FAMILY MATTERS
Rick Hanson, Ph.D. and Jan Hanson, L.Ac., © 2004
Taking In the Good An Essential Inner Skill for Adults and Children
As we've discussed in recent columns, grown-ups and kids alike need inner skills as well as outer ones -- and the essential inner skills are self-awareness, letting go, insight, taking in positive experiences, and choosing well.
Our last column focused on insight. This one covers probably the most enjoyable inner skill: soaking in positive experiences.
Why Bother Taking In Good Experiences?
In a profound sense, we are what we remember: The slowly accumulating residue of lived experience, both positive and negative, fashions your inner landscape -- both setting the inner atmosphere of your mood and congealing in approaches to life that can help you or hurt you.
What's amazing is that human beings have the ability to be the architect of their interior landscape, that they can send it in a better direction by looking for and capturing positive experiences. But to do so, it really helps to know two key facts about their own brain.
First, your brain stores personal information in basically two kinds of memory: explicit and implicit. Explicit memories are recollections of specific events and your experience of them, like the time you had to get some stitches or the day your child was born.
Implicit memories are different. They're a kind of background recording of feelings, desires and how they were fulfilled or frustrated, ways of relating to others, and a fundamental sense of the world. These implicit memories sit mainly out of sight, but they are constantly being tapped to guide us in daily life, and as they are activated, they shade our emotional reactions, set up our point of view, and tilt us toward acting one way or another. This type of memory is a very big deal because (A) what's in it is much vaster than all your specific recollections, (B) it's the default guide in the brain for how to respond to whatever is happening in your life, and (C) its hidden nature means that it can set you going in a bad direction without you really knowing why.
OK, so it's important to get a handle on what's in your implicit memory banks. Unfortunately, here's the second fact: your brain instantly records negative experiences in order to help you survive - it doesn't care if you're happy, it only wants to make sure you have grandchildren - but (short of something like winning the lottery) positive experiences generally have to be held in awareness for 5 - 10 - 20 seconds for them to register in emotional memory. For example, one bad experience with a dog is more memorable than a thousand good ones. Basically, your brain is like velcro when things are yucky but like teflon when times are good.
This means that automatically, moment by moment, the pile of negative implicit memories is growing, growing, growing compared to the positive ones -- unless you deliberately absorb positive experiences so they pile up, too. If you do that, or help your child do that, it brings three big benefits:
Intentionally absorbing positive experiences is about being in reality, and not wearing rose-colored glasses. It's about proportionality, about your sense of the world being consistent with the nature of the world. For example, if the "mosaic" of life is mainly good, shouldn't our sense of living be mainly good?!
A Very Simple Method
So how do you help yourself to soak in good experiences, to shift the fundamental neurological landscape of your mind in a more positive direction?
It's really easy.
First, you want to have - or encourage your child to have - these basic attitudes:
Then, with those attitudes in mind, you just absorb good experiences like a thirsty sponge. In daily life, this usually takes just a few seconds. With time and little practice, it will become automatic - but for starters, it could help to break the process down into these simple steps:
That's all there is to it. Normally, these three steps moosh together, and happen quite quickly. You can apply them on the fly, with the everyday good experiences that come your way. As well, if you like, you can take a few minutes in the day as a special time to reflect on the good things that have happened; you might do this in your mind as a private contemplation, or perhaps write in a journal. With a child past two, it's sweet to talk over the day when you put her to bed, with special attention to the good parts - and to taking that little extra moment to have them sink in.
The Most Powerful Personal Growth Tool We Know
Now, for triple bonus points, you can use this method of soaking in positive experiences to heal the psychological bumps and bruises we all - kids and grownups alike - suffer in this life. All you have to do is to sense that the new positive experience is sinking down into the old hollow places and wounds inside you and filling them up and replacing them with good feelings and attitudes.
When you do this, you are gradually but truly changing your own brain. You will not forget that those hard things happened - but the emotional charge on them, the problematic decisions and approaches to life linked to them, and their hold over you - will dissipate, like the smoggy mists of old crud burning off under the warm sunlight of new good experiences.
