Savoring your life

"We've been raised to compete, to want more! More! More! It's a way of life. It's about greed.”

Sandy Duncan

Greed, excessive materialism and hedonism are addictive behaviours that are definitely not life enhancing and can destroy inner peace and happiness. We are challenged daily by a world that encourages and supports these addictions. They’re insidious and deceptive. And once you’re on the treadmill of escalating desires, it’s not easy to get off.

By understanding the natural processes that lead to these destructive emotions and behaviours, you can learn to control your desires and re-balance your life. Happiness is created, not by satisfying greed, but by truly savoring and appreciating what you have and do in life. True wealth involves more than money and true joy needs more than the satisfying of desires.

Addiction to Greed

It’s becoming exceedingly obvious we live in a world filled with selfishness and greed. The evidence surrounds us. Take a look at the state of the world! The media is filled with stories and images that are testament to the greed that has stealthily overtaken society.

We are living well beyond our means. The planet cannot support so many humans living such rapacious lives. We are destroying our world and our future. Our economy is in massive disarray. Our ecosphere is in massive decline. We are raping our world in the name of greed, desire and avarice.

This has all come about due to the craziness and un-sanity of following an economic model of infinite growth in a finite system. Yes, an infinite growth model… For hundreds of years our society, politics and economics have been managed using a year on year growth imperative. Our businesses and financial systems have been measured and directed by expectations of year on year growth – that’s growth on previous growth.

This is an infinite growth model. It relies on exponential growth, of continuous and never ending expansion on top of previous growth. And as we are now experiencing, it is unsustainable. We live in a finite world. We cannot keep digging and siphoning up limited resources and expect that to continue forever. It’s unsane!

And I’m sure I don’t have to convince you of that… However, we may have more of a challenge getting you to see your own addictions to personal patterns of greed, desire and selfishness that are feeding this unsane system and are ultimately so life denying.

Why is that?

Because many of these patterns, the very patterns that have created our current world issues, are naturally evolved and inbuilt propensities. They are normal. And in controlled amounts they’re even useful and appropriate. They have largely driven the successes we all enjoy and are highly valued in society. But they’re also insidious, addictive and lead naturally ever onwards to more and more and more of the same.

So while en-masse and globally they are now evidenced as crazy and destructive, in your own life they’re often still accepted, overlooked or even applauded. Tracking and changing these insidious greed and selfishness patterns can be challenging.

The first step of course is awareness. You need to be aware of the patterns and processes of ‘greeding’ in your life. The next step is to interrupt the patterns. Then finally and continually you need to practice emotions and behaviours that oppose these negative greed patterns and inoculate yourself against them.

The biology of greed

The primitive emotion-driven biological circuits of your brain become intensely aroused when you anticipate greed behaviours.

Research at Stanford University has shown that anticipation and desire for money during behaviours such as financial investing and gambling cause the same areas of the brain to activate as those responsible for sexual desire. In one study, the brains of young adult men were scanned with magnetic resonance imaging while they viewed sexually arousing pictures and also when they made risky financial decisions. The study found the same areas of the brain light up during financial gambles as during sexual desire.

This is something to be aware of: Greed utilises many of the same biological circuits as hunger and sexual desire. Greed feels good. It’s quite an insidious trap.

The other important thing to note about the biology of greed is that satiating desire does NOT feel as good as the greed itself. One study found that the hot state of anticipation cools down as soon as you gain the financial reward, yielding lukewarm satisfaction.

As Jason Zweig, author of the book ‘Your Money and Your Brain’ describes it, "Making money feels good, all right; it just doesn't feel as good as expecting to make money. In a cruel irony that has enormous implications for financial behaviour, your investing brain comes equipped with a biological mechanism that is more aroused when you anticipate a profit than when you actually get one".

Contentment versus Greeding

According to the Dalai Lama, “The true antidote of greed is contentment” and a reliable method to achieve inner contentment is “not to have what we want but rather to want and appreciate what we have” (The Art of Happiness by Dalai Lama and H. Cutler).

These deep and ancient insights from Buddhist philosophy have been recently supported by research in Positive Psychology. The studies show that savoring and appreciating what you currently have can significantly increase levels of joy and happiness.

