Healing Regrets – Talk with Rick Hanson

I offer these every week along with a guided meditation just click the uh subscribe link below to be notified through YouTube when I post the latest recording or if you'd like to join us live which would be great uh just go into the description section below and follow the link along to be able to sign up for free so I'd like to um offer a couple of comments on the meditation and I've noted some of the comments that have come into the chat um the first is that in research on meditation and in various traditions we find a loose distinction between two sort of clusters of types of meditation um in one type of meditation in effect we're doing as little as possible we're moving into just sitting just being uh open awareness is the technical term ter used commonly in research on this kind of meditation we're simply present and the efforts we're making are the minimum amount necessary to essentially stay present in that form of meditation uh we are in effect opening into everything and really undermining um a kind of dualism between you know the one who is making an effort and and everything else so okay that's good opening into everything and uh in that kind of meditation uh sometimes it can be very accessible to have insights into the nature of experiences as made of parts that are connected and changing thus empty of absolute solidity identity and the possibility of being possessed as a permanent or lasting source of Happiness okay open awareness then there are and many of the mindfulness practices that are increasingly popular in in Western circles uh are really about that kind of open awareness then we have focused attention practices that's our technical term that involve essentially becoming absorbed in or becoming very focused on and resting attention on a particular thing perhaps the sensations of breathing at the upper lip or as we did here in this guided practice um really taking contentment U after taking lovingness and then the blending of the two as an object of attention well even though in modern circles open awareness practices tend to be most popular and tend to be most taught certainly in the surviving written record of early Buddhism focused attention practices absorb aborption practices could be called Sade practices or concentration practices get the most attention uh whether it's in the Sati patana suta the four establishing or foundations of mindfulness uh suta which is full of very practical methods or the anapan Sati suta mindfulness of breathing or in the focus on uh the development of the janas in right concentration uh there's a tremendous focus on becoming absorbed in really really useful states of awareness and so I would just want to emphasize that because sometimes focused attention practices get a kind of a bad rap as being goal directed or egoic or dualistic and yeah watch out for the pitfalls of getting really as I have overly caught up and attaining these states of mind and you know kind of achieving uh and comparing with regard to them all right don't fall into those pits but otherwise stay on the path uh and it's very helpful to cultivate these qualities so that they become increasingly stable in us including as we understand more and more now drawing on mechanisms of positive neuroplasticity that turn states of being into traits of being hardwired into our own body point two about that meditation is to explore contentment and lovingness and if you think about it a lot of our best efforts come from a loving Place deep down inside the expression might be complicated but at bottom the intention is good I have a lot of background in um developmental psychology and early childhood and uh young children for example you know they could do all kinds of stuff you know they like uh rub their mom's lipstick all over their face or as our daughter did once when I was pouring a glass of milk and the glass she the the glass became full of as much milk as she wanted while I was pouring and she just pulled the cup away because she had enough you know and you know the milk kept pouring on the table she was about two two and a half at the time no problem you know the intent is good Underneath It All even if you know they could use a little Improvement in the tuning of the of the way they go about doing it so think of it as we have impulses that are at bottom good which is a beautiful way to understand yourself it's really important to explore what is the underlying good intent even uh in things that you regret and I'll be focusing on regret uh in a in a few minutes so here we are we have some kind of positive intention and then it moves into expression if we are in a frame of discontent at the time how is that loving intention going to be expressed it's probably going to be expressed in problematic ways I was saying to our son Forest recently that um if you think of the distinction between making things happen and offering making an offering into the world and seeing what it takes up um many of the good things that I've done in my life have come from a framework of making things happen all of the bad things in my life almost all the bad things in my life have come from the work of making things happen so when lovingness meets discontent that often puts us on the very slippery slope into problematic forms of making things happen including lots of drivenness so it's really powerful to when something comes up to do like you have a desire or an intention a purpose a project to just just tap the breaks for a moment just pause and recenter yourself as best you can in an experience in the present of enough already content already if only for a few seconds before you say that thing to establish yourself in feeling okay I don't have to get pressured I don't have to move into the feeling of craving I don't