Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Dr. David Vago on Self Transcendence – How to Experience Personal Growth and Awakening Through Meditation and Meta Awareness

Starting point is 00:00:00 coming up next on the Passion Struck Podcast. The critical piece to meditation, it's the mechanism that we refer to, meta-awareness, which is just awareness of awareness. So knowing where your mind is at any point, rather than getting sucked into the process of thinking and reactivity associated with that, you're disidentifying from that internal negative experience, and you have reduced reactivity to the content of those thoughts. That meta awareness and de-centering process is the key to improving and optimizing how your mind can then function. Welcome to PassionStruct. Hi,

Starting point is 00:00:38 I'm your host, John Armiles, and on the show we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guest ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck.

Starting point is 00:01:19 Hello, everyone, and welcome back to episode 123 of PassionStruck. One of the top health and education podcasts in the world. Thank you to all of you who come back weekly, listen and learn, at a live better, be better and impact the world. And if you missed last week's episodes, our guest was the one and only Susan Kane. And during our interview, we launched her new masterpiece,

Starting point is 00:01:48 Bittersweet, Poussaro, and Longing Make Us Whole. It was a truly phenomenal episode. And my momentum Friday show focused on the science behind how we learn. Please check them both out and consider giving us a five-star rating and review. behind how we learn. Please check them both out and consider giving us a five-star rating and review. We absolutely love to hear from our audience

Starting point is 00:02:10 and so do our guests. And speaking of upcoming guests, I wanted to announce that we are doing the official book launch for the duo behind the super popular Liz and Molly Comics, who have a new book, Big Feelings, How to Be Okay When Things Are Not Okay, and It and the Episode will both release on Tuesday, April 26th. Definitely another episode like today's amazing guest, be you absolutely don't want to miss.

Starting point is 00:02:40 Speaking of our guest today, I am truly ecstatic to welcome Dr. David Vago to our show, who is one of the foremost experts in the world on meditation and has been studying it for over 20 years. He is a research associate professor and director of the contemplative neuroscience and mind body research laboratory in the Department of Psychology at Vanderbilt University. He is also part of the faculty for the Vanderbilt Brain Institute and Vanderbilt Institute for infection, immunology, and inflammation. Dr. Vago maintains a research associate position in the functional neuroimaging laboratory, Br him in women's hospital, Harvard Medical School, and is also a research lead for the mental health

Starting point is 00:03:30 and well-being platform, Brown Glass, and a Mind and Life Institute Fellow. Today, we discuss how the study of meditation became his life's work and his pursuit in academia, how his work with the Mind and Life Institute created the avenue for him to actually meet and interact multiple times with the Dalai Lama and we'll also talk about the challenge that the Dalai Lama gave Dr. Vago to pursue. Why his goal is to put an end to human

Starting point is 00:03:58 suffering and the importance of meta-awareness in that pursuit. We discuss the enormous value that meditation can have for our health. His study of the adaptive mind, brain, body, interactions in humans. He describes the work that contemplative science is undertaking and its role in understanding human flourishing and transcendence. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. [♪ Music playing in background, playing in background,

Starting point is 00:04:36 Thank you so much, Dr. Vago, for coming today. Great to be with you, John. It's really pleasure. Well, I thought a great starting point for the audience would be to go into your background of how does someone make meditation and the study of it their lifelong purpose? It's a great question. When I started studying meditation back only in probably 2000 and four formally.

Starting point is 00:05:06 There wasn't a lot of people doing that kind of research. In fact, it wasn't really popular. It wasn't accepted as an area of study that would really provide much empirical data. I came out of a neuroscience program, a cognitive neuroscience program in the University of Utah and my graduate training. At the same time, I was also a meditation practitioner. I've been meditating since the 90s.

Starting point is 00:05:30 It was a personal interest of mine as I was always interested in the mind, brain, and its influence on health and healing. And so because of that interest, it was just natural for me to also explore some of the more contemplative or wisdom-based traditions that focus on nurturing the inner mind, the inner self, and reflecting inwardly through meditation practice. And so my investigations into Buddhism and Vedanta, different so Buddhist and Hindu approaches to understanding the mind, was a complement to studying the Western approach of mind and brain.

Starting point is 00:06:19 And it gave me first person experience into the profound shifts transformative capacity through meditation that I always was open to the idea of studying it but it wasn't till I met probably one of my earlier mentors Richie Davidson, who's at the University of Wisconsin who had started doing this kind of work focused on studying advanced meditators, practitioners of meditation, Buddhist meditation,

Starting point is 00:06:54 in the context of neuroimaging. So looking, taking these really advanced practitioners, putting them in the context of a FMRI, or MRI scanner, which is a big magnet that really can just not only look at the structure of the brain, but can also look at functional activity of the brain. And he basically inspired me that this is a possible niche that I could also fill that I can be part of. So I worked with him and an organization

Starting point is 00:07:23 called the Mind and Life Institute, which was started by Francisco Varella, who's a neuroscientist, a businessman that came from Harvard Business School, Adam Engel, and the Dalai Lama. And so what a combination, right? So with the Dalai Lama's intention to explore Western approaches to the mind, which would be, he was even open to neuroscience informing the spiritual tradition of the Buddhist path. There was an opening to really have a large impact on for humanity and watch how Buddhist sort of conceptions of mind could also inform

