metaphor – Grow Mindfulness

Time as Metaphor

George Lakoff and Mark Turner point out in their book, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor, that we “deal with time metaphorically”, just as we do with other abstract concepts such as life and death. In a previous post, I discussed how a metaphor itself shapes our perceptions and world view and how poetry can enable us to change metaphors and break frames. Time metaphors are pervasive in our everyday language and expose how we view time.

Time metaphors

In this current post, I discuss several time metaphors and explore ways to break free of the constraints in thinking and feeling that they elicit:

If only I had more time

The desire for “more time” is fraught with difficulty because “time” is finite in the sense that we only live one lifetime (normally, up to 100 years). The saying suggests that we could do “more of the same, without reflecting on how we use our time”. We need to review how we spend our time, e.g. in watching TV, sleeping, going to the movies, talking, spreading rumours, playing video games, engaging with social media, feasting on the news. We can treat time as an endless commodity to be drawn on at will or view it as something that is finite and valuable. We can waste time or fritter it away because we have not learned to value what time represents – our chance to learn, grow, contribute and support. There is more to time than meets the eye.

Killing time

This is a way of saying: I need to use time up because I have too much time. It suggests that we are bored, have nothing positive or productive to do. This is an opportunity to savour the freedom of boredom. We are consumed by the need to be doing things all the time, to fill in time with activity. The emphasis on “doing” instead of “being” creates its own stresses. Boredom can be freeing in that it motivates us to be more creative in how we spend our time – the work that we do, our leisure choices, our creative pursuits, developing relationships, our mindfulness practices. Arlie Russell Hochschild suggests that our need to be busy creates a Time Bind that means we are caught up in an obsessive need to fill in time with activity. In the workplace, we have to be seen to be busy – what Christine Jackman describes as “performative busyness”.

Running out of time

This expression often refers to an impending deadline, one that is externally imposed or self-created. We can review the external deadlines in terms of importance and necessity and, where possible, negotiate a change in timeline. Self-imposed timelines are time- traps of our own creation. We can review them and question why we have created them – are they the product of limiting self-beliefs, a need to please, or a need to achieve? In reviewing our self-imposed deadlines, we can ask ourselves, “How necessary are they?” “How could they be changed/adjusted?” By way of example, when I started out writing this blog, I set myself the goal of daily blog posts. This became unsustainable when I started co-facilitating manager-development programs across the State. On the advice of my mentor, I changed my goal to two or three posts a week. I have subsequently adjusted my timeline again to reflect my desire to write a series of e-books based on this blog. I now aim to write two 1,000 word posts per month, along with updating my archive page. Adjusting our self-imposed deadlines for changed circumstances becomes essential if we are to avoid creating unnecessary stress.

Wasting time

We often hear the expression, “That’s a waste of time” or “Stop wasting time”. The emphasis on waste is a recognition that time is a finite resource for our life here on earth. Unfortunately, we spend so much time either thinking about the past or worrying about the future – catalysts for depression and anxiety. Jake Bailey reminds us too that we can spend so much time on looking forward to tomorrow (and live in expectation of what it has to offer) that we lose sight of the present. Elisha Goldstein in his book, The Now Effect, reminds us that being mindful of the present moment can change our life. Richard Carlson and Joseph Bailey reinforce this message in their book, Slowing Down to the Speed of Life. They maintain that we speed up our lives when we live in the past, engage in self-judging or become overly-analytical of our daily life and its related problems. They argue that the benefits of slowing down to the present moment (rather than racing ahead) include improving our health and relationships, enjoying more peace and equanimity, reducing our stress and strengthening our focus and capacity to be productive.

Time metaphors and chronic illness

Jennifer Crystal – writer, educator and author of One Tick Stopped the Clock – has written about the different perceptions of time and mindsets by people experiencing chronic illness and those close to people suffering from chronic illness. In a blog post, The Time-Warp of Tick-Borne Illness, she discusses time metaphors in the context of her own experience of tick-borne chronic Lyme Disease.

Jennifer points out that we typically have a different relationship to time (and different time metaphors) at the various stages of our life. As children, time does not move fast enough; as we become aged, we want time to slow down. When people experience chronic illness, different time metaphors come into play.

Jennifer notes that she lost so much time through illness which delayed her degree graduation, her relationships and job/life plans. For her during this period of chronic illness and a subsequent relapse, time moved too fast. She felt an urgency to catch up with time. However, her recovery depended on her slowing down and spending time on self-care. Despite the feeling of having a lot of catching up to do, Jennifer has had to move at her own pace to achieve her goals in her own time and to avoid further major relapses.

