#760 From Black-and-White Thinking towards Intimacy

     We all experience "ups & downs," "good times & bad," etc. In fact, our contact with life's "opposites", and our "approach-avoidance" reaction to them, started in utero!

     “From the very beginning of our lives, even from before we are born, we organize ourselves in response to our environment. We pull away, with our body and our consciousness, from whatever is painful or overwhelming, and we constrict those parts of ourselves that are experiencing pain. Our pulling away from abrasive stimuli is not just a mental process. It is an actual constricting against the sensation of pain.
     … trauma (is) any event that is too intense, too painful – emotionally or physically – or too confusing to be fully received.

     (This) is simply the ordinary human condition. We all grow up to some extent limited in our human capacities, such as our ability to love, to speak freely, or to think clearly, by (trauma-induced) holding patterns … Although we may be aware of feelings of tension in our body, most people are not aware of the limitations in their ability to receive and respond to life, unless these limitations become severe. Most of us accept our limitations as being ‘just who we are.’ ” Judith Blackstone

     We approach pleasurable opportunities to promote well-being & survival. Conversely, we avoid or withdraw from painful experiences as protection from harm. This biological approach-avoid dichotomy underlies all motivational tendencies, forms the basis of emotion, & promotes adaptation.
     We're biologically & culturally programmed to seek pleasure & avoid discomfort. But life includes pleasure, pain, as well as uncomfortable periods of growth that take place beyond our comfort zone - in liminality - a state of in-between-ness, ambiguity confusion & even boredom.
        Lovas J, Gold E, Neish N, Whitehorn D, Holexa D. "Cultivating Engagement through Mindfulness Practice." Poster Presentation, American Dental Education Association annual meeting, March 19, 2012, Orlando, FL. 

     Our struggle to avoid pain & liminality, and cling to happiness is the basic obstacle to joyful, full engagement with life.
     Particularly in our youth, we might assume that "really living" is a wild roller coaster ride. During periods of calm & peace, we may actually become anxiously "bored." With age, however, we tend to prefer peace over emotional extremes.

     Mindfulness practice cultivates wise acceptance of, & the ability to work equanimously within the entire range of what life brings us - embracing all the apparent opposites, even all apparent paradoxes. 
     Our minds cannot comprehend this - a serious, often permanent road-block for many. HOWEVER, for the few who are sufficiently interested, patient meditation practice allows us to experience the fact that literally "everything is workable," moving us well past mere acceptance, towards intimacy with ALL of life.

#752 Returning to Being

     I strongly suspect that the vast majority of us constantly feel “driven” to do something, to be someone else, to be somewhere else, etc. If we have 5 seconds of "down time" don't we immediately fill it up with distraction, no matter how meaningless: check social media, text someone, have a coffee ± snack, smoke a cigarette, pop a pill, etc? And those who are severely traumatized, marginalized, and perhaps suffering from other psychological handicaps may even act out with irrational violence. We're rarely at ease, rarely OK with who we are, where we are, just being (instead of furiously doing).

     As we age, our ability to maintain this pace of trying to escape just this, right here & now, progressively diminishes. And guess what? Our world, as they say, gets smaller & smaller. We’re forced to contemplate, spend quality time with who we are & just this, right here & now - something we've desperately tried to avoid since we were kids. No wonder meditation isn't for everyone - we do our utmost to avoid being peacefully aware of reality. Of course, putting it that way, suggests that many of us could benefit from psychotherapy, and at the very least mindfulness training. Wisdom is a rare & precious commodity.
     More about this: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2018/04/may-you-live-with-ease.html

     Can you imagine being perfectly comfortable, equanimous, and deeply at peace with having: nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one else to be? This is stripping ourselves of all our conditioning, all that's extra, all that's not really who we are. Aging, as well as suddenly finding out that one has a very short time to live ("post-traumatic growth") tend to speed up this evolution of consciousness or maturation process, where we drop all our habitual bullshit and focus on loving well & living meaningfully.

     “Happiness is not found in things you possess, but in what you have the courage to release.” Nathaniel Hawthorne

 

Christi Belcourt "Revolution of Love" christibelcourt.com

#737 Prolific Conceptualisation

     Most of us are well aware of our tendency to "go off on a tangent", while thinking, speaking, or looking something up on the internet. We start off on one specific topic, and before we know it, quite unintentionally, we're way, way off on a totally unrelated topic and may not even remember what we started with. Especially problematic forms of "thought proliferation" play central roles in depression (wallowing) and anxiety (catastrophization). But since we all seem to do "normal" thought proliferation, we mistakenly assume that it's harmless. 

