Category: ACT

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Acceptance Acceptance and Commitment Therapy ACT Feel Better

Conceptualised Selves

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

WALT WHITMAN

Sometimes it can be helpful when we start to feel very trapped in a mind-state that is causing us a great deal of suffering to do a practice that pushes us (a little uncomfortably, but hopefully not too uncomfortably) at examining the very perspective from which our thoughts and feelings emanate.

These two exercises come from Steven C. Haye’s book A Liberated Mind. I have found them both interesting and helpful at times for myself and when used with clients.

PRACTICE ONE: I AM?

Take a sheet of paper and write down the following.

I am ________________.
I am ________________.
I am ________________.

Now complete the top two with one-word answers that represent positive psychological attributes of yours. Don’t put in mere descriptive attributes (e.g., I am male). Use terms that refer to your most prized personal qualities. Reserve the last for the exact opposite. There, list in a single word a personal attribute that you fear you have or think you have that is negative.

Let’s begin by reviewing the top two “positive” answers. A couple of simple questions: Is this true all the time? Everywhere? Toward everyone? Without exception?  What about the bottom one. Is it totally true, everywhere? Would someone else say the same thing if they could watch you 24/7?

Now another question: how many of these statements can you turn into a comparison with others? Try to do it with each one. If you wrote down I am smart or I am kind, see if these statements link to the idea that you are smart-ER or kind-ER (or dumb-ER and so on) than at least some other people. This isn’t just your story—it’s your story in comparison to others. No wonder we begin to feel alone inside our own “content”-focused selves.

The beginning of a solution is to notice our fusion with these statements. Beginning with the first one and continuing through all three, change the full-stop at the end of each sentence to a comma, and then write down these two words: OR NOT. For example, I am intelligent, or not.

Now read each sentence again, slowly. Watch what happens. Take your time. If you find your mind filling with negative thoughts as you do this, use your defusion skills on them, saying to yourself, “I’m having the thought that . . .” and see if that helps to loosen the grip on the thought that’s threatening to hijack your mind.

You may be able to sense something opening slightly—as if a little bit of air is coming into a room. You may feel that you somehow have more options about how you think about yourself. Don’t try to hang on to that feeling—it will come and go—and don’t get into an argument with yourself about which version is more accurate. The mental process we are cultivating here is reminding ourselves that we can refuse to buy one version of a story as compared to another. We’re opening our minds to possibilities. See if you can notice that this sense of opening happens with both the “positive” statements and the negative one.

Now take the first sentence and cross out all of what you’ve written after I am. Who would you be without that content? Pause to consider the answer. Then do the same with each of the other sentences. What would it be like just to let go of that content?

This process raises the question: Who are we without all of our stories and defenses? Who or what are we trying to protect? If we woke up one day and all sentences like this were just sentences—they all had that open sense of “_______ or not!”—would we still be our selves? If your mind replies, “Hell no!” take just a moment to notice who is noticing that mind of yours. Aren’t you noticing that mental reaction? Isn’t the you that is noticing a deeper sense of “you”?

As the final act in this little exercise, circle the two words repeated three times—I am—and consider them. What if the deeper sense of self we seek is closer to these two words alone? In crafting the story of our lives, we lose sight of this powerful alternative: just being.

There is one more step in this exercise, which helps us become more aware of when we tend to fall under the spell of our self-telling. Ego-based stories are not just distorted, they also tend to be too general. In actuality, we focus on different aspects of our self-story in different circumstances. For example, when at home with our loved ones, we may focus on our view of ourselves as being caring; while at work, we might focus on our thoughts about being inept. Becoming aware of how our self-story changes according to different situations helps us stay better connected with our transcendent self, and therefore with our ability to choose among possibilities about how we will be.

So now, we’re going to transform the “I am _______” statements by rewriting each. First, instead of I am, write I feel or I think. For example, if you wrote I am loving, replace it with I feel loving. If you wrote I am intelligent, make it I think of myself as intelligent.

Next, qualify each statement by describing the situation in which you think or feel that way, including how your own behaviour is involved, using this phrasing:

“When [the situation] and I [your behavior] then [how you think or feel].” For example, “When my wife is disagreeing with me, and I take her perspective seriously, I feel loving,” or “When I have a lot to do, and I take time for self-care, I think of myself as intelligent.” You can also write descriptions of the situations in which you do not feel loving or intelligent. For example, “When I have a lot of work to do and I ignore my twelve-year-old son, I do not feel loving.”

PRACTICE TWO: DIFFERENTIATING BETWEEN WHAT WE’RE AWARE OF AND WHO WE ARE

Take a breath or two, notice who is noticing that sensation, and then note your experience. Whatever your mind settles on—an external object, an internal sensation, a thought, a feeling, a memory, or so on—get clear on it.

Then restate the experience in three forms:

  1. “I am aware of [state the content]”
  2. “I am not [state the content]”
  3. “I contain awareness of [state the content].”

For example, “I am aware of the television. [PAUSE] I am not the television. [PAUSE] I contain awareness of the television”

Or “I am remembering a memory of being five. [PAUSE] I am not a memory. [PAUSE] My awareness contains a memory of being five.[PAUSE]”

Five or ten minutes is plenty of time for this exercise, and after the first engagement with it, you should practice it regularly for several days. Then, for ongoing practice, you can simplify the task. Just notice the experience and then state “I’m not that; my awareness contains that.”

Don’t get drawn into an argument—instead see if you can touch a deeper awareness that your attachment to any content is distinct from awareness itself.

Categories
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy ACT Feel Better Happiness

Counting Happiness: How Much Should We Trust Our Feelings?

This excerpt from Yuval Noah Harari’s wonderful book Sapiens manages to distil a great deal of wisdom and discernment about our quixotic quest for feeling good. I think it also points to the challenges that we face as psychotherapists in working with clients’ assumptions (which are also our own!) about striving for happiness and well-being: highlighting how these assumptions have fundamental cultural and historical foundations which we rarely question, so intrinsic are they to the symbolic worlds in which we live. 

COUNTING HAPPINESS

Social scientists measure happiness by distributing subjective well-being questionnaires and correlating the results with socio-economic factors such as wealth and political freedom. Biologists use the same questionnaires, but correlate the answers people give them with biochemical and genetic factors. Their findings are shocking.

Biologists hold that our mental and emotional world is governed by biochemical mechanisms shaped by millions of years of evolution. Like all other mental states, our subjective well-being is not determined by external parameters such as salary, social relations or political rights. Rather, it is determined by a complex system of nerves, neurons, synapses and various biochemical substances such as serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin.

Nobody is ever made happy by winning the lottery, buying a house, getting a promotion or even finding true love. People are made happy by one thing and one thing only – pleasant sensations in their bodies. A person who just won the lottery or found new love and jumps from joy is not really reacting to the money or the lover. She is reacting to various hormones coursing through her bloodstream, and to the storm of electric signals flashing between different parts of her brain.

Unfortunately for all hopes of creating heaven on earth, our internal biochemical system seems to be programmed to keep happiness levels relatively constant. There’s no natural selection for happiness as such – a happy hermit’s genetic line will go extinct as the genes of a pair of anxious parents get carried on to the next generation. Happiness and misery play a role in evolution only to the extent that they encourage or discourage survival and reproduction. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that evolution has moulded us to be neither too miserable nor too happy. It enables us to enjoy a momentary rush of pleasant sensations, but these never last for ever. Sooner or later they subside and give place to unpleasant sensations.

For example, evolution provided pleasant feelings as rewards to males who spread their genes by having sex with fertile females. If sex were not accompanied by such pleasure, few males would bother. At the same time, evolution made sure that these pleasant feelings quickly subsided. If orgasms were to last for ever, the very happy males would die of hunger for lack of interest in food, and would not take the trouble to look for additional fertile females.

Some scholars compare human biochemistry to an air-conditioning system that keeps the temperature constant, come heatwave or snowstorm. Events might momentarily change the temperature, but the air-conditioning system always returns the temperature to the same set point.

Some air-conditioning systems are set at twenty-five degrees Celsius. Others are set at twenty degrees. Human happiness conditioning systems also differ from person to person. On a scale from one to ten, some people are born with a cheerful biochemical system that allows their mood to swing between levels six and ten, stabilising with time at eight. Such a person is quite happy even if she lives in an alienating big city, loses all her money in a stock-exchange crash and is diagnosed with diabetes. Other people are cursed with a gloomy biochemistry that swings between three and seven and stabilises at five. Such an unhappy person remains depressed even if she enjoys the support of a tight-knit community, wins millions in the lottery and is as healthy as an Olympic athlete. Indeed, even if our gloomy friend wins $50,000,000 in the morning, discovers the cure for both AIDS and cancer by noon, makes peace between Israelis and Palestinians that afternoon, and then in the evening reunites with her long-lost child who disappeared years ago – she would still be incapable of experiencing anything beyond level seven happiness. Her brain is simply not built for exhilaration, come what may.

Think for a moment of your family and friends. You know some people who remain relatively joyful, no matter what befalls them. And then there are those who are always disgruntled, no matter what gifts the world lays at their feet. We tend to believe that if we could just change our workplace, get married, finish writing that novel, buy a new car or repay the mortgage, we would be on top of the world. Yet when we get what we desire we don’t seem to be any happier. Buying cars and writing novels do not change our biochemistry. They can startle it for a fleeting moment, but it is soon back to its set point.

