Category: Awareness

Shedding an Identity

In a previous post, I discussed surrendering to the process of shedding old beliefs.  There are also times when we need to shed an identity or an aspect of one of our identities.  In this context, identity relates to the way we conceive of ourselves as being different to others – it can encompass a set of specific skills or trade (e.g. an architect); a level of achievement in sport, art or literature (e.g. a writer); and/or represent identification with a particular group such as a cultural or ethnic group.  There are times, however, when assuming an identity ceases to work for us owing to outside influences, often beyond our control.

Elite sportspeople, for example, who suffer a career-ending injury are confronted with the need to reframe their identity.  Others may find that chronic illness or a disability makes it impossible to pursue the activities that they once saw as part of their identity.  It may mean that they can no longer teach, write or act in the theatre, so they need to rethink how they define themselves or suffer ongoing frustration and, potentially, depression.   People who suffer from the debilitating effects of Long Covid often find that they can no longer entertain an identity that has been a large part of their life – brain fog, fatigue, inability to concentrate and endless pain can preclude activities that they once saw as part and parcel of how they viewed themselves and their capability.

Shedding an identity is a long but rewarding process

 Shedding an identity takes time and self-care.  It involves acknowledging a declining competence, recognising a loss of self-efficacy and a need to address self-esteem issues.  While there can be residual elements of an identity retained in the event of major life changes, there needs to be acceptance that you are no longer like you used to be in relation to the identity being shed.  The challenge is to handle the change not only at an intellectual level but also on an emotional and physical level, particularly where a life time of competence building has been involved.

However, the rewards of shedding an obsolete identity are a sense of freedom, the opportunity to pursue other creative outlets, and build a new sense of identity.  One participant in a recent Creative Meetup noted that leaving her corporate job (and related corporate identity and trappings) provided space for her to pursue her artistic talents – she indicated that it had felt very constraining to be “an artist in a corporate suit”.

A personal example of the process of shedding an identity       

I prided myself as an “A” Grade tennis player, having won a number of team competitions at that level.   I enjoyed the feeling of competence and control that I could gain from playing great tennis shots and winning games (including my own serve).  Associated with this identity was a sense of agility, speed and endurance over many games and sets of tennis.  I would pride myself for being able to chase down a drop-shot and play a winning shot from this position (I was a school champion sprinter in secondary school).

However, more recently I have been diagnosed with multi-level spinal degeneration, exercise asthma and arthritis in my “trigger finger” (used to hold the racquet firmly).  The combination of these disabilities means that I can no longer use my “first serve” without causing injury to my back (because of the need to bend sideways), no longer play singles tennis (as a result of the exercise asthma) or hit the ball hard for a sustained period (because of the pain from the arthritic finger).  I have also had to avoid net play to reduce the risk of falling or being hit in the face (where I have had multiple surgeries for skin cancers, including a melanoma – a vestige of playing summer competition in the Queensland heat).  The challenge for my self-esteem is that I have gone from being a tennis player that people want to partner because of my proven competence to an aged player that some people resent playing with.

Over many years I have built up my sense of self-efficacy in playing tennis by recalling good shots that I have played during a match.  I would go to sleep at night replaying different shots in my head.  The net result is that I have virtually a video-tape library stored in my head that I can sort by tennis shot (e.g., backhand, volley, lob) covering shots that I have played over many years in both competitive and social contexts.  The challenge to my self-esteem now is that while I can envision these shots, I can rarely execute them.  As an opponent said on one occasion when I missed while playing a top-spin forehand shot down the sideline, “You must be playing from memory”.  He was right, but little did he know that I had spent many hours by myself just practising that shot when I was younger.

So I have had to make adaptions including shedding the image of being a very competent “A” Grade tennis player.  My adaption has involved making changes at three levels:

1. Mental
  • Giving up the goal of winning each shot/game (I no longer have the “weapons”)
  • Focusing on achieving shots that surprise my opposition as well as my partner (because of residual skills associated with my original tennis identity, e.g., being able to play different spin shots, able to “read the play”, sound positioning on the court, and an array of shots that I have learned and practised over more than 60 years).  The ingrained skills acquired through conscious effort have enabled me to retain the capacity to play instinctive shots in some situations (shots that I have never practised but just do intuitively in a rally, e.g., backhand, half-volley lob).
2. Physical
  • No net play or running down drop shots
  • No smashes or first serves
  • No lengthy rallies involving a lot of running
  • No singles play
  • No playing in daylight (because of UV radiation and the risk of more skin cancers/melanomas)
3. Emotional
  • Overcoming the worry about what people ‘think” in terms of my tennis prowess (or lack of it)
  • Being able to rise above my mistakes when playing tennis
  • Dealing with my tennis partner’s expectations and/or disappointment
  • Coping with the frustration of not being able to play a shot that I used to play with ease.

Reflection

Shedding an identity is a multi-layered affair that takes time – sometimes it is two steps forward and one backward, particularly on the emotional level.  At least I am only dealing with an identity in a recreational/sporting arena.  A lot of people are dealing with shedding an identity (or multiple identities) that are core to who they perceive themselves to be, and by how they are recognised by others.

Progressively shedding the identity of a competent “A” Grade tennis player has made room for me to develop a new creative outlet in the form of poetry.   Over the past few months, I have written at least eight poems of reasonable length that have caused one observer to comment, “You are a talented poet” – so something lost, something gained.   This provides a new arena for me to build a new sense of competence and self-efficacy – by writing poetry and researching this writing genre as I have done through books such as Kim Rosen’s book, Saved by a Poem: The Transformative Power of Words.

As we grow in mindfulness through reflection, writing, and sharing in community, we can develop new creative outlets, build stronger emotional regulation and develop resilience to manage life’s challenges and setbacks that lead to the need to shed an identity.

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Image by John Hain from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Surrendering to the Process of Shedding Old Beliefs

There are times when we have to shed something of ourself that we hold dear – our beliefs, our self-stories, or an aspect of our identity.   Sharon Salzberg, in her new book Real Life, describes this shedding process as “the movement from constraint, narrowness and limitation to openness, connection, and freedom”.   Shedding was the topic introduced by Jennifer Harris, the facilitator of our recent Creative Meetup.

Jennifer introduced the theme of shedding by sharing Harryette Mullen’s poem, Shedding Skin.  Harryette likens the process of shedding to stripping off “old scarred skin” and “sloughing off deadscales”.  In her view, it involves being open to vulnerability by “shedding toughness, peeling layers down”.   Jennifer also introduced the words of a song by Florence and the Machine in which she sings, “And in the Spring I shed my skin”.  These words from Rabbit heart (Raise Me Up) are interpreted to mean “shed timidity and become courageous”.

Shedding old beliefs

Neale Donald Walsch, in an interview with Kute Blackson for the Soul Talk Podcast, spoke at length about the challenge of giving up old beliefs.  He had been told by his father not to talk to black people because “they were trash”.  He sustained this belief for some time because he thought it would be disrespectful to challenge the authority of his parent.  However, his own life experience as a radio host caused considerable cognitive dissonance for him to the point where he had to shed his old belief about black people.  Neale found that when interviewing for his radio show the audience was predominantly black and he found that they were, in fact, “brilliant and incredible…nice human beings” and ended up having lunch with them and seeking a close friendship with one black person in particular.  He had to shed his old, wrong beliefs about black people to overcome his cognitive dissonance and sustain his relationships with members of his audience.

Neale also had to shed his beliefs about women (again taught by his father) – “women should take care of the house and kids and not being paid equally, not being as bright as men”.  This belief undermined his relationships with women and resulted in multiple failed marriages.  His beliefs about women were constraining, limiting and narrow.  It took regular relationship crises for him to challenge his beliefs and to learn to behave differently in his relationships with women.  So, disconfirming evidence and/or life crises can lead to shedding wrong or outdated beliefs.

