In this talk, I dig into a remarkable ancient teaching by a nun named Dhammadinnā, exploring how concentration works together with virtue and wisdom to actually move you from suffering toward genuine release. Think of it like pairing a sharp blade with real heft behind it — one without the other just doesn’t get you through the thicket.

Click here to join the free Wednesday Meditations – which are open to everyone!

Talk: The Powerful Combination of Concentration and Insight

Timecodes & main topics:

• 0:00 — Introduction: The Majjhima Nikāya & meeting Dhammadinnā
• 3:58 — The framework: four levels of enlightenment in early Buddhism
• 6:04 — The Noble Eightfold Path: what “right” and “noble” really mean
• 11:13 — The three pillars: virtue, concentration, and wisdom
• 23:50 — Why concentration is the key — and how to develop it
• 29:25 — What supports concentration: calm, heart opening, and gladness
• 32:13 — The runup to awakening: from ignorance to release to unbinding

A Meditation: The Power of the Breath

My friend Art led us through a simple, grounding breath meditation — nothing fancy, just the practice of returning to the breath again and again. As Art put it so well, the goal isn’t to get rid of thoughts; it’s to notice when you’ve wandered and gently come back. Every single time you do that, you’re building the muscle of your own attention.

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THE PRACTICE: BE HELPFUL.

Why?

I’m doing a series on my personal top five practices (all tied for first place). I have so far named three: meditate (including mindfulness, self-awareness, and, if you like, prayer), take in the good, and bless (including compassion, generosity, and love).

I saw one way to bless on a trip to Haiti in the efforts of many dedicated people: be helpful. As you probably know, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with roughly 80% unemployment. The national government seemed like a tattered sheet in the wind. The public middle and high schools I visited were missing half their schoolbooks as well as the funds for the last two grades. Imagine your own child in such a school . . . and that the $30 it takes to buy the books she needs is a month’s wages, as out of reach as the moon.

Yet in the face of these enormous challenges, I met so many people – both in NGOs and in everyday life – who kept doing whatever they could to help things get better each day. I was humbled by their heart and their efforts. And especially by the joy they could still find even in hard, hard conditions. It reminded me of this story:

Two women are walking along a beach after a storm swept countless starfish up onto the sand, now dying in the sun. As they talk, one reaches down every few paces to pick up a starfish and flick it back into the sea. After a while, her friend points at the miles of beach and bursts out, “Why do you bother?! You’re not making any difference!” Her friend replies, “It makes a big difference to the ones I touch.”

One of the most remarkable things about human beings is that we do bother. Our altruism is unique among vertebrates. An early MRI study on compassion showed that it warmed up the motor circuits of the brain, readying them for action: we don’t just feel the suffering of others; we want to help.

How?

In the words of Nkosi Johnson, a South African boy born with HIV who became an advocate for children with that illness before he died at about age 12: Do all you can, with what you have, in the time you have, in the place where you are.

Do not underestimate the impact of a small deed. Think of a turning point in your own life in which another person did something objectively small – helped you fill out a form, offered an encouraging word, invited you to a meeting, mentioned an opportunity – that had big benefits for you.

In everyday life, look for small concrete physical things that would contribute to others. Empty the dishwasher, give someone a ride, or scratch someone’s back.

Also, look for places where restraint would help, such as not interrupting or not trying to win the argument.

Include inner actions, such as giving full attention instead of letting your mind wander or mobilizing authentic interest in conversation or romance, even if that wasn’t your initial impulse.

Pick a relationship or situation and ask yourself, what could I do to help? Maybe an elderly relative is bored and lonely, or a friend needs a jump-start in clearing out a garage, or a co-parent is carrying too many tasks and too much stress.

And look for leveraged effects, where something small for you is big for someone else. For example, I’ve seen families in which one parent averages 60-70 hours/week on the job (including commute and travel), and dialing back the workweek by 10% increases the parent’s time with the kids by 100%.

As to the larger world, this idea of leveraging brings me back to Haiti – and to the extraordinary staff and work of Plan International, the NGO I support there. It’s just a dollar a day for me – but that’s roughly a day’s wage in many parts of the world. You probably have your own ways of helping, whether at home or abroad, with money or time or other means. We all know that the needs are great.

And so are the opportunities to make a big difference to the ones we touch.

Know Someone Who Would Like to Find Ways to Be Helpful?

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They start by describing what healthy conflict looks like, the mutual respect that holds it together, and why “me and you vs. the problem” is the way to go. Forrest then asks Rick about four common conflicts: the accidental argument, the chronic broken commitment, the missed bid, and the slow, hard-to-name sense that a relationship is changing. Rick offers guidance on how to interrupt each cycle, turn down the heat, and get back on the same team.

Rick’s Attachment Course: Join Rick for a 5-week online course on using the research-backed HEAL method to heal insecure attachment and create new neural pathways for interacting and connecting securely. You can learn more here.

