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“the skilful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience” and “who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love-is the sum of what you focus on.” -Winifred Gallagher

“leaders can become prisoners of too much cognitive input when what they should do is improve the quality of attention they give to the here and now” Michael Chaskalson

 A sense of drive is one of single most important attributes leaders can have-the drive to create a successful team, a purposeful business, meet targets, focus, do deep work[1], have excellent presentation skills, strategic thinking and problem solving, giving meaningful feedback, leading change and building teams. These are, arguably, all first class, outward facing skills, yet great leaders are also known to just get through, keep going, coping well, past the point of true effectiveness-their drive leading to overdrive when even the fumes they were running on, run out.

Effective work is a balance between challenge and resource; some challenge (stress) can be a good thing, provided we have effective resources, though running on fumes is a familiar experience felt by many great leaders. We sometimes assume leaders are better at rising above the obstacles and stressors of everyday work life. However, stress can be a polarising state: It is either too challenging and overwhelms and shuts a person down, or galvanises them to face the challenges at hand-providing the right resources are present.

When we are stressed we are seldom present, when we are not present a significant amount of our lives are bound up in the opposite of being attentive and aware; we’re caught up in distraction and our unconsciously and automatically piloted behaviours. We disrupt our sense of presence or being here and now; we are no longer in touch with what’s happening now. Great leadership means being attentive, awake and being here and now: presence.

Lisa Feldman Barrett[2] writes about what she calls our “body budget”-our available resources that are the fuel, energy or budget that keeps us going, and if even great leaders keep going they will eventually blow their body budget. Coping, therefore, is not enough; great leaders have to manage their energy by bringing a sense of presence or mindful awareness to their work. This is the other side to the coin of great leadership; the capacity to move within to restore resilience and manage energy release.

 Mindful presence for great leaders

 Aetna, the third largest health insurer in the U.S. recently partnered with Duke University to study meditation and yoga. Researchers found mindfulness practices decreased stress levels by 28%, improved sleep quality by 20%, reduced pain by 19%, and improved productivity 62 minutes per employee per week. Aetna is now offering similar programs to employees as well as to its customers. Companies such as Google, General Mills, Blackstone and Goldman Sachs have shown that mindfulness training increases presence and decreases stress levels.[3] A mindfulness course at Google called Search Inside Yourself[4] is one of the company’s most popular training programs. Approximately 2,000+ employees have participated in it.

Six of the best practices to build up resources and bring presence into great leadership

1. Breathe: it doesn’t take long in the working day before your breathing is taking place from the chest upwards; research shows[5] that lower belly breathing both relaxes, oxygenates and revitalises the body budget. Inhale to the count of 4, then out to the count of 4: get a felt sense of your breath travelling down, into your body, imagine your breath coming out the pores of your skin in your feet.
2. Ground: rock and root. Feel yourself rocking on your feet then root into the ground (i.e. the floor of your office) as if you literally had roots that connect and anchor you into the earth. Stretch out-when we take part in cognitive work we inevitably contract our bodies; we need to stand up and move our bodies outwards to inhabit a wider and more relaxed, open body space.[6]
3. Walk: go for a walk, out of the office if you can, get some fresh air. If you can’t, try to find a part of the building that has a large window with a view: look into the horizon and expand yours.
4. Come to your senses: what do you see, what can you touch, taste, smell and hear? Doing deep work can leave us sensate deprived and we need to replenish this right throughout the day.
5. Watch your food intake, watch your sleep: sorry, but grandma was right after all, much of our body budget, and hence our presence can be improved by better food and better sleep. The key really is the Buddhist inspired middle way: not too much, not too little.
6. Recognise the EWS or early warning signs of a low body budget; are you getting distracted, snappy? Act now.

Another way of thinking about this by introducing pause(s) into your day, a pause for mindful presence and your resources to restore.

Finally, its crucial to know yourself, not just your drive but also your motivation and need to self-actualise-to realise the potentials that you may have kept in shadow[7], yet are also potential toxic blind spots that bring ruination to your leadership.

Be great: have drive-but get out of your own way and also have presence!

[1] See Cal Newport Deep Work

[2] Lisa Feldman Barrett How Emotions Are Made

[3] For a wealth of research see Michael Chaskalson’s book The Mindful Workplace

[4] See Chade-Meng Tan Search Inside Yourself

[5] Brown & Gerbag The Healing Power of The Breath

[6] The ex-NASA manager Ginny Whitelaw calls this going from tension to extension see her book The Zen Leader

[7] See Charley Morley Dreaming Through Darkness for an exploration of the human shadow

Our minds take us away from the present moment, from the life that’s here and now. We spend much of our thinking ruminating about the past, the future or beset in distraction, on an automatic pilot or in continuous entertainments.

Here, now though, is the only life we truly have and can live.

The life that’s here is not hard to find, but it is difficult to stay here; the habitual pull into distraction, away from here and now is compelling and powerful. To dwell or to be caught up in what appears to be unresolved issues from the past-a past which does not actually exist save in psychological time-and to be tied to a yoke of recycling old regrets, resentments, old pain and suffering, this seems part of our human  condition, yet to attempt to live in the past or to be caught up in the past and expect a change it is akin to living in a hell realm of impossibility; there is only the life that’s here.

We should learn from the past, seek to find the meaning in our past wounding but living there is simply to waste the life that’s here.

What is pain? Pain is an unpleasant physical sensation caused by illness or wounding. What is suffering? Suffering is what we do next after feeling pain, and suffering, our suffering is how we carry and often prolong our pain by living in and maintaining our story of suffering.

Where do we find pain? Where do we find suffering? Where do we not find these things? Love, work, children, religion, sex, food, shelter, race, age, achieving, education; all of the contexts of our life have the potential-and usually actually have-pain and suffering in the them; pain and suffering are stitched into the experience of being human. Though we will never be separate from this experience it does not have to define the totality of us, we do not have to live anchored in the past story of our pain and suffering.

