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The Effect of Positive Emotions on Our Health

Bhavika
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12
The Effect of Positive Emotions on Our Health

“The best way to overcome undesirable or negative thoughts and feelings is to cultivate the positive ones.” ~ William Atkinson

Its important we recognise our thoughts and emotions and be aware of its effect not only on our health but also our relationships and our surroundings.

happiness-quotePositive emotions makes you feel happy and joyful.

Everything around you seems beautiful, you enjoy the moment and things seem to fall into place.

Barbara Fredrickson, one of the long-time researchers and author on positive emotions, has shown how cultivating positivity can transform us at a cellular level and actually shape who we are.

Fredrickson’s theory of positive emotions, ‘Broaden-and-build’ suggests that positive emotions lead to novel, expansive behavior, and these actions, over time lead to lasting emotional resilience, flourishing and meaningful social relationships.

Positive emotions or behaviour – like playfulness, gratitude, awe, love, interest, serenity, and feeling of interconnectedness to others – broadens our perspective, opens our mind and heart as we feel completely in tune with our environment. Like the flowers that blossom when the sun rises, the same way positive emotions bring light and joy back in our lives.

According to Fredrickson, Negative emotions are necessary for us to flourish, and positive emotions are by nature subtle and fleeting; the secret is not to deny their transience but to find ways to increase their quantity.

Rather than trying to eliminate negativity, she recommends we balance negative feelings with positive ones.

In this video she discusses how positive emotions broadens our awareness of the world, allowing us to become more in tune with the needs of others.

Barbara Fredrickson: Positive Emotions Transform Us
Barbara Fredrickson: Positive Emotions Open Our Mind

Shakespeare said, “Frame your mind to mirth and merriment, which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life.”

Lets take a look at the physical and emotional benefits of positive emotions –

  • Faster recovery from cardiovascular stress
  • Positive emotions have also been shown to benefit individuals with cardiovascular disease.
  • Lower blood pressure and risk for cardiovascular disease
  • Better sleep, fewer colds, headaches, aches and pain, and a greater sense of overall happiness
  • Expands our perception of what lies in our peripheral vision
  • Research suggests that even more abstract positive emotions like hope and curiosity offer protective benefits from diseases like high blood pressure and diabetes.
  • Studies show that positive emotions help a person to overcome negative emotions faster and be more resilient and be able to cope with a difficult situation.
  • People are more playful when happy, so that leads better physical fitness, regular exercise or increased flexibility. (so its important to engage in an activity that makes you happy)
  • People who experience warmer, more upbeat emotions may have better physical health because they make more social connections

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When you delve in that happy space, more possibilities and new ideas emerge and our creativity flows. Happiness and joy transform us, although you might not stay in that state all the time.

There will days when you feel down and out, but if we observe our emotions and divert our mind and think of the happy moments, you will find the negative emotion fading away.

Don’t forget negative, repressed emotions can have detrimental effect on our body, mind and spirit. It takes control over you and makes you feel down, gloomy, unhealthy and its a unpleasant state to be in.

Nothing like a good humour to drive the negativity away, always works for me. So increase your daily diet of positivity or engage in activities that bring about happy feelings either meditation, exercise, yoga, laughter clubs, walk, painting, and so on.

Positive feelings also help us live in the present moment and believe in oneness and interconnectedness with everything around us.

To sum it up, Marcus Aurelius said “Remember this, that very little is needed to make a happy life.”

Resources:

Emotional Guidance Scale from Abraham Hick’s Ask and it is Given
Barbara Fredrickson
Fredrickson’s Quote
Positive Emotions

4 Ways Traveling Can Expand Consciousness

Gary Z McGee
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6
4 Ways Traveling Can Expand Consciousness

“Genuine travel has no destination. Travelers do not go somewhere, but constantly discover that they are somewhere else… Nature does not change; it has no inside or outside. It is therefore not possible to travel through it. All travel is therefore change within the traveler, and it is for that reason that travelers are always somewhere else. To travel is to grow.” ~ James P. Carse

Experiencing the world can expand our minds because it allows us to see the world from another perspective.

