Rick Hanson (quotes)

The brain is drawn to bad news.
Resentment is when I take poison and wait for you to die.
For if the brain is the cause of suffering, it can also be its cure.
In the responsive mode, you meet challenges without them becoming stressors.
Nurturing your own development isn’t selfish. It’s actually a great gift to other people.
It’s impossible to change the past or the present: you can only accept all that as it is.
Desiring itself can be an unpleasant experience; even mild longing is subtly uncomfortable.
Only we humans worry about the future, regret the past, and blame ourselves for the present.
Therefore, you can use your mind to change your brain to benefit your mind—and everyone else
In a way, empathy is a kind of mindfulness meditation focused on someone else’s inner world.
Nurturing your own development isn’t selfish. It’s actually a great gift to other people. The
If compassion is the wish that someone not suffer, kindness is the wish that he or she be happy.
In effect, the negativity bias is tilted toward immediate survival, but against quality of life.
Stress reduces serotonin, probably the most important neurotransmitter for maintaining a good mood.
Unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence.
It’s sometimes said that the greatest remaining scientific questions are: What caused the Big Bang?
that suffering is the result of craving expressed through the Three Poisons: greed, hatred, and delusion.
The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace by Jack Kornfield and Forgive for Good by Fred Luskin.)
I am larger, better than I thought, I did not know I held so much goodness. —Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road
Do all that you can, with all that you have, in the time that you have, in the place where you are. —Nkosi Johnson
Experiences are thus incapable of being completely satisfying. They are an unreliable basis for true happiness. To
In my heart, there are two wolves: a wolf of love and a wolf of hate. It all depends on which one I feed each day.
you can do small things inside your mind that will lead to big changes in your brain and your experience of living.
Each of us has two wolves in the heart, one of love and one of hate. Everything depends on which one we feed each day.
You can decide to get eggs from the refrigerator without craving them—and without getting upset if there are none left.
Have faith that others will pay their own price one day for what they’ve done. You don’t have to be the justice system.
Thoughts are just thoughts, sounds are just sounds, situations are just situations, and people are just being themselves.
Negative experiences create vicious cycles by making you pessimistic, overreactive, and inclined to go negative yourself.
How about making a personal commitment never to go to sleep without having meditated that day, even if for just one minute?
You can’t control how she treats you, but you can control how you treat her: these are the causes you can actually tend to.
How about making a personal commitment never to go to sleep without having meditated that day, even if for just one minute?
A single raindrop doesn’t have much effect, but if you have enough raindrops and enough time, you can carve a Grand Canyon.
Say only what is well-intended, true, beneficial, timely, expressed without harshness or malice, and—ideally—what is wanted.
Inner strengths are the supplies you’ve got in your pack as you make your way down the twisting and often hard road of life.
Be nice. Share your toys. These are excellent intentions to be kind—and you don’t need much more than them to steer your life!
More than ever, the human world needs to find ways to build love, understanding, and peace, individually and on a global scale.
Virtue simply involves regulating your actions, words, and thoughts to create benefits rather than harms for yourself and others.
When you understand why you feel nervous, annoyed, hassled, driven, blue, or inadequate, those feelings have less power over you.
Virtue simply involves regulating your actions, words, and thoughts to create benefits rather than harms for yourself and others.
Negative experiences create vicious cycles by making you pessimistic, overreactive, and inclined to go negative yourself. Avoiding
All joy in this world comes from wanting others to be happy, and all suffering in this world comes from wanting only oneself to be happy.
Suffering has clear causes in your brain and body, so if you change its causes, you’ll suffer a lot less. And you can change those causes.
It’s impossible to change the past or the present: you can only accept all that as it is. But you can tend to the causes of a better future.
Realize that some people won’t get the lesson no matter how much you try. So why create problems for yourself in a pointless effort to teach them?
On the path of awakening, keep going! Lots of little moments of practice will gradually and truly increase your contentment, kindness, and insight.
All joy in this world comes from wanting others to be happy, and all suffering in this world comes from wanting only oneself to be happy. —Shantideva
Your brain is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones—even though most of your experiences are probably neutral or positive.
…much of what you see out there is actually manufactured in here by your brain, painted in like computer-generated graphics in a movie.
The number of possible combinations of 100 billion neurons firing or not is approximately 10 to the millionth power, or 1 followed by a million zeros, in
principle; this is the number of possible states of your brain. To put this quantity in perspective, the number of atoms in the universe is estimated to be
Everything changes. That’s the universal nature of outer reality and inner experience. Therefore, there’s no end to disturbed equilibria as long as you live.
The apparent wall between your body and the world is more like a picket fence. And between your mind and the world, it’s like a line painted on the sidewalk.
(Raichle 2006). Your brain simulates the world—each of us lives in a virtual reality that’s close enough to the real thing that we don’t bump into the furniture.
fraction of the inputs to your occipital lobe comes directly from the external world; the rest comes from internal memory stores and perceptual-processing modules
Small positive actions every day will add up to large changes over time, as you gradually build new neural structures. To keep at it, you need to be on your own side.
Be aware of passing thoughts and feelings without reacting to them. Notice a growing disengagement. There’s less tilting toward pleasure, less pulling back from pain.
