human condition – Grow Mindfulness

On Death and Dying

Elise Esther Hearst, in her novel exposing the day-to-day reality of people experiencing inter-generational trauma, makes the unequivocal statement in the title of her book, One day we’re all going to die. This is an undeniable aspect of the human condition. Buddhists remind us of the impermanence of everything and the need to prepare ourselves for the inevitable reality of our dying and death. They strongly urge us to savour the preciousness of life and nature and to meditate on death.

The recent Death and Wisdom Summit offered free recently is now available on a paid, upgrade basis. During the Summit, a number of presenters addressed the issue of preparing for dying and death. They shared the lessons from their own research and work in the hospice arena and in providing grief counselling. One of the keynote speakers Frank Ostaseski, author of The Five Invitations: Discover What Death Can Teach Us About Living Life Fully, spoke of the similarities between dying and meditation.

Similarities between the dying process and meditation

In an interview with Steve Heilig, Frank shared his lessons about living from accompanying over 1,000 people in the dying process. In the Death and Wisdom Summit, he focused on sharing his personal insights into the similarities between the dying process and meditation or other spiritual practices such as retreats. Frank, himself, had been a meditation practitioner over many years.

Frank identified the following aspects as similarities between the dying process and meditation:

Withdrawal from daily life – there is a peeling back of identity and a re-focus on the present moment and experience. Roles and ego identity are stripped away – the face we present to the world is no longer needed or relevant. In dying, as with meditation, distractions are reduced, habituated responses removed and other parts of our life are left behind, including our wide circle of friends. We are either left alone or engage, sometimes silently, with an intimate few.
Breaking down of conventional boundaries – there is a move away from duality towards wholeness. Elements previously experienced as separate are gradually integrated – such as mind and body, I and others. On a different level, the barrier between persona (projected or perceived ideal image) and the shadow (the unconscious, emotional blind spot) is broken down. So someone who is normally gentle and soft-spoken can suddenly appear as aggressive and loud (or vice versa). The shadow can emerge from behind the mask as the unconscious seeps into conscious life.
Increasing silence and appreciation of being silent – there is new-found comfort with, and valuing of, silence. People can experience a coma-like state before dying and, as a result, savour the silence. Frank noted, for example, that one person who emerged from a brief coma before dying stated, “If I had known that quiet was so beautiful, I would have spent a lot more time in silence”. There is a gradual process of “turning down the noise” – both the external interactions and the internal dialogue. There is an emergent clarity about our inner landscape.
The realisation of ordinariness – the progressive acceptance that we are all subject to the human condition, there is awareness that there is a naturally occurring “unfolding” of causes and conditions. This leads to humility and a sense that we are “no better or worse than anyone else” – we are all conditioned by our humanity and its fragility, its foibles and its impermanence. It can lead to the breaking down of “constructed protection” that results in “self-limiting identity”, thus allowing a fuller, more humane identity to emerge.
Emergence of a state of “not knowing” – a recognition that our fixed ideas about ourself, other people and the world around us are limited and limiting. Not knowing frees us to embrace the unknown and the uncertainty of death. Frank notes that “we all carry stories about our death” and these not only “shape the way we die” but also can shape how we live and love. Self-stories can blind us and their progressive release in meditation and dying can create openness to emergent possibilities.
Surrender – flows from “not knowing” and often follows a state of exhaustion. Frank describes it as a form of expansion, moving beyond our limiting self-stories to a “kind of spaciousness”. It is beyond struggling, beyond fighting with ourselves and our death and beyond acceptance.

Frank was adamant that “surrender” was not the same as “acceptance” and was “infinitely deeper than acceptance”. He explained that having been mentored by Elisabeth Kubler Ross he was convinced that many people, including those working with the dying, misunderstood what she was talking about in her book, On Death and Dying, when she identified the “five states of dying” – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. He maintained, that contrary to popular belief, Elisabeth never saw the stages as linear or sequential, but sought to identify some of the defence mechanisms employed by people who were dying. Frank also explained that later in her life, Elisabeth mentioned to him that she had come to realise that the “five stages” did not represent the full picture of the dying process. Part of Frank’s unique contribution to our understanding of the dying process is his elaboration of the stage of “surrender”.

According to Frank, “acceptance” is a conscious act of “letting go” – removing attachment to, or constraint by, objects, people or false ideas. He suggests that, in contrast, surrender is an “effortless, easeful, non-doing” state that enables realisation of our basic nature without internal or external interference. He likens it to the experience of “time standing still” that some people experience in a car accident situation. In grappling to find the words to describe “surrender” fully, Frank resorted to telling the story of his near-death experience in a whirlpool while rafting in the Grand Canyon and how surrender followed exhaustion. He provides further elucidation of this elusive concept in his podcast, Surrendering to Death.

