What if the qualities you’ve spent years trying to correct are actually hidden strengths?
In this episode of Dharma Lab, Dr. Richard Davidson and Dr. Cortland Dahl explore how stable differences in brain activity may shape the ways we engage with the world. Richie explains how early research on brain asymmetry revealed distinct styles associated with qualities such as optimism, introversion, social anxiety, and our tendency to approach or withdraw.
They also discuss what meditation can change without erasing the qualities that make us who we are, why one neurological style is not inherently better than another, and how meta-awareness can help us uncover the potential strengths within our natural disposition.
Enjoy!
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In this episode
00:00:00 – Finding the hidden superpower in your natural disposition
00:01:04 – Individual differences in brain asymmetry
00:02:07 – Why we compare ourselves to other people
00:05:32 – The early science of brain asymmetry
00:08:37 – What an EEG experiment is actually like
00:12:00 – A surprising discovery in the resting brain
00:13:41 – How stable are our neurological tendencies?
00:15:29 – Approach-oriented and more cautious styles
00:17:12 – Does one brain style lead to greater happiness?
00:18:08 – Seeing our perceived weaknesses as superpowers
00:20:45 – What does Richie’s own brain reveal?
00:22:20 – What meditation changes and what remains
00:24:56 – Richie on anxiety, anger, and transformation
00:27:07 – When neuroscientists were told to try marriage counseling
00:28:12 – Does meditation change your personality?
00:29:43 – “Exactly the same, only more so”
00:33:15 – Are differences in brain asymmetry inherited?
00:35:03 – Heritability does not determine whether we can change
00:35:18 – What handedness reveals about the brain
00:38:26 – Finding the strength in your natural predispositions
00:39:09 – Meta-awareness and experiential fusion
00:40:45 – The skill at the heart of flourishing
Earlier Posts on Brain Asymmetry:
Written transcript for those who prefer to read
00:00:00 – Finding the hidden superpower in your natural disposition
Cortland Dahl:
The fact that I have zero discomfort just locking myself in a room for weeks on end with a pile of books, and I’ll just be a happy camper.
At one point, I thought that was a curse. Now I feel like that actually has been such a blessing in my life.
It seems like one of the lessons here is that, within any of these styles or patterns, or even looking at brain asymmetry and whatever natural predispositions are going on in our brains, it’s about leaning into that and asking: Where is the hidden superpower in this particular configuration that I have?
Rather than saying, “I wish I could be more like that. I could be more optimistic, or less anxious, or more anything,” it’s leaning into these potential superpowers that are just waiting to be tapped into.
00:01:04 – Individual differences in brain asymmetry
Cortland:
Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Dharma Lab. I am Cortland Dahl. I’m here with Richie Davidson, one of the most respected and well-known neuroscientists on the planet.
We’ve been having an amazing series of discussions about Richie’s early work, going back to the late 1970s and proceeding through the ’80s and ’90s, which was really some of the most pioneering work on the neuroscience of emotions.
Specifically, we’ve been talking about what is known as asymmetry and how the different hemispheres of the brain have some really important and fascinating differences.
We’re going to continue that discussion. If you haven’t kept up with the previous discussions, that’s totally fine, but you can go back and catch up on them.
Today, we’re going to discuss a very interesting nuance, which is the individual differences we find when it comes to this topic of asymmetry.
00:02:07 – Why we compare ourselves to other people
Cortland:
To lead into this, Richie, I wanted to share a story because I think it highlights some of the key points we’re going to capture today.
As you know, we started Tergar, which is Mingyur Rinpoche’s meditation community, back in 2009. For those of you who don’t know, Mingyur Rinpoche is a meditation teacher whom both Richie and I have studied with.
I was kind of new to teaching meditation at that time. I had been teaching for a while, but not that much. I started teaching with a group of three other instructors.
One of them was Myoshin Kelly, whom you know well, a really brilliant meditation teacher. I started teaching with her, and I immediately noticed that she was so grounded and warm, just the embodiment of care and empathy.
I felt like I was maybe more conceptual. I had been coming from a very academic training, you might say. I was judging myself against her and feeling like I needed to be more like Myoshin. I needed to be somehow more empathetic and less heady and conceptual.
I was evaluating myself relative to what I saw as her strengths. That was going on in my mind for the first few years.
We talked together more and more, and at one point we had a kind of heart-to-heart. We were very close, almost like family. She told me that she was kind of doing the same thing. She appreciated my clarity and some of the precision I brought to the teachings.