However, some people continue to maintain firmly held beliefs despite disconfirming or conflicting evidence and will defend them with overt or covert aggression.  I learnt this at my own expense when I was a young manager in the 1980’s.  I participated in a national conference for State Managers of Training held by the Australian Taxation Office in Canberra.  At one stage in the process, an Assistant Commissioner of Taxation (2IC) joined us to provide moral support for the Central Office Training Team (who were “under fire” from the State representatives for trying to centralise all training).  During the Assistant Commissioner’s presentation, I politely challenged his statement that “The Taxation Office is at the forefront of technology in Australia.”  I explained that at a State level the opposite was true – in fact we were years behind the private sector at the time.  I was publicly abused for my challenge to his firmly held belief (which, while no longer true, was true in the 1960s and early 1970s).  His abuse was so memorable that I was stopped in the street 10 years later by a participant from another State who recalled the “abuse”.

I also learnt again painfully that people in authority can protect their beliefs by covert aggression as well as overt aggression   When I was an academic, I was introducing action learning into my university and using it as a basis for my PhD research.  My Dean opposed my endeavours by trying to prevent my appointment as a tenured academic as well as my overseas travel for a World Congress on action learning in Colombia (I was a member of the international organising committee).  He eventually prevented my promotion to a Senior Lecturer – in the feedback afterwards, telling me that “you had the best application [because of my experience and rating as a teacher], but you are using a non-mainstream approach in your PhD research”.  Action learning promotes the view that we are all “personal scientists” building expertise through life experiences and reflection on our experiences – a position that conflicted with my Dean’s belief in the expert role of academics and the role of Universities as being the “repositories of all learning”.  In consequence, he used covert aggression to try to prevent my academic advancement.

Shedding self-stories

Negative self-stories can develop through the influence of our parents, teachers, peers or colleagues.  These self-stories can shape our beliefs about ourself and our worth and influence our behaviours in the face of difficulties and life’s challenges.  Negative self-stories can arise through traumatic experiences and are often at a sub-conscious level.  Self-beliefs such as “I’m not good enough” can arise from behavioural messages of parents (e.g. through neglect, constant criticism, or extended absences).  The “need to please disease” as a hidden motivator can also arise from a belief that “I’m not lovable” and “I have to be nice to be liked and not rejected”.

It is difficult to overcome adverse childhood experiences that are often behind negative self-beliefs.  Tara Brach suggests that mindfulness practices (such as mantra meditation, writing and reflective conversations) can help us to loosen false beliefs about ourselves.  She offers a process for investigating and challenging false beliefs about ourself.   She argues that as we grow in mindfulness we can develop the self-awareness necessary to enable us to identify our habituated behaviour and to name and challenge our false beliefs.  In the process, we can loosen the hold of our false self-beliefs, restore our energy and engage more positively and creatively in everyday life.

Surrendering to the process of shedding

Participants in our recent Creative Meetup discussed the difficulty of letting go of old beliefs.  They suggested that the process takes time, patience and self-compassion.  They discussed the movement from the pain of shedding to the realisation of potential.  They suggested that the process of taking on new beliefs is uncomfortable, moving from the known to the unknown. 

The rewards of surrendering to the process of shedding beliefs were valued and highlighted.  They talked about “a new way of seeing”, removal of blinkers, experiencing release and empowerment, and accessing a “deeper self” and a “a new way of being”.  The challenge of surrender is real, but the rewards are great.

Tara Brach, with Jack Kornfield and colleagues, offers an online course, Power of Awareness, that is designed to help us “break free from negative thoughts” to realise balance, peace and joy.  They offer a mindful approach to achieving a quiet mind by bringing awareness and self-compassion to our “inner dialogue”.   I have undertaken this course and found it highly beneficial.

Reflection

Lulu & Mischka in their mantra meditation, Metamorphosis, capture the essence of surrendering to the process of shedding.  They encourage us to “keep letting go”, “trust in the process”, relax into the present and “stop resisting”.  If we can do this through mindfulness practices such as reflection and mantra meditations we can achieve healing and a metamorphosis that will enable us to spread our wings and fly higher.  This exhortation resonates with Sharon Salzberg’s encouragement to move from constraint to freedom, from narrowness to connection. from limitation to openness.  I have expressed these insights in the following poem:

Surrender to Shedding

There comes a time in our life when we have to shed old beliefs.
Slough off our limiting self-beliefs,
Remove constraints on our thinking,
Break down the barriers of our defence mechanisms,
Let go and stop resisting,
Surrender to the process of casting aside what no longer works for us.

The shedding process is painful.
Discomfort with the new,
Feeling lost,
Leaving behind the known,
Moving to uncertainty,
Open to anxiety.

The rewards of shedding are great.
Releasing from constraints and limitations,
Achieving a new sense of freedom,
Moving from pain to possibility,
Discovering a new creative self,
Flowing like a river, rediscovering “Flow”.

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Image by Jonathan from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Finding Strength in Vulnerability

Kylie Orr in her novel, The Eleventh Floor, has her lead character, Gracie, comment after experiencing the impact of deceit in a relationship, “I was committed to loving up close, to being open, vulnerable”.  While Gracie acknowledged that “there is danger in that”, she was willing to take the risk inherent in vulnerability because “a life held together by lies fell apart so easily”.   Being vulnerable exposes us to the possibility of being harmed by someone else emotionally, intellectually or physically – it   involves showing our true self with our emotional weaknesses, character faults and physical defects.

Vulnerability, however, is a source of strength.  It underpins perseverance and resilience, facilitates sustainable relationships, enriches our contribution to community, and enables the writing of an entertaining and enlightening memoir.  To access the strength in vulnerability we have to face up to being vulnerable – we need to name our feelings (e.g., fear of rejection) so that we can tame them.

Perseverance and resilience

Contrary to the Alpha Male depiction of power, dominance and the trappings of success, Lance Alfred (legally deaf NBA player) contends that perseverance and resilience in the face of adversity require a totally different orientation.  He maintains that there is real strength in vulnerability – owning up to our feelings, being authentic, having self-awareness and self-intimacy (acknowledging our own thoughts, actions and consequences), forgiving others, moving beyond other people’s expectations to be our true self, accepting our inadequacies and mistakes and overcoming the fear of failure.  

When we fear failure we can be trapped by inertia – unable to move forward beyond the current challenge.  In her novel The Brightest Star, Gail Tsukiyama describes a time when Chinese-American actress, Anna May Wong, was making her stage debut In The Circle of Chalk and was terrified that her speaking voice and singing were not up to the expected standard (after spending so much time acting in silent movies).  The critics were having a field day about her voice but she acknowledged this weakness and “went on the offensive”, hiring a voice coach.  Despite the criticisms of the critics, the show had a “successful run”.  

Sustainable intimate relationships

We can hide our fear of being vulnerable in a relationship in multiple ways including excessive criticism of the other person, aggression (anger), withdrawal (silent treatment), overcontrolling or projecting our own weaknesses or fears onto the other person.  These defence mechanisms only serve to push the other person away, to wound them and disable them.  While they provide protection for our ego and self-concept, they create a barrier to a sustainable intimate relationship.

Tara Brach provides a meditation which enables us to explore the ways that we create separation or distance in a relationship by resorting to defence mechanisms to ward off vulnerability.  In the meditation, we are asked how we are impacting our relationships(s) by avoiding vulnerability.  The challenging questions relate to self-protection, projection, judging, withholding, distrusting or engaging in “superior conceit”.  Tara points out the power of being vulnerable (overcoming our natural defence mechanisms) in terms of building closeness and sustainable relationships. 

Enriching our contribution to community

Tara tells a number of stories where being vulnerable led to someone else finding strength to manage a disturbing or embarrassing circumstance.  One of the features of the Creative Meetups hosted by The Health Story Collaborative is the vulnerability shared by participants in the monthly, online meetings.  Participants are people experiencing chronic illness or disability or are in a caring role.  They willingly share their pain, difficulties in coping, inability to think clearly, physical weaknesses, anxiety or depression or lack of energy. 