Frank maintained that we could develop qualities that enable us to be more ready to achieve the state of “surrender’ when dying. He suggests, for example, that a sense of wonder and awe, religious conviction, love or confidence in our acquired wisdom (achieved through mindfulness), can “engender surrender”. He further likens “surrender” to an initiation process involving prioritising the essential over the dispensable. Frank stated that our natural reaction is to resist and fight death through fear, but that “the essential is so magnetising, the surrender so compelling, that fear does not stop us”.

Reflection

Frank provides a very strong exhortation. He maintains that it is a “ridiculous gamble’ to assume that when dying “we will have the physical strength, emotional stability, the mental clarity to do the work of a lifetime”. He argues that NOW is the time for personal transformation – to grow in mindfulness through meditation, silence, developing wonder and awe, cultivating love and compassionate action and strengthening belief.

In the process we can let go of limiting self-stories, misconceptions about death and dying, attachment to externalities, and fear of losing control. We can develop a “not knowing” state, realise the reality of our human condition and our own ordinariness and increase our sense of connectedness to nature and others.

Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach provide a Power of Awareness Course online with 21 hours of teaching. The Course helps you to develop a daily practice of mindfulness mediation and provides ways for you to sustain this practice. It enables you to live life more fully, break free of self-limiting thoughts, increase your sense of wonder and joy and enrich your relationships at home and at work.

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Image by Nicky from Pixabay.com

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.

Healing through Storytelling

A challenging medical diagnosis can turn your life upside down, make you question your self-image and increase feelings of isolation, particularly if it prevents you from actively engaging with your social or sporting network. Dr. Annie Brewster M.D., who experienced these challenges when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2001, found that medical practitioners lacked understanding and compassion for her situation – they were ill-equipped to help her deal with the internal fallout that accompanies a chronic illness diagnosis. Annie is now Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School while actively engaged as a practicing physician in Boston at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Annie, who had been quite athletic, found that her sense of identity was challenged by her diagnosis. She discovered that by storytelling – writing her own story addressing her identity confusion, accompanying anxiety and resultant trauma – she was able to move towards recovery reframing her identity, restoring her own power in the healing process and building resilience to handle uncertainty and fear. She recounts her story, and offers storytelling techniques with co-storyteller and journalist Rachel Zimmerman, in their book, The Healing Power of Storytelling: Using Personal Narrative to Navigate Illness, Trauma and Loss.

Healing through storytelling

Through her book, Annie helps chronic sufferers to process their challenging emotions, create their own healing story, reframe their identity narrative and reconnect with people close to them as well as the wider supportive community. She encourages us to utilise whatever medium we are comfortable with – whether art, music audio, video or writing – to share our healing journey and accompanying story. The techniques she and Rachel offer can help us in that process.

Inspired by her own positive experience of healing through storytelling, Annie created the Health Story Collaborative which acts as a platform for people to share their stories of health challenges and recovery. The Collaborative offers a medium for overcoming the isolation of chronic illness and is “patient-centered and research based”, drawing on the research providing evidence of the therapeutic power of storytelling. The Health Story Collaborative enables people to share their stories of illness and healing and offers multiple modes for doing so. There are videotaped Healing Stories Sessions (accessible to anyone), as well as Audio Stories (available for public consumption). You are encouraged to share your story of illness and recovery and the options also include music, art, poems, written stories or alternative media. Some of the more helpful stories are featured on the collaborative blog.

Storytelling about my own diagnosis of a chronic disability

I have recently started writing my memoir, inspired by Jeff Brown’s online course, Writing Your Way Home. One of my motivations has been the opportunity provided by storytelling to work through my personal experience of trauma. Almost simultaneously, I have received a diagnosis of spinal degeneration resulting from “wear and tear” over my 76+ years. A contributing factor was a serious car accident when I was 12 years old, with the undiagnosed injury aggravated by playing competitive and social tennis over 65 years.

I am now confronted by the challenge of rehabilitation and the loss of my capacity to play tennis, cutting me off from the game I love and my social tennis network (one of my few social activities). I can relate especially to what Annie calls the need to “integrate a traumatic health event into a new and evolving identity”. I have to reframe my identity from my self-image of a fit, competent tennis player, which has been an integral part of my life to date.

Reflection

Ash Barty has provided me with inspiration and encouragement through her own life story. She has also made me realise again why I loved the game of tennis. I’ve been reading Ash’s memoir, My Dream Time – A Memoir of Tennis and Teamwork, which could alternatively be called Developing Resilience through Adversity (as she documents her multiple injuries, mental health challenges and recovery strategies). Ash, the smiling assassin, who achieved World Number 1 WTA singles ranking for 114 weeks, shares openly her battle with negative self-messages, including the inexplicable negative self-talk about “not being good enough”.

I can relate deeply to what Ash describes as the pleasure she developed in playing tennis – enjoying the game for its own sake and finding “love in the marriage of movement and timing and speed and strength and guile and nerve” (the willingness “to go for your shots”). I found sheer enjoyment in my competence at tennis and my ability, even in my seventies, to surprise my opponents with unpredictable shots (such as a backhand half volley drop shot, a shot down the line or a half volley backhand lob). I would often mentally record the competent shots that I played and still to this day can replay some of them mentally as if on videotape. I undertook this process of recall and replay of my best tennis shots to build my sense of self-efficacy in playing tennis.

