Category: Mindfulness

There’s a two and a half thousand year old story about human reactivity attributed to The Buddha. The story passed down is called The Second Arrow.

The Buddha thought of all the misfortunes that life brings to us and pictured it as if we were being shot by an arrow, driving pain deeply into us. Shakespeare’s line about “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” is presaged by nearly two millennia here.

But the Buddha said that for us mortal pain was not enough; in our reactivity a second arrow is shot, a mental arrow fired from ourselves to ourselves-this is our reaction to being hurt or distressed at the wrong end of outrageous fortune, or at times our reaction to our deeply held beliefs being challenged, and is usually made up of a fare amount of self defence, self criticism, self loathing, a feeling that we deserved what happened and in truth deserve more of the same; it’s as if it’s not enough to experience a passing pain or judgement, we need to hold onto to it, to internalise it as a kind of belief or story about us. We can also react in an angry way, lashing out-the challenged or hurt soul hurting back-though often it’s somebody else entirely we lash out to. We turn from pincushions to porcupines in seconds.

There’s a simple way of understanding this with an ARO formula

Action plus reaction equals outcome

Or, whatever happens to me, I react to and a (possibly bad) outcome is produced

However, it’s worth exploring this.

Our reactivity is really all the learnt thinking, feeling and behaviour we’ve amassed over our lifetimes. It’s all our cultural norms, our values, our conditioned responses, in part according to context and upbringing, in part according to being human beings, that become so embedded within us that they only take nanoseconds to spring into (re)action-in that nanosecond lies decades of unconscious assumptions and beliefs about what has to happen next. These are our deeply held “oughts”, “shoulds” and “musts” that command our reactions, that appear to be in control of us; it’s sometimes, in our reactivity, as if the tail was wagging the dog.

But although we cannot often control what happens to us, we can respond differently: we can, over time refuse to fire the second arrow. We can challenge our assumptions, beliefs and stories that are embedded within us so tightly, that we embody in tension, anger, in stressed and rigid sets of attitudes and beliefs that hold us back from living more relaxed, expansive, rewarding and happier lives. The formula changes:

Action plus response equals different outcome

ARO1 to ARO2

Whatever happens to me I respond with mindful reflection, out of compassion and choice, and a better outcome results

Of course, exploring this is hugely difficult for a person on their own; we’re often our own worst enemies when it comes to self inquiry and change, sometimes we need help to see our own set of limiting beliefs, norms, assumptions and reactions about and to the world and how these might be holding us back-who was it who said “the last person to notice the water is the fish”?

Counselling can help you explore and unpack your reactions and help you develop a more accepting and affirmative range of responsive behaviours, thoughts and feelings, so we become more mindful of our reactive thoughts and feelings when the first arrow of life strikes.

he fragrance of white tea is the feeling of existing in the mists that float over waters; the scent of peony is the scent of the absence of negativity: a lack of confusion, doubt, and darkness; to smell a rose is to teach your soul to skip; a nut and a wood together is a walk over fallen Autumn leaves; the touch of jasmine is a night’s dream under the nomad’s moon.” -C. Joybell C

Now that spring is officially upon us, and daffodils are blooming (even here in The North East!) our thoughts turn to nature, to getting out more, to our parks and our gardens. I’ve just finished reading a book by Nark Coleman called Awake in the Wild: mindfulness in Nature as a path of self discovery. The book almost literally invites us to take a walk into our senses, to -as Kabat-Zinn says “come to our senses” to come out of autopilot, into the body and use the senses as a place to stay present and be grounded.

When you are stressed, tired or anxious, notice how this plays out in and on your body; your senses literally tighten and close down. You compress. You become like James Joyce’s Mr Duffy who “lived a few feet away from his body”. But you can decompress, return to a felt experience of having your “senses open, returning to now”. This type of practice encourages you to open out again, to recognise, turn towards and befriend your difficulties, with a kindly embodied and sensory awareness, grounding in the here and now so we “taste the dharma” (Buddha, attrib.)

Together, mind and body form one powerful communication system looped into a continual interaction. We are often aware of what we are communicating externally, but we may be less in touch with what’s going on inside and how this in turn relates in a continual connection. Even though our minds and bodies do interconnect and communicate with us all the time, we may not always pay attention to the messages! 

Most of us are fortunate enough to have five senses: sight, sound, touch, smell and taste. Everyone’s sense system is totally unique to them because people experience things differently. This forms part of what we call ‘our map of the world’. Imagine eating an apple, with all of the sounds, tastes, smells and sights associated with it. If you try this activity with a friend and compare notes, you’ll find out just how much this can vary between two people. 

If you start to tap into your senses and really connect with them, far more information becomes available to you. This will become apparent in your internal state as well as externally, in the way you communicate and connect with others and the world at large; you literally become “one”. 

You can also take advantage of your senses to become more mindful and to savour the moment. This not only enables you to make the most of each moment but can also ground you and help you to tune in to what’s really happening as it happens. You’ll notice the experience in a very different way. Whether it’s something simple like washing your hands, watching rainfall, kissing your partner goodbye as you go to work, drinking a cup of tea or just looking out of a window – the world of your sense offers itself to you, time and time again.

A simple practice

• Pause
• Breathe in, breathe out
• Become more aware of your soothing breathing
• What are your thoughts?
• What feelings do you have?
• What do you see, what do you notice happening right now, without needing to judge or qualify it?
• What do you hear happening right now?
• What can you smell happening right now?
• What can you taste?
• What are you touching? How does that feel?
• Where is your body right now?
• What’s happening inside you right now?
• Recognise the sensory world around you as it is right now, grounding and being in this moment
• Senses open, return to now

Ah, not to be cut off/Not through the slightest partition/Shut out from the law of the stars./The inner-what is it?/If not intensified sky

-Rilke

the body keeps the score” Bessel van der Kolk

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

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

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

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

We need to approach this from another perspective altogether.

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

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

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

A simple practice

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

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

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

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

References

Michelle Foucault Discipline and Punish

Chris Germer The Mindful Path to Self compassion

James Joyce Dubliners

Bessel van der Kolk The Body Keeps The Score

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

Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now