Create Love in Your Life
Love, according to Barbara Frederickson, PhD, a leading researcher of emotions, is "micro-moments of warmth and connection."
She says love occurs anytime two or more people (even strangers) connect over a shared positive emotion (large or small).
These moments create changes in your brain and body that broaden your perspective, help you become more attuned to others, and allow you greater creativity and emotional regulation. Over time, little by little, these changes reshape your life for the better.
Learn how to get started creating micro-moments of warmth and connection with the people you encounter each day.
Loving Kindness
One simple strategy for increasing the number of micro-moments of warmth and connection you experience each day is by practicing loving-kindness meditation. Frederickson's research showed significant benefits to people who developed a habit of performing loving-kindness meditation.
The process is deceptively simple and the benefits are profound. The feelings generated in loving-kindness meditations affect your thoughts, body language, vocal patterns, and behavior.
Other people will feel safer and more comfortable around you--even though this practice requires no outward expression!
Interested in trying it out?
Beginner's Instructions for Loving-Kindness Meditation
- Sit in a position that allows you to feel comfortable, relaxed, and alert. The goal is to "be open" to the experience, not to induce a state of insincere or forced positivity.
- Focus on your heart as you breathe. (There's lots more to learn at the HeartMath Institute.)
- Choose someone you feel positive emotions about (e.g., a close friend or a pet).
- With each breath cycle, think one of the loving-kindess thoughts with that individual in mind.
"May you be safe. May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you experience peace." - Notice what physical sensations come up in your body.
- Next choose another person or group and continue the pattern of breathing and directing your thoughts toward them.
- Also try extending loving-kindness to yourself either by wishing yourself the four thoughts or by envisioning someone close to you sending you the same intentions.
This is just the first step of creating more micro-moments of warmth and connection in your life. If you'd like to learn more ways to create the live you love, join the UNLEASHED Resilience membership.
No matter where you are on the success path--whether you're just now making the decision to find new tools and strategies that will support you or you've reached the point of adapting long-held practices to truly make them your own--there's always something new to learn and try in UNLEASHED Resilience.
A supportive community of lifelong learners just like you is waiting to welcome you. Join us!
UNLEASHED Resilience Success Path
Links worth clicking
- Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become, Barbara Frederickson, PhD
- Subscribe to UNLEASHED (at work & home) on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or Stitcher
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