#193 Imperfection - Perfectly human

     At the beginning of each 8-week mindfulness workshop, participants share what brought them to mindfulness training. The essential common theme is that they've become painfully aware of the fact that their way of coping with life, and by inference, their worldview and self-concept, no longer work. They've come hoping to learn a wiser way of relating to themselves, to each other, and to life.
     A very common theme among health-care professionals, among all helping professions, is the attempt to escape from one's own problems by helping others. Such "wounded healers" are more or less effective to the degree that they've processed their own woundedness. In other words, bypassing personal healing via work (religion, drugs, or anything else) is dysfunctional and makes life in general, not to mention our already challenging professions, difficult to impossible.
         Yet having "battle scars" from a lifetime of living is NORMAL - PERFECTLY HUMAN.  A lot of us live with anxiety and or depression, as well as the full range of mental and physical illnesses - becoming healers / helpers didn't magically spare us after all. When we admit and honestly share our humanity, it gives others permission to recognize, accept, and perhaps even share their own imperfections. Isn't it strange that if someone stood up and declared themselves "perfect" we'd all laugh our heads off. YET at the same time, most of us fear revealing details of our own imperfection to colleagues - until at least one of our wheels fall off?
     We don't need to continue wasting all that energy pretending to be perfect. We're all wise enough to know that none of us is perfect, and that we are all changing, aging, getting sick and dying. We ALL carry heavy burdens - let's learn to help each other when we can, and - this may be most difficult for us - gracefully seek & accept help when we need it.

View from Wolfville, Nova Scotia

#192 Preconceptions get in the way

     It's natural to have ideas about what meditation and other mindfulness practices are about. However, Mindfulness practices are categorically different from our usual arena of competence: linear thinking, effortful pursuit and acquisition of goals. In other words, our ideas tend to be off the mark - a bit like a street-fighter's concepts about piano lessons.
     A common concept is that the harder and the longer you work, the greater the results and the faster you'll achieve them. Such strong emphasis on a particular goal or end result has negative effects on the process for achieving the goal, as well as on the doer. In Mindfulness practice, I am both doer AND result. The QUALITY or ATTITUDE that I embody during the practice is what matters, and is in fact the product.
     This quality is an inherent part of our human nature, but underdeveloped, unappreciated, and underutilized. Mindfulness practice is about intentionally training to recognize it, see how it effects our daily lives, and make it progressively more consistent.

#191 The Battle vs the War

     It's easy to become disheartened by difficulties and obstacles that incessantly block our path. We all fantasize (much more than we realize), especially when trying to achieve some worthy goal, that God, Mother Nature, or "The Force" should walk on ahead of us to sweep away all annoyances and petty hindrances!
     That line of "reasoning" is flawed in many dimensions. First and foremost, difficulties in life spare no one. You are not alone! And the kicker: one's intelligent, conscious interaction with difficulties is precisely what creates a mature evolved person. In fact, truly successful well-rounded people typically have had a surprisingly challenging life - see Kenneth R. Pelletier's remarkable 1994 book: "Sound Mind, Sound Body: A New Model for Lifelong Health." Simon & Schuster.  https://drpelletier.com/
     So sticking it out, be it in a marathon or a job, may be the polar opposite of martyrdom and self-abuse - it may well be exactly what you need to grow as a human being. Accepting the inevitability of loosing many battles along the way helps us win the war - and emerge as an evolved wise person.

#190 Grandmotherly wisdom

     There's nothing more rigidly inflexible than someone who believes that they are right, and of course that the other party is wrong.
     Compare this with a grandmother's loving attitude toward her grandson. Grandma is very flexible - goes with the flow of her grandchild's shifting moods and occasional misbehaviors. She accepts his human imperfections, and trusts deeply in his fledgling goodness and wisdom, and thus patiently nourishes both.
     We've all been "right" as well as "wrong"! How many times have we ourselves been flat-out wrong? How many times have we been absolutely sure we're right, only to later realize we were dead wrong? Our minds mercifully get fuzzy about such stats. We're all fallible, all carry heavy loads, all perfectly human.
     We all need to receive patient, encouriging grandmotherly love - throughout life - AND - all need to provide the same to everyone, of all ages. It's the only way to cultivate a world where we and our loved ones would want to live - a world that feels like home.

Photo: Denisonlab   www.dpreview.com

#189 Choices every moment

     What we choose to do, each moment, is our best shot at survival, avoidance of suffering, and grabbing a bit of happiness. The choice is not necessarily wise ie well-reasoned with respect to our own and everyone else's long-term best interests, but it's the best we can come up with at the time.
     Mindfulness meditation helps make these moment-by-moment choices increasingly more conscious and wiser. By seeing things more clearly, we naturally act more appropriately. This is an ongoing process - approximating ever more closely the ideal of decreasing suffering and doing the least harm in the process.

