nature – Page 6 – Grow Mindfulness

Working from Home and Staying Mentally Healthy

Many people have been thrust into the situation of working from home because of the Coronavirus and related Government restrictions on movement and contact. As a result, numerous people are ill-prepared for the challenges and opportunities involved. However, there is plenty of advice available through blog posts, videos and podcasts to help us acquire the necessary information to work effectively from home. There are also specific suggestions for particular groups of people, e.g. teachers working from home and working from home with kids. Many of these sources of information stress the need to stay mentally healthy as well as look after your physical welfare. Here are some strategies to achieve both effectiveness and sound mental health.

Strategies for working from home healthily for mind and body

The pattern you create needs to meet your personal preferences (e.g. a morning person vs. night person), your lifestyle, family situation and location. Here are some suggestions that may help you to make choices that are relevant to your needs and those around you:

Negotiate arrangements – this entails reaching at least a tentative agreement at the outset with other affected parties such as your boss, you partner and your colleagues – having some clear understandings and groundrules at the outset can pave the way for a relatively smooth transition to working from home and avoiding unnecessary conflict at a time when everyone is feeling stressed. If you have a partner living at home with you, it pays to negotiate arrangements about working space, quiet time, coffee buying or making and eating arrangements (e.g. getting your own breakfast and lunch but sharing dinner preparation and eating). It is often the little things that can bring daily angst if they are not sorted out early. If you have had an extended marriage or living together arrangement, groundrules get established unconsciously and it pays to explore how these might change with one or both of you working from home.
Establish a routine: this gives you a sense of agency, the feeling that some aspects of your life are under control when everything else is changing constantly and creating uncertainty and anxiety. It is strongly suggested by many authors that you maintain your daily routine of getting ready for work (e.g. showering, getting dressed well, and beginning work at a set time). I think some flexibility here can be healthy without jeopardising your ability to work effectively and not waste time. You might, for example, wear more comfortable clothes, introduce a morning exercise routine (to take advantage of the time saved in not having to travel to work), occasionally sleep in when you feel tired from the extra stress created by the Coronavirus) and take time for conscious reflection (e.g. writing a journal about what you are experiencing and how you are responding). Sleep is particularly important at this time to enable your body and mind to recuperate from the stresses that you will be experiencing.
Develop an exercise program: physical exercise reduces stress and builds positive mental health. It is wonderful to see so many people making the most of their additional time at home to walk, run or ride in the open (particularly along the bayside where I live). Yoga and Tai Chi, offer physical, mental and emotional benefits in these times of stress and anxiety. Getting some fresh air is important – there can be a tendency with social isolation and safe distancing to become stuck in your home and not take in the benefits of time spent mindfully in nature. Activity is a great antidote to anxiety and depression.
Don’t sweat the news: in times of uncertainty, there is a strong tendency to become obsessive about news reports (via newspapers, emails, social media or podcasts). This not only dissipates your focus but also exacerbates difficult feelings of anxiety, depression and loneliness. Obviously, some information is important to know (e.g. available relief packages for individuals or businesses and Government advice/directives/legislation relevant to the Coronavirus). Experts in the area of mental health suggest that establishing a set time or times during the day for catching up on the news can be a useful way to proceed (do you really have to be the first to know?). It also pays to take note of the positive news, e.g. the many random acts of kindness that are occurring everywhere in the world as people struggle to cope with the present crisis.
Stay connected: with your work colleagues and boss – establish a routine for checking-in (preferably daily) as well as strategies to effectively employ electronic communication for planning, sharing and product/service development. There is a need here to maintain the balance between work and task – not oversharing social information but not being overly focused on work alone. Some work-from-home groups institute a set time each week to share recipes, a virtual lunch experience or happy hour, a sing-along or coping strategies.
Undertake special projects: there are often work-related, home-based projects that have been put off because of lack of time or prioritising. These projects can improve your work-from-home situation and enhance your productivity. They could involve, for instance, clearing up the clutter in your “office”, strengthening the security of your computer system, improving recycling in the home (including disposal of sensitive work information) or establishing a home-based coffee-making machine or a filtered water system such as the Zanzen Alkaline Water System.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, recently participated in a Ted Connects© interview and provided deep insight and very sound advice about dealing with the overwhelm of the current Coronavirus crisis. She advices strongly against substituting the busyness of the workplace environment with a new form of busyness in the working from home environment. Elizabeth argues that we spend so much time running away from ourselves, not fronting up to ourselves including our fear and anxiety. She argues that the present situation of enforced or voluntary working from home creates a wonderful opportunity for developing self-awareness and self-regulation through meditation, mindfulness practices and reflection. Often our greatest, unconscious fear is being-alone-with-our-self. We seek distractions and fill up our time with multiple tasks only to find that we have no time to truly find ourselves.

Reflection

The current working from home situation that many of us face has inherent challenges and opportunities compounded by the requirements around social distancing, safe distancing and avoidance of unnecessary travel (local and international). Clarifying working arrangements, establishing a routine, developing an exercise program, avoiding obsessing over the news, staying connected and undertaking special projects that enhance a sense of control over your environment, are all important for a healthy mind and body.

