We had our Sunday Introduction to Meditation Class at Yoga Bliss. We practiced Dr. Kristin Neff‘s guided meditation called Self Compassion. Kristin is a professor of psychology and author of Self Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up & Leave Insecurity Behind. She’s conducted pioneering research into self-compassion and has developed an 8-week program to teach self-compassion skills. I learned about Kristin after listening to and interview with her in Rick Hanson‘s Compassionate Brain series. I encourage you to investigate these resources as both are generously offered as a community service.
We’ve been drawing on Rick’s work to explore how our we can use our minds to shape our brains. In The Buddha’s Brain: the Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom Rick writes:
Much as our body is built by the foods we eat . . . our minds are build from the experiences we have. The flow of experience gradually sculpts your brain thus shaping your mind. Most of the mind shaping remains unconscious – this is implicit memory. Implicit memory includes expectations, models of your relationships, emotional tendencies, general outlook. The implicit memory function establishes the interior landscape of your mind. What it feels like to be you. It’s based on slowly accumulating residues of lived experience. These residues either benefit you and others or they can be harmful. . . . According to the Buddhist Eight Noble Path’s principle of Wise Effort, we should create, preserve, increase beneficial implicit memories and prevent, eliminate or decrease harmful ones.
Rick goes on to explain the ways we can recruit the “machinery of memory” to gradually build a store of positive material in our brains. With intentional practice we can even use positive material to infuse negative memories and change their neuronal residue.
Our brains selectively store key details of experience with a bias toward the negative ones so we can recall them quickly to guard against threat. In recall, the brain rebuilds memories from these key features and uses its simulating capacities to fill in what’s missing. This rebuilding process gives us an opportunity to gradually shift the emotional tone of our inner landscape. When we activate a memory a large assembly of neurons and synapses forms an emergent pattern. If other things are on our minds at same time, especially if they are strongly pleasant or unpleasant, the amygdala and hippocampus will automatically associate them with that neural pattern. When memory leaves awareness its reconsolidated in storage with those associations.
Rick cautions:
If you repeatedly bring to mind negative feelings when a memory is activated then that memory will increasingly be shaded in a negative direction. For example, recalling failure while lambasting yourself will make that failure seem increasingly awful. On the other hand if you call up positive emotions while the memory is active those wholesome influences will slowly be woven into the fabric of memories.
Every time we can integrate positive feelings and views into painful, limiting states of mind we can build a little bit of neural structure. Over time, the accumulating impact of this positive material will change our brains: “synapse by synapse.”
In her interview, Kristin Neff talks about the debilitating effects that self judgment has in our culture. It’s no longer o.k. to be just o.k. Everyone is expected to be above average or we see our selves as somehow inadequate. Think about how many memories get stored with negative self judgments. In a way it’s like making an enemy of yourself! I know I’ve done this. I’m tooling along fine until I see myself naked after a shower. Somehow my eyes seem to look for “flaws”: sagging cheeks, wrinkled neck and my folds of belly fat – sadly I could easily go on. Sometimes when I see these rings of softness I remember the surprise I felt when my son told me his girlfriend referred to those folds on her own body as her “sweetness.” What a kind (and forgiving) characterization!
Just reading through Kristin’s guided meditation on self compassion was powerful. It made me slow down and acknowledge myself with the same kindness I would readily extend to some one else. Her sensitive words reminded me that we’re all in the same boat, we all feel inadequate in some way, we all make mistakes, this is our human condition and it’s o.k. Her guidance uses the steps Rick suggests to “take in the good”. She encourages recalling our essential goodness and actually moving from the thought of it to an experience of it. We dwell on the experience, taking in as much of the associated emotion and body sensation as we can. By placing our hands over our hearts we recruit our sensing and intending capacities to really make this compassionate open heart part of very being.
Rick says that taking in the good is not about putting happy positive face on everything or turning away from hard things. It’s about nourishing well being, contentment, peace inside – refuge you can always come from and return to. Little by little we’re building inner resilience that will better enable us to surf the waves of life that are sure to come.
You can find this week’s homework and other resources at:
Sunday Meditation Class 14 Homework