Broadening our perspective on success and other thoughts about leadership

A few weeks ago I attended the Pump Your Career meeting--a day of workshops organized for female academics to give them a platform to meet and work on professionalization. While the title of the event is a bit stereotypical, the content is usually very good.

The event started by a keynote by Pravini Baboeram which drew everyone's attention to the theme of diversity. While it is known that diversity tends to increase quality of work output, still there is a challenge in making workplaces friendly to a diverse audience. The speaker encouraged us to move from being colour-blind to being colour-brave. One important thing to keep in mind is that equal opportunity does not just involve providing the same opportunities for everyone, but more to provide circumstances such that everyone can make use of these opportunities. For example, having a network is great, but if someone does not know how to network, the network is of no use. In a sense, we need to think from not just our own perspective but from the other person's perspective.

Pravini Baboeram

Rana Dajani

This time I attended a workshop by Roel Breuls from the Centre for Academic Leadership which I enjoyed a lot. The workshop talked about the complicated feelings involved in taking a position of a leader, which I recognized quite well. For example: a leader cannot satisfy all. A very painful conclusion, but very recognizable. An inspiring quote that was shared was by Philip Massinger (1623): "Those who govern others first should be masters of themselves." Consequently, Roel introduced the concept of Personal Leadership, which means that to effectively lead others, you first need to be able to govern yourself, and realize your strengths and weaknesses. For example, if you are strong on vision, you may be weaker on implementing practical details, and if you have a tendency to control others, you find it difficult to go with the flow. Yet leadership tends to require us to go beyond the strong preferences and tendencies we have to endure the discomfort of working with our dominant tendencies such that they are reduced and balanced out by their opposites. It is quite helpful to reflect on your dominant tendencies and to think about which ones need work. Leadership is also a lonely position, because you have to do this work mostly by yourself: your team is not going to do it. However, friends and colleagues can help you power through this.

the leaky pipeline

We also talked about the complicated meaning of a team in academia. Usually a team is a group with a common goal, a common leader, and interdepency. While the common leader and interdependency are satisfied. the common goal is more rare with many different projects happening at any point in time. An insight from this discussion was that the tasks of a leader are to set boundaries and to protect her people. When there is too little nurturing or too little boundaries, disturbances can arise in teams. Leaders should strive to still create some coherence, such as creating a culture for working together. I realized I should probably create such a vision statement for my lab as well, following some wonderful examples from Candice Morey and Maryam Aly.

Other interesting factoids were that females tend to deal with uncertainty in different ways than men (in general, of course). While males tend to resort to hierarchy and competition in the face of uncertainty, females tend to resort to a lack of hierarchy. And guess what the academic world looks like? Pretty male in my book!

Finally, I also found the overview of leadership tasks very helpful. A leader is to endure loneliness, otherwise you cannot set boundaries. Moreover, they have to use power, using language such as "I want you to...", "I don't want you to...". I notice how I find that quite challenging. Also, the leader should leave the fate of the employee with the employee, and not do their work for them. Finally, the leader should be an example of success, which includes the ability to take criticism, which can inspire others to also dare more. While this is challenging, a good message was that "there is nothing great about making yourself too small." Good point.

Presentation of the LNVH monitor on females in senior academic
positions and salary gaps

The day ended with a keynote by a very inspiring woman: Rana Dajani, who presented herself as someone wearing five scarves, after a book she wrote. The five scarves represent her roles as mother, academic, advocate, and more. She mentioned that interestingly, in the middle east and India, there are more women than men in STEM. Why is this? Why is there na absence of leading females in STEM in the Western world? She proposed that this could be because success is defined mostly in male terms: fame and money. What if we redefine the criteria pf success? Maybe we can then have a much more creative and diverse workforce. I resonate quite a bit with those ideas. She encouraged us to persist, because the world needs us, and we can be role models for others. Yet, we also need support, and recommended mentoring. I highly agree--mentoring is incrdibly helpful. She also mentioned a website with resources of mentoring support: the three circles of Alemat. In short, a very inspiring day in which I learnt a lot!

Finding gratitude in happiness and suffering

The thirteenth lojong slogan is "Be grateful to everyone." I think this holiday time is therefore a great time to blog about this in the #lojongchallenge, since I feel the Christmas period is always a time to reflect on what I can be grateful about. As the year draws to a close, I always think about what happened in the past year, and so much has happened. Although I never feel I have enough time to accomplish what I want to, nevertheless stuff happens and papers do get published, data gets collected, and grants get submitted. In this past year, my lab doubled in size, which is quite sobering.

Grateful for the delicious food on the Christmas table (a vegan roast, gravy, loads of veggies...). Picture by Maya Thierens.

Being grateful is a one of the easiest way to enhance your happiness. There is even some research that shows that being grateful is a great way to enhance satisfaction with life and self esteem. I often forget to be grateful for what I have in the mad rush to get stuff done. When things slow down towards the end of the year, gratefulness gets a chance to re-emerge. When you think about it, there is a lot to be grateful about: having a (somewhat) healthy body, having a roof over your head, food to eat, friends and family, a sense of purpose in life...

Image of my injured knee

Some of the aspects of gratefulness that are emphasized in Lojong are also worth a mention: we usually have the habit to think that all the good things that befall us are our own merits. But actually when you think about it, a lot of the good things that happen are due to many causes and conditions that make those emerge. Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche writes in The Intelligent Heart:"it is a gift from other sentient beings". Without the care of your parents, you would not be able to grow up into a functioning adult. Without the care of colleagues, you would be able to succeed and get promotion in your job. Without food to eat you would not be able to be healthy and survive. In this way, contemplating the kindness of others in acquiring what we enjoy can open our hearts to these others, instead of being oblivious to them. One thing that I was particularly grateful for in the past days is a chance to be a dancing angel in a Christmas mass/celebration for patients in the hospital. Such a gift to be able to give something to those suffering with my dancing!

