EP 108: Building a More Resilient Brain | Dr. Rick Hanson

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Hi, Fleab Maul here for the Radical Responsibility podcast. In this episode, I have the pleasure of sharing with you an interview I did for one of our summits with Dr. Rick Hansen, a friend and colleague, who I think does a better job of.

Explaining all the current neuroscience and all the new discoveries in neurobiology in layman's terms that can benefit you and I and that we can really actually begin to use this new knowledge to benefit our lives in very direct ways. So in this episode we talk about how to turn positive states of resilience into lasting traits. Positive states, in other words, accessing states like gratitude, forgiveness, joy, connectedness, and by, through practice and repetition, turning these positive states into positive traits, in other words, lasting traits that become foundational for our life. We also talk about different levels of resilience and how we can engage with each of them. He shares three tools that are incredibly powerful for these challenging times we're living through, and a five minute challenge that can really change your life if you actually put it into practice. So please enjoy this conversation that I had with my friend and colleague, Dr. Rick Hanson.

So how are you, Rick?

I'm good, Fleet. And I always love talking with you. I just think you're one of the more remarkable teachers literally on the planet and I'm not a false praise kind of guy and I really feel that way.

Well, we get. Well, thank you. I'm now all embarrassed. But we get to talk like this periodically when we do these kind of. I've interviewed you for a number of these online summits and also you're on our online faculty for the Engaged Mindfulness Institute, our teacher training program. Yeah, so it's. We have this virtual relationship, but I hope we get to meet in person one of these days when we all get to travel again.

Yeah, so.

So your work has been a lot about resilience. You, you had, I think at one point you had a year long program. Maybe you're offering that still to really help people deepen their well being and resilience. You wrote a book a while back on resilience that, that I think you, you share with me. It's just got renewed interest in the book now on Kindle because obviously we're all concerned about resilience right now. And, and I'd like at some point before we finish to talk about your new new book, Neurodharma, a bit. So I'd like to begin by talking about some of the. The neurobiology of resilience. So resilience, you know, we think resilience we often common. Commonly we think of it as a kind of elasticity. Our ability is to kind of take or receive a bit of a challenge or blow and bounce back. Right. So that resilient. And. And it also has to do with. It seems like we have a reservoir of resilience at any given time. Right. Adept. Like what's, you know, like sometimes I talk about the need to top off our batteries or add more batteries to the battery pack. Right. So, you know, is resilient a state? Is there actually a neurophysiological reservoir somewhere of resilience? What is resilience?

That's a really great question and I like the way you framed it. It's partly about responding to adversity and not being rocked too much and recovering as soon as you can when you are rocked. That's one really important part of it. Another aspect of resilience that's really important to appreciate in daily life, it's what we draw upon to keep on going in the face of challenges, new opportunities, emerging threats of different kinds of issues with other people, problems we have to solve, we keep on going. And so resilience is not just about recovering from the worst day of your life. It's about thriving really every day of your life. And the point of resilience is survival in a basic biological sense. But beyond that, it's about well being. The point of resilience is in support of well being in the broadest sense. A sense of fulfillment, basic contentment, keeping your heart open, being able to feel that your life has meaning and purpose. So what makes it psychologically, resilience is based on internal factors of various kinds, such as self regulation.

Executive functions, being able to direct yourself. Positive mood is a major factor of resilience. Feeling connected with others and feeling that you have fulfilling ways to express your own love. That's another psychological factor of resilience. Mindfulness, obviously enormous factor of resilience. You know, seeing clearly what's going on around you. We were talking before about just how I'm drawing on my background in the mountains, which is, you know, extensive at this point, just to deal with these crazy times and like the body memory of when you see the storm coming and you're not exactly sure what's up to like slow it down to make a clear plan and find your footing. These are all aspects of resilience. And to your point, we can grow them. Right. Roughly a third of who we are is baked into our DNA. But the other two thirds of the variation in how people turn out is acquired. That's enormously hopeful. We can acquire things that wear resilience down, like sensitivity and reactivity and prickliness. We can also acquire things that build resilience up, like self compassion and mindfulness. And I'd love to talk with you about the actual how of growing those resources which empowers us to help ourselves be stronger and wiser and more loving every day.