Key Topics

• 0:00: Intro and what healthy repair looks like
• 5:26: Red flag: the withdrawal of caring and compassionate curiosity
• 9:26: Initiating repair
• 12:24: Scenario 1: The “accidental argument”
• 21:10: Scenario 2: The chronic broken commitment
• 40:01: Scenario 3: The missed bid
• 1:01:38: Scenario 4: The “seeming” change in relationship
• 1:07:11: Taking in repair, the key to successful relationships
• 1:16:23: Recap

The post Being Well Podcast: How to Repair: The Key to Successful Relationships first appeared on Rick Hanson, PhD.

Click here to join the free Wednesday Meditations – which are open to everyone!

Talk: Insightful Freedom from Craving

Timecodes & main topics:

• 0:00 — Returning to the Original Teachings
  An early Buddhist sutta and reflects on the value of engaging directly with the Buddha’s original psychological teachings rather than watered-down versions of mindfulness.
• 5:32 — Meeting Dhammadinna
  The story behind the teaching: an awakened nun answers profound questions from her former husband about the nature of self and liberation.
• 9:11 — What Is the Self, Really?
  An exploration of the Buddha’s teaching on the five aggregates: form, feeling tone, perception, mental formations, and consciousness.
• 12:36 — The Three Forms of Craving
  The Buddha identifies craving for pleasure, craving for becoming, and craving for non-becoming as the roots of self-identification and suffering.
• 15:54 — The Noble Pony and the Naughty Pony
  How to distinguish wholesome desires from ego-driven motivations, and how to pursue worthy goals without getting trapped by them.
• 18:43 — Three Questions for Wise Living
  A practical framework: Are your goals wholesome? Are you pursuing them skillfully? Can you remain fundamentally at peace regardless of the outcome?
• 20:49 — What Would It Feel Like to Let Go?
  Exploring the Buddha’s description of freedom as the fading away of craving and the release of compulsive self-identification.
• 22:27 — The Eightfold Path as a Practical Cure
  Rather than merely describing suffering, the Buddha offers a path of practice through right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration.
• 23:32 — Investigating the Self Through Direct Experience
  The Buddha’s analytical approach to examining whether the body, feelings, thoughts, or consciousness truly constitute a permanent self.
• 29:26 — Does Letting Go of Self Lead to Depersonalization?
  An important discussion about how healthy spiritual practice differs from dissociation, especially for those with trauma histories.
• 30:18 — Filling the Hole in the Heart
  Why taking in experiences of being valued, loved, and appreciated actually reduces self-preoccupation rather than inflating the ego.
• 32:30 — The Difference Between Happiness and Craving
  Buddhism does not reject the desire to be happy. Instead, it encourages us to choose greater happiness over lesser happiness.
• 35:42 — Impermanence, Suffering, and Interdependence
  Three core characteristics of existence and shares which aspect of practice has been especially meaningful in his own life recently.

A Meditation: Peaceful Stillness 

If you’re feeling stressed, caught up in striving, or carrying more than you need to, this meditation offers a chance to simply let go. Together we’ll rest in the enoughness of the present moment, soften the drive to become or achieve, and reconnect with a quiet sense of contentment, openness, and ease.

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Rick’s Attachment Course: Join Rick for a 5-week online course on using the research-backed HEAL method to heal insecure attachment and create new neural pathways for interacting and connecting securely. You can learn more here.

Key Topics

• 0:00: Intro
• 3:19: Repair as the biggest predictor of relationship success
• 5:29: Models of conflict and where they originate from
• 16:08: What is healthy repair, and why is it so hard?
• 24:54: What to do about emotional flooding
• 30:25: When to let things go, and when to address them
• 38:36: What repair is and what it’s not
• 46:47: The power of authentic apologies
• 57:04: Recap

The post Being Well Podcast: Healthy Conflict: The Most Important Relationship Skill We Don’t Learn first appeared on Rick Hanson, PhD.

Click here to join the free Wednesday Meditations – which are open to everyone!

Talk: Coming Home to Yourself: Self-Compassion as the Foundation for Healing

Timecodes & main topics:

• 00:00 – The stories we carry: How inherited stories, personal narratives, and cultural messages shape our sense of self.
• 05:23 – Moments that become breadcrumbs: Lakiba shares how music, compassion, spirit, joy, family, and meaningful connections as guides back to ourselves.
• 07:08 – The role of self-compassion: Meeting ourselves with kindness instead of judgment and learning to care for our own suffering.
• 09:10 – Breadcrumbs from the soul: Teachers, friends, songs, conversations, and moments of stillness that help us remember who we are.
• 11:25 – Sharing our stories: Why Lakiba created Breadcrumbs from the Soul and the importance of passing personal stories to future generations.
• 13:53 – A house with many rooms: Personal growth as continually opening new doors to qualities such as joy, courage, creativity, grief, and awe.
• 16:29 – Opening doors despite fear: How self-compassion helps us move through doubt and discover hidden gifts within ourselves.
• 18:15 – Belonging to yourself: The realization that before belonging anywhere else, we belong to ourselves.
• 23:18 – Nature, healing, and self-discovery: Discussion of nature, Buddhism, lifelong growth, and reminders of essential truths.
• 26:08 – How to open the doors: Following intuition, staying open, and cultivating the courage to welcome new experiences.
• 29:52 – Compassion changes everything: How self-compassion transformed Lakiba’s life and helped her grow beyond limiting beliefs.
• 31:04 – Finding her own voice: Lakiba shares her experience of stepping in for Rick and learning to teach from her own story.
• 36:16 – Self-care versus self-centeredness: Discussion of healthy self-care, compassion, and caring for others.
• 41:30 – Lifelong self-discovery: Participant reflections on continuing to open doors and discover new parts of themselves throughout life.

