What if happiness was a skill you could learn to master? According to Matthieu Ricard, a 66 year old
Tibetan Monk and geneticist, it is.
Ricard has submitted to scientific testing which revealed a brain wave
pattern unheard of by neuroscientists.
The unusual activity in his brain accounts for what scientists say makes
Ricard ‘the happiest man in the world”.
“Meditating is like lifting weights or exercising for the mind”, Ricard
told the Daily News. “Anyone can be happy by simply training their brain”, he
says.
To study the physiological states Ricard enters into and to understand how
quantitatively happy he is, neuroscientists at the University of Wisconsin
placed 256 sensors onto Ricar’d skull and asked him to meditate. Ricard performed compassion meditation and
the neuroscientists could hardly believe what they were seeing. The monk’s
brain was producing a level of gamma waves that went entirely off the charts.
They found also that his brain demonstrated extreme activity in the left
prefontal cortex in comparison to the right.
What this means is he exhibits an unusually great capacity for
experiencing happiness with a much lower than normal tendency towards
negativity.
As part of the same study, the researches delved into the minds of other
practicing monks to see if the results may be comparable. It was revealed that monks who were long-term
meditators- meaning who had sat in 50,000+ rounds of meditation, exhibited
altered brain function in important ways, though they also found that
individuals who practiced meditation for only 20 minutes a day for 3 weeks
demonstrated some degree of change as well.
The monk wishes to spread his amazing happiness and meditation benefits
and so he has written a book called Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s
Most Important Skill. The proceeds from
selling his book are donated towards more than 100 humanitarian projects.
“Try sincerely to check, to investigate,” he explained to the Daily News.
“That’s what Buddhism has been trying to unravel — the mechanism of happiness
and suffering. It is a science of the mind.”
How our brains have gotten so off track that a huge percentage of people
on our planet are not effortlessly happy would be an extensive topic for
another article. Yet what I love about Ricard’s message and these findings is
that we have the power to literally program our brain to produce good feeling
emotions and this is no doubt connected to harnessing the powerful effect our
thoughts have on our bodies and overall well being.
It seems that the more often we can allow our brains to tap into these
certain brainwave states, associated with being clear-headed, relaxed, alert,
conscious, and at peace, the more able we will be to consciously switch into
these states of brain function while meditating, but also while going about our
daily lives as well. It can all start,
as this study shows, with a short meditation session every day- as little as 20
minutes.
It also includes monitoring one’s thoughts and developing awareness within
our though processes. The more we can cultivate a conscious relationship with
what we are thinking, the more control we take back from ourselves and the more
and more we steer our own ship of consciousness, so to speak, rather than being
navigated by automatic thought patterns and at times by beliefs and thoughts
that are not in alignment with our well being or who we really are. Time for an
upgrade!
As themindunleashed.com puts it, One of the greatest American filmmakers,
television director, visual artist and musician is David Lynch. Lynch is an
advocate of the use of Transcendental Meditation (TM) in bringing peace to the
world. His passion to help students learn the TM techniques has launched the
David Lynch Foundation For Consciousness-Based Education and Peace. In this
video, David Lynch answers a couple of questions on his understanding of how TM
can affect creativity and overall learning and expansion of the human mind.”