Starting point is 00:08:08 more Western approaches to you in therapeutic context, so psychiatric context. Right, how do you help people with anxiety and depression through the lens of meditation? And that just started to build in probably from 2004 to the current day, it's increased exponentially. If you look at the number of grants and research that's out there right now, it's dramatic in terms of what has been done only in the last 20 years. And I have been there along the way through my work with the Mind and Life Institute. I got to, you know, not only be around the Dalai Lama, but around a lot of great scientists, like Richard Davis and Daniel Goldman, John Cavitz, and then great practitioners like

Starting point is 00:08:59 Jungi Mingur Rinpoche, a different, a whole number of Rinpoche's and Buddhist teachers, contemporary Buddhist teachers like Shinzen Yang, Sharon Salzburg, Joan Halifax, Joseph Goldstein, all these great teachers and scholars all trying to better understand how the mind can work to not just heal itself through a lot of the issues that come up in a psychiatric setting, but to empower it, right, through this power of intentionality, through this power of awareness and acceptance and embodiment, to move ourselves in a trajectory that is adaptive

Starting point is 00:09:51 and unraveling sort of the sense of self that could be harmful or maladaptive. And so that that has always been my inspiration because as a practitioner, you're always also trying to do service for others, trying to give back what you can. And so my science has been really about the motivation to reduce suffering through the lens of studying rigorously the mind brain body complex. So that, through that motivation, I've moved from studying basic neuroscience

Starting point is 00:10:27 of learning and memory and rats to working at Wild Cornel Medical School, to Harvard Medical School, and then being recruited back in 2016 to drive a research infrastructure at a Vanderbilt University Medical Center, at an integrated medicine clinic. So that has sort of culminated into where I am today, both at an academic standpoint, where I focus on studying the basic neurobiological mechanisms by which meditation functions. And then that's also allowed me to pivot a bit

Starting point is 00:11:08 and work with the for-profit sector, where I'm the research lead for a for-profit company called Round Glass. That's not only bringing meditation content to the world, but everything from nutrition, social wellbeing, physical wellbeing, right? And all the dimensions or pillars of well-being that we can focus on that leverages meditation as a central component. So now I'm at a point where I have the academic sort of standing to help really understand mechanisms by which these practices work to improve

Starting point is 00:11:48 people's well-being. In a for-profit world where I can sort of make sure that what people are getting in the commercial side of this industry is done rigorously and in an authentic way. And we're just starting a new society called the International Society for Contemplative Research that is bringing the community of scholars and practitioners. And even the for-profit sector together

Starting point is 00:12:17 to really build this way of experiencing the world through the lens of well-being in a rigorous way. So there's a lot of components that have manifested for me on this path. And I'm just really grateful to be embedded in it, helping to lead the direction for how we can really use our sense of self and our own mental capacity to improve our health and well-being. What an incredible background and I think a great example for this audience of how once you unlock your purpose and really follow it how far it can take you in

Starting point is 00:13:01 life and how intentional you've been through each of these progressions and then the universe has kind of rewarded you for just keeping down this path. So I thought something I heard on another podcast was pretty funny and I'll just relate this in a personal story. When I was a junior or senior in high school. I had an English teacher that everyone loved. And one time I went to her for her advice on where I should go to college. And her response is something I will never forget. She said, John, it doesn't matter where you get a college

Starting point is 00:13:37 because you were never gonna be successful in life. But where I wanted to relate this is you had an academic mentor tell you that you would never be successful in academia studying meditation. So I think they're both good lessons to take input that you hear from others, but trust your gut on your journey. Completely. 100%. I agree. I'm not going to say that my path hasn't had obstacles. It has. But when you believe in something strongly and feel that there's

Starting point is 00:14:15 meaning behind it, that you have that sense of purpose behind it, there's no stopping, right? There's no way that it can, that any obstacle can be a roadblock, right? There's gradual influence that you can have over time. And as you can see from just looking out at the marketplace now, mindfulness, I mean, is a, it's a commercial industry now, you see it everywhere. For your your listeners It's important to think about trusting your gut my mentor in graduate school would look on my bookshelf and see all these books on Buddhism More books of Buddhism than neuroscience and he would complain like Dave You know, you're you're never gonna get anywhere with his Zen stuff. You need to really think about Focusing on neuroscience and not meditation, but I saw it. there's a real overlap there about how meditation is a way to influence our own neurobiology. And we know there's plenty of work now to show that a particular mindset, for example, just how we see the world and how we see our own health, how we identify with our own health and illness,

Starting point is 00:15:28 can influence our health outcomes. Right? So, there's work by Alia Krum that focuses on stress enhancing versus stress enhancing mindset versus stress debilitating mindset. What she's found, one interesting finding, for example, is just by thinking that stress has a negative impact on your health and well-being, can lead to almost a,

Starting point is 00:15:58 somewhere between like 60 to 70% increased risk of dying prematurely, just by thinking and orienting towards your own health and well-being in a negative way. You think about the people, I don't know if you watched the Olympics recently, but a lot of stress to perform on that one run, ski run, or that on the ice for that one time is very stressful. How do you perform at your optimized capacity? You know you've done this like a hundred,

Starting point is 00:16:31 hundreds of times well, but now is the opportunity to do it in this one shot. How do you get out of your way? How do you make sure that your body performs and is in that flow, in that zone, that optimum state of performance, without letting your mind bring you down, because it can often interfere with your ongoing tasks demands if you start wine wandering and thinking about other things.

