Blog

“there’s no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong trousers”

-Billy Connelly

Every few years my wife and I drive to the North-West Highlands of Scotland. This area is known as Assynt-the broken country-which I reckon got its name from a serene, majestic wildness that could break you apart. It’s open, empty and beautiful, laced with bleak, bold and rugged mountains such as the mighty Quinag and the brooding Suilven, seemingly invincible in their solidity.

We decided to take a walk, a meander if you like, via Inchnadamph.

Inchnadamph is nestled along the A837 between Ledmore Junction and the ruins of Ardvreck House on Loch Assynt. There is a hotel there, but during Easter it was, as yet, unopened. We packed our rucksacks and pulled our walking boots on tight, then layer after layer of waterproofs and put on a good pair of sunglasses (to keep the rain out of our eyes!).

We began to walk.

We could see Suilven shrouded in mist and snow ahead of us, but little else except a fierce and horizontal rain; our boots met squelching mud and even the sheep looked cold and hacked off. We came to a bridge, the stream underneath raged like a torrent and we passed a small metal hut shaking in the wind. A lady poked her head out and said, in her best Texan “Ah reckon Ahm staying under here until the rain clears”. I wondered if she knew exactly how long rain might last in the Highlands, but we exchanged pleasantries and walked on.

After another 30 minutes I was wondering if this was worth it. I asked Kim if she wanted to go back, secretly hoping she might say yes. She looked at me behind sunglasses dripping with rain, and said “what would your mindfulness say?”

One of the many things I love about my wife is her ability to cut straight through to the chase, the real issues. Between us were anxiety, our sunglasses, the rain, more rain then suddenly nothing; it all fell away and I knew she was right: just notice what you can see, hear, taste, smell and touch. It’s just like this. I straightened my spine and let the weather do its thing. Kim smiled at me and we walked on.

About 15 mins later the sun broke out-this happens in the Highlands, you get every season in one day-and the soaked vegetation suddenly radiated out in sunlight; gorse shone in gold, the green along the path looked luminous, almost radioactive in its intensity and the world danced; we still squelched when we walked but now with delight.

We turned a corner and could hear a waterfall a few feet away, and in a small valley lime moss lit up rugged brown rocks, boulders and framed a crystal-clear stream as it frothed and pulsed towards the distant loch. We sat down, took off our waterproofs and ate our lunches, drank our coffees, glad to be together and alive, meandering mindfully though the landscape.

And it occurred to me that marriage, perhaps many couple relationships, are like this at times: sometimes the going is rough, sometimes you want to give up (and that’s not such a bad thing at times) and sometimes your emotions and your mind is just too unsettled to make a wise choice. But if you pay compassionate attention to each other, you can accept the rain, the rocks and the bad weather as weather, and treasure the sun-bleached pine and the purple heather. It all changes!

Just don’t forget to bring your waterproof pants!

“Time to recognise the sanctity of the world, of minerals, rocks, river and plants”

-Rachel Corby Rewilding

 “Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better”

-Albert Einstein

 Many of my mindfulness friends and colleagues are very keen gardeners. They grow a wide range of organic produce: carrots, onions, radishes, lettuce, turnips, and I’m slightly in awe of both their graft and devotion, particularly when I’m eating the results of their toil!

The garden that we (my wife and I) have is very different. It’s really useless.

From the moment you begin to enter the garden in springtime, a cascading Clematis Montana showers you with its pink blossom; moving into the garden proper a canopy of Fatsia shades the sun under a wooden bench, connecting to a triumphant Ceanothus Zanzibar arching over a patio bedecked with fern and Hosta plants. This is pretty much the character of the garden: thick variegated ivy, tortured Hazel and a graceful Mountain Ash that breaks into burnt orange in autumn.

Gardening for me is about connection with the Earth, with nature. I can practice getting down and dirty with care, digging deep into the soil; this resonates with a certain compassionate intention to encounter my own personal loam that feeds the lotus; “nature” as the Buddhist writer and somatic practitioner Reggie Ray says, is “relentlessly dharmic”.

Touching nature, touching the earth, the rough tree bark, inhaling geranium or mint, sensing the graceful curves of a New Zealand Flax, tasting cut Thyme, watching and listing to the rainfall nourishing the lawn deep inside. This feels like a profound grounding. I can work here and feel the sun reign down on my back and enjoy how my limbs move and sweat whilst digging or cutting.