I was shocked by that. I was like, “Why would you want to be more like me? You’re the perfect teacher.”
She was shocked that I was thinking that about her, and something really unlocked in that.
I started to see that it was wonderful that we were different. Rather than feeling like I needed to be more like her, or she needed to be more like me, I started to see that I was bringing something unique to this, and it was helpful.
I don’t need to be everything. She was obviously bringing something utterly unique and helpful. It was more of a complement.
It shifted me out of this mindset where I was constantly critiquing myself against any range of idealized versions that I thought I should be. Instead, I leaned into the natural skill set I had and where my mind, and in this case my teaching ability, naturally went.
I immediately remembered that when we were talking about asymmetry and some of what we’ll capture today.
Maybe I’ll turn it over to you. You can remind us a little bit about some of these key findings with asymmetry.
Then, specifically, we can talk about individual differences and how the default we have, which is usually to be very judgmental about ourselves, can be shifted. We can use these findings to have a very different perspective on our own brains, how they function, and even our own minds.
I’ll turn it over to you, and you can kick this off however you like.
Richie Davidson:
Thank you, Cort. It’s a beautiful story, and it particularly warms my heart because I know both of you very well. I experience each of you as amazing teachers who are very different and totally complementary.
Cortland:
You knew us at that time, too, so you were probably observing this whole thing.
Richie:
Yeah, so it was great.
00:05:32 – The early science of brain asymmetry
Richie:
For those of you who weren’t with us when we first started talking about this early work in brain asymmetry, I want to go back and review a couple of key points.
When we began this work, it was prior to the availability of MRI to probe the human brain noninvasively.
Pretty much the only way we had to probe the human brain noninvasively was with EEG. EEG stands for electroencephalography, and it involves electrodes. They’re little sensors that are temporarily glued to the scalp surface, not with superglue, but with a gel to make contact.
We can pick up electrical signals from the scalp surface that are generated within the brain.
This was really the only technique we had at the time, but it continues to be used, largely because there is generally a trade-off between the spatial and temporal resolution of methods used to interrogate human brain function.
Methods that tend to have really good spatial resolution have poor temporal resolution. Methods that have very good temporal resolution tend to have poor spatial resolution.
EEG has very good temporal resolution, but not such good spatial resolution. That was what we had available at the time, and it was certainly good enough to make inferences about the functioning of different hemispheres of the brain.
We were doing studies where we recorded electrical activity from people’s brains and gave them different emotion tasks that elicited emotion, including perceiving emotional faces.
One of the things we always did with EEG was record a baseline before people started and before we began to present the tasks.
In the early stages of this work, we used the baseline to make sure the instruments were calibrated and the signals looked as they should. If any electrodes needed to be fixed, we monitored that during the baseline period and corrected it.
We didn’t primarily collect this period for any scientific purpose. It was for the strictly methodological purpose of ensuring that the recordings were doing what they were supposed to be doing.
00:08:37 – What an EEG experiment is actually like
Cortland:
Richie, maybe you could share what the experience was actually like. Imagine somebody sitting in the chair.
I remember all the time it took to get the EEG net on the head. There was a whole process around that. Then you would sit there for the resting state and look at emotional faces.
What would the experience of somebody sitting there actually be like?
Richie:
That’s helpful.
We had this giant net with 256 electrodes. Some of you have probably seen pictures. There’s an iconic picture that was taken in our lab and appeared on the cover of National Geographic, showing a monk wearing this 256-channel EEG net.
It looks like something from outer space. Each of the sensors or electrodes has a wire connected to it, so there are 256 wires coming out of this thing. It looks like this mass of spaghetti wire coming off the net on the head.
As you’re alluding to, Cort, it takes a while to put this on.
Cortland:
I remember all this gel being all over my head. It was pretty funky.
Richie:
We would squirt the gel with a blunt syringe. It didn’t hurt. It wasn’t piercing the skin. It was just a way to inject the gel into the electrode sitting on the scalp surface.
Doing that with 256 electrodes takes some time. It was at least 45 minutes of preparation before we were ready to begin recording.
The tasks we used in those days varied, but they included looking at emotional pictures.
In some of the work, particularly work we were using to probe positive and negative emotions, we would present positive pictures, like a parent hugging their child. There was a whole series of iconic pictures of that sort.
Correspondingly, there were negative pictures, which we often described as images of human suffering. For example, a burn victim with clear scars on the face, or an accident victim.
