On Knowing You Can Bear It (In the Time of Coronavirus)

There is a story in Jack Kornfield’s wonderful book, The Wise Heart, that reminds us of what kindness and compassion can do for us in the immediacy of illness, uncertainty and fear,  as individuals and collectively as a human family:

JK: On one occasion I was sick with what was probably malaria, lying in my hut, feverish and wretched.  I had received medicine but it was slow in taking effect. Ajahn Chah came to visit me.  “Sick and feverish, huh?” he asked.  “Yes,” I replied weakly.  “It’s painful all over, isn’t it?” I nodded.  “Yes, it’s suffering alright.”  He paused.  “Here. This is where we have to practice.  Not just sitting in the meditation hall.  It’s hard. All the body and mind torments.” He waited for a while, then he looked at me with the warmth of a kind grandfather.  “You can bear it, you know.  You can do it.”  I felt that he was fully there with me, that he knew my pain from his own hard struggles.  It took some time for the sickness to pass, but his simple kindness made the situation bearable.  His compassion gave me courage and helped me find my own freedom in the midst of hardship.

Much of my own teaching centers around guided meditations, the application of mindfulness, practices of personal development, all towards the aims of optimal well-being, increased focus and performance at work and reducing our day to day stress. These are all honorable and important intentions for the quality of our lives.  I feel privileged to be able to do it.

AND what drew me to mindfulness so very long ago was its powerful antidote to fear and suffering and trauma, moments like these- when any escape is a mirage and avoiding reality for something more palatable is not only dangerous but sometimes lethal.

Mindfulness as part of an overarching philosophy of our human suffering and how to ease that suffering has its underpinnings in the teaching of compassion as our very human nature. Mindfulness without embodied kindness  lacks the power to sustain our spirit when it tires.

As the poet Naomi Shihab Nye writes: “Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things/feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.  What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the the regions of kindness…then it is only kindness that makes sense any more.

The answer say the sages and those who have fought the hard fight (as Paulo Coehlo likes to call it) is kindness. Kindness is a tender quality of being with unbreakable roots. You can bear it. You are being held in your own heart, cared for by the stranger who is here to make you well and sharing the fear among us with friends and family, dividing it up and breaking it into more manageable bites.

Kindness is the ‘com’ part of compassion.  Being with the suffering- your own and that of others, with gentleness and a sincere desire to help reminds us of our resilient nature and the indomitability of the human spirit.

A Primer for Letting It Go: When People Get “On Your Last Nerve”

During the course of our daily life, we inevitably push each other’s buttons and pull one another’s triggers. Mostly unintentionally, people can, at times, get “on our last nerve.” We’re human. And most of the time, with the little stuff AND if we’re taking good care of ourselves, it can be easy to just brush it off.

Yet it is also true that when you’ve been hurt (or even annoyed) by someone, at work or in any other part of your life, the path to letting it so is not always so simple.  We know that holding on to a grudge or nursing a slight will only make us feel worse- and not just emotionally.  Resentments and pent-up irritations can cause our blood pressure to spike and activate stress chemicals that can make us physically sick.  And the truth is: it doesn’t really do any good anyway.  Any satisfaction in being right or having the last word is short lived and ultimately a misuse of our imagination.

 

Here are some steps to help you let go when you feel angry, sad or plain indignant:

 

  1. Name It-Whether you’ve hurt yourself or have been hurt by another, allow yourself to simply name the feelings that are there.  They might include guilt, shame, sorrow, confusion, or anger.  A study at UCLA found that when you name your emotional experience it turns the volume down on your amygdala, the emotion center of the brain, and brings resources back to your pre-frontal cortex, the rational part of your brain.  By naming the feeling, you create some space around it and not become overwhelmed.
  2. Feel It- Forcing yourself to let go is an oxymoron.    Keeping hard feelings bottled up only cause additional stress to your mind and body.  Talking it out is helpful- to a point.  Sharing helps you expand your perspective, and perhaps even see what happened through a different lens. It’s not about telling everyone your side of a story.  It’s about letting out your frustration so you can move on. This could also mean writing about it. The practice below can also help you to pause and sense what you’re feeling.
  3. Flip Your Focus. If possible, see if you shift your focus from being the victim to seeing the other person as being distracted in their own inner world of worries, who are, like so many of us, stuck in reactivity.  People lash out and speak before thinking, sometimes. Have we ever done this?  This is difficult to do, but remember, you’re not condoning any action.  It’s just about trying to see how each of us are deeply impacted by our life experiences, which informs how we show up in the world.  Researcher Brene Brown, author of Rising Strong, says, “Blaming is a way to discharge pain and discomfort.”  However, it gives us a false sense of control inevitably keeping the negativity kicking around in our minds, increasing our stress and eroding our relationships. Compassion tends to flow a more understanding perspective.

