Neurodharma

Compassion-focused meditation stimulates specific parts of the brain involved with the sense of connection, positive emotion, and reward, including the middle orbitofrontal cortex, behind where your eyebrows meet.

Please consider these questions: What do you hope to heal in yourself? What would you like to let go of? What do you hope to grow in yourself? You can also practice for the sake of others as well as yourself. Holding them in your heart as you practice can feel really sweet. How might your own healing and growth be a gift to those with whom you live

From time to time, consider how a particular experience could be changing your brain bit by bit, for better or worse.

Every so often, slow down to recognize that life in general, and your body and brain in particular, are making this moment’s experience of hearing and seeing, thinking and feeling.

Wise speech is well intended, true, beneficial, not harsh, timely, and, ideally, wanted. • Wise action avoids killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, and using intoxicants. • Wise livelihood avoids commerce in weapons, human trafficking, meat, intoxicants, and poisons.

always consider whether his actions were skillful and led to beneficial results. He told Rahula to reflect in this way before, during, and after all acts of thought, word, and deed. If an action was skillful and beneficial, fine; otherwise don’t do it.

It’s really useful to be interested in how you make your own suffering.

I once asked the teacher Gil Fronsdal what he did in his own practice. He paused and then smiled and said, “I stop for suffering.” This is where practice begins: facing suffering in ourselves and others.

The painful residues of events can get caught in the nets of emotional memory, but without context and perspective. The conscious mind may forget, but as Babette Rothschild wrote, the body remembers.