They’re the kinds of images we see in the media all the time. We’ve become a little overexposed and habituated to these images. Nevertheless, in the context of seeing both positive and negative images, they clearly elicited some emotion, and we monitored the changes that occurred in the brain.
In some of our work, we also used video clips. They weren’t just static images. The clips included sound in some of the work.
That was the kind of experimental setup we had.
00:12:00 – A surprising discovery in the resting brain
Richie:
Going back to the setup, we had this period where we were collecting data during the so-called resting baseline, when people were not exposed to any of these images or video clips.
Then we would present the video clips.
After a few years, and it really took us a few years of doing this work for reasons that were initially just methodological, we began looking at what was going on during the baseline.
We saw that some people started out at very different places.
If you look at a measure of asymmetry in the prefrontal region of the brain, which is the region where we found these variations associated with emotion, and you take a large group of participants and compute the asymmetry score, it is essentially the activation difference between the same region in the left prefrontal cortex and the corresponding region in the right prefrontal cortex.
You can express it as a difference score or a ratio.
It turned out that there was a bell-shaped curve. It was normally distributed.
Some people showed extreme right-prefrontal activation. Other people showed extreme left-prefrontal activation. There was a big hump in the middle.
Cortland:
Most people are in the middle, and then you have small groups that are out on these extremes.
Richie:
Exactly.
00:13:41 – How stable are our neurological tendencies?
Richie:
When we first saw that, we decided it was critical to determine whether this was actually a reliable difference, or whether it was associated with how much sleep people got that night, what they ate for breakfast, their mood, or other transient differences.
We began studies where we brought people back after a week and after a month. We tested them again by having them sit and rest without doing any task.
Sure enough, we found, quite remarkably, that this was incredibly stable. It was really more stable than most other physiological signals that people had studied. It was a big surprise to us.
Once we established that this was reliable in a statistical sense, it meant that if you showed strong left-prefrontal activation today and I brought you back a month from now, you would likely show strong left-prefrontal activation a month from now.
We then set out to explore what these variations were associated with.
Were there differences in personality associated with these variations in brain asymmetry?
It turned out that there was indeed a whole constellation of differences associated with these variations in brain asymmetry that were quite interesting.
00:15:29 – Approach-oriented and more cautious styles
Richie:
If I can succinctly summarize it, people with stronger left-prefrontal activation had more of an approach orientation to the world.
By that, we mean these are the kinds of people who are ready to jump out of bed in the morning and take on the world. They’re actively engaged. They’re more likely to be extroverted and optimistic. They have this active, engaged stance.
Others who were more right-prefrontally activated were more shy. They might be a little more socially anxious or introverted.
It’s not that one is better than the other. There are advantages and disadvantages to being extreme on either side.
One thing that’s important to keep in mind, as you mentioned earlier, Cort, is that most people are in the middle. Most people are not at one extreme or the other.
This was an important observation and led us to publish many papers associated with it.
We initially thought that left-prefrontal activation was somehow associated with greater happiness and well-being. But after many years of study, it turned out that this was simply not true.
00:17:12 – Does one brain style lead to greater happiness?
Richie:
It’s more associated with a style of interacting with the world.
Introverted people can be just as happy as extroverted people. Our well-being and flourishing probably have more to do with the match between our style and the environment in which we find ourselves than with the characteristics of the brain itself.
That’s a critical insight.
Each person would benefit from knowing more about their own style and not necessarily trying to change it so much as being aware of it and arranging their circumstances so that they’re most conducive to the kind of style they express.
00:18:08 – Seeing our perceived weaknesses as superpowers
Cortland:
I love this. To me, this feels like the key point.
It runs counter to what naturally happens in many of our minds. It’s similar to what I shared earlier with Myoshin, feeling like, “Why can’t I be more like that?”
We look at somebody else’s superpowers and wish we had them. Then we see whatever is going on in us as deficits rather than seeing those qualities as potential superpowers.
I very much feel like this has been the story of my life.
I’m very introverted and was very much on the shy side. On this spectrum, I don’t know how extreme I would be, but I would probably be somewhere toward one side.
Now I feel like those things have been incredible assets in my life.
My meditation practice, obviously, has benefited. I love solitude, and that has served me so well. I’ve done so much retreat, and it has brought so much to my life, my creative work, writing, and other things.
The fact that I have zero discomfort just locking myself in a room for weeks on end with a pile of books, and I’ll just be a happy camper.
At one point, I thought that was a curse. Now I feel like it has been such a blessing in my life.
