Rick Hanson's Blog, page 112
February 25, 2014
Key Points of Awareness – Part I
Keys to Awareness
Feel that your own well-being and functioning matters. Get on your own side; be for yourself. Question: How many people does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: Only one. But the light bulb has to want to change.
Cultivate wanting to be in reality, to know the facts of the inner and outer worlds. Know and trust that your greatest safety and hope is in seeing what’s true, no matter what it is. Whenever you move into awareness/observation mode, you instantly distance yoursel...
February 24, 2014
Rest in Center
Are you all over the place?
The Practice:
Rest in center.
Why?
Gravity and entropy are powerful processes in the natural world. Gravity draws things together, toward a center, while entropy scatters them into disorder. In much the same way, in our own lives, some things bring us to center, while others disturb and disperse us.
In terms of centering, be aware of your whole body as you take a long slow breath, or think of something you’re glad about. You’ll probably feel more at home in yourself, m...
February 22, 2014
The Fight or Flight Response
“Is the “fight or flight” response the functional part of the primitive/reptile brain or the emotional brain?”
These distinctions about the brain – fight or flight response, primitive/reptile brain, emotional brain – are used a lot these days, but they’re inherently fuzzy.
The amygdala (as you know, there are two of them, one on each side of the brain) does initiate the fight or flight response through inputs into the hypothalamus (triggering the hormonal part of that response) and to brainstem...
February 21, 2014
Courage: Training Our Brains to Risk Something New
Guest post by Linda Graham
Yes, risk-taking is inherently failure-prone. Otherwise, it would be called sure thing–taking. — Tim McMahon
Whenever we’re about to venture into something new — moving across the country, getting married again, taking on a new job, finally fixing the leaky showerhead — we can feel a hesitancy, a pullback within — a somatic feeling of “Uh oh! Strange territory! Don’t know if I should be doing this!” — even though, consciously, we might very well want to forge ahead. O...
February 19, 2014
Understanding Neuroplasticity
In this video, I explain how we can use our minds to change our brains to change our minds for the better. This video was taken at the Greater Good Science Center in UC Berkeley as part of the Science of a Meaningful Life Series.
For more video from Rick Hanson, visit http://www.youtube.com/drrhanson or http://bit.ly/p54uup
The post Understanding Neuroplasticity appeared first on Dr. Rick Hanson.
February 14, 2014
“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, ...
“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.” – Henry David Thoreau
The post appeared first on Dr. Rick Hanson.
Choose To Love
What does your heart say?
The Practice:
Choose to love.
Why?
Many years ago, I was in a significant relationship in which the other person started doing things that surprised and hurt me. I’ll preserve the privacy here so I won’t be concrete, but it was pretty intense. After going through the first wave of reactions – Wha?! How could you? Are you kidding me?! – I settled down a bit. I had a choice.
This relationship was important to me, and I could see that a lot of what was going through the mind...
February 13, 2014
The Mind, the Brain, and God – Part III
In Part I and Part II of this blog series, we discussed the meaning of the words: mind; brain and God, and looked at the interdependence between the mind and the brain.
In this last part of the discussion we’ll examine the neural correlates and morality and summarize the discussion.
Do Neural Correlates Mean There’s No Soul?
The last sentence in the article on the NPR site really caught my eye: “If something as complex as morality has a mechanical explanation, [the scholar said], it will be hard...
February 10, 2014
The Mind, the Brain and God – Part II
In the last blog post we discussed the meaning of the words mind, brain and God and saw how the mind and the brain are interdependent.
In this segment we’ll go into the popular arguments for and against God and further into the link between the mind and the brain.
Proofs and Disproofs
Lately, numerous authors have tried to rebut beliefs in God (e.g., The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins), while others have tried to rebut the rebuttals (e.g., Answering the New Atheism: Dismantling Dawkins’ Case a...
