adversity – Grow Mindfulness

Tina Turner’s Approach to Mindfulness

Allyson Pimentel, psychologist and meditation practitioner/teacher, fittingly provides a meditation podcast titled, The Mindfulness Teachings of Tina Turner. Allyson describes mindfulness as “a way of attending to your life as it unfolds” while bringing to this awareness an attitude of “openness, friendliness, and kindness” without judgment. Associated with this, is a willingness “to be with things as they are”.

She maintains that the goal in practising meditation is not to master the art of meditation itself but to lead better lives day-to-day though our groundedness, compassion and wisdom. We do this so that we can become “a force for good” in our family, in our work, in our community and in our daily interactions. Allyson maintains that Tina Turner, who died at the age of 83 in May 2023, exemplified this broader goal and drew on mindfulness practices to be a positive influence in people’s lives. Allyson viewed Tina as a personal hero who, in her view, embodied kindness, love, wisdom, resilience and creative talent.

Tina’s approach to personal transformation

In her book, Happiness Becomes You: A Guide to Changing Your Life for Good, Tina explains her Buddhist approach and how she turned her life around after multiple “lifequakes” that threatened to derail her singing career and harm her mental wellbeing. She explains in-depth that chanting enabled her to overcome adversity, develop resilience and realise happiness in her life. Her ability to commune with nature from an early age enabled her to find her true home within, despite the turbulence and torment of her outer world. Besides the vibrational energy and groundedness of chanting, Tina drew on the teachings of Nichiren Buddhism to transform and reframe her life.

Tina explains that this Buddhist approach, that places emphasis on engagement and social activism helped her to move beyond her comfort zone, to appreciate the connectedness of everything, to value diversity in nature and cultures and participate actively in the Beyond Music Project designed to use music as a way to respect and celebrate cultural diversity.

Tina saw experiencing adversity as a way to shape ourselves and build our resilience – in her words, adversity is not a bad thing in itself, it is how we use it that really matters. She contended that adversity could build character, self-awareness, insight and a stronger sense of connection. This perception aligns with the tenets of mindfulness that reinforce the view that while we have little in our life that we can control, we can control our response to what happens to us as well as around us. Mitra Manesh in her podcast on responsibility contends that mindfulness builds our ability to respond to adversity and setbacks – she describes this outcome of mindfulness practice as developing our “response-ability”.

Tina explained in her book that all of life shapes us – the good, the bad and the ugly. We become our transformed selves through the richness and diversity of our life experiences and by developing a constructive, creative and energetic response to whatever occurs. She maintained in her eighties that she had no regrets – she had lived her life to the full, positively impacted numerous people all over the world and experienced deep happiness.

Reflection

Tina demonstrated in her life, music and her writing that as we grow in mindfulness we can overcome adversity, develop resilience, enrich our creativity and build the courage and sense of connectedness to take compassionate action. Her life and music provide an invaluable legacy and a “ripple effect” that has the power to inspire others to work to create a better world.

In her guided meditation podcast, Allyson draws on Tina’s core teachings to help us explore our connection with nature, the influence of our ancestors, our own legacy, and our present moment awareness.

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Image by Kanenori 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.

Adversity, Resilience and Happiness: A Chanting and Meditation Pathway

Tina Turner experienced an incredible amount of adversity – an abusive marital relationship, stalled singing career, severe illness (including a stroke and kidney failure), all preceded by adverse childhood experiences (including parents who constantly fought, divorced and abandoned her). At age 34, still in her destructive relationship, Tina discovered Buddhist chanting and meditation and this eventually changed her life, giving her the courage to break off her damaging relationship and launch her solo career. Tina explains her journey in her new book, Happiness Becomes You: A Guide to Changing Your Life for Good.

The chant that changed her life

Tina explains how she discovered the power of the Daimoku – the chanting of the Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo. This mantra is central to Buddhist practice and millions of people around the world practise it every day. Orlando Bloom, the English actor, is also a strong advocate and practitioner of this mantra.

Tina maintains that chanting the Buddhist mantra generates vibrational energy and positive Karma in a person’s life. She explains “Karma” as “the sum of all your actions – thoughts, words and deeds” and suggests that it is like a “balance sheet” reflecting the net balance of the positive and negative actions of your life. Karma “determines our dominant life condition”.

Tina maintains that chanting the mantra is doing a workout for your spirit and likens it to a physical workout that conditions you for physical exertion and sporting activities. She suggests that the time spent in daily chanting should be influenced by the level of your karma limitations (excess negative over positive energy), your life condition and the magnitude of your dreams.

