Letting go of fear

Awareness is born of intimacy. We can only fear what we do not understand and what we perceive from a distance. We can only find compassion and freedom in intimacy. We can be afraid of intimacy because we are afraid of helplessness; we fear that we don’t have the inner balance to embrace it without being overwhelmed. Yet each time we find the willingness to meet fear, we discover we are not powerless. Awareness rescues us from helplessness, teaching us to be helpful through our kindness, patience, resilience, and courage. Awareness is the forerunner of understanding, and understanding is the prerequisite to bringing suffering to an end.

Christine Feldman

Running

Many of us don’t allow ourselves to be relaxed.

Why do we always try to run and run, even while having our breakfast, while having our lunch, while walking, while sitting? There’s something pushing and pulling us all the time. We make ourselves busy in the hopes of having happiness in the future. In the sutra “Knowing the Better Way to Live Alone,” the Buddha said clearly, "Don’t get caught in the past, because the past is gone. Don’t get upset about the future, because the future is not yet here. There is only one moment for you to be alive, and that is the present moment. Go back to the present moment and live this moment deeply, and you’ll be free."

How do we liberate ourselves in order to really be in the here and the now? Meditation offers the practice of stopping. Let’s try not to run. We run because we’re too afraid.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Mindfulness and emotional well being

Some research has been done on the effects of meditation on the development of positive emotions, leading to a greater ability to function in everyday life. One urban study conducted by Roth and Robbins in 2004* and published in Psychosomatic Medicine, looked at the effect of the eight week Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme on the development of positive emotions.

The results showed significant improvement in the participants’ emotional and social functioning, as well as their general health and vitality. Even though no impact on physical functioning was detected in this study, participants did report themselves more capable of working and performing their day-to-day activities. These improvements were reflected in an overall improvement in their health-related quality of life. It was noted that the ongoing effect of these benefits tended to increase with more frequent mindfulness practice, and were most pronounced in experienced mindfulness practitioners.

… with nothing to do, the mind is unable to prevent negative thoughts from elbowing their way to center stage worries about one’s love life, health, investments, family, and job are always hovering at the periphery of attention, waiting until there is nothing pressing that demands concentration. As soon as the mind is ready to relax, zap! the potential problems that were waiting in the wings take over.

Csikszentmihalyi, Flow


*“Mindfulness based stress reduction and health related quality of life: finding from a bilingual inner-city patient population”, Psychosomatic Medicine, 2004: 66(1):112-23

The Narrowness of Fear

In many ways it seems that humans change behaviours more easily in response to fear than in response to more positive emotions. We quickly get defensive, shut down and move away in response to real or perceived threats. And even some of the "positive" resolutions which are formed in these days are fear-driven, motivated by negative views of ourselves or comparisons with others or more desired states. It would seem that we have evolved to use fear and anxiety more regularly than more positive emotions, simply because they may be more immediately necessary for survival.

This could be partly because positive emotions like joy, love, calmness and gratitude do not immediately impact as forcibly as fear or anger. They do not register as strongly in the body, or push to to act in the same ways. All emotions can lead to changes in what has been called “momentary thought-action repertoires" – the range of potential actions the body and mind are prepared to take. However, the negative emotions have a specific function of promoting survival. This means that when we consistently practice negative emotions, such as fear, our thought-action activity significantly narrows, focusing on avoiding and defense. Since fear is somewhat "easier" to follow, some psychologists argue that we need to learn skills to keep fear in check and develop positive emotions.

Positive emotions such as joy, gratitude, and contentment, seem to broaden a person's thoughts and actions, and help us approach what we need in order to grow fully. These emotions broaden, build and open people's mindsets, enabling more creative and flexible thinking. Thus they expand our thinking and behaving capacities. These positive emotions also seems to effect our overall health and even our recovery from illness. Research has found that contentment and joy speed the recovery of a patient after illnesses and after the onset of certain diseases. Using positive emotions seems to be at the heart of what allows people to bounce back from hardship and become stronger than before. Not only do they effect the individual in the present but they seem to lead to better mood and functioning in the future. Again, studies show that people who increase their positive emotions develop better collaborations with others, their resilience and optimism strengthens, and they become more content with life, compared with people who do nothing to experience them more frequently.

Cultivating positive emotions therefore would seem to be a necessary skill, if only to loosen the effect of negative emotions which can dominate a person's body and mind. How can we do this? It seems that the key is to start in our actual current circumstances. Developing the ability to be truly open to what actually is happening in our lives and celebrating the good things found there, seems to be crucial. Not surprisingly meditation has been found to boost positive emotions, as has walking or running in nature, dancing, or reading a new book.

Simple changes in self-talk can also help. Self-limiting talk, - such as “I can’t handle this!” or “This is impossible!” - is particularly damaging because it increases the stress in a particular situation and stops the person from looking for solutions. It is better to turn such thoughts into questions. Thinking “How can I handle this?” or “How is this possible?” already opens up more space and allows the imagination seek new possibilities.

Learning new habits

At this time of year people often focus on new habits of behaviour, changing existing patterns or learning new skills. For example, some seek to more exercise, some to eat more healthily or learn a new skill, or maybe even meditate every day. The question is, how often does it need to be performed before it no longer requires huge effort or massive self-discipline? How many days or weeks does it take for a new habit to become ingrained?

