podcast – Page 17 – Grow Mindfulness

Developing Kindness through Meditation

Neuroscientists tell us that we become what we focus on because the act of focusing and paying attention creates new or deepened neural pathways in our brain. So if we are constantly obsessed with criticism – finding fault – then this stance begins to pervade our whole life, and nothing will ever satisfy us. So too if we develop kindness through meditation, our thoughts and actions become kinder towards ourselves and others.

Diana Winston, Director of Mindfulness Education at the Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC) at UCLA, offers a specific guided meditation designed to develop kindness. This meditation podcast is one of the weekly podcasts offered by Diana or one of her colleagues on a weekly basis through MARC – drawing on personal experience, dedicated research and the wisdom of the global mindfulness community. The kindness meditation as with most MARC meditations begins with being grounded and then moves to offering kindness to ourselves followed by kindness to others.

Becoming grounded in meditation

There are multiple ways to become grounded – becoming focused, still and fully present. Often, we can start with deep breathing to enable our body and mind to relax and increase awareness of our bodily sensations. This enables our focus to move inwards and away from the distractions and intensity of the day – away from the anxiety, negative thoughts and worries associated with meeting deadlines, doing presentations, dealing with conflict or challenging interactions with colleagues or salespeople in stores and supermarkets.

Once we gain some sense of balance and ease with deep breathing, we can move on to undertake a body scan. This entails progressively noticing the various parts of our body and related bodily sensations, releasing any tension and tightness as we progress. We can observe the firmness of our feet on the floor, straightness of our back, weight of our thighs on the seat, the pressure on our back from the chair and the tingling and warmth from energy flow in our fingers. Observation will lead to awareness of tension which we can release as we go – tautness in our shoulders and arms, rigidity in our stomach, stiffness in our neck or tightness in our jaw, forehead or around the eyes. It is important to focus on tension release and not seek to work out why we are so uptight or tense or, even more importantly, to avoid “beating up” on ourselves or being unkind towards our self because of the “failing” or deficiency” represented by our tension.

Finding our anchor in meditation

The next stage of the meditation is to find an anchor that we can continuously return to in the event of distractions or loss of focus – an anchor to stop us from being carried away by the tide of our thoughts or emotions. An anchor is a personal choice – what works for one person, may not work for another. Typically people choose their breath, sounds in the room or some physical contact point.

You can focus in on your breath – bringing your attention to where you most readily experience breathing – in your chest, through your nose or in your abdomen. For instance, you can increase your awareness of the rise and fall of your abdomen with each breath and choose to rest in the space between your in-breath and out-breath.

Another possible anchor is listening to the sounds in your room – listening without interpreting, not trying to identify the nature or source of a sound and avoiding assigning a feeling, positive or negative, to the sound. You can develop a personal preference for using your “room tone” as your anchor.

Choosing a physical contact point in your body is a useful anchor because it enables you to ground yourself wherever you happen to be – whether at work or home or travelling. It can help you to turn to awareness rather than your phone whenever you have waiting time. An example is to focus on the firmness of your feet on the ground, the floor of your room or the floor of your car (when it is not moving!). My personal preference is to anchor myself by joining my fingers together and feeling the sensations of warmth, energy and strength that course through the points of contact of the fingers.

Whatever you choose as an anchor, the purpose is to be enable you to return your attention to the focus of your meditation and, in the process, build your awareness muscle. As Diana reminds us, “minds do wander” – we can become “lost in thought”, distracted by what’s happening around us, planning our day, worrying about an important meeting, thinking of the next meal, analysing a political situation or indulging in any one of numerous ways that we “live in our minds”.

Throughout the process of grounding, it is important to be kind to our self – not berating our self for inattention or loss of focus, not assigning negative labels to our self, such as “weak”, “distractible”, or any other derogatory term.

Kindness meditation

The kindness meditation begins with focusing on someone who is dear to us – our life partner, a family member, a work colleague or a close friend. Once you have brought the person into focus, the aim is to extend kind intentions to them – you might wish them peace and tranquillity, protection and safety, good health and strength, happiness and equanimity, the ease of wellness or a combination of these desirable states.

You can now envisage yourself receiving similar or different expressions of kind intentions from the same person. This can be difficult to do – so we need to be patient with this step and allow our self to be unsuccessful at the start (without self-criticism or unkindness towards our self). We can try to become absorbed in, and fully present to, the positive feeling of being appreciated and loved. Drawing on our memories of past expressions of kindness by the focal person towards us, can help us overcome the barriers to self-kindness.

You can extend your meditation by focusing your loving kindness meditation on others, particularly those people you have difficulty with or are constantly in conflict with. We can also extend our kindness meditation by forgiving our self and others for hurt that has been caused.