Jennifer noted that perceptions of time can be so very different for the well in comparison to the chronically ill. The former often wish for the free time that they see as the province of the chronically ill (time to lie around and read or watch TV). What they don’t realise is that the chronically ill person often does not have the energy or pain-free experience to enjoy these envied activities. Jennifer maintains that each side (the healthy and the chronically ill) need to develop an understanding of the perspective and experience of the other. Even the healthy person experiences stressors and pain in this fast-paced world.

Reflection

In this post, I have concentrated on several time metaphors that can constrain our perception and mindset. However, there are time metaphors that have positive connotations or that promote proactivity, such as a stitch in time saves nine.

In the March Creative Meetup, an online support group for writers-with-chronic-illness, Jennifer shared her blog post and offered two time-related writing prompts:

How has your relationship to time changed with your illness?
Imagine yourself springing forward or backward to a future or past moment in your life. Write a letter to your future or former self from your current self.

As we grow in mindfulness through reflection and other mindfulness practices, we can gain self-awareness about our own time metaphors and find creative ways to break the frames that constrain our thinking and mindset.

I developed the following poem while reflecting on time metaphors:

Time Metaphors

Time doesn’t wait,
it marches on.

We waste time when
killing time,
living for tomorrow,
buying our time,
waiting for the right time.

We express time regrets when we say
if only I had more time,
I have too much time on my hands,
time is going too fast,
if only I had my time over again.

We express frustration with time when we say
where has all the time gone?
I can’t wait till tomorrow comes,
I’ve run out of time,
I’m caught in the trap of time.

Time is restless, relentless, resilient, resourceful.

Time is opportunity
to learn, grow and create,
to care for self and others,
to be in the present moment,
to experience wonder and awe.

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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.

Poetry – Blending Opposites and Breaking Frames

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is the author of a poem-a-day as well as a dozen books of poetry. Her daily poems can be accessed through her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils. Her latest books of poetry – All the Honey and The Unfolding – were written after the death of her son and that of her father three months later. Her son took his own life and Rosemerry’s grief expressed in her poems is palpable. Rosemerry describes writing poetry as a mindfulness practice that has helped her manage her grief and an abiding sadness

Poetry – “a dance of opposites”

What is particularly distinctive about her poetry is the blending of opposites – pain and joy, sadness and wonder. Rosemerry considers poetry as “a dance of opposites”. She maintains that poetry gives expression to opposites. This process enables her to hold two conflicting feelings at the same time. Writing poetry helps her to rise above her sorrow – to be able to admire beauty and peace amidst pain and loss.

Her focus on what is good in her life enables her to manage the personal devastations that she has experienced. While she gives full voice to her grief, her poetry expresses her gratitude and appreciation for the beauty and goodness that surrounds her daily. She is able, through her poetry, to be fully present to what is – the good, the bad and the ugly.

Rosemerry asks the question, “How do we show up for these oppositional feelings?” such as grief and joy. Her discussions cover not only feelings but also perceptions and mindsets. In an interview about her book, The Unfolding, she tells the story of how she used to make assumptions about Ford car owners and their likely voting preferences. To challenge this perception and mindset, she purchased a Ford car herself and found that by reaching across the mental divide she was able to perceive some commonality with other such owners.

As I was listening, I recalled that I had developed a mindset about Mercedes owners, assuming they were thoughtless, constantly obsessed with “time is money” and caring little for other people’s needs. Then two things happened – my wife and I were looking at buying a Mercedes ourselves (it was the best option available at the time to meet our needs) and a thoughtful Mercedes driver let me into a busy line of traffic. These experiences challenged my perception and mindset. Rosemerry asserts that poetry can also do this by helping us to take an alternative view and look at oppositional perceptions and mindsets.

Poetry: changing metaphors and breaking frames

In a TEDx Talk, Rosemerry spoke of the need to change metaphors if we are to accommodate oppositional thinking. In her presentation, she quotes linguist George Lakoff who writes in his book, Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, that “one of the fundamental findings of the cognitive sciences is that we think in terms of frames and metaphors”. Neuroscience has identified the physical manifestation of this phenomenon in the form of neurocircuitry.

Rosemerry asserts that the use of metaphors is universal, employed in every language throughout the world, to enable us “to understand our world, our ideas and our emotions”. She suggests that we just listen to, and carefully observe, everyday language, which is replete with metaphors, e.g. “the time is ripe”, “fell like a dead tree”, “he has a heart of gold”.

