Welcome back to Live Free Creative podcast. I’m your host Miranda Anderson, and you are listening to episode number two hundred and forty. Two four zero! It’s fun how the numbers just keep getting bigger and bigger. I guess that’s what happens when you continue to do something week after week.

This podcast is in its fifth season. In September, we’ll begin season six, and I’ve said this before, but it continues to be the most consistent I’ve ever been with anything in my entire life. If you have been a longtime listener, you may recall that I talked about and thought about starting a podcast for about two to three years before I did.

My husband gave me a podcast recording microphone for a gift one year, and it sat in the box for about six months, and finally one day I just opened the box, sat down on the floor, plugged it in, and just started talking.

It’s been four and a half years, and I continue to sit down and plug it in every week. I’m so grateful for those of you who are new here that you’re trying out the show.

For those that have been longtime listeners, whether you’re in and out a little bit here and there, it’s a real joy for me to create this show and to share ideas and inspiration and research and stories with you every week.

I sure hope that the show itself is a positive experience for you, that it brings you some new ideas, a new perspective, maybe some permission, maybe feeling like you belong because you relate to some of the things that I share.

I’m feeling super grateful today as I sit down to record with you and just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge that and to feel that feeling. And today’s episode is hopefully going to invite you into these types of gratitude moments in your own life. The show today is about a concept in positive psychology called savoring.

Savoring

Now, you’ve probably all heard this term before. Oftentimes we think of the word savory when we’re talking about a type of food. If something isn’t sweet, we refer to it as savory. Savory and salty are different. Savory and sour are different.

Generally, as just a topical food category, you will have sweet and you will have savory, and savory is something that isn’t sweet. Interestingly, savory, when we’re talking about experiences. To savor something, it means to have an agreeable flavor, smell, pleasure, or delight. We may tend to think of some of the experience in our lives that we savor as sweet experiences.

It is a little bit funny, paradoxical, that sweet flavor is the opposite of savory flavor. But savoring experiences may be something we consider to be a sweet experience or a pleasurable experience.

Now, I really love savory foods. I like sweet foods, but I tend to lean more towards savory foods as my very favorites. It makes sense to me that I would savor life the same way that I like savory foods.

Where do you fall on the spectrum of flavors? Do you love savory? Do you love the sweet? Do you like a combination of both? Today we’re going to talk not about foods and tasting, but we’re going to talk about experiences.

Experiences inside and outside of your mind. These can be external experiences that you. Have with others that you have alone. They can also be internal experiences, moments of insight, or wisdom or inspiration. I’m going to share with you some of the fun facts about savoring and why it matters and how we can get a little bit better at it with intention.

All of this after a quick segment, I like to call life lately.

Segment: Life Lately

This has been a great week. I’ve had a little bit of downtime between graduation and diving into my Capstone project, and I’ve found pockets of time that I had forgotten existed. I know that I’m not all the way through school yet, and. Starting this week, I’m going to need to get right back into a study schedule and research and writing schedule.

It was nice to remember a time when I had a lot of free time. Surprisingly, even with running a business and having kids and animals in a house, removing the 30 to 40 hours a week that I’ve been spending on school has made a significant difference in the way that I’m able to spend time. So, life lately, at least this last week, has looked like a return to fiction.

A Return to Fiction

I read three fiction novels this last week. I was just, absorbing them, I think because I just needed that release. The first book I read was called Maggie Moves On. Plum, gave it to me for maybe my birthday a few months ago and I hadn’t gotten to it yet. It’s a lighthearted fiction love interest story about a home renovation YouTuber. So much of it felt relatable, both the renovation piece and the social media sort of Instagram, YouTube business running piece. It was fun, and I read it in two days and thought ah, that’s so nice to just cleanse my palette of research for a minute and just read something super lighthearted easy.

Next, I read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. This is the play, it’s like a screenplay that was written about Harry Potter’s children. It takes place about 20 years after the graduation from Hogwarts and the original war against the dark side. I thought it was so interesting.

I haven’t read a screenplay. Maybe ever before or not for a long time. So, reading like the scenes and the script style was interesting to me. Of course, I’m familiar with the characters. This was a book that was given to me, I think by Eliot, probably for my birthday that I hadn’t picked up either. I was trying to go through like my stack of fiction that I keep looking at longingly.

I thought the characters were the new characters, like the children characters were fun and different, and I appreciated the story. So that was great.

