Hello
I received feedback that my exercise at the end of the art of living mindfully post was unclear. I have clarified it. Please check out that updated post for more information. Don’t worry this is not the post for the day – just a quick update.
See you soon.
Beth
Hello
I first started to use mindfulness in a purposeful way in the early 90s when I was facilitating two hospital outpatient, day treatment programs for individuals with eating disorders. It was the best antidote to the automatic quality of the eating disorder process. If a person could get into the present moment in their relationship with food then she could have more control over what action she took. She could engage her own inner strength to see herself with fuller clarity, and make present moment-to moment choices about the feelings and habitual reaction patterns underlying her disordered eating.
My favorite author on this subject is a Vietnamese Zen master named Thich Nhat Hanh. He has written and spoken about “the art of living mindfully” since the 60s. My favorite book of his, Peace is Every Step, talks about how to live mindfully in everyday life. I often suggest it for couples to read when they are attempting to increase their positive communication skills. Each of his vignettes offer new perspectives on how to interact in the everyday world.
Mindfulness can have the enlightening effect of shifting one’s perspective. Often by reframing how your look at a situation you can then change your action in the situaiton. Re-framing is a great term to describe the process of paradigm shifting. A paradigm is a frame, a way in which information is inputted or interpreted. When one re-frames then the information is inputted or interpreted differently – that allows for a change in action in relation to a situation, and in my experience an increase in a compassionate interpretation and action.
As an example, Thich Nhat Hanh’s vignette about “Hope” . He writes that hope is important, because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today. But that is the most that hope can do for us- to make some hardship lighter……he goes on to discuss the tragic nature of hope…..since we cling to our hope in the future, we do not focus our energies and capabilities on the present moment. We use hope to believe something better will happen in the future…..Hope becomes a kind of obstacle. (pg 41 in Peace is every step). He reframes the concept of hope so that rather than helping to create the change, hope becomes an obstacle to our actual opportunities, capacities and actions for change in the present moment.
The thing is that we can only change what we can identify; and we can only use the tools presently available to us. By taking ourselves out of the present moment (hoping) we put ourselves into the future (hope for something better to come) where we have no actual power. Our only power over the future is in the present and what we do in the present. How we act in the present can change the future but waiting for change (living in the future) puts us into a passive, unempowered role.
Living mindfully is the most empowering tool available to us for actual change. Seeing our world for what it is and taking action with the strengths we actually have increase our empowerment.
So try this. Try to figure out what thinking, or doing you currently accept as “truth” (a belief system – Like: I am not smart, or I need this person to survive) that doesn’t actually describe you or your situation- and see if you can reframe how you look at that “truth” so that it allows present moment information, for real empowerment in your life. Hint: it will be something that’s been around a long time, it may be something that you feel defines you, and you will be surprised.
See you tomorrow.
Beth
Hello
So lets look at this idea of mindfulness.
Being present and the release of habitual reaction patterns focuses us on being our best self by utilizing our 6 senses. Have any of you picked up on the fact I keep saying 6 senses? We have hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, and smelling. I am suggesting that we come into being with a sixth sense of intuition similar to what Malcolm Gladwell tried to illustrate in his book Blink. We get gut feelings, hunches and intuitions about people, places, and even goals.
Hunches can actually begin to move us out of stuck working and living routines or situations. They may at first seem like daydreams or fantasies. Follow the information and a clarity appears that we need to change paths. When something doesn’t feel right that’s a type of intuition – it is a sense, a feeling similar to the information gathered from our other senses. This information is less available to us for analysis because of it’s right-brained nature. It’s like a knowing but it doesn’t have the left- brained concreteness, language, and proof. So much of the time most people ignore these feelings, until later when the “proof” presents itself, like the unexpected cold-front that requires a sweater left at home.
Being present and focusing on releasing habitual reaction patterns are ways to increase clarity. To access the information coming in from our senses. This information directs us. In some ways we recognize this – if we touch something hot that sense directs us to remove our hand from that hot space. When we sense that something isn’t right in our lives or in a specific situation that sense also can direct our action. These are the nagging feelings that we are not happy at work or in a relationship or that something isn’t right with our child. These nagging feelings, and inner knowings, when ignored can develop into depression, a sense of disconnect, and lack of focus. In fact the lack of attention to the intuitive sense can at times force the development of the very habitual reaction patterns that we need to dissolve.
Getting on the path of mindfulness, of paying attention to and also acting on all your sense related information including your intuitive information requires a relaxed focus. An increase in one’s awareness is necessary. Just listening to the intuitive voice, the quiet voice in the background of your mind and then taking action that is a beginning. I talked about the difference in the intuitive voice and the voice of fear a few days ago in the January 9th blog, Create Balance Now.