The popular myth is that it takes somewhere between 21 and 28 days. However there does not seem to be any real evidence for this number at all. The figure might have originated with the observations of a surgeon, a Dr Maltz, who wrote that amputees took, on average, 21 days to adjust to the loss of a limb. He abstracted from this to argue that all people take 21 days to adjust to any major life changes.

Now unless the change you intended for 2010 involves major surgery, this does not seem to be the case. More helpful is the study carried out by Phillippa Lally and colleagues from University College London in 2009. She did some research on 96 people who were interested in forming a new habit, such as eating fruit with lunch or doing a 15 minute jog every day. The participants were asked each day how automatic their new behaviours felt. For example they were asked whether the behaviour was 'hard not to do' and could be done 'without thinking'.

On average, the participants reported that the behaviours felt automatic after 66 days, or after over two months. In other words it had become a habit. This was the average, with some reporting as early as 20 days and others 254 days. It seems related to the type of new behaviour being tried, some being harder to acquire than others. Finally it seems that some people in the study were slower than others in their attempts to start new behaviours, suggesting that there may be personalities more resistant to change.

A bit different, then, from the popular optimism which infects people around New Years Eve and which momentarily presents itself as the answer to all our discontents.

Noise and silence

For some people today is the last day of the holidays before the return to work tomorrow. After a period of rest it will be back to the stress and rush of deadlines and meetings, or commuting, and noise. Often the background noise of the city is so pervasive that we can get to a stage that we do not even notice it. As the continual playing of Christmas music in shops over the past few weeks demonstrates, we can't seem to live without some background sound. We have created an acceptance of our noisy world in spite of some evidence that it is making us ill physically and psychologically.

For example, a study by Cornell University published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2001 found that low-level office noise increases health risks and lowers task motivation for people who work there. The study found that workers in a noisy office experienced significantly higher levels of stress and made 40 percent fewer attempts to solve an unsolvable puzzle than a similar group in quiet working conditions. The effect of this stress meant that the same workers were less likely to take breaks or make healthy adjustments which would help them in the long term.

As one of the researchers, Gary Evans, an expert on environmental stress, stated: "One possible reason is that under stress, people focus in on their main task or activity. This focusing leads to less flexibility in considering alternatives during decision making, for example. Perhaps if people are working at a task and are under more stress, they become more focused on the task itself, not being as cognizant as they should be to change their posture or take a break."

In many cases we have no control over our external environment of the noise of a city. However we do have choices in our internal environment and in our own homes. Setting aside time for meditation creates an interior silence. However we can support this by reducing some of the noise that surrounds us, turning off the radio in the car or the TV in the house. We can start this slowly, for short periods, gradually increasing the length of time. It may be that soon we will begin to look forward the periods of silence we have built into our day and even want more. Research supports the fact that this is a step towards becoming more relaxed and less tense even in the midst of our noisy world.

How is it possible to reach inner silence? Sometimes we are apparently silent, and yet we have great discussions within, struggling with imaginary partners or with ourselves. Calming our souls requires a kind of simplicity: "I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvellous for me." Silence means recognising that my worries can’t do much. Silence means leaving what is beyond my reach and capacity. A moment of silence, even very short, is like a holy stop, a sabbath rest, a truce from worries.

Taize The Value of Silence

Resolutions III: Small Steps

Big goals can be discouraging. They can sometimes be set so far out of reach that we get discouraged at the first setback and give up on them altogether. That’s why it seems that gradual, small steps work better in achieving greater life changes. Setting a series of small, attainable goals helps us better achieve that big goal.

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, professor of psychology at Yale University has studied extensively the relationship between mood, motivation and thinking patterns. She has particularly looked at rumination, when people focus more on negative aspects of their achievements and life and their “possible causes and consequences.” According to her, people who ruminate get stuck in a cycle of thinking about their achievements and their problems and, as a result, make things worse by creating negative thinking, blaming and a decreased ability to problem solve. Perhaps her best known book is "Women who Think Too Much: How to Break Free of Overthinking and Reclaim Your Life"

This thinking pattern can affect the way we approach positive change, such as resolutions around health or attitudes toward work. Consequently Nolen-Hoeksema recommends that we focus on small achievable goals, make one specific by writing it down, and rewarding ourselves when we achieve it. Her advice is found in an article on today's CNN website entitled "10 ways to get motivated for change in 2010"

Let's say you want to work on being more optimistic this year. Nolen-Hoeksema recommends imagining what you would be like if you were optimistic. Imagine yourself going through a day at work if you were optimistic and confident, then write that down in great detail. Now, you have specific aspects of that ideal of optimism to work toward. Pick one thing that the optimistic you is doing that you're not, and start working in that direction.

The rest of the advice can be found at http://edition.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/12/29/motivation.new.years.resolutions/index.html?iref=allsearch

Living the New Year fully

A Bright morning, a clear start to the New Year.

A nice quotation from Mary Oliver on getting the most out of each moment and each day:

When it's over, I want to say:
all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Mary Oliver, When Death Comes

Setting out

The soul is dyed the colour of its thoughts.
Think only on those things that are in line with your principles and can bear the light of day.

The content of your character is your choice.

Day by day, what you do is who you become.
Your integrity is your destiny -
it is the light that guides your way.

Heraclitus (c.540 - c.475 BC)