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The Blog is changing address! For those of you who have saved this page please save the new address. All the old posts and all new posts will be found at that address from today onwards

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From now on you can find it at www.mindfulbalance.wordpress.com

Balance in mind and body

The first three pillars of the MBSR Programme are awareness of the body, awareness of emotions and awareness of thoughts. All of these need to work together in harmony for us to have a healthy and positive life.

The first pillar is awareness of the body, both in the way stress manifests itself in the body and how a healthy lifestyle requires a healthy body. One way this is cultivated in the MBSR programme is through Mindful Yoga exercises.

The importance of physical fitness for the mind has been supported in a recent study by Laura Baker and her colleagues at the University of Washington, published in the Archives of Neurology. It found that older adults who engaged in regular exercise showed improved concentration and multi-tasking skills. Another study, this time conducted by Charles Hillman PhD, and published in journal of the American College of Sports Medicine showed that a 30 minute aerobic workout significantly improved the accuracy of memory on administered tests. Finally, a recent Duke University study found that middle-aged participants who worked out for 30 minutes, three to four times a week, showed a 30% improvement in mental function after 4 months. As Dr Hillman stated: “data shows that getting regular exercise over time can increase both gray and white matter in the brain and make a huge difference in how well you process and track information, stay on task and allocate your mental resources”

Laura D. Baker, PhD, et al., Effects of Aerobic Exercise on Mild Cognitive Impairment : A Controlled Trial, Arch Neurol. 2010;67(1):71-79.

Sunday Quote

We often ask, "What's wrong?" Doing so we invite painful seeds of sorrow to come up and manifest. We feel suffering, anger and depression and produce more such seeds.

We would be much happier if we tried to stay in touch with the healthy, joyful seeds inside of us and around us. We should learn to ask "What is not wrong?" and be in touch with that".

Thich Nhat Hahn, Peace is Every Step

Home

We can travel a long way and do many different things, but our deepest happiness is not born from accumulating new experiences. It is born from letting go of what is unnecessary, and knowing ourselves to be always at home. True happiness may not be at all far away, but it requires a radical change of view as to where to find it.

Sharon Salzberg, Loving Kindness

How to tackle a long task

"My son, every day work on only as much ground as your body takes up in space lying down,and your work will progress gradually
and you will not lose heart"

When he heard this, the young man
acted accordingly,
and within a short time the field was
cleared and cultivated.
Do the same, work step by step
and you will not lose heart.

Sayings of the Desert Fathers.

These sayings from the 4th Century have a lot of wisdom in them. In this one the young man gets discouraged because the field is hard to plough. He does not have the strength and feels paralysed. He does not know where to start and as a consequence leaves everything just lying around. We are like this when we have to face a difficult or long task, or indeed a difficult person.

The old man gives the best advice. Do not consider the whole field, just do as much ground as you would sleep on in the night. That can be done easily. And so the young man begins, slowly, but soon the whole field gets done.

Each day we can think that we have a mountain of tasks ahead of us. And if we get tired or stressed they seem even greater. The advice is to start at one place and work slowly, not considering the whole of the task. If we look at the whole day and the extent of work to be done, we can get discouraged and make no progress. Just do one thing after another, step by step....we can all do that without being overwhelmed.

It is the same with our inner life. If we get frightened by our faults or difficulties and think that we will never change, we will never get started. We give up on ourselves. It is enough to do a little piece of work each day, such as a short sitting, and not concern ourselves with the whole field. This way progress happens, without us even noticing it.

The way we live

The value of a life
does not depend on
the place we occupy;

It depends on the way
we occupy that place.

Therese of Lisieux

The other side of the world

Happiness is not a place that is found
outside of where we are right now.
If you wanted to find a perfect get-away
from all your stress and unhappiness,
where and how far would you go?
To the other side of the world,
to the International Space Station,
or just the nearest bar?
Your body would be somewhere else,
but still, you would be taking your
stressed, unhappy mind with you

Thich Nhat Hahn

Thoughts

Coming, going,
the waterbirds
don't leave a trace,
don't follow a path.