It is interesting that Ash talks about her slice backhand as her competitive advantage. In her words, the slice backhand produces “ an unpredictable low bounce” and is created by hitting the ball “with enough angle and speed to generate a fade”. Ash, through her slice, changed women’s tennis game at the elite level. In the mid 1970’s, I used to employ a slice backhand as my main attacking shot when playing competitive tennis … and I would follow it in to the net to complete an attacking volley as my opponent would have to hit the ball up to clear the net. However, over time while playing social tennis, after my competitive tennis days were over, I stopped using my slice backhand – for unknown reasons at the time. On reflection, I discovered that what had got in the way of my using this particular shot was a form of cognitive blind spot – I had unconsciously begun to view it as “not a real shot”. Ash’s resurrection of the slice in women’s tennis made me realise that I had unwittingly discontinued a shot that gave me a competitive advantage.

Ash at one stage in her book talks about “acceptance” – everyone is imperfect and “we’re all unique, all fallible and all with our own foibles”. It is the nature of being human that we are prone to making mistakes and subject to life-changing mental and physical challenges. We need to acknowledge the fragility of the human condition, accept what we can’t control, and act on what we can change for the better. Mindfulness can help us to develop resilience in personally challenging times.

As I grow in mindfulness through reflection, meditation, writing and storytelling, I hope to develop a new narrative about my evolving identity, grow in self-awareness, and strengthen my courage to undertake the necessary, ongoing rehabilitation. Life’s challenges can “make or break us” – mindfulness can help us to remain grounded, develop resilience and explore creative options.

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Image by Chen 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 Self-Love to Realise Our Potential

Often we are weighed down by our past actions, words and omissions. In Lighter, yung pueblo offers us a way to “let go of the past” in order to expand our future. Central to this lighter life is self-love. To achieve genuine self-love, according to yung, we need to make three core changes to our life – (1) radical honesty, (2) positive habit building and (3) self-acceptance.

In the introduction to Lighter, yung shares his own story – an early adult life of drug abuse. Addiction to drugs became the escape from his inner pain, sadness and anxiety. It was a way to avoid spending time in dealing with challenging emotions and personal hurt. It took yung several years to break the habits that were destroying his life and frustrating the realisation of his potential.

A key turning point for yung was when he reached “rock bottom” physically and psychologically and simultaneously experienced gratitude for all that his parents had done for him. He began asking himself how he could behave the way he did after all the sacrifices, effort and encouragement they provided to help him reach his potential.

For yung, genuine self-love is a prerequisite to achieve our potential and build rewarding relationships. He makes the point that the goal of self-love is not about diminishing ourselves, overlooking the needs of others or considering ourselves “superior” – it involves humility generated by acknowledging that we share “the fragility of the human condition” with others and are highly inter-connected and inter-dependent.

Three core changes to expand our future

The core changes identified initially by yung lay the foundation for moving beyond our present blockages to realise our potential:

Radical Honesty – involves being fully present to our thoughts and emotions. It requires us to avoid suppressing what is unpleasant about ourselves and facing up to our real self – no matter how much it hurts and pains us. It means facing the truth and challenging the lies we tell ourselves about who we are or what we have done. It means being open with ourselves to achieve authenticity. The aim is not to punish ourselves but to honestly and calmly “look in the mirror” without distortion or veils. Radical honesty is a life-time pursuit.

Positive Habit Building – radical honesty helps us to identify our habits that are harmful rather than helpful to our goal of achieving our potential. These may involve any aspect of our life, e.g. angry outbursts with colleagues, failing to listen to our life partner, not having adequate rest or sleep, or eating foods that lead to inflammation. We find these harmful habits difficult to change – they become habituated responses and ingrained over time.

yung suggests focusing on one or two habits that you want to change and consolidate them as habituated behaviour through frequent repetition over a reasonable period, e.g. three months. Trying to achieve habit change on multiple fronts simultaneously can lead to dissipated energy, self-defeat and falling back into old harmful habits. Narrowing our focus can lead to successful change and positive reinforcement in that we will feel better, have a sense of accomplishment and experience “moving forward”, rather than being “stuck”.

Being truthfully present to ourselves is a real challenge. yung found that meditation helped him to progressively achieve a radical honesty that was initially unnerving but ultimately rewarding. He encourages us to find our own path to mindfulness and self-awareness. It could involve yoga, Tai Chi, chanting or any one of a multitude of mindfulness practices. He maintains that once we choose a single focus and practice, we should maintain it as a daily activity to build the desired new habit and realise the benefits.

Self-Acceptance – Inherent in the challenge of developing radical honesty, is the need to achieve self-acceptance, “warts and all”. It is difficult to face up to our frailties and vulnerabilities and to own them, rather than deflect them because they are unpalatable. Failure to accept ourselves, can create a roadblock in our journey to true self-love. It does not mean that we are complacent, but rather that we are willing to identify ways to heal from the past to live more fully in the present and the future.

