Posted by: Edward | January 3, 2024

Making Mindfulness Part of Your Life

It is highly beneficial and comparatively easy to add mindfulness to your life and throughout your day.

Reflecting, photo by author.

Some of the benefits include reduced stress, greater ability to regulate your emotions, openness to new experiences, greater ability to deal with pain, and better decision making. It even has physical health benefits in terms of heart disease, blood pressure, and sleep quality.

The first thing to do is let go of the idea that you need to maintain continual mindfulness throughout your day. It’s likely impossible but even if possible there are likely benefits to moving between different levels of mindfulness throughout the day. Like being awake and being asleep, being active and resting, the human brain and body functions better with variation.

Rather than rigidly trying to stay in mindfulness, let your goal be gently returning to mindfulness frequently.

So what is mindfulness? John Kabat-Zinn, creator of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction says that, “Mindfulness is awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally.” What are we paying attention to in this way? Our present moment experiences.

It can be helpful to have a more specific focus. Two of the traditional suggestions are breathing and walking. This leads us to the first way of increasing the amount of mindfulness in our life, formal mindfulness practice

Hopefully I didn’t just scare you too much because formal practice is really no big deal. I’m going to give you a very simple program for mindfulness of breathing and mindfulness of walking.

1. Mindfulness of breathing

Find a comfortable position where your spine is relatively straight and the front of your torso is free to move. This can be lying down or sitting up. This can be kneeling like a samurai, sitting cross-legged on a specially made pillow, or in a regular chair. Heck, you could even do it standing up.

I call it a relaxed regal posture.

Your eyes can be open or closed. If you keep them open, it’s best not to be staring at any one thing. You can even let your eyes relax and let go of focus. I personally prefer keeping my eyes open. Feel free to try both and see what you prefer.

Set yourself a timer. You don’t need to over do this, you can start with one or two minutes. I’m currently doing 10 minutes after work. I’m also sitting down however much time I have between being ready to go and having to go to work. Today that was 20 minutes, last week I was lucky to get five.

Now, gently connect your attention with the feeling of your breathing. This is a light touch, like connecting with a loved one just to let both of you know, hey I’m here, we’re here together. You aren’t trying to rigidly force and keep your attention on your breathing. You aren’t trying to make it so your breathing is the only thing you’re paying attention to.

When your attention wanders, notice this and gently return your attention to the feeling of your breathing body. I say when because your mind will wander, that’s what they do, and it’s perfectly ok that yours does. If you want, you can kindly acknowledge what your mind has wandered with. You can give it a little label like, “thinking” and then gently, lightly touch breathing again.

You will likely have to do this over and over again. And that’s not only ok, it’s good. Noticing we’ve wandered and gently returning is building the muscle of mindfulness. That’s getting your reps in.

Now, while this happens you may be aware of sensations in your body, or arising emotions, memories, or thoughts, or notice things in your environment. All of this is ok. If you are mindfully breathing with these other experiences, that’s actually good.

You don’t need to do anything about these other experiences as long as you are also aware of the feeling of your breathing body. Only if you lose contact with that do you need to do anything, to notice it and return.

After doing this a while, your timer will go off. Congratulations, you just did formal mindfulness of breathing practice.

Consistency and frequency are more important than duration and intensity, especially at first. That’s why I have one consistent time and, to increase the frequency, I also added a more variable amount in the morning.

2. Mindfulness of walking

The next practice that you can choose to incorporate is mindful walking.

Find a space that you can safely and comfortably walk around in a circle at a slow speed. Set a timer.

Stand up with that relaxed regal posture. You could choose to let your arms dangle or adopt the more traditional stance with your right hand gently cupped by your left hand and held about a fists distance from your belly button.

It’s probably best to keep your eyes open but, again, no need to focus on anything in particular.

Focus your attention on the feelings in your feet and legs, especially where your feet make contact with the ground.

Then gently lift one of your feet and move it a short distance, an inch, or up to the length of your foot and return it to the ground. Feel the changes in pressure and other sensations. Repeat with the other foot and alternating back and forth.

This pace will probably feel glacial to you but that’s ok, you aren’t trying to get anywhere.

When your attention wanders, notice this and gently return your attention to the feeling of your walking body and the sensations in your feet and legs.

