Posts Tagged ‘Openness’
Mindfulness for the holiday season: Christmas and the New Year
December is a time of year in which our sensations can be easily bombarded. It’s easy to get stressed about Christmas shopping, overcrowded malls, travel plans, holiday parties, familial obligations, and in some cases, snowstorms. The practice of being mindful is the intentional practice of focusing attention on one thing. Focused attention calms and settles the mind, and circumvents the rat race of disorganized, divided, and unfocused attention. It is a way to come back to the current moment and show up for everything the moment has to offer.
Here are three different ways of being mindful this holiday season:
Five minutes of breathing:
Sit quietly for five minutes and focus on the rise and fall of your breath. Every time you notice your mind wandering or your attention scattered, bring your attention back to the rise and fall of your breath. This may be a useful exercise to do after driving in bad traffic, being in a crowd, or after coming home from work.
Savor sensation: Take a few moments to take in the entire experience of the following:
- The taste of peppermint. Do you really taste peppermint when you eat it?
- Do you ever notice how the air changes as it grows colder? Try figuring out how the air smells or tastes. I’ve noticed the winter air to be crisp, bitter, biting, heavy, cold, damp, salty, and even woody.
- Pay attention to tastes and smells that you enjoy- in other words, don’t pass them up or take them for granted when you notice them.
Show up for the moment…even if the moment brings pain
Sometimes people experience a great deal of sadness during the holidays: Spending holidays alone, spending a “first” holiday after losing a loved one during the year, or being reminded of recent losses or relationships ruptures.
If sadness is part of your holiday, consider:
- Reflecting on what is important and meaningful
- Allowing yourself to grieve deeply and fully, to cry openly, to acknowledge everything you experience with your heart wide open
- Honor what has been lost
- Be gentle and tender with yourself
Singing, carols, generosity of spirit, pageants, and performances can move people deeply. If joy is part of your holiday
- allow yourself to be moved to tears
- fully experience, absorb, take in, and reflect on what you have
- share with others what you appreciate or love
- allow for the positive
- recognize times in your life in which things have been difficult- and how different they are for you now.
Wishing you a holiday in which your experiences are rich and meaningful- I will be back at my blog posting in 2012!
Posted in Mindfulness | 
Tags: Christmas, Emotion, grief, Holidays, Joy, Meaning, Mindfulness, Openness, Sensation | 
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An exercise in mindfulness: Thanksgiving turkeys
In my groups, we spend time at the beginning doing some sort of exercise to slow down, pay attention, come into the room, and notice what is going on. Some of these exercises are specifically directed at paying attention to the breath. When breathing is slowed, paced, and regulated, a person has a better tendency to think clearer and become organized. Using the breath to regulate emotion, attention, and physical arousal is a very critical skill that frequently gets forgotten about in the heat of the moment- especially a very emotional moment.
Breathing exercises can sometimes be difficult. If you were to spend five minutes trying to focus just on your breath, you may notice spacing out, thinking about other things, and generally not paying much attention to the physical aspects of your breath. Therefore, breathing exercises may sometimes be paired with counting, walking, or other more concrete methods to help you get in touch- and stay in touch- with your breath.
Here is an exercise that is a tangible way of following the breath- and can easily be taught to young children as a way to self-regulate. Place your hand on a piece of paper and trace around it. Every time you move up to the tip of a finger, inhale. Every time you move down to the crevice between your fingers, exhale. Try to work on slowing down your breath so that it is even and steady. When you are done, start over. Keep g
oing until you notice feeling calmer, slower, steadier, and perhaps more connected. Be gentle and notice any frustration if it doesn’t “work” right away.
One way to do this exercise is to keep tracing and re-tracing back your hand on one piece of paper. Another way to do this exercise is to not use paper and pen at all, but to trace your fingers with your other hand. This method can be used when you are out and about, in a meeting, or (depending on subtly it’s done) even talking to other people.
However, if you trace a new outline on new paper each time, you can start to accumulate several pieces of paper. If you’d like to add a beak and draw in some feathers on your “hands”, you can start to ask yourself: How many turkeys does it take to get calmed down? If you get really good and regulating your emotions by regulating your breath, you may find that over time the number of turkeys it takes will eventually go down.
Posted in Mindfulness | Tags: anxiety, Breath, Breathing, Holidays, Mindfulness, Openness, Stress, Thanksgiving | No Comments »
Are your walls keeping people in or keeping people out?
With crisis comes vulnerability. When the unexpected happens, we are often confronted with the limits of our mortality. We realize that we can be deeply affected and influenced. The walls that we build around us get shaken, questioned, or torn down.
Fear is on our horizon.
Sometimes, when we are really scared we try to build more walls. We don’t want other people to see us. We snap at people we care about and become strict with ourselves about who sees our pain. We deny our pain to others. We can’t let other people in. We make promises to ourselves that we will never be that open, intimate, or invested in a relationship again. We can’t let other people care about us, and we become calloused to influence. We aren’t able to receive compassion or see how much alike we are.
