A Talk on How to Turn a Corner . . . . for the Better with Dr. 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. I'd like to explore with you uh how we can integrate or connect uh the Buddhist wisdom with some modern psychology and neurosychology and just common sense about what I'm going to call turning a corner. I thought of titling this turning the corner, but I think that's too particular. I think we turn lots of corners. So, I'm going to be exploring with you turning a corner and perhaps multiple times of turning a corner, including different corners. So, I suggest to make this kind of concrete. You think about a sticky situation you're involved with or relationship or or maybe a kind of complicated entangling related to your own history in which you're maybe really reflecting on perhaps some mistakes you've made or some opportunities that just didn't happen or ways you were wronged and mistreated. Uh how can you turn a corner about that? So, lots of examples. Uh I think it's helpful to find one or two for yourself and I'll use a variety of examples here. Just before we started here half an hour or so before I got um a response from a friend of mine with whom I'm uh getting together quite soon and uh with that friend and getting the getting together of it all. There were some ways in which my friend maybe it was a little demanding about the food we bring or whatever the details are. Just let that go. I asked my friend, "Gee, you can you send me your tell me your address again. It's been a while." And my friend replied, "Uh, my address is this and you ask me this. You ask for this every time you come over. Uh, put it in your address book." Her right okay maybe we should all do it together it just arises in the mind okay what do we do then in my own case I saw that harump arising and I thought I don't want to get into it with my friend and so I know I'm going to reply in a clean way why not capture the value of replying in a clean way without getting contentious with my friend. And I looked at my address book. Oh, I had not put it in my address book at my phone. And I replied, "Oops, you're right. Thank you. Sorry. I put it in my phone now. Walk away." Bliss of blamelessness. And I really like my friend. I know that they're dealing with a lot and life's complicated and they tend to be kind of pnikity. That's a little bit their style. you know, uh, okay, I chose to turn a corner. Now, we each get to decide whether we turn the corner or alternately, we say to them, you know, harump or as chats are coming in, how rude, right, Godzuks. Okay. Um, we have to choose whether it rises to that level. And you know that level will depend on how we're feeling and how much food we've eaten recently and so on. You get to decide. But for yourself, you could ask yourself, all right, they did this and then I have a fork in the road in front of me. Which is better for me? Which is in more my self-interest? out of care and concern and loyalty to yourself, what is in your best interest? Is it to um pile on and start pouring what the Buddha called nutrients, nutrition in fuel into the fire? Or is it in your best interest in some way to disengage and turn a corner? Now, sometimes we muzzle ourselves, especially if we've been socialized into doing that, into being nice and compliant and choosing harmony over truth again and again and again. And then afterward though, we feel kind of sick inside. We feel like we betrayed ourselves. Maybe we really let ourselves down. We let that other person push us around. and we don't feel good about it, then then what do we do? Well, first of all, preventing that in the first place is where we have that ounce of prevention rather than later on a pound of cure. Trying to, you know, feel into how you actually want to be. I find often there's kind of a middle place in which we don't get reactive with other people while still replying with a certain amount of class. You know what would mismanners do? We can definitely communicate a certain self-respect and civility and gravitas that you know does not make other people wrong, does not expose us to ridicule or counter complaints and yet very quietly kind of sends a message that maybe will lead that person the next time to be a little more reflective before they do something that uh before they get kind of brristly. I see that word ole kind of brristly with us, right? There is that place. So, preventing it. But what happens if you take the higher road, but you're still mad? How do we turn corners on our own inner reactions? And the Buddha has offered a tremendous amount of very skillful advice and practices with regard to this that have been now uh whose value has been really consistently established in decades of research broadly uh with regard to mental practices and uh clinical psychology. So one thing he talks about is recognizing the various elements, the compoundedness, the various parts that make up our reaction. So we want to help ourselves turn a corner and come to peace, but we're still mad. We still feel hurt. Well, one excellent technique, he talks about it again and again, is just to look directly into your own experience. Nothing woo woo metaphysical about this. What are the sensations in your body of let's say irritation or exasperation or feeling wronged? What are the sensations in your body? Many sensations. How about emotions? Right. How about thoughts? How about desires? Unpacking. Unpacking. Unpacking. And u what about what is