How can this be squared with other psychological and sociological findings that, for example, married people are happier on average than singles? First, these findings are correlations – the direction of causation may be the opposite of what some researchers have assumed. It is true that married people are happier than singles and divorcees, but that does not necessarily mean that marriage produces happiness. It could be that happiness causes marriage. Or more correctly, that serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin bring about and maintain a marriage. People who are born with a cheerful biochemistry are generally happy and content. Such people are more attractive spouses, and consequently they have a greater chance of getting married. They are also less likely to divorce, because it is far easier to live with a happy and content spouse than with a depressed and dissatisfied one. Consequently, it’s true that married people are happier on average than singles, but a single woman prone to gloom because of her biochemistry would not necessarily become happier if she were to hook up with a husband.

In addition, most biologists are not fanatics. They maintain that happiness is determined mainly by biochemistry, but they agree that psychological and sociological factors also have their place. Our mental air-conditioning system has some freedom of movement within predetermined borders. It is almost impossible to exceed the upper and lower emotional boundaries, but marriage and divorce can have an impact in the area between the two. Somebody born with an average of level five happiness would never dance wildly in the streets. But a good marriage should enable her to enjoy level seven from time to time, and to avoid the despondency of level three.

If we accept the biological approach to happiness, then history turns out to be of minor importance, since most historical events have had no impact on our biochemistry. History can change the external stimuli that cause serotonin to be secreted, yet it does not change the resulting serotonin levels, and hence it cannot make people happier.

Compare a medieval French peasant to a modern Parisian banker. The peasant lived in an unheated mud hut overlooking the local pigsty, while the banker goes home to a splendid penthouse with all the latest technological gadgets and a view to the Champs-Elysées. Intuitively, we would expect the banker to be much happier than the peasant. However, mud huts, penthouses and the Champs-Elysées don’t really determine our mood. Serotonin does. When the medieval peasant completed the construction of his mud hut, his brain neurons secreted serotonin, bringing it up to level X. When in 2014 the banker made the last payment on his wonderful penthouse, brain neurons secreted a similar amount of serotonin, bringing it up to a similar level X. It makes no difference to the brain that the penthouse is far more comfortable than the mud hut. The only thing that matters is that at present the level of serotonin is X. Consequently the banker would not be one iota happier than his great-great-great-grandfather, the poor medieval peasant.

This is true not only of private lives, but also of great collective events. Take, for example, the French Revolution. The revolutionaries were busy: they executed the king, gave lands to the peasants, declared the rights of man, abolished noble privileges and waged war against the whole of Europe. Yet none of that changed French biochemistry. Consequently, despite all the political, social, ideological and economic upheavals brought about by the revolution, its impact on French happiness was small. Those who won a cheerful biochemistry in the genetic lottery were just as happy before the revolution as after. Those with a gloomy biochemistry complained about Robespierre and Napoleon with the same bitterness with which they earlier complained about Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

If so, what good was the French Revolution? If people did not become any happier, then what was the point of all that chaos, fear, blood and war? Biologists would never have stormed the Bastille. People think that this political revolution or that social reform will make them happy, but their biochemistry tricks them time and again.

There is only one historical development that has real significance. Today, when we finally realise that the keys to happiness are in the hands of our biochemical system, we can stop wasting our time on politics and social reforms, putsches and ideologies, and focus instead on the only thing that can make us truly happy: manipulating our biochemistry. If we invest billions in understanding our brain chemistry and developing appropriate treatments, we can make people far happier than ever before, without any need of revolutions. Prozac, for example, does not change regimes, but by raising serotonin levels it lifts people out of their depression.

Nothing captures the biological argument better than the famous New Age slogan: ‘Happiness Begins Within.’ Money, social status, plastic surgery, beautiful houses, powerful positions – none of these will bring you happiness. Lasting happiness comes only from serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin.

In Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World, published in 1932 at the height of the Great Depression, happiness is the supreme value and psychiatric drugs replace the police and the ballot as the foundation of politics. Each day, each person takes a dose of ‘soma’, a synthetic drug which makes people happy without harming their productivity and efficiency. The World State that governs the entire globe is never threatened by wars, revolutions, strikes or demonstrations, because all people are supremely content with their current conditions, whatever they may be. Huxley’s vision of the future is far more troubling than George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Huxley’s world seems monstrous to most readers, but it is hard to explain why. Everybody is happy all the time – what could be wrong with that?

THE MEANING OF LIFE

Huxley’s disconcerting world is based on the biological assumption that happiness equals pleasure. To be happy is no more and no less than experiencing pleasant bodily sensations. Since our biochemistry limits the volume and duration of these sensations, the only way to make people experience a high level of happiness over an extended period of time is to manipulate their biochemical system.

But that definition of happiness is contested by some scholars. In a famous study, Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, asked people to recount a typical work day, going through it episode by episode and evaluating how much they enjoyed or disliked each moment. He discovered what seems to be a paradox in most people’s view of their lives. Take the work involved in raising a child. Kahneman found that when counting moments of joy and moments of drudgery, bringing up a child turns out to be a rather unpleasant affair. It consists largely of changing nappies, washing dishes and dealing with temper tantrums, which nobody likes to do. Yet most parents declare that their children are their chief source of happiness. Does it mean that people don’t really know what’s good for them?

That’s one option. Another is that the findings demonstrate that happiness is not the surplus of pleasant over unpleasant moments. Rather, happiness consists in seeing one’s life in its entirety as meaningful and worthwhile. There is an important cognitive and ethical component to happiness. Our values make all the difference to whether we see ourselves as ‘miserable slaves to a baby dictator’ or as ‘lovingly nurturing a new life’. As Nietzsche put it, if you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how. A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.

Though people in all cultures and eras have felt the same type of pleasures and pains, the meaning they have ascribed to their experiences has probably varied widely. If so, the history of happiness might have been far more turbulent than biologists imagine. It’s a conclusion that does not necessarily favour modernity. Assessing life minute by minute, medieval people certainly had it rough. However, if they believed the promise of everlasting bliss in the afterlife, they may well have viewed their lives as far more meaningful and worthwhile than modern secular people, who in the long term can expect nothing but complete and meaningless oblivion. Asked ‘Are you satisfied with your life as a whole?’, people in the Middle Ages might have scored quite highly in a subjective well-being questionnaire.

So our medieval ancestors were happy because they found meaning to life in collective delusions about the afterlife? Yes. As long as nobody punctured their fantasies, why shouldn’t they? As far as we can tell, from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan, and if planet Earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. As far as we can tell at this point, human subjectivity would not be missed. Hence any meaning that people ascribe to their lives is just a delusion. The other-worldly meanings medieval people found in their lives were no more deluded than the modern humanist, nationalist and capitalist meanings modern people find. The scientist who says her life is meaningful because she increases the store of human knowledge, the soldier who declares that his life is meaningful because he fights to defend his homeland, and the entrepreneur who finds meaning in building a new company are no less delusional than their medieval counterparts who found meaning in reading scriptures, going on a crusade or building a new cathedral.

So perhaps happiness is synchronising one’s personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions. As long as my personal narrative is in line with the narratives of the people around me, I can convince myself that my life is meaningful, and find happiness in that conviction.

This is quite a depressing conclusion. Does happiness really depend on self-delusion?

KNOW THYSELF

If happiness is based on feeling pleasant sensations, then in order to be happier we need to re-engineer our biochemical system. If happiness is based on feeling that life is meaningful, then in order to be happier we need to delude ourselves more effectively. Is there a third alternative?

Both the above views share the assumption that happiness is some sort of subjective feeling (of either pleasure or meaning), and that in order to judge people’s happiness, all we need to do is ask them how they feel. To many of us, that seems logical because the dominant religion of our age is liberalism. Liberalism sanctifies the subjective feelings of individuals. It views these feelings as the supreme source of authority. What is good and what is bad, what is beautiful and what is ugly, what ought to be and what ought not to be, are all determined by what each one of us feels.

Liberal politics is based on the idea that the voters know best, and there is no need for Big Brother to tell us what is good for us. Liberal economics is based on the idea that the customer is always right. Liberal art declares that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Students in liberal schools and universities are taught to think for themselves. Commercials urge us to ‘Just do it!’ Action films, stage dramas, soap operas, novels and catchy pop songs indoctrinate us constantly: ‘Be true to yourself’, ‘Listen to yourself’, ‘Follow your heart’. Jean-Jacques Rousseau stated this view most classically: ‘What I feel to be good – is good. What I feel to be bad – is bad.’

People who have been raised from infancy on a diet of such slogans are prone to believe that happiness is a subjective feeling and that each individual best knows whether she is happy or miserable. Yet this view is unique to liberalism. Most religions and ideologies throughout history stated that there are objective yardsticks for goodness and beauty, and for how things ought to be. They were suspicious of the feelings and preferences of the ordinary person. At the entrance of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, pilgrims were greeted by the inscription: ‘Know thyself!’ The implication was that the average person is ignorant of his true self, and is therefore likely to be ignorant of true happiness. Freud would probably concur.

And so would Christian theologians. St Paul and St Augustine knew perfectly well that if you asked people about it, most of them would prefer to have sex than pray to God. Does that prove that having sex is the key to happiness? Not according to Paul and Augustine. It proves only that humankind is sinful by nature, and that people are easily seduced by Satan. From a Christian viewpoint, the vast majority of people are in more or less the same situation as heroin addicts. Imagine that a psychologist embarks on a study of happiness among drug users. He polls them and finds that they declare, every single one of them, that they are only happy when they shoot up. Would the psychologist publish a paper declaring that heroin is the key to happiness?