Last week I read a post about some people who were trying to make sense of 9/11. This book really touched me when I read it. Ultimately, there was a question of what walls we wanted to build. And in general how much of the world we want to let in. Surviving a crisis forces us to consider those questions.
Sometimes disappointment can be so unbearably painful that it makes sense to be a little cautious. On the other hand, allowing our fear to dominate our ability to be human, to make mistakes, to feel pain, to take risks, and to be vulnerable can prevent us from experiencing intimacy and connection.
Are the walls you build keeping you safe and protected or are they preventing you from reaching out, taking risks, and having a fulfilling and meaningful life?
Posted in Distress Tolerance | Tags: Change, dialectics, Loss, Mindfulness, Openness, Relationship, Stress, trauma, wisdom | No Comments »
Give your full attention to what is now.
Your life is about what you pay attention to. Your life may be about pain, joy, sadness, searching, getting rid of, or avoiding. It may be about the discomfort, the uneasiness, the anxiety, the emptiness. It may be about the looking for, the lack of, or the not enough.
Your life is about the very moment you are in.
Bearing with just this moment means being able to be okay with who you are in just this moment.
If this moment is about trying to get rid of all the experiences that come with it, your life will be about NOT tolerating the moment.
Being present with yourself is a willingness to acknowledge whatever is there- including pain.
Return to the breath. When you inhale, allow air into the tiny spaces, the tight muscles, the constricted areas, and the place of being stuck.
Posted in Distress Tolerance | Tags: Acceptance, anxiety, Mindfulness, Openness, Stress, willingness | No Comments »
When the horse throws you off, should you get back on right away?
Deciding to confront your fear can be a helpful thing; however, the manner in which you do so can potentially make the fear worse. Here are some thoughts about getting back in the saddle:
1) Fear is functional- therefore it may be perfectly adaptive for you not to get back on the horse. If you could get hurt, you may be better off staying on the ground! Figure out what the benefit is of having the fear before you decide to approach the horse again.
2) If your fear causes you impairments in having the life you want to lead and is NOT useful to you (ie, if the benefit to riding the horse outweighs the costs of walking away), consider your approach:
3) DON’T grit your teeth, tense every muscle in your body, and actively ignore your skyrocketing anxiety. The horse may experience you as pushy, demanding, intrusive, controlling, or even coercive. There is a difference between approaching what you are afraid of and trying to overcome anxiety by pretending you don’t have it.
4) Facing fears effectively takes openness and willingness. Practice relaxing your body, softening your tone of voice, and opening your palms so the horse can come over and check you out. The important thing is that you make space and allow for all the fear that you feel. And your relaxed posture will help to relax the horse.
5) Keep your eyes open! Take in everything around you. Look at the horse’s posture and body language. See if he has his ears forward (curious, listening) or his ears back (irritated). The better you are at reading a horse’s body language, the more information you will have. This will help you pay attention to when the horse is receptive to having you on its back.
Notice the difference:
You: Anxious, fearful, scared, and determined to get back in the saddle.
You: Calm, receptive, and willing to wait until the horse is ready.
If you were the horse, which person would you want on your back?
Posted in Behavior Change | Tags: Acceptance, Animals, anxiety, Change, Exposure, Openness | No Comments »
Anxiety, awareness, looking, and seeing
When our anxiety controls our attention, our attention becomes narrowed and constricted. We hone in on what is threatening- and often become pre-occupied with getting rid of our anxiety. We simply don’t want to feel as anxious as we actually feel!
When our anxiety controls our attention, our brains often shut down certain aspects of experience. We have difficulty seeing what else is there.
As long as we can prevent ourselves from looking, we can avoid things that make us anxious. Often when we avoid what makes us anxious, we don’t have to come to terms with sadness, loss, or pain.
We actively avoid talking about certain subjects. We avoid conflict, emotions, and people. We fill silence with awkward chatter and exit the room if the intensity becomes intolerable. We avoid eye contact. We make up platitudes that aren’t true to what we are thinking or feeling at all.
Mindful practice enables us to pay attention to aspects of our experience that we simply don’t want to pay attention to. When we pay attention- with openness and curiosity- we can start to get our minds around the places that our anxiety tries to control.
It is the acknowledgement that sets us free. When we are open to this anxiety, this pain, this discomfort, this awkward moment, this silence- we can bear with it. We can receive, acknowledge, and understand. We can accept it and know it for what it is. “It” loses its power over our frenetic actions.
When we willingly re-direct our attention to that which evokes anxiety- we start to see what is in front of us. We no longer have to avoid people, places, subjects, or topics of conversation- because we acknowledge them. We recognize when others change- and when they don’t change- and the impact it has on us.
When we are vulnerable and receptive, we are moved and touched and influenced by the world around us. We might get hurt. We may need to get up and brush ourselves off. But we participate in life and we take risks.
We live as if we are alive.
Posted in Distress Tolerance | Tags: Acceptance, anxiety, Change, Exposure, grief, Joy, Loss, Mindfulness, Openness, Understanding emotion | 1 Comment »