Hello

When I was in college I spent a semester abroad studying Italian Art, Architecture, Language and Literature in Roma, Italia.  It was a very powerful period in my life.  I had been studying Sociology in school and was intrigued by paradigms, cultural relativism, and Gestalt figure/ground perspectives.  I was an open-minded person with a sense that I would or could do anything and had a naive belief that I could effect a positive change in the world.  I was young and enthusiastic.  My experience in Italy was painful, transformative, joyous, strengthening, and enlightening.  It was an adventure.

I had not planned to go to Italy.  My boyfriend, who was an art major, was going and I thought “oh I should go too”;  I didn’t realize that he had wanted to go without me so he could experience the world unencumbered.  In retrospect it would have been more useful to ask him what his plans were before inviting myself along.  This discovery was painful – finding him happily courting a tall woman from Oklahoma – I mention her height because it was the thing that was so irritating about her to me being a small petite girl – she was like an amazon woman stealing my boyfriend away from me.  He was, of course a complicit and willing partner – no stealing – I was the only one who was unaware of the situation.

I was stunned.  Alone in a foreign country and so sad.  He and I had been the best of friends for a longtime and I wasn’t sure of exactly how to proceed.

For the days that followed my discovery I was on auto-pilot, disconnected, unfocused, just putting one foot in front of the next.  Then after a while I began to re-focus on the beautiful amazing country that surrounded me.  I started to identify what I wanted to do, see, accomplish and experience.  In this re-evaluation I discovered myself.

There was a lovely young man in our group from England he was polite, handsome, kind, and ever so smart.  I liked him and he seemed to like me.  He was good friends with a young man who was very involved with Roman politics.  It was exciting to hang out with them and learn about how young people in Rome spent their days.  Quite different from my own experience they were VERY involved in politics, very early.  Paolo, my handsome friend’s friend, had lost his best friend to a bomb due to political issues two years before when he was a teenager.  He had strong opinions and sound arguments to back them up.  It was so exciting to be in their company and begin to develop my beliefs about politics, my country, and theirs.

My handsome young man whose care I had fallen into was even more intriguing.  He had gone to school in England but his family was Persian.  He was one of the kindest and most gentle men I had ever known but he had dealt with great tragedy and difficult situations.  We came to be very close and he showed me a fascinating world that I could never have imagined.  His gentle eyes had both a sadness and a playfulness in them and I felt the safest I had ever felt with anyone when I was with him.

In the middle of our time together we went to Austria.  It was beautiful and magical.  I saw Freud’s house and we played together.  It was like a fairytale.  But the purpose of our trip there was far from the magic and fantasy of Disney.  He needed to get a visa to come to America.  He had gone before and followed the stealthy steps outlined by whomever was assisting him to do so, and he had lost money, and he had been denied.  Half of his family resided in Iran and half was in America.  There was still a great deal of wariness about young Iranian men coming to the states and so he had to go through this secret process not knowing the outcome and risking treachery from outside.

He was successful and this was a celebration that he would be able to join his siblings in the states.

We had a blissful time together in Rome through the rest of our time in school. After, on my way back to the states I joined him briefly in London and then we separated.  I returned to my home and he to a new home in San Francisco.  I visited him once later for a brief time when I went out to a college friend’s wedding, and then we lost track of each other.

He once said to me, while we were still in Italy, that his father would never have approved of him seeing me because I was American.  His father was no longer alive and his mother was still in Iran.  I never thought about how my parents would have responded; they seemed to be open-minded and accepting.  But I was aware that to me he was not his country or his culture but rather an individual person with whom I was in love.  I had not considered the problems between our countries until he made this comment.

Both these men, the boyfriend with whom I went to Italy, and the boyfriend I met in Italy, had perceived their time in Italy as a time to experience being with someone not accepted in their real or home world.  They each had seen it as a break from the cultural and normative expectations to experience more fully a deeper self that they would not take with them except in their memories; and that however their experience may have changed them it must be left in Italy.

I had been so naive that I didn’t understand any of that and yet my experiences with each of them left indelible marks on my sense of self and my character.

