Buddha's Brain The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom Chapter 2.The Evolution of Suffering

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Buddha’s Brain The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom Chapter 2.The Evolution of Suffering

Author: Rick Hanson Publisher: New Harbinger Publications: Oakland, CA. Review Date: Status:⌛️

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in his Four Noble Truths, the Buddha identified an ailment (suffering), diagnosed its cause (craving: a compelling sense of need for something), specified its cure (freedom from craving), and prescribed a treatment (the Eightfold Path).

Life began around 3.5 billion years ago. Multicelled creatures first appeared about 650 million years ago. (When you get a cold, remember that microbes had nearly a three-billion-year head-start!) By the time the earliest jellyfish arose about 600 million years ago, animals had grown complex enough that their sensory and motor systems needed to communicate with each other; thus the beginnings of neural tissue. As animals evolved, so did their nervous systems, which slowly developed a central headquarters in the form of a brain.

Evolution builds on preexisting capabilities. Life’s progression can be seen inside your own brain, in terms of what Paul MacLean (1990) referred to as the reptilian, paleomammalian, and neomammalian levels of development (see figure 2; all figures are somewhat inexact and for illustrative purposes only).

Figure 2: The Evolving Brain

Cortical tissues that are relatively recent, complex, conceptualizing, slow, and motivationally diffuse sit atop subcortical and brain-stem structures that are ancient, simplistic, concrete, fast, and motivationally intense. (The subcortical region lies in the center of your brain, beneath the cortex and on top of the brain stem; the brain stem roughly corresponds to the “reptilian brain” seen in figure 2.) As you go through your day, there’s a kind of lizard-squirrel-monkey brain in your head shaping your reactions from the bottom up. Nonetheless, the modern cortex has great influence over the rest of the brain, and it’s been shaped by evolutionary pressures to develop ever-improving abilities to parent, bond, communicate, cooperate, and love (Dunbar and Shultz 2007).

The cortex is divided into two “hemispheres” connected by the corpus callosum. As we evolved, the left hemisphere (in most people) came to focus on sequential and linguistic processing while the right hemisphere specialized in holistic and visual-spatial processing; of course, the two halves of your brain work closely together. Many neural structures are duplicated so that there is one in each hemisphere; nonetheless, the usual convention is to refer to a structure in the singular (e.g., the hippocampus).

Over hundreds of millions of years of evolution, our ancestors developed three fundamental strategies for survival: Approaching opportunities and avoiding threats—in order to gain things that promote offspring, and escape or resist things that don’t. Creating separations—in order to form boundaries between themselves and the world, and between one mental state and another. Maintaining stability—in order to keep physical and mental systems in a healthy balance. These strategies have been extraordinarily effective for survival. But Mother Nature doesn’t care how they feel. To motivate animals, including ourselves, to follow these strategies and pass on their genes, neural networks evolved to create pain and distress under certain conditions: when separations break down, stability is shaken, opportunities disappoint, and threats loom. Unfortunately, these conditions happen all the time, because: Everything is connected. Everything keeps changing. Opportunities routinely remain unfulfilled or lose their luster, and many threats are inescapable (e.g., aging and death)

Since we are each connected and interdependent with the world, our attempts to be separate and independent are regularly frustrated, which produces painful signals of disturbance and threat. Further, even when our efforts are temporarily successful, they still lead to suffering. When you regard the world as “not me at all,” it is potentially unsafe, leading you to fear and resist it. Once you say, “I am this body apart from the world,” the body’s frailties become your own. If you think it weighs too much or doesn’t look right, you suffer. If it’s threatened by illness, aging, and death—as all bodies are—you suffer.

Let’s consider a single neuron, one that releases the neurotransmitter serotonin (see figures 3 and 4). This tiny neuron is both part of the nervous system and a complex system in its own right that requires multiple subsystems to keep it running. When it fires, tendrils at the end of its axon expel a burst of molecules into the synapses—the connections—it makes with other neurons. Each tendril contains about two hundred little bubbles called vesicles that are full of the neurotransmitter serotonin (Robinson 2007). Every time the neuron fires, five to ten vesicles spill open. Since a typical neuron fires around ten times a second, the serotonin vesicles of each tendril are emptied out every few seconds.