In the simulator, upsetting events from the past play again and again, which unfortunately strengthens the neural associations between an event and its painful feelings.
It’s easy to be kind when others treat you well. The challenge is to preserve your loving-kindness when they treat you badly—to preserve goodwill in the face of ill will.
Imagine discovering that you could give good experiences to a dear friend, or to someone who was hurting. It would probably make you happy to know that you could do this.
It’s easy to be kind when others treat you well. The challenge is to preserve your loving-kindness when they treat you badly—to preserve goodwill in the face of ill will.
If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each [person’s] life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm any hostility. —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
For most people, the left lobe establishes that the body is distinct from the world, and the right lobe indicates where the body is compared to features in its environment.
In relationships,second darts create vicious cycles: your second-dart reactions trigger reactions from the other person, which set off more second darts from you, and so on.
Three Poisons: greed makes me rigid about how I want things to be, hatred gets me all bothered and angry, and delusion tricks me into taking the situation personally. Saddest
Whatever positive facts you find, bring a mindful awareness to them—open up to them and let them affect you. It’s like sitting down to a banquet: don’t just look at it—dig in!
By taking just a few extra seconds to stay with a positive experience—even the comfort in a single breath—you’ll help turn a passing mental state into lasting neural structure.
As much as possible, seek out nurturing and reliable people, and take in the feeling of being with them. Also do what you can to be treated well in your existing relationships.
Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them. —Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
Your brain is built more for avoiding than for approaching. That’s because it’s the negative experiences, not the positive ones, that have generally had the most impact on survival.
Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them. —Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche Some
First darts are unpleasant to be sure. But then we add our reactions to them. These reactions are second darts—the ones we throw ourselves. Most of our suffering comes from second darts.
[I]f you can be with the pleasant without chasing after it, with the unpleasant without resisting it, and with the neutral without ignoring it – […] that is an incredible […] freedom.
Every day, try to have compassion for five kinds of people: someone you’re grateful to (a benefactor), a loved one or friend, a neutral person, someone who is difficult for you—and yourself.
If there were no empathy, we’d make our way in life like ants or bees, brushing shoulders with other people but fundamentally alone.Humans are by far the most empathic species on the planet.
Every day, try to have compassion for five kinds of people: someone you’re grateful to (a ‘benefactor’), a loved one or friend, a neutral person, someone who is difficult for you—and yourself.
Virtue, mindfulness, and wisdom are the pillars of everyday well-being, personal growth, and spiritual practice; they draw on the three fundamental neural functions of regulation, learning, and
What flows through your mind sculpts your brain. Thus, you can use your mind to change your brain for the better—which will benefit your whole being,and every other person whose life you touch.
Connect with People Who Support You Identify friends and family who care about you, and try to spend more time with them. When you’re apart, visualize being with them and take in the good feelings.
Think about the many ways that others will benefit from you being more good-humored, warm-hearted, and savvy. Nurturing your own development isn’t selfish. It’s actually a great gift to other people.
Slow down. Talk less. When you can, do just one thing at a time. Reduce multitasking. Focus on your breath while doing daily activities. Simplify your life; give up lesser pleasures for greater ones.
Find refuge in whatever is a sanctuary and refueling station for you.Potential refuges include people, activities, places, and intangible things like reason, a sense of your innermost being, or truth.
The remedy is not to suppress negative experiences; when they happen, they happen. Rather, it is to foster positive experiences—and in particular, to take them in so they become a permanent part of you.
One way to focus and express kind intentions is through these traditional wishes, which you can think, write down, or even sing: May you be safe. May you be healthy. May you be happy. May you live with ease.
It helps to remember that kindness is its own reward, that consequences often come to others without you needing to bring justice to them yourself, and that you can be assertive without falling into ill will.
It could be 350 years, and maybe longer, before we completely understand the relationship between the brain and the mind. But meanwhile, a reasonable working hypothesis is that the mind is what the brain does.
First darts are unpleasant to be sure. But then we add our reactions to them. These reactions are second darts—the ones we throw ourselves. Most of our suffering comes from second darts. Suppose you’re walking
virtue, mindfulness (also called concentration), and wisdom. These are the three pillars of Buddhist practice, as well as the wellsprings of everyday well-being, psychological growth, and spiritual realization.
Every time you take in the good, you build a little bit of neural structure. Doing this a few times a day—for months and even years—will gradually change your brain, and how you feel and act, in far-reaching ways.
The brain is designed to change through experiences, especially negative ones; we learn from our experiences, particularly those that happened during childhood, and it is natural for that learning to stick with us.
At the end of the day, what you and the other person will mainly remember is not what you said but how you said it. Be careful about your tone, and avoid language that is faultfinding, exaggerated, or inflammatory.
Stephen Gaskin (2005) describes karma as hitting golf balls in a shower. Often our attempts at payback just get in the way of balls already ricocheting back toward the person who sent them flying in the first place.
See the collateral damage—the suffering—that results when you cling to your desires and opinions or take things personally. Over the long haul, most of what we argue about with others really doesn’t matter that much.
