Tag: How Stress affects us

With emotions that cause stress, we have a choice

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I read an interview with Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor,  neuroanatomist and spokeswoman for the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center. She had a stroke that damaged her left hemisphere and for a while she could not walk, talk, read, write, or remember many of the incidents of her life. She underwent major surgery to remove a clot in her brain. She describes her experiences in the book My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey.

In the book she draws attention to brain patterns – or “circuity” –  and states that we actually have much greater choice in the circuits we run than we think we have. For example,  when we get sad, angry or afraid she says we have a choice – to run with that circuity or to not identify with it, to step back and observe it. There is not doubt that it can be easier to engage the circuitry. When this happens we identify with the emotion – I am my anger, I am my sadness, I am my fear.

However, there is another approach which is coincidentally developed in mindfulness practice. In it we work at being aware of what is going on in our mind at any moment. We learn to say – I am in this moment running this circuitry; is this the circuitry I really want to run? And how long am I going to run it? Dr Taylor  states that we can have a real choice on which way we want to go. For example, when something happens which provokes us,  we can be aware of the process of anger and see it as the brain working in a certain way. She puts it this way – “I’m running my anger circuitry, I can feel what this is like in my body”. Then we can develop the gap between ourselves and the strong emotion and decide if we want to stay with it or not.

She goes on todescribe some very practical, everyday ways in which we can develop our  capacity to observe our brain circuity. We just need to pay greater attention to what we are doing in this present moment:

I think the most important thing is to consciously choose to bring your mind to the present moment. How do you do that? You decide that you’re going to see what your eyes are looking at; you bring your consciousness to the present moment. When you are going up the stairs, you look at the steps, you look at the handrail. Most of us unconsciously climb the steps, never think about the steps, can’t even say what the color of the carpet is, if there is a carpet, because we’re somewhere else.

Pay attention to the present moment. Bring your mind, bring your ears to the present moment, start savoring the awareness of the information you perceive in the present moment, and let that grow. And it’s like with any circuitry: the more you concentrate on it and experience it, the more it will develop itself.

For more about Dr Taylor you can visit her website:  www.drjilltaylor.com

Quotations taken from interview “Balancing the Brain towards Joy” :

www.spiritualityhealth.com/spirit/archives/balancing-brain-toward-joy

Jon Kabat Zinn on what mindfulness is

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Jon Kabat Zinn, who developed the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction Programme (MBSR ), outlines what is meditation and how it brings us into the present moment. MBSR is a specific, highly structured psycho-educational and skill-based Programme  that combines mindfulness meditation with yoga and education about stress, delivered as an 8 week Course.

Further benefits of the programme can be found by clicking on the “Benefits of  Mindfulness and MBSR” Tag at the top of the page and  ongoing research is reported in the “Effects of Mindfulbness” Category on the right hand side of the blog

Working with relationships

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As many authors remind us, relationships are the place where our practice is tested most. It is easy to be calm on the cushion or in a retreat centre but not so easy when we mix with family, friends or work colleagues.  Every person we come into contact with has his or her their own relationship histories and have come to learn a number of techniques to manage their own self-esteem and control the behaviours of those they meet. Therefore it is inevitable that sometimes these dynamics can touch us and cause strong emotions to rise in us.

There is a balance to be had in inner practice, between maintaining contact and compassion for others and yet not tolerating being accused when we are not in the wrong or  someone directing their issues towards us.  This balance is never an easy one to get, and traditionally the wisdom traditions have been better at emphasizing compassion rather than maintaining boundaries. True, we have to work hard to keep our minds and hearts open, and notice any tendency to close down towards others. However, at the same time we have to be firm with our own needs and ensure that we are not always surrendering them in an attempt to keep the peace.

In reality, most of us, even in healthy relationships, tend to move from being open to closing up, depending on the other person’s way of relating to us.  If we feel they are not being responsive or if they behave in a way that we feel is threatening, we quickly tense up and start to contract. It is not easy to love without conditions, even if we wish we could. Therefore it is even easier to close our hearts when we are dealing with someone who is angry or unpredictable.

So how do we deal with the ups and downs of relating to others? A good starting place is to have a realistic view of relationships and people. Nobody can be there for us is an totally consistent way, every day, not even those who are closest to us.  There will inevitably be misunderstandings and mistakes. Expecting otherwise just sets us up to feel betrayed and disallusioned.

When words are said or something done, the practice is to stay as close as we can to the experience itself, as far as possible,  noticing when the experience turns into an emotion and the thoughts and behaviours that follow. With practice we try to remain with the experience itself, before fight or flight kicks in and before the self -justificating speeches to ourselves are made. We may not be able to change the initial incident or the words said towards us,  but we can stop it escalating by not running our defensive stories. We try to just be with what comes up, without adding to it, holding it in the light of awareness.

