Cultivating Joy - How To

[Nat]

Something I heard today as a side-note on a podcast today:

Dwell on the good things.

Rumination is one of the things that I tend to do which kills my crop of joy (going with the cultivation theme here).

Consulting the oft-maligned and even-more-oft reference tool Wilipedia:

Rumination is a way of responding to distress that involves repetitively focusing on the symptoms of distress, and on its possible causes and consequences.[1] Rumination is more common in people who are pessimistic, neurotic, and who have negative attributional styles. The tendency to ruminate is a stable constant over time and serves as a significant risk factor for clinical depression. Not only are habitual ruminators more likely to become depressed, but experimental studies have demonstrated that people who are induced to ruminate experience greater depressed mood.[2] There is also evidence that rumination is linked to general anxiety, post traumatic stress, binge drinking, eating disorders, and self-injurious behavior.[1]

Rumination was originally believed to predict the duration of depressive symptoms. In other words, ruminating about problems was presumed to be a form of memory rehearsal which was believed to actually lengthen the experience of depression. The evidence now suggests that although rumination contributes to depression, it is not necessarily correlated with the duration of symptoms.[1]

Rumination is similar to worry except rumination focuses on bad feelings and experiences from the past, whereas worry is concerned over potential bad events in the future. Both rumination and worry are associated with anxiety and other negative emotional states.

It may not be so simple to just decide to dwell on the good things, but knowing this is either a cause or symptom of not-joy makes me think it's worth a try.

I used to think that pop-psych dogma of focusing on the positive or trying to *not think* about bad stuff was basically asking people to delude themselves and dwell in a sort of forced ignorance and disengenuity (sp?). But recognizing rumination as a crop-killer of joy gives me a better handle on the reasoning behind trying to change one's thoughts. I am believing more and more that thoughts are a type of behavior or action or habit - even if they seem relatively inconsequential if they remain unspoken.

My grandmother and her sister both have maintained a lifelong determination to be cheerful and positive and encouraging after having grown up in the depression and losing their brother when he was a young adult. I have to think its a survival skill.

[Nat]

"The intention in the beginning is to give enough attention and care to get to know our suffering. Just that movement itself is very powerful if the usual tendency is to avoid it or attack it or get angry or put your head in the sand: in a very adult and mature way, to sit up right, to stand up on your own two feet in a sense, and turn around and look at your suffering in an honest way. And to learn to do that without succumbing to despair, upset, anger, blame, self-pity - all the things that can get in the way.

Really looking at it - here, I am suffering, this is what's going on, let me look at it. Then the idea is not so you can just suffer better...This is only the entry point. If we look at it long enough, we can actually see the action, the thing that we're doing that's bringing about the suffering. What the Buddha said was that the action is attachment or clinging."

- Gil Fronsdale, Audio Dharma podcast