Practical Wisdom with Dr. Rick Hanson
Oct 21, 2026 · 47 min · 11 segments
What happens when important emotional needs go unmet, especially when we’re young? Even with loving parents and a relatively good childhood, we can carry a lingering sense that something is missing…
Rick HansonHost
So I'd like to explore with you how to fill yourself up today with important experiences and psychological nutrients that were unfortunately either missing or kind of a really thin soup when you were younger or even as an adult.
And place this, this idea of filling up that which has been missing, and I'm gonna locate this in fundamental Buddhist practice.
So to begin, I wanna give a full acknowledgment to Stephen Batchelor, a very longtime practitioner and, and student of both Tibetan Buddhism and Zen Buddhism, Korean Zen especially, and Theravadan, you know, early Buddhism.
And among Stephen's many contributions has been the notion of reordering the Four Noble Truths.
It's a word I'll come back to later, routinely and mistakenly translated as suffering.
Stephen looked at that and said, "You know, let's consider doing this in a different way, and let's make the second noble truth first." So we begin with the reality that as human animals, we crave.
We crave them going away when we don't want them, and we crave them coming back when we do.
We want those things, and in the wanting and the intensity and the contraction around it, we create the second noble truth of painful, difficult suffering.
So even though our craving creates suffering and harms for ourselves and others, there is a path, the Eightfold Path, that will reduce those cravings and reduce that suffering and harm, leading to the cessation, ultimately, of all trouble in the mind and the highest happiness, which is peace.
So you follow the sequence? And I wanna make a really important point in passing, which is that the word dukkha can be understood in two ways.
There is more than these three as characteristics of existence, but they are fundamental characteristics of existence, I think you'll agree.
So I'd like to explore with you how to fill yourself up today with important experiences and psychological nutrients that were unfortunately either missing or kind of a really thin soup when you were younger or even as an adult.
And place this, this idea of filling up that which has been missing, and I'm gonna locate this in fundamental Buddhist practice.
So to begin, I wanna give a full acknowledgment to Stephen Batchelor, a very longtime practitioner and, and student of both Tibetan Buddhism and Zen Buddhism, Korean Zen especially, and Theravadan, you know, early Buddhism.
And among Stephen's many contributions has been the notion of reordering the Four Noble Truths.
It's a word I'll come back to later, routinely and mistakenly translated as suffering.
Stephen looked at that and said, "You know, let's consider doing this in a different way, and let's make the second noble truth first." So we begin with the reality that as human animals, we crave.
We crave them going away when we don't want them, and we crave them coming back when we do.
We want those things, and in the wanting and the intensity and the contraction around it, we create the second noble truth of painful, difficult suffering.
So even though our craving creates suffering and harms for ourselves and others, there is a path, the Eightfold Path, that will reduce those cravings and reduce that suffering and harm, leading to the cessation, ultimately, of all trouble in the mind and the highest happiness, which is peace.
So you follow the sequence? And I wanna make a really important point in passing, which is that the word dukkha can be understood in two ways.
There is more than these three as characteristics of existence, but they are fundamental characteristics of existence, I think you'll agree.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
