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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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.

 



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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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Being Undiagnosable (7)

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Aug 312010
 

Part 7: Surrender

[In part six of this series I paused to summarize my efforts so far in my quest for a diagnosis.]

Step one

We admitted that we were powerless.

A lot of people who start up in 12-step programs have trouble with the first step. Personally, I’ve always liked it.

Our lives had become unmanageable.

To me has, that has always seemed like simple statement of fact about the human condition. We are, when it comes right down to it, powerless over our unmanageable lives.

That’s not to say that I don’t often resist this truth. Like everyone else, I try to create the illusion that I’m in control of my own life.

But the wiser part of me, the existentialist in me, knows better. This part of me doesn’t believe that our lives are guided by some intrinsically meaningful forces, higher powers that are waiting to be discovered. This part of me understands that the only meaning in our lives is the meaning that we ourselves create.

People often balk at that. The idea that our existence has no meaning seems, on the surface, so negative.

But I actually find it to be a tremendously affirmative statement. Because if our lives do not come with pre-determined meaning, we have this incredible freedom to make meaning from our experience. That freedom is both invigorating and terrifying. Because, of course, along with that freedom comes a sobering responsibility.

Still, I understand that this is not the most popular way of understanding human existence. If you’re even a little bit religious, the idea that life is meaningless is…well, sacrilege. And if you’re in the 12-step world, you think of powerlessness and unmanageability as symptoms of an illness. They’re problems to be resolved, not conditions to be tolerated.

But I would argue, using a bit of Buddhist logic, that much of human suffering is not the result of our powerlessness itself, but rather that it comes as a consequence of hanging on too tightly to the illusion that we are ever other than powerless over our unmanageable lives.

To be clear (as I have said before), I’m not against religion at all. But I am deeply, profoundly agnostic. I’m not against 12-step programs either. Quite the contrary. I refer my clients to them regularly. But personally, I can never truly move on to the second step. For all the reasons I’m describing, that whole higher power thing just doesn’t sit well with me.

So my personal 12-Step program is pared down. It’s a 1-Step program. Just keep taking that first step, over and over again.

I don’t need or expect you to agree with me on this. I’m describing it simply so that you can understand the decision I was about to make for myself with regard to my own search for a diagnosis.

I took the first step. I acknowledged that I was powerless over my own diagnosability. But I needed to figure out where to go from there. Since there was no higher power to “restore me to sanity,” how could I find a way to remain in that powerless state?

I turned to the only true guide I know for dead-end situations and that is Victor Frankl, who describes so powerfully how the only absolute power we ever have is the power to shape our attitude toward our experience.

I began to ask myself: what attitude did I want to take toward my own health? What meaning could I make of it?

Homeostasis

In the Spring of this year, as the anniversary of our trip to Mayo came and went, I was settling into an awareness that there were no more doctors left for me to see. There was not a specialty I could think of that might offer any new or different perspective on my undiagnosed symptoms. It really seemed like I’d reached the end of the line.

Nothing much had changed with regard to my symptoms. They were always evolving, but they’d seemed to reach a sort of homeostasis. They ranged from annoying to worrying to occasionally debilitating, but they weren’t getting significantly better or worse. The muscle spasms had grown somewhat less intense, although they occasionally flared up. The fatigue had improved a little bit after the sleep studies, but I was still subject to intermittent bouts of overwhelming exhaustion. Most things came and went with varying degrees of intensity – the migrating neurologic symptoms, the metallic taste, the waves of  “cellular” pain. The cognitive fog was probably the most constant and bothersome symptom. I felt constantly at a slight remove from everyone around me, and most of the time it was just plain hard to think.

So things weren’t great. But they also didn’t seem dire. It seemed likely that I could go on living like this indefinitely.

And I’d grown so tired of going to doctors.

So I began to ask myself: what if this is it? What if the answer is that there is no answer? What if this condition is truly undiagnosable?

I confess that I felt some relief in allowing myself to ask this question. The cycle of hoping for an answer and not getting one had worn me down. It was mentally and physically exhausting. And, more importantly, it kept me focused inward, constantly monitoring my symptoms, which prevented me from being able to direct energy into my work and my relationships the way I wanted to.

