Sublime

When we meditate with the spirit of a smile, we awaken our natural capacity for unconditional friendliness.

In the late 1990s, Fredrickson proposed what she called the ‘broaden-and-build’ theory of positive emotions.2 According to the broaden-and-build theory, positive emotions ‘broaden’ our awareness and ‘build’ our cognitive and social resources. Broaden refers to the immediate effect of positive emotions: when we’re feeling good, our minds open up, we

You can see how the belief that cherished qualities can be developed creates a passion for learning. Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better?

14 We acknowledge Carol Dweck at Stanford University for the creation of the helpful musculature metaphor. See Dweck, C. (2006) Mindset. New York: Ballantine Books.

Like pop positive thinking, positive psychology attends almost solely to the changes a person can make internally by adjusting his or her own outlook.

Dr. Martin Seligman, past president of the American Psychological Association, believes there are five factors that contribute to our happiness: positive emotion and pleasure, achievement, relationships, engagement, and meaning. Of these, he believes engagement and meaning are the most important.

In 1998, Dr. Martin Seligman, incoming president of the American Psychological Association (APA), had challenged the field of psychology to broaden its focus to study and implement interventions that went beyond human problems and pathology to include the study of human strengths and well-being—basically, what’s going right.2 He thus initiated posi