Speaker 1: 0:08

Welcome to Skillful Means Podcast. I'm your host, jennifer O'Sullivan. So how y'all doing out there? I'll just say that the past four months have been among the most emotionally challenging months of my life, and I've had some doozies. What's different is that I've never been so angry and also so fearful for such a long stretch of time before, and it's unending. It's like, oh, I start to feel better one day and then the next day something else pops up and I'm mad all over again. And we do have a lot to be angry and worried about, but it's also not sustainable. In last month's pod, we talked about working with, instead of against, negative emotions, and yeah, that's really necessary. We do need to have that skill on board, but it can't be all that we're doing.

Speaker 1: 1:15

If you get my newsletter Dispatches from the Wilds, you might have seen my April message where I shared the following quote from Tennessee Williams. So here it comes. The world is violent and mercurial. It will have its way with you. We are saved only by love love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share. Being a parent, being a writer, being a painter, being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it all the time is love. Just let that sink in for a second. This quote, in a deep way, really brought home the essential Buddhist teachings. For me, all suffering is caused by three things anger and aversion, gasping or attachments and delusion. It's okay to be angry, it's an appropriate response to many things and it spurs action, but anger can't save us. It's not a liberatory practice. We won't make it if we're only fighting against something. We have to remember what we're fighting for, and all the wise ancestors all around the world undoubtedly joined Tennessee Williams in imploring us to fight for love. We fight for what makes life worth living, for each other, for goodness, for art, for our kids and their kids.

Speaker 1: 3:10

It's not a secret that I'm a sci-fi fantasy fan, and I was among the many people who recently read the last entry in Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight series. So shout out to all the Brando Sando fans out there. I promise I won't bore you with the details of the story, but in this last installment we got the backstory of a longtime character who, we learn, was raised in a culture whose morality centered around whether or not your actions add to the community or subtract from it Okay. Naturally, they had some weird ideas about what falls into those categories, but it got me thinking that I also want to be someone who adds, contributes, doesn't just leave no trace, but leaves things better than the way I found them. Just leave no trace, but leaves things better than the way I found it. It seems that a lot of people were just as moved by Tennessee's quote as I was, because I received a lot of feedback for that newsletter and it can all be summed up as oh wow, I needed to hear that and this gave me an idea for the next several episodes of the pod.

Speaker 1: 4:24

So from now until about September, we're looking at several questions. How do we stay open-hearted and additive in a world that is wobbling under the weight of tyranny? How do we keep our spirits up? How do we help when our problems are so complex and systemic, when our problems are so complex and systemic? In this episode, we're going to consider more closely why it's an imperative that we keep the sparks of love and joy alive in our hearts, especially in times like this. In July, we're going to explore Buddhist teachings on compassion because how couldn't we? And in August we're looking at the yoga concept of seva or selfless service, and I'm inviting my friend Lauren Goldberg on the show to talk about a project they launched. That kind of wraps all these topics into one. I really love what they're doing and I can't wait for you to hear about it. And then finally, in September we're looking at grace, because I know do-gooders like you and me can be really hard on ourselves. We feel guilty when we think we aren't doing enough and if we don't forgive ourselves, we will burn out A couple of housekeeping things before we jump in. If you're enjoying the show, pretty please leave a rating or review on your favorite player and share it with a friend. There's a lot of content out there, y'all, and it's getting harder and harder to break through the noise. So these little things do make a difference. And if you'd like to hear more from me, consider signing up for my newsletter. I send it out monthly and in it I share essays and tips for deepening your inner connections, and I'll put that link in the show notes.

Speaker 1: 6:18

I want to kick us off by diving into what we mean when we say we've got to save the love. I think creatives have known all along that love isn't just about deep emotional bonds with a few close others. Love is also about, as Tennessee Williams points out, what we create, what we devote ourselves to, what gets us out of bed in the morning. Love is what we do if we won the lottery and didn't have to make the donuts every day. Unless you love making donuts, chances are that when you dig deep, all that you love, all that sustains you, eventually boils down to connection. An introverted painter is still motivated to share something of themselves as an offering or a gift. That's a form of connection. I even believe that people who go about things the wrong way are still looking to relate, to be seen, to be witnessed in some way. They just don't know how.

Speaker 1: 7:31

Psychology researcher and professor, dr Barbara Fredrickson, is well known in the field for her work on positive emotions and their role in building resilience. For a long time, psychologists believed that positive emotions were kind of inert, and then they spent most of their time looking at the effects and impacts of negative emotions. Fredrickson is perhaps most famous in academia for her work on debunking this claim. Positive emotions, according to her broaden and build theory, play a huge role in how we learn, develop, support one another and foster society. But I want to start with what she says about love. First because, well, that's the topic of the episode, but also because it explains so beautifully what's happening with our neurobiology when we experience what she calls positivity resonance. She says In her book Love 2.0, fredrickson lays out an updated vision of love.

