Posts from the ‘Mindfulness’ Category

Apr 1

How We Relate Predicts How we Meditate: Attachment Style is Linked to Mindfulness

During a recent trip to Los Angeles California, I was aroused from early morning slumber by an eerie sensation of movement. As the veil of sleep was pulled from my mind, I gradually registered the meaning of the shaking bed beneath me and the groaning structures above me: earthquake! A shot of prickly energy ripped through my gut and landed in my chest, quickening my heart. Adrenaline sharpened my senses and time seemed to slow as I instinctively made my way to the patio door. I looked out onto the street, half expecting to see creviced sidewalks and toppling buildings. Instead I saw people nonchalantly walking their dogs and sipping their morning coffee.

Despite the apparent banality of the event for local Angelenos, the earthquake was a hot topic at the airport among people unaccustomed to earth-shaking awakenings. As I waited for my flight, I found myself listening to a conversation between two newly-acquainted women.

The first woman excitedly asked the other, “Did you feel the earthquake this morning?” Leaving no room for a response, she went on, “Wasn’t that something! I mean, have you ever experienced such a thing? I didn’t know what to do – I jumped up and ran around in my nightie like a chicken with its head cut-off!”

The second woman, pulling back a bit from the shared space, cocked an eyebrow and flatly replied, “Didn’t bother me much really. This is L.A. after all – comes with the territory I suppose.” Shifting in her seat uneasily she scanned the terminal while drumming her fingers on the chair’s armrest, “Have you seen a trash can?”

The first woman took hold of the other woman’s arm, causing her coffee to quiver and nearly spill, “I just kept thinking, ‘What will I do if this hotel comes down around me? How will people find me? What will my husband do without me? I mean, he can barely make spaghetti!”

The second woman slowly unhinged her arm from the first and with a shrug said, “I guess if it’s your time, it’s your time.” Slipping out of the chair (and the conversation), she stood up and wandered away while casting a comment over her shoulder, “Never a trash can when you need one.”

As a social scientist, I was fascinated by this exchange. You might be wondering what we can possibly glean from this brief conversation between two strangers? Well, I believe that their interaction can tell us something about their attachment tendencies and their capacity for mindfulness. As it turns out, these two constructs, attachment and mindfulness, are linked by how a person expresses and regulates emotion. Let me explain.

Mar 24

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Coming Home to Precious Presence

Over a decade ago, in the early stages of my own process of awakening, a colleague intuitively noticed that I was having a particularly difficult day and suggested that I “try to stay in the present moment”. My mind was reeling, my emotions were on overdrive, and I’m sure I was focused on some temporary, self-destructive fix. He caught my frantic, darting eyes with his and gently implored, “Just try to be right here, in this moment, just as it is… being present for our own experience can be pretty cool.”

Needless to say, I really didn’t understand what he was talking about. I had heard about “transpersonal meditation” and “being in the now”. But these phrases typically brought to mind images of bald guys in flowing robes chanting “Ooooommmm” in a remote hill-top monastery. These notions, naïve as they were, seemed to be completely at odds with my hectic, restless, and discontented existence at the time. I remember thinking, “Who has time for the present moment?!”

As I progressed in my self-reclamation journey, I began to recognize that my incessant running from the-here-and-now was associated with tremendous suffering. The constant busyness and perpetual mind-motion was probably meant to fill some void within myself. Yet, despite my frenetic void-filling behaviors, I still felt a lot of emptiness inside. Eventually, the pain of my situation was enough that I decided to try something different; I got curious about what I was running from and what it would be like to stay with my own experience.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this simple inquiry – “what is really here and can I be with it” – has been at the heart of various contemplative traditions for thousands of years. Within the traditions of Buddhism, a style of meditation practice known as vipassana involves training the mind to have greater awareness or insight of bodily sensations, thoughts, and emotions. Today, this type of practice is generally known as mindfulness and can be defined as “bringing attention to the present moment without judgment.” In recent decades, numerous scientific studies have shown that mindfulness techniques can improve relationships, health, and general wellbeing.

Aug 5

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Opening to the Shadow Self

Call it suppression or repression or whatever… the point is that we have a tendency to avoid pain. Not because we are wimpy – quite the opposite actually – much of the time we avoid pain as a way to “stay strong”. We avoid pain because it feels overwhelmingly huge and there just doesn’t seem to be enough “space” to deal with it. We think that we have to stay strong, for our partner, our kids, our job, or our quivering sanity. After all, life just keeps moving, and for most of us, at a pretty quick pace. So, what do we do? We stuff it down… we tuck it and run. We sequester the shadow parts of our self and we keep moving. We survive.

