A friend of mine once sent me the following in an email conversation, when she mentioned how happiness was for her a matter of deliberate choice and I’d asked something like “How do you do that?”
It’s relatively easy, once you know the trick. The trick is to remember how you feel when you feel really good. Consciously see what you see when you feel good, hear what you hear, notice the body sensation. Then, to start, imagine each one of them. When you feel good, rev it up by making it bigger and brighter and louder and more intense. Send the feeling through your whole body, then let it leave (it will want to leave from a specific place, just like the feeling will want to start in a particular space… as the feeling leaves (say through your toes) circle it around and let it come in again where it started.
The specific sensations I found to attach to that advice were those I associated with walking slowly in fresh air with bright sun warming my eyelids, face, shoulder and back, just basking in that spring sun, doing what I call my plant impression...
I’m not really conversant with NLP but that’s where she said she got this from, and I do credit that single paragraph with significant contributions to improving my mood over the seven years since that conversation. (Even though, rereading it just now, I realize I rarely do much more than just recalling that happy feeling; the circling stuff around I’ve usually skipped.)
A friend of mine once sent me the following in an email conversation, when she mentioned how happiness was for her a matter of deliberate choice and I’d asked something like “How do you do that?”
The specific sensations I found to attach to that advice were those I associated with walking slowly in fresh air with bright sun warming my eyelids, face, shoulder and back, just basking in that spring sun, doing what I call my plant impression...
I’m not really conversant with NLP but that’s where she said she got this from, and I do credit that single paragraph with significant contributions to improving my mood over the seven years since that conversation. (Even though, rereading it just now, I realize I rarely do much more than just recalling that happy feeling; the circling stuff around I’ve usually skipped.)
Huh—that sounds fascinatingly akin to this description of how to induce first jhana I read the other day.