However, the real challenge and opportunity lies in developing self-awareness and self-management through meditation, mindfulness practices and reflection. As we grow in mindfulness, we enhance our focus (at a time of intensified distraction), our resilience (at a time of extreme mental and emotional stress), our creativity (when we appear lost for personal and community solutions) and our compassion (when so many people worldwide are suffering and grieving). In all of this turmoil and uncertainty, there lies the opportunity to truly find ourselves.

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Image by Igor Ovsyannykov 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.

Mindfulness Practices to Develop Mental Health and Wellbeing

In these times of uncertainty and anxiety, mindfulness meditation can be an effective way to restore balance to our mental and emotional state. These structured approaches can be readily reinforced by mindfulness practices that are more flexible and adaptable to our personal circumstances and preferences.

Through mindfulness practices embedded in our daily life and routine, we can progressively achieve the situation where mindfulness is not just something we do, but the way we are in the world. This enables us to show up in a mindful and compassionate way and have a positive influence on the people we interact with in our daily life.

Mindfulness practices that you can use to develop mental health and wellbeing

There are a wide range of mindfulness practices described in this blog and in other mindfulness resources. Some of these could prove useful for you in this time of stress and uncertainty:

Mindful walking – consciously walking slowly and being aware of the pressure of your toes and soles on the ground. There are a range of videos on mindful walking on YouTube©.
Mindful eating – eating slowly while being conscious of presentation (how it looks), taste, texture, aroma and touch.
Engaging with nature – Nature is a proven source of emotional healing and mental health. There are a number of ways to experience the benefits of nature.
Exercising – There are endless books and articles on the benefits of exercise, and it is considered one of the antidotes for depression. Some people prefer yoga as their form of exercise and Jill Satterfield has her own YouTube© Channel dedicated to ways to combine yoga with somatic awareness.
Tai Chi – often called “mindfulness-in-action”. Harvard Medical School recently published the results of extensive research into the benefits of Tai Chi and provided an explanation and exercises for each benefit in its publication, The Harvard Medical School Guide to Tai Chi. The benefits of Tai Chi include less stress, a healthier heart, positive mood and a clearer mind as well as better balance and coordination and reduced physical pain.
Taking compassionate action – going beyond self-absorption to helping others in need. An interesting new development is the Adopt a Grandparent Campaign (given the increased isolation of the elderly because of the Coronavirus). Taking compassionate action can have numerous forms and is limited only by your awareness and creativity. Compassionate action includes being aware of, and communicating with, a friend or family member who may be experiencing loneliness.
Use waiting time to develop awareness – our typical default when we have to wait for something is to grab for our phone. We could use waiting time instead to develop our natural awareness.
Expressing gratitude – neuroscience has shown the benefits of gratitude for mental health and wellbeing, not only for the recipient of the expression of appreciation but also the giver. However, you don’t even have to express appreciation to others to gain a health benefit from being grateful. There are many ways to develop gratitude and reap its benefits.
Tuning into sounds – you can adopt a natural awareness approach by tuning into sounds around you (both your immediate surrounds and your external environment). Alternatively, you can be more goal-focused in your awareness, e.g. focusing on the “room tone”.
Establishing a mindfulness reminder – we can use something that occurs frequently throughout our day to be reminded of the need to be mindful. People have used a wide range of things as reminders, e.g. when the phone rings or when they boil the jug/make a cup of coffee, they take a few mindful breaths or steps. All it takes, according to Chade-Meng Tan, author of Search Inside Yourself, is “one mindful breath a day”.

Create small habits to build sustainability

Clearly you can’t do it all and if you attempt to do too much, your new habit will not be sustainable. Start small – Dr. V.J. Fogg suggests that you create tiny habits, breaking larger habits down to their “smallest accessible practice”. Do something that fits with you personally – you don’t have to achieve what others are doing. Be prepared to adopt a trial-and-error approach and change your habit(s) where appropriate – there is no one approach that suits everybody.

Building and maintaining a positive mindset

You can enhance your positive mindset by listening to presentations that are uplifting. These can take the form of podcasts, videos or other sources of positively oriented communications. TED Talks©, for example, offer “ideas worth sharing” and include inspirational stories, innovations and creative problem solving.

There are numerous presenters who work in the mindfulness space and offer encouraging and supportive communications via videos and audio
podcasts. One particular example that comes to mind is Dr. Jud Brewer who has commenced producing short 5-minute videos on his YouTube
Channel© covering timely topics such as:

5 simple habits for good mental hygiene
Using kindness to create connection during a crisis
Working with uncertainty
How to spread connection instead of contagion
How fear and uncertainty lead to anxiety.

One of Jud’s videos focuses on “how to stop compulsively checking the news”. Even in the best of times, the news can be disturbing, disorienting and confusing, yet we are tempted to feast on the news. Cilla Murphy, a teacher who has just experienced 7 weeks in lockdown in China offers a number of very important learnings from her experience and her advice about the news is:

Try not to listen to/read/watch too much media. It WILL drive you crazy. There is [such] a thing as too much!

Reflection

There are so many options in terms of mindfulness practices that can help us in times of uncertainty and anxiety. We can become overwhelmed by the variety and endless choices. The secret to habit change is to start small and maintain the new habit for a reasonable time (to test it and embed it in our daily life).

