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you can manage your mind in three primary ways: let be, let go, let in.
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Rick Hanson |
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The brain is good at learning from bad experiences, but bad at learning from good ones.
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Rick Hanson |
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staying with a negative experience past the point that's useful is like running laps in Hell: You dig the track a little deeper in your brain each time
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Rick Hanson |
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If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each [person's] life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm any hostility. --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Rick Hanson |
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It's sometimes said that the greatest remaining scientific questions are: What caused the Big Bang? What is the grand unified theory that integrates quantum mechanics and general relativity? And what is the relationship between the mind and the brain, especially regarding conscious experience?
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Rick Hanson |
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most of the shaping of your mind remains forever unconscious. This is called implicit memory, and it includes your expectations, models of relationships, emotional tendencies, and general outlook. Implicit memory establishes the interior landscape of your mind--what it feels like to be you--based on the slowly accumulating residues of lived experience. In
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Rick Hanson |
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Stay with the positive experience for five to ten seconds or longer. Open to the feelings in it and try to sense it in your body; let it fill your mind. Enjoy it. Gently encourage the experience to be more intense. Find something fresh or novel about it. Recognize how it's personally relevant, how it could nourish or help you, or make a difference in your life.
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Rick Hanson |
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Even if you, like me, have done things worthy of remorse, they do not wipe out your good qualities; you are still a fundamentally good person.
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Rick Hanson |
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Every time you take in the sense of feeling safe, satisfied, or connected, you stimulate responsive circuits in your brain.
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Rick Hanson |
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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 li..
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Rick Hanson |
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To survive and pass on their genes, our ancestors needed to be especially aware of dangers, losses, and conflicts. Consequently, the brain evolved a negativity bias that looks for bad news, reacts intensely to it, and quickly stores the experience in neural structure. We can still be happy, but this bias creates an ongoing vulnerability to stress, anxiety, disappointment, and hurt.
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Rick Hanson |
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Positive experiences can also be used to soothe, balance, and even replace negative ones. When two things are held in mind at the same time, they start to connect with each other. That's one reason why talking about hard things with someone who's supportive can be so healing: painful feelings and memories get infused with the comfort, encouragement, and closeness you experience with the other person.
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Rick Hanson |
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It's a remarkable fact that the people who have gone the very deepest into the mind--the sages and saints of every religious tradition--all say essentially the same thing: your fundamental nature is pure, conscious, peaceful, radiant, loving, and wise, and it is joined in mysterious ways with the ultimate underpinnings of reality, by whatever name we give That.
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Rick Hanson |
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Just before bed, your mind is very receptive, so no matter what went wrong that day, find something that went right, open to it, and let good feelings come and ease you into sleep. Doing
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Rick Hanson |
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Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them. --Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche Some
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Rick Hanson |
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Three Poisons: greed makes me rigid about how I want things to be, hatred gets me all bothered and angry, and delusion tricks me into taking the situation personally. Saddest
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Rick Hanson |
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Inner strengths are the supplies you've got in your pack as you make your way down the twisting and often hard road of life.
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Rick Hanson |
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Neurons that fire together, wire together.
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Rick Hanson |
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To become happier, wiser, and more loving, sometimes you have to swim against ancient currents within your nervous system.
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Rick Hanson |
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Negative experiences create vicious cycles by making you pessimistic, overreactive, and inclined to go negative yourself. Avoiding
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Rick Hanson |
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Stephen Gaskin (2005) describes karma as hitting golf balls in a shower. Often our attempts at payback just get in the way of balls already ricocheting back toward the person who sent them flying in the first place.
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Rick Hanson |