Beyond the Book #4 – Move As If You Were Underwater

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Dec 312010
 

This is one in a continuing series of posts which explores in more depth the exercises in The Next Ten Minutes. In this post I discuss some of  the ideas behind the exercise “Move As If You Were Underwater.”

Introduction: slow feels good

Readers of The Next Ten Minutes will be aware that while I am a great advocate for mindfulness meditation, I often struggle to maintain a consistent meditation practice myself. One of the things that I find most difficult about getting myself to meditate regularly is that meditation requires me to slow down from my usual pace. Like most people, I tend to associate motion with productivity. When I’m busy doing things, especially if I’m busily doing several things at once, I feel, well…important.  Moving slowly works against the way we’ve been conditioned to behave. Which is precisely why it’s such a valuable practice. The exercise Move As If You Were Underwater is designed to provide you with a way to experiment with life in the slow lane. Because once you surrender to it, slow feels good. Slow allows you to move through your life with the fluidity and grace of a Tai Chi master.


Life under water

Similarly to the way that the exercise Go Into Another Room sensitized you to the pressure of air against your body, this exercise asks you to imagine the feel of water pressing against your skin. That pressure forces you to move more slowly than you feel you should be able to. You can probably remember the experience of being a child in a swimming pool and trying to reproduce the activity of running underwater, how the pressure of the water transformed that  familiar movement and made you acutely aware of the mechanics of an activity you ordinarily did without thinking about it.


Like most of the exercises in the book, this one aims to reawaken your awareness of automatic behaviors by forcing yourself into an observational mode as you examine the mechanics of your behavior. Or, as Dan Siegel calls it, YODA:  “You Observe and Decouple Automaticity.” “Automaticity” is a way to describe our capacity to behave without conscious awareness of our behaviors. Automaticity is obviously very valuable in many ways. Evolutionarily, the development of the sort of procedural memory that allows us to act without thinking was essential for survival. Because it’s obviously not adaptive to be thinking about the mechanics of running while you’re in the act of trying to out-run a sabre-toothed tiger.

But there is an invisible loss that happens when we transform a learned activity into an automatic behavior. What we lose is the present moment…our mindful awareness of what is actually happening, inside our mind and body and also in the world around us.

In my experience, regaining access to the present moment often requires us to play some sort of cognitive trick on ourselves. Because our minds are extremely well-adapted to do what they do, we have to find ways to bypass that automaticity. Forcing yourself to slow down is one such trick.

Ommmmmmmmm….

Using a mantras can be an important technique in the service of slowing yourself down. Mantras have long served this purpose in many spiritual traditions. And in my view anything can be a mantra so long as it’s used to draw our focus intentional toward a single conscious object. The focus of the mantra doesn’t have to be spiritual (although the outcome of using it may well turn out to be).


In the exercise I encourage you to repeat a simple word or phrase as a way to continually re-direct your attention back to your slow-motion activity. So, if you’re peeling potatoes in slow motion you might simply repeat to yourself: peeling, peeling, peeling. Inevitably your mind will wander. When you notice it has wandered all you need to do is to gently draw your attention back to that mantra, the same way you would bring your focus back to your breath in mindfulness meditation.

Slow food, slow driving

Next time you sit down to dinner with family or friends, take a moment to listen to the sounds emanating from the table. Does it sound something like this?


Slurping and chewing noises are a sure indicator that food is being consumed fast and unconsciously. If, like me, you find yourself distressed at the ways in which we have collectively lost touch with the experience of eating, the slow food movement is the antidote. More than just advocating that we slow down and appreciate our food, slow food proponents advocate that we become more deeply conscious of where our food is coming from and how it is created. In other words, slow is more than just an absence of speed, it’s a way of thinking – deeply and expansively.


You might also try a technique which I learned from cookbook author Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, who writes in The Chinese Kitchen about how her father told her “that we must eat our food first with our eyes, then with our minds, then with our noses, and finally with our mouths.” When I notice myself eating too quickly (as I am prone to do), I try to bring myself back to this simple ritual. Before I take a bite I force myself to slow down and experience the food visually. Then I contemplate the food with my mind: what are the many pathways by which it found its way to my plate? Next I draw my attention to my sense of smell, letting myself “taste” the food with my nose. Finally, slowly, I take a bite. And, having gone through these preliminary steps, the experience of eating is transformed.

Another way to transform our everyday experience into slow-motion is through the technique of “hyper-miling.” This practice – driving in a slow and excruciatingly deliberate manner in order to maximize your car’s gas mileage – was born out of a response to high gas prices. But I think of it less as a money-saving technique than as a form of meditation.


In my personal experiments with hyper-miling, I’ve found that one of the most difficult aspects of the practice are the expectations of others. If you’re going to intentionally drive slowly, you have to directly face the irritation of others on the road. How you hold this awareness can vary. You can cloak yourself in righteous indignation; you can be apologetic.; you can try to block out awareness of everyone else. But no matter what you do, you’re still going to be getting in other people’s way. It’s a bit like sitting down to meditate in the middle of a crowded sidewalk. Which forces you to contemplate the interesting but uncomfortable idea that an act of meditation to be obnoxious can also be a public nuisance.

Underwater music

Tempted though I am to use the SpongeBob song as a theme song for the exercise, in the end I have to go with “Son of a Mermaid.” Not because I’m a great fan of the song itself, but because the guy actually performs it underwater.


As always, I welcome suggestions for other pieces of music which capture the essence of the exercise.

Further reading

I’ve created an Amazon list which links to each of the suggestions for further reading at the end of the exercise. You can find it here. The specific books for this exercise are:

As always, if you’ve got suggestions for other books on any of the topics in the exercise or in this post, please leave them in a comment.

 

Read the next post in the Beyond the Book series – Memorize a Data Sequence – here.

 

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Light a Candle: a solstice exercise

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Dec 222010
 

Note: I wrote this new exercise especially for the solstice.  It was first posted on the Beyond Words Trend Watch blog, which you can find here.

The universal element in all our winter holidays is the absence of natural light. On a very primitive level, we’re all a little bit afraid of the dark and that’s why, as the days become shorter and shorter, we string lights around our homes and light candles. We’re holding off against the growing darkness, both symbolically and literally. But in addition to danger, darkness holds a deep and beautiful creative energy. In this exercise (which should be done after sunset or before sunrise), I invite you to immerse yourself in both the lush beauty of darkness and the fragile miracle of light.

What You’ll Need

  • A room
  • A candle
  • Matches

How to Do It

1. See the light. Start by choosing a room in which you feel safe, one in which you have control over the light switches. Now, before you do anything else, simply sit quietly in the room and observe the light that’s already there. Notice the lights themselves – are they overhead or lamps, fluorescent or standard bulbs? Notice everything you can about each source of light. What color is it? Is it constant or does it fluctuate in intensity? Try to identify every other source of light in the room, even those that are masked by brighter lights. Check the electronic devices – they’re always good for some luminescence. How about the windows? Are street lights or passing cars inserting light into the room?