A Meditation: Tending the Heart: Coming Home to Yourself 

In this gentle meditation, Lakiba Pittman guides you through a compassionate exploration of your younger, present, and future selves, helping you reconnect with the strengths, gifts, and wisdom that have been within you all along.

Lakiba Pittman is an educator, compassion and mindfulness teacher, and facilitator who supports healing and well-being in individuals and communities. She is a professor at Menlo College and a Senior Instructor in Compassion Cultivation Training, certified through Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE). Lakiba teaches with the Compassion Institute, Healing Together, and Stanford Healthy Living. She is pursuing a PhD in Transformative Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies, researching music, healing, and collective well-being.

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THE PRACTICE: BEWARE OF ANGER.

Why?

Anger is tricky.

On the one hand, anger – feeling annoyed, irritated, resentful, fed up, mad, outraged, or enraged – alerts us to real threats, real injuries, and real wrongs that need correcting, and it energizes and fuels us to do something about them. In my family growing up, my parents had a monopoly on anger. So, I suppressed my own, along with a lot of other feelings, and it’s been a long journey to reclaim my interior, including anger, and be able to feel it fully and (hopefully) express it skillfully.

Whether in personal relationships or in the halls of power, people in positions of authority or privilege often tell others that they don’t deserve to be angry, they shouldn’t get so worked up, it’s their own fault, etc. when in fact they have every reason and right in the world to be angry. It is certainly important to know in your heart what is actually happening, how bad it is, what the causes are, and what to do – and decide for yourself how much you want to get or stay angry.

On the other hand, anger:

• Feels bad past the first rush of it
• Stresses the body, over time wearing down health
• Narrows attention, losing sight of the big picture
• Clouds judgment, driving us to act impulsively, potentially violently
• Creates and revves up conflicts with others

Anger often hurts us more than it hurts others. I believe there is a saying from Alcoholics Anonymous: “Resentment is like taking poison . . . and waiting for others to die.” This metaphor of a beguiling toxin is also found in a description from early Buddhism: “Anger has a honeyed tip . . . and a poisoned barb.”

How?

Recognize anger. Feel it, don’t suppress it. Explore it and find whatever is valid in what it is telling you. Also look beneath it, to the hurt or sorrow or outrage on behalf of others. Help yourself open to and include all of yourself. Be skeptical of others who try to talk you out of your reactions out of their own self-interest.

Figure out what you are going to do. Usually not easy, to be sure, but try to slow things down so you can think clearly, find your ground, and Take Heart (another, post of mine).

This said, beware – be watchful, be wary – of how anger can work on your mind and hijack you.

Anger comes with justifications. We feel wronged, mistreated, affronted, provoked: “Of course I’m mad. You made me mad. It’s your fault.” I remember once banging my shin on a coffee table and getting so mad I kicked the table . . . as if it were to blame. Anger is seductive, drawing us into cases against others, bills of prosecution, mental emails drafted in bed at 2 am (speaking from personal experience!). Anger fools us, making us feel perfectly entitled to lash out and say or do terrible things . . . from which we eventually wake as if from a nightmare with dismay and remorse at our actions. Anger is – literally – tricky.

And anger is a particularly powerful trickster when it plays out inside and between groups. You can see this at all scales, from cliques in high school to office gossip to politics to war. A group will often form around shared grievances, and then defend and proclaim those grievances no matter what the facts are to maintain its cohesion and identity. Whether on the schoolyard in 5^th grade or in nations throughout history, authoritarian leaders have exploited our social primate vulnerability to the appeal of grievance in order to acquire and hold on to power, inflating and even inventing grievances while promising to protect the group and avenge it against those who have wronged it.

It is no small thing to find your own way inside such a group with such a leader. Or to find a way to relate to those in such groups with moral clarity and strength of heart – without being clouded or infected by anger yourself.

In my meditative tradition, I’ve heard it said that anger is like throwing hot coals with bare hands: both people get burned. In relationships, families, organizations, countries, and the world altogether, there has been so much burning already in our shared human history. Too much burning. Too many minds burned up with anger.

Potency, agency, authenticity, fierce compassion, moral confidence, truth is spoken to power: none of these is anger or requires anger. Truly, each one of us can come home to the dignity, authority, and courage to stand in the truth and speak from the heart with passion and power, free of the flames of anger.