So just before we get into the how, one of the expressions that a quote from you that I've always loved is that based on the negativity bias, our brain has set up to act like Velcro for negative experiences and like Teflon for positive positivity or positive experiences, they just sort of slide right off. And so our long term memory tends to be full of fear, danger, negative experience, which creates implicit memory. That bias, you know, gives us a bias to spin things to the negative a bit. So. But that's kind of what we're up against, right? And then, and so maybe you could talk about that a little bit. And then is resilience, you know, is. It has something to do with the, with basically the efficiency of our brain and neural networks and neurobiology. I know Dan Siegel talks about, you know, mindfulness and ongoing, you know, personal evolution in this area. Our brain becomes more differentiated, more complex, but also more efficient. The pieces are all talking to each other efficiently with. So we have just a system that's more fluid and higher performing as. So maybe we could talk about what we're up against in terms of negativity bias. And then what does it actually look like at a neurobiological level to have a resilient brain?

Great. So.

Because as our ancestors evolved, right. 600 million years of evolution of the nervous system, what a long, strange trip it's been. And down that long run, they had to get carrots like food. They had to avoid sticks like predators. But the difference is that if you don't get a carrot today, you'll have a chance at one tomorrow. But if you fail to avoid that stick today, no more carrots forever. So sticks, typically, in terms of raw survival, have more urgency and impact. So we naturally have a brain that's designed to do five things. Scan for bad news, over, focus on it, overreact to it, over, remember it fast, track it into memory Just like you said, and become gradually sensitized to it over time. That's the fundamental summary of the negativity bias, which is very, very well established in research. It's useful in Jurassic Park. It's useful if you're working in a battlefield or a war zone, or growing up in what is like a war zone, or spending time in prison and what might feel in some places like a war zone. It's really useful in those settings. But in most cases today, it creates unnecessary suffering and conflict. So balancing the negativity bias for me means see the real threats. There's nothing here about positive thinking or rose colored glasses. See the real threats. Don't get overly reactive to them. You know, disengage from them, don't ruminate about them, take appropriate action, get out of the red zone when you can, and then in particular, grow psychological resources inside inner strengths like we're talking about, so you can deal with challenges and threats without going into the red zone, without feeling overwhelmed by them or tipping into fight and flight in a way that's a problem for you. And again and again and again, when you have an authentic felt sense in your body, in your feelings of an enoughness in this moment, you know, you're safe enough in terms of our three needs. You're safe enough in this moment, satisfied enough in this moment, and connected enough in this moment. Really, really, really slow down to take that in. For me, those are three major keys. You know, deal with, deal with the bad, as it were, but don't just get glued to it. Second, grow resources specifically for dealing with challenges. And third, when you have the chance, marinate in that sense of contentment and inner peace and love and gradually hardwire those qualities into your own being. So that's huge. And then in terms of the brain to kind of bottom line it. Basically, a resilient brain has three features, and the more of any one of them is good and all three are the better. Number one, it doesn't overreact to the negative. So parts of the brain that are like the threat response system, the amygdala related hormonal systems, they are adaptable and nimble, but they're not overly sensitized, they don't overreact, and they're relatively well regulated, let's say the amygdala, both by a nearby part of the brain called the hippocampus that puts things in context and by prefrontal regions behind the forehead that kind of create a sense of perspective, you know, and kind of calm, top down Calming, Very, very good. Second thing is that people are able to mobilize and take effective action. They're not just frozen. They're able to draw upon learning in their body, basal ganglia and other systems that help them learn in their body how to cope. And they have good top down regulation. They're able to keep think under pressure, they're able to think while they feel very important to be able to feel through mindful awareness, spacious awareness, what you're experiencing without taking on the burden additionally of trying to suppress it. They're able to feel what they're feeling while keeping their grip, you know, their head straight and going forward. That's the second aspect, effective functioning. That's what makes us resilient. And then third, underneath it all, a fundamental ground of well being, a fundamental in the core, even if around the edges there's fear, irritation, moral outrage at what other people are going to be suffering and what leaders are doing. Those things can be around the periphery, but in the core of the person there's a fundamental sense of, you know, meaning, purpose, fundamental well being, thankfulness, warm heartedness and wisdom. Those are the characteristics and we can grow all three of them.

So let's focus on how we do that now. So when we think about resilience, we can talk about being more physically fit and resilient mentally or cognitive fit and resilient, good cognitive control, cognitive balance, we can talk about emotional resilience, fitness and resilience, and spiritual fitness and resilience. So.

What'S the sort of path we're all somewhere in terms of our current level of resilience or lack thereof. What's the pathway to becoming more resilient in these different ways?

Well, that's a great question. So to me they're the sort of fundamental basic skills, the foundational bricks. And then there's the specific inner strengths that would help a person today with the particular stuff they're dealing with, including the ways in which.