Gaspereau Vineyards, Nova Scotia, September 2012

#188 Grandmotherly love - like oxygen

     Grandparents relate to grandchildren very differently than parents to children. Grandparents have had a lifetime of making mistakes to benefit from, including mistakes in raising their own children. Grandparents now have an opportunity to make up for some of those mistakes, and have more time to "do it right". So grandparents tend to be more attentive, patient, forgiving, and playful. They see the inconsequential nature of sporadic misbehaviors and focus their energies on lovingly cultivating, like a good gardener, the infinite potential for goodness and wisdom in the little child. They "see" deeply into the child and take the long view.
     All of us need nurturing "grandmotherly love" throughout our lives. So we all must learn to provide nurturing to each other AND to ourselves!

Theodore tugboat in Halifax harbor, Nova Scotia

#187 Psychological flexibility = Mature EVOLVING Human Being?

     "Psychological flexibility (is) the ability to act effectively in accordance with personal values and goals in the presence of potentially interfering thoughts and feelings."
       McCracken LM, Gutierrez-Martinez O. Processes of change in psychological flexibility in an interdisciplinary group-based treatment for chronic pain based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Behav Res Ther 2011; 49(4): 267-74.

     Don't we expect any mature civilized human being to behave according to core human values and responsible long-term goals (for self & society), regardless of his/her past or present, internal or external circumstances?

     Psychological flexibility is the combination of 1) acceptance, 2) cognitive defusion, 3) present moment awareness, 4) self as context, 5) values, and 6) committed action.
          Thompson M, McCracken LM. Acceptance and Related Processes in Adjustment to Chronic Pain. Curr Pain Headache Rep 2011; 15: 144–151. 

     Each one of these is cultivated through mindfulness practices.

Fig 1. from Thompson & McCracken 2011

#186 Accepting the many things we can't control

     "The spirit of the term acceptance can be misunderstood both generally and in relation to chronic pain. There is a risk that clinicians may oversimplify what is meant by acceptance, reducing it to whether a patient has come to terms with the possibility that pain may not go away. Rather than seeing acceptance as a one-off agreement or disagreement with a medical opinion, it can be more useful to think of it in terms of a patient’s willingness to continue to actively experience pain along with related thoughts and feelings. In this paper, acceptance is conceptualized as a moment-to-moment process, a continuing quality of action that allows individuals to move toward their goals or act on their values while contacting pain, difficult thoughts, feelings, and memories, and doing so without defense."
          Thompson M, McCracken LM. Acceptance and Related Processes in Adjustment to Chronic Pain. Curr Pain Headache Rep 2011; 15: 144–151.

#185 We underestimate our innate capacities

     “The challenge is, can we live more consciously? In a sense, mindfulness and mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) are really about the art of conscious living. … Our work in MBSR is based on the conviction that … we have infinitely more capacity and dimensions – and I emphasize the plural – that we usually simply ignore. Even the educational system emphasizes only certain aspects of development, such as critical thinking, but it doesn’t emphasize somatic experience or intuitive experience or the cultivation of compassion or, for that matter, self-compassion or empathy and all sorts of other aspects of being human – including perhaps the most fundamental of all – awareness itself, which is an innate capacity we share by virtue of being human.”               Jon Kabat-Zinn

         Gazella K. Bringing mindfulness to medicine: An interview with Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD. Adv Mind Body Med 2005; 21(2): 22-7.

#184 Agency - direct and indirect methods

     Why are movies full of shooting and explosions so immensely popular? A small part in all of us - admit it! - dreams of definitively eliminating our difficulties - to "nuke them back into the stone-age!" Of course, difficulties are difficulties for the very reason that they're not so simple to get rid of.
     Human beings are very attached to approaches to solving problems - particularly simple(-minded) direct approaches. Warfare is a great example. How long have we been massacring each other? How many wars are going on right now? "And how's that working for you?" we should ask the combatants - or not. I once suggested to a friend, while we were having dinner, that warfare in the middle East was not helpful. She became so upset at that suggestion that she had to leave!
      "Grandmotherly love" is a wonderful influence on a toddler, and is equally effective at any age. This is nurturing - an indirect approach - akin to supplying all the vital ingredients for a seed in the soil to grow into a healthy flower. Nurturing takes time, patience, love and above all, wisdom. It works wonderfully.
     Can we intentionally let go of (most of) our much-loved impatient ineffective direct approaches, and cultivate our inherent wisdom?

