The Mindfulness Rabbit Hole

The Rabbit Hole critiques contemporary mindfulness, the adverse effects research, the philosophical and metaphysical questions that intensive practice eventually raises, the broader cultural dimensions, and the personal framework that runs through the rest of the manual.

The mindfulness conversation is unusually polluted by competing framings. The wellness industry treats mindfulness as a productivity tool. The Buddhist traditionalists insist on the inseparability of the practice from its full religious context. The neuroscience researchers focus on what can be measured. The political left critiques the commodification. The political right is sometimes suspicious of Eastern influence. 

I. The McMindfulness Critique

Ronald Purser’s McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality (2019) is the major critique of how mindfulness has been deployed in commercial, corporate, and political contexts. The argument is worth engaging seriously rather than dismissing.

Purser’s core claim: contemporary mindfulness has been detached from the broader ethical and philosophical framework of the contemplative traditions it emerged from, and has been deployed primarily as a stress-management tool that helps individuals adapt to dysfunctional systems rather than questioning or changing those systems. The result is a practice that produces marginal stress reduction in workers while leaving the conditions producing the stress unaddressed.

The empirical evidence Purser draws on is substantial:

• The corporate adoption of mindfulness programmes (Google’s Search Inside Yourself, the broader corporate mindfulness industry) typically frames the practice as a tool for individual resilience rather than systemic change.
• The military adoption of mindfulness (the US Marines and other military mindfulness programmes) deploys the practice to make soldiers more effective at violence, an application at odds with the Buddhist precepts the practices originally sat within.
• The commercial mindfulness industry has economic incentive to frame the practice as marketable wellness product rather than as transformation of self and society.
• The cultural messaging around mindfulness emphasises individual responsibility for managing one’s own stress, often in ways that obscure structural sources of distress (precarious employment, inadequate healthcare, environmental degradation, social isolation).

He is partly right and partly overstating. The corporate and commercial appropriation of mindfulness has genuine problems. The detachment from the broader ethical framework is real. The deployment of the practice as a tool for adaptation rather than transformation is documented. However, the critique sometimes treats the secularisation of mindfulness as inherently problematic, which is harder to defend. The empirical effects of mindfulness practice exist whether the practitioner is engaged with the full Buddhist framework or not. The question is whether the secular practice is sufficient or only partial.

The reasonable position: mindfulness can be a serious practice or a marketable product. Most readers will encounter the marketable product first. The practice requires engagement with the broader questions about how one lives, what one is doing, and what conditions produce the difficulties one is trying to manage. Mindfulness that addresses only the individual symptom while ignoring the structural source is not wrong; it is incomplete.

II. Adverse Effects and the Varieties of Contemplative Experience

The popularisation of mindfulness has understated that intensive meditation practice can produce adverse effects in some practitioners. The Buddhist contemplative traditions have always recognised this; the clinical and popular contexts have often deployed intensive techniques without adequate support structures.

The Britton Research Programme

Willoughby Britton at Brown University has produced the major research on adverse effects through the Varieties of Contemplative Experience project. Her work draws on extensive interviews with meditators who experienced significant difficulties from practice, alongside review of historical Buddhist texts describing similar phenomena (which the contemplative traditions have long recognised under various names).

The documented adverse experiences span:

• Anxiety and panic that emerges or intensifies through practice
• Depression and dissociation that emerges during intensive practice
• Re-experiencing of trauma material the practitioner had been managing through avoidance
• Perceptual disturbances including visual phenomena (lights, shapes, distortions), auditory phenomena (voices, sounds), and somatic phenomena (energy sensations, body distortions)
• Loss of sense of self in ways that produce distress rather than insight
• Functional impairment lasting weeks to years in some cases
• Existential and metaphysical confusion that the practitioner cannot resolve

The Lindahl et al 2017 paper in PLOS One provides the major published documentation of these phenomena.

Prevalence

Establishing prevalence is methodologically difficult. The Schlosser et al 2019 study found that approximately 25% of regular meditators reported particularly unpleasant meditation-related experiences at some point in their practice, with approximately 11% reporting significant negative impact on functioning. These figures are likely conservative given that practitioners who have severe adverse effects often stop practising and exit the populations sampled.

Adverse effects from meditation are not rare. They occur in a meaningful minority of practitioners. The popularisation has obscured this, partly because the wellness industry has economic interest in framing the practice as universally beneficial.

The Dark Night Phenomena

The Theravada tradition describes specific stages of insight practice involving difficulty, sometimes lasting weeks or months. The “dark night” stages (drawing on terminology from Christian mystical tradition adopted by some  Western teachers) include knowledge of fear, misery, disgust, desire for deliverance, and reobservation. These stages are well-documented in the classical Pali commentaries and represent expected (though difficult) phases of deep insight practice.

Daniel Ingram’s Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha (2008, revised 2018) provides the most accessible articulation of these stages for Western practitioners. His framing: these are predictable phases that the traditions developed support structures around, and practitioners encountering them without traditional context often experience them as psychiatric problems rather than as stages of practice.

Some of what gets reported as adverse effects may be classical insight stages that the clinical framing misinterprets. Some of what gets framed as classical insight stages may be genuine adverse effects that the traditions failed to adequately distinguish from progress. The distinction requires sophisticated engagement with both clinical knowledge and the classical contemplative tradition, neither of which is typically available to practitioners struggling with the phenomena.

The Cheetah House Initiative

Britton and colleagues established Cheetah House to provide support and information for meditators experiencing adverse effects. The existence of this resource indicates that the problems are real enough and common enough to warrant dedicated support infrastructure. The website (cheetahhouse.org) provides information for affected practitioners and clinicians.

Implications for Practice

Meditation practice is not universally beneficial. Some people in some conditions benefit substantially. Others may be harmed by inappropriate practice. The popularisation has obscured this, and the practitioner needs to consider both the benefits and the risks honestly.

The conditions that increase risk include: trauma history, psychotic disorder history, severe depression, dissociative tendencies, certain personality structures, intensive practice without adequate support, and the absence of qualified guidance during difficult phases.

This is not an argument against meditation practice. It is an argument for honest framing, appropriate practitioner selection, and adequate support structures for intensive practice. The Mindfulness Cheatsheet’s trauma-sensitive modifications section provides practical guidance.

