From traveling, I've come to know that I have a great deal of privilege for one lifetime. I have many things to be grateful for, to be happy about but I usually just gloss over them. I don't think about them much. It's too easy to "forget" to appreciate them and just focus on what needs to be done or fixed. It turns out that my experience fits well into mindfulness literature and there are many viable solutions to changing this.
Our life experiences construct our mind's structure unconsciously. Even though most of our experiences tend to be actually positive, our brains have evolved to prefer, recall, react to, store and register unpleasant experiences over positive ones. This "negative bias" originated because, centuries ago, negative experiences signaled danger and paying attention to them as if our lives depended on it, facilitated our survival. That said, we don't live in jungles anymore; human civilization has advanced significantly. We still, however, have the same neural hard-wiring, so even when we experience many more pleasant moments than unpleasant ones, our network of implicit negative memories accumulates much faster. In his classic, Buddha's Brain, Rick Hanson assures us that we can rectify this by purposely cultivating positive experiences. We can correct this neural imbalance! I can correct my own.
Doing so implies that I actively looking for good news, especially those aspects of daily life that I tend to gloss over, like the fresh taste of an orange, a stranger's smile, great weather, etc, and then bringing mindful awareness around them, letting them really affect me, giving them sufficient attention. As Hanson states, it's like being at a buffet of quality food, "don't just look at; dig in!" This means that if someone treats me well, for example, I can let that feeling of warmth, feeling cared for permeate my being more than it normally would if I were in Everyday Mode of Being, and therefore strengthening its neural associations. This is where gratitude practice comes in, why some of my meditations need to be focused on gratitude; time reserved only let these good feelings sink into the sponge of my being. This will assist me to make positive experiences more prominent feel them more fully. As Hanson states, positive feelings strengthen the immune system.
What went well today for you that is worth more attention than it received?
Good points. I woke up with an able body, enjoyed my environment, and got to talk about stimulating subjects to a classroom of fairly interested undergrads. Not a bad life.
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