A Simple Practice for Taking in the Good (with Dr. Rick Hanson)
Try this right now if you're willing. Call up some experience that would be good for you to feel. It might be plain enjoyment you're already in the middle of, or a sense that your mind is doing its job well as you follow along here with Erik. Maybe gratitude surfaces instead: gratitude for being alive, for the technology that makes a gathering like this possible, for the decent people around you, for good things that have happened to you.
Or you could turn toward others who care about you. That bond doesn't have to be flawless. Somewhere in the whole pie of a relationship, there's usually a real slice where you matter to someone who loves you, likes you, or appreciates you. Whichever door you walk through, bring your attention to one beneficial experience and rest your awareness on it.
Then stay. This is the part that trips people up. It can be surprisingly hard to let yourself sit inside an ordinary, healthy, good experience for ten uninterrupted seconds. So give it a shot. Let these words lead you into a closeness with your own body, a closeness with what you're living through right now.
As you hold the experience, open to actually enjoying it while you install it. Notice how it feels emotionally. Notice where it registers as sensation in the body, because that noticing enriches it and helps it get encoded. Picture yourself taking it in, soaking it up the way a sponge draws in water.
Good. That's the whole thing, and you did it. It ran long here only because I was narrating each move. In real life the practice is quick: five, ten, maybe twenty seconds, done on the fly. I stretched it out to walk you through the steps, but normally those steps blur together and you do them informally while the day is happening.
If you want the specifics on how this process of positive neuroplasticity gets applied, in psychotherapy, in coaching, in mindfulness training, in teaching kids, or in your own growth and healing, there's a good deal of worked-out detail on the methods and how to adapt them to individual cases. I've made a lot of that material available for free at RickHanson.net, and it's built into the program I run, The Foundations of Well-Being.