There is another reason why we might be pulled into and spend time in past wounding. We have what is known as a negativity bias, where difficult to traumatic experiences leave more of mark on us than positive ones: bad is stronger than good. In our deep past, in evolutionary terms, a certain focus on negative or life-threatening events kept us aware and alive (of sabre toothed tigers at the cave door, so to speak). These threats would come and go and we could relax, though still be slightly wary of any possible threat.

In the 21^st Century things are different. Most of do not come across a sabre toothed tiger in our high street, yet we are overrun, at times over stimulated by experiences of challenge, low level but chronic threats (emails, material demands, workplace assessments and so forth), so much so that out threat level, our “antennae” for threat and negativity is always up, we get very little respite; if its not one thing, it’s the other.

In the midst of all this we get landlocked in an unconscious identification with our suffering past because our nervous system (itself a “nervous” system) is primed by social media, gaming, modern consumerism and urban living and a culture that values (overvalues?) psychological wounding in our early family experience to the detriment of life now. The past becomes a fetish we can’t let go of until this velcroing to the past is culturally sanctioned and seen as normal. It’s not: we don’t have to be identified with past wounds, a negativity bias is just that, a bias and when we recognise a bias we can work with it; when we’re aware of our biases we can make distinctions and choices.

Of course, we don’t always do this. We often store up the pain of the past deep inside us, deep in our muscles, our tissues and cells where it lives as tense and unprocessed energy, a not too subtle sense of physical contraction. After years of this we might come to identify with this part-life, this is me, we might say, I am the low one, the anxious one, the hurt one, the one who was wounded in the past and who is still wounded. We live as if we had no choice but to live this part-life, where another part of ourselves is buried deep in the shadows, living this life suppressed and clenched and continually holding back this wave of psychic pain.

So, we often either block our pain or drown it, fearful that we might drown if we allow our pain to be met in other ways. A colleague recently went on a psychological retreat where he was taken back to when he was a 6-year-old boy. A memory, a painful one, resurfaced. He is now haunted by that memory. Only a small amount of the work has been done here, the unprocessed past has risen, but requires learning from and discharging. Our pain and suffering can work to wake us up, wake us up from the trance like dream of the past and the future into the present moment and the life that’s here, but not if we only carry it and identify with it.

Past pain requires not resolving (I might want to go back into the past and address my perpetrator) but perhaps dissolving, by meeting and gradually staying present with the suffering, allowing it to be here instead of banishing it (where do we think it will go?) and laying out a table for it. A table for it? Sit with it, befriend it-it is your pain, your suffering, it’s you, it’s nobody else now. The past is long gone. What you are meeting, this is you, and surely it makes sense to make friends with as much as you as possible?

Once really seen, once really heard, your suffering has a chance to leave, and when it does the past takes its leave and the life that’s here reveals itself. Your identification with past pain and suffering falls away and the day is fresh, vital, new.

We have come to believe that the past is more powerful that the present, that our wounded or psychological time is us. This is untrue: reach out, taste, smell, listen deeply, look without trying to analyse, nothing in the past can take these primal sensations away.

Notice your minds tendency to wander, its compulsive habit to slip into the past and the future, into autopilot and distraction. Come back to your senses, to your body breathing here and now, notice the sheer presence inherent in your felt experience, the simple feeling of being here; the past has fallen away and you live the life that’s here. Bring your attention here. Ask yourself what’s happening right now, inside and outside me? Not yesterday, not tomorrow, but right here, right now. Not your idea of what could be happening-that’s merely a concept or construction and takes away the reality of the life that’s here, but your actual felt experience of right here, right now. Being here is being attuned, aligned to your senses, your embodied living.

You do not need to travel to find it, life is here, you are life, it has already found you and it is waiting with welcoming arms.

“the issue is in the tissue” Mariana Caplan

In his book “A New Earth” Eckhart Tolle writes of the pain body. He calls it a ‘psychic parasite’ that occupies us and causes us great suffering; he says everyone is touched by this to some extent. Tolle suggests that every physical and emotional pain that we experience leaves behind a residue of pain that lives on in our body, deep into our tissues, our muscles and nerves and even into our cells. It fuses with the pain from the past-which is where it belongs, in the past- and becomes blocked in our mind and body. This, of course, includes the trauma and pain we suffered as a child, caused by the unconsciousness of the world into which we were born; lageley the pain body is past pain and suffering that we keep feeding.
Tolle suggests that the pain body has two modes of being: dormant and active. A pain-body may often be dormant 90% of the time; in a very unhappy person, though, it may be active up to 100% of the time. Some people express themselves and live almost entirely through the drama and projections of their pain-body (there always seems to be a drama around them), while others may find it activated in certain situations, such as intimate relationships (where it can actually be seen most clearly and therefore healed-my romantic partner activates and can heal my pain body), or situations linked with past loss or abandonment, physical or emotional wounding, hurt or trauma. It can be easily triggered.

Note how much of this “lives” in the past.

Some pain-bodies are unpleasant to be with in the family, at work or socially but somewhat harmless, for example the work collage who seems to carry a chip on their shoulder or our in laws with their “strange” habits and neuroses (their view of us is very much the same). Others are vicious, narcissistic and destructive monsters, real demons. Some are physically violent; many more are emotionally violent. Some will attack people around us or close to us, while others may attack their host-us-via self-harming behaviours. Thoughts and feelings we have about our life then become deeply negative and self-destructive. Illnesses and accidents, depressions are often created in this way. Some pain-bodies drive their hosts to madness or suicide.

How do we see or “find” the pain body in ourselves?

What do we do about it?

As the Indian born teacher Krishnamurti says “the seeing is the doing”

We watch out for any sign of unhappiness in ourselves, in whatever form — it may be the awakening of the pain-body. This can take the form of irascibility, impatience, anger, a sombre mood, a desire to hurt, rage, depression, a need to have some drama in our relationship and polarise it.

The pain-body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence, and Tolle says it can only survive if it gets us to unconsciously identify with it. It can then rise up, take us over, “become Me,” and live through Me. We then become a victim or a perpetrator, We appear to want to cause pain, or suffer pain, or a dramatic mixture of both. There isn’t really much difference between the two in this sense.

