Behavior and emotion

This morning I was listening to a meditation on Insight Timer, which asked me to believe that there is no lack because all of the love and abundance that I need are already within me as a creative force. If I’m being honest, it’s a bit hard for me to swallow. I don’t think we’re self-sufficient like that (and to be fair, that’s probably not what she was implying). What I do believe is that creativity is out there in Nature—that it’s everywhere—so, as a part of Nature, it must also be within each of us.

One thing I did like about the meditation, however, was the idea of positive emotions being something that you yourself produce, rather than something in the environment acting upon you. When you’re in love, for example, you feel as if it’s the other person who makes you feel giddy, but it is you making you feel giddy. The emotion comes from within you and so it never actually leaves you. You always retain the capacity to produce it again. In this way, I agree with the meditation that there is never any lack.

One of the emotions that I would like to experience more often is awe. There are behaviors that can induce this feeling, for instance, contemplating and paying close attention to Nature while feeling connected to it, thinking about how you are one single thread woven into a huge tapestry, thinking about how everything is one, looking at the stars, etc. If I made a point of doing these behaviors more often, I could expect to experience more awe.

I think this is one of the main points that the positive psychology literature is trying to get at. We can use our behavior, our habitual practices, to create the feeling. In animal welfare science as well, we are trying to promote positive emotions in animals. We often do this by rearranging the antecedents, or the environmental conditions, to make certain behaviors more likely to occur, behaviors that we know are often accompanied by positive emotions. I wonder why we don’t use the same methodology in the human realm more. Why do we sit on the sofa all afternoon hoping to feel better, when the capacity for positive emotion is always within us, a product of our Nature? All it needs to come out are the right behaviors.