The Neuroscience Of Self Love Quotes

Vulnerability is the least celebrated emotion in our society

I don't trust anybody who isn't a little bit neurotic

I take it as a compliment when somebody calls me crazy. I would be offended if I was one of the sheeple, one of the sleepwalkers in the matrix or part of the collective hallucination we call 'normal

Life is a useless passion, an exciting journey of a mammal in survival mode. Each day is a miracle, a blessing unexplored and the more you immerse yourself in light, the less you will feel the darkness. There is more to life than nothingness. And cynicism. And nihilism. And selfishness. And glorious isolation. Be selfish with yourself, but live your life through your immortal acts, acts that engrain your legacy onto humanity. Transcend your fears and follow yourself into the void instead of letting yourself get eaten up by entropy and decay. Freedom is being yourself without permission. Be soft and leave a lasting impression on everybody you meet

I am a habitual rule-breaker

You are not always right. It’s not always about being right. The best thing you can offer others is understanding. Being an active listener is about more than just listening, it is about reciprocating and being receptive to somebody else. Everybody has woes. Nobody is safe from pain. However, we all suffer in different ways. So learn to adapt to each person, know your audience and reserve yourself for people who have earned the depths of you

I have been at war with parts of myself for so long

Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards us his own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else.

Your fear of becoming a cliche is what turns you into one. If you remove the fear, we are all really walking contradictions, hypocrites and paradoxical cliches

Neuroscience tells us that it is highly improbable that we have souls, as everything we think and feel is no more or no less than the electrochemical chatter of our nerve cells. Our sense of self, our feelings and our thoughts, our love for others, our hopes and ambitions, our hates and fears all die when our brains die. Many people deeply resent this view of things, which not only deprives us of life after death but also seems to downgrade thought to mere electrochemistry and reduces us to mere automata, to machines. Such people are profoundly mistaken, since what it really does is upgrade matter into something infinitely mysterious that we do not understand. There are one hundred billion nerve cells in our brains. Does each one have a fragment of consciousness within it? How many nerve cells do we require to be conscious or to feel pain? Or does consciousness and thought reside in the electrochemical impulses that join these billions of cells together? Is a snail aware? Does it feel pain when you crush it underfoot? Nobody knows.

One way the self grows is by equating itself to things—by identifying with them. Unfortunately, when you identify with something, you make its fate your own—and yet, everything in this world ultimately ends. So be mindful of how you identify with positions, objects, and people.

People hate thinking systematically about how to optimize their relationships. It is normal to hear someone say: “I will just wait for something to happen naturally” when talking about one of the most important aspects of their life while genuinely believing that this approach has reasonable odds of success. Imagine if people said the same thing about their careers. It would sound truly bizarre for someone to expect a successful career to “just happen naturally” and yet it is entirely normalized to expect that good relationships will. People pay tens of thousands of dollars to receive degrees in computer science, marketing, and neuroscience. They make tough sacrifices with the understanding that the skills and knowledge they build in these domains will dramatically affect their quality of life. Ironically, people spend very little time systematically examining mating strategies—despite the fact that a robust understanding of the subject can dramatically affect quality of life. We will happily argue that your sexual and relationship skills matter more than your career skills. If you want to be wealthy, the fastest way to become so is to marry rich. Nothing makes happiness easier than a loving, supportive relationship, while one of the best ways to ensure you are never happy is to enter or fail to recognize and escape toxic relationships. If you want to change the world, a great partner can serve as a force multiplier. A draft horse can pull 8000 pounds, while two working together can pull 24,000 pounds. When you have a partner with whom you can synergize, you gain reach and speed that neither you nor your partner could muster individually. Heck, even if you are the type of person to judge your self-worth by the number of people with whom you have slept, a solid grasp of mating strategies will help you more than a lifetime of hitting the gym (and we say this with full acknowledgment that hitting the gym absolutely helps). A great romantic relationship will even positively impact your health (a 2018 paper in Psychophysiology found that the presence of a partner in a room lowered participants’ blood pressure) and increase your lifespan (a 2019 paper in the journal Health Psychology showed individuals in happy marriages died young at a 20% lower rate). 

