Happiest person
The 66-year-old happiest man turned his back on Parisian intellectual life forty years ago and moved to India to study Buddhism. He is now a close confidant of the Dalai Lama and a respected Western religious scholar.
Now it appears that daily meditation has had other benefits: increasing Mr. Ricard’s ability to experience joy.
The scans showed that when Ricard meditated on compassion, Ricard’s brain produced levels of gamma waves — linked to consciousness, attention, learning and memory — “never before reported in the neuroscience literature,” Davidson said. Interestingly enough, compassion is Ricard’s main secret to being the happiest man in the world.
The scans also showed excessive activity in the left prefrontal cortex of his brain compared to its right counterpart, giving him an abnormally high capacity for happiness and a reduced tendency toward negativity, researchers believe.
Research into the phenomenon, known as ‘neuroplasticity’, is still in its infancy and Ricard, along with other leading scientists around the world, has been at the forefront of groundbreaking experiments.
“We spent 12 years looking at the effect of short- and long-term training of the mind through meditation on mindfulness, compassion and emotional balance,” he said.
“We found remarkable results with long-term practitioners doing 50,000 rounds of meditation, as well as three weeks of 20 minutes a day, which is obviously more applicable to our modern age.”
Matthieu Ricard’s 7 tips for learning and practicing meditation
1) A healthy mind should act like a mirror – faces may be reflected in a glass, but none will stick. Use the same technique with thoughts: let them pass through your mind, but don’t dwell on them.
2) It’s impossible to stop thoughts from coming, but focusing on a particular sound or breath going in and out calms the mind and brings clarity. Controlling the mind is not about limiting your freedom, it’s about not being a slave to your thoughts. Think of it as steering your mind like a boat, instead of floating.
3) Be mindful – notice the sensations of your breath going in and out. If you notice your mind wandering, simply bring it back to your breathing. This is known as mindfulness. You can apply it to other sensations to bring you to the “now” instead of dwelling on the past or future. You might instead focus on heat, cold, and sounds you hear.
4) Once you have acquired some skill in this, you can use it to cultivate qualities such as kindness or dealing with distressing emotions. He says everyone has felt all-consuming love, but it usually lasts about fifteen seconds. But you can hold and cherish this vivid feeling by focusing on it during meditation. If you feel it becoming vague, you can consciously revive it.
5) Just like playing the piano, practicing the feeling for 20 minutes has a much greater impact over time than a few seconds. Regular exercise is also necessary, such as watering a plant.
6) You can then use meditation to gain some space for negative emotions. Ricard says: ‘You can look at your experience like a fire that is burning. When you are aware of anger, you are not angry, you are aware. To be aware of fear is not to be fearful, but to be aware.’ By being aware of these emotions, you will not add fuel to the fire and they will burn down.
7) You will see benefits in stress levels and general well-being, as well as brain changes with regular practice within a month. Those who say they don’t have enough time to meditate should look at the benefits: If it gives you the means to deal with everything else for the remaining 23 hours and 30 minutes, it seems like a worthy way to pass 20 minutes to bring.
Habits of Happiness with Matthieu Ricard