James' Journal

Oo I can help here. You can immediately find out the potency and benefit of appreciation, right here and now, as you’re reading this.

First, if you are not already there, get to a point of feeling good, a very solid enjoyment at the bare minimum.

Are you there? Good!

Now, experientially consider the quality of this feeling good, of this enjoyment, that is happening for you right now. Does it feel good to feel good? Is it enjoyable to be enjoying being alive? Do you like feeling good? It may even be fruitful to contemplate – how exactly do you know that you like it? What about it do you like?

Now compare it to feeling bad – how does it compare? Is it better to feel good than to feel bad? Don’t look for a thought-out answer, just actually answer it for yourself experientially right now.

Appreciation amounts to “assessment of the true worth or value of persons or things” [link]. In other words, if you have followed the instructions, you have been assessing the quality of feeling good, as it is happening now in your experiencing of being alive.

The purpose of this, which you may have already noticed happening, is that now you much more fully… appreciate, as in, “recognize the quality, significance, or magnitude of” [link], just how much better feeling good is, than feeling bad. This drives home the point, experientially, of the sheer wondrousness of feeling good, of enjoying being alive. This directly enables you to be sincere about your purpose of feeling good more and more of the time, because now you see it for yourself, you intimately know just how good it is, so of course obviously it makes sense to nourish and increment it.

This appreciation serves to “lock in” one’s understanding and valuing of enjoying and feeling good, and once it is locked in it serves as a stable point for increasing it further.

Let me know if it helped!

Cheers,
Claudiu

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