Grateful for the chance to be a dancing angel for patients in the hospital

But there is more: we can even be grateful for the challenges provided by others. An example I got to work with this month was that another bicyclist hit me one morning as I was cycling to work. I fell on the pavement and my whole left side was scraped, blue and bloody (see picture for an impression). Even now, my knee is still a bit swollen, although it does not hurt anymore. While I was definitely not happy (especially about the fact that I had to skip several ballet classes because of my injured knee), this was my chance to practise "being grateful to everyone." I was definitely not very successful at appreciating this, but every so often I managed to use my injury as a tool to develop compassion for everyone else who was suffering as well. Feeling the pain in my own body somehow made other's suffering much more real, and I did the healing practices of Vajrasattva for both myself and others. So, in the end, there was benefit in the suffering, and looking back upon it, I can be grateful to the bicyclist who hit me. I feel that for every bit of suffering that I can transform, I become a bit less fearful, and acquire some wisdom that no-one will be able to take away from me.

Finally, for another reflection on gratitude, see this article by Salmaan Sana.

Finding freedom from criticism

Another #lojongchallenge slogan is "drive all blames into one". That sounds pretty scary, doesn't it? However, actually I found that here too the counter-intuitive slogan could help me find some freedom. The slogan refers to the ego, which according to the Buddhist teachings is the source of all suffering. How does this work? Well, in my understanding the ego is this part of yourself that tends to easily feel a victim when criticized, and the part of yourself that continually seeks praise. Neither of these things feels particularly good, does it? In the last weeks, I have been experimenting with my response to criticism. My normal reaction when someone criticises me is to go all in defensive mode, or to hide away. Basically I try to do everything to avoid feeling the criticism. However, Sogyal Rinpoche would always say that "a haircut is not a skin cut". In our minds the criticism may feel like a skin cut, but it's just someone trying to tell you something. In fact, very often the person is simply trying to teach you something. So can you approach the criticism with an attitude of curiosity and appreciation for the things they are trying to teach you rather than one of fear or defensiveness? One of my friends says that people who are very critical are actually very good because they keep you on your toes, where otherwise you may have gone into a comfortable lull and overlooked important issues. Moreover, the people who criticise you also help you with a bit of self-control. By being afraid of criticism we behave better. I found that when I am able to remember these things and simply face criticism as an opportunity to learn then it feels so much better (and probably is more useful too).

Picture by Dubravka Knezic

The other context where ego plays up is that it seeks continuous praise. However, if there is one thing true about life, then it is that you won't be praised all the time. And probably if you were, you would become a very arrogant and ill-tempered person. So, what to do? A very smart approach is to realize that all praise is not really that helpful: it makes you feel good on the short term, but then it does not teach you so much. Of course it teaches you a little about what behaviors should be cultivated, but probably people's opinions are quite biased. So, looking for praise is not really the recipe for becoming happy. I must confess that I am quite terrible at this, but I think that by contemplating this over and over may make me less dependent on praise, and less fearful of criticism. And in the end, that will most certainly make me happier.

Viewing monastic debate through the lens of Western psychology and neuroscience: what can we learn?

I recently submitted a paper co-authored with probably more Tibetan monks than any paper in history (you can read a preprint here). The main point of the paper is to explain that while meditation research in the West has mostly focused on a narrow range of meditation practices such as mindfulness, there are many more practices out there, one of which is analytical meditation and debate. Why are analytical meditation and debate so interesting? As the Dalai Lama pointed out a few weeks ago in his talk in the Netherlands, reasoning and study, of which analytical meditation is the method, may be the best way for Westerners to engage with the Buddhist teachings. Even for a secular ethics that would be available for people from all religions, such analytical meditation could be useful.

So what is analytical meditation and what is debate? Analytical meditation is a practice of studying a text and contemplating it, asking questions such as "do I really understand what it means? How does that relate to other things I know? What follows from this statement? What is it consistent with? What is it inconsistent with?". In debate, you ask these questions to another person. In the tradition, such debates have a very distinct physical manifestation. You can find some videos and pictures from monastic debates a the website of the project.

In our paper, we describe what cognitive mechanisms we think are involved in the practice of debating. First you need to keep track of all the things that have been discussed so far, and this requires working memory. As the debate goes on, cognitive load increases. This may reflect in increasing engagement of a neural network called the fronto-parietal attention network, and this may also be associated with increasing inwardly-turned attention. In EEG measurements, such inwardly-turned attention is likely to be reflected in increasing brain waves in mid-frontal areas. Debating may also increase your speed of processing information, because if debaters do not respond quickly enough, then they are made fun of by their opponents. Furthermore, debate may promote mental flexibility, since winning a debate requires you to look at things from many different angles, and try to find an angle that your opponent has not yet found. Experienced debaters also say this is the most satisfying aspect of debating: it is a kind of research that may give you more insight into the topic when you consider the implications of looking at it in a particular way. This suggests to me as a neuroscientist that debate may require strong engagement of areas such as the anterior cingulate cortex and prefrontal cortex. Debating also is a strong motivator for memory training, since you can not go back to your textbook in the debate courtyard. Indeed we found that during a type of debate called "counting debate", in which the debaters review the texts and definitions, it happened more often that one of the debaters had "difficulty remembering" than during the logic debates, but even there difficulty-remembering could occur. Since debate uses logical reasoning as a foundation, it may also train this cognitive skill. We are now measuring that with reasoning tasks (stay tuned for results!). But debating is not just a cognitive practice: it also requires resilience to strong emotions such as anger, anxiety and more. Once you lose your cool, you are likely to lose the debate. Especially during logic debates, the debaters face many self-reported difficulties. Nevertheless, in some preliminary data from a questionnaire, we found that more experienced monks reported fewer difficulties in regulating their emotions (also stay tuned for this). Finally, debate is a highly social form of meditation, and in another paper we report how inter-brain synchrony, thought to reflect mentally tuning into each other, changes over the different phases of the debate.

So why is all of this interesting? Maybe some of the techniques that the debaters use can also be helpful in our education system. For example, the movement aspect could be used to make the students more physically active. The technique of continually questioning everything that is being put forward and carefully examining its logical consequences could help to cultivate critical thinking. However, a significant challenge in this is that our education system in the West relies on covering a large amount of material cursorily and learning skills for managing information rather than really knowing a detailed area by heart. This makes it much more difficult to apply the techniques learnt in debate. But I continue to think about this idea. If you have any suggestions, let me know!

