Dear Friends,
We love this photo by Ellen Rosenberg – it exemplifies what we want to tell you about this week:
The magic of bubbles... translucent, connecting, childhood memories, magical... mimicking joy in our lives.
When you look back to your childhood and about the joy of creating bubbles or playing on a playground, how does it make you feel? When was the last time you saw a place like a playground in your adult life?
This philosophy is what our friend Dr. Jer Clifton, at the University of Pennsylvania, would refer to as a primal belief. To those of you subscribing to our newsletter for our first time, Jer researches how primal world beliefs (your perception of the world) impact a person’s wellbeing. The following article was released a few weeks ago in Psychology Today and gives an exciting look into the emerging research on how this data is being amassed:
Here are the three main points of the article:
-Major scientific effort finds that people hold three main beliefs about the world. -These three beliefs concern how Safe, Enticing, and Alive the world is. -They are strongly correlated to our day-to-day behavior and happiness.
Jer says: “Safe world belief is very strongly correlated to things like greater trust, higher agreeableness, and lower depression. … Safe world belief may be more like a lens used to interpret our life than a mirror reflecting what our life has been”. “Enticing is very strongly correlated to things like curiosity, gratitude, and happiness. … anyone can see the world as Enticing“. “Those high on Alive world belief think everything happens for a purpose … [and] life is a relationship with an active universe that animates events, communicates, and has a role for each of us to play. Alive is strongly correlated to things like spirituality and having purpose in life”.
The next question is, of course, where do these beliefs come from and can they be changed? We will have to wait for future research to tell us more, but we think you would agree that cultivating a view that says the world is safe, enticing, and alive would help all of us love life and each other a little better.
The SeeingHappy Team