pleasant, unpleasant or neutral in what we're experiencing? Just that unpacking often helps us turn a corner with regard to those reactions. They don't feel so weighty. And as I said before we officially began, there's more of a sense of spaciousness. What is not the reaction present in awareness. That's a beautiful thing. He also has this recurring uh instruction that I've reflected on many times when in other words he says when you're having a reaction observe the gratification in it the reward value the dopamine rush that sense of righteousness maybe like I'm right I'm you're wrong I'm superior you're you're not I know and you don't gratifications of various kinds maybe the gratifications of bunkering up and you know turning away and dissociating gratifications. One, two, recognize the danger. That's a translation of an ancient word, but that's commonly used. The gratifications and the danger. What are the risks to you in identifying with this reaction, let's say, to that other person? What are the dangers for you? How might it disrupt your relationships? How might it create uh you know painful experiences for you? How might it create more health burdens on you? Uh what scientists now call alostatic load of rumination or repetitive patterns of con stressful contraction? Right? What's the danger for you and maybe the danger for others? So, uh, with this person who I know well, who's pretty darn feisty, I could see him immediately getting a little snarky back that was going to have some dangers to it. And then the Buddha has the third thing. As we rec after we recognize the gratifications, you know, the payoffs in our reaction cascade and we also recognize the dangers, the costs to others as well as to us. What is the escape, the gratifications, the dangers, and the escape? Escape is an interesting word, isn't it? It's a kind of corner turning right there. We turn the corner. We escape. They're on that other street. We're going down a different road. Bye-bye. Doesn't it feel great to escape? Um I think about childhood games of hideand seek and tag and just feels great to get away, right? Uh so and the escape essentially a lot uh is through like I'm saying the insight into the elements of what we're experiencing and also a kind of a choosing A key thing that's involved in turning a corner is a sense of choice. Choice and timing and and giving to yourself the opportunity even the right perhaps the encouragement to turn that corner and escape. That's a very useful structure, isn't it? To observe the gratifications, the danger and the opportunity for escape. Now to be really clear certain kinds of material come up again and again and again. Uh I recall a little uh previously I think before our break a comment from Liz Weiner. Basically Liz said well what do we do with early childhood trauma material that keeps coming up? What do we do about that? And here uh I want to say that you know with the power invested in me by the board of psychology in California and a lot of research in clinical psychology I think there are certain injuries that can occur in this life that will pain us that will continue to pain us whenever we're aware of them to some extent. Now some injuries uh we will recall or we will know we will never forget what actually happened and we may continue to see it a certain way and have even a moral view uh about the people who did that to us and so on in all their complexity but we don't have a charge on it anymore. It doesn't grab us. It's not upsetting. It doesn't occupy us. On the other hand, sometimes I still think back on a little moment. I was a kind of a shy, scaredy-cat of a kid. Still, I got involved in a little moment of roughousing with this other boy who was my friend. I was in seventh grade. I was young going through school, so you can imagine. I don't know how old I was, pretty young, maybe 11, 10 or 11. And um I kind of trapped him in a roughousing way. And I experienced the gratification of physically dominating him in some roughousing and he didn't like it. And after, you know, not that long, maybe 10 or 12 seconds, I, you know, I released him. And our friendship was forever changed after that. And I still feel as I speak right now about that. I'm I'm not I don't feel horrible to myself. I was a kid. I was rambunctious you know actually I was feeling my own power in some way gratification right but I wasn't aware of the danger and I did not escape and it had consequences so it may be and this is a very small example I could think of others in which things were you know done to me I was mistreated in some ways not terrible ways and still makes me mad I feel guilty about certain things you know there's things that happen to us we will naturally feel them. We have losses. Um, you know, I've had losses in my life and when I'm reminded of them, you know, I still feel them. There's a place for that. And the danger is getting preoccupied. Yes, feel the feelings, explore what's there to the extent it's useful, but at a certain point, there's just no more value in it, right? There's nothing more to experience about it. Uh there's no more lesson to be gained. There's no more atonement to offer, right? There's no more amends to offer. And at that point, what do we do? And I I personally think, and you decide if it's okay for you to do it. I think it's okay to take yourself by the hand and say, "It's okay. It's okay. Come on. We can turn a corner." And give yourself permission to do that. And to deliberately move