III. The Spiritual Bypassing Question

John Welwood, an American psychotherapist with training in Tibetan Buddhism, coined the term “spiritual bypassing” in 1984. His articulation: using spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with one’s painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs.

The phenomenon is widespread in mindfulness and spiritual contexts. Specific patterns include:

• Premature equanimity: Treating equanimity as the appropriate response to all situations, including ones that warrant grief, anger, or engagement. The equanimity in these cases is often suppression of legitimate emotional response dressed up in spiritual language.
• Bypassing the relational: Using spiritual practice to avoid the difficult work of intimate relationships. People who can describe the nature of mind beautifully but cannot sustain ordinary relational engagement, hold disagreement skilfully, or be honest about their own difficulty.
• Bypassing the developmental: Skipping necessary developmental work (self-concept development, emotional capacity development, healthy ego formation) by attempting to dissolve into non-self before having a self capable of integrating the dissolution. The classical Buddhist traditions recognised this risk and structured practice accordingly; contemporary practice often skips the foundational work.
• Bypassing the political: Using “non-attachment to outcomes” or “everything is impermanent” framing to avoid engagement with collective problems that require sustained action. The Buddhist precepts include engagement with the relief of suffering, including structural and political dimensions; bypassing this engagement under contemplative cover is a misapplication of the tradition.
• Bypassing the somatic: Using cognitive or transcendent framings to escape uncomfortable bodily sensations or emotions. The body holds material that requires engagement; treating the body as something to transcend rather than to inhabit produces predictable problems.
• Bypassing the shadow: Using positive practice (loving-kindness, gratitude, equanimity) to avoid the work of integrating the parts of self that are difficult, dark, or shameful. Carl Jung’s framework on the shadow provides one map; the bypassing pattern uses spiritual practice to avoid the integration the shadow requires.

The recognition of spiritual bypassing as a pattern doesn’t invalidate spiritual practice. It identifies a specific failure mode. The honest framing: the practice typically requires engagement with what the practitioner most wants to avoid, not avoidance of it through spiritual reframing.

IV. The Cultural Appropriation Question

Western mindfulness has extracted specific practices from Buddhist traditions without their broader cultural, ethical, and metaphysical context. Whether this extraction constitutes problematic appropriation, useful translation, or something else is a contested question worth engaging.

The honest framing involves multiple legitimate considerations:

• The critique: The extraction has typically benefited Western (often white, often economically privileged) practitioners and entrepreneurs while the source cultures and their teachers have often received less recognition and economic benefit than the extracted practices have generated. The mindfulness industry has Western entrepreneurial wealth attached to it; the Asian teachers and lineages that developed the practices have generally not benefited proportionally.
• The translation defence: Religious and contemplative practices have moved across cultures throughout human history, typically being adapted to the receiving context. Buddhism itself spread from India to China, Japan, Tibet, and beyond, being transformed in each location. The movement of Buddhist practice into Western secular and clinical contexts is one more iteration of this longer pattern.
• The qualified extraction position: Specific practices can be extracted from their original contexts and used in new contexts where the empirical benefits transfer. The structural changes to the brain documented in the neuroscience research occur regardless of the practitioner’s metaphysical commitments. The practice works empirically whether or not the practitioner accepts the broader Buddhist worldview.
• The reductive extraction critique: When extraction reduces the practice to a stress-management technique, dimensions of what the original traditions developed are lost. The contemplative depth, the ethical framework, the metaphysical engagement, the community structures, the lineage relationships, the embodied transmission from teacher to student—all of these are difficult to preserve in commodified app-based practice.

Practitioners benefit from acknowledging the source traditions, supporting the teachers and communities from those traditions where possible, engaging with the broader ethical and philosophical context where it deepens practice, and refusing to treat extracted secular practice as the whole of what the contemplative traditions developed. The benefits of secular practice are real; the secular practice is also partial relative to what the source traditions offered.

V. The Fallacy of Chasing Inner Peace and Ego Death

A common pattern in contemporary practice: approaching mindfulness as a project to achieve a specific state (inner peace, equanimity, ego death, enlightenment) that, once achieved, will resolve the practitioner’s problems.

The pattern has several specific failure modes:

• Inner peace as outcome: Treating inner peace as a state to be achieved through sufficient practice. The framing makes ordinary mental activity (which includes unrest) into evidence of failure. The honest framing: the contemplative traditions generally do not promise sustained inner peace as ordinary outcome; they offer changed relationship to whatever arises, including unrest.
• Ego death as goal: Treating the dissolution of the self as a goal to be pursued. The Buddhist no-self teaching (anatta) is more nuanced than this framing suggests. The teaching does not assert that the self should be destroyed; it asserts that the self the practitioner thinks they have does not exist in the way they think it does. Recognising this is different from attempting to destroy something. Practitioners who pursue ego death often have insufficiently developed selves to begin with and the pursuit produces destabilisation rather than insight.
• Spiritual achievement framing: Treating contemplative practice as another domain of achievement. The number of years practised, the depth of states accessed, the number of retreats completed, the credentials of teachers studied with all become status markers. The practice typically produces less achievement-orientation, not more. People who are accumulating spiritual achievements are often demonstrating that the practice is not yet doing its work.
• The state-seeking trap: Pursuing specific altered states (the jhanas, non-dual recognition, particular Buddhist attainments) as outcomes. The states are real and the traditions describe them. The pursuit of the states often interferes with the underlying development that allows them to arise. The framing common in the Theravada tradition: do the practice and let the stages take care of themselves; do not pursue the stages.

The practice typically involves work with the difficulties the practitioner was hoping to escape, rather than escape from them. The promise of practice is changed relationship to experience, not the elimination of difficult experience. Practitioners who approach practice as a project to escape difficulty often find that the practice eventually requires direct engagement with what they had been trying to escape.

VI. The Fear of Inner Confrontation

The flip side of chasing inner peace: the avoidance of what one finds in sustained attention to one’s own mind.

The contents that sustained practice reveals include:

• Patterns of self-criticism the practitioner had not previously been aware of
• Emotional material from history that the practitioner had been managing through avoidance
• The activity of the mind that ordinarily operates below conscious awareness
• The repetitive nature of mental content (the same concerns, fears, desires, and stories cycling repeatedly)
• The conditioned nature of much of what the practitioner had taken to be free choice
• The gap between who the practitioner thought they were and what their actual mental and emotional life contains

This material can be enough that practitioners stop practising rather than continue with what they have begun to see. The pattern is widespread and underacknowledged in contemporary practice contexts.

