EP 169: Cultivating Resilient Well-being | Rick Hanson PhD

Welcome to Radical Responsibility, the podcast dedicated to ridding the world of blame and shame, where we explore the issues you care about from a unique perspective. 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, day in and day out. And I'm really thrilled to be here today with my longtime friend and colleague, Dr. Rick Hampson. Welcome, Rick Lena.

I'm really happy to be here, genuinely. Really, every time I see you, it makes me happy. Well, that's the truth.

Well, equally so. And I love these dialogues that we get to have. And your work has been so important and so influential for me and so many. So I'm really thrilled to have you be part of this summit. I'm going to share your bio and then we'll get into the conversation. So, Rick Hansen, PhD, is a psychologist, senior fellow at UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science center, and a New York Times bestselling author. His seven books have been published in 31 languages and include Making Great Relationships. Your most recent book, Neurodharma, Resilient, Hardwiring Happiness, Just One Thing, Buddha's Brain and Mother Nurture, with over a million copies in English alone. He's the founder of Global Compassion Coalition and the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom, as well as a co host of the Being well podcast, which has been downloaded over 10 million times. His free newsletters have reached 250,000 subscribers and his online programs and have scholarships available for those in financial needs. He's lectured at NASA, Google, Oxford, and Harvard. He's an expert on positive neuroplasticity, which is really what this summit is all about. And his work has been featured on CBS, NPR, BBC, and other major media. He began meditating in 1974 and has taught in meditation centers worldwide. He and his wife live in Northern California and have two adult children. And he loves the wilderness and taking a break from emails. Well, when you came on before I actually saw you in the flats, I saw your Google, whatever you call that pixel thing, and it was a great picture of you with some climbing gear on, I think, leaning up against a boulder. It was really.

That's right.

That's right.

In great relief. About a year ago when I just got back into climbing and I got to the top of something that had scared me and I just felt wonderful. So, yeah, that's right.

That's wonderful.

Great.

So, Rick, you've helped so many people with your clinical work, with your teaching as an author, through all the ways that you make cutting edge science and ancestral and contemplative Wisdom available to so many, in so many ways, really integrating fields like positive psychology, neuroscience.

The mainstream mindfulness field, as well as, you know, Buddhist psychology and other contemplative traditions for healing traumas, for healing attachment wounds, as well as for optimizing our brain and nervous system and being, for optimal health and well being and life happiness, life performance and so forth.

And you've done this with books that really focus in on this idea of positive neuroplasticity, like Buddha's Brain and hardwiring happiness, as well as just one thing, which is a collection of practices which could be called self directed neuroplasticity practices or positive neuroplasticity practices. Right?

Yeah.

So I wonder, to begin with, if you could elaborate on how your work and positive psychology, neuroscience, mindfulness and so forth, how this intersects with this idea of that we now know it's always been there, but we now know we have the capacity to rewire our brains in positive ways and based on the scientific findings around neuroplasticity, neurogenesis, epigenetics and so forth. So if you could just talk a little bit about how your work intersects with that in general, and then we'll just see where the conversation takes us.

Oh, that's great. Well, I'll tell you a quick little story about myself as a 15 year old. And at the time I was very unhappy. I was socially awkward, very young, going through school, and my parents were loving and decent, but also quite critical and not very good at empathy. So for all kinds of reasons, I felt like there was a huge hole in my heart. I didn't know how to act with people. I was scared of most people. And I had this kind of realization come to me that no matter how bad it had been or was right now, I could always grow a little every day. I could always learn a little every day. I could become a little more skillful, a little less weird, a little less anxious. And that had incredible hopefulness. And that was kind of the beginning for me, actually in a kind of a major turning point in my life. Beginning of a lot of things. And in other words, we. We have the power which we have to claim. It's latent. We have to claim it. We have the power to help ourselves heal a little, grow a little, and awaken a little every day. It's been clear throughout the ages that this is a fact. With brain science, though recently, it gets very concrete and it gets specific that you actually can change your brain for the better, which is highly motivating. And when you Take the body really into account, not just as a field of experiential sensation, but as an objective fact. When you start realizing that it is the body that is making the mind continuously in the natural Big bang universe, nested in, in my view, with mysterious and transcendental ultimate factors. But other than those mysterious ultimate factors, whatever they are, the body is making the mind. Okay, how can we use that? And that's what's gotten me really interested. How do you actually use what we're learning about the operations of the body and making the mind to actually hardwire over time into yourself the good you want to grow inside, the happiness, the lovingness, the resilience, the commitment to justice, the skillfulness, the healing from your trauma. How can you actually hardwire that into your own being? And that's been really in the foreground of my own work because frankly, the older I get and the more longer I'm a therapist, both the more compassionate I get and the more focused I get on the reality that people need to make efforts. And I don't mean to be that cranky guy on a lawn wagging his finger at the people passing by, but it's just true. If we don't make efforts inside our own minds, we're just not going to change for the better. But if we do make those little efforts, a minute here, a few minutes there, an hour or two once in a while, if we do make those efforts, the sky's the limit.

Yeah, I love that you bring about that. We do have to claim this power that we have. And, you know, it's often been said that the phenomena is known as neuroplasticity, which was really only, I don't know, it evolved over the last several decades, understanding of that because there was time not that long ago, certainly when I did my early academic training and clinical training, that with science pretty much thought the. The brain you have by the time you're adult is the brain you got, and if anything, it's going to diminish in its capacity over the lifespan. So. But I've often. It's often said that neuroplasticity is good news and bad news, because the brain is always learning and changing based on what we expose it to.

That's right.

So if we don't proactively claim that power and make a little effort, if you said, then it's basically being programmed by the world around us for better or worse.