Facing the ever-growing todo list with compassion

The next slogan in the #lojongchallenge is "turn all suffering into the path of awakening." While usually we want suffering to go away, and feel like it distracts us from the spiritual path, or whatever other goals we seek to accomplish, this slogan encourages us to instead use the suffering as fuel to progress on the spiritual path. How would that be possible? In contemplating this slogan, I realized that my particular and most pervasive suffering is the todo-list that keeps on growing, and makes me feel really stressed (you can tell I am pretty spoilt). I suspect I am not alone in this, since stress and feeling overworked are rampant in our modern society. But how can we work with the ever-growing todo list?

I felt that just realizing that the ever-growing todo-list was making me feel stressed was already quite an accomplishment. Such a realization is the moment of awareness. Suddenly the stress is not the thing that defines me, but instead is linked to something outside me--I am not the stress. In fact, I can kindly look at the stress and become friends with it. Instead of hating my endless todo list, I can also ask what it can teach me. What does an endless todo-list say about your priorities? Maybe my ego thinks I am so important that I need to do all those things? Do I really need to do them? And even if there is such a long todo list, I can also just get started, dedicate all my efforts to the benefit of beings, and not worry so much about all the other stuff that still needs to be done. In some of his teachings, Tsoknyi Rinpoche explains very well how sometimes we let ourselves become really stressed because when we are doing one thing, our mind is already onto the next thing and starts worrying about that. in fact, the moment we do nothing, our mind is so restless that it wants to do something--anything. This is one moment when we may create more stuff to do.

Random picture taken by my brother Floris van Vugt

What I found very helpful is just to sit for a moment with my todo list. Not to let myself get distracted by it, but just simply to feel my feelings. Suddenly the todo list was not so daunting--really my stories and catastrophizing were what made it so bad. So whenever I feel this stress about the growing todo list creep in, I try to kindly observe it, and let it dissolve on its own accord. It definitely has helped me be a little bit more calm and happy.

Another important observation is that sometimes I use my todo-list as an excuse for not being able to do my meditation practice. But in fact, the todo list (or any other problem or stress) is exactly when you should practise says Khandro Rinpoche. Practice is not about feeling good; it is about confronting the neurotic aspects of ourselves that make us aggrandize things, go after the things we want and run away from the things we don't want, and ignoring everyone else. So when we feel like a martyr who has to work so hard when looking at our todo list, when we want to run away from it and be in some different place, this is our chance to work with that. Of course that doesn't mean we have to always accept such a todo list and not change the outer circumstances as well. But given that we are now in this situation, why not relate to it in a more sane way?

"Don't run too fast"--self-compassion in the rat race that can be work

Another Lojong slogan is "Begin the sequence of sending and taking with yourself." This slogan reminds me of what we often tend to overlook: caring for ourselves. While caring for others can create a "broad mind" as I suggested in my previous blog, this does not mean you should completely neglect yourself. I think that many of us in the West do not have a sense that we are basically good, and as a result, we are continually trying to prove ourselves and try to get "better." Tsoknyi Rinpoche is one of the Tibetan lamas who has very good teachings on this topic. interestingly, when we try to benefit others and only focus on others to be a "good human" but we don't feel fundamentally good ourselves, then the whole thing becomes quite neurotic.

So what should we do? We can apply all the compassion practices to ourselves! And we should. If you find yourself thinking "I don't need this", "I don't want to waste time on this", this probably means that you really need it! So, instead of taking others suffering and giving away your happiness, as is suggested in the practice of tonglen, you can take away the suffering of your future self, and give happiness to your future self. Or, as is suggested in the Tibetan book of living and dying Chapter 12, you can take on the suffering of the part of you that was hurt, and give it your happiness. In this way you can heal yourself, so that you are in fact ready to give. These ideas are backed up by a lot of research suggesting that self-compassion is crucial for human well-being and can help people deal much better with a lot of stress and emotional turmoil.

Picture by Floris van Vugt

This week, I tried to practise self-compassion when I went back into the thick of work: the academic year is starting. One mantra that I learnt during the retreat is "you don't have to run so fast." My main habit is that I tend to want to do too many things and go too fast when I am insecure. During my runs during the retreat, I would time and time again repeat to myself "you don't have to run so fast." During running, this is important to ensure that you reach the end of the run. But during work, it is important to ensure that you don't overlook things or make (too many) errors. So for me, self-compassion involves mostly giving myself space and permission to not run too fast (both literally and metaphorically).

Happier classrooms - some ideas from the Dalai Lama (and others)

Today His Holiness the Dalai Lama visited the Netherlands to give some talks and lectures. I was fortunate enough to attend one of these, a Buddhist teaching on the Eight Verses for Training the Mind, which is actually a Lojong text as well! In conjunction with this event, Mind and Life Europe also organized a workshop entitled Education of the Heart. In this blog I share some of what I learnt at these meetings.

First the Dalai Lama gave a good tip relevant to those following the #lojongchallenge: if you have a flight delay, read the Eight Verses of Training the Mind text to yourself. Presumably another Lojong text would also do, but the main thing is to use the time for something useful, instead of getting frustrated about the delayed flights. The Dalai Lama also mentioned that you can also acquire a glimpse of the understanding of how phenomena are empty by looking at present-day quantum physics. However, in quantum physics they then go on to state that there is no objective reality at all, which is not in accord with Buddhism, which does assert an objective reality--things do appear--but just not in the way we usually perceive it. He ended by mentioning that the teachings on emptiness can really help to free the mind, because they reduce the self-centredness that causes anxiety and anger and ruin our health.

So how can we train in these skills? For this we need education. Sander Tideman mentioned that in a previous Education of the Heart meeting, one important point was that compassion is not just empathy but involves critical thinking as well. Just like His Holiness the Dalai Lama, he mentioned how compassion and warm-heartedness can overcome stress and anxiety. Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi from Emory University talked about the Social Emotional and Ethical Learning program they have developed at Emory University tries to implement the vision of His Holiness the Dalai Lama from his books on secular ethics (e.g., Ethics for the New Millenium) into a curriculum, which so far focuses on K-12. The curriculum includes attention training, compassion and care, systems awareness (becoming aware of the larger context of which you are a part), and ethical engagement. Crucial in this is that teachers embody these skills themselves. The program includes a lot of scientific perspectives as well as reflective practices such as journaling. Early findings suggest the program results in more self-compassion, a calmer classroom and better prosocial skills.