Self-acceptance may not be an even road – there will be “ups and downs”, progression and regression. We might come up against something about ourselves that we now find repulsive. However, taking these deeper “cuts” slowly and with persistence over time, can lighten our life and heighten our integrity and resilience.

Reflection

Genuine self-love is necessary for lasting, deep relationships. If we can be honest with ourselves and accept our frailties and vulnerabilities, we will be better able to accept imperfections in others and be more willing to acknowledge our inter-connection and inter-dependence. We will be inspired to take compassionate action for those in need.

As we grow in mindfulness, we can develop the self-awareness, courage and resilience to achieve radical honesty, build positive and nourishing habits and achieve a genuine self-acceptance.

Tina Malia, in her mantra meditation, In Sunlight, sings a relevant refrain:

Lead us from illusion to truth

From darkness to light

(Sanskrit translation)

Note: “yung pueblo” (meaning “young people”) is the author’s pseudonym chosen to acknowledge that humanity is not yet mature in realising compassionate interconnectedness.

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Image by Joe 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.

Letting Go: Breaking Free of the Ties That Bind Us

In his earlier book, The Resilience Project, Hugh Van Cuylenburg discussed his search for the way to develop resilience to meet the demands of these challenging times. In a previous post, I explained Hugh’s GEM pathway to resilience – gratitude, empathy and mindfulness. This book proved to be a bestseller and Hugh has gone on to present talks to 1,500 schools, elite Australian sports teams and clubs (covering cricket, soccer, AFL and Rugby League) as well as presentations to numerous businesses and organisations.

When reading The Resilience Project and/or hearing Hugh speak, you could be forgiven for thinking that he was one person who “had it all together”, that he was “on top of things” in his life. However, in his follow-up book, Let Go, he exposes his own vulnerabilities and weaknesses and argues that “it’s time to let go of shame, expectations and our addiction to social media”. Let Go could be subtitled, “The 101 Ways I have Stuffed Up in My life” or alternatively, “How My Human Foibles Have Undermined My Resilience”. This is a disarmingly honest account of his personal vulnerabilities and how they have played out in his life.

Hugh covers a range of topics that highlight his vulnerabilities and offers suggestions on how we can address our own vulnerabilities and learn to “let go”. Throughout the book, he generously shares what he has learnt from his therapy with Anita and discussions with Ben Crowe (famous mindset coach of people like Ash Barty). Hugh covers topics that are natural human reactions to the fragility and uncertainty of the human condition. His key topics include the following that most people can relate to:

Shame: feelings of shame can arise from things we have done or failed to do, from negative self-talk (generated in childhood or later in adulthood) or from perceptions of what other people think or feel about us. Hugh illustrates this by his own inaction in relation to his sister, Georgia, who suffered from mental health issues and the “shame stories” he told himself. He reminds us that shame and associated guilt have been clinically linked to all kinds of psychological problems. Hugh argues that we need to understand the nature of the shame that we feel and learn new, healthy ways to respond to it. He offers a three-step process to address our shame, including sharing our shame with someone (as the hiding of shame, rather than the shame itself, causes us psychological problems).
Expectations: Hugh shares stories of how his own “unreasonable expectations” caused him stress and worry in his life. The expectations that we place on ourselves can cover any or all aspects of our life – our physical fitness, weight, academic achievements, professional life, home roles, house care or contributions to society. We can create a living hell through these expectations that are self-fabricated and their effects can impact on others. Hugh speaks with honesty and openness about instances in his professional speaking life where his unreasonable expectations almost derailed him. One of the ways he was able to manage the situations was to share his vulnerability at the time and encouraged others to do likewise. He drew strength from Frou Frou’s rendition of the song, “Let Go” and particularly the lyric, “There’s beauty in the breakdown”. Hugh also discusses how we can become captive to the expectations of others and the freedom we can enjoy when we break free of what others have called “the tyranny of expectations”. He offers a series of questions to address the expectations of others and the suggestion to write down the answers and then challenge the truth or otherwise of these recorded expectations.
Perfectionism: while Hugh provides a serious discussion of perfectionism and the “inner dialogue” that can plague us in every area of our life, he illustrates the hold of perfectionism by sharing a hilarious anecdote about “one (not so) perfect day”. The story relates to an invitation to Missy Higgins and family to join his family for a meal. He had established a friendship with Missy Higgins who wrote the forward to his earlier book, The Resilience Project. He was so anxious to make everything right for the day that he ended up creating a “disaster” where everything went wrong, Including his artificial grass catching fire. He encourages us to overcome perfectionism through self-compassion and the honest exploration of all the areas of our life where our “perfectionism rules” and to challenge ourselves about “what would happen if these things weren’t perfect”.
Fear of Failure – Hugh illustrates this “phobia” with a humorous description of an embarrassing encounter with Hamish Blake at a café. Hugh admired Hamish immensely and had been a long-term fan and so wanted the encounter to go well. However, his “fear of failure” left him tongue-tied resulting in an embarrassing interaction (for both Hugh and Hamish). Hugh goes on to discuss “atychiphobia” which he describes as “the abnormal, unwarranted and persistent fear of failure” which can result in all kinds of emotional and physical symptoms, including panic attacks. He makes the point that some level of fear of failure can be healthy because it inspires sound preparation and conscious performance. However, an unhealthy level of fear of failure can lead us to procrastinate, avoid making an effort or miss the opportunity to pursue our life goals and make a contribution to the wellness of others. Hugh offers an exercise on “how to let go of fear of failure”.

