I just spent the past week attending Mind & Life Conference which was held with the Dalai Lama at his residence here in Dharamsala, India. Well, that is, I attended the live broadcast of it at the adjacent Namgyal Monastery. I wish I had been able to be at the conference in person!

I’ve been to public ones in the U.S. and India in the past and they are always thought-provoking, authentically open dialogues between scientists, scholars, and contemplative practitioners. I absolutely love these conferences because exciting interdisciplinary ideas emerge and unexpected conversations evolve about, well, what mind is and how we can work with our minds to live skillfully and beneficially.

Organized around a chosen topic, invited presenters speak about their research or practice, then open it up to questions and discussions. In the process, paradigms, assumptions, and philosophical traditions are examined. Issues are raised for how we can improve or solve humanity’s contemporary problems.

The topic of this one was “Craving, Desire, and Addiction.” Check out the Program and Schedule of Events.  Mind & Life Institute assembled a remarkable group of participants–neuroscientists, clinicians, a sociologist, a Christian mystical scholar, monks, and others–who brought first-person perspectives to the table. One neuroscientist, Mark Lewis, had been an addict himself and talked about his subjective experience of the craving cycle, and his objective one as a researcher working on identifying the neurological structures of the brain involved in and affected by substance abuse.

Some eye-opening things I learned from research findings include the idea of the “erosion of free will” in addiction. Dopamine and serotonin structures in the brain involved in thinking, restraint, and projected rewards are actually altered and “hijacked” by addiction so that addicts are, in fact, biochemically disadvantaged in breaking the cycle of craving-imagining-planning-taking the substance, as opposed to non-addicts. Studies indicate that addiction recurs even though addicts no longer find pleasure in the substance and know that it will cause them and others harm.

One anthropologist presented some stunning statistics about the regulation of addictive substances as a program of prevention. In the U.S., criminalization of drugs has resulted in disproportionate incarceration. The American population is 5% of the world population, but is 25% of the world’s incarcerated! African-Americans form 13% of the U.S. population, but are 45% of those jailed for non-violent drug offense! There seems to be a serious bias in the implementation of drug laws. Another example, in New York City, more white people use marijuana, but more black people are arrested for it.

These facts, and many other compelling ones on prevention, intervention, and treatment were discussed. Incidentally, Mind & Life will be posting videos of the conference soon on its website. So if you missed the live webcasts, you can watch them archived online. I highly recommend it if you are or you know someone who is affected by substance abuse and addiction.

The conference was profound in scope. Key discussions centered on definitions and experiences of desire and craving, and how they can be met and transformed. It was insightful not only for illuminating root causes of suffering for addicts but for all of us living in contemporary materialistic culture where craving things becomes the norm for excessive consumption. I read recently that acquiring more than what you need was considered by many pre-industrialized indigenous cultures as pathological. What prescience!

It makes a lot of sense when you consider the suffering of anxiety, depression, neuroses, and suicides in the U.S. among young people who are desperately stressed, competing with each other towards educational goals aimed ultimately at attaining material wealth. The documentary Race to Nowhere is a disturbing and sad account of this phenomena. It illustrates a basis for the alarming disconnection between emotional health and well-being, and what is defined as “success” in American life. See the trailer here.

And while I’m on this topic, the book Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success also takes an insightful look at how we are raising and educating kids.  The New York Times writes, “It would be easy, on first glance, to dismiss [psychologist] Madeline Levine’s Teach Your Children Well as yet another new arrival in a long line of books that have urged us…to push back and just say no to the pressures of perfectionistic, high-performance parenting. But to give in to first impressions would be a mistake. Levine works with teenagers who are depleted, angry and sad…so lost are they in the pursuit of goals that have drained their lives of pleasure, contentment and connection. ‘Our current version of success is a failure,’ she writes. It’s a damning, and altogether accurate, clinical diagnosis.”

And how much of this cultural milieu might drive people to substance use and abuse in an unfortunate attempt to alleviate suffering? It is known that the harmful patterns of addiction take a profound toll on both the individual and society. According to Mind & Life, addiction to alcohol, tobacco, and illicit drugs, for example, is estimated to cost the United States $600 billion per year. Did you just read that correctly? Yes, you did, $600 BILLION. On the emotional level, it’s immeasurable how deeply it traumatizes families and friends, sometimes for generations.

At this Mind & Life conference, as part of the discussion on effective treatment for addiction, the Dalai Lama advocated prevention through new initiatives in education that increases self-awareness and connection to others through the practice of kindness. Because many social ills come from the hyper-individualism championed by the contemporary industrialized world, such excessive self-focus, he said, ultimately produces separation and unhappiness. It gives rise to an “us and them” mentality which makes aggression, greed, and war possible. Instead, we need to develop not only our thinking skills but our emotional ones as well.

If you’re an educator, counselor, or parent, take a look at this nascent movement and see what you can do to make a difference.

See an example of how incorporating kindness in children’s education works in this PBS video. Groundbreaking studies of children learning through mindfulness and kindness curricula currently under way and developed by University of Wisconsin Center for Investigating Healthy Minds are yielding increases in positive social behavior. See here for further information on this and similar programs.