Sustained practice often makes things subjectively worse before it makes them better. The increased awareness of what was previously unconscious produces real awareness of patterns the practitioner had been actively avoiding. The discomfort is information; the avoidance is the original problem that the practice is now revealing.

The contemplative traditions developed support structures around this phase: ongoing teacher relationships, community context, established frameworks for what was being encountered. Practitioners often encounter the material without comparable support and interpret what they’re seeing as evidence that the practice is harmful or that something is wrong with them, rather than as the predictable consequence of beginning to look at what was previously avoided.

The fear of inner confrontation explains portions of why people stop practising. The work of sustained practice is partly the cultivation of capacity to encounter the material without flinching from it. This capacity develops slowly and unevenly; expecting to have it immediately is unrealistic.

VII. Boredom as Failure to Pay Attention

A useful framing that appeared in the original placeholder bullets, worth developing: boredom is the failure to pay attention to what is actually present.

The attention economy has conditioned people to expect constant novelty and stimulation. Activities that do not provide this (queueing, transitions, ordinary domestic tasks, sustained focus on a single thing) get experienced as boredom. The boredom is interpreted as a feature of the activity rather than as a feature of the attention the person is bringing to it.

There is no genuinely boring experience. Any experience attended to closely contains sufficient detail to occupy attention indefinitely. The boredom is the absence of attention, not the absence of content.

Sitting with boredom without submitting to distraction is one of the more useful practices for ordinary life. The work that the attention economy has done to capture attention has corresponding work that practice does to reclaim it. The capacity to be with what is present without needing it to be more interesting than it is is one of the more durable benefits of sustained practice.

The connection to the broader framework: the attention economy operates by capitalising on the cultivated inability to be with what is present. Phones produce constant novelty stimulus. Algorithmic feeds optimise for engagement, which means optimising for capacity to keep capturing attention. The boredom that arises when these stimuli are absent is a withdrawal symptom, not a sign that something is wrong.

When boredom arises, do not reach for stimulation. Sit with the experience of boredom itself. Notice what it consists of. Notice that it changes when attended to. The experience of “boredom” attended to closely becomes more interesting than the experience of “boredom” being avoided.

VIII. Marie Kondo and the Relationship to Physical Environment

Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (2011) became a cultural phenomenon partly because it articulated something the contemplative traditions had long recognised: the relationship to physical environment affects the quality of attention available for other things.

The contents of one’s physical environment are not neutral. Each object competes for attention, holds associations, requires decisions, generates obligations. An environment full of objects one does not actually need produces ongoing low-level attention drain that the inhabitant typically does not consciously notice but that affects available capacity for other engagement.

The Kondo specific framing (does the object spark joy?) is one application of a broader principle. The contemplative traditions generally encouraged practitioners to live with minimal physical possessions, partly for ethical reasons and partly because the simplification of environment supported the simplification of mind that the practices developed.

Reducing the physical clutter in one’s environment is itself a form of practice. The work involves decisions about what is genuinely necessary, what one has accumulated through inertia, what one is keeping out of obligation or fear, what reflects who one actually is and what reflects who one used to be or thought one should be. The work of clearing physical space typically produces corresponding clearing of mental space.

The connection to the broader framework: the Environment section’s framing on designed environments and human autonomy applies here. The physical environments people inhabit affect their cognitive and emotional capacities. The capacity to design one’s environment intentionally, rather than allowing it to accumulate based on impulse and obligation, is itself an exercise of the autonomy the practice supports.

This is not an argument for ascetic minimalism. It is an argument for intentional engagement with the physical conditions of life rather than passive accumulation. Different people will find different levels of material engagement appropriate; the practice is to actually examine the question rather than defaulting to whatever has accumulated.

IX. Ancient Meditation Practices in Deeper Context

The contemporary practice has detached specific techniques from the broader contexts they developed within. Understanding the original contexts deepens engagement with the practices.

The Theravada Foundational Context

The earliest articulation of mindfulness practice survives in the Pali Canon, the foundational scriptures of Theravada Buddhism dating from approximately the fifth to first centuries BCE. The texts present meditation not as a stress-reduction technique but as one component of the Noble Eightfold Path that the historical Buddha taught as the way out of suffering.

The Eightfold Path includes: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. Mindfulness sits as one of eight components, and the other components are not optional add-ons. The path as conceived is ethical (right speech, right action, right livelihood) before it is meditative. Practitioners who engage only with the meditative components are practising a partial version of what the tradition developed.

The Four Noble Truths provide the framework within which the practice operates: there is suffering, suffering has a cause (craving and aversion), the cessation of suffering is possible, and the path to that cessation includes the Eightfold Path. The framing places meditation within an analysis of why human experience is the way it is, what produces dissatisfaction, and what changes the relationship to experience.

The Tibetan Vajrayana Context

The Tibetan Buddhist traditions developed elaborate practices within a metaphysical and cosmological framework. Deity yoga, mantra recitation, visualisation practices, and the non-dual approaches of Dzogchen and Mahamudra all sit within the Tibetan understanding of the nature of mind, the path of enlightenment, the role of the teacher, and the broader Buddhist cosmology.

Practitioners engaging with Tibetan practices often extract specific techniques without their broader context, with mixed results. The practices were developed within structured relationships with qualified teachers, within communities of practice, with specific preliminary practices completed before more advanced techniques were undertaken. The contemporary practice that skips these structures often produces effects different from what the traditions intended.

The Zen Context

Zen developed from Chinese Chan Buddhism, which integrated Indian Buddhist practice with Chinese Taoist sensibility and culture. The Zen approach emphasises direct insight and embodied practice rather than elaborate doctrine. The koan tradition, the master-student relationship, the emphasis on posture and breath, the integration of practice with ordinary activity all sit within a cultural and philosophical context.

The Western engagement with Zen has produced both genuine transmission (through teachers like Suzuki Roshi, Robert Aitken, John Daido Loori, and many others) and partial extraction. The “Zen” framing in popular culture often bears limited relationship to what the actual Zen tradition involves.

Christian Contemplative Tradition

Western contemplative practice has its own history. The Christian desert fathers and mothers of the third and fourth centuries developed contemplative practices. The medieval mystics (Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich) produced contemplative literature. The Eastern Orthodox tradition preserved hesychast practice including the Jesus Prayer. The Catholic contemplative tradition continues through monastic orders and through teachers like Thomas Merton, Thomas Keating, and Cynthia Bourgeault.

