meditation practice – Page 5

Developing Relational Mindfulness

Terry Real, in his podcast interview with Tami Simon of Sounds True, introduced the concept of “relational mindfulness”. He described this as a skill that we can develop through meditation and reflection. It entails being able to be in-the-moment in your interactions within your close relationships and to respond from your “adult prefrontal cortex”, while being conscious of the potential, automatic and harmful response of your wounded child.

Relational mindfulness requires recognising that your close relationship is your “biosphere” – it is integral to your ecology. Terry suggests that “thinking relationally is synonymous with thinking ecologically”. This, in turn, requires humility – recognition of the mutuality of the relationship, moving beyond the hurt of your wounded child and acknowledging your mistakes and the hurt of the other person. It also entails being conscious enough to avoid triggering a negative response from the wounded child of the other person in the relationship.

It takes a lot of self-monitoring and self-management developed through meditation and reflection to achieve the requisite humility. If you can develop self-regulation, you are better able to access your considered, adult response rather than be at the mercy of your compulsive wounded child.

Taking a break to recover and commit to the welfare of the relationship

If, however, despite your best efforts, you are flooded emotionally when you are triggered by the actions or words of your partner, you can withdraw from the interaction. Terry suggests that the adult, considerate way to do this is to state three things:

your need to take a break to deal with your own emotions around the issue under discussion
your desire to re-engage in a reasonable time, e.g. in an hour
your willingness to think about how the needs of both of you can be met.

It is critical to see the conflicted interaction not as an opportunity to win or prove your partner wrong, but as a chance to take care of your partner (as well as gain increased self-awareness). Taking care of your partner may mean apologising (this is where humility helps) and asking what you can do to help your partner or to make good their “hurt”. Accusations targeted at the other’s wounded child only inflame the situation.

As we grow in mindfulness through meditation and reflection we can develop relational mindfulness in our everyday interactions within our close relationships. Meditation practice and reflection on our interactions will help us build a relational mindset and develop adult responses in situations that trigger our wounded child. This relational mindfulness, then, will enrich and sustain our close relationships.

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Overcoming the Obstacle of Doubt During Meditation

I have previously discussed a range of obstacles that can impact on our attempts at meditation – aversion, sleepiness, desire and restlessness. Today I want to concentrate on “doubt” as an obstacle or source of distraction during meditation.

Doubt is a common experience during meditation, particularly for people who are at the early stages of meditation practice. We can doubt ourselves. whether we are doing it right or whether we are progressing at some ideal rate. We can also doubt the process of meditation itself because we are so easily distracted, or we may not be experiencing the benefits that are claimed for meditation practice.

It is a common experience in learning any new skill, such as playing tennis, that we will have doubts and some confusion about what we are trying to learn. It is also easy to give up when we are in the early stages because we are conscious of our incompetence. Early on in meditation practice we are assailed with all kinds of obstacles and we can experience the strong temptation to give it away. However, persistence pays in meditation as in other facets of our life.

We can find it really difficult to deal with the endless thoughts that assail us during meditation – the distraction of things to do, mistakes made, future pleasant events and related desire, impending difficulties or current challenges. By letting these thoughts pass us by and returning to our focus, we are building our “meditation muscle” – our capacity to restore our focus no matter what the distraction or how often distractions occur.

With persistence in meditation we are able to bring our renewed level of self-awareness and self-management more and more into our daily lives – to overcome the challenges, tests of our patience and disturbances to our equanimity.

Overcoming doubt during meditation

Diana Winston, in her meditation podcast on managing doubt during meditation, provides us with some sound advice on ways to overcome these doubts as we meditate:

Accept the doubts – acknowledge the doubt as the reality of “what is” for you at the present moment. Focusing on the doubt and its manifestation in your body, enables you to name your feelings associated with the doubt and to “look it in the face”, rather than hide from it.
Don’t beat up on yourself – doubts assail everyone, particularly in the early stages of engaging in meditation practice. The doubts themselves can lead to negative self-evaluation if you think you are the only one who has doubts.
Spend more time on being grounded during meditation – this process can take us out of our doubts and ground us more fully in the present moment. Diana suggests, for example, spending more time on scanning your body for tension and letting go to soften the muscles in your abdomen, shoulders, back or neck. Another suggestion she makes is to focus on the sounds around you – listening to them without judgement as to whether you like them or not, just focusing on the sound itself.
Remind yourself of your motivation in doing meditation – are you practising meditation to gain self-control, improved concentration, calmness in the face of stress, improved resilience in dealing with difficult situations or general wellness? If you can focus in on your motivation, you will be better able to sustain your meditation practice. Learning any new skill takes time and practice and a sustained vision of the end goal.

