The first step I call activation. It’s having some kind of experience in the first place. Then there’s the second necessary step of any learning, which I call installation. Another term is internalization. It’s receiving the experience into yourself. It’s not just having the experience, it’s helping it leave a lasting trace behind in your physical brain.

Most of us are pretty okay, not always, at having some kind of beneficial experience, moments of peace, kindness, success, beauty. But then we blow right by the second step. The good moment happens and then it’s gone. Nothing sticks from it. It has no lasting value. It didn’t change us for the better in any way. We left all that money lying on the table.

That’s why we need to practice taking in the good. It’s how we help beneficial moments get recorded in the brain, turning passing states into lasting traits, good traits that you carry with you wherever you go.

That’s where the HEAL process comes in. It’s the acronym H, E, A, L.

H: Have a Beneficial Experience

The first phase of lasting learning is some kind of beneficial experience, something that’s useful or enjoyable. There are two ways to have one. You can notice one you’re already having, or you can create one.

Noticing is the main way, and it’s easy because it’s already here. Most of the time in life, all you’ve got to do is notice what’s right under your nose. We often overlook good experiences because our brains evolved to focus on problems and threats. But meanwhile, most of us are having many ordinary experiences many times a day that are enjoyable or useful. The rhythm of your breathing. The chair holding you up. A friendly text. Some music that lifts your mood. Nothing urgently wrong. I think of these as ordinary jewels strewn before us. The problem is, much of the time we don’t even notice them.

The second way is to create the experience. Recall something positive that happened in your past. Recognize something good that’s ongoing in the present, like having enough food, or people who care about you. Acknowledge some of your own good qualities. Everyone has good qualities inside, even while being a work in progress. Or use your imagination.

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I want to tell a little story from my dissertation, which involved offering alternatives to toddlers around problematic wants. Not the steak knives, how about the cool spoons? I went into 20 different homes. I ended up with a videotape of my interactions with their toddler, 20 mothers, 10 little boys, 10 little girls, and I followed them around for a while, just free observation. And then we did a ginger snap cookie making episode, which is full of opportunities for there to be a conflict between the wants of the parent and the wants of the toddler. I filmed it all and then I coded it really carefully, staying up late at night, getting up early in the morning, and I finally got a PhD.

There were several little episodes that stayed with me in really haunting ways. If you’re vulnerable here, you might want to take a step back from the stories I’m going to tell. They were really striking in that there was no overt abuse. Nothing physical happened. Definitely nothing sexualized. And yet I know what happened in these little episodes that lasted maybe 20 seconds really landed, especially if an episode like that happened again and again.

You might reflect on how your parents and your caregivers responded to your own wants. My mother was an extremely loving, decent, motivated, large-hearted person, and she grew up in a culture in the Great Depression in America in which it was just standard that children don’t know what they want. And even if they do know what they want, who cares what they want, compared to the wants of adults? She wasn’t mean about that. That’s just how she grew up.

The Toddler Who Raised His Arms

Story number one is a little boy and a mom. I’m following them around. And the little boy, 15 months old, barely can walk, raises his arms and starts making the sounds, if you’ve been around toddlers: rising tone, arms rising, pick me up. And the mom seemed like a pleasant person. She just stood there staring at him. She didn’t say something like, oh sweetie, I can’t pick you up right now, or oh sweetie, my back is killing me, I can’t pick you up, I’m so sorry, or kneel down on the floor and get next to him and let him crawl into her lap and cuddle there. Maybe picking him up just wasn’t an option for her. Nothing. She just went inert. She just looked at him.

Much research has shown that this is one of the most unnerving things that can happen. There’s a lot of research on what’s called the still face experiment, in which you take toddlers, you put them in a high chair, you park a parent in front of them, and you ask the parent to just maintain a poker face, no matter what the child does. Nothing mean, nothing loud, no yelling. Just nothing. Five, 10 seconds go by, the toddler starts getting animated, tries to get a rise out of the parent. 20, 30 seconds go, the toddler’s getting increasingly upset. 40, 50 seconds have gone by, the toddler is completely broken down and distraught, and they’ve got to stop the experiment.

Even if the other person disagrees with what we say or doesn’t want to give us what we want, at least they’ve received the communication. But when the other person is acting as if they don’t even hear you, or even if they hear you, it just passes through because it does not matter, that’s profoundly devastating to an adult and very, very, very devastating to little kids.

So she just stayed there. And he got louder and louder, and increasingly upset. Finally, he was so upset that, if I recall, she walked out of the room, and he followed after her. So that’s an episode. Probably 30 seconds in the life of that child. And yet if it happened once, especially with a stranger in the room with a camera recording it all, you’ve got to figure it was happening a lot in the life of that kid. What’s the impact of that?

The Toddler Who Wanted the Spoon

Another story. This one was while making ginger snap cookies. This is a kid who was just very delightful, sitting in his high chair. Mom is focused. She wanted to make these cookies. She was dutiful and task-oriented, probably a little compulsive in her behavior, but just the kind of person you want to hire for your company. Very dutiful and conscientious. She was going to make these cookies, which they were supposed to make together. The boy is exuberantly waving his arm around with the wooden spoon in it. And she needs the spoon. So she glances in his direction and plucks the spoon from his hand, because she’s now going to stir the bowl of ginger snap batter. And he looks at her for a moment like: Huh? starts pointing at the spoon. He wants the spoon, no big deal.

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Where Craving Comes From

Why do we crave? Who thought of that, anyway? Whose plan is this? It’s Mother Nature’s plan for her little critters to crave in order to pass on genes and live to see the sunrise. The basis for craving is something is missing or something is wrong. There’s a deficit or a disturbance in the meeting of important needs. That’s why a squirrel craves its nuts and wants to get into its little safe place. That’s why humans pile up possessions. That’s why we chase various pleasures. It’s because underneath it all, we feel like something’s missing and we’re trying to fill that hole.