It seems like one of the lessons here is that, within any of these styles or patterns, or even looking at brain asymmetry and whatever natural predispositions are going on in our brains, it’s about leaning into that and asking: Where is the hidden superpower in this particular configuration that I have?
Rather than saying, “I wish I could be more like that. I could be more optimistic, or less anxious, or more anything,” it’s leaning into these potential superpowers that are just waiting to be tapped into.
It seems like that might be one of the key points here.
Richie:
I think it very much is.
If we go back to our four key pillars of well-being, awareness, connection, insight, and purpose, the dimension of asymmetry is, to use a technical term, orthogonal, which means independent.
It’s not directly associated with any one of those pillars.
You can have left-sided activation or right-sided activation and still cultivate all four pillars of flourishing. They will look different. They won’t look the same in a person with strong left-prefrontal activation and a person with strong right-prefrontal activation.
Nevertheless, both of those people might be truly flourishing.
00:20:45 – What does Richie’s own brain reveal?
Cortland:
I have a whole laundry list of questions here.
First, I might put you on the spot a little bit. Did you measure your own brain? Did you ever look?
Anybody who knows you might think it’s not hard to guess where you are on the spectrum, but I’m curious whether you did that.
Richie:
I’ve done it a few times. I’m left-sided, but not extremely left-sided. I’m in a place on the curve where there are a lot of people, so I’m not at the far extreme.
Cortland:
You’re clearly comfortable with solitude. You’re obviously very social by nature, but you’re also comfortable with solitude.
Richie:
I actually regard myself primarily as an introvert.
Compared to my wife, I’m much more introverted than she is. I’m quite comfortable with that.
I can be extroverted in certain circumstances, but I’m aware of activating that part of myself in a way that is not my default disposition.
00:22:20 – What meditation changes and what remains
Cortland:
One interesting thing we can both talk about at a personal level is what has changed over the course of our lives and what hasn’t.
If I think about my own life, anxiety was a huge theme in my early life, back in my 20s and the early 1990s, when I was in college and starting to meditate.
The thing that has changed dramatically for me is the discomfort in certain situations.
There were times in life when being at a party, even with people I really liked and knew well, was not only challenging but actually uncomfortable.
I would have this feeling that I immediately wanted to leave the moment I entered the situation. I had this impulse that I would rather be somewhere else. It was just not fun for me.
Things like public speaking were complete nightmares. There was a whole gradation of social experiences, some mildly unpleasant and some almost unbearable. I would have done anything to avoid them at that time.
If I look at what has changed, that discomfort element has almost disappeared.
There are very few social situations that make me uncomfortable. Even public speaking, which was among the most uncomfortable, causes almost zero discomfort now. In some cases, I actually enjoy it.
But the thing that has not changed is what I might think of as energizing and depleting.
I can be at a party with people I love and thoroughly enjoy being around, but I find it tiring. I find being on my own energizing and nourishing.
It’s like being in a video game where you can see the energy meter going up and down. My energy meter goes up when I’m alone. Even if I’m doing something I love with people I enjoy being with, it goes down in social settings.
It isn’t necessarily uncomfortable. I don’t dislike it, and I certainly don’t try to avoid it. But that part hasn’t changed at all.
Maybe it’s less intense because the emotional side of it can be extremely depleting. Then it’s like your energy meter enters the death zone very quickly. Perhaps the speed at which it goes down is different.
But it’s interesting that this hasn’t changed at all, while the discomfort has changed dramatically.
I’d be curious what your experience has been with this.
00:24:56 – Richie on anxiety, anger, and transformation
Richie:
I would say there are two dimensions that have noticeably changed for me.
One is also anxiety. I used to experience a lot of public-speaking anxiety, and that has completely dissipated. I don’t experience that anymore.
The other is a kind of volatility.
I used to get angry much more than I do now at work. If someone did something wrong, incompletely, or not as well as I thought it should be done, I had very high standards.
I still have high standards, but I recognize that we’re all human, and sometimes they’re not always going to be met.
I used to have a much stronger reaction to that than I do now.
People around me who have known me for decades would notice and comment on those two elements.
The things that haven’t changed are my vibrant commitment, energy, enthusiasm, and passion for what I do. Those have been consistent.
The way they are expressed is a little different now because they don’t have the same kind of volatility.
Cortland:
That’s so helpful.
I remember when you first told me you used to fly off the handle and get upset at times in a workplace setting. That was inconceivable to me.
I moved here in 2012. We knew each other for a few years before that, but we started working together very closely then.
