Hello

Forgiveness is the most necessary action to be, and remain, healthy and balanced.  Yet it is not taught in school.  It is often not taught at home.  And although all the major identified leaders of various religions, spiritual pursuits, and healers speak about it – the act itself is not actually practiced much.

I think developing the capacity to forgive, and focusing our attention on that act, might be the most powerful tool against stress and disease.

One of my favorite meditations that I teach and use in my practice is a meditation on lovingkindness.

Meditation on Lovingkindness

(an opening to forgiveness)

Sit in your chair, or on the floor, comfortably if you want to use the sitting pose please do so
Breath in for a count of 5 and Breath out for a count of 7, this allows for you to move into a light, calm state
Notice your body against the chair or floor allowing your breath to continue in and out

Breath in from the top of your head and down through your body, you can imagine a sense of warmth entering your body and allow negative energy or tension to leave through your torso, hands and feet.
Continue breathing and focus inward, noticing and allowing your breath as part of the background

Focus your mind onto a being that you love and feel loved by.  Choose a being that is not one of conflict – like a pet, cat or dog, that you love, – or a butterfly, something void of conflict
See the face of that being shining love toward you, be with that and breathe in the love – allowing the love

Now shift the picture, as you are holding and feeling that love, to your face shining toward you so that you can experience self-love – if this is difficult and you feel the energy fade –  bring back the being from whom you felt that love and Begin Again
Once this is fruitful be with and breath in that love – allowing the love – until you can remain with this.

Then in that loving state you may want to put in the face of the being or problem with which you are struggling.

Allow for the love you are feeling to smile upon the problem
Again if this is difficult go back to the last loving being and feel that energy and Begin Again.
Now sit with this loving feeling and with your breath

Now bring in all three, your loving being, your loving self and your loving other/problem
Hold these together as you feel the loving energy flow between these three images into and through you.

Once you feel you have completed this you may bring your attention to your breath, and to your body in the chair, and slowly open your eyes

Forgiveness may be a function of forgiving yourself more than the other person. 

Perhaps it is a something that you have to accept about yourself before you can change that quality or aspect. 

Paradigm shifting and figure/ground perception can be a part of forgiveness.  Mindfully re-viewing yourself or the other/problem can allow you to move into a place of neutrality.  From that place you can then allow love, or grace, or compassion to enter so that you can allow forgiveness.  

Getting to neutrality is sometimes the bottleneck – blocking point.  Anxiety can feel like this, forcing you to feel stuck in a negative, powerless space which can lead to frustration and anger, and a lack of forgiveness.

Breathing in and breathing out, focusing on breath, as the meditation above described, can begin to loosen the bottleneck-blockage in your being/thinking/mind.  Once you’ve gotten that you can use the Lovingkindness meditation, or just use a word in a repetitive way, that has some meaning for you that has a neutralizing or spiritualizing power.

It may be the name you use for God, or a word that has a healing quality to it for you, or a single word or syllable like a mantra.

The word Mantra refers to sacred words or syllables used repeatedly in religious and ceremonial rituals.  Derived from Sanskrit, man – mind and tra – to deliver.

Two recent articles by J. Borman, PhD,RN suggest that daily invocation of a mantra as a useful mind-body technique to manage various manifestations of unwanted stress.  Take a word and Relax– the concept of Mantra Repetition to relieve anxiety.

Frequent repetition of a meaningful, spiritually coded word throughout the day serves as a stress management tool for coping with stress.  CNS NEWS . June 2006, Anxiety. p.10

Using both strategies of

Formal Meditative Practice – Breath focused, Body Scan, Attention shifting to different sensory modalities with Compassion/lovingkindness

AND

Informal meditative Practice 10 – 20 times each day Breathing in, breathing out attention

And Yoga poses as needed to increase self-awareness, balance, and focus

to stay and be in one’s center, and available to mindfulness interaction and forgiveness.

The best candidate for mindfulness meditation is a person who wants to work with developing an experiential fluid self view.  The more rigid a person’s self view the more they act and observe from that (limited, biased, and rigid) space.   