     Buddhist psychology considers our tendency to spin off into the past, future, or sideways - away from present-moment reality - a central cause of suffering.
     "The vicious proliferating tendency of the worldling's consciousness weaves for him a labyrinthine network of concepts connecting the three periods of time through processes of recognition, retrospection and speculation. The tangled maze with its apparent objectivity entices the worldling and ultimately obsesses and overwhelms him."
     Bhikkhu Kantukurunde Nanananda. "Concept and Reality in Early Buddhist Thought. An Essay on Papanca and Papanca-Sanna-Sankha." Buddhist Publication Society, 1971. www.seeingthroughthenet.net

     In meditation practice we clearly see when we're overthinking things, we let thoughts go, and remain continuously grounded in reality, directly experiencing (without words & concepts interposed) moment-by-moment, the ever-changing present moment.

Some activities hold our complete attention!

#725 Observing & Accepting the Conditioned Mind-Body

     At university, while studying for exams, I sometimes felt an incredible urgency to rearrange the furniture in my residence room. Obviously it was an attempt to escape pre-exam anxiety. The urgency was proportional to my anxiety, so the more inappropriate the time reallocation, the more likely I was to carry out the furniture rearrangement!

     Our attempts to avoid truly meaningful priorities in life is mirrored by the degree of our distractedness during formal meditation practice. Can we notice this with equanimity? As we do become aware of this pattern, we're gaining insight into our conditioned mind-body doing it’s conditioned thing.
     Of course we still can train the our monkey mind to cause ourselves & others a LOT less suffering than it does now - to serve us instead of work against us:
http://jglovas.wix.com/awarenessnow#!Worthy-of-Our-Precious-Time-Energy/c17jj/57797ba20cf231c9c3fabfc4

Mahone Bay, NS, Canada

#720 Quality of Life = Quality of Consciousness

     Many of us have a strong, recurrent tendency to waste a lot of time, energy & heartache on external events that have already passed, or are unlikely to happen in the future. In no way is this useful or practical such as seriously deciding to change our behavior, or drawing up a real action plan. 
     By obsessing over the contents of consciousness like this, we inflict tremendous unnecessary suffering on ourselves.

      “We are all prisoners of our minds.
     This realization is the first step on the journey to freedom.”         Ram Das

     “When water is still it is like a mirror ….
      And if water thus derives lucidity from stillness,
      How much more the faculties of mind?
      The mind of the sage being in repose
      Becomes the mirror of the universe.”                    Chuang Tzu

     We're free to effortlessly shift from attending to the contents of (our noisy egoic) consciousness to directly experience the depth of stillness & silence within - the vast field of consciousness itself.
     Contents can be compared to clouds, while (transpersonal post-symbolic) consciousness is the sky in which clouds occasionally float by.

    See: http://jglovas.wix.com/awarenessnow#!Two-Levels-of-Consciousness/c17jj/56f14e0c0cf266a292561f27

#682 How Meaningful?

     As we get older, it seems we try to squeeze more & more things from our "bucket list" into a shorter & shorter space of time - like several "trips of a lifetime" each year, year-after-year! We become desperate to keep busy - clearly needing to remain permanently distracted.
     Is this really the best use of the limited time we have left to live?

     What about QUALITY (vs quantity)? What about MEANING (vs distraction)? Shouldn't we inquire deeply "who am I?" "What is this?" "How can I embrace life most authentically?"

     Isn't quantity & busyness inversely related to quality? Shouldn't we carefully choose what we do, prioritizing only those things that have the most meaning for us at this time of life? Isn't it time to quit trying to escape, but to engage life with an open heart-mind?

Monet's garden, Giverny

#650 Effective Management for Existential Distress ??

     A life of generosity, ethical living & ideally, a longstanding deep meditation practice, seems to be one of the ideal ways to access & embody profoundly meaningful, transformative insight & evolve or mature spiritually. Such maturity generally includes facing death with calm composure (equanimity).

     However, for many in our secular society, who spend their lives focused mostly on material concerns, the possibility remains open for having profound transformative spiritual experiences, even at the end of life, via medically-supervised psychedelic drugs, in palliative care settings.

