it on back and actually enjoying that feeling of bringing the attention back UM is so much more effective because you're subtly training sort of like the deeper circuits of your brain that this is a positive experience that feels good, right, And I think that sort

of then leads naturally into the acceptance part of meditation. Yeah, And you know, acceptance is in a way the simplest idea to understand, you know, just don't resist it except what except what's arising. But it's the one that typically I have the most trouble with UM in terms of communicating it to students, simply because they tend to resist acceptance,

they don't accept it. And you know, there's there seems to be a sense maybe this is the third misconception or something about meditation, but there seems to be a sense in our society that if you ever accept anything, you're like a loser who and a doormat who's going

to get run over by life? And uh, you know, and yet you know, it's obvious that there are things we need to accept, things that we can't avoid, but even beyond that, we need to practice acceptance in order to do the practice of mindfulness for one really important reason, and that is you can't really examine something carefully while you're busy changing it. Right. First of all, you have to see what it is and get a sense of what it is before you go about changing it in

any way. And in order to get a sense of when something really is, you have to be open to seeing what it really is. So that openness to seeing it as it is in the moment is the acceptance I'm talking about. So, just for a concrete example, you know, an emotion comes up, and let's say it's an emotion that most people would say as negative. Like let's say some real sorrow is arising. And it's quite common for us, even you know, walking about during the day to be like, oh,

that's sadness. If we even know what we're feeling, we'd be like, oh that sadness. Uh, you know, I don't want that. I'm going to do something, you know, I'll have a candy bar to make it go away, or watch the teletone exactly. You know. Well, there's so much to say about that there. It really is. There's some kind of satanic backmasking joke in there, but anyway. Um, that propensity to sort of judge and not accept our

emotions gets even worse in meditation. If we feel like we're supposed to be having only nice experiences, are only happy feelings, and so the sadness comes up, and then it's like, oh, I either have to suppress that or deny it or make it go away in some way. And so the net result of all this is we're

never actually experiencing the badness. We don't know what it's about, we don't know how deep it is, how big it is, whether it's maybe just a tiny passing you know, mood of the moment, or if it's some kind of deeper background, you know, sense of depression. Who knows, will never know if we are continuously denying and suppressing it. So, you know, a big part of the endeavor of mindfulness is like,

what's really going on here? If sadness is arising, we're going to contact that and really begin to explore it skillfully. And there's you know, ways to even to go very deep into contact, or to go very deep into even changing it eventually, if we decide that's what's necessary. But the first movement is a movement of acceptance. It's a saying of yes to whatever is arising in the moment. Yeah, I really like the way you put in the book.

You say it's important and notice that acceptance means accepting your sensory experience, not accepting the conditions of your life. That's right, You're you're free to take all the actions necessary or desirable to make your life better. Acceptance doesn't mean becoming passive or inactive. It just means that the current sensory experience is what it is, and you accept

that part of things. And even more simply, you know, I invite everyone to do this exercise where you like, tense your fists and just say no. So try that right now. Tense your fists and your face and your whole body as tight as you can and just say no a couple of times, like no. Right. So that's resistance. And all I'm talking about with acceptance is like opening your fists and letting your face and body relax and just saying yes for just a minute and noticing the

difference there, which is fundamental. So the last part of meditation then that you talk about in the book is sensory clarity, and you talk about it a lot in the book, and you really sell it as a big benefit. So let's talk about what it is, why it's important, and then you know what what are ways to develop it. Concentration and acceptance or equanimity are two aspects of meditation that most teachers, most people would recognize. The sensory clarity

aspect is a little more unusual. It's something that Shinzhen talks about a lot, and it what means is essentially upping the resolution on your senses, seeing things in much more detail, with much more resolution, much more with a much finer grain. And um, I was listening to the podcast you did with Rick Hanson, who's a good friend of mine and I love his book Hardwearing Happiness, and you guys were talking about how to not own we have a good experience, but take in a good experience,

