Hello

Mindfulness, being present, letting go of habitual reaction patterns, and reframing – all concepts that are meant to get you on a path of Instinctive Health.  And along with flexibility, these tools help to keep you remaining in or returning to balance within – so that your actions can be balanced.

In my blog Create Balance Now I wrote about paying attention to the experience of intuition versus fear or habit reactions and how those experiences sound and feel different in your mind and body.  If you remember, fear or habit reactions are loud and push to the forefront of your brain and feel instantaneous, and intuition is quiet, sort of in the background of your brain and you can easily ignore these latter physical and cognitive experiences.

I suggested that you pay attention to the quiet intuitive experiences making real efforts to focus on these and follow through with them.  And I also suggested that you question the fearful, strong, loud, habit reactions – to try to get yourself into a more balanced perspective of yourself or of a specific situation.

Focusing on these quiet impulses and ignoring the loud habitual reaction patterns opens the possibility of finding balance within.

Balance is a spirit, mind, and body thing.  It’s an intra-relational experience.  I’m using intra – not inter because it’s happening within, not outside of you.  In Chinese Medicine energy follows in a certain way from the most insubstantial to the least insubstantial.  The most insubstantial is Shen or spirit, next is Qi – energy, then Xue or blood.

For our purposes, there is a relationship between spirit, mind, and body that is similar.  It is also intra-relational, there’s a  kind of feedback loop – and they can affect each other.  To find balance or return to balance you can go at this structure in a number of ways.

Medicine in general attends to imbalance predominantly from a physical point of view.  Psychology goes at it from a cognitive, belief system, mind point of view; and religion focuses on spiritual systems and imbalances.  I think they are all important.  Addressing any one of these alone, while useful will not bring about balance within the system.

In order to effect balance within all these must be addressed.

Using mindfulness, being present, flexibility, and letting go of the habitual reaction patterns we can review how we spend our days.  Then we can connect with our instinctive knowing and attraction to health and focus on renewing our physical, cognitive, and spiritual instincts, creating balance within our eating, sleeping, exercising, thinking, relating, working, and rejuvenating, patterns.

To begin to find the balance within, or return to balance, do a review of your own internal systems:  sleep/wake cycles,  nutrition, breath, exercise/rest, work/learn/rejuvenation, prayer/meditation, group/individual time, and creative endeavors.

What are your patterns in each of these areas?  Where do you put most of your energy?  Where is your passion and your responsibilities? Where are you overbundled and where do you feel deficient?   Where do you feel angry, sad, and happy?  Are you expecting of yourself actions that are out of balance or out of sync with your internal character needs?

You can even think to earlier times in your life when you felt more in balance  – what things are different now?  Perhaps you were an athlete but you aren’t allowing that to have a place in your life now – perhaps you were an artist but now you have to focus on making money, so you don’t have time to draw or paint.

Think of it like a treasure hunt – you’re going to get clues that you’ll have to interpret and these will help you move along the path until you find the treasure of balance within.

See you tomorrow.

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

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