The level of openness and trust enables individuals to express their vulnerability without fear of being taken advantage of, or being consciously harmed by anyone else present.  Vulnerability, enhanced by the culture of sharing and collaboration, builds closeness and healing.  There is the implicit recognition that being vulnerable is integral to the human condition.

Developing a memorable memoir

In the Art of Memoir, Mary Karr, stresses the need for authenticity – revealing our real self, not the projected self or the deemed “virtuous self”.  She highlights the importance of being vulnerable rather than self-protective.  She sees the memoir as a personal unfolding that is sometimes painful – an honest exploration of our “inner landscape”, not just a recording of external events.  Mary suggests that as we are developing our draft memoir with recalled stories “what burbles up onto the page is what is exclusively yours, both as a writer and a human being”.  She maintains that we have to trust the power of truth enough to “keep unveiling yourself”, despite the shame in the revelations, and, in the process, the memoir will structure itself and you will show up ”warts and all” – leaving a memorable impression that highlights your contribution to relationships and community.

Reflection

Being vulnerable is difficult as self-protection is our natural fall-back position.  As we grow in mindfulness through writing, reflection and meditation, we can begin to draw back the veil that hides our imperfections and inadequacies.  With the inherent growth in self-awareness and self-intimacy, we can become more real and more invested in telling the truth about ourselves. This is a progressive inner journey – a slow unveiling of our true inner self.   By letting go of shame and expectations (our own and that of others), we can develop authentic connections, friendships and intimate relationships.

I wrote the following poem as a reflection on the negative impact of defensiveness on relationships and the power of vulnerability to create intimacy by removing our constructed barriers.

Sustaining a Relationship

Deceit destroys a relationship.
Closeness is beyond us, as we retreat behind the wall.
Facing up to who we are can be painful.

Without vulnerability, our relationships are shallow.
We hide behind our self-projected mask.
We engage our defence mechanisms.
We fence off our inner landscape.

Sustainability lies in vulnerability.
Openness to ourselves and others.
No longer the frightened child.
Now exposed to risk and reward.
Intimacy is in our hands, if we reveal who we truly are.

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Image by John Hain from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site and the resources to support the blog.

Creative Meetups: Action Learning for Health and Healing

Creative Meetups are provided by the Health Story Collaborative (HSC) to enable participants to reflect, connect and gain support from other people who are also living with chronic illness or disability or are carers.  The free Meetups, currently facilitated by Jennifer Harris on the Zoom platform, provide a stimulus for writing “to access and release emotions, personal stories and creative spirits”.  They form an avenue for healing through the mechanism of narrative therapy.

Alice Morgan, author of What Is Narrative Therapy?, maintains that narrative therapy can take many forms.  For instance, she suggests that it can involve “particular ways of talking with people about their lives and the problems they are experiencing”.  In essence, it involves people sharing their stories orally and/or in writing to gain insight into the meanings they ascribe to events, experiences and current situations (such as a physical or mental health condition).  Jodi Clarke points out that we carry multiple self-stories including those related to “self-esteem, abilities, relationships and work.”  She maintains that the process of “putting your narrative together” (however, this is created) enables an individual “to find their voice” as they explore  their life experiences and the meanings they attribute to them.

What is action learning?

Action learning can be described in simple terms as a cycle – planning, taking action and reflecting on the outcomes (intended and unintended).  It is used worldwide in public, private and not-for profit organisations and communities to create positive change and empower people to be the best they can be.  It can be undertaken by an individual by themselves (as I have done with my tennis playing over the years) or, more often, as part of a group or “action learning set”.

Creative Meetups and Action Learning

Creative Meetups and action learning have a core assumption in common.  Alice Morgan expressed this well when she maintained that narrative therapy assumes that “people have many skills, competencies, beliefs, values, commitments and abilities” to resolve their own challenging situations – an assumption that underpins the process of Creative Meetups.  This is also a fundamental assumption of action learning (AL).  

Reg Revans, the “Father of Action Learning”, charged with improving the mining industry in the UK, got mining managers together to solve their “here and now problems” in the mines.    He also got nurses in Intensive Care Units together to work on their challenging situations.  In an action learning context, participants are often described as “personal scientists”.  Some academics in universities, tied to the concept of universities as the sole repository of “expert knowledge”, had great difficulty accepting this core assumption and would actively oppose the uptake of action learning – it challenged their firmly held beliefs about knowledge creation and dissemination.

Creative Meetups and action learning have a number of other elements in common and, in the final analysis, both seek to create positive change in a situation (either individual or collective).  Some of the shared elements are as follows:

  1. Peer support – a fundamental principle is to treat each other as peers – with no acknowledged hierarchical difference.  There is a recognition that we are “all in the same boat” – each facing challenging situations.  Reg described this element as “comrades in adversity”; more recently, people have termed it “comrades in opportunity”.  In essence, it involves providing mutual support irrespective of our work role, status, social position or experience level.
  2. Collaboration – participants work together towards a common goal (e.g. health and healing or team improvement) and willingly share stores, resources, and insights for mutual benefit.  People are unstinting in their sharing – often recommending or loaning books, highlighting helpful websites or identifying relevant expert people.
  3. Don’t know mind – participants adopt a “don’t know mind”, not presuming to know and understand another person’s situation.  Reg suggests that if you think you understand something fully, you are not only going to get yourself into trouble but other people as well.   Adopting a don’t know mind – not jumping to conclusions or interrupting another’s story with your own (erroneously assuming they are same or similar) – enables a person to tell their story in an unfettered way, opening up the path to healing and recovery. 
  4. Honesty – the conscious exploration of what it means to be honest with oneself (owning up) and with others.  This opens the way for improvement and change.  The process of writing in Creative Meetups helps participants to identify false self-stories and unearth truer and richer stories that open up new avenues for their lives and their relationships. Action learning, too, enables the development of honesty.  Reg, for example, recounts an action learning program involving industrial executives in Belgium who, after 18 months of action learning, identified “What is an honest man and what do I need to become one?” (they were all men) as the most significant question they wished they had asked at the start of the program.  He maintained that the pathway to learning and change involves “admitting what you do not know”.  Reg also maintained that if you are going to do “something significant about something imperative”, you will come up against how you define yourself and your role.
  5. Reflection – reflection is assisted by writing and sharing.  The more we reflect, the more it becomes a way of life.  Frequent reflection-on-action can result in the ability to reflect-in-action.  Reg suggests that reflection is best done in a group because when we reflect alone we can tend to reinforce our existing assumptions and maintain our blindspots.  He argues for diversity in the reflective group – diversity of culture, nationality, profession and orientation (business/not-for-profit/community).  The Creative Meetups provide a rich diversity in terms of location (participants are from different countries and cultures) and health/caring situation.   Participants can gain insight gratuitously when others share their reflections from their different perspectives.
  6. Questioning – the willingness and ability to ask “fresh question” to open upinsight into a challenging situation.  Reg describes this as “questioning insight”.  This approach involves “supportive challenge” – challenging assumptions to enable a person to be the best they can be.  Alice Morgan highlights the role of questioning in narrative therapy because we can often develop negative self-stories.  Both action learning and Creative Meetups (narrative therapy) cultivate curiosity.
  7. Action taking – action learning involves learning through action undertaken with others where possible.  Creative Meetups promote writing as taking action to become open to  the healing power of storytelling.   The writing can take any form, e.g. prose, poetry, dot points.  Action is also reflected in the changes in behaviour undertaken by participants as a result of insights gained through writing and sharing.
  8. Facilitation – to design and manage the process of sharing.  In Creative Meetups, the facilitator provides stimulus material (e.g., a story, music or poem) to enable participants to write and share.  In action learning, the facilitator guides the process of planning, acting, reflecting and sharing.  In both situations, the facilitator is not a teacher.  Their role is to create an environment that promotes safety, trust, openness and sharing – their metaprocess goal is to develop a learning community.   

