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Thank you so much for reading, coming back, subscribing, commenting, sharing, rating, liking, and so on. It means a lot to know I am connecting with you.
Bloggers just getting started, have faith that if you keep posting about what you’re interested in, people will find you. That’s the only secret: keep posting!
I included some of this in my earlier post and then decided it needed to be a post on its own.
I picked up a copy of Scientific American Mind from a newsstand recently because of the cover articles on stress. (In fact, it is probably still on newsstands.) If you read this blog, you’ll know I’m very interested in stress management and health and well-being.
I read in the article Fight the Frazzled Mind that very few people know how to be productive when they are not being pushed by stressors — but it can be done. The author of the article, Robert Epstein, says it is possible to perform well when relaxed. Epstein says:
That should be the goal, in my opinion: a life that is productive but also virtually stress-free.
I can go along with that. In fact, that is a fabulous goal to have, in my opinion! (He says to think of kung fu masters. I think of the hypnotized guy in Office Space. My hero!)
When I realized that I wanted to do the kind of work that I would love doing even if I didn’t get paid for it, I set myself on that path.
Epstein, former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, says research suggests there are at least four broad, trainable skill sets that people can use to manage stress in a healthy, effective manner:
The article has a 16-question quiz designed to help you discover where you are competent and where you can improve. He says if you score under 12, you might want to consider taking a stress-management course. (Or you could come to me for relaxation coaching…just saying!)
The full 28-question version of his stress management test is online. I took it, and my best areas were relaxation and prevention. My worst area was thought management — probably because the test presupposes that irrational beliefs are stressful. I actually enjoy uncovering my irrational beliefs and have fun with them. I don’t allow them to stress me, and I don’t believe that irrationality per se equates with stress.
I find right-brain irrationality to be less stress-producing than left-brain rationality. People have a lot of irrational beliefs that are very comforting. Think about life-after-death beliefs. Rationally, it’s a huge unknown and very stressful. Anything else is irrational — and hopefully gives your life solace and meaning.
By the way: If your irrational beliefs are stressful, find a way to question, deflate, or replace them with non-stressful, positive beliefs. Byron Katie’s The Work is simply the best tool out there, in my opinion and that of many others.
So that’s my one quibble with this research, and it’s probably just semantic.
I can definitely work on source management: getting more organized with things, tasks, space, and time. I do okay but could do better.
Before doing the research, Epstein thought that relaxation and thought management — the focus of most stress reduction efforts — would be most effective at helping people reduce stress, be happier, and more successful personally and professionally.
Instead, he found that prevention is by far the most helpful competency when it comes to managing stress. Prevention includes:
In addition to these strategies, he adds two more for fighting stress before it starts:
Epstein found that on average, people scored 55 out of 100 on a test of simple stress management techniques. That means people are failing — badly — at managing their stress levels.
He also states that the new study found a high positive relationship between test scores and the overall level of happiness people reported, personal success, and professional success. Nearly 25 percent of the happiness we experience in life is related to — and maybe even the result of — our ability to manage stress.
That’s significant. Would you like to be 25 percent happier?
The best news is that stress management is trainable, with the greatest benefits reaped from prevention.
This is work worth doing.
I am adoring my experience of a lengthy, soaking RAIN here in drought-stricken Austin, Texas — off and on yesterday, seemingly all night, and most of this Sunday morning. I’m guessing maybe two inches of precious rain has fallen. Feels like such a blessing.
We (people, air, plants, wildlife, soil, streams, lakes, roads) need this so badly. There are cracks an inch wide in the soil under my trailer and under the dead grass. The only green grass around is under trees that got watered in an effort to keep them alive, and around the new trees I planted starting in late August. They’re drinking it up.
I love being inside my trailer in the rain. The sound of rain on the roof is divine.
