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This week we talk to Michael Taft about better meditation
Michael W. Taft is an author, editor, meditation teacher, and neuroscience junkie. He is currently a meditation coach specializing in secular, science-based meditation training in corporate settings and one-on-one sessions. Michael is the author of several books, including The Mindful Geek, and Nondualism: A Brief History of a Timeless Concept, Ego (which he co-authored), as well as the editor of such books as Hardwiring Happiness by Rick Hanson and the upcoming The Science of Enlightenment by Shinzen Young.
He has taught at Google and worked on curriculum development for SIYLI. Michael is also an official advisor to the Therapeutic Neuroscience Lab. He was previously editor-in-chief of Being Human, a site for exploring what evolution, neuroscience, biology, psychology, archeology, and technology can tell us about the human condition, and was editorial director of Sounds True.
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In This Interview Michael and I Discuss…
- The One You Feed parable
- How it takes awareness to know what wolf we are feeding
- Learning to meditate on emotional states
- Defining meditation
- The difference between meditation and mindfulness
- Making the unconscious conscious
- The misconceptions of meditation
- How meditation does not mean having no thoughts
- The Teletubbies
- That meditation is not always supposed to be blissful
- How there are more ways to meditate than just following the breath
- His teacher Shinzen Young
- The pillars of concentration, acceptance and sensory clarity
- Meditation and the Flow state
- How we can’t really examine something while we are trying to change it
- That acceptance does not mean becoming passive or inactive
- The benefits of improving our sensory clarity
- How a wandering mind is an unhappy mind
- The role of the default mode network in rumination and depression
- Learning to turn the default mode network off
Michael Taft Links
Derrick Pohl says
I think that you’ve got a confusing typo in the title of this episode. It says “better mediation” but I think you mean “better meditation”.
Eric Zimmer says
Thanks Derrick. It’s fixed.
Patrick says
Not long ago I went into a newly built modern courthouse for work. I was excited to see on the listing of rooms that there was a “meditation room.” How forward-thinking to include mindfulness in the dispute-resolution process, I thought. Nah, they just misspelled “mediation.”
Eric Zimmer says
Ha! I’m seeing more of meditation rooms in airports and some companies.