have to get driven here I don't have to be insistent I can feel content already and then through the field of that contentment this good intention this loving intention can move that's an amazing comment ation right and it's really worth exploring what is it like to be rested in contentment as wholehearted intentions purposes plans strategies move through you I'm sharing this in part because I need to learn more of it myself okay so and I am aware on the whole of what's coming through the chat um I also want to say that one of our longtime participants someone that I always look forward to seeing I'm probably going to embarrass him now Garrett Peltzer I'm probably mispronouncing something here hello Garrett joins us routinely from Thailand where he's been living and teaching and working for many years and soon he's going to return to his native Germany and in Europe which is eight or nine year eight or nine years eight or nine hours there you go eight or nine hours ahead of us here it's going to be hard for him to join us live so I just want to really appreciate you Garrett and also frankly appreciate many many other regulars here uh and I I just won't try to say all your names and also do appreciate that sometimes things change people come people go and you know there's a normal natural process and Garrett knows that um he and I are definitely going to be in communication with each other even if he's not U coming here next week okay all right so let's see um I'm scanning very good good okay so as you know I will you as you probably we know I always read all the chat I can't always read it all the time during the the the meeting here but I will eventually have read it all so you can be sure of that so I would like to talk about a topic that is I think on the minds of many people that I've spoken with um especially as we age and I'm probably not the only person here who's getting older every day so and that's the topic of regret and I've seen on the whole people be really burdened by regret and in my own process over the last several years I've been really looking at my own mistakes in this life and things I regret so it's a very very very fertile field of practice and when that as you will see uh opens into several deep profound Buddhist themes so I'd like to explore it with you now in this exploration it's very important to have resourced yourself as we did during the meditation uhuh my strategy here to Resource ourselves so we have a sense of what it feels like to have a kind of Refuge our home base um even if we don't have as intense a sense of it right now that we did maybe during the meditation itself still as we grow the trait of contentment and the the trait of lovingheart dness uh we can become increasingly able to access that trait in states of being in the moment all right so it's good to be resourced as we explore this territory of regret and if there's anything about this that is just too much for you you can tune out you can also pick a a very mild minor topic or thing that you regret um really take care of yourself here so to enter into the topic of regret it's important to Resource oneself point one point two it's useful to be clear about what do we mean regret so there are many kinds of regret regret at bottom basically is we feel sad about something that happened often we wish it hadn't happened we often related to regret imagine how it would be or have been if that had not happened okay regret and then sometimes along with regret uh in addition to the sorrow of regret is guilt shame or remorse now sometimes we regret events that we've had no control over whatsoever for example um I regret that my mother um grew up at a time that for her and generally women in America there were very few opportunities uh period including for someone who was pretty bright my mother and um she just didn't have opportunities that would have been really wonderful uh that more and more thankfully uh in more and more developed countries women have access to with many many exceptions with a long way to go etc etc in any case I regret you know I regret that for my mom I did not make that happen I cannot change it it happened but I regret it I wish she had more opportunity okay um we can regret political events we can regret also things that have happened to us that we just were unfort we're unfortunate uh it was not it was bad luck we were perhaps born with a certain kind of uh limit ation uh in ourselves or we can also regret things like uh we are targeted not just based on luck but based on deliberate intent we are targeted by systems of Oppression of one kind or another discrimination bias of one kind or another uh we can regret those things I'm not going to be exploring those categories I'm going to be exploring with you here the kind of regret that um often eats away at Us in which we feel responsible for some kind of harm some kind of impact potentially to ourselves or to somebody else or other people that's the kind of regret I want to talk about here okay what are some examples of that um I still regret uh some horse play that I did with a friend of mine when we were both in seventh grade in which I was just too rough it just comes back to me um this is a you know I regret for complex reasons when I was a senior in high school initially um asking a I'll use the word girl fellow high school student to the prom and for complex reasons including my own just deep shyness and embarrassment about being seen by others at a prom um I I told her I just I just couldn't do it and I was really sad about that but I couldn't do it and I regret to this day we're talking oh I don't know 60 plus years ago um 50 years ago certainly just H I feel it I regret it now uh I know her name wherever you are I want to apologize I don't want to say her name because it's her private