Starting point is 00:16:57 And so meditation really just provides a way to optimize your sort of your path in front of you so you can just be aware of experiences without thinking about them and letting them interfere with your performance. Well, I am going to relate a story to you, and it just occurred to me that I thought the first time I had really practiced meditation was when I was with 1310, because at the time they were training us both using yoga and mind control and breathing to be better present in the moment for operations. But as I look back upon my life, when I was probably a junior in high school, I was a cross-country and track runner and I really wanted to do well and to be able to go on and run in college. And I was having these difficulties when I would get to races

Starting point is 00:18:06 that I would get so nervous that it would, at times, ruin the race for me. And it wasn't until I started to really, started sitting with myself and started to visualize the outcome that I wanted and how I wanted to feel when I started the race and how I was going to feel throughout it that things started to change and I ended up doing that

Starting point is 00:18:31 almost on a daily basis where I would just sit with myself for five to fifteen minutes and I had all these visual cue cards, but I would just close my eyes and imagine the result that I wanted. And through that, I ended up achieving my goal of running in college. But it's why, as you look at this science, because when you started, and I heard this on another episode, there were literally dozens or maybe 50 or 60 articles on this. Now there's 9,000, but I heard you reference that out of the 9,000,

Starting point is 00:19:10 only 1,600 of them are really solid in their basis. Why is it so hard to define meditation? Yeah, good question. There is a lot of good science and bad science. I think people often forget that science is incremental in how it sort of provides support and evidence for anything really. So it takes time. And so often because the beginning of a field and field of study requires a lot of what we call pilot research a lot of what we call pilot research, where you say, hey, is this even feasible? Can we even do a meditation intervention for people that people feel safe, that it works,

Starting point is 00:19:54 and it's implemented in a secular context that people don't have any issues with it? And then you just look at that first and you say, does that work? That takes a few years, right? Then you have these studies that show, and you do that does that work? That takes a few years, right? Then you have these studies that show and you do that in with different populations. Then you have to show in a single arm trial, which means you're just looking at one population. Let's say people with chronic pain. And you say, does this practice or this intervention that we've now determined is safe and feasible, this or this intervention that we've now determined is safe and feasible, does it actually improve outcomes at all? Like does it improve the pain or the ability to cope with the pain? Does it improve the

Starting point is 00:20:31 sleep problems that people have? And the questions have been posed in that way from probably 2005 to 2012. They're still going in that direction. But what they found was, indeed, a single-on-trial will say, yes, it not only is safe and feasible, but now we can say that mindfulness in a context of like an eight-week program can improve health outcomes.

Starting point is 00:21:01 That's wonderful. Now, then you have to do the next stage of research clinical trials, which compare it to an active control. This comes from mostly of the work in with drug studies that always you need a placebo or you need some other drug to compare it to. So you can have these comparative effectiveness trials where it's, let's compare them now, the intervention to the gold standard and the gold standard for treatment of anxiety and depression or pain, for example, has been something like cognitive behavioral therapy, which is a gold standard or controlled intervention that tries to match the elements of the intervention that are what we call non-specific, like just being in a group setting, or the amount of time you spend reading or paying attention to something,

Starting point is 00:22:02 all of that or the charisma of a teacher. All of that's non-specific. We think that the active ingredients is really sitting and meditating, right? So we take everything out, we compare it to each other. And we say, here's this control group that people are going to participate in. And we compare the health outcomes

Starting point is 00:22:21 and biological mechanisms to the intervention, which in this case would be a mindfulness-based intervention. And we now know that there's a good evidence base for an eight-week program called the mindfulness-based stress reduction or a mindfulness-based cognitive therapy and a few variations of that. And the data is showing that not only is it as good

Starting point is 00:22:44 as some of the gold standard treatments, like CBT, Cognitive Variable Therapy, but in some cases, that will perform those. That takes, it takes 15 years, at least, just to get to that point. And now we're trying to say, well, can we actually modify those interventions to optimize how it's delivered in a personalized way. There are some people that benefit from doing specific meditations over others. Are there some people that benefit from doing it in longer dosages or more intense practice? And we don't have those answers yet.

Starting point is 00:23:22 So operationalizing mindfulness was hard enough. John Kabinzin says, mindfulness is described as paying attention in a particular way in the present moment and not judge mentally. And that's been sort of the operationalization of how what mindfulness is, for example. But we know that meditation is more than that. We know that when you sit like the word, the Sanskrit word for meditation Bavana is describes cultivating familiarity with one's own mind. That's really what meditation refers to. It also comes from the Sanskrit Dehayana. These are words that work coming from like the 6th century BCE. Meditation is an English word that translated the Sanskrit from so long ago.