The idea that feelings are not to be trusted is not restricted to Christianity. At least when it comes to the value of feelings, even Darwin and Dawkins might find common ground with St Paul and St Augustine. According to the selfish gene theory, natural selection makes people, like other organisms, choose what is good for the reproduction of their genes, even if it is bad for them as individuals. Most males spend their lives toiling, worrying, competing and fighting, instead of enjoying peaceful bliss, because their DNA manipulates them for its own selfish aims. Like Satan, DNA uses fleeting pleasures to tempt people and place them in its power.

Most religions and philosophies have consequently taken a very different approach to happiness than liberalism does. The Buddhist position is particularly interesting. Buddhism has assigned the question of happiness more importance than perhaps any other human creed. For 2,500 years, Buddhists have systematically studied the essence and causes of happiness, which is why there is a growing interest among the scientific community both in their philosophy and their meditation practices.

Buddhism shares the basic insight of the biological approach to happiness, namely that happiness results from processes occurring within one’s body, and not from events in the outside world. However, starting from the same insight, Buddhism reaches very different conclusions.

According to Buddhism, most people identify happiness with pleasant feelings, while identifying suffering with unpleasant feelings. People consequently ascribe immense importance to what they feel, craving to experience more and more pleasures, while avoiding pain. Whatever we do throughout our lives, whether scratching our leg, fidgeting slightly in the chair, or fighting world wars, we are just trying to get pleasant feelings.

The problem, according to Buddhism, is that our feelings are no more than fleeting vibrations, changing every moment, like the ocean waves. If five minutes ago I felt joyful and purposeful, now these feelings are gone, and I might well feel sad and dejected. So if I want to experience pleasant feelings, I have to constantly chase them, while driving away the unpleasant feelings. Even if I succeed, I immediately have to start all over again, without ever getting any lasting reward for my troubles.

What is so important about obtaining such ephemeral prizes? Why struggle so hard to achieve something that disappears almost as soon as it arises? According to Buddhism, the root of suffering is neither the feeling of pain nor of sadness nor even of meaninglessness. Rather, the real root of suffering is this never-ending and pointless pursuit of ephemeral feelings, which causes us to be in a constant state of tension, restlessness and dissatisfaction. Due to this pursuit, the mind is never satisfied. Even when experiencing pleasure, it is not content, because it fears this feeling might soon disappear, and craves that this feeling should stay and intensify.

People are liberated from suffering not when they experience this or that fleeting pleasure, but rather when they understand the impermanent nature of all their feelings, and stop craving them. This is the aim of Buddhist meditation practices. In meditation, you are supposed to closely observe your mind and body, witness the ceaseless arising and passing of all your feelings, and realise how pointless it is to pursue them. When the pursuit stops, the mind becomes very relaxed, clear and satisfied. All kinds of feelings go on arising and passing – joy, anger, boredom, lust – but once you stop craving particular feelings, you can just accept them for what they are. You live in the present moment instead of fantasising about what might have been.

The resulting serenity is so profound that those who spend their lives in the frenzied pursuit of pleasant feelings can hardly imagine it. It is like a man standing for decades on the seashore, embracing certain ‘good’ waves and trying to prevent them from disintegrating, while simultaneously pushing back ‘bad’ waves to prevent them from getting near him. Day in, day out, the man stands on the beach, driving himself crazy with this fruitless exercise. Eventually, he sits down on the sand and just allows the waves to come and go as they please. How peaceful!

This idea is so alien to modern liberal culture that when Western New Age movements encountered Buddhist insights, they translated them into liberal terms, thereby turning them on their head. New Age cults frequently argue: ‘Happiness does not depend on external conditions. It depends only on what we feel inside. People should stop pursuing external achievements such as wealth and status, and connect instead with their inner feelings.’ Or more succinctly, ‘Happiness Begins Within.’ This is exactly what biologists argue, but more or less the opposite of what Buddha said.

Buddha agreed with modern biology and New Age movements that happiness is independent of external conditions. Yet his more important and far more profound insight was that true happiness is also independent of our inner feelings. Indeed, the more significance we give our feelings, the more we crave them, and the more we suffer. Buddha’s recommendation was to stop not only the pursuit of external achievements, but also the pursuit of inner feelings.

To sum up, subjective well-being questionnaires identify our well-being with our subjective feelings, and identify the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of particular emotional states. In contrast, for many traditional philosophies and religions, such as Buddhism, the key to happiness is to know the truth about yourself – to understand who, or what, you really are. Most people wrongly identify themselves with their feelings, thoughts, likes and dislikes. When they feel anger, they think, ‘I am angry. This is my anger.’ They consequently spend their life avoiding some kinds of feelings and pursuing others. They never realise that they are not their feelings, and that the relentless pursuit of particular feelings just traps them in misery.

If this is so, then our entire understanding of the history of happiness might be misguided. Maybe it isn’t so important whether people’s expectations are fulfilled and whether they enjoy pleasant feelings. The main question is whether people know the truth about themselves. What evidence do we have that people today understand this truth any better than ancient foragers or medieval peasants?

Scholars began to study the history of happiness only a few years ago, and we are still formulating initial hypotheses and searching for appropriate research methods. It’s much too early to adopt rigid conclusions and end a debate that’s hardly yet begun. What is important is to get to know as many different approaches as possible and to ask the right questions.

From Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Categories
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy ACT Anxiety Coping strategies Feel Better Living A Valued Life Meaning Mindfulness Positive Psychology Transcendence Values Worry

Feeling Crap 3: Three Ways out Your Suffering Mind

[Before reading this post, you might like to look at Feeling Crap: A Brief Introduction to Your Suffering Mind, as well as Feeling Crap 2: The Three Layers of Your Suffering Mind.]

HOW DO WE FREE OURSELVES FROM FEELING CRAP?

That’s the million dollar question isn’t it.

The Suffering Mind wants none of this crap, this very human-suffering-crap – for no other creature on this planet suffers in the way that we do. None of them possessing the language with which to suffer: words, concepts, abstract symbols that can make thoughts and feelings and text-messages as mind-breakingly real at times as sticks and stones.

My dog Max experiences the pain of existence in exactly the same way that I do: the pain of physical and emotional injury, the pain of social abandonment and exclusion, of not getting what he wants. Max experiences “reality slaps” like this on a daily, even hourly basis (as do I). But he doesn’t suffer them in the way that you and I do. Not one bit.

Max will never write a blogpost or create a piece of technology called a laptop on which to write it. Nor will he, or any other member of his species invent something like the internet to disseminate these words to other sentient, language-producing creatures.

Us homo sapiens have immeasurably benefitted from language, but consider for a moment the price we’ve had to pay in allowing language to be the primary currency of all our mental processes. Because that’s how, for the most part, we communicate both inside ourselves as well as externally with other human beings. Think of the ways in which language produces joy and pleasure but also immeasurable suffering for each and every one of us on a daily basis, and for our human species as a whole.

ALLEVIATING SUFFERING & ENHANCING WELL-BEING

If everything your language-focused mind has been trying to do so far hasn’t really helped, or helped in only a small way, maybe it’s time to look at some other options?

If you’re frequently locked in the struggle I’ve described above with your pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding, problem-solving mind, maybe you need a more RADICAL solution: one that still uses language (our primary currency, we can’t avoid it), but is also opens us up to other channels of processing?

What we perhaps need is a solution that targets those three crappy layers, but not necessarily in the default Jim’ll Fix It ways of this thinking/languaging lump of human meat we call “the brain”.

If the Blinkered Mind is programmed to say GO AWAY to pain, as well as becoming at times overwhelmingly FUSED with it, then one thing we can maybe start to do is introduce some Receptive Mind strategies into the mix.

In this layer, we might need some DEFUSION processes to help us when we’re “stuck” in a particularly strong reaction (mental or physical) to a painful event.

We might also start practicing MAKING SPACE FOR for difficult thoughts and feelings.

MAKING SPACE FOR practices are an alternative to allowing the mind to do what it does best and by default: pushing painful stuff away, or wrestling interminably with it in the hope that it can be solved like a maths problem. This might help us to free ourselves up to focus on more meaningful actions and activities instead.

Part of this might also involve cultivating the second layer of RADness: Aware Mind.

One aspect of Aware Mind is the development of a more FLEXI-SELF approach to life’s challenges: practising ways of seeing things from different, and hopefully more helpful angles. Also: not getting into arguments or disagreeing with what our minds tell us about the world and ourselves.

To help us do this, we might need to “drop anchor” again and again in order to bring our minds back in MINDFUL CONTACT with what’s actually going on right here and now, as opposed to the what’s happening inside our language-filled heads.

Also, let’s clarify your core values and  begin some devoted, committed action: a few small steps, towards some meaningful goals in your life.

Each of the drawings in this post took me varying amounts of time to create, from a few minutes to a number of hours, and many weeks of writing and fiddling around with words and images to put it all together. The process was at times frustrating and disheartening when things didn’t go according to plan, but in the end I got this crappy little article out of it – a crappy little article which is meaningful to me, and hopefully for you too?

I’ve deliberately used a somewhat “spiritual” word here for the third RAD layer: Devoted Mind. Not because the valued actions need to be religious or spiritual per se.

You can be devoted to your family, or to a creative pursuit, or a football team. I’m devoted to my dog Max, and to my therapy practice, also to learning poems I love, like this one, off by heart (preferably on a walk or a hike). But I don’t have any expectation that you could or should become devoted to dogs or poetry or hiking, unless these are aligned with your core values!