Sometimes I find myself resting in the garden, senses open to birdcall or the sound of frogs in the late evening, the flow of being in the garden, responding to her needs and requirements. Impermanence is here and writ large in the seasons that come, go and return, interdependence is here in the sockless feet that walk over the lawn, taking and sending care.

So, this is completely, wholly, useless.

A short while ago one of the local parks in Newcastle (where I live) needed an injection of funding. The business case was quite explicit: carrying out this work would bring-for the duration-10 extra but temporary jobs into the park then another 5 permanent jobs into the café and an extra 25% footfall into the Park itself generating 15% more income. It would make it more attractive for business to hold corporate meetings, therefore bringing much needed cash and influence into the town as a whole.

I wondered, though, what might have happened if the case had been argued for extra funding: because it will make the park a prettier place? I suspect that the application might have been challenged.

It seems to me that we need to strike a balance, a balance between our requirements to justify via strict utilitarian reasoning and benefits what we are working on or doing or involved in, and another reason altogether; that “there is no reason”.

Could it be that we’re so used-so caught up with- use in its strict “benefits realisation” (as the saying goes) left brain sense that we neglect the beauty inherent in the useless? A few years ago, when visiting Venice our tour guide said “I think all the beautiful things in the world are truly useless” and I think he really hit the spot there.

Perhaps we need to realign ourselves to activity without use as a strict utilitarian drive towards product or production; and of course, here is where mindfulness plays its part, doing nothing, being with, creating and sustaining beautiful things, sitting and arriving and becoming present with the rich beauty of what could be seen and experienced as truly, radiantly useless.

How useful is that?

“All a person wants is Wholeness, but all he does is fear and resist it”

-Ken Wilber Up From Eden

What are we looking for in our couple relationships? If we are searching for something, what is that we have lost? What do we want or really desire?

Aristophanes’ fable in Plato’s Symposium suggests that the human was originally a dual figure with a double gender; two backs, two chests, four hands and legs and two faces looking in opposite directions. This being was so powerful that Zeus divided it in two. Since then we spend our lives looking for our lost other halves.

There is something akin to this in our upbringing, where we begin as a unit of mother and child-a unit which has to divide. We lose this wholeness and every partner we couple with is in some way-perhaps in an unconscious way-compared to this primordial unit where all of our needs were “satisfied” (of course all of our needs are never satisfied, hence to be human is to be bound up in dissatisfaction). We long for and search for this unification.

And so, we walk the Earth, searching for a lost paradise, hoping that our couple partners will provide this for us.

But the whole truth might be more complex than that.

The experience of being thrown out of paradise, of the longing residing in that blissful state of needs-being-met might just be the most crucial event in our human devolvement and most powerful next step in our maturation, if harnessed well.

In his book, Up From Eden Ken Wilber assiduously points out-even in the books title-that in order to actualise our deepest potentials we essentially need to be cast out of Eden. The Fall is God’s greatest gift to humanity.

However, we resist this actualisation.

Why? Perhaps because we fear, we fear not our darkness but, as Marianne Williamson says, our light: “Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you” (Williamson, A Return to Love).

And so, we can descend into a hubris of scepticism, doubt and superficial cynicism, staying close to an egoic self that defends against further falling, literally our “pride goeth before a fall”.

When I was around 2 years into my mindfulness training, and totally besotted with my root teacher Rob Nairn (and still am) I began to experience a feeling-sensation that I had never experienced before. I felt as if everything that I had known and believed and identified with was leaving me; I was falling, as if I’d suddenly lost my grip going down a staircase.

I found myself constantly falling, a falling without an end. After months of this I decided to take this to my academic supervisor who I decided would be the one who would be able to stop this now dreadful experience. I asked her what this was. “not sure” she said “but I’ve experienced it, it’s dreadful” (not helpful, so I asked more, what would Rob Nairn call it? I asked) “I don’t know what Rob would call it” she said “but I know what he would say” (great, I thought, I’m going to get an answer) “he would say: excellent!”

This turned out to be the best kind of advice I could have been given.

The Fall is good news, not bad.

The unity we were at the start-mother and child-that primal couple could well be an undifferentiated template pointing us towards something more real, the differentiated wholeness we only find after meeting The Fall, in the existential clarity of our life: The Great Loss.