Starting point is 00:24:12 It's also used in the Old Testament, but all of it's been about learning how to either gain awareness or insight into the nature of one's mind or to connect with the divine. The nature of mind, from the Buddhist perspective, can be similarly compared to connecting with an experience of God. And so if you look at theological traditions of contemplation, even from the Christian traditions, a contemplation has involved connecting with something greater than oneself. And so that's when we start to realize that it's not just about decreasing stress or improving our attention,

Starting point is 00:24:57 but there's something that is even more meaningful for people when they do this kind of practice that they connect with not only Let's just say they dissolve the boundaries between self and others It's just to improve our connection with others around us But to be more transcendent of our own self identity and connecting with something greater than The self something like nature or the divide. And that is where I think

Starting point is 00:25:28 that you get the most impact for these practices because they help not only unravel the negative sort of aspects of self identity that could be things like depression, anxiety, or distraction, but they lead to something greater like purpose and meaning, like depression, anxiety, or distraction, but they lead to something greater, like, purpose and meaning, like finding your path, finding a way to connect with others and improve humanity. We will be right back to our episode with Dr. David Vago. I would like to emphasize that this podcast

Starting point is 00:25:57 is part of my hope and desire to bring zero-cost information to the general public regarding how to create an intentional life. And keeping with that theme, I would like to thank today's sponsors. This year, one of my goals is maybe I'll try to revive my Spanish. And with Babel, the language learning app that sold more than 10 million subscriptions, not only is learning a new language fund,

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Starting point is 00:27:15 When you go to Babel.com slash passion struck, that's Babel.com slash passion struck for 60% off your subscription. Babble, language for life. Please consider supporting those who support our show and make it possible and free for our listeners. And I know all the links that we put out here on the show can be so difficult to remember. So we also put them in one easy place on our website. You can just go to passionstruck.com slash deals to find them. Now, back to my interview with Dr. David Vago.

Starting point is 00:27:52 You recently published an article with some of the biggest contemporaries I could think of around self-transcendent experience, including Dr. Yaden Ralph Hood, from Chattanooga where my parents are from, Jonathan Hate and Andrew Newberg, some esteemed company. And what I wanted to ask you,

Starting point is 00:28:16 if you could talk about meta-awareness, I thought it was interesting how you all talked about self-transcendent experiences, but I was specifically caught up in awe versus peak experiences to mythism. I thought that could be a good topic to talk about. How meta-awareness in those three things, which to me have some overlap occurs. Yeah, I'm happy. If we go start with self-transcendence and this idea that there is something to transcend,

Starting point is 00:28:48 the self has, if the self is something that is created through, say, time, right, over time, you have certain thoughts and emotions that basically construct your own self-identity. It constructs, what we refer to this as a clinical model of self-reification, conditioning, habit formation. It's all leads to how we conceptualize our identity, our needs, our wants, our fears, our expectations, our attitudes, our values, our whole world view is constructed, and our view of reality becomes embedded in this

Starting point is 00:29:26 reified sense of self, like who we are. And that takes time, right? So when we start to introspect or look into our own patterns of thinking and start to see things like, you know, and start to see things like, you know, thoughts like, I'm not good enough, or I am sick, I am depressed, I am anxious. These are very common thoughts that people have and they are overwhelming, they can be debilitating, and they can really harm someone's motivation for action. And there's a great saying by the Buddha that comes from the Dhamma Pada, which is a collection of saying by the Buddha, it says, our life is shaped by our mind for we become what we think. is shaped by our mind for we become what we think. And the idea there is that the more we have these

Starting point is 00:30:33 sort of recurring thoughts of, I'm sick, I'm sick, I'm sick, I'm sick, or I'm depressed, I'm anxious, whatever those are. Those are negative, negatively oriented thoughts about oneself, and they are what reify the self identity into a sick, depressed, anxious, angry person. And so what meditation does, it allows you to create a distance with those thoughts. And that distance, we sometimes refer to it

Starting point is 00:31:02 as a psychological distance, sometimes we refer to it as de-centering practice, so you're de-centering away from your own thoughts, and you're holding the thought in front of you and realizing that that thought I am sick, I am unwell, I am not good enough, is just a thought. Because if you let it overwhelm you, it takes over your whole physiology, It becomes part of your identity and you can't escape it, right? And this idea of transcending the self, William James once said, we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace. And that is what we're talking about is, is not only having the distance between yourself and your thoughts. So you have awareness and it's sort of a safe place to be, but you're then creating union with something greater than ourselves. And that's

Starting point is 00:32:01 where we'll find not only optimizing our performance, but we'll find a sense of purpose and meaning. But the key is the meta-awareness, which is meditation trains your brain, trains your mind and brain together to allow you to see, create a distance between those thoughts. And it does two things. The first thing it does is it allows you to be non-reactive, right? So if you have a thought I'm not good enough, I'm sad, I'm angry and depressed, those thoughts can actually lead to a stress response. They can lead to inflammation across many pathways of your body and leads to results in a lot of cardiovascular forms of disease and dysfunction and that can be debilitating and it leads to what we call

Starting point is 00:32:57 inflammation. You have a trajectory in life where your brain and body start to degrade and act your fee over time. And that's just part of the aging process. But if it's filled with lots of these negatively oriented thoughts, it can increase the rate at which it ages. And at the cellular level, you can have degeneration happening much faster, with just thinking in a negatively oriented way. So if you take your stresses, and we talked about this a little earlier, about mindset, if you take your stresses and see it as a challenge, and you're able to successfully have this sort of level of meta awareness where the thought is out here, right? Then that just that distance allows you to then transcend that identity that sort of allows you to have a sense of, you can think of it as dissociative