So I began, for the first time, to let myself consider a possibility that had seemed unthinkable earlier. Perhaps this is simply the condition of my life from now on.

In the past this admission would have seemed like a weakness. Like I was quitting because things had gotten too hard for me. But the more I considered it, the more it actually seemed like the only sane approach to take. It was a way of changing the terms of my relationship to my own health. Rather than let my symptoms control me, perhaps I could decide for myself how much influence I gave my them over my own self-definition.

I accept

I asked myself what it would take for me to let go of my search for a diagnosis?

I would have to find a way to treat my symptoms with equanimity.

I would have to find a way to re-focus my energy on the future. One of the ways in which my illness had affected my thinking was that it limited my awareness of my own future potential. It had narrowed my vision, kept me from attending well to any long-term goals.

And more than anything, I would have to find a way to take a positive attitude toward my own life. I’d spent so much time wondering about the ways in which my existence might be curtailed…it would be a significant shift to focus instead on what was possible.

I understood the techniques for making this cognitive shift. After all, I taught them to my psychotherapy patients all the time. And I practiced them in my own half-assed but heart-felt meditation practice. It was a matter of mindfully attending to the ways in which I held my symptoms in mind. Trying not to attach to those symptoms as the definition of my entire being. Instead, I could just notice them and let them go.

When I felt a muscle spasm, for instance, what did my mind do with it? I had a choice about how much emphasis I gave it. I could start scanning anxiously for other spasms, reviewing when and where they occurred. I could make spasms the filter through which I understood the world.

Or I could just let it go.

I received some unexpected assistance in this work of shifting my thinking from my weekly yin yoga class. Yin yoga was one of the few things that had actually made me feel better during all of this. It’s a practice which emphasizes the slow stretching of the body’s connective tissues. Most of it is done on the floor. A pose might be nothing more than a simple, forward fold, held for four or five minutes. You try to relax your muscles, to give yourself access to the deeper tissues. It has helped me in ways that seem to me to be beyond words.

At the beginning of one class the instructor had us do a very simple breathing exercise. Breathe in deeply. Then exhale. And at the bottom of the exhale, the pause before the next breath began, say to yourself: “I accept.”

She didn’t give any instructions on how to direct that acceptance. But I felt immediately what it was that I was needing to accept. And breath after breath, as I spoke those silent words to myself, I sunk deeper into the awareness that acceptance was what I needed more than anything. I was on the edge of tears. This is the state of my life, of my body, of my mind. This is my existence. This is what is.

I accept.

The bottleneck

I made a list at the things I wanted to accomplish in the near future.

In addition to everyday household and parental tasks and the work of maintaining my private practice, most of my list involved things I wanted to do to begin promoting my upcoming book. I wanted to put together proposals for presentations I could make at conferences. I wanted to produce a short video. And I had a fantasy of composing music for some or all of the chapters in the book.

All of these things had come to feel overwhelming to me. Before my health had gone south – before, especially, the brain fog had set in – I could have moved through each of these tasks fairly quickly. I would have been able feel the satisfaction of completion. Now I was going to have to learn to take satisfaction in much smaller steps. In order to feel like I was moving forward, I was going to have to look at these things with a much longer time frame.

Because the simple truth was, I didn’t know, day by day, just how much energy and concentration I’d be able to muster. I usually had a few decent hours in the morning, but the afternoons were a total crapshoot. There were often times when I had two or three open hours to work in the afternoon, but when I sat down to do it, my mind simply froze. I would read the same sentence in a book dozens of times without being able to move forward. I would stare at my notebook, unable to conjure a single coherent thought.

In the past I would have been able to power through these blocks. Because of this habit, it took me quite awhile to realize that things had changed. It was exceedingly difficult for me to accept that it was pointless to try to keep trying. But it was true. When I felt like this, the best thing I could do was to lay down and take a nap. That, I slowly came to understand, was what my mind and body were really needing.

I felt it in my psychotherapy practice as well. Mercifully my caseload was very small at this time and limited to the mornings. Because seeing just two clients in a morning pretty much wore me out.

It was, as my wife kept saying to my doctors, as if I was about to turn 70 instead of 50.

