release – Grow Mindfulness

Body Scan Meditation – Being Present to Yourself

Gloria Kamler, stress-reduction expert and meditation teacher, provides a body scan meditation as one of the many UCLA weekly meditation podcasts. Gloria has been a meditation practitioner for more than 30 years and talks enthusiastically about the many benefits of mindfulness meditation. In the introduction to this guided meditation, she maintains that a body scan meditation can help us slow down, wake up to life and gain clarity about our purpose. She suggests that instead of floating like a balloon on the winds of life, we can choose how we want to live and be able to “show up for your life”.

Gloria argues that focusing on the body via a scan helps you to develop “moment by moment awareness” that can lead to equanimity. She maintains that our minds can lead us astray and delude us, while our body “always speaks the truth” if only we tap into it and pay attention to what we are sensing. Through a body scan, we can access a different part of our brain, develop self-caring and caring for others and build emotional regulation.

Body scan meditation

In her guided body scan meditation Gloria helps us to work progressively from our head to our feet dwelling on different parts of the body as we scan for tension, e.g. tightness in our neck, pain in our back, a tight furrowed brow, aching ankles or soreness in our knees. Recognising these sensations puts us in touch with our own bodies – it makes us present to ourselves and grounds us in the present moment as we experience it. Progressive releasing of tension as we bring our attention to different parts of our body, can create a sense of calmness and control. It can lift our spirits and help us to be ready for the day’s challenges and opportunities.

Awareness of positive sensations as we undertake the body scan can heighten our mood, develop confidence to move forward and strengthen our resolve. We could feel the firmness and solidity of our feet on the ground, energetic tingling in our fingers and arms and a calmness in our breathing – all of which portend and support our ability to surf the waves of life and make a real contribution to the lives of others, whether that is a simple smile, a random act of kindness, or compassionate action. In caring for ourselves through our body scan, we can be open to caring about, and caring for, others.

We can begin to realise that everyone is at some time experiencing some form of pain – mental and/or physical. We can feel connected to others just as we sense the deep interconnectedness of the parts of our body. The process of the body scan, like that of Tai Chi, helps us to appreciate the mind-body connection – if we are not at one with our body, we can be “all at sea” with our thoughts and emotions.

Reflection

A body scan meditation can really help us if our mind is racing or we are distracted by anxious thoughts. Becoming grounded in our body is the fastest route to being grounded in the present because our body is always present to us at every moment of every day – we just have to tune into it. As we grow in mindfulness through body scan meditations, we can access our capacity for conscious choice, emotional regulation and equanimity. We can approach life’s challenges with calmness, insight and openness to what is.

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Image by Dimitris Vetsikas 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.

Forgiveness: A Reflection

In a previous post I discussed an important topic, Don’t Wait to Forgive, based on the book by Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations. Forgiveness is something that we tend to put off because it is too self-revealing and painful. Frank suggests that we have to face up to who we really are and not who we project ourselves to be. We have to look in the mirror, not into an internally fabricated image that shows ourselves in the best possible light. The honesty required is disarming and can be disturbing. Experience and research suggest that some principles can help us along the way:

Be grounded and relaxed – Forgiveness is a difficult pursuit at the best of times. However, if you are agitated or highly distracted, it is extremely difficult to focus on forgiving yourself or someone else. The starting point is to become grounded and relaxed. Grounding in the present moment can involve tapping into your breath, your bodily sensations or the sounds around you. I find sometimes that sounds can themselves be distracting because I am always trying to interpret them. I like using a particular body sensation as a means of grounding, e.g. the sensation of fingers on both hands touching. I find that I can use this practice anywhere, whether waiting for something or someone, or beginning a meditation. It can quickly induce relaxation and focus for me. Each person will have their preferred approach to grounding and relaxation – for some people, it may involve a full body scan to identify and release tension.
Manage distractions – Distractions are a natural, human frailty – they pull us away from our focus. However, they can be more persistent and intensive when we are trying to focus on forgiveness because of the level of discomfort that we may feel when dealing with our shame. Having a “home” or anchor such as our breath can enable us to restore our focus. Persistence in returning to our focus builds our “attention muscle” over time – a necessary strength if we are to progress in our goal of developing forgiveness.
Start small – Self-intimacy around our need for forgiveness (for the multiple ways in which we have hurt others) can be overwhelming if we take on too much at once. When you think about it, our need for forgiveness can be pervasive – impacting every facet of our interactions in close relationships, with work colleagues or with strangers in the street or shops. We can think of times when we have interrupted someone, ignored people, been harsh towards them or spoken ill of them. There are times when we have taken out our frustration or anger on someone who is not the trigger for our difficult emotions. We can begin by focusing on a small, recent incident where we have caused hurt or harm to someone and gradually build to more confronting issues, situations or emotions. Mitra Manesh in her guided meditation podcast on forgiveness suggests that a simple way to start might be to bring a particular person to mind and mentally say, “For all the pain and suffering I may have caused you, I ask for your forgiveness”. This kind of catch-all statement avoids going into all the detail of an interaction. Sometimes we can become distracted by what Diana Winston describes as “being lost in the story” – we can end up recalling blow by blow what happened, indulging in blame and self-righteousness. Forgiveness is not a process of justifying our words or actions.
Forgiveness is healing for ourselves – We have to bring loving kindness to our forgiveness practice whatever form it takes – loving kindness for our self as well as for the person we are forgiving. The process is not designed to “beat up on” our self but to face up to the reality of what we have said or done or omitted to do that has been hurtful for someone else. It’s releasing that negative, built-up energy that is stored in difficult emotions and is physically, mentally and emotionally harmful to our self. It is recognising that holding onto regret, anger, resentment or guilt can be toxic to our overall wellness. However, like giving up smoking, it takes time, persistence and frequent revisiting of our motivation.