And it’s Sunday. Sleeping in (well, to 8 am) to the sound of rain feels wonderfully precious. I’m undecided whether to go out to ecstatic dance, the farmer’s market, the Austin Yoga Festival, or to stay blissfully inside on this wet fall day — I have reading to catch up on, videos to watch, a cat to play with, food to cook, or maybe I’ll mix it up spontaneously.
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I just did a 35-minute meditation session. When my attention was focused, it went to body awareness and to hearing. My body awareness has deepened since I started massage school in June, of course. Understanding my hands as antennas, feeling layers of tissues down to the bone, and experiencing others touching me with various levels of connection, compassion, and presence have been quite an education.
Hearing while on the cushion a mockingbird and other birds, rain noises, traffic on wet pavement, my cat rustling in a cabinet, I notice I’m accustomed to picking out single sounds. It’s a nice stretch to take it all in, and like a symphony, to go back and forth between individual sounds and the whole cacophony, like zooming in and out with a camera, only with my sense of hearing. That reminds me, I’m leading my adventurous Fourth Way book group through the 12 states of attention on Tuesday.
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Yesterday I was fortunate enough to be able to attend a workshop, Metaphors of Money, taught by Charles Faulkner, an NLP trainer, trader, writer, and researcher. Given that metaphors, conscious and unconscious, underlie our experience (the map is not the territory; a map is a metaphor for metaphors), we examined our metaphors around money.
I personify money. I like it, and I want it to like me. I know money likes me when people write checks out to me and give/mail them to me or hand me cash! Also, when I look at my bank balance and it feels good, I know money likes me. When it doesn’t feel good, I feel pressed, and I take steps to bring more in.
I noticed that as the workshop progressed, every time I heard the word “money,” its visual representation in my mind (cash, dollar sign, checks, bank balance) looked brighter and more vivid. By the end, “money” was glowing with white light!
If this workshop is offered again, you can find out by subscribing to NLP Resources Austin‘s email list. (You don’t have to be trained in NLP to participate.) They have a lot of other cool stuff coming up too.
One of my wonderful student massage clients, perhaps triggered by me saying something about fascia (connective tissue), told me about and later sent me a link to this fascinating article, How Pig Guts Became the Next Bright Hope for Regenerating Human Limbs, about how extracellular matrix (ECM), formerly thought to be a kind of structural scaffolding, is actually
primarily a collection of signaling proteins and information that is held within the structural molecules.
ECM can be inserted where tissue has been damaged and destroyed, and somehow it manages to recruit the body’s own stem cells to rebuild nerve, muscle, and other tissues.
It holds promise for regenerating tissues in damaged limbs, preventing the need for amputation, and healing serious wounds without scar tissue.
Thanks, Bruce and Discover magazine.
Today I’m acknowledging the crack, still waiting for the light to get in.
I don’t know what’s going on astrologically, but since a couple of days ago I’ve felt a disturbance in my equanimity.
Anyone else feeling that way?
I hate naming names and casting blame, so I’ll just say that unknowingly, innocently, I subjected myself yesterday to an experience with another person that I never want to repeat. It threw me off, rattled me, and I’m still not centered.
A couple of other incidents before and after that have piled it on, that feeling of being uncentered.
One of them that I feel okay writing about here was listening to part of Fresh Air with Terry Gross this afternoon while running errands in my car. She was interviewing a writer on economics who said that Goldman Sachs helped Greece hide its debt in order to be admitted to the European Union.
Once admitted, Greece had access to very low interest rates and proceeded to borrow lots of money and do things like raise salaries without any accompanying rise in income.
Now Greece has no way of repaying its debt, and it could affect the European Union and the world economy, which as we know is already not in good shape.
“This was not a one-off situation,” he says. “You look at the financial crisis in Europe, and the fingerprints of American investment bankers are everywhere. The financial collapse encouraged the worst sort of behavior. At the same time they were making bad loans in the United States, they were encouraging the same sort of behavior at the government level in Europe. The basic problem was, historically the role of the financier was to vet risk and make sure risk was evaluated. That got perverted in recent times, and instead the financier helped disguise risk.”
