The R.A.I.N. Method for Being Mindful with Emotions
One framework for having a more free, easeful, and mindful experience of emotions is the “R.A.I.N. Method” – Recognition, Allowing, Interest, Non-Identification/Nurture.
Appreciating Ourselves For Our Meditation Practice
One activity that can be helpful to our meditation practice is to intentionally take time to appreciate ourselves for the time and effort that we are put in to it. Actively appreciating, celebrating, and admiring ourselves for our meditation practice can both positively boost our mood and foster consistency and depth in our practice.
Feeling Our Bodies So Fully That Emotional Experiences Leave No Residue
When we feel body sensations – emotional or otherwise – all the way down to their bottom so that they are complete and done with, we may find that their energy has totally moved through, and nothing feels “stuck” or incomplete about them.
Taking Mindful Breaks From Working
One of the ways meditation can most help in our daily life is when we take small, regular, refreshing breaks from what we have been doing to sit, check in, and deeply listen to ourselves and the world around us.
Should I Trust My Inner Impulses?
A central question that often comes up in many people’s lives is, “Should I trust and follow what my inner guidance, my impulses, and my instincts urge me to do, or should I instead do what I ‘should’, what the rules and my rational thinking mind tells me to do?” Mindfulness and meditation can help us with this question.
How Mindfulness Can Help When We Are Angry
“What to do when we feel angry” is a question that many people have. Many people who approach meditation practice hope or imagine that doing so may help them with this dilemma. And, indeed, thankfully, it can.
How Meditation Can Help With Being Sober from Addictions
There are various ways that meditation practice can help us to have fewer addictive urges, and to resist them when they do arise.
What If I Don’t Feel Like Meditating
A two minute read on the topic of, what to do if I have meditated and found it valuable, and have some sort of sense that, “I’d like to have it be more a part of my life”, but aren’t doing much of it.
Meditation Helps Our Happiness Grow Over Time
Meditation may or may not seem to correlate with us being noticeably more happy on a given day, depending on what process our mind is going through. The growth in positive mental states that we get from regularly meditating slowly rises over the years, however.
Mindfulness Meditation Can Help With Our Experience of Aging
Aging is an emotionally challenging experience for most people at least at times, and is sometimes one of the most difficult. Mindfulness meditation, thankfully, is a friend that can help create more ease with the process.
Spirituality And Psychedelics
A few thoughts on the interface of spirituality and psychoactive chemicals: the value that they can have, some of the dangers, and some tips for how to make psychedelic explorations be useful and safe.
Sleepiness During Meditation
This post is mostly about what actions to take to stay awake if you are sleepy during a meditation period and want to remain alert. It also briefly explores the question as to whether it is advisable to sleep during meditation periods, from both sides of the debate.
Spacious, Meditative Communication
I sometimes prefer to speak in a way that is unusual and clunky, but that feels to me like it embodies more mindfulness, presence, freedom, spaciousness, openness, groundedness, and invitation – ways of speech that are more “meditative”.
Mindfulness For The Office Workday
Not only is “mindfulness” a popular trend that’s sweeping the nation, but “mindfulness in the workplace” specifically is too. This post will give you some suggestions for helpful techniques for staying spacious and open when working an office job.
A History Of Circling
“Circling” is a powerfully liberating and connecting authentic relating practice that has been exponentially growing in popularity, worldwide. As circling has reached wider, people have gotten interested in its roots and history. As a part of an epic Facebook discussion thread on the subject, I wrote a post to clarify my memories of the beginning days of Circling and its evolution since then. I especially focused my writings on the early relationships between some of the major founding figures.
How A Meditation Practice And Physically Working Out Are Similar
One way to understand meditation practice is to see it as similar to the habit of physical exercise and working out, which is something that more people are more familiar with and able to understand.
Psychotherapy, Life Coaching, and Spiritual Work (Past, Future, and Present)
I once heard someone say that, “Psychotherapy is about the past, life coaching is about the future, and spiritual work is about the present moment”.
I felt a power to that model when I first heard it. In the years since, I’ve often thought about and examined it. This is what I think.
