Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session we're going to talk about the positive power of negative experiences. And for this session, I'm going to pull on some of the exercises in the book Learned Hopefulness by Dr. Dan Tomasulo. What I love about this book is it has so many different reflections for looking at your past and using that understanding to inform how you live in the present moment in a more useful and hopeful way.

So I'd like to share one of those exercises that has two parts that I think can be valuable for you, regardless of what you're going through. The first part is to write three events out, three negative events that you experienced in the past that led to a positive consequence. That's key. The negative events had to lead to a positive consequence. And the other key thing is the new door that opened.

The positive thing that happened couldn't have happened without the negative event. So identify three events like that. Then this is something you could do after the video at your own leisure. After you do that, think about the circumstances surrounding that event. And then think if this were to happen now, would you respond in the same way and how could you take hints from what happened back then and use that right now? I think this is really powerful because we can get caught in familiar patterns of despair and hopelessness, even though we've gotten through difficult experiences in the past.

And I also think it's important to remember that we come from a long lineage of ancestors who made it through difficult events. So this isn't unique to us. We can look back on the past events we've been through, how we've gotten through those and the positive experiences that came from those events and use that to inspire us in how we meet the negativity events in our life now. Sometimes the most negative experiences create the most outcomes. And I know for me, when I look back on my life, So many of my big growth moments only happened because there were intense periods of pain, confusion, and uncertainty.

So see if this helps you in your own life. It's another tool to put in your toolkit. Thank you for your practice. I'll talk to you in the meditation and take care.