     "under the influence of the (psilocybin), 'individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states . . . and return with a new perspective and profound acceptance.'
     ... cancer patients receiving just a single dose of psilocybin experienced immediate and dramatic reductions in anxiety and depression, improvements that were sustained for at least six months.
     Researchers are using or planning to use psilocybin not only to treat anxiety, addiction (to smoking and alcohol), and depression but also to study the neurobiology of mystical experience, which the drug, at high doses, can reliably occasion.
     “People don’t realize how few tools we have in psychiatry to address existential distress. Xanax isn’t the answer. So how can we not explore this, if it can recalibrate how we die?”
     “When administered under supportive conditions,” the paper concluded, “psilocybin occasioned experiences similar to spontaneously occurring mystical experiences.” Participants ranked these experiences as among the most meaningful in their lives, comparable to the birth of a child or the death of a parent. Two-thirds of the participants rated the psilocybin session among the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives; a third ranked it at the top. Fourteen months later, these ratings had slipped only slightly.
     Furthermore, the “completeness” of the mystical experience closely tracked the improvements reported in personal well-being, life satisfaction, and “positive behavior change” measured two months and then fourteen months after the session.
     A follow-up study ... found that the psilocybin experience also had a positive and lasting effect on the personality of most participants. This is a striking result, since the conventional wisdom in psychology holds that personality is usually fixed by age thirty and thereafter is unlikely to substantially change. But more than a year after their psilocybin sessions volunteers who had had the most complete mystical experiences showed significant increases in their “openness,” one of the five domains that psychologists look at in assessing personality traits. (The others are conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.) Openness, which encompasses aesthetic appreciation, imagination, and tolerance of others’ viewpoints, is a good predictor of creativity.
     “I don’t want to use the word ‘mind-blowing,’ ” Griffiths told me, “but, as a scientific phenomenon, if you can create conditions in which seventy per cent of people will say they have had one of the five most meaningful experiences of their lives? To a scientist, that’s just incredible.”
     ... William James ... suggested that we judge the mystical experience not by its veracity, which is unknowable, but by its fruits: does it turn someone’s life in a positive direction?"
       Michael Pollan "The Trip Treatment." Annals of Medicine, The New Yorker Magazine, Feb 9, 2015
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/trip-treatment 

     Listen to Mary Hines' March 12, 2015 interview: "Psychologist Anthony Bossis: Can psychedelic drugs help ease the fear of death?"  http://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry

Lilly J Warren   www.dpreview.com

 

#643 Choosing our Energy

     This morning I was trying to deal with the glare ice that completely covers our driveway. While chipping away at the rock-hard ice, and doing my best to stay on my feet, I became aware of how incredibly close two vastly different, competing energies resided within me.
     Adversarial reactivity, the default energy, quickly, spontaneously arose - me against the ice; anger-based - get rid of this bloody nuisance, immediately! Our reptilian ancestry remains alive and fully functional in all of us - egocentric, impatient.
     But a few seconds later, a "choice gap" opened, and I realized that I'm here to do something kind for my wife, visitors and myself - making the driveway safer, hopefully to avoid injuries. The adversarial reaction immediately morphed into kind intention; time-poverty into timelessness; tightness into openness; coldness into warmth; smallness into spaciousness; fear, anxiety & anger into stillness, peace & love.
     We can waste an incredible amount of time & energy by angrily hacking away at all the challenges (& challengers!) that arise over a lifetime. Many of us are conditioned to routinely take an adversarial approach to life's difficulties. This is fear-based, ineffective, antagonizing, and very hard on everyone, including ourself. 
     
     With mindfulness training, we learn to quickly recognize & drop this default, bull-in-a-China-shop approach, and immediately a better choice presents. With training, we can choose to embody & enjoy awareness, kindness, timelessness, stillness, peace and joy, under any circumstance, no matter how challenging.

