I’d just crashed a motorbike in a small Indian village in the Himalayas. Not a spectacular crash. Just me trying to avoid a street dog that seemed determined to get run over, but it may have been the most interesting thing to happen all week here.

I was fine, but the locals’ natural concern for visitors meant I was sat on a chair, handed chai, and had superficial scratches doused with Dettol from an antique bottle.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” my friend (who had come out unscathed) asked.

None of the old guys spoke English, so I exhaled and, in the calmest, most relaxed voice, smiled and answered, “Yep, this really hurts a lot.”

I didn’t want to alarm anyone.

My friend laughed, the locals smiled and relaxed, I sat back and finished my chai, looking down the valley, barely thinking about the crash or the more traumatic Dettol incident.

Even the dog was napping on the side of the road as if nothing had happened.

This was not a high-stakes crash or injury. I might have forgotten it altogether if I hadn’t come across some research on irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) that reminded me of it many years later. It seems that mindfulness training helped reduce IBS symptoms, not by acting on the symptoms themselves, but by reducing the catastrophising, worry, and “emotional interference” that accompany them. This predicted a decrease in the reported severity of the IBS symptoms.[1]

Sceptics always cry “placebo” at these kinds of results, which is helpful because it pushes the field into more interesting territory. And this research took me on a fascinating detour.

In a nutshell, it goes like this: When you hold your thumb after hitting it with a hammer, or grab your foot where you step on a Lego piece, this is part of your body’s natural pain management. It’s an in-house opioid system that many pain treatments, such as breathing exercises and acupuncture, are known to activate. Even giving someone fake medication will activate their opioid pain-killing system if they believe they’re taking pain meds.

Mindfulness training is different. It reduces pain and discomfort, but doesn’t activate our natural opioid system. It’s not a physical mechanism.

Pain is usually measured by intensity and discomfort, or unpleasantness. In much of the research on mindfulness and pain, it’s the unpleasantness that is reduced with no significant reduction in the intensity.

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So, as I calmly explained to my friend that the Dettol was indeed causing me pain, the intentional relaxation and my regular meditation practice are likely to have reduced the unpleasantness of it. The sting of Dettol on road rash was probably easier to brush off with some concerned new friends, sweeping views of the Himalayan valley, and sweet chai with cardamom. It’s a state of mind quite different from that of an adolescent being treated for doing something stupid, which is how many of us are introduced to the Dettol experience that we carry into our adult lives.

Just as a calm demeanour with my Dettol-brandishing friends made the discomfort easy to ignore, cultivating a relaxed, accepting approach to more significant pain can make the experience easier to bear.

The possibility that our attitude and emotional reaction to pain influences our perception of discomfort can be traced back at least 2,500 years, to the Sallatha Sutra[2]. When asked about physical pain, the Buddha answered that most of us respond to it with “worry, grief, lamentation, and tears.” And this mental distress means we’re under the influence of “two kinds of feelings, a bodily and a mental feeling. It is as if a man were pierced by an arrow and, following the first piercing, he is hit by a second arrow.” This is in contrast to a well-trained meditator who won’t succumb to these mental “lamentations” that we ordinary folk are prone to. Such a practitioner will experience pain, but won’t be “hit by a second arrow, following the first one”, resulting in less distress.

A recent research paper tested this by electrocuting monks and nuns[3].

Actually, it was a little less dramatic and more sophisticated than that, and it also included laypeople.

The researchers recruited twelve monks and nuns from Theravada Buddhist monasteries, with an average of about 26,000 hours of meditation experience, and another twelve lay people, with an average of about 150 hours of meditation experience.

After each pulse, participants rated three things: how much it hurt, how strongly they wanted to avoid it, and how much it felt like their pain, which was defined as “self-involvement, or getting caught up in the experience.” From a research perspective, you could say this is an attempt to “operationalise” the second arrow.

Very clever.

Perhaps the most interesting result of this study is that experienced meditators had lower identification with pain than lay people across all conditions. The experienced meditators were less affected by the second arrow just resting than the lay people were during meditation, and that’s not all: the monks’ and nuns’ ratings of the intensity of the pain were no different, whether in sessions of mindfulness, loving-kindness, or even just at rest.