To be clear: empathy is neither agreement nor approval. You can empathize with someone you wish would act differently. Empathy doesn’t mean waiving your rights; knowing this can help you feel it’s alright to be empathic.
Equanimity is neither apathy nor indifference: you are warmly engaged with the world but not troubled by it. Through its nonreactivity, it creates a great space for compassion, loving-kindness, and joy at the good fortune of others.
Getting upset about somebody’s thoughts is like getting upset about spray from a waterfall. Try to decouple your thoughts from the other person’s. Tell yourself: She’s over there and I’m over here. Her mind is separate from my mind.
The mind is what the brain does.Therefore, an awakening mind means an awakening brain. Throughout history, unsung men and women and great teachers alike have cultivated remarkable mental states by generating remarkable brain states.
For example, take five breaths, inhaling and exhaling a little more fully than usual. This is both energizing and relaxing, activating first the sympathetic system and then the parasympathetic one, back and forth, in a gentle rhythm.
Mindfulness involves the skillful use of attention to both your inner and outer worlds. Since your brain learns mainly from what you attend to, mindfulness is the doorway to taking in good experiences and making them a part of yourself.
The brain has a wonderful capacity to simulate experiences, but there´s a price: the simulator pulls you out of the moment, plus it sets you chasing pleasures that aren´t that great and resisting pains that are exaggerated or not even real
To use an analogy from the Thai meditation master Ajahn Chah: if getting upset about something unpleasant is like being bitten by a snake, grasping for what’s pleasant is like grabbing the snake’s tail; sooner or later, it will still bite you.
Open to the sense that you are receiving compassion—deep down in your brain, the actual source of good feelings doesn’t matter much; whether the compassion is from you or from another person, let your sense of being soothed and cared for sink in.
No book can give you the brain of a Buddha, but by better understanding the mind and brain of people who’ve gone a long way down this path, you can develop more of their joyful, caring, and insightful qualities within your own mind and brain as well.
Taking in the good is not about putting a happy shiny face on everything, nor is it about turning away from the hard things in life. It’s about nourishing well-being, contentment, and peace inside that are refuges you can always come from and return to.
If you can break the link between feeling tones and craving—if you can be with the pleasant without chasing after it, with the unpleasant without resisting it, and with the neutral without ignoring it—then you have cut the chain of suffering, at least for a time.
When you identify with something as me or try to possess something as mine, you set yourself up for suffering, since all things are frail and will inevitably pass away. When you stand apart from other people and the world as I, you feel separate and vulnerable—and suffer.
One way the self grows is by equating itself to things—by identifying with them. Unfortunately, when you identify with something, you make its fate your own—and yet, everything in this world ultimately ends. So be mindful of how you identify with positions, objects, and people.
you can take action to make the future different. But even then, remember that most of the factors that shape the future are out of your hands. You can do everything right, and still the glass will break, the project will go nowhere, you’ll catch the flu, or a friend will remain upset.
The wolf of love sees a vast horizon, with all beings included in the circle of us. That circle shrinks down for the wolf of hate, so that only the nation, or tribe, or friends and family—or, in the extreme, only the individual self—is held as us, surrounded by threatening masses of them.
Settle into the present moment. Drop the past and let go of the future. Receive each moment without trying to connect one moment to the next. Abide as presence, neither remembering nor planning. There is no straining, no seeking for anything. Nothing to have, nothing to do, nothing to be.
Let the experience fill your body and be as intense as possible. For example, if someone is good to you, let the feeling of being cared about bring warmth to your whole chest. Imagine or feel that the experience is entering deeply into your mind and body, like the sun’s warmth into a T-shirt.
It’s sometimes said that the greatest remaining scientific questions are: What caused the Big Bang? What is the grand unified theory that integrates quantum mechanics and general relativity? And what is the relationship between the mind and the brain, especially regarding conscious experience?
I highly recommend the approach Marshall Rosenberg details in Nonviolent Communication (2nd Edition 2008), which has essentially three parts: When X happens [described factually, not judgmentally], I feel Y [especially the deeper, softer emotions], because I need Z [fundamental needs and wants].
The point is not to resist painful experiences or grasp at pleasant ones: that’s a kind of craving—and craving leads to suffering. The art is to find a balance in which you remain mindful, accepting, and curious regarding difficult experiences—while also taking in supportive feelings and thoughts.
Within your mind, there are hardly any lines at all. All its contents flow into each other, sensations becoming thoughts, feelings, desires, actions, and more sensations. This stream of consciousness correlates with a cascade of fleeting neural assemblies, each assembly dispersing into the next one[.]
Taxi drivers in London—whose job requires remembering lots of twisty streets—develop a larger hippocampus (a key brain region for making visual-spatial memories), since that part of the brain gets an extra workout . As you become a happier person, the left frontal region of your brain becomes more active.
Letting go of ill will does not mean passivity, silence, or allowing yourself or others to be harmed. […] There is plenty of room for speaking truth to power and effective action without succumbing to ill will. […] In fact, with a clear mind and peaceful heart, your actions are likely to be more effective.
It’s a general moral principle that the more power you have over someone, the greater your duty to use that power benevolently. Well, who is the one person in the world you have the greatest power over? It’s your future self. You hold that life in your hands, and what it will be depends on how you care for it.
