Rick Hanson's Blog, page 97

Meditations to Change Your Brain

In this audio excerpt from Meditations to Change Your Brain: Rewire Your Neural Pathways to Transform Your Life, Richard Mendius and I offer seven guided practices to “rebuild” your brain for lasting joy and fulfillment.

I hope you like it.

I’d love to hear your feedback about this audio excerpt in the comments below!

The post Meditations to Change Your Brain appeared first on Dr. Rick Hanson.

Enjoy Four Kinds of Peace

What’s yoursenseof peace?

The Practice:
Enjoy four kinds of peace.

Why?

“Peace” can sound merely sentimental or clichéd (“visualize whirled peas”). But deep down, it’s what most of us long for. Consider the proverb:The highest happiness is peace.

Not a peace inside that ignores pain in oneself or others, or is acquired by shutting down. This is a durable peace, a peace you can come home to even if it’s been covered over by fear, frustration, or heartache.

When you’re at peace – when you are...

Being For Something

This is the second post in the series on Your Precious Life. You can find Part One here. In it we’ll look at the power of Being For Something.

Let’s do a brief practice together. Think of it as an exercise for your mind. You can keep your eyes open or closed, take notes or not, and go as deeply as you want. Please know that you cannot always predict or control what comes up for you in an exercise. Much of what we are doing here is seeding your fertile unconscious, the dark and loamy soil of t...

Rick’s Picks: Amazing Modern Dance Piece

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

Australian dancer and choreographer Wade Robson choreographed this beautiful modern dance piece set to John Mayer’s Slow Dancing in a Burning Room. He shot this short video staring two of his dancers that really connected with the piece, Ben Susak & Pam Chu.

The post Rick’s Picks: Amazing Modern Dance Piece appeared first on Dr. Rick Hanson.

The Hard Things That Open the Heart

I’d like to offer some of my central practices that help me grapple with the First Noble Truth, particularly focusing on skillful means. In this talk at the Spirit Rock Meditation Center I go over some ways to cultivate the feeling of being for something, how to be on one’s own side enough that you actually want to do something about your suffering, and how to stay in the brain’s “home base” of calm, contentment, and caring in the face of the hard things in life.

I hope you enjoy!

The post Th...

Feel Safer

Feeling safer is a tricky subject, with complications that can be both personal and political.

(This topic and others are explored in depth in my interview with New Dimensions.)

Yes, there are real threats out there, but evolution and other factors have left a lot of us walking around in a kind of paranoid trance. I’ve been there myself, and the results include feeling less peaceful and hopeful, and more worried and cranky, than is right.

So I hope you find this post helpful.

Is There Really...

Your Precious Life

This series of blog posts is about Your Precious Life: what an incredible opportunity it is to have a life. At all.

To fulfill that opportunity, we need a fundamental orientation inside that treats our life as if it matters. As if our happiness is important, as if being mistreated is not alright, as if we deserve the same care and goodwill as any other person. As if on the day we were born we were given a bag of pearls, one for each day we will ever have, and every day we spend one of those p...

Rick’s Picks: Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture

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

Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch (Oct. 23, 1960 – July 25, 2008) was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in September 2006, and in August 2007 he was given a terminal diagnosis. He gave his last lecture at the university on Sept. 18, 2007, before a packed McConomy Auditorium. In his moving presentation, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to student...

Mindfulness of the Body as a Whole

Attention tends to move around, but something often bubbles to the surface at the front of our awareness. Even if we’re trying to focus just on the breath, the attention tends to wander from one part of the body to the next.

In this audio practice from the Spirit Rock Meditation Center, I explore the power of opening out that spotlight of awareness to include all of the sensations around you so they appear as one powerful whole. I hope you try this practice at home, and think you’ll enjoy it!...

Don’t Take it Personally

Is it about you?
The Practice:
Don’t take it personally.
Why?

Here’s an updated parable from the ancient Taoist teacher, Chuang-Tzu: Imagine that you are floating in a canoe on a slow-moving river, having a Sunday picnic with a friend. Suddenly there is a loud thump on the side of the canoe, and it rolls over. You come up sputtering, and what do you see? Somebody has snuck up on your canoe, flipped it over for a joke, and is laughing at you. How do you feel?

OK. Now imagine the exact same sit...