January 12, 2017: Dealing with Political Triggers

Getting riled up by political comments on social media, on the street, or in the news?

A mindfulness strategy of compassionate investigation can help channel anger and worry when we are triggered. While we may fall short of the ideal, we can at least try to open our hearts, get curious, and ask ourselves questions like:

·         Why might that person have written/said what he or she did? What might be going on in his/her life to feel that way?

·         What are my own initial reactions? How do those thoughts register in my body – what do they feel like, physically?

·         What do I value that I perceive is being threatened by the person’s comment?

·         Do I feel called to take positive action in support of my values?

Identifying our values can help us de-personalize and shift toward actions like contacting legislators, writing letters-to-the-editor, giving support to organizations working toward our values; or talking to people who think differently in a genuine attempt to understand their views.

                 

This is how our struggles can become our best guides. Exploring them with compassion can lead the way to taking enlightened action. And that’s liberating. 

October 16, 2012: Looking and Seeing

Sometimes I hurry through a busy day and realize I did not experience a single moment of true present-moment awareness. But fall colors have a way of reminding me to look, and not just to look, but to really see. And drawing what I see takes me even more deeply into the moment. I drew this tree a year ago but I still can feel the warm October sun on my back and see those deep shadows in front of me.

August 30, 2012: What Surprised You Today?

Years ago I heard about a Basque spiritual tradition that can help us capture a little mindfulness in retrospect. Here's how it goes: at the end of the day, either write in a journal about the questions below or gather with someone and ask each other to answer them:

• What surprised you today?
• What inspired you?
• What moved you?
• What made you think differently?

Okra is one of my recent surprises. How about you?

March 12, 2012: Impermanence, Revisited

Ginger is gone now. We had to put her down last week; her eyes and body told us it was time.

It would be easy to focus only on the sorrow, but I am grateful that my meditation and mindfulness practice helps me acknowledge the joys, too – memories of Ginger romping ahead of us on the wooded path, her curly tail waving as she chased a squirrel…Ginger grabbing a stick, inviting one of our sons to play tug of war…Ginger running toward us when it was time to get back in the car.

In the abstract we know that nothing ever stays the same, but sometimes we are faced with this truth on a deeper level. The Buddha taught that attachment to things and people and ways of life are futile. Attachment leads to grasping, which leads to suffering, or dukkha. The solution to suffering, I have oh-so-slowly come to accept, is to end the grasping, like the Buddha said, rather than try to escape from the universal law of impermanence. 

Through all these years of walking Ginger in the woods and postage-stamp prairies tucked in and around Iowa City, Ames, and eastern Iowa, nature has demonstrated the law of impermanence. Bloodroot pushes out of the ground in April like old, gnarled palms that turn youthful and flat as they rise, then old and leathery as spring progresses. Sweet Williams release their aromatic lilac scent for a few days in May, after which the smell turns musky and then fades. Purple coneflowers bloom in June like they’re forever, and then suddenly they’re passing the baton to their grey-headed coneflower cousins with the yellow petals. In the fall a deer carcass gets picked over by hungry, cawing ravens; a hawk flies over with a mouse in its talons. Canadian geese honk southward and then north again, leaving the old and sick behind.

At the end, she sniffed more than ran in the woods. Her eyes turned milky and she chased squirrels only in her dreams, her paws twitching.  

If you let go a little, you’ll have a little peace, the Buddhists say. If you let go a lot you’ll have a lot of peace. If you let go completely, you’ll have complete peace.  Mahusukha, the Great Happiness…the great release – nature knows this and Ginger knew it, too. It may take me a lifetime to bend my own mind to it, but I can’t say that I haven’t had a good teacher.

Rest in peace, dear beast.

July, 2012: Can Mindfulness Training Fix Boredom?

Occasionally in my mindfulness/meditation workshops a participant will allude to the stress of coping with work – or a life – that isn’t challenging enough. Can a meditation practice be a panacea for boredom?

Cultivating a mindful state can help with moments of boredom, but to alleviate chronic ennui, we may have to figure out how to challenge ourselves more. As Eric Maisel put it recently in a Psychology Today article (“Who Stole Your Brian?), “If you have a good brain and the world you grow up in demands that you shut it down, you are bound to suffer.”

Maisel says that it is “natural and predictable that our environment may pressure us not to think. This pressure will produce pain as we intuit that we are missing out on a native opportunity and will negatively affect our personality, producing everything from ‘math anxiety’ to ‘depression.’ If you were born to think and got pushed off that path, now is the time to make use of your available personality to craft a new, friendlier relationship with your brain.”

I agree. Mindfulness and meditation can only go so far in improving our lives. Pursuing our passions, nurturing a sense of curiosity, and taking on new learning curves is also part of the equation.

Sometimes when we feel like we’re crawling out of our skin, we need to do something different. Just ask a cicada!