We all have a space in our heart — every one of us – that longs for connection and meaning. We all want to feel like our life, our efforts, our relationships matter, at least in some small way, to other people in this world. It’s a very vulnerable spot within us and we spend most of our lives trying to protect it.
Life is change. Growth is optional. Choose wisely. ~~ Karen Kaiser Clark
Change is part of life and life is continual change. We can’t separate the two. We work and work to get things tidy, predictable, manageable, and dependable. Steady income – check. Dependable relationships – check. Feeling healthy and energetic – check. We want to organize those routines of life and have them stay steady so we can polish, shine and grow upward.
We can get discouraged when our steady foundation gets rocked by change. It’s like having to spend money on the non-glam projects during a house renovation – the furnace, roofing, insulation – when we are craving to be picking colors and matching fabric swatches. Ever notice how the really fun home shows on TV do not involve price-checking furnaces? They’re more often about swanning around town, figuring out which chandelier will match our new loveseat.
Grow up and grow down
It’s because we judge each other on all the shiny stuff. With that desire to look like we’ve made it in life – to have all the shiny stuff – we can sometimes overlook when our foundation needs help. It’s important to grow upward to the things that bring happiness and a smile. But it’s also important to grow downward to develop and nourish our roots.
As much as we love our shiny possessions, it’s only our roots that we truly have control over. The shiny things, the dependable relationships, the steady income all come and go. This became very clear to me last month at a mindfulness retreat with Thich Nhat Hahn, a Buddhist monk. (He was a pivotal teacher for Martin Luther King Jr. on his journey to peaceful resistance. He’s 87 and can teach without notes, cross-legged on a cushion, for 2 hours without skipping a beat.)
I attended a talk about handling change with resilience. He compared change and loss to a windstorm passing through a forest. (The Buddhist teachings use a lot of imagery from nature.) All the trees may lose the beauty of their leaves and branches in the storm but it’s those with the deepest roots that will recover to bloom again.
Growing our roots
We can’t control when the storms arrive and what they take with them. But we have three roots that we can nurture – areas to cultivate that will sustain us in the storms:
There was a lot of discussion in the group about the most painful changes in life. And while people talked about jobs and possessions, it’s the people who were compassionate with us when we felt vulnerable that stay with us forever. We all agreed that they were missed more for their kind words and loving natures than any material possession they had.
Pass it on
We can sustain the memory of their goodness and compassion by cultivating compassion for others and ourselves. When the winds of change are howling, how do you treat yourself and others? Do you let the stress and discomfort get to you? Do you neglect yourself? Or do you treat yourself with the same kindness and compassion that others have in the past?
Kristin Neff is a leading researcher in the area of self-compassion. Her work is based on the idea that we are healthier and more in touch with our humanity when we can be compassionate towards ourselves in the difficult times of life. You can find out more about her work here. Here’s one of her exercises to help you explore self-compassion:
How do you typically react to yourself?
Image: iStockphoto
If you enjoyed this post, please share it with your friends!
We’re at that time of year again when the world is full of people who want to help us fix ourselves.
Have you noticed that many New Years’ resolutions have a scolding tone of voice? No more desserts for you until you’ve cleaned up your exercise routine, young lady. I told you not to spend so much over the holidays, young man. Now go clean that mess up!
Let’s try a different approach, shall we? Let’s go carrot instead of stick.*
I am entering 2016 from a different angle and I invite you to come along for the ride. I’m going to frame out the year through a series of 25 questions that ponder some of life’s intriguing questions. With that 25 questions I’m going to create 100 things – blog posts, webinars, courses, doodles, photos, etc. Anything that helps me express my ideas and experiences about that question. A different question every two weeks. I’ll be diving into the questions with clients, posting on Facebook, tweeting, journalling, Instagramming, creating and checking in with people around me.
Where did this idea come from? Almost out of the blue. I casually joined a group called Quest2015 in early December. I thought it was a group business planning exercise, and it was. What caught my eye initially was a 10% discount for an erasable calendar. I thought it would be great for planning the year out. This makes me laugh now.
My whole sense of what is possible in life was cracked open in December. I know, I know. That’s a pretty big statement. And we hear phrases like that all the time for some pretty mundane events. But it was a real game-changer, to quote the biz types.
Through small doors come life-changing experiences. Jeffrey Davis, of Tracking Wonder, put out the invitation to business artists to use 12 prompts from a group of innovative thinkers to dive deeper into the why of our businesses. I knew, and had an intellectual crush, on quite a few of them. How could I say no?
One of the early prompts was from Pam Houston. She is the author of four books, including novel Contents May Have Shifted and short stories Cowboys Are My Weakness. I haven’t read her work (soon to be fixed) but others call her beloved and insanely talented. She is Professor of English at UC Davis, directs the literary nonprofit Writing by Writers, and teaches in the Pacific University low residency MFA program.
