Rick Hanson Quotes

It's a general moral principle that the more power you have over someone, the greater your duty to use that power benevolently. Well, who is the one person in the world you have the greatest power over? It's your future self. You hold that life in your hands, and what it will be depends on how you care for it.

It's impossible to change the past or the present: you can only accept all that as it is.

Everything changes. That's the universal nature of outer reality and inner experience. Therefore, there's no end to disturbed equilibria as long as you live.

To become happier, wiser, and more loving, sometimes you have to swim against ancient currents within your nervous system.

You can give so much in this life, and that offers you many opportunities to release the self. For example, you can give time, helpfulness, donations, restraint, patience, noncontention, and forgiveness. Any path of service - including raising a family, caring for others, and many kinds of work - incorporates generosity. Envy - and its close cousin, jealousy - is a major impediment to generosity. So notice the suffering in envy, how it is an affliction upon you. Envy actually activates some of the same neural networks involved with physical pain (Takahashi et al. 2009). In a compassionate and kind way, remind yourself that you will be all right even if other people have fame, money, or a great partner - and you don't. To free yourself from the clutches of envy, send compassion and loving-kindness to people you envy.

All sentient beings developed through natural selection in such a way that pleasant sensations serve as their guide, and especially the pleasure derived from sociability and from loving our families. - Charles Darwin

The mind (and brain) takes its shape from what it rests upon, and you're letting it mold itself around the positive experience that you are taking in.

Deep down in the emotional memory centers of your brain, imagined experiences build neural structures through mechanisms similar to those that actual, lived experiences use.

There are three fundamental phases to psychological and spiritual growth: being with difficult material (e.g., old wounds, anger); releasing it; and replacing it with something more beneficial.

By taking just a few extra seconds to stay with a positive experience - even the comfort in a single breath - you'll help turn a passing mental state into lasting neural structure. Over time, you can fill up your inner storehouse with the strengths you need, such as feeling at ease rather than irritable, loved rather than mistreated, and resourced rather than running on empty.

Your perspective on the facts - the context in which you place them and the meaning you give them - really shapes your experience of them. In particular, finding positive meaning in negative events, which is called reframing, is helpful for coping and recovery. This is not to suggest that a tough experience is any less painful, or that it is all right for people to mistreat you. My point is that even a horrible event or situation may have some opportunities in it for a positive experience.

Taking in the good is not about putting a happy shiny face on everything, nor is it about turning away from the hard things in life. It's about nourishing well-being, contentment, and peace inside that are refuges you can always come from and return to.

Your brain is the most important organ in your body, and what happens in it determines what you think and feel, say and do. Many studies show that your experiences are continually changing your brain one way or another. This book is about getting good at changing your brain for the better.

The brain is good at learning from bad experiences, but bad at learning from good ones.

I highly recommend the approach Marshall Rosenberg details in Nonviolent Communication (2nd Edition 2008), which has essentially three parts: When X happens [described factually, not judgmentally], I feel Y [especially the deeper, softer emotions], because I need Z [fundamental needs and wants].

you can decide to get eggs from the refrigerator without craving them - and without getting upset if there are none left.

Suffering has clear causes in your brain and body, so if you change its causes, you'll suffer a lot less. And you can change those causes.

to help our ancestors survive, the brain evolved a negativity bias that makes it like Velcro for bad experiences but Teflon for good ones.