"The genius of Tulku Urgyen was that he could point out the nature of mind with precision and matter-of-factness of teaching a person how to thread a needle and could get an ordinary meditator like me to recognize that consciousness is intrinsically free of self ... I came to Tulku Urgyen yearning for the experience of self-transcendence, and in a few minutes he showed me I had no self to transcend ... Tulku Urgyen simply handed me the ability to cut through the illusion of the self directly, even in ordinary states of consciousness.  This instruction was, without question, the most important thing I have ever been explicitly taught by another human being.  It has given me a way to escape the usual tides of psychological suffering - fear, anger, shame - in an instant. "

Sam Harris

Posts tagged with 'smile'

Embodied cognition: posture & feelings

21st February 2011

This blog post is downloadable both as a Word doc and as a PDF file. Sadly (!) more recent research throws doubt on this 'power posture' literature ... see for example Simmons & Simonsohn's paper "Power posing: P-curving the evidence". Intriguingly there is an argument that possible benefits of an …

walking depression mind-body confidence self-esteem smile embodied cognition power posture face

“Smile intensity in photographs predicts divorce later in life”

5th July 2009

I do think that Matt Hertenstein and colleagues came up with an eye catching title here: Hertenstein, M., C. Hansel, et al. (2009). "Smile intensity in photographs predicts divorce later in life." Motivation and Emotion 33(2): 99-105. [Abstract/Full Text] [Free Full Text] Abstract: Based on social-functional accounts of emotion, we …

happiness positive psychology positive emotions conflict relationships couples smile embodied cognition