micro-practices – Grow Mindfulness

Mindfulness on the Path of a Hero’s Journey

Anna Kent has provided a thought-provoking memoir in her book, Frontline Midwife: My Story of Survival and Keeping Others Safe. The “frontline” theme of her memoir enriches our understanding of this concept. Anna’s story recounts how she undertook nine months service with Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières, MSF) in South Sudan – where the population had suffered civil war for fifty years, with ongoing outbreaks of conflict despite a peace settlement.

Anna whose background was as a nurse in a hospital Emergency Department (ED) in the UK found herself as an accidental midwife. There was no one else available to do the task because there were no trained midwives in South Sudan at the time because of the civil war and its impacts. As I read her “heart-wrenching tale”, I recalled Joseph Campbell’s book, The Hero’s Journey.

Anna’s story is told with unassumed humility, raw emotion, and acknowledgement of her fears, frailties and vulnerability. As nurses tend to do, she provides graphic descriptions of the medical challenges she confronts and provides a warning at the front of the book in terms of potential triggers for people who have experienced birth-related injuries, maternal death, loss of a baby or gender-based violence.

The first eight stages of the hero’s journey – a structured view

As you read Anna’s memoir, you can begin to map Joseph Campbell’s twelve stages of the hero’s journey throughout her account. I have attempted to link her story to the first eight stages in this blog post:

Ordinary world – Before her journey, Anna enjoyed a comfortable life with her kind and musically talented boyfriend, Jack, and a home in Nottingham which included “an airy, high-ceilinged bedroom”. Her normal professional world was that of a highly qualified ED nurse at the Queen’s Medical Centre, Nottingham, where she coordinated a major trauma unit. To prepare herself for her work in South Sudan, she undertook a number of voluntary shifts in the maternity unit while on leave, completed a diploma in tropical nursing and volunteered for a brief placement at a Zambian Hospital in a rural district. Additionally, she completed a pre-departure course conducted in Germany by Doctors Without Borders (MSF).
Call to adventure: Ever since an early age in her childhood, Anna felt the call to do something about the suffering and pain she saw every day on TV and in the newspapers. She felt a strong urge to help alleviate the overwhelming suffering she observed, especially that experienced by children like herself. As an adult, she experienced “complicated reasons” for wanting to volunteer and help those in need of relief from pain and suffering.
Refusal of the call: As she was packing for her trip, Anna was almost overcome by her fears and uncertainty. She felt ill-prepared for what lay ahead and concerned about leaving her boyfriend and all the comforts of her everyday existence. She could acutely feel the tug to stay and not take the perilous journey involved in work in South Sudan. She also wondered about her comfy life, “Why isn’t this enough for me?”
Meeting the mentor: At Loki, in north-west Kenya, Anna underwent a week-long training that included how to survive a kidnapping, emergency evacuation, and working in isolation. She was informed that there was no internet access because computers melted in the heat and was warned about landmines, poisonous snakes and scorpions. She was told about her onsite mentor who she would meet on arrival in Tam, South Sudan. All she knew about him was that he was over sixty years old and “eccentric”.
Crossing the threshold: Anna crossed the threshold in more ways than one. She flew to Tam in a rambling, old aid plane which was the main transport for people and supplies to this remote area of South Sudan. The flight itself involved being thrown into the reality of war-torn Sudan with bandaged passengers and a woman covered in a bundle of rags lying on a stretcher on the floor of the plane. She was dying and had an IV line connected to her arm and attached via string to the seat’s edge. The French nurse attending to her indicated that the woman would be delivered to the MSF Hospital in Leer, the State’s capital. Anna was very aware that back in the UK, this woman would have had the best of care including drips and monitors and would not have had to suffer the indignity of travelling on the floor’s plane. She was informed that Tam itself suffers from a drastic shortage of pain relievers, antibiotics and other medical necessities. After offloading the dying woman and other passengers in need of urgent medical attention, the plane flew onto Tam where Anna would be working. Her plane eventually lands roughly on the mud landing strip that reflected the terrain – hot, barren and forbidding.
Tests, Allies, Enemies: The heat and oppressive conditions are the enemy. Anna meets her mentor, James, a very experienced nurse and she took an immediate dislike to him. His joviality in the face of unmitigated horrors does not ring true and she can’t make him out. This uncertain relationship with someone whom she will have to depend on, added to her discomfiture. She identified an ally in another female nurse who supports her in the early days of her volunteer work in Tam. However, she is horrified by her sleeping conditions – she is in a tent with James nearby in another tent, both located within the dirt compound that is also traversed by poisonous snakes and scorpions. On top of this are the conditions for patients, many of whom walk many miles to attend the clinic even when seriously ill. The waiting room is effectively the “Waiting Tree” where patients huddle under the limited protection provided by a tree within the dirt compound. The stream of patients is endless (Anna and James treat 1,000 patients in a month) and the diversity and complexity of illnesses is scarry. The makeshift wards are overrun with some patients having to lie on mattresses in the dirt compound. There are continuous life and death decisions determining who will be airlifted to the hospital in Leer, given the restricted availability and limited capacity of the aid plane, and the resources at the hospital itself.
Approach to the inmost cave: The death of a young boy became a crisis point for Anna. Her inner conflict intensified, doubts about her own capability in such trying conditions resurfaced, and she experienced emotional turmoil and overwhelm at the sight of unmitigated suffering, pain and death. She was tense about what further trauma lay ahead. Her salvation came in the form of lengthy, tent-to-tent conversations at night with James , her mentor. Unburdening herself with him and talking through what she was experiencing in an open and honest way changed their relationship. It helped her deal with her emotional crisis These conversations enabled her to reflect on her challenging experiences as they occurred and voice her worst fears. He offered her reassurance and emotional support. James introduced her to the power of mindfulness for dealing with turbulent emotions. Anna came to value his advice, his philosophy of life and his positive psychology.
Ordeal: The ultimate ordeal for Anna and the medical team arrived in the form a 16 year old pregnant girl who was in deep distress and agonising pain. Anna played a major role in successfully delivering premature triplets and helping to save the young girl’s life as she was in acute danger of dying from excessive bleeding resulting from “postpartum haemorrhage”. This experience gave Anna the ultimate high so that she felt like a “hero” and suddenly understood why she had volunteered for such physically and emotionally draining work. She believed at the time that the high from this event would enable her to ride out the lows. The image of the young mother walking home with her triplets in a basket on her head reminded Anna of what was possible in saving others and to value her own contribution.