She explains that behind each metaphor we use is a “conceptual frame” that shapes our perception of the world and our situation in it. The frame allows a particular perception and interpretation and excludes other explanations – it constrains our freedom to explore alternative ideas. Rosemerry gives the example of a constraining metaphor that occurred for her following the rejection of one her manuscripts and the acceptance of someone else’s. She describes how the “envy metaphor” took over her thinking – she engaged in an endless comparison with the other person, inflating their positives and exaggerating her own negativities. After a while, she began to realize that the envy metaphor did not serve her well but limited her perception of options. Her comparisons with the other person were grossly distorted.

Rosemerry found that she had to find another metaphor to frame her situation to enable her to move forward, rather than wallow in her disappointment and resentment. What helped her on this occasion was her tendency to push her metaphoric story to absurd limits – a form of reductio ad absurdum (Latin for “reduction to absurdity’}, e.g. she began to think that the other writer was a “better gardener” who had “greener fingers” – an analogy way beyond the writing competence of her perceived competitor.

How to change metaphors and break mental frames

In her TEDx Talk, Rosemerry offered a number of suggestions of how we might change our metaphor that is not working for us in a particular situation. Her first offering might prove to be “too far-fetched” for some people but she offered it nonetheless. In this approach she suggests that you choose an object (any object} and you ask the object a number of questions, e.g. “What can you teach me today?”, “What is your purpose?” This imagined interaction can lead to the identification of an alternative metaphor that may work in your new situation.

Rosemerry also offers a second approach to metaphor change and frame breaking. For this approach, she draws on the work of a friend who suggested that you take a line of poetry and change the words and ideas expressed in that poem. By way of example she quoted a line from an Emily Dickinson’s poem, Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul. Rosemerry suggested that you use this line (or any other line of poetry} as a jumping off point to explore a new metaphor or frame of reference. She offers some possible changes to the line such as persistence is the bindweed that pushes through the pavement.

Putting forth alternative lines opens up the possibility of identifying new metaphors or frames of reference that can create the freedom to think differently, to break through the constraints of an existing frame of reference. Rosemerry maintains that the changed metaphor can enable you “to see the world in ways that you have never seen the world before” – this can be truly freeing and provide the opportunity to develop new perspectives and identify different options to address your situation. She asks, “How might it [the new metaphor] change the way you approach your day?”

Reflection

I took a line about hope from Anne Frank’s book, The Diary of a Young Girl, and changed it to read, Where there is hope there is exploration and openness, not closure. At the time I was dealing with another psychotic episode suffered by my adult son. This helped me to replace a “despair metaphor” with a “hope metaphor” – it helped me to see alternative outcomes and the possibility of healing. The process of reframing led me to develop the following poem where “he” became “we” and opened up a new understanding, as well as allowed space for hope:

Hope is Opening

He has been elevated again.
Why does he consume things that are harmful to himself and others?

Turning the mirror on myself,
why do I consume foods that are harmful to myself and others?

What are we seeking?
Is it an escape from boredom and the sense of exclusion?
Is it a search for companionship and connection?

Where there is hope, there is exploration of new pathways,
there resides openness and the end of closure.

If we grow in mindfulness through mindfulness practises such as spending time in nature, conscious breathing and reflection, we can become more aware of own constraining metaphors and find creative ways to change our metaphors and break our imprisoning frames.

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Image by Loi Tran 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 Inquiry as a Healing Mode for Trauma and Addiction

Compassionate Inquiry is a psychotherapy method developed by Dr. Gabor Maté to help people suffering from the effects of trauma and addiction to experience “deep healing and transformation”. Gabor is a world authority on trauma and addiction and has developed his method after many years in family medical practice, covering the whole range of human experience from obstetrics to palliative care. He found through his counselling sessions conducted each day after his clinic hours that trauma underlay many of the numerous physical and mental illnesses he encountered in his medical consultations. Gabor intensified his research in related fields and explored his own addictive behaviour and its trauma-induced origins.

Gabor acknowledges that his early efforts at therapy were inadequate because he had not been trained in the area. However, he persisted because there were very few people offering a psychotherapy approach to addiction and trauma – even psychologists, in the main, trained in the medical model, adopted a symptomatic approach and related medication treatment. They did not explore the root cause of the addictive behaviour or the distorting impacts of various traumas experienced by people, especially in early childhood.

Compassionate inquiry to heal addiction and trauma

Gabor learned through his early experience that healing lay in enabling the client “to experience the truth of themselves within themselves”. So what he attempts to achieve is not just an intellectual exercise – it involves engaging the whole person, their distorted perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. He maintains that his approach is compassionate even though he interrupts people, challenges assumptions, and explores aspects that are painful for the client. He believes that it is not his role to make the person feel good but to help them to genuinely face their pain and the truth about themselves.

