Dharma Lab

Empathy is really about feeling the emotions of another person, whereas compassion is more about preparing to relieve the suffering of another person. @richiejdavidson @CortlandJDahl @dharmalabco

Cort spent a month in retreat in Myanmar doing body scan practice. He found he could narrow his attentional focus down to what felt like an atomic level. A high-powered laser beam of concentration. On the other end of the spectrum: practices where you widen focus until it is all-encompassing, almost without boundary. @richiejdavidson @CortlandJDahl @dharmalabco

It's kind of like being an explorer out in the world, exploring new terrain that nobody's been to. We're doing the same thing. We're just exploring the inner universe of our own minds. @richiejdavidson @CortlandJDahl @dharmalabco

When you say I am anxious, who is this I? Is it all of you? Is there any part of you that is not anxious? Who is the I that is asking this question? @richiejdavidson @CortlandJDahl @dharmalabco

47% of your waking life, you are not paying attention to what you are doing. Harvard tracked 2,250 people in real time revealing that we are not paying attention. A wandering mind is an unhappy mind, regardless of what you're doing. @richiejdavidson @CortlandJDahl @dharmalabco

Cortland Dahl delivered pizzas in college. He used those drives to practice awareness. Deliveries, red lights, making right turns. Moments that would normally be filled with boredom became moments of practice. @richiejdavidson @CortlandJDahl @dharmalabco

We all have this quality of awareness. And what we do in the attentional family of meditation is we connect to that quality. @richiejdavidson @CortlandJDahl @dharmalabco

The Dalai Lama has told me on several occasions that when he sits down to meditate, he actually thinks about his brain changing. He said he's really inspired by that, inspired to know that his practices are actually changing his brain. @richiejdavidson @CortlandJDahl @dharmalabco

Looking for the self in the brain yields the same result as looking for it through meditation. The more you look, the less you find. @richiejdavidson @CortlandJDahl @dharmalabco

Compassion is not amplified empathy. It activates entirely different brain regions. Empathy triggers distress circuits. Compassion activates reward and positive affect. @richiejdavidson @CortlandJDahl @dharmalabco

Long-term meditators showed elevated gamma-band activity, high-frequency brain oscillations linked to creativity and insight. Not just during meditation, but before it. The practice had altered the baseline activity of the brain itself prior to the meditation. @richiejdavidson @CortlandJDahl @dharmalabco

@boldsobriety It probably takes a meditation master to navigate social services

@dharmalabco Oof…I’m not sure Dan has ever navigated county social services with hold times in excess of 2 hours. That’s next level acceptance. 😉 But yes always an opportunity to become more skillful because it just is.

Dan Goleman made a point about the stress of phone trees that sounds trivial but isn't. "I get angry on hold. Telephone trees make me angry. But what those are are opportunities to rehearse." Every moment of minor frustration in daily life is a low-stakes chance to practice working skillfully with difficult emotions before you encounter them somewhere that actually matters. @richiejdavidson @CortlandJDahl @dharmalabco

@MidLyfeLabs Nice

@dharmalabco Every moment you noticed your breath. Every time you caught a reaction before it ran you. Those were training runs. Great perspective!

@boldsobriety Totally agree Lisa

@dharmalabco This is indeed a practice. To not get hooked into the story and let it be information for what’s needed. 🩷

People think the goal with anger is to get rid of it. The Dalai Lama taught Dan Goleman differently: "To be skillful with anger, you need to put aside the hostility, the us and them, and preserve the focus it gives you, the motivation it gives you, the persistence it gives you." @richiejdavidson @CortlandJDahl @dharmalabco

"Flourishing is contagious" is one of the central ideas in the work Cort and I have been developing, and the Dalai Lama is the clearest example I know. "Being in the presence of the Dalai Lama, you definitely feel at a cellular level the impact of his compassion." @richiejdavidson @CortlandJDahl @dharmalabco

The Dalai Lama gave me what I think of as my life assignment. He said: "Please take the practices from our tradition, turn them into a form that anyone would feel comfortable practicing, investigate them with the tools of modern science. If you find them to be valuable, disseminate them widely." @richiejdavidson @CortlandJDahl @dharmalabco

When Dan Goleman and Richie were graduate students in the early 70s, they wrote a speculative paper with the phrase: "The after is the before for the next during." Meditation doesn't just produce a temporary state while you're sitting. Each session subtly changes your baseline so who you are before you sit down next time is slightly different. That accumulation is what we later called an altered trait. @richiejdavidson @CortlandJDahl @dharmalabco

Dan Goleman put it simply: "Practice makes the difference as it does with everything else. You could try tobogganing, but you wouldn't expect to go to the Olympics." The same applies to managing your emotional states under pressure, sustaining empathy when you're exhausted, or reading a room accurately. These are skills that can be developed. @richiejdavidson @CortlandJDahl @dharmalabco

"We put our butts on the cushion and meditate so we remember to do this when the sh*t hits the fan, when there's real friction." The reason we practice on ordinary days when nothing is at stake is so those capacities are actually available when real difficulty arrives. If the first time you try to work skillfully with rage is during a genuine crisis, you will almost certainly fail. @richiejdavidson @CortlandJDahl @dharmalabco