Reflection

Anna’s story lends itself to mindful reading which according to Mirabai Bush “moves the reader into a calm awareness, allowing for a profound experience and understanding”. It requires full attention, avoidance of distractions and openness to thoughts and feelings as they emerge throughout the reading process. This story is rich in self-disclosure, replete with expression of emotions and immersive in its description of the context and physical environment. Anna encourages us to join her on her hero’s journey into the challenging unknown and land of profound suffering.

Her efforts to grow in mindfulness through micro-practices increased her self-awareness and emotional regulation and enabled her to deal more effectively with the challenges that she had to meet on a daily basis.

__________________________________

Image by Eszter Hornyai from Pixabay

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

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

Ways to Manage Ourself During Difficult Times

The Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC) at UCLA offers weekly guided meditation podcasts on a wide range of topics and issues. In one of the recent meditation podcasts Diana Winston, Director of Mindfulness Education at MARC focused on “Practices in Difficult Times” – providing several mindfulness practices designed to help us achieve calmness, manage our challenging emotions and express compassion to ourselves and to others who are suffering.

Diana highlighted the fact that challenging events such as the mass shootings in America and the war in Ukraine can generate “emotional inflammation” in us – we can feel strong emotions of anger, grief, rage or sadness. We might feel overwhelmed by others’ inconceivable pain and loss and our own emotional response. We might be confused and continually ask ourselves, “Why the children?”, “Why Ukraine?” or “When will this emotional and physical devastation stop?”

Diana draws on mindfulness practices to help us deal with these challenging times and the emotions they elicit in us. She reminds us that mindfulness involves placing our attention fully on the present moment while being open and curious and accepting what is in our present internal and external reality.