The pain-body, which is the dark shadow cast by the ego, is actually afraid of the light of our awareness and consciousness. It is afraid of being found out. Its survival depends on our unconscious identification with it, as well as on our unconscious fear of facing the pain that lives in us. But if we don’t turn towards it and face it, if we don’t bring the light of our compassionate awareness and consciousness into the pain, we will be forced to relive it again and again like an endless recycling of the past.

So, the pain-body doesn’t want you or I to observe it directly and see it for what it is; it does not want us to do this “seeing” for then it is done. The moment we observe it, feel its energy field within us, and take our attention and compassion into it, as we might do with a scared and hurt child, the chain, the identification is broken. Another attitude comes into play, often known as mindful presence or the life that’s here, not the wounded death of the past that is the pain body. The pain body then does not become “resolved” but dissolved, it is seen through as a relic of the past; once it arrived to save us from harm, then it overstayed its welcome.

Time to let it go and live the life that’s here.

“drop the story”-Gangaji

“what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life”-Mary Oliver

Hooked on the past, hooked on the future

We have the gift of a very tricky human mind. We would prefer our minds to be more rational, balanced and insightful, yet we are often beset by rancorous thoughts and emotions that plunge us headlong into regrets, low mood and ruminations about the past, or worries and anxious anticipations about the future, mourning for what could have been or what was, fearful of what could or might be coming. Or we spend time daydreaming, lost in fantasy. It’s a wonder we ever get anything done, being so hooked, as we are, on distraction.

Distraction can be appear in the stories we live, stories about the past that we often believe determine the person we have to be now and in the future, stories of loss, rejection, hurt and wounding. These stories can go way back to our childhood, and at times we can never know the truth of these stories, but stories win not through truth but through repetition until we identify with them as if they feel like and are, cold hard facts. These stories, perhaps meant to be of help at first can, over time, actually diminish our growth, keeping us small. Who might best be served by your story staying small and wounded? Is this your real story? Does the hooking take you towards or away from the life that’s here?

This hooking; in Tibet they have the word shenpa, which points towards the involutory way we tense and stick to emotional distractions not just of the past and future but alcohol, drugs, sex, work; we’re taken away from the life that’s here and into a life that’s not here at all but a construction of our tricky minds

Hooked onto attention

The poet T.S. Eliot said Time past and time future/Allow but a little consciousness. But we can open out to a more vast consciousness, which in turn opens up our lives. For in reality, our whole world expresses itself in the life that’s here, not the life we had or the life we hope to get, but the life that’s here and now.

How do we get to the life that’s here?

The Tibetan for the opposite of shenpa is shenlock, which is recognising when we get hooked into distraction, stories of past or future, behaviours that seem to bring us pleasure but are in reality deeply unfulfilling and only serve to remind us our unresolved issues or woundings.

Shenlock is as much to do with attention as anything else. Our whole life could be said to be the result of where we put our attention to, for this focusses our lives; we can bring our attention to the past, to the future, old wounds or bitter stories, or we can bring our attention to the life that’s here.

Hooked into your senses

It’s often our mind that keep us in shenpa; using our mind is often akin to using gasoline to put out a fire. But if we place our attention onto our senses another world unfolds, a world not of the past, not of the future or any form of distraction or story but of here, what we smell, taste, hear, see and touch. It also opens us up the feeling of our being, our embodied selves.

This is the life that’s here.

So, this requires what mindfulness calls practice. This is a wonderful idea; it’s not about achievement or outcome, but practice, there is no failure or success, but there is finding your embodied self in the here and now, rich in its sensory awakening, charged with potential.

Then we might find that we’re not really going anywhere: we’ve already arrived and living the life that’s here.

For nearly twenty years now I’ve worked as a counsellor in a variety of settings. I’ve worked in a G.P. surgery for ten years and in three Sure Start Centres with young families for the same amount of time. I’ve worked in a domestic violence forum and as a generic and relationship counsellor in an agency setting. I now work almost exclusively in private practice.

I’ve noticed over the past 8 years or so that so-called mental health issues and problems seem to be on the rise; anxiety, stress, depression, fear, anger, angst and distraction are spiking. I believe there are many reasons for this, though its less the “reason” and more the “solution” that I want to focus on in this post.

Its become apparent to me that for most of us we tend to approach our difficult situations or “stuckness” with our cognitive mind; we try to problem solve, analyse or think our way out of difficult thoughts. I have come to see this as a kind of cul de sac in terms of effectiveness, and hence our future wellbeing and overall health.

I have watched as folk have taken thoughts to thoughts, emotions to emotions, thoughts to emotions and emotions to thoughts, and whilst this has brought some reprieve, clients have returned to my consulting rooms-the “problems” have returned, there has been little lasting change.

What might be missing is the part our body plays in all this.

Sure, many therapists of all modalities will ask “how does this feel” or inquire into a broad range of questions regarding physical pain in the body; yet the locus of evaluation will often default to the thinking mind.

Something’s missing, something crucial.

Perhaps what is missing is a sustained inquiry into how we might explore ways of being and living more fully as embodied humans.

I’m reminded of James Joyce’s quote from Dubliners: “Mr Duffy lived a few feet away from his body”-a sentence that perhaps sums up our Western malaise: we’re profoundly disembodied.

The Buddhist teacher Reginald Ray writes about how we use the body in modern culture; he calls our bodies a “donkey” which we often punish to satisfy our ego agendas. We do not take into account that our bodies might contain insight, wisdom or an intelligence we can learn from. In his book Touching Enlightenment Ray suggests that we can become more grounded in our sensory experience, often from the inside out (we are so used to experience our senses from the outside in we forget that it works both ways) to encounter the flow and attunement our body can have with the world, instead of the cognitive battle that takes place when we attempt to control the world and get our own way or simply manage things.

