The Neuroscience of Flourishing: Four Practices for Turning Stress and Anxiety Into Clarity and Calm | Richard Davidson and Cortland Dahl

Hey, how are we doing? So today we're going to talk about some quick and simple practices from neuroscience and Buddhism designed to rewire your brain, change your genes, transform the annoying little

“tasks you have to do every day and boost your overall okness quotient.”

I've got two guests today, my guests are Richard Davidson, PhD, everybody calls him Richie. In my view Richie is truly a historic figure. He's the neuroscientist who pioneered the research into what meditation does to your brain. He's a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where

he also founded an incredible center called the Center for Healthy Minds.

Richie has a new book called Born to Flourish, which he co-authored with my other guests today, Cortland Doll PhD, who is a scientist author translator and meditation teacher. In this conversation, we talk about what it really means to flourish, how difficult emotions such as anxiety, fear, or grief can actually co-exist with well-being, why flourishing is a trainable set of skills, not a personality trait or a self-improvement project.

We get an introduction to the Healthy Minds framework and it's for pillars, awareness, connection, insight and purpose. We talk about why short informal micro-practices, free range meditation as I sometimes call it, can actually, according to the data, be just as effective as formal meditation. We talk about how to cultivate purpose, which is a really important contributor to overall

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your relationships are probably the most important variable in your flourishing that makes

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And if you can't afford it, we give free subscription to anybody who asks, so you can just hit us up at [email protected]. All right, we'll get started with Richie Davidson and Cortland Doll right after this. This episode is sponsored by Better Help. March includes international women's day, a moment to celebrate women's strength and

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This offer is valid for a limited time in terms and conditions may apply. Richie Davidson, Portland Doll, welcome back to the show and Richie's case. Welcome back. Wonderful to be here. Thanks for having us.

Pleasure.

Well, Richie, let me start with you.

What is flourishing? That seems to be a central concept in this new book. What do you mean by flourishing? Well, what we mean by flourishing is when a person is fully present, is connected to the people and the place around them has insight into their thoughts and beliefs and expectations

and understands how they are shaping their perception of the world and has a strong sense of purpose. Okay. So you just named four things that I want to talk a lot about in the course of this interview and they really are part of your healthy minds framework.

That is the entirety of the framework. But I'm going to press you, not in an attempt to be obnoxious although that's definitely in my wheelhouse, but just to make it really concrete for people. If you were on the elevator or somebody had a couple of seconds to explain or acquire

“as to whether somebody is flourishing, how would you make it simple?”

That everything is fundamentally okay, that anything can come down the pike and it's really going to be okay. So interesting you say that because I have not had many meditative breakthroughs in my life a few, you know, big or big to me moments on meditation retreats and the common denominator among the maybe three times where I've had notable moments in my meditation practice.

The common denominator is a feeling of everything's okay. That's great. It's counterintuitive because we look at the world, we look at the news, we look at the problems in our own lives and fundamentally okayness can feel either delusional or dangerous and yet somehow actually it's kind of the truth.

Yeah, exactly. I think it's kind of a radical stance if you will and it's not denying all of the adversity and challenges and it's also not saying that you're going to be happy all the time, but that you'll be okay, it's really quite different than that. So it's a nuanced kind of okadness, if you will.

“Yeah, and it seems important to you and I'm basing this on our past conversations to not”

get happiness and flourishing confused. Yeah, definitely. So you know, it would be if someone lost a loved one particularly if they lost them unexpectedly, natural response would be grief and that would be very appropriate. It would really be bizarre even maladaptive in some sense for someone to be happy in response

to that. And you know, Dan, you and I have both seen the Dalai Lama on a number of occasions and he's not happy all the time, but I would say he's fundamentally okay all the time. Yeah. He strikes me as somebody who is responding appropriately and spontaneously to what's happening

at any given moment exactly court started neglect you in these opening moments, anything to add on this notion of flourishing what are we missing? Well, I think in very ordinary language, you can just simply think of it as being at your

“best across a range of context and I think that's the key thing we're hitting on here is”

that when you're at work, it looks like focus.

suffering, it looks like empathy and care. If you're at a peak moment of life, you know, when your child is being born or you're graduating, then of course it might be joy or elation or awe out in nature.

“I think that's one of the things that Richie and I talk about a lot.”

We touch upon in the book is getting away from the idea positive and negative emotions, positive and negative experiences and just thinking about everything as contextual, everything as healthy, unhealthy, adaptive, maladaptive, really just based on the where you are, who you're with, what you're doing and that's a key feature. The other thing that we've already talked about is viewing this not from the point of view

of like some massive self improvement program where we're endlessly trying to fix ourselves, fix our relationships, fix the world, but actually we're trying to get in touch with the parts

of ourselves that we're never broken and that actually it's easier to do that than we think,

but a lot of it is kind of a mindset shift. It's just getting out of the problem solution mentality into like, okay, what's already going on here and that just goes back to this idea of being fundamentally okay, which sounds totally unrealistic when you first hear it, but there's something quite important and powerful about it from the point of view of mental health and flourishing.

“You don't want to talk about positive or negative emotions and that I think I can get”

behind that, but I want to make sure I understand it. So how can you be fundamentally okay, as Richie said, the Dalai Lama is, when you're experiencing let's say difficult to motion, we won't label it good or bad, but a difficult to motion like fear or grief, Richie, and I just had a great conversation yesterday about anxiety. And I struggled a lot with anxiety.

In fact, what got me started on the path of meditation, very similar to your story

down when I was a college student back in the early 90s, I had a genuine phobia of public speaking to the degree that I fainted on stage in front of my entire high school. That is a true story. In front of all my friends, not only that my mom left on this stage to take care of me, it was perhaps the most uncool thing that could ever happen to a teenage boy.