Starting point is 00:34:10 from that self-identity and just see things with awareness. So you break things down like whether you have anger or anxiety, fear or sadness, you can break that down into just sensations,, and emotional tone, for example, just noting that they are sensations in the body, that there are thoughts that you're having in your mind, and that they have a particular emotional valence whether they're negative or positive. And that is the critical piece to meditation. It's the mechanism that we refer to, meta awareness, which is just awareness of awareness. So knowing where your mind is at any point, rather than getting

Starting point is 00:34:54 sucked into the the process of thinking and reactivity associated with that, you're disidentifying from that internal negative experience and you have reduced reactivity to the content of those thoughts. That meta-awareness and de-centering process is the key to improving and optimizing how your mind can then function. Well, I'm going to take this through a couple more stories and recent occurrences that I've had because I think it ties hand in hand to this concept of what we imagine we create for ourselves. So I recently met a neurosurgeon who at one point was doing five to six surgeries a day until he discovered

Starting point is 00:35:48 meditation and yoga. And now he has involved personalized medicine so much in what he's doing that it's gone down to one to two surgeries a week because he is finding that many of the things people are experiencing, he can treat with personalized medicine. Guest on the podcast, Dr. Jay Lombard, who is a well-known neurologist in New Jersey, for him, he has said that F-M-R-I has changed the game for how he is working with patients and he is now,

Starting point is 00:36:24 he said it allowed him to see into the soul of the person and convinced him that if nature is causing these neurological disorders that he could cure them naturally and so he is now using natural means to cure things like ALS, Parkinson's, CTE, and other ailments. So all of this is showing me that there is so much power in what you were talking about.

Starting point is 00:36:52 And in imagining what these alternate treatments can do for us. And so I just wanted to bring those up, maybe get your thoughts on those examples. Let's be really clear. The placebo response, for example, evoked by just people's mindset towards illness, right, and the potential for healing. It's really just how you, how you believe, you know,

Starting point is 00:37:12 and this is where faith actually can be really powerful. And you can't deny, no, no physician, whatever deny that faith in something can have a profound effect. I mean, we know that placebo has an estimated 60 to 90% of clinically significant benefit in conditions, including pain, anxiety, depression, asthma, things like cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative disorders, immune deficiencies, and recovery from surgery.

Starting point is 00:37:43 There's great evidence that placebo is important. So placebo means believing, right? and you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know effect where this is a particular mindset that you might have that illness is bad and that stress is bad and that I'm going to be I'm going through something really horrible. And that actually that kind of mindset leads to negative health outcomes. So plus C-boat and no C-boat are both evidence that our orientation in our own perception of our health and well-being has an effect on our physiology, indirectly on our physiology. That's really important to think that just how we perceive and think and the core sort of assumptions and expectations that we have about ourselves and how we interact with the world and our health and well-being can actually have a large impact not only

Starting point is 00:38:49 on our mental health, but on our physical health. So it's really critical. And one thing that I wanted to say, some work that we're doing right now that speaks to these effects on neurodegenerative disorders, like ALS and Parkinson's, is we are investigating a Vanderbilt what's called glimphatic flow in the brains of people who have Parkinson's disease, NMS, and people who are advanced meditators.

Starting point is 00:39:21 And we look at this system, the lymphatic system, and then lymphatic system is basically a waste removal system. It's associated with the glial cells in your brain that help support remove the debris, that the gunk in the system that accumulates over time. And it's basically a portal between your nervous system and your vascular system in the brain. It's basically a connection between those, you know, all of the neural debris that needs

Starting point is 00:39:55 to be removed over time. It goes through the blood and then it gets removed and circulates through this glimphatic system. You actually see your cerebral spinal fluid moving in different parts of the sinuses and it is circulating out through the aqueduct and out into your blood system and then through your liver it gets removed from the body. Now what we've seen, and this is recently only in the last like seven years people started looking at the system in the brain what we've seen is that

Starting point is 00:40:33 sleep for example is a critical restorative part of our experience to room to increase that glimphatic flow and Allow you to remove that debris. So what we're finding is that often the people who have these neurodegenerative disorders have very disturbed sleep as they get older. And the disturbances that they have in sleep, if it's not corrected, can actually lead

Starting point is 00:41:02 to decreased removal, decreased glimphatic flow, decreased levels of removing of the debris. And then you have accumulation buildup of plaques and tangles, for example, Nell's Humber's disease, and problems with neural functioning in general. So there is a really good association now with better outcomes when you can improve people's sleep and therefore directly improve the climphatic flow. And the study that we're doing right now also is looking at how meditation can improve climphatic flow. So we're seeing that meditation can improve glimphatic flow.