We need to work out what you want to be devoted to, as well as how you’re going to show (through your actions) your devotion. It does seem though that choosing something important in our lives  “to set apart by a vow” (the origins of the word “devoted”) is almost essential when it comes to living life the fullest.

You get to choose however what you want this to be and how you can turn that into something meaningful that you can then dedicate time and energy towards.

So are you ready to take back control of your super-helpful, often over-helpful, problem-solving, pain avoiding (crappy) brain and get back to living your life to the fullest?

If you are, let’s talk some more about this RAD crap and see how I can help you to get a bit closer to some of the peace and contentment you seek, that we all seek, as well as a life that is valued and meaningful to you in the long run.

**

If you’d like to arrange an initial consultation session to talk more about whatever it is you’re struggling with at the moment, we can organise that via email or telephone (07804197605). 

Also please feel free to drop me a line if you have any other questions regarding the therapy I offer. I look forward to hearing from you.

Categories
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy ACT Anxiety Coping strategies Feel Better Living A Valued Life Meaning Mindfulness Positive Psychology Transcendence Values Worry

Feeling Crap 2: The Three Layers of Your Suffering Mind

[Before reading this post, you might like to look at Feeling Crap: A Brief Introduction to Your Suffering Mind ]

DIGGING INTO THE “BAD” CRAP OF SUFFERING

Let’s dig a little bit more deeply into our very human crap.

Might it be fair to say your mind is labelling all of that crap as BAAAAAD crap at the moment? Good, let’s label it as BAD crap, because maybe that’s what it is, even though it’s also our brains and minds doing their brainy/mindy/languagey/labelling stuff (good me/bad me, good Mum/bad Mum, good day/bad day etc.).

It’s not our brain or mind’s fault. They’re designed to do this, remember? Problem-solve as much as possible through evaluation and comparison in a bid to keep us away from anything they perceive as a threat to us? And it’s not our fault for sometimes buying into the very BAD stuff they sometimes or often come up with. A rama lama lama ka dinga da dinga dong!

For the sake of simplicity though, let’s say there might be three layers to our suffering, three layers of BAD crap.

The first I’m going to call BLINKERED MIND.

When pain in any shape or form shows up in our lives, our problem-solving brains become very, very busy and focused on this pain as if the the pain itself were a terrible threat to our continued existence.

In order to work on these problems our brains quite often fuse with the painful thoughts, feelings, urges, or body sensations, to the point where the thing we’re struggling with starts taking over our lives.

It can sometimes feel or look like that moment in any good horror film where some poor soul is being jerked about like a puppet by the demon now controlling its mind and body. We too can also become controlled, smothered, overwhelmed by our own problem-solving, pain-solving minds.

Also, because pain in any shape or form is so uh painful, our suffering Blinkered Minds will often try to avoid this pain in a very intuitive way.

“GO AWAY it says to the painful thought or feeling. Also: “I’m getting away from all of this shit!” Maybe we go away with booze or drugs, ice-cream, TV (or in my case ice-cream and TV), Twitter/WhatsApp/Facebook, or working long hours.

Or maybe we physically try and escape our lives: staying in bed, or going on a holiday, or cutting off communication with someone we’re in conflict with. Again: the natural, default GO AWAY function of our brains and minds can sometimes start to run, and ruin, the whole show!

When our minds go Blinkered they often also go into Autopilot Mode.

Their focus, their “route” you might say is set, or stuck in a particular way of doing things.

Autopilot Mind equally gets stuck in the past or the future. Focusing bitterly, or regretfully, on where our lives are flying to and from.

Also: why this might be happening to us, or why this has always happened to us, returning again and again to a particular set of memories and experiences.

Sometimes our minds do this fruitfully, as when they sit down to write a short story or a memoir, but very often they do this with a great deal of suffering, and almost no benefit for our present lives.

We also often become fixated on what’s ahead: doing so so with anxiety, worry and problem-solving busy-ness.

Autopilot Mind has no time to enjoy the journey of life. Life is never a sunset or a shooting star,  always just another maths problem.

Like we might binge on a Netflix series, Autopilot Mind binges on problem-solving in an attempt to make sense of, or find a solution to our suffering. But because it’s on Autopilot, when it gets to the end of the suffering script or “route”, it just goes back to the beginning and starts all over again.

So we get stuck on certain routes or grooves of the mind, outdated coping strategies that whirr around and around like a broken record.

We can also get stuck in a certain way of being, a certain kind of identity. Why don’t you sit back for a moment and ask the Identity-Setting part of your mind to complete the following sentence stem and see what it comes up with.

[SPOILER ALERT: It’s unlikely to suggest anything especially positive. Minds aren’t designed to do that. Positivity doesn’t keep us safe from perceived threats and harm.)

Whatever “me” our suffering minds are identifying with at this moment…(again, complete the sentence stem below for yourself)…

…this “idea” of ourselves, these words, become like a small, claustrophobic single-seater aircraft which we can’t get out of until it lands.

Here’s another one for you to get your mind to work on.

Last one.

The main problem with this process is that our minds are designed to fly in certain patterns continuously, without ever landing.

Unless we help them to do so.

So that’s the second layer of BAD crap: when our minds, in the process of carrying out their primary tasks (analysing our lives as if they were maths equations) end up flying in quite rigid, inflexible patterns.

It’s often a case of 1+1=2 when dealing with our somewhat inflexible minds.

And 2, more often than not, can sometimes just equal more…pooh. More suffering.

THE FINAL LAYER OF BAD CRAP

Perhaps as a result of the first two layers of crap, but maybe also for other reasons we become DISCONNECTED from all the good stuff in our lives.

In Blinkered and Autopilot Mind we are often out of touch with those things that give our lives meaning, which is to say our core values.

What is it that really drives us? What do we want to actually DO with our one wild and precious life, other than fighting off painful mind-states?

Understandably, when we are disconnected or unclear about this, we can also become disconnected from…LIVING!

Which is to say: we stop doing all the things that are most meaningful to us whilst we fight with our minds. Instead of focusing on valued-living activities, we might also end up doing other stuff: things that we think will “make us happy” or give us some momentary pleasure (tub of Belgian Chocolate Häagen-Dazs and an endless stream of mindless sitcoms for Steve, please!), rather than feeding our souls.

Or maybe we end up doing what other people, or even the marketing forces of our culture tell us will make us happy, but often fail to do so.

So what to do about all of this BAD crap?!

Good question. You can find some answers to that in my final post on The Suffering Mind: Three Ways out of The Suffering Mind.

**

Otherwise if you’d like to arrange an initial consultation session to talk more about whatever it is you’re struggling with at the moment, we can organise that via email or telephone (07804197605). 

Also please feel free to drop me a line if you have any other questions regarding the therapy I offer. I look forward to hearing from you.

Categories
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy ACT Anxiety Coping strategies Feel Better Living A Valued Life Meaning Mindfulness Positive Psychology Transcendence Values Worry

Feeling Crap? A Brief Introduction to Your Suffering Mind

Hello, are you feeling a bit crap?

If you are, welcome, you’re in good company.

You might not feel like you’re in good company. In fact, you might feel quite alone at the moment: at odds, and kind of stranded with your suffering mind.

When we’re feeling crap, it’s very normal for our suffering, problem-solving minds to react to those crappy feelings with a lot of self-doubt and worry.

This is the kind of thing my suffering mind starts saying. How about yours?

Our suffering minds will usually start responding to the problem-solving questions they pose to themselves, giving us lots and lots of feedback.

Imagine the above “feedback” delivered in the sneery, sermonising tones of your least favourite person. I call this part of my suffering mind “Dave” after someone I went to University with. Dave really thought he was my friend but he was actually a bit of a know-it-all bully. Do you have your own Dave, or Mildred who’s absolutely certain of what you’re doing wrong with your life?

Here’s another question the suffering mind poses to itself and attempts to answer.

Let’s watch Dave answering the must-be-something-wrong-with-me question (for me). You might like to tune into your own suffering mind at this point and let your own Dave or Mildred supply you with a wrong-with-you list for yourself.

And it probably won’t stop there.

When our suffering minds get stuck into us, what they “say” can feel very real and pertinent.

Our response is often just to suck it all up: “Yes Dave, you’re right! I am all of those shitty, unlovable qualities! And look at my massive, Dumbo-sized ears!!!”

This is because, when our minds start to suffer, we become fused with their words to the point where they can start to feel really overwhelming! A bit like this.

We lose sight of the fact that these are just words being churned up by our own minds in an attempt to “helpfully” explain the reasons for why we might be feeling so crap.

Our suffering minds forget that they’re just a blank page onto which anything (any thought, feeling, sensation, urge) can be “written” no matter how hurtful or ludicrous. Instead we all too easily buy into and sort of become those words floating around in our minds. When that happens, I would call my experience a “suffering” one. How about you?

When we are suffering, not only do we blame ourselves for being human, but also others. We might even start blaming Dave, our very own minds and brains, labelling and sometimes shaming them with analysis, diagnoses and put-downs.

We can also become very frustrated with ourselves for not-feeling-OK.

He’s right though.

A healthy human brain like Dave is perfectly compatible with a suffering mind. In fact the two might go together like [cue this song from Grease!]: a rama lama lama ka dinga da dinga dong?

Maybe this is because Dave was not –sorry Dave- designed by Apple (or Samsung).

Three hundred years of evolutionary science and a 100 years of neuroscience have pretty much confirmed that our healthy, but oftentimes suffering human brains are “designed” with 3 primary tasks.

Can you guess what those are?

