appreciation – Page 2 – Grow Mindfulness

Managing Yourself in Times of Crisis

Susan David was recently interviewed as part the Ted Connects© series of talks. Susan spoke on the topic, How to be Your Best Self in Times of Crisis. She maintained that “life’s beauty is inseparable from it’s fragility” and provided a number of ways to manage yourself in times of crisis. She emphasised the importance of facing our difficult emotions, naming our feelings, being curious about what our emotions are telling us, developing our sense of agency and finding ways to help other people. Susan stressed that underpinning her approach is the concept of “emotional agility” – the core of which involves “radical acceptance” of our emotions and self-compassion.

The fragility of life

Susan reminds us that the Coronavirus highlights the fragility of life. This fragility, however, is part of our everyday life experience. We love someone then lose them, we enjoy good health then experience illness, we savour time with our children only to watch them grow up and leave home. The problem for us is that our social narrative, the stories we tell ourselves as a society, is so focused on the importance of always achieving, being fit and happy and appearing to be always in control. There is an inherent denial of the reality of death and the fragility of life – we have to appear to be strong and deny our difficult emotions.

Facing our difficult emotions

Susan stressed the importance of overcoming our habituated way of responding to difficult emotions. We typically deny them, turn away from them and, yet, end up stuck in them or “marinating in it” as Rick Hanson, in his Being Well Podcast, describes the resultant state of self-absorption. Susan maintains the critical importance of facing our emotions and owning them, not letting them own us. This involves naming our feelings not in a broad way such as “I’m feeling stressed” but in what she calls a “granular” way or fine-grained identification of exactly what we are feeling, e.g. disappointment, resentment, anger, fear or anxiety. It is only by truly facing and naming our difficult feelings that we can tame them, stop them from owning us. Susan points out that this self-regulation is a key facet of mindfulness.

Being curious about our difficult emotions

This is a form of self-observation and self-exploration. It’s being curious about what our difficult emotions are telling us about ourselves and what we value. Strong emotions are indicators of what is important to us but, at the time, perceived as lacking in our personal situation. Loneliness, for example, is experienced as disconnection from others and tells us how much we value relationships and connection. Social distancing and social isolation, as a result of the Coronavirus, have compounded our feelings of loneliness. So, it’s important to move towards ways of re-connecting, if not face-to face, by phone and online communication.

Developing our sense of agency

Susan argues that in these times when everything seems out of control, it is important to develop “pockets of control” to enable us to develop our sense of agency – our capacity to control some aspect of our life and our immediate environment. These arenas of control can be minute things like deciding what three things you want to do today, developing a menu plan for the week, setting up a daily routine (especially when you are working at home with children present) or changing the way you normally do things to adapt to changing circumstances. It may be that you decide to master the skill of online communication – developing new capacities as well as gaining control. Some people look to regain control and appreciation over their own yard or garden. My wife and I have recently bought a coffee-making machine so that we can better control our expenditure on coffee, increase our control over how our cappuccinos or Piccolos are made and limit our time and social exposure by avoiding having to go out and queue up for a take-way coffee.

Sense of agency can extend to appreciating what we have and savouring it. The Coronavirus attacks our respiratory system, quite literally taking our breath away. We can begin to really value our breathing through various forms of meditation which can ground us in our body in these times of uncertainty and anxiety. As we learn to control our breathing through meditation, we can develop ways to calm ourselves in times of crisis and stress. Our calmness is reflected in our breathing, as is our agitation.

Helping others in need

Besides showing compassion towards ourselves (in owning and accepting our emotions and what they tell us about ourselves), it is important to move beyond self-absorption to thinking of others and undertaking compassionate action towards them. This may mean a simple phone call to an elderly relative who is in lock-down in a retirement village or contacting someone you have not spoken to for a while. Everyday we hear about people showing random acts of kindness and generosity towards others.

For example, our weekend newspaper reported about the wife of a doctor on the frontline of the fight against the Coronavirus. He has decided to live apart from the family for six months to protect them from contracting the virus. Despite her resultant loneliness, his wife is creating homemade meals for him and his fellow health workers and enlisting the support of neighbours, friends and anyone else to do likewise so that these frontline workers don’t have to rely on unhealthy take-aways to sustain them during their very long hours of courageously caring for others. Susan challenges each of us with the question, “How can we help in little and big ways?” – how can we demonstrate being part of a community and being “values-connected”?

