Recently I have been pondering the whole topic of positive thinking. Is it fact or fiction? Helpful or harmful? And the bottom line for me, does it work or not? Being insatiably curious I decided to run a personal, and please be warned, very unscientific experiment to see what conclusion I came to. The thing about a daily meditation practice is that some days I love taking the time to settle and sit quietly and other days I would really rather swallow razor blades than be locked in a small room alone with my wayward mind. So daily meditation was the chosen subject and the experiment would be to see how positive or negative thinking, about meditation, influenced the actual experience of it.

On Day 1, I dug out my recipe for success and cheered my way into the session, reminding myself how beneficial meditation is, how good I would feel afterwards and I sat down feeling enthusiastic and relaxed.

On Day 2, I grumbled my way onto my cushion thinking about how hard it was to be me, how I unfair life was and all the thoughts that make up my personal recipe for failure.

The results were surprising and not at all what I expected. Day 1 was a good day, I was in a good space and positive thoughts lead to positive action and a happy outcome. Day 2 however was very interesting. The simple act of doing something that I believe is beneficial, even though I didn’t feel like it, got me feeling good about myself! Hmmm, food for thought! The negative expectation I had about how awful it would be did not influence the actual experience.

The Buddhists believe that mind is the master, and body and speech are the servants. In order to change our words and actions, we therefore need to change our minds and thoughts. In the experiment above, what struck me is that the real positivity came from morality, from honouring what was right and beneficial.

So here is my conclusion, it is not so important whether positive thinking is method or madness, what's important is whether, with positive thinking, there is method in your madness!