In order to enlarge the space they need to develop a fluid self view.  That includes paradigm shifting, figure/ground perception, neutrality, present moment, and forgiveness.

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

Continuing to look at Gestalt therapy and it’s process as an application of mindfulness.

The practice of Gestalt therapy is really a function of mindfulness, it incorporates, zen theory and phenomenological theory as well as a number of psychological theories as they interface on the issue of defense mechanisms (habit reaction patterns) and self-awareness.

The facilitator is always paying attention to the Pattern, Whole (Gestalt), Configuration of the person’s being and how an experience is embedded.

The Figure/ground focus is paramount – the most dominant need or unfinished business becomes the figure and emerges into the foreground out of the rest of the person’s experience which becomes the ground or background. When it declines in importance through some kind of resolution (or even boredom), something else becomes figure, and so on.  

In this way Traumatic Incident Reduction is related to Gestalt therapy practice and Freudian Repetition Compulsion.  The working through of a memory or historical situation.  The compulsion to repeat the event is the pattern/strategy for developing the figure – focus issue.

The goal of Gestalt therapy, personal growth is for the person to become fully capable of integrated spirit, mind, and body self-regulation,  that is, responding from his or her own center and needs, (with attention to sensory, intuitive, emotional, and cognitive modes of experience) within the context of the situation.  For Perls’ the goal is not to “be happy,” but to live fully.  To be real.  To experience ourselves, others, and our world as we truly are and be in a passionate connection with our inner selves and our lives. 

The central theme is developing Direct, Immediate Awareness of the total perceptual field and of specific details in it.  The development of immediate awareness, with particular emphasis on sensory awareness, is more characteristic of Gestalt Therapy than of any other psychological approach.  This is a description of mindfulness and Buddhist practice.

The path to direct awareness involves both Techniques to sharpen our awareness and tools for increasing our awareness of our habit reaction patterns or Freudian defense mechanisms, repressions, and whirling vortexes of thought that stand between us and a direct apprehension of what IS in the here and now.

In this, the Gestalt process draws on both phenomenology and zen.   And on Reichian theory that prescribes when you hit a resistance, rather than trying to move through it focus on it.  For Perls and Reich the resistance itself becomes the center of the work – forcing an increase of its expression until what it is hiding presents itself.

Frustration is an important element of the Gestalt process. The facilitator uses certain techniques to thwart the client’s  inauthentic being and avoidance patterns of behavior.  

Expressive techniques are used to help the person contact and develop unused or underused sensitivities and capacities. These techniques are  dynamic and related to the phenomenological relationship as it develops.  It is constantly changing and evolving allowing for the facilitator to intuitively adapt to a given client at a given moment in a given situation. 

The key is the facilitator’s underlying attitude of neutrality, openness, compassion and acceptance – focused on the present moment and discovery without interpretation or judgment.   This is more important than any specific technique used.

Gestalt process-work draws on Karen Horney’s identification of our “shoulds” or inauthentic introjects as a central aspect of personal growth, so that we can go on to discover our own ways of being in the world that are true to ourselves to take their place.

The Freudian defensive mechanisms or what I call habit reaction patterns are a central focus of how to address the individual’s inauthenticity, resistence or figure/ground configurations.

Projection, assigning to another person disowned aspects of oneself – especially projecting my disowned power onto others; Introjection, without mindfulness focus “swallowing whole” ways of acting, thinking, and feeling from early significant other relationships and interactions;

Retroflection, doing to myself what I want to do another but fear the consequences.  For instance, I want to strangle you so I choke myself.  I want to give you a box of chocolates but I’m afraid you’ll spurn me so I eat them myself.

Confluence, this is a boundary issue, not a clear distinction between where I leave off and you begin. This may involve projection–or it may involve Introjection–I don’t establish my own boundary but allow your definition of me to affect my perception of myself.

The person develops the ability to dismantle these various defenses when she is ready, via focused mindfulness, increase in awareness and diminishing of figure/ground dissonance.

The focus of therapy is in the present moment, so Unfinished Business from the past, habit reaction patterns, survivor scenarios, and concerns about the future, are worked with in terms of the person’s present experience of them.  