Gabor stated that often therapists are dealing with their own trauma and addiction issues (as he was in his early stages) and are not able to be totally present to the client nor able to control their responses to what the person is saying or doing – their help is not offered unconditionally. He suggests that therapists need to work on themselves to ensure that they do not contaminate their interaction with their client/patient because of their own unresolved issues. He stated that therapists who display anger or other challenging emotions undermine the healing process for the other person.

Paying attention to the cues

There is one very important aspect to paying attention to the cues provided by the client’s words, actions and non-verbals – and that is the issue of consent. Gabor seeks consent to explore behaviour in-depth with the person he is working with but he also checks that he has consent to continue when the going becomes challenging. He argues that the person will give some cues if they are too uncomfortable and these should be used to confirm ongoing consent. In a podcast conversation for Banyen Books, Gabor said that he exceeded the consent boundaries in his earlier days as a therapist when he would drop into therapy mode with his family members – who outright rejected his approach given that they had not given consent. He soon realised that they wanted him as a spouse, parent, friend or supporter – not as their therapist.

The other key aspect of paying attention to cues is that they give the therapist insight into what is really going on for the client. Gabor illustrates how “unconscious metaphors” (such as the sun revolving around the moon) can indicate that the balance of dependence and inter-dependence is distorted in a relationship between daughter and mother. The daughter might be “carrying” the mother, thus creating a traumatic experience of missing out on maternal support in the early stages of development. Gabor maintains that metaphors a person uses are instructive, even if employed unconsciously. He uses this cue to explore the meaning of the metaphor for the client and the underlying thought processes and emotional component.

His compassionate inquiry approach is designed to get at the “basic human need” that lies unfulfilled in the person he is working with. He argues that no matter what the words or behaviour of the individual (e.g. aggressive or obnoxious) there is a ‘real human being underneath”. He uses the words of Marshall Rosenberg when he describes addiction as “the tragic communication of a need”. The challenge is to enable the client/patient to go inside themselves and confront the uncomfortable and painful truth that they are futilely pursuing an unmet, and unacknowledged, need deriving from adverse childhood experiences or adult traumatic events. Gabor spontaneously illustrates his compassionate inquiry approach in a podcast interview with Tim Ferriss.

Gabor makes the point that his approach does not involve having people tell detailed stories about their traumatic events or adverse childhood experiences, he consciously chooses to focus instead on the impacts of these events/experiences in terms of the person’s distorted perceptions, false self-beliefs and/or addictive behaviour. He sees his task as staying present to the person and their “here and now” experience so that he can “mirror back to them their true selves”. Gabor’s compassionate inquiry approach is supported by Bessel van der Kolk, a global authority on trauma, who has used attachment research and neuroscience to develop innovative treatments for adults and children who have suffered from traumatic events. Bessel contends that his research demonstrates that to change the way we feel we need “to become aware of our inner experience” and then learn to “befriend what is going on inside ourselves”.

Training in compassionate inquiry

Gabor maintains that compassionate inquiry requires an “unconditional determination to understand a person”. He offers several training courses for people who want to develop the requisite skills and personal wholeness to be able to offer compassionate inquiry in their therapeutic/consulting practice. He indicated that experience with these courses shows that participants gain insight into themselves as much as learning about the compassionate inquiry method. Gabor often uses inquiry into the experiences of individual participants themselves to illustrate his perspective and process. He offers a one year, online course in compassionate inquiry over 12 months, as well as an add-on certification process for those who want more advanced training.

An alternative to the online training is paid access over a 1-year period to Gabor’s recorded seminars based on a weekend workshop conducted in Vancouver in 2018. The four videos involved cover more than 9 hours of training by Gabor. Free access to Gabor’s perspective and methodology can also be gained by exploring his YouTube Channel, which includes his interviews and his TED Talk. Gabor’s website also provides additional resources.

Reflection

With his compassionate inquiry approach, Gabor provides a methodology that a skilled facilitator with adequate training and immersion in his approach, could employ to help people who seek assistance with addiction and/or the effects of trauma. Compassionate inquiry practitioners are available in multiple locations around the world. Gabor also offers CI Circles facilitated by a certified CI practitioner for anyone who wants to learn more about CI concepts and practices and to engage in self-inquiry. The Circles involve self-reflective journalling and a willingness to share insights and disclose present moment experiences, somatic and otherwise.

As we grow in mindfulness and associated self-awareness through reflection, meditation and guided inquiry methods, we are better placed to help ourselves deal with the impact of traumatic events from our past life and to assist others with similar needs.

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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.

What Absolutes Are Holding You Back?

