by Ruby Wax
The Monk, the Neuroscientist and Me
Ruby: We’ve talked about compassion, which I can understand, because I can potentially do something about the suffering of others. But what about when someone screws you over or hurts you? My instinct is always to kill them.
Neuroscientist: We’re hard-wired to want fairness. If someone cuts you off in traffic and a minute later you see the cops pull them over for speeding, your nucleus accumbens, the brain’s reward centre, gives you a buzz of pleasure. But if they get away with it, your anterior insula will become more active, making you feel physically uncomfortable. That biological drive for fairness helps people get along in society, but it can become toxic when it becomes a desire for vengeance.
Ruby: I know that feeling of revenge; it’s reptilian, when I feel it, I turn into the Alien, I want to tear them apart. And this is even when I get a traffic ticket. I don’t know where forgiveness comes into that.
Monk: I think we worry that forgiveness means we’re letting someone get away with something, but it’s more to do with releasing ourselves from the burden of resentment. Ruby, how does it feel when you’re holding on to that anger, when you keep chewing over how unfair it is?
Ruby: Sometimes the chewing over is the best part.
Monk: But it’s like holding on to a hot coal. It’s you that suffers, not the other person. Forgiveness would help you drop the sense of burning.
Neuroscientist: Vengeance may be sweet, but anger and fear are potent activators of the limbic system. That’s the more primitive part of the brain which, as we’ve said before, activates the fight-or-flight response. And holding on to anger or fear is a chronic stress. It promotes the production of poisons like cortisol; it’s terrible for the brain and body over the long term.
Ruby: I can’t believe you can train forgiveness. It seems so against most people’s nature. What happened to ‘An eye for an eye … ’?
Monk: The problem with an eye for an eye is that everyone ends up blind; the cycle of revenge never ends. In mindfulness training, there’s a step-by-step approach. The first step is to recognize that anger is a toxin and that forgiveness reduces it. The second step is realizing that your enemy is giving you an opportunity to develop a skill. It’s like this person is putting weights on your barbell, helping you get bigger muscles. They’re an ally in your mindfulness development. The third step is understanding the pain that’s driving the other person’s action. This involves developing compassion and wisdom.
Ruby: So, what happens in your brain when you decide to forgive someone?
Neuroscientist: The brain has to do two things in forgiveness. First, it has to temporarily suppress the feeling of anger that’s happening mainly in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the brain region that puts the brakes on cognition. Then there’s a network between the frontal cortex and the parietal cortex that updates your perceptions. That allows you to let go of your rigid view of blame, and the anger and stress can dissipate.
Ruby: I always have a motto – I should wear the T-shirt – ‘Who can I blame?’
Monk: There’s a parable about that. Someone throws a stone at you. Who do you blame? You blame the person, but it was actually the stone that hit you. So why not blame the stone? Because the stone had no intention to hurt you. By that logic, you should also not blame the person but blame the anger and suffering that made them throw the stone. When someone hurts us, we always think they’re out to get us and that it was deliberate. But if you understand the mechanisms of the human mind, you know that people lose control and do and say things they don’t intend when they’re in pain.
Ruby: What happens if the person really is an asshole and deserves to be punished?
Neuroscientist: Maybe the guy does deserve to be punished, but your desire to punish him will make you miserable. As long as your limbic cortex is hyperactive, your stress levels will be high.
Monk: Three years ago, my teacher and closest friend was brutally murdered while on a trip to China. The killer had been a monk in our monastery. We all knew him. I guess it was a moment of insane rage; none of us can understand why he did it. Before I became a monk, twenty-five years ago, I would probably have been filled with hatred and vengeance, wanting to hunt the killer down. But when it happened, I felt shock and grief but no trace of anger or revenge. It’s clear to me that the guy needs to be locked up because he’s dangerous, but instead of hatred I just felt sad and concerned. I found myself worrying about how he was doing in prison and what would happen to him. I think this attitude was a natural result of all the practice I’ve done.
Ruby: That’s really heavy. I don’t know if I could ever do that. When I was in Austria doing Who Do You Think You Are?, I knew there was anti-Semitism before the war, but that people basically lived in peace with each other. If you were Jewish, you could still go to university and become a doctor or a lawyer. Then, almost overnight, your neighbour, your friend, your co-worker, turned on you. Not just stopped speaking to you but went feral; raped and beat you and didn’t stop the trains that took you to your death. The Jews hadn’t killed anyone, so it wasn’t revenge. Like Rwanda or Bosnia, the ethnic minority hadn’t murdered anyone, so why did they get annihilated? Ash, what happens in the brain that turns us into savages?