So anyways, I was very anxious, so I know a lot about anxiety. And you might think that there's nothing redeeming about anxiety. When you're experiencing it, it's just toxic, it feels horrible, it has such negative repercussions for one's life, but from another point of view, what's really going on with anxiety is it's a protective mechanism.

And in certain circumstances, it's exactly what you need.

“You need to sort of mentally rehearse a threatening situation so that when you're in that”

situation, you'll respond appropriately.

The problem is our biology just switches the anxiety reaction on, perhaps abundantly,

way more than it needs to. It's like we have this big bodyguard that we need sometimes, but the bodyguard is accompanying us when we just want to go to sleep or when we just want to have a relaxing moment, still that protective mechanism is kicking into gear. Actually it's a very wholesome thing.

And in certain contexts, it's exactly the right thing. It's just that that's which is being flipped way more than it needs to be. So a lot of it is, again, just switching the view on it. Well, I can totally get down with the switching view, as you say, on anxiety. It is, as our mutual friend, Jack Cornfield says, it is the organism trying to protect itself.

And so I like that. And I just be curious to go a click deeper on what it would look like to execute on the simultaneous of anxiety and fundamental okness. That's a great question. I'm sure Richie, you have a lot to say on this too.

I think a lot of it is just the switching how we relate to it. And the four strategies that Richie mentioned are four different ways we can do it. But Richie, I'd be curious to hear what you would say about that. Yeah. I mean, I think that when we express anxiety in the presence of fundamental okness or for

that matter, other difficult emotions, there are certain characteristics that are associated with them. One of the hallmark features is that the emotions, they're not sticky, they are context appropriate, even in a motion like anger, you know, I've seen the Dalai Lama be angry. But the next moment, just like that, he starts laughing at something funny.

And there's a kind of fluidity of flexibility and not a perseveration. And so when difficult emotions occur in the context of a fundamental okness, they don't stick, they are serving a function in the context. But then they go away, it's like clouds in the sky. Richie, I'm going to ask a self-centered question abusing my privilege as the host of the

show. But I'm doing this hopefully in the service of the listener because I'm trying to understand it. myself as largely ok and yet there are moments especially with anxiety where I lose it. I lose the fundamental okness, you know, I'm in the city today in New York City instead

nervous. And mostly I can just be with the anxiety and it's not a big deal, but you know, I've had a few moments of like not wanting to get on the elevator just by way of an example. So can we think about fundamental okness as a spectrum where I feel like I have a much higher level of fundamental okness than I did, say 15 years ago, but it's not perpetual.

“Am I hunting in the right direction with this line of questioning?”

Yeah, absolutely. So I think it is definitely on a continuum and this is really what can change as we train our mind and cultivate these qualities of flourishing and all of us are on a continuum. And so, you know, I think it's only the kind of really rare examples like the Dalai Lama who may be sort of displaying this kind of fundamental okness continuously, but I see those

people as an inspiring example of what may be possible, but for the rest of us, we're on a continuum, I think that that's absolutely normative. And even from the point of view of just a snapshot and experience, even a day like you're saying, Dan, we're moving back and forth between different experiences, you can think of almost three stops along the way of inner experience when it comes to relating to anxiety

or really any difficult experience.

The first one which we all know well is we're just lost in it.

If we're angry, we are the anger, if we're anxious, we are the anxiety, our field of perception is narrowed to the degree that the anxiety or any emotion, it just colors the whole field of conscious experience, it's just coloring everything. And just into Jack, we've used the term that we call experiential fusion to describe what court is saying, I like that term exactly, it's just like you become one with it and this

is most of what's happening in our lives until we start meditating. And then there's this magical shift which basic mindfulness practices are brilliant in helping us navigate, which is we uncouple that fusion kind of gets teased apart and usually is what it starts as you could just be aware of the experience. But for me as an anxious college student, I was doing this practice all the time, I would

bring my awareness into my body and just notice what is anxiety actually feel like and just rustled with curiosity with openness. So in a revolution, just that alone, there's something else that deepens from there which is we start to shift into the field of awareness itself. So it's not so much what we are aware of, but into this just open space of being itself.

And that probably sounds hopelessly abstract and esoteric, if you haven't practiced this, but it's a profound shift in a word, it's the shift from doing to being and in that space of being, there's all sorts of things that we discover about ourselves that we're blind to when we're contracted into the emotional reaction.

“And that's I think the true fundamental okadness is in that space where we see, oh, there's”

this part of me that's available in any moment that I can drop into and grow familiar with. And there's no problem. Look, everything else seems in consequential from the point of view of that space of being

again, it's abstract, but it's incredibly powerful as a practice.

Well, how accessible is that though, because I started this conversation by saying I've had three moments in my 16 year meditation career, which I know compared to you guys is nothing, but it's non-trivial for your average person. I've had three moments usually on day six or seven of a meditation retreat where I've really dropped into that sense of fundamental okadness.

So this abstract, abstract experience that you're describing, how accessible is that to our average listener. I think it's much more accessible than we often think and there are simply different traditions in different forms of practice and training that tend to focus on different things. So there are some, the ones that Richie and I are most deeply trained in really focus

a lot on effortless presence. And so you get a pretty heavy dose of that, the quality of being, how do you access that, how do you get in touch with that, how do you grow familiar with it, so you don't lose touch with it. You actually get that on day one.

I mean, you've had Mingyu Rinpoche on the podcast, he teaches that, that's like literally the first thing he teaches.

