#rickhanson

Dr. Rick Hanson. Spirit Rock. May 2018. Woodacre, CA

Disclaimer: As with all of my published notes, these are in no way comprehensive. Nor are they a literal summation of what was said. They are simply my notes, my interpreted, perspective-ed reflections, photos, and jottings, that occasionally combine my own records & thoughts with those of the speakers. There might be some typos.

A core that preserves a fundamental freedom inside regardless of what we’re in relationship to; The storms may come from outside or within me, but there is a core that is not invaded by them.

“When faced with the vicissitudes of life, one’s mind remains unshaken.”

RESILIENCE

Calm

Contentment

Confidence

Cultivation

Safety

Connection

Focusing on positive material.

If you get stirred up, it’s OK. And feel free to do what’s best for you…

Resilience is the capacity to recover from adversity and pursue your goals despite challenges.

It helps you survive the worst day of your life, and thrive every day of your life.

Hedonic Wellbeing

Eudaimonic Wellbeing

To walk evenly over uneven ground.

External conditions come & go, they’re not consistent.

Growing psychological resources..

Inner resources – Wisdom, Concentration, Virtue, Compassion, Kindness, Love, Emotional Intelligence, Gratitude, Satisfaction, Happiness, Interpersonal Skills, Patience, Determination, Grit.

Mindfulness helps us develop and use our inner resources.

Mindfulness = Sustained present moment awareness.

We can be mindful while engaged in wise effort.

Taking things as a whole.

Self Referential Processing.

Not taking life so personally..

The skill of being able to sustain things as a whole –

Expanding the field of awareness to a single unified whole.

Choiselessly, Non-interventionally watching what roles by.

The psychological process of filling oneself with good.

The Responsibility to do what we can to develop conditions out in the world that support human welfare. (YES!)

Inner resources are acquired in two stages.

Encoding -> Consolidation

Activation -> Installation

State -> Trait

The famous saying “Neurons that fire together, wire together.”

We learn & grow from our experiences, for better or for worse  Let’s focus on the better.

Experience doesn’t equal learning.

Activation with out installation may be pleasant, but no trait resources are acquired.

What fraction of our beneficial experiences actually register?

Exponential growth: Getting better at getting better along the way.

Learning is the strength of strengths since it’s the one we use to grow all strengths.

How does one cultivate forgiveness?

There’s full pardon forgiveness, and then there’s another kind of forgiveness..

We still think justice should be served, and we want nothing to do with the person, but it doesn’t eat away at us anymore.

I can still hold the view, name what occurred, pursue justice, and protect others from that kind of thing happening again.

And simultaneously dropping it.

Generating compassion toward ourselves and them.

Letting it go; Disentangling ourselves => Full Pardon.

It’s one thing to feel the feelings, it’s another thing to have them remain & brood on them.

The quality of playfulness / delight / surprise increases dopamine in the brain.

HEAL (Turning States into Traits - Activation)

Have beautiful experiences.

(Installation)

Enrich the experience.

Absorb the experience.

Link positive and negative material (optional).

Being for yourself, treating yourself like you matter.

As we change, the world around us seems to change.

“Keep a green bough in your heart, and a singing bird will come.” – Lao Tzu

Four Ennobling Truths

There is suffering.

As craving increases, so does suffering.

As craving decreases, so does suffering.

If craving cause suffering, what causes craving?

Craving is embodied and grounded in needs.

If we feel like our needs our met, there is no biological basis for craving.

The Fundamental Needs:

Safety -> Avoiding harm -> Threat response.

Satisfaction -> Approaching rewards -> Goal Pursuit

Connection -> Attaching to others -> Social Engagement

Frameworks are not true or untrue; they’re either useful or not useful.

Natural social groups have about 30 people in them (?).

When needs don’t feel sufficiently met: Unsafe -> Fear, Dissatisfied -> Frustration, Disconnected -> Heartache.

With the red zone come a lot of costs.

How do we increase the causes & conditions that help us stay in the green zone.

Chronic inner homelessness.

