Meister Eckhart, the mystic, said, “To grasp God in all things – this is the sign of your new birth.”How often do we notice the presence of Spirit around us?
Rabbi Joseph Telushkin tells the 19th century Hasidic tale about the teacher who told his followers, “Everything that has been created in God’s world has a lesson to teach us.” Thinking that the teacher was engaging in hyperbole, one of his followers called out, “And what can we learn from the train?” “That because of being one minute late,” the teacher answered, “you can lose everything.”“And from the telegraph?” “that for every word you pay.” “And from the telephone?” “that what we say here, is heard there.”
Spiritual growth is concerned with paying attention to all the wonderful and magical things going on in our lives. We miss most of the wonders of life because we are not awake; we devote so much time wishing we were somewhere else, rushing to something else that might be more interesting. The English mystic, Evelyn Underhill, writes, “For lack of attention, a thousand forms of loveliness elude us every day. Moments that may never again be repeated in our lives are often lost because of our busyness, our being in too much of a rush to notice them.”
Be Here Now
The philosopher Henry David Thoreau said, “Now or never! You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, and find eternity in every moment.” We can only pay attention to the magic of life by being in the moment. Be here in the moment, as an artist is here with focused attention, whether you are cooking, cleaning, praying, playing, reading or being with another person.
Buddhist teacher, Jack Kornfield, said, “The quality of presence determines the quality of life.”
One of the most important aspects of our spiritual journey is to see the value and the beauty of life as it shows itself to us in all its wondrous ways. As we open our awareness to the radiant world around us, more and more of its beauty flows into our experience, and worlds that before we did not see unfold in front of our eyes.
Nothing is Forever
What if this week we all begin to pay attention more fully to the signs of God in our midst? What if we slow down to notice all we have failed to see before? Imagine what wonders your attention would bring to you today.
Poet, William Carlos Williams, carried a notepad around with him. On it was written: “Things I noticed today that I missed until today.” Why would you fail to notice anything today? – it might not be here tomorrow.
..
source: dynamiccentre.com
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Friday, July 31, 2009
A chapter from the Silva Ultra Mind system. - creative Visualization
Creative Visualization
How You Can Use the Power of Visualization and Affirmations to Create “Lucky Coincidences”
We now come to the premier techniques for harnessing your mind’s power to shape your life and move you towards your dreams and aspirations.
This principles below will specifically teach you to .
We will teach you two techniques in this lesson.
Affirmations
Creative Visualization.
In our last lesson you learned how to use the alpha level of mind to gain creative ideas and inspiration. You are now ready for the next step. You will learn how to tap into your mind to shape your reality. Perhaps you’re looking to be more positive, to stick to your diet, to improve your golf swing or to end a bad habit. We’ll show you how you can use affirmations and creative visualization to reprogram your mind and reshape your attitudes and behavior.
It all starts with your imagination. Imagination is the ability to create an idea, a vision or an image of something new.
In creative visualization, we use the power of imagination to create a mental image of what we want to accomplish or obtain.
Your goal could be on any level
physical
emotional
mental
spiritual
You might imagine yourself driving that BMW you always wanted, owning a home in the country, married to your ideal mate, succeeding at your job or having $100,000.00 in your bank account.
No matter what your goal, the technique is basically the same. You imagine the desired outcome in your mind. At the same time, you repeat a positive affirmation about the goal. The affirmation is in the present tense.
Imagination is the beginning of creation.You imagine what you desire,you will what you imagineand at last you create what you will.
~ George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950)
The Scientific Evidence
There is strong scientific evidence that visualization can be used to dramatically improve your results in sports, public speaking, performing arts and anything else which involves practice.
In one study, Australian psychologist Allen Richardson conducted an experiment with basketball players making hoop shots. He divided the players in three groups.
Group A – was asked to practice their shots on a basketball court for 20 minutes a day.
Group B – was asked not to practice at all.
Group C – was asked to mentally rehearse shooting a basketball through a hoop for 20 minutes each day.
At the end of the study Group A improved their hoop shot ability by 25%. Group B, as expected, showed no improvement at all.
What was truly surprising, was that Group C improved by 24%, almost as much as Group A, even though they had not physically set foot in a basketball court.
There is also overwhelming scientific evidence that visualization can be used to heal the body. Doctors such as O. Carl Simonton have been helping patients recover from serious illnesses such as cancer by combining visualization with modern medicine. The patients often made dramatic improvements simply by visualizing their bodies behaving in ideal, healthy ways.
We’ll look at more of this fascinating evidence in our next lesson which will be on mind-body healing.
What we’re going to suggest in this lesson is something even more incredible.
Your mind’s influence is not just limited to improving your emotions, skills and physical body. Your mind can influence theworld outside your apparent physical control.
In other words, your mind can spawn amazing coincidences to move you towards your goals. The coincidences could be things that were seemingly unconnected to you and beyond your control.
The techniques we will teach you do not just make you more focused on your goals. They directly influence your reality.
Laboratory evidence pouring out of universities such as Princeton and Stanford has shown that volunteers are able to influence matter by their thoughts. So far the evidence has been limited to effects on random number generators, dice and electronic equipment. We will look at some of this evidence in Lesson Seven.
What is still lacking is scientific evidence that visualization can create “coincidences” in the physical world, outside your immediate control. This of course, is hard to test in a lab.
But thousands of scientists and millions of other people in the world do believe in this because they have experienced it in their own lives.
In short, just because an effect cannot be tested in a lab, does not mean it does not exist.
Some of the greatest thinkers in the world—Einstein, Edison, Jung, Carnegie and Goethe (the man with the highest recorded IQ, 210)—all believed in the power of the mind to create coincidences.
I believe that the mind has the power to affect groups of atoms and even tamper with the odds of atomic behavior, and that even the course of the world is not predetermined by physical law, but may be altered bythe uncaused volition of human beings.
~ Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, English mathematician and AstroPhysicist
Let’s take a look at some of these personal experiences. Millions of people worldwide have reported such coincidences.
On our web site we maintain a library of letters from people who have used Silva Ultra Mind System techniques to accelerate healing, gain inspiration, start a business, find a dream job, achieve goals, walk again after a car accident, earn a six-figure income, and find peace of mind.
Letters are sorted in categories:
Health
Personal Development
Career
Spiritual Development
You can access this library anytime by clicking here
Below, we have included segments from letters that we have received from students of the Silva UltraNubd System. These letters will give you some ideas of what can be accomplished when the mind is properly harnessed.
Letters from Students
The following are extracts from letters we have received from students in the past 12 months. These letters and more, are catalogued on our website
“Investment Success”
[The] technique already solved one problem with my investments. Two days after doing it, the broker called to inform me [that] my value was up 40% and he wanted to get together with me over dinner to discuss better and safer ways of protecting and increasing my assets. This is exactly what I programmed for.”
~ Jim from Illinois
“Mental Rehearsal for Sports & Public Speaking”
“I have received many great complements on my oral presentations which can be attributed to my ability to visualize the presentation before it happens. I have also used this technique in golf and kung-fu. Ever since then, it has helped me to become better at my game and master my techniques.”
~ C.S. from Warwick Rhode Island
“Weight-Control”
“I did [the technique] in which I saw myself making better choices about what I eat, and ended with the result of being my ideal size. Recently, I noticed that without struggle, I have made dramatic changes in the way I eat—much less fat and sugar and smaller helpings, yet I seem to be more satisfied and enjoying the taste of the food I eat more than ever.”
~ G.H. of New York
“Improving Your Career”
“I’m a sales-manager by profession, and I have to say the visualization is such a tremendous part of being successful in my field. Virtually every time I use it, I come close or hit the target on what I wanted to achieve.”
~ Jeff from Fort Wayne, Indiana
“Looking Better & Attracting People”
“I began to see improvement physically. My joint pain disappeared and my energy level was up. I also began to attract people—especially men, in a way that I had not before experienced. I also had people say to me I looked 10 years younger and wanted to know what I did. I lost weight.”
~ Mary from California
Let’s take a look at how you can start applying these techniques.
Basic Technique 1 – Affirmations
Affirmations are positive statements you repeat to yourself while in a meditative or alpha level of mind. Affirmations are always done in the present tense, as if the action has already taken place.
The concept was made famous by a French physician called Emile Coue. Coue was responsible for thousands of remarkable documented healings at the beginning of the 20th century. His remedy was to combine western medicine with the power of affirmations. Patients were made to repeat positive healing affirmations to themselves while in a relaxed frame of mind.
Coue’s most famous affirmation was “everyday, in every way, I am getting better and better.”
When done at the alpha level, affirmations tend to be countless times more powerful than when done at the beta, or waking state.
Why?
Because when you reach the alpha level of mind, your subconscious is brought to a conscious level—this means it’s easier for you to convey commands directly to your subconscious.
Several affirmations that we use in the Silva UltraMind System seminar include:
“I will always maintain a perfectly healthy body and mind”
“Positive thoughts, positive emotions, bring me all the benefits and advantages I desire”
“I am learning to use more of my mind and to use it in a better way”
You can also create your own affirmations:
Looking for job satisfaction? Try saying…
“I have a perfect career that I truly love and enjoy. I have great opportunities for advancement and I am earning a wonderful salary of __________ a year.”
Looking to slim down? Try saying…
“I only enjoy eating the right types of healthy, nutritious foods that are good for my body.”
“I love the feeling of increased energy I get after exercising.”
“Every day, I am burning calories and getting closer to my ideal weight”
Looking to attract abundence? Try…
“I’m so happy and grateful now that money comes to me, in ever increasing quantities, through multiple sources, on a continuous basis.”
Other affirmations you can use include:
“My relationship with _______ is growing.”
“I enjoy my work and am richly rewarded.”
“I have enough time, energy, wisdom and funds to accomplish all my goals.”
Before you start creating your affirmation, note these important rules:
1. Affirmations must be in the present tense.
Your subconscious mind does not think in terms of past, present or future. If you say, I want to be an excellent golfer then your subconscious understands this as a statement of wanting. What you then get is the wanting or desire to be an excellent golfer but not the actual abilityitself.
What you should say is “I am an excellent golfer”. Your subconscious understands this as a statement of your present reality. It therefore works to make this reality true.
Remember, replace I want with I am
2. You must believe that the goal is within your reach.
If you repeat an affirmation, but at the same time you’re secretly thinking you cannot accomplish it, you hijack the process.
When you first start practicing this you should start with small believable goals. As you achieve these goals your confidence in yourself and in the power affirmations grows. This allows you to tackle greater and greater issues.
The best way to implant an affirmation is to release your mind from all desire and intention.
Merely state the suggestion to yourself without passion as a thing that is already so. Something that is true is obvious and undeniable — it does not need to be shouted or defended. It simply is. Use repetition to reinforce the effects of the affirmation.
3. Affirmations must always be done as a positive statement.
If you’re trying to drop weight don’t say, “I am not overweight”. Instead say, “I am slim and healthy”. When you see a phrase such as “I am no longer ill”, the dominant image in your mind is that of illness. When you turn that around to a phrase such as “I am healthy and well”, the dominant image in your mind is then one of health and wellness.
Remember, always turn the affirmation into a positive statement.
Positive affirmations are extremely useful in causing fundamental change, not only in behavior and beliefs, but in the external conditions of life.
When a suggestion is correctly injected into the subconscious mind, the effect is nothing short of miraculous. It does not show itself overnight, however, but is gradual and cumulative.
Basic Technique 2 – Creative Visualization
While affirmations are good—Silva pioneered a technique that is far more powerful that using simple affirmations. This technique is called creative visualization.
This involves visualizing the end result of your goal or desire while you are in the alpha level of mind.
The concept of creative visualization has been known for ages. It gained renewed popularity in the 1970s when a Silva graduate by the name of Shakti Gawain wrote a best-selling book about it.
Just like affirmations your visualization should be done in the “present tense”. Lets say you’re looking to own a brand new car. You want to visualize yourself in the car and feel the moment as if it is happening this instant and not at some time in the future.
In other words, feel the sense of joy in owning the car, rather than the sense of wanting or the sense of desire for the car.
To visualize effectively Jose Silva suggests creating a mental screen in front of your eyes. This should be like the screen you see in a cinema. It should be forward, in front of your eyes, and raised at an angle of around 20 degrees. The screen should be at least 6 feet in front of you. Make the screen as large as you can, almost like a movie screen in a cinema.
Try it now.
Close your eyes and visualize the mental screen, raised slightly 20 degrees above the horizon, and at least 6 feet in front of you.
When you perform creative visualization you will project images onto this screen.
If you are looking to improve your sports skills, visualize yourself playing the game perfectly. See yourself making perfect moves, shooting every basket, making the perfect swing. Feel the joy you feel when you play the game well.
If you are looking to shed some pounds, see yourself healthy and fit. Feel the joy of having a beautiful body. See people complimenting you.
If you’re in sales, you can see yourself making the perfect pitches. See your monthly commission statements showing ever increasing figures
Enhancing Your Creative Visualization
If you have difficulty visualizing use a technique called streaming.
In streaming you mentally describe what it is that you’re seeing. Make the description as detailed as possible. For example if you’re trying to visualize yourself driving a brand new car, mentally tell yourself, “I’m seein the dashboard, it has beautifully carved silver dials, the leather has tiny checkered patterns on it…”
As you describe the image in detail you will find that the image also takes on more detail. This, in turn, gives you more things to mentally describe. One feeds into the other and your imagined image becomes more and more vivid.
Don’t get stuck on the term “visualization”. Different people have different dominant senses. The most common dominant sense is the sense of sight. This is why for most people the process of visualization works well. Some people, however, may have a dominant sense of touch or hearing or smell. These people may have difficulty “visualizing” but may be able to accurately imagine sounds, smells or feelings.
For these people it’s important to incorporate these senses into their “mental experience”. Someone who was born blind for example, can still engage in creative visualization, but rather then see images, they would create the mental experience by using their mental sense of smell, hearing, taste and touch.
How to Increase the Impact of Creative Visualization:
Make the image as realistic as possible Incorporate movement, make the screen three-dimensional. See colors and shapes. Use the streaming technique if you have difficulty visualizing.
Feel emotions associated with the image Joy, happiness, a sense of fulfillment. How would you be feeling if you had what you wanted? Imagine and explore this feeling. A thought without emotions has no energy and no force behind it. It is like running a car on empty. Feel the emotions of having what you want.
Bring in your other senses Feel the wind blowing on your face; imagine the scents involved with the images. Feel texture and temperature. The more senses you involve, the more real the image is to your subconscious mind.
Here’s one example. Picture an orange. Imagine the color of it. Is it bright orange and ripe? Then picture yourself peeling the orange. Imagine the smell as you start to peel it. Feel the juice flowing over your fingers. Then squeeze the orange and feel the flesh of the fruit. Bring it to your nose and imagine the odor of an orange. Imagine tasting it and bring back a memory of how an orange tastes in your mouth. As you can see, the trick is to make the image as real as possible by using all of your senses and emotions.
Remember the more realistic the visualization process, the better and faster the results.
How You Can Practice
You can combine your affirmations with your creative visualization to create a more powerful effect. As you’re imagining your goal, simply repeat your affirmation mentally, as many times as you feel necessary.
Don’t be discouraged if you do not get immediate results. We are all at different levels of spiritual development and some of us have years of negative programming and negative belief systems to overcome. But overcome them you shall. Creative visualization can be such a powerful process when done at the Alpha level that just five minutes a day of practice can undo years of negative programming.
Furthermore, once you get your first success your belief system gets strengthened and this will allow you to manifest your next goal a little quicker. Masters who practiceregularly find that they do not even have to go to a meditative level of mind and spend time repeatedly visualizing their goals. A mere conscious thought of their desire can set the gears in motion and create coincidences to direct them towards their goal.
Before we end this lesson we will share some other letters received from students who have taken the Silva UltraMind System seminar or used the home study program.
Keep in mind that these students attended the seminar or used the home study course, both of which contain advanced techniques beyond the scope of this program.
One can still get excellent results from just the basic techniques outlined in this program but you will have to practice much harder and start with smaller goals while you build up your belief system.
More Personal Experiences
“Powerful Healing”
“I was soon able to walk again, and within 6 months, was able to return to practicing medicine. I have advanced even further and made a move and am happier than I have been in years. Also, no headaches or any other pain. My medical knowledge returned totally intact.”
~ A Medical Doctor in Mississippi who was in a coma after a car accident
“Creative Visualization in Business Negotiation”
“I was put in charge of buying a large amount advertising space for my company. The company selling the space offered us the spot for $500,000.00. This was way above our budget. My CEO who is an excellent negotiator had been trying to get them down to $100,000 for months but had no success. Finally he dumped the project on me. I had no experience with this sort of negotiation but I used the Silva technique while in my meditative level to communicate with the advertisement seller and to request a better deal. The seller had been ignoring me for 2 weeks but that very next day I got a call saying they had agreed to come down to $100,000. I was surprised—we had been trying for months to no avail. By then my confidence was at a peak so I refused the offer and went to my meditative level again and asked for an even better deal. I mentally visualized myself in the negotiation and getting the deal I wanted. Again the results came hard and fast. The very next day I managed to get them down to $60,000. We signed the contract! My CEO was impressed that I managed to do this. Well I got a huge bonus. This was 2 months after taking the Silva Ultramind System seminar. Lets just say the seminar paid for itself 20 times over in a mere 2 months.”
