In some ways, both of you had these maps and, and were upset that, uh, real life was not conforming to them.

I think so.

Um, at the time, I would have said, [chuckles] you know, it was all about her map being... [chuckles] Uh, you know, her holding onto her map.

But it's, uh, I did s- have this insight at one point that also I was starting to fall into my own sort of script, right? And, and that I had a map of, um, being the, the smart, you know, helpful son who was going to help pull her out of her depression, and that I was going to fix her in some way.

And so there was, just as you said, actually two violations.

There's the violation of her narrative of being cared for, um, for the rest of her life and her, her marriage continuing on happily ever after, um, as idealistic as that was.

And then there was also this violation of, you know, my efficacy as a good son, uh, who's gonna help her and, and pull her out of things through my sheer ingenuity.

Hmm.

In some ways, both of you had these maps and were upset that real life was not conforming to them.

I think so.

At the time, I would have said it was all about her holding onto her map.

But I did have this insight at one point that also I was starting to fall into my own sort of script.

And that I had a map of being the smart, helpful son who is going to help pull her out of her depression.

And then I was going to fix her in some way.

And so there was, just as you said, actually two violations.

Describe what was happening in your mind and what you did at that point, Noor.

Do you want to give a little explanation to someone who's not aware of your work? What did you find in your studies that shows that the rumination piece itself and the stuckiness, like getting stuck, is actually something we can work out of and it may not be what we think is, you know, the action steps in the first place?

Sure.

Yeah.

So a lot of my research focuses on specific disorders like depression and vulnerability to relapse into depression.

So once people become depressed, it's as though they've developed almost a habit, a certainty around the world that leads them to become depressed again in the future.

And so what we did is have people go into an fMRI which looks at oxygen consumption in the brain and you can then compare what someone's doing at one time point when they're in the scanner, you can show them different pictures or movies or things like that versus another time point and get some ideas about what parts of the brain are burning sugar and oxygen, what parts of the brain care about that process.

and so we had people who were stressed and signing up for meditation courses and some of them had done the course and some hadn't go into the scanner and watch really sad film clips like as an emotional stressor and we're really interested in how people would might respond differently subjectively to the clips in a way that predicts you know their future vulnerability to depression or how depressed or anxious or in pain they are now but also how the brain might differ between people And what we found actually is that people pretty consistently get sad when they watch sad movie clips, compared to watching home and garden television as a kind of baseline condition.

You also mentioned that it's not so much about like... recreating our habits but maybe about getting beyond our habits so I mean there's we're going really deep in here now but if we talk about that a little bit what does it look like to get out of our own truth or out of our own reality how do we get better at inviting for new possibilities to unfold themselves both for our personal lives but also for the world around us

This is where I wanna take myself." What are some things that I can start to do to facilitate that process?

Yeah, I'd say the overarching principle is to start developing confidence and comfort with being connected to the sensations that are happening in each moment.

So not to become like the world's greatest reader of people's expressions, or of your own heartbeat or something like that, but to start to explore practices where you are at least unfamiliar, maybe don't see the point at first, but, and to develop a kind of confidence with moving into sensation.

And I would start not trying to be the life of the party as your first move, right? [chuckles] Like the first move might just be like, "I wanna start just getting in tune with how my body feels in different situations," or, "I wanna start getting in tune with where I look around a room when I walk into a room, or when I'm just sitting working." And not only like where do I look or how does my body feel, but, you know, where don't I look, right? What don't I listen to? What am I filtering out? So as a practical action, someone could just right now try to notice three things somewhere in the room that they just have never looked at before, or almost never look at, right? Uh, and again, maybe that's upsetting.

You notice like cobwebs or something [chuckles] you meant should have cleaned up, or you've actually been avoiding this because there's something, there's like a to-do list over there.

But the whole idea is like you're just breaking the pattern, right? And you're getting comfortable with exploring the visual world.

You're getting-- You're trying to notice what are some sounds I don't listen to, or I, like there's maybe a background hum.

And what else would be worth touching on for the audience in that book?

Say more about that.

So I think one of the, the big themes we talk about in the book is how wrong we were about what mindfulness meditation was doing and about what made people more vulnerable to depression, and we were wrong in almost the exact same way.

So we went into studying one, some of the very first neuroimaging trials of m-mindfulness-based stress reduction, this eight-week course popularized by Jon Kabat-Zinn, probably the cornerstone of the modern meditation science movement.

I'm thinking that what we're really gonna see is this very well-characterized self-referential network, the default mode network, was, uh, being turned off by meditation, and that's why people felt better.

Right? 'Cause, you know, like, oh, they're doing this, you know, Buddhist tribe practice.

There's no self, so you're gonna realize there's no self, and when the self is out of the way, your problems go away.

So cool.

And does radical acceptance happen in sense foraging?