As we grow in mindfulness and self-awareness through meditation, reflection and daily mindfulness practices, we can learn to face up to our real self and our past and seek forgiveness. However challenging this may be, we need to begin the journey for our own welfare and that of others we interact with. Diana Winston in her forgiveness meditation podcast reminds us that mindfulness involves “being in the present moment with openness and curiosity” together with a “willingness to be with what is” – it entails honest self-exploration. She cites Lily Tomlin who maintains that forgiveness involves “giving up all hope for a better past” – seeing our past with clear sight and honesty.

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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

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

How to Release Pain and Reduce Difficult Emotions

Deepak Chopra on discussing how to release pain and difficult emotions stressed the connection between our physical bodies and our emotions and also the interconnectedness of all living things. He maintained that “there is no mental event that doesn’t have a biological correlate” – that is to say, that our every thought and related emotion finds expression in some form in our body. He stressed that our brain serves to integrate everything we experience – our thoughts, feelings, emotions, social interactions and the ecosystems that surround us. Deepak talked too of our entanglement with each other – how we influence each other energetically and emotionally through “limbic resonance”.

In speaking of ways to reduce physical pain in another video presentation, Deepak strongly supported the idea of regular exercise to release endorphins, meditation to take us beyond our limiting perceptions, music to reduce stress and pain and social connection and interactions to provide support. He maintained that, contrary to popular belief, alcohol and smoking increase pain rather than reduce it. He also highlighted the powerful role of biofeedback, employed by various health professionals including the Chopra Center for Wellbeing.

A seven-step process for physical healing and emotional release

In his presentation for the You Can Heal Your Life Summit, Deepak offered a seven-step process for physical healing and emotional wellbeing. The seven steps serve as an integrated approach to individual mindfulness practices that we have previously discussed on this blog.

You begin by reflecting on an interaction that made you upset or left you having to deal with difficult emotions. Then you follow the following seven steps:

Accept responsibility: accept what you are feeling as your own, not blaming others for the way you are feeling. Without accepting responsibility, you cannot gain control over your feelings, nor can you wait for the other person to change so that you can be released from your feelings, because this will not happen.
Feel the feeling in your body: Deepak maintains that any feeling relates to one of the energetic centres of your body, one of the seven Chakras. The location of your pain is an indicator of the Chakra involved and the unfulfilled need finding expression in that Chakra, e.g. pain around the heart region (the Heart Chakra) can signal a need for love and belongingness, while pain in the stomach region (Solar Plexus Chakra) can indicate an unmet need for stability and strength. To feel the feeling you can close your eyes and focus on the area of your body where you feel pain – and bring your awareness to it without doing anything other than being with the pain wherever it is being felt in your body.
Name your feeling: Deepak describes this step as “labelling your feelings”. By naming your feelings accurately, you can learn to tame them. He calls accurate naming “labelling intelligently” – the more specific you can be about what you are feeling, e.g. resentment, anger, shame, the better you are able to deal with it.
Write it down – here the aim is to express what happened from three different perspectives – your own, the other person’s perspective and a third person’s perspective – the independent observer. Deepak maintains that using this 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd person approach reduces the emotional energy you have invested in the conflict, improves your immune system, and lightens your emotional load because “you are not weighed down by the emotion”.
Share it with someone: here you share both the process you used and the outcome for you with someone that you trust. It is important to accurately share the three perspectives that you have developed – avoid excusing your own behaviour and blaming the other person.
Use a ritual release: Deepak suggests that a ritual activity that symbolises “release” reinforces your new state of equilibrium and equanimity. It can take many forms but needs to be a personal way of expressing release, e.g. using a mantra meditation, scrunching up the paper you have written on or throwing it in the river.
Celebrate the release: again using something that is meaningful to you, e.g. a long forest walk, or mindful walking by the bay – some activity that manifests your joy and the realisation that you are moving on, no longer trapped physically or emotionally.

