An Excerpt from a
Transcript
Below you will find an excerpt of the transcript (including a full table of contents) from the course with Rick Hanson, PhD. Transcripts are a great way to review, take notes, and make the ideas from Rick’s teaching your own. Here’s the sample:
How to Rewire the Brain for More Happiness
with Rick Hanson, PhD
and Ruth Buczynski, PhD
Contents
Three Operating Systems of the Brain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
3 |
The Inner Lizard, Mouse, and Monkey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
4 |
Zones of the Brain: Red Light – Green Light . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
6 |
Steps to Keep People in the Green Zone: HEAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
8 |
Why Novelty is Important . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
14 |
What to Do When Experiences Are Negative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
15 |
Moving from the Negative to the Positive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
17 |
Linking the Negative to the Positive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
19 |
About the Speakers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
23 |
What to Do When Experiences Are Negative
Dr. Buczynski: Now, not all experiences are positive. Let’s focus a little bit about what we should do when we have negative experiences.
Dr. Hanson: Yes – negative experiences obviously are an essential part of life – I think of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, which are utterly psychological.
The first truth is, “There is suffering.” To my way of thinking about it, Ruth, I use a framework that has helped me tremendously, personally and professionally, to think about the three ways to engage the mind. In effect, there are three ways to practice – to engage the mind.
The first way is to simply be with what is there, witness it, feel the feelings, experience the experience, maybe investigate it, maybe feel down to where it’s softer and younger; certainly try to hold it in a big space of spacious awareness.
We are not trying to change it directly. It might shift as a result of being witnessed rather than identified with, but we are not deliberately trying to change it in the moment.
The second way to engage the mind is to deliberately try to release what is negative – in other words, try to help tension drain out of the body, for example, or to argue against negative, foolish thoughts, or release unwholesome desires like getting buzzed every night . . . That is the second way to engage the mind.
The third way to engage the mind is to cultivate the positive – to “grow flowers,” as it were.
If you think of the mind as a garden, we can witness it, pull weeds, or plant flowers – or, in six words, we can let be – let go – let in.
That gives us a natural framework, and an appropriate one, for how to deal with negative experiences.
In the first place, we want to witness them – we can just be with them.
We try to hold them in spacious awareness; maybe we try to bring to bear other factors that help us feel our negative feelings, like self-compassion or mindfulness or a sense of inner allies with us.
At some point, it feels right – like the “Goldilocks point” – not too tall, not too short, not too hot, not too cold – the just right place – when it feels like it is time to move on, “I am not suppressing the emotion but it is time to help it move on out of Dodge.”
Then we move on to the releasing phase – reducing the negative in various ways – draining tension out of the body, venting, turning it over to God, or whatever it is – we let it go as best we can.
In the third phase, when it feels right, we try to replace what we have released with some positive alternative.
The cycle that I have gone through might take half a minute with some familiar negative material like maybe just a momentary irritation or something that didn’t go well, or maybe something from the past that is well understood – “Oh that was my critical stepfather; that’s my little inner critic yammering away. I know what you sound like, dude – I’m not going to listen to you
anymore.”
From all that, we can move on fairly quickly.
On the other hand, sometimes it takes a year or more, like grief over a serious loss, to move out of the being with way of relating to the negative, to then shifting into helping it release, and then eventually replacing it with something positive.
All three ways to engage the mind are important.
The first one is primary: if we don’t really do it fully, if we don’t be with our experience fully, then if we try to shift into getting rid of the bad and getting in with the good, it won’t work – it doesn’t have traction. We need to go back to really feeling it.
On the other hand, sometimes people can get lost in just being with their mind. In my view, that orientation to the mind of pure witnessing has gotten overvalued in some quarters in psychotherapy and now dual approaches and even some spiritual approaches.
It is fundamentally important, but even as big a fan of mindfulness as the Buddha, he also emphasized wise effort, which reduces what is negative and takes in what is positive.
My own work is really focused these days on the third way to engage the mind, including building up resources inside to be able to be with our experience.
We need all three of these – if you don’t grow flowers in the garden of your mind, the weeds will come back.
Practitioners who have taken our course have told us how helpful these are for reviewing key concepts and illustrations.
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