Can a Shot of Ginger Change Your Morals? A Monk on Awareness and the Body

 

Neuroscience shows the body shapes our emotions. Mingyur Rinpoche, once crippled by panic attacks, says awareness is the way to befriend fear.

 

Take a shot of ginger, and you may judge the world a little more kindly.

 

That is not folk wisdom but the finding of a study by psychologist Jessica Tracy and her team at the University of British Columbia, described by CNN's Dr Sanjay Gupta at a CNN Global Perspectives panel in Bangkok on Thursday (October 14), "Your Gut Was Right! The Biology of Human Choice".

 

Volunteers were shown disturbing scenarios; those given ginger, which settles the stomach, were measurably less disgusted than those given a placebo.

 

Their moral judgement softened, Dr Gupta said, "not because anyone argued them into a different position" but because their stomachs had calmed.

 

"Your emotions, your decisions – they are not just in your head," he told the audience. "They are also in your body."

 

To explore whether the relationship can work the other way, with the mind calming the body, Dr Gupta turned to Mingyur Rinpoche, the Nepal-born Buddhist teacher and spiritual leader of the Tergar Sangha.

 

 

The boy who hid from visitors

Rinpoche is the son of a revered meditation master, but his childhood was ruled by fear. He suffered crippling panic attacks and was so afraid of strangers that when visitors came to the family home in the Himalayas, he would run to a small room and hide.

 

"If you ask my mom when I was young, can he give speech in front of five people? She will say impossible," he said.

 

Today he addresses audiences around the world. He entered a traditional three-year monastic stay at 13. Years later, neuroscientists at the University of Wisconsin studied his brain and, Dr Gupta said, declared him one of the happiest people on earth. 

 

 

 

In 2011 he slipped out of his monastery at night with no money and no plan and spent more than four years as a wandering yogi. He is the author of "The Joy of Living" and "In Love with the World".

 

 

Why fighting panic makes it worse

Rinpoche said the heart of his panic was not fear itself but what he calls "panic of panic": fear of having another attack. The mind, he said, behaves like a monkey, chattering constantly. Trying to push thoughts away backfires.

 

"Don't think about ginger," he said, and everyone thinks about ginger. When he asked his father how to fight his panic, the reply was a single word: "Don't."

 

His father gave two reasons. Fighting makes panic bigger. And there is no need, because the mind's fundamental nature is like the sky, and panic is simply a storm passing through it.

 

Awareness, love and compassion, his father told him, are with us 24 hours a day.

 

"If you fight, they become worse," Rinpoche said of anxious thoughts. Following them is no better, he said, because it leaves you lost, unable to sleep and caught up in stress.

 

Instead, he advises letting thoughts "come" and "go" while connecting with awareness, which he describes as the ability to see, hear and feel, and as an "inner safe space" or "inner refuge".

 

 

Mind and body as horse and rider

Asked about the ginger study, Rinpoche said his tradition has long treated the body and mind as inseparable.

 

"Body is like horse, mind is rider," he said. "They always influence each other."

 

He said the body also stores what he called imprints from the past, including trauma and involuntary reactions, and these too worsen when resisted.

 

His approach is to feel the body and let it relax, much as frost melts when the sun comes out, and he said this awareness of the body helps purify the imprint.

 

 

 

Dr Gupta said the link is familiar in medicine: giving anxious patients beta blockers lowers heart rate and blood pressure, and their anxiety often eases too.

 

He offered his own tip that holding gratitude and toxic feelings in mind at the same time is hard, so recalling what you are grateful for can act as an antidote.

 

 

The imaginary strawberry

To show how the mind can move the body, Rinpoche led the audience through a short exercise. He asked them to close their eyes and imagine three of the world's best strawberries in one hand: fresh, organic, held close to the nose, and then eaten.

 

When they opened their eyes, there was nothing there. Yet many hands went up when he asked who had produced saliva.

 

"Actually there's no real strawberry; we know 100 per cent," he said, but the body prepared to digest it anyway.

 

If the mind is joined with awareness, love and compassion, he said, the body's cells, nerves and energy can shift in a positive direction, leaving the mind happy and the body relaxed.

 

 

A few seconds of listening

He closed with a brief meditation that needed no special setting. Keep the spine loosely straight, relax the muscles, and simply listen to the sounds around you.

 

"When you hear the sound, that becomes the meditation," he said, because the ear and mind listen together. It can be done anywhere, he added: while sipping a ginger shot, coffee or tea, driving, walking or sitting in a meeting.

 

A few seconds is enough. He ended the session by gently striking a singing bowl. As the sound rang out, he pointed to it and said that this, the simple act of listening, is awareness.