She has spoken on these issues to clinicians, educators, and researchers around the world.

Ramani’s clinical, academic, and consultative work is the etiology and impact of narcissism and high-conflict, entitled, antagonistic personality styles on human relationships, mental health, and societal expectations. She is a Professor of Psychology at California State University, Los Angeles, and also a Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg.

Ramani Durvasula is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, and expert on the impact of toxic narcissism. We can also help them to move from egocentric to allocentric awareness with a simple exercise of moving their focus of gaze from close to their bodies to a few meters away as the gaze moves further away from the body, the breadth of perspective opens up to include more than just ourselves.Dr. As the adage goes, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” Our task then, is to foster a deepening of the state, to help it become wired as a trait.Īnother useful practice, especially in this period where people finally have time to look within and may begin to question how they’ve been living their lives, is gaining an awareness of the difference between liking and wanting as this facilitates freedom from desire. Rick explains that there are always to processes happening in the brain simultaneously momentary activation and the effects of activation. Something that’s highly relevant for us as coaches is how to help our clients turn states into traits. We can, for example work on moving from an egocentric (self-oriented) way of seeing the world, to an allocentric (impersonal) perspective, so that our informational openness includes and transcends what is about us, which is crucial for moving towards experiencing a sense of interrelatedness. Disturbances move through but these are the foundation of what we are. These are qualities that are innate to us, our natural state. The seven qualities Rick unpacks in his book are:

We need to reinvest in ourselves, and remember what is possible for human development, what is possible for us individually and collectively if we cultivate the higher aspects of our nature. What we need to focus on again is the inner work of building a resilient nervous system. In this time of the corona crisis many people are looking inside and realising there’s not much there. People have been propped up by feel-good states without acquiring positive traits. In the wake of decades of a culture of consumerism, we have largely forgotten about self-actualisation.

Neurodharma by rick hanson