Essentially, there is a mental component to the experience of pain that experienced meditators can isolate from the physical pain and prevent it from forming an amplifying loop that happens to non-meditators.

For them, the second arrow is never fired.

Using some fancy statistics, the study goes even further to show a loop: pain sparks aversion, aversion drives identification, and identification amplifies the experience of pain, creating more aversion, and so on. This is the mechanism that can turn acute pain into chronic suffering, and it’s the same chain the Buddha discovered and taught as “dependent origination” without any stats. At least, not that I know of.

None of this is to say that pain is imaginary or trivial. It’s real – the electric shocks were real, the Dettol was real, and there are times when even painkillers don’t give relief. It can be totally debilitating. The point here is that we don’t just experience the sensation in the body. We also bring other things to it: emotions, preconceptions, and our identification with it, all of which occur in the mind. Then we tend to point to these two experiences and call them “pain” and treat them as one indivisible thing.

Which it’s not.

The physical sensation is one element, and our mental representations of it another. And it’s the second of these that meditation can most reliably change.

This is the reification mechanism I described in the last post. Treating a mental representation as the thing it refers to. There, it was thoughts, opinions and memories; here, it’s pain. The mechanism is the same, and the training that loosens it in those other contexts also works here.

We know that dereification is a natural by-product of mindfulness training. It’s something we can experience very directly in a meditation session. I’ve learned and taught many practices designed specifically to do this, but regular practice makes it a trait that is just part of our day-to-day life.

This explains why the monks and nuns experienced less pain than the laypeople, even when they were just resting, and why the laypeople only experienced pain reduction while they were in meditation. It’s the difference between needing effort to achieve a state in which the relationship with pain is dereified, and being so familiar with that state that it becomes a trait. An embedded way of viewing the world, rather than something you have to look for.

My PhD revolved around this concept of reification, but it’s not why I keep returning to it. The convergence of Buddhist discoveries from 2,500 years ago with those of modern psychology is one of the most exciting developments in contemplative science. In this series, we’ve looked at this mechanism through the lens of trauma, pain, and even cookies. The next post goes further: dereification removes the weight of mental content, but is that enough? Is there something more we can cultivate once that weight has lifted?

There are ways of working with a freer mind to build compassion and insight, to understand and remove the causes of our own suffering, and make a genuine contribution to the world. That’s where the next post takes us.

These ideas take on a different quality in practice than they do on the page. Next Monday in Balanced Minds, we’ll work with the pause — the space between stimulus and response where the second arrow either fires or doesn’t. That’s where this becomes something you can actually use.

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[1] Garland, E. L., Gaylord, S. A., Palsson, O., Faurot, K., Douglas Mann, J., & Whitehead, W. E. (2012). Therapeutic mechanisms of a mindfulness-based treatment for IBS: effects on visceral sensitivity, catastrophizing, and affective processing of pain sensations. Journal of behavioral medicine, 35(6), 591-602. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3883954/pdf/nihms512860.pdf

[2] Nyanaponika Thera (Trans.). (1983). Sallatha Sutta: The arrow (SN 36.6). Access to Insight (BCBS Edition). https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn36/sn36.006.nypo.html

[3] Nicolardi, V., Simione, L., Scaringi, D., Malinowski, P., Yordanova, J., Kolev, V., ... & Raffone, A. (2024). The two arrows of pain: Mechanisms of pain related to meditation and mental states of aversion and identification. Mindfulness, 15(4), 753-774. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12671-021-01797-0

“I would like a cookie.”

This wasn’t just a random thought; it was an Earth-shattering insight. A simple but important truth delivered from the universe to me, sitting quietly on a meditation cushion in my hut.

It had been at least three weeks since I’d spoken to anyone, and hours of daily meditation had settled my mind enough that I’d become aware of much of the goings-on in there. It wasn’t always pretty, but I was only halfway through the retreat, so it was getting easier to disentangle from unhelpful and irrelevant thoughts. And it was clear that this thought was an important one.

Before ending a meditation session, whether it’s at the sound of a bell or due to an important interruption like this one, it’s best to make sure everything’s going well. “Set everything in place before you stand up” is the sort of advice I give when teaching. So, I relaxed the tension building in my shoulder, released all control of my breath and reset my attention.