Tina writes that she spent many hours a day chanting when she was in a karmic low and experiencing adverse life conditions while still holding onto very big dreams. She found that the very positive results she achieved with her chanting acted as reinforcement to maintain her daily practice. She was, however, able to modify the time spent on chanting as her life became more balanced. Tina suggests that even 15 minutes chanting the Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo mantra each day, can be beneficial for your life condition and the achievement of your dreams.

Buddhist wisdom – the Ten Worlds

In her book, Tina introduces the “Ten Worlds” of Buddhism that describe our “life condition” and likens them to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. She explains that our life condition encompasses our thoughts, moods, and our overall wellbeing which, in turn, influence how we view ourselves and others, our emotional disposition, our decisions and actions. Tina compares the lower levels of the Ten Worlds to the lower levels of the hierarchy of needs such as physiological needs, safety, need for belonging and self-esteem.

In Tina’s view, the highest level of Maslow’s hierarchy, self-actualization, accords with elements of the top four Buddhist Worlds, namely Learning, Realization, Compassion, and Buddhahood (complete freedom, endless courage, wholeness, a sense of connection to the “life force” of the universe). Both Learning and Realization are developed through learning and reflecting on our own experiences and insights and that of others.

Tina found that one of the attractions of the Buddhist concept of Ten Worlds was the idea that you can progress directly from the bottom level to the top levels through concerted inner work, working daily on enriching your inner landscape. Her pathway was that of Buddhist chanting and meditation. She maintains that we each have to find our own pathway to live more fully.

Reflection

Tina has demonstrated throughout her life the capacity to bounce back from physical, emotional and relationship challenges – she has shown resilience in the face of adversity. In the process, she has been able to achieve deep happiness. As she points out, we all seek happiness but it is invariably “elusive”. Sustaining a state of happiness is a challenge.

Tina was able to grow in mindfulness and awareness through Buddhist chanting and meditation and found that her daily practice enabled her to rise above challenging emotions and circumstances, enrich her life, and achieve her wildest dreams. For each of us there is a potential pathway to resilience and happiness and the realisation of our dreams and life purpose.

As Tina states in her book Happiness Becomes You:

Each of us is born, I believe, with a

unique mission, a purpose in life that

only we can fulfill.

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Image by Наталья Данильченко 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.

What it Means to be a Tough Male Today: Strength through Adversity and Vulnerability

In a recent interview podcast, Tami Simon spoke to former NBA star Lance Allred about his book which focuses on changes to what it means to be a “tough” male in times of adversity. Lance is the author of The New Alpha Male: How to Win the Game When the Rules Are Changing. As the first legally deaf player in the NBA, Lance missed hearing a number of plays but he brought to the game a keen sense of sight and intuition – he was able, for example, to develop heightened peripheral vision and the capacity to read body language through intuition rather than analysis.

Lance explains in his interview (as part of the Insights at the Edge podcast series) that he was raised as a child in America to become the classical Alpha Male – dominant, powerful and focused on the external signs of success that were associated with materialistic values (what you possess) and “superior conceit” (“better than” or “superior to”). The catalyst for his change of perspective on what it means to be male was the sudden end to his NBA career (precipitated by the Global Economic Crisis) and nervous breakdown which resulted in thoughts of suicide.

Characteristics of males who successfully persevere despite adversity

In the interview, Lance describes the seven characteristics of what he terms the “New Alpha Male”. The characteristics are strongly aligned to mindfulness and Lance describes them as the “seven principles of perseverance” when faced with today’s life challenges:

Accountability: Lance argues that we need to own our feelings and avoid hiding them through “false bravado”. He maintains that to be accountable we have to cast off those embedded self-stories that lead to envy and aggression and own our real feelings, instead of playing the victim or the child throwing a tantrum.
Integrity: Speaking your “authentic truth” – not showing one side to a valued audience and another worse side to people viewed as lesser in importance. This entails working towards personal integration as a lifetime pursuit and being congruent as a leader.
Compassion: Understanding that others are in pain and can often cause you hurt as a result of their pain (e.g. pain resulting from adverse childhood experiences). It entails being willing to forgive others and show compassion towards them and their suffering.
Intimacy: Being able to have the “intimate conversations” that express how you really feel but also being able to “own your side of the street” – what you have contributed to the conflict. Lance talks about “self-intimacy” which is effectively a very deep level of self-awareness along with the courage to own up to what you are thinking and feeling. The resultant vulnerability becomes a strength, not a weakness.
Adaptability: Being able to deal with “extreme discomfort” including feeling alone because you are not conforming to other people’s expectations – people who do not see you for “who you truly are” and what you are capable of.
Acceptance: This is the precursor to surrender. Acceptance entails acknowledging mistakes but working to overcome them for your own benefit as well as that of others affected by your mistakes or inadequacies. Surrender goes one step further in accepting “what is” after you have given your all to a particular pursuit or dream. Lance explains that acceptance and surrender in turn involve both heartbreak and gratitude – willingness to learn through heartbreak and gratitude for what you have achieved.
Choice: A fundamental principle underlying perseverance. This involves showing up in your life – choosing to start again after some “failure”, not being afraid of failure. In the final analysis it means to “be a leader of your own life”.