Consequently, busy little molecular machines must either manufacture new serotonin or recycle loose serotonin floating around the neuron. Then they need to build vesicles, fill them with serotonin, and move them close to where the action is, at the tip of each tendril. That’s a lot of processes to keep in balance, with many things that could go wrong—and serotonin metabolism is just one of the thousands of systems in your body.

A Typical Neuron

Neurons are the basic building blocks of the nervous system; their main function is to communicate with each other across tiny junctions called synapses. While there are many sorts of neurons, their basic design is pretty similar.

The cell body sends out spikes called dendrites which receive neurotransmitters from other neurons. (Some neurons communicate directly with each other through electrical impulses.)

Simplifying some, the millisecond-by-millisecond sum of all the excitatory and inhibitory signals a neuron receives determines whether or not it will fire.

When a neuron fires, an electrochemical wave ripples down its axon, the fiber extending toward the neurons it sends signals to. This releases neurotransmitters into its synapses with receiving neurons, either inhibiting them or exciting them to fire in turn.

Nerve signals are sped up by myelin, a fatty substance that insulates axons.

Figure 1: A (Simplified) Neuron

The gray matter of your brain is composed largely of the cell bodies of neurons. There is also white matter, made up of the axons and the glial cells; glial cells perform metabolic support functions such as wrapping axons in myelin and recycling neurotransmitters. Neuronal cell bodies are like 100 billion on-off switches connected by their axonal “wires” in an intricate network inside your head.

Figure 4: A Synapse (magnified in the inset)

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The Challenges of Maintaining an Equilibrium

For you to stay healthy, each system in your body and mind must balance two conflicting needs. On the one hand, it must remain open to inputs during ongoing transactions with its local environment (Thompson 2007); closed systems are dead systems. On the other hand, each system must also preserve a fundamental stability, staying centered around a good set-point and within certain ranges—not too hot, nor too cold. For example, inhibition from the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and arousal from the limbic system must balance each other: too much inhibition and you feel numb inside, too much arousal and you feel overwhelmed.

Signals of Threat

To keep each of your systems in balance, sensors register its state (as the thermometer does inside a thermostat) and send signals to regulators to restore equilibrium if the system gets out of range (i.e., turn the furnace on or off). Most of this regulation stays out of your awareness. But some signals for corrective action are so important that they bubble up into consciousness. For example, if your body gets too cold, you feel chilled; if it gets too hot, you feel like you’re baking. These consciously experienced signals are unpleasant, in part because they carry a sense of threat—a call to restore equilibrium before things slide too far too fast down the slippery slope. The call may come softly, with a sense of unease, or loudly, with alarm, even panic. However it comes, it mobilizes your brain to do whatever it takes to get you back in balance. This mobilization usually comes with feelings of craving; these range from quiet longings to a desperate sense of compulsion. It is interesting that the word for craving in Pali—the language of early Buddhism—is tanha, the root of which means thirst. The word “thirst” conveys the visceral power of threat signals, even when they have nothing to do with life or limb, such as the possibility of being rejected. Threat signals are effective precisely because they’re unpleasant—because they make you suffer, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. You want them to stop.

Everything Keeps Changing

Occasionally, threat signals do stop for a while—just as long as every system stays in balance. But since the world is always changing, there are endless disturbances in the equilibria of your body, mind, and relationships. The regulators of the systems of your life, from the molecular bottom all the way up to the interpersonal top, must keep trying to impose static order on inherently unstable processes. Consider the impermanence of the physical world, from the volatility of quantum particles to our own Sun, which will someday swell into a red giant and swallow the Earth. Or consider the turbulence of your nervous system; for example, regions in the PFC that support consciousness are updated five to eight times a second (Cunningham and Zelazo 2007). This neurological instability underlies all states of mind. For example, every thought involves a momentary partitioning of streaming neural traffic into a coherent assembly of synapses that must soon disperse into fertile disorder to allow other thoughts to emerge (Atmanspacher and Graben 2007). Observe even a single breath, and you will experience its sensations changing, dispersing, and disappearing soon after they arise. 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. But to help you survive, your brain keeps trying to stop the river, struggling to hold dynamic systems in place, to find fixed patterns in this variable world, and to construct permanent plans for changing conditions. Consequently, your brain is forever chasing after the moment that has just passed, trying to understand and control it.