How You Can Use the Power of Visualization and Affirmations to Create “Lucky Coincidences”
We now come to the premier techniques for harnessing your mind’s power to shape your life and move you towards your dreams and aspirations.
This principles below will specifically teach you to .
We will teach you two techniques in this lesson.
Affirmations
Creative Visualization.
In our last lesson you learned how to use the alpha level of mind to gain creative ideas and inspiration. You are now ready for the next step. You will learn how to tap into your mind to shape your reality. Perhaps you’re looking to be more positive, to stick to your diet, to improve your golf swing or to end a bad habit. We’ll show you how you can use affirmations and creative visualization to reprogram your mind and reshape your attitudes and behavior.
It all starts with your imagination. Imagination is the ability to create an idea, a vision or an image of something new.
In creative visualization, we use the power of imagination to create a mental image of what we want to accomplish or obtain.
Your goal could be on any level
physical
emotional
mental
spiritual
You might imagine yourself driving that BMW you always wanted, owning a home in the country, married to your ideal mate, succeeding at your job or having $100,000.00 in your bank account.
No matter what your goal, the technique is basically the same. You imagine the desired outcome in your mind. At the same time, you repeat a positive affirmation about the goal. The affirmation is in the present tense.
Imagination is the beginning of creation.You imagine what you desire,you will what you imagineand at last you create what you will.
~ George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950)
The Scientific Evidence
There is strong scientific evidence that visualization can be used to dramatically improve your results in sports, public speaking, performing arts and anything else which involves practice.
In one study, Australian psychologist Allen Richardson conducted an experiment with basketball players making hoop shots. He divided the players in three groups.
Group A – was asked to practice their shots on a basketball court for 20 minutes a day.
Group B – was asked not to practice at all.
Group C – was asked to mentally rehearse shooting a basketball through a hoop for 20 minutes each day.
At the end of the study Group A improved their hoop shot ability by 25%. Group B, as expected, showed no improvement at all.
What was truly surprising, was that Group C improved by 24%, almost as much as Group A, even though they had not physically set foot in a basketball court.
There is also overwhelming scientific evidence that visualization can be used to heal the body. Doctors such as O. Carl Simonton have been helping patients recover from serious illnesses such as cancer by combining visualization with modern medicine. The patients often made dramatic improvements simply by visualizing their bodies behaving in ideal, healthy ways.
We’ll look at more of this fascinating evidence in our next lesson which will be on mind-body healing.
What we’re going to suggest in this lesson is something even more incredible.
Your mind’s influence is not just limited to improving your emotions, skills and physical body. Your mind can influence theworld outside your apparent physical control.
In other words, your mind can spawn amazing coincidences to move you towards your goals. The coincidences could be things that were seemingly unconnected to you and beyond your control.
The techniques we will teach you do not just make you more focused on your goals. They directly influence your reality.
Laboratory evidence pouring out of universities such as Princeton and Stanford has shown that volunteers are able to influence matter by their thoughts. So far the evidence has been limited to effects on random number generators, dice and electronic equipment. We will look at some of this evidence in Lesson Seven.
What is still lacking is scientific evidence that visualization can create “coincidences” in the physical world, outside your immediate control. This of course, is hard to test in a lab.
But thousands of scientists and millions of other people in the world do believe in this because they have experienced it in their own lives.
In short, just because an effect cannot be tested in a lab, does not mean it does not exist.
Some of the greatest thinkers in the world—Einstein, Edison, Jung, Carnegie and Goethe (the man with the highest recorded IQ, 210)—all believed in the power of the mind to create coincidences.
I believe that the mind has the power to affect groups of atoms and even tamper with the odds of atomic behavior, and that even the course of the world is not predetermined by physical law, but may be altered bythe uncaused volition of human beings.
~ Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, English mathematician and AstroPhysicist
Let’s take a look at some of these personal experiences. Millions of people worldwide have reported such coincidences.
On our web site we maintain a library of letters from people who have used Silva Ultra Mind System techniques to accelerate healing, gain inspiration, start a business, find a dream job, achieve goals, walk again after a car accident, earn a six-figure income, and find peace of mind.
Letters are sorted in categories:
Health
Personal Development
Career
Spiritual Development
You can access this library anytime by clicking here
Below, we have included segments from letters that we have received from students of the Silva UltraNubd System. These letters will give you some ideas of what can be accomplished when the mind is properly harnessed.
Letters from Students
The following are extracts from letters we have received from students in the past 12 months. These letters and more, are catalogued on our website
“Investment Success”
[The] technique already solved one problem with my investments. Two days after doing it, the broker called to inform me [that] my value was up 40% and he wanted to get together with me over dinner to discuss better and safer ways of protecting and increasing my assets. This is exactly what I programmed for.”
~ Jim from Illinois
“Mental Rehearsal for Sports & Public Speaking”
“I have received many great complements on my oral presentations which can be attributed to my ability to visualize the presentation before it happens. I have also used this technique in golf and kung-fu. Ever since then, it has helped me to become better at my game and master my techniques.”
~ C.S. from Warwick Rhode Island
“Weight-Control”
“I did [the technique] in which I saw myself making better choices about what I eat, and ended with the result of being my ideal size. Recently, I noticed that without struggle, I have made dramatic changes in the way I eat—much less fat and sugar and smaller helpings, yet I seem to be more satisfied and enjoying the taste of the food I eat more than ever.”
~ G.H. of New York
“Improving Your Career”
“I’m a sales-manager by profession, and I have to say the visualization is such a tremendous part of being successful in my field. Virtually every time I use it, I come close or hit the target on what I wanted to achieve.”
~ Jeff from Fort Wayne, Indiana
“Looking Better & Attracting People”
“I began to see improvement physically. My joint pain disappeared and my energy level was up. I also began to attract people—especially men, in a way that I had not before experienced. I also had people say to me I looked 10 years younger and wanted to know what I did. I lost weight.”
~ Mary from California
Let’s take a look at how you can start applying these techniques.
Basic Technique 1 – Affirmations
Affirmations are positive statements you repeat to yourself while in a meditative or alpha level of mind. Affirmations are always done in the present tense, as if the action has already taken place.
The concept was made famous by a French physician called Emile Coue. Coue was responsible for thousands of remarkable documented healings at the beginning of the 20th century. His remedy was to combine western medicine with the power of affirmations. Patients were made to repeat positive healing affirmations to themselves while in a relaxed frame of mind.
Coue’s most famous affirmation was “everyday, in every way, I am getting better and better.”
When done at the alpha level, affirmations tend to be countless times more powerful than when done at the beta, or waking state.
Why?
Because when you reach the alpha level of mind, your subconscious is brought to a conscious level—this means it’s easier for you to convey commands directly to your subconscious.
Several affirmations that we use in the Silva UltraMind System seminar include:
“I will always maintain a perfectly healthy body and mind”
“Positive thoughts, positive emotions, bring me all the benefits and advantages I desire”
“I am learning to use more of my mind and to use it in a better way”
You can also create your own affirmations:
Looking for job satisfaction? Try saying…
“I have a perfect career that I truly love and enjoy. I have great opportunities for advancement and I am earning a wonderful salary of __________ a year.”
Looking to slim down? Try saying…
“I only enjoy eating the right types of healthy, nutritious foods that are good for my body.”
“I love the feeling of increased energy I get after exercising.”
“Every day, I am burning calories and getting closer to my ideal weight”
Looking to attract abundence? Try…
“I’m so happy and grateful now that money comes to me, in ever increasing quantities, through multiple sources, on a continuous basis.”
Other affirmations you can use include:
“My relationship with _______ is growing.”
“I enjoy my work and am richly rewarded.”
“I have enough time, energy, wisdom and funds to accomplish all my goals.”
Before you start creating your affirmation, note these important rules:
1. Affirmations must be in the present tense.
Your subconscious mind does not think in terms of past, present or future. If you say, I want to be an excellent golfer then your subconscious understands this as a statement of wanting. What you then get is the wanting or desire to be an excellent golfer but not the actual abilityitself.
What you should say is “I am an excellent golfer”. Your subconscious understands this as a statement of your present reality. It therefore works to make this reality true.
Remember, replace I want with I am
2. You must believe that the goal is within your reach.
If you repeat an affirmation, but at the same time you’re secretly thinking you cannot accomplish it, you hijack the process.
When you first start practicing this you should start with small believable goals. As you achieve these goals your confidence in yourself and in the power affirmations grows. This allows you to tackle greater and greater issues.
The best way to implant an affirmation is to release your mind from all desire and intention.
Merely state the suggestion to yourself without passion as a thing that is already so. Something that is true is obvious and undeniable — it does not need to be shouted or defended. It simply is. Use repetition to reinforce the effects of the affirmation.
3. Affirmations must always be done as a positive statement.
If you’re trying to drop weight don’t say, “I am not overweight”. Instead say, “I am slim and healthy”. When you see a phrase such as “I am no longer ill”, the dominant image in your mind is that of illness. When you turn that around to a phrase such as “I am healthy and well”, the dominant image in your mind is then one of health and wellness.
Remember, always turn the affirmation into a positive statement.
Positive affirmations are extremely useful in causing fundamental change, not only in behavior and beliefs, but in the external conditions of life.
When a suggestion is correctly injected into the subconscious mind, the effect is nothing short of miraculous. It does not show itself overnight, however, but is gradual and cumulative.
Basic Technique 2 – Creative Visualization
While affirmations are good—Silva pioneered a technique that is far more powerful that using simple affirmations. This technique is called creative visualization.
This involves visualizing the end result of your goal or desire while you are in the alpha level of mind.
The concept of creative visualization has been known for ages. It gained renewed popularity in the 1970s when a Silva graduate by the name of Shakti Gawain wrote a best-selling book about it.
Just like affirmations your visualization should be done in the “present tense”. Lets say you’re looking to own a brand new car. You want to visualize yourself in the car and feel the moment as if it is happening this instant and not at some time in the future.
In other words, feel the sense of joy in owning the car, rather than the sense of wanting or the sense of desire for the car.
To visualize effectively Jose Silva suggests creating a mental screen in front of your eyes. This should be like the screen you see in a cinema. It should be forward, in front of your eyes, and raised at an angle of around 20 degrees. The screen should be at least 6 feet in front of you. Make the screen as large as you can, almost like a movie screen in a cinema.
Try it now.
Close your eyes and visualize the mental screen, raised slightly 20 degrees above the horizon, and at least 6 feet in front of you.
When you perform creative visualization you will project images onto this screen.
If you are looking to improve your sports skills, visualize yourself playing the game perfectly. See yourself making perfect moves, shooting every basket, making the perfect swing. Feel the joy you feel when you play the game well.
If you are looking to shed some pounds, see yourself healthy and fit. Feel the joy of having a beautiful body. See people complimenting you.
If you’re in sales, you can see yourself making the perfect pitches. See your monthly commission statements showing ever increasing figures
Enhancing Your Creative Visualization
If you have difficulty visualizing use a technique called streaming.
In streaming you mentally describe what it is that you’re seeing. Make the description as detailed as possible. For example if you’re trying to visualize yourself driving a brand new car, mentally tell yourself, “I’m seein the dashboard, it has beautifully carved silver dials, the leather has tiny checkered patterns on it…”
As you describe the image in detail you will find that the image also takes on more detail. This, in turn, gives you more things to mentally describe. One feeds into the other and your imagined image becomes more and more vivid.
Don’t get stuck on the term “visualization”. Different people have different dominant senses. The most common dominant sense is the sense of sight. This is why for most people the process of visualization works well. Some people, however, may have a dominant sense of touch or hearing or smell. These people may have difficulty “visualizing” but may be able to accurately imagine sounds, smells or feelings.
For these people it’s important to incorporate these senses into their “mental experience”. Someone who was born blind for example, can still engage in creative visualization, but rather then see images, they would create the mental experience by using their mental sense of smell, hearing, taste and touch.
How to Increase the Impact of Creative Visualization:
Make the image as realistic as possible Incorporate movement, make the screen three-dimensional. See colors and shapes. Use the streaming technique if you have difficulty visualizing.
Feel emotions associated with the image Joy, happiness, a sense of fulfillment. How would you be feeling if you had what you wanted? Imagine and explore this feeling. A thought without emotions has no energy and no force behind it. It is like running a car on empty. Feel the emotions of having what you want.
Bring in your other senses Feel the wind blowing on your face; imagine the scents involved with the images. Feel texture and temperature. The more senses you involve, the more real the image is to your subconscious mind.
Here’s one example. Picture an orange. Imagine the color of it. Is it bright orange and ripe? Then picture yourself peeling the orange. Imagine the smell as you start to peel it. Feel the juice flowing over your fingers. Then squeeze the orange and feel the flesh of the fruit. Bring it to your nose and imagine the odor of an orange. Imagine tasting it and bring back a memory of how an orange tastes in your mouth. As you can see, the trick is to make the image as real as possible by using all of your senses and emotions.
Remember the more realistic the visualization process, the better and faster the results.
How You Can Practice
You can combine your affirmations with your creative visualization to create a more powerful effect. As you’re imagining your goal, simply repeat your affirmation mentally, as many times as you feel necessary.
Don’t be discouraged if you do not get immediate results. We are all at different levels of spiritual development and some of us have years of negative programming and negative belief systems to overcome. But overcome them you shall. Creative visualization can be such a powerful process when done at the Alpha level that just five minutes a day of practice can undo years of negative programming.
Furthermore, once you get your first success your belief system gets strengthened and this will allow you to manifest your next goal a little quicker. Masters who practiceregularly find that they do not even have to go to a meditative level of mind and spend time repeatedly visualizing their goals. A mere conscious thought of their desire can set the gears in motion and create coincidences to direct them towards their goal.
Before we end this lesson we will share some other letters received from students who have taken the Silva UltraMind System seminar or used the home study program.
Keep in mind that these students attended the seminar or used the home study course, both of which contain advanced techniques beyond the scope of this program.
One can still get excellent results from just the basic techniques outlined in this program but you will have to practice much harder and start with smaller goals while you build up your belief system.
More Personal Experiences
“Powerful Healing”
“I was soon able to walk again, and within 6 months, was able to return to practicing medicine. I have advanced even further and made a move and am happier than I have been in years. Also, no headaches or any other pain. My medical knowledge returned totally intact.”
~ A Medical Doctor in Mississippi who was in a coma after a car accident
“Creative Visualization in Business Negotiation”
“I was put in charge of buying a large amount advertising space for my company. The company selling the space offered us the spot for $500,000.00. This was way above our budget. My CEO who is an excellent negotiator had been trying to get them down to $100,000 for months but had no success. Finally he dumped the project on me. I had no experience with this sort of negotiation but I used the Silva technique while in my meditative level to communicate with the advertisement seller and to request a better deal. The seller had been ignoring me for 2 weeks but that very next day I got a call saying they had agreed to come down to $100,000. I was surprised—we had been trying for months to no avail. By then my confidence was at a peak so I refused the offer and went to my meditative level again and asked for an even better deal. I mentally visualized myself in the negotiation and getting the deal I wanted. Again the results came hard and fast. The very next day I managed to get them down to $60,000. We signed the contract! My CEO was impressed that I managed to do this. Well I got a huge bonus. This was 2 months after taking the Silva Ultramind System seminar. Lets just say the seminar paid for itself 20 times over in a mere 2 months.”
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Conscious Innocence & Vulnerability
I have often heard from people that after a powerful opening glimpse of the unimaginable truth of their being, the demons of the past seem to arise more strongly than ever. Rather than the openness and innocence of "What is this now?" the response is often something like "Why is this bothering me again? Why don't these things just disappear? What is wrong with me that I don't experience permanent liberation?" On one hand, there is misery and suffering, and on the other hand, innocence and openness. These "hands" are the polarities of the mind. True innocence is the innate capacity of the heart to openly meet whatever is appearing when it appears, and to see it truthfully for what it is. I guarantee that most everything is not what it appears to be on the surface, but in order to discover a deeper truth, what appears must be met fully in innocence. Not the learned innocence of "but I'm innocent," but the natural openness of innocently not knowing.
True innocence is the capacity to directly experience what is here right now, without any demands that it look, act, or feel differently.
Innocence is openness, the willingness to see and to trust, even if what appears seems absolutely untrustworthy. True innocence is not naivete, nor is it delusion. However, it involves vulnerability. The willingness to be innocent is the willingness to be hurt. This willingness to be vulnerable is what the term "spiritual warrior" really means. Vulnerability takes more courage than being cynical, strong, or powerful. It takes courage to be open, innocent, and willing to be hurt.
Because of the nature of extremely close relationships, especially between parents, children, lovers, and partners, hurt is often experienced. So what? Hurt may feel like the end of the world, but it's not. Hurt hurts. The degree to which you are willing to be hurt, not wanting to be hurt but willing to be hurt, is the degree to which you are willing to love, be loved, and be taught by love. Love can be your teacher, though it never teaches withdrawal from experiencing hurt. Other people are not the source of your hurt, the source of hurt is the fact that you love. Trust the love. If love is to hurt you, then let it hurt you fully. Let it annihilate you. Let your heart break open so that an even deeper love can be revealed.
