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The songs that get stuck in my head carry an important message.

Not in the lyrics, titles or by playing them backwards, but in their unwelcome stickiness. I love Stevie Wonder, but I don’t need to bring him to the bathroom with me. Even the funkiest of grooves won’t help me write an email and can actually get in the way.

When I notice these songs with me everywhere, I’ve learned to treat this as a sign that my attention skills are waning. Or to put it differently, becoming more easily distractible. It might not seem like a big deal, but this distractibility leads to emotional reactivity, which we know undermines attention skills, setting up a feedback loop where emotions can start to run the show. Left unchecked, this can lead to burnout, anxiety, depression and more; so, to me, these messages are important.

I never used to notice. When I was just dabbling in meditation, I didn’t understand what these earworms were telling me, but after a few meditation retreats I saw things differently. A few weeks or months in silent meditation makes you a lot more aware of what’s going on in your mind, and how much it’s affecting you with a clarity that isn’t possible otherwise. But retreats end (at least for me), and no matter how hard I try, daily routines quickly whittle away the stillness and clarity cultivated during a meditation retreat.

Not that my life is busier than anyone else’s. But when meditation is one of many daily tasks, distractibility and emotions gain a much stronger foothold. It means I’m once again subject to a simple fact that Buddhism has known for centuries, and research has supported for a while now.

Under regular daily stress, attention skills degrade over time.

This is all the more dangerous because we don’t tend to notice the degradation as it happens; we just get used to it. And this unconscious adaptation is why we need signs and signals to let us know if we’re heading in the wrong direction.

That’s the message that the songs stuck in my head are delivering.

“Your attention is degrading.” Or as I interpret it: “you need to be meditating more” or sometimes a simple “what’s going on with you?”

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To be clear, having a random memory of a song pop into my awareness and singing along with it for a little while is no big deal. I’ve heard people say that catching themselves singing along to an earworm is a sign that they’re happy, which is actually kind of nice. We can discuss why we need a sign that we’re happy rather than just feeling happy another time, but when those same songs keep intruding while I’m trying to write an email, feed the dog, basically doing anything else at all, is when I sit up and take notice. Not whether I like the song or have some association with it, but the lack of freedom to control my attention, which then puts me even more at the mercy of the random things bouncing around in my own mind.

And there’s definitely some weird things in there.

I know this can sound a little extreme (I’ve been told), but it’s actually an important part of mindfulness training in its traditional context. Not just to be peaceful or productive, and certainly not non-judgemental (again, a blog for another time), but to become more aware of what’s happening in our minds. Then we can identify and sidestep harmful patterns such as rumination and worry, and cultivate the patience, compassion, and wisdom that can lead to skilful responses.

Put simply, mindfulness training supports us to make good judgements. Not snap judgements driven by fear, anger, habit or tribal identity, but judgements based on our higher ideals of wisdom, kindness and so on. It gives us the clarity to notice that we’re still thinking about the car that cut us off on the highway half an hour ago, or the insensitive thing someone said to us yesterday, or catastrophising about worst-case scenarios.

In the beginning, it gives us the freedom to simply turn our attention elsewhere. But just thinking about rainbows and fluffy bunnies when we’re distressed isn’t a long-term strategy.

As our attention skills improve, the power of thoughts and ideas to control our beliefs and behaviours dissipates. They begin to lose their power altogether, at which point the potential of the training ramps up.

Mindfulness is sometimes portrayed as passive and accepting, and while it enables us to remain calm in turbulent situations, its purpose is far more radical. It’s the basis for gaining a type of freedom we don’t often talk about in our culture: freedom from automatic, uncontrolled emotional reactions and freedom to choose how we respond to everything we encounter.

Even how we respond to the activity of our own minds.

This freedom shows up in different ways. When we see someone behaving badly, we don’t just react to the behaviour; we look to understand the underlying causes to help us respond more effectively. Or when we see people doing inspiring things, we don’t just write them off as gifted or special but try to understand and even emulate what made them this way. It means that rather than being overwhelmed by stress, we look for a way through that will improve things for ourselves and our community. We can act with patience and understanding of the mistakes we all make, without tolerating obstacles and injustice.

Contrary to the radical transformative effect we find in traditional Buddhist approaches, recent research suggests that modern mindfulness training can have the opposite effect[1]. Mindfulness practitioners whose goal was emotion regulation were more likely to accept unfair systems and beliefs that constitute the status quo, even when they conflict with basic principles of fairness[2]. Mindfulness becomes a tool to attune their emotional system to fit in with an unfair system.

This is the direction corporate mindfulness programs have gone from the beginning, and it’s a great example of the pitfalls of Buddhist practices entering the mainstream. With the more radical goals and theories stripped from the practice, it can be more a tool for subjugation than the freedom it was originally designed for.

The key to escape the prison of emotional reactivity becomes the opiate that keeps us locked in silence when we should be speaking up, passive and accepting when we should be working for change.

Of course, Buddhist training absolutely focuses on reducing automatic emotional reactions: not to be passive or pliable, but to experience what lies beneath all the emotions, opinions, ideas, and memories that make up our daily lives. This is a radical idea that is more than just belonging to some counterculture. Buddhist practices were designed for people already fundamentally dissatisfied with their society and how it was affecting their minds. It meant examining different concepts of being free, which often means choosing between freedom to chase every desire and to say or do whatever we please, versus the pursuit of freedom from automatic, impulsive emotional reactions that don’t lead us to the happiness and contentment we’re looking for.

This dissatisfaction is the key to deciding that there might be something wrong with the system, rather than with us, because it doesn’t seem to work in our favour.

It means stepping off the hedonic treadmill to recalibrate what it means to suffer and be happy. This can’t be done effectively while prioritising the same goals and aspirations that are considered normal in our society; then we’ll just regulate our emotions to accept the inevitable ups and downs of a materialist life we’re trying to be free of.

And to step out of societal expectations like this was no less radical in ancient India than it is in our modern, hyper-materialist way of life.

All this puts me in a bit of a bind.

On the one hand, I want everyone to sidestep unnecessary stress and find the confidence in their mental health that I did through meditation. On the other, I don’t think everyone should be Buddhist, and certainly don’t think a one-way ticket to the Himalayas will work for many people.

So, we’re caught in a difficult situation. Narrowing the goal of practice to emotion regulation provides real benefit for people under stress, but it risks making them more accepting of injustice and inequality. The corporate mindfulness landscape seeks to hold individuals responsible for their mental state while working within an unreasonable and unfair system. Buddhist approaches to meditation offer the promise of radical transformation people might be looking for, but chasing Buddhist goals of liberation and enlightenment will be stepping too far outside the mainstream for many.

As a very Buddhist person who teaches mostly secular programs, I’ve had more than fifteen years to think about it, study, and research it.

Rather than just lowering the bar for what meditation is for, my approach has been to infuse a sense of the radical into secular practice and scale it as we improve. The emotion-regulation aspect of practice shouldn’t be merely about not getting upset with what’s going on around us. It’s noticing we’re upset, but with freedom from the automated and often unskilful responses, like rumination, stress, anger that leads to strained relationships, and exhaustion. Then we work on the freedom to choose how we respond. No matter how emotional we are.

The calm that the modern mindfulness movement often promotes isn’t actually the endgame; it’s what freedom feels like.

I was very, very sceptical about all this when I first started meditating. But after trying it for only a short time, I was stunned at how quickly I could pull myself out of downward spirals of rumination and worry that had derailed me in the past. So surprised, I got curious about how much further this could go – just what was possible through this type of practice, which I’m still doing more than 25 years later.

I could have got off the bus at any time; the emotional regulation from just the first few months of meditation practice changed my life, but I wanted to know more. And the teaching I received was given in terms of radical freedom; I never heard anything about acceptance or being non-judgemental till I came back from India and did a psychology degree. A more traditional approach builds on emotion regulation skills by learning other types of meditation that shape how we respond to the outside world and the machinations of our own minds. There are practices to cultivate kindness, compassion and insight, all of which put guardrails in place to prevent us from becoming enamoured with merely being calm, when so much more is possible.

After all this time, I’m still interested in what’s possible through meditation, but that doesn’t have to be the case for everyone.

All I suggest is that we don’t learn to meditate to be calm or accepting, but aim for something more radical: freedom. And to notice when these freedoms are being eroded.

Songs still follow me around, but these days when I find them squatting in my mind without permission, I take it as a sign that my hard-won freedoms could be eroding.

This is the last post in the Contemplative Science series, but the conversation continues. Freedom from emotional reactivity - and freedom to choose how to respond is what the “Ground State” online course and community is built around.

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[1] Miller, E. (2026). Dōgen and the Boundaries of Secular Mindfulness. Mindfulness, 1-8.

[2] Chachignon, P., Suchier, J., Dany, L., & Le Barbenchon, E. (2025). Does mindfulness support the status quo? The role of neoliberal orientation and emotion regulation. European Journal of Social Psychology, 55(7), 1197-1215.

She was a nurse on the brink of burnout and came to see me for help.

I’d seen this lack of conviction behind these same words many times in the past. Nurses, doctors, psychologists, teachers, parents, and even random people at public talks have unconvincingly told me that caring too much is burning them out. Many don’t find it a convincing explanation, but it’s usually the only one they have. Left long enough, this idea becomes normalised, reified, and eventually a belief. If it goes unchallenged long enough, it can become a core belief, at which point the doubt in the voice disappears and things become more difficult.

Healthcare is stressful. So is teaching, parenting, and (let’s face it) just being alive in the 21st century. There’s little, if anything, I can do about most of that, but adding the burden of “caring too much” confuses and unnecessarily stresses people already close to their limit.

Worse still, it’s not true.

There are definitely things we can care too much about. The temperature of a coffee, the brand names on our clothing, the number of likes on a post, to name a few.

But not the welfare of people.

I think this is why people often sound unconvinced when they say they care too much. The alternative — that they should care less about people — doesn’t feel right either. There’s (almost) no culture where not caring about others is admired or encouraged, and it feels natural to care. It’s obvious from an early age that we’re wired to care about each other, so caring for people isn’t the reason so many people are stressed. Caring is actually an important part of avoiding burnout.

The problem is empathy.

Imagine being in your kitchen with a friend or family member, and you see them accidentally jam their right thumb in a drawer. Instinctively, you may wince and reach for your own right thumb. This is empathy, specifically affective empathy, which is the natural sharing in the experiences of others without needing to be told about them.

This empathy might spur you into action. Maybe you reach for an ice pack, lead them to the couch, get a painkiller, a drink of water (or something stronger), and show your concern. You might even do all this quite automatically, with no need to think it through. You can see this in a parent responding to a baby’s cry before they’ve consciously decided to act.

A distressed person is helped, social bonds are strengthened, it seems like a very elegant solution.

I want to draw your attention to a thread that runs through these empathic responses, which is the automatic responding. Encountering someone in distress, we move in to alleviate it without even being fully aware we’re doing it, which I find a source of hope in our increasingly fragmented world. Evidence that we’re wired to lean in, not turn away.

It’s an impressive system. We encounter distress, resonate emotionally with it, and move automatically to alleviate it. It’s a great system, until you consider — whose distress?

To what degree are these automatic responses about one’s own empathically triggered distress, and to what degree is it a genuine focus on alleviating the distress of the other person? An honest look can make this an uncomfortable question.

But it doesn’t have to be.

Our empathic response system is very well-evolved for a hunter-gatherer society or a small community. It almost automates a network of cooperation among people who rely on each other to survive and even flourish.

It’s less well-suited for much of our 21st-century experience.

Take a nurse going from bed to bed on a ward, a doctor or psychologist seeing one patient after another in their office. Their days are spent attending to people in distress, which will often automatically put them in distress as well. A teacher in front of a classroom, or parents raising children, will be regularly set off emotionally by others. And that’s on top of whatever stress they’re already under in their personal lives.

It’s worth mentioning that empathic resonance works in the other direction as well. When we encounter people enjoying themselves and laughing, we’ll also resonate with that; I often laughed along with Tibetans before I could speak the language, and I love the arrivals hall in airports. The constant stream of loved ones being reunited is an easy way to generate smiles and emotions that we should spend more time cultivating in ourselves.

We’ve gone from a society of people who knew very little about communities more than a few days’ walk away to being regularly notified about earthquakes, floods and wars on the other side of the world. This has happened quite quickly in evolutionary terms and is compounded by the fact that so much of the information we receive is filtered by algorithms to spark strong emotional reactions. It can mean we’re constantly resonating with the anger, fear, and sadness of people we wouldn’t have previously known anything about, let alone met in person.

So far, this might sound like a case against empathy, but I assure you it’s not. Left unchecked, empathic distress can become a pathway to burnout. But there’s a way to make that response protective.

Transform it into compassion.

Our culture often conflates empathy and compassion, which may be one reason we continue to misunderstand burnout among healthcare professionals. People leave the profession believing they “care too much.”

Consider two nurses performing exactly the same tasks on the same ward. From the outside, their behaviour is identical: same attentiveness, same skill, same bedside manner. But internally, one is running on autopilot, exhausted by the day's emotional residue. The other notices those empathic reactions as they arise, returns attention to the patient’s distress, and seeks to reduce it.

We might not tell the difference from the outside, but the inner orientation changes everything.

Buddhist psychology agrees: compassion is fundamentally a mental state. It often expresses itself through actions, but it isn’t reducible to them. The degree to which we can call any act compassionate is the degree to which the person is focused on alleviating the suffering of another — and that focus on the other isn’t what defines empathy.

Empathy is resonance with another person’s experience.
Compassion is the wish that they not suffer.
Those are not the same thing.

Which means what people often call “compassion fatigue” may be something else entirely: empathic distress. Increasingly, research suggests compassion isn’t the cause of this kind of burnout. It may actually be the solution.

Blaming compassion for burnout is like blaming the cast on your arm for the broken bone.

Can we swap empathy for compassion — is this what contemplative traditions like Buddhism do?

No. We actually need empathy to develop compassion. We need to understand what it’s like for other people in distress so that we can develop the aspiration to help free them from it.

You can have high levels of empathy without compassion, but you can’t have high levels of compassion without empathy.

This is why I was encouraged by the nurse's doubting tone. I wasn’t talking to someone who “cared too much”, but someone who’d mistaken empathy for compassion.

And that’s something that can be trained.