Reflection

Lance puts forward the challenge of conscious choice and mindful action – being willing to overcome our self-stories, moving beyond our comfort zone, being truly accountable and authentic about our thoughts and feelings and being compassionate and forgiving towards others. As we grow in mindfulness, we can develop the self-awareness and self-intimacy that underpins his principles of perseverance and progressively move towards personal integration.

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Image by Pete Linforth 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.

Ways to Accept What Is

Diana Winston reminds us that part of mindfulness is “accepting what is” – being able to deal actively and constructively with our present situation, however unwelcome. Diana, Director of Mindfulness Education at MARC, UCLA, defines mindfulness in her podcasts as paying attention to our present moment experiences with openness and curiosity and a willingness to be with what is. Tara Brach argues that acceptance of what is begins with radical acceptance – overcoming feelings of not being good enough and fully accepting ourselves so that we can live life more fully. Shamash Alidina stresses the proactivity involved in accepting what is – he argues for a growth mindset which entails being willing to learn from our experiences and to change what we can change.

Ways to develop acceptance of what is

There are many times in life when things do not turn out according to our plans, our anticipation or our expectations. These experiences can often lead to persistent negative and destructive feelings that undermine our ability to live life fully and be present for others. Below are some ideas on ways to develop the requisite acceptance of what is:

Begin with self-acceptance – Tara’s book mentioned above has resources, exercises and meditations that can help to develop self-acceptance. Tara also provides a wide range of free and paid resources on her web store – books, videos, e-books, audios, online courses – that provide insights and meditations to help us in the lifelong pursuit of radical self-acceptance.
Break the cycle of complaining – complaining reinforces our dissatisfaction through its negative focus. It also contaminates the emotional wellbeing of those we interact with. Mike Robbins reminds us that “what you resist, persists” – that what we complain about, what we focus on as unsatisfactory in our life, will become increasingly aggravating.
Get it out of your head – Mike suggests that one way to do this is to make a list (preferably written) of all the things that cause you angst in your life – people, work, disappointments, anticipated or actual changes to your health or wealth. As you review each item, reflect on whether you can accept the reality of this aggravation in your life. He argues that acceptance of what is provides the pathway to internal peace and constructive change to make things better in some way.
Get in touch with your feelings – reflect on what you are feeling and why you are feeling this way. The more you can name your feelings and understand their source, the more you can tame and manage them. For example, if you can identify envy as a source of personal dissatisfaction (however unpalatable acceptance of this negative emotion is), you can work towards being joyful for the good fortune and success of others in your life.
Keep things in perspective – no matter how upsetting or dissatisfying your current situation is, it pays to reflect on what other people are experiencing (and managing) that is considerably worse than your situation. Sometimes little aggravations can become so large and dominating in our lives that we lose perspective on what we are experiencing – we fail to appreciate its insignificance in the greater scheme of life experiences.
Practice loving kindness meditations – it is possible to regularly extend loving kindness to others who are experiencing severe, adverse events in their lives such as the devastation of homes and livelihoods through wildfires or the daily physical and/or emotional abuse from domestic violence. Loving kindness not only helps us to keep our own dissatisfactions in perspective but also enables us to move beyond self-preoccupation and reach out to others in our thoughts and actions.
Read about or listen to stories of people who have overcome extreme adversity – you can encounter such stories in your daily or weekly newspapers, email newsletters or blog posts about overcoming adversity. A really good source of inspiration is TED Talks©. You can search the database of over 3,000 videos by using key terms such as “inspiration” or “loss”.

Reflection

It is so easy to get into the negative spiral of complaining about how things are in our life (the “negative bias” of our brains feed this orientation). However, we can be proactive to avoid moving into a cycle of dissatisfaction and depression. There are ways to accept what is, develop peace in our lives and become open to the possibility of creating positive change. As we grow in mindfulness through meditation, reflection and self-observation, we can learn to name our feelings, keep things in perspective, develop a growth mindset, build resilience and extend loving kindness to others.

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Image by Gerd Altmann 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.

Healthy Confidence or Superior Conceit?

In a previous post I discussed how mindfulness can be an effective antidote to narcissism, both in curbing our own narcissistic tendencies and managing the aftermath of a relationship with a narcissistic boss or intimate partner. I also highlighted the work of Rick Hanson who promotes healthy confidence to achieve an effective balance between needing to be seen as superior and developing a grounded but strong sense of self. Rick pursues this dilemma in his podcast titled, Confidence or Narcissism? One of our challenges in developing healthy confidence is to find effective role models – many of our leaders in government, business and sport have failed to resolve this dilemma in their public lives.