And it's always paired with other things because it's hard to stay with that.

There's other practices where you don't get to that until much more advanced stages, but you get other things that are different than that, like you get deep insight into just that workings of the mind, the causes and conditions that shape experience.

“So all the traditions have their own beauty and their own secret sauce, but for the ones”

that focus on that, I would say you can actually get in touch with that pretty easily and it just kind of depends on what you're working with in terms of practice. But our mantra, I'm sure we'll hear it out of Richie's mouth a few times and this is that it's easier than you think and that the science really backs that up.

It's just sustaining it as the real practice.

“So you mentioned Mingyu Rinpoche, who's an eminent Tibetan Buddhist teacher, he's been”

on the show several times. I will drop some links to his appearances in the show notes, if anybody wants to check him out, but he's not here, so court or rich, whoever wants to do it, you said it's easier than you think and it's, you know, you do it on day one, can you just describe to the listener so that they don't have to take your word for it, they can check it out

in their own mind? Well, it should be do it, let's do it. Let me just guide a super brief kind of micro practice as we like to say and just as a little taste of this.

So just, you know, for us and for anybody who's listening, tune into your breath.

You don't even have to change your posture, just imagine you're going about your day. You just notice your breath, most of us have probably done mindful breathing. So just feel the breath, maybe breathe a little deeper, really feel it coming in and out. And this is safe to do while driving, just to say, because many people are driving. Absolutely.

The thing that this is not a concentrator practice, so keep an open space of awareness. You're still tuned into your environment. You're just breathing, it's not a lot of efforting in the mind.

“You're just noticing what's going on in your including your breathing, right?”

You're just noticing that, perhaps a little deeper than normal. So as you do this, start to notice what happens very naturally and spontaneously on the exhalation. What your feel is just a little subtle opening, subtle relaxation, just like a little loosening that happens naturally every time you exhale, but especially happens when you start noticing

that. So just feel that, this is just easing into being. And next, notice how at the end of each exhalation, there's just a little gap, a little pause before you breathe in again. It's just a little natural rest stop between each cycle of breathing.

And what you can do is just imagine yourself, you're just kind of relaxing into that space. Just resting there. Just for a few seconds, you're not holding your breath, it's not anything that's super intense. And what you'll see is that it's the most ordinary thing in the world. There's no special state of mind that is happening or needs to happen.

It just a little taste of being. Very ordinary in a sense, but you can learn to tap into that and you just rest with that. And then slowly as you grow more familiar with that, that quality of openness, this effortless presence, you can just stay with that even when the next breath happens. So just try that for a moment, you just relax with the out breath, you rest there.

And almost imagine that next in breath is just happening within that space. There's no effort required. You're not even really meditating in any kind of effortful way. So there's a million ways to do this. It's just getting used to what it feels like to be.

And you can do this a hundred times throughout your day. And you have a little hundred mini retreats throughout your day. Eventually this becomes like a home. And that's the fundamental okadness.

Because your home is now the open space of awareness, that's always there for you.

And then anything else that happens is it's just on the surface. Richie, I've been picking on court for a while, anything you want to jump in in it.

“Well, I think that the slogan, which we're using a lot these days, it's easier than”

you think is not just a kind of ideological claim, but it's actually based on a whole lot of evidence. And so we've done a number of serious randomized controlled trials, the kind of gold standard of clinical research over the last few years showing that five minutes a day of practice like this is sufficient to produce measurable changes.

In our experience, in our behavior, and in our biology. And it's kind of remarkable, five minutes a day over the course of one month. Now, this is not to claim that these changes are going to be enduring if we stop practicing our aspiration, of course, is that when people taste this, they will be motivated to keep doing this.

It's like brushing your teeth, you don't brush your teeth for a month, and then stop. This is going to be a lifelong practice, but the data really show that it doesn't take much to get these circuits in our mind and our brain going. And we think it's because we're born to flourish. This is part of who we are as humans.

We're actually predisposed to rest in this kind of way.

our mind.

What we're doing is we are getting in touch with our fundamental nature, becoming more familiar

with it.

“My 11-year-old son, I think, would argue, you know, pound the table and argue that you”

can brush your teeth for a month and stop. But haven't said that, draw a link, if you will, richy, between the exercise that court, and thank you for guided us through, and handling our everyday vaccinations. Yes, I noticed, oh, yeah, it's, I felt calm and awake and aware when he directed me to notice that space between the breath, the in breath and the out breath, and then to subsequently

stay with the next in breath, draw the link for those who might not understand it, between

that experience and doing life better.

Yeah, so eventually, one of the things we talk about in our book, are things that happen every day in life to virtually all of us. So for example, humans eat.

“We need to eat to live, so eating is a regular part of most people's lives.”

We can use these activities of daily living as reminders to do these, we call them micro supports or micro practices that you can sprinkle throughout your daily life. And we actually have evidence to show that you don't need to put your butt on the cushion or a chair and formally meditate, the data show that at least at the beginning stages,

the benefits are as strong if you do these practices actively as you're going about your

daily life or if you do them formally as sitting meditation practices doesn't matter. So you can use these activities of daily living as reminders as we use this fancy term that comes from neuroscience, which is a zeitgabber. A zeitgabber is something that occurs with biological rhythms on a regular daily basis and they're a social zeitgabbers.

So eating is a social zeitgabber. We do that every day brushing your teeth is a zeitgabber. And so we can piggyback these activities on daily living. You brought up the kind of challenges that we experience in our daily lives, eventually the challenges themselves become triggers as reminders.