Reflection

In times like the present with the Coronavirus impacting every facet of our lives, we begin to wonder how we will all cope. Susan expresses great optimism that the crisis will enable people to be their “best self” and daily we see evidence of this. Susan points to the history of people handling crises with courage, wisdom, compassion and mutual kindness (witness the recent wildfires in Australia). As we grow in mindfulness and learn to face our difficult emotions through meditation and reflection, we can understand better what our emotions are telling us, regain our sense of agency and begin to show compassionate action towards others in need. Mindfulness helps us to be calm, resilient and hopeful.

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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.

Self-Praise for Health and Wellness and to Make a Difference

In a recent email newsletter, Leo Babauta reminded us of the need to “train your mind with praise”. So often we beat up on ourselves for falling short, for failure to perform to expectations (ours and others) or for an oversight or omission. Our negative self-stories take over and cause us to procrastinate and avoid pursuing what is really meaningful in our life. Leo argues that “shame is a bad teacher” – praise for our self serves to reinforce positive thoughts, emotions and behaviour and leads to good outcomes for others. Leo readily shared how he uses self-praise to strengthen the good habits in his life. Elsewhere he freely shared what enabled him to change his life when he was in a bad place.

Christine Wesson reminds us that the benefits of self-praise include growth of self-confidence. She highlights the fact that what we focus on develops and grows (whether positive or negative) and that, if we appreciate ourselves, others take their cue from our demeanour and appreciate us as well.

What can you praise yourself for today?

You can praise yourself for the numerous positive, small things you do in your day such as:

Stopping what you were doing and attentively listening to your child or partner
Being fully present when you give your partner a “good morning” kiss
Writing that piece for your blog or newsletter or service provider
Reading something about an act of kindness
Expressing genuine appreciation to someone – your partner, child, waiter/waitress, taxi driver
Responding promptly to an enquiry from a friend, relative, client or customer
Genuinely sharing your feelings with someone close to you
Making time to be with a friend
Offering to give someone a lift
Letting someone into the traffic line who was obviously at a disadvantage
Making good use of waiting time to focus on awareness (and not your phone)
Stopping to appreciate the beauty of nature – the ocean, sunset, sunrise, trees, flowers or birds
Helping someone in need
Expressing loving kindness towards someone or a group in your meditation
Taking time to exercise – Tai Chi, walking, gym work, playing tennis, going for a run
Resisting the temptation to do something else while taking a phone call – being fully present to the speaker.

Really, the list is endless – there is so much that you do during any one day that is praiseworthy – that makes life better for yourself or someone else. You do not have to realise major accomplishments to make a difference in the world – it is the small things that add up to significant positive outcomes for yourself (and your capacity to be kind to others), your mood (which is contagious), your interactions with others and your close relationships.

Just as it is important to give ourselves praise, it is also vital to provide positive feedback to others in the form of genuine appreciation that is timely and specific – you can make their day with a simple act of praise.

Reflection

It seems to be anti-cultural to praise ourselves – it is a lot easier to be “down on our self”. Self-praise builds self-confidence and helps to reinforce our positive thinking and behaviour. It serves to push aside our negative self-stories. As we grow in mindfulness, we can learn to appreciate and praise what we do that is healthy for our self and makes a difference (however small) in the lives of people we interact with. It does not take a lot of time to praise our self, but the effect is cumulative and flows over to all the arenas of our life (whether home, work or sports activity).

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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.

Building Your Relationship

In an earlier post, I looked at the different levels of connection involved in “love”. Before that, I explored ways to develop a sustainable intimate relationship through mindfulness. The reality is that building a relationship takes time and effort, but the rewards are great. No relationship is perfect and the belief that this is possible, leads to unrealistic expectations that can easily undermine a relationship. Every relationship experiences its ups and downs – its highpoints and low points – as two people try to negotiate the waves of life. Many people offer sound advice on things to do and to avoid in a relationship to enable it to grow and develop. Here are some suggestions that resonate with me:

Express gratitude and appreciation: this is a consistent theme and it is understandable why people recommend this so highly. No one likes being taken for granted, especially in an intimate relationship where there is always substantial give and take. Kira Newman points out that research shows that a lack of gratitude can drag down a relationship. Gratitude can not only help the relationship but it can also be healthy for you and enable you to deal with things that would normally get you down – things like wanting to complain, being bore or feeling overwhelmed by difficulties.
Don’t harbour resentment: Leo Babauta suggests that resentment is one of seven deadly sins that can kill off a relationship. Resentment can eat away at us and cloud our thinking as well as undermine our health and wellbeing. Leo offers ways to deal with resentment in a relationship in his discussion of the deadly sins. In a previous post, I offered a process of in-depth reflection designed to reduce resentment.
Challenge your unrealistic expectations: in the early stages of a relationship, the other person seems to be perfect (our perceptions can be clouded by the honeymoon stage of love). As time goes on, we begin to notice words and actions that we find annoying or upsetting. If we dwell unduly on these unmet expectations, they can outweigh our positive experiences in the relationship. Leo suggests that unrealistic expectations of perfection in our partner and our relationship can be the seeding ground for resentment. He argues that a foundational unrealistic expectation is wanting the other person to fulfill our lives – be the source of our personal fulfillment. He argues that it is important to find our fulfillment within our self and bring to the relationship a person who fully shows up in their life.
Comprehensive and regular communication with your partner: Leo reaffirms the views of many people that communication is “the cornerstone of a good relationship”. He suggests that this communication should not only cover what we appreciate in our partner but, in a kind and courageous way, involve sharing our resentments, jealousies or unfilled expectations that may arise over time in a relationship.