The Christian contemplative tradition operates within Christian theology rather than Buddhist framework, but the practices share overlap. The cataphatic (positive, content-focused) and apophatic (negative, content-emptying) traditions both have parallels in Buddhist practice.

Hindu Contemplative Tradition

The Hindu tradition has produced contemplative practices across multiple lineages and frameworks. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (approximately second century BCE to fourth century CE) provide the foundational text of classical yoga, including detailed treatment of meditation practice within the eight-limbed path. The Advaita Vedanta tradition (Shankara through Ramana Maharshi through teachers) provides one framework for non-dual practice. The various tantric traditions provide elaborate practices integrating body, breath, sound, and visualisation.

Sufi Tradition

Islamic mystical practice (Sufism) developed practices including dhikr (remembrance through repeated phrases), muraqaba (meditative awareness), and elaborate practices within different Sufi orders. The poetry of Rumi, Hafiz, and other Sufi masters provides articulation of contemplative experience within Islamic framework.

The Common Threads

Across these traditions, certain patterns repeat:

• Sustained attention as foundational capacity
• Recognition of the limits of conceptual thinking
• The role of teacher and lineage
• The integration of practice with ethical framework
• The community context of practice
• The progressive stages of development
• The eventual recognition that the self is not what it appears to be

The convergence across different cultural contexts suggests that the practices touch something genuinely universal about human consciousness. The specific framings differ; the underlying capacities being developed often overlap.

X. The Relationship Between Insight and Metaphysics

Contemplative practice raises a philosophical question. The traditions assert that intensive practice reveals truths about the nature of mind, self, and reality. Secular practice often brackets these claims while preserving the practices. The question: are the metaphysical claims separable from the empirical effects, or is the bracketing leaving something behind?

The major positions:

• The full reductive position: The brain produces the experiences. The brain changes with practice in measurable ways. The reported insights are neural patterns that have evolved or developed under specific conditions. There is no further metaphysical content to recover. Mindfulness is brain training; the rest is interpretation.
• The full traditional position: The practices reveal something real about consciousness that the secular reduction cannot access. The Buddhist understanding of anatta (non-self), shunyata (emptiness), and the nature of mind is empirically grounded in contemplative experience, not metaphysical speculation that can be detached from the practice. Practitioners who bracket these claims are practising something different from what the traditions developed.
• The Harris position: The contemplative insights about the nature of mind and consciousness are real and accessible to practitioners. They do not require accepting Buddhist metaphysics about karma, rebirth, or specific cosmologies. The insights are about how consciousness operates rather than about the structure of reality more broadly. Sam Harris’s Waking Up (2014) develops this position.
• The pragmatic position: The question is undecidable from the practitioner’s perspective. The practice produces effects whether or not the metaphysical claims are accepted. Engaging with the deeper philosophical questions can deepen practice for some practitioners; for others it produces unnecessary complication. The pragmatic approach: practise, observe, and let the philosophical position be informed by the practice rather than the other way around.
• The integrationist position: The reduction-vs-tradition framing presents a false choice. The neurobiological mechanisms and the contemplative insights are not in competition; they are descriptions at different levels of the same phenomena. Denis Noble’s biological relativity framework covered in The Singularity and used across the manual provides one approach: different levels of description are not reducible to each other but are not in contradiction either.

The question is genuinely open. Sustained practice typically produces some engagement with these questions even if the practitioner did not initially intend it. The practice raises the questions; how each practitioner resolves them is a personal matter. The traditions disagree among themselves on substantial aspects; practitioners are not required to resolve disputes the traditions have been working on for millennia.

XI. The Sam Harris Material on Vipassana and Dzogchen

The material from Sam Harris’s Waking Up (2014) preserved from the original page is worth keeping with proper attribution and context. Harris’s contribution is genuine; his framing is one of the more accessible articulations of contemplative experience from a secular neuroscience-trained perspective.

On Vipassana

Harris’s recommendation for beginners is vipassana from the Theravada tradition, partly because it can be taught in an entirely secular way. His articulation of mindfulness: “The quality of mind cultivated in vipassana is almost always referred to as ‘mindfulness.’ It is simply a state of clear, nonjudgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Cultivating this quality of mind has been shown to reduce pain, anxiety, and depression; improve cognitive function; and even produce changes in gray matter density in regions of the brain related to learning and memory, emotional regulation, and self-awareness.”

The Four Foundations of Mindfulness

Harris’s articulation: “The four foundations of mindfulness are the body (breathing, changes in posture, activities), feelings (the senses of pleasantness, unpleasantness, and neutrality), the mind (in particular, its moods and attitudes), and the objects of mind (which include the five senses but also other mental states, such as volition, tranquility, rapture, equanimity, and even mindfulness itself).”

On the Nature of Mindfulness

“There is nothing passive about mindfulness. One might even say that it expresses a specific kind of a passion for discerning what is subjectively real in every moment. It is a mode of cognition that is, above all, undistracted, accepting, and ultimately nonconceptual. Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves.”

On Distraction

Why we crave permanence in change: “We crave lasting happiness in the midst of change: Our bodies age, cherished objects break, pleasures fade, relationships fail. Our attachment to the good things in life and our aversion to the bad amount to a denial of these realities, and this inevitably leads to feelings of dissatisfaction. Mindfulness is a technique for achieving equanimity amid the flux, allowing us to simply be aware of the quality of experience in each moment, whether pleasant or unpleasant.”

On Lost in Thought

The fundamental confusion of identifying with thoughts: “From the contemplative point of view, being lost in thoughts of any kind, pleasant or unpleasant, is analogous to being asleep and dreaming. It is a mode of not knowing what is actually happening in the present moment. It is essentially a form of psychosis. Thoughts themselves are not a problem, but being identified with thought is. Taking oneself to be the thinker of one’s thoughts, that is, not recognising the present thought to be a transitory appearance in consciousness, is a delusion that produces nearly every species of human conflict and unhappiness.”

On Dzogchen

Harris’s articulation of the distinctive quality of Dzogchen: “Dzogchen is not vague or paradoxical. It is not like Zen, wherein a person can spend years being uncertain whether he is meditating correctly. The practice of recognising nondual awareness is called trekchod, which means ‘cutting through’ in Tibetan, as in cutting a string cleanly so that both ends fall away. Once one has cut it, there is no doubt that it has been cut.”