It's a general moral principle that the more power you have over someone, the greater your duty to use that power benevolently. Well, who is the one person in the world you have the greatest power over? It's your future self. You hold that life in your hands, and what it will be depends on how you care for it.

It's been long since thinking humanity has learnt that love is a majestic creation of the brain, yet that knowledge hasn't made love be deemed any less glorious. Then why should it threaten the religious believer to learn that divinity as well is a natural creation of the brain?

The autobiographical self (D’Amasio 2000) incorporates the reflective self and some of the emotional self, and it provides the sense of “I” having a unique past and future. The core self involves an underlying and largely nonverbal feeling of “I” that has little sense of the past or the future. If the PFC—which provides most of the neural substrate of the autobiographical self—were to be damaged, the core self would remain, though with little sense of continuity with the past or future. On the other hand, if the subcortical and brain stem structures which the core self relies upon were damaged, then both the core and autobiographical selves would disappear, which suggests that the core self is the neural and mental foundation of the autobiographical self (D’Amasio 2000). When your mind is very quiet, the autobiographical self seems largely absent, which presumably corresponds to a relative deactivation of its neural substrate. Meditations that still the mind, such as the concentration practices we explored in the previous chapter, improve conscious control over that deactivation process.

Why does the mind crave superstition! It's because superstition is a psychological apparatus for self-preservation. And it appears to us as truth because the only truth our brain is concerned with is the one that takes away our anxiety and aids in our survival, even if that truth happens to be just another lie our brain cooks up to maintain internal order. However, neurologically speaking, there is no such thing as a mind without superstition. Your belief that you have no superstition, is just another superstition. So, it's not about developing a mind without superstition, which is impossible, rather it is about being aware of the superstitions as much as possible, and reject those that are particularly harmful, for the self and society.

The traditional hospital practice of excluding parents ignored the importance of attachment relationships as regulators of the child’s emotions, behaviour and physiology. The child’s biological status would be vastly different under the circumstances of parental presence or absence. Her neurochemical output, the electrical activity in her brain’s emotional centres, her heart rate, blood pressure and the serum levels of the various hormones related to stress would all vary significantly. Life is possible only within certain well-defined limits, internal or external. We can no more survive, say, high sugar levels in our bloodstream than we can withstand high levels of radiation emanating from a nuclear explosion. The role of self-regulation, whether emotional or physical, may be likened to that of a thermostat ensuring that the temperature in a home remains constant despite the extremes of weather conditions outside. When the environment becomes too cold, the heating system is switched on. If the air becomes overheated, the air conditioner begins to work. In the animal kingdom, self-regulation is illustrated by the capacity of the warm-blooded creature to exist in a broad range of environments. It can survive more extreme variations of hot and cold without either chilling or overheating than can a coldblooded species. The latter is restricted to a much narrower range of habitats because it does not have the capacity to self-regulate the internal environment. Children and infant animals have virtually no capacity for biological self-regulation; their internal biological states—heart rates, hormone levels, nervous system activity — depend completely on their relationships with caregiving grown-ups. Emotions such as love, fear or anger serve the needs of protecting the self while maintaining essential relationships with parents and other caregivers. Psychological stress is whatever threatens the young creature’s perception of a safe relationship with the adults, because any disruption in the relationship will cause turbulence in the internal milieu. Emotional and social relationships remain important biological influences beyond childhood. “Independent self-regulation may not exist even in adulthood,” Dr. Myron Hofer, then of the Departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, wrote in 1984. “Social interactions may continue to play an important role in the everyday regulation of internal biologic systems throughout life.” Our biological response to environmental challenge is profoundly influenced by the context and by the set of relationships that connect us with other human beings. As one prominent researcher has expressed it most aptly, “Adaptation does not occur wholly within the individual.” Human beings as a species did not evolve as solitary creatures but as social animals whose survival was contingent on powerful emotional connections with family and tribe. Social and emotional connections are an integral part of our neurological and chemical makeup. We all know this from the daily experience of dramatic physiological shifts in our bodies as we interact with others. “You’ve burnt the toast again,” evokes markedly different bodily responses from us, depending on whether it is shouted in anger or said with a smile. When one considers our evolutionary history and the scientific evidence at hand, it is absurd even to imagine that health and disease could ever be understood in isolation from our psychoemotional networks. “The basic premise is that, like other social animals, human physiologic homeostasis and ultimate health status are influenced not only by the physical environment but also by the social environment.” From such a biopsychosocial perspective, individual biology, psychological functioning and interpersonal and social relationships work together, each influencing the other.