Reflection

One of the most profound things that Hugh asserts is that our vulnerabilities can build authentic connections. We begin to realise that we all share the same fragility even though it may have different manifestations in each of us. Throughout his Let Go book, Hugh explains his developing relationship with Hamish and Ryan Shelton. It was the realisation that each of them experienced the struggle with “shame, expectation and the fear of failure” that led to the development of the podcast, The Imperfects in 2019. Hugh and his colleagues (brother Josh and Ryan Shelton) also developed a sub-group of The Imperfect podcasts that they titled The Vulnerabilitea House which was designed to enable people to share, over a cup of tea, “something honest and a little vulnerable”. Vulnerabilitea House interviewees included Peter Helliar, Martin Heppell and Missy Higgins, as well as Hugh, Josh and Ryan.

As we grow in mindfulness, we can become aware of what is holding us back in terms of shame, expectations, perfectionism and fear of failure. This self-awareness, along with self-compassion, provides the motivation to face our frailties and the courage and persistence “to do the inside work” necessary to “let go” and break free from the ties that bind us.

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Image by Сергей Корчанов 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.

Anxiety Management with Mindfulness

Diana Winston offers a mindfulness meditation podcast, Working with Anxiety, as one of the weekly meditations conducted by the Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC), UCLA. As Director of Mindfulness Education for MARC, Diana frequently leads these weekly meditations. She stresses that mindfulness enables us to be more fully in the present moment and to accept what is in our life (including anxiety) with curiosity and openness.

Diana maintains that mindfulness helps us to work effectively with anxiety because it, (1) enables us to be present in the moment, rather than absorbed in the past or the future; (2) facilitates reframing of our experience, and (3) provides a place of rest and ease from the turbulence and waves of daily life. As Diana asserts, anxiety is part and parcel of daily life, given the human condition and the uncertainty of the world around us today. The world situation with the global pandemic and devastating conflict between Russia and Ukraine add to anxiety-producing situations we experience on the home and local front. In consequence, there is an increase in mental health issues along with restricted resources to deal with explosive demand.

Guided meditation for working with anxiety

Diana’s approach is consistent with trauma-sensitive mindfulness in that she allows a choice of posture, meditation anchor and overall focus. She encourages us to find a posture that is comfortable with eyes closed or open (ideally, looking down). At the beginning of the meditation, she has us focus on something that gives us a sense of being grounded and supported by something of strength, e.g. our feet on the ground/floor or back against the chair. It is important to tap into something that enables us to slow our minds and calm our feelings

Diana then suggests that we focus on our breath as a neutral experience of the present moment. For some people, breath may not be a neutral aspect and could in fact trigger a trauma response. So, she offers an alternative focus such as sounds in the environment, the room tone or rhythm in some music. Whatever we choose as an anchor, we can return to it whenever we notice our thoughts distracting us and leading to anxiety-producing images, recollections or anticipations.

The next stage of the guided meditation involves focus on some source of anxiety and exploring the bodily sensations associated with it. Diana suggests that if we are new to meditation we should focus on a minor source of anxiety rather than a major issue. Whatever our focal anxiety source, the idea is to notice what is happening in our body, e.g. tightness around our neck and shoulders, quickening or unevenness of our breath or pain in our back. By bringing our consciousness to these bodily sensations, we can work to release the tension involved and restore some level of equanimity.

Diana suggests that at any stage we could use imagery as a way to achieve an anchor that gives us strength and/or a sense of peace. The image could be of a tall mountain withstanding the buffeting of strong winds and rain or a still lake reflecting surrounding trees and supporting the smooth gliding of swans or ducks. Imagery can take us out of our anxiety-producing imagination and transport us to a place of strength and/or peace.

In the final stage of the meditation, Diana encourages us to offer ourselves loving-kindness, acknowledging that we are only human after all and that the world is anxiety-producing. She urges us to extend positive thoughts towards ourselves, rather then beat ourselves up for our fragility. We could focus on times when we have demonstrated resilience to overcome difficulties, extended compassionate action to those in need or expressed gratitude for all that we have.

Reflection

There are many tools to help us work with, and manage, anxiety. These include chanting and/or mantra meditations such as the calming mantra produced by Lulu & Mischka, Stillness in Motion – Sailing and Singing with whales. As we grow in mindfulness through meditation, chanting, mantras or other mindfulness practices, we can learn to be more fully present in the moment, to manage our anxiety-producing thoughts, regulate our emotions and find the peace and ease that lie within.