That's right. And then we have the negativity bias, which is a major finding in brain science, that Has a lot of implications. Mother Nature is, well, int negativity bias that creates so much suffering these days and conflict with other people. One of the takeaways for me about it, almost metaphorically, is to imagine your own mind and your body entwined together, thoughts and things entwined together, co arising, not reducing our stream of consciousness to just what the body does, because the stream of consciousness has causal force as well. The mind enlists the body to make the mind in a circular kind of way. So in that context, then, thinking of the mind, brain process as a kind of temple, and I imagine, you know, temples like in Asia, you've spent considerable time there, I think. Let's say there's a temple dog and the temple dog comes into this beautiful space and makes a mess on the floor. What do you do? Do you beat the dog? No, it's just being a dog. It just left a mess on the floor. So there you have like an anxious rumination about something. You're preoccupied maybe with your political adversaries these days, or your people you live with or work with. You know, that dog came in, did what dogs do and left a mess. Do you just let it stain the floor? No, you don't let it just sit there and become embedded and established in your being. You actually.

Become aware of it and release it and treat it seriously. And you definitely don't fertilize it and reinforce it. One of the key takeaways, I think, from brain science is to really appreciate the vulnerabilities of our brains, to reinforce.

Different kinds of reactions when we identify with them, when we fuel them, when we, you know, give them applause, right? When we ally with those qualities in ourselves, they get reinforced really quickly. And as you well know, the difference is mindfulness. It's stepping back, it's there, we feel it, but we don't identify with it. We don't reinforce it, we don't keep chasing after it. And increasingly we replace the messes of the dogs, as it were, with beautiful flowers and statues and bringing other people into the space in service to them. That's, to me, a really central attitude, that we're the stewards. It's like we know what it feels like to take care of a sacred space, right? We bring respect to it and we're clear about causes and effects. We treat it with care. It's the Buddha's final words where things fall apart. Walk your path with care. Care is conscientiousness and care is heartfulness. Walk your path with hair. So we bring care to it. Can we bring that kind of care to the inner temple of our own being.

I love that it's a really accessible and practical way that you describe it. Wonderful. You're a great storyteller. And those images make it, make it really accessible. This idea of the temple of our, our body, mind, and how we care for that and then that extrapolates out to, to our life and our relationships. And, and I loved also the way you talked about body and mind as kind of a circular process that you can talk about how mind arises from body, from our neurological processes, and it may be an emergent property of the brain. But then you can also talk about how mind reshapes the brain. Right, and reshapes our life. And, and so in your book Hardwiring Happiness, you spoke about that we can actually.

Through intentional practices, contemplations, reflections, how we, what we choose to focus on, we can rewire our brain for happiness. So I wonder if you could talk about that and also describe maybe what do you mean by happiness in that sense? You know, there's a happiness that when things are going my way, things are going the way I want, you know, I'm happy, you know, and then of course, when things don't go my way, which always happens as well, I'm not so happy. There's that kind of happiness. But I got a feeling maybe you're pointing to something a little deeper than that. So I wonder if you could talk about how you understand happiness in that sense and then, and what are some of the practices that would actually reshape the brain? That we would tend to be happier more of the time in, in that sense of happiness.

Oh, lovely. So I, I'm willing to use the word happiness in a broad sense, really pointing at, well, being. And what I'm interested in is.

Is how do we cultivate that which is stable in us and beneficially stable in a larger context of relentless impermanence. Two truths side by side. There is relentless impermanence as probably the Big Bang universe with its four dimensions, including the dimension of time, continues to expand. So literally, the temporal expansion of the four dimensional Big Bang universe is continually drawing us into the future, which necessitates leaving the past behind, which is quite an extraordinary way, right, to relate to moment, to moment experiencing, in which, yes, we are continuously losing what is currently present while gaining the emergence, the arising in creation, continuously at the leading edge of the temporal expansion of the universe. A very cool way to relate to it. So in all that, then there is that which changes and that which lasts People long for the happiness that lasts, the love that lasts, the inner peace that lasts. Think of it kind of like as a mood. There can be a depressive mood, an anxious mood, an irritable mood that tends to persist even though they're passing feelings and thoughts on the surface of it. What about. Which I think is.

The aim really in certainly psychology, secular psychology, and also in the contemplative traditions. How do we gradually establish a fundamental core or ground of resilient well being in which sadness, anger, fear, inadequacy.

Gain and loss, the eight worldly winds blow, and yet can there be a kind of stability.

In what we actually experience deep down inside? So for me, that's the opportunity. That's the opportunity. And there's now tremendous research, Flate, you know, well, that shows that that kind of positive core of well being in which there's certainly a fair amount of gratitude, gladness, contentment, peacefulness.

Spurts of joy, a sense of wonderful while being in the real world. Those qualities that are emotionally positive are not just some kind of hallmark card la di da. They're fiercely effective in promoting our resilience, healthy relationships with others, recovery from trauma and long term health and well being and a longer lifespan. Everything I said right there is factually supported with a lot of evidence at this point. So it's worth cultivating these qualities. And then the question is how, how do we actually cultivate that quality? So maybe I'll take breath and see if you have something to say about it all there. And then I really get it. I'll get into the how to of it, which I find is super useful.

Yeah, I want to explore the how to with you. And in particular, mindfulness being one of those tools. Not the only one, but mindfulness being one of those tools. You know, I was thinking of our colleague Richie Davidson's work as you were describing that, and having identified, you know, kind of the neural substrates of what we call well being. Yeah, especially well being, but even hedonic well being as well. And, and that we now know that we can train ourselves to experience well being. It's a skill we can train in. We can actually change the brain through consistent practices where we're going to have more of a default mode of, of well being and consistency and equanimity and resourcefulness and resilience, just as you were describing. And as you were describing, you know, the, the fourth dimension of time. Right. And so how we're kind of being pulled into this emerging future. I, I just had his image of like you Know, we're on a surfboard just learning to ride that, that front edge wave.

That's right.

At the same time, that front edge wave on the surfboard is kind of, you're in the timeless now, the timeless present. That's probably why surfers can surf really well, because they're not in the past or not in the future when they're on the edge of that wave, they're really now. Right?

Yeah.

And there's both the. The sense that in a large scale, that's part of this emergent future. At the same time, it's this timeless present. So really there was a lot of depth in what you shared there. Kind of just wanted to pull that out a bit so people don't miss it. I know.