Three mindfulness practices for difficult times

The three mindfulness practices offered by Diana are described, in turn, in the following discussion:

Calming Practices: Here we are encouraged to tap into the body’s own capacity to generate calm and ease. The primary aim is to achieve groundedness in a way that is conducive to our present needs. We could start by taking a couple of deep breaths and releasing them slowly to let go of the tension within us. There is the option to find a place of ease in our body and focus in on it, e.g., our arms beside our body, our relaxed legs or our fingers joined and pulsating with energy. Diana particularly stressed the power of “feeling the support of the earth” through our feet on the floor or the ground. Our breath with its natural rhythm can provide a basis for experiencing calm and ease (unless, of course, focusing on our breath acts as a trauma stimulus). If attention to our breath is calming, there are many ways to access a relaxed state through mindful breathing practices. We could adopt “micro-practices” such as the 4-7-8 breathing practice often used in yoga, the breathing in time practices (using our breath as a musical instrument) or we could pay attention to the internal physical sensations of our breathing – e.g., the rising and falling of our abdomen or the feeling of air moving in and out of our nose. Diana suggests another alternative is to pay full attention to the sounds in the room or what is being generated externally (especially if we are in a natural setting with the sounds of birds, waves, or wind). Sound can also be used as a calming mindfulness practice as we listen to and sing mantra meditations provided by people like Lulu & Mischka (such as their Rainbow Light song as part of their peaceful Horizon album).
Holding strong emotions: Normally, people tend to suppress challenging emotions, deny them, or deflect their attention from them by numbing themselves with some form of addictive behaviour such as drinking excessive alcohol, overeating, taking illegal drugs or over-spending while shopping compulsively. Mindfulness experts and psychologists remind us that we need to face up to our emotions or they will cause disruptions in our lives through some form of mental and/or physical illness. Diana encourages us in this guided meditation to pay attention to our challenging emotions and observe how they are manifesting in our body, e.g. tightness in the chest, pain in the arms or neck, headaches, overall stiffness or fibromyalgia (non-specific whole-body pain). Holding on to these strong emotions enables us to deal with them directly and use the healing power of our mind and body to dissipate them. If we experience overwhelm while confronting our strong emotions, we can return to our meditation anchor which could be our breath, external sounds, bodily sensations or music.
Compassion practice: Diana explains that compassion practice in this context involves ourselves as well as others who may be experiencing suffering and loss. She encourages us to treat ourselves with kindness and compassion as we struggle to deal with our challenging emotions and our misguided attempts to ignore them or numb them. She suggests, then, that we extend loving kindness to others in the world who are experiencing pain, devastation, grief and anger. Diana offers a possible expression of compassion for others in the form of a statement of desire, “May you be freed from pain and suffering and find contentment and ease”.

Reflection

We have a deep well of ease in our bodies that we can access at any time, if only we can let go of our damaging thoughts. As we grow in mindfulness through calming practices, facing our challenging emotions and practising compassion towards ourselves and others, we can gain the insight, courage and capacity to manage ourselves during difficult times. Mindfulness enables us to achieve emotional regulation, self-awareness and the creative drive to be the best we can be. Challenging emotions, left unchecked or ignored, can undermine our endeavours at home or at work.

Over time we can develop a regular mindfulness practice that suits our make-up and that we can undertake on a daily basis (e.g., Tai Chi, mantra meditations, chanting or yoga). This core mindfulness practice can be supplemented by micro-practices that we engage in throughout the day (e.g., when washing our hands, during waiting times, or when boiling the jug). The compound effect of these core and micro-practices is a calm state of mind, enhanced patience and conscious presence.

__________________________________

Image by ChiemSeherin 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 Flow through Preparation, Focus and Attention

In an earlier post, I talked about our loss of attention through the “fire hose” of continual information dissemination and the incessant temptation of social media. I mentioned that one of the costs of this overload and overwhelm is a loss of the capacity to achieve “flow” – a state of total immersion, energizing involvement and continuous enjoyment when undertaking a meaningful endeavour.

On reflection after writing this post, I realised that I achieve flow in two arenas of my life, one resulting in the intermittent experience of flow and the other involving a sustained flow experience – also known as “being-in-the zone”. The two arenas of my life where I achieve some degree of flow are (1) playing social tennis and (2) researching and writing this blog.

Achieving flow while playing social tennis

What I have found while playing social tennis is that I experience periods of “flow”, sometimes during a set and other times during a point. My “preparation ritual” includes Tai Chi and this enables me, among other things, to focus on my opponent hitting the ball, observing the spin and trajectory of the shot, noticing the location of other players and choosing a return shot that takes into account this focused information. Invariably, when I make a mistake, it is because I have been distracted by what is going on at other nearby courts (e.g. coaching lessons), resulting in my losing attention.

