But I Want To Have Positive Emotions
“If almost all emotions come from meaning and I no longer give meaning to events, does that mean I won’t have any more positive emotions?” A concerned woman in my current Lefkoe Freedom Course asked me this question last week and I think that everyone who reads my blog would be interested in my answer. I’d bet that most of you would like to stop the suffering that comes from negative meanings and yet most of you would not want to lose your ability to experience positive emotions. As I’ve explained in many posts in the past, it is possible [...]
Is It Working For You?
In last week’s post I asked why most people don’t learn how to dissolve meaning when it makes such a profound improvement in their life and when they can learn the basic steps for doing without having to pay anything. That question resulted in over 50 responses so far. Thanks for taking the time to answer. I was fascinated reading all the different reasons people suggested. And that made me think: How many things in your life that don’t really work have you accepted because, “That’s just the way things are”? Is your life—the way it is right now—working for [...]
I spoke at TEDx: How to stop suffering
For the past couple of months my main focus has been preparing a TEDx talk that I delivered in Hoboken, NJ last Friday, June 28. TEDx is the local version of the TED talks that are given annually in Long Beach, CA and that feature some of the most interesting people in the world, talking about “ideas worth spreading.” You can find hundreds of incredible TED talks, each a maximum of 18 minutes, at http://ted.com. So it was a real honor to be invited to present at a TEDx event. I talked about suffering—how suffering is the result of the [...]
Suffering is unnecessary
Imagine you’re driving down a country road at night and suddenly you get a flat tire. Have you ever had a flat tire late at night? How did you feel? Annoyed? … You open your trunk and discover you have no jack. Now you are really upset. You decide to walk back to a farmhouse you remember passing about a mile back. As you walk you start thinking: “Oh boy, I’m going to look like a city slicker who doesn’t even know how to change a tire. The farmer probably will laugh at me. He’ll make me feel ridiculous. He [...]
Do you experience stress?
Would you be surprised to learn that April 16 has been proclaimed National Stress Awareness Day in the United States? Once you realize that that is the day after income taxes are due, the date makes sense: paying taxes is stressful. What else causes most of us stress on a daily basis? Children not doing what we need them to do, spouses fighting with us over money or where to go for vacation, demands at work that we aren’t sure we can meet, having to make presentations in front of others who might judge us, fighting traffic, paying bills, [...]
You can have much more happiness than you realize
Most people are more interested in avoiding or relieving pain than in achieving and experiencing happiness. Thus most people go into psychotherapy or pursue “self-help” programs to overcome "problems"—such as changing some negative, undesirable behavior (e.g., procrastination or not taking action to further one's goals) or stopping some negative undesirable emotions (e.g., fear or depression). Far fewer people ask for help when they aren’t experiencing some obvious problem. In other words, relatively few people strive to improve their lives when it already seems to be “working.” Much more is possible There’s nothing wrong with that approach. I'd like to suggest, [...]
Your questions get answered
Last week’s post sparked a lot of comments and questions. I wrote on the dangers of trying to be positive when you are feeling negative and I suggested that instead of pretending to be positive you just dissolve your negative occurrings and feelings. Because there has been so much interest in this topic, I decided to devote this week’s post to responding to some of the questions from last week. My comments below go much deeper into the topic than my original post. Marie wrote: “Thank you for the post. Separating the meaning from the event is a [...]
Trying to be "positive" doesn’t work
I recently was having a conversation with a very close friend. She had just broken up with her boyfriend after a long relationship; she was feeling lonely; she was having difficulties getting work; and she was feeling sad, frustrated and disappointed. At the same time she was trying very hard to be positive during our talk. “I know that everything will work out in the long run. I know that everything is just a learning experience. I know I should be giving positive meanings to everything that’s happening to me.” She went on and on trying to be positive, when [...]
Are we robots?
The behaviorist school of thought maintains that behaviors as such can be described scientifically without recourse either to internal physiological events or to hypothetical constructs such as thoughts and beliefs. In other words, consciousness is not relevant to understanding human behavior. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behaviorism) As regular readers of this blog know very well, I do agree that some of our behavior (especially emotional eating) and some of our feelings (such as anxiety and anger) can be the result of conditioning. This agreement would seem to validate the claim of the behavioral school of psychology that our behavior is the result of environmental [...]
