Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart

"Tara was the first person to bring together mindfulness – now a very popular technique for cultivating attention – with cognitive therapy, a very popular therapy. Mindfulness means people track their thoughts and their feelings and their actions in real time. Not just in therapy sessions but in their lives. Cognitive therapy helps you talk back to misguided beliefs and ideas which often are at the core of the ways we act that we regret. It helps you change them on the spot, so mindfulness helps you get by when this is happening; the cognitive therapy helps you to change it in a better direction. The book Emotional Alchemy helps the reader learn how to bring mindfulness to those moments but also offers a kind of diagnostic menu for the common equivalent of emotional dysfunction, things like emotional deprivation (‘nobody really cares about me’) or social exclusion (‘I don’t fit into this group’). There are around ten that are very common, and she describes what they are, how to know if you’re feeling them, and what to do about it. It’s a very practical book, unlike my own, which tend to be more science-driven. Yes. The foundational ability of emotional intelligence is awareness, and mindfulness actually amplifies a person’s ability to be self-aware. So I see them as one and the same really, in that if you become more mindful, you’ll be more self-aware. I just published a book with my old friend, the neuroscientist Richard Davidson, who’s at the University of Wisconsin. In the UK and Commonwealth, it’s called the Science of Meditation: How to Change Your Brain, Mind and Body . In the US, it’s called Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body . Davidson and I were graduate students together at Harvard, a long time ago, and we were isolated and joined at the hip. Joined at the hip because we were interested in meditation; isolated because none of our faculty and friends were. And at the time, there were only three articles in the scientific literature on meditation. Fast-forward to now and there are more than 6,000. But Davidson, who has a crew of about 100 people at his brain lab at the University of Wisconsin, was able to sift through those 6,000 and ended up with 60 that were bulletproof. They used the methodology; they’re A-level journals. And the book Altered Traits puts them together in a way that tells a story for beginners and sets out what the benefits are. Things like better attention, being less triggered emotionally, how to recover faster when under stress. The longer you do it, the stronger the benefits become. That’s essentially the message of the book. Some people say you write about what you need to learn! So, I would say that thinking about emotional intelligence, looking into it deeply, has helped me become more aware of my failings and my strengths and helped me work on them. My wife is also helping me in that. So, I don’t separate the two actually, but yes, it’s a work in progress. My wife is the emotionally aware one."