Reflection

It is so easy for a relationship “to go off the rails” and many people who have been able to sustain a long-term relationship, readily admit to the times when they experienced “darkness” or deep dissatisfaction in their relationship. The suggestions in this post can help to move us out of the dark and into the light again. If we can grow in mindfulness as we pursue our personal fulfillment, we can bring to the relationship a deep sense of gratitude, an enlightened self-awareness, a capacity for reflection-in-action (to prevent unnecessary escalation of a conflict), the resilience to meet relationship challenges and the ability to sustain the effort and the lifelong learning required to enrich our relationship. Developing our relationship will enable us to reap the rewards of companionship, mutual respect, love and a deep sense of psychological safety.

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Image by Foundry Co 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.

Developing Sustainable Intimate Relationships through Mindfulness

Wendy Strgar, intimate relationship expert and author, stresses the role of mindfulness as a pathway to developing a sustainable intimate relationship. In her books and blog she openly shares the ups and downs, troughs and deep valleys, of the 30 plus years of her relationship with her husband. Her blog, Making Love Sustainable, has a category of posts devoted to mindfulness. Wendy’s first book, Love That Works: A Guide to Enduring Intimacy, highlights developing intimate relationships as a learning journey for both partners. Her latter book which provides a guide to awakening and sustaining intimate relationships focuses on “deep presence” and “attention” as key ingredients of a sustainable and rich intimate life. I will draw on this latter book to share some of Wendy’s insights into how to sustain an intimate relationship through mindfulness.

Mindfulness for developing and sustaining an intimate relationship

There are very clear lessons in Wendy’s second book on sustaining intimate relationships that link directly to the nature of mindfulness as defined by Jon Kabat-Zin and the definition provided by Diana Winston. Here are some key points that Wendy makes about developing and sustaining an intimate relationship:

Paying attention: Wendy’s longest chapter is devoted to this topic which she considers makes the difference between “fleeting pleasure and lasting happiness” in a relationship. Her broader focus for a discussion of attention is being fully engaged in something that you love, that enriches you and makes you fully yourself. A narrower focus that she emphasises is paying attention to your thoughts about yourself and your partner – since our thoughts create our reality. In practice, this means dealing with negative self-stories on the one hand and developing a growing consciousness of how we think about our partner (a neglected area of personal inquiry). As we have mentioned previously, “we are not our thoughts” nor is our partner solely what we think they are.
Being present: Wendy emphasises presence and being in the moment as key ways to communicate love and respect in an intimate relationship. If our mind is continuously wandering and we are lost in thought (about our “to-do list” for example), we cannot be truly present to the other person. In her blog post, Gifting Your Real Presence, she discusses the relationship benefits of being fully present and ways to achieve real presence.
Deep listening: the art of deep listening involves both paying attention and being present. Wendy suggests that these aspects in combination develop the capacity for “full-body attention” and enable our partner to “feel truly heard”. This art of listening requires that we do not “try to solve the other person’s problems or to steer the conversation” to something about ourselves and our achievements (to avoid the emotive content of the conversation). In Wendy’s view, “attentive listening” serves to “enliven our intimate connection”.
Being non-judgemental: it is very easy to become obsessed with the negative spiral of identifying our partner’s faults and deficiencies (often to defend our own position or our sense of self-worth). We can get into the negative habit of highlighting their lack of congruence – the inconsistency between their words (particularly their advice to us) and their actions. Again, paying attention to our thoughts about our partner will surface this tendency to judge and/or project our negative traits onto our intimate partner.
Developing the intention to focus on the relationship: Wendy suggests that an intimate relationship should be viewed as a container or environment that sustains “an atmosphere hospitable to love” (and intimacy). This entails focusing on cultivating the relationship rather than the singular pursuit of our own needs at our partner’s expense or subservience to the assumed needs of our partner out of a sense of obligation. Focusing on the relationship could also mean exploring the “unwritten rules” in the relationship. When we focus on cultivating the relationship atmosphere we can also think of the analogy of a garden. Wendy suggests an intimate relationship needs the fertile soil of “showing up” in the relationship (translates to “sharing”), the pure water of setting aside time for intimacy, and the fresh air of clear and unambiguous communication.
Bringing openness and curiosity to the relationship: this aspect lines up with Diana Winston’s explanation of mindfulness. This entails a readiness to learn about our-self-in-the-relationship (through self-observation) and to get to know and understand our partner intimately – including their needs and preferences, communication style and their energy pattern.