The distinction between empathic distress and compassion isn’t merely philosophical. It’s practical, and contemplative traditions have spent centuries developing methods for cultivating it. Modern psychology is increasingly arriving at many of the same conclusions.

That’s what Ground State: Mindfulness That Holds Its Ground is built around. Eight weeks of structured practice grounded in contemplative tradition and contemporary science, helping caring people make compassion sustainable rather than exhausting.

Not by caring less, but by learning to care differently.

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If this post has named something you’ve felt but couldn’t quite articulate, the next step is practice.

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“Me neither!” I said, and a sceptical silence fell over the table. For a moment, the background barista and Toronto traffic noises seemed a little louder.

“Now you’re just being difficult.” My friend broke the silence. He was kind of right, but it was about the wording. He’d said, “I don’t believe I have past and future lives”, which ignores the most important issue.

Who doesn’t believe?

And if you can’t identify who does or doesn’t believe, how do we talk about their past or future – in this life or a different one?

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Continuity of consciousness is central to Buddhism, but almost all of the things I use to identify “me” will not continue after I die.

Which leads me to question if the things that I identify as “me”, are actually… me? Or anyone, for that matter?

I’d been studying Buddhism in India for years by then, but I first went over quite unconvinced by many Buddhist views. What I quickly learned was this: when it comes to how reality works, we’re often asking the wrong questions.

And even when they’re not wrong, the questions are still not pushing as deeply as they could.

This series has been building toward this. Dereification of ideas, thoughts and memories can reduce pain, mental illness, and symptoms of trauma. It even gives us the flexibility and nuance to address different ethical dilemmas and better empathise with others. But the most interesting target of dereification is one that, until recently, has been almost uniquely a Buddhist domain.

The self.

Most people first hear about mindfulness as stress reduction, mental health support, emotion regulation and the like. These are all great reasons to do mindfulness training - my own research looked specifically at mindfulness for anxiety and depression, but these are more like supports than the main event.

Buddhist traditions operate a little differently, with mindfulness serving as a skill that enables deconstructive practices1 to target our beliefs about who we are.

This is a different, much stranger project than stress reduction, and it’s gaining increasing interest in psychological circles.

If you’ve ever said something regrettable to someone in your life, this makes you pretty normal. I’ve done it, pretty sure my neighbours will have done it, and most likely your friends and family will have done it. But have you ever identified with it?

Fused the action to your identity?

Put differently: Have you ever been angry with yourself? If you’ve ever chastised yourself with “what’s wrong with you?”, or “why are you so stupid?”, or something similar, then you’ve most likely reified something you’ve done as part of your identity.

Perhaps it still seems abstract, so I’ll say it like this: doing something stupid doesn’t make you stupid. Saying something mean doesn’t make you mean. It’s you doing something stupid or mean, which is different. People often resist this idea, but the logic is clear, and it works both ways.

If you’ve done something clever or kind (and I’m confident you have), then you might think “I’m clever”, or “I’m kind”. But if you’ve previously done something regrettable and scolded yourself for being stupid or mean, then which is it? You can’t be both.

But you can be neither.

Not long ago, there was no room for a claim like this in psychological circles. For those of us on the contemplative side of things, it has often felt as though contemplative science was more about running meditators through mazes than about a true dialogue. That’s changing quickly, as more and more scientists turn to contemplative theories that underpin the practices they’ve been researching.

Some of their conclusions border on Buddhist philosophy as they trace mental distress to the strength with which we identify with habits, memories, and emotions rather than treating them as ongoing, changing processes.

This gets ever more subtle as we travel from the reification of fear and ideas about pain, to the reification of rumination and worry, and even to metacognitive beliefs – beliefs about our thoughts, ideas and memories.

Two recent papers23 capture this subtlety better than anything I’ve read in years, carrying the field into distinctly Buddhist territory by examining the thoughts and ideas we have about ourselves.

These papers support a classic Buddhist view: what we call a self is a label applied to changing processes, yet we relate to the label as though it were something solid and enduring. This leads to a very rigid sense of self, which inhibits the flexibility we need to live in a complicated world that can throw joy and adversity at us seemingly at random. This flexibility is also related to resilience to trauma and adversity4

In the Buddhist model, there are five of these processes: one physical (the body) and four mental. The researchers identify ten and, in a rare move for a scientific paper, link them to the different components of the 5-part Buddhist model; rather than a self, they call it a “self-pattern”.

A pattern of changing processes rather than a fixed, observable thing.

This caught my attention immediately. It’s not every day that a contemporary psychological model maps onto an ancient framework I’d learned in the Himalayas and translated many times from Tibetan. And perhaps the most important part is this: they also identify rigidity in the self-pattern as a driver of mental distress – identifying with a fixed label instead of the constantly changing processes it points to.

This is how you could identify as mean or stupid, despite doing kind and clever things.

Or identify with a diagnosis of depression or anxiety rather than treat them as processes you need help to work back into healthy patterns.

The conclusions are startlingly similar and simple. (i) You don’t exist the way you think you do, and (ii) that’s a very good thing.

This is quite different from many psychological models that rest on the existence of an independent self that engages in patterns of behaviour. Some of these patterns are helpful, and we work to change the ones that aren’t. The self-pattern model says there are ongoing processes that produce a sense of self, and if we identify too much with that and ignore the processes, it creates mental distress.

This is where the conversation becomes more serious, because there are risks, and a contemplative approach like this should come with a warning. Not fine print hidden at the bottom, and not a graphic health warning on a cigarette packet, but some guardrails need to be built into this. Research into the adverse effects of meditation is a very new field5, and there’s still not much research to guide us in best practices yet, but we can look to Buddhism to find some safety and a middle way, because there are reasons Buddhist traditions rarely taught these practices in isolation.

As meditation begins to loosen the rigidity of a sense of self, we’re moving away from what Buddhism calls the extreme of permanence. This can make for big improvements in our wellbeing, but if we dereify our sense of self without proper preparation, there’s a danger that it can take us from mistaking ourselves as solid and unchanging to mistaking ourselves as not existing at all. Then we fall into the extreme of nihilism, which psychologists might recognise as a type of dissociation or identity destabilisation, and it is a genuine risk of these practices.

The deeper Buddhist traditions recognised this risk long before psychologists began documenting adverse effects. They didn’t avoid these practices. They surrounded them with preparation. And that preparation may prove to be one of the most important contributions Buddhism can make to contemplative science.

That’s where the next post will pick up.

The guardrails that the Buddhist traditions built around these practices aren’t esoteric or inaccessible. They’re structured, teachable, and sequenced — and they’re what Ground State course is built around. It’s also the course I used in my PhD.

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If this series has you curious about what it actually looks like to practise dereification safely, with the preparation the tradition recommends, that’s where we go deeper.

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I found the monk very distracting.

Not so much the monk, who wasn’t visible to me, but what he was saying.

It was a cool evening, and I was meditating in the epicentre of the Buddhist world. Just me and a few hundred others under the Bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya.

In the background, an American monk was translating a teaching from a Thai master that I was doing a poor job of ignoring.

It was more interesting than distracting because the teaching covered different types of meditation and how mindfulness fits into their model, which differs from the Indo-Tibetan training I am familiar with. At the time, I was finishing my thesis, so any conversation about what mindfulness was and how to use it felt especially relevant. Also, I was supposed to be meditating.

I’d only heard a fraction of the teaching, and I was turning it over in my mind as I walked through chaotic night markets toward my guest house. This is usually entertaining as locals try their best to sell tours, statues and water pistols with equal commitment, but tonight I was trying to stay focused on what I’d heard.

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At some point, it occurred to me that the mindfulness training I’d spent decades practising, translating, teaching, and now researching was playing a large role in what was happening. Just like a meditation session, where I’d try to keep focus in amongst all the memories, ideas, and random thoughts competing for attention, here all the potential distractions were externalised into the sights, sounds, and smells of the Bodh Gaya market. All things I’d normally engage with, have a laugh, maybe even buy some snacks, were now things I was trying to avoid as I kept focus on what I’d heard.

Once through the markets, the dark unpaved streets gave a little more space to think. It wasn’t just that the Thai teaching had presented a different model of meditation types than my Tibetan Buddhist training. It was the similarity in treating mindfulness alone as a pretty blunt instrument that interested me.

And this was exactly the section of my PhD I was writing at the time.

In my study, the group that did the least mindfulness training did better on anxiety measures. The group had done four weeks of ‘emotion skills training’ before any teaching on mindfulness and outperformed a group that started with four weeks of mindfulness before switching to the emotion skills. Essentially, the group that meditated for four weeks did better than the group that meditated for eight.

This was only a small surprise, and easy to explain.

Improving mindfulness as we measure it in psychology has never been the endgame for Buddhism. It’s a tool to better understand our minds and behaviour, and to keep our longer-term goals in mind when they’re at risk of being temporarily replaced by the emotions and reactions that can make us forget them. There’s an element of applying mindfulness that makes it more powerful than just “being mindful”. It’s not just what to do, but why to do it, and how it should help.

The transformative processes of deepening mindfulness were mapped a few years ago by scientists and a Buddhist scholar (a monk also from the Thai forest tradition)[1]. They created a “Buddhist-informed” model that makes a useful distinction between mindfulness as a simple mechanistic control and mindfulness more informed by how the mind works. This model starts with a mechanistic mindfulness that many people are familiar with through popularised courses, an informed mindfulness that uses Buddhist insights to support changes in habitual thought and behaviours, which can be developed into holistic mindfulness through compassion and deeper philosophies of mind.

In this model, as skills improve, introducing insight and loving-kindness meditation creates a progression of ever-deepening mindfulness from mechanistic to holistic. It’s a different way of thinking than the system I’ve learned, where mechanistic mindfulness is developed, then other forms of meditation are introduced that also cultivate kindness and compassion and deepen insight into mental states and processes. While the Thai system treats insight and compassion as deeper levels of mindfulness, the Tibetan system treats mindfulness as the tool for developing compassion and insight.

They’re different without being contradictory, which is why I’d found it so interesting (read distracting) when I’d heard it back in the Bodh Gaya temple grounds.

Importantly, these forms of mindfulness don’t develop in isolation. As informed mindfulness develops through meditation and emotion skills training, it supports mechanistic mindfulness, creating a feedback loop that strengthens both. This may explain why participants who learned emotion skills first outperformed those who began with mindfulness practice alone. They had a foundation for applying mindfulness skills and understood how mindfulness and emotions work together before they started meditating.

If we’re not experiencing an emotion, we’re probably not far from one taking hold, and it turns out that simply naming and understanding emotions reduces their negative impact. In another example of researchers using an accurate name that will never catch on outside the lab, it’s known as emotional granularity [2], and it can work as part of the feedback loop that supports mechanistic mindfulness.

It works like this: more stable attention (mechanistic mindfulness) makes us more aware of our emotional state, and this awareness develops informed mindfulness, while also feeding back to support our mechanistic mindfulness. As we practice more, our mindfulness helps us identify emotions earlier, while emotional skills help us understand them more precisely. This makes us less reactive and more understanding of our emotions and of those around us.

This evolution of mindfulness is presented a little differently in other traditions. In the Tibetan system, other types of meditation practice are introduced as core mindfulness skills improve. Profound practices to develop empathy, kindness and compassion change the way we think about and relate to others, while insight practices make our ideas, thoughts, and impulses less concrete and all-consuming. These are called constructive and deconstructive practices in a brilliant paper published a while back, which is a great example of how Buddhist and psychological scholars can collaborate for the benefit of people[3].

Whichever model you prefer, the implication is surprisingly consistent: mindfulness on its own is rarely the intervention that changes people. In Buddhist traditions, it’s always been a critical element of transformation, but never the only tool.

To get the most out of mindfulness practice, we need something to use it for. And it makes the most sense to start with our emotions.

We already know quite a lot about them. There are models of different emotion families, their function, how they feel, and the sorts of behaviours they can set in motion. With a little reflection, we can identify the particular emotions that cause us problems and the times and places they occur. Learn a little about these emotions, and you’re starting to develop some emotional granularity that can help dial down their intensity.

If you’re already doing mindfulness training, this will take it up a level; if you haven’t started yet, that’s no problem. My own research showed that learning about emotions first is an effective way to get the most out of mindfulness training.

With those two simple pieces in place, you have a head start over other popularised approaches that prioritise “being mindful”, or non-judgemental, or even “letting go”. This is about tapping into the weight and momentum of 2,500 years of Buddhist practice and the fascinating, brilliant work of 21st-century scientists.

Combining mindfulness with deep philosophy about the nature of reality and our own minds is what drew me to Buddhism nearly thirty years ago. I had the time and interest to take it very seriously, and it worked for me, but most people (including the present me) won’t have the time or opportunity to head for the Himalayas on a one-way ticket. This doesn’t mean we have to settle for mindfulness training stripped of what makes it transformative, when researchers and contemplatives have worked so hard to make sure the transformative potential of Buddhist theory and practice is available to us right now.

And we can do it from our own home, without anything more exotic than an internet connection.

So the question isn’t whether mindfulness works. It’s what we ask it to do, and how we prepare before we begin.

The preparation this post describes: emotion skills first, mindfulness applied with purpose, practices that target the mechanism rather than just symptoms, isn’t abstract. That’s exactly how Ground State is structured. It’s also the sequence my PhD research validated.

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[1] Rogge, R. D., Lin, Y. Y., Swanson, D. P., & Amaro, A. (2024). Tracing the path toward mindfulness back to its origins: Linking tenets of Buddhism to mindfulness within the Buddhism-informed unified flexibility and mindfulness (BI-UFM) model. Mindfulness, 15(4), 775-794.

[2] Wilson-Mendenhall, C. D., & Dunne, J. D. (2021). Cultivating emotional granularity. Frontiers in psychology, 12, 703658.

[3] Dahl, C. J., Lutz, A., & Davidson, R. J. (2015). Reconstructing and deconstructing the self: cognitive mechanisms in meditation practice. Trends in cognitive sciences, 19(9), 515-523.

The bottle of Dettol looked older than me.

I’d just crashed a motorbike in a small Indian village in the Himalayas. Not a spectacular crash. Just me trying to avoid a street dog that seemed determined to get run over, but it may have been the most interesting thing to happen all week here.