This unconditional friendliness towards our own experience provides a third element in our dealing with others. We try and maintain the same friendliness towards them. This does not mean that we have to like what is happening or what they are doing or saying.  Indeed, at times it will be right to say that we do not like it. However, we can maintain a friendliness to the person who is expressing their ideas and their fear, and hold as much as we can in awareness our own reactions to the words or emotions being expressed.  Mindfulness practice believes that the light of awareness has the power to change our experience. If we can be present in a greater way to the other person and listen to the emotion behind the words then space can open up. And as yesterday’s post told us, it is that space which we are looking to expand, both within us and in our lives with others.

May nothing disturb you: Nada Te Turbe

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Today is the feastday of Teresa of Avila, another formidable nun, this time from the 16th Century. She lived in an age of great social change, somewhat like today, and was a strong leader, founding monasteries at a time when most preferred women to be relegated to the kitchen and the home. She was intensely practical and deeply human. However she combined her achievements with a very profound interior life. She reminds us not to neglect the dimension of the soul in this age with our focus on progress and speed.

Despite suffering ill health she had a great trust that a Higher Power was guiding her life and her work. Even if she could not see where things were leading she trusted. These handwritten words were found after her death. May they support all who struggle this evening. The musical version comes from the monastery at Taize, not too far away from here in Bourgogne.

Let nothing disturb you,
Let nothing frighten you,
Everything passes.
God does not go away.
Patience
can attain anything.
He who has God within,
does not lack anything.

Nada te turbe, nada te espante; quien a Dios tiene nada le falta.

Rescued out of the depths

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I watched the first of the Chilean miners being brought out alive from the depths of the earth where they had been trapped for nearly 70 days. It brought to mind the biblical tale  of Jonah who was trapped in the whale for three days  and all those stories and myths about people descending to the underworld to remerge later. These rich themes seem to speak deeply to aspects of our experience. Today I am just interested in the aspect of waiting, which some call of being in a state of limbo.

We can sometimes be in a phase of our life when we feel like we are waiting or we are stuck, and that can make us uneasy. It seems like we are going nowhere. There may be an acompanying sense of unease or low mood. However, what we may not know is that these periods can be ones of important growth. We may go through a dark period, but that doesn’t mean that we are depressed. We sometimes have to have the courage to wait until a new direction becomes clear. Our culture today prizes achievement and fast forward movement. To stand still is seen as the same as going backwards.  Staying quiet and waiting is not valued as a process.

In this understanding, we can see that these periods, when we may feel stuck, even buried or in darkness. can be periods of rebirth. We are leaving behind some elements of the past only to emerge into a new light. As in the story of Jonah, we can be moving in a direction even if we seem to be trapped. The darkness is taking us where we need to go. Sometimes this becomes apparent only afterwards. Not all growth takes place in bright sunshine; as Thomas Moore reminds us, darkness is also part of life’s processes.

You may be so influenced by the modern demand to make progress at all costs that you may not appreciate the value in backsliding. Yet, to regress in a certain way is to return to origins, to step back from the battle line of existence, to remember the gods and spirits and elements of nature, including your own pristine nature, the person you were at the beginning. You return to the womb of imagination so that your pregnancy can recycle. You are always being born, always dying to the day to find the restorative waters of night.

The whale’s belly is, of course, a kind of womb. In your withdrawal from life and your uncertainty you are like an infant not yet born. The darkness is natural, one of the life processes. There may be some promise, the mere suggestion that life is going forward, even though you have no sense of where you are headed. It’s a time of waiting and trusting. My attitude as a therapist in these situations is not to be anxious for a conclusion or even understanding. You have to sit with these things and in due time let them be revealed for what they are.

In your dark night you may have a sensation you could call “oceanic” – being in the sea, at sea, or immersed in the waters of the womb. The sea is the vast potential of life, but it is also your dark night, which may force you to surrender some knowledge you have achieved. It helps to regularly undo the hard-won ego development, to unravel the self and culture you have woven over the years. The night sea journey takes you back to your primordial self, not the heroic self that burns out and falls to judgment, but to your original self, yourself as a sea of possibility, your greater and deeper being.

Thomas Moore, Dark Night of the Soul

Our dis-ease

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The nature of our dis-ease is this: we continually judge, reject and turn away from certain areas of our experience that cause us discomfort, pain or anxiety. This inner struggle keeps us inwardly divided,  creating pressure and stress and cutting us off from the totality of our experience.

We first learnt to reject our experience when we were growing up. As children our feelings were often too overwhelming for our fledgling nervous system to handle, much less understand. So when an experience was too much, and the adults in our environment could not help us relate to it, we learnt to contract our mind and body, shutting ourselves down, like a circuit breaker. This was our way of preserving and protecting oursleves…….In time, these contractions  form the nucleus of an overall style of avoidance and denial.

Thus our psychological distress is composed of at least three elements: the basic pain of feelings that seem overwhelming, the contracting of mind and body to avoid feeling this pain; and the stress of continually having to prop up and defend an identity based on this avoidance and denial.

John Welwood, Toward a Psychology of Awakening