Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them. —Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche Some
Stay with the positive experience for five to ten seconds or longer. Open to the feelings in it and try to sense it in your body; let it fill your mind. Enjoy it. Gently encourage the experience to be...
• To survive and pass on their genes, our ancestors needed to be especially aware of dangers, losses, and conflicts. Consequently, the brain evolved a negativity bias that looks for bad news, reacts...
You can manage your mind in three primary ways: let be, let go, let in.
Staying with a negative experience past the point that’s useful is like running laps in Hell: You dig the track a little deeper in your brain each time
Most of the shaping of your mind remains forever unconscious. This is called implicit memory, and it includes your expectations, models of relationships, emotional tendencies, and general outlook. Imp...
To become happier, wiser, and more loving, sometimes you have to swim against ancient currents within your nervous system.
Three Poisons: greed makes me rigid about how I want things to be, hatred gets me all bothered and angry, and delusion tricks me into taking the situation personally. Saddest
The brain is good at learning from bad experiences, but bad at learning from good ones.
The autobiographical self (D’Amasio 2000) incorporates the reflective self and some of the emotional self, and it provides the sense of I having a unique past and future. The core self involves an und...
Stephen Gaskin (2005) describes karma as hitting golf balls in a shower. Often our attempts at payback just get in the way of balls already ricocheting back toward the person who sent them flying in t...
Even if you, like me, have done things worthy of remorse, they do not wipe out your good qualities; you are still a fundamentally good person.
Positive experiences can also be used to soothe, balance, and even replace negative ones. When two things are held in mind at the same time, they start to connect with each other. That’s one reason wh...
Neurons that fire together, wire together.
Negative experiences create vicious cycles by making you pessimistic, overreactive, and inclined to go negative yourself. Avoiding
Just before bed, your mind is very receptive, so no matter what went wrong that day, find something that went right, open to it, and let good feelings come and ease you into sleep. Doing
It’s sometimes said that the greatest remaining scientific questions are: What caused the Big Bang? What is the grand unified theory that integrates quantum mechanics and general relativity? And what...
It’s a remarkable fact that the people who have gone the very deepest into the mind—the sages and saints of every religious tradition—all say essentially the same thing: your fundamental nature is pur...
Inner strengths are the supplies you’ve got in your pack as you make your way down the twisting and often hard road of life.
If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each [person’s] life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm any hostility. —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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