You are the sky, not just the weather

When we are troubled by thoughts and feelings that seem to hook us and stay with us, it can be helpful to think about the difference between the observing and thinking self.

Your observing self is like the sky. Thoughts and feelings are like the weather. The weather changes all the time, but no matter how bad it gets, it cannot harm the sky in any way. The mightiest thunderstorm, the most terrible hurricane, the most severe winter blizzards – none of these can hurt or harm the sky. And no matter how bad the weather, the sky always has room for it. And sure enough, sooner or later, the weather always, always changes.

Sometimes, we can forget that the sky is there – but it’s still there. And sometimes we can’t see the sky because it is hidden from us by clouds. But if we can rise high enough above the clouds – even the thickest, darkest, thunderclouds – sooner or later we will reach clear sky – stretching before and around us in all directions – boundless and pure.

More and more, you can learn to tap into this part of you: a safe space inside from which to observe and make room for difficult thoughts and feelings.

Simple ways to be present

Being present in your everyday actions seems to be a key ingredient for good mental and physical well-being. Here are three ways for you to practice being more present – rather than off thinking about one thing – often in the past or the future – while doing something else now. The more you practice, the better you will get.

These exercise will help you to centre yourself and engage with your environment. Practice them throughout the day, especially at times when you find yourself caught up with your thoughts and feelings.

Notice five things

1. Pause for just a moment
2. Look around and notice five things that you can see
3. Listen carefully and notice 5 different things that you can hear
4. Notice five different things that you can feel in contact with your body – perhaps your trousers against your leg, the bracelet on your wrist, the air on your face, your feet upon the floor, your back against the chair
5. Finally, the all of the above at the same time. Notice how much there is going on all around you and in contact with you.

Take ten breaths

1. Take ten slow, deep breaths. Focus on breathing out as slowly as possible until yours lungs are completely empty – and then let your lungs fill up by themselves
2. Notice the sensation of your lungs emptying. Notice them filling up again. Notice your ribcage, rising and falling. Notice the gentle rise and fall of your shoulders
3. See if you can let your thoughts come and go as if they were passing cars, driving outside your house
4. Expand your awareness from your breathing – notice your breathing and your body – then look around the room and notice what you can see, hear, smell, touch and feel.

Drop anchor

1. Plant your feet into the floor
2. Push them down – notice the floor supporting you
3. Notice the tension in the muscles of your legs as you push your feet down
4. Notice your entire body, and the feeling of gravity flowing down through your head, spine and legs into your feet
5. Now look around. Notice what you can see and hear around you. Notice where you are and what you’re doing.

Just a few minutes each day – that’s all it takes. Try it regularly, little and often

Pain and love – two sides of the same coin

Suppose you had a choice:

• Option 1: you never had to experience a painful feeling ever again. That’s never. BUT, it means that you lose all capacity to love and care. You care about nothing and no-one. Nothing will matter any more. No one matters. Life becomes meaningless because you don’t care about anything whatsoever.
• Option 2: You get to love and care. People matter to you. Life matters to you. You care about what you do, and what happens. You care about friends and family. You get to build loving relationships. Life becomes meaningful. And where there is a gap between what you want and what you’ve actually got, painful feelings show up.

Which option do you choose?

This choice puts us face-to-face with the human condition. If we are going to love and care, then we are going to feel pain. Love and pain are twins, joined at the hip. In order to avoid pain, some people try desperately not to want or care or love. They can try to do this in an amazing multitude of ways, from alcohol and drugs, to social withdrawal, to declaring that ‘Nothing matters‘, or ‘I don’t care about anything or anyone‘. Unfortunately, these attempts are doomed to fail – they actually end up causing more pain, not less.

Most people choose Option 2. But what if you chose Option 1? Maybe the pain you are experiencing right now is so unbearable, that it seems like the only choice. And maybe life right now is so painful that you’d do anything to stop the pain, no matter what the cost – getting out-of-your-mind-drunk, getting high, or staying in bed all day. Maybe these are ways of trying to stop the pain. I wonder how that is that working for you, and if you find yourself in this position, I encourage you to do the same. I wonder if these strategies aren’t actually making life less painful of more painful?

p.s. there’s a really good extract in Douglas Coupland’s Generation A which alludes to exactly this sort of false choice, and the consequences of losing love. Let me know if you’re interested, and I’ll send you the page numbers of the section I mean – I don’t have the book to hand right now.