Reflection

Developing a sustainable intimate relationship involves a lifetime pursuit of learning and focused intention to cultivate a loving environment for the relationship (rather than just accepting established patterns of saying and doing things which may be injurious to sustainability). As we grow in mindfulness, we can learn to pay attention, be fully present, listen deeply, observe non-judgmentally and develop self-awareness and an unadulterated awareness of our partner (not contaminated by our unfulfilled need for attention derived from a deficient childhood). Being mindful in an intimate relationship does not involve losing our self in the relationship but finding our self through the relationship. It entails showing up fully in our life to enrich the relationship and engender intimacy through mutual appreciation and gratitude.

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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.

Developing Kindness through Meditation

Neuroscientists tell us that we become what we focus on because the act of focusing and paying attention creates new or deepened neural pathways in our brain. So if we are constantly obsessed with criticism – finding fault – then this stance begins to pervade our whole life, and nothing will ever satisfy us. So too if we develop kindness through meditation, our thoughts and actions become kinder towards ourselves and others.

Diana Winston, Director of Mindfulness Education at the Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC) at UCLA, offers a specific guided meditation designed to develop kindness. This meditation podcast is one of the weekly podcasts offered by Diana or one of her colleagues on a weekly basis through MARC – drawing on personal experience, dedicated research and the wisdom of the global mindfulness community. The kindness meditation as with most MARC meditations begins with being grounded and then moves to offering kindness to ourselves followed by kindness to others.

Becoming grounded in meditation

There are multiple ways to become grounded – becoming focused, still and fully present. Often, we can start with deep breathing to enable our body and mind to relax and increase awareness of our bodily sensations. This enables our focus to move inwards and away from the distractions and intensity of the day – away from the anxiety, negative thoughts and worries associated with meeting deadlines, doing presentations, dealing with conflict or challenging interactions with colleagues or salespeople in stores and supermarkets.

Once we gain some sense of balance and ease with deep breathing, we can move on to undertake a body scan. This entails progressively noticing the various parts of our body and related bodily sensations, releasing any tension and tightness as we progress. We can observe the firmness of our feet on the floor, straightness of our back, weight of our thighs on the seat, the pressure on our back from the chair and the tingling and warmth from energy flow in our fingers. Observation will lead to awareness of tension which we can release as we go – tautness in our shoulders and arms, rigidity in our stomach, stiffness in our neck or tightness in our jaw, forehead or around the eyes. It is important to focus on tension release and not seek to work out why we are so uptight or tense or, even more importantly, to avoid “beating up” on ourselves or being unkind towards our self because of the “failing” or deficiency” represented by our tension.

Finding our anchor in meditation

The next stage of the meditation is to find an anchor that we can continuously return to in the event of distractions or loss of focus – an anchor to stop us from being carried away by the tide of our thoughts or emotions. An anchor is a personal choice – what works for one person, may not work for another. Typically people choose their breath, sounds in the room or some physical contact point.

You can focus in on your breath – bringing your attention to where you most readily experience breathing – in your chest, through your nose or in your abdomen. For instance, you can increase your awareness of the rise and fall of your abdomen with each breath and choose to rest in the space between your in-breath and out-breath.

Another possible anchor is listening to the sounds in your room – listening without interpreting, not trying to identify the nature or source of a sound and avoiding assigning a feeling, positive or negative, to the sound. You can develop a personal preference for using your “room tone” as your anchor.

Choosing a physical contact point in your body is a useful anchor because it enables you to ground yourself wherever you happen to be – whether at work or home or travelling. It can help you to turn to awareness rather than your phone whenever you have waiting time. An example is to focus on the firmness of your feet on the ground, the floor of your room or the floor of your car (when it is not moving!). My personal preference is to anchor myself by joining my fingers together and feeling the sensations of warmth, energy and strength that course through the points of contact of the fingers.

Whatever you choose as an anchor, the purpose is to be enable you to return your attention to the focus of your meditation and, in the process, build your awareness muscle. As Diana reminds us, “minds do wander” – we can become “lost in thought”, distracted by what’s happening around us, planning our day, worrying about an important meeting, thinking of the next meal, analysing a political situation or indulging in any one of numerous ways that we “live in our minds”.