The blind spot analogy worth preserving:

“Imagine that perceiving the blind spot will completely transform a person’s life. Next, imagine that whole religions are predicated on the denial of the blind spot’s existence. Perhaps other traditions acknowledge the blind spot but in purely poetical terms; without giving any clear indication of how to recognise it. A few lineages may actually teach techniques whereby one can see the blind spot for oneself, but only gradually, after months and years of effort, and even then, one’s glimpses of it will seem more a matter of luck than anything else. A good teacher would give you a dot and cross on paper, get you to close one eye, and move closer until the dot in the periphery disappears.”

On Spiritual Uses of Pharmacology

Harris’s engagement with psychedelics and their relationship to contemplative practice provides one careful framing. His position: psychedelics can produce states with overlap to deep contemplative experience, and the historical research before prohibition demonstrated therapeutic potential. The research has confirmed much of what was earlier reported. He cautions: “For every insight of lasting value produced by drugs, there was an army of zombies with flowers in their hair shuffling toward failure and regret. Turning on, tuning in, and dropping out is wise, or even benign, only if you can then drop into a mode of life that makes ethical and material sense and doesn’t leave your children wandering in traffic.”

The relationship between drug-induced states and meditation: “Meditation can open the mind to a similar range of conscious states, but far less haphazardly. If LSD is like being strapped to a rocket, learning to meditate is like gently raising a sail. Yes, it is possible, even with guidance, to wind up someplace terrifying, and some people probably shouldn’t spend long periods in intensive practice. But the general effect of meditation training is of settling ever more fully into one’s own skin and suffering less there.”

“We should be slow to draw conclusions about the nature of the cosmos on the basis of inner experiences, no matter how profound they may seem. All psychoactive drugs modulate the existing neurochemistry of the brain, either by mimicking specific neurotransmitters or by causing the neurotransmitters themselves to be more or less active. Everything that one can experience on a drug is, at some level, an expression of the brain’s potential.”

XII. The Huberman Gratitude Material

The material from Andrew Huberman’s podcast on gratitude practices is worth preserving with proper attribution and context. Huberman is a Stanford neuroscientist whose podcast has popular reach. His engagement with gratitude practice integrates neuroscience with practical application.

His neuroscience credentials are real and his platform makes information accessible to audiences who would not encounter it otherwise. Some of his specific claims compress contested research into more confident assertions than the underlying evidence supports; his synthesis is generally substantive but warrants the kind of critical reading any single source warrants. The content below is broadly supported by the research base, with appropriate qualification.

Major Long-Lasting Benefits of Gratitude Practice

Regular gratitude practice has been shown to:

• Build resilience to trauma by reframing prior traumatic experiences and inoculating against future ones
• Benefit social relationships across the board
• Produce neurochemical effects with magnitudes comparable in some measures to high intensity exercise

Prosocial vs Defensive Thinking, Behaviours, and Neural Circuits

Gratitude is a prosocial behaviour and mindset. The brain has circuits that are appetitive, that serve to bring us closer to things and to enhance the details of sensory experience.

The neural circuits associated with defensive behaviours (backing up, covering up the body, quaking voice) are antagonised when prosocial circuits are more active. Because defensive circuits are designed to keep us safe, they appear more robust than prosocial circuits. The information environment keeps the defensive circuits activated.

Gratitude practice creates a wedge between prosocial and defensive circuits in favour of the prosocial. Sustained practice can shift the neural circuits so that the baseline tilts more toward the prosocial.

Neurochemistry and Neural Circuits of Gratitude

Neuromodulators (chemicals released in the brain and body that change the activity of other neural circuits) play roles in gratitude effects. Serotonin from the raphe nucleus is one of the main neuromodulators in the gratitude and approaching circuits. Serotonin tends to support interoception (awareness of internal state) rather than exteroception (focus on external threats).

When someone experiences gratitude, two main brain areas are activated by serotonin: the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). The amount of activation scales with the intensity of the gratitude experience.

The mPFC is associated with planning, deep thinking, and evaluation of different types of experience. More substantively, the mPFC sets context, defining the meaning of experience.

Prefrontal Cortex Sets Context

Circuits within the brain allow perception of certain sensations such as cold exposure. The discomfort of cold is not negotiable, but if one chooses to engage with it, the mPFC can modulate deeper brain regions (the hypothalamus) to produce positive neurochemical effects. Motivation, desire, and control of the situation reduce the stress response.

Gratitude is a mindset that activates the PFC, and in doing so, sets the context of the experience so that positive effects can emerge. However, one cannot simply lie to oneself to overcome pain and difficulty. That approach (from some self-help frameworks) creates disparity between the internal systems and the thoughts the person is forcing.

Neural circuits are powerful, plastic, and context-dependent, but they are not stupid. When one lies to oneself, the brain knows.

Ineffective Gratitude Practices

A poor gratitude practice involves writing down or reciting things one is grateful for while attempting to think and feel those experiences deeper. This is not particularly effective for shifting neural circuitry, neurochemistry, or somatic patterns.

Adding autonomic activation (such as cyclic hyperventilated breathing before writing) can increase effectiveness somewhat by bringing more alertness and richness to the experience.

Effective Gratitude Practices: Receiving Thanks and Story

The most effective form of gratitude practice involves receiving thanks rather than giving it. This produces robust effects on PFC circuits.

If unable to actually receive thanks regularly, an alternative is watching narratives or stories of others experiencing positive social experiences where they receive help. The prosocial brain regions activate when there is affiliation or resonance with the protagonist. This is different from empathy, which requires setting aside one’s own emotions to focus on another’s; in these stories one can shift one’s own physiology and activate gratitude circuits through identification with the experience of receiving help.

Story is one of the major ways the brain organises information.

Theory of Mind

The ability to attribute the experience or understanding of another without actually experiencing what they experience is the substrate for the gratitude practice working through stories. Without theory of mind capacity, the practice would not work the same way.

Building Effective Gratitude Practices

There must be a real experience of someone else’s experience to feel the gratitude effect. Find someone or a story that inspires you.

The practice must be repeated over time, so it is not practical to be constantly foraging for new stories. Think back to when someone was thankful for something you did, along with how you felt while receiving the gratitude. Imagine deeply an emotional experience of someone else receiving help.

