Rick Hanson Quotes

Imagine that your mind is a garden. You can tend to it in three ways: observe it, pull weeds, and plant flowers. Observing it is fundamental, and sometimes that’s all you can do. Perhaps something terrible has happened and you can only ride out the storm. But being with the mind is not enough; we must work with it as well. The mind is grounded in the brain, which is a physical system that doesn’t change for the better on its own. Weeds don’t get pulled and flowers don’t get planted simply by watching the garden.

In terms of building neural structure, what matters is not the event or circumstance or condition itself but your experience of it. Knowing without feeling is like a menu without a meal.

HOW BAD WOULD IT ACTUALLY BE?

Negative experiences create vicious cycles by making you pessimistic, overreactive, and inclined to go negative yourself.

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 key to growing any psychological resource, including compassion, is to have repeated experiences of it that get turned into lasting changes in neural structure or function.

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.

There are three fundamental phases to psychological and spiritual growth: being with difficult material (e.g., old wounds, anger); releasing it; and replacing it with something more beneficial.

activating a positive experience and installing it in your brain.

To do Linking, a person must be able to hold two things in awareness, keep the positive material more prominent, and not get hijacked by the negative. Practicing mindfulness will increase your capacity to do these things. If you get pulled into the negative, drop it and focus only on the positive. Later on, you can allow the negative to come back alongside the positive in awareness. Most experiences of Linking are fairly brief, under half a minute, but you can take longer if you like.

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.

the importance of developing grit in the first place for the challenges you know about and the ones waiting around the corner to surprise you.

Intensify it. Open to it and let it be big in your mind.

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.

positive experiences fill us up, while negative ones wear us down.