Deep down do you feel at ease ? If like me you are working on feeling more at ease in your body and mind you may enjoy and learn from these articles by Rick Hanson. The first one is called ' Pet the Lizard '.

Your brain evolved in three stages (to simplify a complex process):
· Reptile - Brainstem, focused on avoiding harm
· Mammal - Limbic system, focused on approaching rewards
· Primate - Cortex, focused on attaching to "us"

Of course, the brain is highly integrated, so these three key functions – avoiding, approaching, and attaching – are accomplished by all parts of the brain working together. Nonetheless, each function is particularly served by the region of the brain that first evolved to handle it. This fact has significant implications.

For example, in terms of avoiding harm, the brainstem and the structures just on top of it are fast and relatively rigid. Neuroplasticity – the capacity of the brain to learn from experience by changing its structure – increases as you move up both the evolutionary ladder and the layered structures of the brain.

Consequently, if you want to help yourself feel less concerned, uneasy, nervous, anxious, or traumatized – feelings and reactions that are highly affected by “reptilian,” brainstem-related processes – then you need many, many repetitions of feeling safe, protected, and at ease to leave lasting traces in the brainstem and limbic system structures that produce the first emotion, the most primal one of all: fear.

Or to put it a little differently, your inner iguana needs a LOT of petting!

How?

To begin with, I’ve found it helps me to appreciate how scared that little lizard inside each one us is. Lizards – and early mammals, emerging about 200 million years ago – that were not continually uneasy and vigilant would fail the first test of life in the wild: eat lunch – don’t be lunch – today.

So be aware of the ongoing background trickle of anxiety in your mind, the subtle guarding and bracing with people and events as you move through your day. Then, again and again, try to relax some, remind yourself that you are actually alright right now, and send soothing and calming down into the most ancient layers of your mind.

Also soothe your own body. Most of the signals coming into the brain originate inside the body, not from out there in the world. Therefore, as your body settles down, that sends feedback up into your brain that all is well – or at least not too bad. Take a deep breath and feel each part of it, noticing that you are basically OK, and letting go of tension and anxiety as you exhale; repeat as you like. Shift your posture – even right now as you read this – to a more comfortable position. As you do activities such as eating, walking, using the bathroom, or going to bed, keep bringing awareness to the fact that you are safe, that necessary things are getting done just fine, that you are alive and well.

Throughout, keep taking in the good of these many moments of petting your inner lizard. Register the experience in your body of a softening, calming, and opening; savor it; stay with it for 10-20-30 seconds in a row so that it can transfer to implicit memory. Learn to defeat the innate negativity bias of the brain – whose unfortunate default setting is to be Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones.

Some have likened the mind/brain to a kind of committee. Frankly, I think it’s more like a jungle! We can’t get rid of the critters in there – they’re hardwired into the brain – but we can tame and guide them. Then, as the bumper sticker says, they wag more and bark less.

Or relax, like a lizard at ease in the sun.
Tomorrow advise from Rick again on how to sooth the mammalian brain

             Patience is the companion of wisdom.

                     - St. Augustine

A Blessing for One Who is Exhausted

At first your thinking will darken
And sadness take over like listless weather.
The flow of unwept tears will frighten you.

You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.

Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.

When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic,
Time takes on the strain until it breaks;
Then all the unattended stress falls in
On the mind like an endless, increasing weight,

The light in the mind becomes dim.
Things you could take in your stride before
Now become laborsome events of will.

Weariness invades your spirit.
Gravity begins falling inside you,
Dragging down every bone.

The ride you never valued has gone out.
And you are marooned on unsure ground.
Something within you has closed down;
And you cannot push yourself back to life.

You have been forced to enter empty time.
The desire that drove you has relinquished.
There is nothing else to do now but rest
And patiently learn to receive the self
You have forsaken for the race of days.
Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself.

Stay clear of those vexed in spirit.
Learn to linger around someone of ease
Who feels they have all the time in the world.

Gradually, you will return to yourself,
Having learned a new respect for your heart
And the joy that dwells far within slow time.

by John O'Donohue

One of my most painful childhood memories is of a deep feeling of shame and isolation. I can remember vividly the little bedroom, my burning bottom (from the poker ), but by far the worst part was the feeling of being cut off from the love and warmth 'down stairs '. Miss Forde '(the local shopkeeper) had told my Mum about how I was buying lots of sweets for myself and my friends and so the truth came out . I had been stealing money from my Mum's purse (funnily enough I don't remember being ashamed of the stealing ! ) just the the shame of my adored father slapping and detaining me in my room.

Over the last few days I have worked this memory using yesterdays meditation.