What is “Mindful Coaching”?
Isn’t all coaching supposed to be mindful? What’s unique about coaching via mindfulness-informed sensibilities? How does appreciating and having a personal relationship with mindfulness affect coaching work? What’s your experience with coaching, mindfulness, and mindful coaching?
How To Deliver A “Hard Truth” To Someone
A hard truth is when one person is unusually authentic and honest in giving another person feedback, in the form of giving a challenge, penetrating them with a different perspective that they may or may not enjoy hearing, and suggesting difficult changes that the speaker feels may help listener to be more mature, happy, and healthy.
Longer Attention Span
As we know, our modern electronic internet/social networking/cell phone culture is stimulating, entertaining, and short-attention-span-ish, but accomplishments that fulfill us the most take patience, focus, and a long attention span. A quote that I just saw and like, from “The Organized Mind” by Daniel Levitin : “As already noted, the Internet has helped some of…
Only The Flow
I think of my car as an object. But the cars that I’ve owned and driven around in the past are no more – I think now that the steel, fiberglass, plastic, aluminum, etc molecules that made up their parts are scattered all over the planet.
Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness
There are five domains of social experience that your brain treats the same as survival issues: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness,
Two Writing Practices That Can Help Stop Addictions
In this post I will describe two writing practices that I have found helpful in quitting addictions. I recommend them for working with any behavior that you have attachment to, that has major negative consequences, and that at least part of you would like to quit.
Two Types Of Growth
One way to make a big impact on our life for the better is instantaneous, emotional, intense, and invokes making a courageous and bold big change. The other is slow, steady, regular time put in moving towards a goal
Lessons I’ve Learned From Rock Climbing
I’ve noticed that it feels unmistakably more fun and satisfying to challenge myself, to get out and go climbing, to get on some routes that are edgy and difficult for me, and then to be skillful, brave, and persevering, and do what it takes to get all the way to the top. This is, of course, similar to many other areas of life: we don’t have to take on challenges, and we don’t have to succeed at them – but it sure does seem to feel better to win than not to play.
Interpersonal Meditation
Many of us with a desire to be truly emotionally close with other people eventually come to the conclusion that interpersonal relating can either be under control, safe, and artificial, or it can be raw, real, and genuine. A corollary of this is that there is no way around the anxiety that comes from being truly close with people – being intimate involves making space for a certain amount of anxiety without trying to manage it or make it go away.
What I Say To Friends Who Are Grieving
I imagine that most people would agree that it is often difficult to find appropriate words of condolence when a friend is grieving. I personally do not want to say to a grieving friend that I hope that they feel better soon, because I think that it is healthy for a human psyche to go through a period of pain when it has lost someone or something that it cares about. I believe that people often say “feel better soon” because they are uncomfortable in the presence of another person’s pain, and that that phrase can sometimes feel like an unpleasant pressure put on a grieving person to have it all put back together sooner than would be otherwise natural for them.
A Couple Lessons From My Research Career
I spent five years in the nineties as part of research teams studying how to improve drug and alcohol treatment. My job was to manage and clean the data, and to do statistical analysis
In my first job after university, I worked on a team that examined “proximal outcomes” for recovery, both for twelve step programs and cognitive behavioral therapy. The idea was, each modality of treatment program suggests various activities for people to do if they want to get sober – but which of these many activities are actually most effective in helping people to stay clean?
Morality Part I: Moral Rules
A friend of mine posted on Facebook a graphic making fun of religious notions of morality as “handed down from God”. I responded: I think a lot of atheistic objections to religion are a reaction to a simple-minded concept of the Divine. Yes, many people do indeed think of Divinity as an all-powerful Man with a White Beard who has a bunch of rules, a bunch of demands, and a quick temper. But that vision does not fit with the more sublime and subtle Divinity that, for example, the deep spiritual mystics and sages throughout the millennia have talked about experiencing.
