Rick Heller

This week we talk to Rick Heller about secular meditation Rick Heller is the author of the new book, Secular Meditation: 32 Practices for Cultivating Inner Peace, Compassion, and Joy — A Guide from the Humanist Community at Harvard. Rick leads weekly meditations at the Humanist Community at Harvard. Rick received a master’s degree in journalism from Boston University. He also holds a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from MIT In This Interview, Rick Heller and I Discuss:

The One You Feed parable His new book, Secular Meditation: 32 practices for cultivating inner peace, compassion & Joy (A guide from the Humanist Community at Harvard) How in the brain, two negatives do not equal a positive What a "Humanist" is A secular view of meditation & mindfulness Other types of meditation other than breath focused meditation How there's no such thing as an inherently negative stimulus What face meditation is How the muscles in your face can affect your inner speech How to relate to emotions with mindfulness That recognizing an emotion actually brings it's feeling back toward neutral What "positive equanimity" is The difference between cognitive reappraisal and positive thinking Different approaches to help us achieve "mindfulness of life" When you're more "in your head" about something than you are collecting sensory information about something, you're really just dealing with abstractions Skepticism surrounding the concept of "no self" as a goal to pursue His working definition of enlightenment A secular version of the serenity prayer

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