Savor the Moment

Transcript

Lets talk about savoring the moment.

There’s this free course on Coursera.org. If you don’t know Coursera it’s a lot of Universities put up their courses for free.

One course in particular I’ve been looking at is the Science of Wellbeing by professor Lori Santos.

Its a course about the science of happiness but also it’s very practical.

One of the early lessons or one of the early exercises that you do in this course is to keep savoring and gratitude diary. Every night before you go to sleep you think “What was something nice that I savored today?”

The first thing you have to do is savor an experience. One thing which is extremely pleasurable that we all do almost every day is eat.

And so there’s a classic meditation and you take a single raisin, put it on your lips and put it inside your mouth and feel the texture of the raisin on your tongue. Bite into it, observe the sweetness and the texture, the moistness inside the raisin. You can experience all these things in great detail.

Its interesting because we experience so many things every day but we don’t take the time to enjoy them. Even if we’re doing them in part to enjoy them we do them for pleasure.

And of course these kinds of experiences are not limited to things we do for pleasure. When we savor an experience, it does tend to become pleasurable just by the act of savoring it.

So when you’re washing dishes and you take that extra time to move the cloth or the sponge across the plate and take a little extra moment to relax and observe the movements of your muscles in your arms, where your feet are planted firmly on the ground, feeling the floor of the kitchen.

We can do this with almost any experience. We can observe the texture, the tastes, the smells, the feelings, the tactile sensations. All these kinds of things are always available to us.

Of course when we do this exercise and later write it in our diaries we can relive those moments and think how nice it is to have that experience.

Just a little experience just savoring the moment.

Thank you for listening, have a wonderful day.