Hello and 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 talk about how we can often use a positive mindset to

override underlying pain. More to come on that in a moment first let's settle

in together with the sound of the bells okay so I wrote a post the other day in

our text message community that I want to share here and expound upon. I said

using a positive mindset to override your underlying trauma is like playing loud music to

muffle the cries of suffering outside your window. You can avoid it temporarily but nothing is

healed and as soon as you're still whatever is unresolved will be sitting there asking for attention.

Pain, trauma, and our despised self can only be healed through presence, compassion, and love.

So this is one of those tricky ones where we really want to capture some subtlety and make sure we're

not throwing out the baby with the bath water because a positive mindset is useful in so many

circumstances and you could make the argument that we can benefit from a positive mindset in every

moment. It sort of just depends on how you define positive mindset. I'm using it here in a way that

we might typically associate a positive mindset which is like think positive, think good thoughts,

think the best, be optimistic. But we could also look at a positive mindset as just how we're relating

to our present moment experience and holding an experience or our life with equality of presence

and compassion could be perceived as a positive mindset. So I want to make space for that.

And there is also value to the positive thoughts, positive orientation, things are going to get

better. I'm a great person. I've got this. I'm good like a role for that. It's much better

narrative than I'm a terrible person. My life sucks. Nothing is going to get better. So I don't

want to throw that out as well. However, I think we're mostly aware that a positive mindset can

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