If you can break the link between feeling tones and craving—if you can be with the pleasant without chasing after it, with the unpleasant without resisting it, and with the neutral without ignoring it—then you have cut the chain of suffering, at least for a time. And that is an incredible blessing and freedom.
The tragedy and opportunity of this moment in history are exactly the same: the natural and technical resources needed to pull us back from the brink already exist. The issue is not a lack of resources. It is a lack of will and restraint, of attention to what’s truly happening, and of enlightened self-interest[.]
your fundamental nature is pure, conscious, peaceful, radiant, loving, and wise, and it is joined in mysterious ways with the ultimate underpinnings of reality, by whatever name we give That. Although your true nature may be hidden momentarily by stress and worry, anger and unfulfilled longings, it still continues to exist.
This goes two ways: a relationship that’s bigger than its real foundation is a set-up for disappointment and hurt, while a relationship that’s smaller than its foundation is a lost opportunity. In both cases, focus on your own initiative, especially after you’ve made reasonable efforts to encourage changes in the other person.
Take a few minutes to explore extending your loving-kindness to the billions of people living here on earth. Loving-kindness for someone somewhere laughing. Loving-kindness for someone crying. Loving-kindness for someone getting married. Loving-kindness for someone caring for a sick child or parent. Loving-kindness for someone worried.
Empathy is virtue in action, the restraint of reactive patterns in order to stay present with another person. It embodies non-harming,since a lack of empathy is often upsetting to others, and also opens the door to hurting them unwittingly. Empathy contains an inherent generosity: you give the willingness to be moved by another person.
It goes against the evolutionary template to undo the causes of suffering, to feel one with all things, to flow with the changing moment, and to remain unmoved by pleasant and unpleasant alike.Of course, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it! It just means we should understand what we’re up against and have some compassion for ourselves.
most of the shaping of your mind remains forever unconscious. This is called implicit memory, and it includes your expectations, models of relationships, emotional tendencies, and general outlook. Implicit memory establishes the interior landscape of your mind—what it feels like to be you—based on the slowly accumulating residues of lived experience. In
It’s a remarkable fact that the people who have gone the very deepest into the mind—the sages and saints of every religious tradition—all say essentially the same thing: your fundamental nature is pure, conscious, peaceful, radiant, loving, and wise, and it is joined in mysterious ways with the ultimate underpinnings of reality, by whatever name we give That.
Your fundamental nature is pure, conscious, peaceful, radiant, loving, and wise, and it is joined in mysterious ways with the ultimate underpinnings of reality, by whatever name we give That. Although your true nature may be hidden momentarily by stress and worry, anger and unfulfilled longings, it still continues to exist. Knowing this can be a great comfort.
To become happier, wiser, and more loving, sometimes you have to swim against ancient currents within your nervous system. For example, in some ways the three pillars of practice are unnatural: virtue restrains emotional reactions that worked well on the Serengeti, mindfulness decreases external vigilance, and wisdom cuts through beliefs that once helped us survive.
Saddest of all, some second-dart reactions are to conditions that are actually positive. If someone pays you a compliment, that’s a positive situation. But then you might start thinking, with some nervousness and even a little shame: Oh, I’m not really that good a person. Maybe they’ll find out I’m a fraud. Right there, needless second-dart suffering begins. Heating
[K]eep in mind the big picture, the 1,000-foot view. See the impermanence of whatever is at issue, and the many causes and conditions that led to it. See the collateral damage – the suffering – that results when you cling to your desires and opinions or take things personally. Over the long haul, most of what we argue about with others really doesn’t matter that much.
If you want to get good at anything, it helps to study those who have already mastered that skill, such as top chefs on TV if you like to cook. Therefore, if you’d like to feel more happiness, inner strength, clarity, and peace, it makes sense to learn from contemplative practitioners—both dedicated lay people and monastics—who’ve really pursued the cultivation of these qualities.
bring to mind the feeling of being with someone who loves you, while calling up heartfelt emotions such as gratitude or fondness. Next, bring empathy to the difficulties of the other person. Opening to his (even subtle) suffering, let sympathy and goodwill naturally arise. (These steps flow together in actual practice.) Then, in your mind, offer explicit wishes, such as May you not suffer.
Whatever their temperament, if children are part of your life, encourage them to pause for a moment at the end of the day (or at any other natural interval, such as the last minute before the school bell) to remember what went well and think about things that make them happy (e.g., a pet, their parents’ love, a goal scored in soccer). Then have those positive feelings and thoughts sink in.
Richard and I both believe that something transcendental is involved with the mind, consciousness, and the path of awakening—call it God, Spirit, Buddha-nature, the Ground, or by no name at all. Whatever it is, by definition it’s beyond the physical universe. Since it cannot be proven one way or another, it is important—and consistent with the spirit of science—to respect it as a possibility.
Life includes getting wounded. Accept as a fact that people will sometimes mistreat you, whether accidentally or deliberately. Of course, this doesn’t mean enabling others to harm you, or failing to assert yourself. You’re just accepting the facts on the ground. Feel the hurt, the anger, the fear, but let them flow through you. Ill will can become a way to avoid facing your deep feelings and pain.