I was fine, but the locals’ natural concern for visitors meant I was sat on a chair, handed chai, and had superficial scratches doused with Dettol from an antique bottle.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” my friend (who had come out unscathed) asked.

None of the old guys spoke English, so I exhaled and, in the calmest, most relaxed voice, smiled and answered, “Yep, this really hurts a lot.”

I didn’t want to alarm anyone.

My friend laughed, the locals smiled and relaxed, I sat back and finished my chai, looking down the valley, barely thinking about the crash or the more traumatic Dettol incident.

Even the dog was napping on the side of the road as if nothing had happened.

This was not a high-stakes crash or injury. I might have forgotten it altogether if I hadn’t come across some research on irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) that reminded me of it many years later. It seems that mindfulness training helped reduce IBS symptoms, not by acting on the symptoms themselves, but by reducing the catastrophising, worry, and “emotional interference” that accompany them. This predicted a decrease in the reported severity of the IBS symptoms.[1]

Sceptics always cry “placebo” at these kinds of results, which is helpful because it pushes the field into more interesting territory. And this research took me on a fascinating detour.

In a nutshell, it goes like this: When you hold your thumb after hitting it with a hammer, or grab your foot where you step on a Lego piece, this is part of your body’s natural pain management. It’s an in-house opioid system that many pain treatments, such as breathing exercises and acupuncture, are known to activate. Even giving someone fake medication will activate their opioid pain-killing system if they believe they’re taking pain meds.

Mindfulness training is different. It reduces pain and discomfort, but doesn’t activate our natural opioid system. It’s not a physical mechanism.

Pain is usually measured by intensity and discomfort, or unpleasantness. In much of the research on mindfulness and pain, it’s the unpleasantness that is reduced with no significant reduction in the intensity.

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So, as I calmly explained to my friend that the Dettol was indeed causing me pain, the intentional relaxation and my regular meditation practice are likely to have reduced the unpleasantness of it. The sting of Dettol on road rash was probably easier to brush off with some concerned new friends, sweeping views of the Himalayan valley, and sweet chai with cardamom. It’s a state of mind quite different from that of an adolescent being treated for doing something stupid, which is how many of us are introduced to the Dettol experience that we carry into our adult lives.

Just as a calm demeanour with my Dettol-brandishing friends made the discomfort easy to ignore, cultivating a relaxed, accepting approach to more significant pain can make the experience easier to bear.

The possibility that our attitude and emotional reaction to pain influences our perception of discomfort can be traced back at least 2,500 years, to the Sallatha Sutra[2]. When asked about physical pain, the Buddha answered that most of us respond to it with “worry, grief, lamentation, and tears.” And this mental distress means we’re under the influence of “two kinds of feelings, a bodily and a mental feeling. It is as if a man were pierced by an arrow and, following the first piercing, he is hit by a second arrow.” This is in contrast to a well-trained meditator who won’t succumb to these mental “lamentations” that we ordinary folk are prone to. Such a practitioner will experience pain, but won’t be “hit by a second arrow, following the first one”, resulting in less distress.

A recent research paper tested this by electrocuting monks and nuns[3].

Actually, it was a little less dramatic and more sophisticated than that, and it also included laypeople.

The researchers recruited twelve monks and nuns from Theravada Buddhist monasteries, with an average of about 26,000 hours of meditation experience, and another twelve lay people, with an average of about 150 hours of meditation experience.

After each pulse, participants rated three things: how much it hurt, how strongly they wanted to avoid it, and how much it felt like their pain, which was defined as “self-involvement, or getting caught up in the experience.” From a research perspective, you could say this is an attempt to “operationalise” the second arrow.

Very clever.

Perhaps the most interesting result of this study is that experienced meditators had lower identification with pain than lay people across all conditions. The experienced meditators were less affected by the second arrow just resting than the lay people were during meditation, and that’s not all: the monks’ and nuns’ ratings of the intensity of the pain were no different, whether in sessions of mindfulness, loving-kindness, or even just at rest.

Essentially, there is a mental component to the experience of pain that experienced meditators can isolate from the physical pain and prevent it from forming an amplifying loop that happens to non-meditators.

For them, the second arrow is never fired.

Using some fancy statistics, the study goes even further to show a loop: pain sparks aversion, aversion drives identification, and identification amplifies the experience of pain, creating more aversion, and so on. This is the mechanism that can turn acute pain into chronic suffering, and it’s the same chain the Buddha discovered and taught as “dependent origination” without any stats. At least, not that I know of.

None of this is to say that pain is imaginary or trivial. It’s real – the electric shocks were real, the Dettol was real, and there are times when even painkillers don’t give relief. It can be totally debilitating. The point here is that we don’t just experience the sensation in the body. We also bring other things to it: emotions, preconceptions, and our identification with it, all of which occur in the mind. Then we tend to point to these two experiences and call them “pain” and treat them as one indivisible thing.

Which it’s not.

The physical sensation is one element, and our mental representations of it another. And it’s the second of these that meditation can most reliably change.

This is the reification mechanism I described in the last post. Treating a mental representation as the thing it refers to. There, it was thoughts, opinions and memories; here, it’s pain. The mechanism is the same, and the training that loosens it in those other contexts also works here.

We know that dereification is a natural by-product of mindfulness training. It’s something we can experience very directly in a meditation session. I’ve learned and taught many practices designed specifically to do this, but regular practice makes it a trait that is just part of our day-to-day life.

This explains why the monks and nuns experienced less pain than the laypeople, even when they were just resting, and why the laypeople only experienced pain reduction while they were in meditation. It’s the difference between needing effort to achieve a state in which the relationship with pain is dereified, and being so familiar with that state that it becomes a trait. An embedded way of viewing the world, rather than something you have to look for.

My PhD revolved around this concept of reification, but it’s not why I keep returning to it. The convergence of Buddhist discoveries from 2,500 years ago with those of modern psychology is one of the most exciting developments in contemplative science. In this series, we’ve looked at this mechanism through the lens of trauma, pain, and even cookies. The next post goes further: dereification removes the weight of mental content, but is that enough? Is there something more we can cultivate once that weight has lifted?

There are ways of working with a freer mind to build compassion and insight, to understand and remove the causes of our own suffering, and make a genuine contribution to the world. That’s where the next post takes us.

The second arrow doesn’t shoot because of weakness or inattention. It fires because of a trainable pattern — and dereification is what trains it out. Ground State is built around exactly the practices the Buddhist tradition developed to interrupt the loop between pain, aversion, and identification that this post describes.

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If you want to practise what this post is pointing toward, this is where it lives.

These ideas take on a different quality in practice than they do on the page. Next Monday in Balanced Minds, we’ll work with the pause — the space between stimulus and response where the second arrow either fires or doesn’t. That’s where this becomes something you can actually use.

[1] Garland, E. L., Gaylord, S. A., Palsson, O., Faurot, K., Douglas Mann, J., & Whitehead, W. E. (2012). Therapeutic mechanisms of a mindfulness-based treatment for IBS: effects on visceral sensitivity, catastrophizing, and affective processing of pain sensations. Journal of behavioral medicine, 35(6), 591-602. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3883954/pdf/nihms512860.pdf

[2] Nyanaponika Thera (Trans.). (1983). Sallatha Sutta: The arrow (SN 36.6). Access to Insight (BCBS Edition). https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn36/sn36.006.nypo.html

[3] Nicolardi, V., Simione, L., Scaringi, D., Malinowski, P., Yordanova, J., Kolev, V., ... & Raffone, A. (2024). The two arrows of pain: Mechanisms of pain related to meditation and mental states of aversion and identification. Mindfulness, 15(4), 753-774. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12671-021-01797-0

“I would like a cookie.”

This wasn’t just a random thought; it was an Earth-shattering insight. A simple but important truth delivered from the universe to me, sitting quietly on a meditation cushion in my hut.

It had been at least three weeks since I’d spoken to anyone, and hours of daily meditation had settled my mind enough that I’d become aware of much of the goings-on in there. It wasn’t always pretty, but I was only halfway through the retreat, so it was getting easier to disentangle from unhelpful and irrelevant thoughts. And it was clear that this thought was an important one.

Before ending a meditation session, whether it’s at the sound of a bell or due to an important interruption like this one, it’s best to make sure everything’s going well. “Set everything in place before you stand up” is the sort of advice I give when teaching. So, I relaxed the tension building in my shoulder, released all control of my breath and reset my attention.

And then I laughed.

Partly at the sudden and complete lack of desire for a cookie, but mostly at the potential of such an unremarkable thought to derail something as important as a meditation session. After all, I’d organised a two-month break and flown halfway round the world for no reason other than to meditate, but for a brief moment, I let a cookie take control. And not even a real one, just an imaginary one that existed only in my mind.

If you’ve ever done some meditation, it’s likely you’ll have had the experience of a random thought, memory, or image float through the mind without affecting you. You’re aware of it, but it just shows up and then goes away without a ripple.

Other times, this mental activity will show up full-force, and you’ll relive an event of the past, or start to live out a fantasy that’s never happened. Absorbed to the degree that you’re no longer fully aware of the meditation session you’d sat down to do.

You may even have noticed that the same thought or memory can have a different impact at different times. The thought of a cookie might drift through your mind with no more effect than a butterfly in your neighbour’s garden at one time, and another it tasks you with the most important seek-and-destroy mission in history.

Why this happens is no mystery.

Imagine a retreat centre in Tuscany with a small café serving delicious baked goods.

Sitting alone in a small retreat hut nearby, it’s possible to develop a mental image or thought about the biscotti. This could be intentional or not, but the important part is this: it’s a mental representation of the biscotti, not the actual biscotti. The actual baked goods are in a café a few hundred metres away. Nonetheless, the mental representation of biscotti can still make your mouth water and cause you to act as if it’s right there in the hut with you.

The reason for this is simple: you are treating the thought or image as the actual biscotti. In technical terms, we call this treating the representation (thought or image) as the referent (the actual biscotti), and it applies to all mental activity. A mental image of a loved one in another city might make you smile as if they were there with you. Something that is not your loved one will spark an emotional reaction as if they were there.

The meditation session that had almost been derailed by cookies was slightly different. It wasn’t that I was treating mental images of cookies as cookies, but that I was treating a random, unbidden thought as a fact. The thought “I would like a cookie” can drift through the mind with no effect if I treat it as just the random thought that it is. But once I treat it as a fact, it solidifies into a very real desire for a cookie. And this can drive behaviours.

The mechanism extends to memories, which are mental representations of past events. I can feel the crowded excitement of walking into Madison Square Garden to watch an ice hockey game fifteen years ago, and the disappointment of my Toronto Maple Leafs’ 7-2 loss. Even though the memory is not the event.

The emotion isn’t sparked by the content of the memory. It’s not just remembering the crowd, the noise, the iconic location, or even crunching through the snow between the subway stop and the Gardens. It’s about treating the memory as if it were the event.

Or more accurately, mistaking the representation for the thing itself.

It’s a concept that gets a lot of attention in Buddhism and is becoming increasingly common in modern psychological research, where it’s known as reification. The solidifying of thoughts, feelings and perceptions as accurate depictions of reality, rather than mental processes. It’s a mechanism we don’t even know is running, and it’s hard to fully appreciate how pervasive it is in our lives. It’s driving daily decisions and interactions, and even our broader values and worldview.

In the last post, I mentioned that flow states have been shown to reduce the rigidity and uncontrollability of trauma responses. Treatments such as music and surf therapy have had a genuinely positive impact for people with past trauma.

But we can go deeper.

Flow states break up our rigidity, but don’t produce a lasting change in how we relate to our own minds. For all the benefits I found in music, surfing, and mountain biking, it wasn’t until I got serious about meditation that I saw how deeply we can change our patterns and reactivity.
It wasn’t till I studied Buddhism in depth that I understood why.
And it wasn’t till my PhD that I could see the pervasive relevance of reification in modern mental health conversations.

A paper I relied on heavily in my thesis posited this mechanism as one of the three fundamental outcomes of all mindfulness practices1, only they frame it in the reverse: dereification. So the power of a random thought, “I would like a cookie”, to derail a meditation session depends on how much I reify it.

The reified thought of a loved one can make me smile.
The reified memory of a hockey game can get me excited (and make me wince).
The reified thought I’d like a cookie can get me up off the cushion and out the door.

And we can go into less comfortable territory.

The unreified memory of an argument can’t harm me.
The unreified thought to procrastinate won’t interfere with my work.
The unreified thoughts of a public talk or difficult conversation won’t spark worry or anxiety.

And this scales up. The same principle that applies to a cookie also applies to trauma — to the memories and responses that cause the most suffering. At that level, the practice is best approached carefully and with support.

Research has found that dereification is a natural by-product of mindfulness training. This means that the thoughts and memories of regular meditators lose their concreteness as meditation experience increases. This can make them less reactive and less susceptible to rumination, worry and other types of thinking that lead to anxiety and depression. Meditation training also makes a subtle but profound shift from the more common “content-oriented cognition” to the less common “process-oriented cognition.” This makes thoughts, memories, and opinions appear more as models and possibilities than as accurate depictions of reality.

And it’s not just loosening the grip of isolated, individual thoughts and memories throughout the day. There are much bigger issues at play.

This dereification of mental activity plays an important role in our worldview. As content-oriented thinking shifts toward a more process-oriented approach, people are more likely to believe they can change their bad habits and to offer help and support to others. It seems this type of thinking gives people more flexibility and nuance in how they see ethical issues, which can lead to a less polarised view of the world2.

In my own work, I found that while 8 weeks of mindfulness training didn’t reduce mental chatter, it did “defang” the chatter so that it was no longer related to anxiety, depression, or even the worry and rumination that drive them. In short, as people develop a more process-oriented cognitive style, the chatter bouncing around in their minds becomes less likely to cause mental distress.

If the reification of thoughts, opinions and memories is what gives them power, not their content, yet we naturally tend to live in a reified “content-oriented” world, what does this mean? Where does this leave us as people trying to be happy in an increasingly unpredictable world? The good news is we can train ourselves to stop believing everything we think. In fact, the training has been practiced and refined over thousands of years, and there are different approaches to suit different people.

In the Indo-Tibetan system I’ve trained in and translated to English, there are practices designed to give ourselves mental flexibility and freedom by dereifying all the stuff bouncing around in our minds. It’s like taking a chaotic and poorly organised storeroom, where just the thought of looking for something in there is upsetting, to having a neat, tidy, well organised storeroom where you can find what you need to navigate the 21^st century.