We meet this truth in our couple relationships, where our needs feel at times so deeply met it feels like love-and it is, for this is the closest thing to heaven that we have felt for decades, since that time before heaven abandoned us. And then it fades.

Because it’s not real.

It’s a substitute.

What we want is something to return, the Wholeness, but what we need is quite different. If this endless quest, this eternal wanting is going to stop, then we need to stop-and look within.

The Whole Truth is a wholing truth, we find our wholeness not in our partners, but inside; what we really need we find within.

Realising this, we can perform a huge act of kindness; we can release ourselves and our couple partners from a terrible bind that we’ve been part of and put each other in, saying “I set you free from the expectation of making me whole, I set myself free from the same to you”

Now we can get real love, undistorted from the unachievable demands of an impossible wanting. This is the second stage of love: love liberated.

This is then an “inside job”, finding your own Whole Truth: meeting your other half, your Self.

And this is getting real love.

Seven thirty am. Usually Nathan got out of bed first and made the breakfast tea for himself and his wife. This morning he woke up, listening to his wife downstairs singing and realised he had slept in. He swept back the duvet cover and leapt out of bed, a little disorientated. He began to make the bed and stubbed his toe; swearing audibly he cursed the day and the bed. He could hear his wife downstairs still singing to herself and he thought it’s alright for her, why did she not wake me up? I’m in so much pain, it really hurts, this day has gone pair shaped already. He paused and breathed out, sagging a little. Memories came flooding back like a tsunami of remembering: my folks are right, I can’t even make the bed, I’m never going to amount to much…what’s the point, there’s something wrong with me…he sat slumped by the side of the bed.

Most of us have had the experience of being caught up in a chain reaction of thoughts and thinking; often we find that we’re so caught up in the story that the chain of thoughts and feelings in effect chains our very identity, so that we become the angry one, the sad one. This automaticity of thinking and feeling, often seeking further justification for our attitudes, reinforces the chain until the chain pulls on us, tightly binding our sense of self.

Essentially this is “Hulking out”-the responsive Bruce Banner part of us getting caught up in the amygdala hijack of reptilian or old brain reactivity.

Mindfulness teaches us to pause, to break the chain reaction of thoughts that lead to a self-imposed prison, a chainganged misery of unconscious reactivity, where we become lost in our own reactivity. In this mindful pause we can create space, space to breathe and be, even for just a few precious moments: what’s happening right now? we might ask, it doesn’t have to be this way, we might say, I have a choice. We can start to notice that actually there are many links in the chain, how one thing led to another, how we might be catastrophising and making a drama out of a small event.

When we pick out the links we can reflect on our own contribution, how we might have poured a little petrol on the spark and co-created a fire. Picking out even a small link allows us to respond very differently; we can connect with a self not caught up in the drama of a chain reaction but skilfully leaning in with a linked response, pulling away from the reactivity and leaning into our experience as it is and watching it go.

A simple mindfulness practice is the FAB, or feet anchored breathe practice. This is an in the moment practice to encourage a linked response to what’s happening right now in order to break the chain of reactivity that might otherwise catastrophise our day.

Nathan woke up at seven thirty am, he had slept in. He pulled back the duvet cover and stated to make the bed, stubbing his toe. It hurt like hell. Nathan swore and cursed the day, then he paused, and stood still with his feet on the floor. What’s happening right now? He asked himself. Nathan anchored his feet into the floor. He took a breath in, took a breath out and brought his attention to the feelings in his toe, at the pain, leaning into the moment. As he brought all of his attention to his toe he could feel the toe pulse and the pain slowly fall away. The potential catastrophe of the day dissolved. He made the bed and walked into the shower, a little late, a little sore, but opening out to the day.

 “I am the poet of the body” -Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass

“Our legs and arms are full of torpid memories” -Proust Time Regained

Perhaps it was James Joyce in Dubliners who summed up the plight of the situation in the West most concisely when he wrote “Mr Duffy lived a few feet away from his body”.

Our bodies have become what the French philosopher Foucault called “docile bodies,” transformed into a post traumatic self, where our breathing is tight or frozen into the past, installed into the nervous system as the chronic fight/flight of stress or anxiety, our bodies in turn have become socially constructed and reconstructed until they are medicalised, marketed; I am now a Consumer Body, homo economicus, living in my head and desperately wanting what I have been told I need, my somatic self is disowned and thrown into the shadows, into the character armour of the body. If I regard my body it is regarded as Reginald Ray says as a donkey to be punished, controlled and subjugated.