The way I experienced it, it was as if my creative energy had once flowed through a broad pipe, but now one end of that pipe had narrowed into a very small funnel. There was only so much I could get through that bottleneck at a time. I had to develop a lot more patience, and also a bit more faith in my own ability to persist at a project that was moving in slow-motion.

Often I’d sit down to start writing (a piece like this, for instance, which I imagined I would post at least a week early than I actually am), and I’d find that my mind simply refused to function. I simply had to accept this limitation. I wasn’t going to finish the piece that day. It would get done when it got done. I wasn’t going to give up on it, but I wasn’t going to push myself to do what wasn’t possible.

Slowly, day by day, I found a way to accept this new reality. I learned to appreciate how much I was actually able to do, over time, in spite of how I felt. And that wasn’t just happy talk. It genuinely felt good.

The more I was able to get myself into this frame of mind, the more I felt relieved not to be spending all my mental energy focused on my health. I was able, with effort, to think of myself less as someone who was sick, and more as a person who was maintaining a small, successful psychotherapy practice, who was composing music and doing everything he could to promote his forthcoming book.

One last test

So there I was.

I was pretty much at peace. I wasn’t happy not to have a diagnosis. I wasn’t happy with the limitations I experienced. But I knew that I could move on with my life. Maybe things would get better. Maybe they’d get worse. Either way, there wasn’t much I could do about it. I had come to accept that I was powerless over my undiagnosability.

And this was where this story was supposed to end.

But then my wife opened another door.

While visiting her sister in upstate New York, she’d met a woman who called herself a healer. This woman offered to try to diagnose my condition through my wife’s energy. My wife agreed and at the end of the session the healer told her that I had babesiosis. I felt weary at the word. I didn’t know what it was, but I felt overwhelmed by the mere idea of starting up again on another fruitless quest to get a diagnosis.

My wife expected me to be skeptical and I was. The arguments spun around in my head. I’d started down this path so many times. How could this possibly be a proper way to diagnose anybody?

But then again, I told myself, if I was open to having chickens sacrificed in my kitchen, I ought to stay open to this as well. I looked up babesiosis and learned that it was a tick-borne infection that commonly co-occurred with Lyme Disease. The symptoms resembled those of Malaria. My symptoms weren’t malarial. And I’d already had a test for Lyme. Upstate New York was Lyme Disease territory, so of course that’s the sort of thing she’d come up with. I’d never heard of anyone with Lyme in Montana. It just seemed sort of wacky.

Still, my wife said, what’s the harm in getting you tested for it?

She was right. What was the harm in that?

[Part eight of this series will describe the unexpected turn of events that began with this "final" test.]

 

 

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The Minutes-to-Mindfulness Top Ten

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Jun 142010
 

 

“The mindful state, even if just a hint of it is created by a few moments of silent breath awareness…seems to create a receptive presence of mind.”  Dan Siegel, The Mindful Brain


As an advocate of what I like to call “casual mindulness,” I am naturally drawn to meditation techniques which can done very briefly and without any long-term commitment. I am especially drawn to techniques which emphasize acceptance of human flaws and frailty as part of the practice. My own book, The Next Ten Minutes, embodies this spirit by using a series of everyday activities and experiences as the foundation for developing greater mindfulness in our day-to-day lives. In this book I have tried to identify ways in which the gaps and pauses within an ordinary day can be used to foster greater mindfulness. And I am always on the lookout for like-minded practitioners.

The idea behind casual mindfulness is simple: anything which temporarily shifts our state of mind into an attitude of greater mindfulness is valuable. It doesn’t matter how small or how simple the technique…if it produces even the slightest positive change in your state of mind, it’s useful. I think that many people are put off by the idea of mindfulness as an intensive spiritual discipline, which can make meditation practice feel like an impossible burden to take on. It can seem that the only way to achieve the benefits of meditation in one’s life is to fully commit oneself to the long-term practice of a set of complex and abstruse principles. As a result, becoming mindful starts to feel like joining a new religion, or going back to school.

I don’t mean to suggest that there’s anything wrong with such disciplined practice. In fact, I am in awe of people who can maintain such practices. They totally rule. I am simply not one of them. And I suspect that you may not be either.

