Rick Hanson Quotes

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

But when you relax the sense of self and flow with life, you feel happy and satisfied.

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

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.

Every time you take in the sense of feeling safe, satisfied, or connected, you stimulate responsive circuits in your brain.

If you have three to ten minutes, try progressive relaxation, in which you focus systematically on different parts of your body, working either from the feet to the head or vice versa. Depending on how much time you have, you might focus on large sections of your body — e.g., left leg, right leg — or on much smaller units, such as left foot, right foot, left ankle, right ankle, and so on.

you can decide to get eggs from the refrigerator without craving them — and without getting upset if there are none left.

Things go much better if you slow them down. Give yourself — and the other person — the gift of time: time to take a breath or two, figure out what the other person is really saying, allow the first waves of fight-or-flight reactions to pass through your body, and recognize and restrain impulsive words and actions that you’ll regret later. Those extra seconds before you speak help others feel less like they’re on the receiving end of a rat-a-tat-tat barrage of words and emotional intensity. And the extra seconds give them time to reflect and be less hijacked themselves.

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.

We need safety,

You are settling into simply being in the present, letting go of the past and not fearing or planning the future. Nothing to fix, no other place to go, no one you have to be. Rest and relax as a whole body breathing.

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.

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.

The brain is good at learning from bad experiences, but bad at learning from good ones.

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.