Mindfulness and the Brain - Book notes

1. Dan Siegel - 9 functions of pre-frontal cortext (story of mom who gets hit in the head). Mom says "she's lost her soul"

1. 1:31. capacity to regulate the body
2. capacity to attune to someone else attunement; compassion
3. ability to balance emotions -- aroused so life has meaning, not chaotic, not rigid -harmony vs chaos or rigid
4. capacity to be flexible - response flexibility - pause before you act; feel body, adaptive response - pre-frontal area
5. capacity to extinguish fear; inhibitary peptide to calm fear
6. insight - self-knowing awareness -- mental time travel - link past present, future
7. empathy cognitive empathy
8. morality - think about a larger social good, act on it even when you're alone
9. accessing intuition - wisdom of the heart and intestines - laminate 1, thru insula, middle prefrontal area

2. 2:38 - Jack Kornfield - 50 mental qualities - unhealthy mental states (cause suffering), healthy

roots - grasping, addiction, greed, aversion, aggression, fear, delusion

envy, worry, rigidity, self-centeredness... (reaction to grasping, etc.)

related to healthy states: mindfulness, love -- roots: love, wisdom/clarity, generosity/gratitude

give rise to confidence, graciousness, flexibility, modesty, clarity, insight, joy, modesty, adaptability, equanimity, kindness 

mental health is capacity to change form

here's how you train to release addition, hatred; here's how you train in flexibility, .... all function to shift inner landscape from unhealthy ones to healthy ones.... 

these are called skillful means

DSM is all the lack of mental health, pathology, disease...  there could be a complementary manual of human potential Buddhist DSM not just 39 states of bipolar, but corresponding states of contentment... in counterpoint -- 35 positive forms of happiness, happiness, rapture, joy, trust, love, generosity, 

3.  JK - 4:10 - turn towards difficulty; (dealing with out own pain... we blame others because we can't deal with our own insecurity... so we place it on another). the way things are is uncertain; you turn towards with tools of awareness...  capacity of attention and compassion.  How?  we are frightened of physical discomfort;  training of being present for what's uncomfortable; meet it with tenderness and spatiousness; took pain and put it on the altar.  be present for it;   - name the inner landscape..."oh I know you" trust...  what ... Wiesel - suffering can enlighten us.  What do you do with our restlessness? we get up.  we do anything.  We can't face restlessness, boredom, loneliness, so we open the fridge or call someone or turn on TV.  Be bored... do it right... face loneliness... die of boredom.  Acknowledge the name of the thing... give the dragons name.... "restless restless hate hate pride pride restless...."  feel it in your body, make space, OK I'll die of restlessness!  (when you do, it loses its power of you... the real issue is the resistance to it.)   This is the doubting mind, judging mind...  (there are 18 kinds of rapture... begin naming them, like a botanist... yes, I know you too) There becomes a sense of trust.  

4. Siegel - 4:30 - top down, bottom up experience, energy patterns can have information (like words in space).  Layer 1 embeds prior learning; example of encountering dog; bottom up experience is incredibly rich; we move from young childhood to adulthood where we just see "dog."  layer 1, 2, and 3 can be dominant in our lives; we never smell roses; when you get to bottom up, language goes away, total sensory immersion;   if we can disrupt down enslavement or top down dominance -- we needs names and labels for efficiency; our jobs is to maximize efficiency and minmize mindfulness; cortext has great ability to direct attention.... mindfulness - inhibits top down brain action.  

5. 5:05 Siegel - 

Ruth Baer - mindfulness trait survey - 4 traits

1. capacity to be nonjudgmental

2. nonreactive - have emotional response and come back to equilibrium - nonreactivity

3. act aware - be aware when you're doing it... 

4. label and describe the internal world (use the left hemishphre to name it)

5. ability for self-observation....