Speaker 1: 8:37

She reframes it as micro moments of connection, and those micro moments improve our health and longevity. So love isn't just about romance and intimate partnerships. It's something we can experience in all kinds of relationships. I do highly recommend you check out the book Love 2.0, but I wanted to share a couple of things that popped out for me when I was reading it. The neurological, biochemical and biological aspects of love actively promote connection. When we connect in a joyful way with someone, even briefly, all these internal processes kick off to nudge us to do more of that thing. It's an upward spiral. The more we connect, the more primed we are to connect. Okay, so here are some specifics.

Speaker 1: 9:38

When we enjoy a moment with someone, it doesn't have to be a deep, intimate, confessional moment. It's a casual moment, like joking with someone while you wait for your coffee order. So when we enjoy a moment with someone, our nervous system tells our facial muscles to promote eye contact and better hearing. Like the little muscles in your ears tune to the other person, our brains sync up, meaning that being on the same wavelength is a real thing. So for however long it lasts, we feel connected. And when we're feeling positive emotions, our focus shifts from me to we. In other words, we're naturally more inclusive when we're feeling good. Other words, we're naturally more inclusive when we're feeling good. Fredrickson describes it as a sense of expansion and, like the brain sinking sensation, we feel this expansiveness in our bodies.

Speaker 1: 10:44

And then we have oxytocin, the feel good hormone, which does more than just facilitate bonding. It can also boost our ability to be attuned to others. It helps us to become better interpreters of other people's feelings. We navigate stressful social situations better and generally oxytocin helps us to feel calmer. So it's like a social lubricant, and other people's oxytocin helps us to feel calmer. So it's like a social lubricant, and other people's oxytocin can trigger our own through biochemical synchrony, which is what underpins our motivation for mutual care and support. So you can see why love is such an important motivator. It brings us so much. Personally, we feel good when we experience these moments of connection. But it's also the foundation of society If we aren't pouring ourselves into love and connection, what do we even have?

Speaker 1: 11:48

I want to turn back to Fredrickson's broaden and build theory, which explains why it's important we foreground positive experiences more broadly and micro moments of connection more specifically, like love. The other positive emotions, things like awe, joy, amusement, inspiration. They make us feel good. When we feel good, our perspective widens. It's helpful to think of this. In contrast with negative emotions, which have an effect called cognitive narrowing, we focus down on what needs to be done to take care of what other problem has elicited the feeling in the first place. They can see this narrowing effect on brain imaging scans by where blood flow in the brain goes. When we're feeling positive, we get increased blood flow to larger swaths of the brain, including those that take in more spatial data. As a result, we pick up more context clues from our environment. When we're feeling good, we're also less self-absorbed because we're probably not feeling threatened, and when we share positive experiences with other, our view widens even more. So this is the broaden aspect of broaden and build.

Speaker 1: 13:12

Positive emotions help us gain perspective and expand our connections and with additional social supports and more available data, we can leverage our creativity, develop ourselves, support others receive help and solve problems, which is the build part. With a positive orientation, we're less task-oriented and more solutions-oriented. We sow seeds, grow and harvest inner and outer resources, which also becomes an upward spiral. When we start building resources and putting them to work in our lives, the benefits we gain elicit more positive feelings, which widens our scope even more, helping us to then build upon our foundation and up and up we go. It doesn't mean that we transcend ever feeling bad again, but I do think we move through life feeling like we can handle things better and that we also have the supports in place when we need them. What I appreciate about micro moments of connection and broaden and build is that it's easy to see how we can put those theories into practice.

Speaker 1: 14:32

I had a client a while back who figured this out on his own. He's kind of a shy guy and not really the sort to strike up conversations with strangers, but as an experiment he started making small talk with people at the bus stop. He was quite delighted in the little interactions he had with people. He was so lit up telling me about it that it made me feel good too. So this feel-good stuff is also contagious. We can spread it around and in doing so it will circle back to us. I also want to be careful when I talk about focusing on the positive, because I don't want to leave the impression that negative feelings are bad. If you haven't listened to last month's episode on embracing difficult emotions, definitely check it out. Negative emotions are necessary and serve a specific and needed function. We want to tend to them when they occur.

