TRAIN YOUR BRAIN COURSE

Begin the course at any time When: 2nd Tuesday of every month, 7 – 9:15 pm

Where: San Rafael Unitarian Church (directions below) Cost: Sliding scale, no one turned away for lack of funds,

suggested donation: $20-40/month

Rick Hanson, PhD and Rick Mendius, MD Contact: Rick Hanson, drrh@comcast.net

Overview

Key Features This course includes a monthly class, suggested readings, audio files of lectures, suggested exercises, and access to all previous course materials. Taught by a psychologist and a neurologist, it is down-to-earth, relentlessly practical, and user-friendly. It focuses on methods for activating the brain states of happiness, love, effectiveness, and wisdom – which are the central aims of the course. In short, participants learn how to use the mind to change the brain to benefit the whole being – and all other beings, as well. We emphasize skills, tools, and useful perspectives found at the intersection of neuropsychology and contemplative practice, but no background in these is needed. The atmosphere is relaxed and focused, and we address five fundamental subjects: • Steady awareness • Wholesome feelings • Good intentions • Caring heart • Wise action The course is organized around a cycle of 24 topics (see below) that you can enter at any time. You can engage one topic or all of them or any number in between. The suggested donation to the Heartwood Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom for the program is $20 - $40/month (sliding scale down to zero). Our guiding principles include: • A framework that is rational, empirical, skeptical, and utilitarian • A value on skillfulness, especially with the inner world of experience • A belief that each person truly can always do something – inside her head or in the outer world – that is beneficial for herself and others • Respect for the diversity of brains and minds, history and hopes • Offering self-help tools for responsible adults that are no substitute for professional care Logistics While we encourage people to take the course as a coherent series, you can come to any class meeting you like; the exception is the last three sessions, which require some prior participation, or

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permission from the instructors. If you’re coming to a class for the first time, you can get background information about the course at www.WiseBrain.org/materials.html. The atmosphere is warm, welcoming, informal, and very focused on the substantial material of each session. You can always get up for tea and cookies or to use the bathroom, and there will be one, 10-minute break. The suggested donation for the program is $20 - $40/month, paid to the non-profit Heartwood Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom (please contact Rick Hanson if you would like a scholarship). In keeping with Buddhist tradition, finances should never be a barrier to participating in the course. And we certainly welcome any additional contributions to the Institute to support its work! We encourage the development of community within the course – certainly a skillful means in its own right – and one expression of that is to invite and appreciate any volunteer help. The class sessions are on the 2nd Tuesday of every month, 7 – 9:15 pm. We start on time, so please come at least 15 minutes early to get comfortably seated. We end as close to on-time as possible. We meet at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Marin in Terra Linda (San Rafael), at 240 Channing Way. Directions: From Highway 101, take either the Freitas Parkway or the Lucas Valley Road exit to get onto Redwood Highway (the frontage road next to the freeway). From the south, bear initially right on the Freitas Pkwy off-ramp (not left, over the freeway, toward Northgate Mall), and then sharp left down onto Redwood Hwy; you have the right of way and do not need to stop as you go through this confusing exit. From the north, turn right onto Lucas Valley road, go under the freeway, and turn right at the second light, which is Redwood Highway. Proceed to Professional Center Parkway, which has a stoplight at a T-intersection with Redwood Highway, and head uphill. Turn right at Channing Way, and keep going up, up, up to the parking lot of the church. We meet in the Fireside Room, just to the right of the large koi pond in the courtyard to the right of the main entrance to the church. Registration Contact Rick Hanson at drrh@comcast.net. Or simply drop in, ideally 15 minutes before class begins. If you have any questions, email Rick or you can call him at 415/491-4900.

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Key Components of the Social and Emotional Systems of the Brain

Class Topics Steady Awareness 1. Parasympathetic nervous system – 2/13/07 Understanding the autonomic nervous system and its two wings. Costs of chronic sympathetic arousal. Methods for activating the parasympathetic system. Relaxation. Warm hands. Imagery. 2. Awareness of the body – 3/13/07 Beginning to train in steadiness of mind, mindfulness, and the awareness of change. Locations within the body, and the body as a whole. Differentiation and integration as key brain functions. Coming into your own body. 3. Your precious life – 4/10/07 The good fortune of a human birth. The universal wish to be happy. Recognition of death. Compassion for yourself. Being for yourself, on your own side. A sense of the possibilities of life. High aspirations. 4. Filling your cupboard – 5/8/07 The body’s molecular balance sheet of assets and liabilities. The biochemistry of peacefulness and contentment. Readily available nutrients that could help you feel calmer, less anxious, more attentive, and less blue. (In a departure from the overall emphasis on using mind to change matter, this class will present many ways to use matter to change matter.) 5. Concentration – 6/14/07 The importance of steadiness of mind for everyday coping and success, personal growth, and spiritual depth. Challenges of the modern world, with its cacophony, interruptions, intense pace,