And then I laughed.

Partly at the sudden and complete lack of desire for a cookie, but mostly at the potential of such an unremarkable thought to derail something as important as a meditation session. After all, I’d organised a two-month break and flown halfway round the world for no reason other than to meditate, but for a brief moment, I let a cookie take control. And not even a real one, just an imaginary one that existed only in my mind.

If you’ve ever done some meditation, it’s likely you’ll have had the experience of a random thought, memory, or image float through the mind without affecting you. You’re aware of it, but it just shows up and then goes away without a ripple.

Other times, this mental activity will show up full-force, and you’ll relive an event of the past, or start to live out a fantasy that’s never happened. Absorbed to the degree that you’re no longer fully aware of the meditation session you’d sat down to do.

You may even have noticed that the same thought or memory can have a different impact at different times. The thought of a cookie might drift through your mind with no more effect than a butterfly in your neighbour’s garden at one time, and another it tasks you with the most important seek-and-destroy mission in history.

Why this happens is no mystery.

Imagine a retreat centre in Tuscany with a small café serving delicious baked goods.

Sitting alone in a small retreat hut nearby, it’s possible to develop a mental image or thought about the biscotti. This could be intentional or not, but the important part is this: it’s a mental representation of the biscotti, not the actual biscotti. The actual baked goods are in a café a few hundred metres away. Nonetheless, the mental representation of biscotti can still make your mouth water and cause you to act as if it’s right there in the hut with you.

The reason for this is simple: you are treating the thought or image as the actual biscotti. In technical terms, we call this treating the representation (thought or image) as the referent (the actual biscotti), and it applies to all mental activity. A mental image of a loved one in another city might make you smile as if they were there with you. Something that is not your loved one will spark an emotional reaction as if they were there.

The meditation session that had almost been derailed by cookies was slightly different. It wasn’t that I was treating mental images of cookies as cookies, but that I was treating a random, unbidden thought as a fact. The thought “I would like a cookie” can drift through the mind with no effect if I treat it as just the random thought that it is. But once I treat it as a fact, it solidifies into a very real desire for a cookie. And this can drive behaviours.

The mechanism extends to memories, which are mental representations of past events. I can feel the crowded excitement of walking into Madison Square Garden to watch an ice hockey game fifteen years ago, and the disappointment of my Toronto Maple Leafs’ 7-2 loss. Even though the memory is not the event.

The emotion isn’t sparked by the content of the memory. It’s not just remembering the crowd, the noise, the iconic location, or even crunching through the snow between the subway stop and the Gardens. It’s about treating the memory as if it were the event.

Or more accurately, mistaking the representation for the thing itself.

It’s a concept that gets a lot of attention in Buddhism and is becoming increasingly common in modern psychological research, where it’s known as reification. The solidifying of thoughts, feelings and perceptions as accurate depictions of reality, rather than mental processes. It’s a mechanism we don’t even know is running, and it’s hard to fully appreciate how pervasive it is in our lives. It’s driving daily decisions and interactions, and even our broader values and worldview.

In the last post, I mentioned that flow states have been shown to reduce the rigidity and uncontrollability of trauma responses. Treatments such as music and surf therapy have had a genuinely positive impact for people with past trauma.

But we can go deeper.

Flow states break up our rigidity, but don’t produce a lasting change in how we relate to our own minds. For all the benefits I found in music, surfing, and mountain biking, it wasn’t until I got serious about meditation that I saw how deeply we can change our patterns and reactivity.
It wasn’t till I studied Buddhism in depth that I understood why.
And it wasn’t till my PhD that I could see the pervasive relevance of reification in modern mental health conversations.

A paper I relied on heavily in my thesis posited this mechanism as one of the three fundamental outcomes of all mindfulness practices1, only they frame it in the reverse: dereification. So the power of a random thought, “I would like a cookie”, to derail a meditation session depends on how much I reify it.

The reified thought of a loved one can make me smile.
The reified memory of a hockey game can get me excited (and make me wince).
The reified thought I’d like a cookie can get me up off the cushion and out the door.

And we can go into less comfortable territory.

