Speaker 1 · 0:03Welcome back. I'm Sean Fargo. Today we're joined by Dr. Rick Hansen, one of my favorite mindfulness teachers of all time. Rick is going to be talking about the cultivation of some inner resources for opening to happiness and joy and opening into that portal of being. This is Rick's second time being here as a guest teacher. Just have a lot of gratitude for you, Rick, for joining us again. He's researched and written extensively on the neuroscience of happiness and well-being. He has some best-selling books, Buddha's Brain, Just One Thing, Hardwiring Happiness, Resilient, and my favorite book, Neurodharma, which is kind of a newer book. He has an online program and course on NeuroDharma. It's an online program that I recommend.
Speaker 2 · 1:11Let's sort of reflect on what it is we're doing in our own practice or as we're helping others. What are we trying to do? What are we trying to do? And from my viewpoint, there's a traditional metaphor about practice that I come back to again and again, which describes it as like a wagon or a cart with two wheels following two tracks. And one track is the track of original nature, true nature, underlying ground, natural goodness. One can relate to this in an entirely secular kind of way. One can also relate to it in a way that's more transcendentally grounded. Either way, there's underlying goodness and wakefulness and lovingness and wisdom deep down inside us all. It may be covered over, but deep down inside, we can sense it in ourselves, we can see it in other people. So this aspect of practice is about staying in contact or coming home. Coming home. Remembrance again and again and again. You know, there's a saying that the most important thing is to remember the most important thing. Remembrance, practices of remembrance that are embodied, they're very heartfelt. There might be a conceptual aspect of this, especially in the beginning, but the real homecoming is very somatic. It's very felt in the living body. So what do we mean by embodiment? Do we mean an experience that's embodied of compassion? Compassion as as an experience could be entirely conceptual or like an intention, you know. I wish that you didn't suffer. Additionally, can there be more of an embodied layering to that experience? And there we're talking about the experience of embodiment, the first person perspective from the inside out. Another way to mean the word embodiment is from the outside in, objectively, the third person perspective, where we're talking about the actual change in the body as we develop positive traits of all kinds, including the trait of mindfulness and the trait of stable liberation. So two different things. And um I think it's also true that the sense of embodiment as an experience tends to aid embodiment as an objective physical change in your brain. The other track is the track of gradual developmental change for the better that involves healing, trauma, afflictions, the wounds of childhood, relaxing ways of being and defenses that were useful then, but today are like walking around in a suit of armor that's three sizes too small. And the cultivation of, I'll call them broadly, inner strengths, such as mindfulness, the cultivation of traits of mindfulness, compassion, grit, gratitude, emotional intelligence, social intelligence, secure attachment, interpersonal skills, know-how of various kinds, developmental change, both tracks. Both are really, really important. People can sort of tilt from one to the other. For a long time, I was really gung-ho in the second of these. Developmental change, clearing out the crud in the basement of the mind and remodeling the furniture and installing some new cookware. I don't know. You know, occasionally building a new window to let things out of the mind. And it's been recently for me, really in the last, I always had an intuition of true nature, but to really come back to that as a touchstone of practice, as a foundational practice, that's been my kind of rebalancing. Other people can sometimes just get really caught up in a non-dual true nature bandwagon that pushes away and somehow even argues against the necessity of ongoing developmental change for the better. So we need really both. We need both of these. It's a wagon with two wheels. Okay, it's not a unicycle. Now, with regard to developmental change, as a neuropsychologically informed person, we can really ask: how do we actually grow the good that lasts inside ourselves, inside other people, as the basis for growing the good that lasts in our precious troubled world? How do we actually do it? How does change that lasts actually occur? Well, inside the Big Bang universe, the natural frame of ordinary, materialistically unfolding Big Bang universe, any kind of lasting change of mind, broadly, including change of heart, must involve a lasting change in the brain. Otherwise, we're left with supernatural or transcendental factors, which I personally believe in. But other than whatever those are, and you don't have to believe in them to kind of participate here, other than that, whatever it might be that, it's about changing the brain. Okay, how do we change the brain for the better in lasting ways? It's really fairly straightforward to have beneficial, useful experiences, moments of compassion, moments of mindfulness, moments of self-worth, moments of commitment to sobriety, whatever those might be. Experiences are easy. We can usually find them unless we're incredibly depressed or just overwhelmed with physical or emotional pain in the moment. We can usually get some kind of song playing