Welcoming and Releasing Emotions

Urban Monk has a powerful piece on the practice of dealing with our emotions rather than living a life of avoidance. As noted in the article, we tend to avoid people and situations that cause us pain and discomfort, because why put yourself in those situations if you don’t have to?

In our internal world, however, that does us more harm than good. It isn’t until we’re willing to face our pain and troubling thoughts that we begin to understand them and work through them to obtain a measure of peace.

The three steps outlined in the posting – awareness, relax into the raw emotion, and bypassing the mind, are pretty familiar to anyone who has ever experienced exposure therapy or engaged in any sort of meditation. From my perspective, it can be boiled down into one word – feel.

When we choose to feel, rather than think, rationalize, intellectualize – insert your favorite -ize here – we’re getting down to our raw base. Some people call it inviting the emotion in, and they facilitate it by naming what they are feeling out loud.

Pain, come in and walk around – I won’t push you away or hide from you. I’ll let myself be awash in you. All creatures feel pain. It’s okay.

Sadness, my old friend, good to see you again. Come sit with me and get soggy from my tears as I allow myself to acknowledge your presence and understand that it’s normal to feel you. You don’t last forever.

Fear, you’re intruding into my life, as you often do, so rather than wrestling with you, fighting and grappling in an intellectual cage match, I’m going to let you swirl around a bit, knowing that you have no stamina, and that you will soon pass and allow me to focus on more meaningful things.

It can be difficult to embrace and understand your emotions if you’ve been avoiding them for a time. In addition to how you react in your brain, what physical symptoms do various emotions cause?

Muscle tension is a good one for fear or panic, along with rapid pulse, increased rate of breathing, perhaps some dizziness or disorientation. Recognizing them, calling them out, is a good way to label them for what they are – physical manifestations of emotional reaction, temporary in nature, and not indicative of anything else. No pending heart attack or stroke, just your body physically reacting to emotions that you haven’t spent much time with lately.

My experience has been that once I welcomed these emotions, embraced them, named them, understood them, and let them flow through me, two distinct patterns emerged. First, the racing mind and physical symptoms tended to be less severe and the amount of time they lasted became less and less. Secondly, I found myself  with less apprehension about them when there was a possibility that they would occur. Since I knew what they are, what they did, and that I was able to acknowledge and embrace them, they lost all mystery and negative connotation. In the words of our friends from The Sopranos, it is what it is.

So I encourage you to stop avoiding your emotional side and send it an invitation to sit down for a chat. Buy it a cup of coffee or an herbal tea. Know that viewing your emotions as a necessary part of yourself that’s needed to make you a whole being should make it easier to make friends with your emotions, and learn to benefit from the lessons they hold.

We don’t always need to think and analyze and dissect. Sometimes, it’s best to just sit back and feel.

Core Practice: Welcoming and Releasing Emotions, via Urban Monk

CNN Discovers Mindfulness

You know that eastern practices are becoming more mainstream when CNN starts reporting on them. Heck, I would expect Glenn Beck to begin railing against yoga and meditation now, as both exercises clearly discriminate against the mindless hordes.

All political humor aside, the mere fact that the concept of mindfulness is catching on in these odd and confusing times shows that perhaps the philosophy of quick fixes and pharmaceutical intervention is becoming antiquated as the populace discovers that much like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, they had the power all along.

I’ve written about mindfulness here, here, and here, and the longer I practice, the more beneficial it becomes. Certainly, attaining a mindful state isn’t something that happens quickly, or easily. Thoughts and feelings intrude incessantly at the beginning, and it can be difficult to push the head full of busy out of the way and refocus.

But the mere act of recognizing a lack of focus and the presence of intruding chatter and chaos is itself therapeutic, as it helps to frame the amount of noise with which we’re normally dealing and provides a sense of empowerment and calm when we begin to have success at reducing the bedlam to white noise.

The CNN article discusses various “mindfulness” techniques as solutions for stress-busting, but that’s become a sort of catch-all, a default description for anything that helps someone to slow down and feel better. Breathing exercises, stretching, yoga – all are part of plucking yourself out of the rat race and pushing the reboot button to reset your level of tension and anxiety.

Think of your muscles, mind, and body as a rubber band. Visualize that rubber band being stretched when you’re stressed and tense, and then watch it as it grows slack, returning to its natural state. Over time, this rubber band continues to stretch, growing tense, but often fails to fully return to its original loose form due to the underlying tension that never quite goes completely away.

Therefore, our rubber bands end up being partially stretched at all times, so when we do relax, we don’t do it in the manner that we did before – we only return part of the way to a non-stretched condition.