Go on! Before scrolling down, guess the job description for that three pound blob of fat, and blood and white-grey matter, that sits perched on the top of your spinal cord, which we all proudly call THE HUMAN BRAIN!

You can perhaps start to see how these primary tasks carried out 24/7, automatically, in no consultation with our minds, might lead to good feelings at times, but also lots and lots of suffering. Almost as a by-product.

Say I’m at my local Morrisons, happily filling my supermarket trolly with ice-cream, and wine, and cheese, and crackers, and chocolate, and maybe some salad too. I’m looking forward to all that yummy stuff, and feeling pretty good at this pleasure seeking moment (dopamine!).

I’m also relieved to have seen and avoided my neighbour – the one I had an argument with with last week who I spotted walking down another aisle. Whew, and another dopamine hit of pleasure!

But maybe that evening I eat the whole tub of Hagen Daz as I am wont to do and drink most of the wine and feel sick and full of self-loathing.

And maybe if I hadn’t avoided that uncomfortable meeting with my neighbour in the supermarket we might have been able to get back on an even keel?

If you’d like to dig a little bit deeper into this, please take a look at my second post, Feeling Crap 2: The Three Layers of Your Suffering Mind.

Or otherwise, if you’d like to arrange an initial consultation session to talk more about whatever it is you’re struggling with at the moment, we can organise that via email or telephone (07804197605).

Also please feel free to drop me a line if you have any other questions regarding the therapy I offer. I look forward to hearing from you.

Categories
100 Acceptance and Commitment Therapy ACT Defusion Feel Better Pain Suffering worry

PAUSING FOR PAIN (BUT NOT FOR SUFFERING)

When were feeling bad and wanting to feel better, perhaps the most important distinction we can make for ourselves is in keeping clear the difference between pain and suffering. The difference can be summarised in the following adage which you may have come across at some point:

“Pain is inevitable and unavoidable, but suffering is optional.”

A quick click around the internet tells me that this idea lies at the heart of 12-step work, is quasi-attributable to the Buddha, and even comes up for how the author Haruki Murakami deals with physical pain when he’s running marathons. But what does it really mean? And how can this distinction help us deal with (unavoidable, inevitable) pain better, whilst suffering less?

HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT NEEDLES?

Maybe an example will help. I hate needles. I’m probably not alone in this, but at times this aversion has verged on a kind of phobia. And like any phobia, it has often got in the way of me doing the things I need to do to take care of myself. Like going to the dentist for regular check-ups. In fact, I didn’t go to the dentist from 2010-2017, because…I hate needles! Following on from that rule I’ve set for myself (Thou shall hate needles!) I didn’t go to the dentist until the pain of toothache overcame my unwillingness to tolerate the pain of a needle being pushed into my gums.

Why am I so phobic to needles? As far as I can tell, there are two reasons for this: biological and historical. Another way at looking at this is NATURE (biology) and NURTURE (life experiences, especially at an impressionable age):

  1. BIOLOGICAL REASONS:  I am a Highly Sensitive Person (if you’re reading this, you probably are too!), which means I feel stuff really intensely. Physical stuff, emotional stuff, it really doesn’t matter. When I am in the dentist chair, I often have to tell them to double up on the Lidocaine because a normal dose of the local anesthetic often doesn’t numb my highly reactive nervous system enough and I’m left wincing not only when the drug is injected, but during the drilling and scraping thereafter. 
  2. PERSONAL/HISTORICAL REASONS: When I was about 8 years old, I had a rampant outbreak of warts on my legs. My mother took me to the doctor who proceeded to inject and burn off some of the bigger warts in that unfussy, sorry-mate-just-doing-my-job way that medical professionals get on with things. And it hurt! But more than just hurting, the shock of pain, and the shock of not being given enough time before, or after, or during the intervention to process what was going on, or prepare for it seemed to really affect me. This combined with the insouciant attitude of the doctor, gave my brain a strong negative rule to follow when it came to needles (Steve Hates Needles). This is called classical conditioning: where our brains make the link between one thing (needles) and another thing (feeling overwhelmed, and scared) and forms a Life Rule for us to follow: “Never ever, ever, ever let anyone poke you in the arm, leg, or any part of your body with a needle. Ever. Again.” Often these rules are unconscious (“Needles are EVIL!”), we don’t even know we’re following them, but we are. Some of our Life Rules work really well (“Saying please and thank you and being kind is NOBLE!”). But often, even good rules can cause unnecessary problems for us. Having the rule or belief that Needles are Evil isn’t going to serve me that well because needles, as with other instances of pain (emotional and physical), are inevitable and unavoidable. Unless you’re Superman.

So I know why I’m phobic (nature + nurture), and I also know that my phobic, rule-making brain was given an extra boost in 2009 when I had some root canal treatment which wasn’t much fun, and probably just reinforced the Dentists/Needles are Evil story in my head. Knowing where my stories come from though doesn’t especially help me, although it does give me interesting things to think about. And the same goes for other pain too, including emotional pain. Which is why explanations for our pain are useful and interesting, and have their place in the process of reducing suffering, but they often don’t help that much with the job of limiting the amount of suffering we experience. In fact we might even make matters worse for ourselves by creating a kind of “story” around needles, or someone’s text, or why we didn’t get that last job we interviewed for, and that story can send us into a suffering tailspin.

But hang on, didn’t me and Haruki Murakami say that Suffering, unlike Pain, can be reduced, limited, or even dissolved? How?

MORE (PAINFUL) NEEDLES, AND SOME SUFFERING

Let’s look at how suffering works. My problem with needles is, if I really think carefully about it, a Suffering Problem, rather than a pain one.

Let me explain. If I were to dig the fingernail of my right index finger into the back of my left hand, or the crook of my arm, and really push it into the skin, I would feel the kind of pain a needle might deliver to my nervous system. And if I push harder, I might feel even more pain than a needle could ever do to me. And guess what (try it for yourself if you don’t believe me): this is all perfectly fine and dandy, not really a problem at all. Of course it doesn’t feel great. It’s uncomfortable, it’s painful, but it’s just that: pain. So maybe it’s not Pain that’s stopping me from going to the dentist or getting my bloods taken, maybe it’s more an issue of SUFFERING.

What’s the difference? Pain as I’ve shown above is all about…pain. Physical pain in all its manifestations, as well psychological pain, the emotional pain of not getting our needs met from other people, or the world in some shape or form. That’s Painful too. If you turn to me after I’ve just told you something about myself that concerns me (e.g. “I’m really scared of needles”) and you say “Come on, Steve, don’t be such a snowflake”, then I’ll probably experience a good dose of psychological pain. Your reply would be painful for me because we all have core needs such as the need for love, care, and understanding. If you’ve responded to something I’ve said in a way that seems dismissive then I’m probably going to feel a good amount of pain. But no suffering. Not yet. Although it won’t take long. A couple of nanoseconds usually.

Here’s how I suffer, and perhaps this is how you suffer too. I take the pain of your dismissal, the pain of you not being sensitive to my anxiety, of not validating me and my issues with needles, and I add stuff to that. The stuff I add (often unconsciously) is Suffering. 

Non-suffering pain might look like this: “Ouch! So my worry is not something you can relate to, or perhaps show empathy towards. And that’s painful because my need for understanding and validation is not being met. So: ouuuuuch!”

This is pain, but still no suffering. Just me feeling and acknowledging how painful your comments are to me. But of course our brains are not designed to just experience pain. My brain (your brain also?) will also probably jump into an angry, hurt monologue about your dismissive comment. My defensive (me trying to defend myself because I am in such pain) outburst might sound a bit like this:

 “Well fuck you too and the horse you rode in on! Excuse me for burdening you with my anxiety! Some kind of friend/partner/therapist/parent you are! Doesn’t this prove what I’ve always thought: that it’s fine for you to get upset about stuff and for me to be there for you, but when the tables are turned you’re not able to give me an ounce of basic understanding and compassion.”

Or some version of the above. Maybe a bit less fraught and dramatic. And maybe a great deal more fraught and dramatic if my experience of Suffering has taught me anything.

This is suffering. Suffering is ANYTHING painful our storytelling brains/minds do in response to a painful trigger. Recognising this, we might also wish to forgive our brains/mind for doing this whole suffering routine. We can’t help it! Our brains/minds really thinks that having this reaction, filling our heads and hearts with all these suffering thoughts, rants, images, memories, and retributive urges, is actually going to help us process our pain. What usually happens though is that it only doubles, triples, quadruples the pain we already have. Suffering is the addition of extra (optional) pain to ourselves when we are already in (unavoidable, inevitable) pain. Now, not only am I in pain because my need for understanding, and validation hasn’t been met by you. Now I’m in pain because my brain has spun a very convincing story about how little you care for me. The pain of the Unmet Need, which is painful enough, has become Operatic in its scope for suffering. And suffer I/we do.

SUFFERING IS LANGUAGE/LANGUAGE IS SUFFERING

I suffer because my mind/brain is “designed”  to try and solve internal problems the way it solves external ones. If your front door is jamming, you look at the problem, diagnose why the door is jamming, and then come up with a solution to fix it. The only problem is that internal, existential, emotional issues, don’t respond to our brains Jim-Will-Fix- It strategies in the same way. This is because the most sophisticated technology we have for “fixing” our internal problems or pain is with something called language! All those thoughts, beliefs, internal conversations and monologues, memories, beating ourselves up, threatening to beat others up, could not occur without language. We’re very particular in this way.

