Transform Your Experiences into Sources of Positive Emotions

The way we think about each of our life experiences influences our emotions, which in turn influences our behavior. The experiences we’ve accumulated over the years are responsible for where we are today. It can be damaging to cling to emotions that result from the negative evaluation of an experience. So let’s learn to see life through another lens and develop our magical power to transform.

Remember that we all have the power to transform our experiences. Developing this power and transforming the impact of these experiences on us seems like a form of magic. Meditation, positive affirmations, visualizations, mindfulness, and changing the focus of your attention are just a few ways to produce this magic.

The power of meditation

Meditating involves letting your thoughts go by without being trapped by them, in a relaxed position, and in a peaceful environment. Through breathing techniques, you can achieve a state of relaxation that provides numerous psychoemotional benefits.

From a psychological and physiological point of view, meditating can induce an altered state of consciousness. Mindful breathing and progressive muscular relaxation are also beneficial, cognitively speaking. With training in meditation, you can reduce your depressive thoughts and achieve better peace of mind.

If you change the focus of your attention, you can change your emotions

Physiologically speaking, when a negative emotion invades the body, it takes a few seconds for the body to process the information and then recover its normal state. But if, after that time, you continue to think about what made you sad or angry, this physiological process will repeat and you’ll be trapped in this emotion, entering into a vicious cycle.

You can change the emotion by changing the focus of your attention. When you feel a negative emotion, take a moment to breathe, and when you feel it fading away, focus on something else. Think about or do something different, recall a happy memory, listen to music, or watch an entertaining movie and focus on that instead.

Visualization as a transformation strategy

Visualization is a technique that fosters positivity, produces positive chemical reactions in the brain, relaxes the body, and allows you to escape your daily routine and stress for a moment. This is another part of the magic of transformation.

Elsa Punset offers 250 quick routines to improve your daily life in The Book of Little Revolutions. In “the garden of transformation,” she invites the reader to go to a comfortable place where you won’t be interrupted.

From there, she offers the following visualization: “Imagine walking into a garden, you can imagine it however you like. In this natural space, give yourself permission to transform yourself in any way you like: into a blade of grass that sways in the breeze, a piece of immovable granite, a giant running towards the garden, a colorful bird flying above the trees…”

The magical power of positive affirmations

Observing your thoughts is the first step towards understanding what your mind is made of. Most of what you feel is determined by what you think. Therefore, by changing the way you think, you can change the way you feel and act.

You can teach your mind to stop focusing on negative things, which only attracts negative feelings. Instead, you can direct your thoughts towards positive affirmations and learn to put a stop to the negative interpretations you tend to make.

Positive affirmations involve changing your negative thoughts and ideas about yourself and giving them a positive spin (i.e. I am…, I can…, I am capable…).

Transform your worries into present moments

Being present in the here and now is difficult, especially because we’re not used to it. It takes attention, learning, and effort to set aside your negative thoughts and worries. But if you’re able to achieve that step, you’ll have a tool that will be very useful when it comes time to focus on a specific situation and ignore distractions and contaminating thoughts.

Obsessing over past problems or feelings of guilt over past behaviors can feed resentment and even lead to depression. In order to transform your past or future worries into present moments, you have to live in the here and now. The present is a gift, hence the name, and its transformative power is enormous.