Welcome back to Unified Mindfulness Pathways. We’re going to do the Feel Good talk today, so let's begin.
Today, we're going to do a technique called Feel Good. Feel Good fits into a broader set of techniques in the grouping UM calls Nurture Positive. Nurture Positive techniques invite you to intentionally create and grow positivity in your inner system—See In, Hear In, and Feel In. That positivity can then affect your experience and behaviors. For instance, it can help you feel better or think more wisely. You can imagine ways to act more effectively, or be a better role model, or relate to situations in a healthier way. There are lots of other ways nurturing positivity can improve your experience and behaviors. If you come up with one, then you can just know that it’s meant to be covered in this category called Nurture Positive.
As I mentioned, this group of techniques works with thoughts and emotions; they use the inner side of "See, Hear, Feel." Another word for Nurture Positive is Improve. Compared to an Appreciate practice like the See Hear Feel technique where you're just observing what is, when you practice a Nurture Positive technique, you're actively creating positive images, mental talk, and emotion. You’re trying to improve your inner experience so you feel better, and also so you can hopefully have a more positive impact on the world.
This is something different that we haven't explored before in the previous techniques you've done. Up until now, you've just been appreciating what you detect and allowing it to be as it is. You may have narrowed your focus to something very specific, like motor expression, for example, or restfulness, or flow, but in those cases, you’re not asked to intentionally create a state or a thought which is positive. Alternating Appreciate practices like we've been doing with Improve practices like Feel Good optimizes your growth.
You could say that your maturity on this path of mindfulness practice is the degree to which you're able to embrace the cycle of dissolving into transcendence—going beyond the limited self in an extraordinary way and then bringing that understanding into ordinary life in order to make a more positive contribution. Contacting change in your sensory experience, as you practiced with Feel Flow, is one way to release whatever stands in the way of being a good person—there’s nothing to get stuck on. As we transcend our limited identity, as we transcend our rigid ideologies, as we transcend our experience that we find challenging by allowing it to come and go freely, that ability to not get caught makes it easier for us to be a good person. We can become deeply resourceful and draw tremendous strength from detecting in real time how experience changes and going with the flow.
So going beyond the limited self can help you release what stands in the way of becoming a better person. Flow can also be pleasantly rewarding, which makes it easier to feel good. And on the flip side, you can choose to do a technique that asks you to purposely nurture your positivity. Instead of working to go beyond the self, or even accept or express the self, you’re working to improve the self. Nurturing positivity also makes it easier to have equanimity and go with the flow of your experience. When you feel good, it can be easier to let go and dissolve into transcendence. So, in that way, positivity can set the stage for deeper practice experiences. When you intentionally cultivate and contact positivity, that also makes it easier to open up to sensory challenges.
This particular technique we're doing today is Feel Good and that means we're intentionally cultivating positive emotions specifically. Feel Good fits into a broader set of techniques in ULTRA (which stands for "Universal Library for Training Attention"). You can see the Nurture Positive quadrant there, and that's where Feel Good fits in alongside See Good, Hear Good, and any other technique that helps you create positivity. If a technique isn’t standard to the UM system, you won’t see it listed, but we call that a special exercise. So if you’ve ever practiced loving kindness, that would be a special exercise in the Nurture Positive quadrant.
Each of these four quadrants complement each other, which I described a bit earlier. For instance, if you appreciate your experience as it is, you may begin to transcend experience. And while it’s good to express spontaneity, you also want your expression to serve the greater good—you want the content of it to be positive.
Also, you can think of these techniques as modular. Meaning, they fit into one another. The broadest range of experience you focused on was the See Hear Feel technique. There was a narrower range with Feel Flow, for example. You were paying attention just to any change detected in the body. Auto Move narrowed your focus even more to just the spontaneity of physical expression as you're moving your body. With Feel Good you’re also narrowing what you focus on, but in this case it’s to positive emotions in the body. But it’s also a bit different because you’ll often be creating positive emotions. There are some great benefits to that. When you become skilled at this practice, it can dramatically change the way you relate to the world. You can imbue your world with positivity as you move through it. Every moment can become a moment of subtle service to those around you. And, equally important, it can change the way the world relates to you.
You also spend more time feeling positive, and you get more fulfillment out of positive emotions. Positive emotions may be more intense or richer, and this can carry over into your thoughts, your relationships, the way you feel on a daily basis, and the way you move around in the world. Your emotional home base can start to get more and more elevated over time.
Of course, practicing this technique also deepens your fulfillment as a result of developing these three key skills: Concentration, Clarity, and Equanimity. So even if you're not able to
generate positive emotions, just by doing the technique, you’re still improving your ability to know unconditional fulfillment. When your CC&E level is high, you experience rich rewards. By using your skills to nurture positivity, you increase your baseline of Concentration, Clarity, and Equanimity while also intentionally making the content of your experience more positive.
So, what to watch out for? Well, sometimes positive is very subtle and that's OK. You just try to have equanimity with the subtlety and work with it. Subtle is enough. Sometimes, you're in need of self-care and the Feel Good technique just doesn't seem authentic, so that's fine, too. You're free to switch to an Appreciate technique, which might be more appropriate for the moment.
