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“don’t reject thoughts, since they are the play of your innate nature. Don’t reject disturbing emotions, since they are the reminders of wisdom. Don’t reject sickness and suffering, since they are your spiritual friends” -from The Precious Garland of the Sublime Path Lord Gampopa (trans Kunsang)

“whatever you resist, persists”
-Carl Jung

We have a very particular relationship to our human pain and suffering: we instinctively don’t like it, recoil from it and we engage in many different ways to remove it from our experience. We have an aversion to our pain and suffering and over time chronic pain can lead us to depression and despair. Suffering includes our sadness, sorrows, losses, our dissatisfaction with work, family, relationships-I use suffering in its wider aspect here, closer to what the Buddhists call “dukkha” which can be nearer to a kind of existential uncertainty as well as an outright pain.
We meet our emotional and physical pain often with resistance, a resistance which builds into a narrative, an account or story of our suffering, a story about ourselves or the world.
So, in our pain and suffering we reach for a pain killer, or find ways to suppress difficult thoughts and emotions, perhaps drowning our experience of suffering in addiction or distractions, from gaming to alcohol abuse. In every event, we are perhaps fighting off a very human experience, splitting off or suppressing a significant part of us that makes us human.
And it probably doesn’t work.

There’s an emotional and physical tensing in our resistance, a kind of contraction sometimes called an egoic contraction that fixates around the pain and results in a turning away which, ironically, makes the pain worse.

Killing off or suppressing our suffering will probably not make our suffering vanish; at best it will mask it or encourage it to be channelled into surprising-and at times quite awful symptoms, such as resentment, bitterness, anger, or physical complaints such as eczema.

We are required to face and engage with our suffering or be not-so-subtly led by the “suffering of our suffering” so to speak. Significantly, we are bound up in unnecessary suffering in our resistance to pain, so we layer our suffering with more suffering, creating and sustaining stories of resentment, blame, a desire to hurt those who we believe hurt us, yet the hurt often was long ago delivered, but still carried by our storied selves and becomes as wise in its behaviour as throwing gasoline onto a fire in order to put it out.
There is another way to relate to our suffering.

To begin with, we need to view our suffering in a radically different light, from an experience to be disowned and banished to one that we can find meaning, insight and wisdom in, one that we can find a powerful sense of human connection in. Given that the whole population of this planet will experience pain and suffering, this would appear to be of critical importance.
Our pain and suffering are ours, is “me”, an integral part of what it is to be human, vulnerable, interconnected to the planet’s populous; we are connected, you and I in our suffering selves. It is important to consider how we might approach mindfully and bear our pain and suffering, how the tears and sorrow inherent in our messy humanity enriches the complexity of our soul and the compassion in our hearts, finding new connections to parts of ourselves we had disowned, reaching out to others in kinship. You are my family, you are my sister and brother, for we suffer all-this is a step towards “wholing,” finding and connecting with the difficult parts of ourselves that hurt, that are wounded, and caring for them, not rejecting them.
This cannot be done without meeting and engaging with our wounds, yet how to do this without recoiling more, for in turning towards our suffering, might we feel more pain rather than less? Why would anybody in their right mind do this?

We can soften into our suffering, experiencing it as energy, sensation and noticing the change in the pattern and tone of these sensations, their impermanence. Doing this, we are turning back to pain itself and away from suffering, back to the primary sensation rather than the secondary stories of resistance we have carried for so long in our wounded hearts. Bringing awareness to suffering, coming back to that awareness, to the pain, is a radical act of mindfulness and tender healing love for the self.

So we can turn towards our suffering as we would turn towards a child in pain, turning to it with compassion and awareness, asking our suffering what it needs and what teaching it is bringing to us, for it is. This might take time, but surely is worthwhile, for it further strips way the “suffering of our suffering” the layer that we put on our pain and suffering in a bid to resist that takes us away from the experience and makes it much worse; ironically perhaps making it more permanent and less impermanent. This gives us an opportunity to both wake up and grow up (for this is what our suffering is calling us to do) into a fuller range of being that stays with the pain. A more mature self will find a capacity to carry and contain pain and suffering without the need to split it off, suppress it or project it onto others, and find a way to own the primary pain.

We all want to be happy, but focussing on happiness while rejecting pain and suffering is to believe a coin has only one side and deny the existence of other side; this does not mean it goes away, it just works its way in the dark where we are blind to it. An aversion and a resistance to pain and suffering is an aversion and a resistance to life itself, and hence a life not fully lived.

Barbara was 50 years old and a mother of two. A year ago, she lost her husband of 27 years and was still raw with the pain of her loss. She looked at me, tears of agony welling up; she felt consumed by her pain, swallowed up not just by its intensity but by its longevity and another layer of suffering she had applied to her loss, that of shame, guilt and self-loathing at not “getting over it”.

As she sobbed I thought about this. It was if I could feel a deep and physical connection to her pain, but I wondered where she might have got the notion from that she should “get over” the loss of her husband.

