courage – Grow Mindfulness

Living at the Edge: Empathy

Joan Halifax author, Buddhist teacher, anthropologist and Zen priest has written a profound book on what she calls the “Edge States” – “five internal and interpersonal states” that she maintains are the foundation of compassionate action and living a courageous life. They are described by her as “Edge States” because they can lead to positive living and constructive social contribution or become harmful and cause damage to others. Joan describes the Edge States in her book, Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet. Her book covers each of the five edge states in detail – altruism, respect, integrity, engagement and empathy. In this blog post, I will address Joan’s views on empathy as an Edge State.

Empathy vs Compassion

Joan contends that empathy is not compassion. In her words, empathy is “feeling into” another – experiencing their pain and suffering. Compassion, on the other hand, is not only “feeling for” another but aspiring to take some form of action that will be of benefit to the person you are feeling for – this can be any form of compassionate action. Empathy underpins compassion and is a necessary internal state if we are to avoid becoming totally self-absorbed, small-minded or even narcissistic.

Three forms of empathy – somatic, emotional and cognitive

Joan describes three forms of empathy and illustrates them from her own life experience. The first of these is somatic empathy – where resonance with another’s suffering or pain is felt in some form of bodily manifestation. It can take the form of a strong physical sensation such as feeling punched in the stomach, feeling faint or being unsteady. Joan mentions that somatic empathy can occur on a regular basis between people who are close or in frequent contact. She mentions, for example, the uncanny ability of her mountain guide/minder in the Himalayas who became so “physically attuned” to her that he could sense if she was about to fall over and catch her to prevent it happening. Joan indicated that some people are hypersensitive to the somatic experience of others and she mentioned Dr. Joel Salinas who has what is called “mirror-touch synesthesia” – an extreme form of somatic identification that he has to consciously manage for his own preservation and the benefit of his patients.

Emotional empathy, the second form of empathy described by Joan, involves sharing the emotions being experienced by another person – becoming “inhabited by another’s feelings”. When emotional empathy is at a healthy level, it can help us to be more caring, more conscious of connectedness to others and more willing to take compassionate action. However, if we become too closely identified with the emotions of others we can tip over the edge into personal distress, burnout and “blunting” (a state where we no longer “feel for” others as a way to protect ourselves).

The third form of empathy described by Joan is cognitive empathy. This is explained in terms of “perspective taking” – in other words inhabiting the mindset or mind view of another, often described as “standing in another’s shoes”. Again this form of empathy can be enabling for ourselves as well as others or lead to our being captured by another’s way of seeing the world (as in cults or the experience of the German people at the time of Hitler). People’s propensity to adopt another’s world view can be used as a form of manipulation. However, when employed positively it involves attunement to another leading to a form of resonance. Joan illustrates this in describing an experience of being confronted by an angry Algerian soldier at the Algeria-Mali border when she was on an archaeological trip by herself. Her ability to take on his perspective, instead of “othering” him and viewing herself as a victim, enabled her to gain safe passage. Joan also recounts the story of Lieutenant Colonel Hughes and his instructions to his troops in Iraq near the holy Imam Ali Mosque to “take a knee” (and point their rifles to the ground) as a form of successful perspective taking that saved many lives when the troops were confronted by an angry crowd (who misunderstood the American’s intentions).

Over the edge – empathic distress

Empathic distress occurs when we become too identified – somatically, emotionally and/or cognitively – with another person’s suffering or pain. We lose the capacity to separate ourselves from the other person’s experience and in the process become disoriented and unbalanced. Joan describes a number of situations where she was on the edge of empathic distress but was able to recognise her response for what it was and pull back from the edge.

In one situation, involving a young girl with severe burns who had been carried by her father to the Upaya Nomads Medical Clinic in Nepal, Joan found that her own heart rate was racing and dropping, her breath was “shallow and rapid” and her skin became “cold and clammy”. She was momentarily overwhelmed with her perception of the little girl’s suffering and pain. Joan indicated that at the time her “hyper-attunement ” with the child was causing her to spiral out of control and into deep distress physically (almost fainting) and emotionally. Fortunately, through her social engagement activities (including being with the dying), she was able to draw on a process to help her restore her balance and control.

Moving away from the empathic edge – overcoming empathic distress

Joan was able to draw on a process she had developed to help people move from empathy to compassion, to move away from the edge represented by empathic distress. Her process involves the mnemonic, GRACE. This stands for:

G – gathering our attention by refocusing on our breath or our feet on the ground (restoring our groundedness)
R – recalling (bringing to mind again) our intention for being with the other person in their situation
A – attuning to ourself and the other – being fully aware of our own bodily sensations and what the other person is demonstrating (in the case of the little girl, this was resilience).
C – considering how we can serve in the situation without taking control over others or pursuing our own needs
E – engagement and disengagement –adopting an appropriate means of engagement (e.g. engaging in a loving-kindness meditation focused on the other’s wellbeing) and being able to end the interaction when desirable to do so.

Joan makes the point that if we learn to identify empathic distress, we will be better able to manage our responses and restore our balance instead of experiencing burnout, with its physical, emotional and moral degradation. She likens empathic distress to vicarious suffering and highlights the fact that people in the helping professions and caregivers are prone to experiencing this depleted state.

Developing empathy

Joan describes four practices that support the development of empathy – attuning to our bodily sensations, (e.g., body scan), deep listening, stewarding empathy and “rehumanization”. Her description of deep listening is especially insightful and demonstrates her willingness to be with another person fully. She maintains that “really hearing another person requires us to listen with body, heart and mind” while being aware of how our personal experiences and recollections can act as filters, thus distorting the message of the other person. By stewarding empathy, Joan means that we have to be able to cope with the dilemma of our life – that we are both connected to everyone and, at the same time, separate – we cannot become totally identified with the other or we lose ourselves in the process. This requires practice and the GRACE approach is one way to develop this capacity. Lastly, rehumanization according to the work of John Paul Lederach, involves adopting a moral stance “to see the other as a person first, to see ourselves in others, and to recognise our common humanity”.

Reflection

I have experienced empathic distress on a number of occasions. In one particular instance, I was driving across the Story Bridge in Brisbane when I heard a woman on the radio talking about her suffering and grief. I can’t recall the detail of the story but I became more and more strongly identified with her emotions. I can clearly recall my somatic empathy in the form of a sense of dizziness and disorientation while driving. Fortunately, I intuitively knew to turn off the radio and refocus my attention on the act of driving the car and paying attention to the road and traffic.

