This Is Different From Anything You’ve Ever Done

By Dr. William K. Larkin on December 28, 2009

We work here on increasing well-being, raising your happiness set-point and increasing you emotional set-point. We work here on going from good to better and on to best. The focus is not on what is negative, wrong, non-resolved, or needing improvement. We don't talk here about the weakness you have to improve because we believe that you do it best by focusing on what is good about you. Our purpose is not problem-solving or learning to be positive in order to solve problems. It is finding and enjoying the goodness in life for its own sake each day. We teach people to live in an UpSpiral everyday; that is our aim. The world is full of therapists and counselors, problem-solvers, and healers of every kind. We are not healers, only in that healing is a by-product of the positive mind. What we need are places of positivity, where we become more positive, more optimistic and learn to view and savor life through the lens of what is good. Positive watering holes are hard to find. This is one of them.

We believe this so strongly that we claim that positivity is the core of ongoing, creative evolution. We believe that the power of positivity is enormous and largely untapped, that worlds are created by it, and that our civilization is sustained because of it. Positivity is a power waiting for you to tap by changing your focus on life. The emerging sciences are telling us, over and over, through the hard research, that this is true.

The focus is on feeling more positive emotion, finding your strengths, increasing your positive vibration, and moving into the experience of "flow." We believe in the importance of setting goals that are malleable and finding your vision and your passion.

Our central aim is to increase your positivity, what we call your UpSpiral. The higher you go in your UpSpiral, the longer you learn to stay there, the better you will feel in every area of your life. Seeing as much of life as possible through a positive lens, in spite of the negative, is our goal. We spend way too much time, as does our culture, in looking at the negative. This is a place to engage the power of positivity. Its purpose is not to solve problems, but to see the world differently.

The truth is this. We have everything we need today and every day to be perfectly happy. When we learn to be happy and positive today, we increase the happiness that comes to us, maybe not instantaneously, but over time. As the positive reservoir builds, more and more of a satisfying life emerges. The secret is quite simply to learn to be happy and positive today, to see the best in the past, and to think about the good you want in the future rather than fear it. Today I have everything I need to be perfectly happy. The real determinant is my decision to be happy. Abraham Lincoln said it best: "A man is about as happy as he decides to be." We are here to help you sustain that decision.

The Positive Flush

By Dr. William K. Larkin on December 21, 2009

There is a custom in some religions to have a period called "advent" before Christmas. It is a period of purification and cleansing to be more open to receive the "Christ-life" in a new way at Christmas. It is a wonderful idea of emptying out the negative.

What can be very surprising, though, is that one of the best ways of washing out the negative, what doesn't fit and doesn't belong in us, is to practice growing a positive mind. You will find that as you become more positive, you will have times when the positive pushes up and out what is negative and doesn't belong. One would not think that being positive and practicing love, peace, gratitude, joy and hope would lead to anything but "feeling good." It does, for sure, but it will also provide a "flushing out" of the negative which is being re-ordered, reorganized, and routinized in different ways in the brain. The Positive Life organizes the brain in a new and different way.

The left frontal lobe is responsible for "routinization" in the brain. That means it is a "router" and sorter of the information intake of the active right frontal lobe. It is interesting that the left frontal lobe is also the "seat" of happiness in the brain. So the part that "sorts" is also the originator of happiness. Growing a positive mind causes this router of information and experience to start working in a different way.

Sometimes the negative just needs to be flushed away.

The flush may take place in your dream life. It may take place by having more negative emotions when you think you should be having only positive ones. The neuropathways are just realigning and re-learning and establishing new "neural nets" in the brain that affect the very roots and the very core of development and reasoning. After all, you are learning to think and be in a new way.

There are a lot of metaphors at this time of year, called solstice, about letting the "light" come into the darkness of the shortest day in the year. There is no question that a negative, DownSpiral mind leads to a kind of "darkness" of mood and rigid thinking that has become fixed in habits that are limiting and narrowing for the brain. Most of the time our negative emotional patterns are learned and there is no great "why" or single explanation other than that they are learned and new ways have to be learned to replace them.