your attention away from what you know, negativity bias of the brain might keep kind of drawing you back in. There's a place for regulating our attention, including toward internal objects, not just external, but internal objects of attention. You know, much as we go out in the world and um we regulate our attention. I mean, for me, as a man, I'm careful about my gaze uh moving through the world and, you know, appropriately so. uh we regulate our attention in different kinds of ways to what we pay attention to. You know, we're we're watching uh the news maybe or something happens and somebody comes on and we watch it for the first 30 90 seconds and we start to realize, wow, I'm getting really sucked in here. No added value. I basically got it. Change the channel. Right? We regulate our external attention. It's completely the same. It's okay to regulate internal attention. If you feel in your judgment that you have processed enough, you have felt it enough, you have suffered enough, you have atoned enough, you have repented enough that you can turn a corner for yourself. Do you know what that feels like? And if not, I really encourage you to find out what does it feel like to out of wisdom and compassion for yourself much as you would with a friend say, "Dear friend, you have really worked on this one. If it's not going to change, we can't change the past also. You got the lesson. You got the message. You can turn a corner now. You can turn a corner now. And then the next time it comes up, you can turn the corner now. And now, right. Do you know Do you know what that feels like? It's a beautiful thing. I think about just versions of that. You know, phrases you might use for a friend or a child or for yourself. And I'm going to give you some examples. um of all kinds, you know, like sweetie, you don't need to worry about that. How about some from you? So, I'm seeing a really important comment here from Mary Lynn at 7 o'clock, top of the hour, uh reading it, infancy, trauma, abuse is preverbal. That's right. This is simply not resolvable. It's ever present in every cell of my body. No matter how I try to process it out of my body, I just can't shake it. No matter what therapies or modalities or spiritual paths I've followed, it's far too deep to tackle. And I think Marilyn what you're is is relating to what I was saying about some injuries. I think um uh we carry with us. We carry those injuries with us. Last week I talked about living with loss. A version of that is living with injury, living with with with damage potentially. And then how do we live with that? And I think it's really important to honor the injury and to recognize it and to protect ourselves about it because injuries often leave vulnerabilities to additional injuries. So enough that that injury happened, let's protect oursel so we're um not injured again and again, not retraumatized let's say again and again. We do that and in my view you decide we really really turn toward what is also true. Meanwhile, what else is true? So much is also true and we kind of turn a corner from okay there is an injury. We're not denying it. It's right there on that street. And right now, I'm resting my attention in another street. I've turned a corner in terms of where my attention is resting. Yeah. Uh, and I think it's really important to appreciate what Mary Lynn is saying and and Lori can relate to it is that I think sometimes, and I say this as a longtime clinician, on the one hand, we can underestimate the power, the effectiveness of sophisticated mental skills, including from indigenous traditions, you know, not always western science evidence-based traditions. There are different kinds of evidence. Hello. Um, so we can still engage really on the one hand we can underestimate the power of serious deep effort and practice that's skillful often guided by somebody who's very skillful at it. Um, we can underestimate how good it could be for us to to pursue that for some reasonable amount of time, certainly months, sometimes years. On the other hand, we can keep banging our head against a wall of what ain't going to shift inside because it's just wired in too deeply into our body and then and we can feel kind of bad about ourselves like, "Oh, I'm a bad client. I'm a bad meditator." No, you're a good human with a good nervous system that's designed to be changed by your experiences, especially painful ones that occur in childhood with other people. That's the big three of what's particularly resistant to neuroplastic change. I want to um particularly talk about uh turning a corner related to uh things getting worse in your body, your health, maybe a relationship, um your country, the world, you know, things getting worse. Sometimes things get worse. Uh, I'm going to use a vulgar turn of phrase in a moment. If you want to turn a corner and mute your sound in a moment, you can feel free to do that. So, uh, quick point here. Uh, in nature, things phenomena appear in clusters. They cluster together. An ex an exactly even distribution of clouds in the sky. Exactly even, you know, would be like on a grid in the sky. That would be deeply unnatural. Uh you know trees uh you know being exactly equidistant from each other in a forest that's unnatural. Natural phenomena cluster together. Well sometimes in history sometimes in politics in a country at particular times things cluster together and become ready a cluster Sometimes we live in the middle of a cluster perfect storm stuff