     More Nuanced Energy Choices: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2015/02/real-time-monitoring-of-our-own-energy.html

Ami Vitale, National Geographic   http://photography.nationalgeographic.com

#607 Riding Liminality & Loving Life

     How do I relate to my breath? When we start mindfulness practice, focusing on the feel of our own breath can evoke anxiety, rather than the hoped for sense of peace. Gradually, we learn to "surf" or "ride the breath" - a kind of balancing act on top of a constantly moving, flowing, ball of breathing energy.
     Likewise, how do I relate to all other manifestations of constant change - directly to liminality itself? Every fraction of second we're in the now - straddling the past and future. We're not quite sure what just happened, and we sure don't know what's about to happen! Can we learn to surf liminality? Can we learn to ride uncertainty's raw energy? It's the only way to transcend constant anxiety!
     Such a direct, intentional, curious, nonjudgmental, playful engagement with / surfing on / flowing with the energy of liminality itself seems to be the ultimate basis for dismantling anxiety. 
     Anxiety is ineffective striving to avoid challenges - fearful avoidance.
     Mindfulness is brave, competent "leaning into" life-as-it is, difficulties & all - lovingly embracing life. I'm not aware of a better alternative.

Bess - Dec 19, 2014

#602 Stillness & Momentum; Spaciousness & Anxiety

     We feel relatively secure when we feel in motion - literally or figuratively. The momentum of heading towards a goal  promises that we'll feel OK, especially when we get there! 
     On the other hand, stillness these days suggests the opposite. How does it feel being alone, with nothing to do, nowhere to go? Bored? Maybe, but below this very likely lurks anxiety. And what's the anxiety about? What is this "anxious quiver of being"?
     We're so deeply conditioned to chase after friends, position, security, mates, prestige, toys, money etc that we completely neglect to consider what's meaningful in our lives. Our momentum of chasing after stuff is so constant, we fail to realize that all this chasing after, is at the same time a desperate attempt to run away from - from what?

     Can we learn to deeply examine and engage the spacious stillness, silence, ... at the core of our being?

     Can we learn to hold our small "anxious quiver of being" within this expansive spacious intelligence?

snooked   www.dpreview.com

#577 Awareness or "Ordinary Mind" - Choosing Wisely

     Mindfulness training reduces stress by letting us function at a higher level of consciousness.
     Our "ordinary mind", is very useful when assigned certain specific tasks eg solve a math problem. But let loose, it tends to grind out an awful lot of unhelpful, to agonizingly disruptive material (wallowing, catastrophizing, daydreaming, anxiety, confusion).
     Awareness, on the other hand, is marked by clarity, silence, stillness, peace, timelessness, kindness, and joy. Note the absence of struggle, stress and suffering. This level of consciousness is our birthright as human beings - homo sapiens sapiens. Over thousands of years, we've been gradually evolving to inhabit this level of consciousness with increasing stability. Mindfulness practices are designed to help us get there in THIS lifetime.
     We're so conditioned to identifying with (instead of simply using) "ordinary mind", that it's our default mode of consciousness AND way of being. Stressed out, struggling, inefficient is how we see ourselves! Even while taking an 8-week Mindfulness course, some participants drop out when their academic / work stresses rise! These folks trust ordinary mind when what they need is the more efficient, more effective, stress-free, higher level of consciousness. This, like other aspects of our conditioning, needs to be deeply examined and questioned. See: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2014/10/576-practicality-of-prioritizing-quality.html

     Very closely related to trusting the old grit your teeth & grunt approach to work over a more mindful approach, is ignoring self-care and trusting that putting everything directly into one's work is the answer (to what ?). See: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2014/10/quality-of-life-for-one-for-all.html

     A funny, yet very serious aspect of "trust" to examine deeply, in one's own life: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2014/02/492-mindfulness-practice-real-world.html

IraE   www.dpreview.com

#571 Learning What 'Just This' Holds

     Sitting in meditation, thought proliferation may arise: "When is this going to be over? I have a lot to do. I'm getting fidgety. Let's get the show on the road! etc etc etc"

     "When we want something to be over, we lose compassion for ourselves, now."                      John Tarrant

     Can we fully accept self-talk, and set it aside for now? Can we learn to settle for "just this"? 

     Suppose we have a silent, peaceful dimension - without self-talk or other noise, without any time-related issues.
     Just for the duration of this sitting, can we - without any agenda - simply rest in silence, stillness, peace?

#566 Mindfulness Meditation - Expectations & Realities

     Most of us are drawn to meditation practice because we realize that we're anxious, stressed out, depressed. We want all that mess to go away so we can be happy. We hope to use this technique like a scalpel to excise the irritants from our lives.
     But, meditation practice does not work like that. In fact, we'll actually see reality with increasing clarity. Like anything else in life, when we lack the skills to deal with a situation eg skiing down a black diamond slope, we're scared & very reasonably, highly resistant. However, with expert instruction & practice, we gradually look forward to & actually enjoy black diamond runs. 
     Likewise, quality meditation instruction & life-long practice helps us develop skills to negotiate all the slopes of life, from bunny hills to back-country trails, with awareness, kindness & joy.