Throughout the process of grounding, it is important to be kind to our self – not berating our self for inattention or loss of focus, not assigning negative labels to our self, such as “weak”, “distractible”, or any other derogatory term.

Kindness meditation

The kindness meditation begins with focusing on someone who is dear to us – our life partner, a family member, a work colleague or a close friend. Once you have brought the person into focus, the aim is to extend kind intentions to them – you might wish them peace and tranquillity, protection and safety, good health and strength, happiness and equanimity, the ease of wellness or a combination of these desirable states.

You can now envisage yourself receiving similar or different expressions of kind intentions from the same person. This can be difficult to do – so we need to be patient with this step and allow our self to be unsuccessful at the start (without self-criticism or unkindness towards our self). We can try to become absorbed in, and fully present to, the positive feeling of being appreciated and loved. Drawing on our memories of past expressions of kindness by the focal person towards us, can help us overcome the barriers to self-kindness.

You can extend your meditation by focusing your loving kindness meditation on others, particularly those people you have difficulty with or are constantly in conflict with. We can also extend our kindness meditation by forgiving our self and others for hurt that has been caused.

Reflection

Kindness meditation helps us to grow in mindfulness – to become more aware of others, the ways we tend to diminish our self, our bodily sensations and our thoughts and feelings. It assists us to develop self-regulation – learning to maintain focus and attention, controlling our anger and criticism (of our self and others) and being open to opportunities and possibilities. Through the focus on kindness, we can become kinder to our self and others (even those we have difficulty with).

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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.

Ways to Develop Gratitude

In a previous post I offered a specific gratitude meditation presented by Diana Winston through the MARC weekly meditation podcasts. I also mentioned the practice of developing personal reminders to appreciate some aspect of your life – I mentioned in my case using mistakes in tennis (of which there are many) to savour the capacity to run, hit the ball and engage in social activity with friends. Here I would like to discuss different forms of meditation and mindfulness practices that can also assist in developing a deeper sense of gratitude that can increase our enjoyment of life and improve our relationships.

Gratitude meditations and mindfulness practices

Some of these meditations or practices can become part of your daily life or employed on a one-off basis. The important thing is to incorporate some form of gratitude practice on a regular basis because as Jon Kabat-Zin reminds us, “we become what we pay attention to”. So, focusing on gratitude makes us grateful. Here are some relevant meditations/practices:

Loving-kindness meditation – this form of meditation can enable us to appreciate ourselves as we are (rather than wishing we were different) and the people who positively impact our lives. Jon Kabat-Zin provides an all-embracing loving-kindness meditation that extends also to people who may have hurt us and to whoever in the world is in need. Expressing kindness to others engenders appreciation for what we have.
Journalling – there are many forms of gratitude journal that can be used as part of your mindfulness practice. Jason Marsh provides some sound, research-based tips for keeping a gratitude journal – including the benefit of regular, rather daily gratitude journalling. Ryder Carroll in his Bullet Journal Method (pp. 185-187) identifies ways to incorporate gratitude in his approach to journalling. Rick Hanson suggests that a gratitude journal can focus on three simple aspects of your life – things that I am grateful for, people that I appreciate and events that I value. Our journalling can also cover the people in our lives who have imparted their knowledge and experience as mentors, guides, parents, carers or coaches – in Aboriginal terms, it involves expressing appreciation for a Goondeen, a wise person who is a source of wisdom and understanding.
Sharing your gratitude – Tara Brach suggests engaging a gratitude buddy to support your practice of expressing gratitude. She recommends developing the practice of regularly sharing your expressions of gratitude with one other person, e.g. by email or text. Your buddy can support your positive intentions through regular contact.
Appreciating the moment – Nicole Bayes-Fleming offers meditations for “resting in the flow” (19 minutes) and savouring the moment through your senses (5 minutes). These gratitude practices help to displace harmful thoughts and to build appreciation for the simple things in life. Chris Walsh encourages the practice of mindful check-in, particularly during transitions in life, as a way to tap into the benefits of being grateful (including cultivating resilience).
Developing sympathetic joy – this process replaces envy with valuing and rejoicing in the success of others. Johann Hari describes a form of loving-kindness meditation that can develop sympathetic joy by savouring the achievements of others as well your own.
Somatic meditation – developing awareness of your body and bodily sensations. There are various forms of somatic meditation, e.g. lower-belly breathing and body scan. Somatic meditation has proven to be particularly powerful in developing gratitude in times of difficulty.