One sustainable habit can lead to another…and another. We should not be discouraged by the magnitude of the changes we need to make – we can chip away at them progressively with the aid of meditation and mindfulness practice. It takes time to overcome our self-protective mechanisms if we are to achieve significant changes in our behaviour. As we grow in mindfulness, we can become increasingly self-aware, develop our focused intention and build resilience to overcome setbacks on the road to sustainable change.

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Image by RÜŞTÜ BOZKUŞ 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.

Grounding Yourself in Your Body in Times of Uncertainty

On the 5^th March this year, Jill Satterfield conducted a meditation podcast as part of the series of weekly podcasts offered by The Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC), UCLA. Her presentation was titled, Facilitating Ease: Breath as a Restorative Practice in These Times. Jill’s presentation reflected her lifetime pursuit of mindfulness and somatic awareness. She has meditated for most of her life (having been taught to meditate by her mother at the age of four). She has participated in 150 silent retreats and is very well place to conduct personal coaching and training in “embodied mind” – how to be present and aware in our own bodies.

Jill has struggled with chronic pain for most of her life, undergoing multiple surgeries (including heart surgery). Her somatic meditation has helped her overcome her physical pain but, as she herself maintains, the longest journey for her is overcoming emotional and mental pain. Jill offers a form of “somatic practice” which integrates Indian yoga tradition with Buddhist meditation teaching. She sees her meditation teaching as offering “ways to know the body intimately as a reflection of the mind” and “to know and work with what is discovered both somatically and cognitively”.

Becoming grounded in your body in these uncertain times

In her podcast, Jill offers a somatic meditation that enables you to become grounded in your body in times of uncertainty – at a time when we are all physically, mentally, emotionally and medically challenged with the advent of the Coronavirus. Jill views mindfulness as “kindfulness”, a term developed by Ajahn Brahm. In her view, meditation needs to be internally kind and supportive of yourself, others and the community at large. She provides a guided meditation, a gentle “somatic practice”, that employs the following steps:

Begin by settling into your seat, comfortably – not strained or rigid. This first instruction reinforces Jill’s emphasis on bodily sensations.
Close your eyes or look down – either way she suggests that you loosen your vision so that you soften both the back of your eyes and the corners.
Now progressively notice the weight of your bones in various parts of your body – the lightness of your toes in your shoes, the thickness of your bones in your legs and the heaviness of your hip bones. Notice the support your bones provide as you sit in the chair.
Next sense your clothing on your skin – Jill suggests that you feel the difference in temperature between your skin covered by clothing and your uncovered skin exposed to the air.
Be with the gentleness of your breath at the entrance to your nostrils. Experience the softness and delicateness of the air flow through your nose.
Extend your inhalation by taking a deeper breath if is comfortable for you and notice the gentleness in the longer inhale.
Now extend the exhale gently – noticing the coolness of your breath and experience warmth throughout your body – in your chest, stomach and throat. A useful way to feel the sensation of warmth embracing your body is to join your fingers together and feel the tingling that occurs there.
Notice the pause at the top of your exhale motion – to focus on this pause wait a second or two before exhalation to experience the stillness.
Notice the pause before the inhale – extend this for a second or two to experience the quietness and ease of the inward breath.
As you complete these four-part “breath rounds” (pause-exhale-pause-inhale) over a couple of minutes, draw on the support and imagery of nature – the gentle breeze through the leaves of the trees; the slow, breaking waves; or the silence and calmness of the mountains.
Feel the power of loving kindness and forgiveness flowing from your tranquillity and restfulness.

When distractions arise in this meditation, return to sensing the weight of your body on the chair – restore your groundedness. As you slowly come to awareness at the end of the meditation, feel yourself coming to your senses more fully – take in the sights, sounds, smells, touch and taste that surround you as you feel more enlivened and relaxed.

Reflection

There is a certainty in our experience of our bodies in-the-moment and a tranquillity that arises from “resting in sensation”. It is through our bodies that we can become truly grounded in the present. As we grow in mindfulness, through somatic meditation and other somatic practices such as yoga, we can calm our “inner landscape”, still our mind and become increasingly open to our senses, our courage and creativity. We can employ Jill’s somatic practice anywhere at any time to restore our sense of groundedness and experience ease and tranquillity. Jon Kabat-Zinn reminds us that through mindfulness we can move from doing to being present to the power of now.

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Image by Lara-yin 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.

Mindfulness and the Art of Forgiveness

In a previous post, I highlighted the need for compassion and forgiveness to sustain a second marriage. However, forgiveness is a need in all facets of our relationships because we can experience a grievance or hurt wherever we are – at work, at home or in our daily activity outside these spheres. Dr. Fred Luskin, an international expert in forgiveness, explains that there are three main aspects of a grievance, wherever or whenever it is experienced:

Exaggerating the personal offense we experience
Blaming someone else for our negative feelings
Developing a grievance story.

In his book, Forgive for Love: The Missing Ingredient for Healthy and Lasting Relationships, Fred draws on research to demonstrate that forgiveness leads to a sense of peace as well as physical and emotional welfare. In contrast, maintaining a grudge, grievance or anger results in illness, a loss of personal power (you become controlled by your emotions) and an inability to focus on the task at hand. The very words we use – such as “consumed by envy” – evoke the destructive power of grievances and sustained anger.