Most everything we do is to avoid vulnerability. We dress up in grown-up clothes, and play at doing grown-up work, in an attempt to escape the defenseless innocence associated with childhood. But innocence is not limited to children. It is possible for you as an adult to be consciously vulnerable and innocent. You can consciously hurt. You can consciously suffer. When you suffer consciously, suffering is revealed not to be what you thought. In conscious suffering, you are no longer fighting the suffering. You are consciously present in it. Then suffering itself reveals the Buddha, Christ's heart, God revealing itself to you on the mountain. If suffering is met as it appears, then suffering is discovered not to be suffering. But the intention is not to meet suffering to get rid of it. The innocent intention is to meet suffering as it is, even if it means feeling hurt.
Most people are more afraid of having their feelings hurt more than they are of having their bodies hurt. But the willingness to be hurt is crucial. Without the willingness to be hurt, there is no willingness to love, no willingness to die, no willingness to live, no willingness to be.
It is easy to see from your own life experience that no matter how much you try to run away from hurt, you still experience it. To stop the running, to turn and experience what is chasing you, open and unprotected, you have to be willing to be free. Are you willing to be free?
You can examine your life and see for yourself what you are running from, what you are trying to escape. It may be very subtle. But just in the seeing of it, there is the possibility of a deeper opening.
Everywhere I've spoken with people, I have heard this statement: "I want truth, God, and realization more than anything else-----why don't I have it?" When you honestly want truth, God, and realization more than anything else, you realize it is already here. People don't realize it is already here only because they still want it on their own terms.
Look into your life and see what stands in the way of fully and permanently realizing the truth of your being. See if perhaps you find the mindset of having it your way, on your terms, not wanting to feel this, or to see that, or to know the deeper truth. Then see if it is actually possible to feel it, to see it, to know it.
As a gateway to the experience of conscious suffering, and as a means of opening to vulnerability and true innocence, you can ask yourself this question: "What hurt am I unwilling to experience?" Do not look for the "right" spiritual answer, or lie to yourself, but simply open to what this kind of inquiry can reveal. The intention is not to fix or change the hurt, but just to see what is true.
Can you sense the energy it takes to avoid feelings of hurt? Review the ways you try to avoid hurt, what habits of mind you use to avoid it. Be willing to see the repeating patterns and to experience the price you pay for the avoidance, all of the time and energy you invest in avoidance. Just in this moment, what if you simply open to it all, avoiding nothing, welcoming all?
Are you willing to trust love rather than your mind's protection from hurt? If you are willing, then you will taste the possibility of living a life of love and conscious innocence. This is possible for everyone. Love is the teacher. If you are willing to surrender to love rather than trying to control it, love teaches you who you are.
Gangaji
正在 正在閱讀:
True innocence is the capacity to directly experience what is here right now, without any demands that it look, act, or feel differently.
Innocence is openness, the willingness to see and to trust, even if what appears seems absolutely untrustworthy. True innocence is not naivete, nor is it delusion. However, it involves vulnerability. The willingness to be innocent is the willingness to be hurt. This willingness to be vulnerable is what the term "spiritual warrior" really means. Vulnerability takes more courage than being cynical, strong, or powerful. It takes courage to be open, innocent, and willing to be hurt.
Because of the nature of extremely close relationships, especially between parents, children, lovers, and partners, hurt is often experienced. So what? Hurt may feel like the end of the world, but it's not. Hurt hurts. The degree to which you are willing to be hurt, not wanting to be hurt but willing to be hurt, is the degree to which you are willing to love, be loved, and be taught by love. Love can be your teacher, though it never teaches withdrawal from experiencing hurt. Other people are not the source of your hurt, the source of hurt is the fact that you love. Trust the love. If love is to hurt you, then let it hurt you fully. Let it annihilate you. Let your heart break open so that an even deeper love can be revealed.
Most everything we do is to avoid vulnerability. We dress up in grown-up clothes, and play at doing grown-up work, in an attempt to escape the defenseless innocence associated with childhood. But innocence is not limited to children. It is possible for you as an adult to be consciously vulnerable and innocent. You can consciously hurt. You can consciously suffer. When you suffer consciously, suffering is revealed not to be what you thought. In conscious suffering, you are no longer fighting the suffering. You are consciously present in it. Then suffering itself reveals the Buddha, Christ's heart, God revealing itself to you on the mountain. If suffering is met as it appears, then suffering is discovered not to be suffering. But the intention is not to meet suffering to get rid of it. The innocent intention is to meet suffering as it is, even if it means feeling hurt.
Most people are more afraid of having their feelings hurt more than they are of having their bodies hurt. But the willingness to be hurt is crucial. Without the willingness to be hurt, there is no willingness to love, no willingness to die, no willingness to live, no willingness to be.
It is easy to see from your own life experience that no matter how much you try to run away from hurt, you still experience it. To stop the running, to turn and experience what is chasing you, open and unprotected, you have to be willing to be free. Are you willing to be free?
You can examine your life and see for yourself what you are running from, what you are trying to escape. It may be very subtle. But just in the seeing of it, there is the possibility of a deeper opening.
Everywhere I've spoken with people, I have heard this statement: "I want truth, God, and realization more than anything else-----why don't I have it?" When you honestly want truth, God, and realization more than anything else, you realize it is already here. People don't realize it is already here only because they still want it on their own terms.
Look into your life and see what stands in the way of fully and permanently realizing the truth of your being. See if perhaps you find the mindset of having it your way, on your terms, not wanting to feel this, or to see that, or to know the deeper truth. Then see if it is actually possible to feel it, to see it, to know it.
As a gateway to the experience of conscious suffering, and as a means of opening to vulnerability and true innocence, you can ask yourself this question: "What hurt am I unwilling to experience?" Do not look for the "right" spiritual answer, or lie to yourself, but simply open to what this kind of inquiry can reveal. The intention is not to fix or change the hurt, but just to see what is true.
Can you sense the energy it takes to avoid feelings of hurt? Review the ways you try to avoid hurt, what habits of mind you use to avoid it. Be willing to see the repeating patterns and to experience the price you pay for the avoidance, all of the time and energy you invest in avoidance. Just in this moment, what if you simply open to it all, avoiding nothing, welcoming all?
Are you willing to trust love rather than your mind's protection from hurt? If you are willing, then you will taste the possibility of living a life of love and conscious innocence. This is possible for everyone. Love is the teacher. If you are willing to surrender to love rather than trying to control it, love teaches you who you are.
Gangaji
正在 正在閱讀:
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
There is no sin, only mistakes. (excerpt by Swami Vivekananda)
Vedanta knows no sin. There are mistakes but no sin; and in the long run everything is going to be all right. No Satan -- none of this nonsense. Vedanta believes in only one sin, only one in the world, and it is this: the moment you think you are a sinner or anybody is a sinner, that is sin. From that follows every other mistake of what is usually called sin. There have been mistakes in our lives. But we are going on. Glory be unto us that we have made mistakes! Take a long look at your past life. If your present condition is good, it has been caused by all the past mistakes as well as success. Glory be unto success! Glory be unto mistakes! Do not look back upon what has been done. Go ahead!
Those who are always downhearted and dispirited in this life can do no work; from life to life they come and go wailing and moaning. "The earth is enjoyed by heroes" .... this is an unfailing truth. Be a hero. Always say, "I have no fear." Tell this to everybody: "Have no fear." Fear is death, fear is sin, fear is hell, fear is unrighteousness, fear is wrong life. All the negative thoughts and ideas that are in this world have proceeded from this evil spirit of fear.
Wait, money does not pay nor does name; fame does not pay nor does learning. It is love that pays; it is character that cleaves its way through adamant walls of difficulties.
One who leans on somebody cannot serve the God of Truth.
Great work requires great and persistent effort for a long time. Character has to be established through a thousand stumbles.
The greatest religion is to be true to your own nature. Have faith in yourselves!
The Law of Life: All expansion is life, all contraction is death. All love is expansion, all selfishness is contraction. Love is therefore the only law of life. He who loves lives; he who is selfish is dying. Therefore love for love's sake, because it is the only law of life, just as you breathe to live.
Are you sincere? Are you unselfish even unto death? Are you loving? Then fear not, not even death.
It is unswerving love and perfect unselfishness that conquer everything. We Vedantists in every difficulty ought to ask the subjective question, "Why do I see that? Why can I not conquer this with love?"
I am not a Shopkeeper. All the teachers of the humanity are unselfish. Suppose Jesus of Nazareth was teaching, and a man came and told him, "What you teach is beautiful. I believe that is the way to perfection, and I am ready to follow it; but I do not care to worship you just as the only begotten Son of God." What would be the answer of Jesus of Nazareth?
"Very well, brother, follow the ideal and advance in your own way. I do not care whether you give me the credit for the teaching or not. I am not a shopkeeper. I do not trade the religion. I only teach truth, and the truth is nobody's property. Nobody can patent truth. Truth is God Himself."
Those that want to help mankind must take their own pleasure and pain, name and fame, all sorts of interest and fold them into a bundle and throw away into the sea, and then come to the Lord. This is what all the Masters said and did.
Those who are always downhearted and dispirited in this life can do no work; from life to life they come and go wailing and moaning. "The earth is enjoyed by heroes" .... this is an unfailing truth. Be a hero. Always say, "I have no fear." Tell this to everybody: "Have no fear." Fear is death, fear is sin, fear is hell, fear is unrighteousness, fear is wrong life. All the negative thoughts and ideas that are in this world have proceeded from this evil spirit of fear.
Wait, money does not pay nor does name; fame does not pay nor does learning. It is love that pays; it is character that cleaves its way through adamant walls of difficulties.
One who leans on somebody cannot serve the God of Truth.
Great work requires great and persistent effort for a long time. Character has to be established through a thousand stumbles.
The greatest religion is to be true to your own nature. Have faith in yourselves!
The Law of Life: All expansion is life, all contraction is death. All love is expansion, all selfishness is contraction. Love is therefore the only law of life. He who loves lives; he who is selfish is dying. Therefore love for love's sake, because it is the only law of life, just as you breathe to live.
Are you sincere? Are you unselfish even unto death? Are you loving? Then fear not, not even death.
It is unswerving love and perfect unselfishness that conquer everything. We Vedantists in every difficulty ought to ask the subjective question, "Why do I see that? Why can I not conquer this with love?"
I am not a Shopkeeper. All the teachers of the humanity are unselfish. Suppose Jesus of Nazareth was teaching, and a man came and told him, "What you teach is beautiful. I believe that is the way to perfection, and I am ready to follow it; but I do not care to worship you just as the only begotten Son of God." What would be the answer of Jesus of Nazareth?
"Very well, brother, follow the ideal and advance in your own way. I do not care whether you give me the credit for the teaching or not. I am not a shopkeeper. I do not trade the religion. I only teach truth, and the truth is nobody's property. Nobody can patent truth. Truth is God Himself."
Those that want to help mankind must take their own pleasure and pain, name and fame, all sorts of interest and fold them into a bundle and throw away into the sea, and then come to the Lord. This is what all the Masters said and did.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Happiness: 3 amazing tips from the world's oldest case study
by Yeah Dave (David Romanelli), on Tue Jun 23, 2009 4:29pm PDT
We’ve all heard countless studies, articles and TV interviews on happiness. But the other day I stumbled upon something that is just now being revealed to the media for the first time.* It's a 72 year old study that began all the way back in 1937 when 268 Harvard University sophomores were asked to participate in a study measuring “a formula-some mix of love, work, and adaptation-for a good life.” And while many of those who were college sophomores in 1937 are now dying or in their fading twilight, this study continues to be diligently maintained to this very day.
And never before has science been able to report such fascinating and thoroughly time-tested results on happiness. Following are 3 powerful lessons from this study.
1. Have a Healthy Outlet
So many of the people in this study seemed to have all their ducks in a row. In their prime years in the 1950’s and 1960’s, they were making big money in powerful careers. They had beautiful families and lived in idyllic neighborhoods. Oddly enough, later in life, many of these fortunate people ended up breaking down mentally and physically. Why? If one didn’t have a healthy outlet for their fears, nerves, and struggles, it was only a matter of time before repressed demons erupted to the surface. The happiest people in this study had a healthy outlet. They were altruistic or had a rich sense of humor. They funneled their issues into sport, “their lust into courtship.”
It’s something important to consider. As the study proves, a human being can get away with sustaining daily nerves, fears, and doubts for a number of years. But ultimately, such a nervous nelly will crack. If you haven’t already, develop an outlet…find a sport, commit to helping others, lighten up, and laugh more often. A wise one said, "A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs, jolted by every pebble in the road."
2. Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously
This study, as reported in Atlantic Magazine, was summed up beautifully by the journalist Joshua Shenk: “Herein lies the key to a good life--not rules to follow, nor problems to avoid-- but an engaged humility, an earnest acceptance of life’s pains and promises.”
In other words, one can only carry the burden of a big ego and lots of pride for so long before your proverbial knees will buckle. Don’t take life too seriously. We all have weaknesses. Do you really want to battle your dark side year after year? Or might it just be time to lay down your arms, take a deep breath, and enjoy life. It’s shorter than you think.
3. Happiness Must be Shared
The other night I was watching the movie adaptation of Into the Wild, the true story of Chris McCandless . Fed up with the rat race, McCandless graduated college in the early 1990's, left his worried parents in the dust, sold all his belongings, and ventured deep into the Alaskan wilderness. Before dying of starvation, he seemed to regret his isolationist ways and wrote these last words in his journal, “Happiness only real when shared.” According to the 72 year old study, McCandless was spot on. In the study, those who spent too much alone time ultimately struggled. The happiest subjects in the study were those who sustained meaningful, healthy relationships with friends and family. One can never give enough hugs, say enough "I love you's," and send enough "I miss you's."
As I emphasize in my book (Yeah Dave's Guide to living the Moment) and to my own crazy self each and every day: Livin' the good life is not fancy trips, and expensive jewels, and high brow country clubs. Rather, livin' the good life is livin' the moment!
We’ve all heard countless studies, articles and TV interviews on happiness. But the other day I stumbled upon something that is just now being revealed to the media for the first time.* It's a 72 year old study that began all the way back in 1937 when 268 Harvard University sophomores were asked to participate in a study measuring “a formula-some mix of love, work, and adaptation-for a good life.” And while many of those who were college sophomores in 1937 are now dying or in their fading twilight, this study continues to be diligently maintained to this very day.
And never before has science been able to report such fascinating and thoroughly time-tested results on happiness. Following are 3 powerful lessons from this study.
1. Have a Healthy Outlet
So many of the people in this study seemed to have all their ducks in a row. In their prime years in the 1950’s and 1960’s, they were making big money in powerful careers. They had beautiful families and lived in idyllic neighborhoods. Oddly enough, later in life, many of these fortunate people ended up breaking down mentally and physically. Why? If one didn’t have a healthy outlet for their fears, nerves, and struggles, it was only a matter of time before repressed demons erupted to the surface. The happiest people in this study had a healthy outlet. They were altruistic or had a rich sense of humor. They funneled their issues into sport, “their lust into courtship.”
It’s something important to consider. As the study proves, a human being can get away with sustaining daily nerves, fears, and doubts for a number of years. But ultimately, such a nervous nelly will crack. If you haven’t already, develop an outlet…find a sport, commit to helping others, lighten up, and laugh more often. A wise one said, "A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs, jolted by every pebble in the road."
2. Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously
This study, as reported in Atlantic Magazine, was summed up beautifully by the journalist Joshua Shenk: “Herein lies the key to a good life--not rules to follow, nor problems to avoid-- but an engaged humility, an earnest acceptance of life’s pains and promises.”
In other words, one can only carry the burden of a big ego and lots of pride for so long before your proverbial knees will buckle. Don’t take life too seriously. We all have weaknesses. Do you really want to battle your dark side year after year? Or might it just be time to lay down your arms, take a deep breath, and enjoy life. It’s shorter than you think.
3. Happiness Must be Shared
The other night I was watching the movie adaptation of Into the Wild, the true story of Chris McCandless . Fed up with the rat race, McCandless graduated college in the early 1990's, left his worried parents in the dust, sold all his belongings, and ventured deep into the Alaskan wilderness. Before dying of starvation, he seemed to regret his isolationist ways and wrote these last words in his journal, “Happiness only real when shared.” According to the 72 year old study, McCandless was spot on. In the study, those who spent too much alone time ultimately struggled. The happiest subjects in the study were those who sustained meaningful, healthy relationships with friends and family. One can never give enough hugs, say enough "I love you's," and send enough "I miss you's."
As I emphasize in my book (Yeah Dave's Guide to living the Moment) and to my own crazy self each and every day: Livin' the good life is not fancy trips, and expensive jewels, and high brow country clubs. Rather, livin' the good life is livin' the moment!
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Happiness Coaching!
Every time I hand out my name card, I get quizzical looks followed by an exclaimation, “Happiness Coach!” This is usually followed by, “Oh! I could do with some happiness.”
What really is happiness? And why does every one want it?