The unreified memory of an argument can’t harm me.
The unreified thought to procrastinate won’t interfere with my work.
The unreified thoughts of a public talk or difficult conversation won’t spark worry or anxiety.

And this scales up. The same principle that applies to a cookie also applies to trauma — to the memories and responses that cause the most suffering. At that level, the practice is best approached carefully and with support.

Research has found that dereification is a natural by-product of mindfulness training. This means that the thoughts and memories of regular meditators lose their concreteness as meditation experience increases. This can make them less reactive and less susceptible to rumination, worry and other types of thinking that lead to anxiety and depression. Meditation training also makes a subtle but profound shift from the more common “content-oriented cognition” to the less common “process-oriented cognition.” This makes thoughts, memories, and opinions appear more as models and possibilities than as accurate depictions of reality.

And it’s not just loosening the grip of isolated, individual thoughts and memories throughout the day. There are much bigger issues at play.

This dereification of mental activity plays an important role in our worldview. As content-oriented thinking shifts toward a more process-oriented approach, people are more likely to believe they can change their bad habits and to offer help and support to others. It seems this type of thinking gives people more flexibility and nuance in how they see ethical issues, which can lead to a less polarised view of the world2.

In my own work, I found that while 8 weeks of mindfulness training didn’t reduce mental chatter, it did “defang” the chatter so that it was no longer related to anxiety, depression, or even the worry and rumination that drive them. In short, as people develop a more process-oriented cognitive style, the chatter bouncing around in their minds becomes less likely to cause mental distress.

If the reification of thoughts, opinions and memories is what gives them power, not their content, yet we naturally tend to live in a reified “content-oriented” world, what does this mean? Where does this leave us as people trying to be happy in an increasingly unpredictable world? The good news is we can train ourselves to stop believing everything we think. In fact, the training has been practiced and refined over thousands of years, and there are different approaches to suit different people.

In the Indo-Tibetan system I’ve trained in and translated to English, there are practices designed to give ourselves mental flexibility and freedom by dereifying all the stuff bouncing around in our minds. It’s like taking a chaotic and poorly organised storeroom, where just the thought of looking for something in there is upsetting, to having a neat, tidy, well organised storeroom where you can find what you need to navigate the 21^st century.

And it’s best if you start small.

I give guided meditations as short as five minutes for two reasons. Partly because we’re all short on time: fitting one or two 5-minute sessions into a day is more achievable than a single longer session. And also, for people under pressure, a ten- or fifteen-minute meditation session can be too long – if it feels like a heavy chore, we won’t develop the consistency we need to achieve the deep, lasting effects we’re looking for.

We need to build momentum over time, because there isn’t a reification “off switch” that we’ll find in a flash of insight. It sits on a continuum, somewhere on a scale of 0-100. If we develop our mindfulness skills just a little, we’ll start to experience the world less as a fixed place with problems to overcome, and more as an ever-changing context that we can adapt to.

We’ll gain the flexibility to change our reactions, to flip the script on unhealthy responses and to act from a clearer sense of what matters.

And you can start with this five-minute guided session right now.

This is where the practice begins, and there’s a community exploring it with you.

Instinctively, I threw the board sideways and sprayed snow down the slope. A literal digging in of my heels.

By contrast, the two friends I’d ridden the chairlift with leaned forward on the same incline I was furiously backpedalling from. They needed enough speed to clear a five-metre gap on the first jump.

It was my own fault. I had very little snowboarding experience, but in the middle of a fun conversation, I’d followed my friends off the lift and almost into a black diamond disaster. The Mt Tremblant snow park.

The fear and adrenaline quickly dissipated, and it was clear that I was too far down to turn back. A few more breaths and it became mercifully clear the run was designed so someone like me could avoid all the jumps and make it safely to the bottom.

I felt relieved, and in a weird way, kind of seen.

Later, in a warm Montreal restaurant, we laughed at the difference in experience. To me, the black diamonds on the sign made the whole thing more threatening, while for the others they signalled (and I quote) “a need for speed.”

The moral of this story could be left at the perils of not paying attention. But this isn’t about people walking into fountains while they scroll. It’s not about overreacting to perceived danger. It’s about something more subtle, pervasive, often overlooked, and, according to neuroscience, an integral part of resilience to trauma.