And it also goes, I mean, we could do a little sidebar here about something that we talked about earlier, which is the notion as to whether samsara, right, is suffering, or more exactly, is the first noble truth that the Buddha laid out in Pali Dukkha. Is that properly translated as suffering? And the actual answer is absolutely not. Because while there is certainly the leaving of what's the case in the present moment, that's not inherently suffering unless we essentialize it and cling to it and identify with it. And meanwhile, all that which is leaving us is being endlessly replaced by what is arising.

Right.

And I'm not putting a happy face on famine, poverty, tragedy, cancer, you know, physical pain, things like that. I have family members who are grappling with really serious health problems, and you can see, you know, what they're grappling with. But the notion that we're living in emergence continuously is a. Is a factor of resilience, you know what I mean? And it helps us deal with the crude. That's very real as well in this life. So anyway, that part, the how of lasting change for the better is really interesting. And I want to be a little cranky here about what I consider to be a failure in my profession of clinical psychology and more broadly, frankly, a widespread failure in related fields of coaching and mindfulness training and compassion training and all the rest. In that it's a failure to teach people how to be active agents from the inside out.

In their own movement toward greater happiness and love and wisdom, how to be active agents, rather than treating people as a routinely treated in what I think of as a growth 1.0 model, as passive vessels into which information and experiences are poured. And it does stick for some people. You know, I think you're a person, I'm probably A person in which that kind of stuff has stuck. But for many people, the dirty little secret often in studies on various interventions is a third to half of the people or more don't get any lasting value. Those who do, drag the average of the group far enough from the control group so you get statistical significance. But what about people in general? So in that context, what's amazing is that a little bit of deliberate engagement with a useful experience at the time is a major evidence based factor in learning from it. So how do you grow the good inside? Right. People listening might think to themselves, what if it were more present in my mind would really help these days if certain traits were more stable in me. The trait of well being, broadly, which includes certain skills. But more broadly it's a kind of trait, It's a mood, it's an underpinning, it's implicit, it's kind of in your body, it's in the background. What would be really helpful these days? How do you grow it? And the how is very straightforward. It's a two step process and we routinely forget the second step, so we don't actually grow. First, you must experience what you want to grow and then it must get internalized as a lasting physical change in your body, primarily in your nervous system and its headquarters, the brain. Lasting change of neural structure and function. How do we promote that lasting change? So as you know, I have the heal framework. H E A L is an acronym for once you're having the experience of what you want to grow, you can E for enrich and A for absorb it. And in the process of that, usually over the course of a single breath, sometimes longer, you really can increase the degree to which that experience as a passing pattern of neural activation can leave lasting changes behind in your nervous system. By staying with it for a breath or longer, feeling it in your body, focusing on what's rewarding about it, having a sense of giving over to it, receiving it into yourself, and doing that deliberately. Strong teachers like your root teacher, Chogam Trungpa, would do things with people to kind of get them to do it. But we don't tend to teach people how to do it themselves. And that's been a major focus on my work. And if people are interested, they can look at the paper we published a couple years ago called Learning to Learn from Positive Experiences that cites all the various neurologically based studies that document that these methods are effective. And in the training program that we did, the positive neuroplasticity training, we showed that people actually got tremendous value from Learning how to learn, learning how to learn in the broadest sense, happiness. We learn happiness, we learn resilience, we learn the cultivation of compassion. Right. We learn the acquisition of right view, right intention and so forth. You know, so anyway, that's it, that's the spiel. Have it, enjoy it. Not just have the experience of whatever you want to grow, but marinate in it, stay with it. And paradoxically, through truly receiving it in yourself, we're less likely to cling to it. Internalization, cultivation undoes the craving that when applied to the dukkha of reality, is what creates suffering. Or internalize a gritty sense of determination, or internalize a wince of healthy remorse that you did something dumb and you hurt somebody.

It's not just emotionally positive experience. There's a lot of important stuff to like learning how to communicate with your wife more skillfully the next time. I'm working on it.

What you said about if we internalize them, then we're less likely to cling to them. And I think there's a process that they become our own and we have more confidence. Yeah. In things that kind of a more unconditional confidence. So we don't cling to positive, which can be a source of suffering if we're clinging to things. But the more we internalize it, it's like we trust that those are available to us and so we, we can loosen our grip on life a little bit and trust more. Is that kind of what you're pointing to?

Exactly right. You could use, you, you, you start living from a prior sense, this ground that you're living from in the life while dealing with challenges, including other people.

You feel already full and already in balance. And so you're, you're dealing with the challenges of life already centered in an enoughness of resilient well being. And it's very interesting that the Buddha was a profound psychologist and he laid out, as you know, in the first two of the noble truths, the noble truth of Dukkha and the noble truth of Tanha in Pali, a key language of early Buddhism, Dukkha has basically three attributes. Suffering is not inherent in it. First, sometimes there are unpleasant experiences in life. Yes, that's true. Also, all pleasant experiences end. That's true. And all phenomena, certainly all experiential phenomena, have the characteristic of being processes that are interdependent and thus they lack solidity and identity in an absolute sense. So they're incapable of being turned into things that we can then hold on to. Fine, dukkha as dukkha is Just, that's just life. And alongside dukkha is watching puppy videos on YouTube or, you know, drinking water when you're thirsty, or feeling the love in your heart like I'm watching you smile, plead. It makes me happy, you know, that's alongside dukkha. Okay. Dukkha plus craving, Tanha is craving that makes us suffer. Dukkha without craving is just living. That's inner peace. Dukkha plus tanha, that equals suffering. So why do we crave? Well, craving is biological. Lizards crave, mice crave, crabs crave, humans crave. And we crave because it feels like something is missing or wrong. Aha. So on the other hand, as you were saying, we through repetition, through thousands of little moments that are a few seconds in duration, maybe a little longer, sometimes we gradually fill ourselves up so we feel already full and already at ease in the core of our being. So there's less and less biological basis for craving. That's a very cool path.

There's a couple of directions I want to go in here, but I want to go back to something you said earlier. You know, you talked about the importance of body and realizing how body manifests mind, but you also talk about how mind can reshape the body. Literally. There's this, this co. Arising of our body, mind, experience, and how they work together. And. But then you, you did talk about there's this other level, this kind of ultimate level or the deep mysterious level of our being, and that all the great contemplative traditions point to, the mystical traditions point to, the indigenous traditions point to. And sometimes it's just a great mystery or not knowing or unknowing, but there's a sense of a beingness, of a larger reality that we're part of.

