Rick Hanson's Blog

Dr. Rick joins Forrest on this episode of the Being Well Podcast for a deep dive into harnessing our natural generativity. How can we become more productive and creative, experience greater satisfaction, and lean into our biological drives to get more of what we want out of life?

They explore what a drive is, our natural drive states, and what we can learn from models of motivation like self-determination theory, before moving on to what we can do if g...

This Wednesday Night Meditation included a 34-minute meditation and a 47-minute talk about Right Effort . . . about Right Effort!

I hope you find it helpful, and you are welcome to join my free Wednesday Meditations – which are open to everyone!

Meditation: Right Effort . . . about Right Effort!

Download the Audio of this Meditation

Talk: Right Effort . . . about Right Effort! ...

Each year I use an issue of the Just One Thing newsletter to offer Twelve Good Things that I think are really wonderful and worth your attention.

May you and those you love and the whole wide world be truly well, truly happy, and truly at peace.

— ONE — Global Compassion Coalition The Global Compassion Coalition is working to build a better world, with compassion and justice at its heart. Please join me and over a hundred thousand others — it’s free, and growing by several thousand a ...

We’re getting toward the end of the year, and it’s a great opportunity to evaluate where we are and where we’d like to go. On this episode of the Being Well Podcast, Dr. Rick and Forrest explore how we can step out of the way we’ve been, and into a new way of thinking, doing, and being.

They talk about self-concept, unconscious beliefs, and how those beliefs affect our behavior. Forrest then shares a model of what this kind of change tends to look lik...

This Wednesday Night Meditation included a 49-minute meditation and discussion, and a 26-minute talk and Q&A about Effortless Effort: The Wise Effort of No-Self.

Guest teacher Stephen Doetsu Snyder began practicing meditation in 1976. He has studied Buddhism extensively, including Zen, Tibetan, Theravada, and Western non-dual traditions. He was authorized to teach in the Theravada tradition in 2007 and the Zen schools of Soto and Rinzai in 2022. He is a senior student of Roshi Mark Sand...

Just as we can exercise our arms or legs to build physical strength, we can exercise our brains like we do any other muscle. On this episode of the Being Well Podcast, Therapist Amy Morin joins Forrest to help us learn how to regulate our thoughts, manage our emotions, and become more psychologically flexible.

These key skills are particularly important for building a healthy relationship. Forrest and Amy explore how couples can work together to identi...

This Wednesday Night Meditation included a 32-minute meditation and a 47-minute talk from Rick’s series on Wise Effort, focusing on Releasing Receiving.

One moonlit evening in 13th-century Japan, the Zen nun Mugai Nyodai was carrying water in an old bucket made of bamboo strips. It suddenly broke and she had an awakening. I particularly like this version of her enlightenment poem from the writer Mary Swigonski:

“With this and that I tried to keep the bucket together
and then the bottom...

This Wednesday Night Meditation included a 32-minute meditation and a 47-minute talk from Rick’s series on Wise Effort, focusing on Releasing Receiving.

This talk and meditation featured several quotations which can be found under the video players below.

I hope you find it helpful, and you are welcome to join my free Wednesday Meditations – which are open to everyone!

Meditation: Releasing Receiving

Download the Audi...

What can I do if my partner dominates conversations about our relationship? How can I navigate situations where I want to repair, but other people don’t? What’s a “highly sensitive person,” and how does it relate to conditions like complex PTSD, ADHD, and autism?

In this episode of the Being Well Podcast, Dr. Rick and Forrest open up the mailbag and answer questions from listeners.

If you’d like to have a question answered on the podcast, you can join ...

This Wednesday Night Meditation included a 34-minute meditation and a 47-minute talk from Rick’s series on Wise Effort, focusing on The Essence of Practice: Loving, Knowing, and Growing.

Life happens to us, and we happen in life, in nature, in reality. Then what?
We can either be swept along, in ignorance, fueled and poisoned by hatred, greed, and heartache.

Or we can practice:

In our relationship to and how we respond to

what is happening to us

our experiences of that, and...