" Norman Garmezy, a developmental psychologist and clinician at the University of Minnesota, met thousands of children in his four decades of research. But one boy in particular stuck with him. He was nine years old, with an alcoholic mother and an absent father. Each day, he would arrive at school with the exact same sandwich: two slices of bread with nothing in between. At home, there was no other food available, and no one to make any. Even so, Garmezy would later recall, the boy wanted to make sure that “no one would feel pity for him and no one would know the ineptitude of his mother.” Each day, without fail, he would walk in with a smile on his face and a “bread sandwich” tucked into his bag.
The boy with the bread sandwich was part of a special group of children. He belonged to a cohort of kids—the first of many—whom Garmezy would go on to identify as succeeding, even excelling, despite incredibly difficult circumstances. These were the children who exhibited a trait Garmezy would later identify as “resilience.” "
This is an extracted paragraph from an article by MARIA KONNIKOVA.
The word resilience captured my attention and I realize it is very much the same as positive thinking.
The article move on to ask an important question of : why some people excel under stressful circumstance and others crash under it? , or the question can be : why are some people more resilience than others? The answer is : "... resilient children had what psychologists call an “internal locus of control”: they believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. The resilient children saw themselves as the orchestrators of their own fates.... One of the central elements of resilience, Bonanno has found, is perception: Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as an opportunity to learn and grow? Events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic,”
There are two very important points made there : first, the ability to view threat as a challenge and not a fatalist circumstance. Second, the ability to have control and over your perception.
Isn't these two points the same as POSITIVE THINKING?
A person who has the ability to think positively will naturally process their thinking in a direction that benefits them as they believe they can control it.
What if positive thinking can be trained with meditation practise?
Meditation is a process where we give our mind a chance to have a wide space. A non-judgemental space, a space where we can let anything and everything comes and goes without trying to identify with it. It is the process of being an observer of our mind. Paradoxically, this process of learning how to let go is also a process of learning how to "control" the mind. Or we should say, learning how to allow the mind to do what its nature wants to do : to be at ease, calm and manageable. The continuous practise of keeping the mind focus on "nothing" (actually we are concentrating on our body sensations while practising meditation) helps it to find a bigger space for more conscious thinking.
Yoga asana (poses) practise is a prelude to this "focus on nothingness". In Yoga practise, we are trained to look inward, to observe different body parts, to learn how to relax our muscles while stretching and holding in a position. Learning how to relax often require a re-wiring of our bad habit mind.
So if you link everything up, this is how Yoga helps you to train a positive thinking mind :
I hope my description make sense to you. Feel free to share your practise with me on the comments.
Om. Om.