A painful old trauma may be re-enacted and mentally relived in the present. This can be done using the empty chair technique, a type of psychodrama or TIR.

Old unfinished situations that we carry around, what I call habit reaction patterns or survivor scenarios, stop us from being fully present now because we’re responding to them in history to some degree, rather than entirely in our present reality.

Mindfulness, present moment attention, and neutrality help us to release the patterns that no longer serve us in our interactions and relationships.

You don’t have to go to therapy to work with these ideas and have them be useful in your life; my ultimate response is to beckon back to the idea of chop wood, carry water – everyday, present moment, mindfulness.

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

Being wise is supposed to be connected to age.  The wise sage is usually depicted as past 50.  There are of course great spiritual icons that are younger and wise.

I think wisdom is connected to being able to see things from various perspectives – seeing the figure and ground simultaneously.  Wisdom is a function of mindful and responsive paradigm shifting, from what I have noticed a lack of attachment.

The lack of attachment to which I am referring has to do with not having an attachment to how the outcome looks, not having an underlying agenda about what it looks like.

This is key because how one evaluates various perspectives needs to be without bias.

Bias can have an effect on how we decide on choice a or choice b in decision-making.  As long as that is just preference and the two choices are equal then no problem, but when the bias is something that is related to an agenda or attachment – then there is a picture of equality when there is not an actual equality.  Under those conditions choices can be made that are a result of bias and not wise.

I think it got connected to age because youth has a tendency to be reactive rather than responsive.  But I have noticed very wise statements coming out of my six-year-old so I think it’s something else, the connection here is something about not being attached and being connected to spirit and the universe.

In the serenity prayer:

God, grant me the serenity

To accept the things I cannot change;

Courage to change the things I can;

And wisdom to know the difference.

Lately, I have been thinking about how courage and bravery aren’t about not being afraid.

And wisdom isn’t always about knowing everything but rather how you use the knowledge that you do have.

A friend commented that sometimes mind-emptiness is better than mind-fulness.

I suggest that sometimes to get to mindfulness one has to empty her mind – so that she can be neutral and present and focused on the an openness to figure and ground with a lack of attachment to the meaning so that the full meaning of the situation can reveal itself.

Historically I have viewed this as grace.

Wisdom and grace.

To get there requires practice at this willingness to withhold reaction and gather information and then respond after evaluation of the various figure/ground perspectives from an unattached, present moment, and neutral perspective.

I would say easier said then done – but it’s not even that easy to say….

These are characteristics that will allow for one to make enduring decisions that are wise.  It is useful to strive to attain and maintain these.

To get there requires practice, patience, a willingness to re-evaluate, and a striving to seek to understand before pushing to be understood.  It requires responding to what your emotion is trying to tell you about the situation rather than emotionally reacting.

Wisdom is the result of an integrative relationship between compassionate action and analysis.

Wisdom includes understanding your own as well as others’ biases and agendas and how these may interfere with one’s best choice in any given situation.

You can apply this to any important decision-making process.

I think it is paramount for best practices in parenting.

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

My beloved father has been feeling not well for over a year – not really his robust, take charge self.

Recently, he was diagnosed with cancer and it was late in the disease.

I thought that we would have this opportunity to have this warm, loving, connecting family in which people’s best parts would come together to support him. 

At first, calm did prevail and each person was staying connected and collaborating to support my father.  Then all the intensity began to come out.  And it was painful and discordant and difficult. 

It was difficult to maintain any connection to harmony. 

It was as you would expect if you’ve studied grief – the five stages – Denial, Bargaining, Anger, Sadness, Acceptance, well at least four – sans acceptance.

What a mess.   Little battles, big fights.

All the while I kept saying why is this happening. 

This man loved life.  He was a good person; he really made a difference in other people’s lives – his was a life that God would support.  Sure he had made mistakes but it didn’t fit that he would be dying of cancer.

Then I remembered that amazing book by Harold Kushner, When Bad things happen to Good people, and I tried to incorporate what I knew and practiced, mindfulness.