Positive experiences can also be used to soothe, balance, and even replace negative ones. When two things are held in mind at the same time, they start to connect with each other. That’s one reason why talking about hard things with someone who’s supportive can be so healing: painful feelings and memories get infused with the comfort, encouragement, and closeness you experience with the other person.
You are routinely separated from things you enjoy. And someday that separation will be permanent. Friends drift away, children leave home, careers end, and eventually your own final breath comes and goes. Everything that begins must also cease.Everything that comes together must also disperse. Experiences are thus incapable of being completely satisfying. They are an unreliable basis for true happiness.
If compassion is the wish that beings not suffer, kindness is the wish that they be happy. Compassion responds primarily to suffering, but kindness comes into play all of the time, even when others are doing fine. Kindness is expressed mainly in small, everyday ways, such as leaving a big tip, reading one more story to a child even though you’re tired, or waving another driver to move ahead of you in traffic.
What remains when self disperses, even temporarily? The wholehearted movement to contribute, and the wish to thrive and prosper as one human animal among six billion. To be healthy and strong and live many more years. To be caring and kind. To awaken, abiding as radiant, spacious, loving consciousness. To feel protected and supported. To be happy and comfortable, serene and fulfilled. To live and love in peace.
Loving-kindness for someone being born. Loving-kindness for someone dying. Your loving-kindness is flowing comfortably, perhaps in rhythm with the breath. Your loving-kindness is extending to all living beings on this earth. Wishing them all well. All kinds of animals, in the sea, on the earth, in the air: may they all be healthy and at ease. Wishing well to plants of all kinds: may they all be healthy and at ease.
To make any problem better, you need to understand its causes. That’s why all the great physicians, psychologists, and spiritual teachers have been master diagnosticians. For example, in his Four Noble Truths, the Buddha identified an ailment (suffering), diagnosed its cause (craving: a compelling sense of need for something), specified its cure (freedom from craving), and prescribed a treatment (the Eightfold Path).
Love and hate: they live and tumble together in every heart, like wolf cubs tussling in a cave. There is no killing the wolf of hate; the aversion in such an attempt would actually create what you’re trying to destroy. But you can watch that wolf carefully, keep it tethered, and limit its alarm, righteousness,grievances, resentments, contempt, and prejudice. Meanwhile, keep nourishing and encouraging the wolf of love.
Equanimity means not reacting to your reactions, whatever they are.Equanimity creates a buffer around the feeling tones of experiences so that you do not react to them with craving. Equanimity is like a circuit breaker that blocks the normal sequence in the mind that moves from feeling tone to craving to clinging to suffering.Equanimity is not coldness, indifference, or apathy. You are present in the world but not upset by it.
Most fears are exaggerated. As you go through life, your brain acquires expectations based on your experiences, particularly negative ones. When situations occur that are even remotely similar, your brain automatically applies its expectations to them; if it expects pain or loss, or even just the threat of these, it pulses fear signals. But because of the negativity bias, many expectations of pain or loss are overstated or completely unfounded.
Suffering is the result of craving expressed through the Three Poisons: greed, hatred, and delusion. These are strong, traditional terms that cover a broad range of thoughts, words, and deeds, including the most fleeting and subtle. Greed is a grasping after carrots, while hatred is an aversion to sticks; both involve craving more pleasure and less pain. Delusion is a holding onto ignorance about the way things really are—for example, not seeing how they’re connected and changing.
Everything changes. That’s the universal nature of outer reality and inner experience. Therefore, there’s no end to disturbed equilibria as long as you live.But to help you survive, your brain keeps trying to stop the river, struggling to hold dynamic systems in place, to find fixed patterns in this variable world, and to construct permanent plans for changing conditions. Consequently, your brain is forever chasing after the moment that has just passed, trying to understand and control it.
Wisdom is applied common sense, which you acquire in two steps. First, you come to understand what hurts and what helps—in other words, the causes of suffering and the path to its end. Then, based on this understanding, you let go of those things that hurt and strengthen those that help. As a result, over time you’ll feel more connected with everything, more serene about how all things change and end, and more able to meet pleasure and pain without grasping after the one and struggling with the other.
Virtue relies heavily on regulation, both to excite positive inclinations and to inhibit negative ones. Mindfulness leads to new learning—since attention shapes neural circuits—and draws upon past learning to develop a steadier and more concentrated awareness. Wisdom is a matter of making choices, such as letting go of lesser pleasures for the sake of greater ones. Consequently, developing virtue, mindfulness, and wisdom in your mind depends on improving regulation, learning, and selection in your brain.
Connect with People Who Support You Identify friends and family who care about you, and try to spend more time with them. When you’re apart, visualize being with them and take in the good feelings. Companionship, even if only imagined, activates the brain’s attachment and social group circuitry. Physical and emotional closeness to caregivers and other members of the band was a necessity for survival during our evolutionary history. Consequently, activating a felt sense of closeness will probably help you feel safer.