Think about it, back on the Serengeti plains or in Jurassic Park, primates that were super chill. Hey, I feel already full. It’s all groovy. They starved to death. They didn’t keep looking for food, right? Or, oh, I’m all mellow, one with everything. It feels so good here. Chomp! They got eaten. The animals that survived and passed on their genes were the ones that were really cranky and driven and anxious and irritated and demanding and insistent. The ones who craved a lot were the ones who passed on their genes, and here we are today.

Sometimes we get caught up in thinking, oh, I got to get this, I gotta get that. And we don’t really need it. Nothing’s really missing, but we believe it so. But it’s really smart in very practical ways to pay attention to the deficits and the disturbances in your life. I want to talk about what happens when important psychological experiences are missing while we grow up, and even as adults.

What I Did About It

Then I stumbled on a method. I began to neither dismiss that longing in me nor get demanding about it. Those are the two common patterns of reaction to important psychological supplies being missing as we grow up, whether it’s from parents or peers or other sources.

Rather than being dismissive or demanding, I just simply began looking for opportunities to experience authentically being included and wanted and valued, which were three normal range needs that were poorly met when I was growing up, for all kinds of reasons, including my own withdrawal from the world. I would look for the opportunity to feel included, wanted, and seen. And when I had that opportunity, I would observe the fact of it casually, like some guy in the dorm invited me to sit with him for pizza at lunch, or a girl smiling at me in the elevator. I would allow myself to experience it, and then I would take it in. And I would let the sense of being included, wanted, valued, seen sink down into these hollow, empty places inside that could feel very, very young, even going all the way back to pre-verbal sort of body memories of being a really, really little kid.

And I was amazed. I started college at 16, so I was probably 17 when I stumbled on this, and I was just lit up. Wow. On my own I could find opportunities to authentically take into myself today the psychological nutrients that were missing when I was growing up. And gradually, truly, and including now today in different ways, I really have filled that hole in my heart. That sense of deficit has been really filled, and around it is much less sense of craving for all that.

Creating the Basis Yourself

Now, to be clear, the opportunities to fill that hole in your heart are really affected by many factors outside your control, including privilege and social class. I was in college. I was in a safe environment. I was a white male. I definitely had opportunities to experience being wanted and valued and liked and included. And that’s certainly true.

On practical grounds, it’s really helpful to do what one can to create the factual basis for the experiences that bring the psychological supplies. The more that we don’t naturally receive the basis for those supplies from the outside, the more, as best we can, it’s important to be self-reliant, and to look for ways to create the basis for those supplies ourselves, like ordinary experiences of being part of a group, or connection, even fairly superficial, but still a friendly connection with someone at the place where you get your deli sandwiches and so forth.

As we really do fill ourselves up in the present, it’s a lot easier to move into the higher levels of practice, because we’re not carrying around those tin cans, tied to us on a string, rattling behind us, calling out, feed me, feed, feed. When we feed them, they grow quiet, which frees up attention for subtler aspects of awakening.

If you would like to learn more about this, check out my Hardwiring Happiness Masterclass, and use code substack10 for 10% off at checkout.

The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.

You might be familiar with this material I’ve developed around the linking step. A standard practice, whether it’s in formal therapies or elsewhere, is to associate positive with negative. I’ve really taken that on steroids, to the max, because for me at least, the process of linking present time positive beneficial resource experiences of psychological nutrients that I need, connecting those to the underlying hole in the heart, has been absolutely tied for first place of the psychological methods I know. I’ve gotten very interested in it. You can read more about it in detail in my book Hardwiring Happiness and my Hardwiring Happiness Masterclass. If you decide to sign up for the Masterclass, use code substack10 for 10% off.

Tell the Truth About What Was There

Imagine and tell the truth to yourself. Gosh, what was present when I was growing up? My hardworking parents often did the best they could. What kind of psychological supplies came my way, pretty well, pretty reliably? And what, if anything that was important, was missing?

Pick One Thing

You might pick one thing that, wow, would have made a lot of difference if it had been more present when you were growing up. It would have made a big difference for me if I had been more included in groups of other kids, more of an insider rather than an endless outsider. That would have been wonderful.

And I was a factor in how that turned out, because children have agency. They have impacts on others. Doesn’t mean they have moral responsibility, but they have effects. In my own awkwardness and shyness, I was so uncomfortable around other kids that I just really stayed back. So I was part of the mix. Nonetheless, at the end of the day, what was missing?

In that totality of all the causes, and not blaming others, see clearly what’s something important for you that maybe was missing that then creates reactive patterns today.

Match the Supply to What Was Missing

Then you might imagine an experience that is matched to what was missing. Perhaps it’s already available to you. What was missing for me had to do with one of our three primary needs, the need for connection. We have two other primary needs, for safety and for satisfaction. These are broad umbrella terms. If we have a deficit, a lack of meeting our need for connection, fulfilling our need for safety or for satisfaction will be good, but it won’t address what’s missing. It’s not matched.

So for example, even though I had a hole in my heart in college, I pursued goals, I partied, I was successful as a student, I had opportunities for satisfaction. That was nice. But it did not fill the hole in my heart. I also got strong, I protected myself. I was assertive, I had safety, I was in a fairly safe setting, and still I had that hole in my heart. It wasn’t until I sought the nutrients that were matched to my need that I gradually filled that hole. Very often people look for resource experiences, psychological nutrients, that are not matched to what they really need.

