Practical Wisdom with Dr. Rick Hanson
Oct 14, 2026 · 46 min · 12 segments
We all carry emotional baggage from the past. These old hurts, fears, insecurities, and patterns can continue to affect us long after the original experiences have passed. While mindfulness can help…
Rick HansonHost
Tibetan Buddhism has some practices for this, which basically has to do with what do we do with the painful residues of life experiences, the baggage, the patterns, the stuff, the trauma material that just gets lodged in our nervous system.
How do we actually clear it out? So first, I want to name some really useful things from Buddhism in general about this and then slide more into some fundamental neuropsychology for how we help the brain to unlearn some of the painful material it's learned over the years.
Well, first off, we have certainly in Buddhism many practices in which we shift our relationship to our emotional baggage.
Let's say, I'll speak for myself, that you grow up and for whatever reason you feel very much like an outsider with your peers.
Maybe you're bullied, maybe you're not so bullied, but you don't feel like you ever really belong.
You want to fit in, but it's, you're not good at fitting in, so you don't fit in and you get rejected, so forth, so forth.
But with getting some breathing room around it, you know, the mindfulness trainings, the ability to steady your mind so that you're not so hijacked by what arises, establishing a greater sense of quiet as, as foundational in you as kind of like the space in which the noise occurs, the noise of those residues and that baggage, developing a greater sense of wholeness, of unification, of being undivided so that there's less tendency to reject or hate or feel ashamed of different parts of yourself.
As I quoted Dick Schwartz, you know, in, in Internal Family Systems, it's, you know, no, no bad parts.
And you recall what I just went through in the meditation around steadying the mind, quieting it, and coming to singleness.
Buddhism is also really helpful in terms of seeing the nature of experiences in which, let's say that baggage arises, say for me, you know, feeling unworthy in groups or like small and invisible or tending to interpret neutral events as rejecting when actually they're not.
You know, the, the story, the narrative, whatever is arising as an experience, uh, can be recognized directly as made of parts that are connected and changing, compounded, interrelated, and impermanent.
Parts that are connected and changing so that, speaking of myself, that kind of slumping, sleepy, dissociative, sort of beta swerve into invisibility and oblivion when around some sort of dominating, powerful alpha figures, that's an experience.
The body sensations are experiences, the emotions of it, the thoughts of it, the desires related to it, the behavioral enactments of it, the shrinking away, maybe subtly.
Tibetan Buddhism has some practices for this, which basically has to do with what do we do with the painful residues of life experiences, the baggage, the patterns, the stuff, the trauma material that just gets lodged in our nervous system.
How do we actually clear it out? So first, I want to name some really useful things from Buddhism in general about this and then slide more into some fundamental neuropsychology for how we help the brain to unlearn some of the painful material it's learned over the years.
Well, first off, we have certainly in Buddhism many practices in which we shift our relationship to our emotional baggage.
Let's say, I'll speak for myself, that you grow up and for whatever reason you feel very much like an outsider with your peers.
Maybe you're bullied, maybe you're not so bullied, but you don't feel like you ever really belong.
You want to fit in, but it's, you're not good at fitting in, so you don't fit in and you get rejected, so forth, so forth.
But with getting some breathing room around it, you know, the mindfulness trainings, the ability to steady your mind so that you're not so hijacked by what arises, establishing a greater sense of quiet as, as foundational in you as kind of like the space in which the noise occurs, the noise of those residues and that baggage, developing a greater sense of wholeness, of unification, of being undivided so that there's less tendency to reject or hate or feel ashamed of different parts of yourself.
As I quoted Dick Schwartz, you know, in, in Internal Family Systems, it's, you know, no, no bad parts.
And you recall what I just went through in the meditation around steadying the mind, quieting it, and coming to singleness.
Buddhism is also really helpful in terms of seeing the nature of experiences in which, let's say that baggage arises, say for me, you know, feeling unworthy in groups or like small and invisible or tending to interpret neutral events as rejecting when actually they're not.
You know, the, the story, the narrative, whatever is arising as an experience, uh, can be recognized directly as made of parts that are connected and changing, compounded, interrelated, and impermanent.
Parts that are connected and changing so that, speaking of myself, that kind of slumping, sleepy, dissociative, sort of beta swerve into invisibility and oblivion when around some sort of dominating, powerful alpha figures, that's an experience.
The body sensations are experiences, the emotions of it, the thoughts of it, the desires related to it, the behavioral enactments of it, the shrinking away, maybe subtly.
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