Mind wandering is fine. Noticing other things while you walk is fine. Feeling frustrated with the pace is fine. When you lose contact with the feelings of your walking, kindly notice it and gently return your attention to them.

That’s it. Repeat until the timer goes off.

Formal mindfulness is far from the only way to bring mindfulness into your life but it’s a direct way to build the necessary skills of guiding your attention. And it’s very easy to keep track of whether you’ve been practicing or not.

Another thing that formal practice can do is help you build up the felt sense of mindfulness and then you can start to notice it, or bring it to other aspects of your life.

3. Creating mindfulness cues

Next is to decide on cues or signals to connect with the present moment mindfully. In truth, these could be anything. A siren in the distance could be a call to pay attention. A stop light while you are driving, could mean it’s time to connect with your breathing.

Other popular cues are while washing the dishes by hand, mindfully walking whenever you are going up stairs, or practicing mindfulness while showering.

Pick things that happen frequently and, as a bonus, things that happen somewhat randomly. When the cue has a less predictable element you are training you brain to return to mindfulness in more situations and contexts.

4. Using emotional cues

After practicing mindfulness with more neutral cues, you can begin to associate it with situations where “paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally” could be helpful to you.

If you notice yourself feeling stressed or feeling like you need to rush, this can be a very helpful moment for you to slow down and connect with the present moment before focusing on what you need to do.

Connecting your brain with your body and recognizing what’s going on inside and around you when you are feeling anxious can help enormously.

If you are feeling impatient or frustrated while waiting for something or someone.

If you are feeling anger while in some conflict with someone.

Take some time to think of the situations and emotional states mindfulness might be helpful to you and pick one. There’s no need to overload yourself, you can always build more associations later.

Now make a plan, what is also known as an implementation intention. For example, “When I feel stressed and I’m rushing, I will pause and mindfully breathe for four breaths before deciding what to do next.” It can be helpful to write your plan down.

Now for some imagined practice. One helpful thing is because the brain is not good at distinguishing between real and imagined experiences, imagined practice will help you build the neural pathways and habits much like real practice does.

Start by imagining a situation where you might be stressed and rushing, imagine the weakest that feeling could be that you could still notice it. Imagine the earliest in the process of feeling stressed and rushing you could notice it.

Now imagine bringing mindful awareness to that moment. Call up that felt sense of mindfulness we discussed earlier. Imagine yourself pausing and taking those four mindful breaths.

Repeat the process with moderate and stronger experiences of stress and rushing. The more repetitions and the more varied situations and intensities of being stressed and rushing you practice with, the more likely you will remember when it would be helpful.

Now, next time you become aware of feeling stressed and rushing, pause, bring that quality of mindfulness to the situation and connect with the feeling of your body breathing for at least four breaths.

5. Review and reflection

Create a recurring time and place to review how your experiments with mindfulness have been going. Can you identify any benefits you’ve been experiencing? Can you identify any difficulties you’ve been having? Can you find any ways to adapt what you’ve been doing to better fit your life?

This could be done in the form of journalling. This could also take the form of habit tracking, recording how many minutes you do a day, for example. And Comparing that to a subjective 1-10 score for how you feel each day.

As with anything else, it’s easier to keep doing what we usually do than to introduce new behaviors to our lives. Habit tracking and regular reviews can help us move mindfulness from a nice idea to something we regularly do. And they can help us overcome difficulties we encounter on the way to that goal.

May you find a pathway to healing, freedom, and happiness.

Leave a Comment

Posted in habits, mindfulness | Tags: , , ,

Posted by: Edward | July 5, 2023

You Can’t Go Home Again

When it comes to our memory, you can’t go home again. Our memories are not, as we sometimes think, passive recordings but are instead active reconstructions. While there are aspects of what we are remembering from “back then”, what we are experiencing now has been made now.

Photo by author.

It is a story we edit together and tell ourselves in order to create context for what we are going through now. The content this memory is based on may come from our past but, like a movie, much is altered in the editing process.

We simplify, removing elements that don’t relate to the theme we are developing. We reshape it with things we didn’t know at the time but learned later. We recombine or mash up separate episodes to make the reconstructed scene more meaningful. They can almost become symbolic in how we load them with meaning. With memories from childhood we include perspectives we weren’t capable of understanding and narrative structures we hadn’t learned yet.