Developing the art of forgiveness through mindfulness

Fred points out that, contrary to popular belief, forgiveness is not about the other person by whom you feel aggrieved, it is about yourself – your thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations and consequent behaviour. He contends that the focus in forgiveness is self-awareness and self-regulation, not reconciliation. Some of the mindfulness practices that can help you develop the art of forgiveness include:

Mindful breathing: Fred offers a specific, brief practice here. He suggests that you take three deep breaths. When inhaling, you focus on the movement of your stomach as it fills with air. As you exhale, you concentrate on your stomach softening (and the sense of release). On your third deep breath, Fred suggests that you bring your focus to something or someone you love or a thing of beauty – filling your mind with something positive which can serve to displace negative thoughts and emotions.
Naming your feelings: Fred suggests that through reflection you seek to identify the catalyst for your grievance and name the feelings that you experienced. He argues that your past experiences may have influenced your feelings, but you experience them in the present and you are responsible for them (not the person you blame for those feelings). Once you name your feelings, you can take ownership of them and effectively tame them (you control them, they don’t control you). You can also identify how you have exaggerated the personal offense that you have experienced and what expectations or assumptions underlie that sense of being offended. Fred maintains that we each carry around in our head what he calls “unenforceable rules”.
Choosing your channel: Fred proposes that we learn to replace the “grievance channel” (where we repeat our “grievance story” to ourselves and others) with more positive channels such as those focused on gratitude, love and beauty (especially the beauty of nature). In his book, he offers multiple suggestions on how to switch “channels” throughout the day. If we achieve this switch on a regular basis, we naturally develop our “forgiveness channel” because appreciation, a sense of beauty and feelings of love displace negative feelings of hurt, anger and resentment. The art of forgiveness can be further developed by reading about, or listening to, stories of courageous acts of forgiveness by others.

Fred suggests that we need to become aware of the space in our minds that we are allocating to our grievance – how much of our time and energy are being consumed by accommodating and entertaining our grievances.

Reflection

To develop the art of forgiveness, we need to be conscious of the thoughts and emotions we are cultivating through the stories in our head – we become what we focus on, the choice is ours to be bitter or appreciative. As we grow in mindfulness, we can become more self-aware of our “unenforceable rules” in the form of unrealistic expectations or unfounded assumptions, more readily name our feelings and learn to achieve self-regulation by consciously choosing to entertain positive thoughts and feelings of love and appreciation.

In reflecting on what unenforceable rules we carry in our head, I am reminded of an observation by Michelle De Kretser in her book, The Life to Come, when talking about Pippa’s reflections about her family friend Rashida (a Muslim born in India):

There was a whisper in Pippa’s brain, like a subdued, left-hand accompaniment to her thoughts, and this whisper was of the opinion that Rashida should be grateful that white people overlooked the double handicap of her religion and race. [p. 221, emphasis added]

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Image by Pixource 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.

Self-Praise for Health and Wellness and to Make a Difference

In a recent email newsletter, Leo Babauta reminded us of the need to “train your mind with praise”. So often we beat up on ourselves for falling short, for failure to perform to expectations (ours and others) or for an oversight or omission. Our negative self-stories take over and cause us to procrastinate and avoid pursuing what is really meaningful in our life. Leo argues that “shame is a bad teacher” – praise for our self serves to reinforce positive thoughts, emotions and behaviour and leads to good outcomes for others. Leo readily shared how he uses self-praise to strengthen the good habits in his life. Elsewhere he freely shared what enabled him to change his life when he was in a bad place.

Christine Wesson reminds us that the benefits of self-praise include growth of self-confidence. She highlights the fact that what we focus on develops and grows (whether positive or negative) and that, if we appreciate ourselves, others take their cue from our demeanour and appreciate us as well.

What can you praise yourself for today?

You can praise yourself for the numerous positive, small things you do in your day such as:

Stopping what you were doing and attentively listening to your child or partner
Being fully present when you give your partner a “good morning” kiss
Writing that piece for your blog or newsletter or service provider
Reading something about an act of kindness
Expressing genuine appreciation to someone – your partner, child, waiter/waitress, taxi driver
Responding promptly to an enquiry from a friend, relative, client or customer
Genuinely sharing your feelings with someone close to you
Making time to be with a friend
Offering to give someone a lift
Letting someone into the traffic line who was obviously at a disadvantage
Making good use of waiting time to focus on awareness (and not your phone)
Stopping to appreciate the beauty of nature – the ocean, sunset, sunrise, trees, flowers or birds
Helping someone in need
Expressing loving kindness towards someone or a group in your meditation
Taking time to exercise – Tai Chi, walking, gym work, playing tennis, going for a run
Resisting the temptation to do something else while taking a phone call – being fully present to the speaker.

Really, the list is endless – there is so much that you do during any one day that is praiseworthy – that makes life better for yourself or someone else. You do not have to realise major accomplishments to make a difference in the world – it is the small things that add up to significant positive outcomes for yourself (and your capacity to be kind to others), your mood (which is contagious), your interactions with others and your close relationships.

Just as it is important to give ourselves praise, it is also vital to provide positive feedback to others in the form of genuine appreciation that is timely and specific – you can make their day with a simple act of praise.