in the inner iPod for ourselves or induce it in others. That's the easy part. How do we record it? How do we turn it into lasting change grounded in lasting changes of neural structure and function? That's the second necessary step of any kind of lasting change for the better. There's experiencing, there's learning. Or in the saying from brain science, there is neurons firing together. That's the easy part. How do we get them to wire together as well? Especially when the brain, due to evolution, is biased toward negative learning, negative wiring. We have a brain that's like Velcro for the bad, but Teflon for the good, as I say, because that's what kept our ancestors alive back during Jurassic Park, or on the Serengeti Plains, or during Game of Thrones, right? The last 10,000 years, more or less, of human history. So how do we actually do that? And that then takes me into the process of cultivation, bhavana in Pali, cultivation or Sanskrit. Cultivation. How do we actually cultivate? The how of it is typically really simple. And there are a number of evidence-based, neurologically informed, simple methods people can use while they are experiencing something useful, while the song is playing on the inner iPod to heighten its internalization as a lasting change in their nervous system. Things like stay with the experience for a breath or longer, rather than quickly changing the channel or letting somebody else change your channel for you. Stay with it. Not out of clinging to it, out of craving or attachment, out of reifying it, but out of a wisdom that receives the good into yourself that lets you stay with it. That moment of being determined or feeling strong or knowing what it's like to stand in your power without having hatred in your heart? What's that feel like? Stay with it for a breath or longer. Second, feel it in your body. That's another major factor of neuroplastic change. Plastic just means changeable. Neuroplastic means changing your nervous system. Feel it in the body. Oh, what's it feel like in the body to be more patient with my teenager? What's it feel like in your body to feel cared about? You know, you can recognize the fact that they care about you. You know, they appreciate you in some real way. They care about you, but do you feel it? Can you feel it in your body? And can you stay with that feeling? That too will increase lasting change. What does it feel like to be stably mindful? What does steadiness of mind feel like in the body? What's it feel like in the body to be present within permanence and okay with it, even as it everything keeps, in a way, dissolving beneath your feet while being endlessly renewed? What's that feel like in the body? Notice we can use these methods, whether it's for learning things like how to use chopsticks better, or subtleties of the growing edge of our own process of awakening. Or a third major factor of lasting neuroplastic change, focus on what's rewarding about it, what is enjoyable or meaningful. Because as we heighten, technically put, the reward value of an experience that increases activity of two neurotransmitter systems, neurochemical systems, dopamine and norepinephrine. And as dopamine and norepinephrine activity increase, so does the registration of the experience that we're having at the time into the nervous system. And uh what is also increased is protection over the hours and days to come of lasting consolidation, is the term in the nervous system, being aware of what is rewarding about it. There are five other factors as well that I list in my books and stuff. But the point I want to just kind of keep coming back to and stay focused on is that we have a sacred power inside ourselves to help ourselves actually heal a little, grow a little, awaken a little every day in lasting ways through how we engage the experiences we're having at the time. And that way of being involves being an active agent in our own transformation, learning, broadly stated. I've been in the mental health field almost 50 years, actually, and I've just observed a lot as well: psychotherapy, coaching, human potential training, mindfulness training, human resources training. Most of that has operated on the basis of what one could call a growth 1.0 model, in which participants are treated as more or less passive vessels into which experiences or information are poured, with the hope that some of it will stick. Some of it will stick and sink in. Now, for some people it does. For some people it does. There are people who are just naturally more able to kind of rapidly internalize and learn. Maybe they kind of on their own are doing intuitively some of the things I've talked about. Maybe incidentally in that particular monastery or workshop or psychotherapy practice, there's some focus on things that would tend to increase lasting neuroplastic change. But on the whole, it's stunning the degree to which the broad field of mental health, psychospiritual growth, has ignored in any systematic or comprehensive way, ignored the second necessary stage of learning and has not fostered a kind of agency in the minds of the people going through these various processes in any kind of systematic or comprehensive way. And that's where the opportunity is. I don't think there's much opportunity really in helping people have cooler experiences. We're already great at it. We're great at it. Where the opportunity is, is helping them learn from their experiences in lasting, durable ways, so that whatever's beneficial and useful in what they're experiencing actually sticks to their ribs, as it were. And they can take