As we grow in mindfulness, we can overcome doubts that serve as obstacles to our progress. We can avoid the self-defeating cycle of indulging our doubts – our indulged doubts impact the effectiveness of our meditation which, in turn, increases our doubts about the value of meditation for us when we are already time-poor.

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Overcoming the Obstacle of Restlessness During Meditation

In today’s post I continue to explore the theme of obstacles to meditation introduced by Diana Winston. I have previously explored obstacles such as sleepiness, desire and aversion. Here I want to focus on restlessness as a universally experienced obstacle to meditation.

Diana, in introducing restlessness as an obstacle in her meditation podcast, makes the point at the outset that “obstacles” can be viewed as part and parcel of our human experience rather than problems to be solved. By reframing obstacles as integral to life experience and what we encounter in meditation, we can more readily face them with a positive, encouraging mind and avoid criticising our self because they arise.

Restlessness is a natural human condition as our minds are conditioned to scan our environment for threats or impending challenges. Our amygdala, our fight/flight response centre, keeps us on the alert for anything that may stress or harm us. So, our mind tends to wander from one thing to another scanning our internal and external environment.

Overcoming the obstacle of restlessness during meditation

Diana explains in her podcast that there are at least three possible ways to gain control over restlessness during meditation – (1) more precise focus, (2) wider awareness, and (3) paying attention to the experience of restlessness itself.

Becoming more precise – for example, if your focus is on your breathing, then being more precise involves focusing more closely on the experience of breathing. This entails observing not only the in-breath and out-breath but the space between. It can also involve moving awareness to different parts of the body where you experience your breathing – your nose, chest, abdomen.
Developing a wider awareness – make your focus more expansive by taking in the sounds around you, being conscious of your posture and its effect on your meditation, shifting your posture to change your focus, noticing where your mind is going to, e.g. today’s activities, future pleasurable activities, desires and wants.
Focus in on the experience of restlessness and its bodily manifestation – shifting position frequently, wanting to get up from the meditation, feeling tense in the shoulders or back. This focus involves being with what is at the present moment.

As we grow in mindfulness through meditation practice we can learn ways to overcome obstacles such as restlessness, desire and sleepiness.

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Being Mindful About Our Thoughts

Diana Winston in her meditation podcast, Mindfulness of Thoughts, explains the role thoughts can play in our lives and provides options for using mindfulness meditation to control our thoughts.

Thoughts have a powerful influence over our lives – they can be positive or negative with consequential impacts on the way we see and experience the world. They can express our perceptions of others and our experiences. Our thoughts can extend to our needs such as who I wish to marry, where I would like to live, my ideal job, what I want to study/research or what I am going to do with the surplus in my life.

We also have thoughts that contribute to our pain and suffering such as negative self-evaluation, anxious thoughts, thoughts about grief or thoughts that engender negative emotions such as rage, anger, frustration or envy.

Being mindful about our thoughts

Mindfulness can really help us to manage our thoughts. Diana suggests that a fundamental rule is, “Don’t believe everything you think”. Jon Kabat-Zinn reminds us too, “We are not our thoughts”. Thoughts can be seen as real but, in reality, they are just passing through our mind, unless we cultivate and encourage them.

We can be trapped by our thoughts or create some space so that we have times when we are free from them. Freedom comes from just noticing our thoughts as they pass by rather than being enmeshed in them and acting them out, particularly where they are negative.

Diana uses the metaphor of a passing train as a way to illustrate how one thought leads to another, which leads to another…as if they are coupled or joined together. They become like a “thought train that leads us down a particular track”. Before you know it, a lot of time can elapse and you begin to wonder where the time has gone – you have been lost in your thoughts.

By being in the present moment through mindfulness, you can stop yourself from going down that particular track that your thoughts are leading you along. Diana suggests that an alternative position is to visualize yourself staying on the platform and watching the thoughts go by, avoiding getting on the thought train, just letting the train go past.

Meditations to control our thoughts

We can build awareness by focusing on our breathing while noticing when thoughts arise and then returning to our focus – our breath. This practice of noticing, not cultivating our thoughts, and returning to our focus, is a powerful way to achieve equanimity and avoid being disturbed and captured by our thoughts that can lead to a negative spiral.

A second meditation practice is to actually notice a thought and pay attention to it for a brief interval – just noticing it briefly and returning to our focus. It becomes like a temporary aside. We could notice that we are engaged in planning, critiquing or other frequent forms of our mental activity.

A third meditation practice is open awareness – like noticing thoughts as if they are clouds in the sky passing by us as the wind blows them along in a hazy way.

