His plane was coming in for a landing at Philadelphia International Airport when Allen M Weiss, a marketing professor at the University of Southern California, felt a spasm of pain pierce his left cheek near his nose. “It was really weird,” recalled Weiss, then director of Mindful USC, a group of meditation-based programs at the Los Angeles university. “My face froze up.”
Within minutes the pain disappeared and the final leg of Weiss’s December 2015 trip home to California was uneventful. But over the next few months the sensation recurred in the same spot. At first the…