Then I borrowed a stack of books from my friend Elisabeth. I just needed some more. I had gone to a little free library and everything that was there was deep historical fiction lots of World War II, a couple murder mysteries, and I was just needing something little lighthearted.

When I visited my friend Elisabeth, I grabbed some fiction off her shelf. I read one yesterday. It’s a quick read. It’s like a narrow book, and it was just a fun story. It’s called Nora Goes Off Script.

I’ll link all of these in the show notes if you’re interested in checking any of them out.

It was another just very lighthearted, easy to read love story, and I really enjoyed it.

Daytime Nap

I took a nap yesterday, in the middle of the day after doing some gardening. I think because I had slept a few hours midday, I was not very tired at bedtime, so I stayed up until about two, just finished the book, and once I closed the book, I was like, okay, now I can go to sleep.

Magical Gardening

The mention of gardening brings me to the next thing happening right now in life, which is stepping back into my yard. The spring is in full force. We’re almost leaning into some summertime temperatures. My raised garden beds are all planted and going great.

I planted a new rosebush, bringing me up to a total of six interesting colors and shapes of roses, which my friend car was laughing at me I had once mentioned something about not being really into roses, like just not liking them very much. And here I am now a decade later, planting rose bushes all over my yard.

Going to Marty’s Garden party, if you heard about that on my Happy Class episode was inspirational, and I’m curious to see how they go. I have some rose bushes around one of my trees. I’ve got some blackberries and raspberries growing well. Some strawberries in a raised bed. I planted a bunch of lavender, and lavender has historically not done great in my yard, but I’m trying again, and I got some new tips and so I’m hoping to get that flourishing.

I would really like a bed of lavender and what I did this weekend, why I was so tired– with Dave, we added edging to some of the garden beds that didn’t yet have it, and really created some more defined spaces. In my whole yard, maybe 7% or 10% maybe of the yard that is landscaped and intentionally planted. The rest of it is a mess and it’s okay. It’s okay.

It’s a long game. I can do a little bit at a time. I am feeling good about the sections that I’ve got going, and my work right now is the internal work of releasing my expectation around the pieces that I haven’t gotten to yet, and just the patience and acceptance of things being the way they are in progress and knowing that it’s okay and eventually I will get to the other sections and pieces of the yard bit by bit. For now, though, the pieces that I have done feel beautiful and I’m excited about them.

Simpson’s Land at Universal Studios

The last exciting thing happening in life lately is that I’m going to Universal Studios this weekend. My middle son has a very best friend who’s moving to Europe this summer, and I we’re very sad because he’s truly like their best friends.

They’ve been attached to the hip for the last couple years. He’s originally from Sweden, and so his family is making their way back to Sweden to be near their family. They’ve been in the States for almost 10 years, and we’ve known them for the last couple. We thought as a last hurrah, as best buds that they would enjoy a weekend in Universal Studios together.

And so, I’m taking just the two of boys by myself down for a weekend, mainly to do Simpson’s world, which is so funny.

I’m not a huge Simpsons fan, but turns out my son and his friend are, they have watched all the episodes. They are really excited about having a full Simpsons experience. So, this weekend, right after this episode comes out, I will be headed to Florida to enjoy some sunshine and some Simpson’s world with my middle guy and his friend, hoping to just create some beautiful memories and help them solidify their friendship so they’re able to stay close as the years go by and they’re apart.

Capstone Project

Beyond the fiction and the garden and this quick trip to Florida, my focus for the next six to eight weeks is going to be my capstone project, a research project about the benefits of everyday creativity. I had a great meeting with my capstone advisor this week, and I’ve got a plan, and now it’s just time to dig in and do the work, which I’m excited about.

I think it’s fun to be focused entirely on something that I am very interested in, and I can’t wait to learn more about it, that my friends is life lately.

NOVIOS Retreat!

Today’s show is brought to you by Novios Retreat. You may have heard about this all-inclusive, incredible couples retreat that I’ve partnered with Kristin Hodson and her husband Jake, to put on this November in Costa Rica.

The idea for this retreat came about after years of people asking me if I could put together a retreat for them to come enjoy some time with their companion, with their spouse.

