Month: November 2023

The Majesty of Patience

Patience is the path of grace. A mountain rises over millions of years, but its power is in the waiting. In its time a mountain creates wind, directs weather, experiences deadly conditions and extreme energy, yet the mountain is seemingly still. It serves to inspire and guide us. It is not hurrying or competing. And should we be drawn to climb the mountain; haste would not be in our favor.

Tibetan Buddhist masters say that speeding through life is a fundamental disregard for our existence. Speed is anxiety based and causes us to rush forward damning anything that gets in our way.  And once something does get in our way, the collision happens too quickly for a sane response. We become incrementally more important to ourselves the more pressured we feel.  “Get out of my way! I’m late for my meditation class.” We become very important to ourselves when we feel pressured. We yell at the dog or tell the kids to leave us alone or otherwise react in ways that are not helpful.  We have this great responsibility, with very little time to process our actions. I have a job I have to get to; I am important dammit! This is not living with dignity. This is not only unkind to those hurt by our reactivity, but it is unkind to ourselves.

A kinder, and vastly more productive, approach would be to employ mindful awareness to relax into a flow state that  optimizes our experience and honors our existence. We are able to stand up and hold ourselves with dignity and grace. I had a teacher that suggested I slow down enough to move quickly. This is pausing just enough to synchronize with our mindfulness and awareness. Then when we are interrupted, we can respond intelligently with consideration. We say  considerate because we are considering a fuller situation before we react. When our mind is racing, we don’t have time for that we’re rushing down the street late for work and pushing people out of the way or cutting off cars on the road, without any regard for the basic human relationships that make us feel confident and strong. The more we push our life out of the way so we can force our agenda the more we are robbing ourselves from the fundamental sustenance of our life. That sustenance can only come from being grounded. It’s as if we’re pulling the nutrients up from the earth. But we can only do that if we’re synchronized with the earth. When we are synchronized, we are present, and the game slows down. We see that we have more options than the panicked reactions that come from speed would reveal. When we are grounded, we are able to consider more helpful approaches.

One thing that blocks the flow state for us is this feeling that we are pressured and have to make an immediate decision. We have to act immediately without pause, without thought, without consideration. When we’re running late, miss the train and we’re delayed another 8 minutes we stand on the platform looking up at the clock, tapping our feet.  The speed and constriction that we become addicted to slams us into survival mode. Our options are reduced to fight flight or freeze.  When something stops our momentum, we either lash out, run away, or freeze in a PTSD trance. The remedy is to boycott reaction, pause and breathe. Feel your feet on the ground. Come back. Then we can respond. 

Patience is not holding us in white knuckled tension waiting for the storm to pass but actually slowing down and opening our heart. In this way we create a loving space between thoughts and reaction. We enact a gentle pause for consideration. When we are here and now, breathing, with feet on the ground, the space opens up, the game slows down and options beyond reaction are naturally revealed. Looking at patience from a practical point of view we can see it less as a pejorative or limiting action and more of a forgiving and opening. Rather than shutting ourselves down into a reaction, we are opening up to space. If we relax and create a gap before our next action, we are able to bring awareness into the situation. We are doing something healthy for ourselves and helpful to the circumstances.

Patience is a pause that opens to the light of awareness. Rather than reacting from our base mind circuitry by becoming conscious of breathing, we’re able to redirect the energy to invoke our higher cognitive processing ability, accessing our executive reasoning.  We become considerate, or compassionate. We are able to look at the bigger picture and perhaps find a response different that our reaction. We are able to create a space for communication. Now I’m not saying we should become Gandhi. What I’m suggesting is that we pause long enough to be able to actually have a considered response. It might be offering some counterpoint, it might be walking away, or it might be simply waiting in space until the next right action becomes clear. Once we make an offering of our anxiety our fight flight freeze reactions are transformed. We’re using the same mechanism of reactive mind but because we’ve paused and synchronized, we’re able to use these impulses with executive reasoning. Fight turns into expressing our point of view, flight may be that we can walk away. Retreat is not surrender. Retreat is simply stepping back to regroup. And freeze might simply be resting here. This is not a  PTSD trance state where we can’t move but a loving pause where we have the option to do nothing but remain present.  Not to react, but just simply to wait. And that waiting is the essence of patience. If we learn to pause when we’re triggered, we might find that we’re more patient at stop signs, more patient in the subway and more patient with our life.