2. Go over to the dark side. In preparation for this step, make sure you know where your candle and matches are. Identify a safe place where you can light the candle once it’s dark. Then, one by one, eliminate as many sources of light as you can. Sometimes this will simply mean flipping a switch. Other times it will mean turning off or even unplugging appliances. Sometimes it will require you to block out lights that you can’t turn off, by covering them up or pulling the curtains or shades. Note: you’re allowed to back-track a little as you perform this step, turning a lamp back on in order to locate the cord for the appliance that’s still lit up.

3. Curse the darkness. Why? Because it’s fun! Also, because it will help connect viscerally to your primal fear of the dark. Imagine the darkness as an evil force that is trying to swallow you up. Imagine it’s sheltering dragons and other malicious beasts. Once you’ve summoned up as much fear as you can, start cursing the darkness. Think of your voice as a source of light that can penetrate the darkness as you call it the worse names that you can think of.

4. See in the dark. That last step didn’t really work, did it? No matter how much you rage against the dying of the light, the darkness holds steady. So try a different approach. Take a few minutes to simply observe yourself as you sit in the darkness. Observe your thoughts, emotions and perceptions as you sit without trying to fight the darkness at all. What do you notice your mind doing? Is it active or calm, fearful or confident? Then see if you can stop attributing any intention to the darkness and simply notice it. Look into it. Stare into it. Try to see the darkness itself, as if it were a palpable substance. Does your experience of darkness change as you do this? Do you notice your eyes starting to adjust, to be able to make out more detail in the room? Is it possible to notice that change as it happens?

5. Light a candle. Because, as they say, it’s better than cursing the darkness. Locate your candle and matches. Even if your eyes have adjusted so that you can make these objects out, try to do it without looking, as if you were in perfect darkness. Magnify your sense of touch as you push the match against the strike pad, creating the friction that creates the flame. Look at the lit match for a moment before you light the candle. Notice how staring into it actually magnifies the darkness around it. Finally, light the candle. Set it in front of you. For a moment don’t focus on the quality of the light itself. Just take a few deep breaths and notice the way your body feels. What has changed? Then, with soft eyes, let yourself see the light. Notice what your mind wants to do. Does it like to stare straight into the light? Or does it want to use the emanation of the light to look around the room? Do you feel the impulse to jump up and turn more lights back on? Or possibly to blow out the candle and return to darkness? Take a few moments just to notice these impulse and then, when you’re ready, act on whichever one is the most appealing.

Inner darkness

There’s good reason that we’re hard-wired to be anxious about darkness. Darkness steals away our ability to identify danger before it reaches us. In darkness, we have an inherent disadvantage against all those nocturnal creatures whose vision has adapted to the night (and also against humans who are wearing night-vision goggles). Darkness is associated with almost every negative human quality – aggression, ignorance, perversity, etc. To Sigmund Freud, darkness was associated the primal urges that lurked in the unconscious. To Carl Jung, darkness meant the “shadow,” that part of ourselves that we rejected and split off from awareness. Freud was the first to articulate the ways in which we develop defenses against the awareness of this darkness within us. To both Jung and Freud, mental health required some degree of re-integration of these “dark” urges into our conscious minds by acknowledging rather than denying our aggressive impulses. In Jung’s view, owning your shadow is an essential part of becoming a more evolved human being. For Freud, the most profound creativity arose out of the sublimation of primitive, “dark” energy into higher order actions. The issue is not that our inner darkness is a positive thing. It’s that we all inevitably have a dark side, and when we deny it we’re telling ourselves several unsustainable lies. The first is that we are without aggression and hostility. The second is that we are not strong enough to experience dark feelings without acting them out. The irony is that those who most deny the reality of their inner darkness are precisely those who are most likely to act out on those urges. (Which is why variations on the story of the preacher who gets caught with his pants down are so very common.) The truth is that our darkest impulses are bound up with our most vital energy. And allowing ourselves to experience that darkness in a mature way can free up that energy for our use and give us access to our richest creativity.

Variations:

Close your eyes. It’s a funny thing about closing our eyes…there’s so much light happening on the backs of our eyelids. I have no idea what neurological or anatomical features give rise to this internal light show, but whatever the reason it gives us an opportunity to do this a variation on exercise no matter where we are. When you first close your eyes, the experience seems to be one of darkness. But as you settle in you can become aware of the host of visual sensations which arise within your own mind and body. Try using these sensations of light and color as an object of meditation. Take ten minutes or so to focus on the light that you are seeing. Notice everything you can about it. Then (and this is the best part), open your eyes and see if you can catch the imprint of those sensations on the world you see before you.

Just sit in the dark. Surely you know the old joke: How many Jewish mothers does it take to screw in a light bulb? Never mind, I’ll just sit in the dark. We’ve all got an inner martyr. Bring yours into the open by doing this exercise while enacting the spirit of this joke. Give yourself access to a candle, but don’t light it. Fail to light it resentfully. Magnify your feelings of powerlessness and suffering. Imagine what life looks like to those who those who not only don’t acknowledge their own inner darkness, but also refuse to give themselves access to their inner light. When you start to feel your suffering at its most intense, try to shift your perspective so that you are observing rather the martyr rather than in habiting him or her. What would it take to hold this suffering person with compassion?

Further listening: three great songs about darkness and light

Absolutely the best song ever written about a nightlight


Spiritual darkness, spiritual light

 

Melting into the dark

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Hmong New Year

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Dec 172010
 

Last Saturday my family and I were fortunate to be able to attend the Hmong new year celebration here in Missoula. Those who have followed my Being Undiagnosable series will know that while I was in the two-year process of searching for a diagnosis for symptoms which eventually turned out to be Lyme disease, a local Hmong healer offered to perform several healing ceremonies on my behalf. (You can read my account of that experience here.) since that time I’ve kept in periodic touch with Ia, the healer, and her husband Kou. I was thrilled when Kou called to invite me to the celebration and I wanted to post a brief description of the event along with a few pictures and videos.

The celebration took place in the gymnasium of a local elementary school. As we walked in we were immediately engulfed in the spectacularly colorful traditional costumes and the bright sounds coming from the men’s vests, decorated with rows of old French coins which jangled with every movement.

Before the ceremony we were led into the cafeteria, where giant pots of food awaited us. As soon as we walked in, Kou spotted us and welcomed us in.

“Thanks so much for inviting us,” my wife said.

“Of course,” he said simply, “you are family.”