happens that you know comes together and what do we do then what's the Buddhist wisdom of turning a corner applicable here recalling a course that he taught it at a time in which famines uh slavery atrocities brutality Certainly patriarchy and other things were widely common. And so we can practice even when things are really tough and even while they get worse. Think about the example of the Daly Lama and many many others, Tibetans, some monastics, some ordinary people who are practicing with their own country having been occupied brutally by the government of China distinct from the people of China for well over 50 years with many atrocities along the way. And yet uh as the as the Daly Lama put it, you know, he says he said something with regard to my friends, the Chinese government, the you know, my adversary the the the adversarial Chinese government. So point is what do we do, right? I think it's helpful to realize that throughout history, millions, billions of people have lived uh in really tough societies, even in extreme conditions under, you know, the thumb of of tyranny, fullout tyranny, and they found a way to live. And to me turning a corner means realizing okay whatever my circumstances are I am going to try to find a way to live well meanwhile which if you're like me as a fairly rebellious kind of surirly you know person uh to you know being pushed around is has the satisfaction the healthy gratification of being a kind of up yours I'm going to live well meanwhile as best I can you know and I'm going to preserve as much as I can including my innermost being that's intact. That's a kind of corner turning right that I think is really relevant very often for people these days. Um, you know, the Buddha talked about his own practice as he was approaching awakening as painful feelings arising in the mind but not um invading him and remaining. And I think we can turn a corner in a sense by basically saying no the street I'm walking you will not invade you will not invade my innermost being. I will not feed you. I will not follow you. I will not um you know be caught up in yelling at the television about you. I am walking a different road and you cannot stop me from doing that inside the innermost heart of my being. Okay, my two cents. So see what you think. Then I also want to talk about turning a corner in our sense of self. And um I want to do it this way. Basically we often address our thoughts. There is a place for thoughts. The eight-fold path the way that list of eight is starts usually starts with wise view. We're cultivating wise view. There's a place for that. Good. Under those particular thoughts and beliefs we have are different um our assumptions, expectations, uh models of others and oneself, frames of different kinds, meanings. Okay, that's cognition. Under that more deeply are emotions and sensations and desires. And even more deeply in terms of their in its influence is the underlying identity, underlying sense of self. So if we're trying to help ourselves or help another person, where are we going to get the most bang for the buck? Where what's going to have the most highly leveraged far-reaching benefit? It's generally not our beliefs or verbally expressed beliefs. There's a place for that, but it's, you know, that's kind of the tip of the iceberg. Deeper is our emotions and sensations and desires and deeper than that even is to get a sense of who our sense of self. So think about the corner to turn or a corner to turn in how you regard yourself. Maybe you're you are carrying as I have a lot in my life underlying feelings of sort of inadequacy uh or just not being aware of your own natural goodness and and specific good qualities. Maybe you've been carrying a sense of identity as being a bad person. You know it is said that guilt is the sense of I did bad. Shame is the sense of I am bad. So can we turn a corner in how we regard ourselves? The sense of who we are. And you can kind of feel it if you even want to do like a little experiment here. If you were to really uh dramatize and exaggerate a sense of identity as a kind of broken, inadequate, you know, a you know, tainted, damaged, you know, person, let's say, broken, let's say, rather than damaged, broken. What is you know like how would you carry yourself moving through your day with that sense of self on the other hand letting that go. Okay. On the other hand, if you had a sense of yourself as um as upright and dignified, the Buddha has a lot of encouragement to people to to authentically adopt a sense of yourself as uh worthy, as as large-hearted, inherently good, right? um worthy of care. How do you sit then? How do you stand them? How do you hold yourself? And if you imagine some key interactions or key relationships, how would you be in those interactions or relationships? On the one hand, if you were having a sense of yourself as kind of like ick, you know, or me. Oh, yeah. me versus how would you be with those people or those interactions if without being pompous or arrogant or pushy just like hey I'm not perfect far from perfect but I'm coming into this with a lot of quality and a lot of character and a lot of virtue and a lot of good intentions and a lot of history of really showing up as like definitely an all right person, how would you be? How would you conduct yourself? And so, one of the things we can really turn a corner on is our sense of self, our self-concept that's more conceptual, but especially our sense of oursel in