All we have control over is how we respond to the bad things that happen to us.  Cancer doesn’t come from God.  But I believe that, in some instances, God gives us opportunities at the end of our life to clean up that which is undone.  Having faith and feeling God’s presence has to do with what we take from our experiences and how we move through them.

My father’s gift through his illness was exactly like his gifts in life – profoundly generous, and selfless, endeavoring to help even when it seemed like he didn’t understand.

It was to give us the strength to weather the storm of his illness and become better, more healed from working through it.

Sometimes it was through his lead which was the typical way the family was held together, but surprisingly also through his need for us to step-up and BE the persons we were meant to be, – so through our lead, to use each of our special gifts, to make a difference for him and each other.

To make peace with him, ourselves, each other, and God.

He had always been the strength in the family – holding it together – now what was going to happen?

I kept trying to stay focused on my part – be loving and mindful and not reactive.  This was a big job because the family system seemed to thrive on competition and rivalry, while still being one – lots of individual personalities, which made us successful in each of our worlds, but were problematic as a group. 

As my brother said too many chiefs  – many perspectives, all accurate but needing connecting points. 

One brother was really trying to overcome his role in the family and I saw how much he had changed in certain ways – how having to be the one to help has given him a chance to make a difference.  He wasn’t the little brother but an accomplished person.  It was a gift.

Then another brother had to determine where his role was.  That brother was the best at analysis but he had to develop his compassion and forgiveness which was paramount.  It was a gift.

For my husband he was getting the opportunity to be the son who helps a father and credited with expertise.  It was a gift.

My mom who was very religious should have been the one to guide spiritually but she couldn’t wrap her head around how to stay in the spirit world.  I was able to use my training to help her understand about mindfulness, paradigm shifting, and figure/ground by using her terms and giving her a path.  It was a gift for both of us.

My daughter strengthened her connection to my mom – what a gift.

My beloved step-son was able to be seen and accepted as the grown-up grandson full of ideas and intelligence and strength.  It was a dream come true for my father to have a hint of what the new generation could and would bring and see how he had positively affected him.  It was a gift to each of them.

Grace prevailed.

Each of my brothers and I had breakthroughs to seeing each other in new ways that had not been previously perceived; each offering connecting, loving words to me – where I felt seen and cared for. 

My mom came to me and said God is using this to teach her how to love.

That seemed to be the gift for each of us.

My father’s illness was his last gift to us.  He was giving us the opportunity to grow up and become our best selves. 

And he was receiving God’s gift of how he had positively affected all those he loved.  Which was the thing that most mattered to him, that defined his life.

I saw these events as directly connected to God being present in our lives. 

Yes, it was about how each of us chose to respond,  but I think that spirit, mind, and body are connected – so for me it was emotionally and mindfully our gift to each other, and my father’s gift to us; but spiritually our connection to God was the guiding force – it was Grace.

For me, I was glad that although I was having to say goodbye to someone who was so important to me, this time I had a chance to do that – and show my gratefulness to him, unlike my last big loss.  It was a gift. 

I find, even in dark moments, I can feel God’s presence. 

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

There are many arenas where mindfulness and paradigm recognition and shifting are useful.   Parenting, team building, relationship development, and inner balance of spirit, mind, and body are all arenas about which I have written to apply these principles.

When caregiving for someone who is dying it is important to combine analysis and compassionate action in a mindful and flexible way.

If as a caregiver you are personally connected to the dying person you also have to incorporate ways to have compassion and mindfulness toward your own needs and an understanding of how these may be in contrast to the requests, actions, or desired wants of the person for whom you are caring.

If your emotion becomes too strong and forward in the relationship you can create a difficult situation.  This is especially difficult when caregiving for a child, and in some ways for a parent.

If you are too dispassionate and only analytical you miss the important opportunities to assist the individual in his decision-making opportunities and offer emotional support. 

Providing accurate information in a warm, neutral and clear way is the most beneficial attitude.  If you try to soften or sugar coat the information or make it sound less severe, than you are doing a disservice to the individual; being too blunt without compassion is equally as problematic.