Any kind of time and now the time of the virus, right, the pandemic time lands on people depending on what they need. So hyper succinctly, if we want to grow anything, if we want to cultivate, we want, want to develop in any way, it's a two step process and the second step is necessary. First step, we must experience whatever we want to grow. So let's suppose a person wants to develop patience, they have to feel patient, they want to develop mindfulness, they have to feel mindful compassion, gratitude and so forth. Second step, critically important, turn that passing state into a lasting trait by gradually hardwiring it literally into a physical change in the body, notably in the brain, a physical change of neural structure and function. Without that second step, the experience might be nice, might be helpful, might be useful in the moment, and it's gone. And I think one of the huge takeaways of this time is that many people are realizing that when the storm comes, you're left with what's already inside you. You know, if you're not able to count on familiar resources, if familiar resources seem to be crumbling, you're left with what's inside you. And for a lot of people, I think they're kind of, it's a wake up call. Wow. I just haven't put much in the bank in terms of my own inner being, my own inner resources. So it's a wake up call here.

If I could. So many of us have practice doing gratitude lists. Gratitude is an emotion. It's a feeling. And if you get out your legal pad, just start writing down all the things you have to be grateful for and you fill out five, ten pages. How do you feel? You feel grateful, right? And if you do that on a regular basis, somehow that, that state is going into your implicit memory. You're. You have a felt feeling of it. Somehow it shifts from a state to, to a lasting trait. So what is that pathway with all these wonderful pro social qualities that we'd like to have, how we'd like to feel about within ourselves, how we would like to feel in terms of others and responding to others? Compassion, kindness, altruistic behaviors. What is the process of things going from a felt experience to our contemplative practices, for example, to becoming a trait?

Oh yeah, that's great. So you're asking, how does that second step work? And I just want to really underline though, the conversion from state to trait for most people, most of the time is very poor.

Otherwise we'd see a much steeper growth curve for people. And many, many times people might do a gratitude practice and think it, but not feel it. And then even if they feel it, they don't internalize it. The physicality of state to trade is, I think, summarized well in the saying, neurons that fire together, wire together. They can wire together. So new connections can form existing connections, synapses can get stronger or weaker. Weaker could be a form of growing.

Blood starts moving more readily through capillaries. Little tendrils bring supplies in to parts of the brain that are doing things. With these new connections forming and new blood tendrils coming in, layers of Cortex literally grow get measurably thicker. And as they get thicker, much as when a muscle gets bigger, you can do more stuff with it. And there are a variety of other physical ways in which mechanisms whereby so called experience dependent neuroplasticity proceeds, including changes of the gene expressions in the nuclei of neurons, major regions become more connected with each other or they don't become so glued to each other as you were kind of saying earlier, they get more differentiated. So it happens in a variety of ways and we can help it happen. That's the takeaway. We can help ourselves be super learners. If I could teach people one thing, it would be how to learn. And there are a variety of ways to do it. I summarize it in my material. But I'll tell you the big three for me again and again, they're the go tos. Stay with it for a breath or longer. Feel it in your body. And third, focus on what's rewarding about it, what feels good about it. Any one of those three things will increase the conversion from state to trait. They'll increase the lasting changes of neural structure and function. Feel it for a breath or longer. Feel it in your body. Feel what feels good about it. And there are other details. I summarize them in the acronym HEAL H E A L. You know it, but that's the essence of the process. So we can help ourselves every day and then just finishing. Well, do you want to jump in?

Yeah, well, no, you're just pointing to a couple of things that are favorite substance. So practice. What you're really pointing to is practice repeated behaviors and then also the power of embodiment. It seems like if we any of these practices that are going to be good resilience building tools. If we can activate the body's capacity to feel internally interoceptive awareness and be more embodied, that's going to leverage all of our efforts. Would that. Would you agree? Is that the case?

Totally true. Now there is a place for internalizing ideas, wise views of various kinds. There's a place for that. Or the sense of just how to be more skillful with another person the next time. That's really appropriate as well. In other words, I'm talking about growing anything that you want to grow. Grit, determination, healthy moral outrage at how many vulnerable people are really suffering right now needlessly based on failures of leadership. You know, it's okay to cultivate these various things I'm working on, frankly as I age. Cultivating the capacity to feel completely at peace, frankly about my own death. I'm not intending it or I kind of like the party, you know, I still want to stick around. It's really interesting. It's screwed up as it is. It's still pretty interesting, but sooner or later the show will end for me and I'm working on that. Whatever it is you want to develop, you can work on. And that goes to that point I was making that for many people it's very helpful to appreciate. What if it were more present in my mind these days, would really help. For example.