Webster's and Oxford dictionary describe the word happiness as a state of feeling great pleasure, and contentment. Someone who is happy is said to be favored by circumstances; is lucky; fortunate etc. Wikipedia defines Happiness as a state of mind or feeling such as contentment, satisfaction, pleasure, or joy. A variety of philosophical, religious, psychological and biological approaches have been taken to defining happiness and identifying its sources.
Philosophers and religious thinkers have often defined happiness in terms of living a good life, or flourishing, rather than simply as an emotion The thesaurus uses words like pleasure; gratification; enjoyment; fruition, relish; zest; gusto; well being; joy; gladness; enchantment; rapture; ecstasy; heaven; honeymoon.
No wonder everyone wants to be happy.
I once sent out an email to my friends asking them to define happiness. I got some lovely responses, some rather simple and some extremely profound and insightful (too many to list here), but most said it was appreciating what we had, living in the present, showing gratitude and giving without expectation.
No one mentioned money, sex, good looks or food, but often during my chats on happiness I found that many equated happiness with extrinsic factors such as money, status, job, relationship, ideal body weight etc. Rather interesting isn't it? We all know or at least pretend to know what happiness is but when it comes down to really being happy we forget and run after all the things that only lead to momentary pleasure and not towards lasting happiness.
Let me attempt to define happiness as I see it. I have interviewed thousands on this subject and can say with some authority that “Happiness just IS”. It is not a byproduct of money, status, good looks, ideal partner or ideal body weight. All these surely help but do not necessarily ensure happiness. Happiness therefore is a way of being. According to Vedanta,( an Indian philosophy based on science and reason) our happiness depends upon peace of mind, peace of mind on self-control, and self-control on awareness of our true Self. So the search for happiness should be a search for the ‘true self’. I don’t mean to sound too profound and thereby make happiness such an esoteric term that we lose the simplicity of happiness.
Happiness is way of living. It is living a life of joy and meaning and it is entirely within us to find the path towards lasting happiness. Happiness is the ability to enjoy life unconditionally, along with the ups and downs of life. Seeing the beauty and joy in things is what makes for a happy life. Happiness is a choice and it is a skill. We are all born happy, but somewhere along the way we forget what happiness looks like and start relating happiness to want fulfillment.
So is it really possible to be happy most of the time? Yes it is, and we can start that today.
The simplest way to become happier is to find something to appreciate at this very moment. I would even encourage you to stop reading and find something right now that you can appreciate. It could be the beautiful day, uninterrupted time at the computer, a beautiful smile by your child or even a stranger, a hot cup of coffee, soft music or even smell from your kitchen. Anything that you can find to appreciate right at this moment. In the rare circumstance that you really cannot find anything to appreciate, appreciate the fact that you are breathing and pay attention to that breath. I guarantee you will feel better right away.
Next step towards instant happiness. Pick an alphabet and think of a positive word starting with that alphabet. Let’s say you picked D, now D could stand for Dream, Derive, Development, Declutter, Decide, Do etc. The next step would be to choose that word and try and think of using it in context all day. For example- if it is Dream, think of your most beautiful dream. Allow yourself to be carried away into dreamland, find ways of fulfilling that dream. Stay in that dream land for some time and then carry on with your daily activities. If the word you choose is Do, do everything with enthusiasm and hope. Give power and energy to the word Do and focus on doing things in a positive manner. You can make your own list of affirmative words and focus on that word for at least one whole day. Do this exercise for a minimum of 30 days. You can choose a different alphabet or the same alphabet for the 30 days.
The third thing to do is to move your body. If possible go in front of a mirror and look straight into your eyes and say to yourself you are beautiful and happy. Say it a few times till you actually believe it. It is not uncommon for people to find this exercise very difficult. It sounds easy, but years of repressed self love and appreciation leads to a self belief of inadequacy and self doubt that is so powerful that it almost impossible to look into your own eyes and say loving and kind words to yourself. How and why would you expect the world to love, and respect you if you can’t do it to yourself? I don’t mean to confuse self love with narcissism; self love is an expanding kind of all encompassing generosity towards self and others. According to Vedanta we are all one consciousness, therefore we can start with love and appreciation towards the self which is after all a part of the whole.
There are thousands of books and philosophies on happiness and each offers a route towards a fulfilling life. Find a path that gels with your thinking and adopt it. Do whatever it takes to develop the skill of happiness and as with any other skill the more you practice the better you get.
More to come, but as of now let’s start with the above three simple routes to happiness.
Love/luck/happiness
What really is happiness? And why does every one want it?
Webster's and Oxford dictionary describe the word happiness as a state of feeling great pleasure, and contentment. Someone who is happy is said to be favored by circumstances; is lucky; fortunate etc. Wikipedia defines Happiness as a state of mind or feeling such as contentment, satisfaction, pleasure, or joy. A variety of philosophical, religious, psychological and biological approaches have been taken to defining happiness and identifying its sources.
Philosophers and religious thinkers have often defined happiness in terms of living a good life, or flourishing, rather than simply as an emotion The thesaurus uses words like pleasure; gratification; enjoyment; fruition, relish; zest; gusto; well being; joy; gladness; enchantment; rapture; ecstasy; heaven; honeymoon.
No wonder everyone wants to be happy.
I once sent out an email to my friends asking them to define happiness. I got some lovely responses, some rather simple and some extremely profound and insightful (too many to list here), but most said it was appreciating what we had, living in the present, showing gratitude and giving without expectation.
No one mentioned money, sex, good looks or food, but often during my chats on happiness I found that many equated happiness with extrinsic factors such as money, status, job, relationship, ideal body weight etc. Rather interesting isn't it? We all know or at least pretend to know what happiness is but when it comes down to really being happy we forget and run after all the things that only lead to momentary pleasure and not towards lasting happiness.
Let me attempt to define happiness as I see it. I have interviewed thousands on this subject and can say with some authority that “Happiness just IS”. It is not a byproduct of money, status, good looks, ideal partner or ideal body weight. All these surely help but do not necessarily ensure happiness. Happiness therefore is a way of being. According to Vedanta,( an Indian philosophy based on science and reason) our happiness depends upon peace of mind, peace of mind on self-control, and self-control on awareness of our true Self. So the search for happiness should be a search for the ‘true self’. I don’t mean to sound too profound and thereby make happiness such an esoteric term that we lose the simplicity of happiness.
Happiness is way of living. It is living a life of joy and meaning and it is entirely within us to find the path towards lasting happiness. Happiness is the ability to enjoy life unconditionally, along with the ups and downs of life. Seeing the beauty and joy in things is what makes for a happy life. Happiness is a choice and it is a skill. We are all born happy, but somewhere along the way we forget what happiness looks like and start relating happiness to want fulfillment.
So is it really possible to be happy most of the time? Yes it is, and we can start that today.
The simplest way to become happier is to find something to appreciate at this very moment. I would even encourage you to stop reading and find something right now that you can appreciate. It could be the beautiful day, uninterrupted time at the computer, a beautiful smile by your child or even a stranger, a hot cup of coffee, soft music or even smell from your kitchen. Anything that you can find to appreciate right at this moment. In the rare circumstance that you really cannot find anything to appreciate, appreciate the fact that you are breathing and pay attention to that breath. I guarantee you will feel better right away.
Next step towards instant happiness. Pick an alphabet and think of a positive word starting with that alphabet. Let’s say you picked D, now D could stand for Dream, Derive, Development, Declutter, Decide, Do etc. The next step would be to choose that word and try and think of using it in context all day. For example- if it is Dream, think of your most beautiful dream. Allow yourself to be carried away into dreamland, find ways of fulfilling that dream. Stay in that dream land for some time and then carry on with your daily activities. If the word you choose is Do, do everything with enthusiasm and hope. Give power and energy to the word Do and focus on doing things in a positive manner. You can make your own list of affirmative words and focus on that word for at least one whole day. Do this exercise for a minimum of 30 days. You can choose a different alphabet or the same alphabet for the 30 days.
The third thing to do is to move your body. If possible go in front of a mirror and look straight into your eyes and say to yourself you are beautiful and happy. Say it a few times till you actually believe it. It is not uncommon for people to find this exercise very difficult. It sounds easy, but years of repressed self love and appreciation leads to a self belief of inadequacy and self doubt that is so powerful that it almost impossible to look into your own eyes and say loving and kind words to yourself. How and why would you expect the world to love, and respect you if you can’t do it to yourself? I don’t mean to confuse self love with narcissism; self love is an expanding kind of all encompassing generosity towards self and others. According to Vedanta we are all one consciousness, therefore we can start with love and appreciation towards the self which is after all a part of the whole.
There are thousands of books and philosophies on happiness and each offers a route towards a fulfilling life. Find a path that gels with your thinking and adopt it. Do whatever it takes to develop the skill of happiness and as with any other skill the more you practice the better you get.
More to come, but as of now let’s start with the above three simple routes to happiness.
Love/luck/happiness
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Happiness 101
By D.T. MAX
Published: January 7, 2007
One Tuesday last fall I sat in on a positive-psychology class called the Science of Well-Being — essentially a class in how to make yourself happier — at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. George Mason is a challenge for positive psychologists because it is one of the 15 unhappiest campuses in America, at least per The Princeton Review. Many students are married and already working and commute to school. It’s a place where you go to move your career forward, not to find yourself.
The class was taught by Todd Kashdan, a 32-year-old psychology professor whose area of research is “curiosity and well-being.” Kashdan bobbed around the room or sat, legs dangling, on his desk beneath a big PowerPoint slide that said “The Scientific Pursuit of Happiness” as he took the students, a few older than he, through the various building blocks of positive psychology: optimism, gratitude, mindfulness, hope, spirituality. Though the syllabus promised to “approach every topic in this class as scientists” and the assigned readings were academic, the classroom discussion was Oprah-ish. The students seemed intrigued by the research Kashdan presented mostly in relation to their own lives.
The focus of Kashdan’s class that day was the distinction between feeling good, which according to positive psychologists only creates a hunger for more pleasure — they call this syndrome the hedonic treadmill — and doing good, which can lead to lasting happiness. The students had been asked first to do something that gave them pleasure and then to perform an act of selfless kindness. They approached the first part of the assignment eagerly. One student recounted having sex with her boyfriend 30 feet underwater while scuba diving. Another said he “went to Coastal Flats and got hammered.” A third attended a Nascar race in North Carolina, smoked, drank and had sex. Some also watched favorite TV shows; others chatted with friends.
When it came time to talk about the second part of the assignment, the students were excited, too. The Nascar attendee, who was afraid of needles, gave blood. Another collected clothes from family members and donated them to a shelter for battered women. The boy who had gotten hammered bought a homeless person a 12-pack of “Natty Ice” at a 7-Eleven, wondering if it was the right thing to do. A fourth gave her waiter at Denny’s a $50 tip. At times, Kashdan, who ran the class in the nonjudgmental manner of a ’70s rap-session leader — he used the word “cool” a lot — would compliment them on their behavior and pull out a moral. In this case, as one student wrote in a summary she submitted to Kashdan, comparing “a day at the spa covered in really expensive French” stuff and “a day of community improvement covered in horse” manure, the smile on the community organizer’s face “beat out the smile on the masseur’s face any day.” That is, she had learned that doing good is good for you.
Though Kashdan brought up published studies that optimistic people live longer and that certain regions of the brains of positive people show more activity (“Have a very active left prefrontal lobe day,” he joked at one point), in class they didn’t spend a lot of time on clinical research. Absent were the rats with electrodes, data charts, syndromes and neuroses. The main experimental corpus seemed to be the students themselves, with Kashdan assuming the role of therapist, asserting that pleasure isn’t enough. True happiness comes with meaning, he said, and the students agreed.
I sat in on the course a few more times during the semester, and when Kashdan was done with pleasure versus selfless giving, he took up gratitude and forgiveness, close relationships and love, then spirituality and well-being and finally “meaning and purpose in life.” “I never use the word morality,” Kashdan said. Rather his goal was to show that “there are ways of living that research shows lead to better outcomes.”
More than 200 colleges and graduate schools in the United States offer classes like the one at George Mason. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Barbara Fredrickson passes out notebooks with clouds on a powdery blue cover for each student. At the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, students pass out chocolates and handwritten notes to school custodians and secretaries. The introductory positive-psychology class at Harvard attracted 855 students last spring, making it the most popular class at the school. “I teach my class on two levels,” says Tal Ben-Shahar, the instructor. “It’s like a regular academic course. The second level is where they ask the question, How can I apply this to my life?” True, the course is known as a gut, but it is also significant that 23 percent of the students who commented on it in the undergraduate evaluation guide said that it had improved their lives. “It wasn’t until my senior year that I started thinking maybe law school wasn’t for me,” wrote one graduate, Elizabeth Peterson, in her biographical précis for the masters program in applied positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She had decided to take the class on a whim. “I was pretty much hooked from there. I realized that what I loved the most was talking to people about their problems.”
Positive psychology brings the same attention to positive emotions (happiness, pleasure, well-being) that clinical psychology has always paid to the negative ones (depression, anger, resentment). Psychoanalysis once promised to turn acute human misery into ordinary suffering; positive psychology promises to take mild human pleasure and turn it into a profound state of well-being. “Under certain circumstances, people — they’re not desperate or in misery — they start to wonder what’s the best thing life can offer,” says Martin Seligman, one of the field’s founders, who heads the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Thus positive psychology is not only about maximizing personal happiness but also about embracing civic engagement and spiritual connectedness, hope and charity. “Aristotle taught us virtue isn’t virtue unless you choose it,” Seligman says.
Sitting in Kashdan’s classroom, you might wonder whether psychology had abandoned its proper territory or found a new one, and if a new one, whether it owed more to science or to Sunday school. Perhaps that was because the class reflected the discipline’s own tension between simplicity and complexity, “good tough science,” as Seligman calls it, and airier talk of values. With its emphasis on the self in the world, positive psychology is already an ethics seminar. Which is fitting, given that it has its roots in a Socratic dialogue of sorts. Seligman likes to tell the story of how his daughter Nikki, when she was 5, accused him of being a grouch. She reminded him that he had criticized her for being whiny and that she had worked hard to stop whining. If she could stop being whiny, he could stop being grumpy. He realized, he says, that she was right, that he was “a pessimist and depressive and someone of high critical intelligence” and that he needed to change. Seligman, who at 54 had just been elected president of the American Psychological Association and was renowned for his hard science — most of his research had been in depression — decided to put his considerable talents into finding out “what made life worth living.”
Though positive psychology is only beginning to be used as an educational tool in classrooms and secondary schools, in the nine years since Seligman’s epiphany it has taken a firm hold in academia. The field’s steering committee includes a number of psychologists and psychiatrists who have done highly regarded clinical work: Ed Diener of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, whose specialty is “subjective well-being”; Christopher Peterson at the University of Michigan, who has made a study of admired character traits around the world; George Vaillant, who has long headed a Harvard project tracking success and failure among the college’s graduates; and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of Claremont Graduate University, who has spent years studying “optimal functioning,” or the state of being intensely absorbed in a task, what he calls “flow.” Seligman’s book, “Authentic Happiness,” published in 2002, lays out the field’s fundamental principles and has been translated into nearly 20 languages. Last year’s annual positive-psychology summit in Washington attracted hundreds of academics working in the field or interested in doing so, as well as a children’s programming director, who was working to imbue her cartoons with positive psychology messages, and the Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman, who studies the relationship between economics and perceptions of happiness. In addition there were a lot of “life coaches,” independent consultants who hire themselves out to help clients achieve their life goals.
Despite its seemingly American emphasis on self-reliance and self-expression, positive psychology is also proving popular in England and the British Commonwealth. Nick Baylis, a psychologist at Cambridge University, helped found the Well-being Institute there last year and is consulting with Wellington College, a private boarding and day school, on how to apply positive psychology to its curriculum. The Geelong Grammar School, a prestigious boarding and day school in Australia, is planning to shape its curriculum around the precepts of positive psychology in 2008, and the government of Scotland has also been in touch with Seligman to see whether the discipline might help its citizens. “Our old nation has been renewed through our new Parliament, and if we can embrace this new science of positive psychology, we have the opportunity to create a new Enlightenment,” one government official announced.
Positive psychology is popular with educators because if happiness is something that can be learned, it can be taught. And because being happier seems to have positive long-term effects not just on well-being but also on health and life span. In one often-cited study, researchers at the University of Kentucky analyzed the essays novices born before 1917 wrote on entering the School Sisters of Notre Dame and correlated them to the nuns’ life spans. They found that 9 out of 10 of the most positive 25 percent of the nuns were still alive at 85, while only one-third of the least positive 25 percent were. Overall, their study showed positive emotions correlated to a 10-year increase in life span, greater even than the differential between smokers and nonsmokers. Another study, by Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at U.C. Berkeley, correlated the smiles that the female graduates of Mills College in Oakland, Calif., displayed in two mid-20th-century yearbooks with life satisfaction and found that the bigger the smile, the more satisfying the marriage and the greater their well-being. Inspired by studies like these, positive psychologists have developed “interventions,” or practices, designed to maximize positive emotions and have tested them on thousands of people. One such intervention is to think every night about the good things that happened to you that day. Another is to make sure in any given day that you either work or play in a new area that draws on what positive psychologists call your “signature strengths” to create a sense of well-being. Gratitude visits — looking up someone who has taught or mentored you and thanking him or her — are important in positive psychology, too; this last intervention, studies show, gives the biggest increase in happiness of all.