My inability to sustain a truly disciplined meditation practice used to really discourage me, until I figured out that mindfulness is one area of life where casual, even half-hearted practice is actually beneficial. In most areas in life, this isn’t the case. For instance, banging out a few random notes on a keyboard isn’t going to improve your ability to play piano. And doodling in the margins of an algebra textbook isn’t going to improve your math skills.

But pausing to take a single focused breath – even if you don’t give it any more thought than that – is going to create a small but significant shift in your state of mind.

You could read that last sentence and feel a sense of futility. Or you could recognize how profound the present-moment value of that gesture really is. In this moment, you can change your mind.

This is why I believe that in certain ways casual approaches to mindfulness can be as powerful as more disciplined practices. Because they are accessible to anyone, at any moment. I’ve found that one of the best ways to identify such techniques is to look for meditation instructions which contain the word “minute” in their description. The creators of these techniques (and I of course am now among their number), are inherently optimistic about the power of mindfulness even in extremely low doses. It is in the spirit of celebrating casual mindfulness that I created the Minutes-to-Mindfulness Countdown which follows. (Note: this list was first posted on my Facebook page, The League of Half-Assed Meditators. Check out that page to see the runners-up for each ranking. Book descriptions from Amazon.)


The Next Ten Minutes: 51 Absurdly Simple Ways to Seize the Moment

It’s me!


The desire to discover meaning in our lives is a powerful motivator for many people. Some turn to psychotherapy and counseling for help, some turn to spiritual teachings, and many turn to both. The Next Ten Minutes is the guide to help us discover the seeds of transformation and meaning in even the most ordinary routines.The Next Ten Minutes consists of a collection of exercises originally created for use in the Dr. Peterson’s successful counseling practice. Rather than taking readers out of the everyday, Dr. Peterson invites them to move more deeply into the familiar tasks of ordinary life, such as turning simple breathing, eating, physical love, or throwing out the trash into meditative exercises that can transform your day. Based on both Buddhist philosophy and proven psychology techniques, these succinct and accessible meditations also offer simple and effective methods for therapeutic counseling and personal growth. The power to seize the day is but a few simple steps away.



Coming in at number NINE…this delightfully insane meditation clock!





8 Minute Meditation: Quiet Your Mind, Change Your Life

A nice de-obfuscation of meditation techniques.

 

 

In recent years, mainstream Americans have begun to come around to meditation in a big way-and scientific studies are suggesting that the physical and mental benefits are solid and real. But to many, it remains something mystical and inaccessible…and spiritually-oriented tomes on the market don’t do much to make it easier. As interest in meditation continues to grow, this book offers a simple, no-nonsense program to help beginners experience reduced stress and increased focus in only eight minutes a day. Designed by meditation expert and bestselling author Victor Davich, this program teaches the basic principles of meditation while clearing up the misconceptions and myths that too often get in the way.



7 Minutes of Magi: Recharge Your Body Each Day with Qi Gong

It’s not exactly meditation, but it’s definitely meditative enough to belong on this list.


A blend of Eastern movements rooted in qi gong and Western fitness, 7 Minutes of Magic offers the perfect total workout to dramatically change your energy and fitness levels each day. In the morning, the seven-minute sequence wakes up the body with flowing movements and stretches designed to charge the muscles with energy and help focus the mind for the rest of the day. While in the evening, the exercises clear stress and calm the mind for sound sleep. In addition, Holden provides breathing techniques, nutritional tips, and advice on simple lifestyle changes throughout the day to increase vitality. Complete with more than 125 step-by-step, black-and white photographs, variations for more targeted workouts, and additional routines for more relaxed weekends, with 7 Minutes of Magic readers will start feeling their best today.



 

At number six, it’s Florian! Who suggests: “Let’s just sit silently and BE.”




Flip the Switch: 40 anytime, anywhere meditations in 5 minutes or less

I love the way this shoehorns meditation into the small moments of everyday life.