Shinzen Young Discusses Liberating The Deepest Levels of the Unconscious Mind
Here is an brilliant excerpt from a talk by master meditation teacher Shinzen Young, discussing a difference between psychotherapy (where we completely deal with one memory percolating up from the subconscious at a time) and insight meditation (where we slowly bring awareness and openness to the whole mind, conscious and subconscious)
Being Clear About Boundaries
One thing that I think helps with clear communication is to be conscious of the on the fact that boundaries are not always bilateral or reciprocal. That is to say, I think that “Heyyyy! You just asked me to not do x, and now you’re doing that exact same thing!” is usually an unproductive thing to say.
Quotes By Guy Sengstock
I have entered many deep, rich, alive spaces over the years listening to my friend Guy Sengstock speak during the workshops he teaches. I have been regularly amazed by his spiritual clarity, how he naturally attunes to the deep way of things.
Here are some written quotes by him that leave me feeling open, inspired, and clarified after I read them:
Buddhist Practices For Dealing With Addictions
In Buddhism, it is taught that, ultimately, liberation comes though insight. It’s difficult for me to explain what “insight” means in this context, but I suppose in simple terms you could call it, seeing existence as it truly is. The traditional teaching, though, is that deep insight usually requires a concentrated focused mind, and that developing concentration usually requires a foundation of ethical behavior.
Music And The Mind
“Melodies which run through one’s mind … may give the analyst a clue to the secret life of emotions that every once of us lives … In this inward signing, the voice of an unknown self conveys not only passing moods and impulses, but sometimes a disavowed or denied wish, a longing and a drive we do not like to otherwise admit to ourselves … Whatever secret message it carries, the incidental music accompanying our conscious thinking is never accidental” — Theodor Reik, in “The Haunting Melody: Psychoanalytic Experiences in Life and Music
“If”, by Rudyard Kipling
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
Tassajara Zen Monastery: Learning From Kitchen Work
The group for this retreat has a little over forty monks in it, which fewer than the sixty to eighty who were here when I have been here for ninety-day retreats in the past. This means that all groups of monks (the work crews, the meal serving crews, the kitchen crew, etc) are on a smaller scale. We’ve had a number of people coming and going, which is fine, but I also find that I liked better the tighter container that I experienced in past years (i.e., where everyone who is here at all is here no less than the full three months).
Dead Ramones
“Do you know that old age, disease, and death must overcome us, no matter what we are doing? What do you wish to be doing when it overtakes you? If you have anything better to be doing when you are so overtaken, begin on that now.”
Love Remains At The Heart Of Things
“What I’m about to tell you is very real – I’m telling you the truth – I’m telling you what’s really so for those people: their inability to respond, their bound-upedness, is the highest expression of love which they are able to muster. About this I know the answer: they have a capacity for love, like yours or like mine, which is absolute. The only thing bound up in their life is the expression of that capacity. So, what you’re getting is a bound expression of an absolute love for you.”
Looking For Patterns Of Happiness And Unhappiness
Recently I did some thinking and writing about the texture of the time that I have been an adult, the ebb and flow of happiness in the twenty-five years since I graduated high school. I started listing, what were all the months and years of greatest growth, expansion, opening, and generally good things; in other words, what activities, experiences, and factors seemed to correlate with my life coming more alive. What I came up with were:
Truth
So what is it to be a “true person”? One of the simplest definitions of what is “Truth” (and perhaps pointing to the “truth that will set you free”) is that we are being truthful when we do what we say and we say what we do. We can tell the truth at least to ourselves, and maybe even to others too. Living in truth, there is a harmony between our words and our actions. Buddhists would go one step further, and say that truth is expressed when there is a harmony between our “beingness”, what we really are, with what we say and what we do – in a sense, when they are the same.
Dating, Sexuality, and Buddhist Teachings
I once read a book on sex that suggested that healthy sex has at least three aspects: respect, honesty, and consent. Within that framework, the book suggested, do whatever your dirty li’l minds come up with. That definition made a positive impression on me. And now, years later, having developed in my Buddhist practice, I like those three as good guidelines for a basic foundation of “right sexuality” that fits with the modern world that I live in.