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Image by Patrik Houštecký 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.

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.

Developing a Sense of Belonging through Mindfulness

In this era of widespread depression, loneliness and disconnection, it becomes critically important to rediscover and enhance our sense of connection. Allyson Pimentel, in one of the UCLA guided meditation podcasts, reminds us that mindfulness can ignite our sense of belonging to ourselves, other people and the earth. Mindfulness is a pathway to reaffirming our connectedness to everything. In the podcast, Allyson draws on the book by Sebene Selassie, You Belong: A Call to Connection. Selene makes a profound case for our connectedness, despite differences, when she writes, “although not one, not separate” and “although not separate, not the same”. She affirms that much of life is paradoxical, but to deny this is to turn a blind eye to the reality of our human existence on earth.

Allyson argues that the “delusion of separateness” contributes to depression and loneliness. She states that we all belong “in every moment and to everything” despite our traumas, injustice and racism in the world, differences in language – culture – philosophy, the presence of hate and division, and the pervasive sense of disconnection and meaninglessness. Building a sense of connection and belonging heals wounds and divisions, contributes to positive mental health and enriches our lived experience through joy, wonder, relatedness and consciously “being with”. Mindfulness, with its focus on what is happening now and doing so with openness, curiosity and acceptance, intensifies our sense of belonging. Paradoxically, being still and silent leads us to compassionate action towards others through recognition of our connectedness.

At any point in time, we can sense our connection to the community of people throughout the world who are meditating, doing Tai Chi or engaging in some other mindfulness practice; or experiencing chronic pain; or dealing with the impacts of adverse childhood experiences or other trauma; or trying to manage grief; or attempting to overcome an addiction or craving; or are experiencing anxiety and depression; or any other manifestation of the human condition. We can also become more conscious of our connection to every other living being as well as our connection with nature.

Guided meditation on belonging

At the beginning of her guided meditation, Allyson encourages us to take a number of deep breaths so that we can feel the connection with the air and our surrounds as well as begin to become more grounded and connected to ourselves. At this point, I was reminded of Lulu & Mischka’s mantra meditation, Rainbow Light and the words:

When I breathe into my heart

I breathe into the heart of all beings

After this initial grounding, Allyson encourages us to connect with our breath, sounds in the room and beyond or our bodily sensations. In connecting to the sounds surrounding us, we can become conscious of what Jon Kabat-Zinn describes as the soundscape in his book, Coming to Our Senses. Allyson reminds us to just absorb the sounds, not try to identify or interpret them or create a story about them – just be with sounds, another form of connection and belonging. We can extend our awareness to our other senses or what Jon describes as the “lightscape”, “touchscape”, “smellscape, “tastescape” and, ultimately, our “mindscape” – “the vast empty spaciousness that is awareness itself”.

Allyson suggests that another way to feel connected and belonging is to focus on our bodily sensations related to being supported by our chair, cushion, bed or floor – whatever is connecting our bodies to something solid and unmoving. Being with these sensations reinforces our supported connectedness and sense of belonging.

Reflection

In the final analysis, we can choose to focus on our differences and what separates us or, alternatively, to increase our consciousness about our connection and belongingness. As we grow in mindfulness through reflection, meditation, mantras, and daily mindfulness practices, we can gain an increased sense of connection and belonging and draw support and positive emotions from this growing awareness.

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Image by Eddie K 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.

Compassionate Action through Grief

Rosie Ayliffe in her book, Far from Home, tells the story of how her grief after the murder of her 21 year old daughter, Mia, in a hostel in Queensland in 2016 energised her to fight for legislative reform for Australian backpackers. She tracks the early life of her vivacious daughter who loved people and travel, shares the rawness of her grief and exposes the exploitation of backpackers who engage in the 88 days farm work requirement to qualify for a visa to stay in Australia for a second year. Rosie describes her work to uncover the extent of the injustice towards backpackers and her campaign to redress the lack of registration and controls over the farm work scheme.

Rosie’s research fuelled by her grief and her fury over the widespread exploitation of backpackers from overseas came at considerable personal cost, not the least being reliving the nightmare of her daughter’s savage murder and that of Tom Jackson who tried to come to her aid. In her quest to right the unspeakable wrongs, she left no stone unturned to seek justice for her daughter, Tom and the countless backpackers who had suffered as a participant in the scheme. She met opposition from farmers, union officials, politicians and others with a vested interest in maintain the status quo.

Rosie, an experienced journalist who had travelled the world, was not put off by this opposition but was inspired by the love she had for Mia and the endless expressions of love and grief from Mia’s friends around the world. Rosie built a network of support in Australia including the parents of Tom Jackson and organisations like the Salvation Army who had been working to support backpackers and redress the wrongs they experienced. She also built alliances with people in England, her home country, where many people had agitated for, and achieved, a modern slavery act.