Also in higher education there are some initiatives. Rob van Tulder described his work in bringing the heart into the business school of the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. He shared an inspiring quote of how rare it is to find people with a cool head, even rarer those with a warm heart, and the rarest of all are those who use the warmth of their heart to keep their head cool. Quite an inspiring quote! He mentioned how more of these ideas are worked out in his book Skill sheets which I have not had the chance to check out. Nevertheless, one important challenge they are facing is distraction by too much information, social media, etc. I agree that this is a challenge. I think this is where structural teaching of mindfulness practices could be useful, because they could help people to acquire a sense of meta-awareness of where their attention is.

Finally, Katherine Weare presented the new initiative of the Contemplative Education hub of Mind & Life Europe, because there are many initiatives on contemplative education, but little coordination. Such coordination could allow the different initiatives to learn from each other, but also in advocacy on a societal level, and to deal with challenges such as "how to incorporate the wisdom traditions in an authentic way, yet remain open to people of all religious and non-religious backgrounds?" She ended on a happy note, reminding us that true mindfulness is not only a path to happiness, but happiness is this moment. Maybe contemplative education can help us to build happier schools, and universities. Wouldn't that be marvellous?

Remembering to remember this trick to make your mind bigger

Next installment in the #lojongchallenge. The next slogan is more general: "in all activities, train with the slogans." I think this refers to how in general, it is important to not just think about the slogans in your meditation, but try to remember to apply them in your daily life. Of course that is nothing new for us on this blog, because that is what the blog is all about. The general idea of Lojong is to train an attitude in which we give all gain to others, and take all loss upon ourselves, as the sage Geshe Chekawa said. This is about the most counterintuitive that you can think of, so it is crucial to try to remember again and again. Writing this blog is one way in which I remind myself. Other people have cards with the different slogans in a visible place, or they put some of the slogans on their fridge.

So how have I been working with these slogans? Currently I am on retreat in the beautiful dharma centre of Lerab Ling in southern France, which obviously makes it easier to remember these slogans. In the previous blog I write about how I used the Lojong teachings to generate compassion for the pain of others while running. Another example is that when some judgment about people arises, you can immediately use that as a source of compassion. Instead of judging them, you can see people's suffering, and you can pray or aspire that it may be relieved.

I also had some spectacular failure of applying these teachings. Today right after finishing my retreat rota of cleaning toilets and showers, I was sitting at lunch and noticed I had lost my water bottle. That really sucks when on retreat! So I set out to look for it, first in the temple, and then back at the place where I clean the washrooms. Now it turns out that the person who had locked the cleaningroom after we were done had misplaced the key, so I could not look for my water bottle there. I spent my whole lunch break looking for this person frantically, and not a single moment did any thought of compassion for others arise. In fact, my mind was dramatically narrowed to just looking for this one self-related thing. It was not a very pleasant feeling. Thankfully, I found the person at the end of the lunch break, and he had in fact misplaced the key and I found my water bottle back. What a different space did I feel in my mind. Next time I should remember the Lojong teachings. It would have probably made my lunch break quite a bit more enjoyable.

Finally, to further inspire serious engagement with Lojong, I recently read an article that hypothesized that the Tibetans' resilience in the face of the torture, being forced to flee their country, poverty, and so on, comes from an ingrained mentality of Lojong. They themselves called it "broad thinking" in which you take off the focus from yourself and expand it to all the others that are suffering. Definitely worth a read, and worth doing more research into!

Everything is workable -- turning failure into compassion

The next slogan in the #lojongchallenge is "three objects, three poisons, three sources of virtue." This sounds quite cryptical, but it's actually a really powerful idea. The three poisons according to Buddhism are the three principal negative emotions of attachment, aversion and ignorance or greed, hatred and delusion. These emotions are thought to be negative because they lead to suffering for both the person and those around him or her. But the good news is that each of these can be turned into a source of virtue. So this means everything is workable!

The secret is taht whenever we experience a negative emotion, we can realize that we are not the only ones experiencing these emotions, and we can develop a sense of compassion to those others: may our experience of this negative emotion be enough. This immediately creates a sense of space, and a sense that the suffering of the negative emotion is not useless. For example, I am currently on a Buddhist retreat, and every morning I go for a run. Now it is quite hilly here, which means every run involves some painful ascent. This time, instead of being intimidated by the climb, I tried to use it to take upon me all the pain and exhaustion of all the countless runners. A that time, the climb became much less painful. What a relief!

cows I met during my daily run

up the hill (not during my running route but still up the hill)

Since I am curently on retreat, I am not working. However, I think it would also work really well in dealing with failure. For example, when your paper gets rejected, you may mentally feel: "may I take upon myself all the other paper rejections of all my colleagues as well." The paper rejection still sucks, but you are no longer alone. You then focus less on feelings of worthlessness that may also come up, but on the universality of the suffering (welcome to the world of academia!). I will definitely try this next time, if I manage to think of it ;-)

Seeing the other: daily life benefits of changing perspectives

I have been slacking on the #lojongchallenge in the last weeks, but it is never too late to get back on the bandwagon. I guess one excuse is that I submitted a few papers: one paper described the effects of Tibetan monastic debate on the participants' brain waves. Another article reviews the very small literature on computational modeling in the context of meditation research, where of course I argue that more people should take this approach. A final paper in which we compare analytical meditation and debate to other contemplative practices will be submitted tomorrow before I head into retreat. I hope to write another couple of blogposts during the retreat, since I think blogging is a wonderful way to reflect.