Each of these meditation practices can help us to be mindful about our thoughts and to learn to control them so that they do not control us and the way we experience, and relate to, the world. Diana, in her meditation podcast, leads us through each of these meditation practices to enable us to experience the sense of freedom and control that comes from release from the binds of our thoughts.

As we grow in mindfulness through meditation practices that address our thoughts, we can develop a sense of peace and control and free ourselves to show up for our lives – not being held back by the heavy anchor of negative thoughts.

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The Freedom of Possibilities Versus The Tyranny of Expectations

Phillip Moffitt, author of Emotional Chaos to Clarity, writes comprehensively in a blog post about the tyranny of expectations. He suggests that expectations lock us into a limited future with a fixed view of desired outcomes. We have expectations of ourselves and of others and they, in turn, have expectations of us.

In contrast, possibilities arise in the present moment if we are tuned into what is happening in the here and now. If we are present to our situation, whatever it may be, we are able to tap our imagination and intellect, achieve clarity about the situation and come up with creative options.

Expectations can tie us to a particular outcome and lead to disappointment when that outcome is not realised. Even when the desired outcome is achieved, we can feel dissatisfied that it did not meet our expectations in terms of happiness, joy or success. This results in what John describes as the tyranny of expectations and he illustrates this by giving an example of a woman held captive by her expectations:

Our discussion revealed that she repeatedly experienced being disappointed whenever she actually got what she sought. In response, she would create new expectations, and the cycle would repeat itself.

No one is free from expectations, even yogis who can become trapped by their expectations of what they will achieve through sustained meditation practice. They can become attached to a desired outcome, so much so that they defeat the very purpose of meditation which is to be in-the-moment with whatever is present in their lives.

John suggests that some people go to the other extreme and give up on expectations for fear of being disappointed – they do not pursue their values in day-to-day living. They can experience depression as well as anger and frustration.

As we grow in mindfulness through meditating on our expectations in any given situation, we can learn to understand ourselves and to realise the very powerful role that expectations can play in our lives. Working from the possibilities of the present moment, we can reduce the power of expectations and realise true happiness.

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Managing Expectations through Mindfulness

Expectations play such a significant place in our lives – we have expectations of ourselves and others in our daily activities. We expect ourselves to be able to perform well (or exceptionally) in our work, our sport and home life. We have expectations of others in terms of their words and actions and the level of support they provide to us.

Sometimes we can be captured by external expectations in terms of fitness, health, the way we look, our level of income, where we live and what we wear. Dr. Harrier B. Braiker captures the essence of this “disease” – fulfilling everyone’s expectations of you to avoid rejection and anger – in her new book, The Disease to Please: Curing the People-Pleasing Syndrome. Harriet is the author of the 1986 book, The Type E Woman: How to Overcome the Stress of Being Everything to Everybody (reprinted in 2006), in which she challenges “erroneous expectations”.

Expectations can often lead to conflict. If someone does not fulfil our expectations through their words or behaviour, then we can be upset, annoyed, angry or resentful. This may extend even to the simplest tasks around the house as well as in the workplace where we have expectations of our managers, colleagues and peers. Mindfulness can help us gain self-awareness and self-management with respect to our expectations.

Managing expectations through mindfulness

George Pitagorsky, in his article, Using Mindfulness to Manage Your Expectations, focuses on expectations in a work situation, but the principles apply to any context. He suggests two key strategies for using mindfulness to manage expectations at work:

Being mindful at the outset of a project to ensure that expectations of all involved are aligned.
When expectations are thwarted, being mindful of the feelings you experience and learning to use the gap between stimulus and response to self-manage.

George is the author of Managing Expectations: A Mindful Approach to Achieving Success. His book which focuses on the experience of a Project Manager involved in organisational transition “explores how to apply a mindful, compassionate, and practical approach to satisfying expectations in any situation”.

Phillip Moffitt discusses the Tyranny of Expectations and argues that living in the now, developed through meditation practice, is the way to free ourselves from this tyranny manifested in the endless cycle of ever-increasing expectations.

As we grow in mindfulness through mindfulness meditation practices, we can become more aware of the nature and impact of our own expectations and those of other people and develop our “response ability“, so that we are not held captive by our expectations or those of others.

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Paying Attention

Marvin Belzer provides guidance in a meditation podcast on “paying attention”. Marvin was on the faculty of UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the time. He has many years experience with practicising and teaching meditation, having taught a semester-long course on the theory and practice of mindfulness. Among other things, he provides meditations for teens – ways for young people to learn to pay attention and to access calmness and clarity.