Dogen, On Non-Dependence of Mind

Moving towards a Mindful Society

Jon Kabat Zinn recently gave an interesting and thought-provoking interview to the Buddhist Magazine Shambhala Sun about developing mindfulness in the whole of sosiety. In it he talks about the benefits of developing greater awareness, for ourselves and for society as a whole:

Genuine awareness can modulate our thinking, so that we become less driven by unexamined motivations to put ourselves first, to control things to assuage our fear, to always proffer our brilliant answer. We can create an enormous amount of harm, for example, by not listening to other people who might have different views and insights. Fortunately, we have more of an opportunity these days to balance the cultivation of thinking with the cultivation of awareness. Anyone can restore some degree of balance between thinking and awareness right in this present moment, which is the only moment that any of us ever has anyway. The potential outcomes from purposefully learning to inhabit awareness and bring thought into greater balance are extremely positive and healthy for ourselves and the world at large.

The full interview is well worth the read. You can access it directly by clicking on the title to this post or by finding it here:

http://www.shambhalasun.com/index.php?Itemid=0&id=3493&option=com_content&task=view

Every moment
and every event
of every person's life on earth
plants something in their soul.

Thomas Merton

Just

Practice is just hearing, just seeing, just feeling.
This is what Christians call the face of God: simply taking in this world as it manifests.
We feel our body; we hear the cars and birds.
That's all there is.

Charlotte Joko Beck

Every day

"Make of yourself a light,"
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal-a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.

An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire-
clearly I'm not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

Mary Oliver

The mind like the sky

Teachers often suggest considering your thoughts to be like clouds in the sky. Some are dark and stormy, some are beautiful and fat, while others are wispy and ethereal. Sometimes there are no clouds at all. No matter. Just like clouds in the sky, thoughts pass through your mind. And just like the sky, your mind can contain it all.

We are accustomed to identifying with every large or small thought that comes along. But you can train in identifying as the sky instead. When you do, tremendous confidence arises. You see beyond doubt that you can accommodate it all —sunshine, storms, mist, fog, hail —and never give up.

Susan Piver

Increasing happiness

A recent study found that happiness significantly increases as people pass their 50th birthday. It seems that stress and worry fade after the landmark birthday and people begin experiencing greater daily joy than younger adults. A 2010 survey of more than 340,000 people published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found overall feelings of wellbeing improve as we pass middle age.

Dr Arthur Stone, a psychologist of Stony Brook University, New York, said the findings were "striking".

You would think as chronic illness threatens life would get worse but that is not the case because people don't focus on the threats. They focus on the good things in life like family and friends.

The researchers found positive and negative emotions varied with age similarly in both sexes – although women reported greater stress, worry and sadness at all ages. Variables such as having children, being unemployed, or being single did not affect age-related patterns of well being.

Stress and anger reduced in the 20s but worry and anxiety remain a significant issue. Peter S. Kanaris, Ph.D., a psychologist and coordinator of public education for the New York State Psychological Association, observes: Prior to midlife, people are building families, paying mortgages, developing in their careers at a time when there is much more uncertainty than usual. This creates a great deal of stress.

By contrast, the 40s and 50s are actually a time of contentment: People in midlife have reached a time where they are a little more settled and established, he says. With levels of stress and worry all dropping significantly in the fifties, the levels of happiness and enjoyment increase.

Dr Carlo Strenger, of Israel's Tel Aviv University, gives further food for thought: If you make fruitful use of what you have discovered about yourself in the first half of your life, the second half can be the most fulfiling. Most people can anticipate a second life, if not a second career.

The right time

To truly be kind to others (and ourselves for that matter), it helps to abandon time slavery and try to notice what place others are keeping, to notice their face and their gesture, to know when they are ready to hear something, ready to be quiet, ready to come, to go, to be led, to be followed.

So many times I have been unable to listen or to notice what someone was going through or where they were headed because it didn’t meet with my schedule. Patience and timing are inextricably linked. Patience, which we can regard with such excruciation, offers a hidden reward. When we stop watching the pot, we may learn that it boils right on time.

Sometimes my father would forget to wind the big clock, the weights would fall, and time would stop. We wind the clock. It does not have to wind us.

Barry Boyce, What Time is Now?

Some thoughts on illness

Loss and anguish, bereavement and grief, anxiety and despair, as well as all the joy available to us, lie at the very core of our humanity and beckon us to meet them face-on when they arise, and know them and accept them as they are.

