The key to growing any psychological resource, including compassion, is to have repeated experiences of it that get turned into lasting changes in ne… - Rick Hanson

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.

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.

You are the sky. Everything else — it’s just the weather.