It’s a remarkable fact that the people who have gone the very deepest into the mind—the sages and saints of every religious tradition—all say essentially the same thing: your fundamental nature is pure, conscious, peaceful, radiant, loving, and wise, and it is joined in mysterious ways with the ultimate underpinnings of reality, by whatever name we give That. Although your true nature may be hidden momentarily by stress and worry, anger and unfulfilled longings, it still continues to exist. Knowing this can be a great comfort.
Our unique evolutionary background has made us wonderfully cooperative, empathic, and loving. So why is our history so full of selfishness, cruelty, and violence? Economic and cultural factors certainly play a role. Nonetheless, across different kinds of societies—hunter-gatherer, agrarian, and industrial; communist and capitalist; Eastern and Western—in most cases the story is basically the same: loyalty and protection toward us, and fear and aggression toward them. We’ve already seen how that stance toward us is deep in our nature.
Brain Life began around 3.5 billion years ago. Multicelled creatures first appeared about 650 million years ago. (When you get a cold, remember that microbes had nearly a three-billion-year head-start!) By the time the earliest jellyfish arose about 600 million years ago, animals had grown complex enough that their sensory and motor systems needed to communicate with each other; thus the beginnings of neural tissue. As animals evolved, so did their nervous systems, which slowly developed a central headquarters in the form of a brain.
represented within awareness are highly variable, but the representational capacities themselves—the basis of the subjective experience of awareness—are generally very stable. Consequently, resting as awareness brings a beautiful sense of inner clarity and peace. These feelings are generally deepest in meditation, but you can cultivate a greater sense of abiding as awareness throughout the day. Use routine events—such as the phone ringing, going to the bathroom, or drinking water—as temple bells to return you to a sense of centeredness.
As mindfulness stabilizes, you will rest more and more as awareness itself. Awareness contains mind-objects, a general term for any mental content, including perceptions, thoughts, desires, memories, emotions, and so on. Although mind-objects may dance busily with each other, awareness itself is never disturbed. Awareness is a kind of screen on which mind-objects register, like—in the Zen saying—the reflections on a pond of geese flying overhead. But awareness is never sullied or rattled by the passing show. In your brain, the neural patterns
Each person suffers sometimes, and many people suffer a lot. Compassion is a natural response to suffering, including your own. Self-compassion isn’t selfpity, but is simply warmth, concern, and good wishes—just like compassion for another person. Because self-compassion is more emotional than self-esteem, it’s actually more powerful for reducing the impact of difficult conditions,preserving self-worth, and building resilience. It also opens your heart, since when you’re closed to your own suffering, it’s hard to be receptive to suffering in others.
It’s a wonderful paradox that as individual things—such as the self—feel increasingly groundless and unreliable, the totality of everything feels increasingly safe and comforting. As the sense of groundlessness grows, each apparently individual thing seems a bit like a cloud that you’ll fall through if you try to stand on it. At first this is pretty unnerving. But then you realize that the sky itself—the totality—is holding you up. You are walking on the sky because you’re sky. It has always been that way. You and every one else have been sky all along.
Our vastly more developed brain is fertile ground for a harvest of suffering. Only we humans worry about the future, regret the past, and blame ourselves for the present. We get frustrated when we can’t have what we want, and disappointed when what we like ends. We suffer that we suffer. We get upset about being in pain, angry about dying, sad about waking up sad yet another day. This kind of suffering—which encompasses most of our unhappiness and dissatisfaction—is constructed by the brain. It is made up. Which is ironic, poignant—and supremely hopeful.
Tranquility… involves not acting based on the feeling tone. For example, you don’t automatically move toward something just because it is pleasant. In the words of the Third Zen Patriarch: ‘The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences’. Set aside a period of your day—even just a minute long—to consciously release preferences for or against anything. Then extend this practice to more and more of your day. Your actions will be guided increasingly by your values and virtues, not by desires that are reactions to positive or negative feeling tones.
To summarize, whenever a strategy runs into trouble, uncomfortable—sometimes even agonizing—alarm signals pulse through the nervous system to set the animal back on track. But trouble comes all the time, since each strategy contains inherent contradictions, as the animal tries to: Separate what is actually connected, in order to create a boundary between itself and the world Stabilize what keeps changing, in order to maintain its internal systems within tight ranges Hold onto fleeting pleasures and escape inevitable pains, in order to approach opportunities and avoid threats
Negative events generally have more impact than positive ones. For example,it’s easy to acquire feelings of learned helplessness from a few failures, but hard to undo those feelings, even with many successes . People will do more to avoid a loss than to acquire a comparable gain .Compared to lottery winners, accident victims usually take longer to return to their original baseline of happiness. Bad information about a person carries more weight than good information and in relationships, it typically takes about five positive interactions to overcome the effects of a single negative one.
Much as your body is built from the foods you eat, your mind is built from the experiences you have. The flow of experience gradually sculpts your brain, thus shaping your mind. Some of the results can be explicitly recalled: This is what I did last summer; that is how I felt when I was in love. But most of the shaping of your mind remains forever unconscious. This is called implicit memory, and it includes your expectations, models of relationships, emotional tendencies, and general outlook. Implicit memory establishes the interior landscape of your mind —what it feels like to be you—based on the slowly accumulating residues of lived experience.