She asked us to sit quietly and ask yourself, what in the last day or week or month has made your heart leap up? Not what should, or might or always had, but what did. Make that list. Be honest, even if it surprises you. Keep the list with you this month. Add to it when it happens. Train yourself to notice. Then ask your self today, how can I arrange my life to get more of those heart leaps in it?
This thing made my heart leap when my husband hung it before Christmas.
And it made my heart leap every time I stepped out the door and I’d forgotten that was there. Why?
Well, it’s shiny and pretty — and I love shiny things. I used to make things like this all the time but I stopped. Life got kind of serious and difficult and I forgot about making things. Then it got busy and making shiny things was frivolous. And often I was too tired to make things. More spiritually than physically.
And I finished it! I started with a hula hoop, some pool noodles, duct tape and a crapload of ornaments. Now it’s a circle of shininess. Sometimes there were balls on the ground and I knew that the squirrels had taken it for a spin. That makes my heart happy. I’d just put them back on for their next spin.
My heart leaps because I have a sense of getting a ‘next time’ to spin on the shiny circle again myself. Making that shiny circle of Christmas sparkliness seemed to herald a return to energy and possibility. Here’s what’s on my list . . .
Dive into sensual pleasures. Movement that nourishes. Joy in others. The beauty of nature. Giving love away like it’s a bottomless pool. Laughing with friends until you cry or spit or expel something. Pretty things that please the eye. Good music. Deeply connecting with others. Seeing people grow into their potential. Remembering warm times from the past. Making things. Writing things. Cooking things.
January is a tricky time of year. There’s a natural settling in that comes from the lead of winter. Many of our animal brethren are hibernating and the song of cozy sings. For those who are internal and introspective there can be too much burrowing in and losing contact with the pleasures and joys of nature and connection. To much disconnection from the beauty that life offers if we can see it.
I find my body gets so out of synch over Christmas that a sense of depression falls on it by the end of the month. And with my body goes my mind. Adopting the “New Year’s resolutions” of healthy eating and exercise is more about restoring mental and physical balance than losing weight or changing a size. I want to restore the connection to my nourishing inner life.
Sometimes I have trouble recognizing the things that make my heart leap, even with the return of healthy kindness to my body. Then I turn to another two of my intellectual crushes — Rick Hanson and Barbara Fredericton. I’ve been very lucky to meet both of them and was dweeby when I did.
Rick Hanson wrote Hardwiring Happiness, which is filled with practical mindfulness practices that help your brain balance it’s tendency to see the negative. Barbara Frederickson is a researcher and professor of psychology at UNC at Chapel Hill. Her research reveals how positive emotions, fleeting as they are, can tip the scales toward a life of flourishing. Her Positivity website is a good place to start and has a handy app that helps you see where your emotions are at.
This is a perfect time for journalling and visiting with yourself. Ask — where does your heart leap? Pull out your pictures from last year. As you leaf or page through, remember the moments that your heart leapt. As you have a few moments of quiet let your mind wander to the times of pleasure, happiness and joy. Make a list of the important people in your life and write down those heart leaping experiences with them. Then do the same for those times you shared with strangers. Anything that brings you back to the joys of 2014. Let your mind and heart take you from there.
I divide my experiences into pleasure, happiness, and joy. For me, pleasure is a personal experience. Some delicious chocolate, a good meal, a nice glass of wine. Happiness is a harmony thing. The moments with family and friends of warmth, successes, connection, brightness and order make me happy. Joy comes from a larger place, a place where I can witness the unfolding of what is beautiful and right in the world.
*Not to say that stick doesn’t have it’s place. Sometimes the stick of a deadline or a promise is just what will keep you chugging along. But it’s a heavy-handed tool and you’re much more treasured than that.
Photo: Love joy_ Dave Parker CC 2.0
Let’s raise a glass to the season of joy, love, and food. Cookie swaps, cheese trays, turkey dinners, cocktails and fruit cakes, shall we? I mean, what would the holidays look like if we didn’t have food to bring us together? Time for some mindful eating?
Food is a social lubricant that plays so many roles – it brings us together, distracts us, soothes us, entertains us, numbs us or lets us shine. So many uses, yet so many places to find ourselves overwhelmed. Hands up everyone who hits mid-December and thinks, “If I eat another bite I’ll explode!”
We can’t avoid the season of excess, so it’s important to come to peace with it. This year I’m proposing an unlikely answer to Christmas excess. Perhaps the tools of mindfulness — mindful eating in this instance — can help us have a simpler, more peaceful holiday.