So rather than the challenges being times when you lose it, when you are getting hijacked by your anxiety or whatever it is, eventually as you practice more and more, the anxiety itself can become a reminder. But when you can have this just infuse all of your everyday life. Coming up with Richie Davidson in Corland, I'll talk about the four ingredients that predict

whether you'll be at your best in any situation. You would get that dip of energy in the mid afternoon and it just feels like you're just trying to cut through soupy fog in order to get your brain to work. I don't know about you, but I deal with this all the time. Which brings me to one of our sponsors today, Spark.

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I just want to push on that again and court I'll go back to you. I want to acknowledge I love the fact that we can do these free range instead of a formal meditation practice.

“I think that's liberating for a lot of people to hear, especially people who feel”

time star or who just don't want to fold themselves into the lotus position or whatever it is. So that's great. So I don't mean to brush past that and I will come back to it. Just on the question of the mechanism here, court, for all of us who went through your exercise,

how does doing that help me with fighting with my sound over brushing his teeth or fighting with my boss over giving me more work and I can handle it, et cetera, et cetera. This is really the central question. So going back to this idea of the really what are these central ingredients you could say? What are the main factors that lead us to flourishing some circumstances and to be overwhelmed

knocked off balance, not at our best in other circumstances? And you can almost look at this as like four questions and I think this gets at what you're pointing to. So in any circumstance, say you're with your family and there's a stressful situation or you're at work and you're having a tough day.

You really could imagine any circumstance and just say, am I going to be at my best in the

“situation if I am aware and fully present or if I'm just unfocused and distracted?”

obvious answer.

Second question, am I going to be at my best in this situation if I feel connected?

If I feel like I'm there for other people and I feel like they are there for me or am I going to be at my best if I'm feeling alienated or isolated? obvious question. That's the second factor that we refer to as connection. The third one is insight, am I going to feel better and am I going to be my best

why I perform better? If I really understand the dynamics of the situation, especially the dynamics of my own mind in the moment, if for example, I can see clearly what emotions and thoughts are playing through my mind and I can see how they're shaping and influencing my perception. Again, better or worse.

And lastly, purpose, am I going to feel more on my game? If I really feel like I'm connected to my north star in my life, I have clear values. I feel like I'm living them, I'm conscious of them, I'm connected to them, or what I do better if I feel that it's meaningless and I don't have those. These are just obvious questions.

I think what's missing to people is it's not we just feel like we're doing well in some circumstances and we're not in others, but the ingredients aren't so clear and it's even less clear, how would we actually practice so that each of those things happen so that I'm more aware, I'm more connected, I'm more insightful and wise, I'm more purposeful and I feel things are meaningful.

These are skills. There's brain mechanisms, there's biology behind it, it's easier than you think. I think it's just the roadmap is so clear. So what we practice to just boil down to a fine point, that was one of maybe the most fundamental skill in the awareness category.

And I think what I would personally put my money on is the most bang for your buck in terms of an awareness skill that can just radically change your inner experience, specifically because these days we have no being in our lives. We are doing 24/7 and we're constantly force feeding our mind information and I'd say

that's a more vital, it's always been a vital skill, but learning how to be and to find

our value and worth as human beings in this quality of being. I think it's just a vital skill in the 21st century. So this is equally applicable in all these situations. It's just the roadmap.

It's to restate the map for folks and we've said this a few times, but I just want people to have their bearings here. The healthy minds framework, the spine of your new book, it consists of these four pillars.

The first is awareness, which we've talked about and you taught us how to train very quickly.

And again, it's not a one and done. It's a move we want to integrate into our lives to wake up and be right here right now. The second is connection, the third is insight or self-knowledge and the fourth is purpose. Let's talk a little bit about how we train these others. With connection, we all know something I talk about a lot on the show.

We evolved as social animals and yet we've somehow created a world that militates against connection at pretty much every turn and I don't think it's a coincidence that we have unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, suicide addiction and loneliness. I think largely as a result.

“So how do we operationalize connection and take it beyond sort of bland exhortation?”

Yeah, I'm happy to jump in connection again. We would say is easier than you think.

Let me actually just back up and first say that in 2023, we had a really visionary attorney general

of the United States who issued a health advisory. First time a public health official ever issued a health advisory that's sort in our country on the epidemic of loneliness and social isolation. And in that report, Vivek Merti showed evidence that loneliness is actually a greater risk factor for mortality than is smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

So loneliness and social isolation is not just a subjective quality of the mind, but it also affects our biology in ways that seriously affect our health. So that's one element important to keep in mind with respect to cultivating this. One of the easiest things to do and something I do every single day, you know, I have this little practice I do after I meditate, where I, on work days, and it takes me about not

“more than a minute, maybe a minute and a half, I'll go through my calendar.”

I did this this morning and you're in my mind and heart damn. I just go through my calendar and see what I'm going to be doing that day and just appreciate the people I'm meeting with, really a simple little practice, think of something positive about them and we are predisposed to feel a connection. It doesn't take much, we just need to be intentional about how we use our minds.

And so it's readily available and it's remarkable. We've shown in neuroscientific research that after just a few hours of doing this practice over the course of a few weeks, our brains change. We can see measurable changes in our brain. I'll add another practice.

I don't know what you think of this research, but I found it compelling.

I don't have a as critical lens as you do with it, but for our Frederickson's research

into micro interactions, the power, the massive power of apparently massive power of just having pleasant passing interactions with the barista, somebody in an elevator, your co-workers, you may not be especially close with, hey, how you do an eye contact, keep it moving. This can really ladder up and scale up to apparently quite significant benefits in happiness. Do you agree with what the direction I'm going in here?

Totally. Absolutely.

