November 2010 – Page 10 – Mindfulbalance

Not getting stuck in the past

November 4, 2010November 5, 2010 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on ….. their children than the unlived life of the parent. Carl Jung

I had a conversation today which made me reflect on the way that parental patterns have a huge influence on us even as adults. This notion has been around for a long time. In the Old Testament it was believed that the sins of the fathers are visited on their children. This was at times interpreted somewhat simplistically as a a way of explaining inherited illnesses or chance misfortune. However, in another sense it seems to accord with what can be found in modern psychology.

Some of the behaviours which we see in adult life are in response to unconscious traces left by experiences had in childhood. In general these experiences we have when little frame us into certain judgements about the world. We come to see it as either predictable, stable and nurturing or uncertain and precarious. Our parents also had their own emotional and relationship patterns and ways of dealing with anxiety, and frequently played these out in their relationship to each other, impacting upon us as children. From this we drew our conclusions as to how to deal with the world, and how to develop our own relationships. This parental wound – or the places where our parents got stuck – has a huge influence on our own inner life. The inner world we form as a child will replicate what we see in the outer world and then as an adult we can gravitate towards situations that replicate this inner world dynamic.

We tend to do this by repeating the pattern or by being determined to do the opposite. However, because the opposite behaviour is undertaken in response to the parents’ way of behaving, we are still defining ourselves by it and end up strengthening the dynamic rather than weakening it. A lot of adult neurosis or anxiety can be understood as a part of the self looking to discover its full development away from the narrow confines of the family of origin. A repeating way of doing things or a rigid personal style is a clue to the original place of lack or neglect. Our minds love habits, even when they hurt us.

It is a slow work to recognize the limited nature of the early strategies which we have incorporated into our personality and begin the work of healing by no longer acting on them.

Telling the truth of our soul to ourselves is the first task. Living that truth is the second task. And telling it to other is the third. Such truth-telling will be the supreme test of our lives.

James Hollis

Jabbering

November 4, 2010November 4, 2010 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

All we need to do is awaken to the here-and-now

– to stop jabbering to ourselves –

and be present in this moment.

Steve Hagen

Always generating judgments

November 4, 2010November 4, 2010 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Mindfulness is cultivated by assuming the stance of an impartial witness to your own experience. To do this requires that you become aware of the constant stream of judging and reacting to inner and outer experience and learn to step back from it.

When we begin practicing paying attention to the activity of our own mind, it is common to discover that we are constantly generating judgments about our experience.

Jon Kabat Zinn

When things go wrong

November 3, 2010November 5, 2010 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

A lot of practical things went wrong for me today – computers, recordings, simple practical details around courses. This added extra work onto the calendar and in speeding up things gets lost and mislaid. Have you ever noticed that sometimes when things like this go wrong and disturb us, we have a tendency to think that something is wrong with us or the overall direction of our lives. We may simply think we are doing too much. Sometimes it can go deeper and we think our whole life is out of sync. We seem to have a deep-down tendency to identify with a difficulty and let that affect how we see ourselves or how our life is going. This can also lead us to split the world into “good” and “bad” – or them and us- seeing the situation or a person as all bad, and thinking that the best way of dealing with difficulties is to move them completely out of our life. Sadly, this maximizing of distance in order to increase a sense of personal safety often just solidifies our fearful or defensive sense of self.

Splitting is one of the primitive defense mechanisms described from Freud onwards, and is found particularly in Melanie Klein’s work. It is one of the more simplistic ways of dealing with life’s problems, rooted in the baby’s tendency of associating good experiences with a “good” person and bad experiences with a “bad” person. It is generally replaced as the child gets older by an understanding that good and bad occasions can reside in the one person and that does not make them “bad”. It is, nonetheless a common way of behaving even in adults. It is often activated when we are threatened, and means that we are unable to see complexity in a situation or a person, preferring rather seeing it or them as all bad. It tells us that there is no grey area, and as a result people are frozen into a certain moment or fault and we let that moment define them. We can do it to ourselves also and solidify the most negative core beliefs about ourselves, letting them define our life, seeing it as threatened or frightened.

Mindfulness practice can help us be aware of this and other defense mechanisms arising, – to see fear forming – and help us notice the desire to withdraw – normally accompanied by a kind of defensive story-line- as it appears. If we can spot this happening we may have enough of a gap to see the whole drama . If so, we can question what is feeling threatened, whether it is really actually me, or some story which I have about myself and my life. If we can resist the tendency to split we can come to see that everything is actually workable. We can then experience for ourselves that it is ultimately possible to be open to everything, and to keep a compassionate heart available for others and for all that occurs in our lives.

Where we should invest

November 3, 2010November 3, 2010 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The 2008 Annual Meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists at Imperial College, London was told that the evidence-base for the therapeutic value of meditation for a wide range of health problems was significantly stronger than most pharmaceutical products. A new meta-analysis of 823 randomly controlled trials of meditation, conducted by the US National Institute of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, showed the clinical benefits of meditation across a wide range of physical and emotional disorders.

Meditation is a way of life rather than quick fix achieved by using gimmicks such as incense, music and light, Dr Avdesh Sharma, past president of the Indian Psychiatric Association, said. It doesn’t work immediately. You need to practice it for several weeks before the effects begin to be felt. Dr Sharma added: If meditation was a drug, we’d all want shares in it. It has a beneficial effect on most physical health problems and is very effective for mental health problems significantly reducing levels of depression, anxiety and insomnia by improving relaxation, oxygenation of the brain, and energy levels.