In this hurried world, when is there a chance to stop everything and meditate? Flip the Switch offers 50 surprisingly easy answers. It’s not necessary to be in a special quiet room or twisted pretzel-like into the lotus position to meditate – countless opportunities for quick meditations abound. Flip the Switch points out the time gaps that come throughout the day (idling at a red light, waiting for a computer to restart, standing in line at the grocery store) and teaches specially designed meditations that fit each of these situations. As healthy as they are convenient, the book’s “spot meditations” achieve many of the same positive changes as one long meditation session and can actually offer even greater overall benefits since the healthy transformations occur over and over throughout the day. The book offers quick, easy answers for reducing stress, improving health, clarifying thoughts, releasing creativity, deepening emotions, and boosting sensory pleasures.

 



Four-Minute Centering Meditation: Preparing to Listen to Your Patient

by Rebecca Shafir

www.mindfulcommunication.com

 

Step one:

Sit comfortably, feet flat on the floor, hands open on your lap. Feel your body against the chair. Gently close your eyes and breathe deeply. Watch and feel your breath moving in and out .

Step two:

Consider the mystery of what is about to occur – the fact that each of you- you and your patient – is a unique being and that your interaction, to the extent that it’s genuine, will be unprecedented.

Step three:

Become aware that each moment is brimming with possibilities, that by listening mindfully, you may be able to heal; by foregoing judgment, you may be able to see more deeply; by letting yourself be touched, you may convey to the patient that you care.

Step four:

Let your mind become quiet. Again, become aware of your breath. Feel your feet on the floor, your body against the chair. Breathe. Slowly open your eyes.




The Three Minute Meditator: Reduce Stress, Control Fear, Diminish Anger, in Almost No Time at All

There are quite a few three-minute resources out there. I like this one.


Meditation produces a mental state known as mindfulness, characterized by clarity, insight, and serenity, no matter what’s going on in the outside world. Unfortunately, many people feel they’re too busy to sit down for a relaxed meal, much less set aside time to meditate. The Three Minute Meditator was written for those harried souls who crave the benefits of mindfulness but who feel they just don’t have the time. It offers an easy-to-follow seven-step program that can be put into practice immediately and by anyone. Written in plain, jargon-free English, this simple plan shows that meditation doesn’t need to be arcane, difficult, or painful, that it won’t take time away from anything else, and that it can be learned and practiced in quick spurts throughout the day. Also included are special sections on how to apply mindfulness techniques to physical pain, relationships, aging, parenting, and other issues.


 

At number two: this guy meditating



Interestingly, the books available at number two all seem to have a Christian focus. Nothing wrong with that, it’s just not what this list is about. (Although it does make me curious what it is about the number “two” that draws this particular focus.) The number two mindfulness meditation video contains no instructions…. It’s nothing more than a video of this guy meditating…for two minutes. I love it for several reasons. First, because we naturally define meditation as an interior experience, we never actually sit and watch someone else do it. I imagine that some people might argue that attending to the “exterior” experience of meditation is distracting from the task at hand. But from the half-assed meditator’s perspective, it simply adds another layer to the experience. The other reason I love this video is because of this guy himself. “Mindfulness” is just not the word that comes to mind when you first look at him. But check out his smile as he opens his eyes at the end of the video. He’s a great embodiment of the universality of the practice.



The One-Minute Meditator: Relieving Stress and Finding Meaning in Everyday Life

This is how simple meditation can be.



In an age when everyone is pressed for time and completely stressed out to boot, finding inner peace in just one minute is the type of self-help concept that should quickly find an eager audience. In their new guide on how to meditate in short periods, authors David Nichol and Bill Birchard contend that because the true measure of life is how we feel and act minute to minute, “you can take any minute in life and turn it into a minute of better living. As some Japanese meditators say, you can steal moments from the day.”

In this hurried world, when is there a chance to stop everything and meditate? Flip the Switch offers 50 surprisingly easy answers. It’s not necessary to be in a special quiet room or twisted pretzel-like into the lotus position to meditate – countless opportunities for quick meditations abound. Flip the Switch points out the time gaps that come throughout the day (idling at a red light, waiting for a computer to restart, standing in line at the grocery store) and teaches specially designed meditations that fit each of these situations. As healthy as they are convenient, the book’s “spot meditations” achieve many of the same positive changes as one long meditation session and can actually offer even greater overall benefits since the healthy transformations occur over and over throughout the day. The book offers quick, easy answers for reducing stress, improving health, clarifying thoughts, releasing creativity, deepening emotions, and boosting sensory pleasures.