Practicing mindfulness and stress-reduction helps us take that rubber band and relax it the rest of the way, so that it’s both easier to notice the disparity between the stressed and non-stressed self, but also to fully grow limp from an emotional, physical, and spiritual perspective.

I’ve actually seen great benefit to proactive mindfulness – doing a bit of deep breathing and mind-clearing prior to entering meetings or situations that are typically stressful, so that I’m much more relaxed at the beginning and my stress thermometer is starting from a much lower reading.

Mindfulness – catch it!

Mindfulness training busts stress , via CNN

Meditation Helping Troubled Veterans

The Seattle Times details a new “mindfulness-based stress reduction” therapy for veterans experiencing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Once thought to be applicable only to hippie freaks and David Carradine fans, meditation and mindfulness are rapidly becoming the go-to tool for therapists as they search for ways to assist soldiers and sailors who have been witness to unspeakable havoc and human destruction.

Mindfulness treatment asks participants to be aware of their thoughts and physical pain without judgment. It’s easy to stew over negative thoughts, which can cause more stress and frustration.

By simply pausing to pay attention, people can notice patterns in their thinking and put thoughts into perspective to improve their lives. Deep breathing, meditation and yoga help with this process.

Scientific studies have shown the technique can help patients with a range of issues, including anxiety, depression, chronic pain and rheumatoid arthritis. Kearney hopes to add PTSD to that list.

“I quickly found that people with PTSD sought out the class to find additional ways of dealing with this problem,” he said. “We’ve had many patients report to us the ability to be present in the actual moment helped their PTSD.”

Learning about the Buddhist concept of mindfulness and how meditation can be used to facilitate the mindful state was enormously beneficial to me when I began to grapple with my anxiety disorder. The easiest way to explain it is that the combination of mindfulness and meditation gives my fears a “time-out” where, for that period of time, I’m in charge of my thoughts and emotions. By forcing myself to use my mind in a reasoned, practical, intellectual manner, I’m effectively disabling the runaway thought processes that often lead to the anxiety reactions and behaviors.

I’ve never had much use for the formalized exercises or chanting that often accompany meditation, but repeating key phrases and/or vocalizing my emotional state while clearing my brain of extraneous thoughts has evolved through practice and is now an essential part of my coping mechanism toolbox.

Kudos to the VA Puget Sound Health Care System for their innovative approach to helping our vets.

Seattle hospital teaches meditation to troubled vets

It’s Useful to Have a Duck

In dealing with anxiety, it’s easy to begin feeling like you’re in some strange psychological solitude, alone with your struggles. Family, friends, and co-workers will do their best to empathize with your disorder, but unless you’ve experienced panic and anxiety, it can be quite difficult to understand.

Looking at things from different perspectives can be helpful, not only to put a new spin on an old condition, but also to try and gain an awareness of how others may view you. This can assist in building your toolbox of compensating controls and coping mechanisms.

Back when I was learning how to be an effective trainer, one of the instructors shared with me an approach to understand adult learning behaviors – “Adults are just babies with big heads.” What he was referencing is that people tend to follow the same paths to learning their entire lives, and you can leverage some basic teaching fundamentals from cradle to grave.

That said, getting additional exposure to the concepts of empathy and putting yourself in the shoes of others is a wonderful way of continuing your personal growth, since we’re all interconnected in some way and often we effect other people without knowing it, just as they effect us.

If your boss has an argument with their spouse the night before, they could be cranky in dealing with you the next day, and you might pay that annoyance forward when you’re home at dinner with your significant other. So, your best friend and life partner gets bitched at because your boss fought with their spouse the night before. Classic!

Which brings me to It’s Useful to Have a Duck, an English translation of a Spanish-language book for children.

Via BoingBoing:

It’s an accordion-fold book that you can read from either end — read from front to back, it tells the story of a boy who found a rubber duck that he loves but uses roughly, sitting on it, drying his ears with it and leaving it in the plug-hole when he’s done with his bath. Read back to front, though, the story becomes “It’s Useful to Have a Boy,” and it tells the same story from the duck’s perspective — the boy “rubs my back,” “waxes my beak” and when its all done, the duck finds “my little sleeping hole.”

This would be an excellent book to help your youngsters embrace the concept of empathy, and it’s not a bad refresher for adults, either!

It’s Useful to Have a Duck

One Minute Meditation

This a nice little 1-minute exercise to clear your mind and push your reset button. I haven’t followed Stacey Mayo’s request to join her Stillness Experiment, but feel free if you’re interested.

Death Anxiety

In The Philadelphia Inquirer, writer Dan Gottlieb’s column tackles a question from a reader regarding death anxiety. Whoa – heavy topic that we all try to avoid.

