Say Thanks

November 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Say Thanks - Just One Thing

Each Thanksgiving holiday, we are reminded to be thankful. When times are tough, finding reasons to be thankful may be challenging or even seem inappropriate or impossible. This year, before we sit around the dinner table, let’s think about the myriad benefits to saying thanks, and how to truly savor the opportunity, no matter what. What do others give you? The Practice: Say thanks. Why? What do you feel when someone thanks you for something? For a comment in a meeting, a task done at … [Read more...]

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Have Compassion

November 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Do You Care? The Practice: Have compassion. Why? Compassion is essentially the wish that beings not suffer - from subtle physical and emotional discomfort to agony and anguish - combined with feelings of sympathetic concern. You could have compassion for an individual (a friend in the hospital, a co-worker passed over for a promotion), groups of people (victims of crime, those displaced by a hurricane, refugee children), animals (your pet, livestock heading for the slaughterhouse), and … [Read more...]

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Speak from the Heart

August 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

What's Your Heart Say? The Practice Speak from the heart. Why? One Christmas I hiked down into the Grand Canyon, whose bottom lay a vertical mile below the rim. Its walls were layered like a cake, and a foot-high stripe of red or gray rock indicated a million-plus years of erosion by the Colorado river. Think of water - so soft and gentle - gradually carving through the hardest stone to reveal great beauty. Sometimes what seems weakest is actually most powerful. In the same way, speaking … [Read more...]

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Keep Hope Not Fear Alive

June 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

This recent series of posts has used the example of Stephen Colbert's satirical "March to Keep Fear Alive" as a timely illustration of a larger point: humans evolved to be fearful -- a major feature of the brain's negativity bias that helped our ancestors pass on their genes. Consequently, as much research has shown, we're usually much more affected by negative -- by which I mean painful -- experiences than by positive ones. Besides the personal impacts of this bias in the brain, it also makes … [Read more...]

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Confronting the Negativity Bias

May 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

My previous post used the example of Stephen Colbert's satirical "March to Keep Fear Alive" as a timely illustration of a larger point: humans evolved to be fearful -- since that helped keep our ancestors alive -- so we are very vulnerable to being frightened and even intimidated by threats, both real ones and "paper tigers." With this march, Colbert is obviously mocking those who play on fear, since we certainly don't need any new reminders to keep fear alive. Some Background This … [Read more...]

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Balancing Joining and Separating

May 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

There is a natural balance within us all between the desire for joining and the desire for separation, between the desire for closeness and the desire for distance. These two great themes – joining and separation – are central to human life. Almost everyone wants both of them, to varying degrees. People tend to focus a lot on the joining theme, both because relationships are about – uh – joining, and because spiritual practice of any kind is fundamentally about coming into relationship … [Read more...]

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5000 Synapses in the Width of a Hair

July 22, 2010 By

How much change in the brain makes a difference in the mind? That's the issue raised by a very interesting comment regarding my previous blog, "The Brain in a Bucket." So I've taken the liberty of posting the comment here (hoping that's OK in blog etiquette; still learning as I go), and then responding. Here it is: I was pondering your statement that long term meditators show a thickening in certain areas of the brain. As I understand it, the volume of the skull is fixed in adults. This would … [Read more...]

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The Brain in a Bucket

July 8, 2010 By

Have you ever seen a real brain? I remember the first time I saw one, in a neuropsych class: the instructor put on rubber gloves to protect against the formaldehyde preservative, popped the lid off of a lab bucket, and then pulled out a brain. It didn’t look like much, a nondescript waxy yellowish-white blob rather like a sculpted head of cauliflower. But the whole class went silent. We were looking at the real deal, ground zero for consciousness, headquarters for “me.” The person it … [Read more...]

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About Your Wise Brain

May 28, 2010 By

Your Wise Brain is my blog, posted at Psychology Today, Huffington Post and other major websites. It's about how to take charge of the caveman brain in the 21st century by using practical methods from the intersection of psychology, neurology, and contemplative practice. With a new post every week or so, I’ll showcase cutting edge research on the brain, present new and powerful methods for healing and transforming the mind and heart, and share fascinating insights from the world's great … [Read more...]

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