Reflection

Kindness meditation helps us to grow in mindfulness – to become more aware of others, the ways we tend to diminish our self, our bodily sensations and our thoughts and feelings. It assists us to develop self-regulation – learning to maintain focus and attention, controlling our anger and criticism (of our self and others) and being open to opportunities and possibilities. Through the focus on kindness, we can become kinder to our self and others (even those we have difficulty with).

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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.

Creating a Positive Future in a Climate-Changed World

Diana Winston recently provided a meditation podcast entitled, Envisioning a Positive Future in Our World. The podcast was timely given the devastating fires across Australia in the months preceding and following the presentation and the ongoing challenge of gaining control over fires that continue to rage. Diana’s guided meditation was a part of the weekly podcasts offered by MARC, UCLA. Diana emphasised the need to draw on mindfulness for strength and resilience, to envisage a better future and to collaborate to achieve a better world.

The immeasurable impact of the Australian bushfires

The devastating impact of the Australian bushfires and wildfires was brought into sharp relief by the ABC Four Corners© program, Black Summer, aired on 3^rd February 2020. The program incorporated video footage from various areas and stages of the fires along with discussions by people who had survived the fires and lost their homes and/or family members, firefighters who described what it was like to be in thick of the fires, evacuation centre volunteers and elected officials living in areas impacted by the fires.

Michael Pengilly, Mayor of Kangaroo Island in South Australia, summed up the extent of the physical devastation when he said:

So far this bushfire season, almost 12 million hectares have burned. At least a billion native animals have died. More than 3,000 homes have been destroyed and 33 people have lost their lives.

He pointed out that there were still bushfires creating havoc across Australia at the time of the TV program.

Firefighters and people who had lost their homes and loved ones spoke of the trauma resulting from the fires, the fear of losing their lives, the 48 hours of blackness and the suffocating smoke that burned into your throat and lungs. Aaron Salway, who lost his father and brother in the bushfires, spoke of the immeasurable impact on themselves and children who have experienced and survived the fires:

This fire I’ll never forget. I don’t think my kids will ever forget it. It’s something that’s going to be scarred into my brain. I don’t ever want to see it again.

When you see pictures of 60 metre high flames; raging fires driven by gale force winds (in excess of 80 kph); exhausted firefighters who have just heard that two of their colleagues had died in a fire truck rollover caused by a fallen tree; and flying embers moving at high speed horizontal to the ground, you understand that the emotional scars are deep and very real.

Some of the lessons from the Australian bushfires

The fires brought to the fore the courage and resilience of individuals and communities when confronted with a crisis of this scale. One such inspiring example was that of members of a Muslim Community who travelled for five hours to cook for exhausted firefighters in East Gippsland in Victoria and arranged five truckloads of donated goods to be delivered to people in fire-affected communities.

The firefighters (many of whom were volunteers) who risked their lives, and in some cases lost their lives, showed incredible commitment to helping others to deal with the frightening challenge of the fires raging out of control.

One of the key lessons of the fires was what people could achieve when they pulled together, pooled their resources, supported each other emotionally and concerned themselves with the safety of others. The questions and answers during the video episode highlighted some other key lessons:

The climate-changed world is a “new normal”
Unless people of different political persuasions can pull together and collaborate, there is no way that the situation can be redressed and the prognosis for the future be improved
Leaders at every level need to move beyond petty differences and demonstrate true leadership – marshalling committed followers to work towards creating a positive future
Australia must find ways to tap into the indigenous knowledge of landscape management – learning about and respecting the environment and related ecosystems.

Tackling climate change as individuals

In introducing her podcast, Diana highlighted an article by Emma Morris in the New York Times on January 10, 2020. In the article, titled How to Stop Freaking Out and Tackle Climate Change, Emma provides a sound five-point plan that individuals can pursue to move beyond paralysis by fear to constructive engagement:

Ditch the shame
Focus on the systems, not yourself
Join an effective group
Define your role
Know what you are fighting for, not just what you are fighting against.

The last point demands moving beyond blaming to collaborative endeavour. Emma’s plan shows what individuals can do to create a positive future for their children and grandchildren.

Diana draws on this discussion to incorporate a visioning exercise in her guided meditation. After an introductory period focused on becoming grounded, Diana suggests that people engaging in the meditation begin to envision what a renewed environment would look like in terms of flourishing trees, clean air, running water, clear skies, happy children, healthy and diverse wildlife, numerous birds and butterflies – a very different picture to one of darkened skies, dense and suffocating smoke, children distressed about their future environment, blackened trees and flora and burned/dead animals (many of them in danger of extinction). Diana maintains that the future is ours to create.