#183 Motivation to practice mindfulness

     Most folks get into mindfulness in order to manage - get away from - stress. Another motivator is to get away from themselves, their situation, and "go to a happy place".
     But the more we desire, the more fixated we are about, and the more quickly we want to reach a specific goal, the less likely we are to succeed! This applies to any method, not just mindfulness. Why? Because the state of being rigidly goal-oriented is fundamentally incompatible with the method used to achieve it. To achieve most goals, one needs to be curios, open and fully engage with a new process, (at least temporarily) ignoring the goal.
     A gardener provides all of the conditions - good soil, water, sunshine, fertilizer, seeds - knowing that the plants will grow just fine - a natural result. So too in mindfulness practice, we learn to loosen our death-grip on what we want, and instead, learn to relax, and simply engage in the practice, letting benefits arise on their own.

#182 A shift in consciousness

     Daily we do, say and think things that we regret instantly or up to decades later. As our mindfulness practice matures, we notice our errors of judgment sooner and sooner. Also, the manner in which we notice them becomes less harshly judgmental. It starts to feel less like a body blow, more like observing a common unavoidable event.
     The shift from erring on autopilot to noticing the error from our innate, but underdeveloped, mature, evolved, Homo sapiens sapiens perspective, becomes progressively more subtle and effortless.
     We learn to feel the difference between being on reptilian autopilot and mature human - like the difference between driving while drowsy and driving while relaxed yet fully alert.
     On autopilot, errors are indeed common and unavoidable. The more sustained our mindfulness, the less likely the errors. Mindfulness gradually becomes our new operating system as we drive down the highway of life.

Photo: fulviavecchia   www.dpreview.com

#181 Healthy Psychosocial Maturation, Evolution of Consciousness - Why We Practice Mindfulness

     The purpose of mindfulness practice is to grow in wisdom. It's an intentional journey of learning and understanding. Mindfulness practice provides ideal conditions for our consciousness to mature, evolve:

• from stuck in the past & future toward dynamic presence 
• from self-centered reactivity toward altruistic response to others’ needs 
• from “I can’t handle this” toward increasing abilities to manage complexity, ambiguity & difficulty (ie real life) with competence & composure
• from rigidity & cynicism toward psychological flexibility, acceptance, humor & joy 

Lake Winnipeg, Gimli, Manitoba

#180 Courage to open

     “Despite how risky love is, how easily we are hurt, none of us can run from risking the dangerous shoals of love, compassion, and openness to others [and to ourselves], lest we live a sterile, unrelated life, locked within the constricted frames of our history and our comfort zones. The paradox of relationship will always be that rather than solve our problems for us, relationship brings us new problems, new complexities, but that we also grow immensely from these problems, these complexities. In short, the greatest gift of relationship proves to be that as the result of encountering each other, we are obliged to grow larger than we had planned.”

        Hollis J. What matters most. Living a more considered life. Gotham Books, NY, 2009.

"Stone Pears" 2003 by Artist: Nancy Camden Witt http://www.crossmillgallery.com/nancy.html

#179 Mind - Identity or Instrument?

     The default assumption for many is that the content of the mind ie self-talk and other habits of mind IS one's identity - who they fundamentally are. Yet we get sick and tired of both our own mental chatter as well as our habitual ways of thinking about things and seeing the world. Hence, "a change is as good as a rest"; how we enjoy traveling to another country, where we tend to see things from a different perspective. We keep outgrowing our own worldviews (unless we freeze in our tracks due to fear, laziness, lack of imagination or psychopathology).
     A healthy human adult is able to observe her own self-talk and thought patterns with some degree of objectivity and recognize if it still serves her long-term interests or not. If not, she can let go of the current worldview, and construct a new, more satisfactory one.
     Looking at oneself like this is referred to as introspection. Upgrading one's worldview is at least as critical to an individual as upgrading an operating system is to a computer.

Gimli, Lake Winnipeg, Manitoba

 

#178 Why should I meditate?

     Why should one take the time to sit down and "do nothing", when one could be doing countless other things that may be fun, necessary to do, or just a meaningless diversion?
     It's people who in some way realize that their life could be better, deeper, richer, more rewarding, that make the effort to experience a qualitative shift - who go beyond the status quo. But there's a strong tendency to remain stuck, even when life is far from ideal.
     Deep down, most humans are restless for a better life. Meditation is the time-tested means of nurturing and personally experiencing the evolution of one's own consciousness. It's safe, gentle, and works.
     No dogma, no leaving your intellect at the door when you enter. Meditation is training to come out of our common trance-like day-by-day existence - to wake up and live fully alive!

Hay bales, Manitoba, Canada