Golden Oversoul
Are you familiar with the Invisible Gorilla test? In a psychological experiment that has since become famous, the subjects watch a video of a group of players tossing a basketball back and forth amongst themselves.
They are asked to count how many times the players wearing white pass the ball. About halfway through the video, a person in a gorilla suit calmly walks into the middle of the players, beats its chests, then exits the scene.
The kicker? Of the subjects asked to count the passes in the video, about only half of them reported actually seeing the gorilla. As the conductors of the experiment noted, it was as if the gorilla were invisible.
Sounds hard to believe, right? Except for a little thing called inattentional blindness. In common speak, this simply means that humans are wired in such a way that when we are focused on one thing, we can easily overlook something else.
Outside of the lab where that demo was filmed, we live in a culture and are surrounded by media that often asks us to focus solely on the chaos, the trauma, and the drama in our world. And even if you make a concerted effort to carefully curate the media and information you take in, you still have a mind that, according to psychologist Dr. Rick Hanson, is like Teflon for good experiences and Velcro for bad ones.
It can be so easy to become singularly focused on your crappy job, financial woes, the current political landscape, or the heartbreaking plight of so many fellow humans on this planet. And yes, many of these issues will likely require some attention to improve the situation or remedy the injustice.
But be careful where you direct your mental spotlight. If you’ve got a floodlight on the negative the majority of the time, it can leave the ever-increasing light and goodness around you in the dark.
Instead, set your focus to look for the good. Prime your brain to look for the miracles, no matter how small.
In my Soul Digger community, we have a practice called “Miracle Mondays.” Each week, we share serendipities, bits of magic, or examples of living in the flow that we have experienced in the prior week. We are priming our minds to look for the goodness, for the messages from the Universe, for the winks from the Divine.
Because when we do, we spot that number on the license plate ahead of us that holds special significance, or the song that was so meaningful to our lost loved one actually catches our attention when it plays on the radio, or we see that book that almost falls off the bookstore shelf that provides the exact inspiration we need to get through a tough situation.
✨✨✨ Overcome your human tendency toward inattentional blindness when it comes to goodness and miracles. You might just see an otherwise-overlooked beautiful synchronicity, answered prayer, or even an invisible gorilla. ✨✨✨
(Wanna see the experiment? Click HERE.)