Creative Meetups, in promoting writing and reflection, are helping participants to grow in mindfulness which is described by MARC (UCLA) as “paying attention to present moment experiences with openness, curiosity and a willingness to be with what is”.   Both action learning and mindfulness contribute to positive mental health because they increase self-awareness and heighten a sense of agency (belief in the capacity to have some control over our inner and outer environment).  In cultivating mindfulness, both approaches help people to develop resilience, compassion and creativity. 

Reflection

I initially joined the Meetups with a view to writing my stories in prose but have found that the stimulus provided by the discussions and my recent reading of Kim Rosen’s book,  Saved by a Poem: The Transformative Power of Words, has led me to write several poems about my health story and the process of the Meetups.  Kim’s identification of the transformative elements of a poem continues to provide a pathway for my poetic expression.   I used her elements to analyse a poem I had written called For the Love of Tennis that enabled me to express my gratitude for being able to continue to play tennis despite a diagnosis of “multiple-level spinal degeneration”.

Following a recent Meetup, I unearthed my feelings about my chronic condition of food sensitivity/allergy resulting from Long Covid-induced Mast Cell Activation Syndrome.   I was surprised about the intensity of my feelings of frustration and alienation that I had not previously given voice to.   The poem, The Inflammatory Thread in My Life, provided a creative outlet and release for emotions I had kept “under wraps” and not expressed to anyone, including myself.

In a previous post, I shared a poem, Compassionate Listening, that I wrote following a Creative Meetup where the stimulus input included an excerpt from Joni Mitchell’s performance of Both Sides Now at the 2024 Grammy Awards.  To me the poem reflects the stance of participants of the Creative Meetup in being able to engage in deep listening, provide active support of the storyteller and reflect back not only the feelings expressed but also the intensity of those feelings. 

Compassionate listening strongly reflects the ethos of HSC where Healing Story Principals (such as Micheal Bischoff) sought to support people “to tell and listen to stories in ways that are healing, connected and empowering”.  The support and connection underpinning Creative Meetups and action learning promote health and healing.

Reflecting on the process of Creative Meetups and my long-standing experience with action learning in multiple contexts, I was inspired to write the following poem:

Where is “There”?

When you share your innermost secrets

and I say, “I’ve been there!”,

where is “there”?

It’s not where you have been

with your unique experience and perception.

I’m not inside you looking out,

I’m outside you looking in.

It’s like the glimpse of the Bay

that I get from my back deck.

It’s not the Bay!

It’s only a tiny window

on a complex ecosystem.

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Image by Xavier Lavin Pino from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site and the resources to support the blog.

How to Develop Positive Beliefs About Aging

Previously, I discussed the pervasive impact of negative beliefs about aging and the life-enhancing benefits of positive age beliefs.   In those posts, I drew on the mind-opening research of Professor Becca Levy, author of Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Will determine How Long and How Well You Live.  In her book, Becca not only explores the potential negative or positive impacts of our beliefs about aging, she also  offers multiple ways to develop a positive mindset that will enable us to live longer and with a better quality of life.  She provides numerous examples of people in different fields who have achieved incredible things in their old age.  Becca stresses the need for each of us to be proactive in building positive beliefs about aging to counteract the influence of ageism which is with us from the time we hear our earliest fairy tales until we experience palliative care. 

The ABC approach to developing positive beliefs about aging

In her book, Becca introduces the ABC Method to liberate us from the socially-derived negative beliefs about aging and free our minds to realise the potential inherent in aging.  Her ABC method incorporates three core elements – awareness, blame and challenge:

A – Awareness

Becca suggests that developing positive age beliefs begins with ourselves, increasing our awareness of our own thoughts and the way this impacts our words and actions.  We can increasingly become conscious of how we speak to people in different age groups – how we positively recognise “age diversity” (rather  than perpetuating “age blindness”).  She recalls that on one occasion, she found herself talking in a childlike manner to older people (“elderspeak”) and immediately pulled herself up and changed the way she spoke to these people.  Her newly  adopted adult-to-adult communication was respectful of the wisdom and experience of the people she was addressing. This is an example of reflection-in-action, a skill we can develop by practising reflection on our actions as a habitual approach. 

Our awareness can develop by building a “portfolio of positive images of aging”.  We can do this by reading newspaper reports and articles about people who have excelled in various fields of endeavour.  Another rich source of positive age images is memoirs written by people who describe their accomplishments in old age despite early childhood setbacks, including traumatic experiences.  An incredible exemplar of this approach to developing positive beliefs is Maya Angelou.  She not only broke new ground in writing memoirs but wrote her seventh memoir, Mom and Me and Mom, in her eighties.  Her accomplishments in many fields such as  poetry, writing, acting, film, singing and activism are memorialised in a website in her name.  Becca cautions us, though, to avoid trying to model ourselves on a single, exceptional older person – she argues that a more attainable goal is to strengthen qualities in ourselves that “older role models” exhibit (such as Maya’s work ethic).

We only have to look around us for positive models of aging amongst our friends, relatives, colleagues, our medical carers and other professionals.  This involves developing relationships with, and paying attention to, people who have aged and yet who continue to contribute positively to their career arena, the local community or society generally.  We can also seek the company of elders.  Nadine Cohen, author of the exquisite, debut novel, Everyone and Everything, actively seeks people of her mother’s and grandparents’ age and finds that she is “usually richer emotionally” because of their counsel and wisdom.  

B – Blame

Becca argues that we should put the blame where it truly belongs – not our biology but the ageism that surrounds us in every facet of our life.  This involves consciously developing awareness of our social environment in our everyday life.  It means being able to identify “negative age stereotypes” perpetuated in education, the arts, medical professions, and in daily conversations with friends, colleagues and family members.

As we develop this external awareness, we can begin to identify the “upstream causes” impacting the health and wellness of the aged. Becca maintains that “age beliefs are an upstream predictor of health and well-being”.  She contends that if we actively develop positive age beliefs we can change our health habits.  This approach is in line with the research that shows that to create new behaviours, we need to challenge the assumptions that underlie old behaviours – it is not enough to practise new behaviours if we want sustainable change.

C- Challenge

Becca recommends challenging ageism in whatever form it takes.  She points out the example of antiageism activist, Ashton Applewhite, author of This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism, and the blog Yo, Is This Ageist?   Ashton is actively and publicly challenging the hidden negative beliefs as they are reflected in newspaper articles, headlines, advertisements, and elsewhere and educating readers by responding to their questions about ageism.  She also has a YouTube channel incorporating her Talk at Google and other presentations addressing ageism.   In her Ted Talk, Let’s End Ageism, she points out that ageism is “a prejudice that pits us against our future selves – and each other”.

While people like Ashton and celebrities such as Madonna and Robert De Niro are speaking out publicly against ageism, Becca contends that we can help to overcome ageism in society if we “call it out” when we encounter any form of ageist remark in the relationship circles in which we move,  Becca recounts her discussion over coffee with Irene Trenholme who at 99 years of age ran the Secondhand Prose bookstore which donated all it profits to the local St. Johnsbury library.  Irene proved to be an exemplar for challenging ageism.  Whenever she encountered an ageist remark or action, she would firmly indicate that this was inappropriate, including challenging her doctor who spoke too loudly to her (assuming that, because of her age, she was “hard of hearing”).

Becca challenges many myths that surround aging and encourages us to take up the task of questioning firmly-held beliefs that have no scientific foundation.  She provides an Appendix in her book which she describes as “ammunition to debunk negative age stereotypes”.  She lists common negative age stereotypes and offers facts (proven by research) that can be used to debunk these stereotypes, including “cognition inevitably declines in old age” and “older persons are technologically challenged”.  In relation to the latter myth, Becca points out that Mildred Dresselhaus innovated the field of nanotechnology in her seventies.

