Last week my husband Richard and I attended the 7th European Conference on Positive Psychology. Why, you might ask, did a former chemist and a former lawyer spend almost a week of their lives in the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam with over 900 international experts on that subject? The answer is simple: it’s significant and it’s inspiring. Positive psychology (pp) welcomes connections with all other scientific disciplines. So we heard about pp and biochemistry, design, organizations, health, and much more. If you want to know more about positive psychology ask Google. In this series of blogs I will tell about the great things we experienced at the #ECPP2014.

 

Barbara Fredrickson gave the first keynote with an overview of her work. What triggered me most was her study on the effects of meditation on the brains. She discovered that loving kindness meditation had more effect on the brain than mindful meditation. Somewhere in Barbara’s profile Wikipedia describes the effects of LKM.

 

We also met an Israeli lady who was very concerned about the disorder in her region of the world. But she also told, her family teases her, because she is never at home when the missiles come. As if it is normal to be threatened by missiles! For her war was a normal state of living. And I wondered, would loving kindness meditation help the leaders in countries at war to become less aggressive and more connecting? Could loving kindness meditation get the war out of the people that are living with war so long?

 

The exercise Barbare Fredrickson used in her experiment is simple and easy done: before you go to sleep, reflect on the love you experienced this day. Think about all the kind things you have received, then go to sleep.
So if you go to bed tonight, think about love and kindness and see how you will flourish tomorrow!