Sometimes the sense needs to be fine tuned or trained. A great way to do just that is to get a magazine or several. Browse through them. As you are browsing notice what draws your attention. Cut out the pictures that are attractive, and try to not put a lot of thought into the exercise – be open, and allow the different feelings. Cut these out and create a collage. Leave the completed collage in a space where you can look at it each day and jot down in a journal feelings and thoughts that develop in relation to it. This can give you a picture of what is going on in your unconscious. It’s a conversation with yourself about yourself. If you choose to do this with a focus in mind, a problem that you may want to resolve, then it can be a way of clarifying a problem, and a solution will present itself in the collage. This can be a fun way to access more tangible information.
Talk to you tomorrow.
Beth
Hello
So the concept of letting go of specific patterns of relating with oneself and others (releasing the habitual reaction patterns and being more in the present) is like paradigm shifting at a core level. And breathing helps you get to your center, which is a type of paradigm shifting within yourself.
Steven Covey in his book the seven habits of highly effective people gave a beautiful description of what we experience when we are able to view someone else’s world from their perspective and how that change in perspective also allows a more profound understanding of the other. In his well acclaimed book he describes a young man on a commuter train with children that are wreaking havoc and the original perception of the observer of how out of control the children were with a desire for the father to control them. Then he writes that the father reports to the observer about how he isn’t sure about what to do, the children were just returning from the service where they had buried their mother and although normally he would calm them he wants them to have an opportunity to be happy for a little bit. The observer hearing this immediately changed his perspective about the situation with increased compassion toward the father and children. Paradigm shifting is the most useful tool in relating to another person.
Asking questions and breathing help to get into the moment so that a shift in perspective can happen. I think these two tools are fundamental to effective parenting.
Paradigm shifting allows for and requires flexibility. Flexibility in how one receives the information and flexibility in how one acts, based on the information input. Flexibility is an extremely useful tool in parenting. Parenting requires a constant process of mediating between the needs of the individual and the needs of the group, and other stimuli. Parents are guiding their children to learn to live within the structure of society as well as develop unique aspects of their individual children. Often the needs of the group and the individual are in some sort of conflict and the decision of which to focus on requires some sort of hierarchy. This is where instinct comes in. Mothers talk about how they can tell their child is getting sick because ‘they are not themselves’ even pediatricians will use this as part of their evaluation process – when a mother says the child is uncooperative and this is not typical to the child’s personality the pediatrician uses this information along with other symptoms. This is a type of intuition or knowing that is outside of something tangible but is essential to navigating the needs of our children.
I think of paradigm shifting as a type of mindfulness. Fully evaluating a situation in real-time. Navigating through our everyday as parents is an interplay of many different continua: love and clarity, teaching and listening, growing and assimilating, allowing and containing, structure and freedom. Knowing when to be where on each continuum is a challenge. Mindfulness is an essential key to assessing where to be on those continua. The more we are free of our habitual reaction patterns and the more centered we are (breath) the more effective and responsive we are as parents.
It’s not all sweetness and honey – an important piece is acting quickly and fully in extinguishing a negative behavior. But knowing what to extinguish, what to question, and when it’s best to take different actions, that requires being in the present, mindfulness, flexibility, and grace.
I think the main responsibility of parents is to be a midwife to the spiritual, psychological, cognitive and physical aspects of their child; to guide and contain and help bring out the unique personality of their child while raising responsible, socialized individuals. This is a fun concept that I will write about in future blogs.
Having worked with lots of people who feel they were injured in childhood I have developed some basic concepts for guiding parents. Know you will make mistakes – there are no perfect parents. Saying I made a mistake and making a change in your own behavior is the best healing tool parents have. Doing this as soon as you figure out you made the mistake goes far to heal childhood injuries – so if you don’t figure it out until their adults then still make the adjustments – it still heals. Being willing to ask questions and learn from your children about their particular needs and setting structure – together – help to teach children that they have to develop both their internal personality and their socialized self. Be uptight less and laugh more. Try not to determine your “good parentness” from other or outside approval but rather from what you feel and see developing in your child. Teach multitasking and focus. Accept yourself and your child where you each are. And my personal favorite – Children are not always learning what you think you’re teaching – so you have to pay attention. They listen when we don’t know it and sometimes don’t listen when we are talking. It’s a conundrum.
See you tomorrow.
Beth
Hello
Being present, mindfulness, and breath.
