Emotional Awareness: Overcoming The Obstacles To Psychological Balance And Compassion (2008) - Plot & Excerpts
Ekman does most of the talking in this conversation between him and the Dalai Lama. Have some compassion & overlook Ekman's neediness, & many fascinating aspects of emotion/religion/meaning are explored."EKMAN: I want to raise the technical question of why it is that sitting every day and focusing your attention on your breath going in and out of your nose, why in the world should that help you with your emotions?"I am accepting the idea that it does.... Each of these meditative exercises have a common theme, which is that you are focusing consciousness on something that in ordinary life we do not need to focus consciousness on."When you are a child, you have to learn how to use the fork. Once you learn how to use the fork, you never think about putting the fork into a piece of food and bringing it up to your mouth. No thought at all!.... Breathing we never think about. What we are doing with these meditative practices, such as focusing on the breath, is creating skills that in some sense we do not need. It is very hard to focus attention on our breath because it is automatic. We are not equipped by nature to focus on it: It is unnecessary. But if we learn how to do so, then we are more generally acquiring the ability to monitor automatically mental processes and that means we are building new neural connections for monitoring what occurs without consciousness."If you create these new connections, which are unnecessary to breathe, walk, or eat, I postulate that it will allow you to monitor the automatic nature of emotions. If you develop the skill to focus on your breath for longer and longer periods of time, then that very skill that you have developed will benefit your emotions because your emotions are automatic also." Kindle location 1358-1380 I often struggled with the ratio of Paul Ekman's speech to the Dalai Lama's. I felt that Ekman had a bunch of ideas he wanted to promote, rather than have an actual evolving dialogue. I wish there had been more information from the other side about Buddhist psychology and how it could help people in conjunction with Western Science. This book wasn't nearly as moving or as helpful to me as Destructive Emotions, one of the earlier Mind & Life conferences. The side notes by Buddhist scholars and western scientists ARE very helpful, however.
What do You think about Emotional Awareness: Overcoming The Obstacles To Psychological Balance And Compassion (2008)?
This book is loaded with valuable information, but can be hard to focus on and hard to digest.
—1JustMe1
Another Great book from two of my favorite people!
—l_gigi