On other occasions, I have experienced hyper-attunement to someone who is suffering extreme stress from working for a narcissistic manager. Because I have been involved in directly helping a manager and their unit in such a situation, I have great difficulty stopping myself from taking on another’s distress and suffering when they are in a similar situation.

Joan’s GRACE model will be particularly helpful for me in the future. As I grow in mindfulness through mindfulness meditation, reflection and mantra meditations, I can increase my self-awareness of when I am experiencing empathic distress and have the insight and courage to adopt the GRACE model so that I do not fall over the empathic edge.

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Image by Mirosław i Joanna Bucholc 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.

Realising Our Full Potential

Kimberly Snyder recently released her new book, You Are More Than You Think You Are: Practical Enlightenment for Everyday Life. While the book is replete with practical everyday advice and personal anecdotes, it is essentially a call to realise our full potential. In this sense it resonates strongly with Kute Blackson’s call to take the next step to your life purpose.

Kimberly’s focus is on becoming your “True Self” in line with the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda – Hindu monk, guru and yogi who spent his last 32 years in America. He became incredibly influential in the US, so much so that Steve Jobs ordered 500 copies of his book, Autobiography of a Yogi, for distribution at his own memorial service. Yogananda is famous for teaching people globally about meditation and Kriya Yoga.

Early in her book, Kimberly offers a simple definition of “True Self” as the “stable, loving, honest, courageous, peaceful, and creative intelligence” that each of us has within us. She then proceeds with insight and humour (reminiscent of Yogananda’s wit) to unravel what it means to live our True Self and offers practical ways to achieve this state. Along the way, she reinforces the power of meditation and mindfulness to build courage, generate peace and tranquility and release creativity.

Steps along the way

Kimberly offers steps to achieving our True Self and provides a series of practical meditations/reflections to aid us on the journey. The steps act as a series of reinforcements of Yogananda’s message and a way to put his teachings into practice. She asserts that his teachings respect all religions, irrespective of their geographical or traditional origins, and, at the same time, respect agnostic belief systems. In Kimberly’s view, Yogananda’s teachings (centred on yoga) can lead to enrichment of anyone’s life – providing a holistic approach to elevating mind, body and soul.

Central to Yogananda’s teaching and Kimberly’s practice is Kriya Yoga that she describes as a scientific method that involves not just the physical but also the mental, emotional and spiritual arenas. It is an integrating force that enables a person to achieve energy alignment – aligning external activity with an evolving inner landscape. In her book, Kimberly addresses the key principles of Kriya Yoga and provides practices to help the reader internalise the desired “soul qualities”.

Fearlessness: taking the first step towards our full potential

Kimberly describes fearlessness as a foundation principle enabling us to move inexorably towards our full potential. She maintains that “fearlessness lets you walk in a straight line through the forest of life” – avoiding detours, byways or dead ends that result from fear. It is often fear that prevents us from realising our potential – initiating an endeavour, making a contribution to our community or providing a service to others in line with our core knowledge and skills.

We can be disempowered by our fear of failure, of the unknown, of uncertainty and/or of our inability to control outcomes. Fearlessness enables us to rise above these fears and tap into our innate qualities of insight, courage and resilience.

Kimberly describes how she accessed Yogananda’s teachings and other sources to enable her to move beyond the panic resulting from her separation with the father of her first child. Fear of not being lovable and of being unable to cope disempowered her until she immersed herself in these teachings and practices, particularly meditation.

She argues that if you spend time in meditation you can get in touch with your inner voice that is aligned to your True Self and provides the inspiration and energy to move forward. She also maintains that the more you are aligned to your True Self, the greater the likelihood of positive outcomes for your endeavours. However, if you are acting out of fear, anger, revenge, envy or obsessive ambition, then your energy will not be aligned with your True Self and your endeavours will ultimately prove unsuccessful, creating all kinds of adverse consequences, both personal and interpersonal.

In her book, Kimberly provides a range of practices to get in touch with our underlying fears – a process she describes as “getting the fears out of the shadows”. She argues that fearlessness creates freedom and enables us to realise “the best version of our life” and our most significant dreams. One particular practice Kimberly encourages involves journalling, starting with writing down your fear. The journalling process then proceeds as a conversation between your Fear and Your Truth and Wisdom (inner voice). Countering the disabling fears with true and wise retorts has the effect of quieting your fearful mind. Kimberly illustrates this with an example conversation.

The conversation could go like this:

Fear: I’m not sure what will happen when I run the mindfulness workshop.

Truth and Wisdom: You can only control the process, not the outcomes.

Fear: But what if the process does not work?

Truth and Wisdom: It will work for some people; others may not be ready for the honesty and self-awareness involved.

Fear: What if some people do not turn up for the second workshop?

Truth and Wisdom: That is a decision that they are free to make; you can only provide the opportunity, review your process and get feedback so you can improve what you are doing (taking their needs into account).

Reflection

Kimberly offers processes and practices to enable us to realise our full potential. She highlights the fact that fear holds us back from achieving what we are capable of – in her words, “we are more than we think we are”. She contends that mindfulness practices, especially meditation and yoga, enable us to identify, confront and overcome our fears so that we can free up our intuition, creativity and courage to align our words and actions with our True Self.

Kimberly asserts that following the teachings of Yogananda, in particular the practice of Kriya Yoga, enabled her to move from totally disabling fear to achieving her potential as a writer, mother, partner and influencer. Before the book discussed here, she wrote other books such as Recipes for Your Perfectly Imperfect Life , The Beauty Detox Solution and Radical Beauty: How to transform yourself from the inside out (with Deepak Chopra).

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Image by jplenio 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.

Take the Next Step to Your Life Purpose

Kute Blackson, presenting during the 2021 The Best Year of Your Life Summit, spoke energetically and insightfully about following your life purpose. His inspirational video podcast was very well received because of its practical and down-to-earth character. People could relate to what he was saying irrespective of their stage of life and their level of clarity about their life purpose. On his website, Kute offers free video training on how to find your purpose.