In the first few weeks of the semester, Kashdan asked his students to keep a record of their thoughts and experiences. He then gave them “experiential assignments” to make them happier, working their emotions the way an athletic coach might work their muscles. One week they were to report on attempts to go into “flow.” “Sex, drugs and chocolate are all highly useful avenues for people to attain flow states,” Kashdan said. To enter flow, students were asked to do something that they were good at, be it writing, playing basketball or talking to their friends. According to positive psychology, your signature strengths play a special role in building your confidence and thus bringing you happiness. Seligman’s Web site, authentichappiness.org, has a 240-question test to help determine whether your gift is for creativity, bravery, love or something else. In class, one student recounted going into flow during a fistfight; another told of being at her father’s grave. A third talked about being with a friend watching TV and suddenly having a profound conversation. “We had so much love for each other,” the student remembered in class, “and suddenly we were crying.”
Several studies undertaken by positive psychologists have suggested that meditation enhances well-being, so another class assignment was to meditate for 15 minutes three days in a row, attend a free yoga class (Kashdan’s wife, a yoga instructor, arranged this with her studio), be mindful twice a day and report on the results. The mindfulness exercises — excercises in heightened awareness and openness to experience — are central to positive psychology and made a big impression, according to Kashdan: “Some said they just noticed for the first time how many types of trees there are on the way to campus.”
The following week, students were asked to watch “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset,” movies starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. In the former, the two fall in love through intense conversation during one long evening in Vienna and then part. The sequel catches up with them nine years later. The students had to write about the first time they fell in love. The next assignment was to pay a gratitude visit or write a gratitude letter. After that, the students were to exercise their curiosity by doing something “novel, complex, and uncertain . . . epistemic, sensory and social” — that is, they were to use their signature strengths to try something new. One student tasted a pomegranate for the first time; another went to a book reading by Carly Fiorina, the former C.E.O. of Hewlett-Packard. Finally, the students were asked to select one memory they would be willing to spend an eternity with, an intervention inspired by the Japanese movie “After Life.”
Kashdan’s enthusiasm — he is a passionate teacher — ate up class time, and so the students never got to other parts of the syllabus, among them optimism exercises and exercises that would make them better teammates. On the last week, students handed in their final papers, describing how they had tried to enhance their lives toward, in Kashdan’s words, “a specific, personally meaningful positive outcome” during the semester. There was no final exam; the students’ grades were based in large part on the paper and class participation.
In an era when psychology is seeking to become a hard science of M.R.I.’s and evidence-based therapies, when, as Seligman says, “if it doesn’t plug into the wall, it’s not science,” positive psychology can seem like a retro endeavor with the appeal of a cure that fits on a recipe card. While this may make it particularly adaptable for use in the classroom, critics are often most disturbed by what they perceive as its prescriptive nature. “There is way too little evidence of stable, long-term benefits — and lack of harm — to justify large-scale incorporation of positive psychology programs into schools,” Julie Norem, chairwoman of the psychology department at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, said in an e-mail message. “It pays scant attention to individual differences.” For all that the open, 1960s-style classroom has fallen out of favor, it allowed a child to find his or her own way. In the words of the founder of the famous Summerhill school in England, a child should be free “to live his own life — not the life that his anxious parents think he should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educator who thinks he knows best.” Children were treated as unique, which you might think would result in a more capable, independent adults. By comparison, positive psychology can seem as if it is laying out a road and asking the adherent to follow. “If I could wave my magic wand, there would be no positive psychology — there would be positive psychologists,” says Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, whose own work in the science of affective forecasting suggests that what we think will make us happy rarely does, or at least not for long. “I guess I just wish it didn’t look so much like a religion.”
Indeed, the sectlike feel of positive psychology can be hard to shake off when watching classes like Kashdan’s or even when reviewing the record of the field’s beginnings. When Seligman was first trying to establish the discipline, he and his colleagues invited 25 young psychologists to the Yucatán to discuss the positive side of life. They snorkeled and talked philosophy and then swam some more. They summarized their work and listened to others’ reactions. One evening, the group devoted itself to poetry and song. Seligman recited Ezra Pound’s “Immorality”; a colleague named Sonja Lyubomirsky read some of Prospero’s speeches from “The Tempest.” Seligman’s daughter Lara — Seligman educates his five younger children in part by traveling with them — recited a Delmore Schwartz poem, “I Am Cherry Alive.”
The talk under the palapas was not just about happiness but also about engagement. Participants contrasted the “hedonic treadmill” with “the meaningful life.” To find the qualities that gave life purpose, the team examined Western religions, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism and Bushido as well as the mores of 70 nations. Over time, positive psychologists, led by Christopher Peterson, settled on 24 virtues — or character strengths, as they prefer to call them — including courage, modesty, spirituality and leadership. “The agenda comes from the world,” Seligman told me. “These are universals we’re after.”
The search for what unites humans in virtue was an ambitious effort to integrate psychology with those fields that have long sat alongside it: ethics, religion, philosophy. Before the retreat in Mexico, Seligman met with one of his former professors, the Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick. His book “The Examined Life,” written late in his career, looked at how questions of value might be related to everyday experience. It was Nozick who suggested a “taxonomy of character,” by which he meant, as Seligman put it, a list of “those abiding moral traits that everyone values.” Lyubomirsky remembers that many of the young scientists were uncomfortable doing so. “There was a lot of debate about it,” she said. “We were trained as hard scientists.” Seligman wasn’t so sure himself that he wanted virtue to be part of positive psychology either: he was wary of science becoming prescriptive, but Csikszentmihalyi was enthusiastic, Seligman recalled, and in the end Seligman agreed.
Two criticisms as troubling as the problem of positive psychology’s religiosity are 1) that it is not new — psychology always cared about happiness and 2) that the publicity about the field has gotten ahead of the science, which may be no good anyway. True, there have been attempts to marry psychology to ethics, to enlist it in the service of decoding what it means to be fully human, throughout its history. In the 1950s and ’60s, for instance, Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, among others, established humanistic psychology to focus on what gave meaning to life, looking at the very subjects positive psychologists now take as their own. But where Maslow and Rogers relied primarily on qualitative research for their theories, Seligman and his colleagues hope to establish positive psychology — and thus the nature of happiness itself — on firmer scientific ground. The idea that whatever science there is may not yet be first-class troubles Seligman, too. “I have the same worry they do. That’s what I do at 4 in the morning,” he says.
When Todd Kashdan asked his students at George Mason to tell him which they liked better, experiencing pleasure or doing good, he cautioned, “Don’t give me the Miss Universe answers.” But when I met the participants in the nation’s only master’s program in applied positive psychology, at the University of Pennsylvania, I felt the spirit of Gandhi was hovering over us. One woman wrote in her application essay, “My strange and energetic career has included activism for peace and justice; teaching safety and self-defense skills to 10,000 students.” She was also a founder of two nonprofit organizations and taught “Swedish massage and stress-reduction skills.” Another sold her Mercedes and was using her savings to pay for the course. A third left banking to find the meaning in life.
There were, in all, about 30 students in the master’s class at Penn on the Saturday in September I attended. MAPP, as the program is known, is organized around intensive days of class time, online work and conference calls. Seligman, who runs the program, says that he likes to invite others to lecture so he can learn what’s going on in the field, and so that day Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina was presenting her “broaden and build” theory, while Seligman sat at a little table nodding and taking notes. “It’s a neat design that allows humans and other organisms to grow and become more resourceful versions of themselves,” she told the class.
The first part of her theory stems from a series of experiments that she published in 2005 in which five groups of 20 people each watched short film clips. The clips were meant to elicit negative, positive or neutral emotions. The participants were given a sheet ruled with 20 blank lines and asked to write down what they were feeling. Those who had just had positive emotions induced were able to provide more ideas about what their responses would be than those with either negative or neutral ones.
For Fredrickson, this was evidence that positive emotions lead to broader thinking. The participants were also tested for what is called global-local-visual processing. When asked to look at a design on a computer of three squares arranged in a triangle, those who had watched happy-making film clips tended to see the broader pattern — i.e. the triangular pattern — while the angrier subjects saw only the squares. (The neutral ones saw some of each.)
This was only the first part of Fredrickson’s theory. But it could be that thinking broadly has no effect on happiness or well-being — it might even be a deficit. To show that broadening led to building, she then described an experiment she had undertaken on a group of employees at Compuware, a progressive information-technology firm in Detroit. With the company’s assistance, she followed two groups — one that was taught a loving-kindness meditation (a meditation in which the practitioner repeats phrases that cultivate a caring attitude toward all life) and one that was wait-listed for the meditation. After eight weeks, she compared the two groups’ responses to questions about well-being. Those who meditated reported higher mental resources than before; their mindfulness, freedom from illness and connectedness to others all increased. But interestingly, their sense of well-being hadn’t, at least not immediately. It dropped at first. “It’s like you started a gym membership and then you realize you have to go,” Fredrickson theorized. But once their sense of well-being increased, they retained their edge over those who only wanted to meditate even after the meditation program was over.
All this interested Seligman’s students, but what Fredrickson says always catches their attention most is a study Fredrickson did with a Brazilian workplace psychologist named Marcia Losada, who observed annual strategic-review meetings of employees through one-way mirrors. The data she collected showed that the most effective teams — the criteria were customer satisfaction, profitability and internal review — were the ones who had more positive meetings. There was even a number that corresponded to the minimum amount of positive to negative feedback necessary to encourage successful functioning. That number, Fredrickson told the class, was three positive comments to one negative comment. “The ratio lady,” one student called her.
With its emphasis on universals and practical applications, positive psychology fits these divided times: it preaches values without linking them to a particular value system and embraces spirituality without making you go to church. When positive psychology was introduced into the language-arts program at Strath Haven High School outside Philadelphia in 2003, the left-leaning parents welcomed it because the values were internationally accepted; all but the most conservative ones were reassured that there were values at all.
Seligman recently held a meeting with the leaders from the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, the Episcopal Academy in Merion, Pa., the Riverdale Country School in the Bronx and the KIPP program, a national network of public charter schools, at which the educational leaders discussed introducing positive psychology into their schools. They are all looking to restore “wholeness” to the teenage years, to replace the supposed sense of certainty that the ’60s removed and that returned in the ’80s as a national political objective but that teachers are now too bogged down in the fundamentals to teach and adults, working longer and longer hours, are simply too busy to shore up at home. A follow-up meeting is scheduled for June, this time with a dozen schools; one item on the agenda is to add personal strengths and virtues to admissions criteria. (Educational Testing Service is exploring a test that students wouldn’t be able to fake.) “What this is about is building character,” Seligman says.
Currently, the biggest project on positive psychology’s drawing board is at the Geelong School. “As a school, we would like to know how to make all students more resilient, how to turn depressing thoughts into positive ones,” Charles Scudamore, the head of the project at what Seligman calls “Australia’s Eton,” wrote in an e-mail message. That there is a need for a curriculum to promote engagement and happiness among teenagers is obvious, and Geelong is the first school to give positive psychologists a chance to show that they can really change teaching. According to Scudamore, “When we adopt a positive-psychology approach, it will be seen and practiced in all that we do.” The Australians “have had a lot of depression in kids, that’s half the reason they want it,” said Ed Diener, the professor of psychology at the University of Illinois.
What the psychologists have in mind for Geelong is very much the sort of intervention Kashdan was teaching at George Mason. The draft proposal by which they secured Geelong’s support included gratitude exercises, exercises in the “three pathways of happiness,” “the four ways to promote savoring” and “the five ways to overcome” adversity. To teach savoring, the teacher would explain mindfulness and show the students how to taste their food more thoroughly and then instruct them to try “savoring with a friend.” The students would have journals to record their emotions, their “grudges and gratitudes.” They would mentor a younger student too. Scudamore says he hopes that even the teachers will feel “their well-being” and their teaching skills enhanced. Seligman and his family are scheduled to make a six-month visit. An American-trained positive-psychology instructor will be in residence to provide training and real-time feedback.
This endeavor outstrips the ongoing Strath Haven experiment. The effort there, financed by a $2.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, is limited to the ninth-grade language-arts program. At the school last year, the positive psychologists interwove their teachings with the literature classes. The idea was to buffer the lessons from bleak books like “Lord of the Flies” and “Romeo and Juliet” with some reassuring thoughts — or at least a more positive framework for understanding human behavior than the classics offer. Thus, according to Mark Linkins, now coordinator of the Swarthmore school district’s curriculum, who helped teach the classes, the animalistic and murderous Jack in “Lord of the Flies” shows “what happens when someone is lacking in signature strengths.” And when reading “The Odyssey,” students were asked: “What are the signature strengths that Odysseus lived and breathed? What are the things he might have improved on to make things go better?” It is too soon to know the effect of these stratagems on the school’s students, since part of the protocol agreed to with the Department of Education requires that they be followed for four years. The results will be compared with a control group that received the standard curriculum. (For his part, Seligman home-schools the children he had with his second wife. He says he likes to balance the standard high-school fare he gives the older ones with “books in which notions of virtue and nobility do not end in humiliation and death,” like Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s End.”)
Not all positive psychologists are sure educational interventions are a good idea. Lyubormisky, for instance, turned down a similar request from the Compton school system in California. “I did not think the science was ready to be applied in that big a way,” she told me. Linkins acknowledges that happiness may come at the cost of a full understanding of literature and human complexity. But, he said, “it’s preferable to be happy than not, even if that means the potential for creative output is diminished.”
The question is, Can positive psychology actually fulfill its promise of making people happier? If positive emotions widen the sphere of what it is to be human, as positive psychology asserts, then positive psychology, at least as it is taught in the classroom, can seem to narrow it. If you are not optimistic, fake it. If you do not have friends, make some. I wondered what sort of student positive psychology would create. Was he or she more likely to be a future Nobel Peace Prize winner or J. P. (Gus) Godsey, the Virginia Beach stockbroker, dad and Craftsmen-tool enthusiast whom USA Weekend Magazine declared in 2003 “the happiest person in America” (“You are a blessed, happy person, Gus,” Martin Seligman commented in the article. “You’ve created many of your blessings on your own.”)
When I e-mailed various graduates of Penn’s first master’s class, I found that they continued to take positive psychology’s emphasis on the engaged life very seriously. One woman was using positive psychology to teach first-year medical students better patient-communication skills, citing Fredrickson’s optimal flourishing ratio as a benchmark. John Yeager, who has a doctorate in education and runs the Center for Character Excellence at the Culver Academies, a boarding school in Indiana, wants to “help teachers ‘broaden and build’ character strengths and positive emotions in children, young adults and themselves.”
Of course the master’s students were a self-selected group, willing to pay almost $40,000 for a degree with no clear career track. The students at George Mason, though they, too, had chosen the course, were perhaps more relevant to the question of what positive psychology can really teach. There I found a mixed response. They seemed remarkably sure that they had undergone an important experience but less sure what the nature of that experience had been. Had they saved the world or themselves? I spoke to Brandon Rasmussen, an easygoing student who seemed to me like a surfer dude washed up on some New Age shore. The class had energized him, and he had been a vigorous participant — earning an A. His final paper was about learning to really be with his friends, going into flow with them, something he had long had difficulty doing. “My personal satisfaction is the personal measure for me, and my personal satisfaction is great,” he explained. “I hate to say this, but really in the scheme of things we’re not going to change the war in Iraq.” Then he paused and thought how that sounded. “We can only fix the world one person at a time.”
D.T. Max is a frequent contributor to the magazine. His most recent book is “The Family That Couldn’t Sleep,” a scientific and cultural history of fatal familial insomnia, mad cow and other prion diseases.
Published: January 7, 2007
One Tuesday last fall I sat in on a positive-psychology class called the Science of Well-Being — essentially a class in how to make yourself happier — at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. George Mason is a challenge for positive psychologists because it is one of the 15 unhappiest campuses in America, at least per The Princeton Review. Many students are married and already working and commute to school. It’s a place where you go to move your career forward, not to find yourself.
The class was taught by Todd Kashdan, a 32-year-old psychology professor whose area of research is “curiosity and well-being.” Kashdan bobbed around the room or sat, legs dangling, on his desk beneath a big PowerPoint slide that said “The Scientific Pursuit of Happiness” as he took the students, a few older than he, through the various building blocks of positive psychology: optimism, gratitude, mindfulness, hope, spirituality. Though the syllabus promised to “approach every topic in this class as scientists” and the assigned readings were academic, the classroom discussion was Oprah-ish. The students seemed intrigued by the research Kashdan presented mostly in relation to their own lives.
The focus of Kashdan’s class that day was the distinction between feeling good, which according to positive psychologists only creates a hunger for more pleasure — they call this syndrome the hedonic treadmill — and doing good, which can lead to lasting happiness. The students had been asked first to do something that gave them pleasure and then to perform an act of selfless kindness. They approached the first part of the assignment eagerly. One student recounted having sex with her boyfriend 30 feet underwater while scuba diving. Another said he “went to Coastal Flats and got hammered.” A third attended a Nascar race in North Carolina, smoked, drank and had sex. Some also watched favorite TV shows; others chatted with friends.
