The Higher Energy Podcast with hosts Paula Shaw and Robert Schwarz - Episode 002: Neurodharma: Science, Wisdom, and Highest Happiness with guest Dr. Rick Hanson

002: Neurodharma: Science, Wisdom, and Highest Happiness with Dr. Rick Hanson

Today, on Higher Energy, we are joined by special guest Rick Hanson Ph.D., who is a neuropsychologist, Senior Fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, and a New York Times best-selling author that has written and taught about the essential inner skills of personal well-being, psychological growth, and contemplative practice – as well as relationships, family life, and raising children.

Dr. Hanson is Founder of the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom, and has been an invited speaker at Google, NASA, Oxford, and Harvard, and taught in meditation centers worldwide.

He joins us today to discuss the new neuroscience of awakening and how internalizing our beneficial experiences helps us to better deal with the challenges of life. He explains how his simple, 4-step program, HEAL, blends neuroscience and practical psychology to grow greater mindfulness, emotional balance, and well-being in a way that creates powerful and lasting change in the body, particularly the brain.

Dr. Hanson shares how we can hardwire our brain and inner resources for greater happiness, peace, and well-being, and what we can do to grow the good in our brain in order to function from our highest potential and get the most out of life. He also explores seven practices for strengthening the neural circuitry of profound contentment and inner peace to grapple with the inevitable pains and sorrows of life, help heal old pain, and increase our resources for coping.

 

“There’s a radical transience in both physical reality and certainly in our experiences. That’s alarming when you really, really come to terms with it. And it’s such a beautiful thing for an individual to come into a receptive intimacy with their lived experience, in this moment, and to harvest and to receive into themselves what’s beneficial about it. There’s a tenderness in that. You’re giving to yourself, you’re standing up for yourself, you’re saying, “In this extraordinary, mysterious gift of a human life, I’m going to receive as much as I can and grow as much as I can from it, and then have all the more inside me to give to others.” – Dr. Rick Hanson

 

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