Underlying the assumption that older people are technologically challenged is a foundational ageist myth that I call the “blank slate myth”.   People often assume that those who are older lack any related knowledge, skill or experience in a particular area, e.g. technology.  They forget that the technology they enjoy today was pioneered and developed commercially (long before some were born) by people who are now in their later years.  I am now 77 years of age (2024), but I have a long history of involvement in the development and application of technology in education and the workplace in the 1970’s, 1980’s, 1990’s and early 2000’s:

  • National Project Team – the design and implementation of the first online, national, accounting and management information system in the Australian Taxation Office (1973 -1977);
  • National Project Team – the introduction of word processing and personal computers in the Australian Taxation Office;
  • Role of Director, Computer Operations, Australian Taxation Office, Queensland and the Northern Territory;
  • Sensitive National projects associated with physical computer security and deterrence and detection of computer fraud;
  • Role of National Change Manager for the implementation of online learning and teaching in the Technical and Further Education Institutes across Australia (2000-2004);
  • Role of a Leader in Squidoo – a social media platform developed by Seth Godin (2007-2014);
  • Creator of a 6-month, online Social Media Marketing Course – 24 weekly PDF’s (2010);
  • Creator of e-books on internet marketing, social media marketing and Squidoo marketing strategies (2009-2012);
  • Creator of blogs on affiliate marketing (2005-2012) and small business marketing (2011-2012);
  • Co-Creator with colleagues in Germany and America of the article-based, social media platform, Wizzley.com (2011);
  • Sole author of my current Grow Mindfulness blog (2016 – present; 745 posts).

I spend very little time on social media platforms these days, not because I’m “technologically challenged” but because I have other priorities.  My priorities at the moment are to write my mindfulness blog (1,000 word post per week); co-author a book on “managing people”; and write a memoir.

The “blank slate myth” not only applies to technology but also many other areas of endeavour.  I found that it applies even in social activities.  I still play social tennis in my late seventies and I am often confronted with the manifestation of this myth in our social tennis games.  For example, I recently played with a younger partner who shouted out to me not to hit a shot that was clearly going out (by at least 2 metres), assuming that, through lack of experience (or loss of memory/faculties), I had not been able to judge that the ball would be out.  Having played more than 10,000 sets of tennis (including competitive tennis at an A-Grade level) over more than 60 years, I have a fairly advanced awareness of what shots are going to go out – it’s embedded in my body memory.  I can, for instance, when lobbed by an opposition tennis player, chase down the tennis ball and hit it back over my head and land it in the court (the secret is to face parallel to the back fence of the court so your body knows where it is in relation to the court outline).   To me, the “blank slate myth” defies logic and denies the richness of skills, intuition, insight and reflexes developed over many years.

Reflection

In thinking about the impact of negative and positive age beliefs, I became very conscious that, despite social conditioning, what we believe about aging is up to us – and our beliefs determine our actions. I incorporated this reflection in the following poem that I wrote recently;

The Choices You Make About Aging

If you are positive, you open up your potential –

life’s joys and pleasures are yours to gain.

If you look, you will see what is possible –

aging models of achievement are everywhere.

If you challenge the myths, your mind is freed,

you can pursue your goals without constraint.

If you remember what you have achieved

you can draw on your sense of agency.

If you exercise your mind and body

you can restore your acuity and strength.

As you grow in mindfulness

through reading, research and reflection,

you can become more self-aware

and free of stereotypes, assumptions and insipidness.

What you believe about aging

influences the choices you make.

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Image by GreenCardShow from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site and the resources to support the blog.

The Transformative Power of Poetry

I have just been reading Kim Rosen’s brilliant book, Saved by a Poem: The Transformative Power of Words.  I found it enlightening, stimulating and inspirational – opening up new areas for personal exploration.  Kim is a world-renowned poet, activist, an award-winning “spoken-word artist, and a teacher of self-inquiry.  She brings a rare openness, insight and compassion to her writing and numerous individual and community engagements.  Kim collaborated with cellist Jami Seber to create Feast of Losses, a unique merging of music and poetry.  The collaborative endeavour reflects the ambiguity of everyday life in today’s world – life and death, grief and joy, loss and gratitude.

Saved by a poem

In her book, Kim describes situations in her own life and that of significant other people where a poem has proved to be a source of insight, healing, support, and rescue from depression and/or suicide ideation.  At the age of 15, Kim experienced an awakening from what she describes as her insular life characterised by “distance, intelligence, and control”.  The poem, “somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond” by E.E.Cummings, broke through her protective shell – a remarkable unfolding occurred through the “waves of sensation, emotion, and imagery” she experienced when reading the poem aloud.

Kim explains that the healing from poetry occurred for her not from writing poems but from “taking a poem deeply” into her heart and life and speaking it aloud.  She contends that the language of poetry is not a purely intellectual exercise but involves a holistic approach – engaging the whole person, their thoughts, emotions, spirit and body.  Poetry enables personal integration, reinforcing the mind-body connection, exposing our inner reality and its embodiment in our physical sensations.  It creates a sense of being vulnerable before a deeply profound truth that is difficult to deny.

Developing a relationship with a poem

Kim explains that sometimes we can seek out a poem for strength and support in a time of crisis – at other times a poem can seek us out.  We may initially resist a poem’s message but eventually if we persist, especially in reading it aloud, it will penetrate our defences.  She suggests that to take a poem into our life requires allowing the words to ignite our true essence – achieving an alignment of our “thoughts, words, and deeds with our heart’s wisdom and longing”.  

Kim tells the story of when she lost all her investments and savings in a scam that left her unable to pay rent.  A friend offered her somewhere to stay and together they continuously read aloud the poem Kindness, created by Naomi Shihab Nye.  The poem seemed to find each of them independently before they shared lodging for a while.  Kim recounts how, after memorising the poem and repeatedly saying it aloud, she came to understand that the kindness referred to in the poem is not about kindness to others but the kindness others offer you when you have lost everything.  The opening words of the poem resonated deeply with her – Before you know what kindness is, you must lose things.  Kim experienced an incredible outpouring of kindness from others when she lost everything – offers of accommodation or financial support and many gifts (even a year’s supply of lattes).

Kim suggests that choosing to learn a poem by heart can be influenced by curiosity, desire for pleasure, love or a personal need arising from a crisis.    She also talks of the challenge from what she calls “the yoga of poetry”.  We might be attracted initially to a poem but its inherent challenge, intellectually and/or emotionally, may be off-putting.  The focal poem requires a degree of stretch, moving beyond our comfort zone or opening ourselves to new insights about ourself and/or others.  This yoga-like stretch can be achieved progressively by persisting with the poem, reading it aloud, committing it to memory and, where possible, sharing it with others.

Opening up to poetry

Kim describes the habit she developed of recording poems in a diary, both those she has written and poems by others.  She describes the resultant record as an Autobiography in Poems. She explains how each group of poems addressed a need at a particular point in her life, e.g. to challenge her “idealized image” of herself; facing chaotic feelings; and finding herself and her life purpose. 

Kim argues that we can access the transformative power of poetry by writing or reading poetry, joining a poetry writing group, reading poems aloud by ourself or in public presentations, reading poems with a group and/or recording poems that appeal to us in a diary (or on digital voice media).  She encourages us to explore poetry as a way of opening ourselves to the richness of our inner life, as well as our inhibitions.

Reflection

In her book, Kim describes how poetry saved Maya Angelou, after she had been raped by her mother’s boyfriend (at the age of seven) who was jailed and subsequently murdered.  Maya, feeling guilty for exposing her attacker and contributing to his death, became mute for six years.  During her silence, she memorised poems that appealed to her, including 60 Shakespearean sonnets.  Her school teacher (when Maya was 12 years of age) was aware that Maya was mute and loved poetry, so she challenged her by saying, “in order to love poetry, you must speak it”.  This led to Maya reciting a sonnet from Shakespeare – her first spoken words in six years. Maya went on to become a  world-famous author, poet and activist.  She also pioneered a unique autobiographical style in her book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Kim observes that poems “seemed to know me better than I knew myself” and often “reflected my deepest feelings more intimately than words alone can touch” – because what touches us through a poem Is “between and beyond” the actual words.  She maintains that poems can give voice to supressed feelings and longings that may be hidden from ourselves.  I found this personally when I wrote a poem called The Inflammatory Thread in My life after hearing William Stafford’s poem, The Way It Is, provided as a stimulus piece for our writer’s meetup group with the Health Story Collaborative.  Until I wrote the poem, I had not realised the extent of my frustration with my allergies and food sensitivities that were impacting what I could eat and drink and negatively affecting my relationships.   

