How Mindfulness Can Counteract Negativity Bias

Imagine you’re living millions of years ago out on the plains of Africa. It's a dangerous place. The weather is hazardous. There are predators lurking about, slinking through the grass, waiting to pounce on you. Your nervous system needs to be on high alert to warn you of danger so you’re constantly attuned to the possibility of negative outcomes.

By contrast, let's say somebody from your band, your tribe flashes a smile at you. You smile back, and that's it. 

Why is that? Why would something positive not be as powerful in the body as something negative? 

Well, if somebody smiles at you and you smile back, it's nice for a moment. But if there’s a little rustle in the grass and your nervous system doesn't register it as a predator that's stalking you, you're dead. You're a lion’s next meal.

How does this relate to mindfulness?

There's a neuropsychologist by the name of Rick Hanson whose work I really enjoy because he explores how practicing mindfulness can shape our brains in a way that counteracts this negativity bias. And we should counteract it. After all, we’re no longer living in situations that constantly put us in mortal danger like our ancestors did. 

And yet it's been shown that negative experiences still tend to have a more profound impact on our nervous system than positive experiences. What’s worse, it’s been shown that we transfer negative experiences to our long-term memory more readily than positive experiences. 

This is where I think Rick Hanson’s work is so useful to us as mindfulness practitioners. Hanson says the brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones. Think about that. You have a negative experience — perhaps you wake up in the morning and you were really hoping to have a couple eggs for breakfast, but there's only one egg in the fridge. (That actually happened to me this morning. It was devastating! I'm still recovering.) Or maybe you recall a bully on the playground when you were five years old. Whatever it is, your nervous system records these experiences. Something bad happens, and the amygdala in our brain fires. It transfers the negative experience to the memory center, and we remember that moment maybe the rest of our lives. 

Rick Hanson's antidote is to work with this bias. He suggests that you let positive experiences soak in to the mind — let it soak into your neural circuitry for at least 12 seconds.

Do that for a moment now. 

Think of one nice thing that has happened today — ideally something trivial. And just sit with it for at least 12 seconds.

…

We can use our mindfulness practice to amplify the countless positive things that happen in a day. We might have an amazing day, and then a single phone call completely dominates our awareness since it came in with the bad news. We run it through our minds again, and again, and again, in hopes that we might avoid something like this happening in the future. 

So instead of letting this negativity bias run away with our lives and rob us of the inherent happiness that we have as human beings who are alive and awake, we can soak in the positive no matter the circumstances. That's one of the takeaways of a mindfulness practice. If you are aware in this moment and breathing, you are more wealthy than the wealthiest of kings and queens.

So let’s do a little bit of neuro-sculpting. We're going to focus in on a positive experience that easily could have slipped right off of our teflon brains. We're going to take a moment to just allow some positivity to fill our awareness. 

Over time as we make a practice of this, as we hold an intention to do this in our mindfulness practice, we have quicker, more ready access to positive experience. It makes us happier.

Begin Practice

Whatever you're doing at the moment, just notice that you're doing it. Bring your awareness to sensation. Just the feeling of feeling. The feeling of physical embodiment, of sensation. 

And as you do this, you can breathe. Just allow yourself to breathe and imagine that the breath is like a billows, fanning the flames of a fire. Only now it's the breath fanning the flames of sensation. Just allow yourself to enjoy in embodiment. And if you have chronic pain or significant pain in your experience in this moment that's totally okay. You can bring awareness fully to any part of your embodied experience that isn't painful. So, if you have a splitting headache, you can focus on the quality of having relaxed muscles throughout the body. If you have back pain, you can notice how good it feels as the lungs expand and contract and the breath nourishes the body with oxygen. Do this for a few moments.

And now I want you to look back on your day. Or if you just barely rolled out of bed you can look back to yesterday. I want you to just call up one thing that happened that was nice. It doesn't have to be amazing. It can be very subtle. But subtle is significant. Call up just one thing and really let it soak in. You can even allow a subtle smile to spread across your face as you do this.

