The Mindfulness Gap: Why Doesn’t Science See the Life-Altering Changes I Experience?

The research findings on mindfulness meditation are far less effervescent than my experience of it. Why is that?

There are two ways to wash the dishes. The first is to wash the dishes in order to have clean dishes and the second is to wash the dishes in order to wash the dishes. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Over and over, mindfulness meditation gets damned with faint praise from the scientific literature. With each new publication, researchers demonstrate that mindfulness meditation provides modest relief from anxiety and depression for some people, though these practices are not necessarily superior to other spirit-lifting activities.

Not that there is anything wrong with that. But reviewing this research gives me cognitive dissonance. I have not found mindfulness to provide modest relief. I have found it to be deeply transformational.

How can a practice that I find so mind- and life-altering have such lukewarm effects under the microscope of clinical trials?

Maybe I’m just a sucker. Or one of the lucky ones.

In 1979, John Kabat-Zinn brought meditation into the mainstream of the medical community by creating a formal program of secular meditation training and practice. This program was termed “mindfulness-based stress reduction.” This has proven useful for both clinical application and research. But the concept of mindfulness that was thus released into the mainstream is just a subset of what both meditation and mindfulness can entail.

When I think about, talk about, or practice meditation I mean a period of intentional, non-judgemental attention to whatever arises in the present moment. And by mindfulness I mean meditation combined with inquiry into the nature of reality (informed by meditation) and an attempt to align all of life with the results of that inquiry.

Thus, meditation as I know it is a dress rehearsal for the rest of the day — learning to attend to the true nature of reality under ideal circumstances, so that I can keep attending to it under the more demanding circumstances that arise once I stand up. Mindfulness should not paper over the cracks. It should shatter the illusion that the realm of thoughts is real, that my conception of “self” is real. Mindfulness should bring us face to face with the vast beauty that is conscious existence in the present moment.

I’ll admit that “illusion shattering” is hard to standardize, operationalize, and quantify for research purposes. But it begs questions: Is there more to mindfulness meditation than has been documented (or is documentable) by the research? And is there more to the practice than is captured by standardized frameworks like mindfulness-based stress reduction?

Been there, done that

I’ve taken (and still take) antidepressants. I’ve exercised. I’ve sought counseling. All helpful in various ways and to various degrees.

I have also meditated.

I cannot say with certainty what the role of meditation has been with respect to alleviating my depression. My depression is alleviated, but that is certainly due in large part to the meds, the lifestyle changes, and tincture of time.

This alleviation also coincided with the period in my life when I started to take meditation and mindfulness seriously. Would my depression have been alleviated without mindfulness? I am not sure. And now that I meditate, can I stop taking the medications? I have zero intention of finding out.

Like my dad used to say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

But despite the SSRIs, counseling, and exercise, I nevertheless still find the burning of anxiety kindling in my chest on a more regular basis than I would prefer. In such situations, I don’t reach for something else in the medicine cabinet. Rather, my next move is a meditative one. I turn to curiosity about the anxiety. What does it feel like? Who or what, exactly, is anxious? What is provoking the anxiety — something that only exists in the realm of thought, or a real and present threat to my actual well-being? What is happening right now that is beautiful, interesting, or otherwise worthy of my attention?

After a brief interval to allow the adrenaline levels to fall, these maneuvers almost always lead to the dissipation of the residual anxiety all the other tools in my wellness tool chest could not vanquish.

This sort of symptomatic relief can be — and has been — captured by the research. And if this was all mindfulness did, it would certainly be a worthwhile endeavor. Far better than, say, microdosing dopamine by mindlessly scrolling through YouTube shorts.

But wait, there’s more

Saying that mindfulness relieves stress is a little like saying an iPhone makes phone calls. It certainly does, and that is fantastic. But so does a flip phone. Or a landline.

Sure enough, mindfulness can relieve stress. But while the effect is harder to measure than how stressed I feel on a given day, mindfulness is also chipping away at the entire cognitive foundation on which my stress and other forms of mental anguish are built — my unfettered thoughts.

I have a tendency to get lost in thought, and my sense is that I am far from alone. Our attention gets completely enveloped within the discursive dreamscape of our thoughts, often to the complete exclusion of what is happening around us in the physical world.

There is nothing wrong, of course, with thinking about things. Thoughts can serve both individuals and humanity very well. I am thinking some thoughts right now. (Whether these thoughts are humanity serving is a question I leave to you, dear reader.)

But when they have served their useful purpose, they tend not to stop. They hold us in their seductive gaze, spinning a feverish dreamscape so captivating we forget to even try to escape it.

Today, there are entire industries built around monetizing distraction. But even when we turn our phones and computers off, the distraction continues. We quickly move from fascination with Mr. Beast’s latest outrageous (though charitable) exploits to thinking about what we need to do tomorrow, and then perhaps what irritates, angers, or saddens us about yesterday.