Being a caregiver requires a connection to your inner self and a watchful eye on the figure/ground, and various paradigms of perspective, to know how to proceed.  One of the most important requirements is the opportunity to take a break and then return – when this is not possible the stress of the situation can be overwhelming and leave long-standing injuries to the caregiver emotionally.

I like to think of compassion as an action; it is a way of being in the world, and is more in the foreground.  Analysis is more in the background.

In this situation there may be several simultaneous processes or paradigms of figure and ground in play – containing all of this simultaneously and guiding the best action is profoundly challenging.

Utilizing compassion in your analysis can bring others together to create peace in relationship and families, between children and parents.  And it helps to create an avenue to be clear about responsibility to versus responsibility for – in the caregiving process.  Even in this caregiving process the appropriate attitude is respons-ability to not for.

Peace comes from fully understanding the other person’s perspective, and fully understanding your own, and then mindfully looking for connection points – where those two perspectives connect.  It requires an earnest communication, asking questions, delving further, all the while with a focus on understanding, with a tone of calmness and serenity rather than interrogation.

In order for compassion’s healing power to work those engaged in relationship and dialogue have to be in  a mindful state, a listening state.  It requires having your senses on receive and integrate, not send and conquer.  Through compassion integrated with analysis you can move a situation forward and teach or educate.

To get to understanding one must make efforts to explain meaning and not assume that a word has the same meaning for all parties.  Descriptive language rather than inference is the most useful style of communication.  Inflection, and non-verbal statements too, have meaning and must be fully evaluated and understood.

Compassionate understanding requires the listening and understanding part happen first, then the focus on connecting and incorporating analysis.  Compassion requires the ability to see figure and ground simultaneously and to shift paradigms with flexibility; it works best when there is congruency between one’s words and one’s actions.

Apply a compassionate attention to interactions and relationships to increase your clarity and understanding of them and yourself.  Compassion, mindfulness, and seeking understanding increase connecting points so there can be unification and allow for a transformed, thoughtful, mindful, response– able dyad or group.

As a caregiver, the work is to keep the needs, rights, and wants of the caregivee in the center of the picture.  This is difficult.  Sometimes what the individual receiving the care wants is not in agreement with what the caregiver feels he needs or should want.

The caregiver has to be cognizant of the personality of the person who is being cared for.  If the illness interferes with that person’s typical and natural style of being in the world there is a great need for compassion and patience on the part of the caregiver.

Compassion and analysis are the figure and ground of the style of caregiving and assessment of what is required in the caregiving situation.  Both of these need to be working together and in accordance with each other to allow for the best possible outcome.

The relationship of figure/ground of compassionate action and analysis can be applied to many situations.  It requires mindfulness, flexibility, and paradigm recognition and shifting. 

Thinking about how you can develop this is useful in many arenas in one’s life.

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

I am not sure that I really understand how memory works.  But I have some ideas.

It’s some kind of combination of feelings, words, and images.  The stronger the emotional quality of something the more likely we’ll remember it unless it is too strong and then we push it deep into to our unconscious.

In therapy it is often the remnants of memory with which we work.

Attention, paying attention and to what you attend, affects how memory is stored – so if you have attention deficit disorder you have a weird memory process.  It isn’t that you don’t remember, it’s that you can’t necessarily find the information where you think it will be – it isn’t stored in the same way because of the attentional issues.

Sometimes even when you don’t have an attentional disorder your attention is distracted, either on purpose or accident, and your memory of something is distorted and spread out all over, so you don’t have access to it through any normal channels.

There is this amazing procedure called Traumatic Incident Reduction that allows one to work through the kind of memories that are pushed down into our unconscious, or spread out in weird ways.  It helps to release them from their prison so that the information held within the memory can be used to help guide us, while the fear, pain or hurt connected to the memory can be unlinked from the memory ident and released from our physical bodies.

It helps to eradicate habit reaction patterns.  Habit reaction patterns and survivor scenarios are connected to memory.  The triggers that incite habit reaction patterns or keep us stuck in a survivor scenario pattern or style of being in the world, are parts of memory remnants with should action attached – if this then that – equations.

