Self-Help for Skeptics

Here's an article about "Self-Compassion" that I read yesterday (in the Wall Street Journal!). It was titled Self-Help for Sketptics. I'm really happy to see more and more people waking up to the benefits of intentional healthy practices.

And just think, if practices like the ones suggested below--ones that just barely scratch the surface of our 'souls'--can be helpful, how much richer can integrative practices of mind-body-spirit be?

Buddhist monks, Sufi masters, Jewish and Christian mystics have been diving deep, deep beneath the surface for millenia, and their 'research' is becoming more and more widely available. AND more accessible. We don't have to be 'monkish' to get way beneath the surface ourselves. I named this blog Ordinary Mindfulness for that very reason.

My take is that people who practice meditation or contemplative prayer for 6 months or so usually 'know' more about the deep benefits of self-compassion than the researches who are (thank God) getting so stoked about the kind of results the following article highlights.

Anyway, I'm really grateful for the growing convergence between our current scientific research and the richest mindfulness practices of our ancient traditions.

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In times of stress, even people with close social networks can feel utterly alone. We're often advised to "buck up," "talk to someone" (who is often paid to listen) or take a pill. Wouldn't it also make sense to learn ways to comfort and be supportive of ourselves?

Think of it as becoming our own best friend, or our own personal coach, ready with the kind of encouragement and tough love that works best for us. After all, who else knows us better than ourselves? If that sounds crazy, bear in mind it sure beats turning to chocolate, alcohol or your Pekingese for support. (Personally, I find pets to be remarkably supportive -MH)

Experts say that to feel better you need to treat yourself kindly—this is called "self-compassion"—and focus on the positive, by being optimistic. Research shows self-compassionate people cope better with everything from a major relationship breakup to the loss of their car keys. They don't compound their misery by beating themselves up over every unfortunate accident or mistake. Car broke down? Sure, it's a drag, but it doesn't make you an idiot.

"They are treating themselves like a kind friend," says Mark Leary, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. "When bad things happen to a friend, you wouldn't yell at him."

In 15 studies conducted over the past seven years, Dr. Leary has found that self-compassionate people are happier. Three of the studies, soon to be published, examine how self-compassion affects people over age 65. The studies found that people who accepted memory lapses, arthritis and other difficulties of getting older, and who treated themselves extra nicely on tough days, reported more positive emotions and were coping better with the aging process.

Self-compassion helps people overcome life's little, and not-so-little, stressors, such as public speaking. In another study, Dr. Leary asked people to stand in front of a videocamera and make up a story starting with the phrase, "Once there was a little bear…" Then he asked them to critique their performance, captured on videotape.

People whom the study had identified as being high in self-compassion admitted they looked silly, recognized the task wasn't easy and joked about it. People low in self-compassion gave harsh self-criticism.

Experts say you can learn self-compassion in real time. You can train your brain to focus on the positive—even if you're wired to see the glass as half empty. A person's perspective, or outlook, is influenced by factors including genetic makeup (is he prone to depression?), experiences (what happened to him?) and "cognitive bias" (how does he interpret his experiences?). We can't change our genes or our experiences, but experts say we can change the way we interpret what has happened in the past.

Everyone has an optimistic and a pessimistic circuit in their brain, says Elaine Fox, visiting research professor at the University of Oxford, England, and director of the Affective Neuroscience Laboratory in the Department of Psychology at the University of Essex. Fear, rooted in the amygdala, helps us identify and respond to threats and is at the root of pessimism. Optimism, in contrast, is rooted in the nucleus accumbens, the brain's pleasure center, which responds to food, sex and other healthy, good things in life.

"The most resilient people experience a wide range of emotions, both negative and positive," says Dr. Fox, author of "Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain." To enjoy life and feel good, people need roughly four positive emotions to counteract the effect of one negative emotion, she says.

It's possible to change your cognitive bias by training the brain to focus more on the positive than on the negative….