Know Someone Who Could Be More Watchful of Anger?

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About our guest: Dr. Trisha Pasricha is a physician-scientist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and columnist for the Washington Post. Her new book, You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong, explains the connection between your gut, your brain, and your mental health.

Rick’s Attachment Course: Join Rick for a 5-week online course on using the research-backed HEAL method to heal insecure attachment and create new neural pathways for interacting and connecting securely. You can learn more here.

Key Topics

• 0:00 Intro: what’s neurogastroenterology?
• 5:48: The importance of believing the patient
• 9:31: The lifelong impact of childhood gut issues
• 18:27: The relationship between the gut and the brain
• 23:20: The tiktokification of gut health information
• 30:56: Probiotics – do they help?
• 34:15: The microbiome
• 43:34: Advice to people with gut issues
• 46:21: What about cleanses?
• 55:52: Recap

The post Being Well Podcast: The Gut-Brain Connection: Anxiety, Depression, and Wellness Fads with Dr. Trisha Pasricha first appeared on Rick Hanson, PhD.

Click here to join the free Wednesday Meditations – which are open to everyone!

Talk: Equanimity as an Expression of Love

Timecodes & main topics:

• 0:00 – 3:30 — What Is Equanimity?
  Margaret Cullen gives a practical definition of equanimity as the ability to fully experience life without getting caught in reactivity, and why Buddhism places it at the center of so many teachings.
• 3:30 – 10:30 — The Real Measure of Equanimity
  Why equanimity isn’t about never getting triggered. Research on experienced meditators shows that wisdom often appears as a faster recovery from activation, not the absence of it.
• 10:30 – 18:30 — Metta: The Love That Doesn’t Make You Special
  Exploring loving-kindness as unconditional goodwill rather than the approval, recognition, and validation the ego naturally seeks.
• 18:30 – 22:15 — When Love Meets Suffering: Compassion
  How compassion naturally arises when goodwill encounters pain, along with common pitfalls such as pity and overwhelm.
• 22:15 – 26:20 — When Love Meets Joy: Mudita
  Understanding sympathetic joy as the capacity to genuinely celebrate the happiness and success of others without self-centered attachment.
• 26:20 – 30:00 — Equanimity as Love in the Face of Vulnerability
  The heart of the talk: equanimity emerges when love encounters the reality that we cannot prevent suffering for ourselves or the people we care about most.
• 30:00 – 37:15 — Awakening, Empathy, and the Quality of Attention
  A rich discussion on awakening, mindfulness, empathy, and why the quality of our attention matters more than attention alone.
• 37:15 – 43:30 — Equanimity: The Secret Ingredient of Mindfulness
  Why many teachers see mindfulness and equanimity as inseparable, and how equanimity shapes the way we relate to every experience.
• 43:30 – End — Cultivating Equanimity in Daily Life
  Practical reflections on building equanimity, closing with a beautiful poem by Joseph Goldstein that captures the spirit of steady, loving presence amid life’s uncertainties.

A Meditation: Equanimity Meditation

Margaret is a psychotherapist and a pioneer in bringing contemplative practices into mainstream settings. One of the first certified MBSR teachers, she also co-developed the Compassion Cultivation Training with Thupten Jinpa at Stanford University School of Medicine, the Mindfulness and Compassion Training for Military Spouses with Amishi Jha at the University of Miami, and Compassion Corps, a program that brings compassion programs to underserved populations

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The Practice:
Be Amazed.

Why?

Here are my top five inner practices for helping this year be a good one for you and others (click the links to see the first four):

• Drop the stone
• Let it flow
• Learn as you go
• “Us” all “thems”
• Be amazed

By “be amazed,” I mean staying open to a sense of freshness, wonder, gratitude, and awe, instead of taking things for granted or getting numb from the pressure of work and life.

While recently stressing about some undone tasks, I glanced in a mirror and saw my t-shirt, with a picture of a galaxy and a little sign in its outer swirls saying “you are here.” A joke gift from my wife, I’ve worn this shirt many times – yet for once, it stopped me in my tracks. In William Blake’s phrase, the doors of perception popped open, and it really hit me: yes we are actually here, off to the edge of a vast floating whirlpool of stars, alive and conscious, walking and talking on a big rock circling a bigger burning ball of gas. Here, now, nearly fourteen billion years after the cosmos bubbled into being. What the?!

My mind stopped yapping, and I felt the delight and awe of a little kid who for the first time sees a butterfly, or tastes ice cream, or realizes that the stars above are really far away. Gratitude and wow and something feeling sacred washed through me.

In a word, I was amazed – which means “filled with wonder and surprise.” Besides the simple happiness in this experience, it lifted me above the tangled pressures and worries I was stuck to like a bug on flypaper. Amazement is instant stress relief. It also opens the heart: I couldn’t be even a little exasperated with anyone. Being amazed brings you into the truth of things, into a relationship with the inherent mysteries and overwhelming gifts of existence, scaled from the molecular machinery of life to the love and forgiveness in human hearts to the dark matter that glues the universe together.