And so that we can sort of train ourselves and practice into having greater competence and even unconditional competence in this state of well being. Right. And therefore we're not so prone to craving because we have more of a default level of feeling. We can do that with our brain. Yeah, but would you say there's also an innate level of that, that on some levels we're already full? There's a fullness that's already there that we can tap into that some of these practices will allow us to drop into a level where we drop into that fullness that's unconditional, always present. And that might also help reshape, reshape things and increase our, both our relative and unconditional confidence in the workability of life, the wellness of life, the fact that I'm okay and life's okay. And this is where even may one difficult somehow there's a certain okayness to it.

My short answer is yes, and my slightly longer answer is to mark some key distinctions that often get really muddled, and then that undermines skillful practice. So.

I believe that innate in our ordinary biology.

Not yet getting into anything transcendental, is a core of being, a level of being that is very accessible, that is aware.

Is positively intending, is benign, not malicious, and is affectively positive with qualities of contentment and peacefulness.

And is.

Inherently pure and unstainable, unbreakable. And people can access that. And having a feeling of that even as you're grappling with your difficulties, is incredibly useful. And the basis for it, I find completely mysterious. Like, why would Mother Nature evolve that? What is that about? And yet it's undeniable that people can access that and they report it. I'm aware of it right now. You can feel it. What is that? That right there? And drawing on a metaphor, that, again, you probably know this notion that practice or the process of healing, growing and awakening is like a cart with two wheels that follows two tracks. One track is the track of gradual development. It's the track that therapists tend to focus on and teachers tend to focus on. But the other track is true nature, already inherent goodness, natural goodness, already that certainly the Tibetan tradition, I think, is of the Buddhist strands is the strongest and the clearest about altogether. And then we see it in other traditions, too. So working both of those tracks, my history personally, is that I was really good at the gradual development track. And in the last 10 to 15 years, I've been coming to your side of the field, their fleet of innate purity, goodness, et cetera, already. Okay, so that's really clear. Then the question is. Then the question is, is there something else than what is occurring inside the natural unfolding of the Big Bang universe that we're also tapping into, tuning into, when we start.

Relating to and opening to and being lived by, lived from that level, right? And my conviction is that there is. It's both my experience and my reasoned belief. I interpret what the Buddha pointed to in terms of what that which is unconditioned, deathless, and so forth, described in a very bare way through negation. He was pointing to that. And I am perfectly comfortable, you know, in the worlds in which I live professionally, that some people absolutely stop at that first level. And that's why I deliberately wanted to mark it. Okay, fine, Purely secular, you know, nothing else that's it, it's just the big bang universe unfolding fine. On the other hand, I do think the great teachers, and it's certainly my experience and that of many, many people, is that bringing, including this transcendental all rightness, you know, and.

You know, being at peace with that is a profound refuge, if that's meaningful to you. And even a secular organization like the American Psychological association went through a shift around 20 years ago in which it came to terms with the fact that for many people in a secular psychotherapy, their own religious or spiritual practice and faith tradition was a major resource for them in their healing. And that it was important to acknowledge that without the therapist becoming a preacher or agreeing or disagreeing per se, but that including that as a major refuge and resource for many, many people is skillful means. So I try to talk about it in this two part way.

Well, now that we've kind of touched in and acknowledged this profound depth and resource that's there for all of us, even just within the relative world of our body and the flow of our physiological processes, and as well as in these deeper ways and even in the most profoundly transcendental ways, maybe we'll come back to the challenges that often we're dealing with day in and day out. And you did reference that negativity bias before and how, you know, how in evolutionary terms, in order to survive that we learn to put risk awareness, to prioritize risk awareness. Right, because. And those that did survive and passed on their genes and those that didn't, didn't survive and didn't pass on their genes. And you have very aptly described this with a line that's quite famous now that our brain is set up to act like Velcro for negative, negative experiences and like Teflon for positive experiences. So I wonder if you could go into that a little more about how that operates and how we then start when, when we're under the influence of that and the implicit memory that it creates, how we then just kind of tend to interpret and spin everything, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy and then how we can actually begin to reverse that.

Yeah, that's excellent. Here's where a little brain science is super helpful because it's like a pointing out instruction. In other words, we can know ourselves in two ways. From the inside out or the outside in, from the first person perspective or the third person perspective, from the point of view of mind, or the point of view of matter in effect, and moving back and forth, toggling back and forth between those is the Great opportunity for of practice in the 21st century to bring those together. So in that context, your brain fleet and mine, 3 pounds of soggy tofu, like tissue inside the coconut, is designed to do five things routinely because this keeps creatures alive in harsh conditions, whether Stone Age or Jurassic Park. One, scan for bad news out in the world or inside your body. And we tend to do that. We're looking for where's the threat? As you said, prioritizing risk awareness. You could see creatures in your backyard. I have a backyard on the edge of open space. Birds, lizards, fish, you know, they're endless. Squirrels are scanning for threat. Okay. Second, when you find it, in other words, people tend to scan more for peril than for opportunity, for threats rather than opportunity. It's a bias. Second, when we find it, we focus in on it and we tend to ignore the whole field. That's partly why Barbara Fredrickson's work on some of the beneficial effects of positive emotion has to do with, as she puts it, broaden as well as broaden and build. Positive emotions tend to broaden our perceptual field so we can be more creative and resourceful and see more things. Because our brain tends to lock onto that one flashing red light in the mosaic of our experience or mosaic of reality, we over focus on it. Third, we overreact to the negative. A lot of research shows that people react more to loss than to gain of equivalent amounts. People react more to negative feedback from somebody else than positive feedback. We react more to pain than to pleasure. We overreact to it. And then fourth, we over remember it. Painful, unpleasant experiences, anxiety, irritation, they get fast tracked into emotional memory. We tend to remember negative information about people more than positive information. Thus gossip magazines and attack ads. In politics.

