Hello

“The healer knows that there is only one way to solve the truly difficult problems of this world:  with love, the energy of the heart and its permutations – – gentleness, kindness, patience, tolerance, and ethical behavior.” — Warren Grossman, PhD

I found this quote while researching information for an ethics seminar. It’s kind of cool.

Grossman was a therapist who developed this as a philosophy in response to his work as a therapist.   His website states the following:

For Grossman, ” Love – not romance, Tolerance – which does not mean to tolerate, Interdependence – with the rest of nature, Intelligence – not intellect, Healing – becoming more whole, Forgiving – exchanging anger for love, Respect – appreciative regard for that which is not familiar, Here and Now – The only time that is neither memory nor fantasy, Nature – what you are, Transformation – becoming better, Epistemology – knowing about knowing”;

his book Earth/Heart –’ what you are reflects the many important things the author learned through the years, specifically his encounter with the flow of life and his thoughts about the simple truths of nature’.  Warren Grossman, PhD

This is remarkably similar to what I have been writing about over the last few months.

There are many paths to this concept of Mindfulness.

Focusing on self-knowing and compassion toward others allows for the opening of one’s heart in a way that is different from falling in love.

One of my favorite authors Erich Fromm wrote about the Art of Loving.  Loving is not so much a feeling as an action; it’s a way of being in the world.

It seems to be more a matter of knowing the other, understanding the other, and accepting the other rather than making the other become something from your imagery.

When I think about the sixties and how free love was interpreted I think they missed out on the opportunity for truly freeing love and opening up to a higher level of consciousness toward others.

Then it was about getting out of the constraints of social mores here I am talking about upleveling consciousness.

Love is healing.

Truly gifted therapists love their patients.  They attend to them with this compassionate, accepting, understanding way and guide them toward health with openness, honesty, kindness, and resilient focus.

If you have been in therapy with a gifted therapist you found a healing path for yourself with their guidance.  Those who know this, know psychotherapy works.

The reason that it has not been proved that it works is due to the sad fact that not all therapists act in this manner.  It is not specifically prescribed to do so – in fact there are many boundaries, rules, and constraints set up to avoid such a relationship because most individuals don’t love in this higher consciousness way and falling in love with your patients will and does injure them.

It is my contention that one of the reasons for therapy is to resolve the injuries of the heart that occur without intention in childhood.  As such, often the work in therapy is to re-parent those beings you find in your practice.

As I meditate on mothering and parenting I see the similarities between therapy and parenting; how to best heal or help birth the consciousness of our children is to use these actions of higher love.

Compassion, understanding, accepting, being with while guiding forward these actions as parents make it so that injuries may be avoided or healed from the inside out.

Think about how you can free love or free your heart toward your partner and /or child – increasing your understanding of them so that you can be more accepting of them.

Of course I am not suggesting co-dependence or neglect of response-able expectation in relationship just seeing the person in front of you and loving who they are.

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

So we’ve been taking about stop, look and listen, language and meaning, figure and ground, and paradigm shifting.  These are all ways to increase mindfulness to act in a present moment way within the context of authenticity and internal strength toward connection and the development of one’s best self.

When I was in college I read a landmark book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, first published in 1962.  It developed a theory that truth in science was a function of one conceptual world view being replaced by another.  This was the basis of the concept of paradigm shifting that was later taken up by Steven Covey 27 years later in his powerful book on change, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

I experienced a mini-internal cultural revolution.

• Making connections and seeing how to integrate disparate views to incorporate a vision that life is connected.
• How we connect/disconnect and how we view life has more to do with our experiences and how we interpret those experiences than something objectively real.
• Empowerment is a function of personal will-power and the terms intention, attention, perspective, perception.
• Responsibility is the ability-to-respond in the present moment; and, freedom, rights and responsibilities are interconnected.
• Unconscious habit reaction patterns require shifting to create mini-internal, cultural revolutions, paradigm shifting using mindfulness.

Hermann Hesse’s literary work The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi), which describes an individual’s search for authenticity, self-knowledge and spirituality was a pivotal source-work for me.  I  suspect this has something to do with my affinity for existentialism and phenomenology as conceptual worldviews.

Existentialism is a philosophy that focuses on how all actions are choices, even no action, and that an individual has power as she has responsibility for her choices in the world, and through this responsibility is free.   Jean-Paul Sartre best describes this philosophy; I like many of his literary works but my favorite is Being and Nothingness.

