Rick Hanson Quotes

Stress reduces serotonin, probably the most important neurotransmitter for maintaining a good mood. When serotonin drops, so does norepinephrine, which has already been diminished by glucocorticoids.

Let acceptance spread inside you.

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

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.

Being dependent may sound like a weakness, but it is one of our greatest strengths. Spreading to the farthest corners of the globe, even walking upon the moon, humans have become so wildly successful through depending on each other: children on their parents, one parent on another, families on communities, and communities on the many adults who aren’t raising children. The root of the word “confident” means “to have trust or faith.” If others are dependable, we develop trust in them as well as faith in our own worth. But if others are not dependable, it’s normal to develop a sense of inadequacy, self-doubt, even shame. This is particularly true in childhood, when we are both most dependent on others and most affected by our negative experiences.

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

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.

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

Try to accept what you’re experiencing as it is, without making it good or bad, right or wrong. It might be painful, it might be pleasurable; in any case, it’s here, it’s a human experience, it’s occurring due to various causes and conditions, many of which extend beyond you to other people, other times, and other places.

HOW BAD WOULD IT ACTUALLY BE?

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.

If you’re having a stressful or upsetting experience, simple pleasures such as listening to music can move the needle of your internal stress-o-meter out of the red zone and back toward green.

Living in the Green Zone Developing inner resources is like deepening the keel of a sailboat so that you’re more able to deal with the worldly winds — gain and loss, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and slander — without getting tipped over into the reactive mode — or at least you can recover more quickly. With growing confidence in these capabilities, you become more comfortable raising your sights in life and sailing even farther into the deep, dark blue.

Use imagery, which stimulates the right hemisphere of your brain. For example, if I’m with someone who’s getting intense, I might imagine myself as a deeply rooted tree, with the other person’s attitudes and emotions blowing through my leaves and shaking them — but winds always come to an end, and my tree remains standing. Or I’ll imagine that there is a picket fence between us — or, if need be, a glass wall that’s a foot thick. In addition to the benefits that come from the particular images themselves, activating the right hemisphere encourages a sense of the whole that is larger than any part — including that part of your experience which might feel uncomfortable with closeness. Be Mindful of Your Inner World

inescapable physical or mental discomfort is the “first dart” of existence.