Reflection

As we grow in mindfulness, we can become aware of the many people and things in our life that we can be grateful for. Focusing regularly on these positive aspects of our daily life can displace negative thoughts and engender the many proven benefits of gratitude.

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Image by Susan Cipriano 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.

Developing Gratitude through Meditation

Diana Winston recently conducted a meditation podcast on the theme of Gratitude, prompted by the imminent celebration of Thanksgiving in the USA. Diana, Director of Mindfulness Education at MARC, observed that as people grow in mindfulness, they become more appreciative of different aspects of their life and work. Often, we operate on autopilot and as a result so much of our life passes us by – we are not conscious of what is happening for us or how we got to where we arrived. There is so much of our life that we take for granted, especially the simplest things like being able to breathe, walk, listen and converse. Through meditation we can become more focused on, and appreciative of, the present moment.

The benefits of gratitude

The benefits of gratitude are so great that it is well worthwhile consciously building appreciation as an integral part of your life. Research in this area consistently shows that gratitude contributes substantially to the development of positive emotions such as happiness, resilience, and joy as well as the displacement of negative or “toxic emotions” such as resentment and anger that can gradually erode your sense of equanimity and contentment.

Developing gratitude through a personal reminder

It Is usually when we lose something that we begin to really appreciate what we have. For instance, one of the discs in my back collapsed in 1997, so for 18 months I was in extreme pain from sciatica – having difficulty standing and walking (and being unable to play my favourite sport of tennis). Now when I am playing social tennis, I try to appreciate the fact that I can run, hit the ball and participate in rallies. I am trying to make each mistake that I make a prompt or reminder to appreciate what I can do, rather than focus on what I did wrong when attempting to hit the ball. Developing a relevant, personal reminder (based on your life experience) is one way to build gratitude and appreciation into your daily life.

Developing gratitude through meditation

Another way to consciously develop gratitude is to practice a gratitude meditation. Diana offers one way to approach this in her meditation podcast. The steps involved are:

Grounding yourself in your body through being conscious of your posture (the pressure of your body on the chair and your feet on the floor), and undertaking a body scan exploring points of tightness and releasing any tension that exists in places like your shoulders, jaw or arms. The grounding can be strengthened by closing your eyes or looking down and/or touching your fingers together and feeling the sensation of your bodily energy flow.
Establishing an anchor for your meditation – this can be the experience of your natural breathing process wherever it is readily felt by you (in your chest or abdomen or through your nose), listening to sounds in your room or focusing on a particular body sensation (such as your fingers touching or your feet on the ground).
Appreciating the present moment – Diana introduces a 15-minute period of stillness and silence in this next stage of the meditation. The basic approach is to focus on your anchor, appreciate that you can experience the positive benefits of your personal anchor (breathing, listening or feeling) and naming any distraction (e.g. “thinking”, “avoiding”, “wandering”, “complaining”) before restoring your focus to your anchor. Instead of beating up on yourself for being distracted (a normal part of the human condition), you can appreciate your capacity to be aware that you have lost your focus, that you have developed an anchor to return to, that you have the capacity to restore your focus and that, in the process, you are building your awareness muscle. [I began to appreciate my capacity to focus on an anchor after I conducted a mindfulness session in my manager development course. One of the course participants commented that the meditation component did nothing for her because her mind was so agitated that she could not still her mind at all. This person suffered from severe anxiety as a result of post-traumatic stress. Fortunately, in line with the guidelines for trauma-sensitive mindfulness, I had offered everyone the choice of not participating in the exercise if they did not want to or were unable to for whatever reason.]
Free association – Diana suggests that you let your mind focus on something or someone that you appreciate in the present moment. If you are in an intimate relationship, you could appreciate, or be grateful for, the opportunities to share your successes or failures, the times of quietness spent comfortably together, the chance to go walking together in a pleasant environment, being able to enjoy a movie or a special location with each other, the pleasant feelings of friendship, sharing ideas and plans or the sense of support and unconditional love.

Reflection

There are so many things to appreciate in our lives and to be truly grateful for – many of which we take for granted. For instance, we can savour friendship, our achievements and rewards, the development of our children or, counterintuitively, savour being alone or experiencing boredom. As we grow in mindfulness through daily personal reminders or formal gratitude meditations, we can develop an ever-present sense of appreciation and accrue the desirable benefits of being grateful.

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Image by Susan Cipriano 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.

How to Cope with Uncertainty

Recently, Diana Winston offered a meditation podcast on the topic, Dealing with Uncertainty. This was at a time of heightened uncertainty generated by the California wildfires that were threatening people’s lives and homes. Uncertainty arises when we do not know what will happen in the future, we have a sense of being out of control and we fear that the future holds potentially damaging outcomes for us physically, emotionally, financially or socially. Diana emphasised that uncertainty is an integral aspect of the world we live in today – in our increasingly global environment and resultant interdependence, many things are uncontrollable and beyond our capacity to influence.

