PODCASTHappiness Break

Scroll down for a transcription of this episode.

Take a few minutes to develop your sense of awe for the circle of life in this mediation with Dacher Keltner.

LINK TO EPISODE TRANSCRIPT: https://tinyurl.com/2tv3whj2

All sentient beings are impermanent, and out of this we find appreciation. We find poignancy. A little sadness even, but also out of that sadness and poignancy, a sense of deep appreciation for the people we love.

How to Do This Practice:

• Find a comfortable place. Focus on taking a few deep breaths, relaxing your body from head to toe.
• Think of an older relative who you are close to. Picture them in your mind.
• Imagine how they entered the world years ago as a newborn.
• Continue to imagine this individual growing up — through adolescence into adulthood, developing the qualities that you admire.
• Now imagine them later in life, into seniority.
• Reflect on the progression of the individual’s life, from the beginning to the final stages in this natural progression of the life cycle for humans.
• Recognize that they’ll pass or maybe they have passed, and that’s part of this cycle.
• Take note of how you feel.

Today’s Happiness Break host:

Dacher Keltner is the host of the Greater Good Science Center’s award-winning podcast, The Science of Happiness and is a co-instructor of the GGSC’s popular online course of the same name. He’s also the founding director of the Greater Good Science Center and a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Check out Dacher’s most recent book, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/4j4hcvyt

More resources from The Greater Good Science Center:

What I Learned About Resilience in the Midst of Grief: https://tinyurl.com/2uw7uvxd

How to Face Grief in Yourself and Others: https://tinyurl.com/yckknp9r

Death and Gratitude: https://tinyurl.com/mwcn752j

How to Bring More Meaning to Dying: https://tinyurl.com/vnbkwf52
Learning to Live in a World Without a Loved One: https://tinyurl.com/2v4avfvv

How do you find awe in impermanence? Email us at happinesspod@berkeley.edu or use the hashtag #happinesspod.

Find us on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/6s39rzus

Help us share Happiness Break! Rate us and copy and share this link: https://tinyurl.com/6s39rzus

We’re living through a mental health crisis. Between the stress, anxiety, depression, loneliness, burnout — we all could use a break to feel better. That’s where Happiness Break comes in. In each biweekly podcast episode, instructors guide you through research-backed practices and meditations that you can do in real-time. These relaxing and uplifting practices have been shown in a lab to help you cultivate calm, compassion, connection, mindfulness, and more — what the latest science says will directly support your well-being. All in less than ten minutes. A little break in your day.

We’re living through a mental health crisis. Between the stress, anxiety, depression, loneliness, burnout — we all could use a break to feel better. That’s where Happiness Break comes in. In each biweekly podcast episode, instructors guide you through research-backed practices and meditations that you can do in real-time. These relaxing and uplifting practices have been shown in a lab to help you cultivate calm, compassion, connection, mindfulness, and more — what the latest science says will directly support your well-being. All in less than ten minutes. A little break in your day.

Transcript:

Dacher Keltner: I am Dacher Keltner. Welcome to Happiness Break. Today we’re going to do a practice called focusing on the impermanence of those we love. In the West, we often shy away from thinking about the impermanence of people we love. It’s hard, it’s painful to think about their loss. Why would we do this?

Well, what we know is when we grapple with the impermanence of people we love, we actually gain some perspective on this fact of life. We feel a sense of common humanity with other people. That this is just a truth about being a human being, is that people we love pass. It also gives us an opportunity to kind of reappraise – to rethink the passage of time and the fact that people age and change. So there are a lot of good reasons to focus on the impermanence of people we love.

And when we consult other traditions, like the Bon tradition of the Himalayas, they have practices that get us to contemplate impermanence, to appreciate who is with us and what they are right now.

So we are gonna contemplate the impermanence of someone you love.

Get into a restful position, a nice posture, hands in a comfortable place. Close your eyes. Just take a couple of nice deep breaths together. Now in this next inhalation, expanding your chest and your belly, just relax your shoulders and your back and your face. And let that relaxation spread through your legs and down into your feet, and into your hands. Now I’d like you, as you breathe imagine an older relative who’s important to you. Even somebody who’s passed, just get a picture of that individual in your mind. Breathing in, you might imagine their face and their eyes and their body and their voice. Now breathing out with the strength of your imagination, imagine this person being born into the world many years ago, entering in as a newborn.

And then continuing in their journey imagine them as a child. A little three or four year old standing there. Just get a picture of them as a young child. And now again, using just the richness of your imagination imagine this elderly relative moving through childhood, into adolescence and their aging and becoming a teen, and now a young adult and adult developing the qualities you admire. Imagining the progression of their life.

And then imagine them moving through the stages of adulthood, of maybe getting married, having kids, doing work, moving through that middle part of life, and now as they move past the middle of life, they start to age and imagine just their aging body, how they’ve changed since the images you had of them being newborn or a child or a young adult. We age and change.

And now imagine them really becoming elderly if they’re lucky. We’re lucky to move into those later decades, the seventies and eighties, nineties, even, really getting old wrinkles and the body stooping perhaps, and slowing down. Try, if you can, just to get a picture of the sweep of this individual’s life from those first moments to really becoming old in this natural progression of the life cycle for humans. And recognize that they’ll pass or maybe they have passed, and that’s part of this cycle.

Now let’s just reflect together that when we get images and pictures of a person’s life from the buoyancy of early childhood, moving through life and becoming older, and just how everything changes with age. That’s just part of our life cycle and know that is just a fundamental quality of our love for people, is, is this impermanence. All things change. All sentient beings are impermanent, and out of this we find appreciation. We find poignancy. A little sadness even, but also out of that sadness and poignancy, a sense of deep appreciation for the people we love. And as we come to a conclusion of this, also a sense of that philosophical insight that everything is impermanent as we move through life.

I’m Dacher Ketlner, thank you for taking this Happiness Break with me. Happiness Break is produced by PRX UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center.