Mindfulness trains the brain so say “Whoa there! Maybe it’s time to attend to what is actually happening in this present moment.” The more we meditate, generally speaking, the better our brains get at this thought surveillance — both while we are meditating, and when we aren’t.

Artificial self

In addition to monitoring and regulating my thoughts, mindfulness offers a second — and even more transformational — opportunity. The opportunity to encounter my true nature. That is to say, what I really am.

It is hard to imagine a clinical trial looking at the question, “What are you, really?” But whether or not we can study it, the question is an important one.

While meditating, sooner or later the thoughts will stop, when all goes as designed. I do not even need to try to stop my thoughts (indeed, trying to stop thinking just leads to more thinking). But by allowing thoughts to pass rather than chasing each one and following it to its bitterest end, thoughts just tend to dissipate. And in due course there will be a pause. It may be only a second or two. But that is enough to experience something remarkable.

Namely, when my thoughts stop, I do not stop. Whatever I am, I am not my thoughts. And, conversely, whatever thoughts are, they aren’t me.

Of course, I identify with my thoughts, and use them to build a mental construct of self. I am a doctor. I am a father. I am a spouse. I am smart. I am dumb. I am cold. I am hungry. I am a failure. I am a success.

“As long as this view is the central understanding of our lives, and it is for most people, we spend energy and effort gratifying the self, defending it, holding on to it,” writes Joseph Goldstein, author and founder of the Insight Meditation Center in Massachusetts, in his book Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening. “And yet all of this potent karmic activity is revolving around something that isn’t even there. This is the obscuring power of delusion.”

While sometimes expedient and useful, this mental construct of “self” is the source of much of our inner turmoil and suffering.

“According to the Buddhist teachings, human beings have a distorted view of reality that leads them to suffer unnecessarily,” writes Sam Harris in his book Waking Up. Within the dreamscape of thought, “We grasp at transitory pleasures. We brood about the past and worry about the future. We continually seek to prop up and defend an egoic self that doesn’t exist.”

The mental model of self has its uses. For example, “I am a person who is obliged to get up this morning, walk the dog, and go to work” is the sort of thought process that serves all but the most recluse of us very well.

But mindfulness is an invitation to look beyond that model when its usefulness has passed and recognize the joyful freedom that is available outside the selfish constraints of self.

Will the real me please stand up

But to the extent I can loosen my grip on my sense of self, what is left? If not a thinking self, then what am I?

I am consciousness. Depending on your religious bent (or lack of one), you may think your consciousness is inextricably linked to your physical body, or you may think it is independent in some way from the body. You might think it is localized and temporary, or universal and eternal.

But however you want to think about the details, you are not a being that, among other things, is conscious. You are a being that, at your root, is consciousness.

Scientists have a long way to go to understand consciousness. As a result, the effects of mindfulness on our experience of consciousness is as resistant to measurement as it is important.

Mindfulness affords us the opportunity to encounter this true nature of our existence. And far from being a mere salve on the occasional rash of stress or anxiety, shaking off the suffering of self and leaning into the exquisite beauty of consciousness can transform our life experience at its core.

“By seeing things as they are, we cease to suffer in the usual ways, and our minds can open to states of well-being that are intrinsic to the nature of consciousness,” says Harris.

Consciousness seems banal, of course, because it is so very familiar to us. But consciousness is the crowning achievement of the universe’s 14 billion year journey from the big bang to us. Consciousness is as extraordinary a thing as things come.

“I like to walk alone on country paths, rice plants and wild grasses on both sides, putting each foot down on the earth in mindfulness, knowing that I walk on the wondrous earth,” writes Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh in his book The Miracle Of Mindfulness. “In such moments, existence is a miraculous and mysterious reality…Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.”

Mindfulness meditation affords just such an opportunity to see things as they are and attend to the true nature of our consciousness.

Back to the beginning

I started this article expressing my confusion over the relatively modest results of clinical trials studying mindfulness meditation. I suspect the disconnect between my experience of mindfulness and the results of mindfulness research is partly due to constraints in the definition of mindfulness required by standardized research, combined with the inherent difficulties of quantifying some of the essential aspects of mindfulness I have described here.

I do not mean to discount the effects documented in these studies. Anxiety and depression are serious business, and any intervention that does more good than harm with respect to the suffering brought by these maladies is worthy of admiration.

But there is another reason to applaud these results. Even if the quantifiable short-term benefits of mindfulness meditation are modest, these practices also open a door to realization of more magnificent benefits in the future for any given practitioner.

As Goldstein puts it in Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening, “Even the first few moments of genuine mindfulness are a turning point in our lives, because we realize, perhaps for the first time, that the mind can be trained, can be understood, can be liberated. We get glimpses of something beyond our ordinary, conventional reality, touching a space that transforms our vision of who we are and what the world is. And we understand that there is a direct and clearly articulated path to this end. These intimations give passionate meaning to questions of ultimate truth, because although we may not always be living in that space, we understand it to be the source of everything we value.”

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