And that’s exactly the way it felt throughout the evening. First we were fed, then we were led into the gymnasium where we watched a wonderful series of musicians and dancers perform. We were told that the dancing would keep going on until at least midnight. We didn’t have the stamina to last that long, but here are some scenes from the time we were there.




Kou and Ia, dancing




Musical performance using a banana leaf


Hmong flute performance



A dance done with a traditional musical instrument

I feel so fortunate to have Kou and Ia consider me a part of their family. I’m so grateful for the support they’ve given me in my illness. I feel held by their entire community.

If you’re interested in knowing more about Hmong culture, here are couple of wonderful books that talk about the Hmong in America. The first, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, will resonate especially with those who have struggled with our fractured healthcare system. The second, The Late Homecomer, is a broader, beautifully poetic portrait of the Hmong experience.

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My Lyme Disease is Not The IDSA Lyme Disease

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Dec 092010
 
Borrellia

On 12/8/2010 an article appeared in the Chicago Tribune entitled, Chronic Lyme disease: A dubious diagnosis. The following is my response.

 

According to the Infectious Diseases Society of America, I can’t possibly have Lyme disease.

That doesn’t change the fact that in the Fall of 2008 my health went to hell. It started with weakness. I was a marathon runner, but suddenly it became difficult to bike up the small hill where I picked up my sons from school. Then I started having muscle twitches and spasms, all over my body, all of the time. Parts of my body started going numb. Other parts were intermittently tingly, or would have sudden shooting pains, like electric shocks running through my muscles. I became heavily fatigued so that most afternoons I needed to spend several hours napping. It became harder to think clearly. I lost thirty pounds in a couple of months, for no clear reason. One winter morning I spent a half hour shoveling snow – something I ordinarily enjoy – when I suddenly went dramatically weak, pale, shaky. It took me several hours to recover.

I made an urgent appointment with my doctor. He was certain it was a cardiovascular episode. I was at the cardiologist’s office the next day, doing a stress echocardiogram. Turned out my heart was in great shape. That wasn’t the problem.

What was the problem? I had no idea. And neither did any of the doctors that I saw over the next two years. Not the first neurologist, not the oncologist, not the gastroenterologist, not the rheumatologist, not the allergist. And not the second neurologist, at the Mayo Clinic.

Mayo was able to tell me that I didn’t have ALS, which was a great relief since that’s what my symptoms most closely resembled. Through doctor visits and many, many tests I was also able to rule out cancer, MS, Parkinson’s, Celiac Disease, Polymyositis, and many other more obscure conditions. Whatever was wrong with me looked at least a little like all of those things, but was clearly something different. Something no one seemed to be able to identify.

Somewhere along the line I even had a test for Lyme disease, the ELISA screening test, which came back negative. Made sense to me at the time. Lyme was the last thing I suspected. For one thing I live in Montana, where popular wisdom has it that Lyme does not exist. For another thing, I didn’t have that classic bullseye rash that you’re supposed to get.

I didn’t know at the time that the ELISA produces many false negatives. And I didn’t know that you can get Lyme without having the classic rash pattern. As a result, I didn’t give much thought to the rash that I actually did have, a month or two before my symptoms started.

In the meantime, my entire life was transformed. I had to stop running and doing any other demanding exercise. Work wore me out so I did as little of it as possible. I was consumed with fear, trying to figure out what the hell was going on with me. And I spent a whole lot of money trying to get an answer.

In the summer of 2010, on the recommendation of a friend, I went to my doctor and asked for a more sophisticated (and much more expensive) test for Lyme – the Western Blot.

According to mainstream medical practices, my doctor had no business ordering that test for me. According to the CDC, if a test comes out negative on the ELISA, you don’t have Lyme. Period.

 

Funny thing though…the new test came back positive. For Borrelia burgdorferi, the spirochete that causes Lyme disease. And the test results were unequivocal. They met the CDC standards for reporting Lyme.

Finally, I had a diagnosis. Finally I could start treating the symptoms that had already stolen so much of my life away.

Except for one thing.

I couldn’t, according to the IDSA, actually have Lyme disease.

Here’s why. My doctor (who was skeptical that I could possibly have Lyme) was willing to prescribe me a month’s worth of antibiotics – the IDSA recommended treatment for the disease. I filled the prescription and took the medication faithfully. The result: nothing. I might as well have been taking Tic Tacs. My symptoms continued exactly as they had before.

By the logic of the IDSA, if symptoms corresponding with Lyme don’t respond to the recommended treatment, then the disease isn’t Lyme.

Stop for a moment to consider that argument. Imagine the same logic being applied to any other disease. Say, to treatment for cancer. Try to imagine a conversation between a breast cancer patient and her oncologist going like this:

“I’m sorry Ms. Jones., but since you haven’t responded to the chemotherapy I can only conclude that you don’t actually have cancer. It has to be something else.”

And the next line in the conversation would almost inevitably be:

“I suspect that there might be psychological issues involved, so I’m giving you a referral to a therapist.”

The absurdity is self-evident. But this is exactly what Lyme patients are being told every day.

 

Mis-diagnosis goes both ways.

The Chicago Tribune article conveys the impression that hundreds or even thousands of people are being told that they have Lyme disease when they don’t, that Lyme is being massively over-diagnosed by loony-tune doctors, who then murder their patients by giving them dangerous treatments that they don’t need.

It’s awfully hard to square this accusation with experience of so many people with Lyme, who have spent years going from doctor to doctor, just like I did, who are themselves being mis-diagnosed with everything from arthritis to ALS. Or who are being told that there is nothing wrong with them at all, that their pain and fatigue and cognitive impairments are all in their head.

Non-diagnosis can be just as harmful as a mis-diagnosis.

The truth is that nothing in medicine is as clear as the way IDSA defines Lyme disease. Every illness in the world has variations and subtleties. Every disease manifests itself a little differently in every human being. And every treatment for every illness is variable in its effectiveness.

Except, according to the IDSA, for Lyme.

 

So, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America, there’s no way that I can have Lyme disease.

But that doesn’t change the fact that my life has been turned upside down by Lyme. That I continue to experience the same set of ever-shifting symptoms which dramatically limit my life and leave me feel like I’m about to turn 80 rather than 50.

And by comparison with many other people with Lyme, I’ve got it pretty easy. I have some pretty decent days – as long as I get a lot of sleep and don’t work too hard, as long as I don’t try to go running or skiing or to rake leaves or shovel snow or do anything else which will inevitably trigger a reaction.

I’m lucky enough now to have found a doctor who believes that I have Lyme and who is willing to treat it. The treatments haven’t helped much yet, but that’s not surprising. Because the very controversies which the Chicago Tribune describes have paralyzed research into effective Lyme treatment.