From the Wall Street Journal Online

Make Yourself Smarter?

I find myself adding psychology and biology to my spiritual reading list these days--and really appreciating it. When we know the truth it sets us free.

Not that our science is forever settled; it surely keeps morphing. But that's one reason I'm so glad to be getting updated: SO much has changed since I was in school.

For a long while I've experienced profound overlap between science (hard and soft) and spirituality. To make sense of things, we have to process stuff honestly and reasonably accurately. Knowing how thinking and feeling (how we) work is liberating. And challenging. And often disorienting.

Yet (alleluia) reorienting is a wonderfully apt way of picturing what repentance actually is: it's a kind of 'turning, turning' like in the Quaker song, 'til we come round right.'

Repentance, understood primarily as cringing, or even apologizing to God, is not very helpful. Repentance can be much more like simply keeping ourselves oriented in the direction the best, the wisest parts of us 'just know' we want to go.

So, here's a passage from James Pennebaker's book, Opening Up: the Healing Power of Expressing Emotions. If you've been exploring mindful practices, his research may make you smile--may be like one more stack of stones on the road marking the Way.

His main theme is how surprising and promising it is that people who are able to make sense of their lives by journaling, talking with friends, working with therapists--or even confessing to a priest!--keeps them physically healthier. People who make an effort to witness their lives and open up about what they see are sick less often.

This is a longer blog than usual--and offers at best a tiny taste of the book. If you don't have time today, come back when you do. And if it rings true, add another stone to the stack beside the road along the Way.

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Freud…discussed a number of defense mechanisms that individuals employ to protect themselves from overwhelming feelings of anxiety. Many defense mechanisms, such as denial, suppression, and obsessions, are akin to low-level thinking strategies. More recently, scientists have attempted to identify how thinking patterns affect problem solving in general.

Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer began a compelling project that sought to understand when people became “mindless” versus “mindful” in their everyday thinking. When people are mindless, they are rigid in their thinking and cannot appreciate novel approaches to problems. When mindful, people are active problem solvers, looking at the world from a variety of perspectives. According to Langer, all of us can be mindful at one time and mindless at others.

Being mindless, a state similar to low-level thinking, has some major drawbacks. All of us can be lulled into mindless thinking in a variety of ways: living completely predictable lives, letting others do our thinking for us, watching television, and being in uncontrollable settings where we think that nothing we do can make a difference.

When we are mindless or thinking on a low level, we don’t feel much pain, nor do we feel much happiness. We don’t feel much at all.

…In a mindless state, people are not motivated to talk with others, develop new interests, or learn new things. Across several studies, we know that when people are mindless, they perform more poorly on tests of creativity and complex thinking. Mindless people are also far more likely to be persuaded by con artists, television advertisements, and political speeches. In a very real sense, mindlessness makes us stupid.

Mindfulness makes us smarter. Low-level thinking and mindlessness reflect thinking styles that can protect us from feeling and thinking. If our lives are miserable, any escape can sometimes be welcome. Most of the examples that I have mentioned suggest that low-level thinking reflects an automatic way of dealing with upsetting experiences. Usually, people move to lower thinking levels without any conscious awareness. 

Americans have turned to jogging, racquet sports, weight lifting, and exercise groups like no other people in the world. Part of the exercise craze reflects a general concern with physical health. I suspect it also provides an efficient way to get stupid, that is, move to a lower level of thinking (though exercise can also be a healthy practice).

Mindlessness, compulsive and addictive behaviors, and other forms of low-level thinking dull our pain by making us less thoughtful and aware. In short, low-level thinking usually serves as a mental Band-Aid to chronic psychological anxieties.

…Psychologically confronting upsetting experiences produces long-term benefits in psychological and physical health. Study after study points to the value of confronting unwanted thoughts directly.

…Confronting our unwanted thoughts can be painful and anxiety producing. Fortunately, the pain is usually temporary. Confronting the source of our problems undermines the need for low-level thinking. In short, acknowledging and disclosing our thoughts and feelings can make us smart again.