A lot of people these days are forced into isolation. So what would help, well, well, what would help is to be able to tap in again and again to the felt sense of feeling liked and loved and included already as like a body memory, an emotional memory inside you. That's something we can cultivate. We can also cultivate the outflowing. Not just the inflowing, but the outflowing of lovingness, broadly defined. And love is love, whether it's flowing in or flowing out. So we can cultivate that feeling caring and concern for others, which is a way of feeling connected with them. So that would be a cultivation, or put it differently, some other people, you know, it's kind of like we don't get to spend as much time with people we like. And now we're forced to spend a lot of time inside doors with people we don't necessarily like so much or we like them in small amounts. But now we're up against each other. Well, right there. Skills. How can you cultivate the skill of. I laugh at myself recently, of not being so irkable, not being so readily irked, you know.

Acquiring non irkability. It's a work in progress. It's another way of describing equanimity. But working on non irk ability, you know, that's too. Could be something to develop. And if you know what it is you're developing, then it becomes very simple. One or more times a day, look for a chance to feel it, look for a chance to experience it. And then bring a big spoon, you know, really, really take it in and give, give that. Keep those neurons firing together for a breath or longer. So they really wire that into yourself.

That's great. I like that image. Let's take that. Take a big spoonful. So in talking about resilience, it seems to be there's. There's multiple levels and so any way in which we begin to feel more confident in the world in terms of, well, take care of ourselves and then interacting with others. So all the relative skills and the relative confidence we can develop that certainly increases our overall sense of confidence, groundedness and resilience. And then there's a more foundational level. In my own tradition we have an expression, my own meditative tradition we call unconditional confidence. And this is the confidence if you lost everything at the moment of death, even at the moment of death, that bedrock of confidence there, because it's grounded in the direct experience of the depth of our being and it's not conditional to anything. And that's tied in very closely to experiencing within the depth of our being some undeniable innate goodness or wholeness, which could be also innate resilience. So I'm wondering if you could talk just a little bit about that more sort of ultimate foundational, unconditional level that could be foundational to then developing all the relative forms of resilience and competency and skillfulness in the world.

Wow.

We'Re like dropping. We're taking the elevator down to the basement. Right. And feels that way.

Well, you mentioned that inner peace that would carry you right to the moment of death. So you opened the door. Yeah.

That's really great. Well, this is something that, as you know, is I've been meditating since 1974 and this territory is deeply important to me. And I just actually wrote about it, you know, in Neurodharma, like what these depths and.

So much we could say about it.

I'll tell you straight how I connect with it myself, let's say. And I'm going to try to do this without getting into redoing my book here, it's super short. So minimally, when our animal.

Personness, we're all, we're a body, mind process, we're a person, okay, as an animal. When the animal in the moment does not feel scared or frustrated, lonely, in other words, feel safe enough, satisfied enough and connected enough, it comes home. We naturally come home. This is really good news. We come home to an underlying ground. I call it the green zone, the responsive mode. We come home biologically without getting mystical. We come home to.

Basically in the green zone, the body protects itself, it conserves resources and it's emotionally positive. And the mind is colored with a broad sense of peace, contentment and love. And as you know, I have this metaphor of petting the lizard, feeding the mouse and hugging the monkey that are loosely related to the three stage evolution of the brain in the ways that the lizard brain tends to avoid harms for safety. Mouse brain tends to approach rewards for satisfaction. And the monkey brain, the primate brain, as it were tends to attach to others for connection. Simple way of doing it. So any time during the day that I can settle into what I call deep green, I really value that. And as a personal practice for people a minute or more a day to just drop in, your body's getting as calm as possible. You feel strong, your heart is open, there's contentment. Deep green, that's our home base. Without. That's hard science. That's rock solid neurobiology, evolutionarily deep green.

Then from you want me or you want to stop there?

Please, please continue.

Two tumor levels is super fast. And so then.

Through our.

Awareness, we can feel more and more what we know to be true, that this moment of experience exists while being empty of substance.

And this moment of the body, mind process, the integrated matter and mind, rupa and nama, as it were in Sanskrit, this moment is existing like an eddy in a stream, while being empty.

Connected to everything. We know intellectually, that's true. We know intellectually that in this moment we are breathing stardust. We are breathing oxygen made inside a star as it blew up. In most cases, we know that this moment of consciousness, this moment, this thought, is reality expressing itself locally. We know that, and we can feel that more and more. So more and more we start feeling like a local wave in the ocean of allness that's absolutely available to us. It's the truth of things. The great teachers express this quite eloquently, and I'm learning from them myself, but I'm developing the trait of this continuous felt sense that's available to us. And then at the deepest level.

