Remembering the positive side of everyday happenings can be a struggle for people suffering from clinical depression. But by developing skills to tune into the positive, depressed people can strengthen their mental health, a new 2009 Ohio State University study shows. By staying mindful of the positive elements of daily events, and even documenting each days happiest moments in a journal, you may lower your stress levels. “Positive emotions build resilience to stress, in addition to having an undoing effect on depression” says Alan Keck, Psychologist at the Centre for Positive Psychology.
Month: December 2009
On hearing a wren sing
There is always something magical about birdsong. Yesterday I heard a wren sing for the first time in many years. For the briefest moment nothing else was heard and the world stopped.
Birdsong brings relief
to my longing.
I am just as ecstatic as they are,
but with nothing to say!
Please, universal soul, practice
some song, or something, through me!
Rumi
I do not know which to prefer
The beauty of inflections
or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after
Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
The arrival of winter
Winter has begun to make its presence felt, muted light, paler days, the bare sky, the bare trees. Grey on grey. Snow on the mountains. Or the frosty white landscape in the morning, tree trunks and bare branches, ghostly in the early mist. Now that it has arrived there is almost a feeling of disbelief. Things come to a halt rapidly, they die, and the ground hardens and tightens.
Winter can seem as a period of bareness, cold and sorrow. A period noted for its absence of colour. A period just to endure, to get back to the colours we long for with the coming of spring. However, to see it this way may miss some of the life lessons hidden in the season. Look at nature, it is winding down or in the case of animals, stocking up. Our cat is eating more, putting on weight, as instinctively he prepares for a time with less hunting. There was a time when the changing of the seasons dramatically affected people’s lifestyles also. In winter when the days were short, people would sleep longer, sit by the fire, tell stories, and wait.
However, these days our lives aren’t much different from season to season, The problem in work life is that there is really no slow season any more. How often do we hear these days “Things are really busy” as year end approaches, as there are exam papers to be corrected and reports to be written, and gifts need to be bought or trips to be planned. Even holidays can become another thing we are obliged to schedule and often even when people do go on a break, their blackberries and laptops go with them.
However, in our inner life we do have a choice. Slow down, simplify. As the animal kingdom testifies, we need rest at this time, and not just our bodies. Nature can teach us this simplicity and contentment, because in its presence we realize we need very little to be happy.
The All Day Retreat
Tomorrow is Saturday in week 6 of the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction Course and as always we have an All Day Silent Retreat. Despite its formidable title it always turns out a calm, enjoyable, restorative day.
These days we are under continual pressure to do better, to be fitter, to be thinner, to get more education, attend more courses. It is almost as if rest equates with laziness. We so surrounded by hyper-achievers who are constantly overscheduled that we are tempted to consider busyness not only normal but right. Rest for some is a sign of weakness, a lack of ambition. And we can fall into the same approach even in how we approach our inner life. Even attending a MBSR Course or doing meditation can become another way to “fix” ourselves or another, latest, “self-improvement” project.
However, one of the most neglected of all inner pursuits seems to be quiet and rest. One of the most needful things for our sense of meaning is simply rest. A quiet day allows us this, a day without goals, just more time to be with our experience, whatever arises – a day of kindness to ourselves.
Disappointment
Sometimes things really don’t work out as well as you think. It’s true, no? You can buy the latest must-have gadget, find it marvellous for a few days and then it breaks, leaving you with a sour taste in your mouth.
Life can be even worse. You work hard on your career, or on a relationship or in changes to your lifestyle, but still you are not as happy as you assumed you would be “if only” this or that happened. Or someone who you thought you could be safe with can let you down. Our family stories can be complicated and painful. Or we may have a setback or rejection, and feel our hopes and dreams dashed. We can come to understand that something we always thought possible is never going to happen: a change in some behaviours, making peace with a difficult part of our history, realizing all the dreams and potentialities that we think we have.
One first step toward dealing with disappointment is to understand the forces that drive disappointment in our own view and in that of the culture around us. One is the deep seated belief that life can be free from disappointments and suffering. This is ingrained in today’s society which needs us to think we deserve all the toys, thrills, and pleasures we can get, and that our fulfillment is linked to that. However, the teachings that are the basis for mindfulness tell another message, namely that life is challenging, even unsatisfactory, for everyone. Our physical bodies, our health, our plans, our relationships, all the elements in our story are fragile and subject ot change. This is a basic reality. The cause of our disappoinment, our suffering, is not the change in itself, but the mind’s struggle in reaction to the change. Mindfulness proposes one way of dealing with suffering – training a non-struggling, peaceful mind.
A second step is to work directly with the sense of disappointment as it arises. We firstly stop being surprised when our internal life is not as smooth as we would like it to be, and simply try some practices gently and kindly. One practice is to say to ourselves, “I feel disappointed. I have made a desire such and such expectation so solid that I have let myself be identified with it. That is now causing me to suffer.” Once we recognize this, we have a moment to choose between two possibilities – whether we want to go back to our story and wander around in it, and feed it more, or whether we can rest in the felt sense of disappointment and simply acknowledge it for what it truly is.
If we do the first we often notice that the disappointment can trigger our core beliefs, such as, “I am not good enough”, “They always leave”, “I’ll never be happy”. If we choose the second way it can help us gently break through the defensiveness and armour by looking at the distress directly. Maybe seeing that it is not as solid as we first thought. Although difficult, we try to begin by saying “I am disappointed. What does it feel like at this moment? Where is it in my body?” Thus, instead of maybe contracting into our disappointment, we allow some space for a broader picture to be seen.
From a worm’s cocoon, silk.
Be patient if you can,
and from sour grapes will come something sweet.
Rumi
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