Understanding our Relationship to Happiness & Joy.

Cultivating Happiness and Joy

So I am almost half way through a two-year online course on mindfulness and mediation.

This content has been so nourishing for my wellbeing - I absolutely love it and I love learning.

This month it was my turn to host a mediation for my peer group on cultivating happiness and joy for ourselves. We were asked to really examine the times when we are experiencing joy and happiness.

This alone has blown my mind! Being able to spend time examining and studying this concept  was not introduced into my sphere of learning as a child or adult. And yet this is so powerful in supporting our mental health and the psychology behind it.

What I found really interesting was Rick Hanson’s share on how our brains are programmed to shift more to the negative bias thinking and how, when we do experience something positive, it becomes such a fleeting sensation for us humans - we are not wired to give it importance. This brought up so many thoughts about myself and all our ancestral conditioning into this thinking pattern.

Though behind it is fear - the negative thinking bias is fear - and what that does to our perception of ourselves & the world we live in with our daily interactions and  all of our decisions and opinions. 

Within the  philosophy class of my yoga teacher training the swami shared with us that we are only ever operating from two emotions: FEAR and LOVE

.  They are the scaffolding for all the other emotions and feelings. Ram Dass, a spiritual teacher also speaks about these two main operating systems that we work from to navigate our lives.

The more I stay on the path of self development the more I understand that ‘unlearning’ has to happen in order to learn new ways of being to expand your understanding. 

The paradox of it all, you have to laugh.

The analogy that comes to mind is the sea waves washing up on the shore and taking some debris out while the waves erode some stones to create the sand. It always comes back to the ocean - the depth of the ocean, an undiscovered world.

Thoughts from the Thoughtful Wave.