I’ve hosted life-changing women’s retreats for the last five years, and this is an opportunity to bring that same connection and intention and purpose into your relationship. Novios is an all-inclusive adventure weekend for couples, so you sign up, we’re going to do a couple calls this summer to get to know each other so that when we land in Costa Rica in November, we’re already friends.

We will be ready to enjoy six days of travel and adventure together. The experience itself will feel like a luxury planned vacation with the bonus of some intentional relationship-oriented workshops while we’re there.

If you feel like you and your spouse could use a week to reconnect and have fun together without all the logistics and planning, Novios could be the place for you!

Check out the link in the show notes for more. We just have two spots available, so if you’re interested, consider applying today.

Now let’s talk about savoring.

Savoring in Europe as a Teenager

When I was just finishing high school, I was about 17. I was a junior. I was performing with a performing group, singing, and dancing. We did these about hour long shows, and we would perform them all over the city, like at carnivals and events, and even in the mall sometimes. Then, during the summer we would take our show on the road.

After years and years, I had performed in different cities around the country. In San Francisco and in Chicago and a few other places that aren’t coming to mind immediately.

My big trip that I took with this performing group, it was called Clayton Productions, was to England. We had about a 10-day performance schedule in England, and this was going to be my first trip to Europe. My mom signed up to come along as a chaperone, and we decided because we were going to get over there to Europe anyway, that we might as well extend our trip and visit a few different countries while we were there.

The first 10 days of performing were incredible, and I have these distinct memories from this whole trip. One of them was sitting down in an alleyway in London. We had waited in line for the Hard Rock Cafe, but it was taking too long, and so we dashed across the street and into a little bar called the Red Fox Bar. This is now, over 20 years ago, so who knows if it even exists still. And I ordered a chicken sandwich at the bar and then took it outside.

It was wrapped in paper and sat down on the curb in this little alley in London and ate this chicken sandwich. And I remember thinking, “This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten in my whole life.”

I don’t know if that’s true, but at that moment there was something so delightful and pleasurable about the experience being in this new place, having our plans derail a little bit meant we were doing something spontaneous, jumping into this other restaurant to grab something to eat, and the actual food was good. I just remember sitting there on the curb thinking, this is so good, and I savored every bite of this chicken sandwich. I loved it so much.

That moment was an active engagement with my present experience of pleasure and enjoyment. And the reason why this Europe trip stands out to me in my mind is because I have so many, it was a long trip. We were there for about three and a half or four weeks. We went left Europe and went to Paris.

We had a funny experience where we took the channel the train that goes beneath the English Channel, and we were supposed to get off at a stop sometime, like near the border of France. Neither my mom nor I understood the train French, and we weren’t paying at attention. So stopped at the last stop in Paris, and we were like four days ahead of our itinerary, like our planned schedule.

We had a rental car in a hotel, and everything booked, you know what three days behind us on the rail was now. And we decided, we were just going to wing it, and so we got off the train and walked across the street to the first open vacant hotel that we saw and slept the night and kind of regrouped in the morning and figured out what we were going to do.

We just chopped off that first part of our trip and winged it from there on out. Drove across the, the French countryside. We spent a couple days in Belgium and went to Germany and Switzerland. We flew out of Frankfurt at the end of the trip. Throughout the experience there, I have these clear moments that are just crystallized as beautiful savoring experiences.

Another one beyond the chicken sandwich, and (you’re going to notice a lot of them have to do with food because I love food so much.) Another one of these savoring experiences happened when we were driving in this very small town somewhere in Germany. We had the windows of our rental car rolled down for air and just to see better through the windows.

Suddenly, we started to smell this delicious, sweet smell and the whole town, like we, we had passed through some invisible line where now all the air around us and coming in through the open windows of the car was this delicious smell. We pulled over and decided to truly follow our noses.

And I remember thinking that we were like those cartoons where the cartoon characters lift their noses and there’s, like the squiggle on the cartoon of the smell and you can see them following their noses. And we did this, we didn’t lift our noses in the air, but we followed our, the smell as it got stronger and stronger.

We found this little bakery tucked into a corner of a street, and they were pulling fresh coconut macaroons out of the ovens. These were perfect, like quarter sized little peaks of coconut and caramelized sugar, and they, we ordered some, they scooped up a scoop of ’em and put them in a paper bag and handed it to me.