Writing, reading, speaking or sharing poetry can help us to grow in mindfulness because these activities can develop deep insight, expose our inner landscape and strengthen our resolve and courage, along with inspiring us to emulate the compassionate action of others.

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Image by cromaconceptovisual from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site and the resources to support the blog.

The Pervasive Impact of Negative Beliefs About Aging

Dr. Becca Levy, Yale professor and world leader in the psychology of aging successfully, has written a groundbreaking book that is brilliant in its conception and exhaustive in its research foundation.  The book is titled Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Will Determine How Long and Well You Live.   Becca draws on global research, undertaken by herself and colleagues in the field, to demonstrate that our age beliefs impact positively or negatively not only our physiology but also our mental health.  Negative age belief, perpetuated through the media and our social environment, can lead to mental and physical ill-health and a diminished quality of life.  In contrast, positive age beliefs can enable us to transcend the limitations of aging in terms of mental acuity, physical strength, flexibility and longevity.  Becca draws on numerous stories of people from all walks of life – artists, musicians, actors, athletes, carers, and health professionals – to illustrate the very real impact of beliefs about aging.

How our negative aging beliefs are formed

Becca demonstrates the impact of nursery rhymes and cartoons on the early formation of our age beliefs.  These typically negative portrayals of aging are further reinforced by social media, films, newspapers and everyday social conversations.  The pervasive marketing of a desirable body image and associated cosmetic propaganda (a Trillion-Dollar industry), have served to embed a negative image of aging in our psyche.   We now have “age-defying” skin treatments that remove wrinkles and make our skin glow, along with a pervasive negative stereotyping of menopause (loss of youthfulness, sexual drive, physical prowess and energy).

The impacts of negative age beliefs on institutions and individuals

The resultant negative age beliefs underpin the growth of ageism – “discrimination against older people because of negative and inaccurate stereotypes”.  This discrimination is reflected in institutional bias, in interpersonal communications and relationships, and self-talk/limiting behaviours.  Becca gives examples of institutional discrimination in employment, the acting and legal professions and hospital protocols.  She explains that her research confirms that many health professionals have negative age beliefs and act on them.  Our language in conversations can betray an ageist mindset, for example, when we talk about “having a senior moment” (Becca devotes a chapter to this phenomenon and highlights the amazing memory of deaf people and the role of memory in the oral transmission of indigenous knowledge).

The last mentioned arena of negative age beliefs, the intrapersonal, is difficult for an individual to realise and acknowledge.  Becca surprised herself by her ageist mindset when she suffered an injury while running in a charity event.  Despite her professional knowledge of aging, she immediately attributed the injury to her middle-aged body “succumbing – all too early – to the ravages of age”.  She assumed that her running days had come to a “premature end”.  It was only when her husband, a doctor, explained that she only had a “badly pulled muscle” that she was able to recognise and acknowledge the personal impact of her negative mindset about aging.  Like many people, Becca was shocked that ageism was influencing her own thinking.

I can relate to Becca’s personal injury story.  I was diagnosed with multilevel spinal degeneration, in part, as a result of playing tennis for more than 60 years, including many years at a competitive level.  My doctor told me that I would have to give up tennis because the injury was the result of “wear and tear”.  Initially, I put the degeneration down to aging (I was 76 years old at the time) and decided that my body was no longer able to cope with the rigours of tennis.  For some reason, unknown to me, I decided to seek a second opinion.  The second medical practitioner gave me a referral to an exercise physiologist who provided me with a series of progressively more challenging exercises over a period of six weeks.  By the end of this period, I was able to return to playing tennis and have been doing so for six months (I play social tennis weekly at night).  This brought home to me that a negative mindset about aging can actually prevent us from exploring and undertaking remedies for health issues. We can adopt a helpless frame of mind that impedes our chances of improving our health, physically and/or mentally. 

Reflection

Becca reveals through her research and storytelling that our negative age beliefs can influence our behaviours, our ability to recover from illness and injury, our quality of life, and life span.  It behoves us to become aware of the influence of ageism on us, to become conscious of our negative thought patterns and to be aware of our resultant limiting behaviours (including our willingness to seek ways of healing).

As we grow in mindfulness through reflection and mindfulness practices such as meditation, we can become more aware of our thought processes and their impact and develop increased self-awareness, including knowledge of our habituated behaviours.   Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield teach us about The Power of Awareness developed through mindfulness meditation.

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Image by John Hain from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site and the resources to support the blog.

Life After Death and Spirit Communication

Mark Anthony, JD, has written a landmark book covering life after death and spirit communication.   The book draws on his research, personal experience, stories of other people and quantum physics.  The stories that Mark reports in detail are drawn from people who recount their Near death Experience (NDE) or their Shared Death Experience (SDE) as well as the stories that arise in his work as a “spirit medium”.  Mark is described as a “psychic explorer” and is known as the Psychic Lawyer®, being an experienced, Oxford-educated trial lawyer.  

He conducts “spirit communication sessions” face-to-face around the world and live on television and radio.  His goal is to enable people who have lost a loved one to  better manage their grief through receiving assurances from the person’s spirit on the Other Side. Mark’s book incorporating the latest science and illustrative stories is titled, The Afterlife Frequency: The Scientific Proof of Spiritual Contact and How That Awareness Will Change Your Life.

Life after death – the survival of consciousness

Quantum physics has demonstrated that everything in our world, including our blood cells and beach sand, are made up of quanta, “subatomic particles of electromagnetic energy”.  Einstein maintained that “everything is energy”.  The Law of the Conservation of Energy states that “energy can neither be created or destroyed”.   Since everything is made up of quanta, Mark contends that “everything is energetically connected”.

Consciousness, often referred to as the “soul” (our individuality shaped by our experiences, personality, knowledge and other attributes) is described by physicists as “the quantum electromagnetic field within the brain”.    In his Afterlife Frequency book, Mark explains how he developed the concept of the electromagnetic soul, drawing on history ranging from 4,000 years old Hindu beliefs, through Leonardo Da Vinci’s scientific research, Buddhism beliefs, the work of Sir Isaac Newton and the present-day research of Dr. Gary Schwartz of the University of Arizona. 

Given that energy cannot be destroyed but only “transformed from one form to another”, Mark and world leading scientists, contend that as we are energetic beings, “the energy of life transcends physical death”.  The electromagnetic soul thus lives on after death and exists in another dimension at a higher energy frequency, no longer constrained by the limitations of the human body.  Mark affirms that the electromagnetic soul is neither created by the brain nor extinguished on its death. He draws on an analogy developed by Professor Hans-Peter Durr of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics to argue that “at death the electromagnetic soul is uploaded to a higher frequency” and joins what he terms “collective consciousness”.

Spirit Communication

Mark makes the significant point that spirit communication does not come in a direct form like text messaging.  Sometimes the message is received in the form of metaphors, feelings, images or symbols.  This means that interpretation of the message may not be immediately available to the medium or to the person for whom the message is intended.  Mark explains that the understanding of the message by the intended recipient may take hours, days or even years.  Eventually, at an appropriate time, the meaning in the message becomes clear as the associations connected to the message are identified and understood.  Mark gives examples of this time lapse in understanding by people for whom he has performed “readings”.

Mark contends that despite the fact that we are not all mediums like him (who is a fourth-generation medium), we are each able to communicate with spirits.  He explains that the pineal gland in the body, also called the “psychic gland”, enables us to receive higher frequency transmissions.  As Mark explains because we all have the same “physical apparatus”, “everybody has the ability to have a psychic experience”.