For some time, I have been questioning what seems to be the current vogue that suggests great loss, trauma, hurt and pain are “things” we can “get over”. I’m not so sure. All those messages we hear, such as “you’ll turn a corner” or “there’s always light at the end of the tunnel” or “time is a wonderful healer” might be constructed more to console the person you bump into in the street rather than have any great meaning for you. Pain is yours, it’s your reality and it is perhaps calling on you, asking you to pay attention to its meaning.

What meaning?

Perhaps the pain and suffering of great loss do not ever go away because they are not meant to go away; perhaps we are better served by meeting our suffering, bit by bit and letting it enrich us and seeking out its meaning, instead of feeling guilty and ashamed for feeling human, desperate, dreadful and a mess. Human living is mostly around being a mess-my mindfulness teacher Rob Nairn suggests that we accept ourselves as a “compassionate mess”-which for me suggests that we might recognise a deeper connection and meaning. The connection and meaning I am suggesting here we often find difficulty in describing positively, for who in their right mind would ever encourage a person to feel pain?

The feeling that I mean here is akin, I think to an immersion, but a mindful, compassionate immersion that builds soul. Now soul is a tricky little word, and the soul I mean in this context is not the essence of us that lives on after death, but rather soul as character, depth, heart, a recognition that after great loss, trauma or pain something almost alchemical has happened inside us at a bodily depth and we now possess a gravity of thoughtfulness, empathy and even seriousness that grants us an ability to see the world quite differently.

How might we see the world? We might recognise the invertibility of pain and suffering as not negative events that have to be “got over” but our humanity as a result of our suffering, not in spite of it and therefore a thing to be ashamed of, suppressed or banished.

In the hurly-burly-skimming-over-the-surface-grinning-all-the-time world that social media presents, perhaps in our pain and suffering we can leave a mindful, compassionate space to contact and let enrich in us the soulful nobility within our suffering, and allow this to deepen our character and wisdom, leading us to experience what it is to be human after all.

According to ACAS in 2015/16 over 480,000 people in the UK reported that work-related stress was making them ill, amounting to nearly 40% of all work-related illness.[1]  The World Health Organization calls stress the global health epidemic of the 21^st Century[2] and many of us now work in overconnected and overloaded work cultures on the cusp of burnout. It is doubtful that this will change soon, so it makes it more crucial than ever before to build skills of resilience in and for the workplace.

This good news is that this can be done: balance and the faculty of managing emotional dysregulation, taking time out and recharging your battery can be done and done well in a series of simple steps.

One of the first steps is to make a simple distinction between good stress and bad stress. Good stress is the stress of challenge, where the tasks of work helps us grow and do our jobs leaving us feeling satisfied having done a rewarding day’s work: this is the “green zone” of stress where we work in a dynamic balance sometimes called flow[3]. Bad stress is when we don’t have the resources inside to deal with the challenges of work and we keep going long after we have ceased to be productive in any meaningful way. It’s this bad stress that stands out and impacts on us more, probably due to our propensity to absorb and retain negative experiences, leaving us in an overstressed red zone.

Here are some mindful hacks to help you approach stress and build resilience in the workplace:

1. Break up your workload: at the end of each day make a list of the next day’s tasks. Leave it behind at work; when you go in you are ready to hit the ground running (so to speak) with your jobs list. Leave space for overnight tasks.
2. Take a pause: we can only productively work for so long, probably around 90-100 minutes. Every 95 minutes take pause, it need not be long, but simply walking out the office and down the hall can take us out of the “office mind” and into our bodies where we can feel more present.
3. Defuse: similar to taking a pause but taking time to get a felt sense of any stress you might be experiencing in the body. Notice it working its way through the body, notice how it leaves the body (which it will) and how your emotions calm and regulate accordingly.
4. Mind yourself kindly: one of the single most overlooked skills in the resilience set is self-compassion[4] -which literally strips away the lethal layer of self-attacking which leads to burnout. Relating to yourself with more self-acceptance is a critical skill in building resilience [5]

Implicit in these 4 hacks-especially 2 & 4-is the notion that in order to build a truly lasting resilience we need to move beyond a merely cognitive response. Rick Hanson[6] calls this a practice of installation, whereby passing states of mind are transformed into embodied traits: true resilience is an integration of mind and body.

The ability to build workplace resilience is a fundamental skill that will help all of us in the increasingly hyper stressful world of work; employees, managers, companies families and society all stand to value from a resilient workforce: building workplace systems that have a resilient culture at their centre just makes good business sense.

[1] ACAS http://www.acas.org.uk/index.aspx?articleid=6062

[2] WHO http://www.who.int/whr/previous/en/

[3] See flow at https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-father-of-flow/

[4] See Neff and Germer http://self-compassion.org/

[5] See http://self-compassion.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Durkin.2016.pdf

[6] See http://www.rickhanson.net/being-well-podcast-enriching-absorbing/

“You cannot beat the living transmission from teacher to student, and from student to teacher”

-Junpo Denis Kelly Roshi

The revered Rinpoche

A few years ago, I went to a retreat centre in the leafy southeast of England. The Rinpoche leading the retreat delivered powerful and elegant practices throughout the 5 days of meditation. He (they are nearly always a he) also gave a series of talks, instructions really, on how to apply his teachings in the world at large.

