Can you tell the difference between sky blue and marine blue?
Between chartreuse and light yellow?
Or is that light green?
How about between frustration and anger?
Or worry and concern?
What about between happy and blissful?
In order to see the difference between things as flavors of ice cream or emotional states,
It takes practice.
You could become an Epicurean and be able to really differentiate wines and cheeses and.
.
.
What about baseball,
Golf,
Cooking,
Even cleaning?
Everything with practice has differences that can be differentiated.
Mindfulness training is the same thing.
And the more we can learn to differentiate what's happening around us,
The more we're able to shift from one mind state or body state to another.
Listening to sounds all depend on your ability to differentiate white from black,
Red from green,
Yellow from orange,
Happy from sad.
Once you learn that ability to differentiate,
You're halfway to home.
What I like to do is take groups of words ranging from miserable to ecstatic and put in four or five words,
Six words in between those two extremes.
And then learn to feel the body tone that goes along with each word.
Then with mindfulness,
You can determine,
You can feel at any moment in time when you become aware,
What's my body tone right now?
What's the word in my mind that represents the body tone that I'm in,
The mood,
My emotional state?
What do I call it precisely?
Is it anger?
Would it be nice to be frustrated instead of being angry if you could do it?
Would it be nice to be happy instead of sad?
Now there's a lot of words in between happy and sad,
But when you get down to it,
If you have a sequence of words going from one state to the next,
To the next,
To the next,
And to the next,
Then wherever you are,
You can go up or down one level at a time,
Or two levels,
Or five levels,
Or jump from the top to the bottom.
So make up your own list of words and you'll be able to utilize this happy up technique in order to have more happiness in your life.