Find a story that is particularly meaningful for you and take bullet points: what the struggle was, what the help was, how it affects you emotionally. Neural circuits will develop familiarity with the narrative, making access easier over time. A 1 to 3 minute practice can change mood and physiology effectively at any point.

How Gratitude Changes Your Brain

Repeated gratitude practice changes how brain circuits work and how the brain and heart interact. It changes the resting-state functional connectivity in emotional and motivation-related brain regions, making anxiety and fear circuits less likely to be active and the circuits for wellbeing and motivation more active.

The Practical Protocol

The interventions are only 5 minutes long. They must be grounded in story and activate the emotions associated with it, genuinely experiencing the memory of receiving thanks or watching someone else express genuine thanks.

The duration: 1 to 5 minutes is sufficient. Once a narrative is established, 60 to 120 seconds can be enough. Best timing: first thing in the morning or before going to sleep. Three times per week is sufficient.

The Anterior Cingulate Cortex emerges as a key component for empathy, altruism, and gratitude across the research base. Women who maintained regular gratitude practice showed reductions in amygdala activation and reductions in TNF-alpha and IL-6 inflammatory markers.

Practical Notes

Just listing things one is grateful for is not particularly useful. The practice must engage genuine emotion through a story or remembered experience.

If a giver expresses gratitude that is not genuine, neither party gets the full effect. Genuine receiving and genuine giving are both required for the practice to operate at full effect.

Serotonin support through 5-HTP or tryptophan-rich foods may assist gratitude practice given the serotonin involvement in the relevant circuits. Sceletium tortuosum (kanna/zembrin) is a traditional herb chewed before stressful endeavours that may support prosocial circuit activation.

The basic structure (brief, story-grounded, repeated, genuine emotional engagement) is broadly supported by the research base. The specific neural attributions to ACC and mPFC are well-supported. The specific inflammatory marker effects (TNF-alpha, IL-6 reductions) are documented in some studies but with modest effect sizes; popular accounts sometimes overstate the magnitude.

XIII. Authenticity and the Practice

The placeholder bullet on authenticity from the original page warrants development. What does the practice produce in relation to authenticity?

Culture has discourse about authenticity (being your true self, living authentically, finding your authentic voice) while typically failing to address what the “true self” actually refers to. The contemplative traditions raise this question more directly.

Several positions:

• The conventional position: There is a true self that contains genuine preferences, values, and ways of being. Authenticity involves recognising this true self and acting from it rather than from the various social roles, expectations, and conditionings that have accumulated.
• The Buddhist anatta position: There is no true self in the conventional sense. The contents the practitioner takes to be their self (thoughts, feelings, body, personality, identity) are constantly changing conditioned arisings. Authenticity in this framing is not about discovering a true self but about reducing the identification with what is not actually self.
• The integrationist position: Both positions have something right. There are stable patterns that distinguish one person from another (temperament, values, capacities) that are useful to recognise and engage with. There is also no fixed essential self underneath these patterns. Authenticity involves both honest engagement with the stable patterns and recognition that they are not the whole story.
• The Carl Jung position: The conscious self is one part of a larger psyche that includes unconscious material. Authenticity involves the ongoing process of individuation: integrating the unconscious material rather than living from the conscious persona alone.
• The performance theory position (Erving Goffman and successors): The self is performed in social contexts. Different contexts call for different performances. The question of which performance is “authentic” may be misframed; the question may be which performance is appropriate to which context.

The practice clarifies these questions by direct investigation. Sustained attention to what one is actually doing in different contexts reveals the patterns. The recognition of what is genuinely one’s own vs what is socially conditioned vs what is performed for specific contexts becomes clearer through practice. Authenticity becomes less about discovering a hidden true self and more about ongoing honest engagement with the actual contents of one’s experience.

The connection to Jay’s own framework on signal and static (developed below) is direct. Signal is what is genuinely arising from one’s own integrated being; static is the interference produced by external conditioning, performance demands, and reactivity to others’ expectations. The practice develops capacity to distinguish signal from static and to operate from signal more consistently.

XIV. Jay’s Framework: Signal, Static, Coherence, and Growth

My personal framework, integrates material from the contemplative traditions with neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and the broader framework operating across the manual. 

Fear or Growth

Every choice to delay, perform, or plan endlessly reflects either a desire for safety (fear-based) or a desire for development (growth-based). This draws on the psychology of avoidance patterns while connecting to older frameworks (the Buddhist analysis of craving and aversion, the evolutionary psychology of threat detection systems).

Most ordinary decisions are made with fear or growth as the underlying driver, often without the person being aware of which is operating. The practice develops the capacity to recognise which driver is active in any given choice. The recognition does not always require choosing growth; it allows the choice to be made with awareness of what is being chosen.

The fear vs growth binary maps onto the dual control architecture covered in Optimizing Pleasure, the defensive vs prosocial circuit framework from the Huberman gratitude material above, the threat detection vs exploration tension that runs through evolutionary psychology, and the broader question of what produces flourishing.

The Undercurrent

Most of what people do reflects unconscious patterns established in earlier developmental contexts rather than considered choices in the present.

We often deny the unconscious dimension of motivation, framing all behaviour as conscious choice. The denial produces predictable problems: people who cannot understand why they keep doing things they consciously want to stop doing, people who experience their behaviour as inexplicable, people who attribute to others’ character what is actually the operation of unconscious patterns.

The practice develops the capacity to recognise the undercurrent. The recognition does not eliminate the undercurrent; the undercurrent is partly what one is. The recognition allows engagement with the undercurrent rather than passive movement by it.

The undercurrent connects to the default mode network (which produces automatic processing below conscious awareness), to attachment patterns (which shape adult relationship behaviour from early developmental contexts), to the broader Jungian framework on the unconscious, and to the therapeutic work on implicit memory and emotional patterns.

Return to Signal

Not all mental activity is equivalent. Some activity reflects genuine engagement with what is actually here; some activity reflects automatic patterns that have been imposed or developed under conditions that did not serve the person. The capacity to distinguish requires sustained practice and honest engagement.

The signal vs static framing operates at multiple levels: in conversation (the genuine response vs the performed response), in choice (the choice that reflects what one actually wants vs the choice that reflects what one has been told to want), in emotion (the emotion that is genuinely arising vs the emotion that is being performed), in identity (the patterns that are genuinely one’s own vs the patterns that have been imposed).