Picture by Floris van Vugt. Seeing a very small other! (little frog)

Now onto the topic of this blog: the next Lojong slogan, which is: "Sending and taking should be practised alternately. These two should ride the breath." This slogan refers to a Buddhist practice called Tonglen--the exchanging of self and other. The idea in this meditation is that you do exactly the opposite of what you normally do: normally you try to acquire good things for yourself and avoid bad things. In this practice, you instead take other people's suffering, and give away all the good things you have. Now of course that is a bit challenging since it goes so directly against our natural tendencies--even though sometimes it can be quite liberating as well. Nevertheless, you can also start by putting yourself in the other's shoes: realizing that they are another human being that also wants to be happy. This seems to be logical, but if you think about it, you realize that in fact we rarely act that way. More often, we consider others as just some kind of animated things. I have this problem sometimes with my students and other employees: I tend to think about their work from the perspective of my knowledge and skills, instead of thinking about their skill level. As a consequence I then get frustrated because they may not be able to perform the work I ask them to do efficiently. When instead I look for the talents of that individual and try to help them from their perspective, the work proceeds more smoothly and more efficiently--for all of us.

This trick of exchanging yourself with others also works when another person is acting quite annoyingly from your perspective. Usually we then focus on our own annoyance, which gets worse and worse. If instead we focus on the needs of the other person, and think about why they may be acting that way, maybe even feeling some compassion for them, the annoyance decreases quite quickly. So next time this person cuts right in front of you, you can try to imagine how they may be very stressed about an upcoming deadline, instead of focusing on your own anger and frustration. Worth an experiment! (probably more than one...)

Lesson I learnt from Tibetan monks: make sure you don't take yourself to seriously and play

The next #lojongchallenge slogan is "in daily life, be a child of illusion." The idea is that during meditation, you become more familiar with the idea that all phenomena are impermanent, interdependent and consisting of multiple things. However, only realizing this in meditation is not enough: you need to also embody it in your daily life. As I detailed in my previous posts, even just getting a taste of this already creates so much space in your mind, and so much humor.

monks playing around during a classroom activity demonstrating a signalling cascade with a movie-cut board

Some monks really love to play badminton, basketball or soccer!

The challenge is of course to remember to be a child of illusion--looking upon the world with the innocence and playfulness of a child--in the midst of the craziness of life. Probably my most powerful reminder of how this could work were my experiences teaching the monks at the Emory-Tibet Science initiative. Although most of these guys were in their thirties and beyond, they were so tremendously playful, while also being dedicated at the same time. They were always up for little game-like activities in class. One day we studied visual adaptation by asking some volunteers to wear "pirate patches" (in reality those were sleep masks covering only one eye) and then having them go through an obstacle course in a dark room that had been created by their fellow students. They had so much fun taking pictures of themselves wearing their patch, then stumbling through the obstacle course (even the non-patch wearers wanted to try it afterwards). In the West, probably my students would have complained about having to do such silly things, but here everyone just played whole-heartedly in a game. But the monks were not just playing around--they were also studying until 1 am for their buddhist philosophy exams. I hope that i can learn some of the monk's playfulness. We need to have more in our world, that is often way too serious. I am convinced that having more playfulness will help to reduce stress and thereby improve mental health, and probably enhance success as well. It would be so much fun if during our scientific debates at conferences, we would pepper them with jokes and humor, instead of being worried about being serious and prestigious scientists.

In short, what I probably learnt most from the Tibetan monks is: don't forget to play. The added benefit is that it implements part of this Lojong slogan on being a child of illusion as well!

Learning to rest and resting to learn

It took me a while to write this next blog in the #lojongchallenge because I have been running around at Drepung Loseling monastery in India to teach the monks there about neuroscience in the context of the Emory-Tibet Science initiative. It has been an amazing experience! About every other morning I go for a run, and during this morning's run and the subsequent resting meditation I finally had an idea for this blog. The next Lojong slogan is "rest in the nature of alaya."

Monks resting during a class experiment with heart rate monitors

In the classroom at Drepung Loseling

According to my limited understanding, the idea of this slogan is that after all of the investigation, you can rest in meditation and simply observe the thoughts and emotions. Actually, this led me to think a bit more about a very interesting meditation method common for analytical meditation: first you contemplate and reason about some concept (such as the emptiness of phenomena and self that we talked about before), and then when you get tired, you simply drop the meditation and rest. This method of resting is unique to the practice of analytical meditation, and is what makes it different from conventional study in school. The resting may help to consolidate the insights into your experience, and create a deeper and more embodied understanding.

How would resting enhance your understanding? One possible neural mechanism is that of replay. It has been found in animals that when they sit quietly, then their brain activity replays recent experiences. This replay is mostly visible in hippocampal cells that are sensitive to specific locations in space, which repeat the recent trajectory of the animal, and to some extent predict its upcoming choices. It is thought that such approximate repetition reflects the animal's simulation of recent experiences and allows it to generalize and produce adaptive choices on the basis of that (see this paper for an example of replay and its consequences for decision making in humans). In other words, we continually replay recent experiences when we have a moment of rest, and these allow us to recombine these experiences, encode them in our memory, and generalize them to new situations.

Despite this potential benefit of rest, it is sometimes hard to do. I have written before that I find it difficult to rest, but when I manage to do so, it creates a lot of spaciousness and satisfaction. One powerful moment to rest is when you--as I did this morning--have gone for a run and then afterwards you come home and feel completely exhausted. That is a moment it is very easy to simply drop your mind and rest in the essence of the mind, without any further desires (of course the endorphins created by the running help too!). So, note to self: remember to rest!

"I have no time." But how much should you believe your mind?

A bit delayed, but this blog is about the slogan "Examine the nature of unborn awareness". Where the previous slogan was about investigating the nature of reality, this slogan is about investigating the mind that perceives that reality. From my perspective as a neuroscientist I can of course say an infinity of things about this. Our mind feels so real when we think about it every moment. However, an interesting exercise is: how would you draw the mind? As a neuroscientist, I would draw the mind probably as a nice brain picture with colorful blobs. But also as a neuroscientist I know better than anyone that these blob-pictures are highly-processed statistical pictures, that actually say very little about the lived experience of our mind. They only say something about how large numbers of trials in one condition differ slightly from a large number of trials in another condition. So when you come to think of it, our mind does not really have a form.

busy in India (where I am now)

Even worse, we think we can control our minds, but actually, most of the time we are not even aware of what it is doing. In a very interesting article, Thomas Metzinger analyzes how little time we actually have agency over our minds. So much of our thinking is just driven by all kinds of habits, which we repeat over and over again without questioning. My personal favorite habit is "I don't have time", which I have been practising quite a few times in the past weeks (hence no blog). The more I practise it, the more my mind feels tight and my life feels like a heavy blanket. Sometimes, when I can see this is all just a construction of my mind, I can actually develop some agency. And even if not, at the very least, considering for a moment that my mind is a construction that seems much more real than it really is, creates a tremendous sense of space. At least for one moment I can take "I have no time" less seriously--because time too is a construction of my mind...