And after looking back now at something pleasant that happened, I want you to look forward. Let your awareness be drawn to one thing you're looking forward to, today or tomorrow.  Something you're excited about. Doesn't have to be big. Might just be going home and reading the paper because you enjoy reading the news after work. Might be going on a little walk after dinner. Just let your awareness be drawn to one thing. And just tune into the feeling of anticipation. Forget how things turn out, forget how things you're looking forward to actually unfold. But just feel the feeling of anticipation, and enjoy that. Let that be its own reward. 

Where do you feel positive sensations associated with anticipation in your body? Just let it soak. What a gift.

Conclude

You can relax, let go of any effort, and just pulling back. 

I would invite you to make this a part of your mindfulness practice. You can do this anywhere. You can do it on the fly. You can do it in sixty seconds. And if you soak a little bit longer you can do it in two minutes. 

Just noticing all the good things happening that we tend to look past because positive experience slips off us like teflon; negative experience sticks to us like Velcro. As you bring you mindful awareness to positive experience, you realize there is so much positive experience happening in reality moment to moment that we fail to see. You realize that life is much more blessed than we have previously imagined. 

As we do this practice, attending to positivity with intention, we come to do what the Taoists instructed us to do thousands of years ago, which is to learn to dwell in reality.

Mindfulness: A One-Degree Shift in Awareness

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast.

***

At the end of 2016, I decided to do a seven-day silent retreat. But instead of going away to a retreat center as I’d done before, I did this retreat in my home. Seven days of silence, sitting long hours, cooking meals, getting some good walking in, a little bit of exercise. It was a gorgeous week. 

Throughout the week, I dedicated about ten minutes a day on heart-opening exercises. Physically, this entailed movements that spread my chest, allowing it to expand while holding an upright posture. I also did some Feldenkrais movement, which consists of slow, focused, and deliberate motion. 

What I noticed is that by day five, something really struck me: it felt like my heart and my chest were wide open. It felt like my heart was an open nerve. It was an amazing thing. I felt really tender. The world felt really delicate and beautiful to me. 

As I reflected on it, I realized that this feeling was really just the result of a one degree shift in posture. I don't even know that you could tell by looking at my posture whether there was any difference, whether there was any detectable shift. But internally something opened up in me. 

I want to talk about this principle. This one degree shift.

I've noticed that since this meditation retreat my heart feels more available. It feels more tender. It's easier for me to let go of things that are bothersome, things that are spinning around in my mind and clogging up my heart. In this sense, the practice was like a waterfall, like a feeling of rushing water moving through me. If that sounds amazing, it's because it is. It's amazing and it's also really ordinary. 

It started with just a little bit of an intention to spend around ten minutes a day shifting my posture by one degree. My physical posture changed almost imperceptibly to the naked eye. But it changed my internal experience dramatically.

Mindfulness practice is like this. A one-degree shift in awareness can make a dramatic difference. 

You can experience it directly. In this very moment, you can just notice what you're noticing. Notice what you're aware of. Notice the content of your day. What's on you mind today? What are you working with in terms of tasks, things that need to get done? What are the greater challenges in life that are showing up today? 

Maybe the challenges seem unbearable. Maybe they're overwhelming to you. In any event, I just invite you to shift your awareness one degree. And as you shift your awareness one degree, notice what you notice. 

Instead of fixating on a problem like we're so wired to do, what if we shift our attention one degree and pay attention to everything that isn't a problem? Not in a cheesy way because we're optimists and we want to be sun-shiny, but because we're realists and we realize that we have this habit of just zooming in on a challenge so much so that a sense of oppression can totally dominate our awareness. 

Allow yourself to turn one degree. If you feel like you're in a big hurry and there's not enough time, open your awareness up. Shift your attention one degree to the infinite amount of time, the countless seasons that the mountains have weathered and witnessed. Consider most of the things you think have to be done today. Maybe the space-time continuum won't unravel completely if they get done tomorrow instead.

This reminder to shift one degree is to recognize that our awareness tends to fixate. We tend to get caught in our ideas, caught in our perspectives, and in a given moment, we can just shift our perspective. We can turn our attention one degree and see and enjoy everything else we've been missing as we're wearing our blinders through life. 

Let’s practice this directly.