The great paradox here is that if we want our doctors to become more adept at diagnosing and treating chronic Lyme, then we have to investigate the experience of those who us who actually have it. If we continue to marginalize patients then it will never be possible to do the research which can truly determine what is and is not an appropriate treatment for the disease.

To put it bluntly: those practitioners who don’t believe in the existence of chronic Lyme are responsible for creating the very problem they are complaining about. Because there’s no way to identify safe diagnostic procedures and treatments without first acknowledging the existence of the disease.

I don’t know of any other disease in which patients are blamed for the failure of their treatment.

And I can’t imagine any other illness about which the argument would be made that ineffective treatment means that the disease doesn’t exist.


Read Other “My Lyme Disease is not the IDSA Lyme Disease” stories:

Ashley

Eric

Molly

Candice

Kim

Alix


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Beyond the Book #3 – Go Into Another Room

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Dec 012010
 

This is one in a continuing series of posts which explores in more depth the each of the exercises in The Next Ten Minutes. In this post I discuss some of  the ideas behind the exercise “Go Into Another Room.”


Introduction: acoustics and mindfulness

The exercise Go Into Another Room combines mindfulness practice with a simple psychotherapeutic technique with the goal of bringing us into a present moment awareness of the space we are currently inhabiting.

The mindfulness aspect of the exercise involves focusing our awareness on the spatial and acoustic aspects of the physical rooms we inhabit. The therapeutic technique involves mindfully making a very small change in our behavior and using the experience of change as leverage for a larger shift in our state of mind. I talk about the therapeutic technique in several different parts of the book, so in this post I’ll be exploring our experience of acoustic space and the ways in which acoustic awareness can be a vehicle for greater mindfulness. Because I believe that sound is a particularly effective vehicle with which to access mindfulness.  Like the breath, it’s always there. Even in the quietest room there is sound. Even in the absence of external noise, our own bodies create sound. And focusing our attention on the qualities of the sounds around us brings us into a fuller awareness of the present moment.

Acoustic literacy

I am nothing of an acoustician. I don’t begin to be able to comprehend the mathematics and physics that regulate the way sound behaves in different physical spaces. Nonetheless, hearing is by far my dominant sense and as a result I find that I have an intense intuitive awareness of the acoustic properties of physical spaces.

It’s not an intentional awareness and often it’s not even conscious. I find that it’s a difficult experience to put into words. Part of what makes it difficult is that I’m talking not about the experience of sound itself, but rather about an awareness of the behavior of sound within a given space. The sound of a hand clap in an empty room, to give a simple example, is very different than a hand clap in a fully furnished room. The sound of a footstep is different in a bathroom and in a gymnasium. Even if the original source of the sound is identical, the behavior of that sound in different rooms transforms our experience of it.

The reason for this is reverberation. When sound waves move out from their source, they eventually make contact with the surfaces around them. When they bounce off of those surfaces we hear, in addition to the initial sound, its reflection.

Different surfaces behave differently when sounds hit them. Some tend to absorb sound, some reflect them back. Surfaces at different distances reflect the sound at different time intervals. Different materials absorb or reflect particular frequencies of sound. As I say, the mathematical formulas describing the acoustic behavior of different spaces is extremely complex and beyond my understanding. But those who do understand it have created software which can model many different spaces, as in the examples below, which I created by taking a single sound source then running it through different settings on the reverb plug-in on my computer.

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In this example I’ve taken a simple drum beat and repeated it eight times. The difference should be fairly clear even on the worst speakers. The first version is “dry” – no additional reverb has been applied. In the second reverb is applied to create the effect of hearing the sound from a great distance. The third replicates the acoustics of a kitchen. The fourth is a large room. The fifth is a tunnel, the sixth a cathedral, the seventh and exhibition hall and the eighth mimics a martial arts stadium. (For those who are interested, I did this using two of the reverb plug-ins that come with Cubase 5 – Reverence and RoomWorks. I didn’t do anything fancy with the settings, just used the presets that come with these programs.)

Echoic, Anechoic

As I say, my understanding of what’s happening here is primarily intuitive. My ears pick up on these differences and I respond to them. We all perform some version of this extraordinarily complex process. Sort of like bats using echolocation, our minds are constantly making subtle assessments of the relationship between the sources of sounds and the reflections those sounds are creating.

As Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter in the introduction to their wonderful book Spaces Speak, Are You Listening, the ability to sense spatial attributes is not unique to bats and dolphins. It’s hard-wired into our brains. “For example,” they write, “when blindfolded, nearly all of us can approach a wall without touching it just by attending to the way the wall changes the frequency balance of the background noise.” We’re not ordinarily conscious of doing this. But if I blindfolded you and teleported you to the inside of a cathedral, you’d know instantly what sort of space you were in. And if I then teleported you into a bathroom, you’d automatically feel the difference.

Personally, I find that I’m very sensitive to these differences. There are rooms that I can barely stand to be in because of their acoustic properties. And there are other spaces that I completely love. One of the rooms I like the most acoustically

is the music studio that I have created in the basement of my house. It’s a narrow room and before I began using it for music it was acoustically unpleasant…boomy and tight. I treated the walls with a great deal of acoustical foam, which absorbs much of the sound in the room before it reverberates off of the walls (particularly lower, bass frequencies). The effect is a room that, when you walk into it, feels soft and hushed, gently contained. The acoustical treatment has shaped the behavior of sound within the room in a way that makes it much more pleasant. At least to me.

This can be taken to extremes. Blesser and Salter describe the effects of “anechoic chambers,” rooms which have been specially designed so that all surfaces absorb rather than reflect sound waves. “From an aural perspective,” they write, “an ideal anechoic chamber is completely silent and entirely ‘spaceless.’” They describe the sensations of pressure, discomfort, disorientation, even nausea that are created by the absence of sonic reverberation. “The combination of sound isolation and absorption reduces background sound to a level that no longer masks the sound of a listener’s breathing heart or flowing blood.”  Indeed, when John Cage entered the Harvard anechoic chamber in 1948 he reported that rather than hearing silence he heard two distinct sounds which he was told were the sounds of his nervous system and his circulatory system. There is no such thing, he concluded, as perfect silence.


 

I am Standing in a Room

The theme song for this exercise is not a song at all. It is a classic piece of sound art by Alvin Lucier called I am Standing in a Room. (It’s a piece which I’ve listed, along with other minimalist classics, in the “further listening” at the end of the exercise Repeat Yourself.) In this piece, Lucier takes a simple piece of audio (a spoken paragraph) and plays it in a room then re-records the sound as it sounds in the room. He repeats this process over and over until the original sound is transformed by the reverberant properties of the room itself. It’s an extraordinary exploration of the sonic and acoustic principles I’ve been discussing in this post.  An illustration of the technique can be found in the video below. If you’d like to get the entire mesmerizing and surprisingly poignant 45 minute piece, you can find it here.