It helps us to view the traumatic memory from a distance so that we can mindfully evaluate what it is about and how it affected us and how we want to respond to the information of the event now.

It uses a technique that works with a defense mechanism identified by Freud called repetition compulsion.  This mechanism is defined as a compulsion or strong push to repeat patterns or relationships that caused trauma in the person’s life, in order to get a different outcome.

This is a compulsion to repeat and as such, the person tends to do the same thing, get the same result, and then start over, and this keeps repeating ad nauseum – only when the person gets out of the habit reaction pattern or the survivor scenario can s/he then actually re-view the situation.

In order to stop the repetition compulsion the person needs to re-frame or shift the paradigm.

In order to do that, all parts of the memory and its different levels and perspectives of the memory must be viewed and evaluated and then re-incorporated to be seen more fully.  This can happen through the techniques of TIR or, through some forms of light trancework, or through therapy.

I think of memories as having idents of information – not wholes of information – and the work with memories is to return to balance, to put together all the idents to understand it; it requires paradigm shifting and figure/ground.

I think the best practice to help with this is the practice of mindful meditation.

There are a lot of things that can go wrong with how we maintain or even form our memories.  And that can affect our relationships and how we learn.

Utilizing mindful meditation and teaching about paradigm shifting and remaining in the present can assist us in how we interpret and re-form our memories so that they can provide us with the most accurate, whole and useful information contained in them

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

Instinctive knowing is akin to a sixth sense.

We have five physical senses:  seeing, hearing, touch/feeling, taste, and smell.  I think of intuition as related and integrated with these five, but also having a separate connection – so it’s like a sixth sense.

Mindful observance of your five senses increases your ability to integrate information.

When I was pregnant with my beautiful daughter, I noticed a black dot develop on my face just under the corner of my left eye, on my cheekbone.

It became larger as my belly grew.

In my oriental medical school I learned that progesterone didn’t just make babies grow it also made other cells develop more rapidly.  By the time I delivered my sweet daughter the dot on my face had grown exponentially.  It was about 1/8 th of an inch big – which is pretty big for a freckle that had developed over a 10 month period.

I had a bad feeling about it.

My health plan at the time was one of those plans that took forever to get things done – regardless of severity.  So they couldn’t get me an appointment to have the biopsy for months; then something happened and I had to cancel and then I couldn’t get another appointment for months.

It kept bothering me – this nagging feeling that something was wrong with that black dot on my face.  So I kept trying to follow through to get in to the doctor’s office.

Finally, I saw the doctor and she took off a little bit of the dot to biopsy it.  It was her last day with the hospital.  The new doctor to whom I was referred, called me directly following the biopsy asking that I return asap.  He called me, twice, not the nurse, not the scheduler – the doctor.  That informed me that it was serious.

It was a melanoma in-situ.  It was stage 0, just at the site.  Which was good, because even at that low a stage the doctor had to remove a 1/2 inch all the way around the dot to get clean borders.

It left a big 1-inch scar on my face, that has turned into a laugh line.

I had an instinctive knowing that there was something wrong.  I had information from my sensory guiding system too, and the two together guided me to keep following up on the black dot.

My instinctive knowing led me to get treatment far in advance of when skin cancer is usually found which in turn  increased my chances for a positive outcome.

Of course, it helped that it was right there on my face; right in a place I looked every day and the world looked too.

A much more obscure example of instinctive knowing was an innocuous freckle on my husband’s thigh.

There was really nothing about his freckle that was different from all the other freckles.  It was the normal size of a freckle.  He had other freckles that were the same shape and color.

Objectively, it did not really have any characteristic that differentiated it from the other freckles.

His dermatologist who was one of the best in town had looked at it, and measured it, and determined it was okay.

It bothered me.  I had a bad feeling about it.  I would see it and I would say I want you to have your doctor check it out.

It looked darker, almost black, to me, and when I held my hand over the area I could feel a sharpness, a hot, tingling in my palm that seemed to be radiating from the freckle.  I didn’t feel this with any other freckle.