“I think that's important work and I think there's the important truth to that.”

So we're marching through the four, I'm calling them pillars or aspects of the framework you lay out in the book. The first, again, is awareness, the second, is connection we've talked about, how to practice both of those in ways that don't require you to reinvent your life in your schedule. The third, and we've talked about this a little bit, but I think it's worth going a little

bit deeper here, is insight. I think this can be a tough one for people to rock. You use a word that's not going to help, but it's interesting and you can unpack it in ways that will be helpful. The word de-reifying.

What is that? The de-reification you could say is the second part of an inner movement, inner process, which you first simply become aware of your own thoughts, feelings, emotions, and so forth. You just know you're having them versus you're fused with them as we discussed before. That's the first thing.

But you can be aware of a thought pattern and still believe it. This is a very important point. I had a lot of this, again, going back to my own anxiety, where I had was learning to step back and feel what I was feeling to notice the inner narratives, but part of me still believe it.

It's like, okay, I know I haven't this thought, but it's kind of true.

De-reification is seeing that thoughts are nothing more than mental habits and they are

not necessarily true or real.

“In fact, they are often times distorted, sometimes wildly distorted.”

Any anxious thought by definition is going to be a magnet for negative information and it will repel positive information. So insight is a lot of just knowing that. The de-reifying. It's like the de-regidifying, if that's where I don't even know if that's where.

But loosening up the mind, right? The things that are locked and stuck, you know, old habits just seem so entrenched. This is a way to loosen that up and to see that the mind is much more fluid than it often seems. There's a reference in your book, Richie, in this part of the book on the aha moment.

What do you mean by that? Well, the aha moment is a moment of insight that many people have experienced even in sort of pedestrian sorts of ways. So if you're doing a crossword puzzle and you suddenly recognize the word that fits in a certain context, there's a little bit of an aha moment.

You got it. It just occurs to you just like that. And when there is that aha moment, research shows there's a burst of a certain brain rhythm that can be measured with EEG, with electrodes on the scalp surface, non-invasively. That burst is a burst of gamma oscillations.

These are very fast frequency waves.

They typically last less than a second, you know, where they correspond to the sort of timing

of an aha moment, it could be like a quarter of a second. And what we see in long-term meditators who do a lot of this inside practice is that they show these gamma oscillations that last a long time, they're really enduring. I mean, this is a little bit hard to imagine. And what we're talking about now is really long-term practitioners.

People like Mingurimpej were participants as subjects in this research. They're showing continuous activity like this. It's as if they're phenomenological world as a continuous aha experience. A number of years ago, I wrote a book with Dan Goldman called Altered Traits. It's a play on Altered States.

And the idea is that as we train our mind, these qualities that once were short-lived become much more enduring for very long-term meditators, this quality of insight becomes really enduring. There's a great analogy for this in the tradition, which is a candle flame with a glass enclosure around it.

And this also speaks to how the four factors of awareness, connection, insight and purpose work together. So in this analogy, awareness is like the glass enclosure. So you can imagine a moment in life. We've all had these where you have a sudden epiphany, something clicks into place about

your life that you see that you didn't see them moment before.

“It feels like your life is totally different.”

You've just now seen something that's going to change your life forever and sometimes it does. But oftentimes what happens is, although it feels like your life has changed in delibly, the next day, the next week, the next month, it's just a memory. It's not embedded for some reason.

And that reason is because awareness is unstable.

Our attention, we're distracted, there's a million influences on our mind.

And so that epiphany, that deep insight is lost. So awareness practices give us that interstability where we can nurture those moments. But we also need to flame itself, which is insight. This is classically what we would think of as wisdom. We need to see clearly the dynamics of our inner experience, the dynamics of our lives.

And we need to be able to embody that. So we act skillfully in a way that supports our own and hopefully others ability to thrive and flourish. So we need that. But we kind of need all of these.

It's like not enough just to have awareness or just to have insight. And you one of these, you actually need all four of these. And they're all skills that are mutually supportive and reinforcing. So insight, the fundamental promise of the book is that there are micro practices that can help us develop all four of the skills that are at the core of the book.

“What are some of the ways that we can throughout the course of our day develop insight?”

Richie, I'd love to hear a kind of your go-to practices. Some that I find super helpful, super easy to do is the wise friend kind of analogy. So in any situation, especially things that are challenging, difficult to stressful, I just stop and ask myself, what would my wiseest friend? I mean, for me, I'd known Mingyu Rinpoche for many years.

He's one of my guiding teachers. So oftentimes, we'll think of him. I would just kind of imagine what would Rinpoche say about this? And that does something very interesting. The answer doesn't obviously come from Mingyu Rinpoche.

What it does is it shits me from that getting locked into my own perception of the situation.

And it unlocks the feeling that whatever story I'm telling myself, which usually we're

“always telling ourselves stories about whatever the situations are, it just loosens that up.”

And suddenly I'm looking at it from a different vantage point. So it's not that I'm tapping into some other form of wisdom. It's not like obviously I have some direct channel, the Mingyu Rinpoche. I'm tapping into my own wisdom insight in that moment. I'm just getting a fresh perspective and a wise perspective on whatever that situation

might be. So it's really just that asking the question and then coming back to whatever's going on from that new vantage point. So simple, just takes a moment to do and it's kind of game-changing in the way it loosens

up the old habitual patterns that most of us are carrying with us into these difficult situations.

And in that kind of little exercise or practice, we don't need to have necessarily a Mingyu Rinpoche in our lives. It could be just imagine this from another person's perspective. Just to loosen the grip that your perspective has and appreciate that there are other perspectives that would see this situation differently.

