MSC Week 9: June 3, 2021

“Embracing Your Life”

New practice: “Compassion for Self and Others”

Cultivating Happiness
Our lives are a mixture of good and bad, bitter and sweet. Our evolutionary need to survive has oriented us more toward problems than toward the positive aspects of our lives. Earlier in the course we talked about how the default mode network in the brain is always searching for problems in the past and the future.

Negative emotions such as anger or fear narrow our perceptual field—help us focus us on survival threats—and positive emotions such as love or joy broaden our awareness to notice new opportunities for food and shelter (Frederickson, 2004). Helen Keller (1929/2000, p.25) wrote, “When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.” The psychological term for this is negativity bias (Rozin & Royzman, 2001). Rick Hanson (Hanson, 2015) says we are “Velcro for negative emotions and Teflon for positive emotions.” Because of our negativity bias, we need to intentionally pay attention to positive experiences to develop truly balanced awareness.

This week we discussed three ways to correct the negativity bias:
1.    Savoring
2.    Gratitude
3.    Self-appreciation

Savoring
Mindfulness of positive experience. It refers to:
1. recognizing pleasant experience,
2. Allowing oneself to be drawn into it,
3. Lingering with it, and
4. Letting it go

We practiced savoring during the MSC retreat, in the "Sense and Savor Walk" and "Savoring Food" practices. In both practices the instruction was to “give yourself permission” or “allow” yourself to enjoy the experience, rather than “trying” to enjoy yourself. The simple pleasure of lingering with positive sensations and emotions can be a radical discovery for hard-striving mindfulness and compassion practitioners.

Gratitude
Gratitude means appreciating the good things that life has given us. If we just focus on what we want but don’t have, we’ll remain in a negative state of mind. Ample research shows that gratitude practice enhances wellbeing (Dickens, 2017; Emmons & McCollough, 2004; Wood, Froh, & Geraghty, 2010).

Gratitude is a wisdom practice. One component of wisdom is understanding the complexity of a situation, or how every event arises interdependently with other events (Olendzki, 2012). When we practice gratitude, we are acknowledging the many factors, large and small, that contribute to our lives. We can say that gratitude is the texture of wisdom—how wisdom feels.

Gratitude is also a relational practice, or a connection practice. The joy that arises from gratitude may be attributed, in part, to freedom from the illusion of separateness.

Self Appreciation
Self-appreciation was the third practice for cultivating happiness we explored in Session 10. The first two—savoring and gratitude—provide a foundation for self-appreciation. Appreciating our good qualities means that we have the capacity to savor them, and we need gratitude toward those who have helped us in order to appreciate our strengths without feeling vulnerable and alone.

We can be grateful for many things in our lives, large and small, but we are rarely grateful for positive qualities in ourselves. We tend to criticize ourselves and focus on our inadequacies, and take our good qualities for granted. This gives us a skewed perspective of who we are.

Ordinarily, when we receive a compliment, it bounces right off us, but when we receive the slightest negative feedback, we fixate on it. It feels uncomfortable to even think about what’s good about ourselves.

Why is it so hard to celebrate, or be grateful, for our good qualities?

Possible reasons are:
We don’t want to alienate friends by our arrogance.
Good qualities are not problems that need to be fixed.
We’re afraid of falling off our pedestal.
It may cause jealousy
It makes us feel separate.

If we apply the three components of self-compassion to our positive qualities (as well as our negative ones), we can be more self-appreciative.

o   Mindfulness - We need to be mindful of our good qualities rather than taking them for granted.
o   Self-kindness - We need to be kind to ourselves by expressing our appreciation.
o   Common humanity - We need to remember common humanity so we don’t feel separate from or superior to others.

A sense of common humanity is key to self-appreciation: Our good qualities are the result of many people and favorable conditions in our lives—we are connected to everyone else. Therefore, we don't need to take our own good qualities so personally.

When we appreciate our own beauty, we do so not because we’re better than others, but because every human being has wonderful qualities in addition to their not-so-wonderful qualities. As the saying goes, “I may not be perfect, but parts of me are excellent!”

Finally, self-appreciation is not selfish—it's not something we do to benefit ourselves at the expense of others. Instead, it provides the emotional buoyancy and self-confidence we need so that we're able to give to others.