If you get 20 points of feedback from your boss in your quarterly review, and 19 are positive, one is room for improvement. What do you obsess about about for the rest of the day? So we tend to internalize it. And then fifth, we tend to become sensitized to the negative. So just think about that. We scan for bad news, over focus on it, overreact to it, over remember to it, and get sensitized along the way. Each one of those is something to be mindfully aware of, including in interactions with other people that are maybe conflictual or the way in which you think about yourself or.

How you communicate with other people. And I myself have found that I have kind of a little saying that summarizes how to turn this into practice. Deal with the bad, turn to the good. Take in the good. So much of practice is about that we have to deal with the bad. This is not about overlooking the bad. But don't overreact to it. Don't let it hijack you. Don't let it invade your mind and remain See what is also true. Turn to the good that is also true. Other people, other capabilities in you, other times things went well, the possibilities in the future turn to the good. And then when you experience that which is good in a broad sense, that which is beneficial.

Take in the good, let it sink in so you gradually build up resilient well, being inside yourself. Yeah.

So.

I'm glad you talked about we. We deal with the bad, then turn to the good and dwell on the good or spend time with the good so that we do, we do internalize it. And so this isn't some kind of spiritual bypassing. It's not a transcendentalism. We have to deal with the challenges of life and even Barbara Fragrance and work. You know, some people talk about the danger of toxic positivity and you know, sore faith. I think it can go too far. Although even some of that alarm may be part of people's relating to positivity from the reptilian brain. But yeah, but you know, I think Barbara Frankensburg it is good to spend time in positive emotional states. It doesn't mean that it's not also necessary to experience other emotions, to experience anger, to be sadness, grief to frustration. These are all normal human emotions which we can experience, but. And we shouldn't avoid them. We need to deal with them, we need to work with them. And there's wisdom in all these emotions that we understand from some deep connect contemplative traditions. And at the same time, on some relative level it would be good if we have more of our 24 hours spent in relatively positive emotions rather than anger and resentment and things like that. We're going to be happier campers and over time our brain is going to change in positive ways. So there's some kind of balance of here of not, not getting into spiritual bypassing or toxic positivity or denying the challenges we have. But at the same time there is a somewhat of a preference or prioritizing positive emotions because they do good things for us. Is that a reasonable way to look at it? I wonder if you could elaborate on that a little bit.

Oh yeah. So I've been, you know, I started as, you know, practicing back in 1974 and before that I was pretty engaged in the human potential movement. And so, you know, And I just turned 76 months ago I completed my 70th lap and who knew, right? Like what? How'd this happen? Internally, I feel like I kind of moved between 9 and 29 and very often more toward the younger end of that range. And I just think there's a lot of BS about this topic territory, to be blunt. So first of all, there's no avoidance of values. To try to avoid values is itself a value. So what do we value? And you can see in our shared tradition of Buddhism, there's a valuing of sila, samadhi and panya. There's a valuing of the cultivation of virtue, mental training and wisdom that's valued. The elements of the Eightfold path, the factors of awakening, they're valued. And secure attachment is valued compared to insecure attachment. Healthy executive functions are valued. We can value things. It's appropriate. Would you rather be rested in a fundamental sense of well being or to feel depressed and miserable and, you know, damaged goods? It's okay. What do we wish for our children? And I just think there's a kind of dismissal of the role of values and the roles of cultivation out of the fear that somehow people are going to get super attached to stuff. Well, don't get so attached to it and recognize actually that it's the internalization of wholesome beneficial qualities that we value that is a major factor. It's like a solvent that dissolves the machinery of craving, including in its deeply biological roots. Point one. Point two.

Yes. Don't try to avoid your painful feelings. I'm a therapist. I dwell in painful feelings. I deal in them for a living. I tell people things they don't want to hear. I get it. I help people slowly peel the scab off. Slowly take the lid off. Slowly open the doors to the rooms inside the mansion of their mind. Terrify them. That's the therapeutic process, a key part of it, right? Yes. You know, don't suppress those things that, you know, the mind and the brain are not like a flush toilet. It doesn't just go away. They're like a septic tank. The stuff you shove down sticks around and smells over time. Yes. Okay, don't do that. Meanwhile, what are you healing? What are you growing? What are you awakening? Where do you dwell? Right. Where does your heart dwell? What are the states of being in which you dwell, which gradually cultivate the traits inside you that you're developing over time? It's fine to do that. It's crazy not to do that. And then finishing my rant here, most Pain has no gain.

Yes, there is a short list of kinds of growth that only occur through painful experiences, certain intensities. Like I've had life and death experiences in wilderness. I've had extremely painful experiences with other people that really taught me important lessons that I would not have gotten otherwise. Okay, but most of the time, pain is just pain. It wears us down. It leads us with what's called allostatic load in our bodies of chronic stressful experiences that are characterized by negative emotions, the big four, typically on the range of anxiety, sadness, anger and inadequacy or shame. That's not good for us. It's not good for us. There's this strange. I just think there's a lot of BS around the fear of toxic positivity. I think there's a kind of almost professional Grinch industry that when you look closely at it, it's just not true. Most of what we cultivate that's wholesome and beneficial in ourselves.

And in our kids is emotionally positive at the time. It feels good because it is good for us. Mother Nature evolves systems that mark and motivate certain kinds of experiences because they're healthy for us, they're good for us, they are salutogenic rather than pathogenic. In other words, they're good for us. So why turn away from them? And then when you have that opportunity, why not take them in? I find so many people for every one person, and I'm sure they exist. I grew up in la. I'm sure they exist somewhere, at least in la, you know, who's constantly chasing feeling good, feeling good, feeling good. Right. In a kind of a manic, selfish kind of way. For every one of Those, there are 99 people who are indifferent to their own pain. And when they have opportunities to recognize beneficial facts, they don't recognize them. And if they recognize them, they don't let the recognition become a feeling, an experience. And then when they do have that experience, they don't receive it into themselves. They don't let themselves have it. They live in the hell realm of the hungry ghosts. Right? Huge appetites, but not taking into themselves. To me, that's the major issue that we ought to be focusing on.

