Meditating on other people As part of the health psychology module in undergraduate degree that we teach at the university where I work, we cover positive psychology, mindfulness and acceptance. One of the most powerful workshops we do with the students is the experiential practice of meditating on others. I‘m routinely met with cynicism from students about meditation and in particular this type of loving kindness meditation. They are mainly sports students who more interested in what they can gain for their own performances from more traditional types of sport psychology like mental toughness, confidence and a cultivating a winning mindset (don’t worry we teach them about that too!). However, I get more response from students about the following practice than I do with any other exercise that we teach throughout the year, many of them surprised by the difference it has made to their lives. To give them some background to the exercise I start off by explaining that pursuing happiness alone and for oneself can actually be detrimental to a person’s mental health and well-being. Happiness is an individual state, so when we look for it, it’s only natural to focus on ourselves. Yet a wealth of evidence consistently shows that self-focused attention undermines happiness and can cause depression. In one study by Mauss and colleagues in 2012, demonstrated that the greater the value people placed on happiness, the more lonely they felt every day for the next two weeks. In another experiment, they randomly assigned people to value happiness, and found that it backfired: these people reported feeling lonelier and also had a progesterone drop in their saliva, a hormonal response linked to loneliness. The Exercise Then we begin this very simple exercise. I tell them to imagine two human beings. Don’t say anything, don’t do anything, just wish for those two human beings to be happy. That’s all. We do this for just two minutes and say no more about it until the end of the class, after they have completed some other tasks. I set some homework at the end of the class and ask them to perform the task again the following day, spending 10 seconds each hour randomly choosing two people and silently wishing for them to be happy. I always tell them to start off with people they know and love and then when they feel able to, move on to people they have neutral feelings about and finally people they dislike. I get more personal emails about how this task has impacted on them than any other task we do throughout the whole year and it’s always the one task students remember when they are saying their farewells at the end of their time at university. They tend to report that it particularly helps them in tough times when they are suffering and almost can’t bear to focus on anyone but themselves. However, they still manage to do it because 10 seconds is easy to manage. This exercise is not going to immediately solve all of your problems but it does start to shift your perspective in a slow and noticeable way.
Posted on: Tue, 08 Oct 2013 13:34:32 +0000
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