Savoring involves relishing and paying special attention to the pleasurable and meaningful things and events in your life. It’s about truly appreciating and celebrating your experiences, including those occurring in the present, those that are now fond memories and those you are looking forward to with positive anticipation.

The studies also show that savoring positive experiences is correlated with a greater sense of well being, increased happiness and better physical health – All great life enhancing benefits and wonderful antidotes to greeding!

By shifting your attention to a focus on contentment, you’ll have broken the vicious spiral of wanting more and more. You’ll have allowed your multi-mind to experience and enjoy the life you have right now. You’ll overcome the enemy to happiness of greed and never-ending desiring.

Remember also that the mind/body is a patterning system, so the patterns you put into your mind and life create the patterns of results you get back from life. I liken the practice and focus on savoring and contentment to the Native American story about the wise grandfather talking to his grandson. He tells the young boy we all have two wolves inside of us struggling with each other. The first is the wolf of peace, love and kindness. The other wolf is fear, greed and hatred. "Which wolf will win, grandfather?" asks the young boy. "Whichever one you feed" is the thoughtful reply.

So make sure you feed the life enhancing patterns you want in your life, and stay tuned for more ideas and distinctions in up-coming blog posts on ‘Wealthing your life’.

"The doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live.”

Flora Whittemore

Want to learn more, get a copy of my book: Avoiding the Enemies to HAPPINESS!

life enhancing thoughts and wishes,

Grant

Appreciating your World

I received an email containing the following life enhancing story a couple of days ago, and thought it so impactful and fascinating that it was worth sharing with you!

Something To Consider...
----------------------------------
Washington, DC, Metro Station, on a cold January morning in 2007. A man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time approximately 2000 people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. After 3 minutes, a middle aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds, and then hurried to meet his schedule.......

4 minutes later: The violinist received his first dollar: a woman threw the money in the hat and, without stopping, and continued to walk.

6 minutes: A young man leaned against the wall to listen, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.

10 minutes: A 3-year-old boy stopped, but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. Every parent, without exception, forced their children to move on quickly.

45 minutes: The musician played continuously. Only 6 people stopped and listened for a short while. About 20 gave money, but continued to walk at their normal pace. The man collected a total of $32.

1 hour: He finished playing and silence took over. No one noticed. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before, Joshua Bell sold out a theatre in Boston where the seats averaged $100 each.


This is a true story.

Joshua Bell playing incognito in the Metro Station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people's priorities. The questions raised: In a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context?

Consider this: if we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world, playing some of the finest music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments ever made... how many other things are we missing in life?!!


An Amazing Story!

What an amazing story! I checked it out by googling it, and yes, every word is true. In fact, the experiment was written up in an article 'Pearls Before Breakfast' in the Washington Post, and its author Gene Weingarten won a Pulitzer Prize for his outstanding and thought provoking analysis of the experiment. The article and experiment asked "In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?" And the results, which you can view in the video clip below and hear the awesome beauty of the performance, speak for themselves... Very few people stopped to enjoy and appreciate their world!



Savoring and Appreciating your World

Are you savoring and appreciating your life, your world and as many moments of each day as possible? The research from Positive Psychology shows that savoring, appreciation and gratitude all measurably increase levels of happiness and life satisfaction. Taking the time to notice and focus on the positive events in life really is life enhancing.

And the best thing is... with practice, the skills and strategies of savoring and appreciating form deep unconscious competencies that start to operate without the need for constant reminders. The more you do it, the easier it becomes and the more your unconscious mind finds and brings to your conscious awareness the wonderful, serendipitous, beautiful and joyful experiences that occur all around you.

Beginner's Mind

Let me share with you some of the techniques I use to appreciate my world...

To begin with, every time I walk to work at any of the Organisations I consult to, I always take the time to look at the sky, enjoy the ambience of the city-scape and notice the colours, sights and sounds around me. I play with and pretend that I'm a visitor from another country, or from outer-space, and look at the City with fresh eyes. It's amazing how much beauty and newness I find every single time.

In Zen Buddhism this technique is known as 'Beginner's Mind'. It's an attitude and way of thinking that evokes what in NLP is likened as 'the wide-eyed curiosity of a child'. We all know and can recapture that sense of wonderment. So play with it every single day, and you'll build it up like a well-exercised muscle. You'll easily find yourself savoring and appreciating your world anew and in wonderful and fascinating ways.