It is precisely a turning toward and an embracing, rather than a turning away or a denying or suppressing of feeling that is most called for and that awareness embodies. Awareness may not diminish the enormity of our pain in all circumstances. It does provide a greater basket for tenderly holding and intimately knowing our suffering in any and all circumstances, and that, it turns out, is transformative and can make all the difference between endless imprisonment in pain and suffering and freedom from suffering, even though we have no immunity to the various forms of pain that, as human beings, we are invariably subject to.

Jon Kabat Zinn

Eyes to see

The real voyage of discovery
consists not in seeing new landscapes
but in having new eyes

Proust

The Wrong Trousers

Sometimes we get little reminders that our way of seeing the world is not always completely objective. We see the world not as it actually is, but as we are.

I recently bought some clothes, thinking that they looked nice. Shortly afterwards I was informed that the colour did not suit me and that they were a strange choice. For a moment I took refuge in the fact that maybe I have better taste, that I have an interesting dress sense, and anyway I don't have too much interest in criteria like colour. I had a certain notion of how these clothes were right. Normally when our judgment is questioned we need to rationalize and reduce some dissonance between our "good judgment" and others' opinions. However, I soon admitted to myself that others are probably more objective and that I was more than likely wrong.

I know that in most things, I see through my own subjective filters, so it is likely the same for my dress sense. We think we see something as it is. But really it is we see it through our own conditioning and history, and often through the story which is dominant in our life at that moment. Indeed, most thinking is not pure thought, but is rather a self-focused emotional activity. A similar process applies to the words we use. Something may be said to us with the best of intentions but we hear it through the emotional place we are standing. Or similarly, a simple email or text message which we send can be understood completely differently by the person receiving it, because of where they are at, and as a result they move to an interpretation which was never intended.

Practice is essentially clarifying our vision. We learn to sit still, to befriend ourselves. We return to sit each day in order to see through our mental processes, with all their noise; and to increasingly enter into reality as-it-actually-is. We see that we can hardly take a breath without a thought or opinion or judgment going through our head. We see that we prefer to relate to life through our thoughts and frequently our fears. Our natural calm mind is often clouded by the limited self-image created by habitual, obsessive, neuronal patterns. Practice works on this, allowing us let go of the fears that drive our thoughts, getting closer to the moment as it is. We observe the mind in order to not get lost in it. We learn to relate simply with the thoughts, feelings and experiences that arise as we sit. Slowly we get to see the world more objectively. To see things as they are, not as I want them to be.

Swimming

Have been taking swimming lessons the past few weeks. Some things are best learned early, but I never learned how to swim as a child. It is going so well; the secret is to relax and let go. I don't know if I will ever swim like a fish but am already pleased with being able to keep my head under the water and move forward across the pool. For me it is such a freedom to float on the water and not be afraid.

Learning to swim contains a lot of lessons which can be applied to practice and to life. In many ways we can approach our practice as if we are there to correct or fix something. We often start from the deep-down assumption that there is something wrong with us, that we need to change or get away from. So we seek out personal development programmes or practice in order to change ourselves, to get away from what we are not at ease with. Or we can seek outside ourselves, in work, projects or relationships, for something that will complete us.

What swimming teaches is that somethings go better when we just relax and let go. We can stop striving. We can release the need to 'control' everything in our lives. When we tense up and try to fix things, we create a whole new set of problems. Often when we are stressed out, we attract more stress into our lives. We end up trying to make ourselves different than how we actually are. Freedom starts with accepting ourselves and letting go, trusting that the water, or that life. will actually support us. We can let go of our fears.

Sometimes, in order to let go we must "unlearn" many of the things we have spent our entire life learning and which have been reinforced in relationships and life's experiences. From an early age, we have been conditioned to worry about our family, our relationships, our jobs, our security, and everything else in our lives that we want to improve. We are taught to compete and to overcome our anxiety by doing better and striving harder. Ironically, when we stop the worry, stress, and fear, we allow our natural rhythm to flow into us and we drop into our deep inner resources. The greatest truth we learn from practice is that we are already perfect, just as we are. Nothing needs to be added to us in this moment. We can just float and let go.