I actually had a visceral response of not liking the freckle; it was weird.

Every time it bothered me, I bothered my husband until finally he went to the doctor and said, my wife says there is something wrong with this freckle.  The doctor said, I don’t think it’s anything but since it bothers her I will take it off and biopsy it.

He did.

It was melanoma, stage 1.

My husband had surgery the next week they removed 2 inches around the freckle to get clear borders.  He has a five-inch scar, but the area doesn’t feel tingly-hot to my palm anymore.

And he is okay.

Funny thing, now whenever he goes to see his dermatologist, his doctor says – is there anything that is bothering Beth.  He doesn’t ask it first; he uses all his training and skills to evaluate if there is something out-of-place – but he always asks it before the consult is over.  He and I, both, have learned to pay attention to my instinctive knowing.

My willingness to listen and respond to my instinctive knowing saved his life.  That’s a good thing for sure.

These two stories identify two separate incidents where mindful observation of the five senses – the sensory guidance system – integrated with instinctive knowing, allowed for an opportunity for something resembling a sixth sense to guide my and my husband’s actions.

The instinctive knowing wasn’t fear or anxiety it was more of a bother or a nagging feeling that kept bringing me back to something that was calling for attention.

Practice paying attention to those quiet, nagging feelings that something is out-of-place, like a puzzle or a mystery.

You may find your sensory guidance system includes an instinctive knowing that will guide you to make a transformative decision or response.

I have to say, I do like puzzles and mysteries.

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

How do you distinguish between instinctive health and habit reaction patterns?

When I am writing about instinct I am referring to intuition as a part of your emotional sensing system.  That is to say that I am not referring to information from an outside source but rather a knowing that is from within.

Instinct in this way is not a primitive set of patterns instilled from an earlier evolutionary state.

Intuition instinct is part of an integrated informational system that incorporates the whole of who you are and then offers information from that source within you to guide your actions.

So what is instinctual for you may not be the best instinctual choice for another.

Our emotional guidance system includes our emotions and intuition.

Remember how anger is just an alarm going off to let you know that someone has crossed your boundaries.  The best response is to say hmm what boundary has been crossed; applying your mindful approach to the emotion in order to determine your best response in present time rather than reacting from a habit reaction pattern which is based in history not present time.

Intuition is a function of a mindful approach to living; it is a feeling/knowing that directs you to make a decision based on information in combination with your emotional guidance system.

Intuition instinct is knowing yourself, knowing the environment and acting on that knowing in a mindful, present moment way.

An example of this is when I was making a decision about how to treat my dog’s heart failure.

My intuition instinct was that I had a bad feeling about the medicine to treat my dog even though studies indicated it was the right treatment for my dog’s heart disease.  The expert-vet was caught up in the ego of being the doctor and couldn’t compute the intuitive information that I brought to the circumstances.

I had a knowing that there was some piece of the puzzle that wasn’t being interpreted correctly – I knew his lungs were involved in the problem, but not in the way she was looking at it – I had an intuitive instinct that the medicine was not the best medicine for him.

My primary vet had years of experience with a very successful practice.  He had the capacity to listen to my intuitive instinct and incorporated that into his treatment plan.  He was able to take that information and shift his paradigm and use a medicine that was empirically indicated.  My dog has lived 5 months longer than expected based on this collaborative approach.

Intuition is some part knowledge from the universe like Jung’s collective unconscious, and some part observation of how something is out-of-place, and some part knowing.

It has an imprint quality, but not a history imprint, and it comes in wholes – it is the answer with the picture and the explanation all at once.

It’s a knowing not a feeling, even though we describe it as a feeling.  It’s an instinctual response, not a reaction.

Learning to trust your intuition requires a few things.

First, you must have an understanding of how the emotional guidance system works.

You have to be able to distinguish between fear/anxiety and intuition.  Fear/anxiety internal voices tend to have an intensity and loudness to them – they break through whatever is going on.  They push through to the front.  These are usually not intuition; these are unconscious habit patterns.  If you feel immediately triggered it is more likely that rather than any sense of intuition.