Key messages

In the video presentation for the Summit, Kute provides several key messages to enable us to be free of negative self-talk and self-doubt and to take the next step for finding and following our life purpose:

Overcome the lies we tell ourselves: Kute suggests that we lie to ourselves to prevent us from taking a step into the unknown. Fear of failure causes us to think of all the things that might go wrong and we take these as givens. As a result, we tend to cling to our comfort zone and procrastinate, and so we fail to take the next step on the road to our life purpose.
Challenge expectations: sometimes what holds us back from realisation of our life purpose are the expectations we place on ourselves or that others, such as our parents, place on us. Kute tells the story of how he tried to live up to his father’s expectations that he become a preacher only to find it was not aligned to his heart’s purpose. He left his father’s ministry to move to Los Angeles with two suitcases and the courage to move beyond other peoples’ expectations. He found his life purpose in helping people to transform their lives by finding their life purpose that aligns with their true self and deeper inner life (what he describes as “soul”).
Let go of the need to know: Kute encourages us to let go of the need to know everything – what will happen if we start on the path, how we will manage if difficulties arise, what we will say and do in particular circumstances. He argues that we do not need to know everything about where our life choices will take us – we need to “trust our soul”, our inner conviction of what we are meant to do and contribute to the welfare and wellness of others. Kimberly Snyder reminds us that we are more than we think we are.
Be conscious of the pain of not taking action: Kurt encourages us to be fully aware of the pain and suffering that we experience if we fail to take action to align with our true purpose (e.g., leave a job or a role and/or begin a new endeavour). Sometimes we hide from this pain and attribute it to what we have to put up with. The pain of not being aligned with our true purpose can take many forms including physical illness (e.g. headaches and fibromyalgia), boredom, a sense of ill-ease, or other emotional reactions. Kute strongly believes that we need to be honest about this pain of inaction as well as face up to the fear that holds us back.
Don’t wait for clarity about life purpose: people can spend their whole life trying to formulate their life purpose with perfect clarity, only to take no action towards realising it. Kute argues that our life purpose will be slowly revealed as we live our lives. If we realise the potential of the present moment and focus there, rather than a idealistic or unrealistic future, we will begin on the path to our purpose. He describes this as “living into life’s purpose”.
Take the next step: Kute maintains that our life purpose unfolds as we live each moment fully. Everything we experience is preparation for our life purpose, including the challenges and difficulties we experience as well as the highs. He encourages us to take the next step in line with the direction of our purpose – “even when you don’t know where you are going”. He suggests we “trust our innate intelligence” and contends that that our soul is pulling you when you “move in the direction of your joy, of what lights you up, of what you love”. So, his exhortation is to set out on the journey of following our life purpose by aligning with what is joyful, energising and rewarding in our life. He contends that “life reveals the next step in the process of living”.

Reflection

Kute asks us to reflect on a number of questions:

What gives you joy?
What are your core skills?
What is stopping you from taking the next step to achieve alignment with your joy and your skills?

At the heart of Kute’s approach is encouragement to surrender – surrendering to our inner voice. He explains this process in his book, The Magic of Surrender: Finding the Courage to Let Go.

Lulu & Mischka capture the essence of this process in their mantra meditation, Metamorphosis from their Horizon Album:

Don’t give up, keep letting go, simply show up, surrendering to the flow

Let yourself be broken, fall into pieces, Trust in the process, your metamorphosis

Let yourself be broken…stop resisting. Relax into this moment, healing unfolding.

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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.

Under the influence of Thich Nhat Hanh

In a prelude to a guided meditation podcast, Remembering Thich Nhat Hanh, Diana Winston spoke with reverence about the life of Thich Nhat Hanh and his global influence. Nhat Hanh, who died aged ninety-five in Vietnam on January 22 2022, was a Zen Master, peace activist, poet and author of over 100 books focused mainly on mindfulness and peace. He established multiple Buddhist communities around the world and is considered the “Father of Western mindfulness”. He exerted a global influence throughout his teaching life conducting numerous retreats and speaking with influencers such as the World Bank, Google and the U.S. Congress.

During the Vietnam war Nhat Hanh introduced the concept of “Engaged Buddhism” and led Buddhist monks in actions designed to help people of Vietnam who were suffering from the drastic effects of the extended conflict and regular bombing. He argued that mindfulness increases our capacity to “see” but that this insight needs to be translated into compassionate action. Nhat Hanh established the Plum Village in France, the largest Buddhist community in the world and an international practice center for followers of his mindfulness approach. The influence of Thich Nhat Hanh is so pervasive that it is not possible to do its credit in this short blog post. However, his teachings and meditations are readily accessible via Plum Village videos on YouTube and his full life history on the Plum Village website.

Guided meditation

Diana Winston, at the outset of her podcast meditation, acknowledged the profound influence that Nhat Hanh had over her mindfulness practice and that of numerous other mindfulness teachers and practitioners around the world. She stressed Nhat Hanh’s influence over the practice of bringing mindfulness into everyday life and emphasised the benefits of mindfulness meditation in terms of stress reduction, overcoming anxiety and depression, managing pain, improving mood and developing a positive mindset and emotions.

After suggesting a comfortable, focused posture, Diana begins the meditation with the encouragement to take a couple of deep breaths, recalling the words of Nhat Hanh “Breathing in, I calm the breath; breathing out, I smile”. She reminds us to identify any points of tension in our body and to soften those points to release the tension.

Next Diana asks us to focus on our breath – the process of breathing, whether the awareness is through the movement of air through our nose or the undulations of our chest or abdomen. This is a passive observation, not trying to control the breath, but following it as it happens naturally in our body.

She then suggests that we focus on the sounds that surround us – again passively, allowing the sounds to reach us without attempting interpretation or evaluation (in terms of pleasant or unpleasant).

Diana maintains that it is only natural for thoughts and feelings to intrude and distract us from our chosen focus. However, she recommends that we use our breath or sounds as our anchor to bring us back to our focus. An alternative is to focus on bodily sensations such as those of our feet on the ground or our fingers touching each other causing tingling, warmth or a sensation of flow. I like to use fingers touching as my anchor and I find that when I am waiting for something (e.g. a traffic light) I can touch my fingers and immediately drop into a breath consciousness that is calming.

Diana observes that there are times when strong feelings will emerge, depending on what is going on in our lives at the time. She suggests that we face these feelings and allow them to manifest without staying absorbed in them. I noted that at one point in the meditation, I experienced a profound sense of sadness precipitated by the distressing events in Ukraine. I was able to stay with the sadness for a time and then restore the focus on my anchor, the sensations in my joined fingers. The period of ten minutes silence at the end of the meditation podcast enabled me to deepen my focus.

Reflection

In her meditation podcast, Diana recalls Thich Nhat Hanh’s comments about death and dying. In his video podcast on the topic, Where do we go when we die?, Nhat Hanh reminds us that cells in our body are dying all the time and new cells are being born – so, death and birth are part of every moment of our life. He maintains that the disintegration of our body at death does not mean we cease to exist. In his view, our words and actions continue to influence others – so, after we die, we continue in all the people who have come under our influence (or will come under our influence in the future). He indicated that when he died he would continue in the lives of many thousands of people through the books he has written, the videos he has created and the podcasts that live on after him.