When it came time to talk about the second part of the assignment, the students were excited, too. The Nascar attendee, who was afraid of needles, gave blood. Another collected clothes from family members and donated them to a shelter for battered women. The boy who had gotten hammered bought a homeless person a 12-pack of “Natty Ice” at a 7-Eleven, wondering if it was the right thing to do. A fourth gave her waiter at Denny’s a $50 tip. At times, Kashdan, who ran the class in the nonjudgmental manner of a ’70s rap-session leader — he used the word “cool” a lot — would compliment them on their behavior and pull out a moral. In this case, as one student wrote in a summary she submitted to Kashdan, comparing “a day at the spa covered in really expensive French” stuff and “a day of community improvement covered in horse” manure, the smile on the community organizer’s face “beat out the smile on the masseur’s face any day.” That is, she had learned that doing good is good for you.
Though Kashdan brought up published studies that optimistic people live longer and that certain regions of the brains of positive people show more activity (“Have a very active left prefrontal lobe day,” he joked at one point), in class they didn’t spend a lot of time on clinical research. Absent were the rats with electrodes, data charts, syndromes and neuroses. The main experimental corpus seemed to be the students themselves, with Kashdan assuming the role of therapist, asserting that pleasure isn’t enough. True happiness comes with meaning, he said, and the students agreed.
I sat in on the course a few more times during the semester, and when Kashdan was done with pleasure versus selfless giving, he took up gratitude and forgiveness, close relationships and love, then spirituality and well-being and finally “meaning and purpose in life.” “I never use the word morality,” Kashdan said. Rather his goal was to show that “there are ways of living that research shows lead to better outcomes.”
More than 200 colleges and graduate schools in the United States offer classes like the one at George Mason. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Barbara Fredrickson passes out notebooks with clouds on a powdery blue cover for each student. At the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, students pass out chocolates and handwritten notes to school custodians and secretaries. The introductory positive-psychology class at Harvard attracted 855 students last spring, making it the most popular class at the school. “I teach my class on two levels,” says Tal Ben-Shahar, the instructor. “It’s like a regular academic course. The second level is where they ask the question, How can I apply this to my life?” True, the course is known as a gut, but it is also significant that 23 percent of the students who commented on it in the undergraduate evaluation guide said that it had improved their lives. “It wasn’t until my senior year that I started thinking maybe law school wasn’t for me,” wrote one graduate, Elizabeth Peterson, in her biographical précis for the masters program in applied positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She had decided to take the class on a whim. “I was pretty much hooked from there. I realized that what I loved the most was talking to people about their problems.”
Positive psychology brings the same attention to positive emotions (happiness, pleasure, well-being) that clinical psychology has always paid to the negative ones (depression, anger, resentment). Psychoanalysis once promised to turn acute human misery into ordinary suffering; positive psychology promises to take mild human pleasure and turn it into a profound state of well-being. “Under certain circumstances, people — they’re not desperate or in misery — they start to wonder what’s the best thing life can offer,” says Martin Seligman, one of the field’s founders, who heads the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Thus positive psychology is not only about maximizing personal happiness but also about embracing civic engagement and spiritual connectedness, hope and charity. “Aristotle taught us virtue isn’t virtue unless you choose it,” Seligman says.
Sitting in Kashdan’s classroom, you might wonder whether psychology had abandoned its proper territory or found a new one, and if a new one, whether it owed more to science or to Sunday school. Perhaps that was because the class reflected the discipline’s own tension between simplicity and complexity, “good tough science,” as Seligman calls it, and airier talk of values. With its emphasis on the self in the world, positive psychology is already an ethics seminar. Which is fitting, given that it has its roots in a Socratic dialogue of sorts. Seligman likes to tell the story of how his daughter Nikki, when she was 5, accused him of being a grouch. She reminded him that he had criticized her for being whiny and that she had worked hard to stop whining. If she could stop being whiny, he could stop being grumpy. He realized, he says, that she was right, that he was “a pessimist and depressive and someone of high critical intelligence” and that he needed to change. Seligman, who at 54 had just been elected president of the American Psychological Association and was renowned for his hard science — most of his research had been in depression — decided to put his considerable talents into finding out “what made life worth living.”
Though positive psychology is only beginning to be used as an educational tool in classrooms and secondary schools, in the nine years since Seligman’s epiphany it has taken a firm hold in academia. The field’s steering committee includes a number of psychologists and psychiatrists who have done highly regarded clinical work: Ed Diener of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, whose specialty is “subjective well-being”; Christopher Peterson at the University of Michigan, who has made a study of admired character traits around the world; George Vaillant, who has long headed a Harvard project tracking success and failure among the college’s graduates; and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of Claremont Graduate University, who has spent years studying “optimal functioning,” or the state of being intensely absorbed in a task, what he calls “flow.” Seligman’s book, “Authentic Happiness,” published in 2002, lays out the field’s fundamental principles and has been translated into nearly 20 languages. Last year’s annual positive-psychology summit in Washington attracted hundreds of academics working in the field or interested in doing so, as well as a children’s programming director, who was working to imbue her cartoons with positive psychology messages, and the Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman, who studies the relationship between economics and perceptions of happiness. In addition there were a lot of “life coaches,” independent consultants who hire themselves out to help clients achieve their life goals.
Despite its seemingly American emphasis on self-reliance and self-expression, positive psychology is also proving popular in England and the British Commonwealth. Nick Baylis, a psychologist at Cambridge University, helped found the Well-being Institute there last year and is consulting with Wellington College, a private boarding and day school, on how to apply positive psychology to its curriculum. The Geelong Grammar School, a prestigious boarding and day school in Australia, is planning to shape its curriculum around the precepts of positive psychology in 2008, and the government of Scotland has also been in touch with Seligman to see whether the discipline might help its citizens. “Our old nation has been renewed through our new Parliament, and if we can embrace this new science of positive psychology, we have the opportunity to create a new Enlightenment,” one government official announced.
Positive psychology is popular with educators because if happiness is something that can be learned, it can be taught. And because being happier seems to have positive long-term effects not just on well-being but also on health and life span. In one often-cited study, researchers at the University of Kentucky analyzed the essays novices born before 1917 wrote on entering the School Sisters of Notre Dame and correlated them to the nuns’ life spans. They found that 9 out of 10 of the most positive 25 percent of the nuns were still alive at 85, while only one-third of the least positive 25 percent were. Overall, their study showed positive emotions correlated to a 10-year increase in life span, greater even than the differential between smokers and nonsmokers. Another study, by Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at U.C. Berkeley, correlated the smiles that the female graduates of Mills College in Oakland, Calif., displayed in two mid-20th-century yearbooks with life satisfaction and found that the bigger the smile, the more satisfying the marriage and the greater their well-being. Inspired by studies like these, positive psychologists have developed “interventions,” or practices, designed to maximize positive emotions and have tested them on thousands of people. One such intervention is to think every night about the good things that happened to you that day. Another is to make sure in any given day that you either work or play in a new area that draws on what positive psychologists call your “signature strengths” to create a sense of well-being. Gratitude visits — looking up someone who has taught or mentored you and thanking him or her — are important in positive psychology, too; this last intervention, studies show, gives the biggest increase in happiness of all.
In the first few weeks of the semester, Kashdan asked his students to keep a record of their thoughts and experiences. He then gave them “experiential assignments” to make them happier, working their emotions the way an athletic coach might work their muscles. One week they were to report on attempts to go into “flow.” “Sex, drugs and chocolate are all highly useful avenues for people to attain flow states,” Kashdan said. To enter flow, students were asked to do something that they were good at, be it writing, playing basketball or talking to their friends. According to positive psychology, your signature strengths play a special role in building your confidence and thus bringing you happiness. Seligman’s Web site, authentichappiness.org, has a 240-question test to help determine whether your gift is for creativity, bravery, love or something else. In class, one student recounted going into flow during a fistfight; another told of being at her father’s grave. A third talked about being with a friend watching TV and suddenly having a profound conversation. “We had so much love for each other,” the student remembered in class, “and suddenly we were crying.”
Several studies undertaken by positive psychologists have suggested that meditation enhances well-being, so another class assignment was to meditate for 15 minutes three days in a row, attend a free yoga class (Kashdan’s wife, a yoga instructor, arranged this with her studio), be mindful twice a day and report on the results. The mindfulness exercises — excercises in heightened awareness and openness to experience — are central to positive psychology and made a big impression, according to Kashdan: “Some said they just noticed for the first time how many types of trees there are on the way to campus.”
The following week, students were asked to watch “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset,” movies starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. In the former, the two fall in love through intense conversation during one long evening in Vienna and then part. The sequel catches up with them nine years later. The students had to write about the first time they fell in love. The next assignment was to pay a gratitude visit or write a gratitude letter. After that, the students were to exercise their curiosity by doing something “novel, complex, and uncertain . . . epistemic, sensory and social” — that is, they were to use their signature strengths to try something new. One student tasted a pomegranate for the first time; another went to a book reading by Carly Fiorina, the former C.E.O. of Hewlett-Packard. Finally, the students were asked to select one memory they would be willing to spend an eternity with, an intervention inspired by the Japanese movie “After Life.”
Kashdan’s enthusiasm — he is a passionate teacher — ate up class time, and so the students never got to other parts of the syllabus, among them optimism exercises and exercises that would make them better teammates. On the last week, students handed in their final papers, describing how they had tried to enhance their lives toward, in Kashdan’s words, “a specific, personally meaningful positive outcome” during the semester. There was no final exam; the students’ grades were based in large part on the paper and class participation.
In an era when psychology is seeking to become a hard science of M.R.I.’s and evidence-based therapies, when, as Seligman says, “if it doesn’t plug into the wall, it’s not science,” positive psychology can seem like a retro endeavor with the appeal of a cure that fits on a recipe card. While this may make it particularly adaptable for use in the classroom, critics are often most disturbed by what they perceive as its prescriptive nature. “There is way too little evidence of stable, long-term benefits — and lack of harm — to justify large-scale incorporation of positive psychology programs into schools,” Julie Norem, chairwoman of the psychology department at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, said in an e-mail message. “It pays scant attention to individual differences.” For all that the open, 1960s-style classroom has fallen out of favor, it allowed a child to find his or her own way. In the words of the founder of the famous Summerhill school in England, a child should be free “to live his own life — not the life that his anxious parents think he should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educator who thinks he knows best.” Children were treated as unique, which you might think would result in a more capable, independent adults. By comparison, positive psychology can seem as if it is laying out a road and asking the adherent to follow. “If I could wave my magic wand, there would be no positive psychology — there would be positive psychologists,” says Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, whose own work in the science of affective forecasting suggests that what we think will make us happy rarely does, or at least not for long. “I guess I just wish it didn’t look so much like a religion.”
Indeed, the sectlike feel of positive psychology can be hard to shake off when watching classes like Kashdan’s or even when reviewing the record of the field’s beginnings. When Seligman was first trying to establish the discipline, he and his colleagues invited 25 young psychologists to the Yucatán to discuss the positive side of life. They snorkeled and talked philosophy and then swam some more. They summarized their work and listened to others’ reactions. One evening, the group devoted itself to poetry and song. Seligman recited Ezra Pound’s “Immorality”; a colleague named Sonja Lyubomirsky read some of Prospero’s speeches from “The Tempest.” Seligman’s daughter Lara — Seligman educates his five younger children in part by traveling with them — recited a Delmore Schwartz poem, “I Am Cherry Alive.”
The talk under the palapas was not just about happiness but also about engagement. Participants contrasted the “hedonic treadmill” with “the meaningful life.” To find the qualities that gave life purpose, the team examined Western religions, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism and Bushido as well as the mores of 70 nations. Over time, positive psychologists, led by Christopher Peterson, settled on 24 virtues — or character strengths, as they prefer to call them — including courage, modesty, spirituality and leadership. “The agenda comes from the world,” Seligman told me. “These are universals we’re after.”
The search for what unites humans in virtue was an ambitious effort to integrate psychology with those fields that have long sat alongside it: ethics, religion, philosophy. Before the retreat in Mexico, Seligman met with one of his former professors, the Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick. His book “The Examined Life,” written late in his career, looked at how questions of value might be related to everyday experience. It was Nozick who suggested a “taxonomy of character,” by which he meant, as Seligman put it, a list of “those abiding moral traits that everyone values.” Lyubomirsky remembers that many of the young scientists were uncomfortable doing so. “There was a lot of debate about it,” she said. “We were trained as hard scientists.” Seligman wasn’t so sure himself that he wanted virtue to be part of positive psychology either: he was wary of science becoming prescriptive, but Csikszentmihalyi was enthusiastic, Seligman recalled, and in the end Seligman agreed.
Two criticisms as troubling as the problem of positive psychology’s religiosity are 1) that it is not new — psychology always cared about happiness and 2) that the publicity about the field has gotten ahead of the science, which may be no good anyway. True, there have been attempts to marry psychology to ethics, to enlist it in the service of decoding what it means to be fully human, throughout its history. In the 1950s and ’60s, for instance, Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, among others, established humanistic psychology to focus on what gave meaning to life, looking at the very subjects positive psychologists now take as their own. But where Maslow and Rogers relied primarily on qualitative research for their theories, Seligman and his colleagues hope to establish positive psychology — and thus the nature of happiness itself — on firmer scientific ground. The idea that whatever science there is may not yet be first-class troubles Seligman, too. “I have the same worry they do. That’s what I do at 4 in the morning,” he says.
When Todd Kashdan asked his students at George Mason to tell him which they liked better, experiencing pleasure or doing good, he cautioned, “Don’t give me the Miss Universe answers.” But when I met the participants in the nation’s only master’s program in applied positive psychology, at the University of Pennsylvania, I felt the spirit of Gandhi was hovering over us. One woman wrote in her application essay, “My strange and energetic career has included activism for peace and justice; teaching safety and self-defense skills to 10,000 students.” She was also a founder of two nonprofit organizations and taught “Swedish massage and stress-reduction skills.” Another sold her Mercedes and was using her savings to pay for the course. A third left banking to find the meaning in life.
There were, in all, about 30 students in the master’s class at Penn on the Saturday in September I attended. MAPP, as the program is known, is organized around intensive days of class time, online work and conference calls. Seligman, who runs the program, says that he likes to invite others to lecture so he can learn what’s going on in the field, and so that day Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina was presenting her “broaden and build” theory, while Seligman sat at a little table nodding and taking notes. “It’s a neat design that allows humans and other organisms to grow and become more resourceful versions of themselves,” she told the class.
The first part of her theory stems from a series of experiments that she published in 2005 in which five groups of 20 people each watched short film clips. The clips were meant to elicit negative, positive or neutral emotions. The participants were given a sheet ruled with 20 blank lines and asked to write down what they were feeling. Those who had just had positive emotions induced were able to provide more ideas about what their responses would be than those with either negative or neutral ones.
For Fredrickson, this was evidence that positive emotions lead to broader thinking. The participants were also tested for what is called global-local-visual processing. When asked to look at a design on a computer of three squares arranged in a triangle, those who had watched happy-making film clips tended to see the broader pattern — i.e. the triangular pattern — while the angrier subjects saw only the squares. (The neutral ones saw some of each.)
This was only the first part of Fredrickson’s theory. But it could be that thinking broadly has no effect on happiness or well-being — it might even be a deficit. To show that broadening led to building, she then described an experiment she had undertaken on a group of employees at Compuware, a progressive information-technology firm in Detroit. With the company’s assistance, she followed two groups — one that was taught a loving-kindness meditation (a meditation in which the practitioner repeats phrases that cultivate a caring attitude toward all life) and one that was wait-listed for the meditation. After eight weeks, she compared the two groups’ responses to questions about well-being. Those who meditated reported higher mental resources than before; their mindfulness, freedom from illness and connectedness to others all increased. But interestingly, their sense of well-being hadn’t, at least not immediately. It dropped at first. “It’s like you started a gym membership and then you realize you have to go,” Fredrickson theorized. But once their sense of well-being increased, they retained their edge over those who only wanted to meditate even after the meditation program was over.
All this interested Seligman’s students, but what Fredrickson says always catches their attention most is a study Fredrickson did with a Brazilian workplace psychologist named Marcia Losada, who observed annual strategic-review meetings of employees through one-way mirrors. The data she collected showed that the most effective teams — the criteria were customer satisfaction, profitability and internal review — were the ones who had more positive meetings. There was even a number that corresponded to the minimum amount of positive to negative feedback necessary to encourage successful functioning. That number, Fredrickson told the class, was three positive comments to one negative comment. “The ratio lady,” one student called her.
With its emphasis on universals and practical applications, positive psychology fits these divided times: it preaches values without linking them to a particular value system and embraces spirituality without making you go to church. When positive psychology was introduced into the language-arts program at Strath Haven High School outside Philadelphia in 2003, the left-leaning parents welcomed it because the values were internationally accepted; all but the most conservative ones were reassured that there were values at all.
