Are You “Taking in the Good in Your Life” or Hiding It So No One Can Steal It?
ARCHIVED - Monday, June 15th, 2015
Do you ever have ideas of things of what you could do to feel happier and more at peace with your life and you write them down and then forget about them. This is something that happens to me all the time. I have a special notebook where I write them down and then completely forget about them. I won’t remember them unless I open the notebook and read them again. And of course I forget to do that too.
If I am honest with myself I get a sense of satisfaction and security from having the written down and hidden safely away. They are like diamonds in my pocket hidden where no one can find them, including myself because I can’t remember that I have written them!
So most of the time I would write down my creative ideas down but fail to go back to reread them and begin to make them happen in my life. It used to frustrate the hell out of me. They felt so alive and attractive when they come into my head I just could not understand how I could forget them so easily.
Until recently that is, when I read Rick Hanson’s new book Hardwiring Happiness. (See the book review in last month’s Inner Answers Newsletter)
In it he describes how our brains are hardwired to spend more time focusing on remembering negative dangerous experiences (like how to avoid being caught and eaten by predators in our caveman days ) than focusing on remembering positive experiences that bring us feelings of happiness and wellbeing. Recent research has shown that it takes the brain less than a second to encode and remember negative fearful experiences but up to 15 seconds! to remember and encode positive experiences of wellbeing and happiness!
Rick has developed a process of dealing with this and programming your mind to stay focused on the pleasant feelings you have when good things happen to give them time to encode in your memory. He calls this “Taking in the Good” and describes how to do it in his book Hardwiring Happiness.
All this was a real eye opener for me and I realized if I wanted to remember my early morning creative inspirations I needed to train my brain to feel safe to remember and encode them. So of course the kinesiologist in me got down to talking to the body to find out what inner negative conditioning I need to disentangle to allow me to remember my early morning creative inspirations and begin to take action to create and make them real in my life.
It’s a work in progress but stay tuned for my next blog and I’ll let you know how it is all going.