First, identify your core aims. What are your purposes and principles in relationships? For example, one fundamental moral value is not to harm people,including yourself. If your needs are not being met in a relationship, that’s harmful to you. If you are mean or punishing, that harms others. Another potential aim might be to keep discovering the truth about yourself and the other person. Second, stay in bounds. The Wise Speech section of Buddhism’s Noble Eightfold Path offers good guidelines for communication that stays within the lines: Say only what is well-intended, true, beneficial, timely, expressed without harshness or malice, and—ideally—what is wanted.
Recognize the fleeting nature of rewards and that they usually aren’t actually all that great. See, too, that painful experiences are transient and usually not that awful. Neither pleasure nor pain is worth claiming as your own or identifying with. Further, consider how every event is determined by countless preceding factors so that things can not be any other way. This is not fatalism or despair:you can take action to make the future different. But even then, remember that most of the factors that shape the future are out of your hands. You can do everything right, and still the glass will break, the project will go nowhere, you’ll catch the flu, or a friend will remain upset.
Focusing on what is wholesome and then taking it in naturally increases the positive emotions flowing through your mind each day. Emotions have global effects since they organize the brain as a whole. Consequently, positive feelings have far-reaching benefits, including a stronger immune system (Frederickson 2000) and a cardiovascular system that is less reactive to stress (Frederickson and Levenson 1998). They lift your mood; increase optimism, resilience, and resourcefulness; and help counteract the effects of painful experiences, including trauma (Frederickson 2001; Frederickson et al. 2000). It’s a positive cycle: good feelings today increase the likelihood of good feelings tomorrow.
Turn positive facts into positive experiences. Good things keep happening all around us, but much of the time we don’t notice them; even when we do, we often hardly feel them. Someone is nice to you, you see an admirable quality in yourself, a flower is blooming, you finish a difficult project—and it all just rolls by. Instead, actively look for good news, particularly the little stuff of daily life: the faces of children, the smell of an orange, a memory from a happy vacation, a minor success at work, and so on. Whatever positive facts you find, bring a mindful awareness to them—open up to it—dig in! Savor the experience. It’s delicious! Make it last by staying with it for 5, 10, even 20 seconds.
Everything changes. That’s the universal nature of outer reality and inner experience. Therefore, there’s no end to disturbed equilibria as long as you live. But to help you survive, your brain keeps trying to stop the river, struggling to hold dynamic systems in place, to find fixed patterns in this variable world, and to construct permanent plans for changing conditions. Consequently, your brain is forever chasing after the moment that has just passed, trying to understand and control it. It’s as if we live at the edge of a waterfall, with each moment rushing at us—experienced only and always now at the lip—and then zip, it’s over the edge and gone. But the brain is forever clutching at what has just surged by.
Actively imagine what the other person could be thinking and wanting.Imagine what could be going on beneath the surface, and what might be pulling in different directions inside him. Consider what you know or can reasonably guess about him, such as his personal history, childhood, temperament,personality, “hot buttons,” recent events in his life, and the nature of his relationship with you: What effect might these have? Also take into account what you’ve already experienced from tuning in to his actions and emotions.Ask yourself questions, such as What might he be feeling deep down? What could be most important to him? What might he want from me? Be respectful,and don’t jump to conclusions: stay in ‘don’t know’ mind.
It’s a bad combination for the amygdala to be oversensitized while the hippocampus is compromised: painful experiences can then be recorded in implicit memory—with all the distortions and turbo-charging of an amygdala on overdrive—without an accurate explicit memory of them. This might feel like: Something happened, I’m not sure what, but I’m really upset. This may help explain why victims of trauma can feel dissociated from the awful things they experienced, yet be very reactive to any trigger that reminds them unconsciously of what once occurred. In less extreme situations, the one-two punch of a revved-up amygdala and a weakened hippocampus can lead to feeling a little upset a lot of the time without exactly knowing why.
At some point in life, we all ask the same question: Who am I? And no one really knows the answer. The self is a slippery subject—especially when it’s the subject that is regarding itself as an object! So let’s begin by grounding this airy topic with an experiential activity—taking the body for a walk. Then we’ll investigate the nature of the self in your brain. Last, we’ll explore methods for relaxing and releasing self-ing in order to feel more confident, peaceful, and joined with all things. (For more on this profound matter, which reaches beyond the scope of a single chapter, see Living Dhamma by Ajahn Chah, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, or The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Maharshi.)
What is the chance that the feared event will happen? How bad would it be? How long would the damage last?What could I do to cope? Who could help me?. Most fears are exaggerated. As you go through life, your brain acquires expectations based on your experiences, particularly negative ones. When situations occur that are even remotely similar, your brain automatically applies its expectations to them; if it expects pain or loss, or even just the threat of these,it pulses fear signals. But because of the negativity bias, many expectations of pain or loss are overstated or completely unfounded…So, when a fear arises, ask yourself: “What options do I actually have? How could I exercise power skillfully to stick up for myself and take good care of myself? What resources could I draw upon?”