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A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving. ~ Laozi

We can read all we want, poke people on Facebook from Wherever-istan, watch videos of snake charmers in the Medinas of Marrakesh, or talk to people who have visited Tibet, but until we actually immerse ourselves, we will never truly understand the majestic power of these beautiful locations.

Here are 4 ways traveling can help expand consciousness.

1) It diminishes preconditioned prejudices

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” ~ Mark Twain

We don’t choose where we’re born. We don’t choose what culture we’re raised in. We don’t even choose what values we’re indoctrinated into as children and adolescence. Growing up we are conditioned to believe and to think with a particular worldview that is often drastically different than the worldview of someone in another part of the world who was born on the exact same day as us.

If we never travel, we may never even become aware of this astounding fact. When we finally do get around to traveling, we discover that the world is an amazingly diverse place.

Immersing ourselves in diverse cultures helps us to become more flexible in our worldview. We become perceptually elastic and even more empathic as we become engrossed in the alien goings on. Travel teaches patience and resiliency and helps us to become more adaptable and open-minded, making us more Zen in our everyday life. Nothing stretches a comfort zone like good travel.

When we open ourselves to the world, the world opens even further to us. We discover that our preconditioned nationalism and patriotism are petty things compared to the glorious interconnectedness that comes with true immersion into diverse parts of the world.

Like Einstein warned us, “Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.”

2) It creates unity

“The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.” ~ Marcel Proust

As our preconceived prejudices diminish we discover another boon of good travel: unity. We come to understand that separation is an illusion. When we travel we become better at handling relationships.

Our social skills improve dramatically. The more people we meet, the more we tend to grow into refined, sophisticated people. Good travel even improves our ability to trust.

Everywhere
Everywhere

Five studies done at Northwestern University examined the effect of travel on generalized trust.

Researcher Jiyin Cao wrote, “In all five studies, we found a robust relationship between the breadth of foreign travel experiences and generalized trust.”

The more we travel, the more we learn about the harmonious cycles of various cultures, the more we come to realize that, even though things are different, things are also connected in ways that go beyond sharing a border with a country.

We discover that there really are no borders. Borders are illusory lines drawn into the sand, at best; especially those laid down by outdated methods of governance and parochial power plays. A genuine traveler realizes that all boundaries can be transformed into horizons.

3) It enhances creativity

“If you’re really listening, if you’re truly awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold evermore wonders.” ~ Andrew Harvey

There is so much beauty in the world, and no amount of pictures or videos can do justice to experiencing it firsthand. The biodiversity alone is astounding. Nothing beats the ability to contrast the memory of a sunset in the Sahara with the memory of a sunset in Kauai, or the capacity to differentiate between the popcorn-stink of tiger piss in Thailand and the dry dusty-stench of a donkey while hiking down into the Grand Canyon.

You can’t get this from sitting around at home vegetating in front of a computer. Having such diverse experiences enhances our imagination which, in turn, enhances our creativity.

Capture the moment
Capture the moment

Genuine travel reveals the searing beauty of the world, and we cannot help but be bursting with the need to express it. Whether through photography, poetry, a traveler’s journal, or the canvas waiting for us when we get home, traveling compels us to share our experiences through our art.

You can feel it weigh heavy on your heart when you witness monkeys leaping from cliff-face to cliff-face while boating through the Three Gorges on the Yangtze River.

You can see it at midnight in the bioluminescent waters off the coast of Pi Pi Don. You can smell it while backpacking through a tulip farm in Amsterdam, or on the back of a camel trekking through the Sahara. You can taste it eating a scorpion kebab in Bangkok.

Like Laurence Gonzales wrote, “See the beauty. Seeing what is beautiful in the world binds you to it so that you are motivated to stay alive to enjoy it again.”

4) It can reduce stress and depression

“If the individual realizes his self by spontaneous activity and thus relates himself to the world, he ceases to be an isolated atom; he and the world become part of one structuralized whole; he has his rightful place, and thereby his doubt concerning himself and the meaning of life disappears.” ~ Erich Fromm

Genuine travel reduces anxiety. But in a nine-year APA study that tracked the health of 12,000 middle-aged men, researchers found that those who took at least one holiday a year were almost 30 percent less likely to die from a heart-related cause compared to men who did not take time off.