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and demands for multi-tasking. Overview of ways to stabilize attention. Brief survey of the possible neurology of the factors traditionally considered to promote the states of extraordinary absorption known as “jhanas.” 6. Mindful presence – 7/10/07 Accepting impermanence. Not trying to solidify the changing world. Doing one thing at a time. The foundation for clear seeing. Being here now. The centrality of “being with,” distinct from “working with.” Survey of what are called the “Four Foundations of Mindfulness.” 7. Being in reality – 8/14/07 Wanting to know the truth. The Buddha and Beck: cognitive techniques for dealing with inaccurate, partial, negativistic thoughts. The enlightenment factor of investigation – applied to the psychological defenses of suppression/repression, disowning – in order to be more self-knowing, self-owning, and self-accepting. Wholesome Feelings 8. Positive emotions and taking in the good – 9/11/07 The neurological benefits of positive emotions; “happiness is skillful means.” The formation of psychological structure and the unfortunate primacy given to internalizing negative experiences. How to turn good experiences into good internal structures (one of the five essential inner skills). 9. Letting go – 10/7/07 (Another of the essential inner skills.) Review of methods already covered: relaxation and cognitive techniques. Additional methods: imagery, the Buddha’s advice for dealing with distracting thoughts, venting and other forms of emotional release, and disidentification. 10. From anxiety to security – 11/13/07 How traumas – micro- and macro- – affect the brain. Review of previously presented methods for letting go of anxiety. New methods that target anxiety. Seeing threats clearly, without the pitfalls of catastrophizing or viewing the world through rose-colored glasses. Making plans for what worries you, and surrendering to the remaining, inherent uncertainties of life. Consideration of increasing supportive, even protective allies. The power of taking refuge – whether in the traditional terms of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha – or in your own way. 11. From anger to peace – 12/11/07 The toxic power of anger. Applying previously learned methods to letting go of anger. The paradoxical power of taking responsibility for what angers you, and extending lovingkindness to your adversaries. Consideration of reducing the sources of contention in your life; disengaging from burning quagmires. The personal practice of non-contention. Cultivation of tranquility. Focusing on appreciation and gratitude. 12. From shame and guilt to a sense of worth – 1/8/07 The social machinery of shame. The harsh and primitive inner critic. The distinction between healthy remorse and unfair guilt. Methods for releasing shame and guilt. Honest inventory of your own good qualities. Taking in acknowledgement.

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13. From sadness to contentment – 2/12/07 Healthy mourning, grieving, and “the wound of the heart” – and unhealthy melancholy and depression. The contentment that experiences nothing missing in the present moment. Good Intentions 14. The power of intention – 3/11/08 “Everything rests on the tip of motivation.” Frontal lobe controls. Methods for clarity of purpose: verbal, imagistic, theatrical. 15. Energy and strength – 4/8/08 The neuropsychology of energy. Thyroid, oxygen, blood sugar. Exercises for feeling strong. Focus on your sphere of influence. Cultivating efficacy, potency, agency. Development of the will. 16. Tending to the causes – 5/13/08 “Wise View” about what leads to good results in life, and what does not. “Fearless inventory” of improving your purposes and plans in life. Creating sanctuary in the brain and mind for wholesome intentions. Caring Heart 17. Empathy – 6/10/08 Attunement: synchronizing two brains. Mirror neurons. Deepening tolerance of being with another. Giving attention over; “the bodily sacrifice of attention.” Looking beneath the surface. Accepting complexity, ambivalence, and conflict in others – and yourself. 18. Feeling felt – 7/8/08 Tolerating closeness. Dealing with past feelings of invasion, violation, intrusive control, “Trojan horses” of manipulative seductions, etc. HeartMath methods for calming and opening the heart, literally and figuratively. Feeling strong enough to rely on others. 19. Benevolent interdependence – 8/12/08 Enlightened self-interest of non-harming, of “giving no one cause to fear you.” Practices of compassion, lovingkindness, and sympathetic joy. Turning ill will to good will. Healthy assertiveness. Wise Action 20. Equanimity – 9/9/08 Hypothalamus-pituitary-amygdala circuitry. Reactivity to the feeling tone of experience (pleasant, unpleasant, neutral) leading to craving, clinging, and suffering. Ways to dampen amygdala reactivity. Profound patience. Neurology of impulse control, restraint, putting on the brakes. 21. Selflessness and service – 10/14/08 Survey of converging views from neuropsychology and Buddhism on the emptiness of “self.” Core self and autobiographical self. Observing the rise and fall of self circuitry in the mind, and the suffering caused by selfing. Survey of the notion of renunciation as applied to people with jobs and families.

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22. Wholesome generativity – 11/11/08 Surrendering to being your best. The possible neurology of the Jungian archetypes. Being carried by your highest aspirations and most wholesome qualities. Kindling “bodhichitta.” 23. Bliss . . . – 12/9/08 Applying methods learned in this course to the classic instructions to “steady the mind internally, quiet it, bring it to singleness, and concentrate it.” 24. . . . And beyond – 1/13/09 Liberating insight. What might be happening in the brain during enlightenment. “After the enlightenment . . . the laundry.” The ox-herding pictures in Zen; the Buddha drives a taxi.