With practice we can allow our thoughts and emotions to drop into our body and allow an integration of thoughts-emotions-body. This in turn allows us to be with our experience in a fuller way, owning what we have come to disown and come to reject: the life of the body. If this experience is held cognitively or emotionally only, then it is not lived through, we remain stuck: at best we are given a kind of respite from our difficult thoughts and thinking, but they return.

In her book How Emotions Are Made Lisa Feldman Barrett writes about our “body budget” the available energy we have in out body and how our thoughts and emotions are intimately connected to this energy source. This is a budget we need to replenish via nutrition and rest, but also something that we need to pay attention to; it has a wisdom that we can learn from. There is an invitation here to not only attempt to “resolve” our difficult thoughts and emotions but also to let them “dissolve” in the spaciousness of somatic descent. This is a radical change in our relationship to mind and body.

We might shift our perception here, we might realise we no longer “have” a body but we “are” a body and begin to relate to a more integrated sense of self. Our soma, which we previously positioned as our body, is now experienced as more akin to a vibrational field that resonates deep with us and radiates back and forth in a never-ending feedback loop of connection to the world; we’re vaster and more interconnected than we thought, that thinking would allow.

We might experience a whole range of denied thoughts, repressed emotions and suppressed pain, parts of us we held as numb; we might shake with joy at finding new connections. And then-because this is experienced somatically-the energy here changes; we’ve become more embodied for the first time in our lives since we were little children.

Anxiety, stress, depression, anger, fear can all be held and fed in our minds, our thinking minds traying in vain to resolve what the soma can dissolve if it is lived all the way through.

We might best change our minds by changing the way we relate to our body.

See

Lisa Feldman Barrett https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Emotions-Are-Made-Secret/dp/1509837523/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1528972622&sr=1-1&keywords=lisa+feldman+barrett+how+emotions+are+made

Reginald Ray https://www.amazon.co.uk/Touching-Enlightenment-Finding-Realization-Body/dp/1622033531/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1528972575&sr=8-2&keywords=reginald+ray

Our life’s journey can be a rich mixture of enabling and disabling thoughts and actions. We find and share success, make mistakes, go down blind allies and often teeter on the edge of precipices. The spiritual path is no exception to this, in fact it might be the most complex path of all to walk in clarity. In walking this path, we often put our trust and faith into teachings and guides, methods and gurus who themselves are flawed and human (though that could be quite an advantage, too) but also so biased and locked into their cultural heritage that they persist in projecting their own shadow or unprocessed prejudices onto us. We find ourselves accepting this bias, which is akin to going down another blind alley.

How to we find a mature spiritual pathway, one that includes a sense of full self-examination and progress in its repertoire?

Over the last few years the American philosopher of spirituality Ken Wilber has outlined what he calls “a revolutionary spirituality of Growing Up and waking Up” (see first hyperlink). Now, this is a bold claim to say the least; most of us (myself included) might recoil from such hyperbole. But he could be right, and his work could provide us with a “new” spiritual pathway, one that is attuned to the multiple needs and contexts we find ourselves in in 21^st Century culture.

Here’s my understanding of it (please see the links below for a fuller one).

We engage in two different modes on the spiritual path: via a sense of spiritual intelligence (how we picture and perceive Spirit) and via a sense of spiritual experience (how we experience Truth or spiritual reality). Both of these are equally, radically, important and Wilber calls these two paths “Growing Up” and “Waking Up”. Growing Up is how we might meet and engage our cultural and psychospiritual edge and develop through distinct stages of maturation. Waking Up is how we directly, with little or no resort to conceptualisation, experience the now of Spirit in all of its manifest luminosity, the so-called nondual.

So, in essence there are two paths, Growing Up, which tends to be the one favoured by the West, and Waking Up, which tends to be the one favoured by the East. The two paths are rarely integrated.

Wilber claims to have done just that.

Wilber says that Growing Up as a path, in all of its psychosocial development, was only discovered about 130 years ago and can be seen in our psychological, political and social development (e.g. modern to postmodern values); Waking Up has been around via our shamanic past for about 50,000 years. Most spiritual systems do not have a sophisticated understanding of Growing Up, most psychological systems do not have a sophisticated understanding of Waking Up. So, on their own each path is half a path (at best). Wilber says “we have actually been training ourselves to be partial, broken people” (ibid). We now have a method to halt this.

This gives us an insight into why religious faiths can claim to be a great source of love and yet murder and war; they have not learned to Grow and realise their higher cultural and psychosocial potentials, for at whatever point a person has a spiritual insight or realisation it will be perceived and hence hold the bias at the level of that person’s psycho-social growth and cultural context. It also explains why exquisitely realised teachers can be racist, misogynist and unenlightened as regards the secular world: their sociocultural and psychological development is partial. This does not indicate the realisation(s) is false, merely partial or immature. At every rung on the ladder of our human development a different spirituality presents itself.

Wilber suggests 4 major stages of Growing Up:

1. Egocentric: it’s all about me
2. Ethnocentric: it’s all about my tribe or group
3. Worldcentric: it’s all about all of us
4. Kosmocentric: it’s all about all being

As we develop through the stages our identity grows wider, as does our care and concern.

So, Waking Up: achieving a realisation that both beholds and internalises ultimate truth to be reality, imbued with the nondual luminosity of all, is radically important. Growing Up: being able to interpret and be culturally sensitive to cultural and psychological development in order to enable moral action in the relative world: radically important. An experience of Waking Up is not enough, especially if it be experienced at a lower level of development.

Spirituality now has a pathway (an integration of two paths) that can provide and nurture a sense of an all-inclusive, all-embracing, authentic and mature engagement and response.

Psychological and cultural development might be the best method of Growing Up, meditation such as transformative mindfulness might be the best method of Waking Up.

Oh, and Wilber contends that upon integrating the paths of Waking Up and Growing Up we then become more fully engaged in Clearing Up (ourselves) and Showing Up more.

Sound like fun?