Starting point is 00:41:45 So we're seeing that meditation can actually mimic some of the restorative effects of sleep. So if your sleep isn't very good, but you're doing some meditations during the day, you're also improving the ability to clear out the system. So that's one, another specific mechanism by which meditation can help improve not only the way you're thinking about the world

Starting point is 00:42:10 and these mindsets to help leverage that placebo effect and decrease the nose-sebo effect, but can directly affect part of your brain's system of clearing debris. So all of that is then leading to decreased inflammatory pathways across the brain and body and improved health outcomes. So it's dramatic what we can do with just meditation and mindsets. Yeah, it's incredible.

Starting point is 00:42:42 And I am going to have to introduce you to Dr. Lombard because this is what he's been studying over the last decade in applying. So it backs up a lot of the research he's doing and what he talked about on the podcast and making real life changes and people who were facing death-defying disease. So I'm so glad you brought that up. I'm going to take this to a little bit lighter area. The chances of me interviewing two people back to back who have met the Dalai Lama is gotta be one in a million. But yesterday I interviewed the author,

Starting point is 00:43:26 Brechen Ruben, who had the opportunity to meet him, she's the author of a number of best sellers, including the Happiness Project. But I understand when you met him that he gave you a mission. So I kind of wanted to hear what is one, what is it like meeting the Dele Lama because I heard you from others that you feel a presence when you're around him and then what mission did he give you? Yeah, I thanks for going there. I feel very motivated by his holiness, the dilemma, and his efforts to make people realize how important

Starting point is 00:44:08 compassion is, compassion and bringing people into this non-dual state of awareness, which is we can dissolve the boundaries between ourselves and others. We realize, and you see this so often with human dynamics in the workplace or in a professional setting, people are always competitive with each other. It's just sort of naturally set up that way in society that we compete, especially in the academic world. There's always competition, you're always competing for grants and such, but the goal here is that we're all going to work together to improve humanity and how do we do that? He's always been an inspiration

Starting point is 00:44:45 for me and because as a meditation practitioner of course he's one of the great teachers of the Tibetan Rosaryana path. So I've had the opportunity to meet with him a bunch of times through my work with the Mind and Life Institute but there was a specific time where I got to present my work to him with a number of emerging leaders in the field of contemplative science and mindfulness research and meditation research. And he said basically that he looked at us and there was sort of a turning, changing of the guard. There's some people who did some of this work in the 70s and they're sort of

Starting point is 00:45:25 moving in towards the retirement phase maybe or just starting to look for legacy, leaving their legacy with newer generation of scientists who focus on meditation and mindsets and really better doing the rigorous work that needs to be done for the future. And he says, now you and your generation, it was talking to six of us that were in his presence, you and your generation have the responsibility to build a happy, peaceful world. It's hard for me to even say that knowing that right now Ukraine is being invaded at this point. And there's a possibility for people to die in the context of war, but millions of people

Starting point is 00:46:12 want a peaceful world. They're just lacking the knowledge of how to do so, right? There's just these structures embedded in our world and in our society to compete with each other. But so few individuals show interest in actually doing the work. And he was telling us, month by month, year by year, you will gain awareness about these things,

Starting point is 00:46:34 how to bring more conviction to others' minds with evidence to convince others. And he said he will watch us and whether we are really helping to build a happy, peaceful world or not. And then he was joking and he's good, he's a good joker. He says, I'll be, I'll watch from either hell or heaven. If from hell, there's not much I can do. But if you do the wrong things, I'll come as a demon with horns and hunt you down. but he really was just being playful and saying that we

Starting point is 00:47:07 should constantly check your own motivation. So I have been continually motivated no matter which way I go, whether I stay in the academic path or work with others in the for-profit sector or in the context of this new society that we're building, I really am just trying to use my neuroscience skills and my own meditation practice to help inform people about the science, the rigor in which we can say meditation can have a truly lasting impact

Starting point is 00:47:41 and help humanity in a positive way. And that's really the gist of it. It's really just a form of motivation for me. Well, I think that is a great segue to discuss a mutual friend of ours, Jeff Walker, who I had on the podcast. And for those in the audience who aren't aware of it, UVA now has a contemplative science center, but not only was Jeff involved in, he was the chairman of, and as I was looking at their mission, it struck me as really aspirational, because they described their mission as the study and application of human flourishing. So I was hoping I could ask you about two things.

Starting point is 00:48:26 If the audience doesn't understand what contemplative science is, maybe you could define it for them. And then, through your own research and that, and you're doing with other contemporaries, how do you think we can promote more human flourishing? Because I think it goes hand in hand with that challenge that the Dalai Lama gave you.

Starting point is 00:48:47 Yeah great great question. So, um, contemplative science has really defined the scholarly and scientific investigation of contemplative practice, and this really involves general techniques that focus attention in a sustained fashion, with the aim of deepening states of concentration, tranquility, and insight. This allows us to broaden our field of awareness, develop altruistic tendencies, including empathy and compassion, and selfless acts of love.

Starting point is 00:49:23 So it can involve the study of intentional first person phenomenology, so it can be common, uncultivated, spontaneous experiences of absorption, right? In any activity, it can be experienced in it, and we, you mentioned all, the experience of awe, which can be a self-transcendent experience, where you feel union with something greater than oneself, and your own self, self-saliens is diminished. And that experience of being lost in that moment, but so focused in the zone, right, we sometimes refer to it as flow. Chicks and Meehai, the Hungarians, psychologists also talks about this idea of flow. We've talked about it in that article that you referenced with David Yaden and Jonathan Hate and

Starting point is 00:50:14 colleagues focusing on how all and love the selfless sort of acts of just connecting with something deeper than oneself can also be a contemplative experience, right? So it doesn't have to be just meditation and it doesn't have to be done in, you know, India or Nepal or in a cave or in a retreat setting. You can cultivate these deepening states of concentration and insight and broadening the field of awareness, right?

