Luke's gotta get his mind right!

One of my all-time favorite movies is the 1967 classic "Cool Hand Luke" with Paul Newman.

There's a great line in the movie when the Road Captain says to the Prisoners: 

"...You run one time, you got yourself a set of chains. You run twice you got yourself two sets. You ain't gonna need no third set, 'cause you gonna get your mind right. "

That's the root of all our problems isn't it? Our state of mind. We have to get our minds right!  And when our mind isn't right, we feel totally enslaved and in chains. We feel imprisoned by our thoughts. We are trapped when our mind isn't right.

Reflect for a moment on the off-handed comments we have about our minds and our thinking. We say thinks like:

"I must be out of my mind."

"I can't make up my mind"

"This situation is mind-boggling"

"My mind is racing!"

"This job is mind-numbing."

Training the mind to be an effective and disciplined tool is a skill that can be developed just like any other skill. But it takes practice - and the practice is meditation.

Meditation is misunderstood by many people. Meditation is not necessarily a spiritual or religious pursuit - but it can be. At the root of meditation is focus - disciplined, constant focus and attention. It doesn't really matter WHAT you pay attention to, as long as you pay attention.  

And there are tangible benefits to meditation. Researchers at Harvard, Yale, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found the first evidence that meditation can alter the physical structure of our brains.

Brain scans they conducted reveal that experienced meditators boasted increased thickness in parts of the brain that deal with attention and processing sensory input.

“Our data suggest that meditation practice can promote cortical plasticity in adults in areas important for cognitive and emotional processing and well-being,” says Sara Lazar, leader of the study and a psychologist at Harvard Medical School.  

“These findings are consistent with other studies that demonstrated increased thickness of music areas in the brains of musicians, and visual and motor areas in the brains of jugglers. In other words, the structure of an adult brain can change in response to repeated practice.”

The researchers compared brain scans of 20 experienced meditators with those of 15 nonmeditators. Four of the former taught meditation or yoga, but they were not monks living in seclusion. The rest worked in careers such as law, health care, and journalism. All the participants were white. During scanning, the meditators meditated; the others just relaxed and thought about whatever they wanted.

Meditators did Buddhist “insight meditation,” which focuses on whatever is there, like noise or body sensations. It doesn’t involve “om,” other mantras, or chanting.

“The goal is to pay attention to sensory experience, rather than to your thoughts about the sensory experience,” Lazar explains. “For example, if you suddenly hear a noise, you just listen to it rather than thinking about it. If your leg falls asleep, you just notice the physical sensations. If nothing is there, you pay attention to your breathing.”

Successful meditators get used to not thinking or elaborating things in their mind.

The increased thickness of gray matter is not very much, 4 to 8 thousandths of an inch.  

“These increases are proportional to the time a person has been meditating during their lives,” Lazar notes. “This suggests that the thickness differences are acquired through extensive practice and not simply due to differences between meditators and nonmeditators.”

As small as they are, you can bet those differences are going to lead to lots more studies to find out just what is going on and how meditation might better be used to improve health and well-being, and even slow aging.

Repeated practice. Repeated practice. Repeated Practice. Time to get your mind right!