Here’s where it became, for me, a problem.

Without going into too much details (I’m not one to name names) it quickly became apparent to me that his worldview was replete with male power, hierarchy and entitlement, and whilst he gave us much to think about in terms of meditation, his knowledge of current political and economic affairs was very poorly informed and his secular ignorance was shocking.

In the refectory later, I brought this up with 3 retreatants who were closer followers of the Rinpoche. I told them that whilst I found his delivery of meditation quite exquisite, I found his secular world view a problem. The retreatants eyes widened and all said “you don’t question the Rinpoche; he knows much more than all of us-you wait until what he says, you understand.”

At that point it felt I was trapped: either revere the Rinpoche and swallow a message of male power, entitlement and uninformed instruction or disagree and look like an egotist full of disrespect.

What to do?

At this point in the 21^st century we have more access to information, knowledge and growth that ever before: we’re literally just a click away from thousands of articles, papers and books that promote personal development. The internet is truly a world-wide tool of access which means more folk that ever before-especially those who hold positions of authority in the public domain-have a responsibility for growth and a responsibility to check, explore and reflect on what they are propounding with the tool that helps: you can’t hold high office without having high responsibility.

Shadows on the spiritual path

It behoves us not only to wake up within the spiritual path, but-as Ken Wilber says in his book Integral Mindfulness– to grow up, too. This means we have a responsibility to do emotional, psychological and socio-political work on ourselves as well as contemplative. I recall Wilber once saying (and I can’t recall where) when asked “what can you do that the Buddha couldn’t? replying “I can drive a jeep”. As with many of Wilber’s comments, this is profundity in flippancy; he’s pointing out that what we do spiritually also has to work in the world and we’re limited by the history and contexts we find ourselves in.

Junpo Denis Kelly Roshi writes “but in my experience, there were moments where there was so much psychological shadow in a monastery I was stunned. Some of the American students were desperately trying to get away to find themselves. They had self-institutionalised, because they could not function in the world outside the temple gates [    ] there was enough of this kind of behaviour to make me question if insight alone-spiritual insight-was enough. [    ] some people, I suspected, need to go to a therapist to work out old childhood wounds, to do shadow work”

The spiritual writer John Welwood calls this spiritual bypassing, when we have not explored the dark, denied and shadowy aspects of ourselves and our socio-political contexts well enough. Perhaps it is time that the days of unreflective reverence come to an end: is it time to look every Rinpoche, guru and teacher in the face and question them?

Irreverence on the spiritual path

The Cambridge dictionary defines irreverence as “not showing expected respect for official important or holy things” but the notion of irreverence that I want to introduce here is one that I have been adopting for years as a systemic therapist. I have adapted it here as my survival strategy on the spiritual pathway.

In 1994 Cecchin, Lane and Ray published a slim but powerful book called Irreverence: a strategy for therapist Survival which allows therapists to free themselves from the limitations of their own theoretical schools of thought and the familiar hypotheses they apply. Cecchin et al write that irreverence is being “slightly subversive against any reified truth” and the irreverent practitioner need “never feel the necessity to obey”.

Four of its components I have adapted to the spiritual path include:

• Discourses of power: what narratives are presented as truth that in turn work to disempower participants voices?
• Doubt as asset not hindrance: employing a reflective, doubting state of mind to explore other narratives that might be more enabling; checking out the teachers experience and secular-as well as spiritual-experience
• Curiosity: keeping my own questioning spirit of inquiry alive and open towards the teachings
• Context and position: what is/was the socioeconomic context that the teacher was embeded into and might, to a greater or lesser extent still embody?

This means that I can work to increasingly take more personal responsibility for the beliefs, expressions and actions I embody on the spiritual path. Hopefully I am less likely to became seduced, reduced and wedded to a particular text of teaching but respect the teachings as facets in an overall “spiritual diamond” so to speak.

Revving up irreverence

However, on the other side of the nondual coin Is the issue of my ego: in what way can I be certain this is not my arrogance playing out a game with the guru? (Not that they might care, but it’s essential that I do. Care, that is.)

Perhaps one way I might stay reflective and grounded here is to turn the 4 points to myself:

• What narrative or preferences do I embody, and am I embedded into?
• To what extent to I get lost in the echo chamber of my own preferences?
• Can I positively doubt myself?
• Can I turn my curiosity inwards?
• What is the impact of my own context as a white, male, Anglo Saxon born of a certain privilege and position?

Cecchin et al write “prejudices are heat seeking missiles”-and and it is ourselves as well as others who are the targets. Prejudices might just be our juiced-up preferences or our unaware biases. The spiritual path is not one of primrose and pleasantry; it requires rigour and discrimination to embody a path with heart, authenticity and depth. Staying respectful, reflective and irreverent is just one way of doing this.