Superior conceit displayed by sports stars – defective role models

In the earlier blog post, I shared Bonnie Duran’s perspective on narcissism where she relates it to the Buddhist concept of superior conceit – the need to be “better than” or “superior to”. Bonnie explains superior conceit in one of her podcast talks titled, Conceit and Latent Torments.

There are many instances of elite sportsmen and sportswomen displaying superior conceit and related narcissistic behaviour. For example, narcissistic behaviours have been exhibited by international tennis stars who:

Abuse chair umpires and line umpires
Throw their racquets in disgust or anger and/or throw tantrums on the tennis court if things don’t go their way
Demonstrate a total lack of empathy or concern for the feelings of others
Boast about how much they have earned from tennis and their total asset worth (as if their financial resources are a measure of their personal worth)
Show a lack of respect for their opponents and/or tennis fans
Seek to win at any cost, even if this means cheating or bullying others.

Ash Barty – an effective role model for healthy confidence

Ash Barty has achieved more in one year (2019) than most tennis players (male or female) achieve in a lifetime. She reached World Number 1 ranking in June 2019 (and held it at the end of the year) and won the French Open, the Birmingham Classic, the Miami Open, and the WTA Women’s Finals – Shenzhen (after being runner-up at the China Open). Ash was the winner of a tour-topping 52 matches.

On top of these achievements, she has been awarded (in 2019) the Don Award (by Sport Australia Hall of Fame), the Women’s Health Sportswoman of the Year, and the ITP Fed Cup Heart Award (for outstanding courage and distinctive representation & commitment). The individual Don Award is for an Australian athlete “who, by their achievements and example over the last 12 months, are considered to have the capacity to most inspire the nation”. These awards recognise that in so many ways Ash is a role model, not only for sportspeople but all of us who aspire to achieve “healthy confidence” and its attendant rewards. Her status as a role model for other Indigenous women had been recognised in 2018 when she was named Australia’s first National Indigenous Tennis Ambassador.

Ash demonstrates healthy confidence through the following traits:

Resilience in the face of adversity and setbacks
Recognition of the need to take time out to achieve a better balance in her life and master self-management (she spent 18 months playing state-level cricket)
Respect for tennis opponents, officials and fans (a trait that is widely acknowledged and appreciated)
Empathy and compassion for others
Authenticity and humility
Amazing capacity to focus and sustain her concentration
Valuing and publicly recognising her support team.

Ash readily acknowledges the profound contribution of her mentor and mindset coach, Ben Crowe, in shaping her outstanding success. Ben observed that, in addition to the abovementioned traits, Ash demonstrates the following characteristics:

Acknowledges that there is strength in vulnerability, rather than needing to claim or pursue perfection
Recognises that she can “write her own story”, not accept habituated, negative self-stories
Has the ability to let go of the things she cannot control while maintaining focus on what is under her control
Does not let tennis define who she is, but pursues her true self and values depth of character
Is prepared to put in the hard work to achieve continuous self-improvement and excellence.

His insightful and revealing explanation of the underlying philosophy that he has been able to impart to Ash explains why she is an exemplar of healthy confidence.

One of the problems for us in trying to develop our own healthy confidence is that bad behaviour has dominated the attention of mainstream media, whereas Ash’s exemplary behaviour has been buried under the controversy associated with narcissistic behaviour displayed by some international tennis players. Kate O’Halloran, writing for the ABC, expressed the hope that Ash’s French Open win will turn the spotlight more on “an exemplary sportswoman whose respected demeanour and success” has failed to attract the media attention that it deserves.

Reflection

There are some very profound lessons for us in the philosophy and behaviour of Ash Barty and some ideas about how we might develop our own healthy confidence. However, we should be careful of joining the chorus to criticise the narcissistic behaviour of individual international sports stars while indulging in narcissistic tendencies ourselves.

We can ask ourselves when the last time was that we made a point of highlighting our qualifications or the nature and breadth of our experience when meeting someone for the first time? When did we attempt to outdo someone else’s story (about the drama we experienced, the places we have seen or the achievements we have realised)? How often do we interrupt others’ conversations to focus attention on ourselves? When have we thought that our car/house/dress attire is better than that of someone else’s? Do we ever measure our personal worth in terms of the assets we have or the importance of our job? As we grow in mindfulness, we can become progressively more aware of our own narcissistic tendencies and begin to develop a healthy confidence and deep sense of our real self.

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Image by Alexas_Fotos 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.