The fundamental work is recognizing, returning, and resting in our meditation so that we have built these tools in our life. In this way, awareness is the loving space  that allows us to see the appropriate response. All we need to do is train in this.  We don’t have to figure it out on the spot. It’s not on us. We don’t have to prove we’re right. We can just recognize the flashpoint and then remove the pressure. We can  offer our anxiety, panic, and aggression. We can offer the assumed mental pressure of disempowerment and receive the natural patience of a mountain.

We can rest on the earth where we belong.

IT’S A WORRISOME LIFE – Working with Negativity

Our human psychologies are nuanced and complex. One foundational affect, or deeply embedded physio/emotional belief, is that we need to store negative experience in order to learn how to protect ourselves and our species. This gives way to an experiential prejudice toward negativity, commonly referred to as “negativity bias“, or the “negativity effect”. As a protective measure, humans value negative experience above positive. Deep within we believe that positive experience is inessential and negative experience is instructional.

During our ascension up our planet’s fauna-chain humans developed higher cognitive functioning. This came to replace, or become superimposed upon, earlier rudimentary defenses. We traded fangs, claws and venom for memory and reason. This is why, when threatened, many of us get locked into compulsive thinking.  This greater RAM space allows us the processing ability to strategize our way out of danger and toward sustenance. We employ memories of past experience toward reasoning solutions in the present. However, while our present reasoning ability is contemporaneous, it is based on older, more ingrained experience. In order to secure our survival, our systems developed negativity awareness which is driven by past painful experience, or handed down genetically from past experience. This creates a cognitive dissonance because while our social mind pretends to search for pleasure or actualization while our deeper tendencies are driven by survival. Remembering Maslow’s pyramid, the foundation of our actualization lies upon supplying our basic needs. Survival is our most foundational need.

Our higher spiritual development seems to be what is needed for us to us to feel fully actualized. In order to realize that potential, we need to incorporate fun, relaxation, meditation, art, exercise, and social interaction into our lives. However, often in life those experiences become hijacked by the urgency of “more important” negative fixations. In some cases, we are so fixated on negativity we fail to see opportunities for enrichment in our life. This is interesting because while negativity is driven by survival, our reduced awareness actually makes us less secure.  This “ostrich syndrome” is, in humans, more like an eagle placing its head in the sand. We have the potential for tremendous awareness that is all too often conflated into a survival binary. We have the ability to see the whole picture, but nonetheless focus on the negative in a misguided attempt to secure our survival. In this way, we overvalue the negative, and even exaggerate it. We create a culture around it, competing with each other over whose life is worse. Jon Kabat-Zinn called this “Full Catastrophe Living”.

But, being locked into negativity is not satisfying. There is so much goodness in our lives that we discount or undervalue. At some point we become depressed. There is only so much we can push away in our lives before we start to close down to ourselves. Our negatively oriented life becomes itself fully negative. When this happens a natural – though unhelpful – strategy is to find blame. In order to ease our suffering we find an object on which to pin our pain. This object of blame may be our lover, a co-worker, or an element of society. But it is often driven by older, more deeply ingrained fears. Our mind is like a periscope searching for danger even when no danger is apparent.

If we are interested in living an actualized life, gaining some agency over our thinking is essential. Meditation master Chogyam Trungpa encouraged students to look at their minds with acceptance and accept their thoughts.  He felt it important that meditation be devoid of judgement. In his view, all thoughts had equal value. Our mind can be seen as basically good rather than an instrument of torture. In this way we can see our mind as fundamentally workable. By not dismissing thoughts we are offering our mind the room to discover itself. However, by applying the techniques of meditation and returning to the breath, we are accepting but not indulging our thoughts. All thoughts are equal but present moment experience is the point. So we come to be familiar with our thoughts and the games our mind plays.  Then we can determine if we want to follow along in action.  Rather than reacting to everything our mind tells us, meditation offers us the executive functioning to see our mind and decide how, if and when to act. The process of meditation allows us to “pause before send”, creating a buffer between thought and action. This is also very much true on the micro levels. Even if our action is tightening in the body, we are supporting negativity. We have the choice to notice and release the tension.

This subtle somatic negativity is important to recognize and accept. We may walk down the street nominaly enjoying our day, but internally clenching our stomach in fear of what may happen next. Even when everything is going right, is our body waiting for the other shoe to drop? It is essential to see this subtle negativity and feel the feelings otherwise they provoke unless they build within us and influence our mind in ways we cannot see.