Neuroscientist: That’s the question that everyone was asking after the Second World War. A psychologist at Yale, Dr Stanley Milgram, did pioneering work on this in the early sixties. Milgram wanted to understand the psychological defences that the Nazi leadership used during the Nuremberg trials, mainly that they were just obeying orders. Milgram placed an ad in the local paper recruiting volunteers to participate in an experiment that he told them was about learning. The volunteers were given a list of maths questions and answers and each one was told to play the part of a teacher, quizzing another volunteer in a closed booth. When the person in the booth got a question wrong, the volunteer/teacher was supposed to press a button administering an electric shock. The shocks increased in voltage from slight to severe to life-threatening. It was all fake: the guy in the booth was an actor and there were actually no electric shocks. But Milgram found that every single one of his volunteers continued delivering what they thought were high-voltage electric shocks, even though they heard the other guy screaming in pain and begging to be let out. About a third of the volunteers even delivered what they believed would be life-threatening shocks. They obeyed because each time they hesitated in upping the voltage, Milgram would say, ‘Please continue.’
Ruby: And with ‘Please continue,’ that did it? I’m not buying this.
Neuroscientist: The experiment has been replicated many times, in many countries, over many years, and there have been similar results. What seemed to influence the original volunteers to continue was that Milgram told them that he would take full responsibility. So even though the volunteers were pressing the button, they didn’t feel it was their fault. At Nuremberg, Nazi soldiers said the same thing: they were just following orders, it wasn’t their fault.
Ruby: The Austrians turned on the Jews without any instructions. The Germans even told the Austrians not to be so brutal when attacking the Jews. They wanted to take charge.
Neuroscientist: So that’s something on top of obedience to authority. We’re tribal animals, so we define people as either in group or out group. We don’t see out-group people as fully human, and that enables us to treat them in horrible ways. The important thing is that this can happen to any of us, at any time, if the circumstances are right. When an authority figure whips up enough hatred for the out group, it pulls together the in group and incites them to violence. And it’s not all at once; usually, it’s one little step at a time. It’s like when people start a sentence with, ‘I’m not a racist, but …’, you know what they’re about to say will be racist. It’s the start of losing your moral compass.
Monk: When we can face the fact that we all have this inner savagery, we can stop demonizing the ‘other’, acknowledging that we all carry the se
eds of violence and hatred within us. If we can learn to look inside and forgive ourselves for this very dark but human feature, we can begin to forgive others. That’s where mindfulness helps: we notice our animalistic side but still manage to find forgiveness, when we realize that we’re bigger than our thoughts.
Mindfulness Exercises for Forgiveness
If you can let go of endlessly thinking about why, what and how things have gone wrong for you and whose fault it is, then you’ve forgiven. And if you’ve forgiven, you’re free.
THUBTEN’S EXERCISES
Exercise 1: Three Steps
Forgiveness can be trained by using a three-step process. These steps involve thinking differently about a situation so that the anger and hurt can begin to shift and forgiveness start to emerge.
You’ll notice that these steps involve thinking, rather than the usual style of mindfulness, where you try not to get involved in thoughts; however, they’re powerful tools for transforming our deep-seated habits.
Begin by calling to mind the situation or person you are finding challenging. Your mind might start to swirl with resentment, but try to step back a little and ask yourself some questions about the situation:
Who’s Really Hurting?
The first step is to recognize that holding on to anger just makes us burn. This person who hurt us did so in the past, but what is hurting us now in this moment? Our resentment and anger. Holding on to this anger is like holding a hot coal in our hand, it just burns us. If we could drop it, we would find relief. In the same way, if we work on our minds, we can free ourselves.
Gratitude
Is our enemy really an enemy? They’re actually giving us an opportunity to develop the skill of forgiveness. They’re an ally in our compassion training. Without this person, how else would we learn forgiveness?
When you can think in this way, the idea of ‘enemy’ starts to change, as gratitude arises. Maybe your enemy is a friend in disguise.
Understanding
Who else is hurting? Think about the other person’s deep pain and suffering. Maybe it’s hidden, but we can be sure it’s there under the surface. Try to resonate with the struggles which might lie beneath their aggression. Even if they’re cold-hearted or they seem to enjoy causing harm, we could understand them as being unwell, completely out of balance, and that’s what makes them behave like this.
This is a challenging step, but the more we practise mindfulness, the more we’ll see how the human mind can so easily be controlled by thoughts and emotions; there’s very little freedom until somebody trains their mind. With mindfulness, we start to understand the human condition. Nobody is ‘out to get us’, they’re simply consumed by their own pain and ignorance and very often can’t control their words or actions. This doesn’t mean we’re condoning what they do, or allowing it to continue, it’s about shifting our attitude of resentment and dropping the burden of hurt and rage.
Exercise 2: Mindfulness and Forgiveness
The second method, to be practised alongside this, is simply to do regular mindfulness practice, using whichever technique you like, for example the breath. Through this ongoing training, our patterns of resentment, as with all negative emotions, will start to have less hold over us. We can learn not to latch on to the feelings so much. That persistent hurt is yet another habitual pattern in the mind, and mindfulness practice helps to loosen up those habits so they can start to dissolve.
It’s important to be very patient with yourself and not to berate yourself for not being able to let go. Just do the practice, and things will slowly start to shift.
Exercise 3: Training throughout the Day
In the exercises for body, we looked at practising micro-moments of mindfulness throughout the day, particularly when we’re waiting for something. The ability to be mindful and stay relaxed in queues and traffic jams helps us to train ourselves in forgiveness, as it teaches us to welcome difficult situations and not push them away. It trains us to stay mindful in situations where we would normally feel resentful, irritated or upset. This training will help us to see our difficult relationships, or the things we find hard to forgive, in a new light.