Practice

Start by taking a couple of big, deep breaths, just to settle into the moment. Let yourself breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth. Take a big audible sigh if you're comfortable doing that. And notice that just giving yourself space to take a couple of deep breaths has shifted your awareness one degree. 

Notice the physical body. See if there's an opportunity somewhere to shift the body one degree. If you're sitting, see if you can sit in a way that allows even more ease. Even less effort. If you're standing, if you're lying down, whatever you're doing, bring your awareness to the body and see if there's a way you can invite even more freedom in to this experience in this moment, through the body. That might just be relaxing the face, moving the face. Maybe giving the jaw a little side to side wiggle, letting go of tension through the head. Maybe just letting go of the stomach. We hold on to our stomach so much: sucking it in, keeping it tight. Maybe you can just let that round out and let go. 

And once you've made any micro adjustments to the posture, any one degree shifts to invite more wakefulness, more ease, take a moment to just do nothing and enjoy it. Deeply receive the experience of this moment. Without trying to earn it, without striving for an even better moment, you can just deeply take in the very moment this is.

And finally I'll invite you to bring your awareness to a challenge in your life at this time, something that has been occupying your awareness, maybe dominating it. You find yourself coming back to it again, and again, and again. I'll invite you again to shift your awareness one degree so that you notice that this challenge is actually held in awareness. Your life isn't just this problem, just this challenge. This challenge is another ripple on the ocean of your being, your vastness, your awareness. And because you're so big, because you're so expansive, because you're so resilient and creative and compassionate, you can absolutely hold this challenge in your embrace. When you shift one degree, you shift from being totally dominated by this challenge to experiencing yourself as something much bigger, much further reaching.

Conclude Practice

Give yourself a moment to just linger for a moment, staying soft, staying open. 

Remember that when you get into trouble in life — and we all get into trouble — we can shift our attention one degree. We can take a new perspective, giving rise to a totally new experience, a new moment, a new life.

***

Want to deepen your practice? Download the Mindfulness Essentials course.

“You’re Not Doing It Right”: Encountering Your Threshold Guardians in Meditative Practice

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast.

***

Years ago I was at a ten-day meditation retreat when I became consumed by a voice inside my head. The voice was like a drill sergeant barking at me, telling me that I was doing the meditation wrong — that if I were doing it right, I would be more comfortable, more relaxed, and happier. 

Given how unhappy and how uncomfortable I was, the voice started to make a lot of sense. I thought, “Gosh, he certainly has a point. I'm pretty miserable. I'm seven days into this retreat, and I'm supposed to be blissed out — enlightened, levitating with the ascended masters beyond space and time — but instead I'm just suffering. My back hurts, my knees are stabbing, and my mind is racing. I want a good, proper meal, and I want to stop waking up at 4 A.M to meditate.” 

That's the situation I was in.

Yet something in me just sat through it. And after days of enduring this voice in my head, suddenly, like a soap bubble bursting and vanishing, this voice just disappeared. It was gone. I was stunned because moments before it had vanished, it was real. It was solid, it was substantive. I could hear it clearly saying, “Quit meditating. Go home, you total hack!” And then moments later I was blissed out. I didn't feel any pain, there wasn’t a single thought in my head, and I could have just sat there forever.

My hope in sharing this story is to facilitate people across this common threshold. 

Threshold Guardians

In Jungian psychology, there’s talk of threshold guardians — challenges that show up when we're about to get somewhere significant in our life. These challenges can be personified in mythology as demons and beasts and villains, or we can just interpret them to be our own emotional barriers. 

If you decide you want to develop mindful awareness in a way that’s constantly benefitting and uplifting you moment to moment in life, you will most certainly encounter these threshold guardians. What should you do when this happens?

There are a lot of different ways to answer such a question, but in today’s short lesson I want to focus on the skill of recognizing inner chatter — the inner voice, the inner talk in your head that has an opinion about virtually everything. I want to sensitize you to what can happen. 

You have two options:

1. You hear the voice, and then you tuck your tail and run. That’s what I was contending with when I heard the voice on that retreat. 

2. You stay with the voice. You get really precise about what's happening. What's the voice saying? What's the emotion associated with that voice? You just allow the voice to arise.