Reflection

As we grow in mindfulness through meditation and reflection, we can build our resilience; better appreciate our connectedness to others and our natural world; develop our motivation to collaborate and take compassionate action; overcome our biases and assumptions; and develop our personal role in helping to shape a positive future in our climate-changed world.

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Image by Johannes Plenio 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.

“Transformative Pyramid” Applied to Meeting the Needs of Customers

Chip Conley developed the “transformative pyramid” as a reflective framework for his leadership philosophy and approach. He had created it by adapting the work of Viktor Frankl and Abraham Maslow who focused on the hierarchy of human needs. Applied to employees, the Transformative Pyramid translates into leadership action to meet basic security needs (such as adequate and fair pay), recognition for contribution to the organisation and providing clarity around the meaningfulness of their work. Chip was very focused on enabling leaders to grow and develop through reflection and to develop a growth mindset in their transition to midlife. Associated with this mindset change is the need for leaders in midlife to learn through curiosity from millennials in their organisation.

Chip not only applied his Transformative Pyramid to employees but also to investors and customers. He suggested that in relation to customers, businesses too often benchmarked against the lowest common denominator which in his model represents the security needs of customers. His pyramid, however, suggests that great companies can move up the pyramid of need and really engage customers to the point where they become intensely loyal and market the company themselves by their word-of-mouth “advertising – sharing their great experience with others in their family and social networks.

Transformative Pyramid applied to customer needs

Chip explained in a podcast interview with Tami Simon that the Transformative Pyramid when applied to customers, involved the same three levels as when the pyramid is applied to employees – survival, success and transformation. However, each of the levels has a different meaning when applied to customers. “Survival” relates to meeting customers’ expectations (a basic need also for business survival); “success” in this context involves meeting the desires of customers; and at the highest level, “transformation”, means to differentiate and expand through meeting an “unrecognised need of the customer”.

Identifying and meeting a need of customers that has been unrecognised and unmet is the basis of Chip’s approach to marketing as explained in his book, Marketing That Matters. Chip gives the example of one of his boutique hotels, Hotel Vitale, that developed a yoga studio on its top-level floor and provided free morning yoga classes. This met an unexpressed and unrecognised need of travelling businesswomen who wanted to maintain their health to counteract the wear and tear of business travelling. The convenience of being able to do yoga before work without leaving the hotel premises was a real selling point. Up until this point, boutique hotels were very much designed as “men’s clubs”- meeting the needs of male business travellers.

Innovation and transformation

Chip drew on his experience as owner and CEO of 52 boutique hotels to put forward what he described as The Three Key Rules Around Innovation and Disruption. He spoke about (1) foreshadowing that occurs before an innovation (some companies begin to move in the direction of the innovation but their early efforts are incomplete or inadequate); (2) innovators fulfill “an underlying human need that has not been met” adequately or comprehensively; and (3) established companies eventually catch up and adopt the innovation (and we can see this happening daily in the growth of “gluten-free” and “vegan” products in our major supermarkets, previously the province of specialist (organic) stores).

However, being innovative and creative by departing from established practice takes courage and bravery. An Australian example is Karen Quinlan who introduced fashion as a key differentiating theme of the Bendigo Art Gallery. Karen recognised that over 80% of visitors to art galleries were women and they were very interested in fashion and its history. She set about meeting this “unrecognised need” – a need that art galleries around the world had not met because they were almost exclusively managed by male Art Directors who were blind to this need of their predominant customer base. Bendigo Art gallery now enjoys global recognition for its innovative approach and theme-based fashion exhibitions.

Chip points out that deep listening to customers can lead to identifying needs that have not been met. He suggests that what is important in innovation is understanding customer psychographics – their interests, passions, values and who/what they identify with. He suggests that the great companies develop the capacity to effectively “mind-read” their customers. To do this their leaders have to be fully present to customers and notice their inclinations, behaviours and self-expression.

Reflection

As we grow in mindfulness, we can develop curiosity, creativity and innovation and begin to understand our own needs and those of our customers/clients. We can progressively move from trying to make ourselves appear interesting to being genuinely interested in our customers and their unmet needs. This requires mindful listening, an openness to new ideas (from whatever source) and the courage to act on our insights and avoid procrastination through fear of departing from the established norm.

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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.

A Framework for Reflection for Organisation Leaders

Chip Conley, author and hospitality entrepreneur, emphasised the importance of reflection, wisdom and lifelong learning for leaders. He created the Modern Elder Academy to further that end. He was especially interested in making the workplace a place for fullment, inspiration and self-actualization for employees – which he maintained was the means to achieve a sustainably successful organisation. Chip acknowledged that his leadership philosophy was heavily influenced by the writing of two men Viktor Frankl and Abraham Maslow.