Strong emotions may be indications of an acute situations, but they may also be a trigger from a habit reaction pattern.  So the first thing to do is to discern which is happening.

A great way to do this is to apply mindfulness, remaining neutral and in the present moment, and attending to figure/ground information and looking at the situation from all the paradigms available.

Second, you have to notice the intuitive instinct information, to hear the quiet inner voice that carries the information from the emotional guidance system.  So if you’re good at ignoring those nagging voices/senses you have to shift that so you listen more acutely and more often.

Practicing some type of meditation or breathing exercise like Qi Gong, or Yoga is helpful to develop this.

Intuition is quiet and not forceful and it usually doesn’t have an urgency or any other emotional history imprint with it.  It’s like a quiet whispering that has substance and neutral certainty to it.  It can have a nagging quality to it.

I know I have used the statement I have a bad feeling about this as a reference to intuition but it isn’t really a feeling it’s a sense/knowing sometimes without emotion.  It’s a quiet certainty.

Instinctive health is the practice of listening for that quiet inner voice and taking action based on it.  And conversely the practice of not acting on those fearful/anxious impulses.

Instinctive health is allowing your emotional guidance system to guide you.  And I think it is the calmest and most efficient way to navigate through important decisions.

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

Attachment is a funny thing.  In some ways it is the thing that holds us together and in other ways it is the thing that barricades our progress.

How can that be that it is both?

How attachment can be a barricade to progress is more of a psychological interpretation; being attached means you have a picture of what something is, or is supposed to be, or meant to be and you will not accept anything that deviates from that picture.

If you hold too strongly to that picture you may not see the reality of what is.

I think about individuals who are always looking for the perfect partner.  Because they are attached to a specific picture of that partner, they are unable to see how a number of people may fit the picture and so they miss out on really important opportunities in relationship.

Being attached may also mean a sense of connection. Usually this is related to a situation where two or more people have an agreement about what something is and that agreement holds the group together, or makes the group successful.

In the first scenario the person’s attachment is what impedes the creation of exactly what the person wants.

In the second scenario the attachment is connecting and furthers the creation of what the person wants.

In order to create something, you must have a picture of what it is. But holding too strongly to that picture, not having flexibility in how you view the guidelines of what you want to create – that’s one of the ways we fall into the trap of attachment.

We create a picture of something we want to create.  And that is good.  It is good to know what you want.

Attachment to that thing looking a very specific way is what gets us into trouble.

So if you want a partner that’s great; if you want a partner to have a number of specific attributes, that may become something that impedes you in developing a relationship with someone who will be a good match.

It’s all in the ability to understand how to generally have a guideline for what you want to create rather than a blueprint.

You must have the ability to know what you want de novo. But when you start to think – it can only be that picture – then it becomes something to which you are attached.

Applying mindfulness, in the present moment, and being flexible is what helps us to keep the picture dynamic and allows the picture to guide us without becoming attached to it.  This leads to a stance of non-attachment and neutrality about the outcome or the specifics of the picture.

It’s a focus of non-attachment to the picture that allows us to see it change into what is really wanted or needed according to all the information available to us.  It requires incorporation of new information while maintaining a strong connection,  but not attachment, to the core structure.

Non-attachment is not non-caring.  Non-attachment is a neutral stance of allowing.

If you want to create a relationship, but the person has to be a certain, height, age, color of hair, economic status, education status etc then the picture becomes too much like a model to which all of the possibilities are measured .

If you say I want someone who has similar values, and is attractive to me with whom I feel comfortable.  Those specifics are incorporated into the guide by virtue of who you are but the guide is not so specific that no one can fit into it.

Use your mindfulness skills to think about how you may be attached in some way to an outcome in something that is important to you.

If you can apply mindfulness to get to the underlying goals.  And then allow that to be created in it’s best form, remaining unattached to the specific picture of the outcome, you will see how all things can work out as they need to be.

Sometimes what we need is not actually what we think we want; and sometimes what we can have is so much better than the picture we can create.  Being open and non-attached to the outcome allows for the best outcome to be created.

See you tomorrow.

Beth