One of my favorite ways to help others begin to get a handle on being present or being still has to do with breath and breathing. We are all automatically breathing without much attention to it. Focusing on your breath is a very enlightening experience. When one focuses on one’s breathing often the depth of their inhalation increases which is so good for a person. Deep inhalation (breathing in) and long exhalation (breathing out) are the first line of action for reducing anxiety – in fact the fastest way to slow down your heart rate and get into the present moment is to focus on your breathing. I know those of you reading this that are busy and functioning well at a high degree of multitasking are lol right now at this suggestion. It seems unreasonable to suggest you take time from your already over packed schedules to stop and focus on your breathing. But it works. It moves you out of the automatic mode into the mindful mode and that transition will help you make fuller assessments and more accurate decisions and ultimately increase the amount you can accomplish effectively. Why? Because you will have access to all your senses including the intuitive, instinctual sense. It’s as if breath allows for the traffic of the information to move more smoothly and congregate into the proper groups so that your decisions have more depth and breadth, and more relevance to the present moment.
The best way to practice focused breathing is to find a quiet space where you can sit for 5 minutes – in a pinch the bathroom at your office, or the privacy of your car, will do. Sit down and breath in for a count of 5 and out for a count of 7. Doing this for a couple of minutes. If you are scientifically minded you may want to take your radial pulse before you begin and then after practicing for 2 minutes – your heart rate will have reduced after the two minutes of focused breathing in this way. Note: it’s important that your inhalation be shorter than your exhalation if you breath in for a longer count than breathing out you will increase your heart rate and feel anxious and hyperventilate. So keep your inhalation shorter than your exhalation. As you practice this over time you may find that you may also desire to increase the length of your inhalation and exhalation – that’s great just remember to keep your exhalation at least 2 counts longer than your inhalation.
I encourage you to begin practicing this today and do it whenever you think about it for 2 to 5 minute intervals throughout the day – several times a day. And to keep this practice going when you are not necessarily stressed but rather to increase your skill at it. After a bit of this practice, you may want to use the breathing technique when you are actually feeling stressed or when you are trying to get into the present and not act from an habitual reaction pattern.
In my opinion what we put our attention on increases, so focus on what is working in your life and be grateful you will find that more is right than you originally thought.
See you tomorrow.
Beth
Hello
So the key to Instinctive Health is the instinctive part. How can we see, hear, and feel more instinctively or more accurately? It’s a great question.
I wrote last time about how we generally develop these habit reactions – it’s a short cut to deal with routine activities and interactions – historical relationships from our childhood and how we resolved conflicts there get applied to current relationships – but it’s inexact and it creates a skew in our communications and interpretations of our relationships. It’s like a flawed logic problem a reasonable logic equation looks like this: if a =b and b=c then a=c ; habitual reaction patterns look like this: if a =b and c=d then a =d. Do you see the flaw? That’s what we’re doing in our communication styles. To be more accurate if a certain relationship gets resolved in a certain way it doesn’t actually follow that always relationships end up that way. Habit reaction patterns set it up as if that is true – we create habit reaction patterns that are descriptive of our early relationships. We relate in past time, but just as we are different the other person is different so we’re interacting in historical time not present time within the same relationship. And we apply those same patterns across relationships. The problem with relating in past time is that you are not actually seeing the person in front of you. Present time interaction means the relationship is happening in real-time and related to current events not past events. It requires fuller, and more complete interactions with questions like what does that word mean to you because it means this to me or what did you hear me say because your reaction to what I said indicates you heard something different from what I meant to say. Most people in daily interactions want a short cut they want a faster degree of communication do the habit reaction pattern feels like it’s better. The problem is that although it’s faster it skews the interaction so that over time two individuals interacting in this fashion will ultimately feel unheard, unseen, and unappreciated in the relationship – generally not the goal of relationship.
Okay great, so how do we more accurately hear, see, and feel more instinctively (and by instinctively I don’t mean habit reaction patterns, I mean something that is a natural response that holds our highest goals and best interests at its center, something a priori – it’s our sixth sense, intuition, that Blink response referred to by Malcolm Gladwell in his book by that name). My first response is to say well it’s best if we listen to that part of ourself early in our lives and don’t push it under and apply the habit reaction pattern to begin with – – but that will only work when our parents are living that way and able to tolerate us living that way – so hopefully current day parents can create that for their children. And this will be the content of a future blog. So stay tuned. For the rest of us who are going to have to unlink charges to our words and actions and those of others the answer is different. A charge is an ident attached to a word or action it’s like a personal note to oneself that says this word or action always means this extra negative fear based thing that requires defensiveness. So that when one hears the charged word or sees the charged action then one feels the charged defensiveness and habitually reacts as such – and guess what that feels like? Right defensive but also it feels like it’s an instinct because it is reflexive. So we interpret that it must be true and we don’t question that it may be a habit.