Sounds True provides a video of Nhat Hanh, the artist, as he engages in calligraphy as a form of mindfulness, using the in-breath and out-breath. In one calligraphy, he likens the continuation of our lives in different forms to a cloud that never dies.

Diana states that the global mindfulness movement represents in many ways the continuation of the life of Nhat Hanh. She asks us, “How are you going to enable the continuation of Nhat Hanh’s life in your own life?”. As we grow in mindfulness, we are continuing the life and tradition of Nhat Hanh and gaining access to the benefits of mindfulness including calmness, emotion regulation, insight, resilience and the courage to take compassionate action.

Thich Nhat Hahn made a hugely significant contribution to the global mindfulness movement and world peace (he was nominated by Martin Luther King for the Nobel Peace Prize). Nhat Hanh left us a huge store of resources to enable us to plumb the depths of his teachings and his indomitable spirit, and to continue his life’s work to create a “beloved community”. In all his life, throughout the challenges of suffering, grief and disappointment, he “practised a lot of breathing, coming back to himself”. Mindful breathing provided his grounding during all phases of his life, especially in the face of violence against the Vietnamese people, his followers and social workers.

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Image by Karl Egger 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 Overcome being Imprisoned by Self-Neglect

Edith Eger in her book The Gift: 12 Lessons to Save Your Life, discusses the “the prison of self-neglect”. Habituated behaviours that underlie self-neglect can arise through adverse childhood experiences, an abusive relationship or a deficient developmental environment. Edith suggests that self-neglect often arises because of unmet childhood needs – specifically the need for “attention, affection and approval”. Our own needs are neglected in order to fill the gap left by unfulfilled childhood needs. So we pursue the “A’s” (mentioned above) at the expense of our present needs. An aspect of self-neglect is the avoidance of expressing strong emotions for fear of causing discomfort to others.

Factors leading to self-neglect

We might have had parents who offered conditional love – on condition that we met their high standards in sport, academic or other achievements. Their expectations about our performance can create a dependency whereby we are forever seeking approval or acceptance. We might have suffered neglect as a child through the conscious choice of parents or their own adverse circumstances. This can lead to our continuously seeking attention. In one of my workshops, one participant proved to be continually disruptive through constant challenge to anything other participants said. It turned out she was seeking attention and approval because she was denied this as a very young child – being expected to contribute meaningfully to adult conversation when still very young.

Sometimes self-neglect can arise as a result of the role we played as a child or young adult. Family circumstances may have led to our being the “responsible one”, “the carer” or “the earner”. These roles may have been necessary at the time but the unspoken expectation that comes with the role can continue into adulthood. Edith recounts the story of a client who was imprisoned by the self-expectations that arose as a result of a childhood role as the “reliable one”. This led to continual self-neglect in pursuit of other people’s needs – often unexpressed but assumed. The result was personal burnout as well as depriving others of the opportunity to develop independence. Sometimes creating dependence on ourselves fulfills our desire to be needed. This was something that Gabor Maté discussed as contributing to his need to be a workaholic medical practitioner.

Gabor maintains that underlying many addictions is an unmet need arising from early childhood. The addiction, whatever form it takes, is an ineffectual way to address the pain arising from parental neglect, abuse or inattention. His “compassionate inquiry” approach is designed to unearth the early triggering event(s), the resultant negative self-message and the reward sought through the addictive behaviour.

Overcoming the imprisonment of self-neglect

The fundamental rule to freeing ourselves from the prison of self-neglect, is to begin to put ourselves back into the picture, to have self and our needs as part of the equation when trying to decide how to spend our energy and time. Edith suggests that there are a number of ways to do this:

Savour the things and people in our life that bring us joy. We can start small with a few minutes each morning spent appreciating the little things in our life – noticing a new leaf or flower on an indoor plant, reflecting on a picture or painting that generates positive feelings, or valuing a person who has shown us kindness, thoughtfulness or generosity. Savouring what is good in our life can extend to appreciating the development of our children, accomplishments and rewards, the wonders of our subconscious mind, the capacity to think and create and our relationships (even our relatives). We can actively seek to let joy into our lives.
Appreciating nature – nature has a healing power and enables us to cultivate all our senses and develop our sense of wonder and awe. In nature, we can be lost in the beauty, the sounds, the textures and the smells that surround us. We can actually find ourselves in this process of being lost in something immense and awe-inspiring that is beyond ourselves.
Edith herself adopted an affirmation that expresses something of her uniqueness and what she has been able to contribute to the world. We can all find the words to reflect the positive things we have contributed to others and what makes us a truly unique person. In the process, we can value the people who helped make us who we are – our parents and their positive traits, our mentors and their wisdom, and our teachers who willingly shared their knowledge and insights.
Reflect on an occasion where you were asked for something or to do something. Ask yourself what were your thoughts and feelings at the time. What was driving your choices? How much of looking after yourself was reflected in your response. How could you have responded in a way that did not involve self-neglect, e.g. expressing your true feelings. Are there habituated behaviours that you engage in that continually overlook your own needs?
Explore the balance in your life. Edith suggests that we keep a record (for a short period) of how we spend our day in terms of how we allocate time to work, play and love. Does work absorb all our time and energy at the expense of our needs for nurturing, relaxation and time to ourselves. How often do we allow ourselves to become absorbed in a hobby, creation or charitable activities or just enjoy social activities with friends or family.

Reflection

With the busyness of life, it is so easy to lose ourselves through self-neglect. There are often hidden forces underpinning this neglect, so self-exploration is important to unearth what drives our behaviour. As we grow in mindfulness through observation and reflection, we can gain the necessary self-awareness and insight to understand ourselves and develop the courage to make changes to the way we live our life.

Edith maintains that we do not change until we are ready to make the change and often this is driven by a need to change habits that no longer serve us in a positive way. Any changes we make to our behaviour, no matter how small, need to be reinforced by savouring our achievement. From Edith’s perspective, change involves the process of “finding the real you”.

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Image by Perez Vöcking 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.

Expressing Emotions or Being Imprisoned by Avoidance

Edith Eger In her book, The Gift: 12 Lessons to Save Your Life, discusses the “the imprisonment of avoidance” – the refusal to express challenging emotions. She maintains that avoiding feelings through suppression leads to depression – the opposite involves release through expression. We can supress our feelings for many reasons, e.g. to avoid the pain and hurt of recollection or to protect others from seeing us as vulnerable and suffering.