Barriers to spirit communication

In a chapter titled The No, No, No, Syndrome, Mark identifies a number of barriers that people create that effectively block spirit communication.   He draws on many examples experienced during his spirit communication workshops or phone calls to explain the nature and impact of these barriers.  For example, people may be so anxious or fearful that their thinking becomes clouded; they may be so emotive (wanting a communication desperately and subsumed by grief) that their emotional state acts as a “deflector” of the spirit communication; or they may overthink or “hyper-analyse” the message during the communication.  Mark argues that feeling should predominate during the communication, analysis should come after the message is received.  He suggests that inviting not demanding, and feeling not analysing, is the way to effectively receive spirit communication.  Spirit communication also requires patience because messages received can have multiple levels of meaning.

How to become receptive to spirit communication

Mark maintains that we can each develop what he calls spiritual situation awareness so that we are “capable of getting in sync with afterlife frequency”.  This awareness enables us to detect spirit communication in the form of “signs” and be able to interpret and act on them.

He suggests that one of the easiest ways to develop the requisite awareness is to begin by paying attention to our immediate world through our senses, what Jon Zabat-Kinn calls Coming to Our Senses. We can start by listening to sounds in our immediate environment and then expand our attention to take in sights, smells, tastes and touch.  Through this process we can eventually develop natural awareness and what Mark calls situation awareness, a trait highly developed by emergency services personnel.

Mark contends that we can take our awareness to a higher level moving beyond awareness of our physical environment to awareness of “what is happening around us energetically”, what he terms spirit situational awareness.  He proposes a 4-part technique that builds spiritual situational awareness over time.   The technique he describes in his Afterlife Frequency book is called the RAFT Technique:

  • Recognize  
  • Accept
  • Feel
  • Trust

Mark maintains that with practice we can develop unconscious competence in recognizing, accepting, feeling and trusting the signs and messages received through spirit communication.  We can also progressively remove the blockages that would otherwise interfere with the communication and our understanding of what is being communicated.   Mark explains that practice is necessary because we can unwittingly block the “energetic impulse” communicated by a spirit which would, without the blockage, create a connection to the electromagnetic field of our brain.

Reflection

As we grow in mindfulness, we can develop our natural awareness, our spirit situational awareness and our receptivity to spirit communication if we choose to do so.   Mindfulness with its focus on paying attention purposefully, can enrich our lives on many dimensions – physical, psychological and spiritual.  The benefits of mindfulness are far-reaching and encompass the totality of human experience.

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Image by Đức Tình Ngô from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site and the resources to support the blog.

Mast Cell Activation Syndrome and Covid-19: The Invisible Link

There has been a lot written lately about Long Covid and its differential impacts on individual’s health.  More recently research has highlighted a connection between Covid-19 and Mast Cell Activation Syndrome.  It is important at the outset to reinforce the need to consult a medical practitioner for treatment of individual health symptoms.  We can too easily make assumptions about what is occurring for us if we go it alone.   For example, I assumed that my numb feet were the result of peripheral neuropathy caused by Long Covid.  When I consulted my medical practitioner, I  discovered, through the X-Ray that he requested, that my assumption was wrong – the actual problem was multi-level spinal degeneration.   However, it is important to consult practitioners who are open to multiple explanations of chronic symptoms, such as those induced by allergies and food sensitivities.  Often, this may involve a medical practitioner who has a holistic perspective and/or is  qualified in functional medicine.

I recently participated in a Creative Meetup conducted by Health Story Collaborative.  During the meeting, Diane Kane responded to a discussion by a number of participants who were experiencing Long Covid symptoms such as loss of sense of smell, brain fog, and allergies.  When I mentioned my ongoing battle with food sensitivities and allergies, Diane shared some information about Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS).  She explained that her website is a research hub for MCAS.  On the website, Diane shares her own extended patient story as well as research resources including a video presentation on MCAS by Dr. Larence B. Alfin, author of Never Bet Against Occam: Mast Cell Activation Disease and the Modern Epidemics of Chronic Illness and Medical Complexity.

What is Mast Cell Activation Syndrome?

Dr. Kelly McCann in a video podcast interview explains that mast cells are a key part of our normal immune system.  Their role is to watch for invaders that would cause injury to our bodies.  They reside everywhere in our bodies from our head to our feet, and typically live in areas of our body that are at our interface with the environment, e.g. our skin, our blood vessels and our nerves.

Mast cells are responsible for delivering chemical messengers, called “mediators”, such as cytokine and histamine, that produce an inflammatory response to the perceived invader, e.g. a virus, environmental chemicals, mold, or the flu.  Kelly points out that research has shown that mast cells play a major role in the “cytokine storm” that causes an inflammatory response to Covid-19.  If the “foreign invader” is overcome (e.g. we recover from Covid or the flu), “everything quiets back down again” and ‘inflammation goes away”.

However, for some people mast cells become over-active, “hyper-vigilant” and hyper-responsive” – a condition identified as Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS).  What happens then is that our body “misperceives things”, some of which are actually good for us, e.g. healthy foods.  Hence, we can end up with food sensitivities and allergies (to things like smells, chemicals and some foods).  Kelly makes the point that because of the pervasiveness of mast cells in our body, “anything in our body could present as a mass cell activation symptom”, e.g. brain fog.

Kelly explains that Mast Cell Activation Syndrome is “a spectrum” – ranging from mild to extreme.  A key feature of MACS is that over time, without intervention, there will be an “escalation in the inflammatory or allergic symptoms” of an individual.  The inflammatory response can be exacerbated by what Kelly calls “hits”, e.g. a virus, sustained exposure to mould, or a tick bite (leading to Lyme Disease).  For example, the progression of mast cell activation syndrome could be signalled by the worsening of food sensitivities for an individual.    

Diane’s personal health story

Diane created her website as a means of education and advocacy about the independent science research being conducted on mast cell activation syndrome.  Her own story is really about the extreme end of the spectrum of MCAS and is one of resilience, persistence and hope – a great source of inspiration for anyone experiencing MCAS symptoms.  Diane’s multi-dimensional health problems persisted over 46 years.  Despite visiting 80 consulting doctors and undergoing “extensive evaluations” at 15 major hospitals and suffering multiple anaphylaxis attacks over 20 years, she was not diagnosed with MCAS until 2017 when she visited Dr. Ali Rezale of the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. 

Dr. Rezale and Dr. Alfin are working with Diane to improve her health overall.  In the meantime, Diane is working on writing a book titled, The MCAS and Covid-19 Theory: A Multidimensional Epigenetic Phenomenon.   As an experienced medical researcher and author who suffered long-term symptoms of MCAS, she is well-qualified to document her story and the growing body of relevant scientific research.  Diane provides draft copies of early chapters of her book on her advocacy website. 

My health story

I have experienced multiple “hits” as described by Dr. Kelly McCann.  Having had asthma as a child, I am prone to respiratory problems and allergic reactions.  While I overcame the asthma by the time I was 12 years old, since then I have contracted pneumonia three times, RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus) three times and Covid-19 in 2021.   In 2017, I experienced major eczema covering my whole body, following 8-weeks of intensive antibiotics to heal an infected leg (resulting from an operation to remove a melanoma).   Since then I have experienced continuous food sensitivities and allergy which are increasing in breadth and depth to the point that there are very limited things I can eat or drink without negative side effects. 

Dr. Kelly McCann explains that there are two things going on with MCAS – a trigger(s) and reaction(s).  Both need to be addressed.  In terms of food triggers, I can relate to Dr. Kelly McCann’s comment that she was gluten-free, dairy-free and unable to eat a long list of foods.  As Kelly suggests in her presentation, I have been undertaking an elimination process trying to identify specific foods (especially those high in histamine or salicylates) that cause aggravation of my symptoms so that I can remove them from my diet. 