It’s hard for me to imagine. It’s so night and day from how you are now that it’s almost hard to believe. Of course, I believe it, but it just shows that transformation.
00:27:07 – When neuroscientists were told to try marriage counseling
Richie:
One of the people I worked closely with in the early days was Cliff Saron. Some of you may know him.
He’s one of the neuroscientists who started the Shamatha Project with Alan Wallace. He’s done some important meditation research and is a Dharma brother.
I’ve known Cliff for more than 50 years, so we go back a very long way.
We used to scream at each other. Just scream at each other.
Cortland:
Wasn’t he your lab assistant? It’s amazing. He’s one of the most eminent researchers in the field now.
Richie:
A couple of people suggested that we go for marriage counseling just to work together.
Fortunately, we’re still very close friends, and we’ve been through a lot together. That was just this crazy style that we evolved.
Cortland:
It sounds like you were both pretty fiery at that time.
Richie:
Yes, we were both really fiery.
00:28:12 – Does meditation change your personality?
Cortland:
Another example of this, which we were discussing before we started recording, is the far extreme of people who are exemplars of the meditative traditions.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Mingyur Rinpoche, Khandro Kunga Bhuma, and Khandro Tseringma are examples.
We were both just in Nepal a month ago with a female teacher who is like an alien in the best possible way. She is just a remarkable individual.
One of the things that is so fascinating about people who have taken their meditative training to depths we can’t even imagine is that they are completely different.
It’s not as though the training flattens things out and they all become peaceful and emotionally flat. They are dramatically different from one another.
00:29:43 – “Exactly the same, only more so”
Cortland:
What captures or summarizes this for me is what happened when Mingyur Rinpoche came out of retreat.
Several years ago, he did a five-year wandering retreat. In the middle of the night, he suddenly left his monastery in rural India.
I think many people knew he was going to do this at some point, but he didn’t tell anybody when. He literally jumped over the wall and left in the middle of the night.
He didn’t even tell his closest attendants. Then he disappeared for about five years. Nobody knew where he was.
When he came back, everybody was asking, “What is he like now? Is he different?”
Our friend Paul MacGowan, who is a documentary filmmaker, summed it up perfectly. He said, “He’s exactly the same, only more so.”
I thought that was the perfect distillation, because it was true.
You couldn’t say he wasn’t different, but somehow he was different in exactly the same way. It was as though what made him who he is had been amplified in a beautiful way.
These are examples of tapping into your superpowers rather than trying to self-correct toward some idealized version of a person.
Richie:
This little exercise you just laid out is a really important teaching for me.
You and I have talked about this offline periodically. Each of these people is an exemplar of the further reaches of human flourishing. They’ve all put in enormous amounts of practice and led remarkable lives.
Yet each of them is really different. They have distinctive personalities.
The idea that if you meditate long enough, your emotions will somehow subside is just not true.
Each of these people has meditated an enormous amount in their life, way more than even you have, and you’ve meditated an enormous amount, Cort.
Yet they are uniquely different. There are aspects of their personality and marks of their demeanor that remain similar, so you can recognize them even after, as with Mingyur Rinpoche, a five-year retreat.
They’re still there, except more so. That, to me, is really interesting.
At least to some extent, the asymmetries we talked about at the beginning are like that.
They do move around some. They may particularly move around with someone who is depressed and does certain things to improve their depression. But at more advanced levels, they don’t seem to move very much.
They may partly reflect relatively enduring qualities, aspects of demeanor that differ among people.
There’s a reason people are different and have different kinds of superpowers. We need those differences to be maximally helpful.
Different teachers have different styles, and they can appeal to different kinds of people. In other areas of life, those same differences would also be adaptive.
00:33:15 – Are differences in brain asymmetry inherited?
Cortland:
Around the time you were doing this work, there was a lot of amazing research on heritability, including twin studies.
At the University of Minnesota, where I did my undergraduate degree, one of my first classes was with Tom Bouchard. Some really interesting work was done there, and I got a bit of a front-row seat to it.
Was there ever any work that you or others did on the heritability of these individual differences in asymmetry?
Do we know how much is due to our genetic predispositions?
Richie:
There has been some work, and we did some twin studies.
Asymmetry with twins is actually a bit complicated. It would take us down a whole tangent to explore it deeply because there is a phenomenon in certain groups of twins called mirroring, where co-twins have opposite patterns of asymmetry.
It has even been expressed in systemic anatomy, where organs are on different sides of the body in co-twins. It has to do with how cell division works and basic issues in embryogenesis.