Viktor Frankl through his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, impressed on Chip the importance and power of a meaningful life for leaders and the critical role of leaders in providing an environment that is conducive to employees developing a “sense of purpose and meaning”. Research has confirmed that a meaningful life is foundational to a person’s health, happiness and overall well-being.

Abraham Maslow and his work on developing a Hierarchy of Needs had a very profound effect on Chip and his approach to leadership, both as an owner/entrepreneur and a mentor to other leaders, especially the young founders of Airbnb. Maslow’s work gave Chip an insight into how to develop a reflective framework to guide his own role as a leader and to assist other leaders to create meaningful work for employees.

A framework for reflection for organisational leaders – the transformative pyramid

Chip explained his reflection framework in a TED Talk© given in 2010 titled, Measuring What Makes Life Worthwhile. He elaborated further on the evolution of the framework and how to put it into practice in a podcast interview with Tami Simon of Sounds True. He was particularly concerned about the challenge of applying Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to business and the management of employees.

What Chip realised is that, for employees, meaning provided inspiration which in turn developed intrinsic motivation. He came up with the idea of a framework which he called the “transformative pyramid” – built on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs which was illustrated as a five-level pyramid with physiological needs at the bottom of the pyramid and self-actualization at the top.

To simplify things and make his framework easy to implement, Chip developed his transformative pyramid as a three-level pyramid with “survival” at the bottom, “success” in the middle and “transformation” at the top. He pointed out that many leaders focus only on the bottom of the pyramid, the survival needs, by using all their energy to create non-sustainable, extrinsic motivation in the form of pay, bonuses and financial rewards while ignoring what truly influences and shapes employee motivation.

In Chip’s model, “success” relates to recognition that an employee is achieving their role and contributing to the organisation. He understood that positive feedback was a powerful motivator and that people often left their jobs because of the way they were treated, including feeling a sense that they had been “taken for granted” and their efforts were unrecognised. Chip explained, by way of example, that during the dot-com crash, he introduced a process of recognition at his weekly managers’ meetings that not only provided some positive element to what was a relatively sober discussion but also helped to spread recognition and positivity throughout the organisation.

The initiating process for giving recognition was simple – he introduced a ten-minute period at the end of each meeting where a manager would mention someone in one of the teams who “deserved recognition” for something they had done in the workplace or in the field. This recognition was communicated personally to the individual involved who felt that they were “noticed” and respected, and their contribution was appreciated. Chip suggested that great companies are differentiated by the fact that they are “first-class noticers”.

At the highest level of the transformation pyramid is personal reframing of work from “just a job” to something that is meaningful and worthwhile. Chip suggested that this can be achieved by helping employees to understand the higher purpose of the organisation – the inspirational “why”, and to find meaning in what they do by understanding the connection between their daily work and something broader that makes a difference in people’s lives.

Chip indicated that he learned this lesson from a maid who had worked for a long time in one of his hotels. When he asked her why she seemed so happy doing mundane work every day (such as cleaning the toilets), she said that she was able “to create joy” for people who stayed in their hotel away from their home and often without their family or partner. She was able to mentally connect what she did every day to a “noble purpose”. This realisation and reframing were “transformative” for her – putting her mundane work in a totally different light and acting as a source of intrinsic motivation.

Chip encapsulated his “transformation pyramid” and its underlying principles in his book, PEAK: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow. He encouraged leaders to use his framework to reflect on their relationships with their employees, customers and investors. Since the first edition of the book, many organisations worldwide in different industries have used his framework to transform their businesses. In particular, they have found innovative ways to recognise the contribution of their employees.

Reflection

It is often the simplest ideas that have the greatest impact. Chip demonstrated that focusing on intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation was the way forward to transform companies and he proved this through his own roles as founder and CEO of Joie de Vivre and as mentor to the founders of Airbnb. In the process, he addressed one of the key underlying problems associated with the growth of depression – the loss of connection to meaningful work. As we grow in mindfulness, we can increase our understanding of leadership and what is meaningful in life for us and others, and notice, appreciate and provide recognition to people we encounter who contribute in whatever way to our own welfare and that of our organisations. Noticing, appreciating and giving recognition require us to be present in the moment – a key aspect of mindfulness. Being present builds awareness of our self and others.

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Image by Pete Linforth 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.

Guided Meditation for Releasing Stress and Reducing Overthinking

In times of stress, we tend to overthink – to engage in self-stories about who we are, what we are capable of and what negative impacts will eventuate from our situation. These negative self-stories can lead to a debilitating downward spiral and undermine our capacity to cope with our daily challenges. It is important to break the cycle of negative thoughts before they become entrenched in our psyche.

Great Meditation on its YouTube© Channel offers a specific guided meditation to help release stress and reduce overthinking. The meditation focuses on three key areas impacted by stress – our breathing, our thoughts and our body.