“Yeah, it's like the shift itself is the important thing.”

Not so much. Yes. That is just an example. But it's so easy. There's so many ways you can do it.

It's quite remarkable and how easy and simple this. Joseph Goldstein often says, "Don't side with yourself." That's a good one, it's great. I love that. Coming up Richie and Court talk about the importance and how true of cultivating purpose

and how small consistent practices can change your brain and even influence the expression of your genes. So again, we're walking through the four pillars of the healthy minds framework and then talking about how we can integrate micro practices into our life that help us train these skills.

Again, they are awareness connection insight and let's talk about purpose. How are we defining and understanding purpose? Let's start there, Richie. What do you say? So purpose, the way we use it, it's not so much about finding something grand.

And really more purposeful to do with your life like some big life shift, rather, how can we find meaning and purpose in our daily activities without changing any of the external features of our lives? Now, it could be that there are times when we may want to change those external features and that's important.

But it's also possible to nurture purpose in the context of our daily lives by connecting meaning and purpose even to the most pedestrian activities of daily living. So I'll give you an example for my own life and this may sound really corny but I do this every day I'm home. So as long as I'm not traveling, I do this every day.

We have a cat at home and there's a litter box. The litter box is in the corner of big living room and I am the one that scoops the litter every night and I do it as a practice. I really do and as I kneel down to go to the litter box, I just reflect on how this is helpful to my wife because I'm the one that's dealing with this for people that come

into the living room, they don't have to smell the cat litter for the wonderful Xiaomi's cat who's now 14 years old, this is a benefit to her life. It's just a way to have this connect to being a benefit to others and it's so simple. So simple and I do something similar when I take out the garbage. These are things that we do every day and often people regard them as chores.

Yeah, gotta do this and it's a kind of grind that people feel they have to do but it's so easy to connect these simple activities to altruistic motive and that changes everything.

So if you look at the active ingredients just to interject for a second, there's two things

“and what you've just said, Richie, did I think are like the key ingredients?”

One is there's a sense of clarity about the motivations and values that are most nourishing. Like in this case, being of service, kindness, you could see a bunch of things wrapped into that one experience. So the inner clarity is one and then the other is embodiment, like it's not just you have a nice warm fuzzy thought in your mind.

It's linking that to something you're doing so if thinking I'm now going to put this value, this guiding aspiration or motivation, whatever it might be, I'm going to live that in

Richie because we are often recording things and doing things together.

“We have a little ritual just to give another example where we pause before we hit record.”

We do just like a one minute motivation reset and Richie, you can speak to what's going on your mind. I know in my mind I'm simply thinking that whatever comes of this conversation we're about to have. In fact, I did it before we hit record here with you, Dan, may whatever comes of this,

may this really do some good in the world, may this reach somebody who really needs it, may this provides clarity or some inspiration for somebody who really could use a little boost in their lives, may this just do good in the world, may whatever is happening here

may it somehow be a benefit and be of service.

So again, just take some moment. It doesn't have to be something grand or positive like you said Richie, you can be washing the dishes or taking out the garbage or the most mundane things. You can link anything to a value that's nursing to you. Eventually, everything really, Mingurum Peche has been teaching this introductory course anywhere

any time meditation and a friendly amendment is everywhere all the time. Yeah, and the book, I think you call it reframing the mundane, which I love. Richie, say a little bit about the science here. From a biological standpoint, purpose isn't just a nice to have.

Yeah, so there's a lot of science of particular kinds and also a lack of science in other

ways. So there's a lot of research on naturally occurring variations among people in their quote, level of purpose in life that is assessed typically through a simple questionnaire and its relationship to many other factors. One of the factors that it's been related to is health and so among people 65 years

“and older, having a strong sense of purpose in life is the single most important psychological”

factor in predicting longevity and that's after carefully controlling for other factors. People who have a stronger sense of purpose live longer and so clearly this gets under the skin and affects our biology. The other thing we found is that purpose is an enormous contributor to resilience. And resilience here is defined in a very specific way in a neuroscientific context and

the way we define it is simply the rapidity with which you recover from adversity. If you recover quickly from adversity, you're said to be more resilient. And people who have a stronger sense of purpose in their brain, they recover more quickly from adversity. So it's really directly affecting brain circuits that are critically involved in our response

to adversity and in what we might think of as emotion regulation.

“And just to be clear, I think you explained this before, but I want to make sure I've got”

it. I think you're saying that we don't need to have a clear rallying cry slogan of a purpose that's tattooed on our chest. It really can be, no, I'm just going to try to reframe the mundane all day long. Exactly. And I should say that some of this is still uncharted in terms of scientific research,

to be clear and appropriately cautious and humble about it. What is clear is the research that shows that people have a stronger sense of purpose do better on lots of different things, including living longer, showing more resilience and so forth. There's been virtually no research on cultivating this sense of purpose.

And these little practices are really meant to do that, and so there's still a lot to be discovered about how these kinds of micro interventions may impact our experience and our biology and change our sense of purpose. Got it. Well, speaking of the science, you've referenced this a couple times that rewiring the brain

is a thing we can do and it doesn't take a ton of time. Can you just say a little bit more about the types of changes we can see to our brain and what kind of investment is required for said changes. And then maybe also while you're at it, rich you talk a little bit about how we can not only change our brains, but also our genes.

Sure. So when we talk about changing our brain in this general category of neuroplasticity, there are many different kinds of neuroplasticity.

referring to, but broadly speaking, there are two big buckets.

“One, we might call functional changes in the brain.”