Rosie Ayliffe on Australia Story

Rosie’s grief permeates her story and is never far from the surface. She recounts the arduous task of creating Part 1 and Part 2 of Long Way from Home for the TV show Australia Story. There were not only the exertions involved in filming and retakes but also the energy and effort for the additional research required and the unsettling visit to the hostel in North Queensland where Mia died. Rosie was able to create the expose through the support of her friends, colleagues and the creators and film crew of Australis Story. The TV show gave increased exposure to the issues for backpackers including the psychological, financial and sexual exploitation. This, in turn, led Rosie to make a contribution to an inquiry underpinning moves for a modern slavery act in Australia.

Reform and Compassionate Action

Rosie’s efforts and determination contributed substantially to the development and promulgation of the Queensland State legislation known as the Labour Hire Licensing Act 2017 and the Federal Legislation, The Modern Slavery Act 2018. Rosie’s story is one of love, loss and unrelenting courage written with the exemplary writing skill of a journalist, compassion of a mother, and resilience to unearth the adverse circumstances contributing to her daughter’s death. Mia herself is never far from the surface nor is the rawness of Rosie’s grief. As Rosie points out, grief and its expression are different for everyone and cannot be quantified or compared. She maintains that grief for the loss of a child is especially traumatic and enduring for a parent because there are “so many painful reminders, so many missed moments, so much wasted potential”.

Despite her grief and her anger, Rosie was able to rise above the debilitating effects of her loss, learn again to be grateful for life and show compassionate action towards the parents of the mentally ill person who murdered her daughter through her expressions of forgiveness and understanding and desire to build a relationship with them. Therein lies the true character of Rosie, her love of others and deep, abiding compassion.

Reflection

Rosie’s story is moving, challenging and inspiring. It moves us to share the grief and sense of loss, it challenges us to take compassionate action towards others who may have hurt us and inspires us to appreciate life and the present moment, because the human condition is fragile and life is transitory. As we grow in mindfulness through meditation, expressions of gratitude and reflection on our life and friendships, we can develop a deep sense of appreciation and the courage for compassionate action.

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Image by fotografierende 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.

Achieving the Benefits of Meditation Through Regular Practice

In his Mindful Monday podcast on the 9^th of August, Marvin Belzer emphasised the importance of keeping meditation simple, especially when we are new to meditation – focusing on something that is simple and real such as our breath, ambient sounds, or bodily sensations. He stressed that this simple focus enables us to experience what is happening now for us and leads to realising the many benefits of meditation such as calmness, clarity and concentration – each of which flows over into other areas of our lives such as family, work, sport and relationships. He highlighted the need to relax into our meditation, not trying to force specific outcome. The process of meditation that he described is similar to what I explained previously, though on this occasion there was more time devoted to silent meditation.

In a subsequent podcast on 16^th of August, Marvin stressed the need for effort and patience to realise meditation’s benefits – we cannot rush the results. He maintained that we are not aiming for perfection but need to recognise the nature of the human condition – a realisation that cultivates humility and the acceptance that we have very little control over much of our life. However, what we can control is our ability to direct our attention – a skill that underpins much of success in life. Controlling our attention is “doable” if we make the effort of regular meditation practice. Marvin suggests that what helps here is humour as we recognise the frailty of our ability to concentrate for any sustained period of time without distractions.

The benefits of regular meditation practice

While sustained meditation practice can be difficult, the benefits that accrue are worth the effort and persistence involved. These benefits include:

Creativity – we can develop creative solutions to our everyday problems and realise creativity in our work life. Creativity is cultivated in an environment of stillness and silence – an environment where our mind is uncluttered and we are not overwhelmed by challenging emotions.
Clarity – meditation helps us to clear our minds and open ourselves to self-awareness and to insights into what we bring to a situation. It also throws light on our life purpose – how we can utilise our life experience, skills, knowledge and values to create a better world, whether locally or globally.
Resilience – as we become more grounded through meditation, we can bounce back quicker and easier from setbacks and disappointments. Meditation builds resilience because it helps us to clear false beliefs, regain perspective and overcome “emotional inflammation” that is prevalent in these challenging times of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Calmness and equanimity – as we become more grounded in our breath which is always with us while we are alive, we can experience calmness and face the vicissitudes of life with equanimity. We can use symbolic actions, such as joining our fingers, at any time during the day to recapture this sense of calm and stability.
Compassion – as we come to accept our own frailty in the face of life’s challenges, we can become more empathetic towards others and more motivated to take compassionate action to alleviate the pain and suffering of others.

Reflection

Meditation requires effort but multiple benefits accrue if we can sustain regular practice. If we are not too hard on ourselves – not seeking perfection in meditation practice – we can more readily sustain the motivation to undertake regular practice, no matter how boring the process may feel at times. As we grow in mindfulness, we can become more tolerant of ourselves and others, appreciate our life and live it more fully.

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Image by Iso Tuor 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.