and how important that is. You know, we pay a lot of money, for example, to go on a nice vacation, but we get which is good, and we get on that night's vacation and we don't enjoy anything because we're just busy racking through the experiences. So sensory clarity is a real answer to the question of how to take in an experience, how to enjoy and experience, how to

make it, you know, salient. And so, for example, UM sensory clarity means not just saying, oh, feel your breath when you're meditating, but actually getting into every little, tiny, tiny, tiny detail of the body sensations of the breath. You know, how it feels between these two ribs versus those two ribs, how it feels in this little part of the lung as opposed to that little part of the lung. Things

like that. It may seem almost mundane or meaningless when I ask people to do that, like why would you want to zero in that deeply? But it's actually building the part of your brain that allows you to take that experience in at a very deep level. So it's it's in a way a major key to getting the

real benefits of meditation. Yeah, and I've I've experimented with it to some degree, and I will say that I think, like other things in meditation or pretty much anything in life, it takes some practice too, because my initial reaction is there's not I don't feel anything there right, There's nothing

happening at my foot right now. Right. One thing that I found has a great way to practice this is to try it in the shower, because in the shower, at any given moment, some every part of your body has some experience happening waters running down at water is hitting it. It's not quite as warm because it's not

in the water. It's it brings for me, It brings the body to life, and it makes it makes it easier for me to start to train that muscle of paying attention to those things, and then I'm a little bit better able to do it outside eye to that time, but it's still one that I recognize the value in, but really feel like I've got a long way to go. Well. Working on it little by little is the only way to do it, and it's you know, it's experienced dependent

neural plasticity at work. Right. The more you do it, the better you get it doing it. And this is one of the things they've shown, at least if we're only talking about body sensation, the insula, the part of the brain that feels internal body sensation um is thicker in people who have meditated a long time, and in fact, you can predict the thickness based on the number of years they've been meditating. So it appears to be the case that when you are feeling into your body sensation,

you're getting better at feeling into your body sensation. So the more you do it, the better it gets. Um The long term result of this, though, is that you know, even an experience, for example of taking a shower, can be quite pleasurable because you've got such a richer ability to experience it. If you get a teletubby in the shower, I should have just let that one go, but it

popped right in my head, you know, the blue or pin. Yes, So one of the parts in the book that I really like, I said, I liked a lot of it, but one of them that really hit me was you talk about that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. And I think there's a few things there too that I'd like to add and then ask you to extrapolate

a little bit further. But one is you talk about a study that was done by Daniel Gilbert at Harvard, and I actually have participated in it a bunch of times, where they just send people messages and sort of check in with them about how they're doing at any given moment and ask a variety of different questions. And one of the big findings was that because one of the questions they ask is how sort of how much attention

are you paying to what you're doing right now? And um, one of the big findings was that people in their mind is wandering all over the place, they are distinctly more unhappy. And I have certainly found that to be true for me. Yes, you know, they did this study

with thousands and thousands of people too. It's a very robust statistic that people's minds were wandering almost fifty of the time, they weren't paying attention to what they were doing, and during the times that their mind was wandering, they were significantly less happy. It turns out that paying attention i e. Concentrating on what you're doing makes you feel good, which backs up the research of chicks up me Hi

right exactly that that flow state. And so you also in the book talk about something called the default node network. Can you talk about what that is and how that applies to the mind wandering idea. Yeah, So this was a new idea in neuroscience that came out of all the f m r I studies. They realized that, um, the brain doesn't just turn off when you're not quote doing anything. When you're just sitting around like waiting for something to happen, in this case, you really waiting for

the experiment in the fm fMRI machine to begin. Um, your brain is still doing something. And so this was a big revelation to scientists UM when they discovered that, UM, this activity of the brain that occurs when you're not involved in a specific task actually involves a dedicated network. It's a dedicated system of your brain that's sort of like the idol setting or what I call in the

book the screen saver. And so this screen saver setting of your brain is called the default mode network, and it mainly involves the medial prefrontal cortex and the post singulate cortex and a couple other couple other areas of the brain that are involved in thinking about yourself. So, in other words, when your mind is wandering, what you're typically doing is daydreaming. You're thinking about the stuff from the past that you did and things in the future