I have studied sociology all my life and I would say that I view the world through a sociological lens and yet even with that I experience each person individually.  Sociology takes the position that one’s self is completely bound up by one’s culture and that self and mind are really just an introjection of the society or culture within which you live; but my experience is that individuals interact with their culture in innovative and unique ways to develop intricately specific and personal selves.  That one can see the culture and beliefs within another’s personality and characteristics but that self, and character are profoundly personal.

My dear beloved boyfriend with whom I traveled to Italy said to me upon our return that although he abandoned me for this exciting opportunity to be with that tall girl he ultimately had a depressing and uneventful experience because she went on to another boy and he was left without either her or me.  And I, in my action to respond to his abandonment, had a true adventure.  Sadly, for him this was true.  Joyfully for me, he was right.

How you respond to your world is your only true offense and defense in the action of life.

And perspective is everything.

I think of my dear boyfriend that I met in Italy, living in America, and I wonder how well he is thriving.  I wonder if his family still in Iran is faring well through the strife in his country, and I pray that he and those individuals like him will be able to develop a country that better speaks to their needs.

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

Space creation is more than just a starting point to a project it is a requirement for any new creation to happen.  Often the first thing one does is create a space in which to work – cleaning off your desk, starting a new page on word, or cleaning out the space for drawing and construction.

Sometimes clearing out the space physically performs the function of creating an internal space for change.

Other actions that can help create that internal space are mindful meditation, yoga, focused breathing, prayer, writing about the issue, and listening both to others and yourself.  The latter is a modality you can use all the time in relationship and interaction.

Listening to the non-verbal components in conversation, the tone, and the language or word-choice all offer ways for you to increase your understanding in communication.  Through these techniques you can see or hear where you are out of sync with reality or how you are acting or thinking based on an inaccurate belief system.  It opens your internal system of thinking and being.

The most difficult space to create is the space within to change thinking and behavior patterns.  Changing habits requires identification of the problem as a first step.  The space creation to change is like a stretching out so that you can observe from a different perspective.  Often influence from outside is the first glimmer of understanding that shifts your focus to the inaccuracy of your habit.

This can be an aha experience or it can be insidious, a slow developing awareness over time.

Creating that inner space starts with the questions What is at the center of this thinking or this behavior ?- What is the underlying belief or value that drives it?  And then once discerning the answers, defining if that value or belief is consistent with what you actually believe.

It requires a slowing of actions and a reworking of thinkings.  Breathing, applying mindfulness, looking for and creating balance, applying compassion and understanding – all these allow for an increase in awareness and delay action to allow for re-working thinkings with a renewed perspective.

Recently I was struck by an internal belief that I had been using to organize my behavior and thinking.  I discovered that it was not actually an accurate description of reality, but rather a picture of a misunderstanding from my early childhood that had been frozen in time, not allowed to incorporate new information or ongoing analysis; it was a stuck, rigid, fear-based belief.  I had been acting from a position that I must prove my worth and my intelligence.  That I had to bring something extra to a relationship because just being myself was insufficient for friendship.  This was the opposite of what I taught my children and patients, and yet here I was acting from this inaccurate perspective.

Astonishing!

It was a powerful and profound experience to discover both the internal belief and  that I no longer had to act from this inaccurate space.  Seeing it, recognizing it, and understanding its etiology allowed me to create the internal space to let it go and to shift my perspective to incorporate the full or whole of my life experiences, not just that one event.  It was so freeing, and so opening; it created the internal space to make a change in my thinking and my behavior with respect to this issue.

Mindful reflection and paradigm shifting create internal space so that change can happen.  Utilize the methods that best suit you to open a space for you to view and review your internal systems and create a space for internal change.

You may find you are freed from a restrictive belief system that is not an actual representation of reality.  In doing so you may create a space to live more freely and more happily.

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

I have had a request to write about how to deal with parents or in-laws in a mindful way.  So here are some thoughts.

It’s not really that different from parenting  your children.  The key is the combination of  forgiveness, acceptance, and staying out of feeling defensive.  Think about Turning NO to ON as applied to relationships with history.

Remember the blog titled Interpreting bias in decision-making – posted August 5, 2010?  In it I wrote about the problem with responding from a defensive place and through bias and how this interfered with decision-making.  Defensiveness and bias skew how information is interpreted.  Each skew to the negative and set the stage for reaction rather than mindful response.