If Trungpa recommended we accept our thoughts without judgement, there is one category of thinking he deemed unacceptable. “Negative negativity” are the judgements we have about ourselves, including those we have toward our own negativity. Negativity is naturally inherited behaviour. Blaming our negativity is counterproductive. It’s essentially blaming ourselves. Whenever we feel the tightness associated with self-affliction, we can come to see that we are punishing ourselves, which is self-flagellation. We can just let any self-judgement go.WE don’t have to pretend we are a buddha, or Mother Theresa or Kendrick Lamar. We can be ourselves and accept negativity as small minded and self-defeating but entirely common and natural.  We can allow ourselves to feel our negativity without judgement – but also without action.  We can become aware of our underlying behaviors without acting on them. We have every right to feel however we feel, but no right to inflict those feelings upon ourselves or anyone else. If we act out our negativity we are training the mind to continue negativity. On the other hand, as we are socialized not to act out, “acting in” builds internal pressure until we explode, or fall into depression.  Both of these actions build the propensity for us to see the world negatively making it easier to act out/in.

Negativity is the cause and condition of psychological trauma. Trauma may refer to a specific wound, but also to its embedded experience. As experiencing trauma is reliving past experience, acting on trauma is living in the past. When we relive the past, we are performing the same experiments which garner the same results. Acting on negativity and seeing the world negatively wounds us deeply. Walking down a street bitching internally at everyone is not an indicator of spiritual actualization. It is programming us to be victims of our own hatred. Victims? Yes. While negativity masquerades as a logical response to the buttheads of the universe, in truth, when we percolate ill feelings inside us, that churning will manifest in ourselves and our world. It’s the I’m rubber you’re glue syndrome in reverse. Whatever we churn inside manifests in the world, which sends back in kind. Instant Karma, it was said. But we can work with karma and make it less instant. We can slow it down with a tool called mindfulness. When you feel negativity, uncouple from fixating on an other, pause and feel inward. Don’t expect answers. When you fondle a lover you dont expect immediate gratification. You’re touching in to let them know you care. Feel in to your body and let yourself know you care.

Whenever we feel that negativity we can use it as a red flag to pause and check in with ourselves. In this way, life becomes lighter and less burdensome. When I find myself bitching I ask: is this real? What am I actually feeling? Am I defending my existence right now? And eventually the inner grip lessens and I begin to see the world around me.

Life need not be continuously worrisome. It can sometimes be enjoyed, appreciated, and valued.

When I developed my meditation instruction into a practical life path I chose the name LIFEWORK for my new business. This felt apt because, in a very practical sense, our work is to live our life. Our jobs and any financial security we’ve earned would, ideally, support our life. While many of us have pressing financial and professional issues, I believe Right Livelihood is the creative development of our essential being. Simply said, living is our life’s work. And perhaps that work can be a work of art. A truism in the field of motivational development is that money is not an effective motivator. While a few may be genuinely motivated by acquiring wealth, the majority of us fear not having wealth. Or, perhaps we fear wealth itself 

My work is to remind people that life is the point. Our jobs are only one of life’s pillars. Some others are health, play and spiritual wellness. A “Life” Coach would help illuminate all of the aspects of life, not just help with employment.  If our job supports our life we are fortunate. And if our job is eroding our health and spiritual wellness, we are also fortunate. We have been gifted an opportunity to rediscover ourselves and reorient our path. All roads led us here, and so here we are.

Now, where would we like to go?

The healthiest life orientation is one in accord with our true nature and placing this in alignment with, and service to, the world around us. Some traditions talk about turning their path and our life decisions over to God. Some talk about working with the universe. THe important point is that we don’t have to muscle through on our own if we orient ourselves toward a greater purpose. Yet, we cannot lose ourselves in the process. My belief is that we have to honor what Martha Beck calls our “Essential Being,” which she posits as distinct from our “Social Being”.  Our Essential Being is informed by other’s needs but is not defined by anyone’s expectations. It is self-existing and yet open to communication and change. Our essential nature seems to understand verbs over nouns. What is our action? If our action is fearful, then this action programs us to believe that that life is to be feared. When our action is confident we are guiding ourselves toward openness. In terms of our livelihood, many of us have a complicated relationship with money. We fixate on money, we discuss money, we may even study money, but we are actually quite frightened of money. Hence, money doesn’t excite us and wealth feels unattainable. And so, our lives become obligatory rather than creative. Lennon suggested that we break our backs to earn our day of leisure. And yet, Lennon was wildly successful in life because he “broke his back” for his passions. Whether it was perfecting the three-minute song, affecting progressive politics, falling in great love, or finally caring his family, he was an example of dedicating life to the things that matter.

