One of my mentors, the sociologist Seema Kapani, frequently advised me to “speak into their listening.”

This guidance expresses a fundamental principle of all great teaching. It proves even more essential in the teaching of ideas, concepts, and insights that prospective audiences of learners find foreign, unusual, culturally challenging, fanciful, or preposterous.

In the mid-20th century, the ideas that behavior shapes human physiology – that “neuroplasticity” characterizes the human brain, that meditation offers health benefits by shifting not only “states” but also, potentially, “traits” – all met resistance in the places where the frameworks for listening were scientific: psychology, sociology, and medicine. The implications of such ideas for the law, lawyering, and lawyers – if they ever found purchase in empirical support – could barely be imagined, at least in the United States.

So, following the principle of “speaking to their listening,” the small but ultimately influential wave of North Americans hoping to translate and teach the ancient principles of eastern practices that would ultimately come to be called “mindfulness” here would need to learn to “speak into the listening” of empirically minded, high-strung “type A” Americans, such as many lawyers.

A Revolution of West Meets East

Enter Richard Davidson.

Davidson now heads up the multidisciplinary Center for Healthy Minds and a neuroscience research lab, both at U.W. Madison, central to exploring the effects of meditation on the brain – and thereby on behavior.

In the 1970s, Davidson was one of a small group of Americans asking questions about the effects of meditation on human health and happiness. With his friend Daniel Goleman, Davidson began to explore using the tools of western research to measure, document, and articulate those changes and to translate them into applied work for western audiences.

Early on, these projects existed on the outer edges of “normal science,” as paradigm-challenging work often does. Nurtured by the propitious formation in 1987 of the Mind and Life Institute,¹ Goleman and Davidson prepared the groundwork for a scientific revolution that would demonstrate the veracity of many eastern beliefs about what promotes health and happiness.

In Goleman and Davidson’s 2017 book, Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body,² Davidson recalled the first time he publicly argued for the concept of neuroplasticity: in a 1992 talk to the sociology department at U.W. Madison. His argument was designed to “speak into the listening” of a discipline that could still ignore the body in its theories of behavior.

Fast forward 30 years, and it would be difficult to find a physician, psychologist, rehabilitation therapist, sociologist, biologist, teacher, or lawyer who is unfamiliar with this concept that is revolutionary in its implications.

Creating a Space for Change

For lawyers, the implications of this revolution are multidimensional. The scientific demonstration of meditation’s benefits on brain functioning has practical appeal. Davidson and Goleman call this the “wide path” of benefits derived from eastern mindfulness practices.

In using eastern-inspired meditation and mindfulness practices, lawyers have learned they can cultivate sharper focus, greater mental clarity, and more resilience in the face of stressful situations.

There’s an alternative deeper path too, and some lawyers are beginning to embrace it: a path that involves not just “state shifts” (such as calming down in a given moment) but the longer lift of “trait shifts” – changing our brains through mindful practice, making our habitual interactions with the world more generous, benevolent, balanced, and peaceful, and changing situations as a result.

Jennifer Mohamed is a practicing attorney, a yoga teacher, and president emeritus of the Princeton Bar Association. Calling herself “Jen the Yoga Lawyer,” she says she used yoga to “detox” from the stress of lawyering – until she saw the possibility of using her practice to do lawyering differently:

“After years of living in the toxicity that has saturated the legal profession and learning to let it all go on my yoga mat, I’ve set out on a journey to train lawyers in mindfulness to transform how we practice law, and train anyone who will listen in conscious leadership and wellness habits to change the world. Yes, to change the world.”³

Fifty years into a scientific paradigm shift in understanding the brain and its interrelationships with the social world, the trajectory of that shift begs these questions:

• What would a paradigm shift centered on mindfulness, consciousness, and the most optimistic of human possibilities mean for the practice of law?

• Where will innovators of new paradigms in the practice of law emerge and find support and nurturing?

And how will they “speak into the listening” of the dominant paradigm in ways that effectively create space for change?

Endnotes

1 The Mind and Life Institute was created in 1987 by the Dalai Lama, neuroscientist and meditation practitioner Francisco Verela, and lawyer-turned-business-owner Adam Engle (also a mindfulness practitioner).

2 Daniel Goleman & Richard J. Davidson, Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body (New York: Avery, 2017).

3 Jennifer Mohamed, Jen the Yoga Lawyer – Optimal Wellness for Lawyers and Leaders, jentheyogalawyer.com.