A Roadmap to Befriending the Mind

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Extensive research has explored our role as active agents in our own flourishing. In 2020, Cortland Dahl and colleagues from UW-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds introduced a multi-disciplinary, training-based framework featuring four psychological pathways for cultivating well-being: awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. These dimensions, the authors argue, can be developed through various mental training methods, highlighting the plasticity of human flourishing.

In his latest book, Dahl—an expert in the science of meditation and a Buddhist scholar—delves into meditation as mind training for well-being. Meditation, says Dahl, can help us develop a rich inner life. Our sense of self might shift, leading to a more direct experience of the world. This shift, according to Dahl, creates an intimacy with the mind. Intimacy, in turn, can be a harbinger of softening (“Paying attention is the most basic form of love,” writes Tara Brach). A kinder relationship with our own minds, then, like fertile earth nourished by the sun’s unreserved regard, can become footing for flourishing.

Here are insights from Dahl on how exploring the mind through meditation can nurture well-being.

Two ways we usually relate to our inner experiences

According to Dahl, there are two habitual ways with which we often relate to our inner experiences: (1) identifying with our thoughts and emotions or (2) pushing away negative experiences.

For example, when somebody cuts us off in traffic, we might immediately get annoyed and honk at them. When we get swept away in our reactions to events, we often don’t even realize we are having them. “At that moment, anger becomes our (bad) boss—it tells us what to do,” says Dahl.

We can also be less identified with our anger and more aware of it and the pain it causes. However, what usually creeps into that space between ourselves and our experience is aversion. We go to war with our inner experience, explains Dahl. We wish for it to go away. Often, we accomplish this wish utilizing distraction.

Both of these ways of relating to our inner worlds can cause us to suffer.

Meditation creates an inner workspace

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“In meditation, we learn to open to experience, rather than control it, banish it, or get swept in our reactions to it,” says Dahl. This opening creates options. We suddenly have an “inner workspace” where we can choose what to say and do, rather than being caught in our habitual push-and-pull.

Dahl suggests three approaches from the Buddhist tradition, that can help us work with negative emotions:

1. Apply an antidote to the experience to diffuse its emotional impact.

For example, short-circuit the negative impact of anger by generating a feeling of kindness.

2. Transform the negative emotion by using it as a bridge for compassion.

For example, if your anger is caused by someone else’s behavior, put yourselves in their shoes and consider what could have made them behave the way they did. Alternatively, think of everyone else who, at that very moment, is also suffering because they’re caught up in their own anger. Wish them to be free of it.

3. Use anger as the basis for deep inner exploration.

See into the very nature of anger, without the need to do away with it or transform it. “When we realize that this strongly charged wave of emotion is just thoughts in our mind and sensations in our body, and it doesn’t even mean anything, we are, in a way, freed of the experience,” says Dahl. “It becomes anger without the anger.”

Making friends with our inner experience

The roadmap to befriending the mind begins with being able to be in the same room with your own inner experience, according to Dahl. In other words, it is embodying the sentiment “I can be here with this now.” From noticing and acknowledging, we can then move to allowing. This means we bear witness to the unfolding experience and resolve not to fight with it. “There’s grace to allowing for anything to just be here,” says Dahl. As you allow the experience and get to know it, it becomes easier to tolerate it. Eventually, as Dahl and others have found, “the thing that you hated can become your friend, and even beyond that, your greatest teacher.”

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The key ingredient: warm-heartedness

The secret to helping us leap from noticing to allowing, to befriending, lies in the inner attitude we cultivate during meditation. Specifically, according to Dahl, the qualities of curiosity and kindness. Many meditators secretly hope to use meditation as a tool to correct their shortcomings. Instead of our usual self-judgment, meditation offers a different paradigm. “It’s less about improvement, more about acceptance,” Dahl says, pointing to the core requisite for all explorations of the mind: warm-heartedness.

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The benefits of getting intimate with our minds

As Dahl explains, contemplative traditions suggest that there is a vast potential of our own minds that is completely untapped. “Meditation allows us to access that sense that there’s much more possible for us by connecting us to the full range of our inner experience.” Being a little more present in our lives can make us feel more at home in the world, which can foster a warmer, more caring relationship with ourselves, others, and the world. This shift, according to Dahl, can bring about a wealth of benefits. We become more understanding. We see our interconnectedness. We realize that we’re not isolated in our suffering. We feel more awe, wonder, and curiosity. Our openness, in turn, can usher an intimacy with everyone and everything. “Living out of the entire spectrum of experience, rather than just from the narratives in our heads, offers a new perspective,” says Dahl. “It’s like we’ve been living in black-and-white and then suddenly, we get the full-color version of reality.”

Less doing, more being

Despite its prominent place in our Zeitgeist, meditation remains shrouded in myths. One misunderstanding that Dahl wishes to dispel has to do with the “achievement mentality” we bring to the practice. We feel like we need to do something to reap the promised rewards—learn to sit still, concentrate, and empty our minds. Meanwhile, Dahl says, meditation can put us in touch with “the parts of ourselves that are not broken and that don’t need to be fixed.” We get there not through doing but through being.

“My favorite moment is at the end of a meditation session when I ring the bell, and watch people let go of all striving and trying to meditate, and simply allow themselves the space to just be—that’s the practice.”

Many thanks to Cortland Dahl for his time and insights. Dahl is a scientist at UW-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds, a Buddhist scholar, and a meditation instructor with the Tergar Meditation Community. His latest book is A Meditator’s Guide to Buddhism (2024).