The other, we might call structural changes in the brain. Structural changes are anatomical changes. They're changes in the actual anatomy, areas made, grow larger or smaller, connections may become larger or smaller, whereas functional changes are changes in the activity patterns of the brain.

Changes in activity patterns of the brain can occur really quickly. The kind of practice that court let us through, I guarantee that if we had people hooked up to the right equipment, you would see changes in their brain just like that.

Personal changes, but that doesn't mean that those changes will endure.

The structural changes we think are changes that occur that are the correlate if you will of the more enduring changes that we see.

“But the structural changes are easier to produce than we think as well.”

And I should just give some context, not for meditation. There have been studies of people who are learning to juggle. And after a 90-minute class in juggling, the wiring of your brain changes, just after 90 minutes, we have new data now, not yet published, that shows that less than 150 total minutes over the course of a month of practicing these four pillars, produces structural changes in

the brain.

So that's not very much, but again, it doesn't mean these structural changes are really

dynamic. They can revert back, it doesn't mean they're going to persist. It's like weight, where weight loss could be very variable. And so it is our strong intuition that, in order for these changes to endure, we need to keep practicing.

Yeah.

“And Richie Orcourt, whoever wants to take it, what about changing our genes?”

In this case, it's G-E-N-E, not J-E-A-N. Let me say just a little bit about that, and then Quartin Ed, whatever he might say, there are two aspects to our genes, broadly speaking, that are relevant here. One is the sequence of base pairs that constitutes our DNA. For the most part, for most people, that's not going to change, no matter how much meditation

we do. You know, radiation exposure and spending a lot of time on airplanes can change that. But for the most part, it's not going to change. What will change is our epigenetics and epigenetics is the science of our genes are regulated. And you can think of genes having little volume controls that go from low to high.

And that's very dynamic, and those volume controls can be modulated. And they can be modulated by meditation and other kinds of experience. And so there's good evidence now to show that even over the course of a single day of intensive practice in an experienced meditator, six to seven hours of practice is enough to produce a measurable change in gene expression.

One thing to piggyback on what Richie's sharing here, if you bring these two principles of neuroplasticity and the insights from epigenetics together, what this is showing is just the dynamics of our inner experience and our lives is much more malleable than previously we understood scientifically. But that kind of cuts both ways.

We are living in a world right now that is engineered to produce distraction, emotional, imbalance and social division. And so if we're not intentional about what we are surrounding ourselves with and what we are filling our minds with, that epigenetic capacity and neuroplastic capacity is just a recipe for the epidemic levels of distraction and mental health concerns that we see.

We're living through a grand experiment that we can see the results of this. So it just invites the importance of really taking charge of this. So we can see that actually we all have a role to play and none of us can afford individually or collectively to just be passive about this. Maybe one very specific point to mention is just the information died.

If you think about information being like food to our minds and brains in the way that physical food is for our body and physical health, you would think immediately about how

And if you think about how much information we ingest, it's insane compared to 20 years

“ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, we are consuming information at a rate that's just”

totally unprecedented and that would be questionable and any circumstance.

But the quality, the second question is the quality, is that healthy, is the food healthy,

is it unhealthy? We can just look, I mean, most of the information we're consuming is making us more distracted, more anxious, feeling more us to them, kind of feelings in society. We really need to get a handle on this and work on these interskills so we can just be intentional about what's happening in our minds and brains and with our nervous systems.

Because we can just see the, what happens when we don't, we're just living through a collective experiment of what happens when we're not intentional. And so just to say one other thing about what Court just said to make this clear, your plasticine epigenetics are neutral with respect to its impact on our mind, brain and body. If we are exposed to all this toxic information that Court is referring to, it will harness

our neuroplasticity and epigenetics to produce the catastrophes that we're experiencing right now. And so we can harness the same mechanisms of neuroplasticine epigenetics in a virtuous way to cultivate wholesome qualities of the mind that will help to counteract this. Well said, it's a really one major area I'd like to touch on before I let you both go.

We've touched on this a little bit, but I want to hit it head on. Because it's a question I get all the time. I have live meditation and Q&A sessions that I do for my app community once a week and almost every time I get the question. X event just happened in the news. What good is meditation or what's the, they don't use this word, but in the context of your

book I'll put it and I'll use this word. How can I flourish in a world where X just happened, Trump did or said this or whatever.

“So how do you respond to that question when you feel it?”

Court, do you want to go first and then I can go?

Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, I'm living my current version of this because I'm from Minnesota. I grew up in Minneapolis and it's a place I love dearly and, man, I was just watching some stuff last night that was heartbreaking honestly. I'm even emotional just thinking about it now.

The community I grew up in is almost unrecognizable kind of what's going on. And so if you take a situation like that, like here's a very real situation. And a community I love, I'm very emotional invested in this. And a question is sort of what is flourishing look like at a time like this. So to go back to one point that Richie made that is super important, flourishing doesn't

mean happy.

Clearly seeing what's going on in this case in my own community, where I'm from, where

I grew up, being happy is not the response to that, right?

“I want the magical alchemy of wisdom and compassion to be driving me.”

Right? I can see rage. I can see frustration. I can feel powerlessness. I can see how any of those things would be totally understandable, it feels so overwhelming.

I feel so disconnected. What could I possibly do in this? And I'm so disheartened by what's happening. That's not helpful. I'm not going to be in my best if I'm just overwhelmed or hopeless.

So it's how do I get in touch with this part of myself, where I'm just simply seeing that dynamic more clearly, it's not the narrowing of perception when our conscious experience is totally hijacked by anxiety or fear or anything else. And yet it's infused with care. This again goes back to really nurturing the care and connection and nurturing the awareness.