Guided meditation to release stress and reduce overthinking

The 10-minute guided meditation offers a simple but effective way to unwind and take control of your thinking and bodily sensations. The meditation process has three key steps:

Focus on your breathing – the starting point is to become grounded through your breath. Just observing your breath can be relaxing. The key here is not to try to control your breathing but notice it occurring in a part of your body – through your nose, in the rise and fall of your abdomen or in your chest. Adopting a comfortable posture helps you to maintain focus on your breathing.
Observing your thoughts – this entails noticing what thoughts are occurring in your mind without judgment and without entertaining them. It is important if your mind is blank not to go searching for thoughts because this can lead to overthinking. The key is to maintain your relaxed breathing while you notice what is going on in your head. Just let your thoughts pass by and remind yourself that “you are not your thoughts” – they are merely mental constructions.
Notice your bodily sensations – we experience stress in our bodies in the form of tight shoulders, a stiff neck, localised pain or sore arms, legs or ankles. Your body mirrors the fact that you are uptight in response to stress. As you scan your body, you can progressively release points of bodily tension by focusing on these areas and letting go. Deep breathing can assist this process and enable you to end the meditation process smoothly.

There are numerous sources of meditations that will enable you to release stress and free yourself from overthinking. For example, Great Meditation provides a wide range of meditations for specific purposes on their YouTube© Channel. Additionally, psycom.net lists links to meditation resources including music meditations, guided meditations, podcasts and meditation apps.

Reflection

The resources available for meditation practice are numerous and are very often free. The challenge is to maintain regular meditation practice to enable us to destress and stop living in our thoughts. As we grow in mindfulness through meditation, reflection and mindfulness practices, we will be more able to calm our minds, notice and release tension in our bodies and progressively build the resilience necessary to handle the challenges of work and family life.

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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 Let Joy into Your Life

Diana Winston recently provided a meditation podcast on Opening to Joy. She reinforced that mindfulness is about openness to the present moment in a curious and non-judgmental way. Diana thought that this particular meditation is relevant in December when we are constantly being exhorted to be “joyful” – when many of us are experiencing emotions other than joy owing to anxiety, depression, or serious setbacks (physical, emotional or financial) at this time of the year. It is also a time when we can experience extreme levels of exhaustion if we have been working intensely throughout the year or spending lengthy and stressful days as a carer. Diana offered this guided meditation as Director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA as part of the weekly meditation podcasts presented by MARC.

We can find that at this time of the year our negative feelings can be magnified as the pressure of family celebrations mounts, distressing memories of recent (or even long-past) adverse events well up or existing painful emotions such as loneliness become intensified because we are feeling left out or overlooked or misunderstood or marginalised. Some people have very recently lost family members as a result of bush fires, car accidents, or other misadventures – while others experience recollections of these devastating events occurring at this time of the year in the past. It takes a lot of time, focus and energy to heal the wounds of past trauma.

Diana encourages us to be kind to ourselves through self-compassion as well as to show compassion for others. She encourages us to explore mindful approaches to equanimity to allow peace and joy to re-enter our life if we are experiencing negative emotions or distress. To this end, she is offering an online course Cultivating Forgiveness as part of the many courses presented by MARC.

Encouraging joy in your life through mindfulness

When we practice mindfulness, we are opening ourselves to joy and contentment – to experiencing what is, in an accepting and kind way. It does not have to be a laugh-out-loud happiness but can be something small and subtle. Joy can range from something that is profoundly felt to a simple sense of being content with life at the present moment. It can be the sensation of mindfully taking a walk by the sea, drinking a cappuccino, being fully present and mindfully listening to someone – joy can happen just by being fully here and showing up in our lives. The act of gratitude for the positive things in our life – savouring our child’s development, our achievements, our friendships – can release us from unease or resentment and let joy into our life.

A guided meditation on cultivating joy

Diana provided a specific guided meditation on how to cultivate joy in your life during the podcast. The basic steps are as follows:

Begin by experiencing being grounded through your feet on the floor, your thighs resting on the chair, your back upright but not strained – developing a sense of stability and being supported.
Progressively scan your body and loosen any muscle that may be tight or tense including your feet, legs, arms, wrist, neck, shoulders, shoulder blades, lower back and your face and forehead – your whole body, opening to a sense of well-being and ease. You can take deep breaths as you progress with your scan and use the outbreath as a way to release tension and let in ease.
Now focus on something that will serve as an anchor in the event of distraction – the sensation of your breathing in some part of your body or the sounds in the room (without interrogation of their nature, source, volume or pleasantness). You can also use the dual process of focusing on the sensation of your fingers being joined while at the same time experiencing your breathing in some part of your body where your attention can focus. When you experience distractions such as planning, thinking, evaluating or worrying, redirect your mind to the present and your anchor to stay with the sense of ease, rather than the experience of unease. This process of redirecting attention builds your awareness muscle and increases the prospect of experiencing joy in your life.
While you are being anchored through your breathing or sound, be conscious of the peace or contentment you are experiencing. Pay attention to the joy that arises from being mindful – being fully in the present moment with openness and curiosity and wonderment.
Now focus in on a specific, recent experience of joy – e.g. being with a loved one, sharing an experience with a friend, enjoying company over lunch or dinner, walking in a rainforest, or enjoying the sense of competence when playing tennis or any other sport. Try to recapture the moment, the sensations, feelings, thoughts and the resultant joy – stay with these feelings and positive thoughts. You can express gratitude for being able to have such an experience and to have the capacity to recapture it.

The art of cultivating joy flows from our conscious efforts to develop mindfulness and live our lives as fully as we can in the present moment.

Reflection

We can cultivate joy in our lives through mindfulness practices, meditation, reflection and expressing gratitude. A meditation specifically designed to cultivate joy can assist us to grow in mindfulness and, as a result, more frequently capture and savour the experience of joy in our everyday lives. We can cultivate joy by being mindful in our words and actions.

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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.

Living with Purpose

Ginny Whitelaw introduced her Lead with Purpose online training program In an interview with David Riordan of Integral Life. Basically, the program is about living with purpose because it is not only about leading in an organisational setting but extends to every area of our life, including family and community. During the interview, Ginny explains in detail what the course covers, the practices employed, and the perspective offered. She particularly emphasises the non-religious orientation of the course even though it draws on Zen philosophy and is part of the many leadership development programs available through the Institute for Zen Leadership. Ginny maintains that unlike many leadership programs that are highly conceptual in nature, the Lead with Purpose program is very much about mind-body connection – it highlights the need to achieve this integration of mind and body if a leader is to achieve realisation of their ideas and purpose. Integral Life offers other enlightening interviews in their series of podcasts, as well as courses.

The influences behind the Lead with Purpose Course

Ginny brings to the course her doctoral studies in biophysics, a sound understanding of recent neuroscience research, training in and practice of Zen philosophy, training in martial arts (Aikido black belt, level 5 achieved as well as training others) and her experience as a senior manger in NASA (coordinating groups that support the International Space Station). So, her training covers mind and body and their intimate connection – and she incorporates this uniquely shaped perspective in the training course.

To Ginny, the Zen approach is about direct experience of the mind-body connection and aims to deepen and enrich this sense of connection. This is achieved in part through physical practices focused on the breath and moving focus away from analysis and obsession with using the brain to work things out. The practices are designed to centre and stabilise the energy of the body and make it available as a rich resource to pursue our life purpose.

These practices heighten our intuition and sensitivity to the body’s signals and develop our insight into our fundamental purpose in life and the pathway to pursue it. Ginny points out that our individual purpose is what differentiates each of us and our connection within and with others enables us to manifest that unique purpose in our lives, whatever arena we are operating in. She maintains that this centredness enables us to influence others effectively whether in a meeting, a public presentation, in our family relationships or when engaging with the wider community.

Some of the modern-day issues addressed in Lead with Purpose

In today’s fast paced world with ever increasing demands and rapid change on every front, we often express frustration in three main areas – (1) lack of time, (2) lack of energy and (3) inability to translate ideas into action.

Ginny explains in the interview that the course changes our relationship to time so that we are not racing against time but are focused on the now and being fully engaged with our situation. She points out that participants in the course develop a different perspective on time and no longer see time as something separate but experience time through their continuous, personal evolution.
Ginny addresses the lack of energy by maintaining that often we are unproductive because we get distracted from our purpose and energy gets “siphoned off’ into other pursuits. The Lead with Purpose course through its centredness in the body builds energy and enables real resonance to be achieved by a person who is leading. She explains that “as the body relaxes, energy flows”. Ginny describes four basic “energy patterns” that exist in our nervous system and that are foundational to her approach in the course. She maintains that we each prefer a particular pattern which reflects our personality (and influencing style) but we need to develop the capacity to use the “right energy at the right time” – a specific focus of the course. As we increase our internal connectedness between body and mind, we can use our heightened energy to influence externally – to manifest our dreams and purpose.
Often our attempts to translate our ideas into action are thwarted by our internal barriers (such as negative self-talk) as well as external barriers related to organisational, personal or community readiness to change. The Lead with Purpose course creates a heightened sensitivity to what is possible, to the opportunities that open up and to a way forward in pursuit of our purpose.

Ginny explains that through the program, participants create an “intuitive connection’ with the situation in which they lead and an “empathetic connection” with their followers, collaborators or co-creators.

