Welcome back to Practicing Human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Corey Muscarra.

And in today's episode, we're going to be talking about how to become an optimist and the many often

unknown benefits of doing so. More to come on that in a moment, but first it is Two Bell Tuesday. Oh,

Hallelujah, Two Bell Tuesday.

I'm gonna ring the bells twice.

You listen with your full presence and awareness and focus as if this were the most important 20 seconds of your life.

Here we go. D. You're going to be. Hmm, thank you two bell Tuesday. Now that we're a little more settled in, let's talk about optimism, often spoken about

alongside its close cousin, pessimism.

Now when you hear those two words, optimism, what is your knee-jerk

feeling about which one you identify with? Are you more of an optimist? Are you more of a pessimist? You don't

have to say it out loud, but just get a sense for yourself as you hear those words and you consider your own personality or expression

in relationship to them.

If you've listened to this podcast for some time or followed my teachings over the years, you know at the core of my belief of

what leads to a good life is integrating all the various parts of yourself, your humanness, your personality, making space for these

parts of you to be seen, accepted, held, and even loved, even the really difficult parts or the parts that we don't like.

And this is because being human is complex and we're going to have many different parts of us

that express themselves at different times throughout our life.

And if we're constantly suppressing or fighting these parts, well, we just create more tension

and suffering.

But that doesn't mean we can't condition the mind in a particular way to lead to things that we know create greater well-being and happiness and peace.

That's one of the reasons we meditate. And with optimism and pessimism, it's kind of the same thing.

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