Dec 25 2007
Can Meditation Make You Lucky?
Are you lucky? Really, do you feel like you’re a lucky person? Not lucky in the sense that you have a good, or even a great, life, but lucky in the sense that things just seem to fall into your lap?
Whether you are lucky or not, you probably think that luck is just random, that people stumble into good things by accident. You may have heard that luck is “preparation meeting opportunity,” but how then do you explain a mere acquaintance calling you with free tickets to a show you’ve been wanting to see, but couldn’t afford?
What if luck isn’t random after all? What if there is actually a structure underlying luck? Ten years of research by Professor Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertforshire, England suggests exactly this. His research shows that luck is largely composed of four capacities:
1) Creating and noticing chance opportunities. You have to be out in the world, and you have to be relaxed enough to actually notice them.
2) Making lucky decisions by paying attention to your intuition. There is much more happening around us than we can ever grasp in our conscious minds. But beneath our conscious awareness, we are picking up all sorts of cues and clues to what is happening, which we call intuition.
3) Creating self-fulfilling prophecies by having positive expectations. When you expect things to go well, you will unconsciously pick up the cues that match what you expect – you’ll see it when you believe it.
4) Adopting a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good. Lemons can be made into lemonade. You can learn from the worst disaster. If you’re always looking for the silver lining in the dark cloud, which is often a life lesson to apply going forward, your luck will improve continuously.
Other research of Professor Wiseman suggests that luckier people tend to have wider social networks than less lucky people. This is a kind of virtuous cycle. When you look at the first capacity above, you’ll notice that you have to be out in the world to be in the right place at the right time. Thus, if you want to be lucky, it’s a good idea to cultivate wide enough social networks that you’re frequently out of your cave and in the lucky zone. And how can your social network do anything but expand when you have positive expectations and a resilient attitude? Those vibes are bound to draw people to you.
So how can meditation improve your luck? Meditation helps cultivate the capacities for luck.
1) Meditation helps you relax. Numerous studies show that meditation increases relaxation, as measured by lowered heart rate and decreased blood pressure, even when the person is not meditating. There is also evidence that meditators recover more quickly from stress than nonmeditators. When you’re relaxed, you notice more of those chance opportunities. (These studies were reviewed by Michael Murphy and Stephen Donovan and are available online at www.noetic.org/research/medbiblio/index.htm.)
2) Meditation increases visual sensitivity, particularly improving sensitivity to visual stimuli before the meditator is consciously aware of the stimulus. Again, seeing before you know you’re seeing helps you notice those chance opportunities.
3) Meditation improves empathy, which is the ability to sense what others are feeling. This a big part of intuition – knowing what’s going on for someone else, so you know whom to approach, or when is the right moment to ask for a favor. It’s also a big part of having a large social network, which is related to luck.
4) Meditation improves visualization. The more you visualize something positive, the more likely it is to happen, or at least, the more likely it is that you’ll notice if it’s happening.
5) Meditation improves psychological health. In different studies, meditators have been shown to be less nervous, less anxious, less aggressive, less depressed, less irritable, less domineering, less inhibited, more sociable, more self-confident, more positive about themselves, more emotionally stable, more self-reliant and more field independent than non-meditators. Being healthy psychologically helps you have positive expectations and deal effectively with life’s setbacks – the resilient attitude that turns bad luck into good.
It’s often been said that “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” But sitting in the “not doing” of meditation may make you even luckier!