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A note from the blogger: Social Psychologists are usually better at studying data than outlining wise spiritual paths! Working mindfully, contemplatively, is rarely about "Confronting problems." It's always more about welcoming them, letting them be what they are, holding them with kind attention and keen awareness--and then taking action--choosing to do something or simply choosing to let something go.

"Letting go and letting God" is more our style--and letting go and letting God is always richer when we bring our 'best game' -- our 'high level awareness' into the mix. When we 'see more clearly' and 'love more dearly' it's SO much easier to 'follow more nearly.' 

An Empty Bucket

Today I'm working with the first sentence of the poem in yesterday's post:

To move

Cleanly.

I don't have much of a grasp on that. I usually blog what already makes sense to me, what has been explored, what is known. And this is what I 'know' today--that it's really been helpful to me to explore what I don't know--the stuff that somehow rings true or at least comes from somebody who's life (or poetry) rings true.

So I'm just going to carry

To move

Cleanly

into the day. Like a bucket. Or maybe a prayer: God, what does it mean to move cleanly? Michael, what is the world around you saying about what it means to move cleanly?

Wisdom calls from the crossroads. And from the tingly little feelings at the top of the chest when we're curious and baffled at the same time.

The first three definitions in my dictionary say about clean:

1. Free from dirt
2. Having been washed since last worn
3. (of paper) Not yet marked by writing or drawing.

Hmmmmmm. Little something already in the bucket.

I friend I trust says that 'moving cleanly' has something to do with being open and honest, a certain 'freshness.' Being somehow strong and gentle at the same time.

So nice to talk about meaningful stuff with a wise friend.

How nice to wake up with 'nothing' in our bucket and already have such interesting 'gifts' just plopped right in.

Fresh

Below is a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye. It was our lectio reading in the Monday Mindfulness Group earlier this morning. 

Just six sentences in the poem. A person could take the first today, the next tomorrow, etc., and be finished in time for a day of rest on Sunday. 

I'm often reminding myself (and anybody else who'll listen) that inspiration, as wonderful as it is, is just the beginning--like hearing about a great new restaurant from a friend and making reservations--because it just sounded like such a great place. 

It's the 2 or 3 hours we spend in the restaurant that really count. 

Ms. Nye sets a good table. Bon appetit. 

Fresh 

Naomi Shihab Nye

To move

Cleanly.

Needing to be

Nowhere else.

Wanting nothing

From any store.

To lift something

You already had

And set it down in

A new place.

Awakened eye

Seeing freshly.

What does that do to

The old blood moving through

Its channels?

Anxiety and Compassion

As a follow up to yesterday's post about pairing anxiety with kindness, I'm re-posting an earlier reflection (below). In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt writes, "Blessed are the sense-makers!" He says this because research has shown that people who are able to 'make sense' of their lives, particularly who are able to integrate trauma and adversity, are happier than those who are not able to make sense of their lives. He notes that in various experiments, religious people, in general, test “happier” than non-religious people--more than likely because religious people have major paradigms for making sense of life. 

James Pennebaker, in his book, Opening Up, tells us that people who journal (or dialogue with trusted friends) openly about traumas are healthier than people who don't--at least they don't go to doctors or hospitals as often. 

It makes sense to 'make sense' of our lives. Mindful practices help by allowing us to see more and more precisely what’s really going on with us and in us. Contemplative practices in all spiritual traditions are full of wise, time-tested counsel for becoming whole.

God bless us—and keep us on paths of sense-making.

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Anxiety as the Abuse of Imagination

Do you remember the scene in the Lord of the Rings movie where the signal fires get lit? One after another, across those glorious mountain peaks, the carefully stacked fire wood, soaked in oil, is ignited and the flames leap up! And the proclamation goes out: “The Beacons are lit! The Beacons of Gondor are lit!”