Facing an angry colleague by turning him into a dreamlike angry colleague

This week's Seven Points of Mind Training is "regard all dharmas as dreams". Dharmas here refers to phenomena. This topic links to the Buddhist teachings on emptiness, which is a huge topic. However, very simply one aspect of it is that we take our experiences less seriously. Actually, I recently watched a very interesting TED talk by neuroscientist Anil Seth that made me think of this topic. He demonstrated how none of our perceptions are pure perceptions of reality: all perceptions are in part constructed by our predictions about the world. From a Buddhist perspective, the most important predictions we make are that things are permanent--they are not going to disappear or change, that they are singular--do not consist of multiple parts, and independent--they do not depend on other things. If we think about this, all of this makes a lot of sense, but emotionally we tend to react often as if things are permanent, independent and singular. Conversely, when we consider things are like the stuff that dreams are made of, then we can often see them with a lot more humor and we get less overwhelmed by them.

This week I had a good challenge with which I could practice this: a colleague of mine got very angry with me about some communication issues and misunderstandings. When people get angry at me, my habit is to duck away and try to avoid it. However, this of course does not solve things. So, I had to face it and go talk to the angry colleague. Here the "dreamlike" concept was really helpful. Before I walked to his room, I reminded myself of the dreamlike nature of everything. And in dreams, nothing can really go wrong--when you remember it is a dream you can change everything, and if all else fails, you just wake up. The reminder of dreams immediately gave me some space outside my thoughts, and I worried less about being hurt. And actually the meeting with the colleague turned out not to be so bad after all. If only I could remember this more often!

Ballet also allows me to enter some kind of a different reality or "dream world"

Undermining the imposter syndrome with reflecting on hopes and fears

The first slogan of the Seven Points of Mind Training is "First, train in the preliminaries". Preliminaries are in fact a whole topic in themselves. A large part of these preliminaries includes reflecting on what is called the Four Thoughts which are reflections on (1) the preciousness of our human birth, (2) the truth of impermanence, (3) the infallibility of cause and effect, and (4) the suffering nature of samsara--the cycle of birth and death. Although the last reflection on suffering sounds quite negative, this is the one I decided to focus on this week.

So much of what I do is hoping for success (picture from Young Academy Groningen)

Where does the suffering come from? One of the most clear explanations of this is given in terms of the Eight Worldly Dharmas: hope for fame, fear of infamy; hope for gain, fear of loss; hope for happiness, fear of suffering; and hope for gain, fear of loss. I notice myself getting caught up in these hopes and fears a lot, especially in relation to my job. One of the most insidious aspects of my job is the imposter syndrome, which many academics suffer from (of course many people in other professions as well). It is the feeling that you only got to your job because of a fluke, and any time they are going to find out that you are really not capable. I often get this feeling when a grant is rejected (as happened this past week), and sometimes I get it in my ballet class as well (when I am put in the back row on stage for a show).

The interesting thing about the Eight Worldly Dharmas is that they completely undermine this imposter syndrome thinking. Imposter syndrome and the feeling that you are not good enough can only exist if there is a need to succeed, to be better than other people, to not suffer. The moment I realize that actually all these hopes and fears are only leading to suffering, and kind of short-sighted, I can feel a lot of space open up. The whole question of not being good enough becomes irrelevant when you are not hoping for fame and being afraid of infamy; instead you just focus on doing your best and trying to benefit others. Of course understanding this intellectually is not fixing it straight away, and you need to go through this reasoning many times, but it is worth the effort.

Introducing the #lojongchallenge

Last weekend I was at a retreat organized by Rigpa Netherlands about the topic of Lojong. Lojong means literally training the habitual mind. The Lojong text we focused on was the Seven points of mind training. What is amazing about these teachings is that they are very practical ways to bring kindness and compassion in your life, and at the same time to give you some tools to work with your emotions. Note that these blogs are not intended to be teaching tools, so if you want to know more about these teachings, I suggest you read some of the excellent books that are around, such as Training the Mind, The Intelligent Heart or for a more contemporary application to the workplace: Awake at Work. Or you can of course take a course at your local Tibetan Buddhist centre if they offer it.

Picture taken in my hotel room in Amsterdam at the retreat

The retreat was an interesting one for me, because Rigpa has been in a lot of turmoil because the main teacher Sogyal Rinpoche has been accused of sexual abuse, physical abuse and financial mis-management, and consequently he stepped down as the director of Rigpa.* This was the first retreat without him, quite a searching process for the sangha that is very divided on what they think of the matter. In the midst of all the rampant emotions and the general happenings in the world, it was magnificent to study and practise Lojong.

While I think these teachings are amazing, my main problem is that I always forget to actually put them into practice. For this reason, I came up with the #lojongchallenge, where I challenge myself (and whoever would like to join) to write a blog/tweet/facebook/instagram post on a Lojong topic every week. In these blogs I plan to not regurgitate the teaching, but rather write a short story on how I worked with the teachings in my life as a practitioner and as an academic (or even as a dancer). I will probably start by going through the 59 Lojong slogans in order, because that gives a nice structure, but I may deviate from that as time continues.

Note also that these stories are not intended as a showcase of my realization (which I clearly don't have), nor a teaching tool, but only as a motivation to take the Lojong teachings seriously, and maybe to inspire others as in the process...