Besides that, traveling gets us away from the corporate rat-race and domestic grind of life. It connects us back to the world. Our materialistic, hyper-possessive lives fade away as we suddenly become more engaged with the cosmos. We become more aware. We realize that things don’t create lasting happiness, but the experience from traveling will stay with us forever.

Like Chris McCandless was recorded as saying in Into the Wild, “…so many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a person than a secure future. The very basic core of a living spirit is passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day, to have a new and different sun.

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Passport
Everywhere

When in Doubt, One must Grow

Garima Roy
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0
When in Doubt, One must Grow

Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother. ~ Khalil Gibran

Doubt is a state of mind where the person cannot take a decision or come to terms with the given truth. There is confusion, irritation, and, if the doubt persists, it leads to criticism.

Sometimes, doubt becomes a constant state of mind for years. We doubt history, anthropology, epistemology, psychology, philosophy. Metaphorically speaking, there is so much to doubt. And doubt is the engine of the mind. There is nothing wrong in doubting. But dwelling in one, is certainly harmful.

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There is no denying the fact that everybody doubts in a different way. When in doubt, most of us make an effort to clear that doubt. Sometimes, we are almost on the verge of clearing our doubts but we turn back or divert our attention to some other doubt. Some wrongly doubt for the sake of doubting.

Some live in that particular doubt zone to protect their preconceived notions from getting eroded for the sake of their sanity. They work on building new defence mechanisms to avoid people from shaking their foundation of belief/doubt. For example, religion and racism is an example of this category of doubt-dwellers.

Sometimes the area of our doubt has no immediate or definite conclusion. Philosophy is one such domain. It is not chemistry where hydrogen and oxygen make water by hook or by crook. Thankfully, wisdom can never be a market commodity. One cannot buy wisdom. One can only experience it endlessly. Consider this statement.

Person A ~ “I have been good for so many years. They say if you do good, good things happen to you. But nothing good has ever happened to me, so I will transform into bad.”

Here, clearly, the person doesn’t even know what good or bad actually means. Here the person doesn’t know what to doubt. It amazes me how so many people live their lives this way.

Getting back to the theory of doubt, Rene Descartes, a French philosopher, said, “I think, therefore I am.” He also gave the theory of Cartesian doubt, a form of methodological skepticism. He said, doubt everything, even one’s core beliefs. The purpose is to use doubt as a route to certain knowledge by finding those things which could not be doubted.

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Several years have now elapsed since I first became aware that I had accepted, even from my youth, many false opinions for true, and that consequently what I afterward based on such principles was highly doubtful; and from that time I was convinced of the necessity of undertaking once in my life to rid myself of all the opinions I had adopted, and of commencing anew the work of building from the foundation…~ René Descartes, Meditation I, 1641

That’s how one evolves. But keep your mind open. Doubt should be a carved path to knowledge and wisdom. Humans, most of the time, don’t like to be told that their common sense is not good enough.

Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has. ~ Descartes

The fact of the matter is one should rise above the false sense of pride and entertain doubts that cross the mind. One should have enough courage to be faithful to the questions that arise rather than sticking to the authoritative conclusions. Be compassionate to your doubts because it’s you speaking to yourself.

Human eye has a defined range of normal vision. We cannot see anything after a point. That doesn’t mean things don’t exist beyond that. As Khalil Gibran said, doubt and faith are twins. But have coherent reasons to your doubts. Don’t doubt like the Person A, I mentioned above.

One should not doubt to demean a concept or a person, or to show superiority, or to exert intellectual power. It shouldn’t be like stagnant pale water but, instead, it should allow you to touch different shores of human understanding time to time. Doubt because you want to know the truth that will help you in crossing all the boundaries drawn between you and understanding yourself.

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Doubt
Bukowski 

Be Extraordinary: How to Believe in Yourself When You Don’t Feel Worthy

Gary Z McGee
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15
Be Extraordinary: How to Believe in Yourself When You Don’t Feel Worthy

What do you do when you realize that you’re nothing more than a story you’ve been telling yourself?

I’ll tell you: You make that story as interesting and extraordinary as possible. That’s it. That’s all you need. Now get out there and retell/rewrite your story. Not enough for you? Okay then.

The trick to hacking your way out of the Labyrinth of Unworthiness is to “act” like your worthy. Eventually, your acting worthy will make you worthy. It’s akin to the expression, “Fake it till you make it.” Or, “Practice makes perfect.” You might “feel” unworthy but if you “act” like you’re worthy then you WILL be worthy.

Still not enough for you? Okay. Imagine a first-time firefighter standing outside a burning building with a baby inside, and the building is about to collapse. The firefighter is going to “feel” fear, but if he doesn’t “act” with courage, then that baby will die.

So he trumps his feeling of fear with an act of courage. He felt fear but acted courageously. Similarly, we can feel unworthy but act worthy.

The intent is the thing: if our intent is good, then even if the result is bad our conscience will be clear. The action is the thing: if we act with courage, then even if we fail we can still be proud. The journey is the thing: if we enjoy the ride, then it becomes primary and the destination becomes secondary.

Charlie Chaplain said it best, “Smile though your heart is aching.”

There’s a Greek word, métis, which is a quality that combines wisdom and cunning. This quality was considered to be highly admirable in ancient Athens. Metis was the Greek Goddess who gave Zeus the potion that caused Cronus to vomit out Zeus’ siblings. Metis was also the mother of Athena, goddess of wisdom and courage.

How to Believe in Yourself When You Don't Feel Worthy

The mythology plays out like this: Zeus became aware of a prophecy that his and Metis’ progeny would one day overthrow him. After coitus, Zeus tricks Metis into transforming into a fly at which time he promptly swallows her. But he’s too late.

Metis is already pregnant with Athena and burrows herself into his brain. Then Hephaestus splits Zeus’ head open with an axe at the river Triton, and Athena leaps out fully grown.

Métis is the emergence of wisdom from the coalescence of unconscious and conscious energies. But I say it is more than just that. It is a higher state of cunning, a magical cunning, an exceedingly astute meta-wit. It is uncanny creativeness personified. It is neither explicit nor implicit. It is both, somehow: eximplicit, if you will.

It’s an almost god-like awareness and sensitivity toward the all-pervasive medium, the “water,” in which we are immersed, and the all-encompassing “fishbowl” in which we are bound.

It is an ancient sly orientation with reality and a cosmic wisdom all wrapped up in the capacity to understand that we are beings of limited capacity and rampant fallibility. It subsumes self-actualization, individuation and enlightenment, not merely as means to an end but as ends in themselves.

How to Believe in Yourself When You Don't Feel Worthy

Like Metis planting herself in Zeus’ head, our ability to act courageous in the face of fear, calm in the face of rage or worthy in the face of unworthiness, is our ability to choose to be extraordinary despite feeling ordinary. It’s the ability to tap into our own “magical cunning,” our inner-métis.

If, as Kurt Vonnegut said, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be,” then it behooves us to pretend to be extraordinary.

It behooves us to allow ourselves to be worthy, especially when we are feeling worthless. It takes some counterintuitive thinking, and perhaps some crown-chakra meditation, but it is possible.

Pretend you’re courageous by acting courageous and, guess what? You’re suddenly courageous. Keep practicing it. Keep trumping sadness with happiness, hate with love, paranoia with pronoia, jealousy with compersion.

Trick your self into a higher self. Fake it until you make it. Eventually you won’t even have to fake it at all, for you will have subsumed the process. You’ll find, as Alan Watts did, that you’re no longer a victim of the world, you ARE the world.

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Athena-Metis

From Victim to Warrior: Saying Yes to the Soul

Gary Z McGee
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8
From Victim to Warrior: Saying Yes to the Soul

“The basic difference between an ordinary person and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary person takes everything either as a blessing or a curse.” ~ Carlos Castaneda

Life can throw us for a loop sometimes, and sometimes it can feel like the entire world is against us. The good thing is that we have a choice in how we handle it: victim or warrior. The bad thing is that it is often overwhelming and difficult to handle.