We can have a sense of what the Buddha called the unconditioned.

We can experience that inside ordinary reality in a sense of awareness which is able to hold anything. So it's effectively unconditioned. We can have a sense of stillness deep in our being, around which movement occurs. That stillness feels unconditioned. And for myself, I suspect, for you, too fleet. And for many, that sense of timelessness, what is not conditioned, what is not subject to arising and passing away, and what may well be imbued or infused with mysteriously some form of consciousness and benevolence.

The truly transcendental, meaningfully distinct from ordinary reality. For many people, the sense of that in just everyday life. My Christian aunt and cousin in Colorado Springs, you know, have a real sense of this in their way. People may have a sense of this in other traditions. I have a sense of it that's informed in part through my Buddhist background, but that's an ultimate resort for people, the sense of the transcendental. So those are like three ways for me of talking about these deep. The deepening ground of things. And we can cultivate.

Them as traits, including a sense of being increasingly transparent to them and lived by them.

Well, thank you. And so that gives us a glimpse into your new book, Neurodharma. I'm really excited to get a hold of and read and let me run something by here and see how this lands for you. I think there has often been a tendency to imagine that something like higher consciousness or enlightenment or liberation or experience is somehow we transcend the body to get there and more and more. In fact, for many years now, I've been convinced that the pathway is actually through the body, within the body. So I feel like there are two modalities when we're being mindful of body, mindful of breath. For those of us who are practitioners of some kind of body and breath, meditation practice, mindfulness practice, there's two modalities that you could reference. One would be observing or noticing sensation. And we have a sense of the watcher or the witness that's noticing something, which is fine because that's really the beginning of our freedom. I like to use the analogy that we're before awakening to some level of mindfulness and awareness. It's sort of like we're in the stream of sensate experience without a lot of awareness. So then we can step out of the, get on the bank of the river or the stream and look back and observe what's flowing by. That's kind of this witnessing or watcher mode. But then there's another modality where we can now with awareness, slip back into the river and directly feel the water, feel the current. So this direct sensing or direct experiencing. So combining that kind of direct experience, which is less dualistic, less a sense of a separate watch or witness, with deep interoceptive awareness for me, begins to take us into the body, mind interface, whatever that is, wherever that is, or even what we might think of as subtle body, subtle things. And really is the pathway into this greater depth of our being that describes that three step path you were describing, taking us to that more unconditioned realm that we can actually really go there, becoming more and more deeply embodied and relaxing. The need to have a watcher to observe that, to let the body just feel itself at that deeper, deeper, more stabilized level. Curious about your thoughts about that?

Well, my thought number one is that, you know, you're a really, really great teacher. And my thought number Two is that there's this, if it's helpful to people, kind of a classic progression from focused attention practices like you described, which include deep absorption practices, shamata practice, samadhi practices, the jhanas move into these deep states, okay, focused attention. Then there's second open awareness, where you have as much stability as you can. You know, just enough sense of some object of attention, like the feeling of breathing while just pretty much hanging out by this. By the side of the stream of consciousness with the flotsam and jetsam going by. I'm marking stuff, you know, fleet. I'm just being clear about it. But these are marked in research as well. The distinctions are a little soft, but they're transition. Then there's third step where you abide as awareness, you drop increasingly into that. I think Diana Winston, in her lovely book the Little Book of Being, talks about being awareness. These stages are marked routinely in the traditions. Adyashanti writes really eloquently, as you know, about being awareness really dropped in. And for some, they stay inside the frame of the big bang, ordinary reality. For others, when they're dropping into being awareness, it feels increasingly transpersonal. There's some kind of.

Very, very fuzzy and disappearing distinction between personal awareness and some. In the phrase cosmic awareness, some transpersonal awareness. Oh, yeah. So that's how it goes. Yeah.

Eckhart Tolle's book the Power of Now goes into that territory quite a bit as well. Yeah. Helpful to millions of people.