Marvin emphasises that “paying attention” is a natural ability that does not require forcing. We can notice things, look at things closely, observe what is happening in front of us – it all comes naturally. However, we have lost the art of focusing because of the distractions in our lives and, particularly, our endless thoughts.

To learn to pay attention again, we need to practise. This practice ideally involves focusing on something simple – our breath, hand, bodily sensations or sounds around us. If we keep the focus simple, we can more easily sustain our attention. As Marvin points out, the process of stabilising our attention on something that is simple (and does not entice our thoughts to go wild), “automatically induces calmness”. If we practise paying attention through daily meditation we also gain clarity, be able to think more clearly.

The challenge of losing attention

If our mind wanders, we do not need to consider this a failure, but “part and parcel” of the process – affirming, firstly, that our mind is active because an intelligent mind needs to exercise itself on something challenging, not something that is simple.

We will find that, as we attempt to pay attention, our mind will suddenly become absorbed in memories, thoughts, emotions or planning – like me, you could end up planning your next activity, working on your to-do-list, deciding how you are going to get to that meeting later in the day.

The important thing is to re-focus without blaming yourself or indulging in negative thoughts and stories about yourself and your perceived “weakness”. A useful technique to use if your are distracted during a meditation is to make the distraction a part of the meditation itself. Instead of consuming energy trying to get rid of the distraction (and distracting yourself more) just notice what is going on – “i see that I am feeling a bit anxious now and I sense a tightness in my shoulders”. You can just name the emotion and feel the sensation in your body.

It is important to remember that you are not trying to perform for anyone else, even yourself. You are not trying to meet anyone else’s rate of advancement. Focusing on something simple is a neutral activity and encourages you to be calm and real – to give yourself permission to be-in-the-moment.

Paying attention meditation can open your mind and heart to creativity. By stilling your mind, you are able to a access what Kabat-Zinn calls the “spaciousness” within. You will gradually overcome your existing habit of “mind wandering” and be able to develop the sustained attention needed to fully access your creative mind.

The process of paying attention is integral to all forms of meditation, with the focus varying from one form of meditation to another. In his podcast, Marvin Belzer leads you through a paying attention meditation that moves from a focus on breath, to listening to surrounding sounds, to undertaking a form of somatic meditation – focusing on your body. As we grow in mindfulness through practising paying attention in meditation, we can readily access calmness and clarity and open our minds to creativity.

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The 4P’s of Mindfulness in the Workplace

Caroline Welch, Co-founder with Dan Siegel of the Mindsight Institute, presented at the Mindfulness at Work Summit on the topic of the 4P’s of mindfulness at work. The 4P’s are covered at length in her book, The Gift of Presence: A Mindfulness Guide for Women, published in 2020. Caroline’s aim with the book is to encourage and support women to develop the confidence to handle life’s many challenges.

The 4P’s represent ways of bringing mindfulness to the workplace despite the busyness of our lives. The challenge of being mindful at work is made more difficult for women because of the many roles they play and the challenging questions such as, “When should I go back to work after the birth of my child?”, “Can I maintain a career if I take time off?” “How do I overcome the guilt of leaving my child in childcare during the day?” The difficulty, and associated stress, is aggravated by the Type E Woman who attempts to be “everything to everybody”.

Caroline identified the 4P’s as Presence, Pacing, Prioritizing and Pivoting:

Presence – this is foundational and it means being-in-the-moment, realizing that things in life are transitory, consciously being present to people when communicating with them and developing open awareness to appreciate what life provides. Presence is cultivated by mindfulness practice – a daily routine that develops awareness as a habit that will sustain “presence” at work or in the home. Given the challenge of “finding the time” to practice, Caroline suggests adopting a “ruthless” commitment to a single practice that is adopted for whatever time you have available, even one minute or “one breath at a time” – attaching the practice to something you already do can assist to make the practice both easily remembered and sustainable.
Pacing – this is dealing with the “impatience of youth”. Increasingly we want to achieve all at once, particularly in our 20’s or 30’s. Caroline suggests that we should think in broader timespans than just the immediate day, month or year. It means accepting that you cannot achieve everything in life at once, that life is very much about phases with each phase enabling the following phase. It also means accepting the fact that people are living longer nowadays – so everything does not have to be achieved now.
Prioritizing – means being conscious of our values (and those of the organisation) while working through the endless priorities that confront us in the workplace. This also implies letting go of things and delegating to others, or not doing things that are relatively meaningless. With this comes the realization that yesterday’s priorities are today’s waste bin submissions. We need to ask ourselves, “What really matters?
Pivoting – this entails being able to pay attention to the relevant data that confronts us daily and being able to make decisions on that data. This focused attention may mean that you have to leave a job, change career direction, or take on a part-tine or a full-time role, depending on your circumstances.