The wolf of love sees a vast horizon, with all beings included in the circle of “us.” That circle shrinks down for the wolf of hate, so that only the nation, or tribe, or friends and family—or, in the extreme, only the individual self—is held as “us,” surrounded by threatening masses of “them.

At some point in life, we all ask the same question: Who am I? And no one really knows the answer. The self is a slippery subject—especially when it’s the subject that is regarding itself as an object! So let’s begin by grounding this airy topic with an experiential activity—taking the body for a walk. Then we’ll investigate the nature of the self in your brain. Last, we’ll explore methods for relaxing and releasing “self-ing” in order to feel more confident, peaceful, and joined with all things. (For more on this profound matter, which reaches beyond the scope of a single chapter, see Living Dhamma by Ajahn Chah, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, or The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Maharshi.)

The tragedy and opportunity of this moment in history are exactly the same: the natural and technical resources needed to pull us back from the brink already exist. The issue is not a lack of resources. It is a lack of will and restraint, of attention to what's truly happening, and of enlightened self-interest[.]

In retrospect I can clearly see that as my self-compassion increased, my toxic shame decreased. Modern advances in neuroscience [see: A General Theory of Love] suggest that we are intrinsically limited in our ability to emotionally regulate and soothe ourselves. More and more research suggests that our ability to metabolize painful emotional states is enhanced by communicating with a safe enough other person.

Superstition is a psychological apparatus for self-preservation.

You can give so much in this life, and that offers you many opportunities to release the self. For example, you can give time, helpfulness, donations, restraint, patience, noncontention, and forgiveness. Any path of service—including raising a family, caring for others, and many kinds of work—incorporates generosity. Envy—and its close cousin, jealousy—is a major impediment to generosity. So notice the suffering in envy, how it is an affliction upon you. Envy actually activates some of the same neural networks involved with physical pain (Takahashi et al. 2009). In a compassionate and kind way, remind yourself that you will be all right even if other people have fame, money, or a great partner—and you don’t. To free yourself from the clutches of envy, send compassion and loving-kindness to people you envy.

In the society of thinking humanity, the natural law of trust should be - In I, I trust.

The many aspects of self are based on structures and processes spread throughout the brain and nervous system, and embedded in the body’s interactions with the world. Researchers categorize those aspects of self, and their neural underpinnings, in a variety of ways. For example, the reflective self (“I am solving a problem”) likely arises mainly in neural connections among the anterior cingulate cortex, upper-outer prefrontal cortex (PFC), and hippocampus; the emotional self (“I am upset”) emerges from the amygdala, hypothalamus, striatum (part of the basal ganglia), and upper brain stem (Lewis and Todd 2007). Different parts of your brain recognize your face in group photos, know about your personality, experience personal responsibility, and look at situations from your perspective rather than someone else’s (Gillihan and Farah 2005).

No self, no problem.

Through the sacred verses filled with violence and self-righteousness, the minds of the angry individuals find a way to get rid of all their misery. At that unstable state of consciousness, they are drawn to the description of the Holy War. They visualize a glimmer of hope. They feel absolutely immersed in it. Finally when they emerge as holy warriors, they are no longer humans, from the emotional perspective. They emerge as wild beasts, neurologically almost unable to feel human emotions, like empathy, love, kindness and compassion. Consequently the whole world faces the wrath of the most primitive of all human elements in the name of God’s judgment.