Seligman recently held a meeting with the leaders from the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, the Episcopal Academy in Merion, Pa., the Riverdale Country School in the Bronx and the KIPP program, a national network of public charter schools, at which the educational leaders discussed introducing positive psychology into their schools. They are all looking to restore “wholeness” to the teenage years, to replace the supposed sense of certainty that the ’60s removed and that returned in the ’80s as a national political objective but that teachers are now too bogged down in the fundamentals to teach and adults, working longer and longer hours, are simply too busy to shore up at home. A follow-up meeting is scheduled for June, this time with a dozen schools; one item on the agenda is to add personal strengths and virtues to admissions criteria. (Educational Testing Service is exploring a test that students wouldn’t be able to fake.) “What this is about is building character,” Seligman says.
Currently, the biggest project on positive psychology’s drawing board is at the Geelong School. “As a school, we would like to know how to make all students more resilient, how to turn depressing thoughts into positive ones,” Charles Scudamore, the head of the project at what Seligman calls “Australia’s Eton,” wrote in an e-mail message. That there is a need for a curriculum to promote engagement and happiness among teenagers is obvious, and Geelong is the first school to give positive psychologists a chance to show that they can really change teaching. According to Scudamore, “When we adopt a positive-psychology approach, it will be seen and practiced in all that we do.” The Australians “have had a lot of depression in kids, that’s half the reason they want it,” said Ed Diener, the professor of psychology at the University of Illinois.
What the psychologists have in mind for Geelong is very much the sort of intervention Kashdan was teaching at George Mason. The draft proposal by which they secured Geelong’s support included gratitude exercises, exercises in the “three pathways of happiness,” “the four ways to promote savoring” and “the five ways to overcome” adversity. To teach savoring, the teacher would explain mindfulness and show the students how to taste their food more thoroughly and then instruct them to try “savoring with a friend.” The students would have journals to record their emotions, their “grudges and gratitudes.” They would mentor a younger student too. Scudamore says he hopes that even the teachers will feel “their well-being” and their teaching skills enhanced. Seligman and his family are scheduled to make a six-month visit. An American-trained positive-psychology instructor will be in residence to provide training and real-time feedback.
This endeavor outstrips the ongoing Strath Haven experiment. The effort there, financed by a $2.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, is limited to the ninth-grade language-arts program. At the school last year, the positive psychologists interwove their teachings with the literature classes. The idea was to buffer the lessons from bleak books like “Lord of the Flies” and “Romeo and Juliet” with some reassuring thoughts — or at least a more positive framework for understanding human behavior than the classics offer. Thus, according to Mark Linkins, now coordinator of the Swarthmore school district’s curriculum, who helped teach the classes, the animalistic and murderous Jack in “Lord of the Flies” shows “what happens when someone is lacking in signature strengths.” And when reading “The Odyssey,” students were asked: “What are the signature strengths that Odysseus lived and breathed? What are the things he might have improved on to make things go better?” It is too soon to know the effect of these stratagems on the school’s students, since part of the protocol agreed to with the Department of Education requires that they be followed for four years. The results will be compared with a control group that received the standard curriculum. (For his part, Seligman home-schools the children he had with his second wife. He says he likes to balance the standard high-school fare he gives the older ones with “books in which notions of virtue and nobility do not end in humiliation and death,” like Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s End.”)
Not all positive psychologists are sure educational interventions are a good idea. Lyubormisky, for instance, turned down a similar request from the Compton school system in California. “I did not think the science was ready to be applied in that big a way,” she told me. Linkins acknowledges that happiness may come at the cost of a full understanding of literature and human complexity. But, he said, “it’s preferable to be happy than not, even if that means the potential for creative output is diminished.”
The question is, Can positive psychology actually fulfill its promise of making people happier? If positive emotions widen the sphere of what it is to be human, as positive psychology asserts, then positive psychology, at least as it is taught in the classroom, can seem to narrow it. If you are not optimistic, fake it. If you do not have friends, make some. I wondered what sort of student positive psychology would create. Was he or she more likely to be a future Nobel Peace Prize winner or J. P. (Gus) Godsey, the Virginia Beach stockbroker, dad and Craftsmen-tool enthusiast whom USA Weekend Magazine declared in 2003 “the happiest person in America” (“You are a blessed, happy person, Gus,” Martin Seligman commented in the article. “You’ve created many of your blessings on your own.”)
When I e-mailed various graduates of Penn’s first master’s class, I found that they continued to take positive psychology’s emphasis on the engaged life very seriously. One woman was using positive psychology to teach first-year medical students better patient-communication skills, citing Fredrickson’s optimal flourishing ratio as a benchmark. John Yeager, who has a doctorate in education and runs the Center for Character Excellence at the Culver Academies, a boarding school in Indiana, wants to “help teachers ‘broaden and build’ character strengths and positive emotions in children, young adults and themselves.”
Of course the master’s students were a self-selected group, willing to pay almost $40,000 for a degree with no clear career track. The students at George Mason, though they, too, had chosen the course, were perhaps more relevant to the question of what positive psychology can really teach. There I found a mixed response. They seemed remarkably sure that they had undergone an important experience but less sure what the nature of that experience had been. Had they saved the world or themselves? I spoke to Brandon Rasmussen, an easygoing student who seemed to me like a surfer dude washed up on some New Age shore. The class had energized him, and he had been a vigorous participant — earning an A. His final paper was about learning to really be with his friends, going into flow with them, something he had long had difficulty doing. “My personal satisfaction is the personal measure for me, and my personal satisfaction is great,” he explained. “I hate to say this, but really in the scheme of things we’re not going to change the war in Iraq.” Then he paused and thought how that sounded. “We can only fix the world one person at a time.”
D.T. Max is a frequent contributor to the magazine. His most recent book is “The Family That Couldn’t Sleep,” a scientific and cultural history of fatal familial insomnia, mad cow and other prion diseases.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Happy Like God By Simon Critchley
What is happiness? How does one get a grip on this most elusive, intractable and perhaps unanswerable of questions?
I teach philosophy for a living, so let me begin with a philosophical answer. For the philosophers of Antiquity, notably Aristotle, it was assumed that the goal of the philosophical life — the good life, moreover — was happiness and that the latter could be defined as the bios theoretikos, the solitary life of contemplation. Today, few people would seem to subscribe to this view. Our lives are filled with the endless distractions of cell phones, car alarms, commuter woes and the traffic in Bangalore. The rhythm of modern life is punctuated by beeps, bleeps and a generalized attention deficit disorder.
But is the idea of happiness as an experience of contemplation really so ridiculous? Might there not be something in it? I am reminded of the following extraordinary passage from Rousseau’s final book and his third (count them — he still beats Obama 3-to-2) autobiography, “Reveries of a Solitary Walker”:
If there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul. (emphases mine)
This is as close to a description of happiness as I can imagine. Rousseau is describing the experience of floating in a little rowing boat on the Lake of Bienne close to Neuchâtel in his native Switzerland. He particularly loved visiting the Île Saint Pierre, where he used to enjoy going for exploratory walks when the weather was fine and he could indulge in the great passion of his last years: botany. He would walk with a copy of Linneaus under his arm, happily identifying plants in areas of the deserted island that he had divided for this purpose into small squares.
On the way to the island, he would pull in the oars and just let the boat drift where it wished, for hours at a time. Rousseau would lie down in the boat and plunge into a deep reverie. How does one describe the experience of reverie: one is awake, but half asleep, thinking, but not in an instrumental, calculative or ordered way, simply letting the thoughts happen, as they will.
Happiness is not quantitative or measurable and it is not the object of any science, old or new. It cannot be gleaned from empirical surveys or programmed into individuals through a combination of behavioral therapy and anti-depressants. If it consists in anything, then I think that happiness is this feeling of existence, this sentiment of momentary self-sufficiency that is bound up with the experience of time
Look at what Rousseau writes above: floating in a boat in fine weather, lying down with one’s eyes open to the clouds and birds or closed in reverie, one feels neither the pull of the past nor does one reach into the future. Time is nothing, or rather time is nothing but the experience of the present through which one passes without hurry, but without regret. As Wittgenstein writes in what must be the most intriguing remark in the “Tractatus,” “the eternal life is given to those who live in the present.” Or ,as Whitman writes in “Leaves of Grass”: “Happiness is not in another place, but in this place…not for another hour…but this hour.”
Rousseau asks, “What is the source of our happiness in such a state?” He answers that it is nothing external to us and nothing apart from our own existence. However frenetic our environment, such a feeling of existence can be achieved. He then goes on, amazingly, to conclude, “as long as this state lasts we are self-sufficient like God.”
God-like, then. To which one might reply: Who? Me? Us? Like God? Dare we? But think about it: If anyone is happy, then one imagines that God is pretty happy, and to be happy is to be like God. But consider what this means, for it might not be as ludicrous, hybristic or heretical as one might imagine. To be like God is to be without time, or rather in time with no concern for time, free of the passions and troubles of the soul, experiencing something like calm in the face of things and of oneself.
Why should happiness be bound up with the presence and movement of water? This is the case for Rousseau and I must confess that if I think back over those experiences of blissful reverie that are close to what Rousseau is describing then it is often in proximity to water, although usually saltwater rather than fresh. For me, it is not so much the stillness of a lake (I tend to see lakes as decaffeinated seas), but rather the never-ending drone of the surf, sitting by the sea in fair weather or foul and feeling time disappear into tide, into the endless pendulum of the tidal range. At moments like this, one can sink into deep reverie, a motionlessness that is not sleep, but where one is somehow held by the sound of the surf, lulled by the tidal movement.
Is all happiness solitary? Of course not. But one can be happy alone and this might even be the key to being happy with others. Wordsworth wandered lonely as a cloud when walking with his sister. However, I think that one can also experience this feeling of existence in the experience of love, in being intimate with one’s lover, feeling the world close around one and time slips away in its passing. Rousseau’s rowing boat becomes the lovers’ bed and one bids the world farewell as one slides into the shared selfishness of intimacy.
…And then it is over. Time passes, the reverie ends and the feeling for existence fades. The cell phone rings, the e-mail beeps and one is sucked back into the world’s relentless hum and our accompanying anxiety.
Simon Critchley is chair of philosophy at the New School for Social Research and the author of several books, including his most recent, “The Book of Dead Philosophers
I teach philosophy for a living, so let me begin with a philosophical answer. For the philosophers of Antiquity, notably Aristotle, it was assumed that the goal of the philosophical life — the good life, moreover — was happiness and that the latter could be defined as the bios theoretikos, the solitary life of contemplation. Today, few people would seem to subscribe to this view. Our lives are filled with the endless distractions of cell phones, car alarms, commuter woes and the traffic in Bangalore. The rhythm of modern life is punctuated by beeps, bleeps and a generalized attention deficit disorder.
But is the idea of happiness as an experience of contemplation really so ridiculous? Might there not be something in it? I am reminded of the following extraordinary passage from Rousseau’s final book and his third (count them — he still beats Obama 3-to-2) autobiography, “Reveries of a Solitary Walker”:
If there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul. (emphases mine)
This is as close to a description of happiness as I can imagine. Rousseau is describing the experience of floating in a little rowing boat on the Lake of Bienne close to Neuchâtel in his native Switzerland. He particularly loved visiting the Île Saint Pierre, where he used to enjoy going for exploratory walks when the weather was fine and he could indulge in the great passion of his last years: botany. He would walk with a copy of Linneaus under his arm, happily identifying plants in areas of the deserted island that he had divided for this purpose into small squares.
On the way to the island, he would pull in the oars and just let the boat drift where it wished, for hours at a time. Rousseau would lie down in the boat and plunge into a deep reverie. How does one describe the experience of reverie: one is awake, but half asleep, thinking, but not in an instrumental, calculative or ordered way, simply letting the thoughts happen, as they will.
Happiness is not quantitative or measurable and it is not the object of any science, old or new. It cannot be gleaned from empirical surveys or programmed into individuals through a combination of behavioral therapy and anti-depressants. If it consists in anything, then I think that happiness is this feeling of existence, this sentiment of momentary self-sufficiency that is bound up with the experience of time
Look at what Rousseau writes above: floating in a boat in fine weather, lying down with one’s eyes open to the clouds and birds or closed in reverie, one feels neither the pull of the past nor does one reach into the future. Time is nothing, or rather time is nothing but the experience of the present through which one passes without hurry, but without regret. As Wittgenstein writes in what must be the most intriguing remark in the “Tractatus,” “the eternal life is given to those who live in the present.” Or ,as Whitman writes in “Leaves of Grass”: “Happiness is not in another place, but in this place…not for another hour…but this hour.”
Rousseau asks, “What is the source of our happiness in such a state?” He answers that it is nothing external to us and nothing apart from our own existence. However frenetic our environment, such a feeling of existence can be achieved. He then goes on, amazingly, to conclude, “as long as this state lasts we are self-sufficient like God.”
God-like, then. To which one might reply: Who? Me? Us? Like God? Dare we? But think about it: If anyone is happy, then one imagines that God is pretty happy, and to be happy is to be like God. But consider what this means, for it might not be as ludicrous, hybristic or heretical as one might imagine. To be like God is to be without time, or rather in time with no concern for time, free of the passions and troubles of the soul, experiencing something like calm in the face of things and of oneself.
Why should happiness be bound up with the presence and movement of water? This is the case for Rousseau and I must confess that if I think back over those experiences of blissful reverie that are close to what Rousseau is describing then it is often in proximity to water, although usually saltwater rather than fresh. For me, it is not so much the stillness of a lake (I tend to see lakes as decaffeinated seas), but rather the never-ending drone of the surf, sitting by the sea in fair weather or foul and feeling time disappear into tide, into the endless pendulum of the tidal range. At moments like this, one can sink into deep reverie, a motionlessness that is not sleep, but where one is somehow held by the sound of the surf, lulled by the tidal movement.
Is all happiness solitary? Of course not. But one can be happy alone and this might even be the key to being happy with others. Wordsworth wandered lonely as a cloud when walking with his sister. However, I think that one can also experience this feeling of existence in the experience of love, in being intimate with one’s lover, feeling the world close around one and time slips away in its passing. Rousseau’s rowing boat becomes the lovers’ bed and one bids the world farewell as one slides into the shared selfishness of intimacy.
…And then it is over. Time passes, the reverie ends and the feeling for existence fades. The cell phone rings, the e-mail beeps and one is sucked back into the world’s relentless hum and our accompanying anxiety.
Simon Critchley is chair of philosophy at the New School for Social Research and the author of several books, including his most recent, “The Book of Dead Philosophers
pm What You Don’t Know Makes You Nervous By Daniel Gilbert
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Seventy-six years ago, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took to the inaugural dais and reminded a nation that its recent troubles “concern, thank God, only material things.” In the midst of the Depression, he urged Americans to remember that “happiness lies not in the mere possession of money” and to recognize “the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success.”
“The only thing we have to fear,” he claimed, “is fear itself.”
As it turned out, Americans had a great deal more to fear than that, and their innocent belief that money buys happiness was entirely correct. Psychologists and economists now know that although the very rich are no happier than the merely rich, for the other 99 percent of us, happiness is greatly enhanced by a few quaint assets, like shelter, sustenance and security. Those who think the material is immaterial have probably never stood in a breadline.
Money matters and today most of us have less of it, so no one will be surprised by new survey results from the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index showing that Americans are smiling less and worrying more than they were a year ago, that happiness is down and sadness is up, that we are getting less sleep and smoking more cigarettes, that depression is on the rise.
An uncertain future leaves us stranded in an unhappy present with nothing to do but wait.
But light wallets are not the cause of our heavy hearts. After all, most of us still have more inflation-adjusted dollars than our grandparents had, and they didn’t live in an unremitting funk. Middle-class Americans still enjoy more luxury than upper-class Americans enjoyed a century earlier, and the fin de siècle was not an especially gloomy time. Clearly, people can be perfectly happy with less than we had last year and less than we have now.
So if a dearth of dollars isn’t making us miserable, then what is? No one knows. I don’t mean that no one knows the answer to this question. I mean that the answer to this question is that no one knows — and not knowing is making us sick.
Consider an experiment by researchers at Maastricht University in the Netherlands who gave subjects a series of 20 electric shocks. Some subjects knew they would receive an intense shock on every trial. Others knew they would receive 17 mild shocks and 3 intense shocks, but they didn’t know on which of the 20 trials the intense shocks would come. The results showed that subjects who thought there was a small chance of receiving an intense shock were more afraid — they sweated more profusely, their hearts beat faster — than subjects who knew for sure that they’d receive an intense shock.
That’s because people feel worse when something bad might occur than when something bad will occur. Most of us aren’t losing sleep and sucking down Marlboros because the Dow is going to fall another thousand points, but because we don’t know whether it will fall or not — and human beings find uncertainty more painful than the things they’re uncertain about.
But why?
A colostomy reroutes the colon so that waste products leave the body through a hole in the abdomen, and it isn’t anyone’s idea of a picnic. A University of Michigan-led research team studied patients whose colostomies were permanent and patients who had a chance of someday having their colostomies reversed. Six months after their operations, patients who knew they would be permanently disabled were happier than those who thought they might someday be returned to normal.
Similarly, researchers at the University of British Columbia studied people who had undergone genetic testing to determine their risk for developing the neurodegenerative disorder known as Huntington’s disease. Those who learned that they had a very high likelihood of developing the condition were happier a year after testing than those who did not learn what their risk was.
