What We’re Getting Wrong with Meditation
Presenter:
Dr. Richard Davidson
Time:
1:11:21
Summary
Dr. Richard Davidson (Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry, Founder & Director of the Center for Healthy Minds) shows us what it truly means to be well in your emotional self by harnessing our trauma mechanisms into well-being! He breaks down the scientific data he’s gathered on long-term meditators (including monks!) to show the efficacy of meditation, the parts of the brain most affected by meditation, and what all of that means for how we self-regulate and cope with trauma. Dr. Davidson explains how meditation can help parenting, how our expectations and narratives influence our perception of the world, and what our "emotional fingerprints" are. He and Mayim discuss how his framework of awareness, connection, insight, and purpose lead us to understand the science of well-being, the notion that love and kindness are innate and hate is learned, and the importance of teaching forms of meditation to our kids.
Transcript
Our beliefs about ourselves and our expectations of ourselves influence our perception of the world. And I would go even further to say they not only influence our perception of the world, they define the world in which we subjectively inhabit one way for an average person to to reflect about this, and this is a kind of simple meditation exercise that we do, is imagine a challenging situation that has happened recently in your life, bring it into your mind and simply envision what your response to that situation might be if you had a completely different set of beliefs and expectations going into that situation. We are so fused with the beliefs and expectations that we have of ourselves, many people don't even recognize that they have beliefs and expectations. Wait.
Can we just can we slow this down just for a second because so I thought of a situation. I'm not gonna go into too much detail. I thought of a situation where someone hurt my feelings and they did something that I think is wrong, you know, unethical, like, really wrong. So I'm trying to imagine, like I have, I'm thinking of a friend of mine who happens to be a I would consider a pretty enlightened person. She was raised in a Buddhist community, and she's very chill. If this happened to her, she would have had a totally different reaction. I mean, it's not to say that she wouldn't be hurt.