If we are suffering from past hurts or trauma we can try to shield loved ones from the discomfort that comes with the expression of strong feelings. In the process, we are not being honest and we are also depriving them of the opportunity to express empathy and love. We can also unconsciously train our children to avoid the expression of feelings when they are hurt or upset. We can try to diminish their feelings out of our own discomfort or sense of sadness. We might say, “Don’t cry, there will be other opportunities to go to parties”, “You’ll forget about this tomorrow”, “Look how many friends you do have who let you play”, or “Let’s get some ice cream and make the pain go away!” (we can try to substitute something pleasurable to avoid the expression of pain and hurt, thus setting in place habituated avoidance behaviour).

Edith suggests that sometimes we suppress our feelings by trying to convince ourselves that we are happy and joyful when this is patently not true. We might even resort to affirmations to hide our true feelings. This form of subterfuge only acerbates our feelings because it denies our reality – the depth and breadth of our true feelings. Edith encourages us “to feel so you can heal” because “you can’t heal what you don’t feel”. Sometimes our underlying feelings can be mired in resentment and can be unearthed through a guided reflection.

There is a real cost to ourselves in avoidance. Despite our very best efforts, emotions are embodied – they manifest in our bodies as physical tension/pain and/or result in emotional or physical illness. By not living our truth or accepting the reality of how we are feeling, we undermine our own integrity and personal integration. Edith provides a detailed and graphic example of the impact of unexpressed feelings on a women who experienced incomprehensible violence by a family member. Her life was lived in fear and loneliness because she never owned up to her feelings of rage, anger and deep fear of the perpetrator.

There may be times in conversation with a friend that we withhold a true expression of our feelings about some matter relevant to our relationship with them. Edith suggests that we can revisit the conversation mentally, work out what we should have said and then approach the relevant person at a suitable time and in a neutral place to express our real feelings. We could even start by practising with restaurant waitresses and expressing our honest feelings about a meal (rather than hiding our true feelings because we do not want to hurt or embarrass them).

Facing up to our feelings and naming them provides a real release. Edith suggests that we can practise this by stopping ourselves at any time during the day and naming our emotion, whether positive or challenging, in the present moment. This is not only a form of mindfulness practice but is also a way to increase self-awareness and develop honesty about our feelings both to ourselves and others.

Edith explains that sometimes this challenge to express rather than supress feelings appears overwhelming. She writes about her inability to face the Auschwitz Museum for fear of the pain of recollection of her parent’s murder and her own torture and starvation as a prisoner in the concentration camp. It took her a lot of courage after 10 years to visit the Museum and she describes in detail what she felt when confronted with images of emaciated people, the cattle trains and arrival platform. She found herself cringing and curled herself up into a tight ball in a dark corner of the Museum – overwhelmed by grief, pain, anguish and anger. However, revisiting the trauma and owning the depth of her feelings provided a new level of release to enable her to be even more productive and helpful in her ongoing work as a trauma consultant – she had finally gained release from the imprisonment of avoidance.

Reflection

Edith’s own life experience, which she shares so freely in her books, bears out how difficult it is to free ourselves from the imprisonment of avoidance. It may take many years of progressive inner work, and trying out various ways of overcoming our entrapment, to achieve some degree of freedom and realise ease and joy. However, suppression leads to ongoing suffering and depression.

As we grow in mindfulness, we become increasingly self-aware of the different ways we avoid expressing our true emotions, develop the courage to own up to these emotions and achieve the resilience required to break free of the imprisonment of avoidance. _________________________________

Image source: 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.

Changing Our Inner Landscape to Achieve Freedom

In her book The Choice: A True Story of Hope, Dr. Edith Eger tracks her journey from imprisonment in Auschwitz, to her physical liberation and, finally, her personal freedom from the imprisonment of her “inner landscape”. She had been transported to Auschwitz by cattle train with her parents and sister and had experienced unbelievable maltreatment through torture and starvation following the murder of her parents in the gas chamber the day after they arrived at the concentration camp.

Edith contends, in concert with her mentor and friend Viktor Frankl, that “our worst experiences can be our best teachers”. In her later book, The Gift: 12 Lessons to Save Your Life, she has detailed practical steps to overcome the mental imprisonment that can occur through grief, anger, guilt, shame and other difficult emotions and experiences. Edith does not sugar-coat the reality of daily life. She maintains that traumatic events, setbacks, disappointments, illness and the resultant suffering are part and parcel of the human condition with its uncertainty, ambiguity and challenges. In alignment with Gabor Maté, she argues that it is not what happens to us in life that determines our mental health, but how we relate to these experiences and their impacts – and this is a matter of conscious choice.

Choosing freedom over victimhood

One of the 12 lessons Edith writes about in her book The Gift is freedom from “the prison of victimhood”. She asserts that playing the victim rewards us by enabling us to blame others for our situation and avoid responsibility for our own response to our adverse experience. This is in line with Judson Brewer’s concept of the habit loop (trigger-reward-behaviour) that provides reinforcement for habituated behaviour such as addiction and cravings. In the victimhood context, the trigger can be any recollection or trauma stimulus event; the reward is avoidance of responsibility (not having to do anything different); and the behaviour can find expression in depression, anxiety addiction, or any number of self-destructive behaviours.

Edith maintains that a sign of victimhood is continuously asking, “Why me?”. In contrast, the road to personal freedom requires the question, “What now?” – given what has happened what do I need to do to survive and what do I want to achieve in the future. This goal-directed response builds hope and energy to move forward. The alternative is to wallow in the continuous self-story of “poor me!”. Edith who has extensive experience as a clinical psychologist and trauma counsellor provides many accounts in her book of people, including herself, who have been able to make the choice to exchange victimhood for energetic hope and achievement.

Edith reinforces the view that the pursuit of inner freedom is a lifetime task and she commented that even as she wrote her book, The Gift, she still experienced “flashbacks and nightmares”. She told Gabor that his Holocaust experience would always be with him because of the embodiment of trauma. They both agree from their own personal experience, their work as clinical psychologists and trauma counsellors and their underpinning research, that what is required to find freedom is inner work.

Edith also contends that the pursuit of inner freedom is a never-ending process of finding your “true self”. It is a journey of self-discovery – of unearthing our inner resources, enlisting our creativity and clarifying our purpose in life. It ultimately involves identifying the ways we can make a contribution to the welfare and wellness of others. Edith found her path in her writing, her counselling work helping others who have experienced adverse childhood experiences and trauma and public speaking such as her TED talk, The Journey of Grieving, Feeling and Healing. In her book, she also describes the journey to freedom from victimhood of her eldest daughter who experienced brain injury as a result of a serious fall. Edith points out that her daughter, at one stage, actually challenged her for treating her daughter as a victim. As Edith comments, we can assign a victim role to other people as well as ourselves, thus locking in a negative and disabling self-belief.