I am a late-comer to mindful eating. When I first learned about mindful eating at Duke it left me cold. Our class had reconvened in North Carolina after our first month of training. We were full of joy and excitement to see each other and share our new perspectives and experiences as budding coaches. We dutifully waited through our morning classes to catch up at lunch, only to discover that we were going to have a ‘mindful lunch’. It was a silent meal with no interaction. We focussed on our bland cafeteria food as we glanced anywhere in the room away from each other.
Blech.
Still, I keep hearing good things about mindful eating. Like more enjoyment from your food, or weight maintenance or balanced eating. From my own experience, I can tell exactly where my emotional and mental state is by how I’m eating. Am I under deadline pressure? Then I’m bolting down my food. Am I worried or feeling emotionally vulnerable? Then I’m eating chocolate at night. Am I relaxed and happy? Then I’m on Yummly, exploring new recipes for dinner deliciousness.
So if silent eating with endless chewing isn’t my thing, where can I find the gold in mindful eating?
I’ve decided to see if paying attention to my Christmas treats can open up the joy and connection of the season. I want to see if it’s possible to shift my perspective about holiday food from being a management project to a treat to savour.
Here are three ways to check in:
Tune into your Senses
Think about getting ready to eat at a holiday event. Perhaps you’re helping yourself at a buffet table or enjoying a glass of wine and some cheese at a cocktail party. Take a moment to run through the different sensory experiences you are having with your food.
Don’t take more than a short moment to run through your senses. Try to avoid comparing your experience with others you’ve had in the past. If it’s a traditional family dish, don’t dwell too long on whether it was better last year or not. Stay in the present and notice what’s going on at the moment.
Thank the Cook
Take another moment to think about where the food came from. If it’s a potluck, do you know who brought the dish? Is it your host’s go-to favourite for parties? Maybe there’s a way to make a pleasant connection with someone over their cooking talents.
Do a Regular Check-in
Check in with how hungry you are on a regular basis. And how satisfied. Give your hunger a number on the range of one being ravenously hungry and ten being painfully full. A great rule of thumb is to stay between four and eight – not too hungry and not too full. Then think about how satisfied you are with what you’ve eaten. I know I’ve tried substituting a healthier food for something I’m craving, only to finally break down and just eat the food I’m craving. For me, an apple doesn’t satisfy the craving for chocolate. It’s almost always better to be satisfied by a mindful experience of chocolate than to eat three apples and then a chocolate bar.
Short bursts of mindful eating will help you tune into the wonderful parts of the season. If you’re having trouble applying these three principles to your eating, perhaps it’s a sign that you’re getting overwhelmed by your holiday schedule. Take some time out to take care of yourself.
I’m looking forward to English trifle (one of my mother’s recipes), gingerbread cookies (courtesy of Martha) and some smooth Italian red wine. What’s your favourite holiday treat?
Quick. Think of your most important relationship. Is it partner, kids, an inspiring friend, a parent, a mentor at work? Think again. What about the relationship you have with the voice in your mind? How harmonious is that relationship for you? Kudos if you have developed an equally great relationship with your inner critic and your inner champion.
If you’re like most of us you probably want to give that critical voice a Xanax and move on. What a trickster and killjoy it can be! But when we don’t develop a good relationship with this voice it starts running the show. We cut ourselves off from what we’re capable of. It stops us from reaching out to other people. It preaches perfection.
I think what GK Chesterton is arguing is that most of life doesn’t require all that much precision. It’s better to show up regularly with a decent effort than to flame and then crash. There’s a lot to be said for doing “just enough” for your responsibilities and saving some time for restorative and nurturing pleasure. Your inner champion knows this.
How does your inner critic treat you? Does the voice show up to remind you that you’re not all that and stop you from exploring your talents? Maybe you are acutely aware of critical comments people make about you. Do you remember every slight or casual comment as a barb? Or perhaps you have mindlessly followed the path others have laid out for you, unsure of yourself and your ability to choose the right path for yourself.
Over the years women have shared their inner critic stories with me:
Sadly, ignoring the critical voice just doesn’t work. First, it falls out of touch with reality. You locked it away and it hasn’t watched you grow up. Remember when you were a kid and your parents’ friends came over. They couldn’t stop themselves from saying how much you’d grown, how tall you were, how grown up you were now. You’d roll your eyes and know, with the pure conviction of a child, that you were never going to be that lame when you grew up.
Guess again. When you don’t stay in relationship with your inner critic it turns into one of those lame adults. When you don’t really take in your accomplishments and share them with the voice you are not integrating everything you learn in life. The voice needs new ways to get your attention. It has to get really loud to catch your attention. And when loud doesn’t work then it gets nasty.
It may not seem like it but you can influence whether you hear your inner critic or your inner champion more clearly. Your inner critic is louder so you have to listen harder for your inner champion.
