Dr. Caroline Leaf discusses neuroplasticity and brain change; Rick and Forrest look at emotional intelligence; what is the nature of the 'self?"; Adam Avin explores teen mental health
Neuroplasticity Tools to Change Your (and your kid’s) Brain with Dr. Caroline Leaf
"As you work to clean up your 'mental mess' you need to
focus on four categories that are giving you information: your feelings, your behaviors, your body sensations, and your perspective." – Dr. Caroline Leaf
Dr. Caroline Leaf joins Rick and Forrest to explore how we can harness the power of neuroplasticity to clean up our mental mess…and teach our children to do the same. They detail Dr. Leaf’s five-step Neurocycle process, walk through a practical example, and explain how we can use
mind-management tools to reshape our relationship with difficult thoughts and feelings.
Making Great Relationships and Neurodharma Open House Session September 19, 2023
On your path to growing and changing for the better, having a group of like-minded peers to encourage
and motivate you can make a big difference. My friends at Cloud Sangha have put together discussion groups that focus on material from my books Making Great Relationships and Neurodharma - and you can check them out for free at one of the open houses.
We explore emotional intelligence, including what’s “in” it, balancing emotional closeness and distance, and how we can become more self-aware, self-regulated, and empathic.
What’s the nature of the sense of being that remains when parts of the psyche fall away?
You raise a deep and wonderful question, and its answer depends on how you define "Self." I use that word to refer to the central "I" that's presumed in Western psychology and philosophy (and everyday usage) to be the owner of experiences and agent of actions, and which is defined and constituted by three
attributes:
Unification– There's just one "I".
Permanence– The "I" stays the same, things happen to it but it doesn't change.
Independence– The "I" is just there, an innate part of the psyche, not created by anything, and fundamentally not dependent on anything (other than a brain) for its existence.
"The fact is that these three attributes that constitute an "I" cannot be found in one's own experience, nor in the neural processes
that underlie I-related activations or representations in the brain."
The actual experience of "I" is made up of parts (not unified), continually changing (not enduring), and affected by many factors (not independent). This has been seen in neuroimaging studies. (Check out these two papers: Is Self Special? and What Is Self-Specific?) To use the language of Buddhism, the apparent "I" is empty: without substantial, essential nature. Both phenomenologically and ontologically, the presumed "me, myself, and I" is empty. If you like, check out my book, Buddha's Brain, whose last chapter is about this subject.
In general I think that we can have and value all sorts of experiences of witnessing, integration, beingness, spacious awareness, etc. – experiences of the "self" – while also recognizing that these experiences (and their dynamic neural substrates) are compounded, transient, and dependently arising . . . and thus empty of essence.
Like many others, I'm leery of reifying or substantiating dynamic and insubstantial processes – even vital ones, such as the executive functions, subjectivity (ipseity), or the encompassing awareness that remains when the "parts" step back – into an entity, a being, a self. Trouble and suffering begins when we identify with and try to protect and glorify such an entity.
Adam Avin, founder of Wuf Shanti Children's Wellness Foundation, delivers a terrific speech at the Broward Mental Health Summit. He offered his insights into how kids can lead positive and happy lives.
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