Ep. 2: The Pause

Alice tells Ash her own story of growing up in a Buddhist family. She says meditation allowed her to consider her emotions more but she doesn’t know why. What is it about that helps us deal with our emotions?

To answer Ash goes back to Robert Wright who explains why we are so emotional in the first place. He says the main problem is we are not in as much control of our minds as we think. That’s because of evolution. But according to the neuroscientist Sara Lazar it’s also because of something else - this tiny part of our brains that controls our emotional response called the amygdala. Sara explains that meditation provides a pause between experiencing something and reacting this. This insight chimes with Alice’s experience of meditating.

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