See

http://integral-life-home.s3.amazonaws.com/Wilber-ARevolutionarySpirituality.pdf

http://www.kenwilber.com/Writings/PDF/SummaryofMyPsychologicalModel_GENERAL_2000_NN.pdf

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Integral-Meditation-Mindfulness-Grow-Wake/dp/1611802989

“you are much more in the driving seat than you might think. You predict, construct and act. You are an architect of your experience”

-Lisa Feldman Barrett How Emotions Are Made

In his erudite and powerful book Deep Work, Cal Newport offers an account of Winifred Gallagher’s experience of her cancer and its treatment path. She in turn writes about how “the disease wanted to monopolise my attention, but as much as possible I would focus on my life instead.” Gallagher came to the conclusion, a conclusion shared my many who practice mindfulness, that “the skilful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience” and “who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love-is the sum of what you focus on.”

In other words, what we pay attention to constructs our world and is who we are.

In mindfulness, this power of attention-sometimes called focus or awareness-stands at the heart of the practice. Why? Because a significant amount of our lives are bound up in the opposite of being attentive and aware; we’re caught up in distraction and our unconsciously and automatically piloted behaviours. This is prevalent in our thinking, and perhaps most prevalent in our emotional life. It is in our emotional domain where we can get caught up in and be effectively sabotaged by a whole cascade of unprocessed feelings-bad, sad, and mad being the basics-that rob us of our awareness and present moment attention and equanimity.

In her ground-breaking book How Emotions Are Made the psychologist and neuroscientists Lisa Feldman Barrett contends that our emotions are not “facts” or “objects in here” (i.e. the brain) but rather the inevitable result of our brain’s drive to predict, categorise and make sense of our experience. Emotions are not pre-programmed but derive from our upbringing, personal history and the various contexts we find ourselves in. Thus, what we are embedded within we emotionally embody: our emotions are social constructs and by our emotions we construct and in turn re-construct our worlds (and our future) through these habits of neurological prediction and categorisation. Barrett suggests that instead of asking ourselves how real our emotions are, we would be better placed to ask ourselves how we came to perceive our emotions as real.

Barrett points out that we like to consider ourselves as rational creatures, citing the classic evolutionary model of the triune brain (human on a horse on a reptile) but says that in truth our rationality is very much what she calls a “bounded rationality” (I wondered what she might make of Ken Wilber’s claim that up to 65% of the planet’s human population is at a pre-rational stage of development). She further contends that our emotions are dynamically linked to our bodily sensations. When we experience an emotion, it impacts on what Barrett calls our “body budget” and writes “you cannot overcome emotion through rational thinking, because the state of your body budget is the basis for every thought and perception you have.” Here Barrett disputes the triune brain system that has been popular for decades, presenting us with a more complex and systemic map of how the brain works. In essence, Barrett makes a seamless link between emotions and the budget a body has to offer in terms of its energetic resources.

The interdependence of thoughts-emotions-bodily sensations and the practice of bringing attention and awareness to these domains has been for some time integral to the practice of mindfulness. If, as Barrett contends, we construct our worlds emotionally via our attention, wouldn’t it be good practice to hone our “attention muscle”?

This is what mindfulness does. In his (now famous) definition of mindfulness Jon Kabat-Zinn calls mindfulness “paying attention in a particular way; on purpose, in the present moment and nonjudgmentally”. Here we can see how highlighted intentionality is in mindfulness practice in the phrase “on purpose” and how important our attitude is in the whole process. Attitude is the other-wing-on-the-bird to attention; attitude and bringing awareness and attention to the emotions.

When non-judgmental attention is taken to our emotional repertoire we can become less caught up in them, as we are less inclined to “Velcro” to a palette of emotions with few colours; we begin to extend the shades, hues, tints and tones of our emotional repertoire, even perhaps learning new emotions and integrating them into our palette, such as exploring “tocka” the Russian for spiritual anguish or “voopret” the Dutch for the pleasure you feel about an event before you attend the event.  Extending our emotional range is this way can result in a lowering of what is often called our emotional hijacking. This being so, we are less likely to be caught up in, or fused to a net of hasty and unconscious emotions that create and sustaining a reactive self.

We can, therefore, live our lives with more mindful equanimity, response and choice-and in turn chose a better emotional world to live in, for a wider, more elegant system and repertoire of constructed emotions is literally a better constructed world.

“In order to grow and gain wisdom, first you must have the mud — the obstacles of life and its suffering” -Goldie Hawn

Once upon a time, in a land not very far away at all, there lived a lotus. The lotus made its home in a muddy pond and lived underwater, where the water is unmoving on the surface. Under the surface the lotus was surrounded by muck and mud and fish, insects and dirt. It would be easy for the lotus to be confused at times: why so much mud, and so relentless? It seems, for the lotus that the world is all about mud, mud, mud!

It’s true, at times the lotus is confused: what is the use of all this muck and mud? The lotus can feel quite overwhelmed by this dirt, being just a stem with only a few leaves and a tiny flower pod.

But this lotus has learned something; there in the dark, it has learned that it can take in the nutrients from the mud, little by little and it can actually use these nutrients to grow.

So, it does, and it grows, and the pod slowly rises and surfaces above the water, then the mucky water falls away, as the flower opens into the clean air, finally freeing itself from the harsh life below. It is then that the lotus slowly opens each beautiful petal to the sun, unmasking itself in the worldly beauty surrounding it.

In Buddhism, the bud of the lotus symbolises potential; the mud is suffering. Both, as Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh says are of an “organic nature…which means they are both transitory”

The lotus flower represents an awakening, a soulfulness; it is intimate with, but not constrained by, suffering. Just as the lotus flower emerges from the water we can emerge from our suffering, if we find a meaning that is soulful. The lotus could be thought of as awakened mind, a soulful quality of maturation that knows life cannot be lived without pain and suffering, yet this suffering need not be permanent, and it can offer us insight and build our souls into grace from grit.

At times we want to only banish our suffering, to kill it off. This is understandable, but perhaps a great mistake: for if we kill off our mud, how will our lotus flower begin to grow? How will we find our meaning and soul?