Reflection

The wisdom of this approach is the recognition throughout of the profound mind-body connection – In releasing our emotions, we can release pain in our bodies. It takes time to develop the self-intimacy and honesty required to defuse these emotions and the related physical pain. Persistence brings its own rewards in this endeavour as in many other endeavours. As we grow in mindfulness through mindfulness practices, meditation and reflection, we can achieve a level of consciousness that creates emotional freedom and physical ease. Deepak maintains that “all healing is consciousness”. To deepen our level of consciousness, we can make a habit of self-observation, naming our feelings and related unmet needs, and exploring creative ways to respond.

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Image by Nika Akin 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.

Meditation for Working with Difficult Feelings and Pain

Diana Winston offers a meditation for Working With Difficulties that is brief, focused and eminently practical. The seven-minute meditation is provided by her through the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC). Diana is Director of Mindfulness Education at MARC. She is also the author of the recently published book, The Little Book of Being. Diana’s guided meditation on dealing with difficulties provides a relaxing image as she takes you through the steps of the meditation process.

Guided meditation for working with difficulties

The guided meditation has several basic steps that involve alternating between an experience of peace and restfulness and the disturbing sensations associated with difficulties. The steps are detailed below:

Adopt a comfortable position and become grounded through your breath, either by taking several deep breaths or just by tuning into your natural breathing pattern without trying to control its pace.
Now find somewhere in your body that feels pleasant and restful – your fingers, hands, feet or ankles. Touching your fingers together can be a very useful way to bring positive energy to your practice and provide an ongoing anchor for you. As you get in touch with a pleasant part of your body, notice the sensations, the energetic flow, the warmth and comfort that surrounds you. Luxuriate in the pleasure of this bodily awareness of positivity. This step is important for you to be able to address your difficulty.
This is the step that is really difficult – dealing directly with your difficult emotion(s) or bodily pain. Now you need to face up to what is happening for you. You might experience your difficulty as a pain in your shoulders, neck, back or somewhere else in your body. If so, feel the tension or tightness and try to let go or soften your muscles in that area. You might have to name the feelings you are experiencing to be able to tap into their bodily manifestations. It is important to capture the difficult feelings along with their bodily expression or you will not be able to gain a degree of release as you progress the meditation. However, it is equally important that you don’t “beat yourself up” if you can’t immediately tap into the feelings or painful sensations. With practice, you will be able to see, and feel, through the veil that you use to cover these unpleasant experiences.
Once again revisit the part of your body that provides you with a pleasant feeling and/or sensation (Step 2).
Repeat step 3 – facing up to your difficulty both emotionally and physically. With these repeated steps, you may experience a lessening of your difficulty – it may be shrinking in size or power or visual representation (e.g. no longer a disturbing menace that takes your breath away or spasmic pain that makes you uptight or rigid). Alternatively, you may experience your difficulty more intensely in the initial stages as you move past denial to acknowledgement and acceptance. Sometimes, it takes a while for us to accept that we are experiencing such strong, negative feelings. You may also be used to ignoring bodily tension over a long period. It is critical at this stage to treat yourself with loving kindness – rejecting any harsh judgment of yourself.
You can repeat these steps in one meditation session, dropping in and out of pleasant sensations. If the difficulty is hard to shift in intensity, you may find it useful to repeat the meditation over several days or daily. As you progress with this form of meditation, you will be able eventually to just give your difficulty “a sideways glance”, not becoming overwhelmed by its intensity or tenacity.

As we grow in mindfulness through meditation, our awareness of our difficulties expands as well as our understanding of how these difficult emotions or physical pain are experienced in our body. This guided meditation for dealing with difficulties encourages us to move in and out of our discomfort to give us an emotional and physical break and to lessen the hold that the difficulty has over us. With time, the impact of the difficulty will lessen, and we will be better able to deal with the stress involved.

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Image by Heike Frohnhoff 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.

Note: Multi-talented Heike Frohnhoff is also a Jazz Singer.

Being Vulnerable: How to Improve Our Relationships and Contribution

In the previous post I discussed Tara Brach’s presentation on vulnerability and intimacy and ways to overcome our defence mechanisms. In this blog post, I want to focus on becoming vulnerable to improve two aspects of our lives – our contribution and our relationships.

Vulnerability is universal

Vulnerability is “part and parcel” of being human. When you think about it most people you encounter in life will have experienced at least one trauma – a significant frightening or disturbing event – in their life at one time or another. A traumatic event may take many forms and people will react differently to varying events such as the death of a child, partner, parent, sibling or friend; the break-up of parents through divorce; a major car or workplace accident; loss of a job; experience of chronic illness and/or pain; severe financial difficulties resulting in the loss of a home; break-up of an intimate relationship; a period of mental illness; addiction to drugs or alcohol; or any manner of distressing events.