Reflection

It seems to be anti-cultural to praise ourselves – it is a lot easier to be “down on our self”. Self-praise builds self-confidence and helps to reinforce our positive thinking and behaviour. It serves to push aside our negative self-stories. As we grow in mindfulness, we can learn to appreciate and praise what we do that is healthy for our self and makes a difference (however small) in the lives of people we interact with. It does not take a lot of time to praise our self, but the effect is cumulative and flows over to all the arenas of our life (whether home, work or sports activity).

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Image by Foundry Co 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 Does Love Mean?

In a previous post I explored ways to sustain an intimate relationship. But what does love mean? We use the word so loosely – referring to everything from a dessert to a location to an intimate friend. Mitra Manesh explores this question in her guided meditation podcast, Meaning of Love – one of the many weekly meditation podcasts from MARC, UCLA. Mitra is a mindfulness teacher with MARC, creator of the Inner Map app and provider of mindfulness teaching through her short videos on Vimeo©. She has worked extensively to bring mindfulness to the corporate world, combining Eastern and Western perspectives.

Guided meditation on the meaning of love

Mitra begins her guided meditation by suggesting that you first become grounded by using your hands as the anchor. She suggests that you can focus on the pressure of your hands on your lap, the touching of your fingers together or the up and down movement of your hands on your stomach as you breath in and out. Whatever hand anchor you choose, the idea is to gently bring your mind back to this anchor whenever your mind wanders.

Once you have become grounded, you can explore “love as connection”. Mitra’s guided meditation is based on the idea that the connection underpinning love occurs at four levels – the physical, intellectual, emotional and universal levels. The meditation follows a progression from a focus on the physical to universal connectedness and incorporates connection to self (experiencing self-love):

Physical connection – here the initial focus is on a pleasant body sensation such as the warmth of your fingers touching, the softness of the palm of your hand or the firmness of your feet on the floor. Once you have experienced this pleasant bodily sensation, you can extend your focus to the recollection of the pleasantness of a physical connection to another person such as a hug or a kiss. When you have achieved awareness of physical connection and experienced pleasant recollections, you can gently move on.
Intellectual connection – firstly focus on connecting to your own mind – what is going on in your head. Mitra suggests that you envisage your thoughts as clouds coming and going, merging and dissipating – blown by the winds of change. This is a pleasant change from other forms of meditation where you are discouraged from being distracted by your thoughts. Here the idea is to notice what is going on in the process of your thinking – how one idea leads to another, how ideas connect you to past experiences and how ideas flow through you endlessly. You can expand this intellectual focus to recollecting a recent experience where you felt a strong intellectual connection to a colleague, a family member or an intimate partner. You can then move on to the next level of connection.
Emotional connection – this is the level we often associate with love, but genuine love operates at all levels. Here you first focus on a pleasant emotion that you may be experiencing at this moment – enjoying the contentment, pleasure or happiness that arises through this mindful awareness. If your current emotion is experienced as unpleasant, Mitra suggests that you look inside yourself to see what unfilled need is giving rise to this negative experience. Again, if you wish to extend your sense of emotional connection to another person you can recollect a time when you were with someone, a friend or partner, where you had a real sense of emotional connection – whether the experience was one of joy, peace, safety, comfort or other positive feeling.
Universal or spiritual connection – this is not an aspect that Mitra dwells on in her guided meditation. However, we can focus on human connectedness and our connectedness to nature to gain a sense of the universality of our connection.

Tara Brach, in her brief talk on the meaning of love, discusses the “aliveness of connection” and the translation of this universal connection into compassionate action. To illustrate this connection to all living things, she tells the story of a prisoner who saved a pigeon from stoning by another prisoner by saying simply. “Don’t do that – that bird has my wings.” Tara argues that radical compassion has all the elements of love including caring, forgiving and appreciating. She illustrates the multiple meanings given to “love” by sharing stories of how 8 year old children described love. One child, for example, had this to say on the meaning of love:

When you tell someone something bad about yourself and you are frightened that they won’t love you anymore, but then you are surprised that they love you even more!

Reflection

Love has multiple levels and is expressed in many different ways. As we grow in mindfulness through meditation, reflection and compassionate action, we can learn to appreciate self-love and love for others that we experience at all levels – the physical, intellectual, emotional and universal levels. The essence of love is connection and mindfulness practices can help us to better understand and enhance these connections.

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Image by Annie Spratt 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.

Lifelong Learning through Reflection

Ortrun Zuber-Skerritt and Richard Teare in their edited book, Lifelong Action Learning for Community Development, highlight reflection as core to action learning and lifelong learning. Hospitality entrepreneur and author, Chip Conley is an exemplar of lifelong learning through reflection. In his podcast interview with Tami Simon, he emphasised the role of reflection in his entrepreneurial career. Chip had a secret process of recording his learnings in a weekly bulleted list based on his reflections about the previous week and what he learned from each significant encounter. His reflective Wisdom Books in the form of notebooks were developed over many years and provided the ideas for his five published books on leadership, entrepreneurship, peak organisational performance, psychology and marketing.

Mutual mentoring – the Modern Elder

Chip was the founder and CEO of a chain of boutique hotels, Joie de Vivre. He sold them after 24 years following a near-death experience a few years earlier. This “flatlining” experience was the catalyst for him to think about what he wanted to do with the rest of his life and also changed his orientation from an efficiency-driven “to do list” person to a “to be list” person who was prepared to slow down and appreciate beauty and aesthetics.