And it’s best if you start small.

I give guided meditations as short as five minutes for two reasons. Partly because we’re all short on time: fitting one or two 5-minute sessions into a day is more achievable than a single longer session. And also, for people under pressure, a ten- or fifteen-minute meditation session can be too long – if it feels like a heavy chore, we won’t develop the consistency we need to achieve the deep, lasting effects we’re looking for.

We need to build momentum over time, because there isn’t a reification “off switch” that we’ll find in a flash of insight. It sits on a continuum, somewhere on a scale of 0-100. If we develop our mindfulness skills just a little, we’ll start to experience the world less as a fixed place with problems to overcome, and more as an ever-changing context that we can adapt to.

We’ll gain the flexibility to change our reactions, to flip the script on unhealthy responses and to act from a clearer sense of what matters.

And you can start with this five-minute guided session right now.

Dereification isn’t a concept to understand — it’s a skill to train. Ground State is where I teach it directly, using the same framework my PhD research was built around: practices drawn from Tibetan Buddhist training and tested against modern psychological science.

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If this post made the mechanism click, Ground State is where you put it to work. This is where the practice begins, and there’s a community exploring it with you.

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Instinctively, I threw the board sideways and sprayed snow down the slope. A literal digging in of my heels.

By contrast, the two friends I’d ridden the chairlift with leaned forward on the same incline I was furiously backpedalling from. They needed enough speed to clear a five-metre gap on the first jump.

It was my own fault. I had very little snowboarding experience, but in the middle of a fun conversation, I’d followed my friends off the lift and almost into a black diamond disaster. The Mt Tremblant terrain park.

The fear and adrenaline quickly dissipated, and it was clear that I was too far down to turn back. A few more breaths and it became mercifully clear the run was designed so someone like me could avoid all the jumps and make it safely to the bottom.

I felt relieved, and in a weird way, kind of seen.

Later, in a warm Montreal restaurant, we laughed at the difference in experience. To me, the black diamonds on the sign made the whole thing more threatening, while for the others they signalled (and I quote) “a need for speed.”

The moral of this story could be left at the perils of not paying attention. But this isn’t about people walking into fountains while they scroll. It’s not about overreacting to perceived danger. It’s about something more subtle, pervasive, often overlooked, and, according to neuroscience, an integral part of resilience to trauma.

This is about the shift from certain catastrophe to a fun and easy speed run down the mountain that avoided all the jumps. Albeit with some disdain from the more advanced riders.

This ability to shift perception is so taken for granted that we don’t even consider it important. We write it off with a simple “I changed my mind” as if changing our minds were the easiest and most ordinary thing in the world.

But what if it’s one of the key components of mental health?

A recent paper by leading neuroscientists studying trauma calls this “metastability”, which is a great example of researchers choosing a very precise term that will never catch on outside the laboratory. Essentially, it means the flexibility to update our perception of the ever-changing world around us. It’s how we adapt our behaviour to different circumstances, and it’s a capacity that’s diminished as a result of trauma.

This means that trauma creates a system of hypervigilance, flashbacks, and avoidance, and reduces the capacity to interrupt those responses, even when there is no imminent threat.

Even when the person knows there is no imminent threat.

The missing flexibility (metastability) would help a person living with trauma re-evaluate a sudden loud noise as a jackhammer, or someone shouting as an expression of their excitement. Instead of automatically collapsing into worst-case scenarios, they could face and respond to what’s actually happening.

It would mean looking for ways around the jumps, rather than a panicked stop in the middle of a crowded ski slope.

Our brains and senses keep us safe by working at an incredible speed, and it’s this speed that makes responses so hard to interrupt. The hypervigilance created by trauma makes people quick to react as if there’s a threat, and the reduced flexibility makes it difficult to interrupt even when they’re not in danger.

The issue, according to these researchers, is less about the memory of the experienced trauma and more about the mental flexibility that is damaged by the trauma.

Which brings us to the controversial part.

The authors push back on much of the mainstream thinking about trauma. Specifically, the popular idea that trauma is “stored in the body”, and (perhaps more controversially) that it needs to be released somehow.

It’s an attractive metaphor that has led to some very effective somatic therapies to help people dial down symptoms, reduce reactivity, and start experiencing joy and meaning.

These body-focused therapies help people gain control of their lives and responses, not because trauma is stored there, but because it gives them somewhere safe to be, till the storm passes. With each storm navigated and survived, confidence to survive another slowly increases, but the flexibility needed for stable, long-term results may develop more slowly.

More importantly, to work, these therapies don’t need the popular model of trauma being physically exorcised or purged, because it turns out, the body is the messenger, not the archive.1

A messenger so fast and efficient that it masquerades as the source, but it’s not. The interpretation is the source, and it becomes embodied, which is different from being stored. Trauma-based inflexibility is what sustains it over time.

And this happens in the mind.

Flow states are known to support this mental flexibility and can shift reactions from avoidance or freezing to what’s known as “approach dynamics”. This means a tendency to lean into what’s happening and find a way through, rather than collapsing into automatic responses.

This is what happened to me when I froze on the mountain and moved past the fear by looking for a way through. The more we can do this, the more often we’ll find a way to safety that avoids unnecessary danger and stress.

Surfing, hiking and music have all been shown to induce flow states. This can increase our flexibility and tendency to look for ways through, rather than fall into previous habits. It’s also been shown to reduce the power of intrusive thoughts and memories, all of which makes us less reactive to our outer and inner worlds.

Meditation is also a way to experience flow states, albeit at a much deeper and more stable level. I’ve often been asked whether flow and mindfulness are the same thing, and I believe they’re related. The main difference lies in subtlety.

In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, we might say: If it’s mindfulness, it’s flow; if it’s flow, it’s not necessarily mindfulness.

Meditation, especially traditional mindfulness practices, will increase the flexibility we’re looking for, but as a by-product. The real power of these practices is in something much deeper. Not mystical, not inexplicable, but a simple mechanism that psychology is starting to recognise as powerful.

It’s the power behind the results of my PhD, but it runs much deeper into Buddhist principles of how suffering works.

The mechanism I’m pointing toward in this post is also the one behind my PhD research, and what traditional Buddhist practice has been training for millennia, and it’s something you can learn and practise directly. Ground State is where I teach it: the specific skill that builds the kind of mental flexibility this post describes, at a level flow states can’t reach.

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This is the same course I used in my PhD research.

In the next post, I’ll unpack how 2,500 years of Buddhist understanding has made its way into modern psychology and why it makes this such an exciting time to be in the field.

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In surfing, it’s called a sneaker set.

A few waves, much larger than any others, that appear out of nowhere. They break further out and drag everyone toward shore, like some kind of punishment for being out there. You may have been riding waves, enjoying the ocean, chatting with friends, and the next moment, you’re on an underwater roller coaster gone wrong.

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It’s also called a clean-up set.

I’d come down to the beach specifically to relax. It was an especially tense time in my work, there was a lot of friction in the team, and I was burning out. An afternoon surf seemed just the ticket.

Paddling hard for the horizon, I knew I could just sneak under the first wave. And as I pushed my board and body down into the water, I couldn’t believe what was happening.

I was angry.

I popped out the back of the wave unscathed, but there was a much bigger one behind it. This time, there was no way out, and to my utter astonishment, as I swam for the bottom and the Pacific Ocean rolled over my head, I was still thinking about things that had happened days ago on land.

The turbulence ripped the board from my hands, and I was dragged helplessly underwater by my legrope. Even here, there was no escape from the turbulence of thoughts, memories and ideas washing around in my mind.

I came up gasping for air and freedom from bad metaphors. I also happened to be in the perfect position for the smaller wave behind it, which I decided to ride all the way to the beach. If I couldn’t relax floating around in the ocean, what was the point of being here at all?

The sun was on its way down, the wind was calm, the beach mostly empty - there were even some dolphins off in the distance, but it didn’t matter. I’d come down to unwind, but had brought all my stress and reactivity with me. Even as I walked up the sand, I was thinking about work and getting angrier… which annoyed me even more.

Decades after I first understood that we participate in our own stress, that we can take it with us everywhere we go if we’re not careful, I still wasn’t immune. It’s a hard truth: if we travel with a disturbed mind, then we end up in disturbed places.

Even when it’s a perfect sunset on an empty beach.

So here’s the uncomfortable question: If we can’t escape our minds and all the activity that happens there, what actually changes when things get better?

And I mean really better. Not just coping strategies.

This question sent me to the Himalayas for years. I learned Tibetan and (to my surprise) adopted an ancient and very foreign framework for understanding my own mind. It worked for me, but most of us aren’t going to disappear into the mountains for years at a time.

Only much later, doing a psychology degree, did I understand that there were well-tested treatments and strategies to keep traction in a world that keeps spinning us out.

Not that long ago, these different sides barely interacted.

One claimed unbroken lineages of successful practice over thousands of years, the other placed its confidence in the scientific method and peer review.

It’s hard to imagine now, but at some point, a few courageous researchers risked their careers and reputations to test these ancient practices for relevance in our modern world. They did it against the advice of mentors, with elite institutions and experts looking down their academic noses at efforts to bring scientific rigour to contemplative traditions. And as they did, something interesting happened.

The evidence built.

Slowly at first. But despite facing a wall of scepticism from the scientific establishment, at some point in the early 2000s the momentum tipped. Research activity skyrocketed, monks were on the cover of Time Magazine, and for a while, it seemed you could sell almost anything if you just put “mindful” in front of it.

Pretty soon, contemplative science went from a rarely visited backwater to the wild west of a booming industry, where all sorts of self-proclaimed experts could cash in on programs and ideas of dubious value. At one point, I saw a claim that colouring books could lead to enlightenment.

In this swing from pariah to saviour, there was inevitably some push-back. Valid criticisms about the research methods, the media hype, ignoring possible dangers, and eventually from the contemplatives themselves.

Exciting as that early momentum must have been, much of the research was like running meditators through mazes. The depth of the theories behind these practices was mostly ignored.

In that rush to make mindfulness measurable, to fit it into scientific frameworks, much of the original context was stripped away. Partly out of ignorance, definitely some arrogance, but also some necessity, because too much theoretical depth and authenticity could risk losing credibility with the very institutions researchers needed to be on side.

So the focus had to be narrowed to achievable goals like stress reduction and symptom management. But in the traditions these practices come from, the aim was never just to feel a bit better; these are radical tools to face down and tame our minds once and for all.

And without people who can move between those two worlds, that gap is very hard to close.

When we get caught up in disagreements over what the mind is and where it comes from, we lose sight of the agreement on what it does. More importantly, can we use these two approaches to get our minds and emotions working for us in a world that is becoming ever more motivated to prevent us from having control over them.

There’s a time and place for the philosophical debates, but they won’t lead to the collaboration of Buddhism and science that the world needs right here and now. As I talk to friends, read the news, and (against my better judgment) scroll through social media, it can start to feel a bit hopeless. These are times I have to take my own advice: be careful what you pay attention to, because if you don’t pay attention to something, it doesn’t exist for you.

It’s important because despite how it sometimes feels, these are very exciting times to be working in this space.

The early pioneers risked everything to bring contemplative approaches into scientific and mainstream settings. Contemplatives pushed back against the trivialising of these practices, and are now collaborating with scientists who no longer treat them as meditating lab rats. Both sides are becoming ever more serious about how the depth of this ancient understanding can improve 21st-century lives.

Psychology has undergone a similar shift. Refining its ideas and approaches from just treating symptoms and behaviour, to cognitive behavioural therapy that targets distorted ideas and beliefs that drive distress. Now even further refined to an understanding that more powerful than these distorted thoughts and ideas are our distorted beliefs about them.

This evolution from coarse to more subtle and profound understanding is familiar and exciting for me because Tibetan Buddhist study works in a similar way. By first tackling simpler philosophy, we’re led through ever more refined views and practices over time with the aim of arriving at a very profound model of suffering and its causes.

This overarching sense of evolution is what gets me the most excited and hopeful for the future. The teething problems of contemplative science are fading as a more mature field allows exploration of deeper, subtler models of mind and mental activity. The work I’ve been describing here sits within that intersection.

Not as a definitive answer for everyone, and certainly not as the only approach, but as a model we can use to take both sides seriously. Preserving the depth of the original practices while making them usable, testable and relevant in a modern context.

And most importantly, to understand how they work. Not just as a scientific paper or philosophical treatise, but in practice.

Because if there is one thing that both traditions increasingly agree on, it’s this: what transforms our lives is not controlling what thoughts arise, but how we relate to the ones that do.

That isn’t something we achieve conceptually, and the model I’ve been developing and testing is one way of doing exactly that.

It’s something we learn through training.

This is the conclusion the series has been building toward. Ground State is where that understanding becomes a practice — the specific, sequenced skills drawn from Buddhist training and tested in my PhD research. If the series made the case, this is where the work begins.

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This is the final post in the series.
Click below to read them all
How Suffering Works (What my PhD Taught Me)

My wife (we weren’t married yet) and I were looking out a 26th-floor window at the Triborough Bridge, which links Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx over the East River. On this day it was serving as a kind of weak metaphor because we were also at a three-way junction.

Back to India, on to somewhere new, or move back to Australia.

This is part 7 of a series How Suffering Works

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At the time, my parents lived in New York City, which happened to be the best place in the world to get an Indian visa. For reasons I never understood, this consulate would give 12 months, while everywhere else would only give six.

So every year or so, I took an overnight bus out of the Himalayas, connected with a flight out of Delhi, and spent a few weeks in Manhattan. Usually, I’d even get up to Toronto for a visit.

But this time was different.

This wasn’t a visa run. We were deciding where our life would actually be.

My brother and his family were also in town, and he mentioned a course he’d done earlier in the year that sounded interesting. The name, Cultivating Emotional Balance (CEB) didn’t jump out at me, but the way he described it did.

It sounded like a genuine blend of the meditation I’d been studying and translating in India with modern psychology I hadn’t yet explored. And there was a teacher training later in the year.

It wasn’t the reason we chose to return to Australia. But it was the first time I’d come across something that might bridge the ancient-modern divide that I’d been straddling for years. It certainly gave me something to look forward to as we settled into life in Brisbane.

