Posts tagged ‘practice’
Becoming an Naturalist
“You can observe a lot just by watching”
— Yogi Berra
Columnist and author, Marilyn vos Savant, once said, “To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.” This skill of observation is the primary tool used by naturalistic researchers for the study of subjects or phenomenon:
“Naturalistic observation occurs when a scientist conducts observations in a naturally occurring situation, without becoming actively involved. In conducting naturalistic observations, a scientist makes no attempt to control or change what happens. The research task is to make a detailed record of the events that occur and of apparent relationships between events, without having any effect on their occurrence.”1
Each of us has this capability to become a naturalistic researcher. And, in order to develop wisdom, you are actually your best laboratory for observation. In the words of Benjamin Franklin, “Observe all men, thyself most.”
You might ask, what does this ability for observation have to do with reducing my stress? The answer is that without observing our moment-to-moment experience, we can become its victim. Unaware of our inner experience, we are often at its mercy as we unconsciously are pulled into a reaction to it: pushing away what we don’t like or grasping onto what we don’t want to change – wanting things to be different. These reactions cause us significant suffering and even result in physical and emotional wear and tear over time. This where the power of observation arises: once we can see and acknowledge our own experience, we are more able to respond out of choice rather than becoming engaged in these unconscious reactions. By developing the ability to respond more effectively to our experience, out of wisdom, we can find ways to stay more balanced in our day-to-day life or return to balance when find we have been pulled away from it. Equanimity is possible with growing awareness of your own inner experience and the wisdom that is derived from that. The imperative: simply observe.
“Use your five senses. Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone you can become expert.”
– William Olser
References:
1. The City College of New York: http://www.ccny.cuny.edu/bbpsy/modules/naturalistic_obs.htm
Going Home
“The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
— Maya Angelou
A common saying states that “you can never go home again.” The truth of this statement depends, however, on your perspective of where home resides.
In this journey that we call life, early stages of development tend to be outwardly focused: finding one’s place in society, cultivating a career, creating a family, and perhaps acquiring material belongings. The trials and tribulations of this outward path provide for experience that is essential to one’s growth. From this viewpoint, home is considered to be an external place and one tends to seek outside oneself for comfort and answers. And as a person grows and changes, one can never go home again as the same person one used to be; therefore, one can never go home again.
It is not uncommon at some point in life for one’s path to take a turn inward, often when one’s suffering becomes great enough to motivate this reversal: one is finally willing to stop looking outward and to take the courage to look inward. “No longer does ‘being at home’ have to depend on an external requirement. You can live from the inside out – rather than the outside in.”1 This is the recognition that we can tap into the wisdom that is part of us and no longer need to seek outside ourselves for comfort or answers; instead, to be always at home. As Sharon Salzberg suggests:
“Sometimes we take quite a journey – physically or mentally or emotionally – when the very love and happiness we want so much can be found by just sitting down. We spend our lives searching for something we think we don’t have, something that will make us happy. But the key to our deepest happiness lies in changing our vision of where to seek it. As the great Japanese poet and Zen master Hakuin said, ‘Not knowing how near the Truth is, people seek it far away. What a pity! They are like one who, in the midst of water, cries out in thirst so imploringly.’ “2
Just as in the game of baseball, perhaps coming home is one’s true objective throughout life’s journey.
Here is breathing exercise offered by Thich Nhat Hanh to assist you in coming home:
“When you notice your mind wandering, often the judging mind becomes activated – subtly, or not so subtly, reprimanding you for not being in the present. Instead, when you notice your mind has wandered, you can welcome it home to your breath. Welcome home, I missed you! Your breath can serve as your home base. It is always there, no mater where you go. If you are at home with your own breath, you can be at home wherever you go.
Breathing in, arriving (right here, in the present moment)
Breathing out, being at home (wherever you are)
Your breath can provide you with the familiarity, the security that represents home.”1
“Go where he will, the wise man is at home.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
http://www.shambhalasun.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=1979
2. LovingKindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness by Sharon Salzberg
Turn Into The Skid
“This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be cleaning you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
Because each has been sent
As a guide from beyond.”