in our belly and bones, right? What's it like to turn that corner? That's a corner I've been working on in my own life to have a sense of um believing in and trusting in taking and taking refuge in a sense of just innate natural goodness without and in fact the you know when I settle into that any residue of defensive superiority just falls away because there's no basis for it. So to turn that corner and then I'll really dive into some some more questions here. Um I think it's really helpful on the one hand to turn this corner in terms of sense of self to identify as who you really are. It helps to give yourself absolution and forgiveness for some of the things that like kind of drag you down into that other sense of yourself and to say things to yourself like I forgive you or you have already paid a price. you have already paid enough or you know just absolution even absolution uh which I believe is sometimes the case in um certain certain contexts you know absolution that in a way is undeserved beyond earning it or something or like I what you have to do to prove yourself good enough absolution washed clean. You know that there's a place for that sense of that to turn this particular corner. And then also there's the fact the factor or the value if you want to turn this corner in your sense of yourself as things you you say to yourself, maybe even write to yourself. You remind yourself of who you really are. Uh you maybe make a little list. I've done this kind of thing of you know three to five qualities that are both who you are and who you are becoming. And you can take as they say in Tibet you can take the fruit as the path. You can take a way of naming what you are growing into as who you are already and give yourself over to that. Give yourself over to that already as your identity. Okay. And then as you turn the corner and walk down that other street, enjoy it. Appreciate the value of it. Uh get used to that new street, you know. Um whether it's you just don't do that old argument with your uncle Bob or um you just disengage from that kind of reaction to other people's reactions. You know, maybe that's your new street. Maybe your new street is one where you just let it sink in uh that you've paid enough of a price and you're walking down a different road now. whatever it might be, enjoy that corner that you've turned and enjoy the new street you're walking down. That'll help you stabilize uh there and establish it increasingly for yourself. So, what do you make of all this? What do you make of this notion of turning a corner and giving including giving yourself permission to some often being deliberate about it? Sometimes you need to kind of take yourself by hand. You know, maybe large portions of you are saying things like, "No, no, I want to ruminate about that." You know, "No, no, I'm really into beating myself up about that." And you, "No, no, no, no. Come on. No, no." The other parts you want, no, I really want to get mad at them. I really want to be righteous about them. I really, you know, want to build up my case about them. No, no. You kind of take yourself by the hand and you help yourself turn that corner. Okay. What do you make of all this this this topic turning a corner? By the way, what Elaine brings up here, does it help to think if I can do this situation over, what would I have preferred to say? Yeah, I think a so-called fearless and searching inventory, love that phrase from Alcoholics Anonymous, includes when you look at what you've done, honestly, what you could have done better, and then um you know, I think it's really useful to to distinguish between opportunities for greater skillfulness, which sometimes involve regret, like, oh, okay, I wish I'd been more skillful then, but I will be more skillful now. That's different from moral fault, which calls for appropriate guilt, remorse, perhaps even appropriate shame. Uh there's a place for that, but that's really different. And most of the time when we look back at our mistakes and regrets, we would have, could have, should have been more skillful. And there's not really a basis for guilt, remorse, or shame. And to distinguish between those two, even if other people want you to feel guilty or remorseful or ashamed, you get to decide no what's genuinely worthy of, you know, remorse, guilt, and shame and what is simply a matter of skillful correction from now on. That's really helpful when you when you look at things from the past. And once you've gotten the message, once you've learned the lesson about um skillful correction or you've really processed appropriately whatever is um you know appropriate for a moral fault, you decide what's what is actually a moral fault. You decide. When you've worked that through, made amends, done the best you can, and moved into forgiveness for yourself in ways that feel authentic and and real for you, then sometimes you really have to tell yourself it's okay. You can turn a corner. You know, that's the missing piece for many people. They really have identified skillful correction. Um, and they really have processed appropriate remorse, let's say, but they have not given themselves permission to turn a corner, which sometimes means I'm going to help myself not think about that anymore. You know, my habit of thought keeps dragging me back down that other road. I get it. Negativity bias. I'm going to help myself not think about that in the future. I'm going to help myself. I'm not denying it, but I'm going to, you