Which is why we are the only animals to suffer, but not the only animals to feel pain. When my dog Max is sick because he ate some human turd in the park (true story!), he feels pain. This is the same pain I would feel if I were to eat human turd in the park and be sick afterwards. But there is no suffering accompanying his retching and puking and shitting blood. He doesn’t beat himself up for having eaten the human turd. He doesn’t go into a twisted, blaming rant about the person who decided to defecate in the park rather than walk 500 metres to a toilets at Morrisons Supermarket. He doesn’t get angry at me for not watching him carefully enough, or at the person who relieved themselves under a tree. He feels pain, but there is absolutely no suffering. And when the pain of his mistake has passed, he is as happy as Larry. Bless him.

We however. are completely different animals. We feel the pain of the needle, the pain of someone not responding to a text message in the way we would have liked, the pain of not getting the job we wanted, the pain of having the job we have (if we’re unhappy at work), the pain of getting a low mark on an essay, the pain of seeing the people we want to go out with us swiping left, as well as the thousands of other painful situations, both large and small that fill our lives. And then, on top of that, our story-telling brains ladle a massive helping of Suffering just to make things feel proper awful. Even to the point where the original pain itself is miniscule compared to the ratio of suffering we’re experiencing after the fact.

Pain is crappy, but suffering can feel intolerable. I didn’t go to the dentist for seven years because whenever I thought of the pain of that little needle, I added a big dose of suffering-inducing, language-constructed mental activity, far far worse than the two second pain created by a Lidocaine jab. Instead, my brain fed me over those seven years hundreds if not thousands of excruciatingly painful thoughts, images, memories. All created with language. Here’s just a sample:

I hate needles. I can’t deal with needles. I hate them, and I can’t deal with them.

I can’t face going to the dentist.

Why was Dr Levin so insensitive to my needs when I was 8 years old!?!

Look at the trauma he has left me with! He has incapacitated me in this regard.

Doctors are so insensitive and uncaring. Dentists too. Fuckers.

I blame my mother for not recognising how traumatised I was by the experience.

Why can’t I just get on with it and be less sensitive, like Dad?

I’m such a fucking wuss. I should just man up.

I can’t believe I still haven’t gone to the dentist for a check-up. I’m useless at this stuff.

And here is a sample of the Suffering Images that played for seven years on my Internal YouTube Channel:

Gigantic syringes, gigantic needles, gigantic needles entering my sensitive wee gums, dentist not stopping when I yelp in pain, me yelping in pain, me embarrassing myself by yelping in pain, dentist thinking I’m a wuss for yelping in pain etc.

And that’s just a small sample of my suffering loop. Times that by 1000 and you’re just about getting close to the Hell Realm of me not going to the dentist for seven years. And that’s just the suffering I’m willing to share on a public website to prove my point. That’s just the tip of my iceberg needle. Because pain isn’t the problem. I’ve already proved to myself that I can tolerate a modicum of pain by digging my fingernail into the back of my hand, or the crook of arm. It’s suffering that’s driving me/you/anyone crazy!

Which means that if only we can, when in pain, separate out the pain from the suffering, we might be better placed to experience the unavoidable, inevitable pain of being alive, but without the extra lashings of suffering. That’s the best I think we can aim for: experiencing Pain as cleanly and uncomplicatedly as we can, but dialing back on Suffering! Especially as that’s the only dial we have access to.

Remember: Pain is unavoidable, inevitable (no dial for us to twiddle). Suffering: also somewhat inevitable because of our weird story-telling brains, but much more avoidable and diminishable.

Let’s now look at how to reduce psychological and physical suffering.

 

REDUCING YOUR SUFFERING: THE P.A.U.S.E.

So how do we experience as “cleanly” as possible whatever dose of psychological or physical pain that is next coming our way without getting trapped into having a double dose of suffering alongside it? Here’s a five step process which is easy to do and remember. But it does require practice, until it becomes second nature. Which is where the acronym helps. P.A.U.S.E! P.A.U.S.E. stands for

PAIN

ACKNOWLEDGING & ALLOWING FOR PAIN

UNDERSTANDING/UNMET NEEDS

SUFFERING

ENGAGING WITH OUR PAIN

 

P.A.U.S.E. STEP ONE: P stands for PAIN!

Think of something a situation or a conversation you had with someone, or just something ongoing in your life that is causing you pain. Make a note of your pain on a piece of paper or on your phone.

Here are some examples:

PAIN: Gavin said in a text message that he doesn’t want to see me at the moment.

PAIN: My back’s really hurting at the moment.

PAIN: I haven’t done any work today, just faffed around.

PAIN: I feel like my life isn’t going anywhere.

PAIN: Yesterday I ate too many carbs and sugary things and today I’m feeling like a beached whale.

P.A.U.S.E. STEP TWO: A stands for ACKNOWLEDGING & ALLOWING!

In this step, you set the intention to allow yourself to feel some of this pain without reaching for the jar of suffering to start slathering all extra pain on top. Think for a moment how willing are you right now (out of 10) to just experience the pain as it is, without any additional thoughts, analysis, or “stories” about the pain?

Don’t feel bad if you  discover that your willingness is only about 1/10, as this will also give you an indicator of how strong the pain is, as well as how tenacious our story-telling brains are when it comes to adding lots of thoughts, images, and explanations about our pain. 

We also need to consider that when we are in a lot of pain, and especially if we are very sensitive, our default FIGHT-FLIGHT-FREEZE stress response kicks almost instantaneously, and so we might find ourselves invariably fighting the pain with lots of extra thoughts, internal monologues/rants (FIGHT-STUFF), or just trying to get away from the pain by either numbing or distracting ourselves, or telling ourselves even more stories about the individuals or world that has triggered this pain in us (FLIGHT-STUFF). Sometimes we also freeze up entirely, unable to think or do anything, caught in the pain like a rabbit in the headlamps (FREEZE-STUFF).

So let’s try and not do that, just for a few minutes.

See if you can turn up the dial on your willingness to experience the pain, even just for the five minutes it takes you to do this exercise. Being willing to experience pain without moving into lots of thoughts, analysis, or story about the pain is an incredibly hard thing to do because our brains are designed to respond to pain in the way that brains always respond (via language), but it is also a courageous and wise thing to do as it gives us a chance, even if just for a minute or two, to just take in and process our pain. Before our brains turn it into a Suffering Extravaganza.

So maybe at this point, give yourself a little pat on the back for gently taking offline (to some extent) your highly resistant, won’t shut-up-about-it, default fight-flight-freeze nervous system and storytelling brain, so that you can give all of of your compassionate and available attention to this horrible pain. This is the first step to becoming your own therapist who is there to help you process painful events in your life 24/7. It may take a couple of years of practice, but this is where it all starts.

P.A.U.S.E. STEP THREE: U stands for UNDERSTANDING/UNMET NEEDS

In step three, you offer understanding and compassion to yourself for why you are feeling this way. It’s a tricky step, because often the “why” can take our brains into a place where either we blame others or ourselves. This is why we focus on Unmet Needs in this step (another “U”), because 99.99% of the time, these unmet needs lie at the core of our pain. In fact, I’m so confident of the fact that ALL our psychological and physical pain stems from Unmet Needs that if you can find a painful event in your consciousness that isn’t connected to an Unmet Need, I’ll give you £100.

So come back to the sentence you wrote, and see if you can find the unmet need from this list of core needs:

  1. The need for CERTAINTY and COMFORT: our need to feel in control and to know what’s coming next so we can feel secure. This is also the need for basic comfort, the need to avoid pain and stress, and also to create pleasure and stimulation (physical, mental) for ourselves.
  2. The need for UNCERTAINTY and VARIETY: paradoxically we also need things to be different at times, for there to be surprises in our life (but maybe not too many, and not painful ones, even if unavoidable!)
  3. The need for SIGNIFICANCE: is my life meaningful to me, and am I meaningful to other people?
  4. The need for LOVE and CONNECTION: am I being appreciated, acknowledged, understood, valued by those people I care about. Am I being heard? Are people making space for my self-expression, hearing me out in a way that feels supportive and kind?
  5. The need for GROWTH and CONTRIBUTION: am I growing, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually? Am I able in some way to contribute to other people’s growth and well-being, or to the world in what I say or do?

Invariably your pain will be connected to an Unmet Need, and you can make a note of that underneath your pain.

PAIN: Gavin said in a text message that doesn’t want to see me at the moment.
UNMET NEED: need to be appreciated, accepted understood by others (LOVE and CONNECTION)

PAIN: My back’s really hurting at the moment
UNMET NEED: the need for certainty and physical comfort

PAIN: I haven’t done any work today, just faffed around
UNMET NEED: the need for SIGNIFICANCE and meaning, also GROWTH and CONTRIBUTION

PAIN: I feel like my life isn’t going anywhere
UNMET NEED: The need for SIGNIFICANCE, GROWTH and CONTRIBUTION

PAIN: Yesterday I ate too many carbs and sugary things and today I’m feeling like a beached whale
UNMET NEED: the need for certainty and physical comfort

If you can’t find the unmet need that is foundational to your pain, ask yourself this question: “What do I need at the moment? What would make me feel better? That is often a way of discovering your Unmet Need.”

When you have found the Unmet Need that is shining a particularly glaring spotlight on your pain, this is also a good time to see if you can find a little self-compassion for your pain-afflicted self. Maybe just calling to mind the notion that because these needs are universal (we all have them), the fact that you are in pain at the moment is invariably because this need is not being met. And that is COMPLETELY understandable and OK. IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT (no matter what your Inner Critic tells you). You might even want to say that to yourself a couple of times: “It’s not my fault for feeling this pain. It’s really not my fault.” I would also be in pain if that need was not being met for me, and so would that person who perhaps triggered your pain, if the pain stems from a relational issue, as many of our painful moments do.