it home with them, and it's still there a week later or a year later, and it hasn't faded. To be able to internalize an experience deliberately, and I want to make a distinction between sort of incidental acquisition of various strengths and the deliberate internalization. Some incidental acquisition does occur through million-dollar moments or through sheer repetition. And I think there's also natural variation. There's some people whose brains, for all kinds of reasons, are just a little more adept at incidental internalization, which means that as a kind of diversity issue, we really should think about the people who are not necessarily so genetically or based on their life experiences, fortunate that they're rapid internalizers. So to be able to internalize, we need to sustain mindfulness to an experience, and then we need to sustain mindfulness to how we are adeptly engaging the experience, such as sustaining it for, let's say, a breath or longer, or opening to it in the body, expanding awareness to the somatic emotional aspects of an experience that we're hoping to cultivate and develop as a trait. And then also, third, focusing on what's enjoyable or meaningful about it, you know, what's rewarding about it. We need to sustain mindfulness to be able to do that. So mindfulness is not at all at odds with learning. We need mindfulness for learning, social emotional learning, somatic learning, motivational learning, spiritual learning broadly. We need mindfulness for that. And sometimes you bump into a viewpoint that what mindfulness means is a strictly passive and neutral witnessing of the streaming of consciousness and no more. So that any kind of active, wise effort in your mind to actively release what's problematic or cultivate what's beneficial, that's at odds with mindfulness. That's a deep mistake, right up front. Bingo, deep mistake. And yet it's a mistake that I've I've had thrown in my face more than once while teaching workshops from people who are really sure that mindfulness means just witnessing. And if you're doing anything more than just witnessing, you ain't being mindful. So I just want to kind of clear that up from the get-go. Second, to use the Tony Robbins example, I did the firewalk with Tony in 19, I don't know when, would have been like 1982 or something, you know, like a way back when. And I actually think the guy's pretty cool. I'm good with Tony Robbins, et cetera. But just that example, I just want to kind of unpack it a little bit. Often the states we are experiencing are just happening. There you are, you're with somebody. And what we can do beneficially if we want is to notice the experience we're already having. Or we can deliberately create certain states of being. That's what Tony's talking about there. So call up that memory of being the Robins workshop. And suddenly you're all jacked up again. Yeah, I can do it. Well, Rocky, you know, or whatever. Or you just bring to mind something incredibly sweet, like your kid crawls into your lap and it's like, oh my gosh, this just feels so good. You call it up. Or you bring to mind something you heard on a retreat, or a teacher said you call it up. You're creating it. There's a place for deliberately getting some kind of song playing in your inner iPod. Great. And that alone is not the development of lasting beneficial traits. There might be some incidental internalization from that intense state of being that's been called up, that's been created, but it itself is not lasting learning. Now, what is interesting, and I think this also gets at something that Tony would be very supportive of, we have states of mind. That's where we start. We can't just jack a cable into the back of our head like Neo in the Matrix and suddenly fly a helicopter or no kung fu. We have to um, you know, have experiences. We start with states, which then can be internalized as traits, which foster them as states and become easier to create at will, which then can be further reinforced to strengthen the trait. So there's this potentially positive cycle, a nice positive upward spiral from states to traits to states. And the capacity to be able to call up a feeling, a thought, a perspective, um, a state of being in your body at will within a few seconds is really, you know, a marker of um being adept. And people who have deep trait mindfulness can just really quickly drop in. And one of the major research markers of depth of practice is how rapidly respiration slows when people just drop into meditation. Within a few breaths, you know, the breath is slowed down, you know, within half a minute, heart rate is really slow. Trait, trait, steadiness of mind, trait calm. So I just kind of want to make that distinction in part because routinely people miss that distinction. They go state, state, state when they really think they're enhancing traits, and they're really, really not. So you know, there's this old line like the porcupine only knows one thing, but that one thing it knows really well. There's one thing I've really come to know really well: installation, installation, installation, right? If real estate boils down to location, location, location, lasting, healing, growth, and awakening boils down to installation, installation, installation. So that's the frame for me in which we can think about the value of so-called joyful, happy experiences. For me, if you look at it, most experiences of whatever we want to grow inside ourselves, and the second experience of internalization is affectively positive, usually. It feels good, often mildly, but it feels good to be kind of gritty. You