Mindfulness and your unholy trinity

the body keeps the score” Bessel van der Kolk

In one of his short stories in Dubliners James Joyce writes “Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body”. Joyce goes on to describe the consequences of being disconnected like this, and suggests that this is a perfect description of how many people live their lives. Being disconnected from our bodies also presumes being disconnected from our feelings, thoughts, emotions, our five senses; literally our embodied selves and therefore the world itself.

This would appear to be a Western World phenomena which is spreading out across the globe¹. The stresses of our busy, frantic lives pushing us further into digital overload, distraction, and into our heads. We become, as Eckhart Tolle says “lost in thought” and disconnected from our sensory lives, from our vibrant and creative core.

Stress itself, the low but chronic stress of our everyday lives, from workplace targets, car journeys to the office, digital demands, the multiple pressures of media conditioning and cultural complexity, conspire to create what the French philosopher Michelle Foucault called “docile bodies” -the body acquiesces to outside demands and requests and the head claims sovereignty; this is the fallout of the activation of our fight and flight system, created to keep us safe from tigers in the wild but which in contemporary society reacts to the “paper tigers” around us, leaving us habitually stuck in a threat related system.

Chris Germer has also outlined how this happens, calling the ramifications of this our “unholy trinity”. Germer suggests that our fight response becomes internalised as criticising or attacking ourselves, our flight as distracting, suppressing or disconnecting with ourselves and our freeze as getting stuck in ruminative thinking-lost in low mood and thought. We try to meet stressful thinking with more stressful thinking, getting Velcro’d to the very thing we’re looking to be Teflon’d to!

We need to approach this from another perspective altogether.

Mindfulness has been described by Buddhist scholar Rob Nairn as “knowing what’s happening while it’s happening, without preference” and this “knowing” is considered here not just a cognitive but an embodied knowing, where the self is integrated as a whole, as one.

Germer and Nairn’s work dovetails together in the practice of antidotes to this unholy trinity. The antidote to flight is our sense of common humanity-we’re not alone, the antidote to fight is self-kindness or compassion and to freeze is mindfulness. The practice here is a full body one, of opening up to our senses. The core of mindfulness deals with how to reconnect with everything that Mr. Duffy is disconnected from: our sensory self, not our docile bodies but the élan vital of the embodied self.

The body, our sense of being embodied, opens up our senses and we begin to realise that despite our habitual tendency to distraction and dissociation, when we enter the forest of our embodiment with a kind and curious attention we have an inherent capacity, an inner wisdom that soothes and reconnects, that releases the score. This mindful practice lowers the fight-flight system and allows us to enter a forest clearing of the embodied self and live more authentic lives.

A simple practice

Find a place where you can walk for about 10 minutes, a park, a beach, but don’t worry if it’s in city, just walk.

As you walk, let your thoughts just come and go; if you get caught up in distraction or lost in thoughts just come back to the feeling of your breath as you walk, breathing in, breathing out.

Bring you attention to your feet, legs, pelvis moving, walking, see if you can get a felt sense of this then gradually open your senses up, and ask yourself what am I seeing, hearing, what can I smell, touch, what is the felt sense of all of this like? Allow your experience to be just as it.

Then walk, in the simple feeling of being a walking human being, present in this moment, and this moment, and the next.

References

Michelle Foucault Discipline and Punish

Chris Germer The Mindful Path to Self compassion

James Joyce Dubliners

Bessel van der Kolk The Body Keeps The Score

Rob Nairn Mindfulness Asscoation http://www.mindfulnessassociation.org/

Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now