It’s as if we live at the edge of a waterfall, with each moment rushing at us—experienced only and always now at the lip—and then zip, it’s over the edge and gone. But the brain is forever clutching at what has just surged by.

Note: head of the fountain head of the arrow head!

In order to pass on their genes, our animal ancestors had to choose correctly many times a day whether to approach something or avoid it. Today, humans approach and avoid mental states as well as physical objects; for example, we pursue self-worth and push away shame. Nonetheless, for all its sophistication, human approaching and avoiding draws on much the same neural circuitry used by a monkey to look for bananas or a lizard to hide under a rock. How does your brain decide if something should be approached or avoided? Let’s say you’re walking in the woods; you round a bend and suddenly see a curvy shape on the ground right smack in front of you. To simplify a complex process, during the first few tenths of a second, light bouncing off this curved object is sent to the occipital cortex (which handles visual information) for processing into a meaningful image (see figure 5). Then the occipital cortex sends representations of this image in two directions: to the hippocampus, for evaluation as a potential threat or opportunity, and to the PFC and other parts of the brain for more sophisticated—and time-consuming—analysis.

Figure 5: You See a Potential Threat or Opportunity

Just in case, your hippocampus immediately compares the image to its short list of jump-first-think-later dangers. It quickly finds curvy shapes on its danger list, causing it to send a high-priority alert to your amygdala: “Watch out!” The amygdala—which is like an alarm bell—then pulses both a general warning throughout your brain and a special fast-track signal to your fight-or-flight neural and hormonal systems (Rasia-Filho, Londero, and Achaval 2000). We’ll explore the details of the fight-or-flight cascade in the next chapter; the point here is that a second or so after you spot the curving shape, you jump back in alarm. Meanwhile, the powerful but relatively slow PFC has been pulling information out of long-term memory to figure out whether the darn thing is a snake or a stick. As a few more seconds tick by, the PFC zeros in on the object’s inert nature—and the fact that several people ahead of you walked past it without saying anything—and concludes that it’s only a stick.

The Feeling Tone of Experience

Throughout this episode, everything you experienced was either pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. At first there were neutral or pleasant sights as you strolled along the path, then unpleasant fear at a potential snake, and finally pleasant relief at the realization that it was just a stick. That aspect of experience—whether it is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral—is called, in Buddhism, its feeling tone (or, in Western psychology, its hedonic tone). The feeling tone is produced mainly by your amygdala (LeDoux 1995) and then broadcast widely. It’s a simple but effective way to tell your brain as a whole what to do each moment: approach pleasant carrots, avoid unpleasant sticks, and move on from anything else.

Key Neurochemicals

Primary Neurotransmitters Glutamate—excites receiving neurons. GABA—inhibits receiving neurons.

Neuromodulators These substances—sometimes also called neurotransmitters—influence the primary neurotransmitters. Because they’re released widely within the brain, they have a powerful effect. Serotonin—regulates mood, sleep, and digestion; most antidepressants aim at increasing its effects. Dopamine—involved with rewards and attention; promotes approach behaviors. Norepinephrine—alerts and arouses. Acetylcholine—promotes wakefulness and learning.

Neuropeptides These neuromodulators are built from peptides, a particular kind of organic molecule. Opioids—buffer stress, provide soothing and reduce pain, and produce pleasure (e.g., runner’s high); these include endorphins. Oxytocin—promotes nurturing behaviors toward children and bonding in couples; associated with blissful closeness and love; women have more oxytocin than men. Vasopressin—supports pair bonding; in men it may promote aggressiveness toward sexual rivals.

Other Neurochemicals Cortisol—released by the adrenal glands during the stress response; stimulates the amygdala and inhibits the hippocampus. Estrogen—the brains of both men and women contain estrogen receptors; affects libido, mood, and memory

Chasing Carrots

Two major neural systems keep you chasing carrots. The first system is based on the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine-releasing neurons become more active when you encounter things that are linked to rewards in the past—for example, if you get a message from a good friend you haven’t seen for a few months. These neurons also rev up when you encounter something that could offer rewards in the future—such as your friend saying she wants to take you to lunch. In your mind, this neural activity produces a motivating sense of desire: you want to call her back. When you do have lunch, a part of your brain called the cingulate cortex (about the size of your finger, on the interior edge of each hemisphere) tracks whether the rewards you expected—fun with your friend, good food—actually arrive (Eisenberger and Lieberman 2004). If they do, dopamine levels stay steady. But if you’re disappointed—maybe your friend is in a bad mood—the cingulate sends out a signal that lowers dopamine levels. Falling dopamine registers in subjective experience as an unpleasant feeling tone—a dissatisfaction and discontent—that stimulates craving(broadly defined) for something that will restore its levels.