Diana reminds us that we cannot deny the uncertainty of our reality, but we can learn to manage its impact on our lives – on our thinking, feelings, behaviour and relationships. Our anxiety in the face of this ever-encroaching uncertainty is exacerbated by our brain’s negative bias – often fearing the worst to enable us to prepare for fight or flight. We tend to anticipate negative outcomes from many activities such as a medical diagnosis and we begin to worry in anticipation of this unwelcome outcome. Diana maintains that meditation can provide a place of refuge when we experience uncertainty and the associated fear and anxiety – a secure retreat away from the waves of uncertainty that besiege us.

Meditation as an anchor in a turbulent sea

Diana offers several steps in her guided mediation for dealing with anxiety (MARC, UCLA). The meditation practice is designed to engender a sense of solace when uncertainty seems overwhelming:

Adopt a comfortable position and allow your body to begin to experience relaxation.
Focus attention on your body beginning with your breath as it courses through you. You can ground this attention by focusing on the expansion and contraction of your chest or abdomen.
Feel the sensation of your breath – coolness, energy flow, evenness.
Choose an anchor – e.g. your breath, sounds in the room or a bodily sensation such as tingling in your fingers when they are pressed together, or the feel of your feet placed firmly on the floor. You can then return to your anchor whenever you become unfocused or distracted by thoughts or sensations such as an itch or pain in a part of your body.
Notice any wandering off task and name what is happening e.g. lost in my thoughts; feeling anxious. Once you have named what is happening, return to your anchor.
Notice any sensation of discomfort or disturbing thought – give it some space and pay attention to it with kindness. You can change your posture if this helps or, alternatively, accept what is happening and plan to take action later, e.g. put some dermatitis cream on an itch.
Express appreciation for your safety, protection and wellness.
Extend your sense of gratitude to people engaged in making others safe and protecting them from harm, e.g. volunteers, the police and firefighters.
Focus on the groundedness of your body, take a deep breath and return to awareness of your surroundings.

Reflection

Meditation can help us to grow in mindfulness – awareness of our external reality and internal reactions such as fear and anxiety in the face of uncertainty. Meditation provides a refuge and a source of solace in the face of life’s uncertainty. The anchor we develop through meditation can serve us well throughout our daily lives, at work or at home. Mindfulness can help us scare away the darkness of uncertainty so that we can achieve what the singer, Passenger, suggests:

Feel, feel like you still have a choice
If we all light up, we can scare away the dark.

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Image by Jerzy Górecki 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.

Developing Trust and Your Sense of Belonging

Tara Brach in a video presentation on Basic Trust highlights the importance of trust and a sense of belonging in our lives. She stresses the role of trust in shaping our view of ourselves, the quality of our relationships and our perception of the world around us. Tara contrasts this positive sense with the distrust and sense of separation that can pervade our view of ourselves, others we encounter and the world at large.

The sense of separation versus the sense of belonging

Tara suggests that our sense of separation is part of our evolutionary condition – we develop a sense of our separate self very early on. However, our culture and our parental influences can potentially drive a wedge between ourselves and our sense of belonging. If in our early stage of development, our needs are not recognised or met, we begin to sense that we are “not good enough” – we begin to feel separation and distrust. Our culture stresses the importance of “making it” – whether in terms of economic status, job role, relationship status or intelligence levels. If we have not made it in terms of cultural expectations, then we feel we are not a genuine part of our group or community.

If we are different at school – failing to fall into the narrow band of children gifted with left-brain intelligence – we can feel less than others, even though we may excel at other forms of intelligence, such as spatial intelligene or musical intelligence. If our personality is different from the dominant personality type in our work organisation, we can feel less than others or even a “misfit”.

There are many ways we can receive messages about our separateness or not being good enough to belong. Many religions reinforce our “sinfulness” or unworthiness, highlighting what is deficient in us rather than what is good and kind in our nature. As we feel a sense of separateness, we tend to build up our defences to protect our fragile ego and this can lead to a tendency to only see the defects in others, to become blinded to what is good in them.

A sense of belonging builds trust

Much of what we hear about ourselves and reinforce in our own narratives, is that we do not belong. However, if we can develop a sense of our own goodness and that of others we can learn to trust ourselves and those around us and be less ego-driven and self-protective. Tara suggests a brief meditation to highlight our sense of belonging that involves several core questions:

To what extent do we belong to our bodies (accepting them as they are)?
How much are we in touch with our own heart and kind feelings?
How strong is our feeling of belonging in our significant relationship?
Do we experience a sense of belonging in our family?
How much are we connected to the people around us, in our work or our community?

