Practice Thriving and Resilience: Skill 1: Describe events using neutral observations
A thriving and resilient life is an intentional life. Thriving means your needs are met consistently enough that you have a sense of well-being and contentment. Resilience means accessing resources, inside and out, that allow you to maintain your center or quickly come back to center in the face of adversity.
Maintaining thriving and resilience in your life means you can meet life’s challenges without being swept up in a roller coaster of reactivity.
Thriving means consistently engaging in that which truly supports your life, taking care of your needs day-by-day. When you’re thriving, you not only enjoy your life, you are also a gift to others.
Cultivating thriving and resilience means knowing the difference between what’s actually happening and your interpretations of it. It means learning to maintain equanimity through the ups and downs of life. It is the ability to process intense experiences with confidence. It includes effective self-care, gratitude, finding meaning, building community, and more.
Read more about thriving & resilience.
Skill 1: Describe events using neutral observations
Discerning the difference between observations and the meaning you add to them creates an open space for curiosity and choice. Curiosity is one of the most important elements of maintaining an expansive perspective. Being able to choose whether or not to believe the interpretations you make gives you an opportunity to live more fully from the expansive experience.
The capacity to remain conscious of the fact that everything you experience is the result of your own biased perceptual system helps you remain open, curious, and flexible. From here you can find freedom from the prison of your own thoughts. You can give yourself and others the benefit of the doubt, creating a foundation for greater connection and compassion.
Holding your interpretations lightly, you also make space for presence and the deep satisfaction that comes from an experience of the senses unmediated by thought.
The ability to describe an event using neutral observations also helps others have a greater understanding of your experience. By hearing the observations as separate from your interpretations, they can follow the unfolding of your experience and accompany you in a more clear and grounded way.
You can speak with clarity about the difference between observations and interpretations and still acknowledge that the human memory is often inaccurate. Regardless of the accuracy of your memory or perception of something, your experience just is— and, as such, is valid in and of itself. Facts can be corrected, but experiences cannot. Experiences are to be noticed and accepted as they are so that they arise, exist, and disappear with the natural flow of life.
Practice
Use your phone to make an audio recording of yourself talking about an experience in which you know you have mixed interpretations and judgments.
As you listen to the audio after recording, pause it frequently to write down each interpretation, evaluation, prediction, or judgment.
Listen a second time and write down each neutral observation or fact.
Connect each observation to the interpretation you made of it.
Identify the feelings and needs behind each interpretation and observation.
Identify how you have or would like to meet the needs you identified.
Take some time for reflection afterwards:
What did you enjoy about separating observations from interpretations?
What was the most challenging for you?
Did you notice a pattern regarding the type of interpretations you are more conscious of and the type you were less conscious of?
Did you notice any form of inner resistance to the exercise? If so, what need was underlying that resistance?