63 Marvellous Quotes from Buddha's Brain by Rick hanson

Buddha's Brain by Rick Hanson is for those suffering from depression and painful past.Once you understand how your brain works you will be better able to control its states.

Here are the quotes i love:

''What flows through your mind sculpts your brain. Thus, you can use your mind to change your brain for the better—which will benefit your whole being,and every other person whose life you touch.''

― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''If you want to get good at anything, it helps to study those who have already mastered that skill, such as top chefs on TV if you like to cook. Therefore, if you’d like to feel more happiness, inner strength, clarity, and peace, it makes sense to learn from contemplative practitioners—both dedicated lay people and monastics—who’ve really pursued the cultivation of these qualities.''

 ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Taxi drivers in London—whose job requires remembering lots of twisty streets—develop a larger hippocampus (a key brain region for making visual-spatial memories), since that part of the brain gets an extra workout . As you become a happier person, the left frontal region of your brain becomes more active.''

 ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''The mind is what the brain does.Therefore, an awakening mind means an awakening brain. Throughout history, unsung men and women and great teachers alike have cultivated remarkable mental states by generating remarkable brain states.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Our vastly more developed brain is fertile ground for a harvest of suffering. Only we humans worry about the future, regret the past, and blame ourselves for the present. We get frustrated when we can’t have what we want, and disappointed when what we like ends. We suffer that we suffer. We get upset about being in pain, angry about dying, sad about waking up sad yet another day. This kind of suffering—which encompasses most of our unhappiness and dissatisfaction—is constructed by the brain. It is made up. Which is ironic, poignant—and supremely hopeful.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''For if the brain is the cause of suffering, it can also be its cure.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Virtue simply involves regulating your actions, words, and thoughts to create benefits rather than harms for yourself and others.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Mindfulness involves the skillful use of attention to both your inner and outer worlds. Since your brain learns mainly from what you attend to, mindfulness is the doorway to taking in good experiences and making them a part of yourself.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Wisdom is applied common sense, which you acquire in two steps. First, you come to understand what hurts and what helps—in other words, the causes of suffering and the path to its end. Then, based on this understanding, you let go of those things that hurt and strengthen those that help. As a result, over time you’ll feel more connected with everything, more serene about how all things change and end, and more able to meet pleasure and pain without grasping after the one and struggling with the other.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Virtue relies heavily on regulation, both to excite positive inclinations and to inhibit negative ones. Mindfulness leads to new learning—since attention shapes neural circuits—and draws upon past learning to develop a steadier and more concentrated awareness. Wisdom is a matter of making choices, such as letting go of lesser pleasures for the sake of greater ones. Consequently, developing virtue, mindfulness, and wisdom in your mind depends on improving regulation, learning, and selection in your brain.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Your fundamental nature is pure, conscious, peaceful, radiant, loving, and wise, and it is joined in mysterious ways with the ultimate underpinnings of reality, by whatever name we give That. Although your true nature may be hidden momentarily by stress and worry, anger and unfulfilled longings, it still continues to exist. Knowing this can be a great comfort.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''To make any problem better, you need to understand its causes. That’s why all the great physicians, psychologists, and spiritual teachers have been master diagnosticians. For example, in his Four Noble Truths, the Buddha identified an ailment (suffering), diagnosed its cause (craving: a compelling sense of need for something), specified its cure (freedom from craving), and prescribed a treatment (the Eightfold Path).''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Everything changes. That’s the universal nature of outer reality and inner experience. Therefore, there’s no end to disturbed equilibria as long as you live.But to help you survive, your brain keeps trying to stop the river, struggling to hold dynamic systems in place, to find fixed patterns in this variable world, and to construct permanent plans for changing conditions. Consequently, your brain is forever chasing after the moment that has just passed, trying to understand and control it.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''A single raindrop doesn’t have much effect, but if you have enough raindrops and enough time, you can carve a Grand Canyon.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Desiring itself can be an unpleasant experience; even mild longing is subtly uncomfortable.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''You are routinely separated from things you enjoy. And someday that separation will be permanent. Friends drift away, children leave home, careers end, and eventually your own final breath comes and goes. Everything that begins must also cease.Everything that comes together must also disperse. Experiences are thus incapable of being completely satisfying. They are an unreliable basis for true happiness.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Your brain is built more for avoiding than for approaching. That’s because it’s the negative experiences, not the positive ones, that have generally had the most impact on survival.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''The ones that lived to pass on their genes paid a lot of attention to negative experiences.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''The brain is drawn to bad news.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Negative experiences create vicious cycles by making you pessimistic, overreactive, and inclined to go negative yourself.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Negative events generally have more impact than positive ones. For example,it’s easy to acquire feelings of learned helplessness from a few failures, but hard to undo those feelings, even with many successes . People will do more to avoid a loss than to acquire a comparable gain .Compared to lottery winners, accident victims usually take longer to return to their original baseline of happiness. Bad information about a person carries more weight than good information and in relationships, it typically takes about five positive interactions to overcome the effects of a single negative one.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''As you can see, your brain has a built-in 'negativity bias'  that primes you for avoidance. This bias makes you suffer in a variety of ways. For starters, it generates an unpleasant background of anxiety, which for some people can be quite intense; anxiety also makes it harder to bring attention inward for self-awareness or contemplative practice, since the brain keeps scanning to make sure there is no problem. The negativity bias fosters or intensifies other unpleasant emotions, such as anger, sorrow, depression, guilt, and shame. It highlights past losses and failures, it downplays present abilities, and it exaggerates future obstacles. Consequently, the mind continually tends to render unfair verdicts about a person’s character, conduct, and possibilities. The weight of those judgments can really wear you down.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Suffering is the result of craving expressed through the Three Poisons: greed, hatred, and delusion. These are strong, traditional terms that cover a broad range of thoughts, words, and deeds, including the most fleeting and subtle. Greed is a grasping after carrots, while hatred is an aversion to sticks; both involve craving more pleasure and less pain. Delusion is a holding onto ignorance about the way things really are—for example, not seeing how they’re connected and changing.''

 ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''The brain has a wonderful capacity to simulate experiences, but there’s a price: the simulator pulls you out of the moment, plus it sets you chasing pleasures that aren’t that great and resisting pains that are exaggerated or not even real.''

 ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Each person suffers sometimes, and many people suffer a lot. Compassion is a natural response to suffering, including your own. Self-compassion isn’t selfpity, but is simply warmth, concern, and good wishes—just like compassion for another person. Because self-compassion is more emotional than self-esteem, it’s actually more powerful for reducing the impact of difficult conditions,preserving self-worth, and building resilience. It also opens your heart, since when you’re closed to your own suffering, it’s hard to be receptive to suffering in others.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''It goes against the evolutionary template to undo the causes of suffering, to feel one with all things, to flow with the changing moment, and to remain unmoved by pleasant and unpleasant alike.Of course, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it! It just means we should understand what we’re up against and have some compassion for ourselves.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Open to the sense that you are receiving compassion—deep down in your brain, the actual source of good feelings doesn’t matter much; whether the compassion is from you or from another person, let your sense of being soothed and cared for sink in.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''In relationships,second darts create vicious cycles: your second-dart reactions trigger reactions from the other person, which set off more second darts from you, and so on.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Suffering has clear causes in your brain and body, so if you change its causes, you’ll suffer a lot less. And you can change those causes.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''On the path of awakening, keep going! Lots of little moments of practice will gradually and truly increase your contentment, kindness, and insight.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Much as your body is built from the foods you eat, your mind is built from the experiences you have. The flow of experience gradually sculpts your brain, thus shaping your mind. Some of the results can be explicitly recalled: This is what I did last summer; that is how I felt when I was in love. But most of the shaping of your mind remains forever unconscious. This is called implicit memory, and it includes your expectations, models of relationships, emotional tendencies, and general outlook. Implicit memory establishes the interior landscape of your mind —what it feels like to be you—based on the slowly accumulating residues of lived experience.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Positive experiences can also be used to soothe, balance, and even replace negative ones. When two things are held in mind at the same time, they start to connect with each other. That’s one reason why talking about hard things with someone who’s supportive can be so healing: painful feelings and memories get infused with the comfort, encouragement, and closeness you experience with the other person.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''The brain is designed to change through experiences, especially negative ones; we learn from our experiences, particularly those that happened during childhood, and it is natural for that learning to stick with us.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''What is the chance that the feared event will happen? How bad would it be? How long would the damage last?What could I do to cope? Who could help me?. Most fears are exaggerated. As you go through life, your brain acquires expectations based on your experiences, particularly negative ones. When situations occur that are even remotely similar, your brain automatically applies its expectations to them; if it expects pain or loss, or even just the threat of these,it pulses fear signals. But because of the negativity bias, many expectations of pain or loss are overstated or completely unfounded…So, when a fear arises, ask yourself: “What options do I actually have? How could I exercise power skillfully to stick up for myself and take good care of myself? What resources could I draw upon?”

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''As much as possible, seek out nurturing and reliable people, and take in the feeling of being with them. Also do what you can to be treated well in your existing relationships.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Find refuge in whatever is a sanctuary and refueling station for you.Potential refuges include people, activities, places, and intangible things like reason, a sense of your innermost being, or truth.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Be aware of passing thoughts and feelings without reacting to them. Notice a growing disengagement. There’s less tilting toward pleasure, less pulling back from pain.''

 ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''If you can break the link between feeling tones and craving—if you can be with the pleasant without chasing after it, with the unpleasant without resisting it, and with the neutral without ignoring it—then you have cut the chain of suffering, at least for a time. And that is an incredible blessing and freedom.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

Recognize the fleeting nature of rewards and that they usually aren’t actually all that great. See, too, that painful experiences are transient and usually not that awful. Neither pleasure nor pain is worth claiming as your own or identifying with. Further, consider how every event is determined by countless preceding factors so that things can not be any other way. This is not fatalism or despair:you can take action to make the future different. But even then, remember that most of the factors that shape the future are out of your hands. You can do everything right, and still the glass will break, the project will go nowhere, you’ll catch the flu, or a friend will remain upset.

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Tranquility… involves not acting based on the feeling tone. For example, you don’t automatically move toward something just because it is pleasant. In the words of the Third Zen Patriarch: ‘The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences’. Set aside a period of your day—even just a minute long—to consciously release preferences for or against anything. Then extend this practice to more and more of your day. Your actions will be guided increasingly by your values and virtues, not by desires that are reactions to positive or negative feeling tones.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Equanimity means not reacting to your reactions, whatever they are.Equanimity creates a buffer around the feeling tones of experiences so that you do not react to them with craving. Equanimity is like a circuit breaker that blocks the normal sequence in the mind that moves from feeling tone to craving to clinging to suffering.Equanimity is not coldness, indifference, or apathy. You are present in the world but not upset by it.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''If there were no empathy, we’d make our way in life like ants or bees, brushing shoulders with other people but fundamentally alone.Humans are by far the most empathic species on the planet.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Love and hate: they live and tumble together in every heart, like wolf cubs tussling in a cave. There is no killing the wolf of hate; the aversion in such an attempt would actually create what you’re trying to destroy. But you can watch that wolf carefully, keep it tethered, and limit its alarm, righteousness,grievances, resentments, contempt, and prejudice. Meanwhile, keep nourishing and encouraging the wolf of love.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Empathy is virtue in action, the restraint of reactive patterns in order to stay present with another person. It embodies non-harming,since a lack of empathy is often upsetting to others, and also opens the door to hurting them unwittingly. Empathy contains an inherent generosity: you give the willingness to be moved by another person.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Actively imagine what the other person could be thinking and wanting.Imagine what could be going on beneath the surface, and what might be pulling in different directions inside him. Consider what you know or can reasonably guess about him, such as his personal history, childhood, temperament,personality, “hot buttons,” recent events in his life, and the nature of his relationship with you: What effect might these have? Also take into account what you’ve already experienced from tuning in to his actions and emotions.Ask yourself questions, such as What might he be feeling deep down? What could be most important to him? What might he want from me? Be respectful,and don’t jump to conclusions: stay in 'don’t know' mind.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Every day, try to have compassion for five kinds of people: someone you’re grateful to (a 'benefactor'), a loved one or friend, a neutral person, someone who is difficult for you—and yourself.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''First, identify your core aims. What are your purposes and principles in relationships? For example, one fundamental moral value is not to harm people,including yourself. If your needs are not being met in a relationship, that’s harmful to you. If you are mean or punishing, that harms others. Another potential aim might be to keep discovering the truth about yourself and the other person. Second, stay in bounds. The Wise Speech section of Buddhism’s Noble Eightfold Path offers good guidelines for communication that stays within the lines: Say only what is well-intended, true, beneficial, timely, expressed without harshness or malice, and—ideally—what is wanted.''

 ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''At the end of the day, what you and the other person will mainly remember is not what you said but how you said it. Be careful about your tone, and avoid language that is faultfinding,exaggerated, or inflammatory.''

  ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''If compassion is the wish that beings not suffer, kindness is the wish that they be happy. Compassion responds primarily to suffering, but kindness comes into play all of the time, even when others are doing fine. Kindness is expressed mainly in small, everyday ways, such as leaving a big tip, reading one more story to a child even though you’re tired, or waving another driver to move ahead of you in traffic.''

 ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Life includes getting wounded. Accept as a fact that people will sometimes mistreat you, whether accidentally or deliberately. Of course, this doesn’t mean enabling others to harm you, or failing to assert yourself. You’re just accepting the facts on the ground. Feel the hurt, the anger, the fear, but let them flow through you. Ill will can become a way to avoid facing your deep feelings and pain.''

 ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Have faith that others will pay their own price one day for what they’ve done. You don’t have to be the justice system.''

 ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Realize that some people won’t get the lesson no matter how much you try. So why create problems for yourself in a pointless effort to teach them?''

 ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''It’s easy to be kind when others treat you well. The challenge is to preserve your loving-kindness when they treat you badly—to preserve goodwill in the face of ill will.''

 ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Slow down.

Talk less.

When you can, do just one thing at a time. Reduce multitasking.

Focus on your breath while doing daily activities.

Simplify your life; give up lesser pleasures for greater ones.''

 ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom 

''Settle into the present moment. Drop the past and let go of the future. Receive each moment without trying to connect one moment to the next. Abide as presence, neither remembering nor planning. There is no straining, no seeking for anything. Nothing to have, nothing to do, nothing to be.''

 ― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom