Savoring: Enhancing the Positivity in Your Life-Based Therapy
Meditation-Based Therapy
By David Mellinger MSW, LCSW
The first of three blogs about savoring
Visit this website again soon to read Savoring, Part 2 – “Savoring in Action!”
Part 1 – Introduction and How to Begin Savoring
Wouldn’t it be fine if all our rewarding experiences and fleeting moments of happiness could enrich our enjoyment of life?
Savoring is a way to learn to enjoy on purpose to enable oneself to activate and access a lasting stream of your positive thoughts and emotions. Savoring can reduce the grip of emotional distress and help increase your happiness and positive affect – the good, rewarding feelings and actions that arise at special moments and in our daily lives – if only we can keep attuned to them!
In this blog, I’ll tell you about positive affect and a good deal about savoring and let you know why and how it matters. You’ll be introduced to the main concepts and processes, and I’ll provide you with ways and means of beginning savoring and keeping it going.
| Positive Affect is
the capacity to be tickled, rewarded, delighted, safe and sound, proud, to love and be loving, like, be peaceful, satisfied, secure, heart-warmed, joyous, amazed, gratified, exhilarated, pleased, moved, having fun, and being over the moon. We show positive affect through our facial and verbal expressions and actions – laughter, teasing, playfulness, grinning, flirting, praising, giggling, ROFL, smiles, and twinkling eyes. |
Often good, positive emotions pass us by before we can truly relish and celebrate them and before they become part of us. After laughing with friends, feeling the splendid sense of being swept up in joy or captivated with pleasure, being delighted by our feelings as we gaze up at the gorgeous blue sky with plump, white clouds, and the beauty at the very end of a storm, our positive emotions may nevertheless elude us.
The tenderness and delight we see and feel in a child’s, baby’s, or our elders’ eyes, hearty, delighted laughter or heartfelt cheering can sometimes fade away rather than soaking in and enhancing our happiness.
| Positive feelings and experiences need not be fleeting. Savoring can change that. Instead of responding to positive emotions passively, we can actively embrace them, seek them out, engage with them, and even “juice” them. |
Savoring can enable people whose lives already have a lot of positivity, good experiences, and positive affect to enjoy their good fortune more fully and deeply by enhancing their happiness and reducing the grip of stress and distress.
Learning to savor can help activate or strengthen a capacity for positive affect and lasting pleasure and reduce the stress and distress of people who aren’t very happy due to the difficulties in their lives and/or the tough times they’re going through. Their paths to feeling better will likely need to focus on reducing their difficulties, as well – perhaps with psychotherapy – through diminishing the negative feelings and developing more effective ways of coping with difficulties and challenges.
If you feel somewhat like the people with the good fortune who’ve already had a lot of positivity and good fortune AND you tend to get down in the dumps, you’ll very likely find savoring helpful and beneficial. Either way, why not begin this journey by learning to savor and enjoy more pleasure and satisfaction?
What Does Savoring Accomplish?
It strengthens the connections between our valued, enjoyable experiences, accomplishments, and our positive moods and self-esteem.
Sensitizes us to the positivity that occurs all around us and right before our eyes
Brings our “present moment awareness” to experiences of positive affect, relishing and delighting.
Enables us to experience greater rewardingness – fulfillment, satisfaction, benefit, or pleasure.
Begin By Letting Yourself Become Aware of Savorability
Make a Savoring Notebook
Begin opening your mind to positive feelings and positive affect by making a commitment to pay attention and be more aware. Buy a notebook and make it a “Savoring Notebook” by creating a List of Positives so you can take note of “savorable” moments in the Here and Now. You’ll raise your awareness of “savorability”, the unique quality of the situations or activities within you and around you when you feel positive.
Write down the positive situations, experiences, memories, and desires that you are living, have had, and look forward to and let your entries in the List of Positives “cue” you whenever you encounter them.
Positive emotions show up in many different places. Curiosity and playfulness, for instance, are emotional activities that help us notice and experience positivity and gain knowledge about the goodness of the world around us. Learning and teaching both engage and are motivated by positive feelings.
Targeting comes next:
Choose positives that really matter to you from your list intentionally and deliberately to engage in. Mark them with a target – . Target something by planning to take active, concrete steps toward it that are consistent with your values. Targets may be
- your senses – things you like to see, certain music, or feeling relaxed
- your thoughts – like the history of dogs, smart ideas, philosophy, or your favorite music,
- shaping your experiences – such as learning to dance, how you converse with a person who doesn’t speak English well, or reading to children or seniors at a center
- focusing on particular objects – like a cat, a sculpture, or a beautiful tree
- engaging in certain activities – like cooking, pickleball, or getting a massage
- engaging with specific people
Try taking the steps outlined here. Experiment. Maybe discuss them with your friends and family. Discover what you enjoy and the effects on your pleasure, enjoyment, and attitude.
END OF PART 1
What’s Next? My next blog, “Savoring in Action” – Visit this PanicBuster.com website again soon to read “Savoring in Action!”
Would you like to vividly experience savoring? In “Savoring in Action”, my next blog, you’ll be able to try out intentionally noticing and appreciating more of life’s pleasures. You’ll learn to focus your attention on savorable moments or situations, tune in to what you like, and practice immersing yourself –prolonging and intensifying the strength of your savoring and basking in the positive feelings.
See how it feels to actively bring positive affect to bear on relieving stress and losing the blues and increase your awareness and appreciation of your accomplishments. “Savoring in Action” will enable you to integrate savoring into your daily activities. Maybe you’ll decide to sample or discover how you’d like to create and schedule daily positive activity periods along with an active savoring session each day.