 

  1. Bring Awareness Practices into your daily life.  In two recent studies in both the Journal of American College Health and The Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology with several hundred participants that found a direct link that a consistent mindfulness practice supports our ability to forgive.

 

  1. Have patience: Forgiving and letting things go isn’t always a one and done.  It’s not always a quick fix.  It’s a process, so be patient with yourself.  With smaller transgressions, forgiveness can happen pretty quickly, but with the larger ones, it can take longer.

 

A Mini Forgiveness Practice to Try (1x Day):

 

Think of someone who has caused you angst (to start, it’s not advisable a person who has deeply hurt you).  Visualize the person and even feel the tightness in your unwillingness to let go.  Now, observe what emotion is present.  Is it anger, resentment, sadness?  Use your body as a barometer and notice physically what you feel?  Are you tense anywhere, or do you feel heavy?  Next, bring awareness to your thoughts; are they spiteful, sad, or something else? If you feel like you have carried this burden long enough, silently repeat: “Breathing in, I acknowledge the hurt.  Breathing out, I am forgiving and releasing this burden from my heart and mind.”  Continue this process for as long as it feels supportive to you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5 PIECES OF ADVICE

Today’s Post is the kind of wisdom you want to tape to your fridge, have folded in your wallet so you see it everyday.  You might want to safety-pin it  to your jacket.  You get the picture. It’s short, sweet and oh so good for you.

The 5 Pieces of Advice by Amercian Buddhist nun rockstar Pema Chodron are reminders to help us stay on the path of growth and vitality:

  1. The mundane details of our life eat us up. Therefore it is important to keep asking ourselves again and again: What is the most important thing? Since death is certain and the time of death is uncertain, what is the most important thing? Let that perspective be your guide.

 

  1. Don’t be afraid to challenge yourself. At the gut level, you might want to go for the most comfortable thing. Always go for the stretch. Sometimes the stretch is to stay, sometimes to go. Sometimes to say, Yes, sometimes to say, No. You don’t always know. The key is to be willing to go through the shedding and unmasking process.

  1.  Rest in the insecurity. Remember that when we lose ground we habitually panic and look for something solid to hold onto: that’s a description of samsara. Go at your own pace. And don’t push it. But continue to train in resting with insecurity.

 

 

4. Don’t believe everything you think. If you can follow this advice, you will be in good shape.

 

  1. And take exactly what appears as your path.

 

 

 

 

 

One Essential for Cultivating Emotional Intelligence

Daniel Goleman’s seminal work, Emotional Intelligence has made universally recognizable the acronyms EI and EQ (referring to Emotional Intelligence and Emotional Quotient). We all seem to have an intuitive grasp of what these terms mean. When referring to a coworker, boss, or a potential employ, we nod our heads approvingly when someone tells us, “She is one of those people with a high EQ” or shake them in sympathy when we hear, “It’s just that he is completely un self-aware, you know, low EQ.” This capacity of individuals to recognize their own, and other people’s emotions, to discriminate between different feelings and label them appropriately, and to use that emotional information to guide thinking and behavior is at the core of leadership competency. 

 Today’s inspiration explores the four competencies of EI: self-awareness, emotional self-regulation, social awareness, and relationship management, and their connection with the role of mindfulness:

By consistently practicing mindfulnessnot only do individuals develop deeper self-awareness, one of the major tenets of EI, they also develop greater insight into others, into human nature and along with an easing of ego-based concerns, mindfulness encourages a more compassionate concern for others.” Dr. Richie Davidson, neuroscientist, author of The Emotional Life of your Brain and founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at UWISC- Madison.