n but man if I ever met her I would just tell her how much I regretted doing that I I wasn't mean about it I wasn't bad about it I have the right to to to back out but I know she felt disappointed and sad and I just regret it okay we regret those kind of things I regret um not to share all my dirty laundry with you but I regret uh basically swerving away from really focusing on my own career for the throughout my uh I did all kinds of other things and I learned a lot along the way and healed some things but you know I got a late start and that has had some consequences you know now in U my eth decade so uh you know we can regret various things many kinds of regrets uh we can regret uh continuing to drink too much when we knew we shouldn't we can regret continuing to eat too much or we can regret um staying too long in a relationship that just was never really really going to have much cheese down that tunnel we can regret those kinds of things you know there's a wide range here so what I'd like to do is to offer some Buddhist perspectives about regret that I have found really useful and then I'm going to move into a very practical psychologically oriented set of practices with you that I used and you can use yourself that can be very very useful and then next week I'll be here and I'm going to follow up on this topic including following up with people who've tried the practices that I'm going to offer to you here all right so strap on your seat belt roll up your sleeves we're in the releasing regrets um Express here so two Buddhist perspectives that are very useful the first perspective is to ask oneself what is a regret as an experience regrets are processes made of parts that are changing based on causes and conditions they are processes they are fluid in their nature and when we get most burdened by regret it's when we lose sight of its fluidity and it and we turn it into a solid or treat it as a solid approach it as a solid and and don't recognize its fluidity this is one of this is one of the sides of the coin I'll get to the other side of the coin of arguably the most precious the most precious Jewel the most precious coin in all the Buddhist teachings this matter of The Emptiness of all phenomena they exist emptily they're fluid they are processual they're made of processes and regret is is of the same nature and when we relate to regret in that way is a fluid experience and we don't and we and we stop regenerating it through preoccupations and ruminations if we if we allow it to flow as an experience um and if we then it doesn't seem so weighty and also if we start to recognize that the causes the variety of causes that created the regret were also very fluid when we open to looking at something that we regret in this fluid kind of way it's a lot easier to bear the other side of the coin of deep deep Dharma is to ask the question not just what is Regret but who is regretting what is regretting what are you that you are regretting and this goes to um the question of moral responsibility the Buddha was very very very pragmatic and his Focus was not on um guilt or shame his Focus was on huh what leads to Awakening and along the way pragmatically what leads to Awakening is to um reduce harms to others and oneself uh wise intention has three elements to it it and two of them have to do with not harming one is the intention to release ill ill will which is the movement to hurt ill will and also second intention wise intention is to not harm and third is to release attachment to scent to pleasure so we don't get so attached to it we can enjoy it without getting caught up in it that's wise intention so um is true that it's useful to look at um what we have done and to learn lessons from it but it's not useful to add the excess and unnecessary suffering of continuing to beat ourselves up about it so when you look at the you who did the thing like the the the Rick who um told her that he he just couldn't go to the prom uh the Rick who who uh or that who swerved away from certain career moves in his 20s who was that guy who are you that did that thing what were you what are you that maybe continues to do that thing you you too are a process made of many parts that are connected and changing and this more expansive expanding opening up unpacking sense of the eye the self also really changes how we relate to regrets rather than thinking there's some sort of unitary eye who did the bad thing then and deserves to continue to be burdened and punished today we we we let that go and we allow regret to arise as an experience but we hold it more lightly this is fundamental Buddhist teaching what happened that we regret is is like a river with many currents in it the one you know the one uh the person who did that is also a river with many currents moving through it when I look back on the two examples I've given you I can recognize 20 30 forces moving through me that led me to do those things you know this can be really quite abstract but now I'd like to bring it down to earth with some practices here about regret okay so you can do this right now if you're watching this on recording you can use my guidance here to uh move yourself through the steps while uh turning the putting the recording on pause from time to time to take take more time or you can hear my suggestions and that's all they are and adapt them to your own purposes and go off and explore them on your own okay so here we go step one we've already done establishing a sense of Refuge a sense of being in your home base on your own side calm present warmhearted second recall the Insight that what we regret is fluid made of many parts swirling I use the metaphor an Eddy in a stream what we regret has that nature and the other side of the coin is that the doer the doing of that which is regretted is also a