Cortland:
Really? This is even with identical twins?
Richie:
Yes, even with identical twins.
There is a lot of complexity, and you have to account for that complexity. But putting all of that aside, there is evidence for heritability.
This could be the subject of another Dharma Lab. We should pin this.
00:35:03 – Heritability does not determine whether we can change
Richie:
Just because something is heritable doesn’t say very much about its modifiability.
Cortland:
Usually, even if things are heritable, it’s 40 to 60 percent. There aren’t many things that are entirely determined that way.
Richie:
Exactly.
Typically, behavioral characteristics, or things related to behavioral characteristics like this, are influenced by many genes, even hundreds of genes.
It’s not a simple, single genetic contribution, as with a disorder like Huntington’s disease, which is due primarily to a single gene.
Because of that, it’s also more complicated.
00:35:18 – What handedness reveals about the brain
Richie:
One of the things we wanted to mention is handedness.
I noted in the previous Dharma Lab recording that all the work we’re talking about was done with right-handed people.
Right-handed people account for roughly 85 percent of the population.
Left-handed people are more variable than right-handed people. Among right-handed people, virtually all of them, 99-point-something percent, speak with their left hemispheres.
Among left-handed people, it’s not the case that the right hemisphere is always associated with language. It’s much more variable, and there is more bilateral representation of function among left-handed people.
There are many interesting things associated with that.
It may be that certain groups of left-handed people are actually better at tasks requiring integration between the two hemispheres because they have more bilateral representation.
Cortland:
Some left-handed people may have an increased ability in synthesis or things that are cross-hemispheric?
Richie:
Yes.
To give you an example, I looked at this a while ago, and I’m not sure it’s still true. But at one point, if you looked at the membership of the American Institute of Architects, there was a much higher percentage of left-handed architects than left-handed people in the general population.
That is an example of an occupation that may benefit from the cognitive style that is more prevalent among left-handed people.
Cortland:
Are there other professions or similar things where you see an overrepresentation of left-handed versus right-handed people?
Richie:
I don’t know the recent findings on this.
We can do another episode of Dharma Lab after I poke around in the most recent research. There might be, but I’m not sure.
00:38:26 – Finding the strength in your natural predispositions
Cortland:
As usual, every time we have one discussion, we somehow create five more discussions that we need to have.
Maybe we can round this one off by returning to the key point about how this insight can help us at a personal level.
It seems to be about identifying and leaning into the natural predispositions we have rather than viewing them as weaknesses.
It’s about finding the buried superpower within things we might otherwise think of as a problem or a deficit.
I know that has certainly been true in my life.
Do you have any final thoughts along those lines, Richie, or any practices that have helped you?
00:39:09 – Meta-awareness and experiential fusion
Richie:
One of the things we talked about earlier was what changed in our lives and what may not have changed and remained consistent.
One of the big things for me is the presence of meta-awareness. That is simply knowing what is going on in my mind.
I would say my earlier years were characterized by a term that Cort and I invented and wrote about in an earlier paper. We call it “experiential fusion.”
I was totally fused with the emotions I was experiencing. I didn’t have this background awareness that was a container for it all and provided an opportunity to look at it with curiosity.
That itself is a highly stabilizing and regulatory capacity that all of us have.
I think that is really important.
Whatever our style is, there is a lot of reason to respect different styles. We need people with different skill sets and different superpowers.
If we can cultivate meta-awareness so that we are aware of these differences rather than simply being in the river and carried away, I think that is really helpful.
00:40:45 – The skill at the heart of flourishing
Cortland:
It’s funny you say that.
If the question is how we tap into these latent superpowers, and I think back on my own life, I would say that was certainly the starting point and, in many ways, one of the key ingredients, especially in my early years of practice.
It was simply being more aware of what was going on within me: my mental and emotional habits, my thoughts and emotions, and how those played out in my life and relationships.
It was leaning into that and exploring it.
Meta-awareness is the vehicle for doing that. You can’t do it without meta-awareness.
That was profoundly transformative.
We talk about flourishing as a skill and well-being as a skill. In many ways, meta-awareness may be the critical linchpin for the whole thing.
Richie:
I would 100 percent agree with that.
Cortland:
Such a beautiful thing.
Hopefully, if you’re still with us, you found this dialogue enjoyable. Please tune in again. We will certainly continue this discussion and pick up some more of these threads.
Thank you, Richie. As always, it’s a joy.
For everyone who joined us, thank you for tuning in.
Richie:
Wonderful to be here. Thanks, Cort.