know, turn a corner away from it. Yeah. What if you cannot make amends? Very often, hugely important question. Uh I found Susan. We often cannot fix things we've done. And turning a corner means accepting I cannot repair the damage I did. Uh I've reflected on catastrophic mistakes that I've made. Very few people have not made at least one catastrophic mistake in their life. I have friends who are excellent doctors and they know that it's it's really hard to be a doctor under certain conditions such as intense emergency room medicine, battlefield medicine, um tough complicated surgeries, very complicated care. It's it's really hard to get through a medical career in certain areas as a physician or or nurse and not know that you were involved in the preventable death of somebody. How do you lead troops in combat? How do you lead firefighters into burning buildings and not know that at some level you were involved in some choices that had catastrophic consequences? Very few people. Very few people. You might feel like you're alone. It's common humanity. Um, people can make big mistakes. I've made big mistakes as a parent that have, you know, long-term consequences. They cannot, you know, you can't fix it. Uh, you can do the best you can around it. And sometimes we make mistakes with people. We realize it. They're no longer alive. I sure wish I could apologize to my parents about a variety of things from my teen years onward. Uh obviously teenagers are less morally culpable but still they have a lot of agency still that have effects on their family systems including their parents. So but we can't do it. What do we do? We name it. We know it. I can't fix those things. In our hearts we know that we know we did something wrong. We are not defending against it. we take appropriate responsibility while also recognizing uh the many many other things in the mix. Many other people, many other forces in our lives in the mix um in what we did ourselves and often in the mix what other people were doing too and we you know look at all that and then we go okay I can't fix that. Maybe we try to be a better person in other areas, you know, uh if you take a real look at the total balance sheet of your life, you know, um assets and liabilities, you know, pluses and minuses. I would be astonished if the balance sheet in your life were not overwhelmingly positive, including in the days to come. knowing that as context for the things we cannot make amends for. And then you basically say, okay, I'm going to carry that guilt. Uh it's a kind of injury, a moral injury. I'm going to carry it with me. I'm always going to wse whenever I think about that. And I permit myself to turn a corner here. I encourage myself to turn a corner here in part because in that corner turning I will be less bedeled by and preoccupied by and burdened by my past and I will be more able to radiate my true gifts in this life outward for the sake of others. Someone asked uh privately uh shame is more like I'm bad and it tends to be really really primal and the gesture of shame in evolution the biology of shame is around subordination you know betas who are carried by shame to submit to alphas so they won't be hurt anymore you know kind of like that and uh guilt tends to be more cerebral more of a sense of you know complex standards including moral standards S uh I think of remorse as something quite beautiful actually. Uh I told a friend of mine a long time ago that when you're feeling guilty, someone's lying to you, including you're lying to yourself about what really happened. I mean, there's a place for feeling guilt. And I'm not going to, you know, parse these things too much semantically, but I think of remorse as a very healthy remorse. It's like, uh, ouch. Remorse to me is simpler than guilt and more direct and more real and healthy and to be felt and then you know to be processed to be felt and then to be moved on from. But you decide for yourself you know what works best for you. at bottom. The distinction between unskillfulness and moral fault is incredibly useful. And you get to decide what the difference is between those two in including in the face of others who are wagging that moralistic guilt tripping shaming finger at you. You get to decide what's actually a true moral fault. uh and rather than just unskillfulness and even looking at other people. We we can be kind of uppidity about other people, me included, but actually they're just being unskillful. They don't really know any better. They never learn to do better. They got carried away. They weren't regulated. They were unskillful and banged into us pretty hard. Not denying that. But it's not that they're a bad person or have evil intent. they just weren't very skillful, including skillfulness in managing their own thoughts and feelings. Okay, so finishing up here, um I'm going to turn a corner and move on to the next phase. And um I really invite you when all of this sort of settles down to find the feeling that is sort of related to the image of you know you're on a street. You could turn toward what is there and get caught up in it. Or you could take a breath. You're at the corner. What are you going to do? and you could choose to walk down a different road. The feeling of that, what that's like inside yourself, including the sense of advocacy and support and kindness for yourself, is the is the essence, the heart of what we've been exploring tonight. So truly, thank you for your kind attention.