process with many processes inside it you are like that yourself aware of that then in the third step picking something you regret I recommend something mild or medium if you're really resourced and you've worked with this stuff before you can do something that's more severe and take some moments to let yourself feel the regret I suggest being aware of the Body Sensations of the regret and I'm moving through this fairly briskly so we can end by 7:30 my time but you can take your time with it with the recording and on your own this is a structured well- constructed sequence I'm taking you through so in the third step we open to the experience including its Body Sensations and its emotions we might name these like sadness anger at myself remorse we include our thoughts our perspectives our images related to the regret we're still opening to The Experience and what I've observed that people do with regret is they hover in this middle place that's the worst of Both Worlds they don't fully open to the experience nor do they completely release it they're stuck in the middle we need to fully open to the experience in order to eventually release it so at least we're not pre occupied by it if we think about it it may still hurt it may still be an ouch I'm still upset about what happened for me in high school with that girl um in any case but we're not preoccupied by it okay so in our third step we're aware of thoughts and perspectives and also we're aware of desires wishes that we had done something different different wishes that other people have been more helpful maybe desires and in the experience of regret can be certain kinds of actions like actions um that we can sense in our body uh posture facial expression bracing guarding or um actions that as Peter lavenus pointed out it would have been so good if we had taken or been able to take or been supported in taking at the time but we just couldn't kind of thwarted coping of various kinds okay so in the third step we explore the experience we unpack it we open it up including getting a sense of what's deeper we need to Resource ourselves to do this like I've said but we uh keep in mind also that things are made of parts that are connected and changing so we unpack it we unpack it that's the third step of healing then in the fourth step we take into account repairing okay so we include what we have already done to address that which we regret and taking some inventory here is really useful most people dramatically underestimate the legitimate amount of repair they've already attempted or made including the repair of never making that mistake again the repair perhaps of reaching out to the person you hurt and talking with them about it the repair making amends the repair of a kind of penance in a healthy sense so take a look at what you've done to repair already it could be really helpful if you have time pick a regret and write start writing out what have you done to repair you've perhaps developed greater Insight you understand things better now you've you've acquired new skills so that you can act differently in the future you've nudged your character more and more in a in a more and more Global Direction uh such as becoming simply a calmer more loving person [Music] um how have you repaired okay that's number four and also in number four how could you repair additionally how else could you repair sometimes there's some real soul searching with this one sometimes you realize with hopefully relief wow ain't nothing else and there's nothing else reasonably to do you know uh I've been honest with myself I've felt the feelings I've C to my stuff I've admitted it um I've made as they say in AA a fearless and searching inventory uh I'm walking a different Road I've done all that I can H or you might realize you know there's some there's more that I could do okay now that's repair fifth step release release in releasing and releasing can also be happening somewhat along the way but I'm marking these so far five aspects in sequence although often we kind of spiral through them we move through M sectors almost more and more deeply release you let things flow you let the sadness flow you know you maybe you write a letter you never send uh maybe you really let yourself vent in some safe place like on the edge of the ocean by yourself probably or elsewhere um you know you can feel things flowing out of your body often you can feel a kind of contraction around the regret and in the opening is releasing you give yourself the blessing the benediction that you have repaired enough to let yourself release releasing doesn't mean that you um give yourself a moral pass if there was something to be as you know remorseful about I really wish I I did didn't know how but I really still wish you know i' done a better job of uh letting her know that I just couldn't go to a prom uh I was just too uptight uh you know at 16 U so uh you know yeah so releasing releasing letting it flow that's the fifth phase releasing releasing beliefs that are just unrealistic you know like well I should have done better how could you possibly have done better you had no idea how to do better you didn't know what better looked like you didn't even know it existed you know given the set of options that your childhood and your culture and your upbringing and the you know the circumstances that you were in gave you right letting go of you know beliefs that are punishing giving yourself um the freedom to turn a corner it turning a corner means that you give yourself permission not to be preoccupied the stuff may still come up but you recognize your brain and the negativity bias and you think you know I got it it arose and I'm going to deliberately turn the channel I'm deliberately turning a corner not as a spiritual bypass not as repressing anything I'm just