We do all of this outside of our awareness, for the most part, and fast enough we can’t see any of the seams. And next time we have this memory, this most recent version will be the starting point for a new set of edits.

This process bears some similarity to hallucination but even more to dreaming. In fact, dreaming is vitally important to the creation and contextualizing of memory. Dreaming is when we organize the emotional meaning of our memories and move our experiences from short-term storage into our long-term library.

For people who want their memory to be effective record keeping, this plasticity might sound like a problem but that is not what memory is for. Memory exists to help us understand and navigate our world. And given our existence as very social animals, it is likely it likely also exists to help our progeny and other members of our community to understand and navigate our shared world.

After we develop language and narrative we can’t help but structure and communicate our memories, our experiences, in linguistic and narrative form. Even things we experienced before we had learned those things will be organized and expressed in those forms when we call it up today.

We are artists… writers, directors, and editors reshaping the raw material of our experiences to suit the narrative needs of the present moment. Creating the context and lessons we need in order to make decisions and act in order to get our present needs met. But also to create context to help those we care about to navigate the perilous transitions of their lives.

Our memories’ failings as literal recordings is exactly what makes them flexible enough for these far more important purposes. And also what makes them flexible enough to allow us to learn, and heal, and grow.

References

White Gloves: how we create ourselves through memory by John Kotre

Leave a Comment

Posted in memory, Narrative Therapy | Tags: , ,

Posted by: Edward | June 21, 2023

The Purpose of Memory

Our memories do not exist for the purpose of record keeping. They exist for the purpose of helping us live our lives. For this reason, Fidelity is not their primary concern.

Over time they’re being abstracted into thematic, even symbolic, forms. They tell us the story of us. They form a map of how our world works.

child looking at map by Annie Spratt

They form a system of contextual and conditional associations we used to predict how the situations we are presently experiencing could go, so that we can select actions that will help us best navigate them. So we can best get our needs met.

This is why I forgetting is so important. The map of meaning is created by forgetting what isn’t relevant to us and what we are trying to do. Just like a collection of raw footage is not a movie until it is edited and spliced together, our raw memories are not the story of our lives more than that by which we navigate those lives until they’re edited and organized.

When we get upset and convinced our memory isn’t working right, we are often judging our memory by the wrong standard. We judge it in terms of how well it performs the task of record keeping.

Rather we could ask, how meaningful is the story of me? How useful is my map of the world? Am I creating a life of meaning? Am I improving my ability to get my needs met and live my values?

References

White Gloves: how we create ourselves through memory by John Kotre.

Leave a Comment

Posted in memory, Metaphor Therapy, mythic, Narrative Therapy | Tags: , ,

Posted by: Edward | June 7, 2023

The Artist and the Art

The creation of ourselves is a complicated business, built in layers over a lifetime. We are built as much by what happens to us as by how we interpret that, and how we choose to respond. As long as we live we are not done creating this unique work of art, this collaborative collage.

Image by Jazmin Quaynor.

Sometimes we think this is something done to us, rather than something we do. Which is understandable as the process begins before we are capable of understanding our role in it.

Our interpretations of what happens to us, and why, were made by child-like minds with very little life experience. The choices we made were made with those same child-like minds with very little personal, economic, or social power. In short, we did the best we could with what we had in that moment.

The bad news is those early experiences, interpretations, and choices form the scaffolding for our later creative work. As a visual artist will tell you, an ink line or brushstroke laid down can’t be taken up again. And unlike them, we don’t have the option of scrapping the whole thing and starting over.

The choice we have now is how to work with what’s there.

And that’s the beginning of the good news, we have a choice about how we work with what’s there, because we are not done creating this particular work of art.

Our brains are far more sophisticated now than when we started. We have far more life experience to draw on. We can even draw on other people’s life experience through observation, through listening, and through reading. And most of us have many more options available to us and far more social and economic power than we had as children.

But most importantly, we can recognize our part in creating ourselves and take control over our interpretations and to choices. And not just our interpretations and choices about what’s happening now but also what happened in our past.

We can layer new interpretations over our old ones. We can make new choices. We can change what it all means, as long as we can accept the responsibility of being the artist AND the art.

