Sit and Be Happy

The Mood-Boosting Power of Meditation

by Wendy Kagan and illustrations by Annie Internicola, July 27, 2011

In the late 1980s, Corinne Mol was a highly accomplished college student with a plum job editing the student newspaper. But she wasn’t happy. “I was overworked, overachieving, and overthinking,” says the 48-year-old Shady resident, who was also plagued by stress-induced insomnia and depression. Desperate for change, she signed up for a 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat and hitchhiked seven hours to get there. Mol knew nothing about meditation but found herself in a silent, monklike immersion, waking at 4am and sitting for up to 10 hours a day. It was hard: Her back hurt and she craved movement. Yet, as the days passed, she felt calmer, learning to let her thoughts go and drop into the present moment. Mol took intense pleasure in the smallest things: food, nature, her own breath. She recalls with a laugh, “When it was over and we were able to break silence, the first thing I said was, ‘Wow, that was better than drugs.’”

Science Says It Works
Scientists have been studying the benefits of meditation for over 30 years, and the news only gets better. Herbert Benson pioneered the field in the 1970s, when he turned his attention to a group of Transcendental Meditation practitioners and found that the body responded to meditation with a drop in heart rate, breath rate, blood pressure, and metabolic rate—all antidotes to the body’s stress response. But new research goes further still, showing that meditation can actually change the shape of the brain and rewire it for the better. A recent review of 52 studies on people who practice mindfulness meditation found heightened activity in brain areas associated with attention and concentration. And in January of this year, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital reported that subjects who practiced mindfulness meditation for about 30 minutes a day for eight weeks had increases in gray-matter density in the hippocampus and other brain regions associated with memory, self-awareness, and empathy, and decreases in gray-matter density in the amygdala, the center of anxiety and stress.

Yet all of this white-coat science pales next to the hands-on experience of dedicated meditators themselves, who will let you in on a secret: They have found a way to be happy. “People come to meditation because they don’t want to suffer anymore,” says Mol, who went on to attend several more retreats after college and eventually started to teach Taoist meditation alongside a complementary focus on Qi-Gong. For Mol, meditation was her respite from a mind that couldn’t turn off. Now she helps her clients develop inner resources so they don’t feel tossed around by the whims of their emotions and reactions. “The negative, critical inner voice loses its power, and the mind becomes gentler with itself and the world,” says Mol. “You learn how to be present with whatever happens, gaining spaciousness and a greater relaxation into life. It’s about self-acceptance: You wake up to who you really are, discovering that contentment and compassion are your natural state. Self-acceptance can then blossom into self-love and a love of life, however it arrives.”

Sitting Styles
The Beatles did it. Al Gore does it, and so does Richard Gere. Nearly every spiritual tradition from Buddhism to Judaism to Christianity offers some form of meditation somewhere in its doctrines or teachings. It was The Beatles who almost single-handedly imported Transcendental Meditation to the West after their famous 1968 trip to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in India. Based on ancient Vedic philosophy, Transcendental Meditation involves meditating on a mantra and bringing the attention back to this core phrase whenever the mind wanders.

Mindfulness meditation—the subject of so many of recent studies—came into fashion in the 1990s thanks to Jon Kabat-Zinn, a medical doctor and student of Zen Buddhism who has made a life’s work out of integrating the two practices. You can credit Kabat-Zinn, author of two best-selling books, with making “mindfulness” a household word among the progressive set. The word suggests complete engagement with the present moment, which may seem elusive but becomes accessible through practice. Meditators begin with quiet sitting and a focus on the breath, and then move on to watch every thought as it comes and goes, whether it’s worry, fear, discomfort, hope, or bliss. When thoughts arise, they’re not suppressed or judged but simply noted and observed, and the breath is an ever-present anchor.

Also rooted in Buddhism, Vipassana (or insight) meditation has quietly revolutionized the lives of practitioners since the time of Buddha. A Burmese teacher named S. N. Goenka has helped Vipassana spread in the West by opening a series of retreat centers, including one in the Berkshires, in Shelburne, Massachusetts. Retreats are free, including room and board; first-time retreaters are not even permitted to make a donation. The 10-day course is rigorous, with 10 hours a day of meditation that explores the connection between mind and body through attention to the breath and bodily sensations. “At first you feel the pains in your body more, but then you learn to relax around the pain and it lessens,” says Mol. “The mental pain of resisting it dissipates as well. You learn to stop resisting life—and life itself becomes less painful.”