A Fistful of Sand

Click here to receive or newsletter or Check out our Website One of my favorite lines from college freshman English literature is still etched in my mind. It is James Joyce’s novel The Dubliners and reads, “ Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.” Mr. Duffy was a one-dimensional bureaucrat who lives an unattractively plain, colorless life. He represents the post-modern everyman: cut off from his feelings, defined by rules and protocols, and lacking purpose and meaningful connections. Buddhist practice is often characterized as being completely rational and firmly implanted in “reality” (whatever that word might mean to you). The popular image is that it leaves no room for sensitivity. There are many people who self-identify as Buddhists of one sort or another that live in their heads finding the distance to their bodies a long walk. In classes I’ll sometimes ask a student how far away he is from his feet. I often get an answer like “five and a half feet or so”...

In a study that will appear in the January 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, a team led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers reported the results of their 2011 study. It is the first to document that meditation practitioners definitely experience changes in the brain over time. Persons who participate even for as short a period as an 8-week mindfulness meditation program appear to develop measurable changes in the brain areas doctors associate with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. The brain seems to respond to meditation as the body responds to physical exercise. Sara Lazar, PhDof the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program, the study's senior author and editor, outs it like this, "Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day… This study...