The opportunity to repeatedly internalize experiences of needs being met.

Repeated internalization of experiences of needs being met.

A key element of coping is being able to generate useful sates of mind.

The hopefulness that we’re not totally bound by our circumstances.

If we can’t have the whole pie, we can still have slices of the pie.

Cultivation undoes craving.

“With repetition, and a little grace, I’m never going to bet against the human heart.” – Rick Hanson

Warming up our capacities…

Self-compassion is a great corrective to harsh criticism.

Matching resources to needs.

Safety -> Peace.

Satisfaction -> Contentment

Connection -> Love

Love is the multivitamin.

The expressing of lovingness feeds as much as the receiving of lovingness.

Cling less, Love more  

Long-standing tendencies..

A leading challenge.

Great question: What - if it were present in your mind these days - would really help?

Developing a keystone habit, of internalizing positive experiences.

What strengths are you developing these days? (Top 3?)

A feeling of worth?

If you know what you’re growing, it tends to organize your day.

Marinating in the green zone.

The mind finding its' way to ease.

The eating gorilla comes in peace  

Resources For Safety:

Being Safe | Feeling Safe

We are designed, biologically, to overestimate threats, and underestimate our resources.

Calming the visceral core.

Fight or Flight | Rest & Digest

Paper tigers.

Parasympathetic & Sympathetic nervous system.

Accompanied by positive emotion…

Most of the information coming into our brains comes from inside ourselves.

Most anxiety is anticipatory.

We needn’t feel more anxiety than is useful.

Always asking, especially for educators:

“WHAT IS THE BRAIN DOING WITH THE EXPERIENCE?”

My thought: Excellent question, especially when it comes to stressful school environments, and punitive discipline (!).

Healing is a form of learning.

The dirty little secret is that about 2/3rds of people get very little to nothing from MBSR / Mindfulness / Therapy / Coaching, and 1/3rd get A LOT. So what’s going on with the 1/3rd?

Letting learning land.

Re: Trauma. What are key resource experiences matched to the particular issue, that the child could have, and then internalize?

A limitation in capacity to influence / agency.

We are vulnerable to the experience of learned helplessness. (YES! Especially in school, and especially among certain populations.)

Learned helplessness is right on the slippery slope to clinical depression.

Internalizing helpful, beneficial experiences of efficacy, agency, making things happen, again & again & again..

Standing up for that space of freedom inside.

For some people, what shapes their life is largely innate, and for some people what shapes their life is largely acquired.

Two fundamental resources for satisfaction: Gratitude & Gladness.

Being brave enough to be dependent (I struggle with this..)

Being courageous enough to receive (I also struggle with this..)

Enoughness Already  

Activate as a state, to reinforce as a trait.

Sometimes we’re so affected by others that it’s hard to find our own footing, let alone be helpful to those around us.

A strong sense of interior-ception.

Tune into your own being.

Being a deeply rooted tree, through which others are blowing (I like that analogy).

Love the ripple, be the River.

Feelings of Worth – It is natural & important to feel that you have worth as a person – which does not mean arrogance or ego.

A Confident Heart.

As they grow an unshakeable core of peace, contentment, and love, people become less vulnerable to the classic manipulations of fear and anger, greed and possessiveness, and “us” against “them” conflicts. Which has big implications for our world.

The personal is the political. And the political is the personal.

Coming home.

Peace.

Contentment.

Love.

SIY Teacher Training Cohort 4 In Da House! Woot Woot ❤️🤗

🙏🏽📿💡📝❤️

*My gratitude to Spirit Rock, and to my fellow teachers in training, for permission to post images. 