The first thing I noticed about CEB was that it isn’t lightweight tinkering around the edges. It’s a comprehensive look at different types of traditional meditation and how they fit with a scientific understanding of emotions. The goal is to make some radical changes, and this takes time.

42 hours of class time, in fact.

It seemed to aim much higher than just a little stress reduction, offering a kind of blueprint for getting emotions to work for us, which is how they evolved in the first place. This makes it quite a commitment, so while I’ve taught more than twenty full courses over the years, more often I’ve given introductory weekends and workshops that covered only some of the course content.

Often, this boiled down to mindfulness training and its relationship to emotional reactivity and reframing emotional experience. This experience of pulling out certain aspects of the course would come in handy much later.

Like CEB, most mindfulness courses teach more than just mindfulness. This means if a mindfulness-based course reduces anxiety and depression, it’s not possible to know what actually did the heavy lifting. It could be the mindfulness component itself, journaling, education, or compassion training. In some cases, a component might not have a direct effect on its own, but still strengthens the overall effect. I saw this in my research.

Basically, while we can measure the course’s overall effectiveness, we can’t know which parts of the course were responsible. This isn’t just a research problem — it’s the same confusion many people run into when they try mindfulness for themselves, they’re not taught why it works and what it should do. It’s an issue with real-world implications.

If we want to make mindfulness more appealing to busy people, minimising the time commitment would be a good place to start. This might mean (as in my case) only teaching partial courses, and there’s really only one way to decide what to cut out and what to leave in.

Educated guesses.

If we want to improve mindfulness training and tailor it to people who differ in time availability, mental distress, or illness, we need to know which parts of the training are effective, which aren’t, and which might catalyse benefits without causing them.

In my research, I saw this as an opportunity.

A full CEB course has four distinct components, which meant I could just pull whichever components I was interested in and deliver them in isolation. I chose the mindfulness and emotion skills components, and to get a sense of what each of them was doing, I did something very simple. Instead of running one group through the material, I divided them into three groups. Each received the same content, but in different sequences.

One group learned only mindfulness for the first four weeks of the course. They were told it would help with their emotional reactivity, but no other advice on how to apply the training outside of the classes was given until the second four weeks, when they received the emotion skills training. A second group went in the opposite direction and received only emotion-skills training for four weeks. This helped them identify and understand emotions, but they received mindfulness training only in the second four weeks. A third group received the components in alternating weeks; odd weeks were mindfulness and even weeks were emotion skills classes. A fourth control group came in for data collection and was given access to an online version of the course once the other groups had finished.

This meant that at week 4, I should be able to see what each type of training was doing on its own.

At some point, there was a moment where the whole project went from an idea and became something I actually had to pull off. I’d run a small study to confirm that metacognitive beliefs affect brooding and reflective rumination differently, and built them into the S-REF model I was using. I’d addressed several of the big gaps and criticisms of the field, including the mechanisms behind those changes, the effects of course components, and the clarity of definitions and training. I was even testing traditional mindfulness training techniques straight from a Buddhist tradition, which is quite rare.

So, I started recruiting for the 8-week shortened CEB course, and it was here a different type of learning took over.

It was easy to be critical of mindfulness research while doing the review early in the thesis. Very easy. But a review is done with a critical eye, so you’re looking for gaps to fill, things that were missed or unclear. Add to that other researchers’ reviews, and the shortcomings are all front and centre. I was very keen to address as many as I could and devised different ways of going about it, but it wasn’t till now I realised why some of these shortcomings have lingered so long.

Running this kind of study properly is very, very hard.

Dividing the course into three groups meant I needed a lot more participants than if it had just been one. I approached all sorts of people and organisations to help spread the word, but it was a busy time for everyone, and many didn’t get around to helping.

But the reality was this: I had material approved by the ethics committee, when I really needed a campaign designed by a marketing team.

Research centres will have a team for this sort of thing, but I did not.

At this point, it stopped feeling like research and started feeling like logistics.

In hindsight, I relied too much on the material approved by the ethics committee, when I could have “sold” the program a little more in my recruiting. But this also creates problems, because telling people the sort of results they could expect from participating could also influence the results.

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At some point, I had enough to run the study, though it wasn’t clear whether it would be enough for the three groups, so I pushed ahead anyway. This was right at the end of the Covid restrictions, and I wanted to run the courses while masks weren’t required in groups, as I thought this might interfere with the meditation classes.

Now, another problem. As people signed up, they were randomly assigned to one of four groups, and inevitably, some couldn’t make the assigned times. This sounds like boring admin, but it matters because the entire design depends on people actually attending the sessions they’re assigned to.

It meant that if someone couldn’t make their allotted Saturday mornings, I could move them to Sunday, but only if someone in the Sunday group asked to be moved. It was a headache I’d anticipated and just part of this kind of research, but I did wish I had someone to hand it to. I was busy preparing handouts, slides, and making final decisions on exactly what would be included in the 12 hours of class time.

Then there’s the control group. These people were asked to attend three 60-minute data-collection sessions in exchange for access to the same course online. Some of these people felt understandably disappointed and withdrew, while others came to some but not all the data collection sessions. Again, this is a headache I expected, but inconsistent control groups are a valid criticism of the field.

And my study fell into this category.

Individually, these were all manageable, but together they started to take a toll.

By this stage of the PhD, I was tired. I was working harder than ever for free, and now the project wasn’t quite landing where I’d hoped, and it was a lot of work to fall a little short. Throwing it in was an option, and the news was reporting thousands of PhDs had been abandoned during the Covid disruptions, so maybe I’d done enough.

I didn’t need the research, really.

I already knew that these practices worked, at least for me and many of the people I’d taught over the years. There were already thousands of years of peer review on them, and the mechanisms were clearly laid out in Buddhist texts for anyone who wants to read them.

Would it really matter if I didn’t finish? I couldn’t see that it would.

There’s a construct in psychology known as “the sunk-cost fallacy”. Basically, we become reluctant to abandon a project, relationship, or job because we’ve already invested so much time in it. Even though abandoning it might be the most beneficial.

At this point, the PhD had brought it from a concept I’d learned about into a vivid lived experience.

I don’t know why I finished, to be honest. I do get stuck on things and have trouble letting go till I’ve understood or completed them, which doesn’t always work in my favour. This time, it’s a kind of character flaw that got me through.

Eventually, the courses were run, and data collected. It was time to start analysing the results and writing them up.

And once again, I didn’t really know what was coming.

I knew what we were looking for: evidence that this shortened CEB course would reduce metacognitive beliefs, with a flow-on effect on anxiety and depression. If so, it would fill some of the gaps in knowledge around mechanisms of mindfulness.

But there were other questions woven into the design.

How mindfulness relates to the different types of rumination and mind-wandering.
Whether the emotion skills component contributes, or whether mindfulness alone accounts for the effects, and many others.

It had all sat very neatly in my mind for a couple of years, but translating the data into something coherent was something else entirely. Slower, less certain, and much more frustrating than I’d expected.

By this stage of the PhD, I was quite familiar with that feeling, but there was one other thing that motivated me.

So often people don’t stick at their meditation, even though they want to. Maybe they don’t see the shifts they expected, maybe they don’t improve quickly enough to stay motivated. It’s understandable, but often there’s a missing element. They weren’t told why it works, which I know can make the difference.

Without that clarity, it’s easy to fall into a pattern of starting, stopping, and giving up entirely. All my effort was about finding ways to talk about the why and how in terms that fit in modern psychology and science-based culture like ours.

Not just asking does it work?, but what makes it work.

Because that’s what will get people the most out of their efforts.

Understanding why mindfulness works is key to its sustainability and effectiveness. Ground State is built around that understanding — the mechanism that explains why practice changes anything at all. Because when the why is clear, the how takes care of itself.

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I sat for a moment, deciding whether to open it now or delay. Whatever was in it was probably best handled after a coffee, so I stepped out for a while.

This is part 6 of a series How Suffering Works

The email contained an external review of my proposed PhD thesis. It would determine whether I could continue in the direction I’d been going or would have to rethink it.

After a year of reading, refining, and shaping the direction of my research, things had started to come together. There was a clear thread running through it; mindfulness, rumination, and how our relationship to thoughts seemed to influence anxiety and depression.

It made sense.
It matched my experience.
And, importantly, it was in line with earlier research.

Sufficiently caffeinated, I got back to the lab and opened the email.

There were some helpful suggestions about the writing, pointing out some passages that weren’t necessary. Overall, the review was very helpful, but one comment took some air out of my sails; I’d missed something important.

Worry.

It’s a major driver of anxiety and depression, and closely related to what I was working on. But I’d been so fixated on rumination and mind wandering that I’d overlooked it completely.

Hadn’t even considered it.

I slumped back in my chair. After full reviews of mindfulness, rumination, mind-wandering, and many other false starts, I wasn’t keen to go on another fishing expedition. Maybe it was the name: the Self-Regulatory Executive Function (S-REF) Model didn’t sound very exciting, and I felt almost a year’s worth of momentum grind to an abrupt and (in my mind) noisy halt.

At first, I was annoyed.

But this is part of the process. A PhD isn’t about reinforcing what you already know; it’s about learning to do research and find new understanding. There were only a couple of days before I had to present my project to a panel that would decide if it was good enough to continue. I had very little time to sit around and complain, so I got on with learning about this model.

The coffee had been the right call.

My resistance to the task fell away quite quickly as I read. Not only did the model fit neatly into what I’d already planned, but it offered a more subtle explanation of anxiety and depression than I’d previously found in psychology.

For some years, I’d been talking about how what we think or remember is less important than how we relate to it. The S-REF model explained this in ways that research could measure and work with. For me, this was gold.

It wasn’t as subtle as a Buddhist approach to thoughts and memories, but it gave me a way to talk about them from a psychological perspective. And it was perfectly aligned with everything I’d learned in the Himalayas and since.

This model agrees that it’s not the content of our thoughts and memories that creates distress; it’s what we believe about them. Often, we don’t even know what those beliefs are, and they show up in very ordinary ways.

Sometimes we like to worry.

Many of us believe that worrying about future events will help “cover our bases” to prepare for what’s coming. It sounds reasonable, but it can lead to excessive worry and catastrophising and is a well-known pathway to anxiety and depression.

These people might also believe that thoughts are dangerous and uncontrollable. They live in fear of what might pop into their minds at any moment, which can lead them to believe they need to control their thoughts.

Put simply, it means people start to feel like their thoughts are dangerous and need to be controlled. Both of which reinforce patterns that lead to anxiety and depression.

These are called metacognitive beliefs, because they’re beliefs about thoughts, memories, opinions – everything happening in the mind, and they are the most important part of the S-REF model.

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It can be hard to see the importance of this right away, but this model approaches mental health from a subtler perspective than any other I’d come across in psychology. That it’s not your thoughts, ideas and memories that cause mental distress, but what you believe about them.

For example, one of the best-known approaches in psychology is known as Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT). It’s a broad term, but here’s an example.

Imagine walking into a room, and you see a few people in the corner talking quietly. Nothing unusual about this, but if you think they’re talking and complaining about you, it becomes a stressful situation. If this happens consistently, maybe overwhelming.

CBT would help you with this negative interpretation. You might learn to question and challenge it, and eventually reframe it in a more realistic way. It’s been quite effective and changed many people’s lives for the better since it was first developed.

What struck me about the S-REF model and the Metacognitive Therapy (MCT) that emerged from it is that it doesn’t target thoughts (cognitions); it targets the beliefs about them. So, rather than reframe each of these thoughts, this approach suggests we can just side-step them altogether as they arise.

As I read, all traces of annoyance were replaced by excitement. A psychological model that pointed directly at what most Buddhist mindfulness practices had been working with all along.

Not stopping thoughts.
Not replacing or reframing them.
Understanding what gives them the power to upset us in the first place.

This wasn’t as subtle as Buddhist explanations, but it was more aligned and exciting than anything else I’d come across.

It was enough to build a bridge.

That coffee was the first of many over the next couple of days as I reworked the thesis around this new model. Whereas before I was working on rumination and mind-wandering as mechanisms of mindfulness effects, I now had a pre-existing model to fit those ideas neatly into.

Admittedly, I had to alter the S-REF model to fit my purposes (I’d even claim to have slightly improved it), but this wasn’t the focus. It had been a year of developing a research project that investigated the subtle mechanisms by which mindfulness can reduce anxiety and depression that bridged Buddhist and psychological understanding. And just when I’d thought I was ready, one frustrating comment in a review of my thesis showed me a cleaner way forward.

In the next post, I’ll show why this approach of changing our relationship with thoughts and memories is more powerful than trying to suppress or reframe them.

And why it raises a deeper question:

If we’re not trying to control thoughts, what exactly are we training when we practice mindfulness?

The answer to that question, what we're actually training, is the foundation of Ground State. Not technique acquisition, but a fundamental shift in how the mind relates to its own contents. The course teaches it in the sequence the research and the tradition both support.

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After a few days of pointless staring at two screens of statistics, I’d I’d dropped down to the beach for some fresh air. That’s when it hit me. I suddenly understood something that had been hiding in plain sight all along, and I was so surprised that it just slipped out. The beach was mostly empty, so nobody could have heard.

This is part 5 of a series How Suffering Works.

This wasn’t so much a new discovery, but a pattern in the data, the significance of which I’d only just understood. With my feet in the sand, I saw the whole angle of my thesis shift, and it became a perfect bridge for discussing Buddhist theories with researchers. A data-driven explanation of why sometimes we have space for difficult thoughts and memories, and sometimes they ruin our whole day. Even lead us to depression and anxiety.

It was both exciting and a huge relief after days of spinning my wheels, so I did what any normal person would have done.

I went for a swim. Bodysurfing, actually.

I’d studied plenty of Buddhist explanations for this, all of which had held up to my own experience, but here were results I could point to that supported the theory. Data pointing to something a little more subtle than what I’d actually set out to do, while helping to fill what I think is the most important gap in mindfulness research literature.

Mechanisms.

There was already plenty of evidence that mindfulness can reliably reduce issues such as anxiety and depression. I’d found papers that taught different types of mindfulness in different ways for different lengths of time. I’d read research that had found reductions in anxiety, depression, ADHD, OCD in populations as diverse as elite athletes and cancer survivors.

But there was almost nothing on why mindfulness training might do this.