Why would we prefer to know the worst than to suspect it? Because when we get bad news we weep for a while, and then get busy making the best of it. We change our behavior, we change our attitudes. We raise our consciousness and lower our standards. We find our bootstraps and tug. But we can’t come to terms with circumstances whose terms we don’t yet know. An uncertain future leaves us stranded in an unhappy present with nothing to do but wait.
Our national gloom is real enough, but it isn’t a matter of insufficient funds. It’s a matter of insufficient certainty. Americans have been perfectly happy with far less wealth than most of us have now, and we could quickly become those Americans again — if only we knew we had to.
“The only thing we have to fear,” he claimed, “is fear itself.”
As it turned out, Americans had a great deal more to fear than that, and their innocent belief that money buys happiness was entirely correct. Psychologists and economists now know that although the very rich are no happier than the merely rich, for the other 99 percent of us, happiness is greatly enhanced by a few quaint assets, like shelter, sustenance and security. Those who think the material is immaterial have probably never stood in a breadline.
Money matters and today most of us have less of it, so no one will be surprised by new survey results from the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index showing that Americans are smiling less and worrying more than they were a year ago, that happiness is down and sadness is up, that we are getting less sleep and smoking more cigarettes, that depression is on the rise.
An uncertain future leaves us stranded in an unhappy present with nothing to do but wait.
But light wallets are not the cause of our heavy hearts. After all, most of us still have more inflation-adjusted dollars than our grandparents had, and they didn’t live in an unremitting funk. Middle-class Americans still enjoy more luxury than upper-class Americans enjoyed a century earlier, and the fin de siècle was not an especially gloomy time. Clearly, people can be perfectly happy with less than we had last year and less than we have now.
So if a dearth of dollars isn’t making us miserable, then what is? No one knows. I don’t mean that no one knows the answer to this question. I mean that the answer to this question is that no one knows — and not knowing is making us sick.
Consider an experiment by researchers at Maastricht University in the Netherlands who gave subjects a series of 20 electric shocks. Some subjects knew they would receive an intense shock on every trial. Others knew they would receive 17 mild shocks and 3 intense shocks, but they didn’t know on which of the 20 trials the intense shocks would come. The results showed that subjects who thought there was a small chance of receiving an intense shock were more afraid — they sweated more profusely, their hearts beat faster — than subjects who knew for sure that they’d receive an intense shock.
That’s because people feel worse when something bad might occur than when something bad will occur. Most of us aren’t losing sleep and sucking down Marlboros because the Dow is going to fall another thousand points, but because we don’t know whether it will fall or not — and human beings find uncertainty more painful than the things they’re uncertain about.
But why?
A colostomy reroutes the colon so that waste products leave the body through a hole in the abdomen, and it isn’t anyone’s idea of a picnic. A University of Michigan-led research team studied patients whose colostomies were permanent and patients who had a chance of someday having their colostomies reversed. Six months after their operations, patients who knew they would be permanently disabled were happier than those who thought they might someday be returned to normal.
Similarly, researchers at the University of British Columbia studied people who had undergone genetic testing to determine their risk for developing the neurodegenerative disorder known as Huntington’s disease. Those who learned that they had a very high likelihood of developing the condition were happier a year after testing than those who did not learn what their risk was.
Why would we prefer to know the worst than to suspect it? Because when we get bad news we weep for a while, and then get busy making the best of it. We change our behavior, we change our attitudes. We raise our consciousness and lower our standards. We find our bootstraps and tug. But we can’t come to terms with circumstances whose terms we don’t yet know. An uncertain future leaves us stranded in an unhappy present with nothing to do but wait.
Our national gloom is real enough, but it isn’t a matter of insufficient funds. It’s a matter of insufficient certainty. Americans have been perfectly happy with far less wealth than most of us have now, and we could quickly become those Americans again — if only we knew we had to.
The Limits of Control
By Leonard Mlodinow
My mother had always feared domestic animals, but now as a plump neighborhood cat ran up our driveway, she gazed at the feline, and revealed that 70 years ago she had had a pet cat. Her 87-year-old eyes teared up. Her cat was white, she said, and so thin you could see its ribs. Still, she loved to cuddle it. It wasn’t a house cat – it couldn’t have been, because she was imprisoned at the time, in a forced-labor camp the Nazis set up in Poland, the country where my mother was born and raised. Back then she was as emaciated as the cat, but still she shared her food with it. It gave her comfort she said, and it was a way of fighting back, to help this animal that, like her, the Germans planned to let die.
The need for control can inspire great achievements, such as dams, medicines and chocolate soufflés, but it can also lead to sub-optimal behavior
The psychologist Bruno Bettelheim concluded that survival in Nazi concentration camps depended on “one’s ability to arrange to preserve some areas of independent action, to keep control of some important aspects of one’s life despite an environment that seemed overwhelming.” Studies suggest that, even in normal conditions, to be happy, humans must feel in control. We are currently confronting economic hardship that, though a far cry from the horrors of World War II, has eroded the feeling of self-determination for many of us.
Eliminate control, and people experience depression, stress and the onset of disease. In a study of elderly nursing home patients[1] , one group was told they could decide how their room would be arranged, and could choose a plant to care for. Another group had their rooms set up for them and a plant chosen and tended to for them. Eighteen months later 15 percent of the patients in the group given control had died, compared with 30 percent in the passive group.
The need for control can inspire great achievements, such as dams that prevent flooding, medicines to ease our lives, and perfectly confected chocolate soufflés. But it can also lead to sub-optimal behavior. Though people generally view “control freaks” in a negative light, that need makes us all vulnerable to making bad decisions – especially when it comes to money. Studies show that people feel more confident they’ll win at dice if they toss the dice themselves than if others toss them [2], and that they are likely to bet more money if they make their wager before the dice are tossed than afterward (where the outcome has been concealed)[3]. They’ll value a lottery ticket more if they can choose it than if it is given to them at random[4]. And in a well-known 1975 study in which Yale University students were asked to predict the results of coin tosses, a significant number of presumably intelligent Yalies believed their performance could improve through practice, and would have been hampered if they’d been distracted.[5] In each of these situations, the subjects knew that the enterprises in which they were engaged were unpredictable and beyond their control. When questioned, for example, none of the lottery players said they believed that being allowed to choose their card influenced their probability of winning. Yet on a deep, subconscious level they must have felt it did, because they behaved as if it did.
That people are prone toward feeling in control even when they are not probably endowed our species with an advantage at some point in our evolution. Even today, a false sense of control can be beneficial in promoting a sense of well-being, or allowing us to maintain hope that a bad situation can improved.
My mother’s illusion came to an end when, one day, her labor camp cat stopped coming. She never learned exactly what happened to it. Unfortunately, that became a template for nameless outcomes by which her sister, her father, and most of her friends disappeared. Of her many illusions of youth that the Nazis snuffed out, the feeling that she could control her destiny was one of the most difficult to accept. But for my mother, and for all those who lived through similar experiences, surviving meant not only possessing a special toughness of body, but also of mind. She found a way to face the world without the illusion of control, of dealing with life as it comes, day to day, without expectation.
On a far different scale, we face losses today. To economists our plight is a “severe downturn,” but to me it feels like a roller coaster ride in which I discover, first, that I have no seat belt, and then, that the concession operator is Norman Bates. Given my jitters, it is a comfort to know that my mother survived a far worse experience and yet maintained the capacity to be happy when, for instance, her grandchildren hug her, or she discovers a tasty new sugar-free dessert. But more important is what I’ve learned from the fact that the current events don’t seem to bother her.
It’s not that my mother hasn’t lost money, or that she doesn’t need it. She isn’t bothered because her early experiences of utter powerlessness taught her to give herself up to what she calls fate. Understanding my own need for control – and exactly why I cannot have it – I now take comfort in letting go of the illusion, and accepting that despite all my efforts and planning some aspects of my future are beyond my sphere of influence. That realization has given me permission not to kick myself for the losses I have incurred. That can be a liberating thought in trying times like these, or any times at all.
For the curious reader, here are the studies referred to above:
[1] Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin (1977). Long-Term Effects of a Control-Relevant Intervention With the Instituitonalized Aged. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35, 12, 897-902)
[2] Dunn, D. S., & Wilson, T. D. (1990). When the stakes are high: A limit to the illusion of control effect. Social Cognition, 8, 305–323
[3] L.H. Strickland, R.J. Lewicki, and A.M. Katz (1966). Temporal orientation and perceived control as determinants of risk-taking. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2, 143-151.
[4]Ellen J. Langer (1975),The illusion of control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32, 2, 311-328.
[5] Langer, E. J. & Roth, J. (1975). Heads I win, tails it’s chance: The illusion of control as a function of the sequence of outcomes in a purely chance task. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 34, 191-198
Leonard Mlodinow teaches randomness to future experimenters at Caltech. His books include “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives” and “Euclid’s Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace.” More of his writing and information about his work can be found at his Web site.
My mother had always feared domestic animals, but now as a plump neighborhood cat ran up our driveway, she gazed at the feline, and revealed that 70 years ago she had had a pet cat. Her 87-year-old eyes teared up. Her cat was white, she said, and so thin you could see its ribs. Still, she loved to cuddle it. It wasn’t a house cat – it couldn’t have been, because she was imprisoned at the time, in a forced-labor camp the Nazis set up in Poland, the country where my mother was born and raised. Back then she was as emaciated as the cat, but still she shared her food with it. It gave her comfort she said, and it was a way of fighting back, to help this animal that, like her, the Germans planned to let die.
The need for control can inspire great achievements, such as dams, medicines and chocolate soufflés, but it can also lead to sub-optimal behavior
The psychologist Bruno Bettelheim concluded that survival in Nazi concentration camps depended on “one’s ability to arrange to preserve some areas of independent action, to keep control of some important aspects of one’s life despite an environment that seemed overwhelming.” Studies suggest that, even in normal conditions, to be happy, humans must feel in control. We are currently confronting economic hardship that, though a far cry from the horrors of World War II, has eroded the feeling of self-determination for many of us.
Eliminate control, and people experience depression, stress and the onset of disease. In a study of elderly nursing home patients[1] , one group was told they could decide how their room would be arranged, and could choose a plant to care for. Another group had their rooms set up for them and a plant chosen and tended to for them. Eighteen months later 15 percent of the patients in the group given control had died, compared with 30 percent in the passive group.
The need for control can inspire great achievements, such as dams that prevent flooding, medicines to ease our lives, and perfectly confected chocolate soufflés. But it can also lead to sub-optimal behavior. Though people generally view “control freaks” in a negative light, that need makes us all vulnerable to making bad decisions – especially when it comes to money. Studies show that people feel more confident they’ll win at dice if they toss the dice themselves than if others toss them [2], and that they are likely to bet more money if they make their wager before the dice are tossed than afterward (where the outcome has been concealed)[3]. They’ll value a lottery ticket more if they can choose it than if it is given to them at random[4]. And in a well-known 1975 study in which Yale University students were asked to predict the results of coin tosses, a significant number of presumably intelligent Yalies believed their performance could improve through practice, and would have been hampered if they’d been distracted.[5] In each of these situations, the subjects knew that the enterprises in which they were engaged were unpredictable and beyond their control. When questioned, for example, none of the lottery players said they believed that being allowed to choose their card influenced their probability of winning. Yet on a deep, subconscious level they must have felt it did, because they behaved as if it did.
That people are prone toward feeling in control even when they are not probably endowed our species with an advantage at some point in our evolution. Even today, a false sense of control can be beneficial in promoting a sense of well-being, or allowing us to maintain hope that a bad situation can improved.
My mother’s illusion came to an end when, one day, her labor camp cat stopped coming. She never learned exactly what happened to it. Unfortunately, that became a template for nameless outcomes by which her sister, her father, and most of her friends disappeared. Of her many illusions of youth that the Nazis snuffed out, the feeling that she could control her destiny was one of the most difficult to accept. But for my mother, and for all those who lived through similar experiences, surviving meant not only possessing a special toughness of body, but also of mind. She found a way to face the world without the illusion of control, of dealing with life as it comes, day to day, without expectation.
On a far different scale, we face losses today. To economists our plight is a “severe downturn,” but to me it feels like a roller coaster ride in which I discover, first, that I have no seat belt, and then, that the concession operator is Norman Bates. Given my jitters, it is a comfort to know that my mother survived a far worse experience and yet maintained the capacity to be happy when, for instance, her grandchildren hug her, or she discovers a tasty new sugar-free dessert. But more important is what I’ve learned from the fact that the current events don’t seem to bother her.
It’s not that my mother hasn’t lost money, or that she doesn’t need it. She isn’t bothered because her early experiences of utter powerlessness taught her to give herself up to what she calls fate. Understanding my own need for control – and exactly why I cannot have it – I now take comfort in letting go of the illusion, and accepting that despite all my efforts and planning some aspects of my future are beyond my sphere of influence. That realization has given me permission not to kick myself for the losses I have incurred. That can be a liberating thought in trying times like these, or any times at all.
For the curious reader, here are the studies referred to above:
[1] Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin (1977). Long-Term Effects of a Control-Relevant Intervention With the Instituitonalized Aged. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35, 12, 897-902)
[2] Dunn, D. S., & Wilson, T. D. (1990). When the stakes are high: A limit to the illusion of control effect. Social Cognition, 8, 305–323
[3] L.H. Strickland, R.J. Lewicki, and A.M. Katz (1966). Temporal orientation and perceived control as determinants of risk-taking. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2, 143-151.
[4]Ellen J. Langer (1975),The illusion of control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32, 2, 311-328.
[5] Langer, E. J. & Roth, J. (1975). Heads I win, tails it’s chance: The illusion of control as a function of the sequence of outcomes in a purely chance task. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 34, 191-198
Leonard Mlodinow teaches randomness to future experimenters at Caltech. His books include “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives” and “Euclid’s Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace.” More of his writing and information about his work can be found at his Web site.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Feeling Depressed.....go fly a kite!!
Did you know that it is physiologically impossible for depressed people to fly kites?
I just watched a video by a psychologist and therapist Dr. Lynn Ianni where she says that it is almost impossible for us to look up and feel depressed at the same time.
Kite flying gets you out doors and forces you to LOOK UP. Depressed people find it hard to look up and therefore find it hard to fly kites!
Could kite flying be used to alleviate sadness?
Ever notice how depressed people walk? Their eyes are cast down, shoulders slouched and movement slow and weak. Whereas when you fly kites you have to look up, run after the kite and pull and tug at the string with the right amount of pressure and awareness. The body language of a kite flyer is exactly the opposite of a depressed person.
Often we hear the term- “Mind over Matter” implying our minds control over our body and its actions. Could our bodies be used in such a way that it could control our mind?
Our brain does not know the difference between real or fake movement. When we fake a smile, the same hormones are released that would be released when we genuinely smile, similarly when we look up, the brain understands it to be a positive movement and all the feelings associated with positivity can be felt in our body. You cannot be sad and depressed and run around and fly kites at the same time.
So the next time you are feeling down and depressed, go buy yourself a kite, find a friend or bribe a neighbors child to go kite flying with you. Go alone if you have to.
If all fails…just imagine a beautiful bright kite flying in the air and going up, above the tallest trees, reaching for the stars. Close your eyes and visualize it in the finest detail. The colour, the shape , the material, the touch. Go into as much detail as you can and now let your kite fly soaring as high as it can. Now imagine yourself chasing it, saving it from other predatory kites and sharp surfaces.
Open your eyes and try and look for that imaginary kite. Look up in the sky and am sure you will find something to smile about.
Luv/luck/happiness
I just watched a video by a psychologist and therapist Dr. Lynn Ianni where she says that it is almost impossible for us to look up and feel depressed at the same time.
Kite flying gets you out doors and forces you to LOOK UP. Depressed people find it hard to look up and therefore find it hard to fly kites!
Could kite flying be used to alleviate sadness?
Ever notice how depressed people walk? Their eyes are cast down, shoulders slouched and movement slow and weak. Whereas when you fly kites you have to look up, run after the kite and pull and tug at the string with the right amount of pressure and awareness. The body language of a kite flyer is exactly the opposite of a depressed person.
Often we hear the term- “Mind over Matter” implying our minds control over our body and its actions. Could our bodies be used in such a way that it could control our mind?
Our brain does not know the difference between real or fake movement. When we fake a smile, the same hormones are released that would be released when we genuinely smile, similarly when we look up, the brain understands it to be a positive movement and all the feelings associated with positivity can be felt in our body. You cannot be sad and depressed and run around and fly kites at the same time.
So the next time you are feeling down and depressed, go buy yourself a kite, find a friend or bribe a neighbors child to go kite flying with you. Go alone if you have to.
If all fails…just imagine a beautiful bright kite flying in the air and going up, above the tallest trees, reaching for the stars. Close your eyes and visualize it in the finest detail. The colour, the shape , the material, the touch. Go into as much detail as you can and now let your kite fly soaring as high as it can. Now imagine yourself chasing it, saving it from other predatory kites and sharp surfaces.
Open your eyes and try and look for that imaginary kite. Look up in the sky and am sure you will find something to smile about.
Luv/luck/happiness
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
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