Well, I'm so happy about how you clarified that, because I think there is a lot of stuff that arises around this. And part of it, I think also goes back to. And I wanted to circle back to this. Anyway. We talked about learning how to learn, and this, this the way in which, you know, in some ways the world of psychotherapy and medicine but also culture in general tends to view people as passive. And there's almost a culture like we don't want to talk about anything good because it's going to make somebody feel bad. We don't want to present it, we don't want to value the good because somebody's going to feel, you know, it's like, yeah, it's like treating everybody as this completely passive or disempowered victim and not honoring the patriarchy. You know, we're not speaking to people's intelligence. People are intelligent and they value feeling good. It doesn't mean we're, you know, I mean some way these practices are learning to be with our life as it is in the moment, which actually feels good even when life is challenging the ability to be with. But it doesn't mean we're not. We want to have it. I want to have an equal measure of misery. And we, we bad. There's nothing wrong with value in the good. And I think part of it is, is about this. So I want to go back to this because I think that's also one of the wonderful things about all the learning and neuroscience is that all these insights and his wisdom has been around for millennia and a lot of these practices that work have been around for millennia. And even learning how to learn in one way or another has been around for millennia. But we now know we understand more about the neurobiology of how the brain, how the mind learns and how the brain learns and how, and, and so I think there's ways which we can empower others and empower ourselves more to have greater self agency in our own process of learning and well being and so forth. And so I think a lot of that confusion is out there is when we tend to regard people as not having agency. It's just being the victims of, oh, if I say this, they're going to be in, if I say this, it's like we're regarding them, it's just some kind of passive potential victims. We don't regard them as people with their own intelligence and their own resourcefulness and their own, you know, wisdom.

And on the basis of that then to the extent it's appropriate, teach them how to not just have a growth mindset, but a growth toolkit. In other words, how can you in evidence based ways change your brain for the better? Deliberately? And I want to really emphasize something here, so I've been presenting this material really for a really a long time and 30ish plus years, this notion of taking in the good and routinely I hear people.

Frame it with a focus on smelling the roses or being happy. Okay, there's a place for smelling the roses and being happy. But honestly, Fleet, my perspective on this is very informed by the first noble truth and to some extent a kind of tragic view of life. Suzuki Roshi said living is like setting forth in a ship that you know will sink. All right, we have the reflections that you know well, one of which is.

Is it given to me to avoid being separated from all that I love one way or another someday? Right. It's not so. And also there's a recognition that there's a lot about society that has messed up. I mean, we made a turning when we moved from hunter gatherer bands to large scale populations with surpluses that enabled concentrations of wealth and power for the last 10,000 years. That has been more or less Game of thrones for about 95% or more of the people who've ever lived over the last 10,000 years. We have problems, we have issues in the world today. So my orientation to this is I value.

Emotionally positive experiences in their own right. They're enjoyable, great. I mainly value them for their pragmatic benefits, for the ways that they develop resilience and healing inside us and equip us to deal with the difficulties of life and to balance the brain's negativity bias. So for me, it's very much about growing strengths inside. How do you grow strengths inside? Some of which feel good, great. Some of them are kind of poignant, like realizing you can't drink because you can't drink. If you can't drink moderately, you can't drink at all. Basically that's a kind of poignant recognition, but that's an important thing to grow. Or the recognition that you know you're never really going to get your needs met in this business relationship or in an intimate personal relationship, or you're never going to get promoted or your brother in law is never not going to hassle you about your politics. You know, there's a wake up call there. It's not a happy experience, but it's a really important strength to grow. So anyway, I just want to kind of stress a framing here that's really about resilience and determination and the long road of life and bringing those you care about along with you.

Absolutely. Very, very, very well said. I'd like to broaden this into the relational field and you know, everything you're talking about.

Can help us develop the capacity and the skills to be more successful, if you will, in relation in Getting our needs met in the relational field and helping others get their needs met to have higher quality relationships of all kinds. And also the relational field is another place where this work happens. Yeah, right there. Where resilience gets build. I mean we're, we are these individual beings, but we're also inter being with others and, and the relational fields we create have their own qualities. So some of our work is relational innately and for a lot of most of us, you know, the rel. Sometimes the relational field, we, we may think of it as a source of a lot of suffering. A lot of our suffering is original in that field. And some of us, hopefully, we've had really positive experiences too that we really value. But it can be dicey. Right. So you know, how do we, how do we learn? I mean, your most recent book, Making Great Relationships is all about this. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how we bring these, these positive neuroplasticity skills that can deepen our resilience and our well being. Not just for the sake of being happy, as you said, not just for the sake positive experiences, but actually becoming more integrated, successful human beings in a sense, more to add value to the world and experience the world and its depth. And, and so how do we bring this in the relational field and into our relationships?

Yeah, so I've, you know, been a therapist a really long time and.

Many of us get to a point in important relationships where it kind of feels like it's stuck or it's plateaued or it's in this kind of place that we're just sort of stuck with. And it's a breakthrough for many of us to realize that we actually make our relationships with what we think and say each day. Now there are limits to how much we can get other people to budge. That's for sure true. But there's tons of opportunity for how we can shift how we experience the relationship. And there's usually tons of opportunity for pursuing. I think of them as best odds strategies. They're not guaranteed, but wow, do they sure increase the odds that something good, something better is going to happen with your adult kids, your partner, the people you deal with at work, or even people that are really quite adversarial and difficult in your life. What are your best odds strategies? So just that right there, you can actually make them better. And if I were to, you know, the way that I did, the book is kind of like a just one thing book for relationships. I initially titled it Just One Thing for Love. And then we Kind of broadened it out. But there are 50 simple practices that are really hardcore. They're just fundamental. I think of them as the building blocks of good relationships. Some of them will be very familiar to people. Some of them will be maybe, oh, wow, that would be kind of useful for me to develop the foundation is to be loyal to yourself. That's the first chapter. You know, what's your relationship with yourself? Can you be fundamentally on your own side and then work your way to laying the ground in which you can be very effectively assertive? You know, I find that.