The reader, Ken, has been experiencing health (and death) anxiety since having a serious medical issue awhile back, and wonders what is driving his anxiety, and what he can do about it.

Gottlieb responds with a detailed look at existential anxiety – how humans find it intolerable to think about no longer existing. So we go about creating this huge identity for ourselves as a way to “leave a mark” on the world. The problem with that is that our ego doesn’t want to let that go, even though ceasing to exist is in the cards for all of us.

It’s very easy to fall into the trap of being so worried and fearful of death that we fritter away the act of living, and unless you’re a believer in reincarnation, this is the only shot we have.

Gottlieb’s advice?

So between now and then, your job is to live your life as fully as possible, mourn what you have lost, and love what you have.

Then teach your progeny what you’ve learned in life and how you’ve learned it. That could be your way of saying thanks for this wonderful journey. Remember, you fear death because your life is precious to you, but when your mind races to the future, you miss out on your life.

Ask Dan: How to live with anxiety over death

Beating the Fears

Zen Habits, always the helpful source of noble truths, has posted a handy guide to beating the fears that tend to hold us back.

Leo Babauta posits that most fears have their genesis in yet another fear – the fear of not being good enough. Babauta explains that in his life, the fear of not being good enough was sufficient to keep him from even trying.

That’s a bit of a head-scratcher to me. I grasp the idea that a lot of folks have issues relating to self-confidence or self-image that make it difficult for them to take risks because of the threat of repeated disappointments, and being constantly beaten down certainly makes it harder to rise up.

But the concept that the other fears Babauta lists – rejection, intimacy, success, going broke – are somehow inescapably entwined with the fear of not being good enough seems improbable.

They may all follow a common thread, and it’s possible the if you have repeated failures, rejections, or break-ups, that you may decide to stop trying, I’m not certain the linkage remains solely around not being good enough. That’s painting lack of success with a mighty broad brush.

Again, the lesson I take from this article is one of compassion for oneself. No one is perfect – even the best ball players only hit .300. So don’t be surprised by failure, and most certainly don’t be afraid of it, as it happens statistically more frequently than success.

We have nothing to fear but fear itself. And bears.

A Guide to Beating the Fears That Are Holding You Back

Anxious Kids and Meditation

Canada.com has an article posted that explores the benefits of meditation when it comes to children.

I’ve been a parent for a very, very long time, and I’ve often found it challenging to corral my kids long enough for lunch, let alone meditation. But I digress.

There’s no doubt that being a kid today differs significantly from growing up in different eras, such as me growing up in the 60s. The world is a much different place, from amount (and avenues) of stimulation to peer pressure to the ever-changing structure of the family.

Looking back at my youth, most of my stress and feelings of pressure were generated in one of three places – school (grades), family issues, and social situations. There was a lot of interplay between them, and as I look at my kids today, there isn’t a lot of difference (in my mind, anyway) in where they see their stress sources. Obviously, social pressures are probably more exacerbated today, but it could be safely ventured that with the advent of online communities and social media sites, finding others with similar interests and issues is easier than ever before. It’s much more difficult now to feel like you’re the only one who is experiencing something.

Nowhere within formal education is coping with anxiety and stress championed or instructed. Many times it’s up to guidance counselors and school psychologists / behavioralists to act on referrals from teachers or parents to engage with a student exhibiting the signs of anxiety. That’s not an optimal model, but it’s better than nothing. However, it can often occur well after the child has been floundering.

One of the things that meditation offers is the ability for kids to disconnect from the world for awhile in a controlled, peaceful manner. It’s unusual to see a child today who isn’t on a cell phone or hand-held game, plugged into an iPod, or otherwise on the receiving end of a constant barrage of stimulus. Having an opportunity to carve out time for reflection and self-awareness is hugely important, especially for teens, who are undergoing so much change that it’s easy to be confused about who you are and where you fit. Learning to be introspective, while time-consuming and a lengthy process, can be enormously beneficial.

Helping kids calm down is something we can all support. Meditation is one way to accomplish that goal.

Meditation helps kids with anxiety

Stand by Me

Via YouTube, a collection of unknown street musicians from around the world contributing to a touching rendition of Stand by Me.

Riding the “E” Train – Mindfulness of Emotions

Jonathan Kaplan, Ph.D., writing in his Psychology Today blog, digs a little deeper into the concept of being aware of your emotional state.

Equating it to a subway train approaching and then zooming past, Kaplan discusses how emotion rises to a peak, like the train coming on fast, and then subsides. He then provides a detailed exercise to use as a tool to recognizing emotional peaks and valleys.

It’s really part of the holistic approach to emotion that we discuss here from time to time, along with the linkage we attempt to establish between emotional and physical response.

Riding the “E” Train: Mindfulness of Emotions