If you have a need for safety, gratitude will not meet your need for safety. What meets the need for safety are qualities of inner calm, feeling strong, being cared about and protected by others, et cetera.

So, in your own case, thinking about this particular thing that was missing for you, what might you experience now that would be a kind of medicine or a supply, an experience that would match to what was missing? For example, if like me you felt really left out, might there be an opportunity here to feel like you’re part of a group? You belong here. Or perhaps as a child you felt pretty helpless. You were pushed around, maybe bullied, you didn’t have much sense of agency. These days, are there ways in which you are strong, you are potent, you are able to make things happen? Maybe you didn’t feel loved enough, maybe because you were not loved enough when you were young. Are there beings who love you today or have loved you? Or if all else fails, can you feel loving yourself?

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So I would pull myself up and out of that experience, shake it off, and start falling back into sleep again. And then, boop, there I was, tumbling in space, falling to my death. And so as I’m falling asleep, it starts again and I let it happen. I let go all the way to completion, where smack, right on that gray granite flat boulder, and then in the moment just before impact, a millisecond just before, I realized, oh, what I was experiencing was an upsurge of the fear that I had been suppressing all day long as an inexperienced young climber on the lead, so that if I fell, I might go 20 or 30 or more feet with a little tiny piece of metal holding me. It was a little scary. I just shut it all down and it was now flooding up again.

And I learned there’s a middle path, there’s a middle place, what a surprise, for healthy anxiety, healthy fear, and to allow it, to make room for it and find that middle place where one is not overwhelmed by it and also one is not trying to lie about it or numb to it or push it all the way down.

Then on the other hand, there’s problematic anxiety. Often, due to some kind of underlying physical condition, the body will generate chronic anxiety. One of the major symptoms of an underlying health condition is an internal sense of alarm. Even before you identify what that internal condition might be, the early warning systems in the body-mind are bubbling up alarm into your consciousness.

So if you’re dealing with a chronic health problem, for example, or you’re in the middle of a difficult situation, you lost your job, or you’re someone in a country who is being targeted for mistreatment of various kinds, well, it’s understandable that you feel scared. Your heart is pounding or your body is tense. It’s really understandable if you’re desperately worried about somebody else.

This is where the Buddhist teachings about how to bear and how to live with, and in some senses shift our relationship to, ongoing painful experiences are really useful.

1. Step Back and Witness It

These are teachings around mindfulness, so there can be a witnessing of the anxiety. Not being identified with it and hijacked by it. We’re not trying to reduce it, we’re just simply stepping back from that. If anything, it’s helpful to the extent you can open to it.

That’s where establishing a base comes in, a refuge of calm strength, as best you can. There are other things that can help you establish that, such as warmheartedness, flowing out and flowing in. It’s a major factor of being centered in the body-mind. Establishing that base then enables us to be more open to the anxiety, to feel it, to let it flow.

If you bump into difficulty, it’s okay, you’re normal. Calm is a normal state of being, a sense of strength is normal, openness is normal, warmheartedness is normal. It might be difficult to access, but it’s a normal range of experience, which means that it’s natural to us. And over time, as you work through the obstructions to that and come home to what is natural to you, you will be increasingly successful at it.

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Anxiety is perfectly normal and has an evolved survival function. It provides signals to us about threat. It alerts us to the tiger that might be dwelling in the bushes. It might alert us as well to what will happen if we don’t listen carefully to our partner, or what might happen if we don’t go see that doctor about this funny lump in our neck. There’s a place for healthy anxiety. I wish I had been more anxious about saving a little bit of money in my 20s and 30s, which would have helped me later on in life, rather than just totally resisting the advice of my parents.

When Worry Gets in the Way

Interestingly, I’ve learned from Gil Fronsdal that a way of translating the Pali word, in early Buddhism, that’s routinely translated as hindrances, is as coverings. Coverings, isn’t that interesting? These are coverings over the beautiful true nature that is inherent in all of us but is covered over by various things. One of them is the hindrance of restlessness and worry. This is rumination, this is mental preoccupation.

Worrying that is not productive hinders your progress on the path, and hinders relationships, hinders productivity at work. It saps energy. It pulls us away from the present as it is, and gets us caught up in mental time travel about the future or being preoccupied about the past.

We worry about what we’ve done. We worry if we’ll ever be able to repair something. We worry about people who are estranged from us and what will happen. So it’s really understandable. And what can we do about it?

Welcome It, Thank It, Then Hang Up the Phone

What’s really useful is to ask yourself, what’s productive here? What’s useful? Welcome, worry. Thank you, worry. What do you have to say?

At the point that you’ve gotten the message, you can hang up the phone. I got it. I understand there are certain things that are uncertain. I understand that there are things that are beyond my control. I understand that some bad things might happen. I don’t know. And meanwhile, I’m going to do what I can. Thank you, but I don’t need to add worry to my discerning and my planning and my acting.

I can disrupt ruminating, which is like a cow chewing its cud. I can interrupt laps around the rumination track. I can glean the value, I can harvest the value. I can squeeze the juice out of that orange of worrying and then release the rind, release the part that’s not so helpful.

If you’d like help with the old reactions underneath your worry, I’d love to have you join me for The Healing Link, and the code SUBSTACK10 gives you 10% off.

The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.

The other part is that these hunter-gatherer bands also competed with other bands, often violently, for scarce food and resources. Individuals and bands that were better at fearing and fighting outsiders, better at aggression and prejudice and disrespect, even terrible violence, were more able to survive too, just a little bit more able, and pass on their genes. The results today are woven into our innate human capabilities and inclinations toward prejudice, disrespect, dehumanization, aggression, and war. As the parable puts it, there are two wolves in each of our hearts, one of love and one of hate, and everything depends on which one we feed, and how they’re fed, each day.