— Rumi
Many of you who learned to drive in winter conditions will be familiar with the expression “turn into the skid.” More specifically, the instructions for recovering from an oversteer skid with the rear of the car sliding out from behind you is to steer into the slide. By turning into the skid, a driver is able to maintain control of the direction of their vehicle when the rear of the car begins to fishtail. The reason this technique needs to be explicitly taught to drivers is that it does not come naturally. Our intuitive or automatic survival reaction is to turn away from the direction of the skid. That is why this new pattern of response needs to be learned and conditioned so that it becomes the new response when a skid occurs while driving in snow or on ice.
These same instructions are helpful for working with our inner experience. Although our natural reaction may be to push away what we don’t want to see or address, the most effective way to respond to what ever our experience may be is to allow ourselves to become aware of it and move in towards it, to take a closer look at its nature. Only this way can we respond effectively to our experience rather than get caught in automatic reactions that often do not serve us over time. Coming back to the advice for driving in winter conditions, the experts say when you’re in a slide, look in the direction you want to go rather than the direction you are headed: look toward the solution, don’t look toward the problem.
Acknowledging Your Experience
“I cannot be awake for nothing looks to me as it did before, Or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep.”
— Walt Whitman
Acknowledging your experience from moment to moment is one of the most successful ways to reduce your stress while also gaining insight in your life.
One aspect of acknowledging your experience is to become aware of its feeling state. The feeling state of an experience can most simply be described as one of the following three: pleasant, unpleasant or neutral (neither pleasant nor unpleasant).
Why is this important to your state of stress? When you have an experience that you interpret as pleasant, your unconscious tendency is to want it to persist. Whereas when you have an experience that you interpret to be unpleasant, your unconscious tendency is to want it to go away. If you interpret your experience as neutral, you may ignore it.
When you unconsciously attempt to hold onto the things you interpret as pleasant or push away those things you interpret as unpleasant, you are creating a subtle or not so subtle suffering in your life – only adding to your stress. Unknowingly, you fall into the ineffective trap of “wanting things to be different than they are.” This is because pleasant experiences are ephemeral; they are bound to change, no matter how much you try to make them persist. Likewise, unpleasant things happen to be part of your existence, no matter how much you try to deny their presence. They too will tend to shift or change if you allow them to do so.
The best strategy for reducing stress is to accept whatever experience you have without trying to hold onto it or trying to push it away – simply acknowledging what is present, as it is, in each moment. By noticing the feeling state of each experience, you can acknowledge the experience without having to react to it; you can notice whether it is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral without holding onto what is pleasant or pushing away what is unpleasant. By objectively observing the feeling state of your experiences, you have the opportunity to gain insight into their existence and their impermanent nature.
To put this into practice in your life, each time you become aware of an experience you are having, see if you can notice the feeling state. You can even silently say to yourself one of the three feeling states that most reflects the quality of your experience: pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Once you are aware of the experience and its associated feeling state, you can consciously make a choice about how you can respond most effectively, if necessary, to that experience.
Impermanence and Equanimity
“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship”
— Louisa May Alcott
Impermanence, or change, is a universal aspect of life. Things arise and, inevitably, they pass as well. We can see this from a variety of perspectives. For instance, from the lifespan viewpoint, we are born, we mature into adulthood, we evolve into older age and then we eventually die. Aging is a constant process of change. Similarly, day-to-day we experience evidence of impermanence in our lives; relationships, housing, jobs, family and health are often in changing states.
Change can be very stressful for us to experience and respond to. Changes require us to constantly adapt. Some changes are joyful: marriages, new homes, birth of children, to name a few. Yet, these joyful changes can be equally stressful as unpleasant ones: challenges in health, loss of a job, a relationship that ends, or loss of a loved one.
With awareness, we can learn to respond to changes in life with greater equanimity. “Equanimity is the strength to stay open-hearted and stable through changing conditions.”* Equanimity first requires us to accept whole-heartedly the fact that everything in life has the nature of impermanence. Out of this deep acceptance we can than acknowledge changes without trying to hold onto or push away any of them. This is particularly helpful during distressful or disruptive times; at these times it might help to remember the age-old wisdom, This, too, shall pass.
It is not uncommon to be overwhelmed by the changes in life. At times you may feel that your reactions to these changes have control over you rather than you having influence over them. Fortunately, equanimity is something that can be cultivated. To begin to bring greater equanimity into your present experience you might try repeating simple phrases such as
“May I have peace amid the changes in my life, and may I have peace amid the changes in others lives.” *
Although we cannot direct the wind, we can adjust the sails.