References:

White Gloves: how we create ourselves through memory by John Kotre.

Leave a Comment

Posted in collage, memory, Metaphor Therapy, Narrative Therapy | Tags: , , , , , ,

Posted by: Edward | May 16, 2023

Securing Attachment Together

We learn how to self soothe by first being soothed. We learn how to regulate by first regulating with others.

In order to live functional lives we need to be able to self-regulate and connect and regulate with others. The best time to have learned these skills is during infancy and early childhood. The second best time is now.

Unfortunately not everyone gets sufficient experience of attuned caring and co-regulation as children to have internalized those skills. In these cases, the core role of the therapist or counselor is to be a surrogate caregiver, a good enough parent, and to create for the client what David Winnicott called a holding environment.

This is very similar to what Carl Rogers identified as the core conditions for therapeutic change: congruence, unconditional positive regard, and accurate empathy.

First, as a counselor, we must establish rapport and trust. This is to make ourselves someone the client can attach to. Then we must continually create and repair this holding environment through our calm comportment and caring attunement with our client’s ongoing present moment experience and feelings.

Carl Rogers’ insight was that if this was all we did as counselors, this would be enough for us to help our clients to change. This fosters the environment necessary for our clients to heal themselves.

The counselor can be a surrogate attachment figure that the client can use as a secure base and safe haven. Additionally, with calm comportment and kind curiosity, the counselor can help the client explore their learned response patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior, and whether they work to lead the client towards what matters them.

References:

Nurturing Resilience by Kathy L. Kain and Stephen J. Terrell.

Leave a Comment

Posted in attachment, relationships | Tags: , ,

Posted by: Edward | May 8, 2023

The Cellular Intelligence of Boundaries

To understand how our boundaries need to be, let’s look back at the original boundary, the cell membrane. The cell membrane embodies a deep wisdom. It’s job is to grow, to encounter the world and learn, but also to protect.

An image of a jellyfish in the dark by and machines

In order to protect the cell within, it will close itself off from world. This is meant to be a temporary measure for if the cell stays closed off too long, it can’t feed or breathe. It will die.

This boundary is intelligent. It learns what in it’s environment helps it and what harms it. It learns when to open and when to close. Ultimately it can only do one at a time and it gets more out of opening than closing, so protection is meant to be temporary.

As soon as the cell recognizes the danger has passed, it will open again.

Ideally we will learn to use our boundaries the same way, as the border that connects us to others and the world, to feed and breathe and learn, and only closing when absolutely necessary. Only closing when what we are encountering is actually harmful to us.

We call this ability to recognize when it is safe to open, trust. Mindful trust. Discerning trust. Trust that has learned what is truly harmful to us and what is not.

As we develop this cellular intelligence, it allows us to more and more engage with the world and others with openness and vulnerability. This is what allows us to get our needs met, to learn, to grow, and to connect with others with the authentic intimacy we fundamentally crave.

References

Liberated to the Bone by Susan Raffo

Leave a Comment

Posted in ACT, mental health, relationships | Tags: , , , ,

Posted by: Edward | April 5, 2023

The Wu Wei of Essentialism

Wu wei is not doing in order to let things effortlessly happen.

Often we think of productivity or effectiveness as something we need to do more of, as something we need to add in order to make more happen. And wu wei, doing by not doing, seems like a paradox. But it’s important to realize that we are already doing. There has never been a society so focused on doing over being.

Given that we are already doing so much, and we have a lifetime of doing more to solve our problems, the most powerful thing we could do is less. We could do less of how we’re getting in our own way. We could do less of the things that don’t matter. We could do less of the complicated and overly sophisticated tricks and hacks.

In a Chuang Tzu’s Daoist teaching story of Chef Ting, Chef Ting is successful because he cuts less. He cuts less because he took the time to really learn where to cut. We can do the same.

Stop trying to do more, slow down, and take the time to really learn where to cut. I’m not telling you to change anything, don’t make cutting another doing. Slow down. Rest in mindfulness. Allow yourself to become aware of what you are already doing. Allow yourself to get to know the flow or process of how you go about living.

