Sharon Salzberg, a leading mindfulness teacher and author, also sees awe as a vehicle to quiet our inner critic. Awe, she believes, is “the absence of self-preoccupation.”
This, Dr. Keltner said, is especially critical in the age of social media. “We are at this cultural moment of narcissism and self-shame and criticism and entitlement; awe gets us out of that,” Dr. Keltner said. It does this by helping us get out of our own heads and “realize our place in the larger context, our communities,” he explained.
The good news? Awe is something you can develop, with practice. Here’s how.
Pay attention.
In 2016, Dr. Keltner visited San Quentin State Prison in California, where he heard inmates speak about finding awe in “the air, light, the imagined sound of a child, reading, spiritual practice.” The experience changed the way he thought about awe. So Dr. Keltner teamed up with two other researchers to enlist people across America and China to keep journals about their awe experiences. He found out that people were having two or three of them each week.
“I was like, ‘Oh, I can just take a breath and look around.’ It doesn’t require privilege or wealth; awe is just around us,” he said.
When William B. Irvine, a professor of philosophy at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, wants to feel a sense of awe, he turns to science. “Science is everywhere, all of the time,” he said. An alluring object or part of nature, for example, is a “piece of an incredibly beautiful puzzle.” We often just think of the piece instead of the big picture, he said, “and that’s a pity.”
But once we think about the context, about what went into its creation, awe will follow.
Focus on the ‘moral beauty’ of others.
One of the most reliable ways to experience awe, Dr. Keltner found, was in the simple act of witnessing the goodness of others. When we see others doing small gestures, like walking an older person across the street, we start feeling better and are also more likely to perform good deeds.
However, goodness in others is often overlooked, Dr. Keltner noted. “Our public discourse and academic discourse sort of forgets about how much good people can and want to do,” he said.