The second system, based on several other neuromodulators, is the biochemical source of the pleasant feeling tones that come from the actual—and anticipated—carrots in life. When these “pleasure chemicals”—natural opioids (including endorphins), oxytocin, and norepinephrine—surge into your synapses, they strengthen the neural circuits that are active, making them more likely to fire together in the future. Imagine a toddler trying to eat a spoonful of pudding. After many misses, his perceptual-motor neurons finally get it right, leading to waves of pleasure chemicals which help cement the synaptic connections that created the specific movements that slipped the spoon into his mouth. In essence, this pleasure system highlights whatever triggered it, prompts you to pursue those rewards again, and strengthens the behaviors that make you successful in getting them. It works hand in hand with the dopamine-based system. For example, slaking your thirst feels good both because the discontent of low dopamine leaves, and because the pleasure chemical– based joy of cool water on a hot day arrives.

These two neural systems are necessary for survival. Additionally, you can use them for positive aims that have nothing to do with passing on genes. For example, you could increase your motivation to keep doing something healthy (e.g., exercise) by being really mindful of its rewards, such as feelings of vitality and strength. But reaching for what’s pleasant can also make you suffer: Desiring itself can be an unpleasant experience; even mild longing is subtly uncomfortable. When you can’t have things you desire, it’s natural to feel frustrated, disappointed, and discouraged—perhaps even hopeless and despairing. When you do fulfill a desire, the rewards that follow are often not that great. They’re okay, but look closely at your experience: Is the cookie really that tasty—especially after the third bite? Was the satisfaction of the good job review that intense or long lasting? When rewards are in fact pretty great, many of them still come at a stiff price—big desserts are an obvious example. Also consider the rewards of gaining recognition, winning an argument, or getting others to act a particular way. What is the cost/benefit ratio, really? Even if you do get what you want, it’s genuinely great, and it doesn’t cost much—the gold standard—every pleasant experience must inevitably change and end. Even the best ones of all. You are routinely separated from things you enjoy. And someday that separation will be permanent. Friends drift away, children leave home, careers end, and eventually your own final breath comes and goes. Everything that begins must also cease. Everything that comes together must also disperse. Experiences are thus incapable of being completely satisfying. They are an unreliable basis for true happiness.

Approaching Involves Suffering

So far, we’ve discussed carrots and sticks as if they were equals. But actually, sticks are usually more powerful, since your brain is built more for avoiding than for approaching. That’s because it’s the negative experiences, not the positive ones, that have generally had the most impact on survival. For example, imagine our mammalian ancestors dodging dinosaurs in a worldwide Jurassic Park 70 million years ago. Constantly looking over their shoulders, alert to the slightest crackle of brush, ready to freeze or bolt or attack depending on the situation. The quick and the dead. If they missed out on a carrot—a chance at food or mating, perhaps—they usually had other opportunities later. But if they failed to duck a stick—like a predator—then they’d probably be killed, with no chance at any carrots in the future. The ones that lived to pass on their genes paid a lot of attention to negative experiences.

Let’s explore six ways your brain keeps you dodging sticks.

Sticks Are Stronger than Carrots

VIGILANCE AND ANXIETY

When you’re awake and not doing anything in particular, the baseline resting state of your brain activates a “default network,” and one of its functions seems to be tracking your environment and body for possible threats (Raichle et al. 2001). This basic awareness is often accompanied by a background feeling of anxiety that keeps you vigilant. Try walking through a store for a few minutes without the least whiff of caution, unease, or tension. It’s very difficult. This makes sense because our mammalian, primate, and human ancestors were prey as well as predators. In addition, most primate social groups have been full of aggression from males and females alike (Sapolsky 2006). And in the hominid and then human hunter-gatherer bands of the past couple million years, violence has been a leading cause of death for men (Bowles 2006). We became anxious for good reason: there was a lot to fear.

