Sati Solutions :: Blog

The NYTimes ran a recent story about how a seemingly insignificant shift in scheduling led to a very significant shift in the habits and the behaviors of elementary school students. The shift was this:  rather than have recess after lunch, they inserted recess before lunch.   In behavioral economic terms, the schedule’s choice architecture was re-arranged, and it led to more positive outcomes.  Children who ate after recess seemed to make healthier food choices and were reportedly calmer while eating.  They weren’t rushing through their meals to get out on the playground.  Educators claimed eating after recess ‘got the wiggle out’.

How this translated to my own, questionably, adult life eluded me.  Should I be doing stair sprints at my office before lunch?  I usually bring my own lunch, so the issue of choosing healthier foods was moot.  And with all the meditation we do at Sati, we have calmness in spades.

But then,  this morning, during my pitch at a local university to add meditation to their soccer team’s training, the coach asked me, rather pointedly:  “Now… do we do the meditation before or after their workout in the gym.”

“After,” I blurted.  “Let’s get the wiggle out first.”

And Coach seemed to like the idea.  Intuitively, I knew it was the right design.

Over the years, I’ve gone back and forth with working out before my morning meditation and after. And while I don’t want to open the whole can of worms about what it means to have a ‘good’ meditation – there really is no such thing – I can report that the quality of my attention is cleaner, clearer and brighter post-workout.  So if the aim of mindfulness practice is to see things as they really are, then this sharper quality of awareness is a definite plus.   And easily reinforced by simple scheduling decisions.

I seem to recall that the Buddha was known to take long walks in the early morning before his sitting meditation.  Hmmmm….

Michael and Josh are pleased to announce that their book, The Buddha’s Playbook, Strategies for Enlightened Living, will soon be available.

“Trenchant, user friendly, quasi-outrageous, this is a meditation manual unlike any other. Use it at the risk of dissolving your favorite neurotic issues into nothingness.”

–Kate Lila Wheeler, author of Not Where I Started From and When Mountains Walked, and the editor of In This Very Life and Nixon Under the Bodhi Tree and Other Works of Buddhist Fiction.

Here’s a quick synopsis:

We all face daily challenges, vicissitudes, stresses and hassles. Particularly in the modern environment, we need to possess a range of skill-sets that enable us to be flexible, dynamic and adaptive. And without this greater capacity for versatility, we play an endless game of catching ourselves up and running ourselves down.

Meditation has a proven track record for increasing health, boosting creativity and strengthening clarity. However, many people are confused not only about how to meditate, but even more-so, how to sustain the habit of meditation. And it’s really the ability to practice meditation with consistency that delivers all the long-term benefits.

Michael Brooks and Joshua Summers have brilliantly synthesized insights from theories on decision-making with ancient contemplative approaches to make the habit of meditation practice real and relevant. By practicing the simple techniques and approaches in The Buddha’s Playbook, you will infuse your life, your work and your purpose with a focused mind and a compassionate heart.

Let Sati Solutions show you how easy it is!

What does a Tibetan Buddhist Lama in an fMRI in Madison, Wisconsin have to do with the U.S.’s predator drone strikes in southwestern Pakistan?    What can world leaders learn from the Dalai Lama’s ongoing conversations with psychologists and neuroscientists?  No, this is not some clever reference to those guys staring at goats, rather a novel approach to the inner-development of leaders and world citizens.

The answers are pressingly relevant.  Leaders, policy-makers and anyone who cares, all face a world of  dizzying complexity and information saturation.   In response, many maps have been designed to help better navigate this melange of situations and dilemmas.  But the fields of neuropsychology and behavioral economics, in particular, are now mapping the cognitive and emotional terrain of the very brains that inhabit these challenges.   These fields are shedding light on our decision-making, its perils and pitfalls, and the strategic approaches that help mitigate our inherent foibles.

Take for example some of the research done by Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin.  He found, as Stefan Klein reports in his book, The Science of Happiness, that individuals whose right pre-frontal cortices are more active are likely to have less control of their negative emotions, to anticipate disaster and generally take a more negative view of life.   Conversely, individuals  whose left pre-frontal cortices are more active are likely to be self-confident, optimistic and often in high spirits.   And while it might be tempting to resort to explanations of genetic determinism, Davidson has found that there is a high correlation between left pre-frontal activity and meditation, as evidenced by Tibetan Lamas with unusually high activity in this area.

While it’s tempting to fantasize of world leaders sitting at the feet of saffron-robed monks for advice, we see enormous potential for the development of strategic leadership and diplomatic dexterity as an evolute from the practice of taking our brains and minds more seriously.  This is what those monks are doing.   In other words, taking care of the mind-brain, or lens, that sees the world, inevitably sets the tone for real-life outcomes.

Just as intellectual and moral integrity are ideally considered pre-requisites to leadership, we contend that panoramic awareness is equally essential.  By this  we mean a broadness of view that can hold complexity, ambiguity and cognitive dissonance.   It’s an awareness that is primed with metacognition, the ability to think reflectively about thinking, and this skill has been shown to dramatically improve decision-making.

Without this panoramic awareness, the distinction between tactic and strategy is all too easily blurred and confused, as is happening right now in Pakistan.   As Jane Mayer writes in a recent New Yorker, Andrew Exum, a former Army Ranger who has advised General Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan, told me, “Neither Kilcullen nor I is a fundamentalist—we’re not saying drones are not part of the strategy. But we are saying that right now they are part of the problem. If we use tactics that are killing people’s brothers and sons, not to mention their sisters and wives, we can work at cross-purposes with insuring that the tribal population doesn’t side with the militants. Using the Predator is a tactic, not a strategy.”
Perhaps those monks in the fMRI’s have something to say about international strategy that has yet to be considered.