#518 Meeting Fear Effectively

     "By inviting fear into the relaxed, openness of your heart, by reaching out to your fear when you feel calm and grounded, you can begin to develop a connection between these two areas in yourself. Later when you become afraid, a connection already will have been established to help you call upon your calm, grounded being. When you feel connected to your inner wholeness, you can offer that as an ally to the place in yourself that experiences the pain and helplessness of being afraid. Shunryu Suzuki said, 'The only way you can endure your pain is to let it be painful' and maybe the same is true of fear. The way to endure our fears is to just be with them. Being present without trying to change our experience is how to tame and transform our pain."
 
        Phelan JP. Practicing with Fear. Mindfulness - published online 06 September 2012.

wgjohnston   www.dpreview.com

#454 Divided Life - or - One Continuous Mindfulness Practice?

     For some of us, dressing up, going to school or work, behaving professionally and doing our tasks, all feel phoney. It all feels like "acting" to earn money so we can put food on the table, and be able to do the things we really enjoy doing & be ourselves. The sense of having to work, having to expend (minimal) effort, producing products & services that (barely) meet standards under tight supervision, are the natural result of living a divided life. This breeds an us-against-them, adversarial attitude between students & teachers, between staff & management. There's no engagement, no personal investment or initiative - the "real me" wants to be elsewhere. This is presenteeism - the land of the walking dead. A huge desire, & unrealistic expectations arise for any opportunity to escape drudgery: weekends, holidays, and the holy grail - retirement. Such students & workers complain because they're truly unhappy, & externalize their unhappiness, believing that the cause lies outside of themselves. Their teachers & bosses usually don't understand the underlying psychology, but do look forward to replacing them with far more collaborative, vital, engaged people.
      Of course it's perfectly normal to sometimes have "a part" of us want to stay home from work - go skiing or read a good book. However, it's also perfectly normal & healthy for another "part" of us to want to go to work and fully, authentically engage in our profession. All play & no work also makes Jack a dull boy! Judging either work or play all good or all bad is extreme, unbalanced & unhealthy.  
     Even retired wealthy individuals feel the need to contribute meaningfully to society. So how can healthy young people possibly feel phoney by working? Is it not that their ideas of "meaning", "self" & "worldview" require maturation?
     These are not simple matters of morality. None of us have had ideal childhoods, full of unconditional love, stable healthy wealthy wise families, friends, etc. But we do have to start where we are - right here, right now. The opposite of externalizing all our problems is seeing all that we encounter as a learning opportunity. We can choose to be fully engaged with, directly experiencing every moment of life with our heart-mind open.
     It is possible to live authentically through continuous mindfulness practice.

Don Pentz - Flood Tide, Broad Cove   www.fogforestgallery.ca

#385 Understanding Willpower & Competing Goals

     Health psychologist Kelly McGonigal PhD, author of "The WillPower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It", defines a willpower challenge as "basically a competition between two parts of yourself. Even though we have one brain, we actually have two minds. And we are completely different people, depending on which systems of the brain are more active. So a willpower challenge is anything where those two versions of yourself have competing goals. 
     For example, a part of you may really want to eat a candybar for a snack, and there’s a part of you that has longer-term goals - thinking of health, weight-loss, bikini season, etc and the banana seems like the better snack. Both of these choices you may be drawn to by different parts of your mind – two different versions of yourself. You could be the very same person, but depending on your mindset, energy, stress levels – your brain is going to meet this willpower challenge in a different way, and you’re going to end up making one choice today and another choice tomorrow. 
     There’s a really interesting fundamental gap between what people know they should do and what they want to do. People are very identified with one version of their self – feel deep down that they’re the person who wants the candybar, and this other person who wants the banana – who is that? That’s not really me. 
     So I realized that people don’t just need to KNOW what’s the right or healthy thing to do, or tips for stress-management or productivity, they need to FEEL like this person and they need to BE this person as the default, rather than always walking around feeling like they had to resist this core self who only wants immediate gratification or never wants to do anything difficult.”

     THIS transformative shift - from surface concepts - to understanding in the marrow of one's bones - occurs by way of mindfulness meditation practice. See: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2013/08/381-each-moment-new-beginning.html