The good is there too

Practising mindfulness for over 20 years, I have been supported and mentored by several inspiring mindfulness teachers. Vici Williams was one of these, and a dear friend too; sadly she passed in August 2024. She truly embodied an open-hearted wisdom, and I still remember her shiny eyes and warm smile whenever we met.

One gift she gave me was how to truly see our dualistic nature of experience — and how we often become more identified with difficult experience. Becoming aware of this in the present moment, even in the most difficult of times, enabled me to understand and experience that the ‘good’ is always there too.

As mindfulness practitioners, we are developing the capacity and awareness to see our experience as it is, and to notice how we are relating to our present moment experience. Yet when we are in the midst of challenges in our lives — especially in the current global context of uncertainty — it can be easy to become aware of the difficult, the unwanted and the unpleasant.

This is for good reason, as the brain is built for survival and not happiness; and our attention is understandably drawn to threats and perceived negative experiences more than pleasant ones because we need to learn from them in order to survive.

When we understand this, we start to see that negative experiences always are more impactful than positive ones; for example, a single difficult event during our day is more memorable than a thousand good events.

I remember one Sunday night many years ago, following a 1-to-1 mentoring session with Vici, I was in my house ironing my clothes for the working week ahead. At that time, I was dealing with several personal and professional challenges and I started to become aware that I was ruminating on a number of the difficult situations that I was facing. I began to feel a stress reaction starting in my body. I paused and took a breath, felt my feet on the ground and remembered the phrase that Vici often compassionately offered me: “The good is there too.” I took another breath or two, looked up and saw my two youngest daughters (they were both toddlers at this time): they were in fits of hysterics as they played together.

I had not noticed their joy when I had been lost in a downward spiral of thinking about what might happen. I continued to feel my breath and the felt sense of my feet to ground my attention as I watched them laughing and playing together. In this moment, as a father, I experienced and felt a deep sense of love and appreciation for them.

As I have practiced mindfulness, I have always found the following analogy helpful: our mind is a garden and as the late Thich Nhat Han put it, “the wholesome and unwholesome seeds are aways there, sleeping in the soil of your mind.” 

So, the question for us to consider is: which seeds are we consciously or unconsciously planting, growing and harvesting?

Rick Hanson, a psychologist and New York Times best-selling author, has researched and demonstrated the importance of taking in the good and how this practice positively impacts our wellbeing. He describes how the mind registers negative experience immediately for survival reasons, while positive experiences generally must be held in our awareness for 5 to 20 seconds for them to register in emotional memory.

This means that it is very important for us to consciously and deliberately help our brain to register the positive experiences — so that they seep into the deepest layers of our mind and body.

What we see from research is that this integration of positive experiences creates a more positive mood, and is a fundamental tool for developing our capacity for self-soothing, emotional self-regulation and wellbeing. It develops our self-regard, optimism and internalises positive resources.

“Gratitude is not a passive response to something we have been given, gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without and beside us…”

David Whyte 

The neuroscience of practising gratitude reveals how expressing thankfulness can positively shape the brain and enhance wellbeing. Studies using brain imaging show that gratitude activates regions linked to reward, empathy, and emotional regulation, particularly the prefrontal cortex and the ventral striatum.

Regularly practising gratitude strengthens these neural pathways, making it easier to focus on positive experiences and manage stress. It also promotes the release of feel-good neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin, which boost mood and resilience. Over time, gratitude can literally rewire the brain to be more optimistic, compassionate, and mentally balanced. As Rick Hanson says, by continually practising gratitude, a state can become a trait.

There have also been many studies from positive psychology concluding that developing a practice of gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with:

• greater levels of happiness
• greater experience of more positive emotions
• savouring of positive experiences
• enjoying better health
• greater capacity to deal with adversity
• greater ability to build strong relationships.

I am not just discussing here a cognitive exercise of recognising and writing down something that we are grateful for, I am suggesting a mindfulness practice and experience of taking in the good — recognising and savouring pleasant experiences.

This practice is about our non-dual reality of life experience: we are usually just too busy focusing and ruminating on negative experience to notice the good. By doing this practice more often we start to see that the foundation of our life is mainly good. This knowledge acts as a counterbalance to the prevalent negative experience that we often pay too much attention to, especially when we are continuously being knocked off course by world and UK events in the news.

To support you to pause and mindfully take in the good, we would like to offer you a gratitude mindfulness exercise, ‘Taking in the Good.’ There are two ways you can access this — either by watching a video, or streaming an MP3. You’ll find both below.

Video version

Audio version

References:

• David Whyte – The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
• Rick Hanson. Buddha’s Brain the practical neuroscience of happiness, love and wisdom.