Rick Hanson's Blog, page 84

Relax, You’ve Arrived

Are we there yet?

The Practice:
Relax, you’ve arrived.

Why?

We spend so much of our time trying to get somewhere.

Part of this comes from our biological nature. To survive, animals – including us – have to be goal-directed, leaning into the future.

It’s certainly healthy to pursue wholesome aims, like paying the rent on time, raising children well, healing old pain, or improving education.

But it’s also important to see how this focus on the future – on endless striving, on getting the next...

Do Before You’re Ready

Rick’s Picks is a series of posts highlighting the very best content online.

Great comic stripbased on the words of Amy Poehler.

(Please note you may need to zoom in on your browser to view this.)

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Welcome Joy

What’s the spark and what’s the fuel?

The Practice
Welcome joy.

Why?

Positive emotions – such as feelings of gratitude, love, and confidence – strengthen the immune system, protect the heart against loss and trauma, build relationships, increase resilience, and promote success. Based on studies that have already been done, if a drug company could patent a happiness pill, we’d be seeing ads for it every night on TV.

Technically, emotions can be organized along two dimensions: intensity (how st...

Practicing With Pain and Threat

Here is a talk from the San Rafael Meditation group with Rick Hanson. It is titled Practicing With Pain and Threat.

More information on the San Rafael Meditation group can be found here.

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QUIZ: Do You Realize Your Dreams?

What hopes and dreams did you have as a child? How has it gone with fulfilling them? Does the part of your life that is “work” feel like a good combination of what you really enjoy doing, are talented at, and care about?

Investigate this in a short quiz from my Foundations of Well-Being program.

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Malala Yousafzai Interview

Rick’s Picks is a series of posts highlighting the very best content online.

Malala Yousafzai is the youngest ever Nobel laureate, awarded the Peace Prize in 2014 for her activism for the rights of all children to education, and for equal access to education for women and girls.

Watch the inspiring Jon Stewart interview after her historic book release here.

The post Malala Yousafzai Interview appeared first on Dr. Rick Hanson.

Find Your Ground

What can you do when you’re shaken?

The Practice:
Find your ground.

Why?
I’ve been to New Zealand, and really respect and like it. There’s a Maori term – turangawaewae, “a place to stand” – that I’ve come back to many times.

I’m sure I don’t know the full meaning of the word in its cultural context. But at a basic level, it’s clear that we all need a place to stand. A physical place to be sure – hearth and home, land and sea, a bed to curl up in – but also psychological or spiritual places, s...

Speak From The Heart

What’s Your Heart Saying?

The Practice:
Speak from the heart.

Why?

One Christmas I hiked down into the Grand Canyon, whose bottom lay a vertical mile below the rim. Its walls were layered like a cake, and a foot-high stripe of red or gray rock indicated a million-plus years of erosion by the Colorado river. Think of water – so soft and gentle – gradually carving through the hardest stone to reveal great beauty. Sometimes what seems weakest is actually most powerful.

In the same way, speakin...

Paul Gilbert: An Interview on Confidence

“A lot of what happens with loss of confidence, is that we undermine whatever confidence we may have. Humans have an amazing capacity to monitor everything – and that can begin to cause you a lot of trouble – because you’re monitoring that there’s a problem, rather than monitoring that you’re okay. So if learn to acknowledge your monitoring without letting it take over, you stop under-mining your confidence, and then self-confidence will grow.”

In my Foundations of Well-Being interview with P...

Cosmic Eye: A Micro and Macrocosmic View of The Universe

Rick’s Picks is a series of posts highlighting the very best content online.

Drawing inspiration from the classic movie Powers of Ten, directed by Charles and Ray Eams in 1977, Cosmic Eye is an app featuring views of our Universe gathered by world-class scientists. With a single touch you zoom into the smallest elementary particles and out to the largest scales of our Universe. The app displays real photographs and state-of-the-art renderings by computer models.

Watch this video for an exampl...