Wow. Really. Wow.

How?

Opportunities for amazement are all around us. I think back to that look in the eyes of our son and daughter as they were born, blinking in the light of the room, surprised by all the shapes and colors, entering a whole new world. Seen with the eyes of a child, the simplest thing is amazing: a blade of grass, being licked by a puppy, the taste of cinnamon, riding piggyback on your daddy, or running your eyes over lines of black squiggles that can fill your mind with tales of dragons and fairy godmothers.

Look around you. For example, I sit down at my computer, click a mouse, and chant recorded in a Russian cathedral fills the room. Crazy! Imagine being a Stone Age person transported 50,000 years forward into your chair. Glass windows, pencils, flat wood, the smell of coffee, woven cloth, a metal spoon . . . it would all be amazing.

Try to see more of your world in this way, as if you are seeing it for the first time, perhaps through the eyes of a child. Beginner’s mind, zen mind. If we’re not amazed . . . we’re not paying attention.

Explore “don’t know mind” – not “duh” mind, but an openness that doesn’t immediately slot things into boxes, that allows freshness and curiosity. The mind categorizes and labels things to help us survive. Fine enough, but underneath this skim of meaning laid over the boiled milk of reality, we don’t truly know what anything is. We use words like “atoms” and “quarks,” and “photons,” but no one knows what a quark or photon actually is.

We don’t know what love actually is, either, but it is all around us. It’s amazing that people love me, amazing that people forgive each other, that those once at war with each other can eventually live in peace. Consider people you know, how they keep going when they’re tired, breathe through the pain, get up yet again to walk a crying baby, settle down in the middle of an argument and admit fault and move on. That a mother can embrace the young man who murdered her son is more amazing than an exploding supernova. And just as others are amazing to you, you are also amazing to them.

If we were brave enough to be more often filled with wonder and surprise, we would treat ourselves and others and our fragile world more gently.

Know Someone Who Could Use More Awe?

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They start with Diego’s experience on his recent 60-day silent meditation retreat, and what that kind of practice teaches about craving, attachment, and getting unstuck from old roles. Diego frames right effort as the middle path between forcing your life and going with the flow, and that tension leads into a conversation about social media, including the appeal of reductive advice and being told what to do. Diego closes with what he’d recommend for someone who wants some of the rewards of practice without committing to a long retreat.

Rick’s Attachment Course: Join Rick for a 5-week online course on using the research-backed HEAL method to heal insecure attachment and create new neural pathways for interacting and connecting securely. You can learn more here.

Key Topics

• 0:00: Intro
• 2:02: Diego’s 60-day silent retreat
• 8:17: Right Effort: balancing pursuit with letting go
• 15:49: Attachment, craving, and suffering
• 19:25: Diego’s journey to the sensitive boy’s club
• 25:19: Resistance: a sign that something is wrong or that we should push harder?
• 31:07: How to stop outsourcing your decisions & find guidance within 
• 42:41: The limitations of labels and therapy-speak
• 52:26: Practices for those who aren’t serious meditators
• 55:39: Recap

The post Being Well Podcast: Right Effort: When to Push and When to Let Go with Yung Pueblo first appeared on Rick Hanson, PhD.

Click here to join the free Wednesday Meditations – which are open to everyone!

Talk: Three Things You Can Really Count On In Turbulent Times

Timecodes & main topics:

• 00.00 — What Can We Truly Count On?
• 3:02 — Trusting Your Good Intentions
• 15:34 — Becoming a Learner
• 20:40 — Skillful Correction vs. Shame
• 23:46 — Changing Your View of Yourself
• 28:33 — What Do You Know Is True?
• 34:31 — Letting the Good News Sink In
• 39:08 — Three Questions for Your Life

A Meditation: Grounded, Peaceful, Warmhearted

In this meditation, I guide you into staying present while life continues to change around and within you. Using the breath, spacious awareness, and a sense of openheartedness as supports, we explore how to rest more deeply in steadiness, vastness, and warmth amidst the flow of experience.

The post Talk + Meditation: Three Things You Can Really Count On In Turbulent Times first appeared on Rick Hanson, PhD.

The Practice:
Accept difficulty.

Why?

Sometimes things are difficult. Your legs are tired and you still have to stay on your feet another hour at work. You love a child who’s finding her independence through emotional distance from you. A long-term relationship could be losing its spark. It’s finals week in college. You’re trying to start a business and it’s struggling. You’ve got a chronic health problem or a disability. Sometimes people don’t appreciate your work. You’re being discriminated against or otherwise treated unjustly. The body ages, sags, and grows weary.

Plus there are all the little hassles of everyday life. You’re in an airport and can’t get Wi-Fi (the injustice!). You’re at home looking for the ice cream and someone ate the last of it. You’re talking to your partner and realize he or she isn’t really paying attention.

