Being Well Podcast
What is mindfulness really? According to one fourth-grader, “Not hitting someone in the mouth.” In this episode of the Being Well Podcast, Sharon joins Dr. Rick Hanson and Forrest Hanson to discuss how we can work skillfully with anger, fear, and reactivity without becoming doormats or numbing ourselves out through the lens of her new children’s book Kind Karl.
They explore the protective function of anger, and how we can create more space by relating differently to our thoughts, emotions, and sense of self. Sharon shares a Buddhist lens that links anger and fear, and how looking closely at “what’s in the anger” can help us get clarity without collateral damage. Along the way, they talk about the difference between healthy moral anger and the habit of anger, how to extract the positive energy from difficult emotions without getting burned, and how lovingkindness and self-compassion can be active, strengthening forces.
Key topics in this episode are:
0:00: Intro and Sharon’s new children’s book
1:30: Rick and Sharon’s personal history
3:40: Making abstract concepts direct and simple
6:00: “Mindfulness means not hitting someone in the mouth.”
12:30: Equanimity, reactivity, and our relationship with pleasure and pain
26:48: Healthy moral anger and outrage
34:17: How mindfulness decenters the self
43:53: Decoupling identity from states of suffering
50:23: Dissolving boundaries, self protection, and loneliness
1:03:09: Recap