 

As always, I welcome suggestions for other pieces of music which capture the essence of the exercise.

Further reading

I’ve created an Amazon list which links to each of the suggestions for further reading at the end of the exercise. You can find it here. The specific books for this exercise are:

As always, if you’ve got suggestions for other books on any of the topics in the exercise or in this post, please leave them in a comment.

Further, further reading

More detailed reading on spatial acoustics, borrowed from Blesser and Salter’s website:

 

Read the next post in the Beyond the Book series – Move As If You Were Underwater – here.

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Life with Lyme 2

 1 Response »
Nov 272010
 

First, the good news…

In my last update I described the medical tests that I was scheduling. I’ve had them all, and they all came back clean.

Arsenic: I re-did the arsenic test that had come out so high during the summer and this time it came back normal. This confirmed my hunch that the high levels on the previous test were the result of the Chinese medicine I’d been taking before the test.

CT scan: a year and half ago, long before I received the Lyme diagnosis, much of my worry about my symptoms centered around a recurrence of cancer. (I’d previously been treated for testicular cancer when I was in my twenties.) At that time I had an abdominal CT scan which showed a few small spots on my spleen, liver and lungs. The doctors weren’t too worried about these but they said that given my history it would be prudent to do a follow-up scan in a year to make sure those spots weren’t growing. The new scan showed that they were stable. In other words, non-cancerous.

MRI: the primary reason for getting an MRI of my head was to make sure that the cause of my human growth hormone deficiency wasn’t a pituitary tumor. In addition, even with the Lyme diagnosis I hadn’t quite stopped worrying that I might have MS. The neurological Lyme symptoms overlap a great deal with MS symptoms. But the scan came back clear. No tumor, no lesions.

All of this is a great relief. It means I can focus on what I know is wrong with me and let go of that lingering anxiety about other possible explanations for my symptoms. I can settle in with two definitive diagnoses. Human growth hormone deficiency and Lyme Disease.

Human Growth

The initial lift I felt when I started supplementing human growth hormone – the improved mood, the sense of physical fluidity – has faded over the past six or seven weeks. It’s possible that this is simply a perceptual issue. As any social psychologist will tell you, a change in state is perceptually more salient than an on-going state. As a change in functioning settles into a stable way of being, it becomes less noticeable. So it could be that the benefit I felt initially is still there but I’m just not experiencing it as acutely.

But I worry that what I’m experiencing is a repetition of something that I’ve felt in the past when I’ve started supplementing other deficient hormones: an initial surge of improvement followed by a rapid return to my previous baseline. I’m certainly not experiencing the common physical benefits that usually come with supplementing HGH…loss of body fat, increased muscle tone, increased exercise tolerance. It’s impossible for me to really sort this out, but I’m concerned that this is my body’s pattern: for whatever reason, I have trouble sustaining the benefits of supplementing any hormones. I want to be wrong about this. For now I’m continuing to give myself the nightly injections.

The causes of my HGH insufficiency remain mysterious. I’ve been asked whether it’s the result of the Lyme. I have no idea and I’m not certain what the mechanism for such an effect would be. I know that  lot of “Lyme literate” physicians

Borrelia

(LLMDs) are aware of the importance of getting hormones in balance as part of an overall treatment plan for Lyme. And I’m very aware that once borrelia (the spirochete that causes Lyme) gets a foothold in the body, it can spread throughout all the body’s systems. So it certainly seems possible that it could mess with the production HGH as well as everything else.

Understanding how my body is responding to continued HGH supplementation feels particularly important because it appeared that an initial effect of the HGH was to clarify the nature of my Lyme symptom cycle. HGH seemed to clear out the symptomalogical static so that, for a few months, a clear pattern could emerge: two bad weeks followed by two not-so-bad weeks. In the past six weeks that pattern has been disrupted (more about that in a moment). What this means is unclear to me, but it complicates my efforts to understand both my Lyme symptoms and my struggles with my hormones.

Existential doubts…an aside

While my naturopath was the one who diagnosed and is treating the human growth hormone deficiency, I continue to work with my internist as well, and (for insurance purposes as much as anything) I wanted him to put in the order for my recent MRI. The conversation I had with him about this was quite fascinating. He had, he reminded me, previously run a test for human growth hormone. His had been a blood test and it had shown normal levels of HGH. I was worried that he was reminding me of this result as a way to argue that the naturopath was wrong and that I shouldn’t be supplementing HGH. But instead he just got a puzzled look and told me that he simply didn’t understand what was going on.

“You’re responding to the treatment,” he said, “and ultimately that’s what matters.”

It is a very unusual thing to have a physician acknowledge the limits of his own knowledge. But what he said next surprised me even more.

“It makes me wonder whether anything we do works at all,” he said. “I think of those studies that show that a significant percentage of people who are ill will get better on their own without treatment. Maybe we do what we do, but people would do just as well without us.”

He mused for awhile longer on the possibility that everything that he had been trained to do was in fact meaningless. I felt an impulse to reassure him. Because it was unnerving to have a person who is caring for you profess such profound existential doubt about his own capacity to help. But I thought about my own experience as a therapist, about how I have experienced similar moments of self doubt and how I have come to accept them as an important part of the process of helping others heal. Those moments are humbling. But they open me up to new ways of thinking about seemingly intractable situations. If I allow myself to experience them fully, they open into transformation.

So I realized that this was an important moment for both my doctor and me. And that, by giving me access to his experience he was truly giving me a gift. I’d spent more than two years in a complex and deeply ambivalent relationship with medical professionals. I desperately wanting them to have the power to be able to figure out what was wrong with me while simultaneously harboring deep suspicions about their capacity to do this.

Here at last was someone who was describing this experience from the other side. The words he was speaking were words I both wanted to hear and feared hearing.

So I stifled the urge to say something comforting to him. I shut myself up and listened. Although it was frightening to me to hear his doubts, I recognized the gift he was giving me by expressing them. In the end I agreed with him that the business of healing is more complex and difficult than either of us could possibly comprehend.

Treatment options

As I’ve settled into my Lyme Disease diagnosis, I’ve discovered that life with Lyme actually has a lot in common with being undiagnosable. The diagnosis is fraught with controversy and confusion. And, as I’ve described in previous posts, treatment is equally fraught. The biggest controversy centers around the use of long-term antibiotics, which many LLMDs and their patients believe is essential for a full recovery from tick-borne illnesses.

But the dilemmas surrounding treatment, I’ve come to realize, are much more confusing and complicated than just that.