Reflection

I am confident that we can each identify a period in our lives, even the present day, when we felt like, and talked like, a victim. Very few people have lived their lives free of adverse childhood experiences or other traumas – whether they involve a relationship breakup, hurtful divorce, death of a loved one, serious injury and disablement or diagnosed life-threatening chronic illness.

As we grow in mindfulness, we can explore our inner landscape, grow in self-awareness, identify our negative self-talk, and develop the insight and courage to pursue our personal freedom and our life purpose.

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Image by Petya Georgieva 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.

Healing Trauma Through the Body

Mark Walsh, Founder of the Embodiment Conference, facilitated a panel discussion at the Conference with five eminent presenters – Peter Levine, Gabor Maté, Richard Schwartz, Dan Siegel and Alanis Morissette. The focus of the panel discussion was trauma – its nature, bodily manifestations and healing capacity. While each of the panel members approached the interviewer’s questions from their own lived experience, perspectives and frameworks, there was remarkable agreement and cross fertilisation in their discussions.

Initially, the panel led by Mark Walsh explored the nature of trauma. While the participants used different words and analogies to explain trauma there was agreement that trauma is not the initiating event (such as death of a parent, sexual abuse or abandonment in childhood) that leads to a traumatic response but rather the impact on the mind and body and the residual effects of the traumatic event such as heightened sensitivity to triggers, that can have a lifelong effect on quality of life and overall wellbeing.

Gabor, who experienced the traumatic events of the Holocaust as a child, mentioned a comment made to him by Edith Eger, who herself survived the Holocaust. Edith, author of The Gift: 12 Lessons to Save Your Life, told Gabor that he would never get over the Holocaust experiences but reinforced the view that what changes with “inner work” is how you relate to the trauma – as Gabor said, “you can’t undo what has been done”. On one occasion, Bessel van der Kolk, who integrates science with trauma healing, told Gabor, “You will have to keep Auschwitz with you wherever you go” – reinforcing the lifelong impacts and ever-present trigger sensitivity of trauma.

The embodiment of trauma

Each of the panel members in their own words reinforced the view that the impact of trauma is not isolated to the mind alone but is also embedded in the body – in the process, highlighting the theme of the conference. Peter Levine emphasised the influence of temperament on the impact of trauma and its embodiment. He maintained that trauma leads to fragmentation or suppression of our life energy, of “our living, vital body” – resulting in the incapacity to “be with the here-and-now”. Richard Schwartz argues that trauma “screws up” the body’s “message board” – the sensory information from the intelligent gut and heart is distorted and amplified in the brain stem, resulting in an overriding of rational thought and natural instinct.

Dan Siegel maintained that the embodiment of trauma would be reflected in adverse impacts on the five “molecular mechanisms” of a healthy body and manifest as:

Elevated levels of cortisol, the stress hormone
Impairment of the body’s ability to fight infection
Adverse impacts on the cardio-vascular system
Increase in inflammation
Shortening of telomeres, resulting in acceleration of the aging process.

Gabor in his book, In the Realm of Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, has highlighted the role that trauma plays in the development of addiction and diseases of all kinds. His colleague, Bessel van der Kolk, documents the multi-dimensional impacts of trauma, including its embodiment, in his book, The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma.

Healing trauma through the body

Given the life-long impacts of trauma and its pervasive, adverse impacts on body, brain and mind, the question arises , “How do we heal trauma?” While the panel members responses differed in terms of specific processes, there was considerable agreement that healing required fully facing the trauma, its origins and its emotional/behavioural/physical manifestations. It also involves avoiding addiction – which is an ineffectual approach to pain alleviation. There was also agreement that the process of healing is aided immeasurably by the assistance of a supportive, compassionate person, whether that be a trained therapist or someone who is trauma-informed and caring. Gabor mentioned that one of his teachers maintained that people will only be open to the truth “when compassion is present”.

Alanis stated that she had a “juicy tool kit” to help her deal with her inner landscape and associated dialogue. She talked about having a “safe, non-judgmental listener”; a therapist (who kept her alive); movement such as performing on stage; writing songs (which proved to be cathartic when she expressed her real feelings); exposure to sun and water; and her mindfulness practices. She suggested that her “trauma recovery journey” requires her to employ the courage she uses in her writings to “break open the armour” that interferes with her relationships. Alanis identified active pursuit of relationships and management of the attendant vulnerability, instead of avoidance, as her way forward.

Richard Schwartz, founder of the Internal Family Systems (IFS) and author of No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness, maintains that our brains involve many “parts” necessary for day-to-day functioning and this is normal. However, with trauma, these parts become fragmented and frozen in an unhealthy, disconnected state. The process of healing involves re-integration of the parts by being curious and open to the hurtful parts that have been locked away. His approach involves engaging an “open-hearted therapist” in the process of revisiting the traumatic event – going into the scene and dealing with the traumatic event, for example, taking the child away from an abuser to a “safe and comfortable place”. Richard’s transformative psychotherapy approach promotes inner harmony and enhances self-compassion so that the “inner critic” does not take hold and dominate a person’s perspective and outlook on life.

I have previously discussed Gabor’s approach to healing trauma and addiction which he describes as “compassionate inquiry”. Gabor reinforced the view that compassion (for ourselves, others and the world at large) is the “healing ingredient”. He argued that we have to adopt a curiosity about everything and everybody so that we enrich our understanding and build healthy relationships. He suggested that our compassion should extend even to people we dislike or detest because underlying their words and actions is “some hurt”. He reminds us that given trauma is about what happens inside us, not the precipitating external events, we are always able to access our hurt and achieve healing – we can change our relationship to the trauma and restore our connectedness.

Peter Levine, creator of Somatic Experiencing and author of Healing Trauma, describes his pioneering program as a move away from “talk” therapies to a focus on restoring the wisdom of the body. In the panel discussion, he described an example of a somatic intervention in terms of helping someone to recognise the source of their trauma by having them explore their back pain – the level of tension, the location of the pain (left or right) and the movement the spine wanted to do. In the process the pain dissolved when the person involved recognised the source of the bodily trauma as a time as an Army doctor when he fell off a truck onto his back when everyone else in the truck was killed by the enemy. Peter explained that the body remembers but we may not be able to recall the event and its adverse impacts. However, through Peter’s processes of somatic experiencing, including relaxation techniques, a person can eventually remember what happened to them and for them and bring this to conscious awareness. Peter indicated that this realisation may be accompanied by trembling and other physical manifestations of release that he describes as the “resetting of the central nervous system”.