Phenomenology incorporates the effect of the interface of energy, spirit, mind, and physical components in the development of self and meaning.  Georg Hegel:  The Phenomenology of Spirit and Martin Heidegger:  On the Way to Language and The Question of Being were strong contributors to this philosophy.

From a psychological perspective, I like the contemporary work by James Hillman and, the transformational work by Heinz Kohut who developed the concept of dynamic self-psychology which focuses on the development of a sense of worth, well-being and self-object relationships, primarily in early childhood but continues throughout all stages of development and focuses on internal conflicts and important relationships.

A contemporary author who incorporates these philosophies to promote mindfulness and integration of spirit, mind, body and action is Ken Wilber:  Integral Spirituality and A theory of everything.

These worldviews applied to parenting have to do with increasing mindfulness, and choice-making in the now.  Increasing internal strength via connection to self and internal will-power and the capacity to navigate internal needs and external expectations to promote optimal growth.

There is a fascinating educational curriculum that has been used in Canada and in some areas in the US to help children and adolescents succeed emotionally and academically in school by increasing their mindfulness, from The Hawn Foundation started by Goldie Hawn, called MindUP, developed by a Harvard psychologist who is part of the foundation.

So there’s a lot of references for the ideas about which I have been writing.

Check them out if you’re interested.

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

When looking at how to connect it’s important to look at strengths and limitations.

Find the places where you can connect or the ways you feel similarly that’s the best way to get and stay connected.  Those are the strengths.

Limitations are equally as important.  When you understand where you diverge you can begin to look for ways that even in your divergence you have connections.  Try to not jump to conclusions or assumptions or to the next proof of your argument.

When the focus of the relationship is connection then slowing down the process of communication – taking your time to get to the underlying beliefs and feelings  – is the most important.

In chess the player is attempting to use information to guess and speculate about the other players next and subsequent moves.  If one does that in relationship then little time is spent in the now.  Most of the time is spent in the future – working on counter moves in order to capture the king only keeps you distanced from the other person.

In parenting you want to build the strengths of your child and diminish the negative effect of their limitations.  Trying to get your child to think about what was the antecedent feeling, experience, or action that caused the negative action or their misbehavior helps to get them to start to think about their own strengths and limitations.

By encouraging them to see the antecedent feeling or behavior, it helps to put things within a context that they can manage – so rather than being overcome by a feeling or behavior they can actually see the relationship between feelings and behaviors and make choices in the now and learn to live mindfully.

Resilience and self-esteem are characteristics built from the inside out – from knowing yourself and standing in the center of yourself.  Having unrealistic expectations about yourself, both positive and negative, will decrease resilience and lower self esteem.  It has to be real, and dealing with real things is what builds a sense of positivity.

Another way to focus on creating strength and resilience, and deal in the real world, is work done by a School Counselor who has for many years now been lecturing across the country trying to teach counselors and school counselors to stop creating victims.  His premise is that some of our biggest school tragedies have been the result of victims’ heartless actions.  His name is Izzy Kalman and he teaches anger management classes called “Bullies to Buddies”.

He teaches that you can “turn Bullies to Buddies by treating them like your friend,” (by not getting mad at them, not reacting, and therefore reducing their power over you).   His work focuses on not reacting to what others say – if it’s true then you don’t need to get mad and if it isn’t true then it shouldn’t matter and you don’t need to get mad.  It’s another way to talk about being centered and mindful although he never uses those words.

His work uses basic psychological theory to prove that our current focus on victimhood has actually resulted in decreased self esteem, and decreased resilience.  He reminds us that “Bullies” feel like victims too so that we need to change the paradigm or lens through which we look at the problem of bullying and victimhood.  His work when actually introduced in schools has had some very positive effects.

So the next time someone says something critical and you feel yourself getting defensive see if the paradigm shift of responding as if they are your friend keeps you in the now in the interaction and allows for a de-escalation of the interaction.

And if they really are your friend or you are in a negotiating situation see if you can look at where you connect first and make those connections before you view where you diverge in belief or principle.

Knowing yourself – your strengths and your limitations – will help you to interact in a way that you do not lose your self or your priorities.

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

The expression of anger and fear, can be a charge that creates or triggers the unconscious habit reaction patterns in another. Or, it can allow for a powerful communication that can lead to connection.

The degree of expression, the level, tone, and word choice are the factors that affect how another responds or reacts.  Using breath to get you into your center and remaining centered is the most helpful way to begin to use the mindfulness process to assess what may be happening in the interaction.