Clare Bowditch – a journey into leading with purpose

Clare Bowditch – singer, songwriter, and actor – is a person of exceptional talent in many arenas. She is the winner of an Aria Award as the best female vocalist and was nominated for a Logie for her acting role in the TV series, Offspring. She has won many awards, toured with famous singers like Leonard Cohen, and developed as a radio presenter and entrepreneur. She recently released her memoir, Your Own Kind of Girl: The stories we tell ourselves and what happens when we believe them. The memoir recounts an extended personal journey to find her purpose and pursue it with her total focus and centred energy.

Clare suffered numerous dark days through depression, catalysed by childhood trauma through the death of her young sister and adverse childhood experiences through her abusive treatment at school and elsewhere because she was considered “fat”. She was filled with self-doubts about her talent, fears about future events and a sense of guilt over the death of her sister and her failure to do more to save her (a totally irrational belief given that her older sister died at the age of seven from a rare and incurable disease).

Clare describes in graphic detail the self-talk that debilitated her for much of her early life and clouded her view of her life purpose. The memoir is also a story of courage, resilience and persistence in the pursuit of her life purpose. Clare adopted multiple approaches to acknowledge her true purpose, accept it and pursue it with a singular, focused energy. Her strategies included:

Drawing on the support of her family and friends (including a “healing friend”)
Engaging in meditation (however imperfect)
Listening to her body and the signals it was conveying about her fears, her energy, her passion and her happiness
Naming negative self-talk as “Frank” and developing a way to shut Frank up and ignore “his” messages (she called it FOF)
Developing a personalised approach to relaxing herself (FAFL – Face, Accept, Float and Let time pass).

Clare had to offload the “shoulds” that beset her throughout her life to enable her to identify her differentiation as a singer/songwriter in terms of speaking with her real voice – becoming her “resonant self”, reflecting her true feelings and beliefs.

Reflection

Ginny’s discussion of her course, Lead with Purpose, helps us to realise the blockages that prevent us from identifying, accepting and pursuing our life purpose. She provides a pathway forward built on an intensive mind-body connection that removes these blocks to insight and energy. Clare Bowditch provides a model of the courage, resilience and persistence required to truly align our energies with our purpose. As we grow in mindfulness through physical practices, meditation and reconnection, we can develop a clarity and resonance that enables us to create a real difference in our world.

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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.

How to Maintain Your Blogging Momentum

Darren Rowse recently published a blog post titled, How to Rekindle Your Blogging Enthusiasm, in which he provided several ways to reenergise your blogging and regain your momentum. Darren is eminently equipped to offer advice to bloggers having started a personal blog in 2002, a professional blog for bloggers called Problogger in 2004 and a very profitable blog on digital photography in 2006. Darren also provides an extensive podcast archive on blogging, a book titled Problogger (for those who want a career in blogging or to earn extra income from their blogging efforts), and a course on how to develop a profitable blogging business titled 31 Days to Build a Better Blog.

Maintaining your blogging momentum

Darren’s suggestions on how to rekindle your blog when your enthusiasm and/or energy wanes are very practical and relatively easy to implement. However, they will often involve changing habits (including avoidance) that have grown up over time (in some cases, over many years). Here are his suggestions:

Take time off from writing your blog – sometimes we go stale and lose enthusiasm. A break can rekindle enthusiasm, develop insight into new ways to approach your blog and provide the opportunity to regain momentum. The break from blogging could involve taking a vacation in a different environment; doing research for your blog content; undertaking a course on blogging or attending a conference on your content area; developing a blogging calendar; or doing some speed writing/brain dump around several topic areas. Ash Barty, current World Number 1 tennis player, took a year off from tennis and played cricket instead – this enabled her to regain her enthusiasm and accelerated her tennis career to the top.
Revisit why you are writing your blog – to tap into your motivation and energy source. Over time, we can easily lose sight of what motivated us to write our blog in the first place. I found this strategy of reconnecting with my purpose a very useful and sustaining approach. To this end, I recently revisited the benefits of writing my blog on mindfulness in a blog post. In that post, I also explained the benefits of changing my blogging frequency from daily to three or four times a week – something that I did on the advice of my mentor (and another strategy that Darren recommends).
Check the alignment of your blogging focus and approach with your overall goals – this includes ensuring that you are in the right content area (in terms of personal interest, potential audience and growth potential) and that your language, target audience and topic choice align with your fundamental purpose in writing. I have found that mindfulness as a topic choice for my blog assists my personal and professional development, enables me to keep abreast of the latest neuroscience findings, stimulates my thinking and engages me in a growth area (with endless articles and video resources and applications in multiple arenas such as mental health, education, leadership, workplaces and community development).
Overcome pride and seek help – there are numerous resources available such as Problogger and Yaro Starak’s blog and his engaging podcast interviews as well as related social media groups. Darren also offers ways to find writers to assist with the challenge of writing your blog on a regular basis.