Resource: 

Spirit Rock

Dr. Rick Hanson

A Day on Resilience at the Greater Good Science Center

I have heard about the Greater Good Science Center for quite some time now and I’ve been curious to check them out. I finally started looking at the schedule over the holiday season and wanted to go to all the seminars–so many amazing topics and amazing leaders! Kristin Neff taught a seminar on self-compassion in February, which I sadly couldn’t attend, but I was able to make it to “The Science…

HOW DO YOU TALK TO PEOPLE? The Practice -Try a softer tone

Why? When our kids were little, I'd come home from work wanting some peace after the daily roller-coaster and often walk into a living room full of stuff - toy trucks, tennis shoes, bags of chips, etc. Irritated, the first words out of my mouth to my wife would be: "How come there's all this mess?" Understandably, after a day chasing children plus juggling her own work, Jan would feel unfairly criticized and sputter back at me. Then there'd be a quarrel or a chilly silence. Not good. And it all began with the tone I used. Linguists like Deborah Tannen have pointed out that most communications have three elements, which I'll illustrate with the example above: * Explicit content - What led to these objects being on the floor? * Emotional subtext - Irritation, blame; startling, the first thing I said; no establishing first of a positive context (like asking about her day before mentioning the clutter) * Implicit statement about the nature of the relationship - I'm on top and get to judge how well she is doing her job as a mother. Many studies have found that the second and third elements - which I define in general as tone - usually have the greatest impact on how an interaction turns out. Since a relationship is built from interactions, the accumulating weight of the tone you use has big effects. In particular, because of the "negativity bias" of the brain - which is like Velcro for uncomfortable experiences but Teflon for pleasant ones - a repeatedly critical, snarky, disappointed, worried, or reproachful tone can really rock a relationship; for example, John Gottman's work has shown that it typically takes five positive interactions to make up for a single negative one. As I gradually learned to use a softer tone, my wife got happier with me - and our living room became less cluttered.

How? Be mindful of tone - Be on the lookout for needlessly negative tone: your own and others. And when it's there - including in mild ways like an eye roll, exasperation, or subtle put-down - notice the results. Also track the results of neutral or positive tone.

Consider your true purposes - In an interaction, ask yourself if you're there to be right, show the other person how he or she is wrong, vent, or work some covert agenda; these underlying priorities will lead to problematic tone. Instead, try to ground yourself in more positive purposes, such as find out what really happened in a situation, speaking from your heart, being empathic, strengthening the relationship, or solving a practical problem.

Lay a good foundation - First try to establish a frame of relatedness and goodwill, and that you are not trying to boss the other person around. You do not need the cooperation of the other person to unilaterally center yourself, clarify in your mind what it is you want to say, open your heart, find good wishes, and take a little time to get into relationship before launching into your topic.

Be careful about anger - I think there is a place for anger - it alerts you to wrongs and energizes you to deal with them - and for letting others know you're feeling annoyed or just plain mad. But how you express your anger can have a lot of unwanted impacts. Humans evolved to be very reactive to tones of anger because they carry signals of threat; just notice how the background hubbub in a restaurant gets quiet when an angry voice is heard.

So slow down, do a few l-o-n-g exhalations to calm your body, put the situation in perspective, and try to feel down to the gentler and more vulnerable feelings beneath anger. Then choose your words carefully, and name what you're feeling beneath the anger without blaming the other person (e.g., "When I see the kids' clutter on floor, I feel unsettled and not cared about"). Remember that dumping your anger on others - including via little barbs - harms you, too, and sometimes more than them; as the Buddha said long ago, getting angry with others is like throwing hot coals with bare hands: both people get burned.

Gentle your body - Relax your eyes, throat, and heart. This will naturally soften your tone.

Don't use inflammatory language - Exaggerations, accusations, fault-finding, words like "never" or "always," insults, swearing, alarming threats, pathologizing (e.g., "you've got a personality disorder"), and cheap shots (e.g., you're just like your father) are like gasoline on those hot coals. Instead, use words that are accurate and not provocative. Imagine that you are being video-taped and people you care about will be watching it later; don't say anything you'll regret later.

Say what needs to be said - A reasonable and civil tone actually promotes honesty and assertiveness because then you don't need to fight side battles or back-track to clean up a mess. But if a softer tone replaces sticking up for yourself, that's not good for anyone. So keep communicating.

* * *

May your good interactions build great relationships!