Tara makes the point that “the more wounding there has been, the greater are the defences”. We each have been wounded at some time through various events, traumatic or otherwise, that have intensified our sense of being vulnerable and precipitated our defence mechanisms designed to protect us from such vulnerability. Ian MacLaren recognised that everyone experiences vulnerability when he wrote, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle”.

Because of our past experiences, we may feel afraid to speak up, to take part in a group activity, to perform publicly, to engage in conversation or to give positive feedback to another person. We may feel that we will be rejected, laughed at, or cut out of a group. We might be concerned about experiencing embarrassment, lack of control or overt emotions expressed as tears.

How we hide our fear of being vulnerable

There are many ways that we can camouflage our fear of being vulnerable such as:

excessive criticism of others, constant judging (people never measure up to our expectations)
projection of our own fears or anxiety onto others (“they are too fearful or lack courage”)
aggressive emotions such as anger, blame (fight behaviour)
withdrawal through depression (flight behaviour)
inertia (freeze behaviour)
overcontrolling others
overconsuming – food, social media, goods and services, drugs
hiding behind a mask/role – being the boss, the helper or the victim

The problem is that these ways of hiding our feelings of vulnerability are often subtle, elaborate, sub-conscious and developed over long periods of time. It takes a concerted effort and continuous training to be able to identify our defence mechanisms and overcome them through sustained, focused attention in meditation.

Being vulnerable to improve our contribution

Tara at one stage in her presentation tells the story of how a disturbed teenager’s life turned around when he heard a monk sing a song both loudly and off-key in front of an audience. He was taken with the courage required by the monk to do that and make a “fool” of himself. The monk showed bravery by placing himself in a potentially embarrassing situation.

I previously recounted a similar story of coach Mo Cheeks (who could not sing in tune) getting up in front of thousands of people at a NBA playoff and helping a 13 year old girl complete the national anthem after she was overcome with nerves.

Both these stories illustrate the power of being vulnerable (overcoming our natural defence mechanisms) to make a contribution to others and the community generally. Mo’s action, for instance, has been a source of inspiration for more than half a million people who have viewed the video of his compassionate intervention.

Improving a relationship by being vulnerable

Tara tells another story of a mother who was feeling very vulnerable because her daughter had become addicted to heroin and was continuously in and out of treatment centres for her addiction. The mother hid her sense of powerlessness and being vulnerable by her angry, blaming and controlling behaviour towards her daughter. Through psychotherapy the mother was able to let go of her defences and need for control and provide compassionate support for her daughter – to be with her daughter in her struggle, trusting in her daughter’s own wisdom to break free of the addiction.

The daughter did succeed and overcame her addiction and the mother and daughter built a deep relationship through this mutual experience of vulnerability. The mother was able to overcome her defence mechanisms to provide constructive support that enabled her daughter and the relationship to move forward.

A meditation on vulnerability

In her presentation (at the 35.45-minute mark), Tara provides a basis for reflection on your own sense of vulnerability and how it is impacting your relationships. She suggests you focus first on a relationship that you want to improve in terms of closeness or one that is bogged down in a pattern of behaviour that is not constructive. The focal relationship can be with anyone – life partner, friend, child, sibling or work colleague.

The reflection then revolves around exploring the ways that you are creating separation through your own thoughts and actions. Tara provides some questions to explore how your vulnerability is impacting the relationship:

in what ways are you protecting yourself in these interactions?
are you judging the other person?
are you projecting on the other person some expectation of how they should be?
are you withholding yourself and pretending to be who you are not?
are you trying to impress the other person by constantly explaining how good you are at some endeavour or how much better your trip or experience was?
are you operating from a low level of trust of people generally?

Once you have addressed these questions, the process then involves getting in touch with how you feel in your body when you are defending yourself – are you uptight?; does your face reflect your intensity?; are you physically rigid?; or are you looking distracted (as you search for a self-protective response)?

You next ask yourself how would you manage if you let go of one or more of your defences in your interactions with this person – how will you need to feel differently? A visioning question can be helpful here – “What if I reduce my armour, what will our interaction be like and how will I cope with being seen to be flawed or being rejected or looking foolish”? You can ask yourself, “How likely is it that these outcomes I fear will actually occur?”

The final step is to face your fear and sense of being vulnerable, acknowledge it and use your breathing to bring it under control. You can adopt a mindful breathing approach, deepen your in-breath and out-breath or envisage the fear as you breathe in and envisage its release as you breathe out.

As we grow in mindfulness through noticing and managing our vulnerability through meditation practice, we can open ourselves up to more creative contributions to our community and to deeper and more meaningful relationships. As the defence barriers we construct begin to come down or weaken, we are able to free up our creative abilities and let people into our life.

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

Image source: courtesy of geralt on Pixabay

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.