Obviously, not all difficulties are equally . . . difficult. And to observe that life contains unavoidable difficulty is not to minimize its impacts or to suggest that we should give up trying to make life better. But people – me included – add a lot of unnecessary frustration, anxiety, and self-criticism by resisting difficulty – often with an underlying attitude of “it shouldn’t be this way.”

Try the attitude of accepting difficulty instead of getting aggravated by it. It’s a lot more peaceful.

How?

In the moment, start by acknowledging any stress, weariness, frustration, anxiety, or pain. Open to the impact on your body and mind of whatever is difficult. Let the experience be whatever it is. Try to step back from it and observe it. Let it flow . . . flowing through you . . . and flowing on out the door.

For sure have self-compassion, the simple wish that a being not suffer applied to yourself. Say to yourself things like ouch, this hurts, I wish it didn’t . . . may I not suffer.

Then step back. See if there is any resistance to things being difficult, and see if you can let it go. Perhaps there’s a belief deep down that life should be fulfilling, peaceful, buffered from pain. Keep softening around the inherent difficulties in living, dealing with them as best you can but not struggling with them. Notice that when you stop resisting a difficulty, it starts feeling less difficult.

As appropriate, try on the attitude: I signed up for this. Not to blame yourself for things that have happened to you or to discount your stress or weariness, but to establish yourself in a relationship of choice toward whatever is difficult. For example, stuck in traffic toward work, remind yourself that this is part of making a living; awakened yet again by your baby, feel in your body yet again your choice to be a parent; under any conditions, you could recognize again your ongoing choice to be alive. Say to yourself: this is difficult and that’s OK . . . I accept the difficulty here . . . yes, it’s difficult, and so what?

It’s OK that things are difficult. That’s part of what gives them their savor. Not all fulfilling experiences are grounded in some difficulty, but many are. Honor yourself for the hard things you’re dealing with. And be aware of the things that are not difficult in your life, including the things that do support you.

In particular, keep up your personal practices during difficult times, such as exercise, meditation, moments of gratitude, protein at every meal, and doing things that nurture you. The more difficult your life, the more you need to take care of yourself.

Difficulties come and go. Meanwhile, your own good qualities and the good things in life persist and remain.

Know Someone Who Has a Hard Time Accepting Difficulty?

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Rick’s Attachment Course: Join Rick for a 5-week online course on using the research-backed HEAL method to heal insecure attachment and create new neural pathways for interacting and connecting securely. You can learn more here.

About our guest: Dr. Lindsay Gibson is a clinical psychologist and bestselling author of a number of books, including Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents and her new book, How to Raise an Emotionally Mature Child.

Key Topics

• 0:00: Intro to Dr. Lindsay Gibson & what emotional maturity looks like
• 7:45: Why our culture undervalues emotional maturity 
• 12:56: The “good enough” parent
• 20:05: What happens to children with emotionally immature parents
• 27:15: Repair in adulthood
• 36:22: The importance of feeling understood
• 43:40: Mirroring: why it’s important and how to get better at it
• 49:07: Balancing connection and autonomy
• 53:39: The appropriate level of parental authority
• 1:04:34: Parenting mistakes to avoid
• 1:15:29: Recap with Dr. Lindsay Gibson

The post Being Well Podcast: Reparenting Yourself with Dr. Lindsay Gibson first appeared on Rick Hanson, PhD.

Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea

Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas

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Talk: Four Ways to Practice with Time

Timecodes & main topics:

• 00:00 – The Vastness of Time
  I reflect on the formation of the moon, the age of the universe, and the immense sweep of history as invitations into gratitude and humility.
• 05:49 – Timelessness and the Unconditioned
  I explore Buddhist teachings on the “deathless” and the possibility of an underlying stillness that exists amidst continual change. 09:36 – Impermanence and Letting Go
• I discuss how recognizing constant change can soften clinging, reduce suffering, and help us hold life more lightly.
• 14:15 – The Ecstasy of the Arising Moment
  I reframe impermanence by focusing not only on what is ending, but also on what is continually arriving and being given in each new moment.
• 19:01 – Mortality, Fear, and Inner Peace
  I share personal reflections on facing death, including my melanoma scare, the “scared monkey” inside us, and the possibility of peace alongside fear.
• 27:33 – Three Questions for the Time That Remains
  I explore how we can invest in ourselves, let go of what no longer serves us, and make room for what we truly want to let into our lives.
• 36:25 – Regret, Life Review, and Self-Compassion
  I reflect on mistakes, grief, unfairness, and the importance of recognizing your own goodness as you look back on your life.

A Meditation: Staying Present While Things Change

In this meditation, I guide you into staying present while life continues to change around and within you. Using the breath, spacious awareness, and a sense of openheartedness as supports, we explore how to rest more deeply in steadiness, vastness, and warmth amidst the flow of experience.

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The Practice:
Accept dependence.

Why?

Want to try a little experiment?

Stop breathing. Really. For a few seconds, maybe a few dozen seconds, and see how it feels.