that you want to do. And it turns out that daydreaming about the past and the future and you know the stuff you're going to uh not get wrong this time, and the things that you should have done differently in the past, even positive daydreaming ends up making you feel

kind of bad. One of the things that we talked about on the show a fair amountain I've wrestled with and work with people that I work one on one with, is this idea of rumination right where we just circle the drain on the same awful thoughts over and over again. I wonder if that's a default mode network piece or if that's a completely different area, because that's sort of

where it starts. In those your mind isn't on anything, and all of a sudden, those thoughts start sort of in that you know, in the default mode but then you know, does it does it transition to a different place. I'd just be curious. I don't know if you know that or the most rumination is in the default mode network, because if it's thinking about yourself, if it's self referential about the present or the past or the future, you're in the default mode network. So meditation seems like a

good way to help move ourselves out of that more often. Yeah, it turns out that doing any task on purpose takes you out of the default mode network. And again, just like the flow state psychology experiments show you know, getting real involved in a task like really difficult music, really extreme sports, things like that tend to get people in very deep flow states. Um and people tend to feel very joyous. Why is that they're not in their default

mode network. And in fact, you know, the default mode network more deeply is about having a sense of self at all. And the more deeply you get involved in an activity, playing the piano, riding a mountain bike, something like that, you begin to notice a loss of the sense of self, right you become quote one with the activity. That's because that default mode network, which generates a sense of self, where is involved in generating a sense of

self is going offline. Yeah. One of the things for rumination a game that I play and i've I've talked about on the show. I call it the alphabet gratitude game. But you start with the letter A and you're trying to think of something you're grateful. It starts with A,

that starts with B, etcetera. And it's the gratitude part is by far the secondary benefit to the giving your brain something else to do, you know, making it because you can play the same you do the same thing with trying to think of songs that start with the letter A that you like, or I just find that's a good way to move out of when I'm just in that spinning spot and I don't have anything specific

to focus on. Well, this is why things like sudoku and crossword puzzles are actually really useful because even though they seem you know, sort of useless on the everyday level, they make you feel good because they're giving you a complex task to focus on, uh and thus getting you out of default mode network activity. And you can get lost in them if they're you know, at the right

level of difficulty. But what's interesting is all these things playing the piano or riding a mountain bike or playing sudoku anything, these are all very specific tasks that people spend years to get good at, and they have their int ensic pleasure and they also have this effect of, you know, um, getting you out of default mode network activity. What's interesting about meditation is that it's a general activity that does this. It's makes you better at getting into

a flow state doing anything. So because meditation is kind of a general practice of doing this, you can learn to go into a flow state when you're just walking or when you're doing the dishes or when you're just staring out the window. And in fact, there's some preliminary research that shows that meditators actually have a different default mode network after a while, they're not defaulting into rumination.

They're defaulting into presence. Uh, you know, present moment awareness of sensory phenomena, so um it deeply changes your brain

structure and changes your whole relationship to rumination. Yeah. I think I'm finding that to some degree just being able to what I notice is the ability to just be more present, like just to notice what's around me and have the things that are around me capture my attention in a more engaging way versus looking at the tree and thinking, oh, that's pretty and then my mind wanders back off. I mean, it's getting a little bit better, and for me, that's reason enough to keep doing it.

That's right. And what you're describing as sensory clarity, you know, you you're able to engage the sensory experience of the tree more deeply rather than just kind of dismissing it with the word tree. Well, this is I think a good place to wrap up. We could probably do this for two or three hours. There's a ton of things in your book that I didn't get to, and a lot of other stuff, but this has been a really

enjoyable conversation. I appreciate you taking the time to come on the show well, I really enjoy it, Eric, and I also congratulate you on your podcast, which is amazing. Thank you so much. On YouTube, m H you can learn more about this podcast and Michael Taft at one you feed dot net slash Taft