Yeah. Well, and what you said. If I could just underline what you just said there very briefly about interoceptive awareness from a neurological standpoint. Just a couple things might be neat for people to know when they're doing what you're describing. You know, nobody needs an MRI to become enlightened. On the other hand, it can be useful. So it's when people are doing what you're describing, that interoceptive awareness, very much involving a part of the brain called the insula on the inside of the temporal lobes, both sides. When that insula gets active with that internal sensation, and there's a difference between sensation on the exterior, like touching your hand, and interoception, including the sublist of that. When the insula gets active in that way, it hits a circuit breaker and it quiets verbal activity and it quiets activity in the default mode network in the midline and back of the brain. I call it the ruminator or simulator. It's where we go when we're kind of ruminating about stuff. So it immediately drops, pulls us out of A lot of self referential processing. Me, myself and I pulls us out of mental time travel engaged by these midline networks, future and past. Pulls us out of a lot of verbal chatter. You know, the voice in the head, interoceptive awareness is fantastic. And you may know this phrase from Samuel Bonder, waking down, not just waking up.

Yeah, great.

Okay, so before we get too deep into cosmic here, let's, let's talk about.

It's grounded in the body. But yeah, you know that.

Yeah.

The practical aspects of, you know, and it's going to be different for all of us. But what would be some of the key elements of a pathway to greater resilience? Like we're in the middle of this global pandemic which is just uncharted territory for all of us. I mean that's becoming somewhat of a cliche, but it's certainly true. And you know, in the background of that is a looming climate emergency that, you know, is really needs to be on our, you know, right on the front burner and all the other possibilities of tremendous disruption and distill. You know, we're in some pretty challenging times. I mean, I think everybody has always thought they lived in the most challenging times, but I really do believe these are the most challenging times. And it's just kind of beyond the beyond at the moment. So for, so for all of us who want to become more resilient, not only to be able to survive in these times, take care of ourselves and our families, but, but possibly even learn to thrive in the face of adversity, what might be some of the key components as we begin to design our own regimen of just becoming more resilient over time.

Yeah. If you'll tolerate this, I'd like to move through. It's kind of how I think for me, three things at this time and then more generally what I call a five minute challenge. So I'll do it quickly. So at this time for me it really boils down to three things. Number one, find your footing, figure out what's going on, look for expertise, take appropriate action. In my life, what I'm doing is I'm basically not adding any unnecessary risks until we know what's going on here, until there are safe treatments, until people can be vaccined, until we know what's going on. I'm just staying home just like a lot of people. And I acknowledge my privilege, that I can do that, my good fortune that enables me to do that. Many people can't. But I'm just saying in whatever situation we have Find your footing and feel that you have the right to do what feels safe to you. Second, common center. Common center.

Talk about more how to do that. But just calm down, stabilize, strengthen, take that breath, just like you said. Tune into your body. Come into the present moment and call up the body memory, the somatic marker from Antonio Damasio's phrase, the feeling in your body of being gritty and strong. It'll give you comfort to tune in, to use your word. A feeling of authentic confidence, earned confidence, grounded in what you know to be true, that you're gritty. We will get through this. The storm is here. But all storms pass eventually. Impermanence. We will get to the other side and then we will look back and consider how we acted. And we want to be glad when we look back, glad about how we acted out in the world and inside our own mind. And then third, tend and befriend. This is a phrase from the work of Shelly Taylor at UCLA on stress ways of handling stress. Pointing out that initially with women that they tended and befriended under stress, not just fought or fled, fighting, flee. Men tend to befriend. Women, fight and flee. But that's kind of where it started. But that means that at this time it's so easy to see others as the enemy. And it's so important to realize that precisely because of our profoundly social nature as a species, we're vulnerable to an epidemic precisely because of that. We're going to have to get through this through relationship with each other. And so those really stand out for me. And then in terms of the five minute challenge to grow specific resources.

As you move through your day half a dozen times a day, take in the good. I'm going to take in the good of this call. I am taking in the good of this call. When you drop me into the deep end of the pool 10 minutes ago, I'm hanging out there. I'm trying to help those neurons fire together so they wire together, right? Why waste those opportunities for Bhavana, for cultivation on your own brain? Don't waste them, especially these days. Otherwise, like so many people right now, they suddenly realize they're running on empty because they haven't been topping up their tanks along the way. So each day more than ever, look for those little things. A key point. The harder your life, the more important it is to take in the good, the more important it is to grow the good inside you. Because the rescue is not coming. We're on our own in a lot, a lot of ways. So we really need to Be self reliant and strong. So look for the flower that's blooming. Pay attention to the kid who's left. You know, feel the goodness in your own heart. Know that feeling in your, inside yourself of being strong. And I'm going to get through this, you know, maybe with some swear words afterward, if you're like me, I'm going to get through this, you know, anyway, so taking the good second, know that one thing these days that you're trying to grow, maybe two or three, given your circumstance, given your challenges, what are you trying to grow inside as a muscle? Patience, compassion for others, compassion for yourself, a sense of fundamental deep bone deep confidence. No matter what, what are you trying to grow these days? And so for another minute or two a day, look for chances to feel it and then take it in. And then the third part of the five minute challenge, and it's just five minutes, but it'll change your day. And if you do it again and again, it'll change your life. Come home to deep green for a minute or more a day where you really are rested in a just pervasive sense. That's true to you in your core. Even if there's other stuff around the edges. In your core there's a feeling of peace and contentment and love, whatever words you want to use yourself. But at bottom it's that feeling. So that's what I would do. And that to me is what people can do every day to grow strengths inside, including for the sake of other people.