This was good news, because researchers are always looking for “gaps in the literature”. Areas of a field that haven’t been investigated thoroughly, and this one was very much in my wheelhouse for two reasons.

Firstly, Buddhism has a lot to say about the mechanisms of suffering, with much Buddhist study and practice focused on identifying and interrupting them.

Secondly, more than twenty years earlier, meditation had pulled me out of a slide into anxiety and depression. Now, this experience was suddenly an advantage.

Because I knew where to look.

I started a literature review on rumination. It was a very simple plan: investigate if mindfulness reduces rumination, and if these reductions are a pathway to reduced anxiety and depression. It was enough for a PhD and would be part of an important discussion about why mindfulness training can reduce symptoms. It would also test whether the more traditional Buddhist definitions and training techniques were effective rather than the modern popularised versions.

Up to this point, my understanding of rumination had been rather simplistic. When attention drifts, it can land in memories of regrettable episodes. Then mindfulness training can pull it back, just as I discovered on the streets of Toronto many years earlier.

It was practical and matched my own experience as a novice meditator, but then I came across a paper titled “Rumination reconsidered: A psychometric analysis”, which proved to be a lot more exciting than the title might suggest. Rather than just one type of rumination that links to mental distress, these researchers posit two distinct subtypes: brooding and reflective.

Brooding rumination is what most of us mean when we say “rumination”. It’s when we get stuck replaying something we regret, or that didn’t go the way we wanted, reliving it and comparing it to what we wish had happened.

Reflective rumination, on the other hand, is more adaptive and has a quality of stepping back, making sense of what happened, and learning from it.

Brooding tends to keep us stuck in a loop of regret and saps our self-confidence, while reflective rumination can help us move forward and do better.

This spoke directly to the evolution of my meditation practice, because using mindfulness to keep pulling our attention away from negative loops can only ever be a stopgap solution.

A more reliable way to make peace with our minds is to change our relationship with the thoughts themselves. And this research gave me the language: from brooding to reflective.

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Most experienced meditators will agree that meditation training doesn’t stop thoughts, and research also supports this. In most Buddhist traditions, stopping thoughts has never been the real goal, and is mostly considered unimportant.

The best way to gain some traction with our minds is by reworking our relationship with thoughts, ideas, and memories that happen there. This is what mindfulness training was originally designed to do.

So my very simple model of mindfulness and rumination suddenly became more complicated, more interesting, and more aligned with my understanding and experience of mental distress. Rather than a very clunky model of having rumination capture attention, and mindfulness training help pull it back, my new model became that mindfulness training reorients our relationship with the content of the rumination in a way that makes it less powerful.

That is, regular mindfulness training increases our trait mindfulness, which switches our tendency away from brooding and toward the more reflective subtype.

Which brings me back to my outburst at the beach.

Although my results had supported mindfulness training as a way to reduce brooding rumination, I hadn’t found anything out of the ordinary until I walked away for the afternoon. It goes like this.

One of the measures in my research is called task-unrelated thought (TUT). I love this term, but mental chatter might be an easier way to think about it. Most people would expect this chatter to decrease with mindfulness training, but in my study, it didn’t change significantly.

You might be surprised to learn that I wasn’t surprised.

The reality is that experienced meditators and researchers will tell you meditation doesn’t stop the mind from being active. It reduces our reactivity.

So it’s not about the amount of chatter, but how it relates to everything else.

At the beginning of the mindfulness training, someone with a lot of mental chatter was likely to have higher levels of brooding rumination, worry, anxiety and depression symptoms. It all moved together.

But by the end of the eight weeks, that relationship was gone. Now the mental chatter had no bearing on symptoms or the pathways to those symptoms.

So effective mindfulness training shouldn’t try to reduce the amount of chatter, it should rob thoughts, memories, ideas, etc of the power to disturb us.

They’re defanged rather than defeated.

Buddhism has a lot to say about the deeper, fundamental mechanisms that do this. I hadn’t aimed to discuss these theories in the thesis, but this work on rumination subtypes and my new beachside understanding opened doors to discussions I had not thought possible.

This is actually why I dropped the beachside F-bomb.

I saw not just more interesting writing for the thesis, but an inroad to discuss these deeper, more contemplative mechanisms that I had not set out to discuss.

For the first time in days, I was itching to get back to the writing. But there was a Thai restaurant I liked on the beach, and my wife was on her way from work.

More on these deeper mechanisms and how some critiques of my thesis led me to find them next time…

The insight this post is building toward, that how you hold thoughts, ideas and memories is more important than the thoughts themselves is the mechanism Ground State trains directly. The skill is called dereification, and it’s teachable.

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This is part 4 of a series: How Suffering Works.

I can remember the first time I noticed the benefits of regular meditation.

Walking through a busy part of downtown Toronto, I caught myself catastrophising about a few things that hadn’t gone my way. A recent break-up, lost work I’d been counting on, a lease that was ending, even doubts about staying another winter were competing for real estate in my mind.

This uncontrolled fixation on what was going wrong wasn’t helping me, so I did something radical.

In amongst the suits, hot dog vendors, and bicycle couriers, I very deliberately turned my attention to the flow of breath as I walked. For a few moments, the stress dropped away, and my body relaxed for the first time that day, probably that week. In that moment, I saw that all the things I was learning to do in my meditation over the previous few months could be used anywhere I went. Not just as abstract ideas, or some relaxation on the cushion, but as evasive manoeuvres to avoid the incoming torpedoes launched by a ruminating and worrying mind.

It was the first time I understood meditation as a real-time disruptor of bad habits.

This was life-changing for me, and I started looking for times when my attention wandered, so I could bring it back under control: bored on the subway, losing focus at a rehearsal or on a gig, even in casual conversations with friends and colleagues. But it was this ability to side-step rumination and worry when it found space to creep in that was most exciting. As I improved and learned more, it became clear that this ability to divert attention away is only an entry-level result. A lot more was possible.

Just ‘looking away’ from our disturbing memories, worries, and ideas is the first step toward making them harmless – ‘defanging’ them, as I like to say. But just avoiding them isn’t reliable or sustainable.

The real purpose of meditation is to change our relationship with them entirely.

This was the sort of concept I wanted to be front and centre in my PhD, but there was one major problem.

I didn’t know how. At least, I didn’t know where to look.

A lot of people come to a PhD through a pre-existing project, or some specific knowledge that industry or research leaders have identified as important. I started mine with a total fishing expedition.

To make it worse, I had to start with a review of mindfulness research.

Literature reviews are an important part of any research. We don’t want to repeat anything unnecessarily, and we need the prior results to justify the research we’re about to do. In fields like mindfulness research, one issue is how to decide which research to read.

To illustrate this, I just logged into the American Psychological Association database and found 25,537 articles that use ‘mindfulness’ as a keyword. Obviously, this is too many to read, so maybe we can narrow it down to only ‘peer-reviewed’ articles, which brings it to 14,451; and if I include only research in adults, we get it down to a totally unmanageable 9,612.

You can see the problem.

Of these thousands of papers, many (if not most) weren’t likely to be relevant to the research I had in mind.

For example, much of the research investigates what’s known as “state mindfulness.” These studies might recruit a few dozen college students with no experience in mindfulness, have one group do a ten-minute guided meditation while another group spends the same time listening to music or reading a book. Then they’re tested on things such as working memory, focus, and mood, and the results are compared.

My interest in meditation came from the improvements over time and the balance that regular practice had brought into my life off the cushion. This is known as “trait mindfulness” and has more tangible links to mental health and wellbeing, which is where my interest lay. Improving trait mindfulness is how I managed to pull out of nosedives into stress and rumination that could have led to anxiety and depression when I’d first become a regular meditator. Improved trait mindfulness is why I first stopped the catastrophising on the sidewalk in Toronto. This distinction of state and trait research made the review much easier because I could just delete any of the thousands of studies researching state mindfulness.

I didn’t need them.

This still left far too many papers, but gradually, more exclusion criteria became obvious. For example, although some studies measured trait mindfulness, they did so without providing explicit training. Or they ran a short course of less than three weeks, or they weren’t clear about what the training was, and so on. All of these became exclusion criteria to define what sort of work I could use to build my project.

I eventually whittled it down to a couple of hundred articles, some of which I could weed out just by reading summaries, and eventually I got around to reading the research and writing the review.

Of course, no matter how carefully we do this, there’s a danger that something important will be left out, and this happened to me. Because my exclusion criteria excluded research that only did neuroimaging, I missed what I now consider one of the most important articles on mindfulness to date. I only heard of the paper a year or more later, driving home from the beach. It was disappointing to have missed it, but also exciting to have found it, and this is just an example of how difficult it is to do good research – things can go wrong before we even get around to designing studies, ethics approvals, or analysing data.

Fortunately, I still managed to build much of my writing around this paper, and it set me up for one of the most important results of the research, so it all worked out.

But only just.

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A perennial friend of any researcher is a systematic review of the field. These papers provide an overview of which studies have been conducted on which types of people and what results have been found. And in some cases, they will give some criticisms of the field and highlight important gaps in the literature.

These reviews contained many valid criticisms, and it was a little disheartening to find the field of mindfulness research in a state of disrepair. Worse still, it seemed that much of the field was ignoring the issues raised, some of which were not hard to fix. A few of these criticisms helped shape the next four years of my life.

At first, I started dreaming up research designs that addressed all of these criticisms. As the project’s ideas grew and became more complex, I came to realise that some of these issues are just part of the imperfections inherent in research on humans. The time, money, and reach required to address all of them would make it nearly impossible to get anything done.

For example, one of these very real problems is that of self-selection bias. That is, most people enrolling in an 8-week mindfulness-based program already believe it will help them. Many may well have learned to meditate in the past.

I tied myself in knots trying to find ways to get around this. I spoke to potential community partners about incentivising people who wouldn’t otherwise be interested in the course. I devised and revised plans to include participants who were sceptical about meditation and mindfulness, and how we might retain them for the full 8 weeks.

After a while, it became clear that this just wasn’t possible. Even if we could get them through the door, the chance that they would stay the whole course, or do any of the regular meditation ‘homework’ seemed remote. So, while I think research on mindfulness among meditation-sceptical people would be a very worthwhile project, it didn’t seem feasible with the resources at hand. Later, it also occurred to me that self-selection bias might not be such an issue. In fact, it’s the same with most research into many psychological treatments.

Just as a mindfulness course attracts only those interested in mindfulness, research into treatments, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, is limited to the relatively small proportion of the population who will seek treatment. Different therapies are only going to attract the relatively small number of people willing to seek treatment.

Just because a treatment is effective doesn’t mean the people who could benefit from it will seek it out. And those sceptical of it, may not get the same results as someone who engages in it wholeheartedly.

This is different to medical research, where many people diagnosed with a condition will seek treatment from their family doctor and, if necessary, move on to see different specialists. Even if the treatment is inconvenient or hard to understand.

So, no matter how well mindfulness training has been found to work in mental health protection, recovery, and relapse prevention, it will only ever benefit those who are willing to try it. It’s just the state of play, and fortunately, there’s plenty of research into other methods of supporting people with mental health issues and disorders.

Other important criticisms of the field were easily addressed by the project I had in mind. The most important of these was also one of the easiest: the lack of clarity regarding the terminology and pedagogy (training methods) of mindfulness training.

Many research papers discuss mindfulness in broad terms or, worse still, don’t define it at all, and this is a real problem. If research projects aren’t clear on their definitions of mindfulness and techniques for training it, an accurate comparison of results is impossible. It could be that one project finds mindfulness is helpful for anxiety or depression, and another finds it isn’t, but they used totally different concepts of mindfulness and types of training. It gets even harder to replicate studies or to test whether a mindfulness program works across different demographics or mental illnesses.

There have been attempts to standardise definitions of mindfulness, but the reality is that even within Buddhism, definitions and understandings of mindfulness vary across traditions. Getting a whole research community (and mindfulness industry) to agree on these is unlikely.

It’s also unnecessary.

More important than everyone agreeing on what mindfulness is and how to cultivate it is transparency – just be clear on the definition of mindfulness and how it’s being cultivated. And if a research team can’t do either of these, then it’s best for everyone that they do something else instead. If a mindfulness teacher can’t explain what mindfulness is and how it’s cultivated, they have no business being in the field and likely to cause more harm than good.

Clarity of definitions and training was easy in my project for one very simple reason: the terminology of mindfulness and training techniques have been clearly spelled out for thousands of years.

The Cultivating Emotional Balance course, from which I intended to draw the mindfulness training, uses terminology and pedagogy directly lifted from the Tibetan Buddhist system. I also teach these so that participants can understand how the terms worked in the Tibetan and Sanskrit source languages from which they were translated.

This will no doubt make some people uneasy, because in the modern world, we often want to steer clear of religion. This is understandable, but in doing so, we’ve created the Myth of Secularisation.

To make mindfulness more accessible to a modern audience, there’s a lot of talk of “secularised” meditation. This is fine, it’s important people don’t feel they’re being converted to a religion. But it raises a question that hasn’t been asked.

What exactly makes a practice Buddhist in the first place?

Does a mindfulness training technique need to be secularised just because it exists in a traditional Buddhist text?

Imagine a corporate executive who wants to be confident in decision-making and stay relaxed in the face of stress. Let’s say she spends 30 minutes a day sitting on the floor, attending to sensations of the breath, noticing when the mind wanders, bringing it back. Now imagine a Buddhist monk or nun in full-time retreat using the identical technique as a means to achieve liberation and enlightenment, as discussed in Buddhist texts.

It’s the same practice, but in the first context it’s secular, and in the second it’s Buddhist.

It’s not the practice that makes it Buddhist, it’s the purpose.

Perhaps techniques and terminology that have passed thousands of years of peer review by expert meditators and scholars shouldn’t be dismissed so lightly.

So this is one of the issues of mindfulness research I felt comfortable with. Not only were the terminology and training technique clear and would be made available in the thesis, but this was also to be one of the relatively few projects that examined meditation techniques lifted directly from a Buddhist tradition, unchanged.

This is only a couple of important issues raised in mindfulness research. Some, like clarity around terminology and techniques, are not hard to address, while others will need creativity and resources to improve. When designing studies, I came to see that many of these weaknesses exist because of the logistics, time and money required to address them all. Well beyond a humble, unfunded PhD research project.

So, it becomes a trade-off. What weaknesses are researchers willing to accept to make the investigations they’re interested in?