My experience of flow while playing social tennis is episodic – with one exception many years ago when I achieved the experience of being-in-the-zone over two complete sets. This early experience involved a sustained sense of flow with heightened enjoyment as a result of my seemingly, easy competence with all tennis strokes – e.g. serve returns on forehand and backhand, lobs, smashes and serving (including a second serve ace which shocked me and my opponent).

Normally, however, I experience flow during tennis when I play a particular point during a game. It can involve a long rally, a well-placed drive or a winning volley. Sometimes, I play a shot that my opponents/partner marvel at, e.g. a half-volley drop shot or a half-volley backhand lob diagonally across the court when both opponents are at the net. In these circumstances, my body is reacting instinctively, not consciously, and I am playing a shot that I have neither been taught nor have practised. This experience is often described as achieving “unconscious competence” – you don’t have to think about shot making, it just comes naturally without any conscious intervention. I attribute this instinctive response and the episodic experience of flow to my remote preparation (many years of playing and practising tennis) and my proximate preparation ritual which involves Tai Chi.

Achieving flow while researching and writing

I can relate to Johann Hari’s experience of achieving flow when researching and writing. Johann described this in detail in his latest book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention. I started researching and writing the Grow Mindfulness Blog in July 2016. I have now written more than 660 blog posts – on my calculation, in excess of 350,000 words. I started out having difficulty writingmore than 400 words. Now I find I have to discipline myself to keep each post to around 1,000 words or less (with the exception of top-of-the-head posts like this one). I find writing my blog posts easy, enjoyable and productive (I can use some of the material in my manager development workshops). I lose all sense of time and can easily create a blog post non-stop for 2 to 3 hours (I have to discipline myself to take a break after an hour). This indicates that when writing my blog posts I can achieve flow or be lost “in-the-zone”.

I think two core things have contributed to my ability to achieve flow while researching and writing the blog. Firstly, I have chosen a focus for the blog – mindfulness – that has become a massive area of development worldwide – in health, business, education, sports and community. There is now an endless stream of podcasts, research papers, articles, blogs, online conferences/summits, and readily accessible mindfulness practices such as tradition-based meditations and mantra meditations. My research area, growing mindfulness, is a treasure trove of ideas and practices and endlessly rewarding. Each “upturned stone” reveals a new area for exploration.

Secondly, besides the limitless resource material available for research and developing my own practice, I have unconsciously instituted what Johann describes as the three pre-conditions for achieving flow – adopting a single focus, pursuing meaning and extending myself (through acquiring and sharing new knowledge and mindfulness practices). I have to use discipline to maintain my particular focus for a blog post when researching because of the volume of material available ( I draw on a skill I developed when researching and writing my PhD – noting down for later research ideas or resource people that are interesting but not directly related to my focal topic). I also learnt a couple of years ago that, if I wanted to get into flow and stay in flow, I had to avoid reading my email before or during the process of writing (removing another possible source of distraction). One think that does help my focus during writing is music, either specific Mozart music for concentration or mantra meditations by Lulu & Mischka.

Hugh Van Cuylenburg mentions a further pre-condition for achieving flow – a preparation ritual -which he describes in his book, Let Go. I have adopted this practice for my writing endeavours (as well as my social tennis). I often do my research – listening, reading or trying a meditation practice – as part of my preparation ritual. This gives me a flow of ideas. I will then “sleep on it” overnight and let my subconscious mind go to work to identify connections and expand on the ideas. I write my blog post the following morning (I am a “morning person” – mornings are when I am most productive). In this way, I am able to produce connections to previous posts I have written and/or researched, my past and current experiences, topical information, excerpts from novels I am reading, and conversations I have had. These connections “just come to me”.

Reflection

In addition to the proximate preparation rituals I adopt for playing tennis and writing my blog, I also engage in regular mindfulness practices, including Tai Chi and different forms of meditation (including mantra meditations). These practices also extend to mindful eating and “mindful waiting”. In this way, I try to develop what George Mumford describes as a “mindfulness mindset” – achieved through adopting a variety of mindfulness practices appropriate to particular settings and time available. These can incorporate “micro-practices”, forming part of a self-care plan. As we adopt regular mindfulness practices, we can grow in mindfulness and achieve the realisation of flow in various arenas of our life and our different endeavours. This can enhance our happiness and sense of who we are and contribute to achievement of our life purpose.

_________________________________

Image by 춘성 강 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.