We have turned away and against our somatic self and it has powerful implications for the planet itself: this “severance of the mind from the body means a corresponding severance of history from nature…once the ego was cut lose from seasonal nature and from the body, it had no felt roots in which to ground…it then seemed perfectly acceptable to the ego to begin a premediated assault upon nature…it failed to comprehend that an attack upon nature was an attack upon its own body…this new body, the alienated and dissociated body” -Ken Wilber Up from Eden.

Mr Duffy indeed.

Another way of describing this is by taking stock of Iain McGilchrist’s work into the divided brain (see https://www.ted.com/talks/iain_mcgilchrist_the_divided_brain). We’ve become used to living from the left hemisphere of the brain with its need to grasp, manipulate, control and label. Essentially, the right brain apprehends bits of things. This has served us well, it’s given us pencil sharpeners, washing machines and MRI scanners, but in doing so we’ve disowned our relational birthright and the very basis of our humanity, the somatic or felt sense of being human. The right brain is our somatic brain, as McGilchrist and Ray both contend, and it apprehends the wholeness of things. It is no coincidence that the word “whole” has semantic correlations to “holistic” and “holy”.

Our overall identification has historically privileged right brain cognitions and conceptualisations. Beginners Body suggests our lives have been co-opted into a Sherlock Holmesian Case of Mistaken Identity; we’ve searched the globe and we’ve searched our lovers and we’ve searched in therapy and finally we’re searching Google.

It’s not there, these are all distractions because it’s been right with us all the time, there in the right brain and the soma, Beginner’s Body: “we’re trying for something that’s already found us”, as the poet says.

Reconnecting with our body mindfully, or Beginner’s Body is a set of practices that take us back into the somatic self, the mind integrated with the body. This has, for some years been the province of many excellent schools and modalities of body psychotherapy, where instead of turning away and against our body and our right hemisphere with its repository of unconscious liberation, limbic attunement, connection and creativity we turn towards it, finding a true and vast relational home, a wholeness that we can become deeply embedded into and embody.

The Indra’s Net of connection that is our soma is a direct, unmediated experience of what is, unfiltered by the left brain’s conceptual mind. The neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor in her book My Stroke of Insight suggests this is akin to the Buddhist term enlightenment: Awareness Itself.

Yet when we do turn towards our soma it is often done with an old story and concepts that reflexively kick in; our past and socially conditioned self appears in a flash and we are reconditioned into a docile or redundant way of relating to our embodiment.

If we are going to re-relate to our soma we need to do it in particular way. It is here where mindfulness affords us a radically different way of reconnection.

The soma is the repository of freedom, but also of shadow; it thus contains both dark and light, the very parts of us that we have, for decades, endeavoured to keep at bay. We cannot connect with the soma in an agitated, distracted or hostile manner; mindfulness practices which enable us to settle our minds, encounter and engage with what arises, our shadow side, with acceptance, welcome and self-compassion, are critical here.

We must be willing to accept and welcome the communication that the soma brings to us, in image, sound, memory and fragments of association. It will not arrive as we want it, it will arrive as we need it.

This activity is the activity of the right hemisphere, it is essentiality inter, that is to say it is interpsychic, intersubjective, interpersonal and interrelated; it is relational in its locus and dynamic, and in its intention.

Beginner’s Body begins when the mind relaxes and is able to start resting with self-compassion to meet with what Reginald Ray calls “our unique beingness, who we fundamentally are”. This is soma, the poetics of the body and the élan vital of the bodymind, free of social construction.

This is us and this is home.

7 connecting links

The steps to Beginner’s Body are not complex; these 7 steps are just a few of the many ways we can reconnect with the soma:

1. Open up to your senses: in a sustained and deliberate manner open up to new-and old-experiences for the first time regarding smell, taste, sound, touch, sight. Discover what it is like to walk along the same street anew, bringing your attention to your sense of sound, for example
2. Tune into the gutbrain: when making choices begin to tune into what your gutbrain is telling you (you don’t have to go with this, but stay connected). Where, really, does the sensation come from? How is it for you?
3. Take up the opposite: develop a sense of play in terms of what you might usually do with your body, e.g. if you do no DIY or gardening, take some up, “reverse gender” some of your activities and deconstruct
4. Get creative: draw how you feel every day. It doesn’t have to make sense, and hopefully it will not; you are developing a presence into the right brain
5. Take up a new movement: learn dance, yoga, self-massage, a martial art; learn to use your body differently
6. New music, new colours: if you usually, listen to rock, explore how opera feels on the body; wear pink if you usually wear blue and so forth
7. Walk in the good: walk in silence paying attention to your body and its movement in the woods, the beach, the city

Finally, sit in meditation, bringing your attention to the sensations and communication that arises in the soma. Stay curious!