So here's the question: Do you think that through the eye's of a child, or the filter of a 'beginner's mind' you would have walked past Joshua Bell? Take a look at the description of the article above, you'll see that it was the children that noticed and tried to stop and listen. It was the time-bound, serious and focused adults that dragged them away and failed to notice the exquisite beauty and enchantment of Joshua's virtuoso playing.

My Tunnel of Happiness'ing

Another technique I use every time I walk to work, is to create a 'tunnel of happiness' that I walk through as I traverse the City. This 'tunneling' is done by looking for, noticing and amplifying every bright light, glint, and reflection that I can see high around me.

I use my peripheral vision to see these and I fantasize/visualise these bright, happy, glinting lights as a delightful tunnel encircling high around me. As I walk through my tunnel, I build strong and uplifting feelings of happiness inside my torso, chest, face and head. In this way I truly appreciate and notice the beauty of the buildings, the sky, the windows and reflections, the lights and all the shiny wonderful surfaces that make up our Cities.

If you are tracking the NLP concepts and strategies behind my 'Tunnel of Happinessing' technique then you'll notice the use of visual submodalities that pay homage to the pragmatic wisdom of the designers of great churches and cathedrals. In such places, for the last two thousand years, stained glass, high windows and candles have been used to imbue and stimulate a sense of awe and the numinous. Sparkle and glinting high in the peripheral visual field is associated with the experience of fascination, delight and awe.

Self-fullfilling Prophecy

I also look for happy people and try my best to connect with and get people to smile with me during my commuting. It's a natural effect of mirror neurons and the process of rapport that if you are exuding positive energy and happiness, you'll attract the attention of like-minded people and their response to you will amplify your own state. There's nothing quite as delightful and refreshing as a beautiful smile from a happy person acknowledging your existence. So make sure you include people in your daily search for positivity and happiness.

How are you Appreciating your World?

So how are you savoring and appreciating your world? Have you been rushing past and missing the moments of beauty in your world? Or are you now truly taking the time and attention to value and appreciate your world in new and life enhancing ways!


happiness, peace and joy,
Grant


And here's some Joshua Bell music you might enjoy:

Sharing and Savoring

Putting feelings into words produces therapeutic effects in the brain

I came across some fascinating research the other day that supports the intuitive insight that verbalising your feelings helps dissipate and make them less intense.

The brain imaging study by UCLA psychologists examined the effects of verbally labeling negative emotional images and showed that the amygdala, a region of the brain that serves as an emotional alarm system, was less active when subjects labeled the feelings engendered by the negative images. The study also found another region of the brain, the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, was more active during emotion labelling. This region is located behind the forehead and is associated with inhibiting behavior and processing emotions.

According to the study's main author, Associate Professor Matthew D. Lieberman, "When you put feelings into words, you’re activating this prefrontal region and seeing a reduced response in the amygdala... When you put feelings into words, you seem to be hitting the brakes on your emotional responses." Lieberman also suggests, "Putting our feelings into words helps us heal better. If a friend is sad and we can get them to talk about it, that probably will make them feel better."

To me, this is a life enhancing research result that backs up what we all intuitively know: talking with a therapist, a loved one, a good friend, or even writing in a journal, helps us cope with and overcome feelings such as anger, fear and pain. Conversely, holding our feelings in, not expressing them and not consciously acknowledging them gives them power and makes them more likely to overtake you.

We all have times when we experience negative life events and are overwhelmed by negative emoting. The cool thing is that you now know that by practicing self-awareness and consciously labeling your emotions, you'll shift the response in your brain. Additionally, you now have life enhancing research evidence to encourage you to verbalise your feelings and share them with supportive friends. Getting your feelings out in the open makes them less intense.

Meta-emoting

Another life enhancing and useful tool for coping with negative emoting is the NLP technique of 'meta-emoting'.

The word 'Meta' (from Greek: μετά = "after", "beyond", "with", "adjacent", "self"), is a prefix used to indicate a concept that is an abstraction of another concept. So for example, a meta-language is a language about languages. Meta-data is data about data. And meta-emotion is emotion about emotion.