Thinking self, observing self, and the difference between the two

There’s a part of you that chatters away inside your head. It never shuts up. It always has something to say. That’s your thinking self. It’s probably chattering away right now. I’d be surprised if it wasn’t. What’s your chattering mind, your thinking self, saying to you right now?

Sometimes, when having a conversation between two people, say if you and I met and talked, it can be helpful to think of 4 people in the room. There’s you and me, and then there’s your mind and my mind. Your mind in going to chatter away to you, and my mind will chatter away to me. But what’s really important is what happens between me and you, not what our minds have to say.

The differentiation between who is doing the talking – you or your mind – helps us to start to see the difference between the thinking self and the observing self. The thinking self is your chattering mind. But there’s a part of you that can listen in to the chattering mind, and can hear what it is saying and what it sounds like. Try writing down what your chattering mind is saying to you. Try it now. Get a piece of paper, and write down what it is saying.

So, what did it say? Maybe This is stupid, or You can’t do this.

The thing is, that this is just a string of words. You can choose to believe what your chattering mind is saying, or you can step away and observe it for what it is. A string of thoughts. The mere act of stepping away helps you to engage your observing self – taking a helicopter view of what is going on in your internal world – recognizing that there is a lot going on, and that you don’t have to be defined by it. The thoughts don’t go away – but you aren’t so vulnerable to them taking up 100% of your attention, and you’re a little bit more free to pay attention to other things.

Writing your thoughts down helps you to create a bit of distance between your thinking self and your observing self, and also helps to stop you being so fused with your thinking self that you can’t see anything else.

Try it out – let me know how it goes.

You are not your thoughts

We can get so caught up in the thoughts we have, we can believe them, no matter what the situation. Here’s a brief exercise to help you create some space between you and the thoughts you have. You and your thoughts are not one and the same. You have thoughts, sure. But you don’t have to accept them at face value. You can create some distance and view them from a different place – not close up so that you can’t see the wood from the trees.

Here’s one way how:

• Find a comfortable position, and either close your eyes or lower your gaze – whatever suits you best and where you are.
• Imagine you are sitting by the side of a gently flowing stream. You can see leaves flowing past on the surface of the water. Imagine it however you like.
• For the next few minutes, imagine every thought that pops into your head, place it on a leaf and let it float on by. Do this, regardless of whether the thought is positive or negative, painful or pleasurable. Even if they make you feel great, pop them on a leaf and let them float on by.
• If your thoughts stop, just watch the stream. Sooner or later, your thoughts will start up again. Take your time.
• Allow the stream to flow at its own speed. Don’t force it to speed up. You’re not trying to wash the leaves away – you’re allowing them to come and go in their own good time.
• If your mind says, This is stupid, or I can’t do it, place those thoughts on a leaf too.
• If a leaf gets stuck, let it hang around. Don’t force it to float away.
• If a difficult feeling comes up, such as boredom or impatience, simply acknowledge that its there. Say to yourself, Here’s a feeling of boredom, or Here’s a feeling of impatience. Place those words on a leaf and let them float on by. Then place those words on a leaf, and let the leaf float on by.
• From time to time, your thoughts will snare you, and you’ll lose track of this exercise. This is normal and natural, and it will keep happening. Our minds are good at it.. As soon as you realize it’s  happened, gently acknowledge it, and then start the exercise again.

This worked for me pretty well yesterday, when I found myself getting hooked up on certain thoughts that trouble me every now and again. Let me know how it works for you.

The problem of perfection

“Problem? What problem? I’m proud of being a perfectionist!”

That almost sounds like me talking sometimes. What’s wrong with being a perfectionist? You get good stuff done, working hard all the way, right? Maybe some of the time. Always hard-working – possibly – but not always getting stuff done. Sometimes, getting stuff done can be compromised by being so driven.

Perfectionists start by setting very high standards. You want to be brilliant and the only way to do this is by expecting the best of yourself. But in the perfectionists’ case, ‘the best’ becomes perfection. That automatically becomes a problem. Perfection isn’t a high standard. It’s an impossible one.