“can we want what we already have?” -Esther Perel

“we’re trying for something that’s already found us”-James Douglas Morrison

The philosopher Jagger sums our life up when he sings “I can’t get no satisfaction”. Dissatisfaction is part of our everyday life, in fact it’s so much sewn up in our living that we hardly recognise it at times and hence we’ve often caught up in it without even knowing it. There is a thought that the Buddhas notion of suffering (“dukkha”), basic to our experiencing as human beings might be better translated as dissatisfaction.

Dissatisfaction and its often-immediate response, distraction, can pervade our every hour.

This is the difficulty that will not go away; in fact we can even call it GDD or our General Dissatisfaction Disorder and one of the biggest impacts that this has on us is our need to do (note the operative word “do”) something about it. But it’s what we do, there’s the rub!

When we feel dissatisfied we tend to do two things, we either turn away from the dissatisfaction or turn against it, we distract ourselves in TV, gaming, the phone, shopping, any activity that appears to fill us; essentially, we’re propelled into states of distraction that become habituated and unconscious, often highly addictive, we’re “distracted from distraction by distraction” in T.S. Elliot’s words and suppressing what the mindfulness trainer Alistair Appleton calls our beingfulness

Our dissatisfaction exposes our wanting mind, which always wants something different and never wants what it has, it takes us from experiencing in depth the here and now of the present moment of being and into a heady future, past or fantasy of escape.

How can you tell if you have General Dissatisfaction disorder?

Hers a few questions that might help:

1. Do you find yourself lost in thought?
2. Do you use a range of 21^st tech to punctuate your life and stop you from getting bored (e.g. Candy Crush)?
3. Does your life feel out of focus?
4. Do you always feel things should be different than what they are?
5. Do you feel a stomach churning sense of dread when there’s nothing going on in your life?

If you answered yes to any of these questions you have GDD. If you got to the second paragraph of this blog and gave up, you have GDD. Actually, you can’t win: we’ve all got GDD. Every one of us.

The problem is that GDD is a trap, for in trying to do something about our dissatisfaction we’re still caught up in it. This is now doubly frustrating!

So how can we deal with the all-pervading sense of distraction that creeps relentlessly into our lives? Do we stand like Canute, helpless before its tidal wave of distractive behaviours?

No: the secret is to do nothing. The secret is that there is a third option between turning against or away from the dissatisfaction in our lives; we can turn towards the dissatisfaction and just sit with the felt experience of it, just being with it as it is, without any need to push it away or suppress it.

Sounds boring? Turn to boredom, boredom is rich in both its mental and physical experiences.

When we turn towards dissatisfaction something happens; it settles, or rather our mind settles and we begin to get in touch with our mindfulness, a sense of grounding and physicality, a felt sense of us that oddly feels like…satisfaction…

Trust. It’s such an important, crucial factor in both our relationships to others, and to ourselves.

Couples and individuals come for help from relationship counsellors after years of broken trust, whether that trust was shattered by infidelity or by profound doubts in the couple relationship. Yet we also have a more primary form of trust, that is the trust we have towards ourselves and in our own experience.

Quite simply we are not brought up to have a full sense of trust in our own experience. The way we measure, evaluate or gauge ourselves is often via a reflected sense of self-we ask for another’s opinion about the very thing that they can’t really offer with any accuracy: how it feels to be in our world.

The person-centred psychotherapist Carl Rogers called this an external locus of elevation. In short, we’re run by the shoulds, oughts and musts that others have put (he called it “introjected”) into our lives. Freud wrote about the superego, that internalisation of parental and authority figures which confers rules, order, regulations and law onto and into ourselves. This makes sense, to have the mores of society part of us, it offers civility in what might otherwise be a chaotic community.