“we must be willing to sit, unblinking, in the face of our ego, the thousand-faced demon we project out into world as the so-called evil we see out there” Junpo Denis Kelly Roshi

Sources

Cecchin, Lane and Ray Irreverence: a strategy for therapist’s survival

Marina Kaplan Eyes Wide Open: cultivating discernment on the spiritual path

Junpo Denis Kelly Roshi The Heart of Zen

John Welwood Towards a Psychology of Awakening

Ken Wilber Integral Mindfulness

The myth of the medical cure?

Brenda walked into her local GP Surgery distraught. She had, two weeks ago, lost her father and was feeling very weepy and low. After a short chat with the GP she left with a prescription for 10 mg of citalopram.

Annie, 21 years old, was the proud mum of a 3-month-old baby boy, except she wasn’t so proud, she attended her local GP Surgery and burst into tears, saying she had never felt this was before, she was completely worn out. She left with a prescription for 20 mg of sertraline.

Both of these are actual events but the names have been changed.

Since the latter part of the 20th century drugs such as Prozac and Ritalin have become household names. In tandem with this, the consumption of antidepressant drugs has increased by 56% between 1988 and 2001[i] and in addition, there has been an 108.5% increase on the 31million antidepressants which pharmacies dispensed in 2006 to 2016.[ii] The steepest rise has been in the use of prescription drugs by children and young people [iii]

But are they effective and do they work?

In a stunning new study Johann Hari[iv] has complied a wide range of psychiatric opinion and research that strongly backs up the case that the positive impact of many antidepressants is no greater than a mere placebo effect-if we believe a thing will make us better, it will. Hari also agrees with other studies that show that although antidepressants are “not addictive” there are huge so-called discontinuation problems, i.e. once you are on, you are unlikely to want to come off the drugs. In addition, because the body develops a tolerance to drug, there often needs to be an increase in dosage.

Moncrieff also writes about the well-known side effects that antidepressants can cause, and quotes a patient who reports “my mind was extremely foggy and I could not gather my thoughts or organisational skills to do daily household duties” [v]

We know that the side effects of many antidepressants include

• Drowsiness
• Headaches
• Nausea
• Diarrhoea
• Dizziness
• Restlessness
• Insomnia
• Low sex drive

And Moncrieff is very clear about other risks: “there is a very high risk of someone committing suicide in the month after they have been prescribed an antidepressant of any sort” (p169)[vi]

Placebos tend not to produce these side effects.

What’s happening here? What’s happening to us as a nation? How are we to think and function well and in a healthy way, how are we to make the right choices if, as a nation, we’re so chemically infused-and who does this really benefit?

Are we losing our minds? Is there another way?

Losing our bodies?

James Joyce said it well; “Mr Duffy lived a few feet away from his body”[vii]-this is generally the Western malaise of the last 100 years, and as Ken Wilber[viii] points out we have not really lost our minds, we are actually too much in are heads and have in truth lost our bodies, that place where we can stay present and grounded. Practitioners in bodywork such as Reginald Ray[ix] and Bessel van der Kolk[x] tell us that our somatic sense of self has much to offer us that our cognitive or intellectual self misses.

What has this to do with the chemical cure around antidepressants and medicating the nation?

Hari contends that our tendency towards anxiety and depression is bound up with disconnection-from meaning, purpose, community, work, values and more importantly from ourselves, and in return we have bought into a chemical cure that this is all the result of our bad brains, and not, as Hari writes, the context we find ourselves in.

In other words change the context, change the response.

So, all those seemingly trivial bits of advice we might have been given around anxiety and depression: take a bath, a walk in nature, go the beach, exercise?

Turns out that as these practices help us to integrate both mind and body, that in return something profound, not trivial might happen: our anxiety lowers, our mood and depression lifts and we come back to life.

Without a single antidepressant, and hardly any negative side effects.

Isn’t it time we found our bodies?

[i] J. Moncrieff The Myth of The Chemical Cure

[ii] Office National Statistics

[iii] J. Moncrieff The Myth of The Chemical Cure

[iv] J. Hari Lost Connections

[v] J. Moncrieff The Myth of The Chemical Cure

[vi] Ibid

[vii] James Joyce Dubliners

[viii] Ken Wilber No Boundary

[ix] R. Ray The Awakening Body

[x] B. van der Kolk The Body Keeps the Score

Stress has climbed to its highest rate in 16 years, according the latest batch of statistics published by the Health and Safety Executive. This data, released on 1 November 2017, comes from the annual Labour Force Survey, produced by the Office of National Statistics. In addition, there has been an 108.5% increase on the 31million antidepressants which pharmacies dispensed in 2006 to 2016. What’s causing this? Clearly, something is going profoundly wrong in our society.

Our society (that’s you) now faces low but chronic episodes of stress related, almost threat saturated events that occur relentlessly, day by day. Our society is not geared up to reduce stress, but to increase, layer upon layer, the stress, pressure and anxiety we experience: modern urban living is turning us into pressure cookers and we need to find the valve(s) that stops us running headlong into burnout.