You can give so much in this life, and that offers you many opportunities to release the self. For example, you can give time, helpfulness, donations, restraint, patience, noncontention, and forgiveness. Any path of service—including raising a family, caring for others, and many kinds of work—incorporates generosity. Envy—and its close cousin, jealousy—is a major impediment to generosity. So notice the suffering in envy, how it is an affliction upon you. Envy actually activates some of the same neural networks involved with physical pain (Takahashi et al. 2009). In a compassionate and kind way, remind yourself that you will be all right even if other people have fame, money, or a great partner—and you don’t. To free yourself from the clutches of envy, send compassion and loving-kindness to people you envy.
As you can see, your brain has a built-in ‘negativity bias’ that primes you for avoidance. This bias makes you suffer in a variety of ways. For starters, it generates an unpleasant background of anxiety, which for some people can be quite intense; anxiety also makes it harder to bring attention inward for self-awareness or contemplative practice, since the brain keeps scanning to make sure there is no problem. The negativity bias fosters or intensifies other unpleasant emotions, such as anger, sorrow, depression, guilt, and shame. It highlights past losses and failures, it downplays present abilities, and it exaggerates future obstacles. Consequently, the mind continually tends to render unfair verdicts about a person’s character, conduct, and possibilities. The weight of those judgments can really wear you down.
The many aspects of self are based on structures and processes spread throughout the brain and nervous system, and embedded in the body’s interactions with the world. Researchers categorize those aspects of self, and their neural underpinnings, in a variety of ways. For example, the reflective self (I am solving a problem) likely arises mainly in neural connections among the anterior cingulate cortex, upper-outer prefrontal cortex (PFC), and hippocampus; the emotional self (I am upset) emerges from the amygdala, hypothalamus, striatum (part of the basal ganglia), and upper brain stem (Lewis and Todd 2007). Different parts of your brain recognize your face in group photos, know about your personality, experience personal responsibility, and look at situations from your perspective rather than someone else’s (Gillihan and Farah 2005).
Stage one—you’re caught in a second-dart reaction and don’t even realize it: your partner forgets to bring milk home and you complain angrily without seeing that your reaction is over the top. Stage two—you realize you’ve been hijacked by greed or hatred (in the broadest sense), but cannot help yourself: internally you’re squirming, but you can’t stop grumbling bitterly about the milk. Stage three—some aspect of the reaction arises, but you don’t act it out: you feel irritated but remind yourself that your partner does a lot for you already and getting cranky will just make things worse. Stage four—the reaction doesn’t even come up, and sometimes you forget you ever had the issue: you understand that there’s no milk, and you calmly figure out what to do now with your partner. In education, these are known succinctly as unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence. They’re useful
The autobiographical self (D’Amasio 2000) incorporates the reflective self and some of the emotional self, and it provides the sense of I having a unique past and future. The core self involves an underlying and largely nonverbal feeling of I that has little sense of the past or the future. If the PFC—which provides most of the neural substrate of the autobiographical self—were to be damaged, the core self would remain, though with little sense of continuity with the past or future. On the other hand, if the subcortical and brain stem structures which the core self relies upon were damaged, then both the core and autobiographical selves would disappear, which suggests that the core self is the neural and mental foundation of the autobiographical self (D’Amasio 2000). When your mind is very quiet, the autobiographical self seems largely absent, which presumably corresponds to a relative deactivation of its neural substrate. Meditations that still the mind, such as the concentration practices we explored in the previous chapter, improve conscious control over that deactivation process.
Relax and steady the mind, focusing on the breath. Pick a situation in which you feel someone has wronged you. Be mindful of your reactions to this person, especially the deeper ones. Scan yourself for any ill will. Now reflect on some of the various causes—the ten thousand things—that have led this person to act in the way that he has. Consider biologically based factors affecting him, like pain, age, innate temperament, or intelligence. Consider the realities of his life: race, gender, class, job, responsibilities, daily stresses. Consider whatever you know about his childhood. Consider major events in his life as an adult. Consider his mental processes, personality, values, fears, hot buttons, hopes, and dreams. Consider his parents in light of whatever you know or can reasonably guess about them; consider, too, the factors that may have shaped their lives. Reflect on the historical events and other upstream forces that have formed the river of causes flowing through his life today. Look inside yourself again. Do you feel any differently now about him? Do you feel any differently about yourself?
The most powerful way to use the mind-body connection to improve your physical and mental health is through guiding your autonomic nervous system (ANS). Every time you calm the ANS through stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), you tilt your body, brain, and mind increasingly toward inner peace and well-being. You can activate the PNS in many ways, including relaxation, big exhalations, touching the lips, mindfulness of the body, imagery, balancing your heartbeat, and meditation. Meditation increases gray matter in brain regions that handle attention, compassion, and empathy. It also helps a variety of medical conditions, strengthens the immune system, and improves psychological functioning. Deliberately feeling safer helps control the hardwired tendency to look for and overreact to threats. Feel safer by relaxing, using imagery, connecting with others, being mindful of fear itself, evoking inner protectors, being realistic, and increasing your sense of secure attachment. Find refuge in whatever is a sanctuary and refueling station for you. Potential refuges include people, activities, places, and intangible things like reason, a sense of your innermost being, or truth.

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