I’m feeling a lot of empathy for the OccupyWallStreet movement. Most of us feel it, that “things aren’t right.” Corporations are not people. Best bumper-sticker I’ve seen recently:
I refuse to believe that corporations are people until Texas executes one.
I’ve felt for a while that I want to live sustainably on something close to a cash basis, with no mortgage and as little debt as possible.
I want to grow some of the fresh produce I eat, and I want to grow it organically from non-GMO seeds.
I want a skill I can barter.
Because I don’t know what’s coming, and it may get worse before it gets better.
That said, I’m going to meditate for a spell and get myself recentered.
A very interesting article that fits in well with this blog, Eat, Smoke, Meditate: Why Your Brain Cares How You Cope was published recently in Forbes, the business magazine — an unlikely place for an article about meditation but a good sign, meaning that this kind of information is reaching the conservative mainstream business audience.
The article, by health writer Alice G. Walton, states that for millenia people have turned to different activities to cope with life’s stresses: going for a walk, taking a deep breath, eating, drinking, smoking, praying, taking drugs, running, meditating.
She adds that most people would agree that the mind’s annoying chatter is a major source of unhappiness. It’s the obsessing, worrying, drifting, fearful mind that creates feelings of unhappiness. (We meditators know it as monkey mind.)
This internal chatter and the unpleasant emotions that accompany its thoughts are really what people are trying to get away from. A Harvard study done last year confirmed that mind wandering and unhappiness are clearly connected. That study found that when people are awake, their minds are wandering about half the time.
Another study found that mind wandering is linked to a network of brain cells called the default mode network (DMN for short). This network is only active when we are flitting from one life-worry to the next.
Meditation is about quieting the mind, facing, and then relinquishing those unhappy, stress-inducing thoughts.
New research from Yale has found that the DMN in experienced meditators is markedly less linked to other regions of the brain. And…when the brain’s “me centers” (areas governing thoughts about the self, such as the DMN) are activated, meditators also activated brain areas for self-monitoring and cognitive control.
They did this automatically, even when not being told to do anything in particular.
This implies that experienced meditators habitually monitor their thoughts and control them — a skill learned during meditation. When the mind wanders — when meditating and at other times — experienced meditators bring it back to the present moment.
Could this be the primary benefit of meditation, that you learn to monitor and control your thoughts, and therefore you feel happier?
The article suggests that meditators actually create a new default mode that is more present-centered and less “me”-centered.
The writer wonders whether happiness is really about shifting our tendency away from focusing on ourselves. Another study found that in praying nuns and meditating monks, brain areas for concentration and attention became activated, while areas that govern how a person relates to the world deactivated.
The author states that this suggests that the focus becomes less on the person being a distinct entity from the external world and more on the connection between the person and the external world.
Separation and oneness, away from and toward. Aha!
The article continues, stating that other tools to relieve stress like cigarettes, food, or alcohol actually end up making the users unhappier. Addictions create negative feedback loops that include craving and relief, followed by craving and relief, et cetera.
She concludes:
Addressing the process itself with other methods (like meditation), which allow you to ride out the craving/unhappiness by attending to it and accepting it, and then letting it go, has been more successful, because it actually breaks the cycle rather than masks it.
A couple of months ago, I blogged about some exciting new research about insomnia. It seems that when we lie awake at night, unable to fall asleep, it’s because our brains are overheating. They tend to generate more warmth during the day and cool down at night.
So something happens that moves us out of this biorhythm and into the minor hell of insomnia (or major, if it goes on long enough). When you would like to be sleeping, the monkey mind grabs onto thoughts and won’t let go — generating heat in the brain and preventing sleep.
The researcher experimented with a cooling cap. It seemed to me that there were alternatives that were much simpler and more accessible.