But it does have to be this way. Here’s one easy-to-do mindfulness based stressbusting technique:

1. Take a cushion and lay it on your living room floor
2. Take off you shoes and if you need to, cover yourself in a blanket (if you need to, play calming spa type music or-better still Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon album)
3. Set a timer for 15 minutes
4. Lie down on the floor with your head on the cushion
5. Close your eyes
6. Breathe
7. Breathe in to the count of 3 or 4
8. Breathe out to the count of 3 or 4
9. Do 3 rounds of this; really feel your breath now in the belly-if you need to, take the palms of your hands and experience your hands rising and falling as your belly does
10. Let go of the counting and go back to your normal breathing
11. If thoughts arise (and they will) take your attention to the breath
12. Take your attention to the 10 touchpoints where your body touches the floor: ankles, calves, back of the thighs, buttocks, lower back, upper back, shoulders, hands (let your hands splay out) arms, back of the head; see if you can get a sustained felt sense of these touchpoints, how they are, any sensations, temperature?
13. If thoughts arise (and they will) take your attention to the breath and the touchpoints
14. On the outbreath, notice what happens to the body, in the body
15. Now do nothing. Allow yourself to sink into the floor. Wait for the timer to go
16. Gently stand up

This adaption of the mindfulness bodyscan allows the body to come to rest; it encourages (and it will get better with practice) the relaxation response to activate in the body, alleviating stress and restoring the body’s deep resilience.

“Emotions are telephone calls bringing us information […] Do not refuse to answer the phone […] Do not run away from the phone. […] Answer the phone! Stop reacting to the phone’s ringing!”

Denis Jun Po Kelly www.mondozen.org

Overloaded circuits

If there is one thing that we all know, it’s that our difficult emotions are, well, difficult. Just when we might believe we have our emotions under some kind of calm or control, or we feel generally at ease or balanced a seemingly random event-a piece of bad news, getting cut off in traffic or rudeness in the supermarket might trigger us and tip us over.

Our emotional overload often finds its “home” now at work. Work related stress and its impact on us emotionally has climbed to its highest rate in 16 years, according the latest set of statistics published by the Health and Safety Executive. This data, released on 1^st  November 2017, comes from the annual Labour Force Survey, produced by the Office of National Statistics. In addition, there has been an 108.5% increase on the 31million antidepressants which pharmacies dispensed in 2006 to 2016. What’s causing this? Clearly, something is going profoundly askew in our society.

Our society (that’s you and me) now faces low but chronic episodes of stress related, almost threat saturated events that occur relentlessly, day by day. And it’s wearing us out.

Our society is not geared up to reduce stress, but to increase, layer upon layer, the stress, pressure and anxiety we experience: modern urban living is turning us into emotional pressure cookers and we need to find the valve(s) that stops us running headlong into burnout.

Professor Marie Asborg, of the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm calls this The Exhaustion Funnel, where we keep on running, dropping bit by bit the activities and resources we need to keep us resilient and healthy. Before too long we’re worn out and stressed to bits, drained of buoyancy and plunged into low mood, our emotional regulation system becoming radically dysregulated.

How does this happen? (part 1)

In 2004 Robert M. Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University published his ground-breaking book Why Zebra’s Don’t Get Ulcers. He draws us a picture of the grasslands where zebras are peacefully eating. Suddenly a tiger bursts out from the bush and the zebras’ fight or flight response is activated. They run for their lives; some succeed, others, not. Sapolsky asks us to notice what the surviving zebras do next: they shake.

They literally shake off their stress.

What do we do when the paper tigers of target performance, journeys to work, and pressures from our children and society impact upon us?

We shake it in.

This is crucial to our understanding of stress, worry and anxiety, pressures that often we believe are in our heads, but when we take a closer look are felt as a tightening of the chest, sickness of the stomach, tension in our shoulders, issues around our immune system, rashes, headaches, anger and irritable bowel syndrome. In short, our emotional regulation system is not just in our heads but experienced through our body.

How does this happen? (part 2)

We often cause ourselves extra, unnecessary emotional difficulty by reacting and fusing to our stressful experience with heighted and catastrophic thoughts, feelings and judgements that in actuality add gasoline onto the emotional fire-we shake it all in. It’s as if we’re at the mercy of this reactivity.

For example, let’s say you are under pressure to complete a task by a certain time. You might have such thoughts as “I need to finish”, or “why did I agree to do this?”, followed by difficult feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, resentment, anger and judgements such as “This is a stupid job” or self-criticism such as “I’m useless at this”. This is putting out the fire with gasoline.

The fire, we can call our primary pain of suffering and all the reactions to that, our secondary pain of suffering or pain and suffering for short. Secondary suffering is pretty much our whole defence system: it protects us but fuses into character armour and projection, existing long after the stressful event has passed and keeping the difficult emotions going. Getting to the primary pain behind the armour is crucial, for this is the actual territory, not the mapped-out reactivity.

We can’t really do anything about our primary pain-we all feel pain-but the suffering-the swirl of difficult emotions that arrive almost immediately afterwards and create fusion or a story of suffering, we can do something about: we are more than our reactions.