For me, this experiment is an intimate way to experience a deep truth, that we live dependently, relying on 10,000 things for physical survival, happiness, love, and success.

For example, within half a minute of no air, most people are uncomfortable, after one minute, they’re panicking, and after four minutes, they’re brain-dead or severely damaged. Second by second, your life and mind require oxygen, the plants that “exhale” it, the sun that drives photosynthesis, and other stars blowing up billions of years ago to make every atom of oxygen in the next breath you take. Or think about the people you rely on – the touches, attention, and caring – or the medicines, wisdom teachings, civil society, technologies, or your own good efforts last year that you profit from today.

It’s kind of freaky and frightening to know that we live dangled by 10,000 vulnerable threads, many of which could be cut at any moment. On the other hand, opening to this truth can silence the lies of unwarranted self-criticism. Of course, we need others, of course, the underlying causes and conditions have to be present to succeed at anything, of course, we can’t grow roses in a parking lot. We are frail, soft, vulnerable, hurt by little things, and hungry for love. When you let this in, you’re not so hard on yourself – or others.

Accepting dependence brings you into harmony with the way it actually is. All things, from gophers to galaxies, arise and pass away in dependence on all other things. Dependence is nothing to be ashamed of, in spite of our culture’s hyper-emphasis on independence. Hearing the voice of someone you love, eating a strawberry, or taking a breath, realizing your dependence brings you into almost ecstatic gratitude when you see that the 10,000 vulnerabilities are actually 10,000 gifts.

How?

Consider some of the many things you depend on. Imagine that for the next year, you leave all your doors unlocked, give up a favorite food, and don’t speak with any friends or family. Let it sink in that you use or need many people and things each day. Try to have a matter-of-fact attitude about this, knowing that this is true for everybody, not just you.

Then look in the other direction, and recognize how so many others depend on you. They’re affected by how you smile, your tone of voice, and whether you pick up milk on the way home tonight. When I see this myself, it makes me feel good: I’m connected rather than isolated, and someone who makes a difference. It also makes me feel more tender and kindly toward others.

Much as people depend on you, you depend on you. The you that you are today has been gifted in thousands of ways, large and small, by previous versions of yourself. Like runners in a great relay race, you hand the baton each day to the you who wakes up the next morning. Think of some of the many things that earlier you’s have contributed to your life: problems solved, goals accomplished, dishes done, relationships nurtured, lessons learned. It’s simple and powerful: silently thank them. How does this feel?

Looking forward, consider how your future you depends on what you do today. Not as pressure, but tenderly, let it land that your future you is counting on you, right now. What will be important to this being that you will become? What could you do this year, this day, that would set up this future person – in his or her middle age or old age – to live with safety, health, happiness, and ease?

Last, be honest with yourself about your own needs, and the things that make a difference for you. What would be good to nourish or shore up? Paradoxically, the more open you are to the humility of dependence, the more straightforward you are about watering your personal fruit tree.

Know Someone Who Could Accept More Dependence?

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Rick’s Attachment Course: Join Rick for a 5-week online course on using the research-backed HEAL method to heal insecure attachment and create new neural pathways for interacting and connecting securely. You can learn more here.

Key Topics

• 0:00: Introduction to Secure Attachment and Attachment Styles
• 2:00: The research on becoming a “secure base”
• 8:17: How we internalize early sources of regulation and recognition
• 15:43: What happens when love is contingent
• 18:44: Forming a coherent narrative
• 29:14: Reparenting yourself
• 42:07: Rebuilding your sense of self
• 57:40: Using your secure base to explore, try, and fail
• 1:09:18: Recap

The post Being Well Podcast: Becoming Securely Attached to Yourself: Reparenting and Healing Insecure Attachment first appeared on Rick Hanson, PhD.

Click here to join the free Wednesday Meditations – which are open to everyone!

Talk: The Freedom Found in Bodily Awareness

Timecodes & main topics:

• 0:00 — Rick’s personal story of disconnection from the body
  Rick shares how he arrived at UCLA in 1969 “numb from the neck down,” and describes the beginning of his long journey toward re-inhabiting his body and reconnecting with buried emotional experience.
• 2:00 — Implicit memory, negativity bias, and emotional residue
  A deep dive into how emotional experiences become stored in the nervous system through implicit memory, why the brain is naturally biased toward negative experiences, and how old emotional material remains active in the body.
• 7:30 — “Emptying the bucket of tears one spoonful at a time”
  Rick explains the importance of resourcing ourselves before opening to difficult emotions, introducing the idea of “pendulating” between challenging experiences and feelings of safety or stability.
• 10:30 — Discovering suppressed love in the body
  Through a powerful story about a Rolfing session, Rick describes expecting to uncover pain and instead finding deep reservoirs of love that had also been pushed down and exiled.
• 17:00 — The five tracks of experience
  Rick explores the “tracks” of human experience — cognition, sensation, emotion, motivation, and behavior — and explains why mindfulness becomes transformative when we pay closer attention to the somatic and emotional tracks beneath thought.
• 24:00 — Four ways to resource yourself during difficult emotions
  Practical guidance for building the capacity to stay with challenging feelings, including mindfulness, calming the body, understanding why healing work matters, and drawing on compassion and social support.
• 29:00 — A somatic practice for cultivating determination
  Rick leads a micro-practice exploring how positive qualities like determination show up in the body, emotions, posture, and nervous system — and how embodied awareness helps strengthen these traits over time.
• 36:00 — Releasing old defensive patterns through bodily awareness
  Using a real-life example of interpersonal conflict, Rick demonstrates how noticing tension patterns in the body can help us soften reactivity, release old conditioning, and replace fear with courage and openness.
• 46:00 — “Wake down, not just wake up”
  Rick closes with an invitation to reconnect with the body as a path of healing and awakening — reminding us that most of human experience happens beneath verbal thought, in sensation, emotion, and motivation.