Cultivate patience and kind curiosity by refraining from changing until you deeply understand how the system currently works. And how it doesn’t. You will start to notice ways you get in your own way. You will notice things that annoy you, things that take too long, things that are too complicated. You will notice things you do over and over again that eat up your time, energy, or joy. You will notice time and energy spent on things that are ultimately unimportant to you.

It is important that I again remind you to refrain. Refrain from trying to fix it. But also, refrain from judging yourself or punishing yourself for what you notice. Look on your behavior with kind curiosity. You are a human being like anyone else doing your best, based on how you’ve learned to be.

You got here by applying the same strategy and solution we’ve all been taught to use, doing more and working harder.

Looking at yourself with curiosity allows you to ask yourself questions like, what am I trying to achieve when I do that, where did I learn to do that, and is doing that moving me towards what matters to me or away from it? You will start to see patterns and connections in your behaviors. You will begin to see underlying issues. You will realize what eats up the most of your time, energy, and joy; either in big disruptions or in the frequency of tiny disruptions.

Now you are ready to make a cut, a decision, that removes a key obstacle.

This first cut is an experiment. In truth, we don’t know what will happen until after we’ve done it. So slow down, refrain from additional action or judgment. Rest in mindfulness and notice what happens with kind curiosity.

Don’t muck about with a bunch of small fiddly changes. Don’t muddy the waters by making another change before you know the results of your experiment.

If you’ve taken the time to really understand the system of your behavior, the pattern of your doing, you will learn a lot from this cut. And if you give yourself the time you need, you’ll know where to cut next.

References:

Essentialism by Greg McKeown

Leave a Comment

Posted in habits, mindfulness, taoism | Tags: , , , ,

Posted by: Edward | March 9, 2023

A Friendly Introduction to Trauma

Our trauma responses are deeply wired into our bodies and brains. They live below and before the parts of us that are human and are instead part of our animal heritage. They are response systems older, faster, and more primitive than thought.

Photo by Alexander Grey

These systems live on in us because they work. The living beings who had these systems were far more likely to survive long enough to be our ancestors then the ones that didn’t.

When these systems are activated they preempt our slower, more complicated, and more recently evolved brain systems. When our body mind perceives our survival is at risk, thinking is no longer the priority.

This means that while these survival systems are activated, we can do things we wouldn’t choose to if we were thinking. Things that surprise us. Things that go against our values. Understanding how these body mind systems work can help us cope with embarrassment, guilt, and shame over what we did, or didn’t do, in order to survive.

These survival systems evolved to be acute responses. A threat arises, they turn on, we do what we need to do, the threat passes, we shake it off or otherwise process it, and we return to baseline. And most of the time that’s how it goes.

Other times we aren’t so lucky. Sometimes our experiences are too overwhelming and we’re unable to fight or flee our way out of them. Sometimes we freeze or dissociate and our minds can’t make sense of the experiences afterwards. These experiences form what we call trauma.

We will then be prone to having our survival systems activated in situations that remind our brain of the traumatic experience. Because our brains have trouble making sense of the traumatic experiences, these reminders can seem as if they’re the original situation happening now. This is what is referred to as flashbacks.

Sometimes these can be as vivid as hallucinations or waking dreams. Other times these can be more subtle, where we are in the emotional states from the experience. And given the nature of traumatic experiences these can be feelings like rage, terror, confusion, despair. These powerful unpleasant feelings can be mismatched to what is actually happening now.

This re-experiencing can also occur in our dreams. The most common trauma symptom is nightmares.

Another form of re-experiencing is the tendency for people with significant trauma to recreate or set up situations similar to their trauma. This is one of the reasons some of us find ourselves in relationships that are strikingly familiar.

With all of these forms of re-experiencing our survival systems tend to get highly activated. And each and every time they do our thinking is distorted and stress is impacting our bodies.

People who have experienced trauma over extended periods of time may also find that these threat detection and threat defense systems start staying active all the time.

This might look like being angry and ready to fight, all the time. It might look like running around and always needing to be busy. It might look like having no energy, not really being present in our lives, and having given up. It might look like always expecting and looking for danger and catastrophe. It might look a lot like anger problems, hyperactivity, depression, and anxiety.

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying these issues are always or only a matter of trauma but sometimes trauma is a major factor in their development. And if other treatments don’t help someone with them, exploring whether and how trauma might be involved may be a good idea.