It's the combination of all of these things together that when something like this happens, it gives us the space to step back, not from some cold clinical gaze, but from a place of deep care. So just say, okay, what's going on here? What can I do?

I'm not going to single-handedly fix this situation. I know it feels terrible just to kind of drown and hopelessness. And so what can I do, right? And then again, you can take simple steps, even just little things in my immediate orbit. Like, okay, I'm not even in Minnesota right now.

I don't live there currently. I live in Madison. So at least in my next interactions, I want to just send some kindness out into the world, some understanding, and maybe even people who I disagree with, like, okay, I don't condone a lot of the stuff that's happening.

I've vehemently disagree with it, but I do want to understand it. So I can engage with people who I disagree with. It's just unthinkable to me how people have the opinions they do. And they probably can look at me and feel the exact same way.

and understand.

“And that doesn't come from hopelessness and being overwhelmed by the emotions.”

So it goes back to those four questions and the four qualities we've been talking about. These are precisely the superpowers that give us the ability to navigate these situations well and to be at our best. The more challenging situations are.

And we're never going to be perfect, but what we can do is view them as opportunities

to practice and to learn and grow. So somebody like Victor Franco, who wrote a man's search for meaning, a victim of the Holocaust is just you know a great example of even the worst possible things that can happen to us as human beings. Obviously we wouldn't wish them upon anybody, but they can be sources of learning and growth

and self discovery and coming together in ways, but we need to be intentional about it. It all comes down to practice. You know, I just add one other little thing and that is that particularly for those who are on the front lines of social change and social activists who are trying to produce system change that is so sorely needed in many parts of our country and the world.

Burnout is so prevalent and the kinds of practices that we're talking about are really important in giving people a kind of resilience and vitality that is going to be necessary to be effective. In the work that they do. Yes, and the way you're describing these practices, it's not some massive project add to your to-do list that will further stress you out.

These are things you can integrate into the course of your day.

Before I let you go to questions I always ask at the end, is there anything either or

“both of you we're hoping we would get to that we haven't yet gotten to?”

There is one other thing and I can just very briefly introduce it and in addition to the conviction that it's easier than you think. There's another slogan if you will that is at the heart of some of what we write about in our book Born to Flourish and that is that flourishing is contagious and there's a lot of really good, hard-nosed scientific evidence for this and so when we cultivate these

skills of flourishing we not only are benefiting ourselves but we're benefiting all of those that we touch because they actually benefit from being around us. I would add to that another kind of key insight that drives our work and message that we want to get out into the world is that these factors that these four things we've talked about are awareness connection inside purpose.

These are not things we need to develop that we don't have. This is actually who we are. A moment of awareness, a moment of connection, a moment of insight in purpose. This is actually here all of the time and it's actually the fact that these things are so omnipresent that makes them hard to see in the sense that we notice what's different.

We notice what's out of the ordinary, it's much more difficult to notice the stuff that's always present and so it just goes like we all have the wrong ingredients to flourish. It's getting in touch with what we have rather than again some never-ending self-help

“project, self-improvement paradigm and I think that's super important.”

It's right here and every moment it's right here. I think and talk about when I'm about to say a lot so many listeners will have heard me say this before and I'm sure my staff has a drinking game every time I say this, but my understanding is the Tibetan word for enlightenment translates roughly into clearing away and bringing forth.

So we're just clearing away a lot of the clutter that naturally occurs in a human brain in mind and also that is injected into us by this incredibly dysfunctional modern environment that we've somehow built, clear that away and what comes forth are these innate factors or qualities that you're both describing in your new book or awareness connection inside purpose.

Okay.

So the second question I always ask at the end is can you please plug everything?

Rich I'll start with you mentioned the book but also your center in Madison, your app just give us everything please. Yeah, so the book is called Born to Flourish. It's coming out March 24th. It can be pre-ordered now.

It has rich descriptions of all of this. Our app is called the Healthy Minds Program and it is freely available and it was created by our affiliated non-profit which used to be called Healthy Minds Innovations and has just been rebranded and is now called Human HUMIN and so please if you're interested, check

Can court please?

“Yeah, in addition to those things, we've mentioned the name Mingurabashay.”

Many times both Rich and I are quite involved with Tergar which is a meditation community

with lots of amazing programs, especially the Joy of Living which is one of the trainings

that both Rich and I have done many times over and a recent venture actually somewhat inspired by Udan and your work is a sub-stack and a podcast called Dharma Lab where it's just a space for us to kind of geek out and have the kind of conversations that we have behind the scenes and just to share those conversations with others who is very much inspired

by us going for walks and just catching up about the things we're most excited about

“and we thought, well, why not have some of these conversations in public?”

That's another one that's available on sub-stack and the podcast is of course available on all the different channels. Listeners, I will post links for every single one of those in the show notes. Richie, congratulations on your new book, thanks for all the work you do in the world and thanks for coming on the show.

Thank you, Dan, and thank you for all the work that you do to bring these teachings out to so many people. Yeah, absolutely, a real joy to join you both. Big thanks to Richie and Court, we did in the course of that discussion talk about Mingurabashay

“and I have dropped links to a couple of episodes that I did with Mingur if you want to”

check them out. Don't forget to check out my new app, 10% with Dan Harris, we've got an awesome and growing community over there, lots of great meditation teachers, lots of live events, opportunities to connect with other people who take this weird meditation thing seriously. You should come check it out, Dan Harris.com, there's a free 14-day trial.

Finally, thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show and they

really do work hard. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili, our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer, DJ Cashmere is our executive producer and Nick Thorburn of the band, Islands, wrote our feet.

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