The self has no inherent, unconditional, absolute existence apart from the network of causes it arises from, in, and as.

The Indoctrinated Brain provides the missing practical knowledge of neuroscience, that explains why isolating people creates a more befuddled, more easily manipulated population. It explains exactly why a message that closeness with other human beings can kill you, or you can kill others (especially your grandma) through physical closeness, might rewire the human brain to create the vulnerability to delusion and bad science and cultlike thinking, that many of us observed in formerly critically thinking loved ones and friends, post-2020. It even raises the question of whether the spike protein contributes to brain fog and to the erasure of a sense of an autonomous, resilient, individuated, and questing self.

Past, present and future are in reality self spacing itself not to be by itself. The purpose of self is companionship, friendship, love; love so love.

I am not thoughts. I am not these thoughts of “I.” Don’t identify with the self! Don’t use self words (“I,” “me,” “myself,” and “mine”) any more than necessary.

Appreciating these challenges will help bring some good humor and self-compassion to your efforts to meditate.

Self-compassion isn’t self-pity, but is simply warmth, concern, and good wishes—just like compassion for another person. Because self-compassion is more emotional than self-esteem, it’s actually more powerful for reducing the impact of difficult conditions, preserving self-worth, and building resilience (Leary et al. 2007).

Science further verifies that when we cultivate compassion and mindful awareness in our lives—when we let go of judgments and attend fully to the present—we are harnessing the social circuits of the brain to enable us to transform even our relationship with our own self.

But when you relax the sense of self and flow with life, you feel happy and satisfied.

The sense of self grows when you separate from the world. Therefore, deepening the sense of connection with the world will reduce the sense of self.

In compassionate adepts, the brain’s insula begins to enlarge. The insula makes us aware of our internal emotional states and raises our level of attention to their signals. It also has rich connections to the heart and other visceral organs, allowing it to track and integrate signals coming from the body. In empathetic people, the insula responds strongly to the distress of others, just as though we were suffering ourselves. Activation of the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) indicates that we can see things from the perspective of another person. This allows us to put ourselves in their shoes and take their needs into consideration. 6.10. Empathy is a neurological event, not simply an emotional state. There’s a part of the anterior cingulate that lights up only when we’re contemplating actions that help others. It isn’t activated by outcomes that favor only us. This region is also associated with impulse control and decision-making; we can choose win-win options rather than the desire-driven cravings of the nucleus accumbens. When adepts are confronted by the suffering of others, the premotor cortex lights up. This means that the brain hasn’t just noticed the distress of a fellow being; it’s getting ready to take action. In experienced meditators, the nucleus accumbens shrinks. This structure, which we looked at in Chapter 3, is active in desire and addiction. Deactivation of the nucleus accumbens through empathetic connection equates to a weakening of self-centered attachment. Calming our emotions and focusing our attention, we’re no longer driven by our wants and compulsions, and the brain circuitry associated with this part of the reward circuit begins to wither. When training people in EcoMeditation retreats, I focus on the Empathy Network only after the first three networks are active. First I have them focus on self, then on just one other person. Only after that do we expand our compassion to the universal scale. That’s because thinking about other people can easily take us into mind wandering. People I love, people I don’t, and the things that happened to cause those feelings. Trying to be compassionate toward people who harmed us can lead us out of Bliss Brain. So I activate the Empathy Network only after the Attention Network is engaged. BRAIN CHANGE IS LIFE CHANGE The fact that blissful states, practiced consistently, become blissful traits is a profound gift to us human beings. It means that we aren’t condemned to live in the Caveman Brain with which evolution endowed us. That practice can evolve our brains, some parts slowly, some parts quickly, is a remarkable innovation.

