Daniel Goleman: The Truth About Meditation (a scientific look).
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 18 September 2017
⏱️ 55 minutes
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Summary
What if much of the popular wisdom and even so-called valid research on meditation...was wrong?! According to Daniel Goleman, it's time for a meditation wake-up call.
Best known for his worldwide bestseller Emotional Intelligence, Goleman reveals powerful new truths about meditation, what it really is and isn't, and how only about 1% of the 6,000+ studies done on the topic are what might be considered "good science."
A lifelong student of meditation and meditative practices, Daniel Goleman spent two years in India, first as a Harvard Predoctoral Traveling Fellow and then again on a Post-Doctoral Fellowship, followed by decades of practice and study. He has moderated several Mind and Life dialogues between the Dalai Lama and scientists, ranging from topics such as Emotions and Health to Environment, Ethics and Interdependence.
In his new book, Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain and Body, he pulls back the curtain on this practice, dives into the claims and show what's fact and what's pretty seriously stretching the truth. The bad news, there's a whole lot of fiction in the meditation space. The good news is, there are also many profoundly life-enhancing changes that come your way. Meditation, it turns out, changes you, on the level of DNA. In this conversation, you'll discover the real benefits of this powerful practice.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Long-term meditators, people who have been practicing every morning for years and sometimes |
| 0:08.4 | go to a retreat, there are many people like that. |
| 0:11.6 | If they do one day of meditation, like six hours or so, there's what's called the down |
| 0:18.7 | regulation of the genes for inflammation. |
| 0:22.7 | That means the genes that create inflammation throughout the body, which are at cause in |
| 0:27.3 | a wide range of disorders, arthritis, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, they go quiet. |
| 0:38.1 | So you may know today's guest, Daniel Goldman, as the guy who wrote a book called Emotional |
| 0:43.3 | Intelligence, came out in 1995, kind of exploded into the public consciousness as sold, I don't |
| 0:49.6 | know, a gazillion copies, been part of the curriculum now in thousands of schools, corporations. |
| 0:56.8 | It basically introduced the idea that success in life, that successful outcomes, a successful |
| 1:02.3 | life, is not just about IQ, it's not about wrote intelligence, it's about this thing called |
| 1:09.0 | EQ, emotional intelligence. |
| 1:12.3 | Underneath that, running under sort of his exploration as a writer, as somebody who |
| 1:17.9 | studied psychology academically, has been a decades-long devotion, fascination with meditation |
| 1:26.5 | and meditative practices. |
| 1:28.6 | And that led him down a rabbit hole of really exploring the landscape of meditation these |
| 1:33.7 | days, and looking fiercely at the science of what's true, what's not true, and revealing |
| 1:40.3 | some pretty eye-opening outcomes about what meditation does and doesn't do for us, some |
| 1:47.2 | myth-busting along the way as well. |
| 1:49.8 | And a lot of that is all wrapped up in a new book called Altered Traits, which he did |
| 1:53.2 | with Richard Davis. |
| 1:55.1 | And I had a chance to sit down with him and really kind of dive deep into his background. |
... |
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