In mindfulness we are familiar with Gregory Kramer’s work Insight Dialogue. This is, essentially a way or re-relating that both extends and deepens our interpersonal skills, yet also allows us to re-relate to the pain and shadow of personal selves. In the midst of Kramer’s six elements of Insight Dialogue lies trust emergence. Here the invitation is to do just that, to mindfully sit with our experience in a more compassionate, insightful manner that enriches our sense of being. Can we trust the emergence of soul in our suffering hearts?

Perhaps this is what my teacher Rob Nairn meant when he asked us to see ourselves as a “compassionate mess”-that the very loam by which we find the nutrients to grow is our messy, suffering selves.

These are some of the little gems that I have picked up on my mindfulness journey, and links to other (re)sources that enlarge on my comments Part 2: number 11 to 21

#11 what’s the big deal about being in the present?

Distraction. It’s becoming one of the biggest habits of the 21st century, habitualised as are to TV, the internet, social media, gaming, any activity that takes us “out of ourselves”, which covers a lot of human activity. Even when we sit in meditation, distraction rears itself-we get distracted into the past or the future, we might begin to ruminate over past problems, unfinished business, psychological traumas from the past might be recalled; all this pulls our mood down. Or we might find our thoughts drifting into the future, worrying over what might, what could happen, if this occurred or that…this activates our anxiety, perhaps leading to severe agitation or panic. The last of the three possible distractions is just fantasy, lost in that dreamy romance with the next-door neighbour, or what it would be like to win the lottery. Now all of these distractions have their uses and their evolutionary origins (good to worry about the sabre-toothed tiger who might invade the cave and shut the cave door) but now the distractions around us at epidemic proportions. We can live our lives in a kind of autopilot mode, not truly being in touch with what’s happening right now.

So much of our lives can become unlived by focusing on the past or future.

In the present there are no low moods or anxieties, there is only here and now and a life lived. How to stay in the present? This is where the breath and sound and the body can be used as supports: the breath, sound and the body are here-and-now and nowhere else. Bringing our focus to the same brings us back to the present moment, which is where our life truly is. See https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-brain-work/201011/new-study-shows-humans-are-autopilot-nearly-half-the-time

#12 come to your senses

Another way of bringing ourselves to the present moment is by taking our attention to our senses. We tend to forget about these: touch, taste, smell, sight and hearing, yet the plethora of sensory events as we go about our world is vast indeed. We can bring a mindfulness of senses to our walking, even in a city we can focus on what we can smell on rain washed streets, see (and we can raise our eyes upwards) above department stores, taste as we walk past a street vendor selling food, touch as we walk through doorways, the concrete feel of buildings, walls. We can then apply this to a walk along the beach, in nature; the world is full of colour, scents, sights, sounds, textures and tastes to enchant our senses. See http://innerspacetherapy.in/mindfulness/mindfulness-exercises-senses/

#13 mindfulness: can it be bad for my health?

Every so often in the press an article will be written about how mindfulness can be “bad” for your mental or emotional health. Participants who go on 10-day retreats and/or 8-week mindfulness courses are interviewed after they have had bad experiences. Normally these folks have never had any so-called mental health problems before, proof that mindfulness “caused” their problems. Let’s unpack this a little. One of our habitual reactions when experiencing threat of any kind is both fight or flight-or freeze-and also one of suppressing the “response to the response”. We don’t always realise we are doing this, and it’s really part of our sympathetic nervous system which gets activated to protect us from threat. The problem is, long after the threat is gone, the suppression stays, and we live in a kind of unaware emotional or cognitive freeze. Mindfulness helps to thaw this out (psychotherapy helps, good relationships also help) and those folks who have suppressed difficulties in their lives might experience further difficultly practising mindfulness when the suppression lifts and the thaw occurs. Mindfulness is about awareness, not peace and calm: these are by products of mindfulness. But, crucially, mindfulness is not the cause, the cause is our unconscious threat system and the suppression that became a habit a long time ago. See https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/images/uploads/Keng-Mindfulness_Review_and_Conceptions.pdf

It’s important, therefore, when participating in a mindfulness course (as with any workshop or programme in self-development) to check it out first. Do some homework, look up the course leader and check him/her out. Call the course leader for a chat about the programme. Don’t do it alone, do dip your feet in the waters first (don’t plunge into a 10-day silent retreat) and make sure it is being delivered by a recognised teacher with plenty of experience. The UK has a listing of recognised affiliates who adhere to the mindfulness Good Practice Guidelines at www.ukmindfulnessnetwork.co.uk

#14 come to your body

James Joyce’s famous line in Dubliners “Mr Duffy lived a few feet away from his body” neatly sums up a whole raft of profound issues for most of us in The West: we live too much in our heads. Arguably, this starts at school, where cognitive results are privileged and prized before emotional or relational ones. The result is we’re too top heavy and at times deeply disconnected from our bodies. The American philosopher Ken Wilber contends that though we feel at times we are “losing our minds” we are not; it’s our bodies that we lost a long time ago, and the Belgian couples therapist Esther Perel suggests that our connection to our life, Eros, is arrived at from “the restoration of the body”. Mindfulness encourages us to develop a closer, more intimate relationship with our body, and in the mindfulness meditation the body scan, to experience the body from top to toe and from inside to outside. We are invited to begin recognising that we don’t “have” a body, we “are” a body and we can listen and relate more fully to our own embodied connection with ourselves and the world at large. This is often called proprioception, our sixth sense, a felt sense of awareness or presence. See http://dharmawisdom.org/teachings/study-guides/mindfulness-body