Often when we are in pain, the pain can be accompanied by a strong Inner Critic who tells us that we shouldn’t be feeling this way, that it is our fault, or that there’s something wrong with us for being so uptight about whatever we’re struggling with. Pausing to focus on Unmet Needs can help us to see that our pain is not only natural and normal, but that it is wholly unavoidable and inevitable. If a need is not met, there will invariably be pain of some sort. And if you are a sensitive person, there will probably be EVEN MORE PAIN. This is just a law of our (human) universe rather than some deficiency in you, or some blameworthy lack in the person or thing that triggered your pain. IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT. Really. It isn’t. 

P.A.U.S.E. STEP FOUR: S stands for SUFFERING!

Now here’s the fun part. Ish.

Sit back and watch (mindfully, jotting down on the same piece of paper) the ways in which your Storytelling Brain begins to fill your head and heart with Suffering Thoughts, Suffering Internal Monologues and Conversations; Suffering Images, Suffering Memories, even Suffering Intentions (which is to say: intentions to do something that will probably just cause us more suffering).

PAIN: Gavin said in a text message that doesn’t want to see me at the moment.
UNMET NEED: need to be appreciated, accepted understood by others (LOVE and CONNECTION)
SUFFERING: How could he be so cruel? Doesn’t he realise what this is going to do to me? (SUFFERING THOUGHT); “I can’t believe you’re doing this! After all the times I’ve been there for you! After all the kindness and care, and consideration I’ve shown towards you and your struggles, and you shut down like this when I’m now struggling (SUFFERING INTERNAL MONOLOGUE/CONVO); Him Just Getting On With His Day, Laughing, Having Fun, Not Even Sparing Me A Single Thought (SUFFERING IMAGE); the two of us connecting and getting on (SUFFERING MEMORY); “Well fuck him, I’m going email him and tell him what I think about him. Or maybe I’ll just let him stew – don’t respond, stop engaging with him” (SUFFERING INTENTION).

Here’s another one:

PAIN: My back’s really hurting at the moment
UNMET NEED: the need for CERTAINTY and COMFORT
SUFFERING: Why me? What have I done to deserve this? There are people in their eighties who are relatively free from pain – it’s so unfair (SUFFERING THOUGHT); “You want me to sit with this?!? You want me to sit like a little Buddha and just focus on the sensations in my body?!? YOU SIT WITH IT!” (SUFFERING INTERNAL MONOLOGUE/CONVO WITH THERAPIST/FRIEND/MEDITATION TEACHER); Pain Driving Me To The Point Where I Just Go Crazy and Throw Myself Off Hornsey Lane Bridge (SUFFERING IMAGE); remembering myself pain-free, without a care in the world (SUFFERING MEMORY); If I don’t have some let up from this constant pain, I’m going to throw myself off Hornsey Lane Bridge! (SUFFERING INTENTION).

Once you’ve done this for a while with a particular painful event you will notice that your suffering thoughts, images, internal conversations, and intentions have a somewhat limited repertoire. This is because the intrinsic plots of our storytelling brain are really just a series of variations on a theme. What is important in this step of the P.A.U.S.E. is to intervene in some way with the the Suffering Thought, Internal Conversation, Image, Memory, or Intention, and not just let it continue to loop itself over and over again, going deeper and deeper into the Suffering Story until you are well and truly suffering. Instead: make a simple note of what your brain is doing (“Ah, Suffering Thought…Ah, Suffering Internal Conversation…Ah Suffering Image…Ah, Suffering Memory…Ah, Suffering Intention – thank you brain.”)

And then. Stop.

Of course your brain will probably ignore you and keep on spinning its stories. So you then make another gentle note of how the invitation to suffer is being delivered in the shape of a THOUGHT, an IMAGE/VIDEO, an INTERNAL CONVERSATION or MONOLOGUE, a MEMORY, or INTENTION, and then once again, you say: ENOUGH! STOP!

You don’t need to be harsh or hard on yourself, but just willing to interrupt yourself (your brain) in the way that you are able to interrupt (if you choose) someone who is relentlessly bombarding you with THOUGHTS or IMAGES or INTERNAL CONVERSATIONS, or MEMORIES, or INTENTIONS that are making you suffer. If all of that stuff was being pumped out of your television set and you were getting no joy or pleasure from it, you would switch it off. We can’t switch off our brains, but we can interrupt whatever is being broadcast to us.

You can devise your own way of doing this, or we can talk more about it together. I quite like to use the word “stop” or “enough”. So if you were a fly on the wall, you would hear me talking to my brain like this:

“Ah, suffering Thought! Stop!…………Ah, that’s now a suffering image, enough! …….. Suffering Monologue, stop! Focus on the pain. What’s the Unmet Need? Feel that pain, just that. ………Suffering Monologue. Enough! Ah, now a Memory. Suffering. Enough.”

Sometimes, when my brain is really set on suffering, and I’m doing something which doesn’t require my full attention, so that my brain can focus entirely on the suffering story, I might need to note and say stop/enough again and again and again. The STOP is especially important when our Suffering Minds are trying to get us to carry out some Actions (revenge, rebuttal, rehash). A Suffering Mind is so skilled at finding ways to convince us that writing an angry email or text will really help us to suffer less, that often, before we know it, we end up doing the very thing that will only make us suffer more. In my experience, lashing out and blaming another human being for the ways they have triggered in me pain, only makes me suffer more. Because then I have to deal with either the anxiety of how they will respond, or the unpleasantness of their defensive words, or whatever their Suffering Brain spins the story to try and make it better for themselves.  

Of course your brain might obstinately refuse to stop suffering. And that’s fine too. Because as long as you are aware that you are having a Suffering Thought, a Suffering Image, a Suffering Internal Conversation/Monologue, Memory, or Intention, you are winning. Because you are at that moment making a distinction between Pain which is inevitable/unavoidable, and Suffering which is not. At the moment in which you ask or demand of your brain to stop making you suffer, you are shifting into a place where you are once again in control of your brain, rather than the other way around, even if it continues to pump out Suffering Thoughts, Images, Internal Conversations, Memories and Intentions. Simply doing the P.A.U.S.E again and again and again,  will eventually reduce suffering. I promise.

But you’ll also need to give some time to the final step, which is:

P.A.U.S.E. STEP FIVE: E is for ENGAGING WITH LIFE

Once we have made space for inevitable/unavoidable Pain, but also respectfully told the Suffering Word Machines that we call “our brains/minds” to stop overloading us in a mistaken belief that it can “fix” our pain, it’s time to engage with something out there in the real world that feels meaningful to us. This also sends an important message to our Suffering Minds that there is life beyond Suffering in some shape or form, nudging it to note the tangible differences between outer experience (life) and our inner-world of images, memories, thoughts, beliefs (i.e. LANGUAGE).

What might this engagement with life look like?

1) Getting On With Value-Driven Activities

All this involves is doing something that is meaningful and has value to you, whilst at the same time being willing to have your Brain/Mind playing the Suffering Channel in the background. So for example, you might go for a walk with our Suffering Mind, or write an article for our website with your Suffering Mind droning on in the background, or do some Yoga with Adriene with your Suffering Minds occasionally interrupting Adriene’s instructions for Side-Reclining Leg Lift with suffering thoughts, images, and internal monologues.

2) Getting On With Healthy(ish) Distractions

Similar to the above but perhaps involving more Netflix binges, Amazon Wish-List making, and tidying or cleaning. Loads more examples here: https://wiredforhappy.com/100-smart-ways-to-calm-your-anxious-mind/

3) Go Back, with Open Arms, To Your Pain:

Perhaps you’ve done all of these things, and still the pain of your Unmet Need is hurting you a great deal. Returning to that hurt, with self-validation and understanding (“Anyone would be feeling this pain if the core need for X wasn’t met! It’s not my fault!”) and going right back to the P of the P.A.U.S.E is a great, and sometimes necessary thing to do.

Maybe you haven’t given your heart and your head enough time to fully take in just how painful this upset is. So don’t see it as a failure if you maybe need to do the whole P.A.U.S.E. process a number of times, perhaps even with the same material. Eventually, the pain will become more manageable, and the suffering will reduce. I promise this will happen. But it does require consistency and working that P.A.U.S.E.

Looking forward to hearing how you get on with it.

Categories
Acceptance Acceptance and Commitment Therapy ACT Core Needs Feel Better Guided Practice

The serenity to accept? The serenity?!?

Tiger StrawberryI have for many years been haunted by a Zen parable about a man being chased by a tiger. Here it is in full:

There was a man walking across an open field, when suddenly a tiger appeared and began to give chase. The man began to run, but the tiger was closing in. As he approached a cliff at the edge of the field, the man grabbed a vine and jumped over the cliff. Holding on as tight as he could, he looked up and saw the angry tiger prowling out of range ten feet above him. He looked down. In the gully below, there were two tigers also angry and prowling. He had to wait it out. He looked up again and saw that two mice, one white, the other black, had come out of the bushes and had begun gnawing on the vine, his lifeline. As they chewed the vine thinner and thinner, he knew that he could break at any time. Then, he saw a single wild strawberry growing just an arms length away. Holding the vine with one hand, he reached out, picked the strawberry, and put it in his mouth. It was delicious.

There are many lessons to be drawn from this parable, but the one I’d like to focus on here is that of acceptance.