So on the one hand, we buy into the voice, which ends up limiting us. On the other hand, if we stay with it, if we stay present and we stay open, we will witness the moment where this limiting thought passes and opens up into a whole new realm, a whole new territory. The truth is that sooner or later, every single thing you encounter passes. It just passes. And what was your reality, what defined your world moments ago, breaks open into utter freedom. 

That's my hope for humanity — that rather than tucking tail and running, we meet these boundaries, that we come into contact with them in a gentle and even tender way. That we wait, abide, soften, and breathe. 

Let’s see what this looks like in practice.

Practice

Find a place where you can stretch and settle in. Feel the ground beneath you, supporting you. See if you can relax your weight into it more fully, trusting the ground, softening. Feel the softness of the belly, allowing it to be round, expanding, contracting with the breath.

Feel the straightness of the spine. Notice the natural wakefulness, the natural alertness that comes from just being upright. Or if you're lying down, the wakefulness that comes with having a straight spine.

Bring your awareness to the space where this inner talk — this running commentary — tends to arise in your awareness. For many people this is somewhere inside the head, or maybe around the ears. Bring your awareness to this general area and notice when a thought arises in the form of talk. [Long pause.]

Good. Stay with it. Keep your awareness in the space where you perceive this mental talk to arise. You don't have to do anything about the mental talk. You don't have to prevent it from activating, and you don't have to dive into the stream, getting washed away with the content of the talk. You can just notice it rising, notice the profound stillness as it passes.

Sometimes it’s like a cat watching a mouse hole. The mouse won't poke its head out, knowing the cat is lurking outside. Often times when we park our awareness in this part of experience, mental talk suddenly quiets down, which is just fine with us. If you notice no thought in particular arising, good. You can just be with the inner silence. And if you notice thoughts activating, good. You can just let them activate, while not getting pulled into them, while not elaborating on the content of the thoughts.

Notice that however active the thinking mind is in a given moment, however much mental chatter you're aware of, you can always detect space in-between the words, in-between the sound. Notice that at the heart of it, this is a practice of coming from and returning to silence. 

Take a final moment to just notice the space you're in. Notice where this practice period has left you. And before you move back in to the business of the day, you can form an intention to leave this door open, free to return to silence at will.

***

Want to deepen your practice? Download the Mindfulness Essentials course.

Reverence for Life: A Meditation, With Script

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast.

Hear this episode to follow along.

Start 

Take a moment to let the body settle into a posture that allows you to be both relaxed and alert. And as the body settles in, you can just open up awareness to all of sensation, everything you're feeling throughout the entire physical body in this moment. Feel the stretch in awareness as you do that.

And from here you can narrow your attention to just the torso for the moment, feeling the in-breath and the out-breath — expansion, contraction. Breathing in, feeling clearly the sensations of expansion through the torso. Breathing out, feeling clearly the sensation of contraction through the torso. 

Just stay with this for a moment. Feeling the in-breath, expansion. Feeling the out-breath, contraction. 

If at any point you get pulled into a thought or are distracted by something in the environment, just notice that, let go, and come back to breathing. Expansion, contraction. Feel the sensation as it fluxes, as it cascades from in-breath to out-breath.

Pay attention especially to the out-breath. Notice that a subtle wave of relaxation tends to spread with each out-breath as the muscles associated with breathing relax. Let go. So with each out-breath, you can allow yourself to be carried by this wave into deeper and deeper relaxation. And if you become aware of intense sensation, intense emotion or discomfort as you do this, you can just stay soft as best you can and allow those sensations to well up, to be felt, and to eventually pass. Don't worry if you don't feel as settled as you think you should be. Don't worry if you're not as relaxed as you imagine a better meditator would be by now. You don't have to worry about any of that. You can just trust — deeply trust — your body’s own natural rhythm of settling in, of letting go, of surfacing, releasing anything that needs to be felt and shed.

And you can do the same thing with emotion: bringing your awareness now to the more subtle body, noticing how you feel in this moment: Your mood, your emotional tone. Just let it be so. If you're the happiest person on earth in this moment, then be so happy that it hurts. If you're the saddest person or the angriest person on the planet in this moment, just be that. Just be what you are.