First of all, disidentifying with your thoughts is a useful skill anyone can learn with a little practice. Thinking is what the mind does. It serves a purpose. It is not inherently bad.
The question is whether thinking is appropriate when you want to be sleeping. There’s thinking, and then there’s mind-running-amok.
To disidentify with those thoughts, you simply choose to focus your attention on your breath, or on sounds, sensations, rhythms, your weight against the sheets and pillow, a chakra, your whole body, a state of wonder, an image — find something that works for you. (All this stuff is happening all the time. “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans,” right?)
Notice that your thoughts are often about something that’s neither here nor now — they’re in the past or future. Bring your attention into the present moment. What are you actually experiencing?
Your mind may interrupt, but as you continue to focus on your present experience, it will interrupt less and less often, and you will fall asleep.
Also, notice whether that thing your monkey mind won’t let go of is something you have any control over. If you can’t influence it, give it up. Trickster is having fun with you. Just plain let go and hand it over to God, the Universe, Spirit (GUS will take care of it). Now go to sleep.
If you can influence it, unless it’s truly life-or-death, sleep on it and see what option comes to mind when you wake in the morning. In other words, pose the question “How can I influence this for the good of all involved?” Let your unconscious mind work and play with the situation while your conscious mind takes the restful break of sleep. When you wake, notice what comes to mind.
You may want to do some journaling.
Drink a glass, or half a glass if your bladder wakes you up early, of water that is between room temperature and cool. Ice isn’t necessary — some people believe that ice is too cooling and not good for the human digestive system’s operations. After all, the human race has done pretty well without iced drinks for millenia upon millenia.
Take a mouthful of cool water, close your mouth, hold it for a bit, and then swallow.
You can also put a cool compress of a wrung-out washcloth on your forehead. Do both!
And, while you’re doing these things, think about the cowboy song Cool, Clear Water while you do this! Let water represent the sleep you want to experience.
Here’s a video of the original by the Sons of the Pioneers. Maybe you have a favorite version.
Continue to breathe through your nose, not your mouth, unless you have nasal congestion.
I shared this with my bodyworker/acupuncturist Patrice Sullivan, who got excited and shared with me some of the pressure points that reduce heat, because in Chinese medicine’s understanding of health, the body can get out of balance and have too much heat — and of course this can affect the brain.
Press into pressure points with a fingertip or pencil eraser to stimulate them, unblock meridians, and release heat. Press briefly and see what happens. Then try pressing steadily for 30 second to 2 minutes.
The list below includes the poetic names of the points for fun. You may want to google each point to view a graphic with more precision about the location.
I’d love to be wrong about this, but in my opinion, Big Science is probably not going to fund research on simple, effective ways to relieve insomnia unless they can make money off it by selling you something they’ve patented. So it’s up to us to figure out what works and let others know.
Please feel free to try any or all of these methods to relieve insomnia and please report back on what worked and didn’t work for you in the comments for this post.
Thank you.
The man is an American institution. I got to see him last night at the Austin City Limits festival.
Initially torn between seeing him or My Morning Jacket, my musician and producer friend Bruce Hughes advised me to go see Stevie by saying this:
His connection to the source is the fifth element.
Who can resist a recommendation like that?
I met my friend Fran Tatu there — her first ACL festival — and we hung out for some Patrice Pike and a little Preservation Hall Jazz Band with the Del McCoury Band. (I have a crush on PHJB’s tuba player, Ben Jaffe.) Earlier I’d seen Daniel Lanois’ Black Dub and some gospel acts.
Fran loved ACL, which is saying something, since she’s from New Orleans and is a long-time Jazz Fest aficionado.
Not to go too far off on a tangent here, but I love Jazz Fest. I’ve been once, pre-Katrina, and want to go again. In comparison, ACL doesn’t attract the diversity of ages and races that Jazz Fest does. I loved that if you wanted to, you could hear just jazz, just blues, or just gospel, each in its own tent with chairs to sit on, all day, every day, for 10 days.