It was warm to the touch. I was holding this warm paper bag of gooey, delicious-smelling coconut macarons. We bit into them, and they had this amazing, caramelized texture, so delicious. We walked back to the car, looking around at these tall buildings with beautiful window boxes full of flowers spilling out and cobblestone streets and just this beautiful in between town somewhere in Bavaria.

I just remember feeling so present and so in love with the moment.

When you think about savoring, about really experiencing all the positive emotion of a particular moment or experience, what comes to mind for you?

 When I think about this in my life, I have just these flashes of different, very particular moments, and none of them are like long times.

They’re mostly minutes long, maybe at longest half hour, an hour of an experience that was extremely intense or embodied in some way. But for the most part, they’re these snippets of pleasure that my mind skips like a rock over the pond of my life.

I think about all these different touch points where I’ve felt happy, really interested, curious, really delighted. Those are moments that I savored.

Defining Savoring

The actual positive psychology definition of savoring comes from a 2007 pair of researchers who wanted to create a word to describe attending to the experience of enjoyment. They set out to describe in positive psychology the experience of paying attention to the enjoyment of the present moment and the word they decided to use was savoring This term denotes a process and represents a counterpart of the word coping.

You also know what coping means, right? Coping is the way that we deal with negative experiences and emotions. Savoring is its opposite. It’s its counterpart. Savoring is how we intentionally enjoy positive emotion and experiences. Savoring is an active behavior. It acknowledges this interplay between a person and the environment.

The environment that I’m talking about can be external, where it, we can be alone in an external environment that we’re enjoying and savoring. We can also savor, actively engage in the interplay of savoring an internal moment, an internal experience.

It can be tangible like a warm macaron straight out of the oven. Or it can be intangible, like a wonderful daydream that you allow yourself to just experience fully and visualize a beautiful future. So, while savoring is related to a pleasurable experience, it isn’t the pleasure itself, it’s the awareness and appreciation of that pleasure that entails the savoring.

Savoring Positive Introductions

Savoring is separate from but paying attention to the pleasure of a positive experience. In one of the very first classes of my graduate program, we did what was called positive introductions, where we as an assignment had written down a story of a moment in time where we were at our best.

Everyone’s stories were very different. Some people were at their best in the middle of a challenge. Some people were at their best when they had achieved a goal. Some people were at their best in an everyday moment interacting with their children.

We broke into small groups and shared these positive introductions. Shared these stories of us at our best, and then we were instructed to help each other savor those experiences by asking questions that invited the storyteller back into the moment to visualize and experience it almost all over again.

Our job as students was to help the person telling the story to attend to that pleasurable experience again, and to get themselves back into that moment where they could experience the enjoyment of it and be aware of it. How good it felt to be at their best all over again. This was such a cool experience, not only coming up with a moment and a story of me at my best and thinking about what that looked like.

Also being in a conversation where we were intentionally asking each other for a little more detail to describe something a little further, or asking a question like, what did it feel like in that moment, or what was your favorite part about that experience, or how did you notice this or that about the experience?

It was a great exercise in constructive communication and it taught us the beginnings of what it looks like to savor an experience, to attend to an experience of pleasure and of positive emotion. It also invited us into one of the three types of savoring.

Three Types of Savoring

There are three types of savoring that you can experience: past, present, future.

You can savor the past like we did in this positive introduction exercise. You can savor the present or the moment that you’re in. And you can also savor the future.

Savoring the Past

Savoring the past is also known as reminiscence or walking down memory lane. If it’s a positive experience, you can remember funny stories with your friends that you grew up with when you’re together at the holidays or elbow your spouse and say, do you remember when you and I did that sort of thing? as you’re watching your kids do interesting and funny things.

Savoring the past is what I did at the beginning of this episode telling you those stories about my trip to Europe. I savored those moments in the present when they happened, which I think has given me easier access to savoring them again in the, now looking back on them and remembering all these details because I was present in those moments.

Sometimes we may be able to look back on experiences that we maybe didn’t enjoy or savor as much in the moment and savor them now. We can see how we learned or grew from an experience that was difficult, even though in the moment it didn’t feel pleasurable.

Savoring the Present

Attending to the positive emotions that we now feel about an experience also can be considered savoring. Savoring the present is really an act of mindfulness, of presence, drawing your attention to flavors and smells and textures.

In different episodes of this podcast, I’ve done some grounding exercises where I invite you into the present with attention to your senses.

What do you feel?

Is the air around you warm or cold?