     More about Challenges & Misconceptions: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/search?q=misconceptions
     and "Meditation is Powerful": http://www.johnlovas.com/2014/02/meditation-is-powerful.html

Early morning mist

#529 Keep On Waking Up

     During meditation we're trying to notice, as early as possible, each time we slip away into one of our basic story lines or daydreams. 
     Why do we compulsively keep escaping from the here & now? It's very important to carefully notice how we feel immediately before the urge to escape arises. 
          • How does it feel immediately before we run to the fridge (when not hungry)?  
          • How does it feel immediately before we check our smart phone (though there's nothing important going on)?
          • How does it feel immediately before we jump up to go somewhere (though there's nowhere in particular we need to go)?

     Does compulsive avoidance work - get us where we need to be? And if not, is it time to let it go?


       Compulsivity is a tendency to repeat the same, often purposeless acts, which are sometimes associated with undesirable consequences. http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/impulse-control-disorders/understanding-differences-between-impulsivity-and-compulsivity

#527 What Can We Do About Toxic Environments?

     We instinctively pull away from unpleasant, difficult situations, people, activities, and are attracted to pleasant, comfortable situations, people, activities. It's the well-known approach-avoid dichotomy see: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2012/03/65-embracing-full-catastrophe.html
     One very unfortunate consequence of this tendency is that when things start going awry in one's surroundings eg a colleague's behavior becomes disruptive, we're apt to avoid dealing with it in a timely, direct manner. We find it unpleasant, we may fear negative consequences from speaking to the person, we may feel incompetent intervening, we may not want to hurt the colleague's feelings, etc. Many of us have minimal training or skills in the behavioral sciences.
     Without constructive intervention, problems tend to persist or escalate. We'll often continue to avoid addressing the offender, because now it's really out of hand - way too much for us to handle. Now we may be grumbling incessantly about the problem with other colleagues, behind the offender's back, and even behind the backs of management, who could & should address the problem. Soon we're also grumbling about management for allowing the problem to get out of hand! THIS is the perfect recipe for poisoning one's environment. This is how a collegial, collaborative, family-like atmosphere can easily be turned toxic - not by the one troubled colleague - but by all the bystanders - the "nattering nabobs of negativism."

     So what is an appropriate, intelligent response (instead of avoidance) to such problems?  
     1) awareness & acceptance of problems
     2) approach & investigate them with curiosity 
     3) learn & apply skills to solve them early
     4) institute proactive preventive measures

     We can learn to become competent in any arena.  Competence transforms unpleasant difficulties that we may once have avoided, into manageable, even interesting challenges. We can become truly proactive by initiating a cultural shift in which training & competence in the psychosocial realm becomes a valued, integral part of our educational system. 
     See: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2013/04/fear-avoidance-ineffective-existential.html
     and: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2013/01/270-interpersonal-conflicts-inevitable.html

Peet J van Eeden, National Geographic   http://photography.nationalgeographic.com

#526 Monitoring My State of Being - Moment-by-Moment

     Awareness of what's going on around us & what's going on inside of us are important components, but nowhere near all of mindfulness. Another vital level of awareness is monitoring our state of being or, in computer jargon, our operating system.
     We've all experienced this unique combination kind / loving, open-hearted, peaceful, silent, still, timeless, hypoegoic / egoless: being with a person or animal we love, performing highly meaningful activity, being in a special place, listening to special music etc.
     We've all also experienced being "stressed-out": fear / anger / anxiety / depression, armored, noise, feeling rattled / shaken, time-poverty, egocentric. If we examine our lives very carefully, the vast majority of our time is spent - to some degree - in this mode.
     Whether we're in the rare open-hearted mode - or - the almost continuous armored mode, we tend to blame external factors entirely. Aside from trying to make the external environment more comfortable & pleasing, we assume we have no control over our quality of life.

     Mindfulness training allows us see clearly & experience directly how WE are ENTIRELY RESPONSIBLE for our own state of being - in which operating system WE CHOOSE to live ie we choose our quality of life independent of external factors.
     You CAN open your mind-heart up to an infinitely greater quality of life.

