Rick Hanson Quotes

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.

Being for yourself simply means that you care about yourself. You wish to feel happy instead of worried, sad, guilty, or angry. You want people to treat you well instead of badly. You want to help your future self — the person you’ll be next week, next year, next decade — to have as good a life as possible.

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

By taking just a few extra seconds to stay with a positive experience — even the comfort in a single breath — you’ll help turn a passing mental state into lasting neural structure.

First darts are unpleasant to be sure. But then we add our reactions to them. These reactions are “second darts” — the ones we throw ourselves. Most of our suffering comes from second darts.

Therefore, you can use your mind to change your brain to benefit your mind — and everyone else

All joy in this world comes from wanting others to be happy, and all suffering in this world comes from wanting only oneself to be happy. — Shantideva

See the collateral damage — the suffering — that results when you cling to your desires and opinions or take things personally. Over the long haul, most of what we argue about with others really doesn’t matter that much.

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.

Whatever positive facts you find, bring a mindful awareness to them — open up to them and let them affect you. It’s like sitting down to a banquet: don’t just look at it — dig in!

I think the sweet spot in life is to pursue your dreams and take care of others with your whole heart while not getting fixated on or stressed out about the results. In this place, you live with purpose and passion but without losing your balance and falling into a sense of pressure, strain, or depletion. This sweet spot is very valuable, so take it in whenever you experience it.

Sense it sinking into you.

It’s a remarkable fact that the people who have gone the very deepest into the mind — the sages and saints of every religious tradition — all say essentially the same thing: 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.

Virtue, mindfulness, and wisdom are the pillars of everyday well-being, personal growth, and spiritual practice; they draw on the three fundamental neural functions of regulation, learning, and

people are not unhappy because they don’t have a car or a promotion. They’re unhappy because they don’t feel comfortable, safe, successful, and satisfied.