Bias is sometimes a result of a belief that may have represented a previous experience but is not necessarily Truth.  Defensiveness can be a result of habit, history or misapplication or misunderstanding of the other person’s intention, tone, or action.  In this way defensiveness can be like bias.

Being clear in a neutral, non-defensive tone, with unbiased and uncharged language allows for fuller communication and an opportunity to re-work old issues with a peaceful and active resolution.

So here are some ways to help you move into neutrality when interacting and also get a handle on what you may be bringing to the situation that is unhelpful, defensive, or a habit reaction pattern from earlier in the relationship.  After you identify that there is something left over, an old unresolved issue or belief then you can determine whether you want to keep it.

These can be applied to any personal relationship or situation, but is most applicable toward parent or in-law relationships.  Our relationships with our parents are very powerful and so hold a lot of complicated meaning about our own power and sense of self.

Defensiveness comes from a need, or interpreted need, to protect ourselves from attack – if we have had miscommunications, or simply mis-takes in how we related with our parents then this can be overly charged and difficult, and can be intensely layered over time.  Following these steps will assist you in working through some of this to increase positive interactions.

• If you feel defensive wait – stop talking, breathe, open your mind, be open to what the other person is trying to say – move into receive rather than send in your communication.  Try to clarify what you really want from the situation and then focus on that, and only that – don’t get distracted and moved onto a more negative path.
• Think about, and feel into, what is behind the defensiveness, follow it like a thread back into your history – this gives you a place to tether the defensiveness – then you can determine if that original event or set of events continue to apply, or how you would like to shift the energy.  It is through this process that you can identify where you want to focus your interaction with the other person.
• If you feel angry, wait – stop talking, breathe, open your mind, try to receive what the other person is trying to say – try to simultaneously discover what is triggering an angry response in you, then as above, consider whether it is something you need to resolve then or let go and refocus on the current issue.
• If you have a block or just can’t understand – or see – what the other person is saying – stop, try to look at it from a different perspective and see if you can identify what perception or interpretation you have that may be blocking your understanding of the other person’s point of view.  Get the other person to re-describe their feeling, experience in different words or give an example so that you can better understand what they are saying.

• I am not suggesting that you must agree with their point of view, I am suggesting understanding comes from seeing both perspectives – remember the figure-ground issues – looking at the images below – see the bear and the vase or the duck and the bunny .  This is Steven Covey’s concept of seek first to understand.  When you understand the other, then you can understand where you connect with and disconnect from the other person and this allows for a place of resolution agreed upon communication about any subject or issue.

Increasing your awareness and applying your mindfulness to the situation allows for increased understanding and increased connection.   This may result in a different course of action.  It may not result in a change, but in this case you will be able to support the situation through a more mindful, neutral approach.  It may allow for a negotiation that incorporates both paradigms – not a compromise, but a collaboration or blending that meets the needs or perspectives of both parties.

Just as in parenting your children you are focused on being mindful and interacting in the present moment taking into account your child’s needs and your personalities; this is like turning a NO to ON but focused on your historical relationships and bringing them into present time and creating them to be positive.

Be truthful and honest in the content of your communication; kind and caring in the tone of your communication; and warm and real in your presentation.  This style and these actions will go the furthest to create a space for a powerful and positive interaction that can increase the depth and breadth of your relationship with your parents or parent-in-laws.

You will have wonderful results.

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

Often it is the milieu in which a person is raised that allows her to see the world from a distinct paradigm that changes her perspective and leads to innovation.

I was a huge Star Trek fan as a kid.  Loved the original and the Next Generation.

Shatner’s character Kirk had an episode where he was challenged to get rid of the trauma of his life and be free – he said he needed his pain, it’s what made him who he was.  And Piccard did a vignette wherein he had a whole lifetime of experience, that was distinctly different from that of being a captain, all transmitted in a dream.  Through that dream he was able to know an entire group of people who had since become extinct and it changed his perspective of what to do in future situations.

I remember even as a young person these ideas held deep meaning for me.

In my experience, your response to adversity is what makes you unique and can create space for a new perspective in the world, a new paradigm through which to view your world or circumstances.