Once the unwanted parts get tucked or stuffed, we don’t really want to dredge them up. We convince ourselves that the unpleasantries of our past are better left in the dark recesses of our minds; “I mean, what good would it do to bring it all up now”, we might say to ourselves. In fact, over time we may not consciously remember what we pushed into to the shadowy corners of our psyche. We may develop nifty habits to keep the threatening information from bubbling to the surface, like addictive behaviors, unhealthy ways of thinking, or maladaptive emotional patterns. These aversive measures do keep the blackness at bay, at least for awhile, but they don’t hold.

Life has a way of reminding us of those things we don’t want to think about: The weight of an old betrayal that we relegated to the attic of our mind threatens to break through the sagging ceiling and drop into the living room of life each time someone threatens to leave us; a shot of fear rips through our body when we pass by the craggy door of our psyche’s cellar where long-ago we banished our unwanted shame related to hurting a friend or family member; we pull the emotional curtains tight to shield us from seeing the characterological garbage we threw over the back fence of feeling. It’s all tucked and stuffed… but not necessarily gone.

Mar 22

From Islands to Landmasses: Gradually Increasing a Sense of Safety within the Body

As I try to understand the effects of psychological trauma, often it’s the body that tells the story. This was certainly the case with Jennifer (as I will call her). During our first meeting, she entered my office with a veneer of aloofness, but her eyes told a different story; they were darting about, quickly scanning me and my office for any signs of threat. She sat lightly and uprightly on her chair, legs ready to spring into action. Her breathing was shallow and quick, and was probably matched by her racing heart. Her eyes hungrily snatched-up any movement inside and outside my office – always on the prowl for signs of danger. Hers was the body of someone who didn’t know safety and probably hadn’t known safety for a long time.

During our second meeting, Jennifer and I talked about what it was like for her to always feel as though she was on “red-alert”. We talked about her constant scanning of the environment and what that felt like in her body. She described a wad of tightness in her belly that was almost always there – a persistent bodily reminder that she must never let her guard down. Her body was constantly ready to attack or to escape. Read more

Mar 21

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Befriending Our True Nature

You wouldn’t know it by looking at me now, but there was a time when I had luscious locks of hair – truly, it was a thing to behold! I used to spend large chunks of my mornings carefully coaxing my hair into perfect shapes with the help of Aqua Net hairspray… (remember that stuff?) My hair was a vital part of my identity – it was synonymous with what I knew of myself. No doubt, I derived some of my personal worth and esteem from my hair.

Then in medical school, my hair began to “thin” (which is a euphemism for “fall out in droves”). During that time, I would wake up in the morning with a sense of dread as I assessed the damage on my pillow. Some mornings it looked like someone had snuck into my room in the middle of the night and rubbed their shedding cat all over my pillow. Absolutely nightmarish.

As you might imagine, this unexpected change of events was troubling for me. After all, I had great expectations for my hair and me – we were going places – we were going to live out our lives together in follicular bliss. I went through the classic stages of grief: denial (for a long time), anger, bargaining, and depression. The final stage, acceptance, eluded me for some time because it required that I look into the void – the hole in my self-worth (and on the top of my head) that was left by my over-identification with my hair.

While it is true that losing one’s hair can be difficult, many of us have lost much more. The experience of change or of losing something dear to us is all the more difficult when it is connected with a sense of who we are… our very identity! When we lose something that is tied to our inner worth, it can be excruciating – like a part of our very being goes away – leaving a terrible feeling of vacancy and emptiness.

Yet, the very nature of this life, this incarnated existence with our imperfect bodies and minds, is that we will experience change! Really, the only thing we can surely count on is impermanence. All of us have experienced change and loss… and we are bound to experience more of it.

So, this begs the question: In this sea of change – this constantly shifting landscape – how do we come to understand our true nature? Read more

Mar 10

Paying Attention to Rising Waters

Alongside green acres of alfalfa, a twisting river cut through the farmland on which I spent much of my formative years. In the summers, after the chores were done, my friends and I would spend hours on the river swimming, skipping rocks and catching fish. (At this point in the story, you may be tempted to whistle the theme song to “The Andy Griffith Show”… but I must protest – I’m not that old. If you’ve never heard of that show… well then, maybe I am that old!)

The water level on the river was controlled by an upstream dam, according to the needs of the farmers in the valley. At times, we could cross the river without getting our shorts wet. But at other times, the river would swell quickly, creating swift currents and daunting whirlpools under the river’s main bridge. These whirlpools were something of legend and lore among children in the area – there were wild stories of men, women, children, and even animals disappearing into these whirlpools, never to surface again.

One lazy summer afternoon, my friend and I were floating downstream on driftwood logs that we found on the shore. We were so busy talking and splashing that we failed to notice that the river was rising rapidly. In fact, by the time we became aware of the water’s alarming elevation, we were already moving downstream at a pretty good clip. Fear washed over both of us as we realized that the now-turbulent currents were too strong for us to leave the relative safety of our driftwood and make it to shore before reaching the whirlpools. Without saying a word to each other, we both decided to ride it out. Read more

Aug 6

Facing the Truth Behind the Mask

“Recovery is about living more in truth than in lies… it’s about facing reality and growing up.”