#15 from content to nature of mind

We all have a story, we all have a context in which we live; in fact, we all have multiple stories and contexts, ever enlarging with our lived experience. My story is not your story, nor yours mine. The content of our stories are very different and would appear infinite in variation. Yet our natures are very much the same, and it is here where mindfulness takes our attention, our awareness to. For example, we all have different stories but we all create stories, this is in the nature of our minds. We all have a habitual tendency to like, dislike or find things neutral, and we all have wanting minds that are rarely satisfied. Mindfulness brings us into a kinder, more intimate relationship with the nature of our minds; we are then freer to respond more clearly to our stories, seeing them as just that. The American writer Gangaji invites us to “stop telling our story right now [and] you can wake up in the dream of your life.” Perhaps all of the content of our minds are just stories, not the fullness of us. See http://vividlife.me/ultimate/22087/read-what-is-your-story-by-gangaji/

#16 trust your guts

Our body is actually composed of more bacteria than cells and most of those bacteria reside in our gut, which is sometimes called the enteric brain. Emotional and psychosocial factors can-and will- trigger symptoms in the gut, and its arguable that we receive these gut sensations before we process them as thoughts. Our gut microbiota play a vital role in our physical and psychological health, if we pay attention to the messages sent. It is clear that the brain and the gut are intimately connected; most of us can relate to the experience of having butterflies in our stomach, or to a gut-wrenching feeling, and we are often told not to ignore our “gut reaction”” when feeling unhappy or disconcerted about something. Our thoughts and emotions can trick us, but our guts are generally truth tellers extraordinaire. So, bring a mindful awareness to what your gut is telling you, the sensations playing out; physical, emotional and cognitive health are all fundamentally connected. See https://sagecareercoaching.com/mindfulness-and-your-gut-how-they-can-work-together/

#17 learn to cook

Most of have incredibly busy lives and are used to getting things done fast and making progress quickly. Mindfulness tends not to occur this way, and though you might feel quite different after a weekend workshop, it will probably take years for real change and a feeling of stability in that change to occur. So, we must learn to cook, and what we are cooking is ourselves, our practice. And just as a real cook has learned both the right ingredients and the right cooking skills over years, and patience and timing in his or her repertoire, so it would be wise for us to have the same in our mindfulness practice. We can find ourselves rushing to teach mindfulness after a few months of practice, and we might find at work our manager asking us to take the staff through mindfulness at work exercises: all these things are to be resisted. Practice on your own, in silence, in a group, and let your practice develop, mature and season. Sit, and sit some more. See http://www.rachaelkable.com/blog/6-mistakes-you-can-make-on-your-mindfulness-journey

#18 find your teacher

Essentially a good teacher is a good map that helps you navigate the territory you are exploring in mindfulness. A good teacher should have a number of qualities: a sense of embodied practice, that they speak from the heart and from their depths, not from a notebook or by rote. They should have a sense of humour, a highly developed sense of compassion and insight into human nature and you should feel that they are here from you. It is not uncommon for students in this capacity to feel they are falling in love (devoted) to their teacher, yet at the same time the teacher should encourage you to question what they say and be largely non-defensive about this. A good teacher will have a sense of lineage about them; for example, my teacher Rob Nairn has a connection with the Tibetan Buddhist Kagyu tradition. I feel he has roots in this respect and is guided by wise guides himself. Your teacher should be your teacher, and you should be wary of taking on others teachers who do not fit you. Of course, books can be great teachers, and your teacher might be in another country-you might never meet them, and that’s okay, it’s not really them but the quality of teaching that might matter most. See http://oxfordmindfulness.org/news/know-someone-teaching-mindfulness-course-appropriately-trained/

#19 why bother doing mindfulness?

There comes a point for nearly all of us where we feel a little stale in our practice; we’re on the cushion we’re off the cushion and nothing really is happening new. Why bother? Our intention to practice, and our motivation to practice mindfulness is here crucially important: simple question to ask yourself, why am I practising mindfulness? keeping this question (and you don’t really need to have or get an answer) keeps the practice fresh-there is no right or wrong answer to the question, and the of you get an answer it may change over time (your motivation might change). Bring your awareness again and again to your motivation, it keeps your practice vivid, meaningful and alive. See https://www.mindful.org/meditate-with-intention-not-goals/

#20 beware the inspirations!

Beware and keep in a doubting frame of mind regarding the cliched, pithy takes on mindfulness that seem to have it packaged as a stressbusting course or appear in social media as “inspirations”. Take a deeper dive into the practice, lookup some Buddhist teachings around dharma or the neuroscience surrounding mindfulness. There is a depth to mindfulness that most blogposts don’t even approach. Take your time to find the depth in mindfulness’ two and a half thousand-year lineage, it will pay you back hugely. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness

Bonus: #21 practice breath by breath

By focusing on the inbreath and the outbreath in a fuller way, letting the breath travel down to the belly, we can become aware of our mind’s tendency to jump around from one thing to another, often known as “monkey mind”. This simple practice of breathing in and breathing out brings us back to the present moment and all the experience therein. We can also place a little more attention on the outbreath, this focusses our attention on our parasympathetic nervous system, or the part of that is calming, brings a sense of peace and spaciousness to our being. This allows us not only to be in the present moment, moment by moment, but also to allow our unsettled mind to settle, like snow inside a snowglobe, to develop a closer relationship to our embodied nature, in relating to ourselves and the world in amore calm, clear way. Practice your mindfulness one breath at a time. See http://socialwork.buffalo.edu/content/dam/socialwork/home/self-care-kit/breathing-in-thich-nhat-hanh.pdf

These are some of the little gems that I have picked up on my mindfulness journey, and links to other (re)sources that enlarge on my comments
Part 1: number 1 to 10

#1 anytime anywhere meditation
In our busy lives it can seem hard-impossible-at times to bring mindfulness into our everyday living. This is possibly because we have an idea that meditation is strictly the province of monks who sit for one or two hours at a time. But we can bring mindfulness, a sense of awareness and presence into our lives anytime and anywhere. Here’s how: find a place to pause. Take a breath in for 3 or 4 seconds, then out for the same. Do 4 rounds of this, then return to your natural breathing rhythm. Slowly recognise your environment, the colours, shapes, textures, scents, sounds and smells. If you can, reach out and touch, hold something in your hand. Breathe. Let the play of sound in your environment come and go; open up your awareness to your body and the sensations flowing through it as they come and go. Feel your feet on the floor. Let your awareness expand outwards, as if it was an ever-growing field of awareness as vast as an empty sky. Be present with this presence. Breathe and be. See https://www.mindful.org/get-good-pause/