This is about the shift from certain catastrophe to a fun and easy speed run down the mountain that avoided all the jumps. Albeit with some disdain from the more advanced riders.

This ability to shift perception is so taken for granted that we don’t even consider it important. We write it off with a simple “I changed my mind” as if changing our minds were the easiest and most ordinary thing in the world.

But what if it’s one of the key components of mental health?

A recent paper by leading neuroscientists studying trauma calls this “metastability”, which is a great example of researchers choosing a very precise term that will never catch on outside the laboratory. Essentially, it means the flexibility to update our perception of the ever-changing world around us. It’s how we adapt our behaviour to different circumstances, and it’s a capacity that’s diminished as a result of trauma.

This means that trauma creates a system of hypervigilance, flashbacks, and avoidance, and reduces the capacity to interrupt those responses, even when there is no imminent threat.

Even when the person knows there is no imminent threat.

The missing flexibility (metastability) would help a person living with trauma re-evaluate a sudden loud noise as a jackhammer, or someone shouting as an expression of their excitement. Instead of automatically collapsing into worst-case scenarios, they could face and respond to what’s actually happening.

It would mean looking for ways around the jumps, rather than a panicked stop in the middle of a crowded ski slope.

Our brains and senses keep us safe by working at an incredible speed, and it’s this speed that makes responses so hard to interrupt. The hypervigilance created by trauma makes people quick to react as if there’s a threat, and the reduced flexibility makes it difficult to interrupt even when they’re not in danger.

The issue, according to these researchers, is less about the memory of the experienced trauma and more about the mental flexibility that is damaged by the trauma.

Which brings us to the controversial part.

The authors push back on much of the mainstream thinking about trauma. Specifically, the popular idea that trauma is “stored in the body”, and (perhaps more controversially) that it needs to be released somehow.

It’s an attractive metaphor that has led to some very effective somatic therapies to help people dial down symptoms, reduce reactivity, and start experiencing joy and meaning.

These body-focused therapies help people gain control of their lives and responses, not because trauma is stored there, but because it gives them somewhere safe to be, till the storm passes. With each storm navigated and survived, confidence to survive another slowly increases, but the flexibility needed for stable, long-term results may develop more slowly.

More importantly, to work, these therapies don’t need the popular model of trauma being physically exorcised or purged, because it turns out, the body is the messenger, not the archive.1

A messenger so fast and efficient that it masquerades as the source, but it’s not. The interpretation is the source, and it becomes embodied, which is different from being stored. Trauma-based inflexibility is what sustains it over time.

And this happens in the mind.

Flow states are known to support this mental flexibility and can shift reactions from avoidance or freezing to what’s known as “approach dynamics”. This means a tendency to lean into what’s happening and find a way through, rather than collapsing into automatic responses.

This is what happened to me when I froze on the mountain and moved past the fear by looking for a way through. The more we can do this, the more often we’ll find a way to safety that avoids unnecessary danger and stress.

Surfing, hiking and music have all been shown to induce flow states. This can increase our flexibility and tendency to look for ways through, rather than fall into previous habits. It’s also been shown to reduce the power of intrusive thoughts and memories, all of which makes us less reactive to our outer and inner worlds.

Meditation is also a way to experience flow states, albeit at a much deeper and more stable level. I’ve often been asked whether flow and mindfulness are the same thing, and I believe they’re related. The main difference lies in subtlety.

In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, we might say: If it’s mindfulness, it’s flow; if it’s flow, it’s not necessarily mindfulness.

Meditation, especially traditional mindfulness practices, will increase the flexibility we’re looking for, but as a by-product. The real power of these practices is in something much deeper. Not mystical, not unexplainable, but a simple mechanism that psychology is starting to see the power of.

It’s the power behind the results of my PhD, but it runs much deeper into Buddhist principles of how suffering works.

These ideas come alive differently in practice than on the page. If you want to explore them in real time, I run a live session inside Balanced Minds every Monday night. It’s where we put exactly this kind of thinking to work.

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In the next post, I’ll unpack how 2,500 years of Buddhist understanding has made its way into modern psychology and why it makes this such an exciting time to be in the field.

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