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Overview of the Nervous System

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Your Wonderful Brain

© Rick Hanson, PhD, 2007 www.WiseBrain.org

Introduction

This is a summary of the key features and functions of your brain. For more information, check out the resources on the WiseBrain website.

Complexity Although your brain isn't heavy - about three pounds of soft, gooshy tissue like tapioca pudding - it has about 1.1 trillion cells altogether. One hundred billion of those are in the "gray matter," a kind of "skin" of nerve tissue wrapping around the "white matter" that comprises most of the bulk of the brain. The gray matter is where most of the action for conscious experience takes place. When a neuron fires, sending neurotransmitters across the synapse – the tiny space between it and another neuron it is connected with – that either excites or inhibits the receiving neuron. To simplify a little, the sum of all the excitatory and inhibitory signals a neuron receives from its “upstream” neurons determines whether it will fire itself – sort of like the dominant message from a crowd of people all shouting “go!” or “stop!” The receiving side of a synapse – the sensitive tip of the spike called a dendrite in the picture above – is the most molecularly complex structure in the body, built from 1100 different proteins. This tip has increased in complexity dramatically throughout evolution, indicating that the development of this fundamental crossroads has been vital in what has made us human.

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On average, each of the 100 billion neurons in your head has about 1000 connections with other neurons, creating a huge network of about 100 trillion synapses. Like a computer network built from one hundred trillion transistors, each representing a “bit” of information depending on whether it is “on” or “off.” Adding up all possible combinations of 100 billion neurons firing or not, the number of potential states of that neuronal network is approximately 10 to the millionth power: one followed by a million zeros. With all that connectivity, circular loops are routine in which – to simplify – the A neuron triggers B which lights up C which signals D which triggers A. This circularity allows and fosters: • The recursive processes needed for self-regulation - and which, after many layers and lots of evolution -- allow you to think about your own thinking • The dynamic and "chaotic" behavior of complex systems: it's not random in your brain, but it is inherently unpredictable. • Wandering stream of consciousness – Again to simplify: the C neuron in the circuit just mentioned could easily be part of another circuit having nothing to do with the first one. Nonetheless, because of that connection, when the first circuit fires the second is more likely to fire as well. That's why thinking about something like a dripping faucet can bring to mind something seemingly random like your grandmother's great oatmeal cookies. In sum, your brain is literally the most complex object known in the universe. More complex than the climate of our planet or an exploding star.

Speed Neurons typically fire 5 – 50 times a second, with millions and even billions of them pulsing in harmony with each other many times a second; the electrical currents of that pulsing are revealed as brain waves in an EEG. In the half second it takes you to clap your hands, billions of synapses have activated in your brain. Most brain activity is lightning fast and forever outside of awareness. The slower, more congealed turgid stuff that we call thought is just the observable tip of an iceberg of lightning quick electrical, chemical - and possibly quantum - activities.

Activity In the deepest sleep, and even in such a deep coma that artificial life support is needed, the brain is always humming away, always “on,” with billions of neurons firing every minute, in order to keep your body alive and ready for immediate survival activities. Consequently, your brain – about 2% of the weight of a typical person - consumes about 20% of the oxygen and glucose circulating in your blood.

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Evolution Your brain is the product of 3.5 billion years of intense evolutionary pressure, including 2.7 million years as tool-using hominids and over 100,000 years as homo sapiens. Human DNA is about 98-99% identical to chimpanzee DNA. But that crucial 1-2% difference is mainly the genetic factors affecting the brain – especially for its relationship functions. In fact, the latest science suggests that the evolution of the brain was driven in two steps having to do with the survival benefits of strong relationships. First, among vertebrates, many bird and mammal species developed pair bonding as a way to raise children who survived. (Remember that fish and reptiles generally do not raise their young and may in fact eat them if they happen upon them soon after they hatch.) The “computational requirements” of choosing a good mate, working things out together, and then raising young to survive – hey, it’s just sparrow and squirrel couples, but anyone who has raised kids knows what I’m talking about – required larger brains than those of reptiles or fish that dealt with similar environmental challenges but made their way in life on their own. By the way, it may be a source of satisfaction to some that polygamous species usually have the smallest brains. Second, building on this initial jump in brain size, among primate species, the larger the social group, the bigger the brain. (And the key word here is social, since group size alone doesn’t create a big brain; if it did, cattle would be geniuses.) In other words, the “computational requirements” of dealing with lots of individuals – the alliances, the adversaries, all the politics! – in a baboon or ape troupe pushed the evolution of the brain. In sum: More than learning how to use tools, more than being successful at violence, more than adapting to moving out of the forest into the grasslands of Africa, it was learning how to love and live with each other that drove human evolution!