Dan Siegel sees trauma healing as moving from “impairment to integration”. He reinforced the view that through the “internal work”, described by other panel members, you actually “shift the process” and that enables bringing together the many differentiated and fragmented elements of mind and body. So in his view trauma healing is “integrative”. He suggested that the pandemic is an opportunity and a stimulus to a different way of living socially and culturally so that we focus on our connectedness, not our separateness.

Reflection

Dan referred to Alanis’ latest album, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, as a means of healing in that it enables the listener “to hold in awareness things that almost seem paradoxical” – the words and rhythms moving in different directions. He sees these songs, along with the processes employed by Peter, Gabor, and Richard as “incredibly healing”. Alanis also contributes to trauma healing, recovery and wholeness through her podcast where she interviews leading developmental experts to bring increasing insight into the nature of trauma, addiction and healing.

Each of the panel members are proponents of the practice of mindfulness in its many forms. They recognise that as we grow in mindfulness, we increase our self-awareness, develop emotional regulation and heighten our compassion (for ourselves and others). Somatic meditation, for example, has been used extensively in trauma healing.

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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.

Meditation on the Power of the Present Moment

Allyson Pimentel, UCLA meditation trainer, provided a guided meditation podcast focused on the power of the present moment. Her meditation, titled Mindfulness and Lineage explores the present moment as the encapsulation of all that has happened in our past along with the potentiality to shape our future. The present moment provides us with the opportunity to reflect on our words and actions, to engage in reflection-in action and to envisage our future. It enables us to begin to appreciate our ancestors and all that has gone before us while looking forward to what we ourselves can contribute to future generations.

When we think of the people who have gone before us, our ancestors, and realise that we are today the inheritors of their efforts, sacrifices, challenges and perspectives, we can begin to feel gratitude for all the positive things that we have inherited. The SBS TV documentary, Who Do You Think You Are?, explores the ancestry of well-known Australians from sport, politics, music, film, stage and television. Invariably, the exploration highlights incredible courage and resilience of forbears and their vision to create a better future for those who were to come after them. They often endured unbelievably harsh living conditions, undertook dangerous and arduous journeys and lived with uncertainty as the reality of daily life.

When we reflect on the past and the people who have preceded us we have a lot to be grateful for – our freedom, innovations, insights, discoveries, technologies (including medical processes and medications). We acquired knowledge through our predecessors trial and error endeavours and risk-taking. We have come to better understand our bodies, minds and spirit through their explorations, including neuroscience research. The inheritance from our forbears is endless, enduring and engaging. If we reflect on our lineage and explore our family history, we come to appreciate even more our connectedness to people, places and history. We can be grateful for the mindfulness tradition which had its origins in Buddhism but has broadened from a religious base and, in Western countries, morphed into a secular tradition informed by neuroscience.

Guided meditation

Allyson focuses initially on our bodies, encouraging us to be really grounded our body in the way it takes up space, its textures, height and width, weight, lightness and heaviness and interactions with its external world through the senses of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. She reminds us that mindfulness involves being fully in the present moment and apprehending the present with its potency and potentiality through curiosity, openness and willingness to be with what is – accepting our here-and-now experience, including our limitations (physical and mental), our lived experience shaping our perceptions and habituated behaviour, and our emergent self-awareness.

Allyson encourages us firstly to explore the back of our body – our spine running down the length of our back as well as the back of our head, neck, buttocks, legs, arms, and heels. She suggests that this process can activate our conscious link with the past, with what has come before us but is now behind us. As we breath in and out gently, we can express appreciation for our lineage – what we have inherited in our world that contributes to our health, happiness and overall wellbeing. We can value our inherited natural environment and the connectedness to nature that we enjoy.

The next stage of the guided meditation involves focusing on the front of our body – our eyes, face, jaw, chest, stomach, thighs, calves, feet and toes. This process helps us to focus on the future – on the fact that our present moment is shaping our future. This is not only as a result of the immediate benefits of meditation but also the way we begin to develop our world view, heighten our perception, enhance our self-awareness and clarify our life purpose.

Reflection

We take so much for granted in our lives. This guided meditation on our lineage opens our minds to the people who have gone before us and what they have made possible for us. It builds our sense of appreciation and gratitude and enables us to deepen our self-awareness through understanding our origins and its influence on our daily lives. The meditation also develops an openness to the potentiality of our future. As we grow in mindfulness through meditation and reflection we gain increasing insight into our inner landscape and our outer environment and the forces that have shaped us and continue to influence our life and our individual paths.

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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.

Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness: Accessibility for People with Disabilities

David Treleaven, author of Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing, organised an online Meet-Up to explore how to provide accessibility for people with disabilities. While many of us experience psychological disabilities or hindrances because of trauma and adverse early childhood experiences, the focus on this Meet-Up session was on facilitating access for people with physical disabilities. The insights and suggestions are relevant to facilitators of any group of people, not only those seeking to engage in trauma-sensitive mindfulness training or facilitation.

Awareness of disabilities

To increase awareness of the nature and range of physical disabilities for facilitators/trainers, David introduced the topic of accessibility by highlighting the “massive and complex” area of people who have a physical disability or impairment. He stressed that as trainers/facilitators we are not aware of the different impairments of participants and the impacts on their ability to access what we are sharing in a group environment. He emphasised the need to undertake an “accessibility check-in” early when facilitating a group to ascertain the particular needs of people in the group.

Given the interactivity and diversity of physical impairments, it is not possible to anticipate all the access needs of everyone – so a check-in is essential. David helped the Meet-Up group increase their awareness of the complexity of disabilities and their impacts by having three people with lived experience of disability (and experience in advocacy for people with disabilities), who told their stories in a moving, disarming way. Among other things, their presentations highlighted the prevalence and unique combinations of impairments that people do experience.

For instance, each of the three presenters identified that they experienced hypermobility – pain in joints (e.g. knees, fingers, hips) that typically extend beyond the normal range. It can manifest in diverse ways including the inability to stand, sit upright or walk for any length of time and can vary over time or on any given day. A specific form of the hypermobility spectrum, known as the Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, can be particularly debilitating and limit the capacity of an individual to engage in the normal range of mindfulness activities such as mindful walking, adopting an upright sitting position or standing. The Ehlers-Danlos Society provides a wide range of community resources for people suffering from this syndrome and others who wish to learn about its manifestations and impacts.