Do you have your hands on your lap or on the chair next to you, or on the table in front of you, or gripping the steering wheel?

What do you see?

What colors are around you?

What beautiful things are within your sight line?

What do you hear?

What flavors are in your mouth?

What smells are in the air?

Attending to your five senses is a sure way to bring you into the present moment, invite you into mindfulness, and invite you into savoring. If the present moment is imbued with some delights, with some pleasures, and normally even a difficult moment when we are present in it will have some positive aspect, some pleasure.

We can experience peace even in the middle of some difficulty. Sometimes we don’t want that. We don’t want to savor an experience in the moment that overall feels negative or difficult. Sometimes it can be helpful to counterbalance our coping, using some skills to overcome some of the negative emotion with some savoring. Actively, intentionally seeking out or intentionally enjoying a positive experience even when things feel hard in our lives.

Savoring the Future

Savoring the future is what we call anticipation. This is when we visualize a trip that we’ve planned with our kids. This is when we, on a Wednesday afternoon our, our making plans for the weekend, and we can already, feel the sun on our backs when we’re taking that hike with the dogs and taste that delicious drink that we’re going to order with some friends when we go out on Saturday night.

Anticipation is such a wonderful way to savor things in the present, bring pleasure and enjoyment and attention into the present around an experience that hasn’t yet happened. How cool is that you can experience joy now for something that you have planned in the future? This is savoring the future.

All savoring happens in the present moment.

All levels of savoring, as you have heard through these examples of savoring the past, savoring the present and savoring the future, all of them happen in the present moment. Thinking about and paying attention to a past positive experience is bringing that savoring pleasure into the present moment. It’s your present self-thinking about the past.

It’s your present self-thinking about the future. In this way, all the savoring that we do, is benefiting our current experience, whether we’re savoring the past through a beautiful walk down memory lane and reminiscing with friends, or we’re savoring the future as we anticipate fun things coming up, or we just ground ourselves in the present moment.

All that pleasure and the attention and the positive experience that savoring can bring to us happens right now in the moment. Just a few years ago, a couple researchers, one of the original researchers of savoring Bryant and a new partner Smith, published an article talking about some of the pre-conditions to savoring some of the elements that are present.

The Four Pre-conditions to Savoring

For us to develop and experience our own ability to savor, there are four basic preconditions to savoring, and I’m going to share them with you right now.

1. Connection to the present moment.

The first is being able to connect to the present moment. I want you to think for a second about your own life and what are some of the obstacles that get in the way of you connecting to your present moment.

Because like I mentioned, savoring always happens in the moment, whether we’re savoring the present or the past or the future, the attention we give. To active enjoyment of the pleasure and the positive emotion that stems from an experience happens in the present. So being able to connect to the present moment is a precondition.

2. Freedom from urgency.

Second is freedom from urgent social responsibilities. Part of that relates to number one, that if you must rush from one thing to the next because of your responsibilities, you probably aren’t. Readily able to connect to and give attention to the present moment.

3. Basic needs met.

Number three is basic physical and psychological needs. It’s difficult to give the attention and the space to savor if you are hungry or lonely or tired, if you’re irritable, if you’re depressed, if you’re super overwhelmed or burned out.

Even mustering up like a thought around a positive emotion can be difficult in those times. So as a pre-condition for deep enjoyment of positive experiences, we probably need to employ some basic self-care, basic taking care of our health and our sleep, making sure we’re fed and that our mental health is at a baseline.

Savoring can help as a balancing act to coping. Sometimes when things are difficult, what we need is to like oomph up some of our savoring to really give attention to positive experiences. When we feel like life is overwhelmingly negative, and it is possible, it just requires a little bit more motivation, and if you’re already feeling negative or depressed, then it’s less likely that you can muster that up.

4. Meta-awareness

The fourth pre-condition to savoring is the idea of having a presence of mindfulness and meta-awareness, and this is just having the ability to pay attention to your thoughts in your own head. Meta-awareness is noticing what you’re thinking, noticing what you’re experiencing, not just experiencing it, but being able to have that meta-awareness of noticing what’s happening so that then you can give greater attention to it and attend to the experience of enjoyment.

With savoring, you’re both experiencing enjoyment and attending to that experience of enjoyment. Like most things that really can benefit us in our lives, savoring is very simple and very accessible.