Mind What is the reason for the remarkable complexity, speed, activity, and evolution of the brain? It is the mind. By “mind,” we mean the flows of information within the brain; a synonymous term is “mental activity.” Much as the function of the heart is to move blood around, the function of the brain is to move information around. The standard view among psychologists and neurologists is that most – if not all – subjective, immaterial states of mind have a one-to-one correspondence with underlying objective, material states of brain. (The distinction between “most” and “all” refers to the possibility of transcendental factors outside the realm of conventional scientific models of the universe.)

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Within this standard framework, the mind is what the brain does. In effect, the mind consists of the representations of the brain about the state of the world, the state of the organism’s body, and the state of the organism’s mind (which would be representations of representations). Just like the menu is not the meal, and the map is not the land itself, those representations are not reality itself. They may be pretty good approximations, but they are not ever complete and entirely true. For example, consider going for a walk with a dog: the dog hears ultrasonic noises and smells things that you do not, but you see in color (presumably) while the dog does not. Physical reality is the same for both of you, but your perception and thus your experience of it will be somewhat different. This point may seem merely intellectual or even confusing at first, but it is important to absorb its cautionary and humbling implications. The brain constructs views about the world, and about the state of your body and your mind, but those views are also one of the four objects of attachment noted by the Buddha as sources of suffering. Even with the healthiest brain in the world, we need to hold those views lightly, as provisional, best-guess, probably-at-least-partly-wrong, and always incomplete formulations about reality. And for someone with a wounded brain, this caution is especially important. Head injuries, strokes, ADHD, depression, and so on all tend to predispose people to be particularly selective or distortive in what they notice about reality. In such cases, it is really beneficial to be aware of these tendencies, put in correction factors (like double-checking), and rely on trustworthy others for reality checks.

Integration of Mind and Brain This linking of mind and brain has three important implications. First, as your mind changes, your brain changes. Your brain changes both temporarily, millisecond by millisecond, AND it changes in lasting ways because – in the famous saying of the Canadian psychologist, Donald Hebb – "neurons that fire together, wire together." The fleeting flow of experience leaves behind lasting marks on your brain, much like a spring shower leaves little tracks on a hillside. For example, the fine motor areas of pianists are measurably thicker than those of non-pianists. Similarly, the portions of the hippocampus that are responsible for spatial memory are discernibly thicker in experienced London taxi drivers compared to when they started their training. On a darker note, chronic serious trauma and stress lead to a noticeably smaller hippocampus, which also has a central role in registering new experiences into memory. Second, as your brain changes, your mind changes. For example, if millions of your neurons start firing together in relatively slow rhythms – called Alpha waves – you will experience a growing sense of peacefulness and calm. Alternately, if your hypothalamus tells your pituitary to tell your

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adrenal glands to release epinephrine, cortisol, and other stress hormones, you will feel revved up to fight or flee. Third, you can use your mind to change your brain to benefit yourself – and everyone else whose life you touch. It may seem a little disorienting at first to think about “using your mind to change your brain to change your mind,” to intervene within your own brain at the organic, material level. But it's actually very natural. For an everyday example, consider how you might routinely change your brain with a cup of coffee or tea – or a donut! – to feel more focused in an afternoon meeting. And for a more profound example, the image just below shows a part of the brain that is very active during deep meditation or prayer – when the rest of the brain is relatively quiet, and thus shown in gray and not “lit up” in orange. The area in orange in the slide is called the anterior (frontal) cingulate gyrus, or ACC, which plays a central role in controlling attention. With routine meditation, the ACC and some other regions become measurably thicker. You can use your mind to change your brain to benefit your being in two ways. First, you can use your mind to activate brain states, right now in the moment, that promote patience or inner peace or other positive qualities in response to difficulties, such as wounds to your brain.

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Second, since “neurons that fire together, wire together,” by deliberately cultivating wholesome states of mind, over time you create permanent, structural changes in your brain. Those changes may be a matter of uncovering a Buddha Nature, or Transcendental Awareness, or True Self that was there all along – but the “removal of the obscurations” is still a change within a person’s brain. These scientific findings in modern psychology and neurology offer incredibly good news. They confirm the ancient teachings of the Buddha about the possibility of each person transforming his or her life – even to the point of enlightenment. They nourish conviction, sometimes called faith: one of the seven factors of enlightenment. They explain why it is really beneficial to do certain practices, which encourages right effort. And they suggest new practices that may increase the power and penetration of traditional ones.

Mind Does Not Reduce to Brain Nevertheless, with all the potential benefits of a scientific understanding of the brain, it is very important to remember that the mind does not reduce to the brain – even without reference to possible transcendental factors, and definitely if you presume such factors, as we do. Within a purely Western, scientific framework, it is clear that the mind is in some ways causally independent of the brain: • To be unavoidably technical: mind is patterns of information represented by patterns of matter. Since much mental information can be represented by any suitable neural circuit – much like a picture can be represented by any available RAM on your computer – it is functionally independent of its physical substrate. • This independence enables thoughts (and other aspects of mind) to be the fundamental cause of other thoughts; the brain carries thoughts but it does not necessarily cause them. • Mind can cause changes in matter (the material brain) through its embedding in the matter that represents it; for example, immaterial thoughts of gratitude are embodied in cascading physical processes which can trigger physical circuits that dampen the release of stress hormones.