An example of a story could be like what happened to me during this retreat. In the first day I felt pretty much everything went wrong: folding bicycle that was supposed to transport me every day from hotel to venue broke down (its chain kept falling off and cannot be repaired), my watch stopped working, the balloon that is inside my meditation cushion broke, and I lost my coat (meanwhile found). As all this happened, I felt my familiar tendency to catastrophize, to feel that "everything is going wrong" started to emerge. Then the slogan "all dharmas are dreamlike" came to the rescue. When you realize that all of these things are natural properties of the world (things will disintegrate, disappear, break...--that is called impermanence), it is no longer such a surprise, and I felt suddenly a lot more relaxed.

a dreamlike image...

So, this was my first contribution to #lojongchallenge. If anyone else wants to join me, please do so, and add the hashtag #lojongchallenge.

* Please note that I will not be discussing matters related to the Sogyal Rinpoche controversy here on this blog. This is not because I want to ignore it or think it is not important. Rather, I think this blog is not the correct forum for that. I am very much working with it in more personal ways in the organization and beyond.

(Some) monks enjoy statistics and other lessons from a recent India trip

Kalden presenting our research in Allahabad

I recently went to India again to continue my collaboration with the monks of Sera Jey monastic university, who are learning to become scientists. This time, we started the visit with the International Conference on Meditation Research, at the University of Allahabad. For the first time, three of the monastic collaborators presented our joint EEG research on Tibetan monastic debate. It was amazing to see them present in a real scientific forum, which was even covered by the Times of India. As one of the monks reminisced, it was also quite historic that the presentation was held in a location quite close to the ancient Buddhist university of Nalanda. The conference also hosted many Indian and international scientists who talked about topics ranging from computational models of meditation (myself) to Hindu philosophy of meditation and its clinical use.

Video scoring in action

Getting our project overview ready

After this exciting meeting I flew to Bangalore, where I gave a few talks, followed by the most important part of the trip: a visit to Sera Jey monastic university. This time, the main goals of our journey were to start a questionnaire study and to improve the rating system of our EEG videos. When we record EEG during a monastic debate, we ask one of the monks to press buttons to indicate events such as agreement, disagreement, distraction, and more. But of course, a problem with this approach is that we do not know how reliable such ratings are. In scientific studies, it is then important to compute inter-rater reliability. We talked about this concept, and then proceeded to re-rate the videos of the EEG sessions we collected, such that it is possible to look at the agreement between raters. This turned out to be quite an interesting experience that led to a lot more discussion between the monks about how to decide when to press a certain button.

Talking about statistics

During this visit, we also had another important realization: that we actually never talked very much about project management. To accomplish a complex team project of the type we are working on, it is crucial to actually divide tasks between individuals, and to have a shared vision on what needs to be accomplished and when. Once we realized this, we put together a big scheme that is now decorating the walls of the Sera Jey science centre, which indicates what the questions are that we are trying to answer, and who is responsible for what part of the work. Such discussions are probably even more necessary when you are working with a multicultural team of Tibetan monks and Western scientists compared to when you are working in a small collaboration with a PhD student at a Western university, because there are just so many more hidden assumptions. Moreover, work cultures are very different, where the West tends to have fixed schedules and predictability, in the Tibetan monastery things happen when they happen, and it is hard to plan ahead (especially given things like power outages).

Despite all this, what was the most surprising thing I learnt this trip? Maybe it's that Tibetan monks like statistics (at least the ones we have been working with). They did not only seem to enjoy geeky conversations during the conference in Allahabad, but also were excited about statistics lessons we ran at the Science Centre.

Open science: do we need that? And if so: how can we get started?

Recently, I organized with the Young Academy of Groningen a workshop on Open Science and Reproducibility. What is open science? Isn't science supposed to be open anyway? Keynote speaker Simine Vazire showed us how this is not always the case. She took us back to the fundamental ideals of science, sharing Merton's norms, which distinguish science from other forms of knowing. Science has a sense of universalism, in which the validity of a scientific claim does not depend on who is making it--there are no arguments from authority. Another ideal is "communality"--the scientific findings belong to everyone and everyone can check them. Science should also be disinterested--all results should be reported without bias. Science should not withold findings that are unfavorable to the scientist. Finally, nothing is sacred in science, and all claims should be tested. But is this really how science proceeds in practice? How many scientific findings can really be checked by everyone? How many scientists are really unbiased? Studies show that even scientists think that most science does not adhere to these ideas. So, we need a change in science to become more open such that it becomes easier for everyone to check scientific claims.

keynote by Simine Vazire

A major problem in science is the emphasis on significant results as a precondition for publication. Unfortunately it is quite easy to obtain significant results with enough p-hacking (trying out many different tests on different subsets of your data) and HARKING (hypothesizing after results are known--presenting the obtained significant results as the original hypothesis). Probably as a result of the commonality of these practices, many studies do not replicate, which was most clearly shown in large-scale attempts at replications (e.g., the Reproducibility Project).

Here I open the workshop

So how can we improve? A good step would be to share all materials and data so others can check it. A good resource recommended was the Open Science Framework. Candice Morey for example has all her materials and data from various projects there. However, during the data management panel the Research Data Management Office mentiond that this does not adhere to the new European regulations on privacy. Better options would be to work with for example Dataverse.nl. Moreover, it is important to really think carefully about you deidentify your data, because with the current machine learning algorithms it is surprisingly easy to identify someone's data by combining a few different sources. Another challenge in opening up your data is that you may not remember the connection between all your graphs and the raw data, or you may feel your data analysis scripts are too messy. Laura Bringmann shared some knowledge about Rmarkdown, which allows you to seamlessly integrate data analysis with code, avoiding the need to have code and graphs and data live in different places. This also makes it really easy to do revisions, because you can easily reproduce the original analyses that lead to specific numbers and plots. Of course even if you decide to open your data, many others may not do so. One practical step individuals can take to enhance openness in science is to participate in the Peer Reviewers Openness Initiative, in which you pledge to only review articles which make their data open (or provide a good excuse why they cannot do so). Of course another way in which openness can be improved is if universities consider the extent to which an individual makes their data and materials open in hiring and promotion decisions.