The better we understand trauma the more we are finding that people have. So if you think you might have trauma, understand that it is a normal human experience. Facing the challenges of life sometimes bruises us. Many people have trauma. I have trauma.

Many people have trauma but don’t have sufficient symptoms to qualify as having post-traumatic stress disorder. If that’s you, that’s okay, it doesn’t make your experiences any less valid.

What matters is whether your trauma experiences are interfering with your ability to live your life. If they are, then you might benefit from seeking help.

This can be help with skills to cope with or live around the trauma you have, this is often called trauma-informed care. Or this can be help to more directly address the traumatic experiences themselves, this is generally called trauma therapy or trauma counseling.

There are several different styles, schools, or approaches to trauma therapy, each with their own focus and with similarities and differences between them. But in general, healing from trauma is found in connection and letting what is trapped within us to be experienced, understood, and expressed.

These knots begin to untangle when we can be with the memories, sensations, and feelings of the past AND with what is happening in the present moment. When we can be with our feelings and bodily sensations AND with the parts of our brain that can speak and make sense of things. And when we can be with the thoughts and feelings inside us AND be present and connected with the people around us.

Leave a Comment

Posted in ACT, mental health | Tags: , , ,

Posted by: Edward | January 20, 2023

Escaping our Stories

Often we mistake our ideas about ourselves for our self.

Photo by Marc Clinton Labiano

Thoughts and feelings tend to go together. When you are thinking a particular way you tend to feel in a manner congruent to that. When you are feeling a particular way you tend to think in a manner congruent to that.

The brain is an association machine, when it has part of a pattern, it wants the rest of the pattern.

If we’re really hooked into a particular thought and feeling combo, we can forget that at other times we think and feel in different ways. But we are not whatever thought and feeling pattern we are currently experiencing. We are what experiences those changing patterns.

We are not the weather, we are the sky.

Some of the hardest thoughts to unhook from are the ones we have about ourselves. It is easy to mistake the stories we tell ourselves about who we are for who we are. Especially when we’ve been telling ourselves that story for years.

We can have all sorts of thoughts about ourselves. Thoughts like, “nothing I do ever works out” or “no one likes me” or “I’m just a loser.”

And in the moment, it can feel like these are true and meaningful. But they are *just* thoughts, produced largely out of habit. Often these harsh and negative thoughts pop up in order to protect us from taking emotional risks or from feeling vulnerable.

Even if these thoughts feel true, because we have lots of past history to point out as evidence for them, they are just thoughts. They do not know the future and they’re not taking into account that we can grow and change and become more than we were.

We are capable of recognizing that these thoughts are just thoughts, not commandments, and to choose to act not the way we have but the way we want to. To embody our values moment to moment.

As we realize that our thoughts about our self is not that Self but just a story, we are free to write a new story, based on what truly matters to us.

Leave a Comment

Posted in ACT, mindfulness | Tags: , , ,

Posted by: Edward | December 30, 2022

Strike at the Root

Everything changes as we learn how to feel okay about ourselves.

Photo by Zach Reiner

So much envy, anger, fear, and shame along with all the aggression, loss aversion, defensiveness, grasping, condescension, and avoidance are simply unnecessary when you come to not only believe but to feel that you are basically okay.

When you recognize that you are worthy of care, capable of getting your needs met, likable, and have a right to your own needs, preferences, and understanding of the world, you no longer need to compete or struggle with others.

So many of us spend so much time commenting on, worrying about, and fighting with the splinter in someone else’s eye because we are terrified about what we’ll find in our own.

And sure, we probably do have a plank in there. But we also have our eye in there. Underneath all the confusion we learned to survive our lives is a perfectly good human being.

We are lovable, even if we’ve been surrounded by people who weren’t able to do that. We are capable of identifying and pursuing our needs and preferences, even if we’ve spent a lifetime believing we can’t and being punished for trying.We don’t need to fight to force others to recognize our value. We need to give ourselves permission to recognize our own.

We don’t need to fight to force others to recognize our value. We need to give ourselves permission to recognize our own.

1 Comment

Posted in compassion, mental health, relationships | Tags: , , , ,

Older Posts »

Categories