Tag: Psychology

Bring your mind to the present moment

Karl Duffy2 Comments

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.

Jill Boite Taylor

Meditation helps you focus and turn down distractions

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The world today is increasingly distracting, with faster media and social networking sites increasing the speed at which we can access information and the amount of time we feel we need to stay connected. A recent study suggests that one key value of meditation may be that it helps the brain deal with this often overstimulating world.

The study, published online on April 21 in the Brain Research Bulletin, was conducted by researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It found that modulation of the alpha rhythm in response to attention-directing cues was faster and significantly more enhanced among participants who completed an eight-week MBSR mindfulness meditation programme than in a control group. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), an imaging technique that detects the location of brain activity with extreme precision, the researchers measured participants’ alpha rhythms before, during and after the eight-week period. They found that  meditators were better able to focus their attention and thus choose relevant new information easier and faster.

Lead researcher Catherine Kerr, PhD, of the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at MGH and the Osher Research Center at Harvard Medical School, explained the findings in this way:  Our discovery that mindfulness meditators more quickly adjusted the brain wave that screens out distraction could explain their superior ability to rapidly remember and incorporate new facts.

Christopher Moore, an MIT neuroscientist, goes further : These activity patterns are thought to minimize distractions, to diminish the likelihood stimuli will grab your attention. Our data indicate that meditation training makes you better at focusing, in part by allowing you to better regulate how things that arise will impact you.

The implications of these findings go far beyond just meditation and could lead to developments in helping people who suffer from dysregulated brain function in ADHD (Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder) and other conditions.

Catherine E. Kerr, Stephanie R. Jones, Qian Wan, Dominique L. Pritchett, Rachel H. Wasserman, Anna Wexler, Joel J. Villanueva, Jessica R. Shaw, Sara W. Lazar, Ted J. Kaptchuk, Ronnie Littenberg, Matti S. Hämäläinen and Christopher I. Moore. “Effects of mindfulness meditation training on anticipatory alpha modulation in primary somatosensory cortex.” Brain Research Bulletin. 2011

A safe holding environment

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The main trend in the maturational process can be condensed into the different meanings of the word “integration”  Winnicott

As we continue to meditate we see that one thing which we need to develop in order to  increasingly free and happy is the capacity for investigation. Investigation means that we move to see things clearly, just as they are. First we strengthen our capacity for awareness;  then we increasingly investigate the present moment. Our practice a kind of moment-to-moment noting of our ongoing experience, and our reaction to that experience, and allows the coming together of the multiple,  varied and fragmented events which we have gone through in our lives and which still have an impact upon our sensations and our emotions.

This process of awareness and investigation is similar to the holding process which Winnicott said was necessary for ongoing integration. In childhood,  the environment around the baby is of  paramount importance,  allowing  growth as the baby  begins to understand  the differences between itself and others, and not see these differences  as  overwhelming threats. Thus the baby begins a process of integration which continues little by little throughout life. It occurs in the intersection between the body and the mind as the child is able to gradually allow distance to appear between itself and the caregiver, with the caregiver allowing the holding space to grow wider, as the child becomes able to function independently. It develops the ability to be alone, through the presence of others.  The caregiver offers an emotional constancy which  is predictable and consistent, and with the assurance he or she  is  someone who can be reached if needed. In this way, difficult moments can be faced without the child feeling a fear of annihilation.

We echo this in meditation. What happens  is that by sitting silently, and becoming more still in our aloneness,  we develop inside ourselves an increasing capacity to hold in awareness and investigate  the experiences which have left their traces in our body and in our mind. We create a similar holding environment inside ourselves which allows our fears to come out safely and be healed. Meditation is not some escape from our experiences or an artificial haven to run to when times get stressed. It is, rather, a place where we hold the things that scare us, and in holding them, slowly heal them.

Letting go of the outside search and turning within

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Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naively suppose that people are as we imagine them to be. Although the possibility of gross deception is infinitely greater here than in our perception of the physical world, we still go on naively projecting our own psychology into our fellow human beings. In this way everyone creates for himself a series of more or less imaginary relationships based essentially on projection.