The Beacons of Gondor were a sign that great danger was at hand and help was desperately needed.

Deep anxiety was my mother’s great wound. When she was 11, her young father, who loved to hunt and who kept 2 dozen dogs, was bitten by one of them and died a horrible death 3 weeks later from rabies.

It happened in the middle of the Great Depression. Her mom was forced to take her two girls, leave their home in the country to take a job as a seamstress 15 miles away in ‘town.’

This upheaval left my mother with a festering wound, a pervasive terror that no matter how stable life might seem, something horrible was always looming.

Though she always tried to put a bold face it, each of her 3 sons inherited this same certainty, a gnawing unease that somehow something bad is always lurking.

I’ve always known this isn’t really true. I’ve worked hard to infuse this fear with reason and outward confidence. But…

I can’t tell you how often I’ve waked up at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning thinking, “The Beacons are lit! The Beacons are lit! The Beacons of Gondor are lit!” All juiced up with adrenalin, I brace my half-awake self and anticipate the worst, wrestling with the demon Dread for the next hour or two.

Of course, my family ‘Beacons’ don’t work right, they’re dysfunctional. I know that. But part of me wants to stride out and find the idiot who keeps lighting that first beacon and throw him off the mountain!

Yet as I’ve sat with my irrational anxiety, tracing the string of beacons back to their source, I’ve realized it’s my mother who lit the first one. She’d be the one I’d have to throw off the mountain.

Somebody said that anxiety is the abuse of imagination. Sounds about right to me. It’s certainly the misuse of imagination. Inventing all kinds of nasty future scenarios.

On the other hand, it’s been imagination, put to better use, that has helped me follow my family’s beacons back to find my grieving, terrified eleven-year-old mom with matches in her hand. It's a scene that lights a different kind of fire in the heart.

All wise spiritual traditions and practices cultivate love. As we meditate, we work on meeting each thought, each feeling, each image, each story with love. And when love meets pain it morphs into compassion. That’s just what it does. And when anxiety or any other unhealthy mental or emotional process is held in compassion it is transformed. Maybe very slowly and maybe over a long time, but it is transformed.

Healthy imagination and mindfulness has allowed me to follow this deep trauma to the very place of its birth. Who knew it could turn out to be a sacred place?

Healing Ourselves With Kindness

Yesterday morning I was reading in Jack Kornfield's The Wise Heart this Barbara Kingsolver quote from High Tide in Tucson:

"Every one of us is called upon, probably many times, to start a new life: a frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, a loss of a job or a limb or a loved one, a graduation, bringing a new baby home: it's impossible to think at first how this all will be possible. Eventually, what moves it all forward is the subterranean ebb and flow of being alive among the living.

"In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again."

Kingsolver frames this bit of wisdom as a coming back from our 'worst seasons'--and our worst seasons DO seem to almost compel us to do SOMETHING to buoy ourselves up, to redirect or maybe even 'save' ourselves. There is real potential grace in adversity.

Yet the grace of mindful practice invites us not to wait until life falls apart to 'teach ourselves joy, over and over again,' but to do it now. It's like Emily Dickinson's insight: Instead of going to heaven at last we're going all along.

I've blogged about anxiety in my family here. As I began to slow down and pay more attention to my life, I noticed that low grade anxiety is with me a lot--and it feels unhealthy, corrosive--like something I shouldn't just 'let be.' It feels like something that should be let go, transformed, healed.

Ah, but what a challenge this is. I think I 'caught' anxiety from Mom well before I learned to speak. It's pretty much hardwired in me. It doesn't 'switch off.' Though I often 'let it go' it never goes very far! At least not yet. However...

I can 'like a stroke victim training new parts of the brain...teach myself joy, over and over again.' For me, joy comes as grace--and grace comes with kindness.

Whenever anxiety begins to feel the least bit corrosive, I 'pair' the feeling of anxiety with a very intentional dose of kindness. Breathing in and out I focus on exactly how anxiety feels. Breathing in and out I bring (with heart, soul, and strength) kindness into the jangly static of anxiety.