BROADCASTING RESONANCE Anchored in nonlocal consciousness, your local life begins to change. As you resonate with the cycles of nature, as your heart’s coherence conditions the energy space around you, as you vibrate to the signal of love and joy in your consciousness, you attract people and conditions that match your states and traits. Without effort, as your magnificent new signal broadcasts out around you, resonating with the music of the universe, you’ll come into synchrony with people and events that bless and delight you. You’ll discover that you’re not alone. As you tune to the great symphony of life each day, you’ll find that you’re tuned to millions of other people who are likewise attuned. With no effort at all, you’ll discover wonderful new friends and companions wherever you travel. As the light shines from your eyes, it meets the light in the eyes of others. When you’re awake, you naturally enjoy others who are awake. 9.3. Coming into synchrony. LOVING THE SLEEPER Not everyone is awake, and that’s fine. Sometimes your friends and family members are tossing in their sleep, suffering unnecessarily. Their plight touches you. You feel their misery. You would love to see them wake up, and shed those beliefs, thoughts, and habits that drag them down. You can’t force them to do so, no matter how much you love them. Everyone makes their own choice. What you can do for people who are suffering is shine brightly yourself. If they’re ready, they’ll wake up. If they don’t, trust the universe. We each wake up when the time is right. Their time might come later; it’s not up to you. You can share this book and other resources with them. You can share your story as I have shared mine, and perhaps these examples will inspire them. If and when each of us wakes up is our choice. UNLOCKING YOUR POTENTIAL As you live in synchrony with the universe, enjoying the community of other Bliss Brainers, you find new possibilities opening up. You start to unlock potential that’s been trapped inside the suffering, selfing self. Increasingly, you’re not just in Bliss Brain during meditation. You’re in the Awakened Mind state with your eyes open, going about your day. All kinds of possibilities that were previously unavailable to you now become available.

Feeling of deep and profound peace Certainty that all things will work out for the good Sense of my own need to contribute to others Conviction that love is at the center of everything Sense of joy and laughter An experience of great emotional intensity Great increase in my understanding and knowledge Sense of the unity of everything and my own part in it Sense of new life or living in the world Confidence in my own personal survival Feeling that I couldn’t possibly describe what was happening to me The sense that all the universe is alive The sensation that my personality had been taken over by something much more powerful that I am As we escape the subjective self and rise above our suffering to view our experience objectively, we abandon the limitations of our local minds in the embrace of nonlocal consciousness.

Feeling of deep and profound peace Certainty that all things will work out for the good Sense of my own need to contribute to others Conviction that love is at the center of everything Sense of joy and laughter An experience of great emotional intensity Great increase in my understanding and knowledge Sense of the unity of everything and my own part in it Sense of new life or living in the world Confidence in my own personal survival Feeling that I couldn’t possibly describe what was happening to me The sense that all the universe is alive The sensation that my personality had been taken over by something much more powerful that I am As we escape the subjective self and rise above our suffering to view our experience objectively, we abandon the limitations of our local minds in the embrace of nonlocal consciousness. Later researchers built on Greeley’s initial findings. They found seven commonalities, including a sense of unity, enlightenment, awe, and bliss. The sensory vividness of the “enlightenment” experience exceeded that of everyday life. In his 1954 classic The Doors of Perception, philosopher Aldous Huxley called this “the sacramental vision of reality.” All mystics have similar experiences, whether they are Hindu sadhus begging as they wander the countryside, Buddhist monks isolating themselves in caves high in the Himalayas, or Christian nuns engaged in contemplative prayer. Harvard University’s first professor of psychology, William James, after his own transcendent experiences, observed in 1902 that “our normal waking consciousness . . . is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.” He said that no account of the universe would be complete without accounting for these states.

