You are here:
>>
>>
>>
Naikan Therapy – Find Happiness through Appreciating What You Already Have

Naikan Therapy – Find Happiness through Appreciating What You Already Have

by Hope Rehab Team

Topic at a glance:

Are You Getting a Bad Deal in Life?

Does your mind have a tendency to view life in negative terms? Are you regularly overwhelmed with a sense that you are being treated unfairly or that life is giving you a bad deal? Naikan therapy is a technique that allows us view things from a more positive perception. It can help us see that when we do a fair assessment of our life, we are actually getting a fantastic deal. This technique can also lead to the life-changing insight that true happiness doesn’t come from getting more of what we want, but in appreciating what we already have. For our purposes, we could think of it as a type of gratitude therapy.

Hope Rehab Water Volleyball

Origins of Naikan Therapy

Naikan therapy is a Buddhist technique from Japan. The word ‘naikan’ can be translated as ‘looking inside’. The idea is that we use this form of structured introspection to gain a better understanding of ourselves and our relationship to life. This approach has become popular in Japan, but it is only starting to become known in the western world.

How Naikan Therapy Works

Naikan Therapy uses three questions simple questions to direct our self-reflections:

Understanding the Three Questions

If we don’t pay close attention to our life we may assume that the answer to the first question (what have I received?) is ‘very little’. This is because we tend to be far more aware of what we are not getting than what we are getting. If we look closely at our experience though, we recognize we are getting a hell of a lot.

Some of the examples of the type of things we received today could include:

When we compare the list of what we have received with what we have given, we will likely notice that the former has a lot more items. This shows that we are indeed getting a good deal in life.

The last question, ‘what problems have I caused?’, is there to balance out our usual preoccupation with the harm done to us by others. You may wonder, why don’t I list the harm caused to me by others? Well, the answer is that we usually have no problem doing this already. In fact, a huge part of our problem can be that we are so focused on the harm caused to us by others. By focusing on the problems we have caused, we can start to see that we are not so hard done by as our usual thinking might suggest.

If you found this post on Naikan Therapy to be useful, please support us by sharing it online.

Other Topics That Might Interest You

Rehab Online

Am I Too Old For Rehab?

Can we be too old for rehab? In this post we examine legitimate age-related concerns while also explaining why it is never too late for second-chances in life.

Meditation with Alon

Singing Bowl Therapy

Sound therapy is based on the idea that vibration is a foundational principle of our universe. We can use sound as an aid to meditation and relaxation.

Contact us

"*" indicates required fields

Your Name*
Country*
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

MOST RECENT BLOG POSTS

Media about us:

GET IN TOUCH TODAY AND HEAR BACK FROM US WITHIN 12 HOURS

"*" indicates required fields

Name*
Country*
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.