– Pia Mellody

Over 2,500 years ago, in Athens Greece, playwrights like Sophocles introduced a form of theatrical art known as the tragedy. Greek tragedies typically dealt with weighty themes such as betrayal, loss, pride, jealousy, rage, love, courage, honor, life and death. Often these dance-dramas also explored man’s relationship with God and the existential challenges that are part the human condition. Actors wore elaborate masks with exaggerated facial expressions so that their character’s role, emotional state, and intentions might be accessible to the audience. Commonly, one actor played several characters during the course of the theatrical performance, changing masks for each character and sometimes for each scene.

Fast-forward to our lives today and the Greek tragedy might be used as a metaphor for some of the key aspects of recovery from trauma and addiction. Like an actor in a play, often we are reacting to life’s existential challenges according to a script. This script can influence how we move about on the stage of life; it can spell out our roles in relation to others, how we think and feel, and how we act in various situations. From the first moments of conception and throughout development, by way of ongoing interactions between ourselves, others, and the environment, this narrative is written into our psychobiology – it becomes an implicit script in the mind-body system.

Moreover, similar to actors in Greek tragedies, our implicit scripts encourage the use of certain masks or personas. In many ways, this is completely natural and necessary for a life in which we play many different roles. For most of us, the scenes on life’s stage are constantly changing; we may transition from a family mask to a work mask, then to a friend mask, and back to a family mask, all within the course of one day. However, unlike the actors in a Greek tragedy, for us these personas are not distinct, separate people – they are aspects of a single being, linked together by the person behind the masks.

For some of us, our own life resembles a Greek tragedy, with painful experiences of betrayal, loss, abandonment, and trauma. These experiences are written into the mind-body script that tacitly flavors our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Some of these life events can be so traumatic that we don’t even want to look at the script – we would rather not face the reality of our situation, it’s just too painful. Yet, our bodies and minds still play the part, even when we don’t pay attention to the script; something happens on the stage of life and we just react according to our past experiences, maybe without even being aware of the script. Read more

Jul 24

Political Mindfulness: Casting a Vote While Maintaining Serenity

One of the most desirable fruits of the recovery process is a greater sense of serenity and peace. Yet, for those who are recovering from addiction and trauma, each day can bring challenges, both large and small, to one’s sense of serenity. Encountering opinions that are different from our own, especially when they bring our own values and beliefs into question, can certainly stir powerful emotions and threaten our serenity.

In the United States, we are nearing the end of a long political season, yet the grueling presidential election process is bound to bring even more opportunities for personal and interpersonal friction. Nevertheless, it is important that we remain involved in the political process and take part in civic duties. The question is do we let politics rob us of our serenity? And if our intention is to maintain serenity, how do we go about doing that?

Recently, I was faced with this very question when I received a politically charged email from an acquaintance. Fortunately, in that moment, I found just enough space and serenity to write my feelings down (instead of shooting off my mouth). My own political views and those of the email’s author are not important, no matter where we stand on the political spectrum we will face moments when our serenity is challenged. Here is my written response in the moment that my serenity was on the line:

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Apr 24

Living in the Present – One Moment at a Time

Recovery programs are replete with catchy little quotes and sage-like sayings, but perhaps none of them are used more often than the time-honored phrase: “One day at a time.” Have you ever wondered why people struggling with addictive behaviors find it necessary to remind each other to take recovery one day at a time? (Some go as far as saying: “One moment at time.”) Wouldn’t it make more sense to actually use our highly evolved neocortex to construct a comprehensive, future-oriented plan for recovery and healing? After all, how can a person reach a desired destination or accomplish a goal without considering several days, weeks, or even years at a time?

As it turns out, people recovering from addiction aren’t the only ones who need to be reminded to take life one moment at a time. By in large, modern humans are addicted to “future-tripping” (one of those catchy little terms used in our recovery program). Most of us spend large swaths of our days, stuck in our thoughts, trying to plan, control, and manage our lives. The human brain naturally fixates on what is wrong, both in ourselves and others, and then ruminates and perseverates on how to avoid the unpleasant what-ifs that haven’t yet materialized. This unrelenting mental chatter is often coupled with a pervasive sense of discontent, as if we are waiting for something else to happen so that we can finally be fulfilled. We habitually lean into the future, hoping that the next moment will contain what this moment does not.

This is not to say that we should all get lobotomies and retreat to the nearest cave to live in solitary present-momentness. After all, critical thinking and future planning are important survival skills in this complex, fast-paced world. Our rational, thinking mind is not the enemy, but if left untrained, it can be a demanding taskmaster instead of a loyal servant. Through various contemplative practices, we discover that the brain is also capable of deep, non-conceptual awareness of the mind and body, other living creatures (including people), and the natural world around us. Many have found that this present-moment awareness can bring a profound sense of contentment and joy. Read more

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