Much of that feeding comes from the outside in, through our parents and caregivers, our peers, politics, economics, cultural forces, and leaders who prey on fears of others to gain power for themselves. But much of the feeding happens inside us, in the ways we choose, routinely, many times a day, whether to dwell in compassion or resentment. Whether to try to understand the grievances of others, even if we don’t agree with every bit of them, or just dismiss them out of hand. The choice, every day, whether to do the right thing even when it’s hard, or to cut corners and justify the exploitation of others. The choice whether to hold people in our hearts, even people who don’t seem like us in every way, or to just cast them out, toss them out of the mind, and regard them as if they don’t matter.

We make these choices every day. We’re responsible for them. These choices define us, and what we choose again and again becomes what we are. Some of the qualities of the wolf of hate are indeed useful in certain situations, when we need to stand up to aggression that’s actually coming at us. But any look at history, or even just the day’s headlines, reveals the destructive power of that wolf once it’s unleashed, and the terrible consequences that follow.

So what can we do? If we hate the wolf of hate, we just feed the wolf of hate. What we can do is stop feeding it so much privately, inside our own minds, building up our case against other people, or making no effort at all to understand what life is actually like for them. And, most important, we can feed the wolf of love.

One of the most powerful ways to feed the wolf of love is very simple: regard others as us, rather than them. Many studies have shown that as soon as we start to regard someone as not like me, it’s a short, slippery slope to looking at them with disdain, mistrust, or simply dismissing them, and moving into mistreating them in some way.

It can be very simple to widen that circle of us. Imagining people next to you on the highway, like me, you’re driving a car. People getting groceries alongside you, like me, you need to get food. Something as fundamental as, like me, you need air to breathe. Like me, you enjoy taking your tight shoes off at the end of a long day. Again and again, getting a sense of common humanity, shared commonalities, common ground, even with people you wouldn’t normally think of that way.

You can widen the circle further, to include people who are genuinely difficult for you, people you disagree with, people you’ve had real conflicts with. Without waiving your rights, without giving up one bit of your own needs, you can still look for the ways you’re actually alike. Like me, you like to be right. Like me, you get mad sometimes. Like me, you don’t like other people telling you what to do. Like me, you make mistakes. Recognizing this doesn’t weaken you. You’re not giving anything up. You’re just recognizing, factually, what you have in common with people you might oppose.

We may still disagree with people in our circle of us. We may still compete with them, and sometimes we may need to be fiery or forceful. But we can still regard them, in terms of our common humanity, as like me in some basic way. Like me, you want to be happy and to live. Like me, you feel pain, and will face death someday. Just that regard, holding someone within even a broad circle of some kind of us, helps you feel better, and it increases the odds you’ll be more effective with them if you ever have to work through a problem together.

If the wolf of hate keeps getting fed by the same old triggers, no matter how much you understand where they come from, that’s usually a sign the reaction is coming from somewhere older than the situation in front of you. That’s exactly what I built The Healing Link to address, a six-week course on reaching the layer where old reactions actually live, so the change finally holds. I’d love to have you join us. Use code substack10 for 10% off at checkout.

The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.

This is an aspect of unilateral virtue, the idea that it’s worth focusing on what’s on your side of the trade, what’s under your control, which is how you think and speak and act, and what you do to influence other people, but mainly focusing on how to be a better, more effective, more skillful person in relationships yourself. This is your best-odds strategy for getting good treatment from others. It’s not a guarantee, but it increases the likelihood of a good result. It also helps you feel better that you’ve done the best you could, that you’ve lived within your own code. And speaking this way reduces side issues, it takes away the possibility that other people will fixate on some tone you had, or words you used, and use that to deflect from what you really want to talk about.

This way of speaking could be called wise speech. For me it really boils down to two simple things:

• are we well intended, and

• are we skillful in what we do with other people?

We can be the best communicator in the world, and the other person, they just do whatever they do. If an interaction goes badly, it doesn’t necessarily mean you did anything wrong, that you spoke unwisely. They have a really big role to play too. But I can say this from personal experience, again and again: it has been so helpful to just realize this is getting a little strange, not going well, and come back to good form.

Six Guidelines for Wise Speech

There are six specific guidelines I use to know what good form actually looks like. Here’s the first.

Well-intended. Think about your underlying purposes, sometimes unconscious ones, or conflicts of purpose inside yourself, when an interaction isn’t going well. I’ve certainly talked with people at times where my real intent, deep down, was to pound my point home, or show them the error of their ways, prove that I was right, or get them to do something I wanted. I wasn’t being open about it, I was being covered about it. Those aren’t good purposes. They’re normal, they’re natural, but look at the results. Usually not very good. Speech that’s truly well-intended wants to lift up rather than tear down, wants to find the truth of your own experience and the other person’s experience, rather than throw dust in their eyes so they can’t see what’s true.

There are five more guidelines and a real distinction between two entirely different kinds of talking that most people blur together without realizing it.

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He put it this way: what about praise and respect coming to you, including opportunities for really rewarding engagement in projects that promise positive satisfaction? These experiences caress one’s self-identity very seductively. So shouldn’t we equally not take positive praise and regard from others personally?

My honest answer is that there’s a developmental process here. In the ultimate, we’re able to see praise and blame as equally empty, ownerless, impersonal, and non-binding. Most of us are not that far along. And I’ve known a number of people who pretend that they’re so far along, they’re not, they’re still vulnerable to getting triggered, and they’re still carrying a fair amount of suffering embedded in emotional residues deep down inside, somatically, in their body.

Most of us would be really served by deliberately looking for opportunities for praise, respect, inclusion, loyalty, and valuing, and internalizing those experiences, to heal ourselves deeply inside, as a major way to reduce craving for those external sources of self-worth.