Equanimity and Fragility of the Human Condition

Martin Brensilver, meditation teacher at UCLA, provides a guided meditation podcast on Equanimity as a Facet of Mindfulness. In the process he explores the nature of equanimity and argues that it is not the same as passivity – it is not inaction or indifference in the face of human suffering in the world. For Martin, equanimity involves “having a relationship with one’s deep sensory experience right now” – engaging with our deepest thoughts and feelings in the moment. It involves being open to the full poignancy of the human condition – not deadening our experience of life but drawing out the sadness and melodrama of the human condition. Mindfulness enables us to meet this intensity with “patience, love and tolerance” and a “soft heart”.

Martin stresses that equanimity is a fine balance between suppression of what we are feeling and thinking and becoming totally caught up in those thoughts and feelings. Equanimity involves being fully present to our bodily sensations and open to fully experiencing our challenging emotions. What equanimity brings to our lives is the capacity to overcome the “compulsion to act out our preferences” – the temptation to succumb to our habituated responses in the face of challenging thoughts and emotions.

Martin observes that there are times when meditation is “not fun at all”. To be silent and still, in whatever posture we adopt, can unearth strong emotions and racing thoughts. It can be a catalyst for uncomfortable bodily sensations. What it does, however, is “open our hearts to ourselves” and what we are experiencing.

The fragility of the human condition

Martin gave a talk in May 2020 as part of a retreat for Buddhist practitioners. The podcast of the talk is titled, Vulnerability, Porousness, Equanimity, and Love. The talk is fairly conceptual and focuses on the difference between classical Buddhist thinking on vulnerability versus modern-day Buddhist thinking. However, Martin makes a number of points relevant to our discussion about the human condition by drawing on the work of several authors.

One of these writers is Adam Phillips, author of Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. Adam suggests that we long for a different life from what we are experiencing. We can become focused on “needs unmet”, “desires unfulfilled” and “roads not taken” – effectively “falling short” of our potential. These are the “lives unlived” that we imagine could have been possible and this can lead to a sense of unrest and even “rage”.

Martin compares the human condition to that of the fragility of a plant and contrasts it to the solidity of a jewel. He refers to Susan David’s comment that “life’s beauty is inseparable from its fragility”. In her book, Emotional Agility, Susan asserts that life involves sadness, fragility and anxiety and we need to acknowledge this, but to live our life more fully requires the courage to go beyond our comfort zone and manage our fear about uncertainty and ambiguity.

Martin asserts that the pandemic has highlighted the downside of interdependence as well as the upside. He suggests that we have been experiencing the “porousness of the boundary between self and world” – the pandemic has injected itself into millions of lives in numerous countries so that we are conscious that we are “living in precariousness”, we cannot ignore the fragility of the human condition. Martin reaffirms Susan’s contention that failure to accept this vulnerability is a “major source of inhumanity” – the harmful withholding of care, concern and compassion. He maintains that, in contrast, embracing vulnerability fully, (and with It, the possibility of rejection) leads to softening the heart and opening to patience, tolerance and care.

Developing equanimity

Martin draws on the work of Sara Lazar, a scientist researching meditation and yoga. Sara and her colleagues in a joint research paper define equanimity as “an even-minded state” or an even disposition towards all experiences no matter their source or how they are experienced (e.g., pleasant or unpleasant).

Martin summarises Sara’s thoughts about developing the key aspects of equanimity as follows:

Widen our perspective – when we are in pain or feel vulnerable (e.g. because of the pandemic), our focus narrows and we can easily lose perspective. Martin suggests that one way to widen our perspective is to envisage the vastness of space or the time the light from stars take to journey to us. We could also envisage the earth in space and billions of people living in diverse countries, timeframes and cultures.
More readily engage in sensory experience – as suggested earlier, this means not denying experience or associated emotions but embracing them fully. If we can accept not suppress what we are experiencing then we are better able to ride out the “the winds of feelings”, rather than tightly bracing against them. This principle is captured in a very practical way by Jon Kabat-Zinn in his book, Full Catastrophe Living: How to cope with stress, pain and illness using Mindfulness Meditation.
Disengage from evaluative (judgemental) thinking and reactive behaviour – we have to overcome the unevenness of our response to challenging emotions and events conditioned by our habituated behaviour. This takes a quiet confidence that is born of courage and self-awareness. Despite our best efforts, our equanimity can ebb and flow but as we work with our deepest emotions we can widen our window of tolerance so that we are “not afraid to be overrun by experience”.

Reflection

Martin reinforces the fact that equanimity is not a steady state – it can have its ups and downs. As we grow in mindfulness through meditation and reflection, we can develop this “even-minded state” and ready disposition towards the challenging experiences and emotions of our life. We can become increasingly self-aware and learn to overcome our reactivity and learned responses to stressors.

Increasingly, we can build what Martin describes as “courageous confidence” – a healthy confidence not born of conceit but deeply embedded in consciousness of the fragility of the human condition. We can progressively move away from acquisitiveness and self-absorption to care and compassionate action for others who together with us are experiencing life’s frailties, uncertainties and challenges.

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Image by Anant Sharma 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.