Let thought, likewise, just flow through awareness. You're not trying to think more or think less, or not think at all. Let thought just be part of the experience when it's part of the experience. The brain secretes thoughts like the mouth secretes saliva. When we see a piece of food, it just happens. It's not a problem unless we make it a problem.

And notice, in this moment, that you're already aware. Sometimes we practice meditation because we want to get enlightened and we want to wake up, but really if we look closely at that, it's just more struggle. It's trying to be something other than what we are right now. So just be awake right now. What you'll find is that you actually can't not be awake. Even if you try. You're always aware.

And if at any point you notice awareness getting clogged up with thoughts in the mind, sensations in the body, sounds in the room — whatever it is — you can just notice and let go again. Empty out again back into clear, pure, open awareness. This awareness, this presence, also is your own body with virtually no borders. Just an endless expanse of wakeful space.

Staying open, staying soft. Awareness is naturally spacious and expansive. You are naturally spacious and expansive. And from this expanse you can focus your attention again on this quality of vitality: life itself that courses through you, that animates you, enlivens you. Notice that you're not just awake in this moment, but you're alive. Just feel this aliveness. We don't know what it is, where it comes from, this life. We have words to explain it, ideas and different stories, but at the end of the day, this gift of life — this vitality — is a mystery. We never fully comprehend the mystery but we can experience it directly.  When we do so, when we open up to this mystery, this gift of life, we find the natural quality of reverence. Reverence for this beauty. Reverence for this gift. When we really receive this gift fully, we naturally want to tread lightly. To be gentle with ourselves, to be gentle with others, gentle with all of life.

Just give yourself a moment to really receive this gift of life. None of us know how much longer we'll enjoy this gift. But in this moment, in this very breath, we know we are unspeakably wealthy. 

As you're ready, you can start to open your eyes, letting the visual world back in to experience. Staying soft, staying close to yourself, remaining aware of this gift that is the foundation of our human life.

End

Why Meditate in Community?

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast.

***

Readers in Salt Lake City might know of our mindfulness community, named Lower Lights Sangha. We meet at least once a month to practice mindfulness and explore human development.

You might wonder why we do this. Isn’t meditation something you do on a cushion in a quiet room all alone? The answer is that it can be, but it can also be a community practice. 

Ancient Buddhists recognized the power of community early on. They even named the sangha — which is a Sanskrit word for “community” — as one of what they call the three gems of Buddhism. They valued the sangha so highly because they recognized that we all sometimes get stuck in the mud so to speak in our individual practice. They knew that when we come together to practice in community we’re buoyed up by the spirit, vitality, and consciousness of each other. When we come together in practice we meet others who we admire, who we want to emulate. We see those who are farther down the path than we are — and there's always somebody farther down the path than we are.

Community is particularly powerful when we’re struggling. And that’s where the concept of our namesake, “lower lights,” comes from. It’s a beautiful metaphor that has inspired me over the years. In pre-modern times, sailors would navigate the open seas by way of what they called the "upper lights": the sun, the moon, and the stars. These sailors could go a long distance just by the upper lights alone. But by the time they got to shore, there were a lot of dangers involved, particularly if it was stormy, dark, or rocky. In such circumstances, sailors were in danger of being dashed on the rocks, their ships crushed, sinking to a watery grave. 

They needed light to guide them in to safe harbor, and they came to call the lights from the town and lighthouses along the shore the “lower lights.” The lower lights were critical, especially in challenging times. When it was stormy out and visibility was limited, sailors desperately needed these lower lights to guide them those last few hundred meters to shore. 

What this says to me is that as we're practicing mindfulness and as we're developing as human beings, we simply can't fully succeed without one another. Admittedly, we can get very far with the upper lights — by meditating on our own and receiving the light about us. But if we want to get safely into harbor, we need one another. 

That makes us all, by analogy, the lower lights. That makes it our responsibility to burn more brightly, to show up for one another more fully. And that's what the name of our mindfulness community suggests: The Lower Lights Sangha.

Countless mindfulness communities and sanghas throughout the world right now are coming together in wakeful community. Individuals coming together collectively to burn more brightly and guide one another mutually along this glorious path of awakening. 

Let the lower lights be burning.

***

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