The Dalai Lama - Healing Emotions: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on Psychology, Meditation, and the Mind-Body Connection

T HE YEAR was 1990, roughly three decades ago. A small group of scientists, a couple of meditation teachers, and a philosopher journeyed to the ridge-hugging village of McLeod Ganj, near Dharamsala, India. There they met for five days with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who calls that village home, while he lives in exile from his native Tibet.

The topic: how positive emotions can aid healing. This was fairly speculative at the timethere had been relatively little research establishing a connection between our mental states, particularly our emotions, and our biological health. The findings we reported were preliminary or suggestive, but none definitive.

But the intervening years have seen a wave of studies that firmly establish this connection, including some that work out details for this mind-body link. By now we can say with confidence that this meeting was a smart bet. The connection between negative emotions, such as stress and anger, for example, have been shown to deteriorate health in part because they trigger the stress hormone cortisol, which in turn marshals energy for an emergency at the cost of our cardiovascular and immune systems. And chronic stress, we now know, worsens these biological costs.

Some of the presentations stand on their own merits, independent of subsequent findings. This holds, for instance, for the philosopher Lee Yearlys exposition of the various bases for judgments of virtue, which in our sessions spoke to the distinction between positive and negativeor wholesome and unwholesomeemotions. And Francisco Varelas brilliant explanation of the immune system in a manner understandable by all needs no updating.

But when it comes to our analysis of the neuroscience of emotions and how that in turn impacts our health, the science has developed so much since Cliff Saron (then on behalf of neuroscientist Richard Davidson, who could not attend the meeting) outlined these relationships. And, notably, Cliff Saron himself has become a major player in studies of meditation and consciousness.

With Allan Wallace, one of two translators for our meeting, Saron conducted a landmark study of how meditation practice can impact our well-being, including at the biological level. They designed a three-month meditation retreat replete with ample measures before, during, and after. This data has more firmly established causal relationships between the positive emotional states meditation generates and a range of neural and psychological benefits.

Another avenue that has proved promising was the presentation on Mindfulness as Medicine. Jon Kabat-Zinn, who developed the well-researched method Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), has gone on to teach the method to thousands of health care professionals, patients, and the general public. MBSR has become the most well-researched variety of meditation and its benefits. In combination with cognitive therapy mindfulness, it has proven particularly healing. Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) has been the subject of a multitude of studies showing its effectiveness with a wide range of psychiatric problems like eating disorders and phobias. In addition, many studies now suggest MBSR may help with chronic pain as well as several medical conditions.

One topic that surprised the Dalai Lama was the notion common in the West of low self-esteem, an idea that has no place in Tibetan culture. His suggestion that compassion for oneselfa given in Tibetan lifewould be a balm for low self-esteem has since been taken up with enthusiasm. Self-compassion in the years since this meeting has become a rich field of research and practice in psychology.

Likewise, the notion that compassion should play a major role in medicine and health care was a minority view within that field at the time of our dialogue. But the advent of AI and robotics and the mentality of the accountant driving medical routines are among the forces putting the need for compassion in patient care at the forefront.

In 2017 I co-authored, with Richard Davidson, a review of the best studies of meditation (which now number over six thousand in peer-reviewed journals) called Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body. In the rearview mirror provided by almost three decades, its clear that meditation research buttresses many of the claims and suppositions we made in this 1990 meeting.

Such scientific findings underscore the timeliness and significance of our conversation with the Dalai Lama. Our hope is that the scientific momentum signaled by our early dialogue will continue to the greater benefit of humankind.

The Dalai Lama had listened attentively to our presentations and engaged in active and mind-opening dialogue with us all. To this day in his public talks Ive heard him tell his audiences how scientists have informed him that constant anger harms health, particularly deteriorating the effectiveness of the immune system.

Indeed, at the end of our meeting, the Dalai Lama thanked us, saying, Youve given me ammunition.

Daniel Goleman