I love the idea of the five minute challenge. It's so practical because we all feel like we struggle with finding time to do the things that we know are good for us.

It would be pretty hard to make the argument that we can't find five minutes. So in a moment, I'd like to ask you to lead a brief guided practice of your choosing. But before that I just want to reference you, you mentioned before that, and you're younger than I am, but you're feeling that sense of your own mortality and the importance of developing that peace of mind so that you can approach the end of your life with some level of calmness and equanimity and so forth. And so the situation we're in, and I don't want to be in any way alarming here, but we're all aware that there's this, the risk with the pandemic that, you know, many of us may actually feel really threatened in really unusual ways that we expect it could happen to any of us. And you know, still the mortality rate with this COVID 19 illness is relatively low, but it's higher than the regular flu. The vast majority of people will recover. But nonetheless, how do we know? Any one of us. And it's not limited to the elderly as we now know from the current news. So just that notion of this could be a wake up call for all of us to be a little more reflective about our mortality. Mortality and another motivation for building resilience might not only be in terms of the quality of our life now, but being able to come to the end of our life with that level of equanimity and calmness. You know all the great spiritual traditions talk about if we really want to awaken, we need to keep death close at hand. Right. Because it keeps us awake and realizing the preciousness of this life. This wanted to invite a comment about how that, you know, there is an opportunity here for awakening with this.

Yeah, well I would if it's okay with you. I'm going to say this. This is the most recent information from the Royal College of Physicians. It's pretty much a consensus public health view just to help people kind of understand it that for people in my age bracket, 60 to 70 on average, and then where you are in that average depends on pre existing conditions. I'm pretty robust. So that. But the average is that while we're uncertain about how many people will get this thing, we're becoming highly clear about what happens if people do in terms of the odds. And for people who do get it in the 60 to 70 age bracket and this goes up as you get older, about close to 20% will require hospitalization. It'll be that serious. And I've had bad flus, I did not require hospitalization. And then of those who require hospitalization, about a quarter of them will need a ventilator. The problem is due to lack of preparation.

Hospitals are going to start rationing medical equipment. For older people. They're going to deny it because they're going to give it to younger people who are more likely to, to survive on a ventilator than an older person. That's just real. And even with ventilator etc, etc etc of the people who require hospitalization, probably about or the people who get sick in our age bracket, the mortality rate currently is about 3%. And these are sobering statistics. So from my standpoint, including speaking from my experience of standing on tiny little ledges the width of pencil, if I was lucky, high on a cliff, do not add unnecessary risk if you can help it, maybe you can't help it for one reason or another. God bless you, really. And if you can avoid it today, why add that rest a day for the sake of convenience or the sake of even placating other people, don't do it. That's very blunt counsel. I think that's grounded in the reality here. And there's a big difference between being prudent and panicked. You know, we can be calm and clear and strong even if we're a little rattled around the edges while in our core knowing what we're doing. I'm not flooded. I'm not worried because I'm being prudent. For example, I'm worried for others, but, you know, for myself, I'm pretty calm about it. So that's kind of context here. And that the ultimate, though I try to live with it as you do, I think the imminence of that. The lights could go out at any point, the movie could stop at any point. And for me, very briefly, if it's helpful, you can edit it out if you want. It helps me to rest in this quality of thankfulness and lovingness. The two together are allies to peacefulness. When I feel thankful about the incredible gifts of this human life so unlikely 13 and a half billion years into the universe, this little planet in the middle of Nowhere, you know, 300 million, 300,000 years, rather years of our species, all the stuff that happened, all the lives that could have been. And I got to have this one, you know, on any given day, lights, sounds, tastes, touches, drinking water. I just feel thankful. But try to rest in that with also a lovingness. And then that can take one into a sense of, you know, we're all waves in the sea and eventually this wave will disperse out into the ocean. And yet meanwhile we were always the ocean, you know, acting locally, Jamal Yogis puts it, all our waves are water. And to me, just feeling that, not abstractly, but feeling it and deepening in the continuity of it really helps me be at peace when eventually my own wave will disperse.