In a penetrating video presentation, Lance Allred asks the questions, “What is Your Polygamy?” Polygamy in the context of his talk is a metaphor for the “absolutes” that we carry in our head from childhood (absolutes that have been reinforced by our own self-stories and by the projections of others). Lance was raised in a polygamous Mormon community established by his grandfather. The community’s beliefs were very “black and white” – no room for grey. Polygamy was practised because of the belief that the more wives you had, the closer you were to God.

Lance’s absolutes included the following:

He had to prove himself to God and man because he was born defective as a legally deaf child
Mormonism is the one true faith and you can only get to Heaven if you are faithful to Mormon beliefs.

Lance escaped from the Mormon community at the age of 13 years, but he maintains that it is taking him a lifetime to escape his “absolutes”. He did become the first legally deaf NBA player, but this became another trap – he became captured by the lights and accolades to the point were his sense of self-worth was dependent on the views of others. He won the praise of others but began to lose his integrity. He was so caught up with defining himself as an elite basketball player that when he was cut from the NBA team, he was severely depressed and entertained suicidal thoughts.

What are your absolutes?

Our absolutes are “culturally indoctrinated” and embedded in our everyday language – they live underneath the “shoulds”, the “musts” and the “have to’s” that we tell ourselves daily and use as excuses when confronted by personal challenges or the requests of others (either explicit or implicit requests).

Lance contends that knowing our “absolutes” is a journey into “self-intimacy” and overcoming them is a lifetime challenge of moving outside our “comfort zone”. He argues persuasively that “we were not born to be caged within our comfort zones” – places of comfort created by our absolutes that we mistakenly view as giving us certainty in an increasingly uncertain and ambivalent world.

Our absolutes hold us back from becoming what we are capable of being. We fear failure because with new endeavours we will need to move beyond what we know and are comfortable with. We are concerned about what people will think of us if we don’t succeed in our endeavour, particularly if we put ourselves “out there”. Lance, however, maintains that “you are bulletproof if your worth is not tied to an outcome” – in his view, by being authentic and true to yourself, you can overcome fear and rest in the knowledge that your worth can never be challenged or questioned. Growth comes through discomfort, and failure contributes to growth because it precipitates deep learning about our self, our perceptions and our absolutes.

Reg Revans, the father of action learning maintained a similar argument, when he said:

If you try to do something significant about something imperative, you will come up against how you view yourself and how you define your role.

Don’t let others determine what you are capable of

Lance stated that others can reinforce the cage of your comfort zone by projecting onto you their own absolutes and/or fears. He tells the story of his first game as an NBA player that he came to play because someone was injured, and a replacement was not readily available. The coach told him not to try to do too much, just settle for one or two goals and lots of defence. He was effectively communicating his belief that Lance could not accomplish more because of his deafness disability. Lance went on to score 30 goals in his first game as well as 10 rebounds. His message as a result – “don’t define yourself by your disability and don’t let others determine what you are capable of”.

Often people associate deafness with both physical and intellectual disability. As Lance stated, the greatest challenge he had to face with his disability was not the disability itself, but others’ perceptions of who he was and what he was capable of.

Lance had been profoundly deaf since birth and had difficulty talking in a way that people could understand. He spent thousands of hours in speech therapy and has become an accomplished public speaker and author. I discussed his latest book, The New Alpha Male, in a previous post.

Reflection

In another video presentation, Lance contends that moving beyond our absolutes and associated fears takes perseverance and grit, traits that he maintains define leadership. I can relate to the need for perseverance and grit in moving beyond peoples’ expectations of what you are capable of when you experience a disability.

In 1974, a disc in my back collapsed resulting in my inability to walk or even stand without extreme sciatic pain. I was told that I would never play tennis again. However, over 18 months, I undertook every form of therapy I could lay my hands on – chiropractic treatment, remedial massage therapy, hydrotherapy, acupuncture, light gym work, physiotherapy and osteopathy. When using the exercise bike in a gym (I hate gyms!), I would envisage playing tennis again. My osteopath, Dr. Graham Lyttle, got me back on deck and I having been playing social tennis weekly for the last 40 plus years.

I can also relate to Lance’s concept of “absolutes”. As I used to play tennis fixtures at an “A” Grade level, I have carried in my head the absolute that I should not make a mistake at tennis. Managing my expectations around this personal absolute, has been a constant challenge. I can take to heart Lance’s exhortation that if your self-worth is not tied to an outcome, you can overcome your absolutes and become what you are capable of being.

As we grow in mindfulness, we can become aware of our absolutes and how they play out in our lives and develop the self-regulation and courage required to move outside our comfort zone and realise our full potential. We can move beyond our procrastination and undertake our meaningful work.

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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.