Saturday, February 9, 2019

Life with Chronic Conditions: Develop a Compassionate Mindset

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Mindfulness and compassion — the practices of cultivating a focused awareness on the present moment, and extending a loving awareness to others — are part of every religion and wisdom tradition, and we’re at last beginning to understand the profound impact that they have on the brain. Dr. Dan Siegel.

In 2016, I went through an experience that made me incredibly angry, creating unbelievable amounts of stress and anxiety, which I wrote about in Defusing One’s Anger.   My  “take home point” of that experience was the realization that approaching situations from a place of compassion for my self and others, wishing no harm to them and vice versa, works.

As Rick Hanson, psychologist and senior fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley,  notes The brain is the organ that learns, designed by evolution to be changed by our experiences: what scientists call experience-dependent neuroplasticity. Neurons that fire together, wire together. This means that each one of us has the power to use the mind to change the brain to change the mind for the better. To benefit oneself and other beings.... Life is often hard. To cope with hard things, to be effective and successful, or simply to experience ordinary well-being, we need resources inside, inner strengths like resilience, compassion, gratitude and other positive emotions, self-worth, and insight. Just One Thing: Be Mindful of Good

Thanks to all the advances in brain imaging, the field of neuroplasticity, neuroscientists agree that both animals and humans have “compassionate instincts” that have helped us to survive for thousands of years. It’s always been important to understand if someone was having a hard time. On the Savannah's of our ancestry, if someone was unable to function properly, it could endanger the tribe, so it was a life or death matter to be tuned in to one another.

Our brains are not as evolving as quickly as our technology. While our “old brain” can help us survive a disaster, such as running away from a tree that’s about to fall, our new brain causes us to obsess over the fact that we could have easily been killed. The threat is over, but the brain can’t let it go and so we ruminate on it with the “what if” questions and scenarios. Obviously it has advantages in keeping people from avoiding certain situations again, but all too often, the rumination goes on too long and we get fixed into a negative way of thinking. As Rick Hanson notes the brain is Velcro for negative- and threat-based things but Teflon for positive ones. In short, we quickly let go of the good things, instead focusing on the bad, which ultimately results in anxiety, stress, depression, and a myriad of health issues.

However, the stresses of modern life and it’s impact on our brain and ultimately our well being,  can be modulated by the use of certain “tools” that do not require any prescriptions or money. There are many ways to develop a practice that can create a healthy mindset and improve well being based on scientific research. 

While the Dali Lama stresses that if you want to be happy be compassionate - to recognize the suffering of others and wanting to alleviate it, this turns out to have a strong scientific basis. Dr. James Doty of Stanford Medicine The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, explains how this work in the video:



Learn more about compassion, your brain and how to develop a practice that works best for you by checking out the following sites

The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education: Contains lots of videos and information, including a number of James Doty’s videos.
Into the Music Shop-The exercises associated with Dr. Doty’s book of the same name.

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