Rick Hanson Quotes

Impatience combines all three ingredients of toxic stress: unpleasant experiences, pressure or urgency, and lack of control.

Try to accept what you’re experiencing as it is, without making it good or bad, right or wrong. It might be painful, it might be pleasurable; in any case, it’s here, it’s a human experience, it’s occurring due to various causes and conditions, many of which extend beyond you to other people, other times, and other places.

Mindfulness helps you open up to the deeper layers of yourself.

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

Repeated mental/neural activity leaves lasting changes in neural structure: what’s called experience-dependent neuroplasticity.

it’s the needs we push away that are often the most important to embrace. So try to be aware of needs, or aspects of needs, that have been unmet. Listen to the longings of your heart. As you go through your day, be mindful of your needs for: • Safety.

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

Neurons that fire together, wire together.

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.

In a way, empathy is a kind of mindfulness meditation focused on someone else’s inner world.

I make myself rich by making my wants few. — Henry David Thoreau

Refuse to worry more than three times about something you can’t change; three strikes and the worry is out.

Linking is a powerful method. The brain learns through association, and when two things are held in awareness at the same time, they affect each other. The key is to make sure that what’s beneficial stays more prominent than what’s painful or harmful. Then the positive will purify the negative, rather than the negative contaminating the positive.

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.

And even when they do see a jewel, they rarely feel anything about it. Jewel after jewel left behind, lost forever. But it doesn’t have to be this way. With a little intention and skill, you can take some seconds here and there each day to weave a handful of these jewels into the fabric of your brain, your being, and your life. Little moments of ease, pleasure, calm, determination, joy, insight, and caring becoming neural structure.