Reflection

Sometimes we do things that naturally rekindle our enthusiasm for blogging (such as participating in webinars or online conferences). At other times, the drain on our momentum is too much because of other commitments that consume our energy and creative capacity – these are times when we could seek and heed the advice of professional bloggers such as Darren and Yaro. As we grow in mindfulness, we can become more aware of our thoughts and feelings that may be impeding our progress in writing, identify creative solutions and regain our alignment, enthusiasm and momentum.

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Image by Karolina Grabowska 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-Compassion for Healthy Eating

Marsha Hudnall, President and Co-owner of Green Mountain at Fox Run (a whole-body wellness retreat), offers an interesting perspective on how to develop healthy eating – whether that involves avoiding overeating, under-eating or eating foods that we know cause inflammation through allergy or intolerance. Marsha in her article on this topic suggests that self-compassion is the missing factor in enabling us to persist with healthy eating.

Often when we stray from the ideal approach to healthy eating that meets our specific needs, we berate ourselves for our failure to stick to the right path. Marsha has been a pioneer in the field of non-diet and alternative approaches to healthy eating through her writing, teaching and her work as a board member of the Center for Mindful Eating. She explains her personal experience and perspective on mindful eating in a Mindful Dietician podcast. Marsha offers advice too for people who are on dietary restrictions as a result of a health condition – available in a paid webinar titled, When the Doctor Says No.

Self-Compassion for healthy eating

Self-compassion has been the life pursuit of Kristin Neff who stresses the importance of self-kindness to overcome negative thinking in the face of set-backs or temporary defeats. Kristin reinforces the need to recognise that we share a common humanity and part of our life experience is larger than ourselves (we are not the only one encountering life challenges). She stresses the role of mindfulness in dealing with thoughts and feelings that damage our self-image and using mindful approaches to grow self-awareness and self-regulation.

In her podcast interview mentioned above, Marsha identifies two key barriers to effective self-compassion – the social and personal obsession with body image (and related materialistic values) and the relentless pursuit of perfectionism. In relation to perfectionism, she argues that we need to acknowledge that we cannot be perfect – we will make mistakes and poor choices. This acceptance opens the way to new learning, new habits and thoughtful responses to life crises. This fundamental realisation was a real breakthrough for tennis player Ash Barty who became Number 1 in the world in 2019.

Mindfulness and mindful eating

Marsha stated that her introduction to mindful eating occurred when Jon Kabat-Zinn visited the Green Mountain retreat center. She came to understand that mindfulness was essentially about awareness and understanding of the influences shaping our responses and the potentiality of making different choices – choosing between a range of options rather than being locked into a single way of doing things, e.g. mindful eating instead of dieting. Marsha alluded to the perspective of her mother-in-law, Thelma (Founder of Green Mountain), who talked about “the plank of choice” versus the “diet tightrope”.

Marsha broadens our perspective on mindful eating when she offers suggestions in her article on ways to bring self-compassion to the process of eating:

Give up a fixed way of thinking – what Marsha calls “black and white thinking”. She suggests, for example, that pizza should not always be branded as bad for you – it may be the best choice when celebrating an achievement with friends. You can be mindful of others, the occasion and the flexibility you have on that occasion – rather than adopting a fixed position that leads to subsequent dissatisfaction for not having “participated” fully in the celebration. In her podcast interview, Marsha argues that we need to adopt a “middle-ground” instead of pursuing unattainable perfection.
Become aware of your negative self-talk when eating – Marsha suggests that you write down these thoughts, and also have prepared responses that you can adopt when the debilitating self-critique starts up.
Practice giving yourself kind responses – do this whenever a negative thought enters your mind during the day. The more you do it, the easier it gets and it quickly becomes a default way of thinking – just as awareness practice while waiting can replace the default mode of grabbing your mobile phone to fill the gap.

Drawing on her own personal experience and awareness of research findings, Marsha maintains that mindfulness can help us to contribute more positively and successfully to our own family, work and professional arena. She observed that as you practice mindfulness, you become more aware of the subtleties of being mindful and its impacts in every arena of your life. Marsha noted, too, that exploring neuroscience and an understanding of the brain, better equips us to deal with our daily challenges.

Reflection

As we grow in mindfulness, we can become more aware of the thoughts and feelings that drive us to unhealthy eating and related practices and build the resilience to achieve self-regulation in our eating habits. Mindful eating involves more than just eating slowly, it also extends to identifying and managing our negative self-talk that can occur while we are eating and other times throughout the day.

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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.