Dharma Lab

Neuroscience and practice of human flourishing. Pod + newsletter with @richiejdavidson & @cortlandjdahl.

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@CliftonBaconNY Many kinds, many roads lead to the same place. Richie and Cort will be discussing on zoom in free practice hour on Aug 19th 7pm CT if interested.

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We wrote this one up too. The episode and the full write-up are on our S-bst-ck, free every week by Dr. Richie Davidson and Dr. Cortland Dahl.

https://t.co/6h19jAAyFg

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Dharma Lab@dharmalabco · Jul 16
@SharonSalzberg was on crutches at the back of a crowd of a hundred, certain she would fall if she moved up front. Then the Dalai Lama got out of his car and walked past everyone to reach her.
It was 1979. She has spent the fifty years since teaching what happened next.

"It's almost like he has a kind of radar for who in a crowd is suffering the most. And that was me. He cut through a hundred people, took my hand, looked me in the eye."

He couldn't fix anything. That's the part that matters.

"He couldn't have made the injury not have happened. But that horrible feeling of being so alone, so unseen, so stuck in the back, it just dissolved."

"It sort of redefined compassion for me."

Fifty years on, she'll tell you the term itself is the problem.

"Loving kindness is such an odd term. You wouldn't hear people at the next table in a coffee shop talking about it."

"I've had translators and scholars say to me, stop being so cutesy, just say love. And that of course is a complicated term. How often it's like a medium of exchange, or I will love myself as long as I never make a mistake."

So she reaches for a plainer one.

"I really prefer the word connection to any other word."

And that radar for suffering? She says it isn't a gift some people are born with.

"People think it's a gift you've either got or you don't. But it is an emergent property of how we pay attention, and attention can be trained."

The research agrees. Benefits show up after very short periods of practice, on objective measures.

"It's easier than you think, because this is who we are." @RichieJDavidson

@SharonSalzberg @CortlandJDahl

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Full episode with @SharonSalzberg here on Dharma Lab.

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Read the full essay → https://t.co/ZGoRtqUTCT

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Most of mental health research runs on a quiet assumption: that being free from psychological disorders is the best we can reasonably hope for, that being okay is as good as it gets. Now consider that the contemplative traditions describe a completely different ceiling, a dimension of mind already whole and already here, where the work isn't building toward it but finding the path to recognizing it.

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Read the full essay → https://t.co/ZGoRtqUTCT

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In the Tibetan tradition, the recognition of rigpa is treated as the most direct path to awakening, built on one premise: you are not a broken thing in need of repair. Which means the actual work isn't becoming someone new, it's recognizing what's already here and already awake in this moment.

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Read the full essay → https://t.co/ZGoRtqUTCT

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A friend of Dr. Cortland Dahl was thrown into the air by a mortar shell in Vietnam, and in those airborne seconds his mind opened into a state of clarity unlike anything he had ever experienced. He spent thirty years searching for what to call it, and a Tibetan word may be the closest fit: rigpa, the open knowing quality of awareness itself.

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Read the full essay → https://t.co/ZGoRtqUTCT

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https://t.co/XQalVdQehg

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Most of the awareness we operate from is filtered through identity, habit, memory, and a million small lenses we picked up without realizing. If those filters dropped away, what would actually be there? Cort traces the answer in his latest essay, You Are Already Awake.

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Read the full essay → https://t.co/ZGoRtqUTCT

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Clouds, storms, and clear days all arise within the sky and pass through it, and the sky is never touched by any of them. Add in the obvious analogy for the human mind and you have the simplest description that contemplative traditions have ever offered: the inner sky, the awareness underneath every passing weather pattern.

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Devon Hase says delusion can actually grow in solo retreat, because you can construct an entire narrative about your equanimity without anyone testing it. Add in a partner who lives in the soft tissues of your heart and suddenly there's nowhere to hide from what's actually true.

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"When we don't know something, we're not comfortable with not knowing. There's some instinctual part of us that will fill in the blanks almost all the time." Dr. Cortland Dahl on how two independent lines of neuroscience research, Gazzaniga's split-brain work and Geschwind's clinical neurology, point to the same conclusion.

@richiejdavidson @CortlandJDahl @dharmalabco

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@RichieJDavidson Read the full essay → https://t.co/ZGoRtqUTCT

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https://t.co/XQalVdQehg

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@richiejdavidson has spent decades studying advanced meditators with 30,000+ hours of practice, documenting brain states genuinely unlike anything in the published literature. Add in a question almost no one has asked or studied scientifically, and you get the open frontier: what happens in the brain when an ordinary person recognizes pure awareness for the first time?