Lifelong Learning Humans have the longest childhood of any animal on the planet – a remarkable fact. Since children are very vulnerable in the wild, why would evolution risk such a long childhood? The reason is that there has been a big payoff - a net adaptive advantage - in giving the brain time, during childhood, to learn a vast number of things, and to become trained to be capable of the additional learning during adulthood that enables a person to adapt to and thrive in his or her environments. All this learning means that the actual structure of the brain must change over time, in a dynamic unfolding process enabled by mechanisms like these: • Neuronal pruning from the moment of birth: a kind of natural selection within your own brain in which inactive neurons die (“use it or lose it”) • Greater excitability of individual neurons due to increases in their activity

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• Increased blood flow to active neuronal regions • Stronger synapses between neurons that are firing • New synapses – “arborization” – among active neurons, like eager spring growth of twigs and buds stretching toward each other in the great forest of the brain Interestingly, the part of the brain that takes the longest time to fully develop is the prefrontal cortex, which is centrally involved in the "executive functions" of planning and the regulation of feelings and actions.

Stability and Instability The brain is continually moving back and forth between stable states followed by disturbance and then reorganization into a new stability. In a sense, stability constitutes a signal (in that it is unlikely, in terms of information theory), while instability is a backdrop of “noise” – though very fertile noise, indeed. These rhythms of stability and instability occur both over long time scales – such as the years of adolescence – and very quickly, such as dozens, perhaps even hundreds of times a second. Stability is needed to have any kind of place to operate from in the world, and instability is needed to have any kind of learning or adaptation. Within your brain, large numbers of ad hoc neural assemblies – whose individual neuronal members keep changing – are continually pulsing. Each pulse is a momentarily stable waveform which rapidly decays and disintegrates – an illustration of impermanence, one of the three fundamental characteristics of existence identified by the Buddha. Then there is a kind of fertile instability, an instant of spacious neurological possibility, out of which the next pulse of stable order comes. That spaciousness is a kind of emptiness akin to the absolute nature posited in Tibetan Buddhism within which the universe eternally flickers into and out of existence. In sum, because of the multiplicity and speed of neural assemblies, there are many, many pulses of functional emptiness every second in your brain.

Specialization and Teamwork The brain works through an exquisite combination of specialization and teamwork. On the one hand, different parts of the brain do specialized things. For example, one part handles producing meaningful speech while another part is in charge of comprehending it. Similarly, there's a dedicated system for processing faces. But on the other hand, those various parts work intimately together. Connectivity is the hallmark of the brain, and interestingly, a busy network system is more responsive to individual messages getting through: Paradoxically, noise in a network fosters clear signals! As Robert Heinlein said, "Specialization is for insects." This property of teamwork means that information such as memories is often widely distributed throughout the brain, not in one place. And under many conditions, one part can gradually take over the function of another if it's damaged, an example of what is called “neuroplasticity.”

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Further, the self itself is not localized to any single region of the brain. In the image just below (from Gillihan, et al., Psychological Bulletin, January, 2005), each one of the little squares, plusses, and crosses represents a different part of the brain activating during different self-oriented activities (e.g., recognizing oneself in a picture, deciding what one wants). Self is spread out in the brain, which means that damage to a part of the brain can affect the sense of self, but usually only to a partial degree. And it means that if you quiet the sense of self through not identifying with things or taking them so personally, you tend to quiet the brain overall – which is useful during meditation and other similar activities.

Individuality Each brain is unique, for many reasons. First, there is genetically-based variation in the quantity and sensitivity of receptors in the brain for dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, and probably other important neurotransmitters. Second, new research is revealing subtle but important differences in certain aspects of male and female brains. Third, the synaptic connections that correspond to something as simple as the number one differ in a thousand tiny ways in the brains of different people.

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Fourth, whatever our genetic endowment might have been, events in utero and from the moment of birth to this present instant have all influenced your brain. All this calls for respect for individual differences. And for compassion for ourselves and others. As it is traditionally said, there are four types of practitioners: those for whom practice is easy and quick, for whom practice is hard and quick, for whom practice is easy and long, and for whom practice is hard and long. Whichever group you belong to, what matters most is to practice wherever you are and feed the causes that will lead you to a good result. And one of the most effective, most fruitful causes to support is the care and feeding of your own brain!