Sustained attention to the difference between signal and static. Over time, the capacity to operate from the signal more consistently. Not perfectly; static is not eliminable. But more often, and with more recognition, when static has taken over.

The Signal Path

The fourth essay synthesises ten principles for a coherent life, integrating the foundations developed in the prior essays:

1. Recognising fear or growth as the underlying driver of any choice
2. Engaging with the undercurrent rather than denying it
3. Distinguishing signal from static
4. Living from coherence rather than fragmentation
5. The integration of practice with ordinary life
6. The recognition that the work is ongoing rather than finished
7. The connection of individual practice to collective flourishing
8. The honesty about what is and is not under one’s control
9. The cultivation of capacity to be with difficulty
10. The recognition that the path is the practice

These principles draw on contemplative tradition,  neuroscience, evolutionary biology, attachment theory, and the broader framework operating across the manual. The synthesis is a personal articulation of how these can be lived together.

The signal-vs-static framing connects to the attention economy material in Environment, to the meaning-laden engagement in Purpose, to the co-regulation in Connection, to the becoming-one framing in Sex Basics. The fear-vs-growth binary connects to the dual control architecture in Optimizing Pleasure, to the defensive vs prosocial circuits in the gratitude material above, to the broader question of what produces flourishing.

XV. The Contemplative Neuroscience Contested Terrain

The neuroscience research on meditation has produced findings worth distinguishing from popular accounts. The Mindfulness Basics section covered the foundational findings. This Rabbit Hole cluster addresses the contested edges.

What’s Well-Supported

The DMN reduction during meditation. The structural brain changes with sustained practice (Lazar, Hölzel, Fox meta-analysis). The HRV and autonomic effects. The cortisol and HPA effects. The amygdala reactivity reductions. The salience network and attention regulation changes. The inflammation effects in some studies (Creswell). The clinical outcomes for stress, anxiety, depression relapse, and chronic pain.

What’s Contested

• The telomere research: Several studies have reported telomerase activity increases with intensive practice; the effect sizes are modest and the methodological challenges are substantial. Popular accounts often overstate the implications for ageing.
• The specific gene expression claims: The CTRA work is real but produces modest population-level effects. Popular accounts sometimes frame this as dramatic individual-level transformation.
• The gamma synchrony findings: The Davidson and Lutz work with Tibetan monks documented striking gamma synchrony patterns. The interpretation is contested. The effects are real; what they mean for ordinary practitioners is less clear.
• The specific structural change magnitudes: Real but modest. Popular accounts sometimes describe transformative brain changes that the data do not support.
• The dose-response question: How much practice produces how much effect remains methodologically difficult to establish. The eight-week MBSR programme produces measurable effects; longer practice produces larger effects in cross-sectional studies; the specific dose-response curve is not well-characterised.
• The mechanism specificity question: The Van Dam et al 2018 “Mind the Hype” critique covered in Mindfulness Basics raises questions about whether mindfulness-specific mechanisms are responsible for observed effects or whether nonspecific factors (relaxation, expectation, attention from researchers) produce some of the effects attributed to mindfulness.

What’s Likely Overstated

Specific dramatic transformations from brief practice. The popular accounts of “8 weeks to a new brain” overstate what the structural changes mean for ordinary function. The dramatic anti-ageing implications. The substitution for clinical treatment of serious psychiatric conditions. The dramatic effects from app-based brief practice.

XVI. Open Research Questions

1. The integration hypothesis: The benefits of mindfulness practice will be shown to depend substantially more on integration into ordinary life than on duration of formal practice, with effects accumulating faster in practitioners who combine modest formal practice with integration than in practitioners who pursue intensive formal practice without integration.
2. The trauma history hypothesis: Standard mindfulness interventions will be shown to produce different effect patterns in trauma-affected vs non-trauma-affected populations, with significant subgroups in trauma-affected populations showing adverse rather than beneficial effects from interventions that the broader population finds helpful.
3. The contemplative depth hypothesis: The deeper stages of practice described in the contemplative traditions (the jhanas, the non-dual recognition, the structural transformations) will be shown to require sustained engagement (thousands of hours) that produces effects substantially different from what the eight-week clinical interventions produce, with the difference being categorical rather than just quantitative.
4. The attention economy hypothesis: Sustained mindfulness practice will be shown to counteract the cognitive effects of heavy attention economy exposure (algorithmic feeds, notification design, social media architecture), with effect sizes substantially larger than for populations not heavily exposed to attention capture systems.
5. The dose-response specification hypothesis: Specific dose-response curves will be established for different practices producing different effects, with the “more is better” framing being shown to be inaccurate for many effects and replaced by more specific guidance about what produces what.
6. The cultural context hypothesis: The effects of mindfulness practice will be shown to depend on the cultural context the practitioner inhabits, with the same practice producing different effects in different cultural contexts due to differential effects on the integration with daily life.
7. The teacher relationship hypothesis: Sustained practice with qualified human teachers will be shown to produce different effects than equivalent practice with apps or self-direction, with the teacher relationship affecting both progression through difficult phases and integration into ordinary life.
8. The retreat practice hypothesis: Intensive retreat practice will be shown to produce different effects than daily practice of equivalent total time, with the concentrated form producing both larger benefits and larger risks of adverse effects, requiring different selection criteria and support structures.
9. The metaphysical engagement hypothesis: Practitioners who engage with the broader philosophical and metaphysical questions the practice raises will be shown to derive different and arguably deeper effects than practitioners who treat the practice purely as technique, even when the formal practice components are identical.
10. The community context hypothesis: Sustained practice within a community of practitioners will be shown to produce different effects than equivalent solitary practice, with the community providing scaffolding for the difficult phases and integration support that solitary practice typically lacks.

XVII. Limits of Self-Investigation

Most of the questions covered in this Rabbit Hole operate at scales individuals cannot directly observe. You cannot assess your own brain structure, your own progress through the contemplative stages relative to other practitioners, your own susceptibility to adverse effects, your own position on most measures of practice depth.