I’m the king of taking in the good, so let me tell you what that actually looks like in practice. It’s continually being in the present where things are arising and passing away, arising, releasing, arising, and releasing, and deliberately sustaining the beneficial experiences, because the brain needs sustained experience for it to lead to lasting change inside. I think of it more like a standing wave. The river is fluid, continuously changing, and yet there’s a stability to it that is healing to the body and mind.

We’re giving to ourselves what we would love to give to the little child we once were, if we could go back in time, or to the person we were in a previous marriage, or job, or friendship, or neighborhood. There’s a natural givingness of goodness to others. It’s good and wise to give it to others. It’s also good to take it inside for yourself.

And as you do that again and again, then when the oatmeal hits the fan, it doesn’t hurt so much, because you already feel full inside. A sense of fullness already, fullness of being, fullness of presence. You have to work up to it. But to the extent that fullness is already present, with a kind of lovingness underneath it, you’re much more able to be direct and real about what actually matters.

The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.

But what do we do when it’s not?

Sometimes we need to work through an issue with another person. It could be minor, or it could be something really fundamental in the relationship. Either way, we need ways that are skillful for working through it.

There are eight of them, and they build on each other.

One: Establish the Facts

Sometimes it’s perfectly clear what happened, but much of the time the facts aren’t that clear, or people disagree about them. Independent of what the facts mean, the facts are the facts, and establishing them grounds whatever issue you’re working through in objective reality, which tends to narrow disagreements. When raising kids, my wife and I might have a different view. I might say, you never do something. She might say, well, I always do something. Somewhere between never and always, the truth might lie.

Grounding things in facts sets you up to move toward solutions. Slow it down in your own mind, at least for an hour, or a day, even a week, and clarify for yourself what the facts actually are. When you’re done, you might realize the thing that bothered you really is that big, or alternately, you might realize it isn’t. Either way, you go into the conversation equipped with real clarity.

The next seven steps take you from there, from getting clear on values, all the way to a discipline most people never learn: knowing when to actually stop.

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Have you been able to talk about things with this person?

Have you been able to express it if you didn’t like how something went?

Or, on the other hand, have you been able to express some of the warm feelings you might have for them? Appreciation and respect, affection, even love. It’s not just negative reactions to other people that get bottled up.

For myself, one of the big lessons for me in my early 20s, when I started getting some very deep tissue bodywork, was that what I had bottled up mainly inside wasn’t so much anger or hurt as I suspected, but in fact, uncommunicative love, which had gotten kind of stagnant inside as a result of my struggles with my parents and what I was withholding from them.

Ask yourself, with this significant person, have you been able to admit fault, maybe express remorse and try to make amends? If we don’t say what we felt bad about, or what we feel good about, or what we wish were different, the weight of what’s unsaid starts to pile up as the days turn into years. I think of two people a little bit like two boats side by side. And the weight of what’s unsaid keeps falling stone by stone, like heavy stones between them, and the weight of its falling starts pushing them bit by bit by bit, farther and farther apart.

In addition to what’s been unsaid, there’s also what’s unresolved, unworked through. Things that bother you, agreements that haven’t been kept, things you wish would be different going forward, maybe in terms of what the other person does or doesn’t do, or how they talk with you. Sometimes it makes sense, on any given day, not to get into it. But as the days turn into years, the impact of what’s been unresolved can really add up for people.

Now, of course, sometimes it’s just not possible to talk about it. The other person may not be alive anymore, or they might be unreachable or unwilling to communicate with you. Or you might think to yourself that it’s just inappropriate, or dangerous, that it could lead to some kind of blowback that would be really problematic. Or maybe you could talk about it with the other person, but it’s really scary, understandably, because if you start talking at all, you’re afraid you’ll take the lid off a whole bunch of stuff that’s going to come out.

With regard to those concerns, very understandable and common ones, it helps to have inner resources first. Things like getting on your own side, being able to calm and center yourself, having compassion for yourself, being able to forgive yourself. Those inner resources matter before the outer skills of how to actually say the words.

That stagnant love, and the weight of what’s unresolved, don’t just sit there neutrally. They shape how you react to people now, sometimes decades later, even when you can’t quite trace the reaction back to where it started. That’s really the piece I keep coming back to in my own work these days: you can understand exactly where something came from and still feel it running the show. What actually reaches it is something more specific than insight, it’s called Linking, and it’s the center of a six-week course I’m teaching a new, live course called The Healing Link. If any of this is landing for you, I’d love to have you join us. You can use code substack10 for 10% off at checkout.

The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.

Turn it around. Don’t you want to feel appreciated? Deep down inside, I think a lot of us have an ache in our heart, as a result of a lifetime of injustice that we’ve received, in which we have been insufficiently appreciated. This is not fuel for ego. My experience and observation is that when people internalize feeling appreciated, they’re less egoic, because now they’ve got that supply inside and don’t need to work others or get caught up in trying to impress others. They feel good enough already.

Very often we get psychologically vulnerable to taking things personally because we’re carrying a lot of narcissistic injury. You might recall the myth of Narcissus, a good-looking young man who got so infatuated with his own reflection that he kept staring at it and eventually starved to death. That’s an extreme version of narcissism. But there’s also what psychology calls healthy narcissistic supply, joining, mirroring, cherishing, prizing, valuing, appreciating. We’re big social primates. We really need that.

We can also recognize ourselves, extremely important, and factually recognize good qualities in ourselves, things that we appreciate in others, that we can also appreciate in ourselves, because that’s only fair. Sometimes people get caught up really fixating on the one kind of external appreciation. They’re gonna die on that hill. That’s the hill they’re going to die on. They’re gonna keep trying to get blood from that stone. They’re going to keep playing that slot machine over and over again for the one time it might pay off to get that external supply. That’s not wise.

