“On Mind Wandering in Meditation”Marcello Spinella, Ph.D.Associate Professor of PsychologyRicarhd Stockton College of New JerseyJuly 19, 2011 https://www.facebook.com/pages/Yoga-Nine-Vipassana/210058179009727 Mind wandering is perhaps the number one obstacle to people starting a meditation practice. A surprisingly large number of people seem to have tried to meditate at least once in their lives. When I ask people about what it was like and what problem they ran into, frustration over mind wandering seems like an almost universal answer. I never heard anyone say "Oh, it was pure peace and bliss, but I just decided to stop." When something is that enjoyable, we tend to keep at it. Ironically, all of this frustration is based on a mistaken assumption, something like: “When I meditate, my mind should not wander.” That’s completely unrealistic. The natural habit of the mind is to wander. It happens all day long. What makes us think it would be any different when we sit down to meditate? An important point to realize is that we have absolutely no control whatsoever over when our minds are going to wander next or where it’s going to go. It's as involuntary as a muscle twitch or the functioning of your spleen. Despite our best intentions, it’s guaranteed to wander and there is no way to predict when. So putting effort toward “not wandering” is like putting effort toward making a cloud not rain. Trying to control something you can’t control can only produce frustration and helplessness, which erodes motivation to continue practice. In psychological terms, attention can be operantly conditioned. This type of conditioning was discovered by Edward Thorndyke and refined by B.F. Skinner. We have the popular cultural image of a pigeon in a cage who receives a pellet every time it pecks a lever. Before long it learns that pecking the lever gets results so it keeps doing it. Developing concentration not different from this. It involves conditioning systems in the brain that, to a large degree, are not under our direct voluntary control. In meditation, we choose some object to focus our attention on, like breath sensations or feelings in the body. We can voluntarily focus somewhat, but how well depends on the amount of distraction. And even in a quiet room, it's not long before long the mind is off again. The most common response to this is frustration. We realize the mind is wandering and get frustrated that it didn't stay put like a good doggie. Well frustration is a form of self-punishment. There are at least two reasons why this doesn't work. The first is punishment isn't a good motivator. It works to some degree, but produces many unwanted side effects. If we try to beat the mind into submission, the whole process will become very aversive and we will start finding excuses to end our meditation session early or find other things to do with our time. The second reason is that it makes absolutely no sense from a behavioral point of view. The very moment we realize the mind has been wandering, attention has already returned. That's good. So to get frustrated is like punishing the mind for doing what we wanted it to do. It's like trying to teach a dog to roll over and whenever he starts to do it, you say "Bad doggie!" It's a strategy that is

doomed to fail.The only reason we do it is out of the habit of trying to correct our behavior with punishment. But taking a step back and considering the process shows us that this not a useful strategy. One can neutrally bring attention back, and if that works, by all means do so. However, it has been recognized in recent years that "bad is stronger than good," a term coined by psychologist Roy Baumeister. We tend towards negative emotion, probably because in evolutionary terms, it was a safer bet in the short run. It was better for our ancestors to get scared when they heard a rustling in the bush, than to ignore it on the off change it was a large, hungry predator. So the automatic tendency toward frustration has an unfair advantage. When developing a meditation practice, self-rewarding rather than self-punishing can counterbalance this automatic tendency. As the saying goes, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. If the verbal label (e.g. "good") becomes cumbersome or unnecessary after a while, you can just drop it. But it can be a very useful technique to overcome the struggling that many experience. A teacher named Upasaka Culadasa (pronounced "choo-lah-DAH-sah"; http://dharmatreasure.com/) tipped me off to this simple but critical point. Whenever we catch the mind wandering and re-focus on the chosen object, feel good about it. I even would use a word like "good" or "yes." Do this every time. Recognize that wandering is not a failure, but re-focusing is a success, every single time. Literally, every re-focusing is exercising attention pathways in the brain, reinforcing synaptic pathways. The more these pathways are exercised, the easier they become activated. With every single re-focusing, a person's ability to stay focused becomes slightly better. Over time this is like putting money in a bank, it not only accumulates, but with compounded interest. Eventually, this results in unbroken attention and freedom from distraction for long periods of time. With instruction, a person eventually learn to enter advanced states of concentration, states of deep absorption called “jhana” in Buddhist terminology, where the mind can stay focused without wandering for hours at a time. This sharpens a person's concentration greatly, which generalizes to everyday life. Emotionally, there is an enormous sense of well-being and stability that comes with this. It also gives one an awesome too with which to practice mindfulness and develop insight. The two general aspects of awareness in Buddhist meditation are concentration (i.e. sustained attention), and mindfulness (i.e. metacognitive awareness of one’s thinking process, emotions, and/or sensations). Any meditation develops a little of both, but some forms develop one aspect relatively more than the other. However, these two skills go hand-in-hand. When our minds wander so much that it’s hard to get a clear picture of what is going on in our subjective experience and develop insight. It’s like trying to read small text with a magnifying glass, but your hand keeps moving around so that you can’t get a good look at what’s there. Concentration practice is like exercises to steady the hand, so that you can use mindfulness to read what’s there. Together, these are like a cognitive microscope. The greater one’s ability to sustain focus, the more turbo charged one’s mindfulness practice becomes. That will lead to penetrating insights that will radically change one's well-being for the better.