Imagine standing in a valley. From where you are, certain things are visible and others are hidden. Move a few steps, walk over a ridge, and what you see changes completely. This is perspective: not just how you think about things, but literally what you can see.
Everything changes with meditation. It might not all change quickly, but it will change. The reason is that life is all about perspective. Perspective is how you see everything: what’s important, what’s unimportant, what you value, what you appreciate, what you fear. Everything is seen from a perspective. When that perspective changes, everything changes.
The Evidence: Equanimity
Learning to see life through a new lens isn’t just social media “transformation-speak”. There is a mountain of evidence that meditators respond to their experiences differently, and that this change comes about because of meditation.
The most consistent finding from studies into meditation is equanimity. Equanimity is maintaining a calm and balanced state of mind, even in stressful or emotionally charged situations. Equanimity is responding proportionately to what we experience, both enjoyable experiences and uncomfortable ones. Samuel Johnson defined equanimity in the first English dictionary in 1755 as “evenness of mind; calm temper or firmness, especially under pain or disquiet”.
The Sunk Cost Experiment
One study I read tested something called the sunk cost fallacy. The sunk cost fallacy is our tendency to stick with something because we’ve already invested time, money or effort in it, even when carrying on no longer makes sense.
In a series of experiments published in Psychological Science, researchers randomly split participants into two groups. One group listened to a 15-minute guided breathing meditation; the other listened to a recording that let their minds wander. Then everyone faced decisions designed to reveal whether they overvalued things they had already invested in.
Fifteen minutes of meditation caused a significant increase in resistance to the sunk cost fallacy. And when the researchers looked at why, they found that the meditation had drawn people’s attention away from the past and the future, which reduced negative emotion, which loosened the attachment.
Sunk cost behaviour is an emotional attachment to something. Equanimity diminishes that emotional attachment. The sunk cost fallacy is irrational behaviour that is incredibly common, and meditation diminishes it.
Letting Go of Attachments
As equanimity grows, our emotional attachment to all sorts of things diminishes. We become less dependent on the emotional palliatives that we get from escapism, distraction, comfort and pleasure.
One of the consequences of attachments is the trains of thought that ruminate over loss, the fear of loss, and the fear of losing these things we’ve become dependent on to help us cope.
The way this changes is a gradual process, where the mind moves away from its repetitive ruminations and mental movies into a calmer, more focused and relaxed experience.
We Are Not Our Thoughts
I recently posted about the experience of realising that we are not our thoughts. This is an example of a perspective shift, because thought is attached to everything, to all experiences. So when our relationship to thought changes, our relationship to everything that provokes thought also changes. These sorts of experiences are relatively rare, as a rule.
The Changes You Don’t Notice
We don’t really notice changes unless we look back, which is, of course, the only sensible way of evaluating progress: comparing how we were with how we are now. But some things leave without us ever noticing they’ve gone. One of the many examples of these is impatience.
If your impatience goes, you don’t notice that it’s gone. You don’t think, oh, look how patient I’m being. It only becomes obvious when you look back and remember the old impatient you, or when something happens to make the comparison visible, such as returning to something you haven’t done for a long time and finding you approach it in a calmer way.
What’s Next
I will continue with this series on seeing life through a new lens for a while, and it will be one of the key elements of this weekend’s meditation retreat, which is unfortunately fully booked. Depending on how well it works, it’s something I might repeat at our next retreat in September. Stay with me for more posts and articles on seeing life through a new lens.
Reference: Hafenbrack, A. C., Kinias, Z., and Barsade, S. G. (2014). Debiasing the Mind Through Meditation: Mindfulness and the Sunk-Cost Bias. Psychological Science, 25(2), 369 to 376. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797613503853
