Rick Hanson's Blog, page 114

Questions About Self-Awareness

“How does being-awareness relate to our underlying animal nature?”

“Is remorse a good thing?”

“Is the “Self” real? What’s the nature of the sense of being that remains when parts of the psyche fall away?”

These questions about self-awareness are just a sampling of those I have received from readers of my books and newsletter, and people who have attended my lectures and workshops. I’ve received questions on everything from Neuroscience to Stress to Mindfulness and Meditation to Relationships and...

Key Scientifc Papers

The Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom website houses a growing body of information related to brain science, relationships, well-being, contemplative practice, and related topics.

There are well over 100 key scientific papers on the site and I wanted to share a few of my favorites:

Meditation and the Neuroscience of Consciousness


Cultivating Positive Emotions to Optimize Health and Well-being


Is Self Special? A Critical Review of Evidence from Experimental Psychology...

How to Hardwire Your Brain for Happiness

We can outwit our brain’s negative circuitry and tilt ourselves toward the good in life.

The inner strengths we all need to cope with life and enjoy it – strengths like resilience, positive emotions, confidence, and feeling loved – are based on underlying neural structures.

Most inner strengths come from positive experiences. But to help our ancestors survive in harsh conditions, the brain evolved what scientists call a “negativity bias” that rapidly turns negative experiences into neural struc...

Creating Lasting Happiness in the New Year

The old-fashioned saying that “practice makes perfect” is true for one’s well-being and relationships. Picking just one thing to think about or do in your mind each day helps make the practice easier.

Keep it simple. But stick with it. For example, drawing on a few practices in my book, Just One Thing:

• Notice that you truly are basically alright right now several times a day, which would help undo the anxious background murmur we inherited through evolution.

• Really enjoy your hands, drawing...

12 Good Things

Keeping with tradition, each year I offer a list of Twelve Good Things. I’ve paired each good thing with a fundamental inner strength: Learning, Mindfulness, Love, Resilience, Contentment, Integrity, Self-Worth, Courage, Social Intelligence, Motivation, Wisdom, and Peace.

1: Learning – Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence tells you how to tap the hidden power of little positive experiences to change your brain for the better.

2: Mindfulness – The Mind...

Neurodharma: A New Way of Healing

I was a speaker at the Meditative Praxis conference at the University of Hong Kong in August 2013, where I interviewed on “Neurodharma: A New Way of Healing”.

Here’s the video:

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Gratitude and the ‘Buddha Brain’

A”buddha brain” is one thatknows how to be deeply happy, loving, and wise. We develop ourselves in this way by cultivating wholesome qualities and uprooting unwholesome ones. In a sense, we plant flowers and pull weeds in the garden of the mind – which means that we are gradually changing the brain for the better.

Gratitude is a powerful tool in this “garden,” since what you rest your attention upon is what will shape your brain the most. That’s because “neurons that fire together, wire togeth...

Feeling Cared About

The practice of feeling cared about is really good if you’ve felt excluded, left out, hurt, unappreciated, or maybe something didn’t go well in a relationship recently. Or perhaps things are coming up from previous relationships – even going all the back to childhood – in which you felt like you didn’t matter enough to other people.

Read the full article on booksforbetterliving.com and listen to the sample practice below.

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Simple Tips for a Stress-Free Holiday

The holidays are a time of year when our stress-levels tend to rise, despite our desire to enjoy the season and the people in our lives. So I’d like to offer you a few simple tips for taking care of your body, emotions, thoughts and actions, to minimize holiday stress this season.

In your body, take l-o-n-g exhalations, relax the tongue, warm the hands (or imagining that they are warm, like holding a cup of cocoa), and relax the body as a whole, to reduce your fight-or-flight, stress response....

Enjoy The Freedom Not To

Do you got to?

The Practice:

Enjoy the freedom not to.

Why?

We’re pulled and prodded by financial pressures, commuter traffic, corporate policies, technology, advertising, politics, and the people we work with and live with. As well, internal forces yank the proverbial chains, including emotional reactions, compelling desires, “shoulds,” and internalized “voices” from parents and other authority figures.

Sometimes these pressures are necessary, like a flashing light on your car’s dashboard telling...