But the challenge is to become mature enough to go from being a mere victim of the world to realizing that we actually ARE the world. Once we can do that, we free ourselves to embody soul. But first we need a proper orientation between what constitutes a good and bad life.

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Change Fear

Carl Jung wrote, “The difference between a good life and a bad life is how well you walk through the fire.”

Shakespeare’s Hamlet said, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Both quotes imply that disposition and attitude is the thing.

A victim walks through the fire and whines about the pain and bemoans his scars. A warrior walks through the fire and learns what the pain has to teach him, and then uses that pain as a stepping stone to a higher state of consciousness, while regarding his scars as trophies.

“Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.” ~ Elisabeth Gilbert

Both get burned, but only the warrior grows. It is a choice between courage and cowardice. Cowardice is easy, but it leads to victimization and egoism. Courage is always more challenging, but it is also immensely rewarding and leads to an embodiment of soul.

This is all easier said than done, sure. Mostly because of the way we’ve been conditioned to perceive the world. Unreasonable expectation is one of the main culprits. Whether it’s our own expectations or the expectations imparted to us by our parents and conditioned into us by culture, it’s an obstacle to our embodying soul. The universe is not designed to match our expectations.

Neither does it deserve the flimsy definitions we vainly attempt to pigeonhole it into.

Like David McRaney wrote, “You can’t improve the things you love if you never allow them to be imperfect.”

In order to truly embody soul, we must allow things to be imperfect. We must allow ourselves to be imperfect. And that means letting go of our expectations.

“However disorienting, difficult, or humbling our mistakes might be,” writes Katheryn Schultz, “it is ultimately wrongness, not rightness, that can teach us who we are.” Indeed.

If the greatest enemy to imagination is expectation and the greatest ally to imagination is disorientation, then it stands to reason that the way we break the cycle of being a victim is by embracing bewilderment and uncertainty and nixing unreasonable expectation so as to improve our imagination. If we are unable to do this it leads to anxiety.

morpheus-quoteBut if we’re able to do this then we are constantly fascinated by the world “in the moment,” rather than suffering in the hell of unmet expectations. Let’s not taint our here-and-now with superimposed expectations.

Let’s instead inject it with awe and wonderment, with surprise and befuddlement. This way, through our ripening imagination, soul is allowed to blossom and come to fruition, despite the crippling expectations of our ego.

But saying yes to the soul is not an easy task for anyone.

As Marianne Williamson writes, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

The interesting thing is: we all know this to be true. We all know, at a fundamental level, we are more powerful than we allow ourselves to be. You see, fear cripples us in both ways. It cripples us as victims AND as potential warriors. This is because when we base our identity on identifying with an authority, which is how most of us are raised, freedom causes anxiety.

We must then conceal the powerful warrior within by resorting to being victimized by the world, thereby relieving ourselves of the anxiety that comes with true freedom. It’s a fascinating, if not bewildering, aspect of the human condition. So really, we shouldn’t be worried about children who are afraid of the dark; we should be more worried about adults who are afraid of the light.

In the end, suffering occurs when we want the impermanence of the world to be permanent.

Like Neil Gaiman wrote, “Hell is something you carry around with you, not somewhere you go.”

The only Hell is unreasonable expectation. If we sacrifice the need for permanence, and instead embrace vicissitude and unexpected change, then “Hell” will continue to elude us.

Let’s escape the tyranny of the linear. Let’s discover the cyclical instead. Let’s remove ourselves from the victim’s dead-stare of coercion, victimization, and the subliminal urge to bend everything to their will. Let’s move instead into the warrior’s open countenance of cohesion, compassion, and the holistic desire to bring people and nature together. Nothing could be easier, and yet, it seems, nothing could be more difficult.

PEACEFUL WARRIOR - MOTIVATIONAL VIDEO

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Change Fear
Hope for the best
Know you are

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