And what matters will change as we develop. When we have this co-creative relationship  we are living life imperfectly, as a work of art. Art is never perfect. Or maybe its imperfections make it perfect.

In 1989 Marsha Sinetar released “Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow” which was something of a manual on what the Buddha called “Right Livelihood.”  Rather than motivate our life journey by our fear, if we identify the essential element of our being, we will access a wellspring of energy that will effectively drive our life. I think of it as a crystal river that runs through the essence of our life. Everything becomes clear when we remember to return to that flow. This is what we are training toward in our daily meditation. Shambhala Buddhism refers to “Basic Goodness.” This is not good versus bad, but a description of our human essence. It is the basis of human being. We are good. We have every right to be here. If we can learn to believe in ourselves, we will believe we are worth whatever goodness life can offer. So “Right Livelihood” is dependent on connection to our spirit.

Do gold rings and bling really satisfy us? Maybe. If we can access our essential goodness then the accoutrements of the world will be, as Chogyam Trungpa said, “ornaments which are pleasant to wear.” But when we forget to remember our basic goodness, acquiring any goodness of the world is,  Sakyong Mipham says, “like putting elegant clothes over an unwashed body.”  If we don’t recognize our own goodness and believe we are worthy, the goodness of the world will not be sustainable. Many of the things in life that we so desperately seek will only lead us from ourselves if we think these things will complete us. This actually erodes our wellbeing. On the other hand, there are things in life that directly feed our soul. When we are in tune with ourselves, we can feel this in our body. So, there are things we do that close us down and things in life that genuinely light us up. If these are the things that money can help acquire it might do better to focus on that which genuinely excites us and then allow the accumulation of wealth to be a practical means to that end.

In my coaching, I have my clients envision what they want from life. This is a maddening exercise at first. We are  trained to regard our own wishes as selfish. But how do we have the ability to help anyone if we’re depleted and unhappy?  And I tell them “lets just toss some ideas and see what the universe sends back.” Nothing is written in stone. Stones are for laws. Laws are an important support, but only to guide the creative. Creativity is an imperfect process. We let go and relax into the flow of life and allow the universe to co-create that life with us. This means we allow God, our teachers, or our higher power into the equation. The way we access the goodness of life is to dedicate that life to enriching all life. Nothing engenders confidence like caring for others. When we do this, we are accessing our higher spirit. We are in line with spirit, source, God, or Basic Goodness.  That spiritual alignment is an amazing feeling. When we have the capacity to extend to others, we are aligned with goodness and the goodness we need from life will come. This is Ruling Our world with dignity and grace. Conversely, when out of fear we live life only for ourselves, we live scurrying and frightened. Thinking about our livelihood, our health, or our life at all seems overwhelming.  Perhaps this is because these thoughts are manifestations of fear and not expressions of confidence.

For some, the money that drives our social economy is a cruel master that causes us to barter our passion for societal progress. Societal progress is not evil, but it doesn’t light us up. And motivating toward financial security is an obligation at best. But what is important is that we remember the essential cause of our motivation. We are humans, not machines. Caring for humanity is a way of transferring our anxiety into meaningful action. This makes us feel better about ourselves which allows us the confidence to recognize and accept goodness from the world. This reconnection to our basic goodness has to be maintained with the daily effort of coming back. We get lost and we come back. Over and over. There is no other way to progress. We train daily by simply coming back to the breath in our practice. Eventually, we gain the confidence to remember to recognize and return to the present in daily life. Then we can turn our life over to our higher power, which is always at the service of helping others. We can go from anxious self-centeredness, which is self-limiting, to the confidence to allow our life to unfold as it should. When we are selfish, we are walling ourselves away from goodness and so will struggle in fear. When we see this, our daily work, our good work, is to return.

It is the biological imperative to protect life on our planet. When we are in alignment with that, we are part of the goodness of creation. With this view, all the goodness in life is dedicated to giving us the means to protect life.