I've been thinking lately about this combination of, I call it the strong heart in which we're resting for our own sake and perhaps that of others as well. We're resting in a kind of unconditional field of good wishes for others. We don't have to be their friend, we don't have to remain their business partner or we don't have to stay their lover. And still we're not going to let hatred and malice poison our hearts. We rest in that space through which others move and that field of warm heartedness. Bodhichitta, let's say compassion is not contingent on what other people do. Okay, and also then how do you speak truth to power? How do you get really firm with other people? How do you just shake your head and say, I don't believe that's true, I don't see it that way? Right. How do you resize a relationship? You know, how do you take care of your own side of the street to the point that you're in a really strong position to ask other people to take care of their own? How do you stand up to bullies? I'm very interested in our vulnerability as pack animals to bullying and to authoritarian demagogues of various kinds who whip up, you know, group identity around grievances that are often highly exaggerated and then use that, you know, to attack others? How do we really stand up against that? So that's, you know, the later chapters of the book are really about those things. But to me it's the full range. And what I find out, maybe I'll just finish on this one point that often we get kind of stuck in this messy, muddled middle in which it's a, yeah, we're just, you know, we're not really standing up for ourselves, but we're not really happy. And I find what's really helpful is this paradox of polarities that support each other, like the, on the one hand, resting in a very real felt sense of the beingness of the other person, the being behind their eyes, you know, the suffering that's over there, while at the same point, you know, being.

Healthily entitled to say what you see and what you care about and what you're going to do in a firm and clear way, and the ways in which those two actually reinforce each other. But you have to kind of move out into those poles. Otherwise you're in this kind of muddled place in the middle where you're not really asserting yourself, nor are you really bringing a full power of love to the other person. Person. What do you think about. I think if you fleet as someone who walks this talk, I mean, you could have written this book yourself.

Well, I do. I do my best. Although we have to check in with my wife to see how I'm doing, but.

I think she do. I'd say I'm probably doing okay. Not that I don't have some strong improvement areas, but.

You know, I. I just love the way you balance this book in terms of loyalty, oneself, and having healthy boundaries, as well as the values of compassion and love and connectedness and so forth. Because there is a certain level of, you know, to be really connected in a relationship and especially personal or primary relationship, there is a some level of. Of surrender and being willing to, you know, think about collective needs and group needs and mutual needs, not only our own, but if we're not taking ourselves care of ourselves to begin with, you know, we're just going to get into the realm of codependency so quickly. Right. And. And I think a lot of the teachings around relationships and happiness don't emphasize enough, you know, I mean, we all have these values of the universal or our interconnectedness, inter being with. But, you know, we can't really connect with that with others until we experience their otherness. You know, I mean, that's not me over there. We tend to live in a world of our projections, right? Where me, myself and I all over the place. And, you know, it can be shocking when somebody steps outside of our projection of them. Well, who's that now? How dare you be other than my projection, Right? So we got to get clear about this, and we got to get clear about there's real other people over there with their own experience and. And then from those boundaries, we can start developing the skills that you're talking about and from. With this benevolent intention. I love you talked about just this environment of holding this kind of goodwill, wishing the benefit of others, the happiness of others, and regardless of what's going on. But the work has to begin with first connecting with ourselves and realizing that is a separate being over there with their own needs. And I'm not responsible for them, they're not responsible for me. But maybe we can get some needs met together. And I think a lot of people don't start there. And I just love the idea of being loyal to yourself to begin with. I love the way you phrase that.

Oh, that's very sweet.

You know, there are these kind of questions, like, for example, can we feel it while we say it?

In other words, can we be experiencing what we're experiencing while we express it rather than reporting it in this kind of disembodied way? Not in a way that's dumping, let's say, anger on other people, but we're in touch with ourselves as we express it. For many people, that's a growing opportunity. That's a growth opportunity. That's a skill that is really acquired. Another one. Can you make a vulnerable request.

From now on? Rather than arguing about the past.

In ways that are not useful because people will argue about the past forever, can you just bottom line it to, what are you requesting from now on? It's not a demand. Now, if they don't meet your request, that may lead you to take unilateral action on your own. But can you have the courage? I find a lot of people are physically brave, but emotionally or interpersonally cowardly. Often big burly men, frankly, who are physically brave in different environments. But to be vulnerable and tender and open and needy, and to speak to the softer hurt or fear under their irritation and anger. Whoa. That's Medal of Honor territory, actually, because it's so scary for them. Okay, can you make a vulnerable request? Here's another one. Can you admit fault and move on? Can you very rapidly cop to your stuff in the matter? Can you take maximum reasonable personal responsibility and you decide what that is for what's going on with another person, clean up your mess. And even if they're still yelling at you or complaining about this or that, that you think to yourself, nope, that's not my problem. That's not my responsibility. Can you admit fault in that way and then move on? Whoa. That's actually really quite skillful for people.

Can you address a broken agreement? You thought you had an understanding. Can you address it? Maybe the understanding was actually not accurate. They thought that cleaning the kitchen, you know, meant just throw the dishes in the dishwasher, but for you, it meant everything. Okay, you clarify that. Or can you deal with the fact with somebody you start to realize they have no commitment to keeping their word with you. They just don't care. You know, they've shown you who they are. Believe them. Right. Okay, can you address broken agreements and then also can you on your own take action to resize a relationship to the scale that's based in a healthy reality so that, you know, you start to realize, okay, we're not going to do business anymore or okay, we're not going to talk about that, or no, we can have lunch together, but we're not going to have dinner because by the time we have dinner, you're already high and I don't want to hang out with you when you're high. You know, you resize a relationship. These are different things that I go through in the book and so forth. And I find from 41 years of marriage now and, you know, adult kids in their 30s and dealing with my own neurotic material interpersonally that these things like this are actually so, so useful in the trenches of everyday life.

Well, I can't recommend your book enough. It's just full of such pragmatic guidance and I love it. Just so reality based. It's really that where rock meets bone of relationships. Right. And, and, you know, I just love that. And.

So as if we're, you know, let's say we get Dr. McCanson's book and we're working with some of these 50 practices that you put. At least we're working with a few of them. We're working with these skills in relation, what's going on with our brain as we're doing that over time?

Oh, that's great.