Parenting offers a way to transmit your gifts from your early experiences to your child so that he or she can learn through your adversity and have innovative approaches to old problems.

This is one of the very best actions that you can take to assist your children, to openly and directly approach and discuss controversial and profound issues with innovative and honest ideas.

Certainly one of the things that interferes with this is when you are holding on to a hurt and feeling injured.  That injury can cloud your full capacity to understand and learn the gift presented through your injury or trauma.  That clouding can actually create or allow for the transmission of prejudice, hatred, and stereotypes.

The best way to clear up the injury or cloudy perceptions is to use a mindful approach to the traumatic experience.  To use a paradigm shift in how you perceive the events, making an effort to shift from figure to ground – from the injury (figure) to the background and context of the event (ground) to more fully understand their relationship to each other – it gives you a more holistic picture.

This isn’t to say to negate the pain but rather to look at what benefits came out of the trauma. To investigate what aspects of the experience were due to a lack of clarity on your own part, what had to do with an internal misbelief or misunderstanding, and what about the experience was a catalyst to change your life for the better.  There are experiences, like the death of a child or loved one, which will not offer any of these kinds of insights – in those circumstances the way through the cloudiness or pain is to discern how to change your response to the adversity or how to keep the positive memory of that person alive through your actions.  In my own personal experience I learned to always let my loved ones know they matter whenever I took leave of them because that may be the last time I would see their faces or hear their voices.  I learned to think about how I relate to others so that it is mindful and not hurtful.  I have seen others start profound agencies to help others in response to a profound loss.  In this way the loss has given rise to the gift of helping others on  a large-scale.

Through this process you can allow yourself to perceive events in a new way and offer a new perspective on how to be or act in the world.

Your actions create a webbing or thread connecting you to others and your future to your past.  Acting from  a mindful perspective increases your focus and purposive action/creation in your world.  Transmitting your gifts through parenting assists your children to have fuller more clarified lives.

It is a ripple effect; you are transmitting a new way of being that is based on mindfulness and wellness responses to adversity and stress.  The effect of which will be more balance and health for your children.

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

The hardest thing to do is to stay true to yourself in the face of adversity or in the face of another’s desire for you to leave your truth and follow theirs.

One is challenged to deal with this when engaging in group dynamics.  It is a function of most aspects of life, blending projects and collaborating in complicated, multilevel ventures in business or social interaction such as bringing together families in marriage or partnering in business.  This is the challenge to remain true to yourself while incorporating another’s perspective when negotiating between individual and group needs as well as negotiating integration of ideas, theories, and groups.

Knowing your truth is helpful when evaluating how to integrate with another.  And because not always what the other says is what the other wants, listening to the whole of another’s message and resisting the need to just swallow whole the other’s position is important.  It is necessary to pause and be mindful in these encounters.  Then you can hold to your truth while being flexible with the other.

I have a facility for languages.  Not just formal languages like French and Italian, but also personal languages of individuals and groups.  It is important to understand what it is that underlies the language of others – what has meaning and how the words contain idents of what matters to people.  The style and quality in which people speak gives clues to what it reveals and conceals.

This is a natural talent, it is second nature to my being.  I can blend in easily and enjoy the experience of seeing through different paradigms, which is a fantastic asset in my life’s work.  It gives me the freedom to experience life from a variety of spaces or perspectives.  I learn a lot by trying on these various styles and viewing from the inside out.

Anyone can step into another’s world, his  language and the paradigms that underlie his style of speaking.

In America you can get the culture of various parts of the country through language.  The south, midwest, west, and east have specific qualities hidden within their word choice and sentence structure, even what is or isn’t said.  The facial gestures, and impressions that assist the verbal language are highly specialized and carry specific meanings.  This can be traced to religious, cultural and personal heritage and experiences.  Additionally, there are unique patterns within families, working groups, and educational backgrounds.

Part of what makes us feel comfortable with another is this similarity or familiarity among and within groups – often first felt and understood through verbal and non-verbal language.

This whole repertoire of behavior and language has its own manipulative force.  There is an underlying push to agree and align, corroborate and connect, underlying the most normal and natural of group dynamics.

