Tag: meditation

Mind Magic

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Being a psychologist, I’ve done a lot of thinking and studying about the human brain – the organ that makes us “the magic animal.” Humans can not only see things as they are, but as they could be. Our cognitive abilities and our imaginations allow us to create cultures and cities and symphony orchestras and entertaining stories about things that never happened.

It was my privilege, as a therapist, to be a witness to people changing their lives in positive ways. I’ve seen parents become better at raising their children. I’ve seen violent people learn that anger needn’t lead to violence, and learn to control their behavior no matter how angry they got. I’ve seen couples discover deep emotional intimacy while respecting one another’s boundaries. I’ve long suspected that major changes in a person’s behavior patterns (i.e. mastering anger management) was probably causing structural synaptic changes in their brains. Synaptic pathways mediate both emotions and behaviors.

My suspicions have been validated in recent years by research on brain neuroplasticity. Our brains have the ability to reorganize themselves structurally and functionally, by forming new neural connections. Brains can “re-wire” themselves to compensate for injury or disease, and to adjust to new or changing situations. My guess is that the brains of bilingual people have more complex neural pathways related to speech and language than people who only speak one language. I suspect that it gets easier over time for formerly violent people to use their anger management skills, because daily practice creates new neural connections, new reflex behaviors.

The human brain has a wide repertoire  of states of consciousness (SOCs). The very notion of “altered states of consciousness” presupposes that there’s a “standard” SOC – which is clearly not the case. Your SOC is different when you solve a math problem, or listen to music, or perform in front of an audience, or make love. So, I submit that we have a range of standard SOCs, which everyone experiences, as well as a range of alternate SOCs – some of which not everyone will experience. Taking drugs – including alcohol and nicotine – reliably alters consciousness in a variety of predictable ways. I won’t get into drugs as a means of altering consciousness in this post, other than to recommend Michael Pollan’s  book, How To Change Your Mind, which is about the potential of psychedelic experiences to bring about  lasting positive changes in peoples’ lives – even after a single “trip.”

I’d like to briefly share some of the things I’ve learned about our potential to “change our minds” without using drugs. Rational thinking  is a learnable skill. We all have rational and irrational thoughts. Many people can’t tell the difference between  them and sometimes act on irrational thoughts, complicating their lives. Rational thinkers are people who can differentiate their rational thoughts from their irrational thoughts, and make rational decisions. I believe that the brains of rational thinkers are wired differently – through practice – than the brains of those who can’t tell the difference. Active listening is a learnable skill that improves receptivity to nuances of interpersonal dialogue and music appreciation, among other things. Over decades of listening to classical music, I’ve become a better listener. Listening is often a passive process, but active listening is mindful listening, with no intruding thoughts.

Hypnosis is generally understood as a SOC “induced” by a hypnotist, where the brain is receptive to suggestion. People who are good hypnotic subjects can learn self-hypnosis to relieve pain, overcome bad habits, and otherwise improve their lives. Meditation is similar to active listening only in that it involves mental focus. But in active listening, the mind is focused on some external thing, whether words or music. Experienced meditators can maintain awareness,without any object of that awareness. There are things to be learned by simple, sustained awareness that can’t be learned by thinking, or be put into words. Mindfulness is a kind of meditation where the meditator is focused on their immediate experience, to the exclusion of thoughts about what they’re experiencing – especially judgments like good or bad, beautiful or ugly. Walking or chopping wood can be the focus of mindfulness meditation.

Not everyone experiences all of these SOCs; some require preparation and effort. Training that I received from anthropologist and practicing shaman Dr. Michael Harner enabled me to experience the shamanic state of consciousness, in which I’ve had vivid experiences of “journeying” in Dreamtime and encountering spirit animals. You can learn more about the techniques of shamanic journeying at http://www.shamanism.org, the website of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, which Dr. Harner founded.

While I agree with Michael Pollan that psychedelic “trips” can, under the right conditions, be profound, positive life-changing experiences, I wrote this post as an overview of non-drug SOCs that can change our minds and lives. If you want to know more about any of these tools for personal growth, I’ve written in more detail about psychedelic consciousness, shamanic journeying, rational thinking, active listening, hypnosis, meditation and mindfulness in previous posts. You’ll also find a few entertaining stories about things that never happened.

Your mind is magical.

Turning off your mental radio

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Although this post is about meditation, and I’ve taught basic meditation techniques to people for years, I’m not a daily meditator, myself. I think of meditation as an ancient, effective psychotechnology – a tool/skill for controlling mental activity. I’ve found it to be helpful in many situations, and have described learning to meditate as learning to “turn off your mental radio” at will.

A Buddhist text describes the mind as a “drunken monkey bitten by a scorpion,” and thinking is the source of much human suffering. Many people that I worked with as a therapist often felt overwhelmed by the unending press of their own thoughts, resulting in high levels of stress and distress – often in the form of anxiety and depression. People suffering from insomnia complained that they couldn’t stop thinking when they needed to be sleeping. I’ve written about rational thinking as a learnable skill in previous posts, but meditation gets at the root problem of runaway thoughts – regardless of content. Practicing it can prevent a thought from becoming an unwanted “train of thoughts” that might take you to places you don’t want to go. In a meditative state one can be aware, without being aware of any thing.

I’ve never had chronic sleep problems, but my rare experiences of insomnia used to be hellish, as I tossed and turned in bed, telling myself that I was having a terrible time. Now, when I have trouble falling asleep, I can avoid being aroused by the content of my thoughts. I can turn off my mental radio and experience getting needed rest, until I fall asleep again. I no longer torment myself with unwanted thoughts that keep me awake. There are other benefits that come from learning to meditate. You can learn it all by yourself. All it takes is practice.

There are many ways to learn how to meditate, and you don’t have to learn yoga or tai chi to discover how to control your mental activity. Daily meditators extol the benefits of their practice, but even occasional meditation can be a helpful skill, enabling you to keep your focus and to reduce your stress. As a therapist, I felt obligated to remain 100% present in the here-and-now with each client. Sometimes I would do a brief meditation between therapy clients, to clear my mind.

I started out with what I call one-point meditation, and went on to learn to maintain awareness, without any object of my awareness – no-point meditation. There are many different focal stimuli that can be used to learn one-point meditation. Probably the most popular method is to focus on your breath, to the exclusion of all thought. But learners can also focus on a visual stimulus such as a candle flame in a dark room or a mandala, or an aural stimulus – a ringing bell or a mantra such as “Om.” In mindfulness meditation, you focus on your present surround or activity, to the exclusion of thoughts about the situation or activity. Walking, or washing the dishes, can be a meditation.

Other than mindfulness meditation or movement meditations such as tai chi, most meditators sit, keeping a straight spine. As you follow your breathing, or try to lose yourself in a mandala or a candle flame or a mantra, thoughts will intrude on the purity of your concentration. One thought can easily lead to a train of thoughts that distracts you from your focal point. Learning to meditate involves learning not to let these thoughts carry you away from the object of your concentration. You notice the thought but don’t follow it, letting it pass, while focusing back on the candle flame, the mantra, your breath, or the activity you’re engaged in. When you first achieve a meditative state, you’ll know it; but as soon as you think, “I’m meditating!” you’re not. Repeat. With practice, you can extend the time that your awareness is one-pointed, uncontaminated by thought.

Once you make progress in one-point meditation, and can let intrusive thoughts drift by without distracting you from simple awareness, you can start to practice turning off your mental radio altogether, with no focal stimulus. I know from long experience that I can be alert and aware, without being aware of any thing, including my own thoughts. In the meditative state, I’m free from stress. I can meditate briefly, to clear my mind between mentally taxing activities. I can clear my mind of intrusive thoughts when I want to fall asleep.

Rhythmic breathing is central to learning meditation, even if you’re focusing on a candle flame or a mantra or an activity. Breathing is a constant, automatic activity. When you bring it into conscious awareness, you can learn to empty your mind of thought – if that is your goal. (Pranayama yoga teaches people to alter their consciousness in a variety of directions, by altering their breathing in prescribed ways.) Your initial practice sessions need not last long. If you set aside ten or fifteen minutes, several times a week, you can teach yourself how to turn off your mental radio.

 

 

The Great Secret

Posted in consciousness, philosophy, psychology, religion1 Comment

In a previous post I mentioned the Great Secret. My fictional protagonist – a man on a quest for Meaning – found a book with the title The Great Secret, only to discover that the pages were blank. I actually have a book titled The Great Secret, written in 1922. Its Flemish author (who wrote in French), Maurice Maeterlinck, won a Nobel Prize in Literature for his poems, plays and essays. Despite its having been written almost a century ago, it’s well-researched and still provides a valuable guide to the tradition of the Great Secret. What attracts me to the notion of the Great Secret is my sense that we all live at the heart of a Mystery: what is life? what is consciousness? what does it all mean?

Maeterlinck studied the Vedic (Hindu) tradition of India, Egyptian religion, Zoroastrianism, Greek mystery schools, Buddhism, Jewish Cabalists, Gnostics, Neoplatonists, and alchemists. I don’t think modern scholars can add much to what Maeterlinck learned about  these ancient wisdom traditions. He was no starry-eyed True Believer, but a  thorough and objective scholar. It’s been said that “those who know don’t tell; those who tell don’t know.” Maeterlinck doesn’t offer a definitive answer to the question, “what is the Great Secret?” but shares what he’d learned from years of study – food for thought. His succinct conclusion is mysterious, not definitive – as you will see at the end of this post.

There were many mystery religions and cults in the ancient world. They often had an outer circle of adherents who were given one set of teachings (exoteric knowledge), and an inner circle of initiates to whom the Great Secret (esoteric knowledge) had been revealed. This knowledge challenged the conventions of the outer circle, often in a shocking way. Imagine growing up believing that God is a male, only to be told by the high priest at your initiation that God is actually female. Maeterlinck suggests that what was whispered in the ear of Egyptian initiates was, “Osiris is a dark god.”

One of the core tenets of the Vedic tradition is that all things are one thing: Brahman. Maya – the veil of illusion – keeps us from knowing our identity with all  things. (The greeting/blessing “namaste” is  an acknowledgement of the divinity of the person being greeted.) This idea of the unity of all things can also be found in other ancient mystical sects, as well as in some modern mystical philosophies. A common thread in various mystical teachings/traditions is that if all things are one thing, then you don’t have to go outside of yourself to discover The Truth. The macrocosm is contained in the microcosm.

Saint Francis of Assisi wrote, “What you are looking for is what’s looking.” Rudolph Steiner, founder of Anthroposophy, wrote “It is in the soul that the meaning of the universe is revealed.” Maurice Maeterlinck put it this way: “It is in you yourself that (God) is hidden and it is in you yourself that you must find him.” This echoes the beliefs of such Christian mystics as Meister Eckhart, as well as mystical Christian, Jewish and Muslim sects.

Another common thread in mystical traditions is that the Great Secret is something to be experienced, not understood. Mystics do not seek contact with, or  knowledge from, the Divine; they seek union. A common belief in mystical traditions is that “the vessel must be prepared” to hold the wine of revelation. Sometimes the preparation involves an ordeal of some kind. Other times it means practicing a discipline, such as  meditation or asceticism. But at the very least it means emptying  your cup of your old beliefs, so that new wine can replace the old. A Sufi saying has it that “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

In his novel Zorba the Greek Nikos Kazantzakis wrote, “Everything has two meanings, one manifest, one hidden. The common people comprehend only what is manifest.” Maeterlinck wrote, “Humanity has need of the infinite.” His best summation of his thesis is, “The Great Secret, the only secret, is that all things are secret.” Go figure.

On Mysticism

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First, a few words about what mysticism is not. Calling the Marvel Comics character Doctor Strange “Master of the Mystic Arts” is inaccurate; he should actually be called “Master of the Magical Arts.” There’s nothing magical or supernatural about mysticism, as I understand it. Since mysticism is about union with God, this may seem counter-intuitive or paradoxical. I suggested in my last post that the potential for mystical experience seems to be hard-wired in our brains, and elicited by certain identifiable stimuli. That means it’s natural, not supernatural. I’m an agnostic and, to me, the  question of whether there “is” or “is not” a God is a matter of definition. If you say that God is love, then I believe in God. If you say that God has a gender or a preferred name, I don’t. I believe that if there’s a God, it’s beyond human comprehension.

Mystics are people who seek, or experience, union with the Divine. Some religious people who have a mystical experience might call it a religious experience and, for them, it is. (I don’t have the philosophical authority to label or judge other peoples’ anomalous experiences.) But I’ve read accounts of atheists who remained atheists after having an experience of Divine union. The existence of mystical experience isn’t proof of the existence of any given deity. Not everyone is going to have a mystical  experience in their lifetime. Many people – even atheists – have reported having an experience of the Divine while under the influence of psychedelic substances such as LSD, psilocybin or mescaline. Back in my hippie days, a common question asked of people who had just  come down from a psychedelic trip was, “Did you see God?” It was a popular jest.

Accounts of mystical experiences have been recorded in cultures all around the world,  throughout history. Triggers include physical agony or ecstasy, asceticism/sensory deprivation, continuous prayer and fasting, deep meditation, and the ingestion of high doses of psychedelic substances. Indeed, mystical experiences are so common on psychedelic drugs that some people refer to them as entheogens – “God-inducing” substances. I’ve had mystical experiences, and don’t think of them as proof that there “is” a God that has a name. Like psychedelic consciousness, mystical experiences are ineffable: words can’t do justice to them. My experiences haven’t involved identifiable deities from any religion, but rather a profound feeling of one-ness with the universe, or being in the presence of something holy, that’s impossible to put into words.

One of the great Christian mystics, Meister Eckhart, a fourteenth-century Dominican friar, taught that we can – if we do the requisite preparation – experience God directly, within ourselves. The Roman Catholic establishment of the day considered the teaching heretical. However, Saint Francis of Assisi had written something similar: “What you are looking for is what is looking.” Centuries later, philosopher and atheist Friedrich Nietzsche had a darker metaphor for this idea, writing “When you gaze into the Abyss, the Abyss gazes back at you.”

The key to union with the Divine, according to Meister Eckhart, was letting go of all worldly things, all desires and preconceptions – even one’s conception of God. Paradoxically, in order to know God directly, one must first un-know everything one thinks about God. The Divine is unknowable in the usual sense of knowledge. He wrote, “We should learn not to give God any name, for God is above names and ineffable,” warning that “if you think of anything he might be, he is not that.” He also  wrote, “Only the hand that erases can write the true thing,” and “the eye by which I see God is the same eye by which God sees me.” Among the things a seeker must abandon is his or her conception of self. Meister Eckhart taught that from this emptiness, this silence, one’s soul could be re-born in the direct experience of the Divine.

This message is echoed in the mystical teachings of Buddhism, Taoism, Vedanta Hinduism, Jewish Cabalism, Sufism, and other spiritual traditions. Buddhist scholar D.T. Suzuki called Meister Eckhart “the one Zen thinker of the West.” In modern terms, the direct experience of the Divine requires the annihilation of the ego. One seeker wrote, “At my worst, I see myself being at the center of the universe; at my best, I see myself as one cell in the body of the Divine.”

The poetry of Sufi mystics such as Rumi and Hafiz reflects this point of view over and over in its metaphors.  Rumi likens himself to a hollow reed made into a flute by the breath of God. He wrote, “We are like lutes once held by the Beloved. Being away from his divine body fully explains all yearning.” Hafiz wrote, “I have learned so much from God/that I can no longer call myself/ a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew. . . .Love has befriended Hafiz so completely/it has turned to ash and freed me/of every concept and image/my mind has ever known.”

In my last post I wrote about the Vedanta Hindu concept of Brahman: there is nothing that is not God. It is expressed in the Sanskrit affirmation tat twam asi – “thou art That.” (i.e. You are one with the Divine.) I’ll close on a light note, with a short verse I’ve attributed to my alter ego writer and philosopher, Philbo T. Woldercan:

You want the key to the Mystery?                                                                                                       The Holy Grail?                                                                                                                                      The essence of the Buddha?                                                                                                                 You’ve known it all along, Bozo!                                                                                                         (tag) You’re IT.

Esalen and the human potential movement

Posted in behavior modification, Humanistic Psychology, philosophy, psychological models, psychology, psychotherapy1 Comment

In previous posts I’ve written about humanistic psychology, which has been called the Third Force in modern psychology, after Freudian psychodynamic psychology and Behaviorism. The founders – including Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls, and Rollo May – seeing that psychology was primarily focused on psychopathology, wanted it to also focus on psychological health and personal growth. Esalen Institute, an isolated  retreat on the Pacific coast near Big Sur, California, is considered by many to be the birthplace of humanistic psychology. I’ve wanted to visit Esalen, a retreat center for growth and learning, since my graduate education in a humanistic psychology program. I’ve just returned home from a writing retreat at Esalen, and it felt like a weekend on holy ground.

Esalen Institute was founded by Michael Murphy and Richard Price in 1963. The land on which Esalen is located was owned  by Michael’s family for generations, and the two of them had a vision of a center for holistic learning. The place is called Esalen because for thousands of years the area was the home of the indigenous Esselen people. Accordingly, Esalen is considered sacred land, and is treated with reverence by residents and visitors. It’s isolated, far from any town, and doesn’t have cell phone service or television. There are hot springs down by the rocky shore, and everyone knows that clothing is optional at the baths. When I soaked, naked, in a pool, looking out at the Pacific sunset, I had the sense of participating in an ancient cleansing ritual.

Humanistic psychology has also been called the human potential movement. The only required course in my psychology Masters program was “Human Growth and Potential” – known by the students as “Gro and Po.” Although most of my coursework involved psychotherapy and psychological testing, I could understand why Gro and Po was required. Psychology had to be about more than psychopathology and the remediation of symptoms. Indeed, our equivalent of an “Abnormal Psychology” course was “Unconventional Modes of Experience,” lest there be any stigma regarding “abnormal.”

While psychanalytic theory and Behaviorism were dogmatic and monolithic, humanistic psychology was more like a tree, with many roots and branches. It was holistic in its orientation to the study of human behavior, focusing on mind and body as a unity, and exploring the factors that enhance creativity and enable self-actualization. It was holistic in studying both Eastern and Western philosophies and practices, recognizing the benefits of things such as yoga and Buddhist meditation, long before they became popular. Existentialism and phenomenology also influenced the human potential movement.

From the beginning of the movement, Esalen has been its Mecca. Fritz Perls did a five year residency in the late sixties, leading gestalt therapy seminars. Other eminent persons who influenced the development of humanistic psychology and had Esalen residencies were Gregory Bateson, Joseph Campbell, Ida Rolf, Virginia Satir, Rollo May, and Alan Watts. Today people go there to study massage and body work, wellness and alternative medicine, psychotherapy, meditation, and a variety of other subjects. I went there to work on being a better writer, and came home with my spiritual batteries re-charged.

A lot of what was new and esoteric back in the sixties and seventies has gone mainstream. Among the extra-curricular classes available to students in the psychology graduate program at West Georgia College (now the University of West Georgia) were massage, hatha yoga, zen meditation, clowning, tai kwan do, and vegetarian cooking. The program was allied with the Philosophy Department, and there were opportunities to study existentialism and phenomenology. In my therapy courses, I learned about psychoanalytic theory, behavior modification, client-centered therapy, gestalt therapy, transactional analysis, sex therapy, and trance work. Once I was a working psychotherapist, my therapeutic orientation was existential, and I was very eclectic in terms of therapeutic style and techniques. I consider myself very fortunate to have attended the West Georgia College psychology Masters program.

Contemporary concepts like emotional intelligence and positive psychology couldn’t have emerged from Freudian psychodynamic theory or Behaviorism. The humanistic psychology movement created a new paradigm for human growth and potential as a legitimate area of study within the science of psychology. I think that the regard for Freud’s contribution to psychology and psychotherapy will diminish over time, relative to the contributions of humanistic pioneers like Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls, and Milton Erickson.

The concept of emotional intelligence suggests that there are other kinds of intelligence than cognitive intelligence. Accurate empathy and compassion are important factors in human relating, and are deserving of scientific study by students of human behavior. I had initial objections to the whole notion of positive psychology, thinking, “psychology is neither positive nor negative.” But then I came to realize that it’s an outgrowth of the impulses that inspired humanistic psychology. The study of psychological wellness and peak performance, of thriving, of human creativity and the process of self-actualizing, is a legitimate pursuit within the field. Psychodynamic theory and Behaviorism will always have their place in psychology, but they need to be viewed in the context of the psychology of growth and human transformation.

Stress Management

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We’ve all heard that prolonged stress negatively impacts our health, but stress isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Dr. Hans Selye, one of the pioneers of stress management, said that stress can be “the spice of life or the kiss of death.” He labeled negative stress distress and positive stress eustress. If we choose to ride a rollercoaster, or to scale a cliff, or watch a horror movie, we’re choosing to experience stress. Stress is an unavoidable fact of life, and a stress-free life would be an uneventful life – boring. Sexual excitement is a form of stress, and we all enjoy an adrenaline rush from time to time, especially if we chose the stimulus that triggered it.

Our autonomic nervous system, which regulates automatic behaviors, has two branches: sympathetic and parasympathetic. Both are involved what Dr. Selye called the “fight or flight” response. Activation of the sympathetic response gears us up, preparing us to fight or flee, whether or not we’re in danger. Heartbeat and breathing instantly become more rapid,  delivering more oxygenated blood to the brain and the extremities. Blood pressure and blood sugar rise, muscles tense in anticipation of action, and you may experience a jolt of adrenaline. After the event or situation that triggered the sympathetic response is past, the parasympathetic branch kicks in, reversing the fight or flight response and allowing us to “rest and digest.” We’re told not to go swimming right after eating a meal, because our blood flow has been re-directed from our extremities to our gut, increasing the possibility of a muscle cramp.

The fight or flight response evolved to help our ancestors to avoid being eaten and to hunt dangerous prey. If you’re a soldier in a combat zone, or a cop, or a firefighter, you may experience it on a regular basis. But although only a few of us in modern society frequently face physical peril – other than heavy traffic – we respond to perceived existential threats, even if we’re not actually in immediate danger. Combinations of financial, social and environmental stressors (How am I going to pay the rent? Is my wife being unfaithful?) can result in a high level of distress, sometimes manifesting as anxiety.

Anxiety is similar to fear, although the causes might be multiple and may not be immediate physical threats. A person having an anxiety  attack may experience their fight or flight response as paralyzing. Once you’ve had one, your fear of having another one becomes yet another stressor in your life. If you only occasionally have fight or flight reactions, stress may not be a significant factor in your health. But if you have them frequently, your health may be affected. But frequent fight or flight reactions aren’t the only stress-related threat. Chronic overstress – having more on your plate than you can handle – can kill.

Stress management doesn’t mean eliminating stress. It means controlling the amount of stress in your everyday life and, where possible, eliminating stressors. There are both physical and mental aspects to stress management. But first you need to identify the sources of stress in your life, your triggers for stress reactions, and how stress affects you.

If you need to practice stress management, start with an inventory of your stress factors: job security and satisfaction, finances, safety, residential issues, and personal relationships. Think of how you might be able to reduce unwanted stress in each area. It may mean some tough choices. Then list the kinds of situations and events that tend to trigger stress reactions. Being aware of your stress triggers may help you to prepare for them or learn ways to avoid them. Become more aware of how you typically respond to stress triggers and overstress. Do you somaticize (physicalize) it into headaches or bellyaches or backaches? Do you stay angry or depressed? Do you worry excessively? Anxiety has many faces , including free-floating (generalized) anxiety, panic attacks, and phobias – including social phobias. After doing this analysis of the role of stress in your life, you’re ready to look at physical and mental stress management techniques.

Physical stress management techniques include breath control, learning to relax your muscles, meditation, self-hypnosis, yoga, exercise, good nutrition, and adequate sleep. Avoid self-medicating with alcohol or other drugs. If you’ve listed rapid breathing as a stress symptom, you can learn to slow your breathing when you’re under stress. This helps to bring the fight or flight response under your control. There are many techniques for relaxing tense muscles, and relaxing the body tends to simultaneously relax the mind. I used to teach clients a method of focusing on the sensations in each of the muscle groups of the body in turn, tensing and relaxing each muscle group until they became aware that they could relax them at will by focusing on the changing sensations. It’s a form of mindfulness.

Learning time management or anger management might be part of your stress management plan. The best single mental stress management I’m aware of – besides meditation, which calms both body and mind – is rational thinking. (I’ve previously published several posts on rational thinking as a learnable skill.) Any stressful situation can be made more stressful by the way we think about it, and the effects of stressors in our lives can be minimized by thinking about them rationally. Failing to achieve something you wanted to achieve doesn’t make you “a Failure.”  Telling yourself that you’ll never get over a loss can be a stress-inducing self-fulfilling prophesy. Thinking that they “can’t stand” something has never helped anyone to cope with distress.

Some stressors can be minimized or overcome, others can be tolerated until circumstances change, by developing coping skills. We can all learn to manage our stress to some degree, if we understand it for what it is and make a conscious effort to control its effect on our lives. Coming up with your own personalized stress management plan and implementing it can help you to become more resilient in times of adversity, and might add years to your life.

 

Mindfulness and meditation

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Mindfulness has become a buzzword, not only in psychotherapy, but in the mass media. Mindfulness is when you “stop and smell the roses.” Some people are making a lot of money marketing mindfulness training, but learning to practice it costs nothing beyond an investment of your time. An age-old Asian aphorism is that the mind is like a drunken monkey bitten by a scorpion. One of the benefits of this time investment is learning to tame your monkey mind.

Fritz Perls said that past and future are fictions: our lives are spent exclusively in the here-and-now. Buddhism teaches that all suffering arises from attachments, and in that regard it correlates to cognitive behavioral therapy. Self-talk is like a constant mental radio broadcast that most people don’t know how to turn off, as much as they might wish to sometimes. In my career I’ve had many clients who lived their lives in thrall to their frequent or constant irrational thoughts. Learning meditation gives you a way to turn off the mental radio at will.

Mindfulness is a kind of meditation that’s always available to us. It doesn’t require silence, or sitting in the lotus position, or chanting, or concentrating on a mandala, or doing yoga breathing – although all of these practices are valid methods  for learning to meditate.  Mindfulness simply means getting out of your head and being fully present in the here-and-now, the only time there is, without letting your mind wander and without making judgments.

Before I specifically get into mindfulness further, I’ll first share my understanding of meditation in general. I learned to meditate in grad school, and found that there are many methods for learning to stay in a meditative state of consciousness, some of which I listed above. I’ve experienced two distinct levels of meditation. I started out with what I call single-pointed meditation, which means learning to focus on a single thing – a candle flame in a darkened room, a mantra (chant), focusing on your breathing to the exclusion of all other thought. Unrelated thoughts will inevitably intrude, but with practice you can learn to ignore them, let them go, and return your focus to the single point. At first it’s a balancing act, like walking a mental tightrope. When you first realize that you’ve achieved a meditative state, you think “I’m meditating!”, but the instant you think that, you’re not – you’re thinking again. With sufficient practice you can lengthen the time you stay in the meditative state, and develop confidence in your ability to meditate whenever you choose to.

Once I’d learned to stay focused on one thing exclusively, without letting my mind wander to other things, I was able to move on to a new level of meditation – pure awareness. I learned that it’s possible to be awake and aware, without being aware of any thing. Learning to suspend object-consciousness and judgement is a liberation. You can tame your monkey mind, turn off the mental radio. The silence is golden. It’s a distinct state of consciousness that teaches you what thinking cannot teach. It calms the body and the mind.

Mindfulness is a kind of single-pointed meditative state. You can be mindful while performing a task, taking a walk, taking a bath, having a conversation, doing Tai Chi, or standing in a crowd. You can be mindful of your self-talk. Mindfulness means staying focused on your here-and-now experience, to the exclusion of extraneous thoughts and without making judgments like good/bad, beautiful/ugly, or right/wrong.

Many times in public I’ve played a mindful game with myself, a game that teaches me things about my ordinary (non-mindful) consciousness and my monkey  mind. Normally when I’m in public, people-watching, I’m constantly categorizing and judging and speculating about all the people I see: whether or not I find them attractive, whether they’re fat or thin, graceful or clumsy, whether  they seem smart or dumb, likeable or unlikeable, etc.  Sometimes when I catch myself making these instant evaluations, I decide to play “the Buddha game.” I mindfully suspend my monkey mind and imagine that everybody I see is a Buddha – perfect, God in disguise. Just as I believe that meditation has changed my ordinary consciousness over time, I believe that playing the Buddha game has helped me to be less judgmental and more compassionate.

Mindfulness training is at the core of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), a highly effective therapy developed by Dr. Marsha Linehan to treat people who meet the diagnostic criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder. While she was devising the core strategies of DBT, Dr. Linehan studied meditation with a Catholic priest in a contemplative order and with a zen master. The people for whom DBT was designed tend to be extremely judgmental (of themselves and others) and emotionally volatile. Dr. Linehan became convinced that practicing mindfulness would help them to find balance in their deeply conflicted lives. Having co-led DBT skills training groups and seeing first-hand the effectiveness of mindfulness training, I believe that it’s beneficial for mentally ill people with other diagnoses, too. But as I’ve said many times, you don’t have to be sick to get better. Mindfulness is a learnable practice that can improve your life, if you invest some time in it.