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September 14, 2023

Dr. Richard Davidson: What We’re Getting Wrong with Meditation

Dr. Richard Davidson (Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry, Founder & Director of the Center for Healthy Minds) shows us what it truly means to be well in your emotional self by harnessing our trauma mechanisms into well-being! He breaks down the scientific data he’s gathered on long-term meditators (including monks!) to show the efficacy of meditation, the parts of the brain most affected by meditation, and what all of that means for how we self-regulate and cope with trauma. Dr. Davidson explains how meditation can help parenting, how our expectations and narratives influence our perception of the world, and what our "emotional fingerprints" are. He and Mayim discuss how his framework of awareness, connection, insight, and purpose lead us to understand the science of well-being, the notion that love and kindness are innate and hate is learned, and the importance of teaching forms of meditation to our kids.

Theme Song Written, Produced, and Performed by Ed Robertson. Mixed by Kenny Luong.
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Dr. Richard Davidson

Professor, Author, Founder

healthy.minds
Mayim Bialik

Host

@missmayim
Jonathan Cohen

Co-Host

@jonathancohenofficial

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Guest References

Center for Healthy Minds
Founded by world renowned neuroscientist Dr. Richard J. Davidson, the Center for Healthy Minds envisions a kinder, wiser, more compassionate world. Our mission is to cultivate well-being and relieve suffering through a scientific understanding of the mind.
Healthy Minds Program App
With a combination of podcast-style lessons and both seated and active meditations, you’ll learn what the science says about the brain while developing skills to tap into these learnings for a healthier, happier you.
See More
Altered Traits by Dr. Richard Davidson
In the last twenty years, meditation and mindfulness have gone from being kind of cool to becoming an omnipresent Band-Aid for fixing everything from your weight to your relationship to your achievement level. Unveiling here the kind of cutting-edge research that has made them giants in their fields, Richard Davidson and Daniel Goleman show us the truth about what meditation can really do for us, as well as exactly how to get the most out of it.
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The Emotional Life of Your Brain by Dr. Richard Davidson
This book offers a new model for understanding our emotions – their origins, their power and their malleability. He has discovered that personality is composed of six basic emotional “styles,” including resilience, self-awareness, and attention. Our emotional fingerprint results from where on the continuum of each style we fall.
See More