I thought, naively as it turns out, that once I found an LLMD my treatment would be fairly straightforward. I knew that it would take time, and that it might not be pleasant…but I didn’t expect it to be mysterious and confusing. Which is exactly what it has turned out to be.

To put it bluntly: there is no single clearly and effective treatment for Lyme Disease. Antibiotics get most of the attention, but even within this approach there are a multitude of types of antibiotics and forms of administration and beliefs about dosing. This book describes the “top ten” Lyme disease treatments. That this book exists tells you something about the state of treatment for Lyme. For most major medical conditions physicians will follow clearly established “standards of practice.” There are always choices in treatment for any illness, but those choices usually involve variations on an agreed-upon protocol.

But with Lyme, it’s a smorgasbord.

Schaller’s book lists, in addition to the “antibiotic rotation protocol,” the Marshal Protocol, the Salt/Vitamin C protocol, detoxification and rife machine therapy, in addition to a set of supportive

Rife Machine

supplemental treatments. Each of these approaches is long and complex. People I’ve spoken to who are following the Marshall Protocol (the micro-biological theory of which is difficult for me to comprehend), tell me that you have to commit to it for at least two years in order to for it to work. That’s a long time frame for a treatment for any disease…especially so for a treatment which may or may not ultimately be effective for you. But unfortunately it’s the status of most if not all Lyme treatments. And that’s where the largest dilemma arises with regard to treatment. Not all treatments work for all people with Lyme. But the only way you can know whether a treatment will work is to stay on it long enough to find out.

As a result, patients need to become experts on their own disease. We need to have enough confidence in our own knowledge about the disease to be able to disagree with the doctors we’ve sought out for help.

This can present a terrible bind.

It’s an emotional bind because we long, when we’re sick, to simply be taken care of by someone who understands our condition better than us.

It’s a cognitive bind because Lyme disease often fogs your brain and makes it difficult to think clearly. For instance, the simple act of reading has become much more difficult for me. It’s not easy to trust a foggy brain to be able to think clearly enough to have a coherent discussion with a physician.

This is simply not a model of medical care that we’re accustomed to. For better or for worse, we’re used to assigning expertise to medical professionals and simply following the treatment recommendations we’re given.

Lyme disease  presents you  with a plethora of possible treatments, many of which have fierce proponents, all of which will require a long-term commitment, but only some of which are actually likely to help you in a significant way at any particular stage of the disease. So you can’t just go to your doctor and ask her what you’re supposed to do. You have to consider that doctor’s beliefs about the disease. Which means that in addition to educating yourself about the micro-biology of Lyme and the mechanisms by which the various treatments work, you’ve also got to educate yourself about your doctor’s position on the disease and on its treatment. Then you’ve got to be willing to hold your own knowledge up to your doctor and be willing to switch to a new doctor if you don’t agree with her approach.

It’s a lot to ask of a person who’s feeling terribly sick most of the time.

Treatment efficacy

Having made the transition from “newly-diagnosed Lymie” to just plain “Lymie,” the most difficult question I face is this: how do I know when a particular treatment is working?

Karl Herxheimer

Am I feeling particularly bad today because it’s part of my usual Lyme cycle? Or is it because the drug I’m taking is killing off the spirochete and the die-off is making me feel worse? The increased symptoms that occur when a treatment is working is known as a “Herxheimer reaction.” “Herxing” can be intense and it’s one of the major miseries endured by people with Lyme. But when you’re “herxing,” it’s a good thing. It means that the treatment is working.

The distinction between core Lyme symptoms and the symptoms of a herxheimer reaction is crucial, but thus far I’ve found that it’s almost impossible for me to sort out the difference. And conversations with other Lymies reveal that this confusion is not at all uncommon.

Since being diagnosed I’ve done several rounds of antibiotics, hydrogen peroxide IVs, and tried several different herbal remedies. (There are a lot more treatments out there than just those “top ten” in Schaller’s book.) Up to this point my naturopath has been willing to shift her approach relatively quickly if a particular treatment doesn’t seem to be working. But I continue to struggle to make sense of the relationship between my physical symptoms and the treatment I’m receiving. My Lyme symptoms change so often that I’m hesitant to attribute any particular meaning to any particular symptom.

So I need to rely on my naturopath to interpret the symptom pattern for me; but I also find myself reluctant to trust her judgment. It’s an aggravating bind.

The treatment I’m following now, as I described in my last update, is called the Zhang protocol. It involves taking a set of Chinese herbal medicines over a period of six months to a year.

A few of my meds

I had an appointment with my naturopath after about three weeks on this treatment. At the time I’d been feeling particularly rotten. A lot of pain in my shoulders and upper arms, heavier than usual fatigue. I was frustrated by a lack of improvement and when I went in for the appointment I was ready to ask for a referral to a doctor who would prescribe antibiotics. But when I described to her what I was experiencing she felt strongly that this was a herxheimer reaction to the herbal medicine I’d been taking.

Was it? Honestly I still have no idea. In the days after that visit my experience was mixed. I had a few good days and a week or so that pretty miserable. At present I’ve been enjoying a reprieve from most of my symptoms. It’s been about a week and it’s a relief.

But I have to say, as an aside, that it feels like I’m not telling the whole story when I describe the good weeks in which my symptoms abate. Because these days the point of comparison for everything I experience  is my most recent Lyme flare-up. So when I say I feel better, it means that that my most miserable symptoms aren’t present. As a result, it inevitably occurs to me a few days into feeling better that there’s another, more important point of comparison: how I felt before all of this started in the first place. Then I realize that I’m keeping myself feeling better by avoiding a number of physical activities – running, skiing, shoveling snow, or even having sex – that will inevitably send me on a downward spiral. It’s a depressing but an inescapable thought; better in the short term is a far cry from regaining the capacity that I’ve lost since all this started.

In terms of treatment I’m left wondering: was the pattern that seemed to establish itself (two good weeks, two bad weeks) a true pattern in the first place? I simply can’t get a good read on any of it. But given the choice between continuing a treatment that might be starting to work or jumping ship and starting in a new direction, I’ve decided to stick it out with the Zhang protocol for the time being.

Community

Although Lyme obviously exists here in Montana, it’s not terribly common. I know a few people who have or had it and it’s great to talk to them. But it’s not enough. There’s something terribly lonely about the experience of chronic illness. For one thing, it’s usually invisible to people around you. Most of the time I look fine. Even if I’m feeling awful.

When you live with this disjunction between your appearance and your experience you inevitably start to feel isolated. Inside your mind the flow of your days is defined by your shifting symptoms. It’s what you think about most of the time, whether you want to or not. But there’s only so much of this you can report to those around you. Even to those who love you the most. You risk becoming an awfully tedious person, constantly describing your aches and pains, your fears about your health and your sorrow and grief about the life you’ve lost.