He came to a clearer understanding of the difference between intelligence and wisdom and began to repurpose his life around sharing his insights and encouraging people to develop wisdom. Reg Revans, the father of action learning, had also highlighted the difference between cleverness and wisdom and pointed out that wisdom, not cleverness, is necessary when confronted with unfamiliar conditions or situations. For Reg, admitting what we do not know is the starting point for the development of true wisdom.

Acknowledging what he did not know became a critical component of Chip’s new career move after the sale of his boutique hotel chain. He had been approached by the three founders of Airbnb to work fulltime in the company as a mentor and strategic adviser. He found himself as someone in his fifties mentoring people in their twenties. This led to a mutual mentoring arrangement where he shared his knowledge and experience re strategy and marketing in the hospitality industry and gained knowledge from the founders about the digital world and its impact on business management and growth.

Chip wrote his book Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder to “share his experience of being both a mentor and an intern”. Jack Welch, when CEO of General Electrics (an action learning-based company), also employed the concept of “mutual mentoring” between senior executives and young technological experts within the company.

The Modern Elder Academy

This experience of mutual mentoring led Chip to establish The Modern Elder Academy to enable people to make the midlife transition in a way that was enriching for themselves and others. Through his personal experience and insight, he recognised that there was an unmet need to help people in midlife to transition to their new reality (whether that be impending retirement, role as a carer, transitioning to a new career or experiencing the onset of chronic illness). He maintained that rituals, training and tools existed for other transitions in life (such as puberty, graduation from school or university or marriage) but not exist for those who were transitioning to the midlife stage (35-70).

The Modern Elder Academy is designed as a “place where people cultivate and harvest their wisdom” and “reset, restore and repurpose” their life. Chip’s academy, described in a Forbes article as a “Cool School for Midlifers”, is very different to any other academy and incorporates learning entirely new skills such as surfing and bread making and incorporates the development of mindfulness through a “silent contemplation park” and periods devoted to meditation, reflection, yoga, “wisdom circles”, appreciating the beauty of nature, and a desert-based vision quest (in the extended version only).

One of the core challenges people experience at the Elder Academy is what Chip terms “midlife edit” – letting go of old beliefs and patterns and acquiring a “growth mindset” where the emphasis is on getting rid of baggage, developing a flexible mindset and focusing on self-improvement and personal growth. Cliff explains that his experience of mutual mentoring led him to adjust his mindset from that of a CEO and industry leader to an “Intern”, to acknowledge that he needed to learn about the digital world of business from millennials and to shift from “being interesting to being interested” – a transition that requires deep listening. Participants who complete the one-week “curriculum” receive a “Certificate in Mindset Management”.

Reflection

We can grow in mindfulness at any stage of our life. However, what Chip offers through the Modern Elder Academy is a structured way of developing mindfulness, processes for changing fixed mindsets and an opportunity to repurpose our midlife in this transition period. The added advantage is the community dimension – making this journey with others and developing a deep sense of connectedness to nature and others (by sharing our common humanity, midlife challenges and growing wisdom).

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Image by Benjamin Balazs 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.

Leadership as Resonance

Ginny Whitelaw, biophysicist and global leadership coach, understandably frames leadership in terms of energy and resonance. She explains that as humans we are made up of matter and energy – matter in the form of blood, skin, bones and energy in the form of our mind. Ginny notes that the leadership function entails concentrating energy, your own and that of your followers, to create an organisational vision (capturing emotional as well as intellectual energy); develop the culture of a team (through energy alignment); and promote innovation (turning creative energy into new products, services and structures). She explains that energy is always on the move, in constant transformation and continuously vibrating. Her new book, Resonate, to be released in 2020 explores these concepts in depth and their many leadership applications.

Resonance – synchronous vibration

One way to define resonance is synchronous vibration. For example, a room or a musical instrument is described as resonant when it amplifies sound vibrations and extends them by vibrating at the same time. Ginny provides the example of making a loud sound over an open grand piano and noticing that some strings vibrate, and others do not – the strings that vibrate match the vibrations in your voice. When things operate synchronously, we say that they are “in synch”. So, in Ginny’s perspective, leadership is about creating real change and making a difference by achieving synchronisation of energy, our own and that of our followers – in other words, generating resonance. She describes a leader as an “energy concentrator”.

Blocks to leadership resonance

Through her study of biophysics and martial arts (5^th degree Aikido black belt), Ginny came to realise the very close connection between mind and body and the role vibration and energy play in human consciousness (the resonance theory of consciousness). Her role as a senior leader in NASA, coordinating the 40 groups that supported the International Space Station, enabled her to understand that coordination involved energy alignment and resonance (vibrating “in synch”).

Ginny’s experience with martial arts and Zen philosophy heightened her awareness of the mind-body connection. For example, she explains that fear holds back our achievements as leaders because it distorts our resonance – blocks our energy emission and reception. She suggests that as leaders we need to go beyond our triggers that create fear in our mind and body. The fears may have their origin in adverse childhood experiences or the negative self-stories that arise through our inner critic.