Austin’s food scene doesn’t rival New Orleans, but there are plenty of creative offerings here, and the food at ACL is getting better and better. I love that ACL brings in the foodies who help make Austin Austin: Hope Farmers Market, Odd Duck Farm to Trailer, The Mighty Cone, Amy’s Ice Cream, The Daily Juice, Maudie’s Tex-Mex, The Salt Lick, Stubb’s BBQ, Torchy’s Tacos, and more.
I enjoyed a Green Tea with Mint and Honey from Sweet Leaf Tea and later an Energizing Kombucha from Hope Farmers Market. I had a Wahoo’s fish taco for lunch (tasty) and a bacon-wrapped sweet pepper with goat cheese from Odd Duck (wowza!).
Back to Stevie Wonder. He played song after song that I knew without even having to think about it. “Signed, Sealed, Delivered.” “Superstition.” “Living for the City.” “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” “That’s What Friends Are For.” “From the Bottom of My Heart.” “Brand New Day.” “Isn’t She Lovely?”
His hit songs have become embedded in American culture since the 1970s. He and I are almost contemporaries, and so these are the songs of my adult life. So positive, so loving, so catchy.
He mentioned that he is a United Nations Ambassador for Peace. He advocates for the disabled around the world, and he takes this role seriously enough to let it influence his music. We were lucky to have him share with us a song he’s still working on, “Check On Your Love,” in which he calls on the people who advocate religious war to, well, check on their love. It incorporates some middle Eastern sounds, which we sang along to (or tried to — singing along with Stevie is hard).
He spoke of his esteem for President Obama, of his desire to have more schools than prisons, of not going back to the bad old days, and more. Right after he praised Obama early in his set, some people in front of us left. Republicans, probably.
All in all, a great set. Started late, ended late. He played and sang, bossed, created, taught, preached, shared. After it was over, I rode my bike to my car, put my bike on the car rack, visited with Katy and Robert, drove home, and stayed up until nearly 2 a.m., my head filled with Stevie Wonder songs.
None of my photos of Stevie turned out well enough to share. We were too far away, and the monitor didn’t photograph well. So sorry about that! He looks great. Happy, healthy, with no restrictions in the neck and jaw — none. He keeps it loose.
I also want to mention how much I enjoyed hearing Daniel Lanois’ Black Dub. I admire his songwriting and sound. His new band includes a lovely young blond woman with more soul in her voice than her years would suggest was possible, who was adept at drums, rhythm guitar, and keyboards as well.
This amazing talent is Trixie Whitley. She could be huge like Adele if she wanted that level of fame — and right now she’s in great company. (I overheard some guys around me praising her. When she picked up a guitar, they said they’d really fallen in love with her.) Here’s a photo of some tight, tight vocals being sung.
Daniel Lanois' Black Dub
I partook of a chair massage at Massage Rocks. I had met the owner, Jon Sullivan, just last week when he talked to my class. So nice to have that available for those of use whose bodies get weary at events like ACL. I vote for a yoga corner at next year’s ACL!
I thought you might like to read an excerpt from the book I’m reading in a book group. The book is called Life in the Labyrinth, by E.J. Gold, who is in the Gurdjieffian Fourth Way lineage of teaching awareness expansion.
As a child of thirteen and fourteen, I found my bedroom overrun with lab rats, and more or less as an afterthought — I had no other use for them, not being particularly attracted to vivisection and the like — built a few mazes to study rat behavior.
One item stood out clearly in my observations of dozens of rats stumbling, bumping and sniffing their way toward their final reward as they learned to synthesize experiential data through a primitive form of deduction…or didn’t learn, and nearly starved to death.