So one of the most important things I’ve found for myself is the on-line community of Lymies. It’s the universal algorithm of support groups: those who are going through the same thing you’re going through “just get it.” They can understand not only the surface meaning of what you say but also everything behind it.

Being understood is healing. This feels as important for me as any medical treatment I’m receiving. I don’t necessarily trust any of these treatment to work, and I know that if it does it may take a long time. But I do trust the capacity of others with Lyme to understand what I’m going through and to offer their support.

And it’s good to discover something that remains constant in this perpetually shifting disease.

 

 

Read the next post in the Life with Lyme series here.

 

 

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Here’s your chance to win a signed copy of The Next Ten Minutes

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Nov 152010
 

I’m honored to be the featured artist in the Lymenaide Holiday Bazaar. Please consider supporting those with Lyme by visiting the Bazaar. And while you’re there, enter for a chance to win a signed copy of The Next Ten Minutes. The details are below.

Featured Artist

Monday, November 15th
Featured Artist: Andrew Peterson



Lymenaide is proud to introduce this season’s first Holiday Bazaar Featured Artist: Andrew Peterson.
Andrew is a relatively newly diagnosed Lyme patient, but is not stranger to physical pain and hardship. He suffered for two years, saw numerous doctors, and even acquired a tentative diagnosis of ALS before he was diagnosed with late stage Lyme disease.
“I was diagnosed with Lyme in July of this year, after spending two years going from doctor to doctor in search of a diagnosis for all my crazy symptoms. I even wound up at the Mayo Clinic because for awhile it seemed very possible that I had ALS. The specialists all kept telling me that there was nothing wrong with me, even as my symptoms worsened. Like so many other people, I came out negative on the ELISA test and this, in conjunction with the fact that I live in Montana (where Lyme supposedly doesn’t exist) kept any of my doctors from worrying about Lyme. I finally got the Lyme diagnosis when I insisted on getting a Western Blot, which came back positive for borellia. (I’ve written extensively about the search for a diagnosis on my blog, in a series called “Being Undiagnosable.” It’s an experience I know that many Lymies will relate to.) So as best I can figure, I’ve had Lyme for almost two and a half years.”
Yet even through the hardship and debilitation that Andrew has faced, he has remained incredibly positive and admirably motivated. Instead of letting the disease destroy everything that he is and was, he used it as fuel to continue on with his passion and shape who he is today.
“As so many people who face my life with Lyme come to realize, it’s a disease which robs you of the ability to work as hard or as well as you used to be able. I came to an important realization during the course of the past few years, which was that while I may not be able to get as much work done as I used to, I can still move my life forward. I can get a little bit done every day, and that will add up. Looking back on it, I can’t believe that I was able to write and publish a book during this difficult time. But the way I did it was by staying focused on what it was possible for me to do at any given moment. By resting when I needed to rest and working when I was able. The book itself has become a symbol to me that even though Lyme has dramatically altered my life, it does not have complete control.

The other thing that has been very exciting to me is that the realization, as The Next Ten Minutes neared its publication date, that I had the opportunity not just to promote my book, but to use that promotion to advocate for greater Lyme awareness. In interviews and discussions about the book, I have the chance to talk about my experience with Lyme and put a human face to the disease.”

“The Next Ten Minutes” Book Giveaway


What better way to kick off Lymenaide’s series of Holiday Bazaar Featured Artist Giveaways than with such an inspiring book, by an incredible author and fellow lyme survivor.

“The Next Ten Minutes contains a set of simple yet powerful exercises which will transform your state of mind by directing your full awareness to the habits and routines of your everyday life. The seeds of change are embedded within the most ordinary routines of daily life. These exercises will help you see how, when you bring your full attention to these routines, daily life can become an act of meditation.”



To enter to win a signed copy of “The Next Ten Minutes”, please do the following:


1. Comment on “The Next Ten Minutes” bazaar booth, which can be found here. In your comment, please either write an encouraging, motivating, or inspiring message to late stage Lyme battlers, or state how you’ve used a talent or passion of your own to cope with your illness like Andrew Peterson has.

2. Either share the link to this featured artist write-up on your blog, twitter account or facebook page, or make a purchase from one of the booths at the bazaar. In your comment on “The Next Ten Minutes” bazaar booth, please either include the link to where you’ve shared, or a link to the booth that you have purchased from.

3. Include your email address at the end of your comment, so we can contact you if you so happen to win.

Your comment will enter you in a drawing that will take place this Friday, November 20th. The winner will be announced on Lymenaide’s facebook page and will receive an email notification. Andrew Peterson will personally mail the winner a signed copy of his book.

“I believe deeply that this disease does not have to stop us in our tracks. Each of the booths in the Lymenaide holiday bazaar represents a triumph over Lyme. Sometimes it seems like we’re only capable of taking the tiniest steps forward…but that is still progress. We can all find ways to move forward with hope and compassion, for ourselves and for everyone else who suffers from Lyme.” – Andrew Peterson



Enter on Andrew’s booth- http://bit.ly/9i2DSR
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Beyond the Book #1 – Procrastinate

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Nov 032010
 

Introduction

This is the inaugural post in a new series, in which I will explore the ideas behind each of the exercises in The Next Ten Minutes. The concept for this series arose as I was writing the book. With each exercise, I found that I there were materials that I really wished I could have incorporated into the book. But most of these materials existed on-line. And to my mind there’s just no good way to incorporate on-line materials into a physical book. So, rather than sprinkle the pages of the book with a bunch of web addresses, I decided to supplement the book with a series of blog posts in which I can link directly to on-line material. These posts will undoubtedly vary in their narrative coherence. Some will be short essays. Some will take the form of a list. All will include links to the additional reading (or listening) references which appear at the end of each exercise.

If you haven’t yet read the book, you won’t have all of the information you need to place the material in these posts in context. Even so, you should find some interesting and entertaining things here. My hope is that you’ll find the information in these posts both fun and helpful as supplements to the book. I would like for this to be a dynamic project and a conversation, so I’m also hoping that readers will suggest additional on-line materials and will provide links in the comments section. My plan is to post an entry about a new exercise about once a week.

The roots of this exercise and the concepts behind it

Procrastinate was the very first exercise I wrote for the book, and it is one of the exercises which is most directly drawn from traditional psychotherapeutic techniques. It is an example of “prescribing the symptom” (a concept which I discuss elsewhere in the book), a technique which is meant to put the patient into a therapeutic double bind. The beauty of a well-executed double-bind is that it creates a situation in which every outcome is positive. When you are instructed to perform a “negative” behavior such as procrastination, you have two choices: you can follow the instruction or you can disobey. If you disobey you win, because you have overcome your procrastination. If you follow the instructions you also win, because you have transformed the act of procrastination into a conscious choice, thus demonstrating the power that you have over your own behavior.