Fortunately for me, one of the quieter criticisms of mindfulness research is an area that I think is critically important, often ignored, and a prime place for Buddhist and modern psychological models to work together.

With the mindfulness literature review complete, I turned my attention to three other reviews that began to answer the question I’d been circling the whole time.

The gap in mindfulness research this post describes — the mechanism question nobody wanted to address — is what drove my PhD and what Ground State is built to answer. Not just does mindfulness work, but why, and what that means for how you practise.

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This is part 3 of a series: How Suffering Works.

Two Tibetan monks sat down at a table near me and ordered breakfast.

It was a rooftop cafe in Bodh Gaya, India. It’s one of the few places that serve real espresso and a welcome retreat from the dust and chaos of the market below. I was working on the final part of my thesis in a nearby guest house during the day and had barely spoken to anyone for a week or more.

Two Tibetan monks were the only other customers, and I could tell they were Geshes; scholars who’d completed a degree that takes 20 years of full-time study. Normally, I’d strike up a conversation, but I was pushing to finish the thesis, and really needed to get back to my room.

I said hello, made a comment about the coffee as I got up to leave.

And two hours later we were still there...

Tibetans often light up when a westerner speaks their language. Once they learned I was doing a PhD on the mechanics of meditation and mental health, the conversation moved from small talk to the philosophical. They’d both taught in Europe and wanted my opinion on the most effective ways science and Buddhism can benefit people in the 21st century.

“Stop discussing the mind, it’s a waste of everyone’s time...” I said, the conviction in my idea slightly undermined by doubts about the wisdom of the second double espresso.

What followed was a truly meaningful and hilarious conversation/debate.

I’ve had a lot of experience translating for Geshes and know that structured debate is their default mode of enquiry. So, although they knew very little about modern psychology, I knew their skills in logic and reasoning meant they would find out what they wanted to know. All I had to do was survive.

Before long, I was explaining my thesis in Tibetan, which was a little harder than you might imagine. They methodically asked questions and raised objections, which I answered as best I could, while the waiter scrolled on his phone in the corner.

I explained the differences between Buddhist and modern approaches to mindfulness. We talked about the importance and difficulties of measuring mental states, and hashed out concepts like rumination, worry, anxiety and depression.

They forced me to defend my position again and again, which I did because I’ve come to believe one very simple thing: We don’t need to agree on what the mind is when there’s so much agreement about what the mind does.

The whole thing was exhausting, but there were some moments of respite when they stopped to argue with each other. As is often the case, it was all done with lots of laughs and jokes that belied how seriously they took the conversation.

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Then it was over. We parted ways at the front door, and just as I turned to leave, one of them grabbed my hand and said, “Don’t stop what you’re doing. This is really important,” he said, making me promise. Then he gave me the contact details of his monastery in Mongolia and wandered off into the dust and noise of the market.

I walked back to my guesthouse through the unpaved backstreets, turning this comment over in my mind. Over the years I’ve heard several influential researchers say that the contemplative science field needs scientists trained in contemplative traditions.

Scientists have increasingly taken an interest in contemplative traditions, but few have travelled in the opposite direction. First trained in authentic contemplative traditions and then entered scientific research.

It’s an issue that had kept me going through times when I’d thought about giving up the PhD altogether.

Now, with the writing almost complete, there was no danger of not finishing. But the question of why the contemplative-trained voice is so important in the research bounced around in my mind.

I’ll be honest. In the beginning, I thought the field needed more contemplative voices to push back against unhelpful scientific concepts of mind and consciousness. It felt like joining a fight against scientific materialism and the medicalised model of mental illness that has slowed the progress of psychology over the years. But as time went on, I realised joining some kind of philosophical fight wasn’t going to yield the results that psychology and Buddhism are both primarily interested in.

Reducing suffering and distress.

In the previous post, I mentioned that Buddhism is goal-oriented. All the study, reason and meditation are designed to work toward liberation and enlightenment by understanding some very subtle philosophy and developing expertise in different types of meditation. It’s about cutting through to the fundamental causes of any discomfort or dissatisfaction we feel in an ordinary life and disabling them.

By contrast, modern psychology largely focuses on effective symptom management.

These are sophisticated treatments designed to help people navigate the fallout of modern life right here and now. They can often prove life-changing and life-saving, and are usually symptom-specific.

This means that depression is treated differently from anxiety or obsessive-compulsive disorders, trauma, and so on. Each disorder has its own treatment models, and in many cases, they work remarkably well.

The power of combining these ancient and modern approaches is in knowing when to use them.

For example, someone seeking help with their day-to-day struggles probably won’t benefit from being taught theories and techniques for investigating subtle states of mind. Recent research even shows it can be harmful.

When someone is in crisis, the most compassionate response is whatever gets them stable and able to cope as quickly as possible. And modern psychology is full of effective and tested tools for this.

However, stabilisation won’t always lead to transformation.

Once people start coping, the relapse rates are high, and until recently, psychology has focused on getting people to what’s called “normal”. It’s a relative newcomer to the project of high levels of mental health and wellbeing.

Enter contemplative approaches such as Buddhism.

Buddhist philosophy and practice weren’t designed to treat mental disorders as we think of them today - the aim was far more ambitious. These practices were designed to eliminate suffering altogether. To permanently disable mechanisms of suffering and work toward what Buddhists call liberation and enlightenment.

These aren’t concepts that should be part of a discussion of psychological treatments, but there might be something to learn from these practices and the theory behind them. I’ve found it helpful to think of these practices as contemplative technology designed to do two things: disable the mechanisms that create suffering and distress, and cultivate habits and states of mind that lead to stable clarity, emotional stability, and wellbeing.

In a nutshell, psychology focuses mostly on symptoms, Buddhism mostly on mechanisms.

After years of immersion in Buddhist thought and practice, I was surprised to find that the mechanisms of mental distress didn’t come up that often in a psychology degree. There were a lot of interesting ideas, very clever research, but nothing about the fundamental workings of the mind. It wasn’t till the ‘abnormal psychology’ subject in the third year that I got an explanation.

Psychology doesn’t have cures for mental disorders.

This might be a surprise if you haven’t heard it before, but it’s not controversial. At the risk of oversimplifying, it works like this: mental disorders that are diagnosed and treated by clinicians are all considered syndromes.

Syndromes are symptom clusters for which the cause is unknown, and when the cause is discovered, the syndrome becomes a disease. But there are no mental disorders for which a cause is known.

This is important, because the only way to develop a cure for any condition is to know the cause. Without it, the best we can do is treat symptoms. They can be very effective treatments, but shouldn’t be mistaken for cures.

So psychology and Buddhism are operating at very different levels; psychological therapies supporting people struggling day-to-day to get back on their feet, and the Buddhist approach which targets the mental mechanisms that create our suffering. Even our reality.

It may seem I’m advocating for an either/or approach to Buddhism and psychology, but I believe we can do better. I believe we can treat them as complementary systems to address different aspects of mental health, and human experience more generally.

Psychological tools can bring symptoms under control and give people a sense of control and agency in their lives.

Practices from contemplative traditions can stabilise the gains and support high levels of mental health and wellbeing over time. This way, we can move people not just from disorder to normal, but from normal to genuine flourishing.

This is where people trained in contemplative traditions can contribute to modern mental-health research.

There’s plenty of scope to use Buddhist theories of mind in modern mental healthcare, but translating those ideas into a form that psychologists and researchers can engage with is not straightforward.

You can’t talk to secular researchers the same way you talk to Buddhist scholars, and you can’t publish Buddhist philosophy in psychological journals.

So the overarching model and motivation of my PhD was set before I even enrolled.

I didn’t see the point in fighting the establishment, or even trying to reduce scepticism toward Buddhism and meditation. I wanted to find ways to use my Buddhist training to engage with researchers and clinicians and even publish papers that would contribute to mental health research and treatment.

And they’d never know it was Dharma.

In the next post: A busy street in downtown Toronto sets the stage for what my research is looking for.

Read it here: The Minefield of Mindfulness Research.

The research framework this post describes eventually became the backbone of Ground State — the sequence of skills that bridges the Buddhist model and the psychological one, in a form you can actually practise. If you want to see where that work led:

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This is part 2 of a series: How Suffering Works.

In the last post of this series, I said the core of my PhD didn’t start in a university. It began more than twenty years earlier in my living room with the discovery that stress and anxiety weren’t just happening to me, but that I was an unknowing co-conspirator.

This kind of stung, but there was a flip side. If my habits and patterns were creating stress, surely I could change some of these patterns, and from there it followed that I had more agency over my mental health than I’d previously believed.

This was reinforced less than a year later on a park bench in Toronto, experiencing all the familiar sensations of anxiety and overwhelm.

I’d been in the city about a week. Snow was melting on the ground, squirrels were darting up and down the leafless trees, and the next day was my audition for a music degree that I’d bought a one-way ticket to pursue. Sitting alone in a city where I knew nobody, the all-too-familiar tension and restlessness of anxiety that had almost derailed my life previously returned, but with one clear difference.

This time, I was enjoying it.

I became very curious because the physical sensations were identical.
My heart rate was up, my mind was agitated and starting to race into bad neighbourhoods of worry and rumination.

It was clearly stress-related, but something had changed. In a new and exciting city, with my old habits on ice, I interpreted those sensations differently.

This was excitement rather than overwhelm.

This was more like paddling into a wave a little bigger than my skill level, dropping into a black-diamond run on a snowboard, or skateboarding in the rain. I couldn’t be sure how it would turn out, but that was part of what made it enjoyable. Hypervigilance might even help me look in the right direction when I cross the street.

So for me, the question had to be asked: if stress and emotions can be paralysing in one context and empowering in another, what made the difference? More importantly, can we make this shift intentionally?

I couldn’t be the first to wonder about this, so who might know?

I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was stumbling onto an important overlap of cognitive psychology and Buddhist theory. These are questions that drove some big decisions later in life, but at the time, I just wanted some answers.

I started at the Zen centre where I first learned to meditate. Nothing mystical, but I was an enthusiastic beginner and was quite disciplined until my practice faced a major obstacle.

Things in Toronto went quite well for me.

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In a short period of time, I went from meditating regularly to just dabbling, and soon enough had no time for it at all. A degree, work, new friends, and the novelty of my big-city life took over till my burning questions became idle curiosity as things just kept going my way.

Until, of course, they didn’t.

After a series of personal and professional setbacks, a little self-doubt crept in. This pushed my focus to things I wasn’t doing well, that weren’t panning out as I’d planned, and suddenly stress and unease seemed to follow me everywhere. It was a frightening and familiar downward pull into emotional overwhelm, as if the ground were shifting beneath me.

It was the familiarity that saved me.

My mistake was obvious; I’d thought that digging myself out from under anxiety and overwhelm made me immune. While it had given me the confidence to take some risks, that confidence turned out to be conditional on things mostly going my way, and it couldn’t hold up to repeated challenges.

It was a pub that saved me.

More accurately, it was my curiosity about the Tibetan Buddhist centre across the road. I’d walked past it often enough, and late one night as we bundled out of the pub, I crossed the street, crunched through the snow-covered parking lot and grabbed a brochure from a small box pinned to the door.

I checked it out and found it to be very different from the “just sit” discipline I’d experienced at the Zen centre years earlier. There was plenty of meditation, but also a genuine interest in discussing ideas, answering questions and even debating different views. It was interesting, challenging, and answered some of my questions about how flexible our interpretations of feelings can be, which had been a recurring theme since before I left Australia. It was a pivotal time for me, but I may never have got seriously involved if it weren’t for one thing.

Canadian tax law.

Back then, if you didn’t owe the government taxes, you had seven years to lodge the return. When things had been going well for me, I’d not had the time or interest in anything as boring as taxes and duly ignored them. Now, stressed and almost broke, I filed several years of returns and was refunded enough money to spend a couple of months just studying and meditating.

In a way, it was my first experience of retreat. I took the discipline of the Zen centre, the logic of the Tibetans, and my own recurring questions, and spent several months looking into them and learning more meditation. The most important question for me was whether it’s possible to achieve more than the surface-level protection from anxiety I’d achieved earlier on my own. I read a lot of books, went to a lot of teachings, asked a lot of questions, and it became clear that the answer was probably yes.

So I bought another one-way ticket, this time to India, to hear it from the Dalai Lama himself. Back then, he would teach for 15 days straight (two sessions a day) right after the Tibetan New Year. My plan was to hear him teach, take some courses, do some retreats and hike in the Himalayas.

Once again, things kind of went my way, and I had the opportunity to stay nearly two years studying Buddhist philosophy and Tibetan language. Although I had to come and go for work and visas, I managed to spend nearly six of the next eight years studying, translating, and meditating, with no real thoughts about the future.

Being immersed in Buddhism as a living culture was a new and interesting experience. Speaking Tibetan made it especially interesting, as any language offers insights into the cultures and worldviews it comes from. I learned a lot while I was there, but I also had to adjust my ideas and preconceptions about Buddhism and meditation that I'd had before I went.

For example, Buddhism is quite goal-oriented. I breezed into India with a very “it’s all about the journey” vibe that I soon found didn’t land so well. The purpose of the Buddhist path is very clear: to guide a person away from distress as efficiently and safely as possible. Working toward liberation and enlightenment with guardrails to prevent crashes and unnecessary detours.

Meditation could be viewed as a type of ‘contemplative technology’ that helps navigate and progress along this path. In fact, the Tibetan and Sanskrit words we translate as ‘meditation’ are better rendered as ‘familiarisation’ or ‘cultivation’. It’s about cultivating qualities that will help and support us along the way and shaking off those that will hold us back.

What fascinated me most was that many of these practices are designed to help us see for ourselves just how much experience comes from the world ‘out there’ and how much is created ‘in here’ by our own minds. And the more clearly we see that, the more we can cultivate states of mind that help us to interpret our experiences in ways that are healthy for ourselves and our communities.

This sparked the most interest for me, as I recall a dark night in Brisbane watching the news, or the cold autumn morning on a park bench in Toronto. People have been asking these questions for a long time, and there are answers, but to go beyond theory, we have to try it ourselves.

And that was the advice of the Buddha. Interested people were invited to “ehipassiko”, which in Pali means “come and see.” In other words, don’t take the teachings on faith. Look closely and see for yourself how experience actually unfolds.