Puppy Love from: smchealth.org       &       Stressed-Out from: knowmybody.com

#519 The Feeling of "I'm No Good at Meditating!"

     Are you with a group that's sitting in meditation for 30-40 minutes, but you don't actually feel like you belong because you're just looking around feeling frustrated? Is self-talk flooding the circuits?: "I'm just no good at this"; "Get me out of here"; "When is this going to be over"; "I've got a million things to do"?
     That too is OK! The facilitator(s) can "hold" that too. Unconditional love & acceptance is hopefully being modeled by both the facilitator(s) and your fellow participants. This holding, this space of acceptance is key to nurturing transformation from suffering to wholeness and beyond. 
     Their example helps you yourself to accept & hold the part of you that feels frustrated plus a mixed bag of other challenging emotions. Your inner wisdom is capable of unconditional love for your own fearful inner child (& everyone else's). A part of you resides in peace, stillness, silence, wisdom, timelessness. Practice lowering your center of gravity from the self-talk jungle of the head, down past the jangled turmoil of the chest, down to the belt level (2 inches below the navel) - the hara or dan tien. See: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2013/05/326-classical-japanese-centeredness.html
     How can you modify mindfulness practice to suit your current situation? It's possible that, at this point in time, you most benefit sitting in meditation for a much shorter time period - maybe 5 minutes. 
     You are your own trainer, therapist, sports psychologist - guide your practice wisely, for best long-term results. Never, ever, ever give up on your #1 client! You can & will do infinitely better than you can currently possibly imagine - just keep practicing wisely, ideally with some guidance from those who've been practicing for a long time.

Cary Maures   www.dpreview.com

#510 Embracing or Enabling?

     We get many clues about which operating system (OS) is operating in us at any given time.
     The fearful / hurt child operating system is emotionally labile, up & down according to security & pleasure (or vice versa) for the self-centered child. In this OS, we're constantly chasing after, or running from something, assuming our (inner child's) happiness hinges entirely on the success or failure of our frantic striving. Not enough time or crushing boredom; anxiety about lacking or emptiness pervade.
     The wise adult / grandparent operating system is equanimous, open-hearted, generous, and equally concerned about the welfare of others (allocentric), own inner child (self-compassion), & the environment (ecocentric). A profound sense of ease, connection, completeness, gratitude, stillness, and timelessness pervades.
     It's a very common mistake to compulsively attempt to satisfy our inner fearful child's appetites, but most of this is dysfunctional enabling. The more we're preoccupied by these appetites or our desire to satisfy them, the more power we give the immature inner child over our adult lives. It's very much like fantasizing about, & repeatedly obtaining alcohol when one's an alcoholic. Yes the wanting is there, BUT there's a vast universe at hand that is happily independent of ethanol & our addictive craving. To the degree that we can open our mind-heart to this vast reality, and can hold our hurt inner child in safety & unconditional love, the power & relevance of the craving fades.
     Consciously recognizing the fearful child effects, embracing without pandering to the inner child, and instead, opening up to the present moment, opening our mind-heart to what's appropriate right now, we steadily become more & more stabilized in our mature wise way of being. 

Jonathan Shapiro   www.dpreview.com

#493 How We Prioritize - Why We Fail to "Pick our Battles"

     How do we know when we have to drop everything, & immediately redirect all our resources to a new specific issue? A classic example: we suddenly feel searing pain (anywhere in the body-mind) - all our alarm bells go off at once - a massive call for action & we're instantly in full fight-freeze-flight mode. We're running on emotions, everything else - including ability to make mature judgments - shuts down. This is the default mode for most people in life-or-death emergencies - instinctively prioritized reaction to the threat to our survival.
     Unfortunately, few of us appropriately distinguish acute life-or-death emergencies from minor threats: to our ego, comfort & convenience. Because of this common conflation, stress, anxiety & depression are epidemic & becoming increasingly incapacitating.
     So the problem is that our firefighters routinely break down the doors & windows, whisking us off to the ER, even though most of the time, there's no fire - just kitty stuck in the tree. This biological version of "the boy who cried wolf" is very hard on everyone concerned - internal friction: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2013/10/423-what-is-this.html and http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=fight

Dianne Silverman   The Boy Who Cried Wolf   www.mnartists.org