Doughnut emotions

The doughnut emotions model illustrates what happens to us when we let our difficult experiences turn into difficult emotions then run out of control: we spend our time in the red zone or circle of suffering.

How to get out? How to shake it off?

Practitioners in bodywork such as Reginald Ray (The Awakening Body) and Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps The Score) tell us that our somatic sense of self has much to offer us that our cognitive or intellectual self misses. Mindfulness recognises that moving from pain to suffering is a turning away from our actual stressful or difficult, yet embodied and primary experience into what is often an elaborate intellectual story of suffering. Realising this we can meet the experience differently.

Here are 5 steps to help deal with difficult emotions:

1. Turn towards the difficulty: the key here is not to run away from or suppress the difficult emotion, but let it slowly register with awareness on your body, get a felt sense of the messages that are being relayed. Try not to stay with the emotion as “thoughts and feelings in the head” as this causes a downward spiral of constant rumination: this is putting out the fire with gasoline
2. Name it: it could be sadness, anger, resentment; give the difficult emotion a name, allowing it to be present; this will also help you defuse from it. You could, for example say “this is worry, worry is here” or “I am felling angry” or “this is anger”
3. Accept the emotion: don’t get caught up in trying to suppress or deny the emotion, allow it to further come without judgement. Let it come bit by bit. Be aware of feeling “flooded” or overwhelmed by the force of the emotion if it is strong. If it feels too strong, distract yourself and then return to stage 1. Then bring a sense of kindness to the emotional state, simply by saying “may I be kind to myself at this time of difficult emotions” or “everybody has difficult times”
4. Follow the feeling: follow the feeling in the body (not the mind, this is more gasoline on the fire) and trace the felt sense of it working its way through the body, as it then leaves the body, which it will. Exhale into the places in and on the body where the feelings travel and leave. Notice what changes occur in your emotional state. It’s as if you have been holding on to this emotion with a clenched fist for years; now you are unclenching, opening up your hands and letting go.
5. Inquire within: as you sit, more and more unclenched, ask what kind of message or wisdom this difficult emotion is bringing to you (because it is). What’s underneath (e.g.) the anger? Grief? Shame? Care? Love? Don’t expect an answer right away, or for the answer to come packaged the way you want it to be. Let it gently arrive with kindly awareness at your door.

Mindfulness teaches us that our emotions are impermanent. They arise and make a display within us for a time, then disappear. This disappearing is called “self-liberation” but as they display we often cling or fuse onto them, adding to them, awfulising or catastrophising them, throwing the gasoline of thinking attention and story onto them. Regulating your emotions by taking your attention to the felt sense of emotions in the body-getting out of the red zone-takes time, practice and patience-it’s a life practice, but will pay off.

And, after all, haven’t you suffered enough?

“Mr Duffy lived a few feet away from his body” -James Joyce Dubliners

Running on fumes

Abby was a middle manager working for a large Tech firm. For months now she had been constantly under pressure from both her staff and her CEO. She felt stressed out by the performance driven needs in her company and was having sleepiness nights; the eczema on her arms had become inflamed and she looked exhausted. “I’m like the middle of a sandwich” she said “squeezed all the time, I’m falling to bits. I keep on thinking I’ll find a way out. I can’t-I’m running on fumes!”

Abby touched upon something quite profound in her account. Her resilience was at an all-time low, yet she still believed she could think her way out of this situation-devise a plan, implement a set of procedures.

Abby is not alone here, for most of us our default mode when the thinking gets tough is to toughen out our thinking. This could be a mistake, a kind of dead end-or at least only partly effective-in restoring our resilience.

In her book The Happiness Track Emma Seppala gives an account of what she calls “natural resilience” and suggests that we need to make a stronger mind-body connection to restore our resilience; in short, our resilience needs to reach a somatic or embodied level.

Making a start

Perhaps the best way to make a start is to use a tool popularised in Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and subsequently used by the Mindfulness Association which quite simply asks us what depletes us and what nourishes us? It sounds simple, yet it is a very effective way of not only eliciting what it is that takes away our resilience but also introduces a boundary of sorts between the stressor and the stress, or the stressed out.

Now practically at this point we might not be able to make any changes, but it gives us points of recognition and helps us to recognise the stressors in our life more clearly.

Building resources

So, the next step is to ask ourselves what is it that nourishes me?

This is where we introduce self-care and self-compassion into our lives-which for many of us can be tricky-we often don’t believe we deserve it, there is that shrill voice in us that says “keep going, strive”-but we know that if we do keep going things will only get worse.

How do we build our resources? Seppala suggests some of the following

• Take a walk in nature
• Breathing exercises: focusing on the out breath, which activates the parasympathetic nervous system, allowing soothing to occur
• Taking a pause-favoured by Tara Brach in Radical Acceptance, who says taking a pause to bring grounding into our days installs mindfulness into our being
• Take a self-compassion break: created by Kristine Neff in her book Self-Compassion, this is a mantra composed of the following sentiments: “this is a moment of suffering/everybody has moments of suffering/may I be kind to myself in this moment of suffering
• Take a long hot soak in the bath
• Do nothing: let your mind settle of its own accord

Finding embodiment

More and more though we are understanding-as the work of Reginald Ray in his book Touching Enlightenment and his work in somatic descent suggests-that body based responses can allow our experience of nourishment to be considerably enriched and deepened.

