BUDDHA'S BRAIN

I recently listened to a lecture presented at Google by Rick Hanson, the author with Daniel Seigel of Buddha's Brain. I am also now reading the book.  The lecture focused on the reality of our brains being highly reactive to percieved threats and that this keeps us feeling stressed, compromises our immune sytems and leads to unhappiness and misery.  He calls this  "threat reactivity." He notes that it is important to be able to react rapidly to a real threat and yet we have expanded what we consider real theats and are frequently reacting to life events as if they are real threats to us.  Dr. Hanson calls this "paper tiger paranoia," as we are reacting to paper tigers as if they were real tigers.  This is not only damaging to our brains and reduces our chance to be happy, but also makes it easy for others to manipulate us by their promoting the "us vs them" mentality and validating our paranoia.  We are encouraged to feel threatened and to focus our paranoia on a certain group of people.  This is how good people can be manipulated to do bad things and often prejudice, oppression of others and wars are the outcome. 

Well that seems bad.  So, what can we do?  Dr. Hanson states that when we use our minds, we change our brains.  He calls this neuroplasticity since our brains change based on how we use our minds. Therefore, if we can change the way we use our minds to be more focused on positive things and allow ourselves to see and feel the positive, we will be able to diminish our threat reactivity type behaviors. Dr. Hanson believes that learning "mindful self-awareness" is a good way to be more positive in our reactions to people and events.  This type of self-awareness is often spoken of as "mindfulness" or "mindfulness practice." I would recommend that you check this out via the internet or by speaking to someone who is familiar with it. Then, you might decide to learn about it and start using it.