Let's say you're trying to contact positive emotions, but it's a day where you're feeling kind of sad and it just doesn't feel natural. That's not a problem at all. You can either shift focus to an Appreciate technique if you need to, or if you're detecting subtle positivity—so, just glimmers of positive emotions—you may be able to direct that toward the part of you that’s struggling. You can sometimes use any momentum of positivity and turn it toward a part of you that needs support.
That's just by way of alternatives, in case Feel Good isn't working for you. Also, sometimes when you try to focus on positive, the exact opposite can come up. You get a rush of intense negativity. That's actually more common than you'd think and, again, same rules apply. You can switch to an Appreciate technique if it's more natural for you, or you can try focusing on subtle positive if it's available to you to strengthen your Concentration, Clarity, and Equanimity.
The practical applications are that you can use this in daily life. You can use it for behavior change. You can send out positive feelings in a meeting, over a meal. You can be secretly sending positivity to people sitting right in front of you. They'll never know. It's a fun one to use out and about in the world as a little secret sauce. You’re doing your best to make the world more peaceful by the way you relate to it.
So, what's unique about the Unified Mindfulness approach to developing positivity? Well, there are a couple of things that are interesting or unique about the Nurture Positive or Improve quadrant as compared to how these types of techniques are often taught in the field of meditation. One is the way it relates to the other quadrants. Understanding the relationship between, for instance, a technique that asks you to appreciate experience or one that asks you to improve experience gives you greater clarity about both types of techniques. Another thing that’s unique about the Unified Mindfulness approach to nurturing positivity is the way the system emphasizes developing the skills of Concentration, Clarity, and Equanimity as you practice. Making that explicit is different from how loving kindness is typically taught, for example, and doing that ensures that you make the most of your practice time.
So how do you do it? Well, you're using the "See, Hear, Feel" model that you're already familiar with. So in the "See" category, you’re visualizing positivity, in the "Hear" category, you’re creating positive mental talk, and in the "Feel" category, you’re finding or generating positive emotions. And, in the case of Feel Good, that’s what you’re mainly focusing on—positive emotions.
And again, what's unique though, is that we are always emphasizing skill development of CC&E. As a quick recap, visualizing positive behavior can help us enact that behavior, replacing negative self-talk with positive self-talk can lead to more productive thought, and cultivating positive emotions can improve your sense of well-being. And Nurture Positive, as a whole category of techniques, helps you experience the kind of happiness that's independent of conditions because you’re cultivating Concentration, Clarity, and Equanimity as you practice.
So, how do you actually practice Feel Good? Well, you can either find or create positive emotion. And I'm going to give you some suggestions on how to do that in the guidance. So you can think of that as “striking the bell” of emotional positivity in your body. Then you apply concentration power, sensory clarity, and equanimity to the positive emotion even as it fades. So you strike the bell. You generate any kind of positive emotion. Then you turn your attention towards it with CC&E, and you stay with it for as long as it lasts, even as it's fading. When it's gone, you strike that bell again, either using the same strategy or something else, and then you do that repeatedly in a cycle. You're generating positivity, staying with the experience until it fades. Then you're renewing the positivity and staying with it until it fades.
We have a fun little acronym to help you remember all the different ways that you can generate Feel Good. It goes: Find the spark or Reach for the STARS. Positive emotions may already be present in the body. So you can find that initial spark to build a stronger flame. If that doesn’t work you can reach for the STARS.
S stands for Smile. You just put a physical smile on your face and then notice the positive emotion that causes in the body, even if it's subtle. It doesn't even have to be an authentic smile. Just by smiling, there is a natural response in the body that you're able to detect and work with. That’s just one option. I’m giving you a bunch so you can find what works for you.
T stands for Think. You can use your thoughts to bring on positive emotion in the body, maybe images in the mind or something you tell yourself or some positive memory you see and hear. So that's Find the spark, Smile, Think.
And A stands for Activate. Some people can just flip a switch and turn on positive emotions in the body, at will. So, find it, Smile, Think, Activate it.
And then R stands for Respond. You can use external stimuli to create a positive emotional response in the body. That’s what we’re going to be doing later on when we work with
music. That’s really a classic way to generate positive emotion in the body. We listen to the music, it moves us, and then we focus on that positive emotional response.
And the last S in STARS stands for Support. Sometimes if we have other reward states such as a pleasant flow of energy or restfulness in the body, that may support our access to positive emotions. So those are all the ways that you can generate positivity: Find the spark or Reach for the STARS.
When you get a momentum with this, you can use your concentration power to get so absorbed in positive emotion that it intensifies and your equanimity allows it to spread across your whole body. Then you can try to radiate it beyond your body out into the world. This may be through your imagination, or you may really have a perceptual experience that that’s happening. In that way, you can color everything you see, hear, or touch with positivity.
In a little bit we’ll use music to create positive emotions. It's a lot of fun. But first we're going to start without the music, and we’ll go through these steps: Find the spark; Reach for the STARS. You don’t have to do these steps every time you practice the technique. You can do what works for you, but this is a great way for you to be introduced to some possible ways to generate positivity.
So, do you have any questions before the guided practice?
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