Feeling myself back in that room, bringing the love and warmth of the meditation with me, I became strongly aware of Daddy's presence , of his deep love for me, I knew from the inside out that each slap was from a deep place of love and concern. Those slaps , the burning sensation, the separation ,were all a sign of his love and concern. What had been a deeply painful experience was transformed into one of love. I suppose this memory was so vivid for me because punishment and slapping happened so rarely in my house . And yet until doing this meditation I had always felt hard done by and a victim. It amazes me how limited my view had been.

Meditation Exercise

Sit comfortably, allow your body to relax. Take a nice deep breath in and exhale slowly allowing yourself to let go and relax even more. Become aware of the chair supporting you, relax.take your time. . . . .

Now call to mind anything that gives you a good feeling. Maybe something in your immediate environment , a picture, a pet, some memory, anything that gives you a positive experience. It doesn't need to be a big deal and it can come and go in awareness , simply the intention to have a positive experience present will activate unconscious circuitry and even if they are activated unconsciously those neurons are firing together and so they are wiring together to form new beneficial structures in your brain.

Next, now that you have a positive experience, take a moment to expand it in time and space. In other words savor it, explore its nuances, the different nice qualities of this positive experience, and also see if you can extend it in space in the sense of it filling your body. Maybe sensing that you are breathing it in and out.

Now for the third step , in your own way intend and sense that this positive experience is soaking into your brain and body, registering deeply in your emotional memory stores. Maybe feel like it is sinking into your back and chest. Perhaps sifting deeply into your mind.

Now for the fourth step. If you can get a sense of something mildly to moderately difficult or painful in your life. Perhaps an experience you had as a child.Get a sense of it even maybe where it is located in your body, and then with every breath just feel or imagine or have the idea of this new powerful positive experience sinking into, kind of soothing those inflamed and raw painful spaces in your heart. Perhaps with a sense of the new positive experience today giving that little child deep down inside you, deep down inside every person what that little child should have received, when you were young, but didn't or couldn't for whatever reasons. Giving that child today whet he or she really needed and every child deserves when you were young.

And last see if you can get a sense that you will carry forward the benefits of this new positive experience sinking into you, benefiting yourself and in various ways other people.

I know that it is really lovely to listen to this meditation and hope it works for you by reading the steps slowly and working that way, or maybe record it and play it for yourself. Enjoy, YOU deserve to feel good and happy so give YOURSELF some time.

I have been listening to Meditations to Change Your Brain, with Rick Hanson
and Richard Mendies. I am finding it really interesting as an overview to much of what I have read lately on neuroscience, psychology, mindfulness and the brain. I particularly liked one of the meditations on enhancing positive feelings through working on 'implicit' memory. Implicit memory according to the authors is what shapes how we feel it really creates the 'atmosphere' in our mind, and thus affects the felt sense in our bodies. We can shape this atmosphere by paying better attention to the positive events in our lives and turning them into positive experiences. This is important because most of us as we tend to resist dwelling on these events. Our brains are wired to pay more attention to possible threats ie. negative events, so we tend to overlook the good.

There are 4 steps to helping positive events become positive experiences.

1 We remember best when the event is made as vivid as possible and then given heightened attention over an extended period (5-20 seconds)That is how to register positive experiences in your brain.Decide to pay attention to positive events (this may sound self evident but as I said earlier we tend to overlook the good).

2. Once you have got the positive experience you want to extend the experience in time and space, keep your attention on it so it lingers don't just jump onto something else. Notice any discomfort with staying with feeling good. Let the experience fill your body with positive sensations and emotions.


3. Sense that the positive feeling is registering deeply in emotional memory. Sense it soaking into your brain and body eg imagine that the experience is sinking into chest and back.
By taking in the good , you gradually build up resources inside. A sense of other people inside or parts of other people inside that are nurturing encouraging and forgiving.

4.Now sense these positive feelings going down deep into old wounds and hurt places inside you and soothing them, replacing them over time with new positive feelings and views ( current feelings of worth replacing old feelings of inadequacy, or current feelings of being loved replacing old feelings of rejection or abandonment ). You will not forget events that happened you are not trying to falsify or make up history but those old events will gradually lose their charge,their painful emotional associations and their hold on you.

By practicing these 4 steps every day you will gradually change your experience to one of being strong and valuable and loved.

Enough for today, tomorrow I will post the meditation instructions for 'Taking in the good'.

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life.
by Wu Men


We often feel happy when we achieve a goal or a desire , and attribute our happiness to our success, according to Lester Levinson, the happiness we feel is not due to achieving our goal or desire but to to fact that our mind has temporarily become quiet.

Wu Men who lived in the thirteenth century and Lester both have the same insight as have we all when we practice and become quiet.