How You See Can Change Your Life.

Star of The Secret and Leonardo DiCaprio’s advisor share a word about mindfulness

My friend Jeffrey Schwartz M.D. who advised Leonardo DiCaprio in The Aviator (2004) and I worked on the emotional color wheel that was used in the following scene of The Mindfulness Movie. Fred Alan Wolf, physicist, who starred in the runaway hit The Secret and What The Bleep Do We Know!? describes the colors of I. (click the image below to watch).

Separating awareness from emotional attachment is very difficult, it can be done with practice. We do this by changing the autopilot loop of mindlessness to mindfulness.

When we identify with such emotional responses, and although each identification, like “I’m afraid of the dark” and “I’m afraid of rats,” is conceptualized separately, they are linked and can be triggered together or independently. Our personalities—our “I’s”—develop through millions of such events.

“Memorable experiences generally have a component of emotional implications. Cues that activate this component might activate its associative network. The relevant cues, in this case, will be ones within the brain and body that signal the same emotional state you experienced during the time of learning. Conscious emotions and thoughts are very similar in certain aspects. They both involve the symbolic representation in working memory of sub-symbolic, unconscious proc-esses. Emotions and thoughts are generated by differ-ent sub-symbolic systems, but emotions involve many more brain systems than thoughts do. (LeDoux, 1998)”

In a New York Times article last month, entitled Inner Peace? The Dalai Lama Made a Website for That:

ROCHESTER, Minn. — The Dalai Lama, who tirelessly preaches inner peace while chiding people for their selfish, materialistic ways, has commissioned scientists for a lofty mission: to help turn secular audiences into more self-aware, compassionate humans.

That is, of course, no easy task. So the Dalai Lama ordered up something with a grand name to go with his grand ambitions: a comprehensive Atlas of Emotions to help the more than seven billion people on the planet navigate the morass of their feelings in order to attain peace and happiness.

“It is my duty to publish such work,” the Dalai Lama said.

To create this “map of the mind,” as he called it, the Dalai Lama reached out to a source Hollywood had used to plumb the inner workings of the human psyche. Specifically, he commissioned his good friend Paul Ekman — a psychologist who helped advise the creators of Pixar’s “Inside Out,” an animated film set inside a girl’s head — to map out the range of human sentiments. Dr. Ekman later distilled them into the five basic emotions depicted in the movie, from anger to enjoyment.