I discovered, independently of texts on behavioral sciences, something which I later learned was by convention called maze brightness, which could be defined for the moment as “becoming able to find new paths through the maze toward the reward-point through sheer repetition”, from which we could, if we weren’t overly concerned about how far we could quantum leap, deduce that some rats eventually become aware of the general rules of maze construction, of course only on a purely subjective-instinctive nose-and-gut level.
I discovered through this a special learning process which could enable the rat to solve not only one known maze but virtually any maze it may thereafter happen to encounter by accident or design.
I also concluded, probably rightly, that such a rat would, eventually — having blundered its way through a sufficient number of mazes — in spite of itself, begin to dimly recognize the inescapable fact that it is in a maze and that moreover, it cannot — at least by present means — remove itself to parts unknown.
Once this first all-important recognition has been achieved, without which nothing further is possible in any direction except down, it can begin to perceive and analyze its surroundings as they actually are, and not as its unexamined fears and perceptual occlusions have caused it to imagine them to be.
Because the perceptual-emotional will have, for the moment, been resolved, it will no longer exhibit the compulsion to maintain a self-constructed veil of confusion and disorientation.
One would think the thrill of observing that single rat, which out of dozens, suddenly gave indications of having become aware of the maze would soon pall, but au contraire…the excitement of this simple yet magnificent discovery never failed to strike me as anything less than downright apotheotic*, and any behavioral scientist worth his or her weight in potassium nitrate who says anything different is spouting pure scoria*.
A rat achieves maze brightness, and its eyes seem somehow at once both older and younger; general posture and behavior toward the environment and toward itself show radical signs of alteration. It seems less frantic, more self-assured, and noticeably less self-destructive.
At the same time, one can see visible signs of excitement as a new sense of freedom descends overwhelmingly upon it, the same sense of freedom which humans who have discovered what they call “enlightenment” experience.
E.J. Gold is a good storyteller, and I’ve just ordered two more of his books, Practical Work on the Self and The Human Biological Machine As a Transformational Apparatus. The book group I joined has already read them, so I have some catching up to do.
*apotheosis means to exalt a person to the rank of God
*scoria means the scum left after melting metal
If you are trying to understand a negative experience, step outside of yourself first. Visualize yourself as a person in a situation and ask, “Why did s/he feel that way?”
Chances are you will discover some new information about yourself, the other person, and/or the situation. Your point of view is larger.
This is a way to gain insight. I don’t know about you, but I find insight to be very valuable.
The less effective strategy is to remember the experience as if you are re-experiencing it, feeling the negative feelings again, and ask, “Why did I feel that way?”
Often your emotion can overwhelm the understanding. People often replay the tape of “he said x, and I felt y” over and over again.
Guess what that does for you?
I dare you to try this now! Think of a recent situation in which you felt an unpleasant emotion. Please pick something with a small to middling emotional effect and not something intensely painful.
For instance, if someone made a remark that you perceived as insensitive and you felt hurt, review the situation as if you are seeing it occur on film. You are one of the characters. See the other character make the remark and see your character reacting.
Now ask, “Why did that remark get to her so much?”
Then notice what happens.
You might need to do this several times to practice if this is new for you.
It’s pretty amazing how such a shift in point of view can make a big difference. Research has shown that people who self-distance from situations that result in unpleasant emotions feel less distressed later, ruminate about the experience less, and are less likely to be hostile when future disagreements arise.
It is amazing to me how many people live decades of their life immersed in either their own point of view, feeling everything intensely, or distancing from everything and not taking anything personally without knowing they can do both — and can choose which point of view to use when.
And…you can review past events and change your point of view. You can actually change your feelings about the past!
We all have a range of emotions. Like the Native American story says, which wolf do you choose to feed? The one with less suffering or more, your own included?
I call this skill perceptual flexibility. It’s worth practicing and cultivating, in my opinion.
By the way, this is elementary Neuro-Linguistic Programming. A scientific study confirmed what NLPers have long known works. I read about it on Steve Andreas’ NLP Blog in case you’d like to read my source.
The Well: bodymindheartspirit 