I’d basically stumbled across not just answers to some of my questions, but deeper and more fundamental questions that people had been debating for centuries. Being able to study these ideas in Tibetan added a depth that is difficult to convey in translation.

At the time I knew that scientists had begun studying meditation, and in teachings, the Dalai Lama often spoke about his conversations with researchers in the West. It seemed kind of interesting that ideas from a 2,500-year-old tradition could be discussed so naturally alongside modern science, but the truth is, I didn’t really care at the time.

I wasn’t there to study it scientifically.
I had come for answers and had already received so much more.

It would be more than fifteen years before things went full circle, and I began investigating those questions scientifically.

In the next post: a rooftop breakfast in India turns into a debate with two Tibetan scholars, and forces me to rethink how Buddhism and modern psychology should actually work together.

Read it here: We Don’t Have to Agree On What the Mind is.

The physiological signal is neutral. What we make of it isn’t. Ground State is where you train the interpretive layer, where you learn the specific skills that change how your emotions become signals to stay calm and respond with skill.

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I can trace mine back to some important events that made me realise I might be participating in my own distress. I first wrote about this experience as a story of using inquiry for resilience, but looking back, I see it was the beginning of a much deeper question at the core of everything I’ve done since, including my current work and PhD.

It came from a question that arose one night alone in my living room thirty years ago.

In 1994 I was a young musician teetering on the brink of anxiety and depression. I had tried without success to make sense of the overwhelm and fatigue, but all I saw were dead ends. And I had no idea what to do about it.

Then, a woman in a country I couldn’t have identified on a map changed the way I thought about everything.

Life was stressful. Being constantly short of cash and hustling for work had taken its toll to the point that I was consumed by self-doubt and becoming anxious at rehearsals, on stage, even just going to the supermarket.

This all came to a crescendo one night, after a low-pressure gig that should have been easy money, when I had a small panic attack after the last set. The next day, I quit the band and while a bit of short-term stress was reduced, I was left with no income, no confidence to look for more gigs, and absolutely no idea what to do next.

This was all compounded by guilt, because it didn’t seem rational. In the past I’d managed to relax and enjoy myself, but now I just stayed home. Partly from anxiety and partly because I knew I wasn’t fun to be around. I stopped doing things I enjoyed and felt like an ungrateful drain on everyone.

And it’s not like nobody tried to help.

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Then it happened. An unremarkable night at home alone, half-watching the news, a story came on that turned my life upside down and still influences me today. It covered a small makeshift shanty-town that a cruel and oppressive government had ordered its troops to bulldoze. It was awful, but what caught my attention was a woman filmed from a distance. Her home had been destroyed, her sons and husband were missing, and she was inconsolable with sadness and anger.

I didn’t know what she was saying, but I understood how she was feeling, and that just felt wrong. It’s a little embarrassing to think about now, but I understood her sense of anguished hopelessness because it’s exactly how I’d felt some days.

My recognition of her emotional state was instant and very real. More importantly, it was obvious that what was happening to her was a lot, lot worse than anything that was ever even likely to happen to me. I was in no danger of being arrested, executed or my house being bulldozed in the middle of the night (though the house was torn down soon after we moved out). As an Australian in the 90s, I even had access to social security that I knew would keep me fed, housed and healthy. The woman on my TV had none of these securities and was in the grip of loss the likes of which I will never experience. So how could I be so distraught? It didn’t make any sense - her anguish was justified. What reason did I have?

For a moment or two my guilt was only compounded, but this night, this experience made me just too curious to sit around any longer.

You see, up to that very moment, I’d always assumed that my emotions were about what was happening to me from out there. Bad things happen, I feel bad, worse things happen, I feel worse, when things go well, I’m happy and so on. It was uncomplicated and logical, but I’d just stumbled across evidence that undermined everything about this view. And as I sat alone in my dark, empty house, the only conclusion I could come to was that it wasn’t all just happening to me.

Perhaps I was somehow participating.

I really took it to heart and made some big changes. I spent a lot more time at the piano practising, swimming laps to get fit and even dabbled in meditation. It helped so much that, soon after, I regained enough confidence to drop everything and move to the other side of the world, to a city where I knew nobody, and audition for a jazz performance degree.

One of the most important things I learned during this time was this: although we can’t just choose to stop feeling depressed, anxious, or overwhelmed, we tend not to notice the patterns that sustain these feelings. Worse still, we often underestimate the power that disrupting routines in even small ways can have.

My first routine change was to swim laps, which worked for and against.

Exercise is known to lift mood; however, I found swimming also gave me time for even more rumination and negative thinking. So even as I got fitter, I was mentally exhausted from the stories in my own mind.

And then I noticed something interesting; even though I was swimming further and stronger, I was still taking regular breaks. These were necessary at first, but as my fitness improved I would still stop to ‘catch my breath’ even though it wasn’t necessary.

I realised these breaks weren’t about being physically tired, they were mental. A combination of simple habit I’d developed and the mental exhaustion of rumination.

The change was small, but precise. My musician training had already taught me to pay attention to what I was doing in the moment and keep other unnecessary noise out. In the pool, it worked the same way; simply pay more attention to the strokes, kicks and breaths rather than all the other noise and negativity.

Not only did this work, but it also improved my swimming and laid important foundations for the serious meditation training I would later pursue.

I began to see that distress wasn’t randomly imposed from outside; it had patterns.

And patterns could be interrupted.

The power of disrupting habits and paying closer attention to what I was doing became obvious very quickly. Previously, I associated concentration with playing music. I now understood it to be a key element of avoiding unnecessary distress and improving my mental and physical health.

It was the first time I started to see that suffering and distress might have internal mechanisms. Not just causes ‘out there’ but processes unfolding ‘in here’.

I didn’t have words for it then, but this question of ‘how might I be participating?’ eventually led me to Buddhist teachings, university lecture halls, and a PhD into what actually changes when mindfulness reduces distress.

In the next post: what happened when anxiety returns, and why the same physiological stress can feel like panic in one context and exhilaration in another. Read it here.

The question “how might I be participating in my own distress?” is the one that changes everything. Ground State is built around that question — not as philosophy but as practice.

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In addition to the uniforms, badges, sidearms, and tasers, he held flowers as an offering to a Buddhist monk, Bhikkhu Paññakāra. To me, the drawling southern accent and smiles of the officers were as disarming as they were surprising as he promised to make sure, “Y’all enjoy your trip through Caroline County.”

Bhikkhu Paññakāra was leading the Walk for Peace; a group of monks walking nearly 3,700 km from Texas to Washington, D.C., through snow, freezing weather, and supported by an astonishing number of people who came out to see them. I’d been keeping tabs on them (and their “peace dog,” Aloka), but I never would have guessed the walk would attract the global attention and support that it did.

Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche remarked that these monks have “achieved more by walking through America for two months than Tibetan lamas have achieved by teaching in the West for years.” People have driven hours to stand in the cold for less than a minute to watch the monks pass, and many described the encounter as profoundly meaningful.

There’s no question that these monks are quite extraordinary, but we should be careful here. Their impact doesn’t come from robes, culture, genetics, or some mystical quality that makes them spiritually gifted.

These qualities of focus, compassion, kindness, and resolve are some of the results of their practice. They weren’t born special or gifted; they trained. They learned how to cultivate a peaceful mind and how to best create peace around them.

If we mistake them as having some innate qualities or capacities that we don’t, we risk missing what I think is the most important part of the message:

The qualities we see and admire in them are qualities we can cultivate as well.

Bhikkhu Paññakāra alluded to this in an interview, saying he hoped that when we saw the monks walking, we would see ourselves in them.

So perhaps when we feel moved by monks walking slowly down an American highway, we can consider not just how extraordinary they are, but ask “what did they do to become like this?”

And even more importantly:

“Can I do it too?”

This question became a significant part of my life in 2003, when I travelled to India and met Tibetan lamas up close. Seeing them in action and listening to them teach added a new element; I didn’t just want to learn from them, I was interested in how they became the way they were.

To me, this was the quiet promise. You can see what’s possible, you can do it too, we can show you how, and there’s no charge.

This is the power of having regular access to inspiring people. It normalises what would once have felt extraordinary. Calm, compassion, presence, and perseverance stop looking mystical and start to look attainable.

I suspect this is why the Walk for Peace monks had such an effect; we so rarely encounter people whose priorities are clarity, equanimity, and compassion that when we do, their normal feels extraordinary to us.

And yes, they’re professionals; it’s their life. Just like I can be inspired by a world-class swimmer, I know I won’t reach the same level if I just get to the pool a few times a week. Likewise, we don’t need to be full-time contemplatives to benefit from the mental training that professionals are doing.

But we do need to train.

While a professional athlete makes conditioning and fitness their primary focus we still improve when we exercise consistently. Even if we’re fitting it in amongst work, family, and snacking on the couch watching TV.

The same is true for the mind.

Most of us aren’t going to join a monastery where we’d be surrounded by others who are wholeheartedly dedicated to the training and in constant contact with teachers. This doesn’t mean we can’t practice and improve; it just means we set goals achievable within our lifestyle.

Perhaps the hardest part of this is staying consistent and motivated when our meditation and contemplative stance makes us an outsider; or at least a little a little strange. Without like-minded people around us, we normalise hustle and stress instead of clarity and calm. We become reactive instead of relaxed, fickle instead of focused, and choose scrolling over stillness.

I know this to be true, because without the proximity to teachers I once had, it’s harder to stay motivated and consistent.

So if we’re not professionals, where do we look for inspiration and support?

That’s easy, we look for a community of practice. Others who are training their minds and cultivating the qualities in themselves that they see in inspiring leaders like Bhikkhu Paññakāra, and the other monks of the Walk for Peace.

We look for places where people are side-stepping the attention economy that is the 21^st century; where people are cultivating peace within themselves to bring out to the broader community. Not just for inspiration, but to normalise what we currently mistake as extraordinary.

Because in times like these, just trying to notice when you’re distracted is unusual, doing something about it even more so, and cultivating a kind and balanced state of mind is quite extraordinary.

Depending on the circles you move in, that is.

We may not be walking through blizzards and across continents, but we still need structures that make this kind of training possible. We need places where a contemplative approach to the world is normal. Where mental health and wellbeing isn’t mysticism or pseudoscience, but something cultivated through practice.

The extraordinary only becomes ordinary when it’s cultivated and reinforced.

And if we don’t create and normalise these conditions intentionally, the 21^st century has an alternative at the ready.

Perhaps that’s what struck me about the sheriff with a flower, a smile, and a sidearm. Respect for peace and the discipline to work for it.

The question isn’t whether peace is possible; it’s whether we’re willing to train in it.

The extraordinary becomes ordinary when it’s cultivated consistently. Ground State is that training; the specific sequence of practices the Buddhist tradition developed, and my research validated.

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If you’re willing to train for it.

Here’s an idea that some people find a bit radical.

You are not your thoughts.

You’re also not your emotions, actions, memories or plans for the future. And most certainly not your brain.

This is quite easy to demonstrate (we’ll talk about it more this week), but it does raise an important question; if you’re not your ideas and thoughts etc., who/what are you?

That question of ‘self’ lies at the heart of Buddhism, and it’s now becoming central to modern psychology too, and not as abstract theory, but as a way to reconsider mental health and human suffering.

These are exciting times, and starting tomorrow (online, in-person or by replay) we’ll be looking at what’s happening in the field and the powerful implications of it all.

You’ll come away with tools that draw on both:

• the inspiring long-term perspective of Buddhist philosophy, and

• the evidence-based, short-term coping skills of psychology.

We’ll also talk openly about where the two fields don’t (and maybe never will) see eye to eye.

As always, Langri Tangpa centre here in Brisbane is super-supportive of this ancient-modern collaboration and offering this series by donation.

Join us in person, online, or later by replay for this exploration of what happens when two ways of understanding the mind finally meet.

I look forward to including you in one of the most important conversations happening today.

Replays available in the Resources and Support space of my online community.

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Some time ago, I was defeated by a loaf of sourdough.

The knife bounced out of its track through the crust and started a new one across the back of my thumb. Not a serious injury, but it needed attention, so I washed it, applied a band-aid, and then engaged in the most critical part of the healing process.

I got out of the way.

If I had gone on with my day as usual - fed the dog, weeded the garden, maybe even cleaned the toilet, it would almost certainly have become infected. I cleaned and covered it, then left it alone to ensure it healed.

From the first scraped knee as a child, we learn that the body heals itself, and all we need to do is not interrupt the process. What we don't usually learn is that the mind is also a self-healing system.

If only we would get out of its way, which we often don’t.

We tend to poke, prod, and contaminate our psychological bumps and scrapes, re-injuring ourselves through rumination, worry, and other stress that prevent mental scar tissue from forming.

Replaying what you said, what you should have said, what they’re thinking about it.

You’ve probably noticed this already. The mind doesn’t just remember difficult moments; it recreates them. Not once, but repeatedly, and often when you’re trying to relax.

So it makes sense to wonder what we can do to heal and protect our minds. But there's a better question.

What can we stop doing to give the mind time to heal itself?

This is a question that Buddhism has been addressing for centuries, and researchers (including myself) are now inserting into the modern mental health conversation. It's an exciting time to be in this space, as the overlap of ancient and modern means we can engage effective day-to-day coping methods from psychology alongside the deeper, longer-term contemplative practices and goals.

Modern psychology can help us clean and cover the wounds, while the contemplative practices stop us from interfering with the mind's natural tendency to settle and heal itself. However, unlike the body, where healing is a waiting game, contemplative tools also speed up the process and protect from future damage.

Suppose you're serious about your mental health and wellbeing. In that case, understanding how to get these two approaches working together gives you what you need: some space to deal with your stress (and the 21st century in general), and tools for longer-term stability and confidence in the face of… whatever’s coming next.

We spend a lot of time doing things to fix the mind, but perhaps the question is simpler.

Where exactly are we getting in its way?

Ground State: Mindfulness That Holds its Ground is built around that question. Not more techniques to apply to your mind, but a clear map of what you’re doing to interfere with it — and the specific skills to stop.

If you’re ready to work with the mind rather than against it:

Join Ground State

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The ‘knowing’ this post describes isn’t theoretical; it’s developed through practice. Ground State is where that practice is taught, in sequence, drawing on 2,500 years of Buddhist methodology and the research that tested it.

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