A Meditation: Mindfulness of Breathing

In this guided meditation, I explore mindfulness of breathing as a way to come home to yourself, relax the body, and rest in simple present-moment awareness. Through gentle attention to the breath and the whole body, this practice supports calm, groundedness, and an increasing sense of ease and well-being.

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The Practice:
Step into the cloud.

Why?

I had a lightbulb moment recently: I was feeling stressed about all the stuff I had to do (you probably know the feeling). After this went on for a while, I stepped back and kind of watched my mind, and could see that I was thinking of these various tasks as things, like big rocks that were rolling down a hill toward me and which needed to be handled, lifted, moved, fended off, or broken into pebbles. As soon as I dealt with one thingy boulder, another one was rolling toward me. Shades of Sisyphus.

Seen as brick-like entities, no wonder these tasks felt heavy, oppressive, burdensome. Yuch!

But then I realized that in fact, the tasks I needed to do were more like clouds than things. Clouds are made up of lots of vaporous little bits, those bits come together for a time due to many swirling causes, and then they swirl away again. Meanwhile, the edge or boundary of a cloud blurs into other clouds or the sky itself. There is a kind of insubstantiality to clouds, and a softness, a yielding.

For example, take writing an email message: It has lots of little parts to it (the points you need to take into account, and the words and sentences), it is nested in a larger context – your relationship to the receiver, the needs that prompted the email – that (in a sense) calls it forth, and it emerges and passes away. This email, this task, links to other tasks, sort of blurs into them. Fundamentally, the email is a kind of process, an event, rather than a thing. It’s like you could put your hand through it.

When I considered my tasks in this way, I immediately felt better: relieved, relaxed. Tasks felt fluid, like streams or eddies I was stepping into and influencing or contributing to as best I could before they swirled on and became something else. Not so weighty or full of inertia; not so resistant, so controlling of me; not bearing down on me, but instead, something I was flowing into. Then I didn’t feel weary dealing with them. They became fun, lighter; there was more freedom in moving through them.

And it’s not just tasks that are clouds. In a way, everything is a cloud. Everything is made of parts (“compounded”), everything arises due to causes (so nothing has absolute self-existence – even “I”), and everything passes away eventually. Everything in your experience and everything “out there” in the universe is a cloud: every sensation, thought, object, body, job, career, activity, relationship, rock, raindrop, planet, galaxy, and moment.

This doesn’t mean that clouds are meaningless or that they don’t have consequences. In fact, when you relate to the world in this way, you feel more connected to it, more a part of it, more tender toward it, and more responsible for it. You love the cloud!

How?

Start by noticing how everything is continually changing: both what’s in your inner world of thoughts and feelings and in your outer world of people, tasks, and physical stuff. Pay attention to endings and beginnings. And even if something persists, know that this is only temporary. Your own body is a cloud, continually changing.

Also, recognize how everything is made up of parts. For example, our reactions have parts (e.g., body sensations, emotions, viewpoints, wants), kitchen tables have parts, relationships have parts (e.g., history, aspects in different situations), and tasks have parts.

Appreciate how these changing parts arise and pass away due to many causes. Everything really is an eddy in the river of reality, emerging and changing and ending because of 10,000 causes upstream.

Try to feel these facts – impermanence, compoundedness, interdependence: the fundamental cloudiness of everything – intuitively, emotionally, and in your body, not just conceptualize them with your mind.

Then consider a task or situation that weighs on you in this light. Reflect on its many parts, on some of the causes that brought it into being, and on its inherent transience (even if it’s painfully long transience!). Try to see it more as a cloud than a brick.

Notice how your mind tries to turn clouds into bricks. To help us survive, the brain continually tries to make fluid processes (hard for lizards, mice, and monkeys to deal with) appear to be static entities (much more manageable). It does this through forming labels, categories, and concepts – and through presuming that everything is a thing-in-itself rather than only passing frothy foam on a transient wave in our ocean of a universe.

Enjoy the clouds. Relax. Flow into the clouds of your responsibilities, relationships, and roles. A cloud yourself, flow into them, through them, beyond them.

Know Someone Who Could Step into the Cloud?

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