Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

Parasympathetic activation is the normal resting state of your body, brain, and mind.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean changing your view that wrongs have been done. But it does mean letting go of the emotional charge around feeling wronged. The greatest beneficiary of your forgiveness is usually you. (For more on this subject, see The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace by Jack Kornfield and Forgive for Good by Fred Luskin.)

Bring Mindfulness to Fear Anxiety, dread, apprehension, worry, and even panic are just mental states like any other. Recognize fear when it arises, observe the feeling of it in your body, watch it try to convince you that you should be alarmed, see it change and move on. Verbally describe to yourself what you’re feeling, to increase frontal lobe re

So sense down into the youngest, most vulnerable, most emotionally charged layers of your mind, and feel around for the tip of the root of whatever is bothering you. With a little practice and self-understanding, you’ll develop a short list of “usual suspects”—the deep sources of your recurring upsets—and you’ll start routinely considering them if

The effort to maintain separations is at odds with the myriad ways you’re actually connected with the world and dependent upon it. As a result, you may feel subtly isolated, alienated, overwhelmed, or as if you’re in a struggle with the world.

The art is to find a balance in which you remain mindful, accepting, and curious regarding difficult experiences—while also taking in supportive feelings and thoughts. In sum, infuse positive material into negative material in these two ways: When you have a positive experience today, help it sink in to old pains. When negative material arises, bri

Your brain is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones—even though most of your experiences are probably neutral or positive.

Since your brain learns mainly from what you attend to, mindfulness is the doorway to taking in good experiences and making them a part of yourself

your fundamental nature is pure, conscious, peaceful, radiant, loving, and wise, and it is joined in mysterious ways with the ultimate underpinnings of reality, by whatever name we give That.

Separate what is actually connected, in order to create a boundary between itself and the world Stabilize what keeps changing, in order to maintain its internal systems within tight ranges Hold onto fleeting pleasures and escape inevitable pains, in order to approach opportunities and avoid threats