Rick Hanson Retreat

I spent Saturday at a daylong retreat hosted by Dharma Zephyr Insight Medidation Community and taught by Dr. Rick Hanson. Hanson is a psychologist who is also a Buddhist practitioner and a contributor to recent research on the brain and meditation. (His web page is wisebrain.org. I suggest everyone check it out.)

The day's talk gave me so much to think about that I don't even know where to start on this blog. After some thought, I decided to start with a theme I focused on a while back as a result of Hanson's newsletter for wisebrain.org: not taking things personally.

A while back, one of the DZ members suggested our sangha do a year of practice, where each one of us takes one suggestion from the Wise Brain bulletin and focus on that one element. I adopted the challenge to not taking things personally.

I think it's important to start this discussion with a caveat on my experience: not taking things personally is like asking myself to never get angry. For me, it is pretty much an impossible task. I did take things personally, but there were moments in which I was able to contemplate my response to a certain stimuli and to try to not take it personally.

On the superficial level, not taking things personally can do wonders for your relationship by establishing a peace that might not otherwise exist. When my husband, for example, asked me if I understood the essay he gave me, I reminded myself to not take things personally. I avoided the normal, negative response I have to his concerns that I don't understand something intellectual. What could have been another terse moment between the two of us turned into a short, not unpleasant discussion.

On a deeper level, not taking things personally is letting go of the self, a Buddhist teaching that not only boggles my mind, but often evades it as well. I do not exist because - really - what am I? As Rick Hanson's partner with the Wise Brain web page, Dr. Rick Mendius explains, ". . . [T]here is no self to be injured, but only the arising and passing of states of mind." If I remember that I am not insulted, but rather there exists an emotion of feeling insulted, I can separate from it. This is good practice at beginning to understand the concept of no self, for me anyway.

A better method of understanding of no self would have been to attend the second day-long retreat. Sunday's topic was No Self and the Brain. From what I hear, it was fascinating.

I could write for a year on topics that emerged in the retreat, but I think I'll cover two more: happiness and brain chemistry. To be continued . . . .