Acknowledge your inner critic
Check your stress level
Explore what’s triggering your inner critic
Remember what’s important to you
Who says?
Create an advisory board
Image: Listen to your inner voice by BrewingColors under Creative Commons 2.0
If you enjoyed this post, please share it with your friends!
What becomes possible when you learn how to “just breathe”?
My first understanding that my breath wasn’t an automatic, mindless action came when I was just 12. I was a pretty typical kid but I was always asking to do lessons in activities that were, shall we say, unusual. Bagpipes, anyone? My mother saw things like ballet and music as more natural choices. But she let me do my thing graciously. It started me on the road to learning how to “just breathe”.
A friend was doing a meditation class with her mother and they invited me along. I thought it sounded interesting. This was in the early-ish 1970s and the Beatles had introduced the world to transcendental meditation. Our teacher looked very much like the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, but of course it wouldn’t have been. The Maharishi had started working on some big plans and surely wasn’t teaching a small group of students in small town Ontario.
We gathered in a grade two classroom at a small elementary school. We sat in those school desks with the plastic seats and the curved arms. They were small for my friend and I and they were tiny for the adults. All of us oversized students, shifting uncomfortably, waiting for Mr. Yogi to share his secrets.
He told us to focus on our breath, to breathe in and out quietly and listen to the sounds it made. He showed us how focusing on a sound, even the sound of our breath, could shift the busyness of our minds. How it would open a space for peace and calm. It was cool. For a couple of days and then I forgot all about it.
Just breathe_Deirdre Walsh
Flash forward 20 years to early yoga classes. Early-ish 1990s — yoga was only a little weird and was full of some really interesting characters. Our yoga teacher was Gita. She was, and always will be, the best. She taught Kriya yoga and we did a lot of poses, but we also did some chanting and breathwork. That part was weird. Weird, but peaceful.
Thankfully, breathwork isn’t weird anymore. Well, at least not that weird. Many people have discovered the spaciousness and peace that come from following your breath and letting your mind settle into the comfortable rhythm.
One of my favorite ways to connect with my breath is during that tiny little pause that comes when you’ve finished your exhale. It’s a tiny little place to rest for a fraction of a moment. When I’m sitting in waiting rooms or in muzik hold or waiting for inspiration I’ll start to slow my breath down and just hang out in that little space for as long as I can. It’s a micro-vacation for me.
There are many, many ways to do breathwork. It’s a practice that portable and mutable. It’s perfect for the lifelong students among us because there is always something to learn. For instance, most of us use the muscles of the upper part of our chest to breathe. We either were taught to breathe that way or it happened over time. This signals to our brains that we are stressed because that’s how we breathe when we feel we’re in danger. It adds an invisible layer of stress on top of the stuff you can see coming at you.
Here are some good resources I recommend for learning how to breathe. Mark Sisson of Mark’s Daily Apple has a very straight-forward way of explaining things, but he breaks down the correct and incorrect patterns very well. Leo Babauta of Zen Habits describes beautifully the meanderings your mind will take you on when you start to focus on your breath. Jon Kabat-Zinn has a guided meditation here if you want company as you breathe.
Once you have a good handle on how to breathe, I offer you a wonderful practice from Christopher Germer on how to use your breath to soothe pain or difficult emotions. This is where you can begin to unlock all the genius that your breath holds. Happy breathing!
Take three relaxing breaths.
Bring awareness to your body and the sensations or emotions occurring there in the present moment. Then find your breath in the heart region and begin to track each breath with mindful awareness. Just breathe for a few moments.
After a few minutes, release your attention to your breath and let your attention be drawn to the place in your body where your difficult emotion can be felt most strongly.
Soften into that location in your body. Let the muscles be soft without a requirement that they be soft, like applying heat to sore muscles. You can say “soft . . .soft . . . soft” quietly to yourself if it enhances the process. Just breathe softness.
Allow the discomfort to be there. Abandon the wish for the feeling to disappear. Let the discomfort come and go as it pleases, like a guest in your home. You can repeat “allow . . . allow . . . allow” if you wish. Just breathe allowing.
Now bring some love to yourself for discomfort in this way. Put your hand over your heart and breathe. You can also direct love to the part of your body that is under stress. It may help to think of your body as if it were the body of a beloved pet or child. You can repeat ”love . . . love . . . love”. Just breathe love.
“Soften, allow, and love”. “Soften, allow, and love”. Use these three words like a mantra, reminding yourself to incline with tenderness toward your discomfort. If you experience too much discomfort with an emotion, stay with your breath until you feel better.
Slowly open your eyes when you’re ready.
Posted by Deirdre Walsh
Photo: Breathe_Mae Chevrette_CC2.0
If you enjoyed this post, please share it with your friends!