#2 always here, always free
We’re beset by the things that we find difficult and distressing, that hurt us and mark us, leaving their negative influence on us. These things trap us, bind us, yet also remind us that the essence of mindfulness and mediation is awareness, and we have-or rather are-an awareness that is as boundless as an empty, vast, cloudless sky. To continue the metaphor, our thoughts, emotions and sensations, our beliefs-enabling and disabling-are akin to clouds that roll through the sky; our awareness is akin to the sky itself, which is never troubled or marked by weather. It is always here and always free, and all we have to do is switch our attention and focus on awareness itself. See https://mindful.stanford.edu/2015/06/thought-clouds/

#3 thoughts are not facts
Here they come, out of nowhere, a whole raft of thoughts and thinking thinking thinking that we grasp onto and convince ourselves that they are factually real. How can they be? They go, and new(ish) thoughts pop up. Its endless! We know that thoughts self-arise (come from nowhere), self-display (make a bit of show of themselves) and self-liberate (go), endlessly, and there is no end to this. This is not a problem, it’s the middle bit, the self-display that becomes problematic, for here we either push away the thought or grasp onto it (neurologically it’s the same act) thus reifying thoughts as fact. They are not, just fleeting clouds in the sky of our awareness. Don’t trust them, or your feelings or emotions, they are too fleeting to be of significance. See file:///C:/Users/Uer/AppData/Local/Temp/all-handouts-for-session-6.pdf

#4 anything, everything meditation
Mindfulness meditation is often promoted as relaxation, stressbusting, a way of helping us with mental health issues such as anxiety, depression of panic attacks. Mindfulness works well in these domains, and there is a lot of good evidence to support its use in psychological support, but these are the by-products or side effects of mindfulness-good reason to practice mindfulness by not really what mindfulness is about. Mindfulness is about cultivating awareness. Awareness of what? Anything and everything. It is about letting, allowing your experience, to be as it is without holding onto it, letting every cloud in the sky of your mind, every thought, emotion and feeling, every physical experience to play out, as it is, without identifying with it. This is easier said than done, we can get a lot of very pleasant experiences in meditation, but opening the doors wide to everything? That’s got to be scary! The answer to this is not to open the doors wide, but to let the content of thoughts, emotions and feelings to enter while the door is ajar-in other words, a little at a time so you do not become overwhelmed. Mindfulness is a faculty that can be cultivated, and the sky of your awareness without holding can grow vaster still with practice, and with practice can hold anything and everything. See https://www.tarabrach.com/meditation-mindful-awareness/

#5 loving the waterfall
For most of us, when we begin mindfulness meditation it gets worse. What gets worse? Thoughts, thoughts that we had in manageable quantities, that trickled or flowed like a brook are now a waterfall of chaotic thinking thinking thinking. How is this supposed to help? In reality your thoughts are not increasing, but your awareness of your thought stream or waterfall is: welcome to you! Don’t suppress this, let the waterfall fall, just as if you were standing underneath an actual waterfall, it will calm itself-in time-if you just let it. This is all going well. This is purification happening as it is happening. See http://tathaastu.com/tumbling-like-a-waterfall-thoughts-and-your-meditation-practice/

#6 the path and the goal
We’re a goal orientated nation; actually, the western world is obsessed with goals and outcomes, at work we’re performanced managed until our eyes bleed. Mindfulness is not goal orientated, it cares little for outcome or measurement, it stands to one side of the striving workhorse that we bring to our everyday lives. There is nowhere to be, nowhere to go, nothing needs to change. Mindfulness is about path, and the path is practice, not about getting it right or wrong, but practice. The path is practice, the practice is mindfulness and mindfulness is awareness. The path is awareness. No goal, no outcome. See https://www.mindful.org/meditate-with-intention-not-goals/

#7 no straight lines
Mindfulness comes and goes, we are “up” and then we are “down” with our mindfulness practice-and our lives. There are no straight lines, and we are wiser when we do not expect things to be straightforward, but more complex. See https://www.mindful.org/getting-results-from-mindfulness-and-letting-go-of-them/

#8 life is a pain
Or rather, pain happens. In your meditation make a distinction between pain-which we cannot avoid-and suffering, the story that we create from pain. In this sense our suffering becomes the “suffering in our suffering” an endless loop of more. To become more mindful of our suffering is to roll back the story and be with the pain, learn how to carry it, be with it, learn from it, discover it’s meaning and wake up from it: pain wakes us up and encourages us to make an empathic connection to all, it encourages a kinship with all created things. See https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mindfulness-in-frantic-world/201501/can-mindfulness-meditation-really-reduce-pain-and-suffering
#9 take what you get

Whatever arises in meditation, this is what you get. Don’t judge or evaluate it but do inquire into it; self-inquiry is another hallmark of meditation. Be curious about the mindfulness of thoughts, concepts and emotions, bodily sensations that arise and reflect on these things. Is there a past connection? Are they familiar to you? Have you been carrying them for a while? Forever? Can you learn to let go, bit by bit? Do you need them at this moment in your story, in your life? Perhaps they were useful at one time, but not now? What is the view of awareness in all this? See https://mindfulminutes.com/video-mindfulness-self-inquiry-jon-kabat-zinn-byron-katie/

#10 compassion
Our mindfulness can be dry with only inquiry as a companion. It can also encourage us to further turn away from difficult thoughts and emotions. This is why we need self and other compassion; it is crucial on the path. In essence this is about re-relating to ourselves not with the striving self-criticism that we ordinarily have but finding greater degrees of self-acceptance and compassion for all our humanness. Here is where we approach our messy selves. My teacher Rob Nairn suggested that we should accept ourselves as a “compassionate mess”. Find more on compassion here http://wtm.thebreathproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/COMPASSION-HANDOUT.pdf