While one researcher titled the important cognitive skill in Jonah Lehrer’s recent New Yorker article “Don’t!” the “strategic allocation of attention,” yogis have long understood the concepts of focus and patience. Subtitled “The Secret of Self-Control,” Lehrer’s excellent piece follows a group of adults who were tested as young children at the Bing Nursery School in the late 1960s through to the present day. Forty years ago they were placed in a room where one researcher made them an offer: you can have one marshmallow now, or if you wait until I return, you can have two. The marshmallow sat on the table in front of the child; the researcher left. For fifteen minutes.

Cruel trick, no? Yet amazing results. Tracing the arc of each child’s life four decades later, researchers found that those who resisted eating the marshmallow were more attuned to society and their life and career than those who gave in and snatched up the gooey treat. Today researchers go so far to say that this sort of testing of one’s patience and self-control is much more indicative of a person’s intelligence than IQ—something well known to people who may not have fared particularly well in school (i.e. “book learning"), and still carved highly successful paths in life. (Interestingly, children who held out for fifteen minutes did score an average 210 points higher on their SATs than those who could not hold out thirty seconds.)

Without merely restating the (ongoing) findings of the article here, what proves interesting for our purposes is the researchers’ observations about human nature: it wasn’t that the children that held out wanted the marshmallow less, or that they were inherently endowed with patient genes. The key, they said, is that those children that held out were extremely good at occupying their minds with something other task, like closing their eyes, singing songs, or playing hide-and-seek with themselves. When the researcher taught them one method of “tricking” themselves—picturing the marshmallow as a portrait and placing a frame around it, instead of seeing it as a snack to be devoured—the children were able to wait with a much higher degree of success.

Sounds kind of like a mandala, no?

The most important aspect of meditation I ever learned was not to try to suppress my thoughts, or pretend like I could. We’d drive ourselves crazy if we tried to meditate in this way, and most likely give up our practice rather quickly. Instead, you observe the thoughts from a distance, and watch them leave as swiftly as they arrive; you patiently train yourself not to follow the thoughts. This tendency to pursue our thoughts exhausts us, and is the very premise of the circular nature of samsara, which leaves us feeling victimized by our thoughts. What’s important to remember is that this sort of mental training is a discipline and a process. Researchers came to the same conclusion about educating children in self-control.

What then, do we replace thoughts with? How do we reorient ourselves to observing the observer? Fortunately the yogis of old realized that no one answer was right for everyone. You had mandalas (predominantly in Tibet; yantras were the visual cue in India), which the seeker focused on, allowing all of their attention to become engaged in the symbolic figure in front of them. There are other visualization techniques, ones using candles or pictures of deities, and then there is the internal focus of the deity, picturing him or her with your inner eye. Bhakti yogis use mantras as focal points, suffusing silence with sacred sound. And so on and on, enough techniques for each of us to find the one that best suits our temperament. The starting point remains the same: to pull back from the rampant succession of desires and observe the process of our cravings. When we begin there, we have found the foundation to work from, to begin our mastery of self-control.