Scott Anderson, Ph.D.

Mention meditation to most people and they’ll picture mindfulness: sitting quietly, following the breath, noticing thoughts come and go. That picture isn’t wrong, but it’s incomplete. Meditation is a large tent, and mindfulness, or what researchers call the “attentional” practices, is only one part of what lives under it. Three Families of Practice In academic settings, meditation is often sorted into three families: attentional, constructive, and deconstructive practices. That framework comes from my friend Cortland Dahl, who developed it with his colleagues Antoine Lutz and Richard Davidson in a 2015 paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences . It’s an elegant model, grounded in the cognitive mechanisms each style of practice engages. In my own teaching, though, I lean toward the more descriptive names I first heard from my teacher, Mingyur Rinpoche, who divides meditation into practices of awareness , compassion , and wisdom . These categories have shaped how I practice and teach ever ...

  Most mornings I'm on the rowing machine well before the sun rises. With the first few strokes, I set the intention that the time I spend working out benefits not only me but all beings. And with that, the meditation begins. Practice is a cornerstone of my day, and over the years I've come to see that the relationship runs both ways: meditation makes healthy routines far easier to sustain, and healthy routines make meditation more stable and alive. Approaches to meditation vary widely, but most share three common threads: awareness, compassion, and wisdom. Awareness is our inherent capacity to be present, here and now. Compassion is the warmth we feel naturally toward those we love. Widening that circle of care, as I aim to do each morning on the rower, turns out to be good for both body and mind. Wisdom is seeing things as they are, rather than turning life's molehills into mountains. Most days I meditate during and after cardio. My favorite way to weave meditation into ...