Reprogram Your Brain For Happiness

The human mind is obsessed with remembering and imagining – it compulsively creates tens of thousands of thoughts each day about the past and the future – such that it often prevents us from connecting to the here and now, where life is actually happening. The most important skill to make the brain the best possible tool is to strengthen our ability attention to pay attention to the present moment. This is what we’ll practice in today’s session, by better understanding the difference between the concepts of pleasure and joy, and by practicing breathing exercises that will allow us to find a serene breathing movement that can then become a point of reference in our daily lives.

One of the most game-changing teachings on how to upgrade our brain to live a happier life was given to us by Buddha over 2500 years ago; that we have the ability to observe our emotions without compulsively reacting to them, thereby limiting the mind’s tendency to create suffering. In this session, we’ll be working on strengthening this ability of our mind to observe what is and to find a sense of peace in the simple observation of our physical sensations.

Fear is the number one factor limiting us in our ability to live up to our full potential and access moments of magic, love and joy. In this session, we'll see how we can learn to move out of our comfort zone and into the place where our wildest dreams come true. The combination of meditation and visualization is a powerful way to train our minds to face fear instead of running away from it.

One of the main obstacles to our brain’s ability to create happiness is its negativity bias: the tendency of the mind to give more weight to negative thoughts than positive ones. Simple as it may sound, when practiced regularly, gratitude has the power to dramatically improve the brain’s ability to create happiness in our lives. In this session, we’ll be practicing breathing, visualizations and affirmations increase this capacity of the brain to become a happiness-making machine.

One of the most powerful ways in which we can upgrade our brains is by learning to refrain from our natural inclination to blame and point fingers at others and instead start seeing other people’s negativity as a form of suffering to which the only rational response is the practice of compassion. In other words: how to go from judgement to comprehension. In this session, we’ll practice visualizations and affirmations to open our hearts and strengthen our ability to feel compassion for ourselves and others.

The most important ingredient for a happy life is our ability to develop and maintain loving relationships with others. This in turn requires that we hone the skill of mindful communication, by bringing more awareness and kindness in how we speak, how listen and how we interpret the words and deeds of others. In this session, we’ll practice affirmations to strengthen our ability to communicate consciously.

One of the ways our minds creates unhappiness is through our perception of/ relationship to time. Either we judge that we do not have enough of it and overwhelm ourselves by trying to do too much at once. In both cases, we’re creating frustration in our lives because of the belief that things should be different from what they are. In today’s session, we’ll practice affirmations to change our relationship to time and learn or relearn to focus on one thing at a time.

We all have aspects of ourselves that we judge as undesirable, that we hide and that we wish we could get rid of. But when we resist a particular trait in ourselves, it tends to show up in our most vulnerable moments, and to create a disconnect with others. It may seem somewhat counter-intuitive, but the only way to prevent these aspects of ourselves from creating unhappiness is to actually embrace them: to love ourselves unconditionally, especially when we display the behavior that we wish no one would see. In this session, through breathing, visualizations and affirmations, we’ll bring our awareness to these repressed traits of our personality and practice giving them more love not less.

One of the most difficult aspects of living with a tyrannical mind is that it always wants to be right and to make the uncertain certain. But this is counterproductive to our happiness, and can lead to unnecessary frustration. Rather, what is conducive to happiness is to learn to focus on what is useful rather than what is right, to do our best in each moment, and to practice going with the flow of life. In this session, we’ll be practicing affirmations to allow the brain to more naturally embrace uncertainty and to take life moment by moment.

An important realization when it comes to upgrading our brains is to acknowledge that we still have much to discover about it, and that we most likely are still using but a fraction of its capacity. One of its most amazing abilities that has yet to be explained in scientific terms is our ability to manifest what we truly desire, that is to say to give material form to our thoughts. Our mind has the ability to attract and manifest our vision into the world, and in this session, we’ll be practicing visualization exercises to strengthen our ability to create the life we desire.