* Reference: The Beginner’s Guide to Insight Meditation by, Arinna Weisman & Jean Smith, Bell Tower: New York, 2001.
Spring Cleaning
“Letting go is simply making a decision – no longer to allow something from the past to influence your life now or to reduce your inner sense of peace and well-being.”
— Sylvia Clare
We’ve officially transitioned into Spring, a season of renewal. With Spring often comes an urge to purge – to rid your environment (room, home or office) of clutter that has accumulated gradually over time, or even to remove the weeds that have settled into your garden or yard. Eliminating unessential “stuff” from your environment can be quite liberating, enabling you to lighten your load both physically and spiritually.
This purging process need not take place only externally. Internally, you likely have been accumulating clutter as well: old patterns that no longer serve you well, ruminations over past experiences, and attachments to people or things that are not adding value to your present life. It is hard enough sometimes to see the external clutter that surrounds you; as you become used to it, it becomes less visible to you. Yet, the internal clutter can be much harder to recognize.
Now is as good a time as any to reflect on what you have been carrying around with you, internally, day in and day out. Some of what you are carrying may have been with you much of your life. However, no matter how long it has been part of your life, once you begin to see this internal clutter more clearly, you have the option to release it – freeing yourself of this ongoing burden, and creating more space, potentially, for new patterns or responses that are more effective for you.
What can you let go of, right now, to lighten your load?
Sympathetic Joy
“In seeking happiness for others, you find it for yourself.”
— Anonymous
Sympathetic Joy can most simply be defined as taking delight in your own successes and the wish for greater success, as well as pleasure in the happiness of others as if it were yours. It is the understanding that someone else’s joy doesn’t threaten our happiness; it actually enhances our own happiness.
In the midst of the demands of our life, we can fall into two common traps that are symptomatic of our comparing mind. One trap is when we play our own success down: “It was nothing,” or “I didn’t try that hard.” In this way, we are not acknowledging or honoring our own success, respecting who and how we are. At some level we are sure that we are not good enough. The second trap that we can fall into is comparing ourselves to others in ways that produce envy and jealousy. You might notice a contraction that appears in your heart when someone talks about their successes. This is the opposite of sympathetic joy. We are separating ourselves when we assess ourselves in relation to someone else’s experience.
Cultivating the capacity for sympathetic joy enables us to connect to ourselves and others more deeply. In rejoicing in the good fortune of others we overcome resentment, envy, and jealousy and even find inspiration in the accomplishments of others. Ultimately, sympathetic joy keeps us intimately connected to others without being overwhelmed by the sight of the world’s suffering, including our own.
To practice sympathetic joy, you can repeat these simple statements to yourself:
May I enjoy my successes; may they grow and increase.
May others enjoy their successes; may they grow and increase.
Gratitude
“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow”
— Melody Beattie
What is gratitude? One way to define gratitude is “a feeling of thankfulness and appreciation.” More specifically, Webster’s Dictionary defines gratitude as a “warm and friendly feeling toward a benefactor.”
“O.K.,” I hear you saying, “but what does gratitude have to do with stress?” Well, our thoughts happen to be a major trigger of our natural stress response (fight or flight reaction). When left unchecked, our thoughts often contribute to stress as a result of our being preoccupied by suffering over the past (replaying, regretting, or stewing in anger) or over the future (worrying, planning, fantasizing). However, when your thoughts are, instead, directed towards the gratitude that you are experiencing in your life, they are more likely to be serving your well-being rather than contributing to ongoing physical and/or emotional wear and tear. Simply put, practicing gratitude can be a process that has a similar effect on your stress as affirmative thinking or reframing your thoughts. For this reason, bringing awareness explicitly each day to the gratitude that you have for people, things, and experiences in your life can have a stress-reducing effect and ultimately improve your peace-of-mind and well-being (both physically and emotionally).
Greg Krech, in his book entitled, Naikan: Gratitude, Grace, and the Japanese Art of Self-Reflection, suggests that “To live a life of gratitude is to open our eyes to the countless ways in which we are supported by the world around us. Such a life provides less space for our suffering because our attention is more balanced.”