Scheduling Groups of People
I have found that instead by far the best way to set a date, for groups of say six or smaller, is for the person with the tightest schedule to send out a comprehensive list of all the dates that they are available during the possible time span, someone else in the group to edit that list down to just the dates that they are also free and reposts, and so on, until, when the last person posts, and you are left with a comprehensive winnowed-down list of date that all people are free.
Book Review: “Codependent No More” by Melody Beattie
Some general themes of the book “Codependent No More” are cultivating boundaries, a healthy sense of separation, solid self-respect, saying “no”, paying attention to one’s own business, and being able to strong and brave in walking one’s path. It’s also about finding balance and general emotional health, and cultivating the ability to love and care for others for real (in a way that isn’t draining).
Book Review: “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, by Stephen Covey
“Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People” is a deceptively basic-seeming book that will actually will reward the reader with as much depth as they are willing to seek from it. Some themes in the book are developing a sense of purpose and intentionality in life, cultivating self-discipline and ethical behavior, and ways to create social networks that work (which, in the end, comes down to love). A big theme in the book is taking on practices and self-cultivations in the service of self-improvement.
Peace as Balance
The best that we can aim for is bringing awareness and allowingness to the heavy thick darkness of life and of ourselves, and thereby transform it into light, and finding some sort of balance for the time being.
Joining Facebook
I noticed years ago that you can have fun cyber-interactions with folks that don’t actually seem to make a huge difference in the texture or depth of the feeling the next time I see someone in the real world. Even emails often don’t seem to really take a relationship deeper. The thing that seems to really open up and deepen relationships are real time interactions, especially if it involves something relatively intense : traveling or living together, dating cuddling or otherwise physically touching, working on a project together, being a men’s/therapy/personal growth group, or otherwise going through a fire of real life together.
Recommending The Arete Workshop
Some of the main intentions of the course, in my words, are to get to the deepest heart of who we are, to have that be seen and celebrated in a community setting, to be aware of what stands between us and being connected to people and to help melt that, and to clear ourselves for getting on with whatever it is that we most want in life.
Choosing Your Problems
The healthy person, the healthy in body and spirit, is a person faced with many difficulties. He has a lot of problems, many of which he has deliberately chosen with the sure knowledge that in working toward their solution, he will become more the person he would like to be.
Some Favorite Quotes About Having Healthy Relationships
We’ve discovered certain behaviors and attitudes nurture relationships and help them grow. Healthy detachment, honesty, self-love, love for each-other, tackling problems, negotiating differences, and being flexible help nurture relationships. We can enhance relationships with acceptance, forgiveness, a sense of humor, an empowering but realistic attitude, open communication, respect, tolerance, patience, and faith in a Higher Power. Caring about our own and each other’s feelings helps. Asking instead of ordering helps. Not caring, when caring too much hurts, helps too. Being there when we need each other helps. Being there for ourselves, and doing our own personal growth work helps.
Communication Skills
Try to deeply understand the other person is saying, to have a feeling of how the world looks to them, and have them know that they are understood, whether we agreed with and enjoyed what they said, or not.
“I Am Not For Myself, Who Will Be For Me? And If I Am Only For Myself, What Am I?”
I love this quote, which has been my email sig line for a few months now. I feel like it expresses nicely and succinctly the importance of a balanced between, on the one hand, self-love and taking care of oneself, and, on the other, love of others, generosity, and connection.
Book Report: “Embracing Your Inner Critic” by Hal and Sidra Stone
The Inner Critic is the self-critical inner voice that judges and shames each of us, trying to get us to be perfect so that we won’t make mistakes or suffer negative consequences. This anxious, pushy voice usually develops in us as a young age, and it has a young, simple view of right and wrong, and good and bad.
Bioenergetics Physical Release Work
This last Saturday, I did a workshop derived from a therapeutic school called Bioenergetics. This work involves physical catharsis of old trapped energy, and activating physical vitality and energy.
Being Real
I make it my aim, wherever possible, to be genuine with people and to be real in my communications. To my mind, in the end, being real in this way is the only real way for people to be close.