You know, with every in-breath we bring oxygen into our bodies. With every out-breath, we move carbon dioxide out of our bodies. It's the hemoglobin in our blood that carries O2, energy we need to live, from our lungs to every cell in us and then returns from every cell carrying CO2 back into our lungs to be released through each out-breath into the air around us. It's the heme in our hemoglobin that makes this possible. Heme is just as happy escorting O2 'in' as it is escorting CO2 'out' (See Breathing Partners).

I'm trying to mimic Brother Heme more often--practicing being a steady little donkey carrying anxiety and kindness up and down, in and out, half a breath with one, half a breath with the other, over and over--calling upon a full heart to teach an old brain new tricks.

The practice, the habit, becomes more natural, steadier, a little more ingrained over time: neurons that fire together wire together. More and more 'I'm' not exactly remembering to work this way with anxiety, some other part of me, the faithful donkey part, just starts doing it. Bit by bit, heme by heme, I'm becoming more 'in love with life' by steadily pairing wholesome lovingkindness with corrosive anxiety.

Most of us can do this. We don't have to be depressed or anxious. Kindness plays well with all kinds of suffering. Imitate Brother Heme. Start rewiring some neurons.

Shadow Boxing (and The Welcoming Prayer)

"Shadow"  is the name Carl Jung gave to the part of our 'selves' that we've repressed. Our Shadow is not so much unconscious as it is unwelcome and ignored! When you hear somebody say, "The Devil made me do it!" (or anything like that) it's usually an attempt to gloss over the Shadow 'acting out.'

In contemplative practice the Welcoming Prayer is a wonderful tool for inviting this 'stuff' we've kept in the shadows to step into the light and be accepted and reintegrated into our lives. When something in us 'feels' unacceptable (embarrassing, strange, too strong, shocking, violent, vulgar, etc., etc.) there's a good chance it's a 'piece' of self that has been kicked down to the basement and is now attempting to 'out' itself. To out a part of your self, my self.

Richard Rohr says this about the Shadow:


Invariably when something upsets you, and you have a strong emotional reaction out of proportion to the moment, your shadow self has just been exposed. Watch for any overreactions or over-denials. When you notice them, notice also that the cock has just crowed (Mark 14:72)! The reason that a mature or saintly person can be so peaceful, so accepting of self and others, is that there is not much hidden shadow left. (There is always and forever a little more. No exceptions. Shadow work never stops.)

One of the great surprises of the two halves of life is that humans come to full consciousness precisely by shadowboxing, facing their own mistakes and failings. People who have had no inner struggles are invariably both superficial and uninteresting. We tend to endure them more than communicate with them, because they have little to communicate. Shadow work is almost another name for falling upward. Lady Julian of Norwich put it best of all: “First there is the fall, and then we recover from the fall. Both are the mercy of God!” I am celebrating that mercy on the 50th anniversary of my first vows today (Aug 16). I have surely fallen many times and my only real recovery has come from God's unconditional acceptance and forgiveness—and from like-hearted friends, like you!

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Here's The Welcoming Prayer. It's a lovely way to bring Shadow and Presence into our souls in the same moment. When you feel creatures from the Shadow stirring, instead of trying to stuff them back into the darkness, try something different--welcome them into the light of day--like this:

Gently become aware of your body and

your interior state. 

Welcome, welcome, welcome. 

I welcome everything that comes to me in this moment

because I know it is for my healing.

I welcome all thoughts, feelings, emotions,

persons, situations and conditions. 

I let go of my desire for security.

I let go of my desire for approval.

I let go of my desire for control. 

I let go of my desire to change any

situation, condition,

person, or myself. 

I open to the 

love and presence of God

and

the healing action and grace within.

––– Mary Mrozowski 1925-1993

The creator and spiritual mother of the welcoming prayer practice