to feel and to be better

"We spend very little time interrogating our own minds." – Richard Davidson

Why interrogate our own minds? Think about what we think about?
To feel and to be better.
This month I invite you to investigate the work of Richard Davidson, a researcher at U Wisconsin’s Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center and author of "The Emotional Life Of Your Brain." He's learned from his research--and from decades of personal experience--that meditation can be a powerful tool for curbing our negative emotions and boosting our resilience in the face of life's inevitable setbacks; meditation helps us “interrogate” our mind: to grow in heightened awareness of our mental processes.
I’ve talked about it before, and I’ll talk about it again, because I need the reminder: that to extend lovingkindness, to be compassionate, is good for all of us. Davidson’s research (to be published in Psychological Science), used a 30-minute compassion meditation (script here, audio file here) with their subjects each day for two weeks. They found scientifically valid changes, compared to the control subjects in
 - enhanced mental focus,
 - increased altruistic behavior, and
 - greater empathy evidenced by changes in neural responses to suffering.

“Finally, all of you, be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble.” – I Peter 3:8

Davidson asserts that warm-heartedness and well-being can be regarded as skills to be cultivated. I find this fascinating. Our brains change in response to experience and training, even showing gene-expression changes within a relatively short period of time (in a day, for practiced mindfulness meditators: Davidson’s research team looked at gene expression in peripheral blood lymphocytes – looking specifically at genes that have been implicated in inflammation; see Rapid changes in histone deacetylases and inflammatory gene expression in expert meditators. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 40, 96–107).
So my summer warm wishes for you are that you might be open to continue learning, to be compassionate, and to be cultivating even greater skills of warm-heartedness. I wish for you to have joy and happiness, to be free from suffering, to be present, to be well.
In lovingkindness, Dee

Hurry is beside the point, useless, an obstruction.

  The thing is to be attentively present. 

To sit and wait is as important as to move.

  Patience is as valuable as industry.

What is to be known is

always there.

  When it reveals itself to you, or when you come upon it,

it is by chance.

 The only condition is your being there and being

watchful.

-  Wendell Berry

“I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

 “He has caused his wonders to be remembered; the Lord is gracious and compassionate.”

- Psalm 111:4