I am one of those people, who when talking with another whose speech pattern is interesting and distinctive, may begin to speak in the same way or take on a  funny gesture which strikes me as having character.  Having this natural facility is like being a chameleon.  I find that my ease at being a chameleon is problematic when holding to my truth.  The balancing agent to this is to have a strong and secure sense of who I am at my core.  This allows me to have the capacity and freedom to enter another’s world, even try on some of the more fun or fascinating characteristics, and still remain true to my authentic self.

Holding to your truth is an interesting process of being connected with an even hand-strength:  too strong and you are inflexible, not strong enough and you can get lost.  Being overly flexible leads to instantaneous understanding and connection but when overly expressed it can dilute authentic purpose or self.

I find the best ting to do is to remain in a mindful state, an open, observing, interested curiosity.   The use of a mantra or phrase which allows you to tether yourself to your authentic self so you don’t lose your way can be very efficient.  This allows you to explore with others their world without losing your own center.

It’s like a safety rope that frees you to explore and negotiate with a fullness that can be exhilarating.

See your tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

When thinking about child development it’s important to apply the rule of balance in comfort and adversity to develop inner strength.

When things are too easy the child is unable to tolerate adversity.

When things are too challenging the child develops a learned helplessness.

I remember when I was in college and I learned this I was determined to be the Mom who put the toy just a little too far away, thinking I would be able to encourage  mastery through one’s own efforts.  Over time what I observed is that there is enough adversity in the world, enough that gets in the way of being there for your child that you don’t have to go out of your way to create it artificially.

What’s important is to maintain a balance of response and inner strength development.

My friend likened this to the idea of hardening-off with seedlings.  When starting plants from seeds the first thing to do is create the most supportive and nourishing environment to get them to sprout and grow into seedlings.  In time they need to be hardened-off by creating a slightly less nourishing environment so that they can develop a degree of hardiness – a capacity to tolerate adversity.  If they don’t go through this hardening-off process the seedlings are unable to tolerate the change from perfect conditions to life in the garden – more little plants don’t survive.

The issue is when and how. When to develop the hardiness and How to create the balance of comfort and adversity.   You aren’t always in control of this element.  However, creating pathways to earning rewards, challenges to the development of skills, and teachings about how things work helps.  Significantly, it is a matter of reading your child and offering opportunities for challenge while simultaneously creating a space to retreat to for comfort.

Humans need a dose of adversity to develop resilience and inner strength.

The children who always have things their way and are pampered have difficulty identifying within themselves the strengths required to be resilient, persevere, and try again.  They don’t have the inner mechanism to figure out how to get through the maze.  Often they fail by not trying.

Conversely, the children that have big challenges through which they continually fail to succeed learn to NOT try – it’s a type of learned helplessness.  These children may be extremely gifted in their intelligence but they do not have the mechanism to push through to succeed because they do not believe they can succeed.  Often they fail through not trying.

A balance of adversity and comfort is the key.

Get to know your children.  They will be different from each other even though they will have similarities.  Observe to what they are attracted and repelled.  Note their temperament:  do they have a natural perseverance and stick-to-it-ive-ness or a natural desire for ease and easily give-up.  This will give you clues about how to structure the balance of the comfort and adversity equation for each.

The goal is to focus on how your child learns and notice when your child is showing signs of overwhelm.  In those circumstances you can break up the problem into smaller more graspable parts or offer opportunities to review ways in which he or she has previously succeeded in a similar endeavor.

The temperament that seems to be most complicated is the child who has a strong internal will and is willful but has an internal sense of insecurity due to trauma or significant adversity.  This child will look over-powering and create many power struggles.  The mistake on the part of the parent or teacher is to try to squash the willfulness and power struggles.  This is a mistake because often it squashes the inner sense of strength in the child.  The more useful action is to separate the inner strength and the power struggling behavior through verbal discussion and also creating a tiered response to power issues.  This allows for the guidance to use the power in a productive way.

What guides a child to learn, grow and develop is significantly different among children, even among siblings raised close together – because it is a unique function of nature and nurture – or genetics/temperament and experiences.  Inner strength and resilience are developed through a balance of comfort and adversity.  These tools assist you in developing a strategy for guiding your child from the perfect nourishing environment to the garden of life.

See you tomorrow.

Beth