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How my mind works, part 1: thinking in sound

 5 Responses »
Mar 292010
 

What do you see when you look at your own mind?

What do you hear?

I have long been an avid student of the workings of my own mind. I find that I can’t help myself. Even when I want to (and I do have such moments), I simply can’t shut off the part of my mind that is constantly observing itself.

While some might dismiss such activity as solipsistic, I am convinced that the self-awareness such attention creates is the foundation for good mental health and for healthy relationships.

That’s certainly what the research on attachment tells us. The attachment literature calls the capacity of the mind to reflect on its own activity “self-reflective functioning,” and research has demonstrated that this capacity is critical if parents are to raise securely-attached children. It is also an essential component in building and sustaining healthy intimate relationships in adulthood.

Buddhists have known this for a long time, of course. In the Buddhist tradition this capacity has been cultivated through mindfulness meditation, in which the mind is trained to watch itself in action. Generally the way this works is like this. You sit and focus your attention on your breath, trying to bring full awareness to this simple experiential cycle: in, out, in out. What inevitably happens is that after a few seconds your mind wanders off…worrying about something you need to do or about things you’ve already done. The future, the past…anything but the present moment. A common instruction when this happens is to give your brain’s activity a name (“worrying,” “planning,” etc.) and then to gently and non-judgmentally bring your attention back to your breath. You do this again and again and again and over time your capacity to observe your own mind grows stronger and stronger. In the process, you have a million opportunities to study the peculiarities of your own particular mind.

Now this is where I’ve begun to get confused.

What most people seem to describe when they meditate is a mental process which, however non-linear, seems to be defined by a single strand of thought. Attention to the breath may be interrupted by a worried thought, which in turn leads to another thought, and then another. The result might be a confusing series of thoughts, but it seems to remain serial: one thought at a time.

What I’m finding as I move deeper into my own meditation practice is something different. When I listen to the activity of my own mind (and I use the word “listen” purposefully), what I hear is a soup of sounds, words and half-thoughts, out of which arises whatever coherent linear thoughts I happen to have. I have no idea whether this is a normal experience in meditation or a peculiarity of my own mind.

I know that people experience all sorts of rich, complex and subtle awarenesses during meditation. And it is obviously quite difficult to compare one person’s subjective experience to another’s, much less to create an experiential taxonomy of those experiences. In many ways, it’s not important. I know that my task is simply to observe my mental experience – whatever form it happens to take – with openness and acceptance.

Still, I find myself a little bothered by the workings of my mind. Because I experience this aural soup of thoughts and half-thoughts as a sort of clutter, white noise which at times makes it very difficult to focus on any one particular thing. I can’t help but wonder if it’s related to what some people with AD/HD describe: an inability to effectively filter out incoming stimuli (although in my case much of the stimuli seems to be internally-generated).

While I find this experience very difficult to describe to others, one thing I know for certain is that I experience this murky mental stew quite literally as sound. In fact, I believe that I may be able to replicate a version of the experience in sound and I am currently at work on a musical piece which attempts to do just that (watch for it soon on this site).

This brings me to Temple Grandin. Recently I read her wonderful book, Thinking in Pictures, in which she describes her particular experience of autism as one in which she experiences her thoughts as visual images. It was startling to me how much I identified with her experience, even though I myself am a consummately non-visual person. I cannot retain visual information to save my life. But I’ve begun to wonder whether I think in sound. The more I study my own mind, the more likely this seems. I “hear” my thoughts. In studying Chinese, I struggle mightily to learn the characters, but the tonality of speech echoes easily in my mind. And when I recall past conversations, what comes into my mind are the rhythms and tones of speech…the words fill themselves in on that sonic framework.

In some ways this is a good thing, in other ways it’s a drawback. I have, for instance, always been frustrated by the fact that I am such a slow reader. Recently I started attending to my experience while reading and I realized something: I cannot read without hearing the words I’m reading in my mind. As a result, I can’t read any faster than I could say the words aloud.

I’m fond of my mind. But sometimes it tries my patience.

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