C. G Jung

We can often feel divided and conflicted. We wish to integrate all the contrasting parts inside ourselves and develop a greater harmony within, a sense of direction that is solid and does not change from week to week. The first step in achieving this is to listen deeply to our own interior intelligence and find out what it is seeking.

Sometimes we notice that we are projecting onto others, or onto some outside  things,  the search for happiness which need to be anchored within first. We can see this  if we pay attention to our daydreams or our fears. It can happen that  an interior need becomes attached to another person or to our job or some plans and ambitions. In other words, we expect that the other person or the outside event fill in the missing parts of ourselves, rather than looking to do that work within ourselves first. We project the unconscious stage of our development onto another, and then act as if that person is what we imagine him or her to be. Frequently, however, the person is actually a mirror of our needs, which we have not yet come to recognize in ourselves. And as I have said before, our relationship with others reflects the current level of our relationship with ourselves.

It can be a great liberation to become aware that  our projections actually represent our interior unlived capacities. We turn within for what we sought outside, recognize our needs and hold them gently. We start to grow, because a part of us which was hidden is now coming to light. Sooner or later in life, we all have to come face to face with the question of who we really are. If we do not run away but  hold this question in ourselves, it can be the beginning of the greatest adventure in our lives. We can find the missing pieces inside ourselves, and in this way let go and move on to becoming whole.

Being genuine with ourselves and with others

Karl Duffy2 Comments

The very basis of  fear itself is doubting ourselves, not trusting ourselves. You could also say it is not loving ourselves, not respecting ourselves. In a nutshell, you feel bad about who you are. So the very first step, and perhaps the hardest, is developing an unconditional friendship with oneself. Developing unconditional friendship means taking the very scary step of getting to know yourself. It means being willing to look at yourself clearly and to stay with yourself when you want to shut down. It means keeping your heart open when you feel that what you see in yourself is just too embarrassing, too painful, too unpleasant, too hateful.

If you do stay present with what you see when you look at yourself again and again, you begin to develop a deeper friendship with yourself. It’s a complete friendship, because you are not leaving out the parts that are painful to be with. It’s the same way you would develop a complete friendship with another person. You include all that they are. When you develop this complete friendship with yourself, the parts you’re embarrassed about—as well as the parts you’re proud of—manifest as genuineness. A genuine person is a person who is not hiding anything, who is not conning themselves. A genuine person doesn’t put up masks and shields.

Pema Chodron

More on repetition and getting stuck

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Something similar to last weeks post on repeating patterns in our lives, or what Freud termed the Repetition Compulsion, where he noticed people repeating – sometimes in a disguised way – the experiences which  were difficult or distressing in their earlier life.  He saw that people do not necessarily remember clearly what was happening in childhood, but still act it out in relationships later, without knowing that  they are  repeating it. Unconscious dynamics which were formed in childhood and which were adaptive then – such as not allowing anyone get too close, or having to “make” others love them – are repeated in adulthood, even if they are self-destructive.  So the past is repeated in a new form, but in the hope that this time the original wound may be healed.

On a day-to-day level this tends to manifest as the story of our life which we have allowed to take hold and which we repeat to ourselves. We can see this idea in this piece from the Tibetan Soygal Rinpoche, writing from a meditation perspective:

As we follow the teachings and we practice, we will inevitably discover certain truths about ourselves that stand out prominently: There are places where we always get stuck; there are habitual patterns and strategies which we continuously repeat and reinforce; there are particular ways of seeing things – those tired old explanations of ourselves and the world around us – that are quite mistaken yet which we hold on to as authentic, and so distort our whole view of reality.

When we persevere on the spiritual path, and examine ourselves honestly, it begins to dawn on us more and more that our perceptions are nothing more than a web of illusions. Simply to acknowledge our confusion, even though we cannot accept it completely, can bring some light of understanding and spark off in us a new process, a process of healing.