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The Buddha, interestingly in the Satipatana, his guide for mindfulness, broke up our experience into

four observable kind of qualities. The first was how we breathe and just how our body feels. The second was our gut feelings, that tension in the stomach, the chest, the throat. The third observable quality was the moods that were in,

moods of the mind, and the fourth was the realm of dama's which means thoughts, the how we interpret the world, how we turn life into an idea or story.

Well, it so happens even the most basic introduction to neural anatomy would show that that's exactly the way you could break down the structure of the cognitive brain. The lowest part... the

the lowest part, the reptilian brain, the brain stem, is what controls our breath and basic body states.

The mammalian brain, which is the midbrain and the limbic system, is what creates the fight-flight

freeze, the basic nurture, the craving for food, that's what some people call the mouse brain, and that would

be most notable in our experience by gut feelings.

Fear, strong states of fight or flight, states of

craving, and then the mood, cheetah as the Buddha call it, the Chita mind is the emotional mind, which is our

right hemisphere of the brain and the fourth foundation, Damas, the way we interpret life.

In fact, many neuroscientists such as Michael Gazaniga refers to the left hemisphere as the interpreter.

So when it all functions well, we are aware and we integrate all the different structures of

the brain and we listen to the breath when we are extremely agitated or when our stomach

grows tight we might become aware of fear or if we start to feel a heightened

expectation when we're with someone we find attractive, we might know that there's a degree

of lust present.

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