Well, gosh, many good things, you know, in the more prefrontal regions that have to do with conceptual understanding. You know, you're understanding things. But to me, that's the tip of the iceberg where most of the action that's valuable lives and is somatic and emotional. So what starts to happen again and again is that you realize something, you try it, and you're now having an activated neural pattern that's associated with that experience that has body sensations, has intentions in it. Hopefully there's some sense of reward, like, okay, this feels good, this is working, all that's happening. And then as you repetitively, you know, repeatedly hang out in that state, you're gradually, definitely changing circuitry in your brain. For example, one of the things this is. I'm going to geek out a little here. Okay, here we go a little bit. I find this quite helpful research, including in this paper with the wonderful title, the Joyful Amygdala, points out that the amygdala, amygdalae, two of them, either side of the brain, deep in the brain, originating probably a couple hundred million years ago. I mean, they're really primal parts of the brain. They tend in some people to be, I'll call it grouchy. In other words, they tend to react strongly to negative stimuli and mildly to positive stimuli. This would be someone with a more aversive temperament, more focused on avoidance than approaching prevention rather than promotion. Technical terms. Then you have another group of people whose amygdalae are ambivalent. They react kind of moderately to negative, moderately to positive.

Okay, fine.

And then, you know, those people whose amygdalae react appropriately to red lights, hot stoves, people who are, you know, coming at you aggressively, but they react strongly to positive stimuli, to opportunity. And those people have a so called doyful amygdala. Now, clearly we can acquire a grouchy amygdala, a grumpy amygdala, because the brain gets sensitized. And one of the major findings about repeated painful experiences is that they sensitize the amygdala to negative experiences so it reacts even more strongly, which creates a vicious cycle. Right. There is some evidence that in addition to whatever is our temperamental set point that we start with, some kids are kind of aversive, some kids are sort of cheerful and opportunity focused. Over time, we can gradually.

Protect and soothe and ease that, you know, scared amygdala. Right. That's just sensitive. Okay, we can calm it down. We can soothe it, in part through the activity of social experiences, because the amygdala has oxytocin receptors on it that are inhibitory. So healthy relational experiences, both flowing out and flowing in, tend to calm down that alarm bell in your brain, the amygdala, which is the initiator of the neurological and hormonal stress cascade, et cetera. And meanwhile, we can cultivate over time a realistic, learned optimism like Martin Seligman has talked about. We can cultivate a realistic.

Positive traits in our heart. So we're more oriented around the good that we can make with other people. And when we're able to rest in that good without the fear that if we rest in the good, we will ignore or not notice the bad. Right. That's incredibly hopeful. I find, over time, grounded in good brain science.

And if we're doing these practices, one thing that one way we might experience that I would suggest over time, or is we might wake up one day and find ourselves feeling more relationally competent. Like we just feel a sense of competency in the relational field. Like I'm, oh, I'm getting better at getting my needs met. I'm getting better at connecting with people and people seem to be experiencing me in a different way. We can have that felt experience. And that's one of the foundational qualities of well being, of psychological well being, is that feeling of relational competency.

And then others are more comfortable with you. A lot of research shows that when you're rested in that well being, you're much more able to be patient, to let little silly stuff go by to slow it down. So you can kind of track that.

Yeah.

Your partner, your colleague, your kid says something kind of dumb, but behind that actually is love for you or good intent.

Yeah.

And simultaneously though, on the basis of that well being, you can stabilize in a certain kind of dignity and gravity about the things that really do matter, the things that really do matter. And when you speak about them, you don't come from a hateful heart. You could be kind of revved up. Okay, maybe there's some fieriness about it, some fierceness about it, but it's not combative. You're not trying to break or damage the other person because you're not motivated to do that. And they can feel that. And then therefore they're much more likely to be able to work things out with you when you're coming from the core of resilient well being.

Thank you so much for everything you shared with us today. Rick has been quite an incredible, rich, deep dive into positive neuroplasticity and how we can become more skillful in our lives and our relationships. And it's a very hopeful message and an empowered message and I really encourage people to check out all of your amazing books. Where can people find out more about your work online? I know you offer lots of free resources, but you also have lots of programs, some long journeys people can go through in terms of learning all these skills. So where can people start?

Well, thank you. Briefly, rickhanson.net, h a n s o n net, chock full treasure trove of mostly freely offered resources. And of course we have scholarships always for people in financial need for any and all of my online programs that range from a year long journey through the foundations of wellbeing to an hour and a half program that's about dealing with anxiety. Also, I really encourage people to check out globalcompassioncoalition.org globalcompassioncoalition.org, which is the emerging nonprofit that is fostering and hosting what is now over 12,000 people and soon to be 100,000 and then larger. A coalition of people at the scale of the human tribe altogether that wants to restore compassion and justice at the heart of human society. Compassion and justice are our birthright. Biologically, we humans evolved a unique strategy called caring and sharing for living together. Compassion and justice, caring and sharing. That was the foundation of living together for 97%, 290,000 years of the time we've walked this earth. And then along came agriculture and other things and Game of Thrones and so forth. So this coalition is about in the 21st century, you know, we're not going to go back to the Stone Age, but in the 21st century, how do we become big enough to become strong enough as a truly effective coalition to reestablish compassion and justice at the heart of all societies? That's the vision there. And I invite everyone to join us.

Yeah, I really invite people to check that out. What a noble endeavor. Well, thank you very much, Dr. Rick Hanson. Really great to have you be part of this summit and this has been really enlightening. So thank you very much and wish you all the best. Please be well.

Oh, same back to you, Fleet. And to everybody listening or watching.

Hello.

It is Ryan and I was on a flight the other day playing one of my favorite social spin slot games on chumbacasino.com I looked over the person sitting next to me and you know what they were doing? They were also playing Chumba Casino. Everybody's loving having fun with it. Chumba Casino's home to hundreds of casino style games that you can play for free anytime, anywhere. So sign up now@chumbacasino.com to claim your free welcome bonus. That's Chumba Casino.com and live the Chumba Life.

Sponsored by Chumba Casino. No purchase necessary VGW Group.

Void where prohibited by law.

21/ Terms and Conditions apply.