The first thing that it requires is our attention, just an awareness, and if you’ve never heard this term before, I’m glad that you’re listening today because giving greater space and attention to the positive experiences in your life will give you a boost of overall fulfillment and satisfaction and wellbeing.

To close out this episode about savoring, I want to share some exercises that Bryant and Vera distinguished that can help you modulate your positive experience during the positive events themselves that can help you really step into savoring not just having a pleasurable experience, but also noticing and attending to it as such.

Some ways to savor:

1. Number one is sharing your positive experiences with others, actively seeking out and including other people in the experiences that you’re having. I shared about with our positive introductions, that can amplify the positive emotions, sharing it and inviting other people to almost experience with us.

That can amplify your savoring, especially when the positive experience that we shared is reciprocated when it’s received with support and encouragement. And sometimes then we may share a simple thing that happened and one of our friends can respond with great enthusiasm for us.

Then, this small thing that we shared now feels even like a bigger deal and we get to enjoy it even more than we had on our own because of the synergy of the sharing.

*I want to make a note here too, and I’ll do another episode about different types of responding to positive events, but it’s interesting how much we either boost or dampen someone else’s positive experience when they share with us. Consider when someone shares a positive experience with you, shares something that they did that they enjoyed, or that they felt good about, or that they accomplished. Do you take the time to savor that with them?

Do you invite them back into the experience by asking a meaningful question or saying, how did that feel for you? Or tell me more about it. I would love to hear. Or do you simply say, oh, that’s great, and move on?

You can experience savoring of someone else’s positive experience by inviting them back into it to share more with you.

2. Another exercise is memory building. This is an exercise where you intentionally create a memory. A common example of this is that people will say, I’m taking a mental picture. While something is happening, if you have the awareness of saying, this is a really incredible moment, I’m going to take a mental picture of it, and you give yourself a second to imprint and capture the feeling and the smells and the sights and this moment you deepen your awareness of it and you’re experiencing and savoring it, then you also are creating a memory that you can return back to in the future.

Keeping a journal or a scrapbook to document special moments are also good examples of building memories. I know with regards to memory building, it’s sad and funny that sometimes I remember things from pictures. It is not until I see the picture that I really can get myself back into the moment, and if the picture wasn’t there, I probably, it would never cross my mind again.

I know with our smartphones are so ubiquitous, we take, a hundred pictures a day and so maybe they’re losing their meaning as we have so much access to them. But my little shoebox of pictures from when I was a kid. Many of those memories are captured in the picture. It’s the image that I need to take me back into the moment, and when I see the image, I can get back there it invites me back into my own memory to savor those positive experiences.

3. Another exercise that you can use to savor is self-congratulation. This is, giving yourself the acknowledgement, giving yourself the acknowledgement of your achievements or your improvements along a process. A funny experience that I had a few weeks ago, I was having a bad day. It may have been a bad week.

It was in the middle of finals. I was very burned out, very overwhelmed, and I saw an ad on Instagram for a flower subscription from The Bouqs, and I love the Bouqs anyway, and I went ahead and ordered myself flowers. When it had the place to put the note I just typed in, “You’re doing a really good job.”

And in the moment, I felt that gosh, I’m having a really hard time, but I’m doing my best. I’m doing a really good job. And I wrote that on the little card. And then about a week later a day, that was a beautiful day that I was out of the fog. I had finished my finals. I was doing a lot better emotionally.

This flower delivery showed up at my doorstep and I unpacked it these beautiful blooms, and I opened the card and I had forgotten my note to myself, my self-congratulation, my documentation that I was doing a really good job and even though I was feeling better by the time the flowers arrived, that note I took a second and savored the feeling of success of  getting through a hard week, getting through a hard time, and of acknowledging that was hard and that I was doing a good job.

I got to experience it more than one time. That is some of the power of self-congratulation and savoring. Okay, there’s a few more, so I’m going to go through these a little bit quicker.

4. Number four is sensory perceptual sharpening. This is the idea that you’re purposely focusing on a single feature of an experience to deepen the experience in detail.

An example would be when you’re sitting at the beach that you close your eyes so that you can listen to the sound of the waves with deep attention and savor the lapping and crashing of the sound of the waves, and you just really give attention and awareness to one aspect of an experience to deepen the savoring of the experience.

