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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