The shadow side of this, though, is that we often turn away from our own experiencing, looking to others to validate ourselves: we simply don’t trust ourselves at a deep level, and at this deep level we’re out of relationship with ourselves, battered by disconnection, self-doubt and self-criticism, isolated and afraid.

The Insight Meditation teacher Gregory Kramer has developed the practice of Insight Dialogue and perhaps this offers us a way out of feeling this sense of disconnection from ourselves. He offers a 6-stage structure of mindful dialogue, and at the centre lies what he calls “trust emergence” where he suggests that we “let go into the changing process that we call now with its uncontrolled sensations, thoughts, emotions, interactions, words, topics, energies and insights” (Kramer p139).

The crucial aspect here is emergence. We might imagine that the door to trust opens wide and quick, but here is a way of staging the process.

In a way, we can think of the analogy of the lotus in the mud: it’s dark and murky in the mud, but the darkness also carries the seed that allows the flower to emerge, grow and its potential to actualise; as with the lotus we have to trust our own emergence.

This, for us, is unpacking our conditioning, those shoulds, oughts and musts in our lives and become more in tune with an internal locus of evaluation, authentically and somatically connecting with our own experience.

This connection and trust with self mirrors our connection and trust with others. Often when couples ask me how they create trust again the best way forwards is to take it slow, form new connections in the relationship: trust emergence.

If trust in the emergence of new connections can be created a new trust can develop in the couple relationship, too.

We all recognise that as human beings we become attached-often identified-to our stories, the content and imaginative narrative of our lives. The Buddhist scholar Rob Nairn suggests that we can become “content obsessed”, fixated on the often motivating, competing and conditional stories in our lives; yet inquiry into this also suggests that large parts of our overall stories when too challenging are disowned, stored in the shadow of our “inner bag” or unconscious.

Looking into this shadow, we discover all over again this content, like a heavy bag of coal we carry; inside this blackness, though, there may be diamonds. It therefore behoves us to explore this with some tenacity and skill, to effectively meet our inner content with a beginner’s mind, sifting and “restorying” the often-disabling narratives that run through here, like dark seams fueling our lives.

We’re not stuck here, though; we can carry and inhabit other stories that are enabling, insightful, unconditioned by past or current influences. But we must be willing to meet and encounter our earlier stories of darkness and despair, our failings, shame and vulnerabilities; we must skilfully sift through this. Perhaps this is the carbon, that once burnt, transforms into diamond and glitters with wisdom?

An old story. A man is seen lying in the gutter by a rich gem salesman who takes pity on his sleeping form. He slips a gemstone into his inner jacket pocket; this will have the power to lift the man out of poverty and relieve his suffering. Then the gem salesmen walks away.

A year later they meet again. The man is still poverty stricken and broken by his suffering. The gem salesman asks him why he did not use the gemstone and the man is astonished-he could have found his liberation if only he had looked in the right place, his own pocket.

If we want to find what’s really precious in our lives where do we go looking?

Perhaps we will never find what is truly precious by looking outside; the path is facilitated by looking within. The Buddha knew this, he said “be a lamp unto yourself” and perhaps we all have to learn to do this by doing this for ourselves, but whereas the territory is our own we do have some maps-stories-laid down by others.

To start with, it might be helpful to understand that for most of the time our minds are unsettled and relatively agitated, “monkey mind” is the term we use to describe the way our minds jump from thought to thought, from past to future or into our imagination.

So, in order to get onto the path in any real way we need to work to settle the mind’s habit of distraction. We can do this via a mindfulness of breathing, contacting the soothing rhythm of our breathing in the here and now, then grounding our experience not in our minds but in our body or the physicality of senses. Our breath and body-our soma-is here and now and graced by presence, by being.

As the mind stills we are preparing to look deeply within, but often when we do we discover-to our horror-such a mess of mixed up entangled thoughts and feelings of pride, shame, self-critical thinking and profound doubts and judgments: who is this person, we might ask, and begin to suppress or attack ourselves.

To look deeply into our minds without a strong reaction into retreat we are required to make friends with ourselves, and we do this by accepting the voices within in an attitude of self-compassion, for these were and are us, the very parts of us that we cast out many years ago, yet still live in our shadows.

When we have developed a more compassionate relationship with ourselves (and this might take time) we can begin to truly look inside, into the murk and mess and entanglements inside and start to reach the gemstone within that was always there and, indeed, nurtured in the mess.