simply disengaging attention from that I'm giving I'm allowing myself to turn a corner because I've repaired enough that's another aspect of releasing okay five is releasing six replacing after we exhale it's time to inhale replacing and in the replacing it's very power one way to replace is to rest in your home base deep green I call it the green zone of peacefulness contentment and love which we two of which we explored in the meditation all right when we are rested in love it's easier to bear the ways that we've hurt other people I don't have any contact with that girl from 50 plus years ago uh I wish her well and um still being rested in lovingness in general huh enables the regret to not sting so much or preoccupy me so you can explore in terms of replacing regret the way that ways that loving heals regretting contentment heals different kinds of regrets peacefulness also heals certain kinds of regrets having to do with threats okay contentment heals regrets related to loss lovingness heals regrets related to breaches with other people and harms done to other people so we're on number six replace ing uh resting increasingly in the depths of your own nature your true nature is a kind of replacing also specifically if you regret certain things that came from impulsivity replacing a greater sense of self-regulation and equinity and walking more evenly over uneven ground being less reactive uh I'm working on replacing exasperation with patience I'm still working on it replacing so you might ask yourself what are natural replacements for that which you are releasing replacing and a key element number six replacing is around forgiveness um the best stuff that I've read on forgiveness was written by our son and me I admit it in the last chapter of the book resilient uh particularly the section on the giving of forgiving the last chapter is about generosity including forgiving yourself so one very penetrating powerful um replacement for regret on the foundation of everything else I've said notably repairing and really and notably experiencing and repairing is forgiveness and you can ask other people to forgive you for what you regret if you're able to talk to the person you directly impacted that's very powerful uh can be complex sometimes um and sometimes they're just unaccessible um they're not in our life anymore maybe they don't live anymore but in any case looking for ways to experience forgiveness related to the regret it doesn't mean that you're changing your view of what happened and the values that perhaps you fell short of but still there's a sense of forgiveness of letting it go of not beating yourself up about it not being preoccupied with it and you can forgive yourself so whether others forgive you or you forgive yourself that's a very useful kind of replacing related to practicing with regret and then take a breath maybe this is number seven it's basically take a breath and live live well Live Well meanwhile whatever the conditions are as best you can uh with a strong heart you know helping and healing along the way Live Well meanwhile uh it's really important to appreciate that for almost everybody uh the things in their life that are worthy of regret are a tiny fraction of all the things all the good things they've ever done but because of the negativity bias of the brain um we don't really notice that proportion we don't notice that we fixate on the handful of tiles in the overall Mosaic that are let's say flashing red and we just kind of glaze over all the mainly green or occasionally gray neutral beige tiles and um it's really important to okay I regreted those things who in this life gets through it without regret all right meanwhile W what do they say in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure be good to each other and party on okay so all right what do you make of all this I'm gonna quickly take a look at the comments in the chat um let's see easier said than done somebody said yep um yeah as Liz points out reaching out to others you know you want to be thoughtful about it um and uh um yeah be be thoughtful so like anything you know my seven my seven part plan um you know it's just an offering see what's useful for you uh this is a territory that I think a lot of us are grappling with honestly in our relationships in our life we're burdened by regret I think that you know so often we get burdened by regret and it just stops US from living bravely living boldly uh taking a breath and going okay what the heck that was that walk out the front door uh you know head up doing the best you can uh yeah you may be carrying with you depressed mood trauma the legacy of systems of mistreatment you know I'm not trying to diminish that what's whatever but I'm talking about not adding the additional baggage the additional bungee courts that you know you know that hold us back regrets you know the ballast in or balloons I'm talking about not adding that to everything else you've got to deal with great all right so next week I'm going to follow up and we're going to have big green stars golden green stars sort of uh for people who actually play with play I see a person naming play plays good play with those seven steps I suggest that you pick mild mild to moderate regrets uh resource yourself uh bail out of the exercise if it's overwhelming uh only do what helpful for you and then come back next week and I'm going to be exploring with you what happened how' to go we almost never talk about practice I I was I've been on the board of meditation centers and been in a lot of practice environments people rarely actually get real you know about hey I tried this and it worked or I tried that and man whoa that didn't work for me at all what do you think you know we don't they don't share uh but that's something that's really important to do