Different manifestations of disabilities and their impacts

Each of the three presenters reinforced the benefits of mindfulness meditation for people experiencing disability and/or chronic pain. However, they drew on their lived experience of disability and pain to share their stories of experiencing difficulties in effectively participating in meditation groups because of a lack of awareness of facilitators/trainers and willingness to make adaptions to their meditation process to enable full access for people experiencing disability.

Heather Boyes spoke about her chronic pain from hypermobility and her environmental sensitivity and, in particular, her sensitivity to fragrances – an impairment exacerbated by the ubiquitous presence of fragrant hand sanitisers and cleaning products as a result of COVID -19 in the community. Her allergic response can range from swollen lips to a “series of stroke-like headaches” and anaphylaxis. She has found that mask wearing brought on by COVID-19 restrictions does not help her as pointed out that we have “olfactory receptors” in every organ, especially the skin.

Heather’s sensitivities extend to touching things like mould, experiencing a lack of airflow and transitioning from inside to outside (changing to a different environment which includes temperature differences).

Heather also explained that public places could result in allergic-type reactions due to sensitivity to lighting, “blue light” from computers and other digital devices and sunlight. All of her senses are heightened by her condition, so that she is even affected by phone transmission.

Heather’s suggestions to make a meditation space accessible to her and others include:

Ensure people are aware of fragrance sensitivity and advise participants in advance not to wear strong fragrances to the meditation sessions
Ensure there is ready access to clean airflow
Be conscious of potential industry smells from nearby factories/workplaces
Have all mobile phones on flight mode before switching them off
Be aware of a person’s emergency contacts and whether they use medication or an EpiPen for emergencies (such as anaphylaxis)
Don’t assume that products branded safe (such as essential oils) are safe for everyone.

Cheryl Harris spoke about her connective tissue disorder that was diagnosed 19 years previously. Her hypermobility manifests in difficulty in walking and standing and pain in her arms, hands and shoulders leading to migraines. Associated with these disabilities is “visual impairment” and difficulty with computer screens. Cheryl found that she experienced considerable difficulties during chronic pain meditation classes despite the trauma-sensitive approach adopted by the trainer. Her physical impairments meant that the meditation sessions were relatively inaccessible for her.

While everyone in Cheryl’s meditation class had chronic pain, she was the only one with mobility limitations. This meant she could not participate in standing meditations or mindful walking. It left her watching and not participating. She left her initial meditation class after 12 years because of the physical and emotional strain involved and joined another group that she was better able to engage with.

Cheryl’s suggestions for meditation trainers and facilitators include:

Recognise that you have the responsibility to find out students’ accessibility needs – it is not the students’ role to initiate this discussion
Establish access needs early on, e.g. “What would help you to feel welcome?” (she stated that the specific words do not matter – it is the awareness and sensitivity that really matter)
Recognise that students may have experienced stigma because of their disability
Don’t assume that people in pain have a disability or that all people with a disability are experiencing chronic pain
Use the language that the person in front of you uses (How do they describe their impairment? – textbook labels do not help because disability is a highly individualised and complex phenomenon)
Consider how intersectionality plays a role, e.g. in increasing the possibility of social isolation, for instance, for someone who has a disability, is a woman and an Aboriginal.

Cheryl provided an excellent resource titled, Adapting Mindful Practices to People Who Have Special Physical Needs.

Tara Beech explained that she suffers from fibromyalgia and hypermobility. She indicated that chronic pain meditations are particularly difficult for her. When she pays attention to her pain she experiences a burning sensation under her skin – resulting in the only pain-free area of her body being under her lips and her left eye.

Tara has decided that she has to treat pain like trauma and adopt a pain-sensitive approach to meditation (not unlike trauma-sensitive mindfulness). Her approach involves:

Cutting slack for herself through self-compassion
Meditating when she feels well
Lying down as the stress of sitting up triggers an allergic reaction
Avoid going beyond her “window of tolerance”.

Tara’s suggestions for facilitators include:

Helping people differentiate between “difficulty” and “distress”
Allow people a choice of anchors (and, where possible facilitate this choice through a session dedicated to choosing)
Encourage a change of posture where appropriate
Be aware that some anchors can cause stress, e.g. the increasing number of people who experience distress/trauma when using breath as an anchor because of personal experience with COVID-19 illness and/or asthma.
Encourage participants to savour something in their life, e.g. a person, an image, an experience, a skill-set or an achievement – this can provide a very pleasant and positive anchor and enable a person to focus on something other than their pain , loss or distress
Willingly explore the “space of disability” (Including neuro-divergence, auditory sensitivity and auditory impairment)
Be willing to explore “work arounds”, be patient, and be flexible (not static).

Understanding shame

Each of the presenters spoke about the shame they had experienced in certain meditation situations. Shame was catalysed by being different, being the only one with a particular impairment, inability to fully participate, and/or divergent behaviour (e.g. having to lie on the floor which was considered “poor form”). They experienced shame because they felt that they were creating a disruption, distraction or dislocation as a result of their unique set of needs arising from their diverse disabilities. In the text chat during the Meet-Up, Dana Baron commented that shame is “stigma turned inwards” and that shame can impede/hinder a person from accessing necessary resources or adaptions/adjustments.

The presenters suggested that “shame will be in the room” and there is a constant need to be gentle. It will also require of the teacher/facilitator a willingness to “have a go”, to accept that you will “not know what to do” in some situations. Some impairments will be invisible (especially in an online environment), so it is important to offer choice and support (despite the inconvenience and the challenge to move outside your “comfort zone”).

Reflection

At the time of listening to the Meet-Up, I was spending most of my days with my feet elevated as I was suffering from an infected ankle – I could relate to the pain associated with walking and standing when you have a disability. It reminded me of the time when a disc in my back collapsed and I spent 18 months in continuous sciatic pain (along with pneumonia in the early stages) – a condition resulting from the trauma of my mother dying and an arduous flight to and from Cartagena in South America (36 hours each way) as well as the cultural shock.

Listening to the presenters, I also became aware that I have some form of environmental sensitivity (which I had not named before) – I experience “exercise asthma” when playing tennis in cold environments and sweating at night when the humidity is very high (over 80%) and the wind speed is low (below 10 kph).

As we grow in mindfulness we can become more aware of what other people are experiencing, more sensitive to their needs and more courageous in taking appropriate, compassionate action.

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Image by Jackson David 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.