Try out this simple practice of gratitude for yourself:
Each day write down, or share with another person, three things for which you are grateful.
“My advice to you is not to inquire why or with whither,
but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate.”
— Thornton Wilder
Let It Be: Letting go of resistance
“When I find myself in times of trouble
Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be
And in my hour of darkness
She is standing right in front of me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be”
– John Lennon
As human beings, we have a natural tendency to move away from suffering. We tend to close ourselves off to things we don’t like to feel or experience.
Our mind supports us by devising various strategies of avoidance and denial to push away those things we don’t want; resisting painful sensations and emotions; resisting difficult people and unpleasant situations. One way we avoid painful experiences is by ignoring them and pretending they don’t exist. A common variation of this means of avoidance is to remain frantically active so we are distracted from the distress we feel. Although this may work temporarily, eventually the pain may become too great to ignore. Another tactic we may take is to be willing to be with the pain, but only in order for it to go away. This is also a form of resistance, albeit a more subtle one.
How much of what we do in our lives is simply an effort to avoid feelings or experiences that we don’t want? Unfortunately, the unwillingness to be with and experience these feelings keeps us always reaching or grasping for something else. It is often difficult enough to be with the original pain, the discomfort that we are attempting to push away. Yet, ironically, through the dynamic of our resistance to the pain, we are actually adding optional suffering into our lives.
How much simpler it would be to just allow these painful feelings and experiences, letting them arise and pass away without struggle or resistance. Ultimately, our willingness to be with the original pain, without trying to deny it or push it away, enables us to let go of the optional suffering that we add to our lives when we resist our actual experience.
Reference source: Seeking the Heart of Wisdom, Joseph Goldstein & Jack Kornfield, 1987
Example
Original pain: Finding yourself stuck in bumper to bumper traffic when you feel time pressure to arrive somewhere. Some frustration or anxiety may arise.
Resistance (Optional suffering): Escalating the disappointment or anxiety into anger. Tensing your muscles in reaction to the frustration of not being able to change your circumstance. Ultimately, you might yourself developing a headache from the withheld tension, or transferring your anger onto others when you arrive at your destination.
Letting it be: Acknowledge your frustration at being caught in traffic. Recognize what you do and no not have influence over in the situation. Shift your attention to an abdominal breath to maintain physical balance. Combat any negative thoughts by giving yourself a reality check and reframing the distorted thoughts into more realistic ones.
“In the end, these things matter most:
How well did you love?
How well did you live?
How deeply did you learn to let go?”
— The Buddha
Goal Setting for Positive Change
“It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are,
without any self deception or illusion, that a light will develop out of events,
by which the path to success may be recognized.”
— I Ching
As we experience the end of 2003 and transition into the New Year, I encourage you to refrain from making New Year’s resolutions. Resolutions made at this arbitrary time of year are often based vastly on emotions and rarely include a realistic action plan that has been defined for your success.
Instead, I encourage the practice of setting goals for yourself. Goal setting is an ongoing skillful practice – all year round. Moreover, it is a practice that can help you experience successful change, if engaged in realistically and with awareness.
In setting goals for yourself, a concrete plan can keep you on course and increase your commitment. Start with a bite-sized, realistic goal, something that you will be able to accomplish in the next several weeks. If you have a large goal, break it down into smaller steps that will be less overwhelming and more reachable. Try putting together a plan that includes the following elements:
· Specific
Set a concrete goal that addresses behavior and results, not emotions.
· Measurable
You must be able to tell when you arrive, and to set milestones along the way.
· Agreed upon
Don’t be the Lone Ranger; ask others to help you and support you.
· Rewarding
Make your behavior change as much fun as possible. Decide how you will reward and acknowledge yourself; both for achieving your main goal and for passing the milestones along the way.
(Source: Stress Management, Beaverton, OR: Great Performances, Inc., 1987)
Example
Goal: I will develop a regular stress reduction practice over the next six weeks.
Measurable: I will begin by practicing mindful yoga or meditation 20 minutes, three days a week for the first two weeks, work up to practicing 20 minutes, four days a week for the second two weeks, and practice 20 minutes, five days a week by the end of the six weeks.
Agreed upon: I will share this plan with my sister and check in with her each week about my progress.
Reward: At each milestone, I will by myself some flowers for my office at work.
Minding Your Stress 