Natural State of Your Brain

When you are fed, unthreatened, pain-free, and not upset, your brain is characterized by being awake and alert, with activation of the parasympathetic nervous system (discussed a few minutes ago), surges of pleasant hormones and neurotransmitters, receptivity to relationship, and a large-scale integration or coherence of billions of neurons firing together in resonant harmony. In short, the baseline condition of your brain is aware, even-keeled, contented, benign, and integrated. It’s remarkable that this is the resting state of an organ that’s been finely honed by 650 million years of evolution of multi-celled creatures in an environment in which life typically was, as Hobbes put it, “nasty, brutish, and short.” This is your home base. It may have been disturbed by an injury or a chemical imbalance or a degenerative conditions. But wherever you go – deep, deep down where your essential nature arises, you are always already home. As J.R.R. Tolkein wrote just below, no matter how dark it gets, there is always light shining through: Exhausted, crawling with Frodo up the slopes of Mount Doom in the center of the gloom of Mordor, Sam sees “peeping among the cloud-wrack . . . a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.” Or, to quote Ajahn Sumedho: Be wisdom itself, rather than a person who isn't wise trying to become wise. Trust in awareness, in being awake, rather than in transient and unstable conditions.

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The Two Wings of Psychological Growth and Contemplative Practice

© Rick Hanson, Ph.D., 2007

www.WiseBrain.org

Introduction Any form of psychological development – and its epitome in refined contemplative practice – requires two fundamental activities/skills/functions:

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• Being with what is (both subjective and objective, internal and external, mind and matter) • Working with what is These are the two wings that enable the great bird to fly. But they are sometimes held as an either-or choice, or in conflict. For example, some therapists and some spiritual teachers seem to stress one wing in particular or criticize the other one. And in our own lives, sometimes our instinct is to be with a feeling, longing, etc. but the situation or person we’re with is pulling for us to work with it (and vice versa). Consequently, it’s really helpful to understand what each “wing” really is, the strengths and pitfalls of each, and how they can work best together.

Description of Each Wing Being With This involves: • The initial orientation of attention (a fundamental neurological activity) • Deepening attentiveness (a similarly fundamental action in the brain) • Witnessing, knowing – For example, as the Buddha’s discourse (called a “sutta”) on mindfulness of breathing says, “Breathing in long, know that you are breathing in long; breathing in short, know that you are breathing in short.” • Accepting – Surrendering to what is. Letting it be. (Of course, this does not mean approving . . . or disapproving.) • Non-fabricating – Not adding anything yourself to what is. No effort whatsoever, no nudging of reality or experience in one direction or another. • Mindfulness Initially when we “be with,” there is typically a dualistic observer/observed. But with continued practice – both in the short-term, as during a session of meditation, and over the months and years – there often comes a growing sense of unification with experience and reality, a oneness that is not an ultimate enlightenment, but still palpably felt. You can be with the flowing stream of experience rolling through – what is often meant by “mindfulness” – or you can be with a single object of attention, and become increasingly absorbed in it. This latter orientation is what’s known generally as “concentration” (“samatha” in Pali) in contemplative practice; intense and sustained states of concentration are called “jhanas” or “samadhis.” Note that both mindfulness and concentration require some – or great – steadiness of mind. Working With This is essentially a matter of tending to the garden of the mind and heart, planting wholesome seeds and restraining and pulling unwholesome weeds.

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We “work with” whenever we: • Attempt to become more skillful, more capable, more patient, less angry, more confident, more resourceful – more of just about anything • Actively investigate the contents of our experience or the outer world • Let go of painful feelings, deliberately take in positive experiences, or use the will • Uncover or nurture our innate and wonderful qualities • Engage any progressive path of learning, self-development, self-improvement The term for this in Buddhism is “bhavana,” which means mental cultivation or development; it also means meditation. This is one of the three “grounds for meritorious action;” the other two are virtue and generosity.

How to Be With and Work With? Most of applied psychology, as well as most of the Buddhist dharma, is an extended answer to this question, so here is just a very summary response. Being With We be with when we: • Observe • Are mindful • Accept, let be, let flow • Have equanimity (both shallow and deep): do not pursue, do not resist, do not cloud over • Relax selfing; do not fabricate; engage what is called “choiceless awareness” Working With We work with when we: • Intend the good • Let go of something, from relaxing to deep breathing to challenging troublesome thoughts • Actively engage insight, whether conventionally psychological (e.g., making connections with softer and younger material, clarifying inner conflict) or contemplatively informed (e.g., looking for impermanence, or the suffering that comes from clinging) • Model people we admire, from Uncle Charlie to the Buddha • Take in the good; internalize positive experiences

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• Engage any of the four right efforts (mentioned above) • Restrain, abandon, uproot any of the hindrances: greed, aversion, sloth and torpor, restlessness and worry, and doubt • Practice lovingkindness • Intentionally strengthen any of our good qualities

Strengths of Each Both of these wings have many strengths. Being With This aspect of practice helps us in many ways: • Teaches that everything flows, that everything is impermanent • Shows us things clearly, without the interference of our efforts to influence them • Demonstrates that it all keeps going on, without a self being necessary • Teaches acceptance, surrender. Ajahn Chah: “If you let go a little, you will be a little happy. If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of happiness. If you let go completely, you will be completely happy.” • Emphasizes awareness itself. This draws us more into abiding as awareness, into the presence of mere presence. • Shows the value of slowing down, not doing, relaxation, and peace. • Draws you into the appreciation of simply what is, exactly as it is – including yourself Working With The fruits of this include: • Absolutely real changes in body and mind and heart. In one way of putting it: you become a better person. • These undeniable changes build conviction and faith in the path of awakening through experiencing the results of practice. • The lessons of training the mind and heart in one sphere have “generic” features that can be applied to other areas (e.g., that perseverance furthers) • An inherent moral view, that helpful is better than unhelpful. In light of these benefits, the occasionally intense criticism of “working with” is perplexing. For example, Care of the Soul, by Thomas Moore (mostly a wonderful book) takes great issue with

