Rick Hanson Quotes

When you like, bring the meditation to an end. Notice how you feel, and take in the good of your meditation.

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.

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?

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.

We develop mental resources in two stages. First, we need to experience what we want to grow, such as feeling grateful, loved, or confident. Second — critically important — we must convert that passing experience into a lasting change in the nervous system.

we evolved to pay great attention to unpleasant experiences. This negativity bias overlooks good news, highlights bad news, and creates anxiety and pessimism.

Stay with the positive experience for five to ten seconds or longer. Open to the feelings in it and try to sense it in your body; let it fill your mind. Enjoy it. Gently encourage the experience to be more intense. Find something fresh or novel about it. Recognize how it’s personally relevant, how it could nourish or help you, or make a difference in your life.

Notice when others could be building up your fears, perhaps for their own advantage. Also, deliberately consider your beliefs about dangers in the world and weaknesses in yourself, and look for the evidence that these are not true.

You can accept them for what they are while at the same time not being identified with them.

Enjoying the taste of toasted raisin bread or the humor in a cartoon may not seem like much, but simple pleasures like these ease emotional upsets, lift your mood, and enrich your life. They also provide health benefits, by releasing endorphins and natural opioids that shift you out of stressful, draining reactive states and into happier responsive ones. As a bonus, some pleasures — such as dancing, sex, your team winning a game of pick-up basketball, or laughing with friends — come with energizing feelings of vitality or passion that enhance long-term health. Opportunities for pleasure are all around you, especially if you include things like the rainbow glitter of the tiny grains of sand in a sidewalk, the sound of water falling into a tub, the sense of connection in talking with a friend, or the reassurance that comes from the stove working when you need to make dinner.

In your body, the gradually accumulating burden of reactive experiences is called allostatic load, which increases inflammation, weakens your immune system, and wears on your cardiovascular system. In your brain, allostatic load causes neurons to atrophy in the prefrontal cortex, the center of top-down executive control; in the hippocampus, the center of learning and memory; and in other regions. It impairs myelination, the insulating of neural fibers to speed along their signals, which can weaken the connectivity between different regions of your brain, so they don’t work together as well as they should.

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.

Cortisol — released by the adrenal glands during the stress response; stimulates the amygdala and inhibits the hippocampus.

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.

Through activating the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), you prevent the stress-response system from reacting to its own reactions. This is one reason why the training for equanimity in contemplative settings involves considerable relaxation and tranquility.