Sometimes this is called the Hero’s or Knight’s Journey and is reflected in ancient stories told of knights who searched for the sangréal, our own royal bloodline. Often The Knight is unknowing that the real job is the inside job of “wholing” and finding the inner cup, the anima that completes, wholing into the Holy. We forgo myths as having no factual truth, forgetting that the Knight who searches for Sophia is a transcendent metaphor for the innate truth of our own journey to insight and wisdom (“Sophia” meaning wisdom).

As with the travails of the Knight, this path brings us into a more intimate relationship with not only our liberation, but also our suffering; there may be no freedom without engaging with the one who is suffering, the one born then reborn from pain and dissatisfaction. Our suffering, too, is the path of the human being and is to be honoured as such when we let ourselves relax in to the very part of us we have defended against, and fought against, for so long.

This is akin to opening up to what we already have and are, a precious gemstone: when we do so the authentic self yawns, stretches and gradually wakes.

We can’t really work effectively with the suffering of others until we begin to work with our own range of elaborate and archaic stories and defences that have cast away our pain; we have come to believe that we should not experience the very thing that makes us most human, our suffering.

But if we do, if we “restory” we could find our place in the human family as authentic, vulnerable, radiant and clear.

There’s much in the world these days to genuinely destabilise us: abrupt shifts in geopolitics, the growing potentials of war, climate change and The 6^th Great Extinction, the low but insidious and chronic stress posed by digital overwhelm and fragile conditions of employment.

Phew! No wonder at the end of the day we might just want to crack open a can or sink into a bubble bath; after a day of stress and discombobulation, soothing away our anxiety and just feeling good seems like the best option. But does this really work?

For some us self-care-chillaxing for some-is challenging; our so-called striving, performance driven work culture obviates against this, positioning it as a weakness or “shirking” and for some if us there are more family and gender based reasons why we might not just relax into feeling good.

What’s actually happening when our outer (and hence our inner) world destabilises is that our reptilian brain becomes activated and our fight or flight system goes online. Too much of this, or too traumatic the intensity, and it stays online, becomes in effect threat saturated and we head into a possible mental health crisis.

Some of this can be “soothed away” with hot bath, a cool beer, a walk-in nature, a massage, or that most potent of all soothers, great sex. These kinds of activities promote the activation of our soothing system pouring healthy bonding neurochemicals such as oxytocin and vasopressin into our bodies as an antidote to the crippling amygdala hijack of fight and flight-they help us relax. These are “relaxive” practices.

But are they enough to promote real change?

Self-care and self-compassionate practices are profoundly important as methods and approaches in re-relating to ourselves, often to that imp inside us that diminishes or puts us down, that refuses to let us relax; but self-compassionate practices may also be a preparation for what we might do next, which is make deeper changes in our lives.

If we walk along a road, fall in a hole and get hurt, it’s a good idea to go home and soothe ourselves, but if we keep walking along the road and keep falling in the hole, then plainly soothing and self-compassion is not enough.

That’s why we need something else: reflexive practice

Reflexivity has described as  “the capacity of language and of thought—of any system of signification—to turn or bend back upon itself, to become an object to itself, and to refer to itself” (see http://bit.ly/2mMB6ot)  and it involves a sustained inquiry into altering not just our relationship to what’s happening but to understand and change our lives-to change what’s happening to cause us to pursue conditions and habits that keep our often-disabling behaviour, feelings and thoughts trapped.

Reflective practice encourages us to take a deeper dive into ourselves, our personal and relational history and patterns not just to vent, discharge and care but also to identify, unlock the disabling patterns we find ourselves caught up in, and grow.

Essentially there are three aspects to this: the technique of settling our agitated minds (mindfulness) promoting a self-caring attitude (compassionate practices) and altitude, or involving ourselves in the very real possibility of development. To date it might appear that the only mindfulness based organisation in the U.K. that takes this deeply seriously is the Mindfulness Association (http://bit.ly/2nraZXm) who have as part of their overall curriculum courses in insight, or “what’s happening underneath what’s happening.”

Mindfulness practices such as tranquillity meditation are wonderful and radically important practices to enable us to settle our anxious thoughts and feelings, but good mindfulness curriculums take us further still into inquiry and insight, into our intra and interpersonal stuck patterns and repetitive, disabling cycles.

