Using your mind to change your brain

- [Rick] We all want to be truly happy, feeling peaceful and contented, worthy and loved, energetic and effective, and peaceful and wise. The great question is, of course, how? The basic idea of this program is that one of the most powerful and effective and pleasurable and easy ways to become really happier and more loving and more rested in the inner peace is to use your mind to change your own brain, to benefit your whole being and every other being whose life you touch. I'm Rick Hanson, a psychologist. - [Richard] And I'm Richard Mendius, a neurologist. - [Rick] And in this set, we will show you many effective ways to stimulate and strengthen wholesome states of mind by activating the underlying brain states that support those. These methods are based on the historically unprecedented coming together of the Western sciences of psychology and neurology with the great contemplative traditions of the world. In particular of those contemplative traditions, the one we will draw on most is Buddhism, which is the one that we're most trained in, as well as the one that has had the most crossover with Western science. But this program is designed for anyone from any background, including no spiritual background at all, as well as for people with no background either in brain science or meditation. We are so excited about the material in this program, which comes from the latest scientific research, informed by thousands of years of hard-won insights from the meditation cushion and translated, most importantly, into dozens of practical tools you can use right now, right in the middle of daily life to feel better, less stressed out, stronger, healthier, more able to concentrate, less affected by old painful experiences, more tuned in to your own body, more grounded in the world, and more at peace. And if you do in fact already have some form of meditative or other spiritual practice, such as yoga, the skills you will learn from this program should help your practices be steadier, deeper, and perhaps even more profound. In the first session, Richard and I will cover fascinating material about your brain and how it affects you and, even better, how you can affect it with good results. And then we will present guided meditations, each one designed to stimulate and strengthen different and important parts of your brain. Each meditation will begin with a brief introduction, and then we will dive in. Of course, you can stop the recording at any point if you want to hang out longer in some part of the meditation before our next suggestion moves you along. The meditations are presented in a sequence that starts with more familiar and concrete material and then moves gradually toward deeper experiences of peaceful oneness with all things. We really wish you the best with this, both for your own sake and for the widening and wholesome ripples that always spread from each one of us seeing more clearly, quieting the mind and resting more in an unconditional ground of well-being, no matter what the conditions are around us, no matter if that well-being also includes sadness or fear or anger. Ripple by ripple, imperceptibly but genuinely, your own growing happiness, love, and wisdom can only help your family, your friends, the people you work with, and ultimately, unknowably rippling farther and farther to benefit even the whole wide world. Who knows? But meanwhile, let's get started ourselves. First, we'll explore the two main ways to be happy and the power of inner skills. Next, we'll give an overview of how your mind and your brain are linked together so that they are continually changing each other, which gives you a great opportunity to use your mind to change your brain to change your mind, thus benefiting, as I said earlier, your whole being. Third, we'll dive into the key features of your wonderful brain and also how it is hardwired by evolution to help us to survive in ways that unfortunately often make us suffer. And then moving onto the good news, we'll cover one example of how mental activities change your brain, exploring the research on meditation. Last, this session will close with a brief guided meditation on gratitude and loving-kindness toward your own brain. Let's dive in. So we want to be happy. Bottom line, what does that actually take? From the perspective of Western psychology and neurology, as well as the world's contemplative traditions, the how of more happiness and less anxiety, sorrow, frustration, disappointment, and anger always involves two things. First, it involves a greater capacity to be with your experiences, to be aware of them, to hold them in a spaciousness of mindfulness like clouds in the vastness of the sky, and to tolerate and accept them without being overwhelmed. Of course, accepting does not mean preferring. Who would prefer a headache? I hate headaches. Or heartache, and I don't like that either. But it does mean surrendering to the sheer and undeniable fact of the simple factual existence of a difficult experience. Second, the how of happiness involves a greater capacity to work with your experiences, not just to be with them, but to work with them, to understand them better, including what caused them, to contain your emotional reactions without acting them out in ways that make matters worse for yourself and your loved ones and other people around you. Working with includes letting go of difficult thoughts and feelings and desires and replacing these unpleasant and often unwholesome and unhelpful states of mind with more positive, more wholesome, more skillful states of mind. And these two capacities, of course, work together. The more able, for example, you are to be with your experiences, the better you can work with them. And working with your experiences always requires being in touch with them too, which means being with them, which strengthen that ability. Now, Richard and I believe that being with is more fundamental than working with since you can always be with painful states of mind that just overwhelm your abilities in the moment to work with them. Nonetheless, working with your mind to nudge it