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directed, solution-oriented approaches such as cognitive-behavioral therapy. In the Buddhist sphere, take this quotation from Jon Kabat-Zinn (whom I respect highly, and who has made an extraordinary contribution to mental health worldwide): “Don’t change yourself, experience yourself. Don’t change your life, live your life.” While there may be some useful guidance in that quote, consider its vehemence, and consider how the inverse phrasing might sound: “Don’t experience yourself, change yourself. Don’t live your life, change your life.” When constructed in this either-or way, both phrasings are reductionistic, incomplete, and ultimately absurd. In Buddhism – as well as in most approaches to psychological resilience and happiness – there is absolutely a strong emphasis on: • A progressive path in which one learns from experience, and over time becomes more skillful, virtuous, and refined • Personal responsibility for self-improvement • Clarity about how our actions lead to results (the law of karma), and thus the importance of enacting the causes of the good and restraining the causes of the bad • Lists of wholesome qualities to increase, and lists of negative qualities (such as the “hindrances” and “defilements” mentioned in the Buddhist suttas) to diminish • Virtue and generosity as the foundation of any genuine mental health and spiritual realization • Removing the obscurations of one’s true, positive, benign nature • In Buddhism, Right Effort is one of the elements of the Eightfold Path (the fourth of the Noble Truths), which consists of the “four right efforts”: to foster the arising and the continuance of what is wise, and the prevention and diminishment of what is unwise Sometimes people consider Buddhism to be little more than a matter of being more aware, relaxed, and nice. That’s a great foundation, but there is much more to it than that. Taken as a whole, it is a vigorous, active, even muscular path. It asks everything of us. And so does any genuine path of real healing and growth. It is easy to underestimate the fullness of the undertaking to be a happy, loving, productive, and wise person – just like it is easy to underestimate what’s involved in getting a college degree, or raising a child, or running a marathon. Life is the real deal, and thriving in it requires a whole-hearted engagement in which we get better at things – including getting better . . . at getting better!

Pitfalls of Each On the other hand, each wing carries certain risks, especially if taken to an extreme or not balanced by the other wing:

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Being With This mode of practice can be misunderstood to be little more than: • A kind of spacey, pleasant vacuity. Almost like being stoned. • Or a flabby indifference: “it’s all the same, whatever” Working With The downside of this mode is more obvious when it’s taken to an extreme or is out of balance. That’s because working with your experience – or your circumstances (i.e., external, objective reality) – can be very powerful, but like a medicine that is strong enough to do good, working with things is strong enough also to do harm. The possibilities include: • The inherent stress of striving • The machinery of craving, desire for sense pleasures, etc. gets applied to psychological or spiritual pursuits • What Chogyam Trungpa called spiritual materialism, which is the reification – the “thinging” – and freezing of fundamentally intangible processes of experience, reality, and realization. • Spiritual pride

A Deeper Union Although – as noted in the introduction to this essay – the two wings are often seen in a kind of tension, actually they support each other profoundly. A Single Great Wing, Really For starters, they intertwine in multiple ways that make them “non-dual.” For example, the repeated act of simply being with something – the smell of an orange, the sensation of the breath in the belly, a memory of summer camp – cannot help but cultivate many wholesome qualities in the mind and heart, such as mindfulness, concentration, detachment, and wisdom. And just being with difficult experiences – really experiencing your experience – is one of the premier methods in psychology for helping them to release from the mind and body. Similarly, working with anything skillfully requires mindful awareness, and close attention to the details of inner experience and the outer world. We should be with what it’s like to work with something; then the act of working with itself becomes the object of spacious attentiveness. For example, in meditation you are often aware of the skillful (and not so skillful) efforts in your mind to remain aware. On the other hand, we should cultivate and thus work with the capacity to sustain choiceless awareness – a faculty of the mind (and certainly the brain) like any other. Both wings share qualities of investigation – though in working with, this is particularly directed and active – which is one of the seven factors of enlightenment, and some might say the most fundamental one. In the same way, both wings are the result of positive intentions. In other words,

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they arise from common causes; to risk another metaphor, they are the mighty limbs of a tree growing out of a single trunk. A Natural Rhythm of Mutual Support Further, the wings support each other in a natural rhythm. Being with reveals things to work with; in meditation as in therapy – and life! – we step in to experience our experience fully and then we step back to reflect upon it. And working with identifies new things to become more aware of, and new fruits of practice to appreciate and savor. Which then give us more to reflect upon, and the cycle continues. These rhythms can ebb and flow over the course of just seconds – or months and years.