Okay following this out HOW can we tell the difference between intuitive instinct and the things that feel like instincts that I’m calling habitual pattern reactions? The first step is to again slow down the process – when you immediately feel defensive, question yourself – does it seem right that this person who loves me is trying to hurt me? Now if it does then certain actions need to be taken and we’re no longer dealing with habit reaction patterns but if it doesn’t which is typically the case in relationships then you can begin to follow the thread of when did you feel defensive; what word or action seemed to reflexively bring that out in you? Then you can try to do some investigation about what the other person is actually saying, meaning, doing and see in present time what you feel.
In my experience intuition is a quiet voice in the back of your mind – like the thought or automatic action of getting an umbrella even though it’s sunny and warm out – and then you say to yourself why am I doing this and you leave that umbrella at home and it rains in the afternoon. We’ve all had that happen and then we remember we had an instinct to bring the umbrella but our cognition talked us out of it. Or a nagging bothersome feeling like something is not right in a situation or with a person. Habit reaction patterns tend to be loud thoughts that punch through in your body to the front of your mind saying: danger. Now these are not the blink responses that are like nagging bothersome feelings – the feeling like the hair standing up on your neck, or the thoughts that say: hmm I don’t think that person is okay or I don’t feel this is a safe situation.
Get the difference quiet easy to push away and ignore – loud and pushing through difficult to ignore. The former is what you want to start paying attention to in your everyday life; the latter is what you need to start to question and investigate more fully. Ironically, completely counterintuitive – which is the reason we don’t typically just stumble onto this on our own.
So here’s what I’m suggesting if you want to create balance, start today to observe both those experiences in yourself the loud and quiet and act according to the above equation and see if that makes a differenc in your life and relationships.
I think the possibilities are kind of exciting.
See you tomorrow.
Beth
Hello.
My name is Beth Gineris. For over 25 years now, I have been teaching, consulting, and training individuals, families and groups on what I call Instinctive Health Medicine. I have graduate degrees in Counseling, Business Administration, and Oriental Medicine and run a small clinic in Albuquerque, NM.
For several years now my friends, patients, and clients have asked me to start a blog or get out a book on my thoughts and suggestions for health and parenting. Since it’s a new year it seemed like a great time to offer a daily blog about Instinctive Health Medicine and habitual reaction patterns versus authentic present moment choice making or mindfulness. I know those words all together seem a little complicated, because what we do is to complicate our process of interaction and development. I’m focusing on simplifying how we relate to the many confluent stimuli at any given moment.
As a culture, in America, we have developed a style of habitual reactions as a way to simplify our responses to the many stimuli that accost us each day – we don’t utilize authentic, in the moment choice making (mindfulness) we are re-acting to past emotional experiences; we reflexively get angry or irritable or defensive as if something has happened when indeed it actually is only our habitual interpretation of what is going on.
Think of the last time you had a fight with your partner or child – commonly you or the other person reports they didn’t say what you heard or visa versa. Why? Because for the most part none of us are very good listeners we are too busy multitasking to actually focus on what is said and interact with the wholeness of the other person. We’ve short circuited our communication style. This is most common in those relationships that are most important to us – our most intimate, longstanding relationships.
It’s a smart aspect of human mechanics gone awry. We create shortcuts to organize everyday or routine interactions and doings. That’s good but in human relationships that tends to create a problem. We end up interacting to each other and sometimes our own needs in an habitual way that leads to us reacting to our histories not our current needs, wants, or selves.
Instinctive Health Medicine integrates the Spirit, Mind, and Body. It allows for the senses and intuition that we naturally have as human beings to guide us in our relationships, well-being, and parenting. Instinctively we HAVE all the information we need but over time as we develop in our less than perfect environments we replace our instincts with our habit reactions – actually thinking the habit reactions are our instincts…this leads to a lot of trouble. After awhile people like me get called into help.
I’m going to be blogging every day and putting up articles and guidelines to help anyone interested in creating a more mindful, balanced life. Ultimately I’ll be working myself out of the business of fixing people and families and groups and into the business of helping people never need my fixing services.
I look forward to seeing you tomorrow.
Until then think about this – what did you really want to do when you were young and what did you change that into as you grew up? Whatever is missing in that equation may give you a clue about where your imbalance lies.
Talk to you soon
Beth
InstinctiveHealthParenting4U 