In longtime meditators, such as Tibetan monks who have meditated for over 10,000 hours, the parietal lobe shows greatly reduced activity during meditation. While the brain’s energy usage only fluctuates around 5% up or down each day, in these adepts it drops up to 40% as they enter an altered state of consciousness. People who are isolated and lonely show the opposite effect. Their parietal lobes may be highly active. Feelings of loneliness and isolation are increasing in our fragmented society, according to a number of studies, and they have detrimental effects on our health. We are social beings, and a sense of connectedness translates into overall physical and emotional well-being. In a meta-analysis of 148 studies with a total of 308,849 participants, the researchers found “a 50% increased likelihood of survival for participants with stronger social relationships. This finding remained consistent across age, sex, initial health status, cause of death, and follow up.” Even when the researchers corrected for behaviors such as smoking, obesity, and lack of exercise, the effect remained consistent. Think back to the times of your life when you were happiest. For most of us, special moments with family and friends come to mind. We may have been on vacation with loved ones or enjoying a meal or a joke with friends. It may have been singing carols during the holidays, when billions of people join in affirming “peace on earth, goodwill to men.” What’s common to all those happy times is that your attention was fully in the present moment, the “timelessness” of Chapter 2. You weren’t worrying about the past or stressing over the future, the way you might be doing if you didn’t have precious people to engage your thoughts. Time and space receded as the love-filled present occupied your attention. Only in the present moment can you escape the demon’s obsession with the mistakes of the past and the problems of tomorrow. Experiences of timelessness, as the parietal lobe shuts down, shape our perception of the world and how we act in it. A Stanford study of people who experienced “the deep now” found that it changed their behavior. They “felt they had more time available . . . and were less impatient . . . more willing to volunteer their time to help others . . . preferred experiences over material products . . . and experienced a greater boost in life satisfaction.” A quiet parietal lobe promotes empathy, compassion, relaxation, appreciation, connectedness, and self-esteem.

The insula also gives rise to empathy. People who are more sensitive to emotional cues from others have greater insula activation and score higher on tests of empathy. And the insula lights up during meditation sessions, especially when the meditator is feeling kindness and compassion. As the meditator expands his definition of connection to include other people and eventually the entire universe, he feels one with everything. In the words of a comprehensive meditation review, “the habitual reified dualities between subject and object, self and other, in-group and out-group dissipate.” As he expands the borders of his tent to infinity, massive changes occur in his brain activity. Insula Activation Benefits Increases Decreases Elevated emotional states Anger Motor control Fear Kindness Anxiety Compassion Depression Empathy Addiction Longevity Chronic pain Immunity Happiness Love Sensory enjoyment Introspection Sense of fulfillment Feelings of connectedness Focus Self-awareness As well as mediating our empathy and compassion circuits, the insula has several other functions. It collects information from a far-flung network of receptors inside our body as well as from our skin. It then stimulates feelings such as hunger that then prompt actions such as seeking food. The dark side of this mechanism is that it can stimulate cravings for drugs, tobacco, and alcohol. Addicts show increased insula activation even before consuming their drug of choice. The insula also lights up when we feel pain or even anticipate feeling pain. Meditators are more “in the moment” when it comes to physical pain, releasing it more quickly. They may also experience overwhelming cravings, as we’ll see in Chapter 5. These are positive cravings directing them toward the ecstatic states found in Bliss Brain.

This instant-gratification world we live in is not how reward-seeking was designed to be, and having dopamine drop below baseline several times a day is not how we were supposed to experience this neurochemical. If you are wondering why you never feel like getting to work on your passion project or never get out to exercise or anything else you have set as a goal, this may be what is happening.

That meant my body was becoming convinced by my mind. It was no longer repeating the story that death is imminent unless we’re on full alert at 12:45. The same thing happened the following night. That’s a positive change! It’s important to love our bodies. So often when they don’t behave, by getting sick or developing patterns like insomnia, we want the problems to go away. We ignore them, deny them, suppress them, get mad at them, or medicate them. If instead we can strive to understand our bodies and accept them just the way they are, we open the door to healing. Carl Rogers, the great client-centered therapist of the 20th century, called this the paradox of growth: We need to love ourselves just the way we are, with all our problems and limitations. When we do that, we start to change. When your body knows it will be listened to, it can speak quietly. A little rumble here. A slight pain there. We hear the message and take care of its needs. When I teach live workshops, I often work with people who’ve been ignoring or even hating their bodies for many years. They aren’t attuned to the body’s messages. They aren’t picking up those subtle signals. When its soft communications are ignored, the body has to speak more loudly. The small pain might become arthritis. If ignored, it might become a full-fledged autoimmune disorder. So many people are at war with their bodies, trying to mute their messages with medication or addictive substances. Growth begins with self-love. Healing begins with self-acceptance, even when circumstances seem unacceptable. Practicing self-love lowers our stress levels and opens our awareness to the potential of our lives. Through that window of possibility, the love, peace, and beauty of the universe can shine.