Starting point is 00:50:45 In any moment that you have, even in waiting in line at the grocery store. And it also involves philosophical inquiry into the nature of one's mind, into your own mental habits. We talked about the word bavana earlier as the Sanskrit for meditation, which really refers to cultivating insight into your own mental habits.

Starting point is 00:51:05 What, what are, where does our mind go when we let it just, you're a wonder? And so not only is contemplation involving this intentional first person phenomenology that focuses on absorption and in activity, but it can also be leads to the most profound experiences that are deliberate, intentional, systematically cultivated through systematic training of the mind, through meditation. So that gives you, should give a sense of what contemplative science really aims to investigate?

Starting point is 00:51:45 It really focuses on mind and body practices, which is a large and diverse group of techniques that involves training the mind or integration of embodied, embedded, or in active forms of cognition. And this is a new field of cognition that focuses on better understanding the differences between experiencing the world through your own sensory

Starting point is 00:52:11 experience without expectations. You being more embodied means to experience the world with your body. So it's finding places like your shoulders where maybe you're having an emotional experience, a feeling state of tension or stress, and then really just being in your body rather than in your head. And that's what we refer to as an embodied experience. And the idea here is that things like meditation, yoga, tai chi, chi gong, these are all mind-body practices

Starting point is 00:52:46 that fit into the areas of contemplative research. It can also involve the investigation of aspects of well-being, including a sense of purpose and meaning, ways of knowing and experiencing the world, feelings of gratitude and forgiveness, and philosophical understandings of one's own self, and the nature of our own suffering. So suffering, and suffering from the Buddhist perspective

Starting point is 00:53:14 really refers to this continual act of dissatisfaction, right, we all suffer, we all have stress. But if we're always dissatisfied with our current state of affairs, then that is, there is a direct anecdote to that, which is awareness and focusing and cultivating awareness. So you can see that dissatisfaction and move beyond it. So Contemplar Research really involves a lot of the focus on these contemplative practices that really deepen concentration, tranquility, and insight. Okay, I think that's great for the audience to understand

Starting point is 00:53:59 and I would encourage them to look at that center, the center that's at Stanford, what you're doing at Vanderbilt, it's going on in Harvard, because there are some just amazing research organizations and academic institutions that are really focusing on this important topic. Now, I wanted to talk about Damapata, which you brought up earlier, which is basically we become what we think. Dhammipata, which you brought up earlier, which is basically we become what we think. And I use this for the last chapter I wrote in my book, that's coming out this summer. And the title of the chapter is really about conscious engagement. And as I started to think about this, and why do so many people fail to achieve change in their life?

Starting point is 00:54:45 It really got me thinking about the comparison between being spontaneously engaged and consciously engaged. And I liken it to a pinball machine where when you're spontaneously engaged, you're kind of like the ball bouncing off the items without any direction. But if you really learn how to play the game of pinball and you're consciously engaged with it, you can learn how to play the game instead of having it play you. And I think the same is true with life. So I think our lives are made not by the peak experiences, but I call them the everyday transition points that we interact with, that really define who we are, how we're living to our core values, etc. Just wanted to ask,

Starting point is 00:55:34 why do so many people spontaneously engage instead of consciously engage in their lives? It's a great question, speaks directly to the motivations that we have for behavior. A lot of what my work has shown is that there's particular biases that we all have, and tendencies for particular mental habits that are conditioned over time. And if we want to move towards something that is adaptive, and if we know that what we fill our mind with has an impact on our own health and health outcomes, that we have to think about the model of what a flourishing human being is like, right, to live within this optimal range of human functioning. To think about, there's usually four components that are described in some models for flourishing, like goodness, generativity, growth, and resilience. And you know, this idea comes from the Greek term,

Starting point is 00:56:50 the Aristotle used called Udimonia, to represent the highest human good on the aim of right action, state of having sort of a good, indwelling spirit, a contented state of being healthy, happy, and prosperous. If we put our intentionality into that orientation of goodness, generativity, growth, and resilience, we find that you can generate meaning and purpose much more readily.

Starting point is 00:57:21 That meaning and purpose is what drives well-being outcomes to be the most impactful and most readily going to improve that scale of like just where you are going to improve that scale of like just where you are having a sense of just overall well being across the different domains of your life. Meeting in purpose are like key to that aspect of well-being. So that means being pro-social, it means being optimistic, it means really respecting the people around you, that everybody's suffering, right, from mental illness or from some sort of problem in the world. There's plenty of them to choose from. But that it's sort of within the range of human experience and that we sort of are looking

Starting point is 00:58:22 for a sense of joy, even in the most challenging times, and that we're looking to have these sort of stress response to many of the challenges that we have, the stressors that we have, we are thinking about in terms of the generative component would be thinking about or orienting towards challenges in a playful way, in a curious way. And that sort of helped broaden some of these thought and action, what we call, repertoires or ways to generate behavior in a positive way. And then resilience and growth really refer to the gains that you get through enduring or really just cultivating personal and social resources. So creating community,

Starting point is 00:59:21 creating flexibility around a lot of your behaviors, and then growth survival in the aftermath of the adversity. That's where we have resilience. And a lot of that requires a few different strategies, things like positive reappraisal, right? Reframing how you're experiencing something. If you are in Ukraine today, you are facing a lot of stress and adversity. How do you emerge from that?