deliberately in a more positive direction is really important to be able to do. And both of these, being with and working with, involve training and changing your mind. And that means using inner skills, and Richard will now talk about how important those are. - [Richard] There are two major ways to make things better in your life and actually in the whole world all together. First, you can improve the outer world. You can work on your circumstances. You can work on your environment. Obviously, it's important. The second and maybe more fundamental is to improve your inner world. Now, both kinds of skills are important, but there's some limitations for outer skills. Trying to change the outer world has certain problems. Your power as a single human being is limited, especially over other people who just don't seem to want to go along. As Sartre, the French existentialist, said, "Hell's other people." It's often hard to change things out there. It's tough to get your boss to be nicer, tough to get your teenager to respect you. It's tough to wring more gas mileage out of your car, more profit out of your business, keep the weeds out of your backyard. Most of what you can change or fix is just a small part of your life. The drip of a faucet, maybe move the landscaping around, or even change part of your job or change your relationship to your partner. And usually even if you can change something, whatever you improve changes over time. Kids will move away. Gorgeous housing remodels get dings and scratches and termites. New blouses fray. And as physics says in the second law, "Everything tends to randomness." And even if whatever you improve doesn't change, you change in reference to it in the sense that you get used to things, even great, wonderful, important things. They don't seem to move your needle much anymore. As human beings, we habituate. We satiate to these things. They become just part of the background. This experience of repeatedly trying to change your outer skills all the time leads to burnout unless you focus on your inner skills. And improving your inner world doesn't have all those disadvantages I just talked about. First, you take yourself with you all the time. Wherever I go, there I am. So shifts in your interior experience are with you all the time, and they will tinge and shape how you experience all your various circumstances. It's amazing the number of people who move from one town to another to find that they might themselves in the backyard. Second, you have tremendous influence over your thoughts, your feelings, your desires, your reactions, your whole interior landscape. And it's often strikingly easy to shift that inner state, as you'll see later in the program. With just a little effort, you can control your attention better. You can feel stronger. You can let go of some of those past painful experiences. You can soak in some past and even present positive ones. You can drop some stress on the road. And you can feel more peaceful. Third, all it takes is practice. None of what I'm talking about is actually very hard to do. The key is given in that dumb but very profound joke about therapists and clients. How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb really has to want to change. As long as you truly want to change and act on that desire in small, routine, constant steps, then the inner world is gradually going to change for the better over time. Perseverance and patience. One drop of water at a time, drop after drop, is gradually going to wear away that granite mountain that you live with. Fourth, inner learning is pretty stable. Yes, people can backslide and usually do. But just how we don't forget how to ride a bicycle, just like we don't forget how to read, we usually don't forget how to be aware of our feelings or take in good experiences once we've actually learned how. In sum, outer skills are certainly important, and we have to perfect them. But truly for our lives, it's the inner skills that make the greatest difference, whether in terms of worldly accomplishments, inner fulfillment, inner happiness, personal peace, because whatever we do in the outer world, we live in our own interior world 24/7, 365 days. And our capacity to work with that inner landscape to change its terrain, to change its climate, to be with the storms and the rainbows, the swampy stuck places, the high clear vistas, the sub personalities, their conflicts and alliances, the volcanic passions that overwhelm us, and that cool voice of reason that can come over us at some of our best times. That whole teeming, bubbling, amazing stew of all of me shapes both our experience of our lives and our functioning at work and at home. And for true self-confidence, it's really fantastic to know that you can actually intervene yourself inside your own brain to direct and change it for the better, that this actually works in nature. And this is a fundamental source of true self-confidence, the faith that no matter what is going on around you, no matter how fixed your life conditions are, there's something you can do. To paraphrase the slang, stuff happens, but suffering about it is optional. Most of us feel so pushed around by external events, gas prices, political arguments, Al-Qaeda videos, your boss, spouse, kids, whatever. Isn't it great to know that there's actually scientifically-based ways to be more the master of your own life by being master of your own inner existence? That has the potential of giving you a sense of more personal power, of efficacy, quite the opposite of what Martin Seligman, the psychologist, called learned helplessness, that underlying sense of futility, being outmanned or outgunned, that is probably underlying a great deal of depression in everyone around us and in yourself. We do know from this 25,000-year tradition of meditation and from modern neuroscience and psychology that you do have the ability to change your mind by becoming more skillful with the underlying hardware, the brain, that enables your mind to exist and to function and to act in the world. And now Rick is going to explain how those two things, mind and brain, work together.