For example, affirming your nourishing acts with a posture of movement, of opening your arms in welcome, introduces a felt sense into the experience, what the writer and neuroscientist Rik Hanson calls “installation” (see CD The Neurodharma of Love) or deepening into a somatic, embodied whole-part of us.

Another way of describing this is calling it-as Jon Kabat-Zinn has done, a kind of coming back to our senses-the senses bringing us back in touch with our embodiment; other practices in mindfulness such as the bodyscan can encourage this, too.

We’re trying for something that’s already found us

How, though, might we achieve a felt or embodied sense of what appears to be emotional or cognitive?

To answer this, we could turn towards a realisation that Eastern teachers have known for centuries (as have Native American and shamanic cultures): the body is nondual. There is no split or separation in the soma, separation exists only in our heads, in the misplaced belief that we “have” a body. We do not. We are a body, we are embodied already, but disconnected from what is. Western writers such as Judith Blackstone in The Empathic Ground have written extensively about this; we are embodied already and this profound shift is a powerful realisation and beginning.

We can reconnect.

Reconnection will not occur overnight, we have become what the French philosopher Foucault calls “docile bodies” of conditioned submission, stuffed up in our heads, turning away from our own field of experiencing.

This radical reconnection puts us in touch with a deep embodiment, a natural resilience and in turn a radiant self-liberation.

How to make a deeper start?

Overall, there are perhaps 3 stages to developing a closer relationship to the soma and an embodied resilience: mindfulness, compassion and somatic inquiry.

We begin with mindfulness to calm the agitated mind and bring a gentle, focussed attention to the body via acceptance and self-compassion. We learn to re-relate to our experiencing with acceptance and kindness, gently opening up to the same in a more inclusive manner.

This allows us to open and deepen into somatic inquiry; we can’t really do this effectively with an agitated or self-critical mind, the mind has to move in to a more “settled” place and we need to find our grounding into a friendlier relationship to self. This is crucial, if we have a difficult or adversarial relationship to ourselves then our habit or default will be to pull away, or self-attack, reinforcing our “striving” and evasion mode.

We can’t allow our experience to be as it is-authentic-and own it if we find it unfriendly and turn against it.

Here are some practices:

• Savour your sensory field: your 6 senses of touch, sound, sight, smell and the sensation of embodiment, of being a body
• Practice the mindfulness bodyscan, reaching more fully into yourself at a somatic level
• Turn to your experiencing with kindness and self-compassion
• Listen to your body
• Ask for the wisdom in your body to communicate with you (it will tend not arise in speech, more in sensation, image or colour)
• Recognise what you are interconnected with, cast your net wider; there is a huge field of interconnection

Shadows in the body

What else might we meet, encountering our rich field of soma?

We have known for some time that when we experience unpleasant, threatening or traumatic events we have an already existing range of defences that help to protect us (see Bateman and Holmes Introduction to Psychoanalysis).

Whilst there are literally hundreds of defences, there are a few “main” defence mechanisms, such as suppression, regression, denial and distortion. However, the younger we are often the more “primitive” our response or defence is. Suppression might take the form of what is often called “splitting” where we disown a part of our experiencing and project it into the unconscious. It still exists, often as repressed psychic energy, embedded and stored in what is often called character armour: this store, and whatever we are embedded into, we will necessarily embody.

The shadows that live here move in a kind of unlived part of ourselves, often known through illness, dreams and the projections we place onto other people.

There is an opportunity to relate to a deeper kind of resilience here that Reginald Ray calls “boundless” or “awareness seeking its own completion” (Touching Enlightenment p268). Robert Bly, too, in A Little Book on the Human Shadow suggests that acquainting ourselves with our shadow generates a more resilient personality. Here we are able to touch this unlived life where, as Blackstone says “our holding patterns [have prevented us] from inhabiting the internal space of our body” -we can shift from docile bodies to embodying a more élan vital.

Further implications

Ken Wilber in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality suggests we are “holons” deep ecological parts of the whole and our embodiment is intimately connected with the world and the cosmos in what Buddhists call co-dependant arising, or dharma (Macy in Dharma Rain: sources of Buddhist environmentalism edited by Kaza and Kraft)-we’re more than brains in bags of skin competing with other brains in bags of skin; our resources can be both personal and vast, intimately connected with a deeply embodied ecological resilience, this journey can be what Kabat-Zinn calls “a roadmap to our radiant selves”.

As the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh says in the book of the same name: no mud, no lotus.

For Abby (above) this worked by beginning to listen more closely to her body. She took pauses at work, even if for just 3 minutes in her day to breathe and be, she enrolled in a once a week yoga class and sat for 10 minutes every other day in silence, allowing her thoughts to settle and calm, grounding into her body. As Abby listened more closely to her body, as she met her body with more acceptance she began to see how her own felt sense or embodiment could be a kind of barometer for wellbeing, she could ease into her own embodiment and follow the patterns of stress that less and less stuck and grew, but were impermanent, and she learnt to let go at a somatic depth; her resilience increased, as did her wellbeing.

