Have you noticed when you experience a positive experience like awe, hope and amusement it feels great, but when that experience is shared with someone the experience seems to be elevated, why? well according to Dr Barbara Fredrickson (World renowned researcher of Positive Psychology) it’s because you’ve just experienced love.
She argues that love blossoms anytime people connect over a shared positive emotion. Whether that be between romantic partners, parents, children or total strangers, anyone can experience these micro-moments of love. Although these experiences may be fleeting, their physical and psychological effects lead to deeper bonds and have shown to greatly improve health.
Out of all the positive emotions, Love actually has the greatest health benefits. And when you switch your perspective from the view that you need a strong romantic relationship to experience love, or have great parents, you realise you can cultivate love through micro-moments of love, those moments of resonance you share with someone over a positive experience.
Now the reason this is great to know is if your ever feeling down or your feeling like you don’t have much love in your life, maybe you don’t have the partner you want, the family or friends you want, by changing your perception on what love is, on how love has to look like and employing some of the techniques we will soon discuss you can easily bring love into your life right now.
Here are 3 techniques:
To cultivate positive emotions we first need to shift our energy and when it comes to feeling love there is no better way then to practice loving kindness meditation.
1/Loving Kindness Meditation
Loving Kindness is a meditation which focuses on creating more feelings of warmth and kindness toward others. You’re first asked to think of someone in your life for whom you have warm and tender feelings, whether it’s a child or a spouse or even a pet, and then to try to bring forth those feelings as much as you can and hold them in your heart. As you’re doing that, you let the child or pet or person you were thinking about kind of slip away, but you hold on to the feeling. Then you take that warm, tender feeling and apply it to yourself or to others whom you might not normally feel that way about. And you continue to apply that feeling to ever larger circles of people.
If you want to practice this meditation visit http://www.positivityresonance.com/meditations.html
They have done many studies on the effects of practicing this meditation on a consistent basis and the main increase that comes from it is an increase in experiencing positive emotions in your daily life.
Try to see loving kindness meditation like a preparatory activity that makes positive connections easier to happen.
2/Savour Micro-Moments
After practicing loving kindness meditation we need to pay attention, be on a look out for those positive moments of resonance. They might be small, like an exchange of a smile, laughing with a baby or a friend, working on a project with a person, but when you’re on a look out you will find them. An then we must be aware of our tendency to brush those moments quickly away and be moving onto the next thing. See if you can stop and savour that moment, by maybe just smiling a little longer, and connecting with the persons eyes and feeling your heart centre at the same time. How often do we really stop in our days to enjoy the blessings that can be found in them, the potential for these experiences are abundant like a field of flowers.
Be aware that positive emotions are a birthright. Even if the family you grew up didn’t help you to feel them, we all have access to them, your upbringing can’t take away your capacity to connect with others, it might have just reduced your skills but the capacity is still there, and like any skill it can be improved by working on it.
3/ Take Stock
And lastly the third way to bring more micro-moments of love into our life is by taking stock at the end of your day – the kind of interactions you had and how attuned and connected you felt in them.
Through the practice of loving kindness you will be hopefully meeting others with more openness and warmheartedness. Taking you out of the blundered state and being curious about whats going on in the lives of the people your meeting. Are they enjoying their day? are they facing any difficulty? and even sending them positive intentions and prays ; I hope good fortune for this person. This is more about bringing about a shift in perception and softening you to become more approachable and in return increasing the frequency of positive connections.
The immediate effects of micro-moments of love are short lived but the long term benefits come from a steady diet of such experiences.
So if your wanting to feel more love in your life, take time to practice the loving kindness meditation, savour micro-moments and take stock of the interactions of your day.
Let me know how you go? what happened when you practiced any of those tips and if you have any questions.
Namaste
Basia