SENSITIVITY TO NEGATIVE INFORMATION

The brain typically detects negative information faster than positive information. Take facial expressions, a primary signal of threat or opportunity for a social animal like us: fearful faces are perceived much more rapidly than happy or neutral ones, probably fast-tracked by the amygdala (Yang, Zald, and Blake 2007). In fact, even when researchers make fearful faces invisible to conscious awareness, the amygdala still lights up (Jiang and He 2006). The brain is drawn to bad news.

HIGH-PRIORITY STORAGE

When an event is flagged as negative, the hippocampus makes sure it’s stored carefully for future reference. Once burned, twice shy. Your brain is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones—even though most of your experiences are probably neutral or positive.

NEGATIVE TRUMPS POSITIVE

Negative events generally have more impact than positive ones. For example, it’s easy to acquire feelings of learned helplessness from a few failures, but hard to undo those feelings, even with many successes (Seligman 2006). People will do more to avoid a loss than to acquire a comparable gain (Baumeister et al. 2001). Compared to lottery winners, accident victims usually take longer to return to their original baseline of happiness (Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman 1978). Bad information about a person carries more weight than good information (Peeters and Czapinski 1990), and in relationships, it typically takes about five positive interactions to overcome the effects of a single negative one (Gottman 1995).

VICIOUS CYCLES

Negative experiences create vicious cycles by making you pessimistic, overreactive, and inclined to go negative yourself.

Avoiding Involves Suffering

As you can see, your brain has a built-in “negativity bias” (Vaish, Grossman, and Woodward 2008) that primes you for avoidance. This bias makes you suffer in a variety of ways. For starters, it generates an unpleasant background of anxiety, which for some people can be quite intense; anxiety also makes it harder to bring attention inward for self-awareness or contemplative practice, since the brain keeps scanning to make sure there is no problem. The negativity bias fosters or intensifies other unpleasant emotions, such as anger, sorrow, depression, guilt, and shame. It highlights past losses and failures, it downplays present abilities, and it exaggerates future obstacles. Consequently, the mind continually tends to render unfair verdicts about a person’s character, conduct, and possibilities. The weight of those judgments can really wear you down.

48 Simulations Make You Suffer

In Buddhism, it’s said that suffering is the result of craving expressed through the Three Poisons: greed, hatred, and delusion. These are strong, traditional terms that cover a broad range of thoughts, words, and deeds, including the most fleeting and subtle. Greed is a grasping after carrots, while hatred is an aversion to sticks; both involve craving more pleasure and less pain. Delusion is a holding onto ignorance about the way things really are—for example, not seeing how they’re connected and changing.

Sometimes these poisons are conspicuous; much of the time, however, they operate in the background of your awareness, firing and wiring quietly along. They do this by using your brain’s extraordinary capacity to represent both inner experience and the outer world. For example, the blind spots in your left and right visual fields don’t look like holes out there in the world; rather, your brain fills them in, much like photo software shades in the red eyes of people looking toward a flash. In fact, much of what you see “out there” is actually manufactured “in here” by your brain, painted in like computer-generated graphics in a movie. Only a small fraction of the inputs to your occipital lobe comes directly from the external world; the rest comes from internal memory stores and perceptual-processing modules (Raichle 2006). Your brain simulates the world—each of us lives in a virtual reality that’s close enough to the real thing that we don’t bump into the furniture.

Inside this simulator—whose neural substrate appears to be centered in the upper-middle of your PFC (Gusnard et al. 2001)—mini-movies run continuously. These brief clips are the building blocks of much conscious mental activity (Niedenthal 2007; Pitcher et al. 2008). For our ancestors, running simulations of past events promoted survival, as it strengthened the learning of successful behaviors by repeating their neural firing patterns. Simulating future events also promoted survival by enabling our ancestors to compare possible outcomes—in order to pick the best approach—and to ready potential sensory-motor sequences for immediate action. Over the past three million years, the brain has tripled in size; much of this expansion has improved the capabilities of the simulator, suggesting its benefits for survival.

The brain continues to produce simulations today, even when they have nothing to do with staying alive. Watch yourself daydream or go back over a relationship problem, and you’ll see the clips playing—little packets of simulated experiences, usually just seconds long. If you observe them closely, you’ll spot several troubling things: By its very nature, the simulator pulls you out of the present moment. There you are, following a presentation at work, running an errand, or meditating, and suddenly your mind is a thousand miles away, caught up in a mini-movie. But it’s only in the present moment that we find real happiness, love, or wisdom. In the simulator, pleasures usually seem pretty great, whether you’re considering a second cupcake or imagining the response you’ll get to a report at work. But what do you actually feel when you enact the mini-movie in real life? Is it as pleasant as promised up there on the screen? Usually not. In truth, most everyday rewards aren’t as intense as those conjured up in the simulator.

Clips in the simulator contain lots of beliefs: Of course he’ll say X if I say Y….It’s obvious that they let me down. Sometimes these are explicitly verbalized, but much of the time they’re implicit, built into the plotline. In reality, are the explicit and implicit beliefs in your simulations true? Sometimes yes, but often no. Mini-movies keep us stuck by their simplistic view of the past and by their defining out of existence real possibilities for the future, such as new ways to reach out to others or dream big dreams. Their beliefs are the bars of an invisible cage, trapping you in a life that’s smaller than the one you could actually have. It’s like being a zoo animal that’s released into a large park—yet still crouches within the confines of its old pen. In the simulator, upsetting events from the past play again and again, which unfortunately strengthens the neural associations between an event and its painful feelings. The simulator also forecasts threatening situations in your future. But in fact, most of those worrisome events never materialize. And of the ones that do, often the discomfort you experience is milder and briefer than predicted. For example, imagine speaking from your heart: this may trigger a mini-movie ending in rejection and you feeling bad. But in fact, when you do speak from the heart, doesn’t it typically go pretty well, with you ending up feeling quite good? In sum, the simulator takes you out of the present moment and sets you chasing after carrots that aren’t really so great while ignoring more important rewards (such as contentment and inner peace). Its mini-movies are full of limiting beliefs. Besides reinforcing painful emotions, they have you ducking sticks that never actually come your way or aren’t really all that bad. And the simulator does this hour after hour, day after day, even in your dreams—steadily building neural structure, much of which adds to your suffering.

Self-Compassion

Each person suffers sometimes, and many people suffer a lot. Compassion is a natural response to suffering, including your own. Self-compassion isn’t self-pity, but is simply warmth, concern, and good wishes—just like compassion for another person. Because self-compassion is more emotional than self-esteem, it’s actually more powerful for reducing the impact of difficult conditions, preserving self-worth, and building resilience (Leary et al. 2007). It also opens your heart, since when you’re closed to your own suffering, it’s hard to be receptive to suffering in others.

The root of compassion is compassion for oneself.
—Pema Chödrön

In addition to the everyday suffering of life, the path of awakening itself contains difficult experiences which also call for compassion. To become happier, wiser, and more loving, sometimes you have to swim against ancient currents within your nervous system. For example, in some ways the three pillars of practice are unnatural: virtue restrains emotional reactions that worked well on the Serengeti, mindfulness decreases external vigilance, and wisdom cuts through beliefs that once helped us survive. It goes against the evolutionary template to undo the causes of suffering, to feel one with all things, to flow with the changing moment, and to remain unmoved by pleasant and unpleasant alike. Of course, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it! It just means we should understand what we’re up against and have some compassion for ourselves.

To nurture self-compassion and strengthen its neural circuits:

Recall being with someone who really loves you—the feeling of receiving caring activates the deep attachment system circuitry in your brain, priming it to give compassion.

Bring to mind someone you naturally feel compassion for, such as a child or a person you love—this easy flow of compassion arouses its neural underpinnings (including oxytocin, the insula [which senses the internal state of your body], and the PFC), “warming them up” for self-compassion.

Extend this same compassion to yourself—be aware of your own suffering and extend concern and good wishes toward yourself; sense compassion sifting down into raw places inside, falling like a gentle rain that touches everything. The actions related to a feeling strengthen it (Niedenthal 2007), so place your palm on your cheek or heart with the tenderness and warmth you’d give a hurt child. Say phrases in your mind such as May I be happy again. May the pain of this moment pass.

Overall, open to the sense that you are receiving compassion—deep down in your brain, the actual source of good feelings doesn’t matter much; whether the compassion is from you or from another person, let your sense of being soothed and cared for sink in.

Notes

Total: 6

🔮 The Cosmos