Train Your Brain
: The Five Essential Skills© Rick Hanson, Ph.D., 2005
TAKING IN THE GOOD
: Key Points"At the banquets of life, bring a big spoon."
What Is Taking In?
In a profound sense, we are what we remember - the slow accumulation of the registration of lived experience. That's what we have "taken in" to become a part of ourselves. Just as food becomes woven into the body, memory becomes woven into the self.The Importance of Taking In Positive Experiences
How to Take in the Good
The Science
Since you are building up records of experiences in your most visceral memory banks, you need to focus on the emotional and body sensation aspects of your positive experiences. Through the mindfulness skills you've already learned, really tune into the embodied sense of the good experience. For example, relax your breathing and and extend your awareness into the felt sense of the experience in your body.
General Attitudes
Try to be aware of any attitudes that say it's vain, selfish, sinful, or somehow unfair to feel good -- especially about yourself. Explore those attitudes -- and then let them go by relaxing your body, releasing the emotions embedded in the attitude, and disputing in your mind the illogical beliefs in the attitude.
Specific Actions Inside Yourself
#1 Help positive events to become positive experiences for you. You can do this by:
#2Extend the experience in time and space:
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Savor, relish the positive experience. It's delicious!
#3Sense that the positive experience is soaking into your brain and body - registering deeply in emotional memory. Perhaps imagine that it's sinking into your chest and back and brainstem. Maybe imagine a treasure chest in your heart.
Take the time to do this: 5 or 10 or 20 seconds. Keep relaxing your body and absorbing the positive experience.
#4For bonus points: Sense that the positive experience is going down into old hollows
and wounds within you and filling them up and replacing them with new positive
feelings and views.
These are typically places where the new positive experience is the opposite of, the antidote to the old one.
Like current experiences of worth replacing old feelings of shame or inadequacy. Or current feelings of being cared about and loved replacing old feelings of rejection, abandonment, loneliness. Or a current sense of one's own strength replacing old feelings of weakness, smallness.
The "replaced" experience may be from adulthood. But usually the most valuable experiences to replace are from our youngest years. They are the "tip of the root of the dandelion," the ones we need to pull to prevent the dandelion of upsets from growing back.
The way to do this is to have the new positive experience be prominent and in the foreground of your awareness at the same time that the old pain or unmet needs are dimly sensed in the background.
The new experiences will gradually replace the old ones. You will not forget events that happened, but they will lose their charge and their hold on you.
THIS IS A PROFOUND, FAR-REACHING, AND GENUINE WAY TO HELP YOURSELF GROW. YOU ARE LITERALLY CHANGING YOUR OWN BRAIN.
Important Kinds of Experiences to Take In
Introduction
Everybody has vulnerabilities, particular soft spots or "holes in the heart" which we yearn to be filled to make up for missing experiences (mainly from childhood). Reflect on yourself or ask a trusted friend what those might be for you. Then look specifically for experiences that would address your needs - or even take appropriate steps to evoke such experiences in yourself (e.g., ask a friend to explain a little what led her to say something nice about you). Then, once the experience arrives, you know what to do with it!
Common Key Experiences - and Potential Sources
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For all of these, look for opportunities to feel them in the moment, and reflect on the past for signs of them as well.
Just look inside. When you are calm and don't feel threatened, what sort of person are you? Of course, like everyone else, you wish the best for other people (and yourself). You can sense your own deepest qualities, even if they're sometimes veiled by the worries and sorrows we all feel. As an inherent property of the nervous system, there's a deep down essence or core in each of us that is awake, present, interested, and quietly happy. And if this sort of language speaks to you, you could also reflect on and deeepen your sense of your own soul, innermost being, or Buddhanature.
As you access a growing feeling of your innate goodness, let that sink in like any other beautiful experience.