So don't be surprised when your growing positivity creates a "flush" of the negative. It is all a part of the process. And just as the "light" increases a little bit each day into spring and summer, so does the life of positivity within us. We grow just a little more positive each day; the positive emotional muscle increases just a little more with each flex of love, peace, gratitude, joy, and hope. Make the Emotional Gym one of your gifts to yourself throughout the holiday.

How Do You Talk To You?

By Dr. William K. Larkin on December 15, 2009

In studies done at Harvard in neuroscience, we know that whenever a person uses a swear word, it arouses the amygdala of the old brain, the place of strong negative emotions. When we read a swear word, it arouses the basal ganglia which, among other things, establishes our habits.

Our swear words often make up our inner self-talk. If anyone on the outside talked to us like we talk to ourselves, we would battle with them.

Talk to yourself like you would like others to talk to you. Talk to yourself in the kindest, most gentle and forgiving way. Talk to yourself in healing ways.

For example:

I am a wonderfully kind, sensitive and caring person. The mistakes I make aren't nearly as significant as the good things that I do. My good so far outweighs anything wrong that what is wrong is disappearing. People like me. People love me. I love me. I have the best of intentions and I see the best in myself and in other people.

I am attractive and I attract into my life what is good and lovely.

Say it and mean it and another part of your brain, called the anterior cingulate, which is the "heart" of the brain, activates feelings of love, peace, joy, and gratitude. The anterior cingulate will also lesson the negative activity of the amygdala of the brain.

You are what you think and you become the emotions you live in. Your brain remembers how you talk to yourself.

Slumps and BRAC

By Dr. William K. Larkin on December 7, 2009

We all have slumps when we are obviously not operating with all of our cylinders of energy and positivity firing. Why does it happen? Why is that I can have a down day or a down several days? When you all get finished asking the wrong question, which is "why," and come up with a thousand different answers, let me say that it doesn't matter. It just happens. The question is-- how do we use it? Use the time gently and be as encouraging to yourself as you would be with your best friend. Treat yourself as nicely and as lovingly as a friend who was having a slump. Would you beat up on them and ask them a thousand questions until you got to the very "bottom" of their souls? Of course not! Tell yourself how good you are when all your "cylinders" are firing. Tell yourself what it feels like when you're not in a slump. Tell yourself that you know you will bounce back, and not only back, but that you are very resilient, and that you will be feeling even better, that you will be even higher and higher in your UpSpiral.

Go to your UpSpiraLife Group and just listen. Don't tell them that you're in a slump and expect them to fix you because they aren't going to do it; problem solving is not the purpose of the group.

BRAC is an acronym for our daily biological clock of the highest high and lowest low within a 24 hour period. My lowest low is 4:00 a.m. in the morning and the high of my day is around 4:00 in the afternoon. But that doesn't necessarily mean that those are my worst or my best times. But regardless, there is that biological cycle. It is not an excuse for me to feel worse, think worse, and expect something worse at 4:00 a.m. in the morning. I usually wake up and I chant and pulse myself back to sleep. I used to make the mistake, years ago, of asking "why" and thinking about everything that was a problem at 4:00 a.m. in the morning. It was awful and nothing ever got solved because it all looked different in the light of day. Now instead of worrying about everything that seems awful and likely comes out of the feeling tone of my dream sleep, I chant and feel gratitude, love, peace, and joy and soon I am back to sleep.

Slumps just are and there may or may not be a reason for them. If there is, the reason will "show up" when you feel better. It will come to you later. The Universe is not trying to get your attention by pulling you down to punish you and tell you there is something wrong with you or your world. It will just come to you if you leave it alone. In one way or another it will come to you. The more you nag at it and dissect it and talk about it, the more you create it. The best answers to your problems come when you aren't thinking about them. The answers surprise you when they come through someone else or a movie or a book, or just a "knowing." Stop beating your slump and yourself to death and practice the principles that we teach here. You become the emotions you choose to live in. Lean, just gently, peacefully toward the positive, even if you can do it only a little.