We suffer that we suffer. We get upset about being in pain, angry about dying, sad about waking up sad yet another day.

When you stimulate the parasympathetic wing of the ANS, calming, soothing, healing ripples spread through your body, brain, and mind.

Keep settling into the breath, perhaps with a growing sense of peacefulness. Be aware of the changing nature of what passes through the mind. Notice how it feels to get caught up in the passing contents of awareness—and how it feels to let them go by. Be aware of peaceful, spacious awareness itself.

To live, an organism must metabolize: it must exchange matter and energy with its environment. Consequently, over the course of a year, many of the atoms in your body are replaced by new ones. The energy you use to get a drink of water comes from sunshine working its way up to you through the food chain—in a real sense, light lifts the cup to your

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

Happiness, love, and wisdom aren’t furthered by shutting down the SNS, but rather by keeping the autonomic nervous system as a whole in an optimal state of balance: Mainly parasympathetic arousal for a baseline of ease and peacefulness Mild SNS activation for enthusiasm, vitality, and wholesome passions Occasional SNS spikes to deal with demanding

example, take five breaths, inhaling and exhaling a little more fully than usual. This is both energizing and relaxing, activating first the sympathetic system and then the parasympathetic one, back and forth, in a gentle rhythm. Notice how you feel when you’re done. That combination of aliveness and centeredness is the essence of the peak performa

Mindfulness of the Body Since your PNS is primarily directed at maintaining the internal equilibrium of your body, bringing attention inward activates parasympathetic networks (as long as you’re not worried about your health). You may have already had some practice with mindfulness of the body (e.g., yoga, a stress-management class). Mindfulness ju

temple. I have seen Rick and Richard offer