Developing a sense of trust and belonging

The absence of trust impacts our sense of belonging. However, we can build our sense of trust in ourselves and others by meditating on (1) our inherent goodness and (2) the goodness in others. We can become aware of our inherent goodness by focusing on our appreciation of beauty in nature, in music, or in art; by a sense of gratitude for kindnesses extended to ourselves or others; by experiencing a collective sense of joy when someone overcomes adversity; or by valuing the connection with family or friends.

Our sense of our own goodness can be realised through the experience of positive emotions through music or musical performances. We can perceive our own thoughtfulness when we go out of our way to help someone in need. Our essential goodness is evident when we appreciate when someone else has a achieved mastery of some skill or activity. It is at times like these that we feel “at home” with ourselves and who we are.

Tara provides a brief guided meditation (at the 31.55min. mark) that helps us to feel good about ourselves and identify the goodness in others around us. She strongly suggests that we share our appreciation of others with them directly – we all need reinforcement of our essential goodness to build our trust and sense of belonging.

As we grow in mindfulness through meditation on the inherent goodness of ourselves and others, we experience a freedom from the binds of negative self-evaluation and become more open to acts of kindness and creative use of our core skills and knowledge in the service of others. Meditation helps us to “lift the veil” on our goodness and to see ourselves as we really are in our essence.

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

Image source: courtesy of johnhain on Pixabay

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.

Loving-Kindness Meditation: A Form of Gratitude

Jon Kabat-Zinn provides an extended loving-kindness meditation that incorporates gratitude for the love of the people in your life who are close to you. It also involves self-love and kindness towards others who may have hurt you in the past.

Jon makes the point that engaging in loving-kindness meditation on a regular basis equips us to deal with the ups and downs of life. It especially enables us to tone down our anger or rage towards another person who may have hurt us. Our expression of gratitude and kindness helps us to restore equanimity in our lives.

Feeling the love

The loving-kindness meditation offered by Jon begins with capturing the essence of the love that a really close person in our lives shows toward us. It involves basking in the ways that this unconditional love is expressed towards us while appreciating what it means to be loved for who we are. Once we have captured these feelings of being loved, we can express kindness towards this person by repeating Jon’s words in a conscious, meaningful and personal way:

May they be safe and protected and free from inner and outer harm. May they be happy and contented. May they be healthy and whole to whatever degree possible. May they experience ease of well-being.

Loving-kindness towards yourself

Jon’s meditation moves onto expressing loving-kindness towards yourself. This involves moving beyond any negative thoughts, self-criticism or self-loathing and being open to loving yourself as you are, taking your cue from those who love you unconditionally.

It is often difficult to embrace self-love and kindness towards yourself but the practice develops a healthy self-regard that enables you to rise above the thoughts that would otherwise drag you down. The meditation involves recognition of your basic humanity. By using the above-mentioned kindness phrases towards yourself, you are wishing yourself safety, happiness, good health and overall well-being. In other words, you are being kind to yourself.

Loving-kindness towards someone who has hurt you

In the meditation that Jon provides, he progresses to having us think about someone who has actually hurt us in some way. He is not asking us to forgive that person but to acknowledge their basic humanity, just as we have done for our self. This entails moving beyond the hurt to expressing kindness to the person involved through using the kindness phrases provided above. This loving-kindness meditation helps to dissolve our hurt and anger and to see the person as connected to us through our universal humanity.

Expanding the field of loving-kindness

Jon suggests that the field of loving-kindness can be limitless. We can expand our focus in the meditation to include people in the immediate world around us or in the broader world – focusing on individuals or groups, e.g. expressing loving-kindness to people who are experiencing the trauma of a hurricane or to volunteers helping to fight poverty.

You do not have to extend your field of awareness during this form of meditation – you can choose to restrict your focus at any point. You may find, particularly with an extended meditation, that you become easily distracted. In this case, as Jon Kabat-Zinn suggests, you can notice your distracting thoughts and imagine them as bubbles that burst as they reach the surface of boiling water or burst as a result of you popping them.

Loving-kindness meditation helps you grow in awareness of, and gratitude towards, those around with whom you come into contact on a daily basis. It opens you up to appreciating the significant others in your life and to extending positive thoughts to the broader community, so that your awareness of your connectedness expands. This form of meditation can also help to reduce anger towards others who may have hurt you – it enables you to expand your response ability in the process. As you grow in mindfulness through loving-kindness meditation you increase your awareness of others and empathy towards them.

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

Image source: courtesy of rawpixel on Pixabay

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.