Traumatic experiences send many people into a spiral of fear from which they never recover. They become vigilant for possible threats, anxious about the future, and suspicious of joy. Nightmares, self-defeating beliefs, and intrusive thoughts haunt their minds. Yet the same traumatic experiences can spark healthy reappraisal of one’s old values. They can open up new horizons of possibility. Anchored in a relationship with a loving universe, we use even the most devastating loss as a springboard for growth.

The marvelous interplay of various brain circuits creates our instinctual reality of the daily life.

Self-expression, experimentation, and a sense of purpose: these are the switches that light up our seeking systems.

a best self is “the cognitive representation of the qualities and characteristics the individual displays when at his or her best.”5 Our concepts of our best selves are not projections of what we think we could become someday. Rather, they’re based on our real-life experiences and actions. They comprise the skills and traits that we’ve developed and discovered over time, and the actions we have taken to affect others in a positive way. The more our colleagues know who we are when we’re at our best, the more likely we can feel like ourselves at work. We suspected that this is the reason why the people who experienced our wise intervention stayed so much longer and made clients happier: because they could express themselves more authentically.

In a series of studies, Julia Lee, a professor at the University of Michigan, found that those who undergo relational best-self activation experience stronger immune responses, enhanced creative problem solving (over 200 percent improvement), and significantly less anxiety and negative physiological arousal.

self-reflective titles let them bring their personal identity into the organization. As we learned in chapter 3, self-affirmation and self-expression activate people’s seeking systems, which increases enthusiasm, decreases burnout, and makes them more open and creative.

It warms the heart to see the seeking system at work this way. Self-reflective titles aren’t just fun names. Because they encourage self-reflection and self-expression, personalized titles trigger positive emotions and a greater sense of purpose. Most of all, they encourage us to “cognitively reappraise” our work.4 In other words, they nudge us to focus on the more meaningful and intrinsically rewarding elements of our jobs, which we’re prone to lose sight of.

This is why I believe there is a big win out there for firms that think of themselves as platforms for employees’ self-expression. If organizations get this right, work becomes an outlet that employees want. Self-expression organizations activate employees’ seeking systems, resulting in enthusiasm and the intrinsic motivation to invest their best back into the companies

I suggest that Jungkiu’s new approach worked because it tamped down employees’ fear and encouraged ideation and self-expression, which activated their seeking systems.

Even if all these needs are satisfied, we may still often (if not always) expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he is fitted for. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization … the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.

The dream of scientific management was that employees’ quirks and self-expression wouldn’t get in the way of standardized processes. And so even today, in big organizations, most people work very specialized jobs.

It’s a wonderful paradox that as individual things—such as the self—feel increasingly groundless and unreliable, the totality of everything feels increasingly safe and comforting. As the sense of groundlessness grows, each apparently individual thing seems a bit like a cloud that you’ll fall through if you try to stand on it. At first this is pretty unnerving. But then you realize that the sky itself—the totality—is holding you up. You are walking on the sky because you’re sky. It has always been that way. You and every one else have been sky all along. What remains when self disperses, even temporarily? The wholehearted movement to contribute, and the wish to thrive and prosper as one human animal among six billion. To be healthy and strong and live many more years. To be caring and kind. To awaken, abiding as radiant, spacious, loving consciousness. To feel protected and supported. To be happy and comfortable, serene and fulfilled. To live and love in peace.