Typically, you'll use new positive experiences that are the opposite of, or the antidote to, the old negative ones. Like current experiences of worth replacing old feelings of shame or inadequacy. Or current feelings of being cared about and loved replacing old feelings of rejection, abandonment, loneliness. Or a current sense of one's own strength replacing old feelings of weakness and smallness. With a bit of self-knowledge, you'll know where it hurts inside, and thus what sort of good experiences to look for, currently.
The painful "replaced" experience may be from adulthood. But usually the most valuable experiences to replace are from our youngest years. They are the "tip of the root of the dandelion," which is just what we need to pull in order to prevent the dandelion of upsets from growing back.
The way to do this is to have the new positive experience be prominent and in the foreground of your awareness at the same time that the old pain or unmet needs are dimly sensed in the background. You'll feel a kind of balm of new healthiness sliding into and easing and soothing old raw, inflamed, tender places within you.
If you use this method for a few seconds every day or so - and how hard is that? - you will soon feel a real difference inside yourself. That hole in your heart may feel as big as a pit, but if you just keep steadily tossing bricks into it - one good experience at a time - it will gradually fill up: maybe not perfectly, but enough to make a significant difference in your life.
As a result, things that used to really get to you will become no more than a minor annoyance. You'll be calmer, more present, less reactive. In short, this is a profound, far-reaching, and genuine way to help yourself or your child heal and grow. It's the best one we know!
Gratitude
Appreciating the good things in life is a fundamental way to take in positive experiences. It's a wonderful personal practice to look for things to be grateful for throughout the day. Additionally, it's very soul-feeding to set aside a specific moment in each day for gratitude. If you like, take a look at the meditation on gratitude that's in the box, and you can use it as a point of departure for your own reflections on what you feel thankful for.
A Meditation on Gratitude
Set aside a quiet time during which you can reflect on some of the many things you could be thankful for. As a starting point, you might read the passage below to yourself or out loud, adapting it to your situation as you like.
There really is so much to be thankful for.
I am grateful to my friends. For their good qualities, for the good things they have done for me. For the ways they are fun, for the good times we've had.
I am grateful for my children - if I have any - for the delight and love they bring, for the sweet smell of their hair and the soft touch of their skin. For the first time they smiled at me or walked into my arms. For the meaning they bring to life. For receiving my love and lessons. For being their own persons, for giving me their own love and lessons. Having them at all is a miracle, and the rest is details.
I appreciate myself. For the love I have given to others, for all the conversations had, for all the helpful acts toward others, for all the dishes done. For the long hours I've worked, the hoops I've jumped through to keep all those balls up in the air. For the efforts I've made, the many times I've stayed patient, the many times I've found more to give inside when I thought I was empty.
I appreciate my lovers and mates, past and present. I can focus on one of these persons, perhaps my spouse or mate if I'm currently in a relationship, and bring to mind the ways he or she has been good to me. I appreciate the fun we've had together, the humor and the companionship. I feel grateful for the times of support, understanding, and sympathy. For sweating and suffering too.
I feel thankful for the life I've already had, for the good parts of my childhood, for everything I've learned, for good friends and beautiful sights. For the roof over my head and the bread on my table, for being able to have a life that is healthier, longer, and freer than most people have ever dreamed of. For this beautiful world, where each breath is a gift of air, each dawn a gift of light. For the plants and animals that die so I may live. For the extraordinary gifts of evolution I carry in each cell of my body, for the capabilities accumulated during three and a half billion years of life's presence on our planet.
I feel thankful for the wonder of the universe, for all the atoms in my body-the carbon in my bones, the oxygen and iron in my blood-that were born in the heart of a star billions of years ago, to drift through space, to form a sun and planets, to form the hand that holds this piece of paper and the eye that reads this word.
I feel thankful for all that was in order for me to be. For grace, for wisdom, for the sacred, for spirit as I know it. For this moment, this breath, this sight. For every good thing that was, that is, that ever will be.
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While each of the five essential inner skills covers a lot of ground and might seem a little overwhelming, getting good at it is just like getting good at anything else, whether it's learning how to bake a turkey, or change a tire . . . or diaper. Like most things, if you keep working at it, you'll get better at it. Just keep planting a few seeds of skillfulness each day, and you'll harvest the fruits for the rest of your life.