Tag: wellbeing

Difficult moments in our lives

Karl DuffyLeave a comment
In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.  Rilke

Every shift in our life comes courtesy of the friendly forces; every catastrophe can offer us exactly what we need to awaken into who we really are. It’s difficult, though, when you are in the middle of a painful transition to mine the experience for inner growth.  And when your life falls apart,  it’s a lot easier to blame someone,  or to rail against fate, or to shut down to the hopeful message carried by the winds of change. Sometimes when friends try to help by saying “There’s a reason for everything” or “It’s a blessing in disguise”, you just want to run away or you  want to say” Yeah, if it’s such a blessing, then why does it hurt so much?” So forgive me when I say that everything in life is a blessing – whether it comes as a gift wrapped in happy times or as a heartbreak, a loss, or a tragedy…. It helps me to remember that everyone is confused when the friendly forces come knocking; there is no one alive who did not want to go back asleep instead of making a big change; and the journey from Once-Born innocence to Twice-Born wisdom is never easy.

Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open

A theoretical framework for mindfulness

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There is a lot of anecdotal – spoken – evidence for the effectiveness of mindfulness meditation practice. Even from my own experience I can say that most people who attend the MBSR Course report feeling some benefits, from a some people having a sensation of greater calm,  to the participants who say that the practice was  “life-changing”. And it would seem that this is consistent with what is said all around the world as well as being suggested by the popularity of the Course. That being said, the MBSR Course is part of a growing field of evidence-based initiatives in Mind-Body medicine and,  although it difficult to measure all the outcomes, it has been accompanied by scientific research from the start. As I have reported from time to time on this blog, much of this – increasingly expanding – research concerns itself with small studies on the application of MBSR and other mindfulness programmes to particular conditions, such as anxiety, ability to focus, exam stress or irritable Bowel Syndrome. However, from time to time we get another type of research which focuses on trying to understand why mindfulness works and come up with a theoretical framework which can explain that.

The best of the studies to this point in time has been published recently, entitled, “How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action From a Conceptual and Neural Perspective“. The lead author, Britta Hölzel, of Justus Liebig University,  has been a part of Sara Lazar’s lab at Harvard Medical School and has worked on the studies there on the effects of meditation on the brain. This excellent, detailed,  study suggests perhaps the most comprehensive framework to date for the different aspects of the person that are impacted upon through ongoing mindfulness meditation. As Dr Hölzel states, the goal of the research was to  “unveil the conceptual and mechanistic complexity of mindfulness, providing the ‘big picture’ by arranging many findings like the pieces of a mosaic”  And what they suggest is that Mindfulness Meditation is a multi-faceted mental practice that involves several different mechanisms, producing effects in four areas, namely, focusing attention, greater awareness of the body, regulation of emotion and a changed perspective on the self. They examine the empirical research, including practitioners’ self-reports and experimental data, which give evidence of these effects as well as looking at brain imaging techniques which explore the neural processes implicated in the process.

This paper is the most satisfying  outline to date for those who wish to reflect on the underlying process of mindfulness and understand it in the context of wider psychological understandings and theories. I find that its more complex framework corresponds to my own experience in working with the MBSR Programme. The mosaic metaphor is also quite apt, as the different elements seem to me to be related. For example, the way we regulate emotion and deal with the fearful situations which threaten us can have a direct impact on our sense of self . Furthermore, a  greater ability to work with the felt sense of the body means that one relates to one emotions in a different way. Grasping the relationships between these components, and the brain mechanisms that underlie them, will allow clinicians to better tailor mindfulness interventions for their patients, says Dr Hölzel. The paper firstly goes into each component and looks at research in that area, but then goes on to suggest the areas of further research that is needed to move understanding in this area beyond the “infancy stage” it is currently in. The authors hope that this research will “enable a much broader spectrum of individuals to utilize mindfulness meditation as a versatile tool to facilitate change – both in psychotherapy and in everyday life.”

Hölzel, B.K. Lazar, S.W.,  Gard, T., Schuman-Olivier, Z., Vago, D.R., Ott, U., (2011) “How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action From a Conceptual and Neural Perspective” Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(6) 537– 559.

How to work with disappointment today

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When you come in contact with some setback or disappointment, your goal is not to stop it, your goal is get to know it. Instead of running away,  you touch in, you tune in. Drop the storyline. What happens with the storyline is that you escalate it, and then it turns into rage.  Drop the storyline. Just experience the disappointment and stay with that.

Pema Chodron.

Seeing and holding the problem in awareness

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Meditation is about finding a centre, and carefully sweeping awareness out into the wilds of the mind, until there is a sense of space, relief, and subtle uplift. We can’t clear the whole wilderness in one go. But a little release is a precious thing; and every time we come out of being the problem to seeing and being with the problem, every time we come out of being entranced by a memory or fighting with it to know – ‘oh, it feels like this, and it’s there’ there’s a shift to a free centre. Every time we widen with kindness and awareness to see that the self-position I’m coming from, or the self I’m trying to get rid of or defend are objects over there and not a subject, something stops and there’s a touch of release. That’s the process. And it’s marked by happiness.

Ajahn Sucitto

How to begin to change what seems frozen or stuck

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How is there going to be less aggression on the planet rather than more? Only in an open space where we’re not all caught up in our own version of reality. Bring this question down to personal level: How do I communicate with someone who is hurting me or hurting others? How do I communicate so that the space opens up and both of us begin to touch in to some kind of basic intelligence that we all share? How do I communicate so that things that seem frozen, unworkable and eternally aggressive begin to soften up and some kind of compassionate exchange begins to happen?  Begin with being willing to feel what you are going through. Be willing to have a compassionate relationship with the parts of yourself that you feel are not worthy of existing. If you are willing through meditation to be mindful not only of what feels comfortable but also of what pain feels like, if you even aspire to stay awake and open to what you’re feeling, to acknowledge it as best you can in each moment, then something begins to change.

Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty

When stressed, shift attention

Karl Duffy2 Comments

On the same theme as recent posts,  but applying it as a practical way of dealing with the stresses and crises that arise during our working day. This is an easy-to-apply way of breaking the cycle of stress reactivity – divert your attention to your physical environment, like the touch of your hands on the keyboard, your breathing, or your feet in contact with the floor. See if you can create a small break from the spinning of the mind by tuning into the sensations of the body.

To gain composure at stressful moments, we can apply the mindfulness effort of letting go – abruptly shifting our attention from our thoughts to the immediacy of our physical environment. By suddenly being mindful in this way, we discover a stillness, an emotional space of “not knowing” , like opening a door to an unknown room or leaping from a diving board. When we are mindful in the immediate moment, the chaotic flood of emotions no longer vies for our attention like a crowd of loud, unruly voices. Instead they focus and settle into a physical feeling, unclear and murky, but no less powerful – a tickle in the stomach, a vague softness around the heart, or an openenss in the throat.

Michael Carroll, At Times of Risk and Stress, Cultivate Stillness