The creator of Google’s Search Inside Yourself program, Chade-Meng Tan, also makes strong the link between EI and mindfulness. Tan wanted to help people find a way to align mindfulness practice with what they wanted to achieve in life, so they can create peace and happiness in themselves, and at the same time create world peace.”  This was predicated on the belief that all empathy and kindness come from cultivating a sense of inner calm, which can be achieved through mindfulness. For Tan the key moment came while reading Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence“I had found my vehicle for aligning meditation with real life, and that vehicle is emotional intelligence. A very good way (and I suspect the only way) to truly develop EI is with contemplative practices starting with Mindfulness Meditation.”

We begin training emotional intelligence by training attention…a strong, stable and perceptive attention affords you calmness and clarity, the foundation on which emotional intelligence is built. Mindfulness is a quality of awareness that is strong both in clarity and stability.  This allows us to perceive emotion with high vividness and resolution.  We can then begin to respond, in the best possible way, to ourselves, to other people and the changing situations of our lives. Being aware and deliberate sure beats reacting in ways that are habitual but don’t really serve us much. In fact, developing emotional intelligence is an ultimately practical endeavor.

And the research is compelling. Research at Harvard and Northeastern have shown that participants in mindfulness training are better able to articulate their emotions and score higher on overall empathy scales than the placebo.  Their conclusion: people who regularly practice mindful meditation can more easily develop the ability to detect and understand the emotions of others. And this greater empathy is circular. The continually flowing loop is from self to others back to self. Knowing yourself lies at the core of EQ, and that the best mental app for this can be found in the mind-training method called mindfulness and meditations that strengthen it.

To enhance your EQ, start with a link to a Three Minute Breathing Space Practice with Zindel Segal, PhD, co-founder of MBCT (Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy):

 

https://youtu.be/amX1IuYFv8A

 

 

 

Living Authentically: The Genuine You

It is the unique combination of talents, personality and experience that make each of us vital to the whole. We sometimes cover up the “real” us; maybe someone once said we were “a bit too much” when we were little or we’re worried that we won’t be accepted if we show up fully ourselves. Of course, these are just notions that don’t serve any good purpose for us or the world. And while it’s true, that we can’t just let it “all hang out” during a workday, we can show up for work with our most authentic self in place. Read more

SIX STEPS FOR EVERYDAY LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

“We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience.”- John Dewey

1.Leadership is not simply a title given to those with a supervisory role or hold a job title that sounds leader-like. Leadership is about influencing people and processes in service of accomplishing a collective aim or goal. Such influence can be performed by any member of a group or organization. This notion of leadership is a fundamental state that we can enter and exit when called upon. It’s about focusing on collective needs and goals and influencing the group towards results that benefit the whole. Read more

Minding the Questions

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Much of skillful leadership involves asking great questions…and really wanting to know the answer. Today’s question involves a disciplined awareness and an inquisitiveness on your part:

What’s Needed Most Right Now, at a Time like This?

This is a worthwhile question; worthy of bringing your attention to- a refrain to ask yourself with curiosity from time to time throughout each day. You could choose to even make it a practice. Read more

“Er”, “Um”, “Like”: Mindful vs. Mindless Speech

 

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I stumbled across a creative and innovative practice this morning that is worth sharing. It incorporates mindfulness into our daily lives in a way that forces us to actually think about what we are saying and how we are saying it. This simple but challenging instruction brings an immediate and positive shift to how we are in the world. Read more

EASING OUT OF COMPULSION, EASING IN TO CHOICE

brainThere are lots of ways in which we as human beings can get caught under the vast net of stress in our lives. We oftentimes find ourselves feeling trapped by difficult circumstances and the attending feelings and thoughts that arise from them. All of this can create a sense of being overwhelmed and life at times can appear unmanageable. We then struggle and we suffer. Often times the root cause no longer exists but our coping strategies themselves have become problematic. Read more

10 Simple Ways to Invite Mindfulness into the Present Moment

apples_editMindfulness is not reserved for only those times when you are “formally practicing.” While taking the time to close your eyes and follow your breath, or taking a mindful walk can be enormously helpful,  we can build our awareness by bringing our full attention to our everyday daily activities. These are the tasks that have been so ingrained by repetition , so habitual that they are often times performed on autopilot. It can almost be like we are sleepwalking.  We sometimes don’t even remember doing them! Read more