According to wikipedia, "Meta-emotion refers to the emotional reactions to one's own emotions (second-order emotions about primary emotions). An example would be being angry (the primary emotion) and being afraid of one's anger (the meta-emotion)."

This is a very powerful concept. You can get yourself into all sorts of psychological and emotional strife if you don't track your meta-emoting and control it.

For example, if you get scared of something such as talking in front of people, then you get scared about being scared, you create a loop that feeds back on itself and amplifies the fearing. This is typically a recipe for inducing a phobia - fear about fear about fear...

On the other hand, if you choose a meta-emotion that is more resourceful and positive, you can easily transcend and transform primary emotions via your meta-emoting. In the example above, if instead of fearing the fear, you chose to find the fearing as humorous and entertaining, then you'd find that the meta-emotion magically changes the primary emoting of fearing into something more resourceful. It's hard to do full on fearing when you are laughing at the fear :-)

By bringing your emotions to consciousness, labeling them, then consciously deciding on what your outcome is and what meta-emoting you are going to do, you create amazingly generative responses to the 'negative' events that occur in your life. And that is very life enhancing!

For those who are interested, here's an insightful read at UrbanMonk.net that talks in detail about the effects of meta-emoting: Meta-Emotions - The Downward Spiral to Unhappiness and How to Avoid Them

Celebrating Failure

Another thing I want to bring to your attention in discussing the importance of verbalising and sharing your emotions with others, is the notion of 'Celebrating Failure'. In NLP we make the distinction between content and process, and suggest that 'process' is often more important for control and change than is 'content'.

For most people, the word 'Celebration' evokes the notion of positivity, happiness and joy. However, from an NLP perspective we would say that this is the typical 'content' of celebrating.

The 'process' of celebrating on the other hand involves intense emotional responding, performance or sharing with others and stimulation. This process is normally applied to positive content. However, without realising it, many people apply the process of celebrating to negative content. They 'celebrate' failure, disaster and negativity.

So the thing I want to highlight, is to make sure that when you share and verbalise your feelings, you don't overdo it and transgress into celebrating failure. The idea is to express your feelings so that you alleviate them, not to amplify and celebrate them and make them an ongoing focus. Express them and let them go. Your life enhancing happiness and peace of mind depend on it.

Savoring Positivity

The other thing that links to enhancing your life by expressing your feelings is the research from the field of Positive Psychology on 'savoring'.

Dr. Fred Bryant, Professor of Psychology, Loyola University, Chicago has studied the effects of savoring for the last 20 years. His recent book, Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience, describes the numerous benefits of savoring and its links to happiness.

Savoring involves enjoying and appreciating the good moments and aspects of each and every day. It's about sharing and celebrating the positive. This includes reminiscing about past experiences, really savoring and amplifying what's happening in the present and building strong positive anticipations for future events.

Fred's research shows that people who strongly savor their lives in an ongoing way, report higher levels of joy and life satisfaction. These positive emotions then broaden and build across contexts helping to buffer against stress and negative emotional experiences.

In his book, Fred recommends a number of strategies for enhancing your life through savoring, and of them the following are incredibly aligned with this blog entry:

• Sharing - sharing the emotional experience of an event with others increases enjoyment of it.
• Journaling - Writing a daily journal in which you recall the day's positive events enhances the savoring experience.
• Awareness - Intentionally sharpening your awareness for an event by focusing on and verbalising the positive emotions enhances the experience.

Practicing Mindfulness

So I hope you are now convinced of the usefulness and importance of becoming more conscious of your emotional experiencing, including both its negative and positive aspects, and of expressing your emotings appropriately. The wisdom of such 'mindfulness' practice is backed up by ancient esoteric traditions, such as yoga and buddhist philosophy. It's healthy and life enhancing.

With negative emoting, express it, share it and let it go. Become aware of and actively practice positive meta-emoting. And finally, savor and share every positive emotional experience that you can.

Get the most juice out of every moment of your life. It's your life, and you and those you care about will benefit immensely if you enhance your life through sharing and savoring.


positive smiles and great wishes,
Grant


Fred Bryant's Book on Savoring:

Excellent books on Positive Psychology: