Mindfulness Archives - Page 2 of 3

Music Will Save Me from Myself

August 28, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 6 Comments

Cosmo's Factory — (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Having declared an intention to maintain my equanimity—and why didn’t I think of this before now?—I have been looking for ways to keep reminding myself that this is my intention and to assist me when situations arise where I’m in danger of losing it.

The last time something pushed one of my buttons, I remembered how powerfully music can affect mood and state of mind. So I created an Equanimity Playlist: 25 songs that make me feel good or lower my blood pressure—or both. They range from the ridiculous (or corny) to the (at least in my opinion) sublime. It’s much more satisfying to turn the music on than it is to throw a stapler across the room (not that I actually do that with any regularity…anymore).

Here’s my list:

For a Dancer (Jackson Browne)
Coming into Los Angeles (Arlo Gurthrie)
I Heard a Rumor (Bananarama)

When You Awake (the Band/Acoustic version by Rick Dank)

Sail On (The Commodores)
Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby (Counting Crows)
Lookin’ Out My Back Door (Creedence Clearwater Revival)
Save Tonight (Eagle Eye Cherry)
Uncle John’s Band (Grateful Dead)
Rise Up (Indigo Girls)
Mexico (James Taylor)
Take a Minute (K’naan)
What It Is (Mark Knopfler)
Peace Like a River (Paul Simon)
Half a World Away (R.E.M.)

All This Time (Sting)

I Want You (Bob Dylan)
Piper at the Gates of Dawn (Van Morrison)

Who Says (John Mayer)

Birdhouse in Your Soul (They Might Be Giants)
A Thousand Beautiful Things (Annie Lennox)
High Tide or Low Tide (Bob Marley & The Wailers)
Human Nature (Michael Jackson)
Terra Nova (James Taylor)
Kathy’s Song (Eva Cassidy)

Many of these songs have been lifting me up for decades, from Michigan to California to New Mexico, and still do it for me today.

What songs would you put on your Equanimity Playlist?

Attention Is Essential

July 19, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 7 Comments

Intention is a great catalyst. It gives us something to aim at, a focus, a goal. But after creating an intention to do something, we also need to pay attention to what happens—to what we do, what we think, and what we feel. Paying attention helps us override the brain’s autopilot so we don’t simply fall back into familiar patterns and habits.

Attention is the same as awareness or mindfulness. Since much of what we do is done automatically, we tend not to be very mindful of our own thoughts, feelings, words, and behavior, let alone the effect we might be having on other people. We aren’t fully present most of the time.

There are various kinds of mindfulness practices, including mindfulness meditation. Meditation has many great benefits and is an excellent habit to develop and maintain for general health and well-being. But it isn’t the only way to be mindful, aware, or attentive. In terms of following through with an intention, a practice or a tool that helps us focus on the behavior we’re trying to generate may be more useful. Here are three suggestions:

Self-Awareness Pie Chart

Draw a circle a couple of inches in diameter and divide it into three slices that represent how much of your attention in that moment is on your feelings (F), your thoughts (T), and your body (B). Put the letter designations inside the appropriate pie slices. Then write your answers to these questions:

How do I feel emotionally?
What am I thinking about?
How do I feel physically?

You can write as much or as little as you like. If you use this exercise to help with an intention, the best time to do it is when you have done—or not done—what you intended to do.

Theme Word or Phrase

Come up with a word or phrase that reminds you of what you’re trying to achieve. Write it on Post-its or index cards and put them where you’re most likely to see them. You don’t have to limit yourself to a word or phrase. You can come up with a theme song, an image, a string around your finger, or anything else that focuses your attention.

Questions

Create two or three questions you can ask yourself each day, such as:

What is my intention?
Why do I want to do [whatever it is]?
Am I committed to doing [whatever it is] today?

You can ask and answer the questions on paper, in your head, or you can invite a friend to ask them.

It doesn’t really matter what you decide to do, as long as you do something to keep your attention focused on your intention. It takes many repetitions for your brain’s autopilot to get the message.

Curiouser and Curiouser

April 11, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

In his book, Waking Up, Charles Tart points out that most people, especially in the West, aren’t taught self-observation skills at an early age. What if we had spent as much time learning how to observe ourselves as we spent learning how to read?

I’m a fanatical reader, so I don’t say this lightly, but maybe self-observation skills are even more valuable than reading skills. In many ways, reading helps open up the outer world to us, but self-observation opens up our own inner world—which is no less vast, really.

These are a few things Tart has to say about self-observation.

It’s All Grist for the Mill

In its most general form, the practice of self-observation is simply a matter of paying attention to everything, noticing whatever happens, being open-mindedly curious about all that is going on. This everything will almost always be a mixture of perceptions of external events and your internal reactions to them. You should drop all a priori beliefs about what you should be interested in, what is important and not important. Whatever is is an appropriate focus for observation.

Three Ways to Pay Attention

This open-minded attention must be more than just intellectual attention. Remember that we are three-brained beings. Thus the attention we should strive to pay to our world and our selves is an emotional attention and a body attention as well as an intellectual attention.

Above All, Be Curious

The practice of self-observation…is the practice of being curious, along with a commitment to do your best to observe and learn whatever is there, regardless of your preferences or fears.

I have to keep reminding myself to stay curious about what is going on around me and within me. And also to stay curious about my own actions and reactions. It’s so much harder for me to get sucked into the drama, the compulsions, and the autopilot behavior when I’m able to maintain an attitude of curiosity about everything that’s happening.

My usual modus operandi is probably the same as everyone else’s. I operate on the assumption that there’s a way things should be and when things are going the way they should be going, all’s well. But more often than not, things do not go the way I think they should. And people do not behave the way I think they should. Even I don’t behave the way I think I should. And don’t get me started on the weather!

As an 8, when things are not going as I expect them to go, my resistance kicks in. That’s a perfect opportunity to wake up and pay attention. When I’m able to do that, I feel much lighter and more expansive. When I don’t or can’t do it, I dig myself deeper into my resistance. No good ever comes of that.

What kicks in for you when things aren’t going your way?

If I want to use the moments when my expectations rub up against the edge of reality to wake up, I have to have the intention to do so.

The practice of self-observation begins with a desire and resolution on your part: “I want to know what really is, regardless of how I prefer things to be.”

As per my previous post, self-observation is not for wimps. It isn’t easy to let go of our preconceived ideas about how the world should work. It’s hard to give up having a temper tantrum when we don’t get our way. Growing up can be painful at times.

If you diligently practice self-observation, you will see much that his painful and much that is joyful, but seeing more of reality will turn out to be highly preferable to living in fantasy. You will begin creating “something” in yourself, a quality, a function, a skill, akin to learning how the controls of your automated airliner work. And you will be pleasantly surprised at how much more there is to life.

Self-Observation Isn’t for Wimps

April 7, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

In order to know ourselves, one of the things we need to be able to do is observe ourselves. But observing ourselves doesn’t come naturally. It isn’t that we lack opportunity, since the object of self-observation is always available. It’s that even if we can detach long enough to engage in the process, we find it difficult to observe any aspect of ourselves—from the most significant to the most trivial—without having an opinion about it.

We like it or dislike it, approve of it or disapprove of it, want to keep it or get rid of it—or get more of it. We find it satisfying (occasionally) or dissatisfying (more often). What we observe puffs us up or deflates us. Not only are we constantly evaluating whatever catches our attention, but the same attribute, behavior, feeling, or thought can be judged acceptable in one instance and unacceptable in another. The criteria we use for our self-evaluations are based in compulsion, so there is no rest for the weary—meaning each of us is just another moving target for self-judgment.

Most of the time, we use our self-observations to identify how and where we need to be fixed, so we can improve ourselves. Alternatively, if we like what we observe, we congratulate ourselves.

I let myself get sucked into helping him again. Damn! I need to learn how to say “no.”
I keep finding excuses not to exercise even though I make plans to do it. I am so lazy.
Gee, I handled that situation pretty calmly this time. I’m getting better.

Self-Judging Machines

It’s an automatic process to move almost instantly from observation to judgment. It happens so quickly and so automatically we usually aren’t aware of it. So our observations just become fodder for the judgments that follow. It’s a vicious cycle.

If we judge something about ourselves negatively, we experience an internal conflict. Staying present to the experience of conflict or dissonance isn’t easy. It’s so hard that almost anything—any kind of activity, even useless activity—is preferable. At least it’s distracting.

But the goal of self-observation is to be able to stay present to what we observe without moving into judgment or trying to change things. Yes, the judgments will inevitably arise, but we can turn the tables by making them fodder for self-observation.

This requires commitment, patience, courage, and a willingness to surrender our overpowering desire to be in control since one of the first things we’re likely to observe is how little control we actually have.

Every now and then, we wake up for a brief instant of clarity and cry out, ‘What the hell is happening here?’ And then we fall back into our semi-conscious state as we continue bumbling about, half asleep at the wheel of our lives. –Lama Surya Das

Meditation and journal writing are both great vehicles for practicing self-observation, even if practiced in short bursts.

(originally posted in Nine Paths; slightly revised)

Don’t Ask Me Why

March 17, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

Why on car — Why (Photo credit: openpad)

Although I’m kind of a knowledge junkie, I’ve always argued for the limits of human understanding. I’ve been railing against the pointlessness of trying to figure out why something happened or why someone or something is the way it is for decades. Of course, I fall into the very same trap myself. My personality is such that I expect things and people to be and behave logically or at least to stay out of my way. Talk about an exercise in futility.

My assertion has always been, though, that the reason there’s no point in trying to figure out the why of someone or something is that since we never, ever have all the information, we can never, ever get a complete answer. It’s a bit of a fool’s game to believe we can answer why questions with convincing certainty.

[W]hen you explain a why, you have to be in some framework that you allow something to be true. Otherwise, you’re perpetually asking why. –Richard Feynman

That doesn’t stop us from doing it. We think that when we know the why of something, we then understand it. And if we understand something, we can accept it or at least know how to deal with it. It’s as if the why is even more important than the what. When it comes to people and why they are the way they are or do the things they do, why questions most often go to backgrounds or motivations. Given that we don’t even know what our own motivations are for doing what we do, thinking we can know someone else’s motivation is more than hubris—it’s delusional.

But, again, we all do this. Asking why questions is very compelling. It seems to be a built-in mechanism that operates first and foremost to explain ourselves to ourselves. Asking and answering why questions helps us construct and maintain a consistent personal narrative—a sense of personal identity. It also operates to explain the external world to us.

Good Enough for Government Work

But another problem with why questions, in addition to the fact that our answers are always incomplete at best, if not wholly erroneous, is that once we get an answer that seems satisfying, we close the door on that particular line of inquiry. Once we get a good-enough answer, the cause and effect link is cemented into place. Occasionally someone might say about something, “Well, that’s as good an explanation as any,” but we could say that about the vast majority of our explanations: one is probably just as good as another. Yet we believe in whatever answers we’ve arrived at, and we proceed as if they are the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So to an extent we do create our own reality, and this is how we do it, through constructing and maintaining a very flawed and false sense of certainty about ourselves and the world around us.

We abhor uncertainty, so any explanation, even a wrong or partial one, is better than none at all.

I’ve been trying to pay attention to this process of explaining everything to myself. It’s exhausting. What a relief when I just admit I don’t know why something or someone is the way it is (or I am the way I am), and I don’t need to come up with an explanation. There’s a surprising amount of freedom in not having an explanation.

What questions seem to be a lot more open-ended than why questions. They cast a wider net, and they tend to focus more on the here and now. I wonder if asking what questions might be a way of training our attention on the present and away from restlessly searching for facile explanations just so we can maintain a comfortable and consistent narrative.