Shauna Shapiro - Good Morning, I Love You

ABOUT GOOD MORNING, I LOVE YOU
Learn how self-compassion can change
everything
about how you feel, how you relate, and how you live—for good
“Revolutionary findings in neuroscience have demonstrated that we can change our happiness setpoint. But it’s not through changing our external world. It’s through changing our internal landscape,” writes Shauna Shapiro. In
Good Morning, I Love You,
Dr. Shapiro—one of the leading scientists studying the effects of mindfulness on well-being—shows us that acting with compassion toward ourselves is the key.
In short, lively chapters, Dr. Shapiro explains the basic brain science and offers numerous mindfulness and self-compassion practices. Stories from her life and research demonstrate how this powerhouse combination alleviates anxiety, boosts creative thinking, and enlarges our sense of belonging and purpose.
We can see it on brain scans. Negative and critical thoughts (and the vast majority of our thoughts are negative) cause the part of the brain responsible for learning to literally shut down. Kind and self-compassionate thoughts, by contrast, turn on the parts responsible for growth and change. With practice, we can literally rewire our brains for greater feelings of calm, joy, and possibility.
Try it and see . . . even if it makes you squirm. When you wake up tomorrow, take a deep breath, hand on heart, and say, “Good morning, I love you.” Then try it the next day. And the next. See what happens.
ABOUT SHAUNA SHAPIRO
Shauna Shapiro, PhD. is a clinical psychologist and internationally recognized expert in mindfulness and self-compassion. She is a widely published scholar and has a TedX Talk on this book’s topic that has been viewed over one million times. She is a professor at Santa Clara University and a fellow of the Dalai Lama’s Mind and Life Institute. Dr. Shapiro lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and can be found online at drshaunashapiro.com.
ABOUT KRISTIN NEFF
Kristin Neff studied communications as an undergraduate at the University of California at Los Angeles. She did her graduate work at University of California at Berkeley, studying moral development with Dr. Elliot Turiel. Her dissertation research was conducted in Mysore, India, where she examined children’s moral reasoning. She then spent two years of post-doctoral study with Dr. Susan Harter at Denver University, studying issues of authenticity and self-concept development. She is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
During Kristin’s last year of graduate school she became interested in Buddhism, and has been practicing meditation in the Insight Meditation tradition ever since. While doing her post-doctoral work she decided to conduct research on self-compassion – a central construct in Buddhist psychology and one that had not yet been examined empirically.
In addition to her pioneering research into self-compassion, she has developed an 8-week program to teach self-compassion skills. The program, co-created with her colleague Chris Germer, affiliated with Harvard Medical School, is called
Mindful Self-Compassion
. Her book,
Self-Compassion
, was published by William Morrow in April, 2011.