What Individual Observation Can Reveal

• Subjective response to specific practices and contexts
• Patterns in your own attention, reactivity, and emotional regulation
• The effects of specific practice variations on your own experience
• The relationship between your practice and broader life patterns
• The recognition of your own patterns of avoidance, bypassing, or premature equanimity

What Individual Observation Cannot Reveal

• How your practice compares to others at population level
• Whether specific difficulties reflect normal practice phases or signs of adverse effects requiring different engagement
• The causal directions in your subjective changes
• The effects of practices you have not tried
• The brain-level changes (or their absence) that your practice may be producing

Testing and Measurement Available

Limited compared to other domains. Some practitioners use HRV monitors to track autonomic changes. Some use brain training apps that approximate certain capacities. Most of the measures require research-grade equipment and protocols.

The Role of Teachers and Community

The contemplative traditions emphasise qualified teacher relationships and community context partly because the practitioner’s self-assessment is unreliable. Sustained practice produces predictable patterns of self-deception, premature claims of attainment, dark night phases that are interpreted as failure rather than progress, and other patterns that benefit from external perspective.

The context often lacks adequate teacher and community support. The reliance on apps and individual practice substitutes self-direction for qualified guidance in ways the traditions generally warned against.

Engage with the practice. Hold conclusions about your own attainment with humility. Seek qualified teachers and community where possible. Use the contemplative tradition’s accumulated wisdom about predictable patterns rather than reinventing the wheel of practice from scratch.

XVIII. Future Topics for Development

A working list of essays queued for development:

• The relationship between mindfulness and psychotherapy: Where the practices overlap, where they differ, where they should be combined, where they should not be substituted for each other.
• Mindfulness in clinical conditions in depth: The specific applications and limitations across PTSD, OCD, eating disorders, addiction, chronic pain, and other conditions.
• The neuroscience of awakening experiences: The research on transformative contemplative experiences (mystical experience, ego dissolution, oceanic boundlessness) including the work coming from psychedelic research.
• The classical maps of contemplative development: The Pali tradition’s stages of insight, the Tibetan Mahamudra and Dzogchen progressions, Culadasa’s ten stages, in detail.
• The relationship between contemplative practice and ethics: The Buddhist understanding of how practice and ethics relate, the broader philosophical question of whether contemplative depth produces ethical depth.
• Mindfulness and parenting in depth: The specific applications of practice to the demands of raising children.
• Mindfulness and creativity: The relationship between contemplative practice and creative work, drawing on the accounts of practitioners across creative fields.
• Mindfulness and aging: The specific applications across the lifespan, including the work on contemplative practice in older populations.
• The Christian, Sufi, and Jewish contemplative traditions in depth: Traditions beyond Buddhism that contemporary practice often overlooks.
• The relationship between contemplative practice and political engagement: The Buddhist understanding of socially engaged practice, the debate about whether mindfulness should be politically neutral or politically engaged.
• The teacher question in depth: What makes a qualified teacher, how to find one, what the teacher-student relationship involves, what to look out for in problematic teacher situations.
• The retreat practice in depth: What sustained retreat practice involves, what it produces, what it requires, what populations should approach it with caution.

XIX. Resources Bridge

Foundational researchers and clinicians:

• Jon Kabat-Zinn (MBSR founder, Full Catastrophe Living, Wherever You Go There You Are, Coming to Our Senses)
• Richard Davidson (Center for Healthy Minds, Altered Traits with Daniel Goleman)
• Antoine Lutz (attention regulation research)
• Sara Lazar (Harvard, structural brain changes)
• Britta Hölzel (Harvard, brain structure)
• Judson Brewer (Brown, DMN/meditation, The Craving Mind, Unwinding Anxiety)
• Yi-Yuan Tang (Texas Tech, Integrative Body-Mind Training)
• Willoughby Britton (Brown, Varieties of Contemplative Experience, adverse effects research)
• Norman Farb (Toronto, narrative vs experiential mode)
• David Creswell (Carnegie Mellon, inflammation and mindfulness)
• Steve Cole (UCLA, CTRA work)
• Mark Williams, Zindel Segal, John Teasdale (MBCT)
• Marsha Linehan (DBT, integration of mindfulness with clinical practice)
• Steven Hayes (ACT, integration with behavioural science)
• Kristin Neff (self-compassion)
• Christopher Germer (mindful self-compassion)
• Ethan Kross (self-distancing research)

Foundational teachers across traditions:

• Thich Nhat Hanh (engaged Buddhist tradition, The Miracle of Mindfulness, Peace Is Every Step)
• Sam Harris (Waking Up, secular contemplative articulation)
• Joseph Goldstein (Insight Meditation Society, Mindfulness)
• Sharon Salzberg (Insight Meditation Society, Lovingkindness)
• Jack Kornfield (Insight Meditation Society, A Path with Heart)
• Tara Brach (Radical Acceptance, Radical Compassion, RAIN practice)
• Pema Chödrön (When Things Fall Apart, tonglen)
• Shinzen Young (taxonomy of techniques)
• Daniel Ingram (Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha)
• Culadasa/John Yates (The Mind Illuminated)
• B. Alan Wallace (contemplative-scientific dialogue)
• Bhikkhu Bodhi (Pali Canon translations)
• Daniel J. Siegel (Mindsight)
• David Treleaven (Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness)
• Ronald Purser (McMindfulness)
• John Welwood (spiritual bypassing)

Cross-section foundational figures:

• C. Sue Carter (oxytocin and pair-bonding, cross-referenced from Connection)
• James Coan (Social Baseline Theory, cross-referenced from Connection)
• Denis Noble (biological relativity, cross-referenced from The Singularity)
• Andrew Huberman (Stanford neuroscience, accessible synthesis)
• Peter Levine (Somatic Experiencing)
• Stephen Porges (polyvagal theory)
• David Rock (Your Brain at Work)

Foundational books:

• The Miracle of Mindfulness (Thich Nhat Hanh, 1975)
• Full Catastrophe Living (Kabat-Zinn, 1990, updated 2013)
• Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression (Segal, Williams, Teasdale, 2002, updated 2018)
• Waking Up (Harris, 2014)
• Mindfulness (Goldstein, 2013)
• Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha (Ingram, 2008, revised 2018)
• The Mind Illuminated (Culadasa, 2015)
• Altered Traits (Goleman and Davidson, 2017)
• Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness (Treleaven, 2018)
• McMindfulness (Purser, 2019)
• Radical Acceptance (Brach, 2003)
• When Things Fall Apart (Chödrön, 1997)
• In the Buddha’s Words (Bodhi, 2005)
• Your Brain at Work (Rock, 2009)