Is One Wing Primary? Nonetheless, notwithstanding these synergies and integrations, we may well ask, is one of the two wings more primary than the other? I believe that the answer is Yes, and that being with is more fundamental, for several reasons. First, our fundamental true nature is awake, interested, benign, and happy. You can see that in ordinary life when you are rested, fed, physically comfortable, and not upset: unless there is an underlying issue with mood or anxiety, you probably feel at least mildly happy at those times, and you wish the world well. That’s the innate resting state of the mind. Neurologically, the resting state of the healthy brain manifests a deep coherence in its brain wave patterns. From a Buddhist perspective, there is a strong line of teaching – particularly prominent in the Zen and Tibetan lineages, but well represented in the Theravadan tradition as well – that the essence of the mind and heart is “stainless purity,” “Bodhichitta,” and similar terms. Buddha nature is our true nature; therefore, your true nature is Buddha nature. While the teachings of the Buddha are generally silent or ambiguous about the existence or non-existence of a Divine Transcendental Something – call that God – and are thus agnostic and compatible with the great religions of the world, the sages and saints in those, theistic traditions speak of an underlying Divinity infusing everything (including you and me), or of an eternal soul, or of a spark of the Divine illuminating our essence. Bottom-line, in the ultimate sense, there is nothing to cultivate at all. You are always already radiant consciousness, loving, happy, and wise. Pretty good news! Second, there is a fundamental categorization of all human activity in terms of Be, Do, and Have. (A related categorization is found in the three forms of the Divine in Hinduism: Create, Preserve, Complete [Destroy].) Of these, Be comes first because it is primary and encompasses the other two; for example, you can Be Do-ing without distorting or falsifying Doing, but you cannot Do Be-ing without distorting and falsifying Being . . . In this framework, being with is obviously “Being,” while working with is definitely a kind of Doing. Third, Western culture – and particularly American – really is kind of berserk in its tilt toward endless striving and its accompanying epidemic of feeling like one is . . . chronically . . . falling . . . .

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. . . short. Most of us are, frankly, tilted way too much toward various flavors of working with. I know I am. Making being with the first thing we think about, rather than (typically) the last one is a wholesome correction to the imbalance most of us suffer from. Fourth, truth be told, sometimes you really just can’t work with something: it’s too overwhelming, or you’re too tired or too flooded or too distracted or too undone. Sometimes you simply have to bear it, and then what do you do? As we have all discovered, again and again, you can always be with it mindfully, and when you do, that simple shift changes everything. Mindful awareness is indeed the ultimate safety net when all else fails. Fifth, it is mindful awareness – being with, in other words – that really reveals the contents of mind and world, their endless flux and interdependent co-arising, and how the least whiff of clinging in any of its myriad forms leads inevitably – and often instantly – to suffering for oneself (and usually for others). For example, Christina Feldman quotes one of her own teachers in summarizing the Buddhist path as: Know the mind. Shape the mind. Free the mind. Not a bad summary, at all! To know the mind is largely a matter of “being with,” and notice that it comes first, before shaping the mind (which is about “working with”). Knowing the mind enables us to shape it, and we can’t shape it until we know it somewhat. Then, at the end of the road – and sometimes in the beginning and the middle, too – comes the great matter of freeing the mind. That’s when we move beyond any willful knowing and shaping – beyond any deliberate being with and working with – to a kind of effortless abandonment of all efforts, all selfing, and all grasping. In its milder, less complete forms, that freeing of the mind comes in those moments of letting go: the clenched fist of mind opens and the light of pure selfless awareness shines through like grains of sands streaming between your fingers. And in its complete form, the utter freeing of the mind is Nibbana, the immersion in what the Buddha called the Unconditioned. He insisted that was a real possibility for everyone, whether monastic or householder, female or male, Brahmin or untouchable, you or me.

Personal Practice All this being said, it is worth inquiring into your own strengths and weaknesses with the two wings. Just like most of us have one arm stronger than the other one, most of us have a stronger wing. Consider these questions: • Are you more inclined to be with or work with as your initial orientation to something difficult?

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• Are you more adept at being with or working with? • What do the people around you, at home and work, reward you for, or count on you for: to be with things or to work with them? Based on their answers, you might like to focus on developing one wing in particular. It is both simple and easy – and complex and a lifelong undertaking – to do that. The simple part is to bring awareness to the wing you want to strengthen and use it more in daily life. Just that will develop it, since “neurons that fire together, wire together.” The more complex part is to place yourself in situations or with people that will naturally “flap” the wing you’re developing. For example, certain Buddhist practices emphasize being with, such as “just sitting” in Zen. Others delve deeply into working with, such as some of the visualization practices in Tibetan Buddhism.

Conclusion Like anything, if you bring awareness to it and even a little attention, you will get better and better at it. And remember both to be with and work with . . . the process of being with and working with!

Side View of the Brain (looking left)

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Major Emotional Circuits