Foster Love and Build Connection to Make Great Relationships
How can we foster healthy and fulfilling relationships of all kinds? Author and psychologist Rick Hanson offers simple but powerful ways to improve relationships with our family, friends and with challenging people so that we can cultivate kindness and communicate more skillfully.
Rick Hanson is a psychologist and has written and taught about the essential inner skills of personal well-being, psychological growth, and contemplative practice – as well as about relationships, family life, and raising children. Dr. Hanson is the author of several best-selling books on these topics, including the book we are discussing today- Making Great Relationships: Simple Practices for Solving Conflicts, Building Connection, and Fostering Love. He is a Senior Fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, and has been invited to speak at NASA as well as at Oxford, Harvard, Stanford, and other major universities. Dr. Hanson offers online classes and programs as well as a free online weekly meditation program. He has his own podcast, Being Well, with his son Forrest Hanson.
WEBSITE: RickHanson.net
FaceBook: @rickhansonphd
Instagram: @rickhansonphd
#relationships,#makinggreatrelationships,#compassion,#meditation,#kriyayoga,#befriendyourself
THE YOGA HOUR TEAM COMMENTS: When Rick Hanson was asked why he wrote this book, Making Great Relationships he said that healthy relationships are the most important aspect of our lives—for our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health. He said one of the most frequent issues that people come to him for, as a psychologist, is help with relationships. Through this book he wants to give us tools that support us in answering HOW to improve our relationships. Dr. Trujillo asked him about meditation and how that supports better relationships. He said that for those of us on the spiritual path, meditation is "homecoming". When we are more rooted in our "home" the harder it is to not be there and then share that energy space with others. Another inspirational and helpful Yoga Hour program that I highly recommend.
DR. TRUJILLO’S COMMENTS: The Yoga Hour team thinks that the topic of building relationships is a critical one for our world at this time, and Rick Hanson’s book Making Great Relationships is a wonderful tool for us all to build skills in this area. I enjoyed our discussion of the need to befriend oneself as a critical starting point in this effort to build better relationships. Our conversation touched on the many benefits of having good relationships on our overall health, including increased longevity. The anecdotes Dr. Hanson shared about feeding the wolf of love in our hearts instead of the wolf of hate, and the importance of not taking things personally really resonated with me. Lastly, I appreciated his description of meditation as coming home, since it certainly feels that way to me.