To heal, learn, or grow, you have to give you the chance to take positive short-term experiences (states) and translate them into longer-term character traits or habits. Mindfulness can show you how to do that by cultivating positive states of being – whether that’s happiness, joy, compassion, courage, gratitude or another feeling you’d wish to experience more in your life.
Ever wonder why good experiences pass by so quickly while negative ones seem never-ending? All of it has to do with the way in which your brain stores information. Dr. Hanson compares negative states of mind to velcro; they have an inclination to follow us more easily due to our brain’s negativity bias.
The more you experience negative states, the more likely you’ll cultivate negative traits where you turn into more reactive, irritated, or anxious unless you consciously decide to override these mental states. Positive states like joy and happiness, however, are more like teflon. They have a tendency to slip off your neural networks easily – that’s unless we continually practice feeling them.
To override your brain’s negativity bias, you could have to repeatedly train your brain to nurture these positive states by listening to them and consciously activating them.
Let’s say you would like to feel compassion more of the time. In your mind, you might conceptually understand what it might appear to be to be more compassionate. Perhaps you possibly can even imagine a scenario where you’re being compassionate to someone whom you might consider an enemy.
Yet it’s one thing to visualise this ideal and to embody it on a consistent basis. By exhibiting compassion in real life, you get to wire this state of being into your brain so it becomes a more natural way of being for you. This can also be where neuro-learning and mindfulness can show you how to speed up the means of becoming the sort of person you ought to be more consistently.
Through referring to each present moment in a non-judgmental manner, you possibly can set the intention to bring forth feelings of compassion which can be already present inside you. The more you access the sensation of compassion or joy in your meditation, the more you’re solidifying the neural networks in your brain related to those states. Then it’s easier so that you can embody compassion or joy within the midst of every day life since you’ve laid the bottom for these neural pathways ahead of time.
