The Book of Joy

familiar and yet suddenly quite different. His face looked long and oval,
from his wide balding scalp, over his triangular eyebrows and slightly
opened eyes, to his straight, broad nose, and peaked cheeks that looked
chiseled now and weathered like the cliff face of a Himalayan summit,
then to his straight and pursed lips, and ending with his soft, rounded
chin. He looked down, as if the shades of his mind had been drawn, and
now he was concerned only with the inward journey.
The Dalai Lama scratched his temple, and I felt relieved that he was
not some austere ascetic who would deny his itches and aches. He
wrapped his cloak more tightly around his shoulders and settled into
quiet, his hands resting in his lap.
At first my mind started racing, and I was having a hard time staying
focused, thinking about the questions I would ask, the video camera that
was filming, the other people in the room, and if everything was as it
should be and everyone had what they needed. Then as I watched the
Dalai Lama’s face, my own mirror neuron system seemed to resonate
with the mind-state that I was witnessing. Mirror neurons allow us to
imitate others and experience their internal states, and therefore may play
an important role in empathy. I started to experience a tingling in my
forehead and then a sharpening of focus as various parts of my brain
started to quiet and calm, as if the activity began to center on what
spiritual adepts have called the third eye, or what neuroscientists call the
middle prefrontal cortex.
Daniel Siegel had explained to me that the neural integration created
by this crucial area of the brain links many disparate areas and is the
locus of everything from emotional regulation to morality. Meditation, he
and other scientists have proposed, helps with these processes. He
explained that the integrative fibers of the discerning middle prefrontal
cortex seem to reach out and soothe the more reactive emotional
structures of the brain. We inherited the reactivity of this part of our
brain, and particularly the sensitive amygdala, from our skittish fight-or-
flight ancestors. Yet so much of the inner journey means freeing
ourselves from this evolutionary response so that we do not flip our lid or
lose our higher reasoning when facing stressful situations.