5. Number five is comparing. Reflecting on how one experience is better than another in a positive way. So, an example of this would be to reflect on a few years ago when some of the things that are currently happening in your present moment. Are things that you once wanted, I’m sure everyone listening can think about a time in their lives when the, some of the aspects of your current life, what’s happening now in your life was your dream?

I can think about this for me, with my family. I vividly remember a time in my early twenties when I thought I am so excited for the day that I’m married and settled and have children and pets, and just have this full, house full of life. And I didn’t know exactly what that pathway was going to look like or how it would all unfold.

And now here I am with my beautiful husband and family and feeling so grateful. And it’s hard sometimes a lot of the time and there’s ups and downs to family life and I can compare what I once wanted with what I now have and really savor the experience of my present reality.

6. Number six is absorption, which is like the concept of flow where you are really aware of a positive emotion while you’re immersed and engaged in an experience for a little bit more of an extended amount of time. This absorption happens often when you exit an experience and you think, wow, that went so fast. You like the time warps when you’re absorbed in an experience.

Having the meta-awareness of how absorbed you are can be a little bit difficult, but you can also look back on this and savor in the past, as you emerge from an experience where you were totally absorbed in something, you can, once you’re out of that experience, savor it in the past and think about what a wonderful time you had when you know, three hours passed in a blink because you were just so absorbed in an activity or an experience.

Really taking a moment to savor that can be helpful.

7. There’s a few more, but the last one I want to touch on is the idea of counting blessings. I learned all about counting my blessings growing up in church. I didn’t realize that outside of a religious context, outside of a spiritual context, the experience of attending to and reflecting on your positive experiences in your life can deepen your gratitude.

Counting blessings can enliven positive feelings, paying attention with gratitude to the positive events and experiences in our lives. Positive relationships, positive memories, positive belongings, positive educational experiences. There are so many things, so many aspects to our lives and so many things that are good.

Savoring benefits us

Among all the things that are rough and tumble and hard and obstacles and challenges, there are so many things that are good happening on a regular basis in our lives. And when we give attention to those and we, we focus our awareness in a moment, we think through so many of those things, even just a few, even just three, think through three things that you’re deeply satisfied with and grateful for in your life that is savoring that attention to the positive experiences and emotions in your life is savoring.

I want you to just take a moment now and think about one positive experience, whether you want to do some grounding in this present moment and pay attention. Focus your attention on each of your senses and create a sensory experience now.

Or whether you want to take some time to think about a past positive experience and relive it in the most abundant detail you can. Paying attention to the experience of enjoyment of the memory.

Or whether you want to visualize and anticipate a future experience that’s coming up that you’re so excited for and give some attention to the enjoyment that you already feel as you anticipate a positive future event.

I’m inviting you to take a moment now to practice what it feels like to savor and then. To remind yourself that this is available to you at any time that you can give extra attention to positive emotions and really feel them savoring is what we’re talking about when you know the old saying invites you to stop and smell the flowers.

It’s noticing and paying attention to the pleasures and positive emotions and experiences that surround us.

Savoring is eating dessert slowly and feeling the chocolate melt on your tongue and noticing that the fine details that bring such pleasure to our lives.

Savoring is holding your newborn baby and nuzzling that tiny soft head and smelling that newborn smell and noticing the fineness of those eyelashes and the brightness of those eyes, the little juicy lips, paying attention to the joys and pleasures of our life.

When we savor, we are actively counterbalancing unpleasant emotions that can happen during stressful events in our lives. Savoring will boost our happiness. It will give us higher levels of life satisfaction and perceived control over our experience. Savoring positively relates to higher levels of positive affect and savoring together in relationships increases the quality of the relationship and the levels of self-esteem of each of the parties involved.

Savoring can help us balance our responsibilities as a family even more effectively and can benefit every relationship that we share in the show notes. I’ll make sure to link an article on positive psychology.com, all about savoring, and I want to leave you with a quick invitation to savor one moment each day this week and see how you feel.

Thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope that you’ve learned something that this idea of savoring, even if you’ve been doing it but just didn’t have a word for it or know all the different sort of dimensions of it, that knowing about savoring can help invite you into the process, into the attention and enjoyment of those experiences, of all the good things that are happening in your lives.

Both in your head and in your world. I want to thank you for tuning into Live Free Creative. I really appreciate you being here. I love creating this show for you, and I hope that it has a positive impact on your life. Have a wonderful week. I’ll talk to you next time. Bye-bye.