Modern life and the modern workplace can be a frenetic rush; getting to the shops on time, getting to work on time, meeting targets and paying bills, catching up with emails and taking the children to out of school groups-worrying if you’re getting it right and staring at your partner and wondering who they are, heck who you at times. Posting on social media, not posting…. we’re not chased by tigers in the bush like we were thousands of years ago, but are at times overwhelmed by the paper tigers of modern living.

It’s a worry, and at times it’s much more than a worry; it leaves us with agitated and unsettled minds. Therein lies the issue, and the solution to the issue: we are too much in our heads!

We have tricky brains, brains that-in evolutionary terms-we are just getting to grips with. In their book Mindful Compassion Gilbert and Choden talk about two types of brain, old brain and new brain. Old brain is composed of flight/fight/freeze in response to threat, new brain is the neo cortex that allows reflection and soothing. It also allows rumination and the ability to Velcro to our anxious thoughts. This new brain is only about 2 million years old-very young in evolutionary terms and we’re just getting to grips with it.

Map onto this the findings that Iain McGilchrist presents in the book The Master and his Emissary, that we are becoming a more left-brain data-information-bits-measurement led culture and its easy to see that we are often not only not seeing the big picture but lost at times in an agitated data stream of thinking: “tangled in an entanglement” as Jon Kabat Zinn called it.

All of this was succinctly summed up by James Joyce in Dubliners: “Mr Duffy lived a few feet away from his body”

So, it’s really not a question, during times of great stress and anxiety, of where did your mind go, rather where did your body go? Its our embodied sense of self we lose when we get agitated, stressed or powerfully anxious, we live a few feet away from our bodies and it’s becoming our default mode: for answers we search not inside ourselves but turn to google instead, throwing in our lot not with wisdom or insight but with the popular bitstream that flashes in front of us.

We’re allowing thousands of years of our humanity to be overwritten by around 150 years of industrial and informational “progress” and the problem is that we’re still creatures of that ancient habit: the old brain still reigns.

What to do?

There is an oft used phrase: “the issue is in the tissue” and many scholars, theorists and practitioners, such as Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps The Score), Peter A. Levine (In An Unspoken Voice), and Reginald Ray (The Awakening Body) are steadily coming to the conclusion that the fragmentation-which is both neurological, psychological, spiritual, cultural and social-into left brain (data driven little picture, cognitive) both creates then privileges a bias to a disembodied anxiety-driven-up-in-our-heads response to our situations. What appears to be called for is a more balanced, integral approach such as the one Ken Wilber in Integral Psychology asks for. This is not about rejecting left brain rationality-far from it, in today’s world we desperately need more rational thinking-but taking time to enhance our right brain, old brain self, our embodied self.

Why?

Because most of the difficult situations we encounter we have, in one way or another, keep going-fanning the flames so to speak-via our compulsive thinking or suppression, disowning the fullness of our experience. Either way these difficulties have not gone away, they’ve just gone underground into the unconscious world of the soma: literally the issue is in the tissue.

The good news is that this world is accessible and mindfulness practices are crucial in repairing the rift between right/old brain and left/new brain. The practice of meditation and compassion allows us to meet what we have previously disowned in our lives and living. In mindfulness we follow the breath and notice with acceptance our wayward thoughts, allowing the mind to settle and gently meeting a more embodied self.

Grounded in the present, and in our own presence, we are no longer body and mind, but bodymind, our somatic self, no longer caught up and lost in our anxious and seemingly crazed thinking; we’ve dropped into our body and are grounded beings, letting the thinking mind, with all of its entanglements, come to rest in the vast sky of our right brain.

Where did your body go? Time to find it and be yourself all over again.

Its an old axiom of mindfulness that our thoughts have a mind of their own; left to their own devices our thoughts will travel back and forth in time, revisiting old wounds and regrets, often in the vain hope that we can somehow change the past.

This-prison of the mind-is a steel trap that’s hard to escape from, yet we must, for living in a past made up of old regrets or wounds is a life unlived. The present is all we have: now is our time. The past is gone and does not exist.

Yet we do get stuck, Velcro’d to the past, unable to move forwards.

How do we get “past the past”?

Note this is not about jettisoning the past or trying to forget the past: that, too would be impossible. Its about a radically new way of relating to the past.

Krishnamurti had a phrase “the seeing is the doing” and in mindfulness we employ this practice to see right through to the truth of the matter, that the present moment is all we have, and to live in the stuckness of the past is not to actually live at all. The “seeing” is performed with a felt sense, where we locate the wound of the past regret in our body (past wounds are somatically stored in muscle, cells, tissue) and breathe out, let the tension go, time and again: it will.

This insight, lived with a radical acceptance and embraced in all its embodiment sets us free not of the memories of the past but of the need to get caught up in painful regret and an impossible need to change what cannot be changed.

“Be here now” as Ram Dass said.