Speaker 1: 15:43

Here's where a bit of Buddhist wisdom comes in. From Mahayana Buddhism, which includes Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, we have the express motivation to cultivate bodhicitta. The yogis listening will recognize the word citta, which appears in the opening yoga sutras of Patanjali, and it's often translated as mind. But in Buddhism heart and mind, or collectively heart-mind, are the same. So citta means heart-mind, bodhi means awakening or enlightenment, sometimes open. So we can think of bodhicitta as an open-hearted orientation and in the Mahayana traditions this is the chief aim when pursuing the Buddhist path. And the main vehicle for cultivating bodhicitta is practicing compassion. In fact Fredrickson, back to her she's done some research on loving, kindness, meditation and it does in fact cultivate positivity, resonance and all those pro-social benefits I mentioned earlier. I'm going to get more into this in next month's episode, but I wanted to bring this up now because there's a small risk of drifting into toxic positivity territory if we don't draw attention to it.

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There are a couple of ways to approach bodhicitta as a practice, and one of them is called relative bodhicitta. This is a teaching that reminds us that we're not here to cultivate good vibes only. Reminds us that we're not here to cultivate good vibes only, and, in fact, one of the enduring resources we build from having an open-hearted and broadly loving orientation is the ability to be with suffering suffering within ourselves and in others. Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron has said that even if we can't get to the point of embracing suffering, we can get to a point where we can be okay with not being okay. So if, as Williams states, we're in a perpetually burning building, our opened heart, the work we do, when we broaden and build, when we remember what we're for, those are the things that are going to keep us from shutting down. Our anger may catalyze us, but it can't sustain us. Only love can save us.

Speaker 1: 18:35

When it comes to cultivating the so-called good life, the aim isn't to shut down our bad feelings and do whatever we can to avoid having them. I promise you that will backfire. Instead, think about what you can add in. In some of Fredrickson's research, they discovered that, because of negativity bias, humans need to have more positive experiences than negative ones in order to really get the broaden and build upward spiral going. Now there's been some quibble over the exact ratio, so let's just go with more. But my theory is that we're probably already having more positive experiences than we think. We just miss them. So start thinking about how you might foreground what's already positive in your life. How can you get some joyful activities on your schedule? Call that person you've been meaning to connect with. Carve out some time for the things that make you feel accomplished or fulfilled. This is going to help you build the inner resources you need to address difficulties when they arise.

Speaker 1: 19:52

I'll also share a practice from Dr Rick Hansen called Taking in the Good. It's based on a positive psychology practice called savoring. Savoring is what you do to really maximize the feel-good qualities of positive experiences so that they have a lasting imprint on your brain. One of the benefits of an ongoing and persistent mindfulness practice is that we start to notice more, including nice experiences we're already having. So taking in the good can both build off of your mindfulness practice. But you can also just take in the good as well, and I'll explain that in a second. So taking in the good uses the acronym HEAL, h-e-a-l, but for our purposes we're going to focus on just the first three letters, h-e-a. H stands for have a good experience. This can be noticing one that you're already having, or you can deliberately do something that will elicit a positive feeling. E stands for enrich it, meaning draw it out, flesh it out.

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See if you can take in more details of the moment. Can you engage more of your senses as you experience it, for example, if you're like me and like sweeping vistas, in addition to what you can see, notice what the air smells like. Notice the people around you. Can you hear something in the background, like waves crashing below or wind blowing through the trees? And don't be so quick to move on to something else. Wait a moment before taking out the camera or continuing on your way. Try to drag out the moment for up to a minute, if not longer. A stands for absorb it. Visualize yourself soaking in all the good feelings, like absorbing it through the skin or letting it permeate your cells like a sponge. I sometimes imagine I'm a superhero, absorbing her powers for the first time, because I just like the image of swirls of light around me and it flowing in. So find an image that works for you, then rinse and repeat several times a day, if you can Remember that, with mindfulness, even everyday experiences like washing your hands while looking out the kitchen window can be a moment to savor.

Speaker 1: 22:53

All right, everyone. That about wraps things up for this episode. Next month I'm going to spend a little bit more time with bodhicitta bodhisattvas and include some trainings in compassion. That'll help you orient yourself towards moments of connection. And if you have any questions about this topic, hit me up at feedback at skillfulmeanspodcastcom, and the invitation is always open for you to help shape the show. If you have a topic idea or you'd like to share something about your practice that might inspire others, check out the link to the survey in the show notes. And if you've ever wondered what it would be like to work with me one-on-one, heading into the summer months, I always have a bit more room on my schedule, so I'll include a link in the show notes for more information about doing some coaching with me. Until next time, may you meet each moment with courage and compassion.