know, you're battered but unbowed. Just hanging in there, right? Or it feels good to kind of realize, oh wow, I could be more skillful next time with my partner. Like, yeah, I slipped again, and I know how to be better next time. I'm really going to take that in. It feels pretty good. It feels good to feel cared about. It feels good to feel caring, to be loving. It feels good to be compassionate, feels good to be mindful, feels good to be grateful. Occasionally, there are key qualities to develop, such as the capacity for healthy remorse or a kind of appropriate disenchantment about something that just ain't gonna happen. You know, that relationship just ain't ever gonna be everything you want it to be. You know, this company will never promote you, curse them, but or maybe don't curse them, but they're just not gonna promote you. You know, there's a place for that. But usually, usually, the good we want to develop in ourselves and cultivate actually feels good in the moment and it feels good to develop it. So for me, what we might think of as positive emotional valence, the feeling tone or the affective tone, the hedonic tone of experiences, the pleasantness of an experience typically marks its value. It's not that we want to fight unpleasant experiences and become aversive to them, because that just what you resist persists, as the saying has it. It's not a skillful means to do that. But for me, the the pleasantness of an experience is usually more of a means to an end. Yeah. Smell the roses, why not? Right? Enjoy every sunrise, why not? But for me, the larger point of it, in the context of a life that's full of challenges and difficulties, even for the privileged and comfortable among us, such as myself, and it's fuller than that of difficulty for many, many, many other people, we need to grow strengths inside. Down the long road of life, what's in your backpack? And the I'll call it positivity of experiences is typically a marker of what of value for you. Deal with the bad. We must deal with it. None of what I'm saying is about positive thinking or rose-colored glasses. Deal with the bad and turn to the good. What is also true? Right now, tough, bad, brutal things are happening in Ukraine and in many other places around the world. And it's also true that Sean's daughter is super cool. It's also true that he's happy about his daughter. It's also true that we have technology to gather here together. It's also true that the lights are working where I live in Northern California. It's also true that in people's hearts is goodness and skillfulness and learning and commitment to social justice, among other things. These are also true. And then, third, after we deal with the bad and turn to the good, take in the good. Don't waste it on your brain. And the HEAL model is an acronym that I use to kind of summarize self-directed neuroplasticity, in other words, helping yourself grow. It summarizes the two stages of lasting beneficial change, experiencing and learning. So HEAL stands for have, have a beneficial experience, either because you notice it or you create it, like we just discussed. And then moving into the installation phase of lasting change. You're nudging your nervous system bit by bit, synapse by synapse in lasting ways. E stands for enriching the experience in a variety of ways, and A stands for absorbing it, which means sensitizing your brain so that it's more receptive to the big experience that you've enriched. And then linking is the optional step that involves associating a big beneficial experience with some negative materials or a lack, something missing deep inside yourself, off to the side. To be clear, the methods, I invented none of them. They're there. They're lying on the shelf. Linking, for example, is used widely. Mindfulness, spacious awareness is a form of linking because we are linking the stability and purity, really, of spacious awareness with whatever is passing through, including if it's negative, let's say, painful, hurtful, problematic. We're associating them. Compassion is linking. It's bittersweet. There's the bitter of the suffering that we have empathy for in ourselves or others, and then there's the benevolence, the caring, the good wishes, the support, the movement to help if we can, the tender concern, which hopefully is bigger than the bitter, because otherwise the bitter will swallow the sweet, and people will not be able to sustain their compassion. That right there is a form of linking. So these are natural things to do. But that drum I'm beating, bong, bong, bong, installation, installation, installation, is to highlight the fact that I'm still not sure why, including when I do it. I'm the world's expert, literally, literally, on this. And I forget to install, you know, when there are opportunities to do so. So bing, bing, bing, banging on that drum.
Speaker 1 · 24:40Rick, thank you so much for being here. I highly recommend RickHanson.net, the Being Well Podcast. If you haven't checked out his podcast with Forrest Hansen, his son, I highly, highly, highly recommend it. It's really well done. And it's not really Rick and his son, so much as it is two esteemed teachers who both have a lot to offer. Rick has a Wednesday night sitting group that are meeting online these days that's free. You can join his Wednesday night sitting group where they meditate together and Rick talks about various topics. A wonderful way to be a part of a mindful community. I highly recommend the book Neurodharma. You have a lot of wonderful courses available as well. Thank you very much for being here today.