Thank you. Now you've got me in the deep end of the pool.

So, Rick, I would like to invite you to lead us in just a brief guided practice of your own choosing right now, if you could.

Great. How long? Fleet, Given our times, what would be helpful for you?

About three to five minutes somewhere in there?

Oh, sure. Well, I'll tell you one that I use a lot myself and inside secret. So I meditate with my wife at night before she goes to bed, and then I stay up an hour or so and Read. And it's really a sweet time for us. And she's not a longtime meditator, so there's this particular sweetness in it and I'm giving her a little guidance. So I'll share with you some of the. Maybe, you know, I don't know, lullaby meditation, but you can use it during the day too. So here we go. So.

Now I'm doing it. So finding your place, helping yourself feel grounded, sitting, standing, lying or walking down.

Feeling of giving yourself this time in this place.

A posture that helps you be comfortable and alert. Whatever it is.

Eyes open or closed.

I'll offer suggestions. Feel free to adapt them to your own purposes. In particular, I'll speak of the feeling of breathing. And if that's uncomfortable for you to focus on, shift to another part of your body or a word such as peace or love or a feeling such as gratitude or an image of a teacher or a favorite place like a mountain meadow. Whatever you'd like to use as an object of attention is okay. And I'll speak of the body and the feeling of breathing.

So being aware of your body being here.

And be aware of three breaths in a row at your own pace.

As you breathe. And if you like, you can count the breaths or not as you breathe. Feeling a core, calming and easing.

Coming in and spreading throughout you while remaining alert.

Tranquil and alert.

Feeling open hearted.

As you breathe.

Calming.

Perhaps a sense of love flowing through your heart.

Going outward and inward with every breath.

Awareness widening, including the whole body.

Widening to include the room you're in.

Widening.

Further and further.

Abiding calmly and warm heartedly in spacious that.

And in this embodied warm hearted calm.

Opening to a growing sense of contentment.

Thankfulness.

Whatever feels authentic for you. Knowing that it's all right to wish for more. It's all right to have pain or worry. Also an awareness. Well, seeing if you can find.

A fundamental sense of enoughness already now.

In the present.

There might be a sense of happiness.

Or simply.

Well, being. Mingling with the peacefulness and love.

As we finish here, a sense of being home.

Peaceful.

Loving.

And contented.

Last big breath as we finish up.

And thank you.

Wow. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

I needed that. That'll set me up for a great day.

So just so people can find you, your primary website is rickhanson.net Is that correct?

Yeah, son.net that's where all kinds of things are, including resources right now that are freely offered for this Corona time. And also you mentioned it earlier, I have a number of online Programs. They're always available for people with financial need for free. We have scholarships and so forth and they're very well priced for people in general. The foundations of well being is this year long course. Yeah. In resilient well being. And then we also have the Neurodharma program online and, and other things as well. Including some programs that are super bite sized one's called Just One Minute. It's 57 little mini practices. Each of them is less than two minutes long. So. Yeah. Anyway. And tons of other stuff there at my website, Rick Hansen.net I love the.

Just one minute practices. And your newsletter is just one thing. Right. So keeping it simple, practical. For those of you, any of you who aren't familiar with Dr. Hanson's workies. It's just really a treasure trove of very practical tools and practices for all of us to enhance our well being and resilience. And Dr. Anson does a wonderful job of taking both the latest neuroscience and the depths of the contemplative traditions and bringing them together in a very practical way that all of us lay folks can access to really improve the quality of our lives. So a great resource and thank you so much for being with us today. I know I'm sure all of our summit participants are just really going to enjoy this particular session a lot. So thank you so much. Thank you.

And if I could just add, it's really important. There's always something we can do from here, which includes tuning into and.

Giving into our true nature. There's always something we can do. And that's incredibly helpful at a time when it feels like this. There's so little we can do. It's so important to claim the power of. There's always something we knew we can always practice.

Absolutely. That's the basic premise of my book, Radical Responsibility. No matter how difficult or challenging or unjust or what horrible the circumstances we may be in, we can shift into a more proactive state by asking ourselves that simple question. What can I do? Because there's always something we can do.

Yeah. Something we can do. Absolutely.

So thank you so much.

Thank you.

Be well, stay safe, stay healthy and be well.

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