Ginny likens the effect of fear to the dampening of resonance created when several socks are placed inside a bell. Even a bell designed especially for resonance will sound dull and clunky when the socks are inside it. The socks are metaphors for our mental and physical blockages – the things that stop our personal resonance. Our challenge as leaders is to remove the blockages – so that our voice is “as clear as a bell”.

Removing the blocks to leadership resonance

Ginny discovered through the impact of deep breathing on her asthma that clearing blockages requires being still, mindful breathing, and other mindfulness practices such as meditation, Tai Chi and yoga. Reconnecting with nature and the multiple sources of energy in the environment also help to rebuild personal resonance. Ginny explores relevant practices and exercises in her book The Zen Leader.

When you can achieve a level of integration between your thoughts, emotions and body you free up yourself to become your more “resonant self’. Ginny explains that by achieving this integration we can emit a “clear signal” and “bring our one clear note to achieve our purpose” as a leader.

Reflection

I can relate fully to the concept of leadership as resonance having been involved in many minor and major change endeavours as a leader in organisations and in community. The concept of energy emission and reception resonates strongly with me. I also find that as I grow in mindfulness, I am better able to tap into my creative energy, enhance my ability to tune into others’ focus and energy and contribute to a purpose that is greater than myself. Removing the personal blockages to my “one clear note” is a lifetime pursuit – a journey into mindfulness through meditation, Tai Chi and other mindfulness practices.

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Image by Valiphotos from Pixabay

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

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

How to Overcome Negative Self-Talk through Kindness to Yourself

Leo Babauta, creator of Zen Habits, recently wrote a comprehensive blog post on the importance of self-kindness to achieve your potential. In his post, How to Be Kind to Yourself & Still Get Stuff Done, emphasised the disabling effects of negative self-talk, the potentiality in releasing yourself from a focus on your deficiencies, defects and mistakes and the power of self-kindness to achieve this release. Leo is a leading expert on the formation and maintenance of healthy and productive habits, the author of Zen Habits: Handbook for Life and the developer of the Fearless Training Program.

How negative self-talk disables you

Your brain has an inherent negative bias, so it is so easy to constantly focus on what you have not done well, your defects and deficiencies and your mistakes. This negative self-talk can lead to depression (regret over the past) and anxiety (about possible future mistakes). It also engenders fear of failure and prevents you from achieving what you can achieve. It serves as an anchor holding you in place and preventing you from moving forward. Negative self-stories, if entertained, can lead to a disabling spiral.

You might find yourself saying things like:

Why did I do that?
What a stupid thing to do!
When will I ever learn?
Why can’t I be like other people, efficient and competent?
If only I could think before I leap!
Why do I make so many mistakes? – no one else does!
If only I was more careful, more useful, more thoughtful or more attentive!

…and so, your self-talk can go on and on, disabling yourself in the process.

Overcoming negative self-talk through self-kindness

Leo suggests that being kind to yourself is a way to negate the disabling effects of negative self-talk that focuses on your blemishes, mistakes or incompetence. He proposes several ways to practise self-kindness:

Give yourself compassion – instead of beating up on yourself when you get things wrong, have some compassion, positive feelings toward yourself whereby you wish yourself success, peace and contentment.
Focus on your good intentions – you may have stuffed up by being impatient in the moment, by a rash or harmful statement or by making a poor decision, but you can still recognise in yourself your good intentions, the effort you put in and the learning that resulted.
Be grateful for what you have – rather than focus on your defects or deficiencies. Gratitude is the door to equanimity and peace. You can focus on the very things you take for granted – being able to walk or run, gather information and make decisions, listen and understand, breathe and experience the world through your senses, be alive and capable, form friendships and positive relationships. You can heighten your experience of the world by paying attention to each of your senses such as smelling the flowers, noticing the birds, hearing sounds, touching the texture of leaves, tasting something pleasant in a mindful way.

I found that when I was playing competitive tennis, that what worked for me was to ignore my mistakes and visually capture shots that I played particularly well – ones that achieved what I set out to achieve. I now have a videotape stored in my mind that I can play back to myself highlighting my best forehands, backhands, smashes and volleys. You can do this for any small achievement or accomplishment. The secret here is that this self-affirmation builds self-efficacy – your belief in your capacity to do a specific task to a high level.

These strategies and ways to be kind to yourself are enabling, rather than disabling. They provide you with the confidence to move forward and realise your potential. They stop you from holding yourself back and procrastinating out of fear that you will make a mistake, make a mess of things or stuff up completely.

Ways to achieve what you set out to accomplish

Leo maintains that being kind to yourself enables you to achieve creative things for yourself and the good of others. He proposes several ways to build on the potentiality of kindness to yourself:

Do positive things: these are what is good for yourself and enable you to be good towards others. They can include things like yoga, meditation, mindful walking, taking time to reflect, Tai Chi, spending time in nature, savouring the development of your children, eating well and mindfully.
Avoid negative things – stop doing things that harm yourself or others. Acknowledge the things that you do that are harming yourself or others. Recognise the negative effects of these harmful words and actions – be conscious of their effects on your body, your mind, your relationships and your contentment. Resolve to avoid these words and actions out of self-love and love for others.
Go beyond yourself – extend your loving kindness to others through meditation and compassionate action designed to address their needs whether that is a need for support, comfort or to redress a wrong they have suffered. Here Leo asks the penetrating question, “Can you see their concerns, feel their pain and struggle, and become bigger than your self-concern and serve them as well?” He argues that going beyond yourself is incredibly powerful because it creates meaning for yourself, stimulates your drive to turn intention into action and brings its own rewards in the form of happiness and contentment – extending kindness to others is being kind to yourself.

