Audio Meditation: A Pleasure Practice

Humans are wired to focus on negative experiences, memories, and sensations. This is reasonable: paying attention to pain or fear is likelier to help us survive, from an evolutionary perspective. But when positive things happen, we can sometimes miss them, skip over them while we wait for the other shoe to drop, wonder how we’re going to have to pay for them in the future, or simply don’t notice them because a negative thought or experience is more present in our minds.

In reality, moments of sweetness happen all day long. The first cup of coffee in the morning. Snuggling with your dog. A sunset. A delicious bite of food. A moment of laughter with a friend. A warm bed on a cold day. These moments don’t have to be big, and they can sit side by side with difficult things that are happening in your life at the moment as well. A moment of sweetness doesn’t negate a period of grief or stress, but they may help prevent us from being swept away into negative thoughts or pain. Let’s practice pleasure and taste whatever sweetness might be happening in this moment.