In regard to reactions, Kelly argues that there is a need to dampen the hyperactivity of the immune response.  My naturopath, Dr. Mark Shoring, agrees with a tentative diagnosis of MCAS in my case, and recommended initially a course in Chinese skullcap (Scutellaria baicalensis), a herb identified by Mt Sinai Health System in New York as being “used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat allergies, infections, inflammation, cancer, and headaches”.  This treatment, along with Turmeric, is designed to dampen down my hyperactive immune response. So, my somatic strategies, at the moment, include identifying and eliminating aggravating foods and drinks while simultaneously calming the inflammatory response of my immune system.

Mind-body connection and healing practices

Kelly maintains that she experiences the influence of the mind-body connection everyday in her clinic when working with patients.   She points out that the impact of mind-body connections is developed through our early family and developmental experiences.  Unfortunately, we are often prone to misperceive these experiences or develop false beliefs that lead to emotional problems such as low self-esteem and emotional dysregulation.  She argues that we have to envisage the health challenge confronting people with MCAS in terms of a three-legged stool – Mast Cell Activation, Limbic System Activation (our emotional centre) and Vagus Nerve Dysfunction (the main nerves of the parasympathetic nervous system).

Kelly mentions a number of practices that can help retrain the limbic system to get our “mental/emotional loops” and habituated behaviour under control, e.g. Dynamic Neural Retraining System, the Gupta Program and Cathleen King’s Primal Trust Program.

Vagus Nerve Dysfunction can lead to people with MCAS becoming stuck in fight/flight/freeze behaviour which can impede healing.  Kelly maintains that the approach required here is stimulation of the vagus nerve to help people to get “back into parasympathetic rest and digest”.  She suggests approaches to achieve restoration of balance, e.g. breathing exercises, meditation and devices such as EmWave, HeartMath and Rezzimax.  Kelly mentioned that she uses mind-body techniques in her clinical practice when the person she is treating is receptive to these approaches.

Reflection

I think it is important to remember that MCAS impacts each individual differently.  The impacts are influenced by our biology and the number and severity of what Kelly calls “hits”.   There are so many confounding variables involved that self-diagnosis is likely to mislead us.  However, this should not stop us from being proactive, e.g. identifying and reducing or eliminating our triggers.  Actively seeking to grow in mindfulness can help us to stimulate the vagus nerve, activate our relaxation response and overcome negative thoughts.

Reading about Diane’s experience prompted me to revisit my naturopath and discuss his diagnosis of my food sensitivity and allergy experience.  He explained that his recommended treatment approach was based on the assumption that I was experiencing MCAS.

During one of my Creative Meetups, also attended by Diane, we listened to a reading of William Stafford’s poem, The Way It Is.  Listening to this poem and the subsequent discussion in the Meetup group prompted me to write a poem about my food sensitivities and allergy:

The Inflammatory Thread in My Life

There are many things I can’t eat
fruit, gluten, dairy and red meat.
I feel left out that I can’t share
even with delicious family fare.
I crave something sweet
but the cost is too steep.
Hives and rashes make me really itchy
legs and feet are shamefully icky.
Wine is off the table, not that I am unable
it’s the swollen ankle, that renders me unstable.
The endless cycle of elimination
to discover the source of inflammation.
It’s harder to share a meal with my wife
what I’ve done for forty years of my life.
Covid-19 has a long arm
it’s still doing me harm.
Almond croissants are my passion
a loss of consciousness my reaction.
Butter was a food sensitivity
It’s now a dangerous allergy.
Food and drink are tainted rewards
a mindset change to move forward.
It’s a long journey with a clear destination
It takes patience, perseverance and dedication.

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This post is provided for information purposes only and is not intended to replace personal medical advice provided by a trained medical practitioner.  Please seek advice from a qualified professional before deciding on treatments for yourself or other members of your family.

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Image by Ingo Jakubke from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site and the resources to support the blog.

Fearlessly Sharing Your Story: Jelena Dokic’s Exhortation

Jelena Dokic shared her story of paternal abuse in the second of her memoirs, Fearless: Finding the Power to Thrive.  Her no holds barred account is disarmingly honest but replete with positivity and gratitude. 

Jelena indicated that she first gave a glimpse of her family situation in an interview with journalist Jessica Halloran, who subsequently co-authored her two memoirs.  The first memoir, Unbreakable, told of her challenges as a refugee from Yugoslavia, her life of poverty and the brutality of her father, Damir Dokic.

The first physical abuse she suffered at the hands of her father was when she was six years old.  He slapped her hard in the face three times because she had laughed and joked with her tennis coach.  In Damir’s view, tennis was not for enjoyment but sheer hard work that had to be taken seriously.  Beyond that first abuse, she suffered continuous beatings as a teenager, especially when she lost a game.  Jelena often played with bruises all over her body.  On one occasion he beat her unconscious with a shoe.

Jelena highlighted in her memoirs the fear and physical suffering she experienced at the hands of her father.  She explained in detail how his behaviour diminished her self-esteem and intensified her sense of shame. Despite her trauma from this physical abuse, Jelena became one of the greatest Australian female tennis players, reaching the rank of number 4 in the world in singles.  She was noted for her nerve and fearlessness on court and her ability to fight back when behind in a match – a resilience born of combating her trauma.

The power of storytelling

Jelena discussed her personal battle with shame when trying to share her story.  From the interview with Jessica to her Fearless memoir, she had progressively revealed more about her life and personal challenges. In the process she has become a very strong advocate for the healing power of storytelling.  Jelena indicated that not only was she able to heal from her trauma through storytelling but she found that other people drew inspiration and healing from her personal battles and her capacity to rise above them.

Jelena used her memoirs to tell her story with increasing levels of disclosure.  She found too that her book tours and public presentations enabled her to share more about her life and how she dealt with her trauma, which often left her feeling helpless, anxious, depressed and exhausted.

Jelena has continued to do public presentations to share her story and the positive value of her storytelling  has been reinforced by the number of people who have expressed gratitude for her talks.  She strongly advocates for people to share their stories of sexual abuse and domestic violence.

In Fearless, Jelena has a section on the “the power of story” and reinforces the positive changes that can accrue from narrative therapy (offered by her psychologist).  She states that through storytelling she moved from a victim mindset to “survivor”.  Her story suggests that she became a “victor”.  Jelena continuously encourages people experiencing trauma to speak up:

I have said it many times in this book speaking up creates change, saves lives.

The healing effects of social support

In a section on “having the right people around you”, Jelena highlighted the importance of supportive people (social support) for the process of healing from trauma.  Her earliest positive experience was being coached by Australian tennis great, Lesley Bowrey, who she described as a “no-nonsense, fair, tough coach with the warmest heart”.  Jelena appreciated Lesley’s strong work ethic, a shared trait that was a source of mutual admiration. 

Lesley showed kindness and an unshakeable belief in Jelena which became a profound source of happiness for her.  While Lesley was her coach, she won the Junior US Open, reached World Number 1 Junior and won the Hoffman Cup with Mark Philippoussis

Jelena waxes lyrical about the unconditional support provided by Tod Woodbridge in her transition from tennis retirement to commentator.  He had encouraged her to write the Unbreakable memoir and mentored her “tirelessly” about the process of commentating tennis matches.

Jelena also mentioned the very positive influence of her psychologist who helped her explore the impact of her trauma on her thoughts and behaviour and to challenge false beliefs about herself.  Her psychologist supported her to progressively make changes in her life to initiate and sustain the healing process.

Reflection

The physical abuse Jelena experienced was demoralising and exhausting.  Jelena showed tremendous courage to share her story, seek social support, work with a therapist and eventually overcome her fears and loss of self-esteem.  She is now very much a role model for dealing with trauma and an encouragement to many people worldwide.

As we grow in mindfulness through our own efforts to increase our awareness of the impact of significant events in our life, we can develop deeper personal insight and the courage to take the actions necessary to achieve personal healing.

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Image by brian teh from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site and the resources to support the blog.