Reflection

There are so many ways that we can be kind to our self and build our capacity and confidence to do things for our self as well as others. As we grow in mindfulness, we can become more aware of the negative self-stories that hold us back, be more open and able to be kind to our self, be grateful for all that we have and find creative ways to help others in need. We can overcome fear and procrastination by actively building on the potential of self-kindness. As Leo suggests, self-kindness enables us to get stuff done that we ought to do for our self and others.

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Image by rawpixel 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.

Bringing Mindfulness to Your Motivations and Intentions

Diana Winston recently offered a meditation on the topic of mindfulness and intentions. Diana is Director of Mindfulness Education at MARC, UCLA and the meditation was part of the weekly meditation podcasts offered by the Center. The podcasts are accessible from the MARC website or via the UCLA Mindful App.

Diana explained that an integral part of mindfulness is curiosity about our self, what we do and why we do it. Many times, our intentions are not conscious – our thoughts and behaviour are often the result of habituated patterns. We might sometimes do things because we think it is the “right thing to do” or because “others are doing it”. As Diana points out, our motivations and intentions are often very complex, mixed in nature and not easily untangled. She offers a guided meditation to unpack these motivations and, in particular, to explore the question, “Why do we meditate?” If we are clear about the benefits that accrue for meditation practice, we are more likely to sustain the habit of meditating. I find, for example, that clarity about my motivations is a key strategy for enabling me to sustain my practice of Tai Chi and writing this blog.

Meditation on intentions

Diana provides a meditation on intentions that has four key phases:

Body scan – you begin by undertaking a comprehensive body scan, starting with the sensation of your feet on the floor and moving through your whole body. I find that a body scan is easier to do if you are following the instruction of another person rather than if you try to do it under “your own steam”.
Exploring why you meditate – what is it that keeps you going with meditation? What are the benefits that you experience? The clearer you can be about the personal benefits for you – the intentions that shape your habit – the more likely you are to sustain the practice through difficult times or when you are time-poor.
Grounding through your anchor – revisiting your personal anchor can help you to maintain your focus when negative thoughts or other distractions take your attention. Your anchor can be your breath, focusing on sounds in the room (such as room tone), or getting in touch with a sensation in your body, e.g. the tingling when your fingers touch (my favourite).
Exploring why you do other activities – now you shift your attention to something else in your life to focus on your intention in doing that activity. You can focus on a major activity that you regularly undertake and ask the fundamental question, “What am I doing this for?” Alternatively, you can focus on a less significant activity that you want to gain some clarity about – it might be a commitment or task that you no longer want to undertake but continue to do so. Diana cautions not to let yourself become frazzled if you cannot immediately find a focus for this phase of the meditation – you can always revisit the meditation at another time. She also suggests that a few deep breaths taken during this part of the exercise can be helpful for finding and sustaining your focus.

Motivation for meditation

When I undertook this meditation, I was pleased that I was able to clarify and strengthen my motivation for persisting with regular meditation practice. I was able to identify the following intentions behind my practice (you may have very different intentions based on your own life experience):

Achieving calm – this is a key aspect of my intentions in meditation practice. I find that calmness enables me to deal with the stresses of life and the inevitable traumas that I experience. At the end of a recent workshop that I was co-facilitating, a participant came up to me and thanked me for my “calmness and creating a calming atmosphere”.
Developing creativity – meditating releases my capacity to be creative in my writing and in designing and facilitating workshops for managers and leaders.
Dealing with difficult emotions – there are several meditations that focus specifically on difficult emotions such as resentment or anger. These meditations help me to temper the emotion and contribute to restoring my equilibrium.
Reducing reactivity – there are so many things in life that can trigger a reaction, e.g. traffic jams, and I can become less reactive through my meditation practice (especially targeted mediations such as “You are traffic too” and “When you are waiting, have awareness as your default, not your phone”). Now in traffic delays, I am able to revert to my anchor, fingers touching, to remain calm and increase my awareness.
Improving relationships – meditation helps me to be more conscious of my thoughts and emotions in any interaction and assists me to be sufficiently present to actively listen to others I interact with, especially in close relationships (even if I don’t achieve this very well in a particular interaction, my awareness and reflection help me to resolve to do better the next time). Awareness of my own thoughts and emotions improves my capacity to understand the dynamics occurring in my training groups.
Health and healing – meditations focused on nature support my emotional stability and contribute to my overall wellness.

Reflection

As we grow in mindfulness through meditation and reflection, we can develop greater clarity about the intentions behind our meditation practice and other significant activities in our life, sustain our motivation and enjoy the benefits that accrue both to ourselves and others we interact with. We can begin to more fully realise the benefits of increasing inner and outer awareness. Meditation focused on our motivations and intentions can help us to make explicit the implicit motivation behind our actions and, in the process, to strengthen our motivation.

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Image by Alexas_Fotos 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.