Exercise 4: Other Methods
Please also see the exercises on compassion and relationships, as they also work for forgiveness.
Exercise 5: Forgiving Ourselves
Sometimes it’s much harder to forgive ourselves than it is to forgive others. We blame ourselves, mentally beating ourselves up.
If we can have some compassion for ourselves, this will really help. In the compassion exercises, there are methods for training in self-forgiveness.
Also, one thing I find useful is to look at a photo of yourself. Sit quietly and closely examine the photo, especially the eyes and around the mouth. There you might detect some vulnerability, or some child-like, innocent qualities, and you can start to feel compassion for this person who is just doing their best, and is lovable and worthy of forgiveness.
Self-forgiveness becomes easier the more we practise mindfulness, as the training helps us to see that our mind is bigger than our faults; those things come and go and are not our true nature.
RUBY’S EXERCISES
I can’t think of a better exercise for forgiveness than getting booked on Who Do You Think You Are?
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My Final Thoughts
I’m glad I did Who Do You Think You Are? It explained why, as far back as I could remember, I’d wake up hearing screaming in my head, and not just one person but a large chorus of maniacs. I’d feel that heart-stopping panic and fear even when nothing on the outside had instigated it. I could be on holiday, sunbathing on a lounger, and still hear it. The word ‘insane’ was bandied around the house when I was growing up. I remember my father telling me he thought I’d end up in an institution by the time I was fifty. I also heard it when my mother, during our fights in public, would sometimes grab a passer-by and belt out, ‘Do you think I’m insane? Because my daughter thinks I am.’ I’m starting to think that this ‘agitation’ my great-aunt and great-great-aunt had is alive and living in every cell in my body. It’s woven into my DNA. I’m not in an insane asylum, I’m carrying one around in my mind.
The fact that my father had a drive to survive at all costs explains why I always feel this drive to take on any challenge presented to me. It can be something as trivial as jumping a queue (at which I’m a master) to pulling off getting into the Royal Shakespeare Company, writing television shows for the BBC, writing four books, or studying at Oxford.
I know that if I try to bury or ignore the battle in my head, it will just create more war. I feel like I’m on a railway line that splits; one track goes towards the insane asylum, the other to freedom. (Railway lines have haunted me since doing the programme.) I’m sure what propelled me to study mindfulness was to try to resolve my dysfunctional links, to be able to find some peace in my internal bedlam. Finding out about neuroplasticity, discovering that I can remap my inherited neural wiring and rewire it for a better life, was the greatest news I’ve ever received.
I came back to the UK on a Sunday night and that Monday morning went to collect an honorary doctorate for my work in mental health. I stood there in my red Harry Potter gown and square hat with tassel, giving a speech to about five hundred mental-health nurses. The Friday of the same week, I went as a visiting professor to the University of Surrey to give out diplomas to the graduating class. They ‘robed’ me up in my old Oxford graduation gown and, as I wedding-marched down the aisle and on to the stage, I thought about my parents, about Olga (my great-aunt), Ella (the other great-aunt), Berta (my great great-aunt), Richard (my grandfather), Salomon (my great-uncle), Karl (my uncle), Martin (my uncle) and all the others I’ll never know, and wondered whether, if they saw this, they’d be thinking, How the hell did that happen? I’m sure they’d be confused, but maybe they’d be proud. That was a moment of self-forgiveness when I realized what I had done was against all odds, a million-to-one chance, just like my
father escaping from Austria.
I also forgive my parents. Who knows who they would have been if they hadn’t had to run for their lives? The past was not their fault.
There’s no question that we humans are flawed, but the power of our minds can change everything.
Acknowledgements
I said it in the acknowledgements for my last book Frazzled and I’ll say it again for this book, no one helped me write this besides my editors Joanna and Ed, the monk – Gelong Thubten, and the neuroscientist – Ashish Ranpura. Besides them, I thank my publisher Venetia Butterfield from Penguin for publishing and my agent, Caroline Michel from PFD, for agenting, and for both women being generally fabulous. Outside of them no one, not even a mouse, showed up to help me write this. I have only myself to thank.
Otherwise, outside of me, I’d like to thank the myriad of unknowing authors whose information I borrowed (as we say in the book biz). I hope they don’t get too upset. If any of you authors are reading this, whatever I used of yours, please feel free to change back into your own words.
Anthony W. Bateman and Peter Fonagy: Handbook of Mentalizing in Mental Health Practice
Brene Brown: I Thought It Was Just Me: Women Reclaiming Power and Courage in a Culture of Shame
Dean Burnett: The Idiot Brain: A Neuroscientist Explains What Your Head is Really Up To
Mine Conkbayir: Early Childhood and Neuroscience: Theory, Research and Implications for Practice
Alistair Cooper and Sheila Redfern: Reflective Parenting: A Guide to Understanding What’s Going on in Your Child’s Mind