But meanwhile, even if sometimes people are in real circumstances where the appreciation coming to them from the world is a very thin soup, we do what we can. Maybe we communicate with others, maybe we find other rivers, where the logs of appreciation are more common. But meanwhile we can still recognize and appreciate ourselves, and then slow down, and feel it, and really, really, really take it in.

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Take two. Everything’s the same. You’re in your canoe with your friend, your nice clothes, your grandmother’s silver, what a wonderful day. And then the shocking crash against the side of your canoe tips you over, dumps you in the cold river. You come up sputtering. What do you see this time? A large submerged log, drifted downstream, that smacked into your canoe and dumped you in.

You’re still cold. You’re still wet. Grandmother’s silver is still at the bottom of the river. But it feels different. It feels different from being targeted capriciously and unfairly by people who did it on purpose, compared to, well, that’s a drag, natural hazard. You don’t take it so personally. Maybe you make some choices in the future, look out for the logs next time, choose a different river, or a different sport altogether. But it’s not so personal. It feels really different.

The takeaway is that most other people are like logs. We’re in the middle of their bad day. That doesn’t excuse them from moral culpability, but we can start to recognize them as being at the effect of, carried along by, thousands of impersonal processes upstream, sweeping them along. It’s really quite powerful to regard other people this way, as usually not malevolent, not evil, just carried along by their own tendencies. We’ve still got to deal with the logs in life. We still have to make choices about which rivers we put ourselves in, the ones that might be full of them. But it’s not so personal. There’s a kind of buffer around it.

This is where the Buddha’s teaching of the two arrows comes in. The first arrow is inescapable, inherent discomfort in life, physical or emotional. You’re dumped in the river and you’re cold. That part isn’t optional. Then there’s the second arrow, the one we throw at ourselves with our own cascading reactions, the taking it personally. That’s where most of our actual suffering comes from. And that’s where we can help ourselves.

There’s a teaching from the Zen master Yun Men that I keep coming back to. He was asked, what is it that trees wither, and leaves fall? He replied, body exposed in the golden wind.

There are undoubtedly associations to that phrase in Zen that I’m probably ignorant of. I’m going to take it at face value, and invite you to do the same. How does it feel? It’s almost like a poem. Golden wind. There’s that aspect of life that includes loss, trees withering, other people doing various things to us and around us. To enjoy the golden wind, we have to be exposed to all the forms of that wind. If we’re going to participate in life, dare greatly, love people, try things that might not work, we’re going to expose ourselves to it. The eight worldly winds, as it’s said in Tibet: gain and loss, pleasure and pain, fame and ill repute, praise and blame. Body exposed in the golden wind. There’s no getting the good parts of being alive without standing in that same wind.

If you’d like to go deeper into the nature of mind that makes this kind of freedom possible, not just less personal reactions, but a genuinely different relationship to who you take yourself to be, I’d love to have you join me in Neurodharma. It’s where I get into the deeper practices for working with identity, awakening, and the wiring of the brain itself. You can find it here: https://rickhanson.com/online-courses/neurodharma-online-course/. Use the code SUBSTACK10 for 10% off when you register.

The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.

When you look at your own internal difficulty holding fast to your boundaries, it’s worth asking yourself: to what extent have I internalized, or to what extent have I understandably been swimming upstream, and as a result, not felt entitled to the kind of good treatment, the kind of respect, the kind of reciprocity that other people who are more privileged or more advantaged in society routinely presume for themselves?

There are three factors that lead to privilege, more or less, and they’re really different from each other.

1. Fortune. Just luck, good or bad. The genetic lottery, avoiding certain illnesses, being born with abilities or looks that happen to be valued in your culture. There’s no moral hazard to it either way.

2. Virtuous effort. Privilege can be earned, through expertise, licensure, standing. There’s no moral hazard here either, if anything there’s moral benefit.

3. Advantage. This one matters most for boundaries. Advantage operates by benefiting some and harming others. It’s a tailwind for some, a headwind for others, and the gradual accumulation of it tends to lift some people up by holding others back.

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Who gets to set the boundaries? Who gets to decide who’s in and who’s out of a group? Who gets to determine what people owe each other? That’s a significant question, and the answer is very often shaped by advantage, not by anything either person earned or deserved.

My wife is one of the best holistic health practitioners I know, technical, solid, really good at what she does. She was talking with our daughter once about how much she charges per hour for her work. Our daughter just looked at her and asked, mom, how much would you be charging if you were a guy? That was a real moment for my wife to look hard at what she felt entitled to, in the give and take of the market.

That’s an example of how we can internalize difficulty standing up for our own boundaries, and asking for reciprocity that’s roughly fair, because of this background of privilege, or the lack of it.

Waiting to feel like you’ve earned the right isn’t the fix. There’s a different place this comes from, and it doesn’t depend on anyone else’s opinion of you.

Here’s exactly where I want to take this: a concrete way to define what you owe anyone, a way to stop chasing an impossible standard, and a piece of the Dharma that settles the whole question of who’s responsible for what.

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What they’re describing is really tender and real. We’re trying, and the mind, the body, take a while to catch up, to change. And to acknowledge that and admit that is tender. It’s open. I think it’s just helpful to first realize that this is how growth happens.

One way of thinking about it is four stages. Stage one, we’re doing it and we don’t even know we’re doing it. We’re not self-aware, we’re not mindful, we’re just doing it. Stage two, we know we’re doing it and wish we weren’t doing it. We wish that reaction were not arising, but we can’t help it, or part of it, or we can’t stop that way of feeling. Stage three, the reactions are arising, the tendencies are arising, but we don’t act them out. We have a lot of breathing room from them, even if they’re arising only inside our mind. And then stage four, that reaction doesn’t occur at all. We’ve really, really moved on.