Starting point is 00:59:59 How do these people, how will they emerge from this in a positive way? So, every adversity is also an opportunity to survive and grow. Of course, you can't always escape some of the challenges. But if you think about, the best example is there are these Tibetan monks who were tortured by Chinese officials in some of what's political sort of aftermath of Tibet being broken up politically by China. And witness some of these monks who talk about their experience of being tortured, and they say that they have compassion for their torturers. And you think about that and you say, how is it possible that these people who did horrific

Starting point is 01:00:59 acts towards you and your body, that you can still have love, that's unconditional for them. And that sort of orientation is the most dramatic form of reframing or positive reappraisal that you can imagine, right? So instead of letting the negative frame of being, I am a victim and of being, I am a victim and I'll never be the same anymore. That's not gonna help you survive and grow. The only way forward is to reframe it in a positive way that allows you to then cultivate something more positive mood state and move and grow from that particular experience. So that's the positive reappraisal part.

Starting point is 01:01:50 Then there's another aspect of resilience and growth and flourishing that I wanted to mention, which is now in some of these evidence-based protocols that involve mindfulness, like mindfulness- oriented recovery enhancement by developed by Eric Garland, shows that you can savor. If you savor the things that are positive in your life, that you can rest your awareness in something, even in the most, you know, difficult challenging times, if you savor the positive aspects of even something simple, something beautiful, like a sunset, just sitting in that awareness of the beauty of a sunset

Starting point is 01:02:31 can allow you to grow and move towards the state of flourishing. And that's, again, so just to reiterate, flourishing is a model in which you have optimal human functioning and it's if you can cultivate this element of positive reframing and savoring, you can optimize the sense of goodness. Generativity comes from just playing and exploring instead of reacting and fighting towards these stressors. Growth really is a manifestation of these positive mindsets because you're going to grow as a result of doing these sort of reframing and savoring techniques. And that's going to allow you to be resilient indexed by your

Starting point is 01:03:21 survival and growth in the apt for math of adversity. I think that's a one helpful way to think about not allowing the negative oriented thoughts or mindsets to take over your self-identity. And I recently had a guest on, who was one of the most inspirational episodes I've ever recorded, it was with Jen Breok or Bauer, who was born without legs. Something that she said just really hit me and that's that

Starting point is 01:03:50 everyone is faced with struggles and obstacles. It's the one equalizer that we all have. And you can sit there and look at the negative aspect or the positive her life. She has always had this everything is possible mentality, which has now allowed her to be a New York Times best-selling writer, performer, and inspiration to millions so many. So I think that goes hand in hand with what you just said.

Starting point is 01:04:16 So I have, I typically do a lightning round, but you and I are out of town time. So I am going to ask you one quick question because I love hearing the answer that people give to this. And that is, if someday you were selected to be one of the first people to walk on Mars and you were allowed to give one law regulation, whatever it might be for this new world, what would it be? Oh, wow. One law about, so a new society, right? I think maybe there would be an element of gratitude practice. What are you grateful for today? Not necessarily a rule, but a suggestion of how we can be grateful for the things that we have and where we're going to preserve humanity.

Starting point is 01:05:15 Something about maintaining a gratitude practice would be something I would ask people to try to do. Okay, I think that's a great way to end. I would just give you the opportunity that if someone wants to learn more about you and I would encourage them to check out your TED Talk because it's one of the best I've ever seen. What are some other ways that they could contact or find out more about you. ContemplativeNuralsciences.com is my personal website. They can also go to contemplativeresearch.org to learn more about the new society. And then if they want to learn something, get some great content that focuses on the broad spectrum of well-being, they can go to round.glass. Okay, well Dr. Vago, this was just an incredible interview. So thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with our audience.

Starting point is 01:06:11 It's a great to be with you, John. And yeah, look forward to reconnecting in the future. Hopefully before we start populating Mars. But it's been great to be with you and your audience. Really pleasure. What an amazing interview that was with Dr. David Vago. And I hope you appreciated it as much as I did.

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Starting point is 01:06:57 And if you'd like to watch today's interview in addition to listening to it, we also have our YouTube channel at John Armiles with over 260 videos. Please go there, subscribe and check it out. And coming up, we have some great additional guests coming on the show, including New York Times best-selling author, Brechen Rubin, astronaut Nicole Stott, part leadership, extraordinaire, Trisha Manning, Jordan Harbinger, Kathy Heller, and also in a few weeks after that, Dr. David Yaden, who is a contemporary peer of today's guest, Dr. David Vago. And if there is a guest that you would like to see us interview here on the show,

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Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Dr. David Vago on Self Transcendence – How to Experience Personal Growth and Awakening Through Meditation and Meta Awareness

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