As we grow in mindfulness through meditation practice with “ruthless” commitment to a daily practice we can gradually realize the 4P’s of being mindful at work with less stress, more satisfying achievements and a healthier life.

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Meditate with Intention

In the previous post, Replacing Shame with Kind Attention, I introduced the IAA model of mindfulness developed by Shauna Shapiro and colleagues. The model depicts a process incorporating intention, awareness and attitude, with each element reinforcing the other two. In that post, I focused on “attitude” and explored the fundamental stance of “kind intention”, that Shauna relates to caring, gentleness, trust and compassion towards ourselves. Thus “attitude” in this model relates to the “how” we need to meditate to develop mindfulness and realise its benefits.

In the current post, I want to focus on the “intention” component of the IAA model. Shauna describes this as foundational to the Model. In a video presentation about the model, she quotes the definition of mindfulness that she developed with Linda Carlson in 2006:

The awareness that arises out of intentionally paying attention in an open, kind and discerning way.

Meditating with intention is basically being conscious of the “why” – the intent or purpose for your meditation. She describes “intention” as “setting the compass” of the heart – not a destination but a direction.

Jon Kabat-Zinn reinforces the importance of intention when he states that “your intentions set the stage for what is possible”. He explains that he initially thought that the act of meditating was sufficient in itself, but soon came to learn that for personal growth and change to occur, we need to have some aspiration or vision that provides the purpose for meditation practice. Shauna Shapiro, in her own 1992 research, found that intention moves along a “continuum from self-regulation, to self-exploration and finally, to self-liberation” (which, in turn, leads to “compassionate action”).

Shauna’s study confirmed that intention determined the outcomes of meditation, so that if your focus is self-regulation that is what you will achieve. Hence, we need to meditate-with-intent, so that our personal vision and underlying values can be manifested in our words and actions. This then enables us to “rest in the moment” and have stability and clarity about our life. We meditate to realise our personal aspirations in our day-to-day lives, from moment to moment.

As we grow in mindfulness, we sharpen our intention in meditation which progressively becomes an evolving, dynamic motivation for a desired way of life. The more we develop mindfulness, the more we can consciously pursue what we value and realise it our life.

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Become What You Practise

Last year, Dr. Shauna Shapiro gave a TEDx Talk on The Power of Mindfulness: What You Practice Grows Stronger. In the presentation she highlighted the power of mindfulness practice by drawing on ancient wisdom and recent neuroscience.

Shauna maintained that one of the problems of modern society is that we hold ourselves up to impossible standards and expect perfection when this is not humanly possible.

Dr. Harriet Braiker epitomised this impossible goal when she wrote her 1986 book, The Type E Woman: How to Overcome the Stress of Being Everything to Everybody. In that book, Harriet challenged women to stop trying to achieve perfection in all their multiple roles, e.g. the perfect spouse, mother, business partner/worker. She argued that women where killing themselves trying to achieve the impossible.

Shauna stated that perfection was not possible but recent neuroscience has confirmed the long-held view that transformation is possible – we can learn, adapt and change. Our minds are not a fixed entity but can be transformed through the facility of neuroplasticity.

Shauna who is a Professor of Psychology and co-author of The Art and Science of Mindfulness, found through her research that one of the most powerful means of personal transformation is mindfulness. This discovery reinforced her own experience of the power of mindfulness when she suffered a serious illness in her teens and had to cope with a pervading sense of loneliness and fear.

In sharing the challenge of learning mindful breathing in a monastery in Thailand, Shauna expressed the frustration she experienced with her wandering mind making mindful breathing a very difficult challenge. She came to realise that part of the work of mindfulness practice is “to train the mind to be here, where we already are”.

In her presentation, Shauna stopped for a moment to engage the audience in a brief grounding exercise, involving breathing and posture, to reinforce the fact that despite our very best conscious efforts, our mind continues to wander. Unfortunately, as she illustrated, what happens is our mind then starts wandering into the negative self-evaluation terrain – “What’s wrong with me, other people are doing it right”.

Shauna recounted that her saviour in her time at the monastery was a visiting monk who shared with her the wisdom of five words – “what we practise grows stronger”. If we practise negative self-evaluation or impatience or resentment, this becomes embedded in our neural pathways. Alternatively, if we practise being calm and focused through mindfulness meditation, that is what we become.

As we grow in mindfulness through meditation practice or Tai Chi, we refocus our minds, change our neural pathways and open ourselves up to personal transformation on many fronts, not the least of these being greater calmness and focus.

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