Rick Hanson Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

in your brain, loving-kindness mobilizes prefrontal language and intention networks as well as limbic emotion and reward networks.

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.

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.

As you go through your day, deliberately flag opportunities for pleasure.

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

Connection. Notice when you feel hurt, resentment, envy, loneliness, or inadequacy. Then recall times when you felt cared about — and times when you felt friendly or caring yourself. Rest in love flowing in and flowing out.

The Reactive mode tears us down, while the Responsive mode builds us up. Adversity is certainly an opportunity to develop resilience, stress-hardiness, and even post-traumatic growth. But for a person to grow through adversity, there must also be Responsive resources present such as determination and sense of purpose.

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.

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.

Just before bed, your mind is very receptive, so no matter what went wrong that day, find something that went right, open to it, and let good feelings come and ease you into sleep.

Mindfulness just means being fully aware of something, in the moment with it, and not judging or resisting it.