Candice Morey talking about pre-registration

In addition, what helps to promote open science is to formalize your hypotheses and deposit them somewhere before you collect the data. This procedure is called pre-registration, a topic also discussed in a keynote by Candice Morey. Preregistration can be done quite easily on the Open Science Framework. Another interesting method is to write up your hypotheses in a Registered Report format (offered by more and more journals), in which reviewers decide on acceptance based on your introduction and methods before you collect the data, and then you are guaranteed (in principle) acceptance, independent of how your results turn out. Of course academic incentives should also change to promote this: rewarding these research practices instead of rewarding high-impact publications.

A further step in improving would be to stop overselling our results and better understanding statistics. Rink Hoekstra talked about common misunderstandings about statistics. Most notably, almost everyone's intuitions about p-values are wrong. P-values cannot ever tell you that your statistical hypothesis is true, but it only provides some evidence against a null hypothesis, and it always carries a certain level of uncertainty. It is therefore never possible to make very definite claims about your data, unlike what journals, and even more the media, wants. A very insightful visualization of how little p-values really mean is the Dance of the P-values. Instead of blindly relying on p-values it is critical to instead focus more on visualizing your data, for which Gert Stulp provided some useful resources.

The data management panel

In short, there is still a long way to go to open up your science, but more and more resources are available. The full slides and materials of the meeting can be found here. You can also check out the hashtag #RUGopenScience.

Working with (against?) work pressure in academia

Today I followed a workshop given by Jeanine de Bruin and Brigitte Hertz on work pressure in academia. This workshop followed at the end of a monthlong writing challenge for academics, in which the goal was to write for two hours every day. I really enjoyed the challenge of consciously shifiting priorities towards generating content and away from responding to things, because even if producing is harder, in the end it is more rewarding (see also my earlier blog post here.

The first insight from the workshop was that the main tool for dealing with work pressure is trying to make the right decisions. It is very easy to get swept away by the onslaught of things to do, and the implicit attitude of "I am busy, so I am working hard and doing it right" instead of thinking about WHAT you are doing.

In managing your work you can think about three levels. The first level is working on a day level. You can start the day with the things that are important to you (e.g., writing this grant application). Moreover, do not have the illusion that you can multitask, because you can really not, and not only the quality of your work suffers, but you also feel much more stressed (at least I do). In addition, I find it very helpful to focus the energy in my day by looking at the goals I defined by means of emacs orgmode; a plain text system in which I stick on my projects with todo items and due dates. This system ensures that no projects are forgotten. I also really like to use it to keep track of each student I am supervising (each student has their own file in which I write a few notes after every meeting with what they have done and what they will do for the next meeting). You can also think about time management at the project level, in which you want to make sure you pick the right projects, and are not afraid to drop projects if they are not leading to something fruitful. Two things I learnt there are first, to take regular space for reflection on how it is going with a project and what is next and so on. This is difficult because the busy woodpecker in me would like to continue doing something "productive", but reflection can really save a lot of time and increase quality in the end. One particular thing to think about are potential roadblocks or plans B: what could go wrong, and what should we do then. I think too little about this, and maybe this wastes a lot of time. On the really long-term level time management is also thinking about what is important for the long-term. What is my passion, where do I want to be 5-10 years from now. I usually only think about this when writing my tenure dossier or a job application, but it is important in deciding what projects to pursue and even what to do in a single day as well. One skilful way of forcing yourself to reflect on this is chatting about it with a mentor over lunch. I highly recommend that. It also made me realize I should review my toggl time log a few times a year to check what my time is being used for, and whether that is what I want. Right now I only review my toggl logs every week when the system mails me the hours tracked.

We then talked about the famous Eisenhower quadrants with urgent-not urgent and import-not important. I have thought about this a lot, and I think that most stuff I do is in the "important" section of the matrix. One thing that I never grasped until this workshop was the distinction between "being important for me" and "being important to do". For example, helping a colleague is a good thing to do, but won't generally help my career ahead. So maybe in the matrix it falls in the category of "not important" in that sense. I realized that I spend too much time following news (partly news, partly news related to science and academic how-to). I made the resolution to limit my news intake to 15 minutes a day, so I won't waste too much time on it. In the end, that won't really get myself too much ahead, apart from staying up to date with the world and getting ideas for lectures, student assignments and grants. Another skilful means for reducing the "not important stuff that needs to be done" is to wonder whether not someone else can do it. I put this into action by requesting a student assistant for the next course I am teaching. While initially this is more work in instructing the person and making all procedures more explicit (grading sheets!), in the end it will save me time. And of course, it is always helpful to remember that saying yes to something means saying no to something else (also described in the book Busy by Tony Crabbe). A final insight from the Eisenhower quadrants was that focusing on the things that are important and not yet urgent will help to increase quality (because you can let the projects rest and then realize you have made some mistakes), and improve your health.

We also discussed what our university can do to reduce work pressure. One important thing I think is that I waste a lot of time searching for information on how to do things, reinventing the wheel, not being aware of procedures. Sharing knowledge more efficiently would really help. We also need to work on more delegation and most importantly better delegation: the insight here was that delegation is not just dropping the task onto someone but also training them how to do it. On the short term training takes time, but on the longer term it reduces errors and therefore headache. It would also be cool if promotion weren't so focused on grant acquisition, because grant acquisition is such a highly risky process that is a lot of work with very uncertain outcomes. I learnt that Utrecht University also has a career path focused on teaching, which sounds really cool. Finally, it would be nice to build more of a collaboration culture at university, rather than the current competition culture.

The last part of the meeting focused on recognizing stress in your work. I think I am blessed in this department because while I feel sometimes exhausted, I never have trouble sleeping and I feel generally happy. I credit the ballet dancing that is a fixture in my schedule, together with the meditation practice that I do every morning and every evening. I think it is really important to stick to those things as priorities in addition to work priorities, because otherwise you waste a whole life working and being unhappy.

In the end, reducing work pressure relies on the confluence of both individual action (trying to work on what is important and inspiring and taking good care of yourself) with institutional action; the universities will have to change because in the long run the current work culture in which many academics put in way too many hours compared to their contracts, and especially in which evaluation is biased towards metrics of grant acquisition that you have little control over is not sustainable. It is helpful to reflect on this both at the individual level and to think together with colleagues and decision makers on how to improve the work culture.