Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about the healing power of positive emotion. So in the context of mindfulness and meditation, there tends to be a lot of emphasis on working with discomfort, stress, pain. Often, because this is a part of our experience that can be hard to relate to. And a lot of people come to these practices because there is some form of suffering and looking for relief.

So a lot of the conversation does tend to be around how to work with that. But a big part of the conversation that is, it's growing, I would say in the mindfulness space, thanks to work from people like Rick Hanson who wrote the book, Hardwiring Happiness, Neurodharma, of recognizing the importance of being able to tune into what is good, the positive. And that's not just in service of making sure we're, we're well-rounded with this. It's also coming from the understanding that being able to experience deeply what is good in our life is incredibly important for navigating what is more trying. If you're constantly experiencing stress, or at best a sense of neutrality, you're not really giving yourself the opportunity to fill up your deep reservoirs of, of energy, of love, of fulfillment that allow us to meet those more trying moments of our life.

I mean, think about, you know, after you go on a vacation where you take some time off, you're not working, you're a little less stressed. You come back feeling more fulfilled. Like you have more bandwidth to take on maybe more of the stressful demands of your work and your family. So that relationship is real. And I think sometimes we, we can have a complicated relationship to pleasure and positive emotion.

If it's there, we're, we're happy that it's there, but we're not making a practice out of it. It's sort of just a sign that, okay, things are, things are good. But what would it be like to really let positive emotion and pleasure saturate you to your core, to make those your practice? When they are arising, to really let yourself take them in like a sponge taking in water. Linger there for a few more seconds, maybe a few more minutes, and let it, let it touch those places within you that have been in pain, that have been struggling, that have been stressed. Positive emotion can be healing in that way, pleasure can be healing in that way, if we really let ourselves take it in.

So maybe spend some time today just contemplating your own relationship to pleasure and positive emotion. Is this something that when it's there, it's like, okay, good things are going well. And if that's the relationship, could you take it a step further and go, you know what, I'm going to really explore making this my practice and let it really sink in. You might be surprised what you experience, both during that and afterwards. So thanks for your practice.

Let's settle in for today's meditation.