This technique is most useful in situations where we feel powerless..or rather, where we aren’t acknowledging the power that we have. It works by giving us access to the part of ourselves that is making the choice to engage in the behavior. It’s a technique which, to the best of my knowledge, was developed by Milton Erickson, whom you can see at work in this video:


Erickson made use of small variations in habitual behaviors as leverage for larger change. In my exercise, the goal is slightly different. I want the reader to experience the “negative” behavior of procrastination as a conscious choice. The larger goal for me (as it is in all of the exercises in the book) is to enhance your “observing ego,” so that you have a greater ability to observe the workings of your own mind.

Another example of a therapeutic double bind

Recently a patient was describing to me how she frequently found herself doing things for other people that she really didn’t want to do. She was puzzled by why she kept doing this. I had her walk through one specific example of this behavior, in as much detail as she could. She described a recurring scenario in which her husband would ask her to do something that he was perfectly capable of doing for himself (“honey, would answer the phone, it might be my boss calling”). When this happened, she had a distinct emotional reaction: an initial flare of anger, followed quickly by an emotional damping down and a cognitive rationalization (“don’t make him get mad at me”). Then she proceeded to resentfully do what he asked.

I instructed her to keep doing exactly what she had been doing over the next week. But to observe herself as she engaged in that behavior. And each time she observed herself repeating this pattern, I told her to say to herself, calmly and without  judgment: “I am choosing to do something that I don’t want to do.”

When she came in for her next session, something had shifted. She didn’t feel helpless anymore in the face of her husband’s intimidating demands. In fact, she confessed, she’d disobeyed my instructions by starting to tell him to answer the phone for himself.

The technique worked because rather than trying to force her behavior to change it created a sort of cognitive dissonance in her own self-awareness. She was forced into a more mindful state about her own behavior. Being able to observe herself in this manner gave her the room to start making different decisions. By failing, she found success.

Etymology

The word “procrastinate” is rooted in the Latin verb that literally means in favor of (pro) tomorrow (cras). I find this interesting because, offhand, I can’t think of another English word that has the Latin root “cras” with this meaning. (If you know of one, please leave it in the comments.) There’s a nice explanation of the etymology at Word Power.

Procrastination: the traditional view

Here’s Ellen DeGeneres, with your basic stand-up comedy riff on procrastination:


Here’s an animated version of the same theme:


There are a few million variations on this theme. Procrastination is a universal experience, but the way we usually think about it isn’t particularly complex. The joke is simply that we humans keep hitting our head against the same wall, over and over again. We try to overcome our weakness, but after a few seconds we succumb.

Traditional techniques for fighting procrastination

Just as humor about procrastination tends to hit a single note over and over again, traditional advice for over-coming procrastination tends to try to stare down our resistance to getting things done by using strategies aimed at forcing our behavior to change, as evidenced in instructional videos like these:


And you’ll find similar advice on sites like these:

eHow

About.com

Mindtools.com

The idea, as I see it, is that you can change your behavior by forcing your behavior to change. But as those who have read The Next Ten Minutes will be aware, I’m not a big believer in this approach. I actually to think that trying to keep yourself from procrastinating is a fool’s errand. If you try to engage it in hand-to-hand combat, it’s not going to go well. In fact, you might actually wind up strengthening the very behavior you’re attempting to suppress.

Meditation on procrastination

That’s a lot of carping about the unhelpful ways that people try to help us with procrastination. But there are also some people out there who think about procrastination in really interesting ways. For instance, I rather like this approach to “structured” procrastination because it attempts to make use of the inevitability of procrastination rather than trying to defeat it outright:

Structured Procrastination

And this is a wonderful piece which looks at the psychological mechanisms underlying procrastination, leading us to think differently about how our minds are working when we’re in the process of procrastinating:

You are not so smart

Finally ,here’s another very good essay on the psychology of procrastination, which gets you thinking differently about the whole subject, and which might just inspire you to get some really important things done:

Paul Graham

Procrastination songs

In my fantasy about this series I have a theme song for each of the exercises in The Next Ten Minutes. But I’m off to a bad start because I honestly cannot think of many hit songs about procrastination. Some people have suggested John Lennon’s “Watching the Wheels,” but that’s not really about procrastination. It’s about detachment. The best procrastination songs I can find are home-made, like the one below. (If you can think of any good songs about procrastination, please list them in the comments.)


Half-assed procrastination

One more thought. In one of the variations on this exercise in the book I ask readers to do something that they’ve been putting off, but to do it without enthusiasm. I challenge readers to see if they can mindfully do a half-assed job on something. It’s a challenge because usually when we do a half-assed job on something it’s a sort of semi-conscious protest.

This variation relates to an idea that has been bouncing around in my head for a long time, one which informs the entire book. I believe that we often discount the value of positive behaviors which we perform poorly or inconsistently. I’ve thought about this a great deal in regards to my own meditation practice….or lack thereof. I know that I am an extremely inconsistent meditator. What I’ve found though, is that this awareness of how poorly I meditate tends to keep me from meditating at all. In writing The Next Ten Minutes I attempted to turn this idea on its head. Because I truly believe that even meditation practices that are done poorly and without much commitment are beneficial. And I believe that giving ourselves permission to practice meditation in a half-assed manner is a great way to build a micro-meditation practice into our daily lives. Rather than telling ourselves that we are failing because we can’t focus on our breath for more than a few seconds, why not build a practice whose goal is to make the most of those few seconds that you can meditate?

Toward that end, I created the League of Half-Assed Meditators, which now has its own page on Facebook. When I come across articles or research supporting the benefits of “micro-meditation,” I link to them there. If you too believe that taking a single, focused breath can make a positive difference in your day, then I encourage you to join the group.

Further reading

The individual reading references for this exercise are:


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can find an Amazon list of references for this exercise here. The find a full set of lists for every exercise here. And if you’ve got suggestions for other books on any of the topics in the exercise or in this post, I’d love to hear them. Please leave them in a comment.

Open questions

Finally, a few question for discussion:

  • What is the most effective tool you’ve ever found to distract yourself from a task that you know you should be doing? Or, to give the question a more sinister twist: if you were a secret agent whose task was to keep your enemies from being able to concentrate on their work…what program or website would you sneak onto their computer to achieve your goal?
  • And what are your ideas for further variations on the basic procrastination exercise?

 

Read the next post in the Beyond the Book series – Relax Your Face – here.

 



http://www.ehow.com/how_2026864_not-procrastinate.html
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The Next Ten Minutes…interview on Beyond 50 Radio

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Oct 272010
 

I was interviewed this morning On Beyond 50 Radio. You can listen to a recording of the broadcast here:


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