Another way of describing it is unconscious incompetence, then conscious incompetence, then conscious competence, we can ride the bicycle, but we really have to focus, and then unconscious competence. Milarepa talked about this too, in his own way. In the beginning, nothing came. In the middle, nothing stayed. In the end, nothing left.

That’s how learning happens. That’s how the nervous system changes over time. And that change process starts expanding and spreading inside the nervous system, revealed by a growing sense of being untroubled. Often it starts that way with lower stress triggers first. Parents, for most of us, are on the zero to ten potential trigger scale, a ten. Even if we love them, even if it was a secure relationship, secure attachment, because they’re so central to us.

You basically are relatively early in this process of moving from states to traits, growing and healing, which is great, actually, it means there’s plenty of upside potential in the days and years to come. And you ended up with a force five hurricane, mom. I would laugh at myself when my parents were still alive. I was in my 60s before my father passed away, my late 50s for my mother, and I’d done 30 years of inner work. I’m a therapist. And still they would use a certain tone with me and it was like I’m nine years old and pissed off yet again, or hurt, or frozen. So it’s understandable. Give yourself a break. Stick with it. Keep learning, keep growing.

Here’s exactly what I want to walk through: why practicing on your hardest relationship first backfires, a specific way your own mind can quietly set you up to fail, and a real filter for deciding whether to actually say the difficult thing once you’re ready.

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Intimacy supports autonomy. The internalized intimacy, broadly, such as in our attachment experiences as young children, the internalization of a secure relationship with a caregiver, forms over time that secure base inside from which we can venture and explore autonomously out into the world.

Go the other way, though, and autonomy supports intimacy too. If you’re getting invaded and enmeshed and engulfed by another person, so that there’s no autonomy, if me is getting lost in we, that can be very beautiful for some period of time. But on the whole, if you’re getting engulfed and enmeshed with another person, that will eventually undermine the relationship altogether, sometimes because that person, wittingly or unwittingly, will start taking advantage of you. You start becoming an extension of them, rather than an independent, differentiated being in your own right.

Autonomy also supports intimacy in a more direct way. If you know that at the end of the day, or the end of the conversation, or the end of a fun evening, you are going to keep your own counsel, you’re going to decide freely and independently what you’re going to do in this relationship, then you’re going to be more willing to enter into the depths of connection, of joining with that other being. Because you know you can always find your way back to your own secure base. If you’re really confident in your own autonomy, that you don’t have to believe what someone says, you’re going to be more willing to step away from your own positions and your attachment to your own views, to actually be open-minded to what they have to offer.

I had a recording engineer, the very first time I recorded a program, a really wise, no-nonsense, seen-it-all kind of person, Randy Roark. At the end of that first recording, I was kind of nervous about what might happen with it. He said, well Rick, I’ve been with all the big teachers, seen them come, seen them go, and I’ve seen that there are two kinds of teachers: knowers, and learners. And you, Rick, are going to be okay. Be a learner.

If you’re more autonomous, you’re more comfortable with being a learner. You’re more comfortable with not knowing, with acknowledging error, with room for improvement along the way. That supports you in relationships too.

There’s one more reason boundaries are good for relationships, not just for you. Boundaries stop other people from destroying a relationship. If you have boundaries, you can often find a middle place, a more limited but still sustained form of relationship with someone, because you’re halting them, or disengaging from certain things they’d otherwise do. Without that boundary, you’d have to be out completely.

If you want to go even deeper into building this for your own real relationships, join me for the Setting Healthy Boundaries workshop on September 19th, live online! Use the code SUBSTACK10 for 10% off when you register.

The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.

And like a lot of kids who become a little parentified, I was empathic and caring, and I felt a certain influence. It was gratifying to feel like I could cheer her up, and to be her confidant sometimes as I got older.

That can lead, as an adult, to an excessive sense of your own influence. An unrealistic appraisal of your own influence over what is really happening in the minds of others.

Many people have some version of this. A sense of over-responsibility for what’s going on inside somebody else. Caregiving responsibilities, caretaking responsibilities. Alongside it, a sense of being overly to blame for what is happening in the mind of another person. And then, using a loaded word deliberately, a kind of grandiosity about how much you can influence what’s going on in there at all.

The Five Reflections, Turned Toward Other People

There’s a teaching from early Buddhism called the five reflections. It comes from a short discourse in the Anguttara Nikaya. You ask these of yourself, and you bring a don’t know mind to each one, a fresh beginner’s mind.

Is it given to me to avoid aging?

Is it given to me to avoid illness?

Is it given to me to avoid death?

Is it given to me to avoid being separated, one way or another, one day or another, from all that I love?

And is it given to me to avoid inheriting the results of my deliberate actions?

I’m slightly updating and paraphrasing some of the traditional language, but I think those questions stand in their own right as I’ve expressed them here. In the sutta the Buddha talks about those who don’t face these reflections, and then those who do.

The twist I want to put to this is to foreground the fact that these reflections apply to other people too.

They face aging, illness and death. They face separation, given impermanence, from all that they care about and love. So we can certainly have compassion for them. And then there’s the fifth one. They too inherit the results of their actions. Your karma, in the sense of the results of actions in this life at least, is your own, for better and for worse. Theirs are their own, for better or worse. Two truths side by side: oneness and distinction, joining and differentiation, the ocean and the waves.

The Bad News and the Good News

Inherent in those reflections is a compassionate recognition that other people are being affected by streams of causes and conditions that are not your own.

