Lingering Summer
Well, it happened. Labor Day weekend has come and gone. The unofficial end to summer has arrived, and perhaps you find yourself already moving into the swing of fall.
I invite you to notice what you might be feeling right now.
Notice where your mind goes.
Is there a contraction?
A holding on, a clinging to summer?
Is there a feeling of grief? Yearning? Missing what had transpired or perhaps a longing for what you weren't able to fit in?
Or maybe you’re already racing ahead. Looking at a full calendar or a hefty to-do list with all the things you had pushed off to this week.
Perhaps you notice a feeling of anxiety. A sense of frenzy beginning to spin around.
Whether you’re holding on to what was or forecasting what may never be, you’ve left this moment.
This moment right here.
The present.
This moment in which there are still technically several more weeks of summer.
This moment in which you’ve chosen to pause and read this email.
Each time our minds wander and drift into the realms of habitual thought, we have a choice. We can allow the mind to ramble about. Or we can choose to come back to the present moment.
We can choose to direct our attention to what is here right now.
Perhaps simply the feeling of the support of the chair or the feeling of the floor under our feet.
Or maybe the feeling of the breath.
Or maybe there is another anchor for the attention.
When we allow our minds to wander, they can often roam into negative territories. The worrying. The anxiety. The replaying of past situations or anticipating the future. And it’s not inherently bad that our minds go on these adventures. Our minds are wired in this way. The seeming preference for the negative is rooted in the desire to keep us safe, healthy, and alive.
In his book Hardwiring Happiness, neuropsychologist Rick Hanson describes our brain as "Velcro for the negative experiences and Teflon for the good." The things that are challenging, difficult, or didn’t go the way we had hoped tend to stick around. We tend to chew on these things. Allow them to linger in our awareness. Whereas the positive experiences, the little successes or smiles in our day, often move quickly through our awareness.
The thing is, it’s possible to make the good experiences a bit more sticky as well. It’s possible to train the brain to have a firmer grasp on the good. To feel these experiences seep into our being.
By "taking in the good" as Hanson writes, we instill these positive experiences in our brain. "By taking just a few extra seconds to stay with a positive experience...you'll help turn a passing mental state into lasting neural structure. Over time, you can fill up your inner storehouse with the strengths you need, such as feeling at ease rather than irritable, loved rather than mistreated, and resourced rather than running on empty."
Hanson developed a meditation practice to strengthen the stickiness of the good moments. The practice involves three steps:
1) Have a positive experience
2) Enrich the experience
3) Absorb the experience
This is a meditation I’ve practiced and guided for many years and have found it to be quite powerful. Inspired by my own longing for the breezy days of summer, I decided to create meditation that explores using these three steps in a bit of a novel way. I’m happy to share it with you today (link here). All you need is a space where you can be quiet for about 10 minutes.