Rick Hanson Quotes

There is a saying in Tibet: “If you take care of the minutes, the years will take care of themselves.” What’s the most important minute in life? I think it’s the next one. There is nothing we can do about the past, and we have limited influence over the hours and days to come. But the next minute — minute after minute after minute — is always full of possibility.

most of the shaping of your mind remains forever unconscious. This is called implicit memory, and it includes your expectations, models of relationships, emotional tendencies, and general outlook. Implicit memory establishes the interior landscape of your mind — what it feels like to be you — based on the slowly accumulating residues of lived experience.

If you take care of the minutes, the years will take care of themselves.

To become happier, wiser, and more loving, sometimes you have to swim against ancient currents within your nervous system. For example, in some ways the three pillars of practice are unnatural: virtue restrains emotional reactions that worked well on the Serengeti, mindfulness decreases external vigilance, and wisdom cuts through beliefs that once helped us survive.

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.

Mental resources like determination, self-worth, and kindness are what make us resilient: able to cope with adversity and push through challenges in the pursuit of opportunities. While resilience helps us recover from loss and trauma, it offers much more than that. True resilience fosters well-being, an underlying sense of happiness, love, and peace. Remarkably, as you internalize experiences of well-being, that builds inner strengths which in turn make you more resilient. Well-being and resilience promote each other in an upward spiral.

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.

If you can break the link between feeling tones and craving — if you can be with the pleasant without chasing after it, with the unpleasant without resisting it, and with the neutral without ignoring it — then you have cut the chain of suffering, at least for a time.

Think about some of what you’ve been given, such as friendship and love, an education, life itself, and a universe that bubbled into being more than 13 billion years ago.

Deliberately call upon your inner strengths related to meeting these specific needs,

activating a positive experience and installing it in your brain.

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

Taking in the good is not about putting a happy shiny face on everything, nor is it about turning away from the hard things in life. It's about nourishing well-being, contentment, and peace inside that are refuges you can always come from and return to.

Equanimity is neither apathy nor indifference: you are warmly engaged with the world but not troubled by it. Through its nonreactivity, it creates a great space for compassion, loving-kindness, and joy at the good fortune of others.

Even minor experiences can build up like a pile of unlit matches.