When you are feeling angry or put off by someone’s comments it may be one of your boundaries has been crossed, or that you are reacting from an unconscious habit pattern, or that the other person’s  comments are the result of their unconscious habit pattern.

The most difficult of these to deal with is the latter.  The first two are within your control you can look at what boundary is being crossed and take steps to respond to that OR in the second case you can become more mindful by questioning your anger and habit reaction to help you get into a more centered space to respond more clearly, and in a more defined way.

However when it is the other person’s unconscious reaction pattern, you can only get through to them if they are wiling to hear that they are not in the present moment reacting with you.  This is difficult because the basic position of the unconscious habit reaction is defensive so it negates the opportunity for being open to insightful information.

Usually your level of intimacy can increase your ability to help the other person look at their behavior; but sometimes the closest people to us are the least willing to learn from us about themselves.  Especially if they are invested in the relationship not growing – in other words if the pattern of the relationship serves them from an unconscious habit pattern.

Emotion and feeling can mediate between figure and ground.  Using feeling, “I” statements, to evoke a softening of the defensive position of the other person is the best strategy to help to unravel the unconscious habit reaction pattern.  Go for connecting statements rather than separating statements.  This is counterintuitive most people want to define how they are different when they feel at odds with someone but actually that just increases the defensive reaction.

Focusing on the connections brings down the wall of defensiveness so that mindfulness can come in to play to replace the unconscious reaction pattern.    After this is secure then you can look at where you and the other person diverge and perhaps see if you are actually dealing with a figure/ground dichotomy.

Gestalt is roughly translated to mean ‘the whole’.  Gestalt figure ground illusions show us there are (at least) two perspectives that make up the whole.  In order to make the transition to one from the other one has to be mindful – and open to the possibility of the other perspective.

Breathing and centering, using feeling and connecting statements, these actions all allow for the line between the two to be less bold so that one is more able to view the other perspective.  And in some cases move back and forth between the two – between the figure and ground perspective.

This allows for connection and increased understanding of each point of view as well as the whole.

In Reiki a type of energy medicine, two of the guiding statements are very useful in focusing one into a state of mindfulness and creating the opportunity for connecting and centering.  One is Just for today I will have the attitude of gratitude and the other is Just for today I will not Anger.

I encourage you to pick one of those statements and use it as a mantra as you go through your day.  It may help you to focus in on yourself and the situation in a more mindful way and open new pathways for change and connection in your relationships.

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

Child development seems to follow this course of outer, inner in its focus.  Develop new skills, incorporate the skills into your self, practice the new thing learned, and then build on it.  So when you look at child development literature you’ll notice this spiral of skills development and then integration.

Psychotherapy follows a similar course: address the outside layer and then go deeper uncovering layers and then recombining into a new self, so to speak.  Often I will hear people say:  “I’ve already worked on that.”  And indeed they have – but there is a spiral to personality and character development where we learn skills or coping strategies and then we have to incorporate them, and then we have to sometimes unlearn and re-incorporate.  Over time it’s a spiral:  outer work, inner work, outer work, inner work and so on.

Change seems to have this dynamic focus as well.  Identify something you want to change, comprehend what interferes with change, make efforts to move the block and incorporate the new behavior (outer), then after time the change occurs internally  and there is both a new thing or cognition (inner) about the identified thing as well as a new action or behavior (outer).  Outer work, inner work, outer work and so on.

These shifts in focus are like mini-paradigm shifts of figure and ground.

Letting go of unconscious habit patterns follows this spiral; you notice the habit reaction patterns are there and how they are interfering with living in the now.  Then you increase your mindfulness to see if you can be more present and respond from a centered and mindful place.  This process is dynamic and it is spiraling which means you may feel as if you’ve already dealt with an issue and then find yourself dealing with a similar issue in a different context – outer, inner.

The emotional charge or energy that’s connected to the unconscious habit pattern gets released once the inner change has rooted.  So just as you don’t feel the charge you are more centered and able to connect to yourself from the inside out.  So you feel simultaneously more flexible AND more stable.  This allows for you to remain flexible and centered even when something from the outside goes wrong.  You are not thrown off by the unexpected event but rather you are able to bend and be flexible and respond to the event without anger, fear, or any other emotional charge.

The visual for being simultaneously flexible and centered is the tree bending in the wind while safely rooted into the soil.  It can respond to the environment around it without losing its center and grounding.

The Spiral and the Tree.  Keep these two visuals in your mind as you go about your days for the next two days as you view yourself, and yourself in your world.

You may even want to attempt the Yoga Tree Pose.

See you tomorrow.

Beth