ACCEPT (v) late 14c., “to take what is offered; admit and agree to (a proposal, etc.),” from Old French accepter (14c.) or directly from Latin acceptare “take or receive willingly,” frequentative of accipere “receive, get without effort,” from ad “to” (see ad-) + capere “to take,” from PIE root *kap- “to grasp.”

The challenge of acceptance, which is already implicit in the etymology of the word is not only to sanction, tolerate, accede to something we’d rather not have to take or put up with, but at the same time to “take or receive willingly”. As an act of choosing, of volition (from the Old English willan, wyllan “to wish, desire; be willing; be used to; be about to”).

26208860994_f2047036a9_kThe character in this Zen fable models different forms of acceptance. There is the choiceless acceptance of running away from a genuine danger (not to be confused with running from imaginary tigers, which is more often what we do); the choiceless choice of taking a risk, a metaphorical leap into the dark in order to reach a safer place, or hanging tenuously onto a lifeline. But then there is also the kind of choice at the end of the story which feels very ACT-like: focusing, even in the midst of stress, and strain, and genuine anxiety or terror, on a valued action. Depression and anxiety tells us that in the midst of our struggles we must either give up (freeze), or escape in some way (fight, flight). And sometimes these are helpful responses. But often we cannot make significant changes to our lives or ourselves swiftly enough to rid ourselves of all the tigers (real, or imaginary) out there. What we can do, however, is focus moment-by-moment on self-care, on pleasure, as well as those things that are meaningful to us. The strawberry represents both of these I believe.

46418566802_55ecc2d4bc_kRecently I’ve been thinking about the word “grant” in the Serenity Prayer. “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” There is in that word the recognition that a certain level of patience with ourselves is required to reach this state of allowing, assent, surrender. Or that maybe it is not fully in our control to accept. We pray, we plead, we recognise how much we cling to having things (people, the world, ourselves) how we would like them as opposed to how they frustratingly present themselves to us, and see the pain that clinging generates. And then we wait for our bodies, as much as our minds to let go. Which more often than not, they don’t, do they?

It sounds so easy when presented in poetry or in a self-help book. Like Mary Oliver does here in her poem “In Blackwater Woods”:

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.

I sometimes ask someone who is struggling with acceptance and letting something go (and we’re all struggling with this in one form or another) to do some sentence stems with “God grant me the serenity to accept…”, focusing on all those things we’d like to accept, to “let go of” in a fluid, Mary Oliverish way, and yet our fingers continue to tightly gripping, gripping, tightly gripping.

This recent piece of writing from Gail* expresses this so well.

God, Grant Me The Serenity

To accept that my attractive (married) Romanian neighbour with the hooked nose and brown eyes that turns me fiercely on will never be mine. To accept that my plantar (right foot), anterior tibialis (left foot) and ankle bone (left) don’t always play ball like they used to. To accept that 99% of the men I have access to on Bumble, Hinge, OKCupid, Badoo, and Tinder bore the pants off me. To accept that the one man I dated for a while this year who didn’t bore me, doesn’t want to be in a relationship with me; to accept that I maybe bore him, or am too needy for him, or something.  To accept that it gets dark every afternoon at 4pm, and this will continue in earnest until Friday, the 21st of December, shortest day of the year. To accept that my notion of a romantic partner, a soulmate, a friend&lover needs to be downscaled in terms of what others are willing to offer me, at least initially. To accept that I am of value to others as a kind friend/hand-holder/carer rather than as a maker of things. To accept that I am addicted to [redacted] and can’t imagine my life without it. To accept that the planet is being destroyed by our greed and selfishness, but I don’t want to give up on my greed and selfishness. To accept that I struggle with acceptance.

Resistance and clinging are not a problem per se. “The whole notion of resistance,” writes Adam Phillips, “implies that there could be acceptance.”

But how to get to that place of acceptance without waiting for God, or some Higher Power to magically “grant” it to us on a whim?

14629078269_4c3a631513_kWhat Gail is struggling to accept, and she is not alone in this, is desire and longing: for a partner, for more light in a day, for consumer goods that don’t come with an environmental price tag. “From the urgent way lovers want each other to the seeker’s search for truth, all moving is from the mover,” writes Rumi. “Every pull draws us to the ocean.” And what does the ocean desire, other than to be, and to be fully itself, expressive of itself, inhabiting the space it needs to inhabit? This is a primal desire, and one which moves everything in existence, including us. The same universal force of attraction that gathers atoms into molecules and holds solar systems spinning in galaxies also joins sperm with eggs and makes us swipe left and right on each other on our dating apps.

While often uncomfortable, desire is not bad—it is natural. The pull of desire is part of our survival equipment. It keeps us eating, having sex, going to work, doing what we do to thrive. Desire also motivates us to read books, listen to talks and explore spiritual practices that help us realize and inhabit loving awareness. The same life energy that leads to suffering also provides the fuel for insight and interest. Desire becomes a problem only when it takes over our sense of who we are.

As human beings our desire for happiness focuses on fulfilling our needs. According to psychologist Abraham Maslow, our needs range in a hierarchy from basic biological drives to spiritual yearnings. We need security, food and sex; emotional recognition and bonding; mental engagement and creative activity; communion and self-realization. Meeting these needs of body, mind and spirit gives us satisfaction and pleasure; denying them leaves us feeling deprived, frustrated and incomplete. We seek out experiences that enable us to survive, thrive and be fulfilled.

If our desires are simple and can be temporarily satisfied, our way of responding is straightforward. When thirsty, we drink. When tired, we sleep. When lonely, we talk to a friend. Yet, as we know, it’s rarely this uncomplicated. Most of the time our wanting is not so easily satisfied. Often our desires fixate on soothing, once and for all, our anxieties. We strive to tie up all the loose ends and to avoid making mistakes, even though we know both are impossible.

15739663939_ceeb05590c_kThe Latin root of the word desire, “desidus,” means “away from a star.” One way to interpret this is that stars are the energetic source of all life and an expression of pure awareness. This aliveness and wakefulness is what we long for most deeply—we long to belong to our star, to realize our own true nature. Yet because our desires habitually narrow and fixate on what by nature passes away, we feel “away from our star,” away from the life, awareness and love that is the essence of who we are. Feeling apart from the source of our being, we identify ourselves with our wants and with the ways that we try to satisfy them.

Often our desiring selves are also our most shameful selves. For this is often the cloying, under-the-radar of consciousness feeling, when our basic needs to be loved and understood are frustrated. If, like Gail, our needs for connection are consistently ignored or misunderstood, our wanting grows stronger, and we seek even more urgently the attention we crave. We spend our lives trying to get away from our painful feelings of fear and shame, disconnecting from and numbing our body, getting lost in self-judgment and obsessive thinking. But this only serves to increase our wanting and shame. As the cycle of reactivity repeats itself over and over, our identity as a wanting self—fundamentally deprived, isolated and unworthy—deepens.

Most mainstream religions—Judeo-Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Confucian—teach that our wanting, passion and greed cause suffering. While this certainly can be true, their blanket teachings about the dangers of desire often deepen self-hatred. We are counseled to transcend, overcome or somehow manage the hungers of our physical and emotional being. Audre Lorde tells us, “We have been raised to fear . . . our deepest cravings. And the fear of our deepest cravings keeps them suspect, keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, and leads us to settle for . . . many facets of our own oppression.”

We are unable to give ourselves freely and joyfully to any activity if the wanting self is in charge. And yet, until we attend to the basic desires and fears that energize the wanting self, it will insinuate itself into our every activity and relationship.

4461591095_7211da6985_bWilla Cather tells us, “There is only one big thing—desire. And before it, when it is big, all is little.” We can honour desire as a life force, but still see how it causes suffering when it takes over our life. Our natural hunger for food can become an ungovernable craving for food—ice cream, sweets, potato chips—comfort food or food to numb our feelings. Our longing for sex and affection can become an anguished dependency on another human being to define and please us. Our need for shelter and clothing can turn into insatiable greed, compelling us to possess three houses and closets full of unworn shoes. Our fundamental longing to belong and feel loved becomes an insistent craving for substitutes.

If we have been acutely frustrated or deprived, our fixated desire becomes desperate and unquenchable. We are possessed by craving, and our entire life is hijacked by the force of this energy. We feel like a wanting self in all situations, with all people, throughout the day. If we are taken over by craving, no matter who or what is before us, all we can see is how it might satisfy our needs. This kind of thirst contracts our body and mind into a profound trance. We move through the world with a kind of tunnel vision that prevents us from enjoying what is in front of us. The colour of the autumn leaves or a passage of poetry merely amplifies the feeling that there is a gaping hole in our life. The smile of a child only reminds us that we are painfully childless. We turn away from simple pleasures because our craving compels us to seek more intense stimulation or numbing relief.

So how to bring ourselves back into a Healthy Adult or Wise Mind headspace where we can experience some of the above not just as concepts but as ways of being, ways of freeing ourselves when trapped in the craving, deprivation-driven grasp of our inner addicts? Here are a couple of things you might like to try. I’m presenting them below as a kind of guided practice. I find these are more effective when we listen and give ourselves up to the experience of these exercises, rather than just try to digest them cognitively as ideas on a page. Ideas can form the basis of prayers, poems and mantras, but in order to feel the benefits of a practice, it’s best we give our bodies to them, as much as our minds.

ACCEPTANCE OF CORE NEEDS PRACTICE:  Dropbox link to MP3 file 

ACCEPTANCE OF THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS PRACTICE: Dropbox link to MP3 file

[All names and some significant details of the above piece have been changed in order to safeguard the anonymity of those involved.]

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