119: 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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