Jon Kabat-Zinn calls this place the “swamplands” in his book Wherever You Go, There You Are, and uses a somewhat Jungian lens of myth and story to peer into this, but how this plays out is as much in our own kitchen sink dramas-often our own internal Jeremy Kyle Show-as it is in myth and symbol.

Some reflexive practices might include:

1. Journaling to reflect back over weeks or months, spotting repetitive habits
2. Exploring your family and your broader relational “family tree” to identify what might be embedded in the family culture
3. Unpacking the context and culture you find yourself in using the Social GRRACCESS i.e. gender, race, religion, age, culture, class, education, sexuality and spirituality: how these influence your past and present living
4. Recognising past trauma that might have frozen your ability to feel yet is still running your choices (you may need therapy here)
5. Getting out of your head and into your body: somatic inquiry and grounding, releasing into somatic freedom
6. Building resources and resilience to help in difficult times e.g. social networks of support, creating robust boundaries and connections
7. Understanding your past and/or current couple relationships and your couple fit (this might be the “Big Daddy” of them all)

Relaxive practices such as chilling, self-care, tranquillity meditation are critically important to our mental and emotional health, probably our spiritual health too-we really can’t do much with an agitated mind-but we also might need to dig little deeper into our selfhood with a reflexive inquiry, bend a little back upon ourselves with an inquiry that creates insight and understanding so we don’t get caught up again on the same road, falling into the same hole.

In the broadest sense this is a kind of best-of-East-meets-best-of-West dovetailing; meditation meets psychotherapy meets neuroscience; a truly mindful counselling.

Stress comes with the territory for most CEOs and managers. Being in the lead position in a workplace means a frenetic swirl of cognitive activity that can be difficult to navigate or at times even hold onto.

When stress piles up, leaders have to find ways to deal with it so that they and in turn their employees don’t burnout. In a seminal paper Ed Hallowell talks about leaders who experience “overloaded circuits” (http://bit.ly/1yW62mV) where CEOs either push away or hold onto stress, often letting it store into the body until the dam breaks, resulting in a panic attack or even a stroke-before this the leader is often caught in his or her own fight or flight mechanism, where a threat saturated headspace becomes a stressed out workplace and peak performance is effectively disabled.

So, all of this is pretty much what-we-know-about-what-we-know-about stuff, and there is a plethora of books and helpful/unhelpful manuals out there to encourage CEOs and business leaders to discharge stress (check out https://groomandstyle.com/breathing-techniques-guide-science-methods/ ).

The big problem is that the instructions are often too long and laboured to make sense.

The CEO under stress requires something else to rebuild and restore their resilience.

Here are 5 easy to deploy strategies

1. 4×4 breathing™: breathe in to the count of 4, breathe out to the count of 4. Repeat 4 times. Feel the sense of your breath as it both fills your lungs and lower torso, and empties again. Unless you have breathing problems (and if you have, don’t do this) this will oxygenate your system, exchanging carbon dioxide for fresh air, which in turn revitalises the brain and the human system in general
2. Pause: just stop. Now notice where you are and how you are, really becoming more aware of your surroundings, the textures and colours around you-the sounds from the environment. Many managers spend so much time thinking, planning, strategising that they lose themselves in thought itself. This simple practice brings a sense of presence, of “you” back to you
3. Get back to the body: when lost in thought we can feel ungrounded and tight, frazzled to say the least and lacking in attention. Two simple ways of getting back into the body are a walk-literally walking from one floor to another, to the car parking garage and back, or stretching a little; stretching (without pulling a muscle) sweeps happy neurochemicals such as endorphins-small neuropeptides produced by your pituitary gland-through your body, making you more somatically based (see also http://bit.ly/1upAdhJ for tips on progressive muscle relaxation)
4. Get some therapy: whoa! this is the last thing that most CEOs would ask for, yet I’ve found that CEOs that come to my therapeutic sessions report a huge benefit in attendance; they spend a focussed hour twice a month and discharge conflict, tension and stress that would otherwise be left stored or taken to the workplace or family: money well spent!
5. Take a nature nurture: this is easy- put elements of nature into your workplace environment; plants, paintings or pictures, bowls of fruit, have an iPod that plays tranquil music, make your laptop background a nature based one. It brings you out of your head and into the world.

www.mindful-counselling.com