And with wisdom, over time, we can start to recognize that the bad news and the good news is that there’s almost nothing you can do.

What a release. Because if you don’t have power, you don’t have responsibility. If you don’t have the power to change what’s happening inside another person, you don’t have moral culpability either. You’re not to blame. It’s not your fault, right?

Others are the inheritors of the streams running through their lives. The results of their own deliberate actions, and also so many forces affecting them from upstream that you’re not the cause of, and that you have very little power to change. That’s worth recognizing.

Much of this comes up when people try to set boundaries in their own lives, which is what I’ll be teaching in a four hour workshop, Setting Healthy Boundaries, on September 19th. We’ll get into the practical side of it: sorting what’s coming at you, knowing what you won’t put up with and what you’re no longer going to give, and how to hold a line with someone you also love. Don’t forget to use code substack10 at checkout for 10% off.

The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.

Setting Healthy Boundaries

In the story of the Buddha’s awakening, sitting under the Bodhi tree, in the middle of the process, in comes Mara, the trickster, the force of delusion, the confuser, the shapeshifter, sending pictures of beautiful, attractive others to draw him away through lust, sending images of horrible demons to trick him with anger. But the Buddha, recognizing what’s happening, simply says, I see you, Mara. I recognize what you’re doing. The Buddha does not fight with Mara, does not get complicated about it, does not feed the trolls, as it were. He just reaches down and touches the earth, grounds himself, and claims his place.

To claim for yourself the right to see clearly what’s actually happening is absolutely crucial. It’s often lost in childhood. Children are often faced with a fateful choice: is there something wrong with you, or with me? For a young child it’s very scary to recognize that something’s wrong with a parent or a caregiver or someone with authority, because if there’s something wrong with them, they can’t take care of you.

Here’s exactly what I want to walk you through: what to actually do with what someone hands you that you don’t want to carry, the much older instinct in you this draws on, and what to do when you realize certain supplies are simply never coming from a particular person or place, no matter how fair it would be if they did.

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There’s a classic suggestion from the Buddha I’ve found personally to be one of the most useful things I’ve gotten from his teachings. Be aware of the gratification, the danger, and the escape. When you’re about to get into it with someone, be aware of the payoffs, what’s drawing you in that direction. Then be aware of the costs alongside the payoffs, the dangers, the cost to you, the cost to others. It’s tempting to pursue a righteous case. Anger itself has reward value, it releases dopamine and norepinephrine, it can feel rewarding, energizing. Anger, as the proverb puts it, with its honeyed tip and poisoned barb. So notice the gratification, then the cost, and then the escape. Turn to your practice. Slow it down. Move into mindfulness.

A subset of differences are boundaries specifically.

What I want to get into now is the actual practical list, five specific things you can do, starting with how to know in your own body that someone else’s reaction is theirs and not yours, all the way through to what it looks like to take real action on a boundary that isn’t working.

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And in that experience, very soft, poignant, wistful, was a knowing that the unhappiness in that home over there was not my doing. There was no abuse, no trauma. There was the ordinary wrangling of two young parents who themselves didn’t have strong family support. There was no village to raise the child. They were under a lot of pressure. I have no rancor for them at all, just, factually, that unhappiness is not mine. I’ve got to deal with it, but it’s not mine. That was very real in me. Okay. I’ve got to take care of myself for the next 10 or 12 years, until I can move on toward more of my own kind of family, my own kind of relationships, out there in the world.

I think many children, even very young ones, have had a sense of that. At some deep level, even if they couldn’t act on it or reveal it, they knew they were differentiated from what was happening around them in their home, and they needed to get on their own side. They were, in some ways, on their own. It was up to them.

That’s the first foundation of healthy boundaries. Self-respect. Getting on your own side. You matter. If there’s no sense of being on your side, if you don’t think you have standing, how could you dare to have boundaries? How could you think you deserve them, if you don’t believe you have standing as a human being? There’s a line from the Buddha I keep coming back to. When faced with a swollen, raging river, if one is swept away by it, how can one help others across? Or, as they say on airplanes, put your own oxygen mask on first. You’ve got to take care of yourself to be able to sustain care for other people.

Second foundation, a combination of compassion and equanimity. Compassion means simply recognizing suffering over there, and that you’re not trying to do any harm. That’s real. At the same time, equanimity means recognizing, with insight, that the causes and conditions swirling along to make that other person’s process unfolding over there are, in some fundamental way, distinct from the causes and conditions making your own process unfold. Their mind stream is not your mind stream. It’s really important to pay attention to the ways we sometimes blur that boundary harmfully, taking on the attributes of others to prevent conflict, or to keep them engaged with us, out of a fear that if we don’t mirror them, or become an extension of their will, there will be trouble.

Third foundation, having your own capacity to risk dreaded experiences. To set a boundary, or act on the basis of one, we’re often afraid that bad things will happen. They’ll abandon us. They’ll reject us. They’ll yell at us. It’s sometimes said there are two major roots of psychological difficulty: low distress tolerance, and negative rumination. So the antidote to both is becoming more able to stay centered in your own calm strength, even if you’re a little rattled around the edges, so you can risk experiences like other people being upset with you, or distancing from you.

Self-respect. Compassion paired with equanimity. The willingness to risk what might happen. Those are the parts of this you can start building on your own, quietly, without anyone else even knowing you’re doing the work.

The how is harder to do alone. It’s the actual practical list, the specific things you say and do differently in your real relationships, especially the complicated ones, where you love the person, or you owe them something. That’s exactly what I built the Setting Healthy Boundaries workshop to cover. It’s a four hour deep dive into the practical side of everything above. Use the code SUBSTACK10 for 10% off.

The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.

Setting Healthy Boundaries