Try this:

Imagine you are at the World Breathing Championships. Everything depends on you being able to breathe perfectly. How are you going to do that?

I guess you might eventually come to the conclusion that there are many ways to breathe well, depending on what you are trying to do. And even then, there might be many ways to breathe well to enable you to do that particular thing. Trying to breathe perfectly becomes meaningless.

• At this point, let’s imagine a work-related goal, you can maybe see that you can’t reach your perfection goal. You keep trying, but you always seem to miss – ever so slightly. You hear other people give you good feedback about your performance, but you’ve a way of dismissing that. You like to point out how your performance wasn’t quite up to par. Other people might tell you to ease up on yourself. But inside, you tell yourself that is rubbish and you need to push yourself harder or you’ll never achieve your goal.
• Maybe you start to feel like you spend a lot of time feeling like you’re not quite hitting the mark. You feel down but at the same time aware of the burden on your shoulders. You might start to feel like giving up, or avoiding what it is you were trying to do.
• Maybe now, you start to give yourself a hard time. You chastise yourself for not succeeding, and try to get yourself up again with punishment and self-critical language. You think to yourself, “If I just try harder, I can do this!”. You harden yourself for the next round, only to find yourself in the same cycle again, felling more and more despondent and miserable.

The perfectionist loop is completed. Sound familiar? Welcome to low self-worth, maybe even feelings of anxiety or depression. Maybe you feel like you are in a fog, or you think that you won’t bother doing the things you love because you feel you aren’t good enough to participate. Maybe you expect relentlessly high standards of your team-mates (or family members) too. You can perhaps find yourself being rigid or impatient, even though you don’t mean to be. Not a pleasant place to be.

What can you do?

• Acknowledge that perfectionism isn’t a desirable end-point. The challenge then is to notice your thinking and whether it is aligned with this standpoint.
• Realistic and challenging goals are the way forward. Where are you right now, and what should your next steps be?
• Set short-term goals. Don’t set any more until you reach that goal. Allow yourself to feel the sense of achievement, instead of denying yourself and moving on to the next one.
• Watch out for ‘should’ and ‘have to’ in your language, especially internally. If you think about what you ‘want’ to do instead, you’ll perhaps be surprised about how different that feels.
• Try thinking excellence instead of perfection.
• Playing the long game also allows you flexibility for when mistakes happen, or progress is held up.
• Watch out for black and white thinking. You don’t just succeed or fail – it is much more likely to be a mix of effective and not-so-effective.
• Cultivate an  awareness of your expectations of yourself and others. Practicing self-compassion, and compassion for others will help you to access more reasonable thoughts.
• Love mistakes. See them as ways to learn. Make learning not to make the same error over and over again your new goal.
• Pay attention to the positive feedback you get – reflect on it, and resist the temptation to brush it off and move on. Appreciate it,and appreciate noticing and giving it to others too.
• Remind yourself that you are not lowering your standards – you are re-defining them.

Let me know how you get on.

 

Wanting to be in control is perfectly normal – but sometimes, it just doesn’t work

All this stuff I write about noticing, accepting, being mindful. It can be hard to get your head around, and even if that isn’t a problem, it can be tricky to practice in our everyday lives.

The truth is that we are all in the same boat. Most of the things that you do – think about the future when you could be experiencing now, losing connection with the present, trying not to think about thoughts and emotions that trouble us – are all things that I do at times. Almost everyone does.

We all get caught up in the same agenda. We live in a society where we are convincingly sold a myth that we should feel good all the time – we get this from all angles. And everyone likes to feel good – no-one likes to feel bad. So we try to get rid of unpleasant feelings. And we keep on doing it, even though it doesn’t work in the long run and we often end up struggling and suffering as a result.

There are a few reasons as to why we do this:

1. We buy into the myth that humans are naturally happy and we should feel great most of the time
2. Because when we do try to control our thoughts and feelings in the short-term, quite often it actually works. So we try this as a long-term strategy too.
3. We think that this works for other people, so we must be doing it wrong. If we keep on trying, we will get it right, like everyone else seems to.
4. And this is the main reason above all – this is the way our mind has developed to solve problems. The essence of a problem is that it is something we don’t want. And a solution means to avoid it, or get rid of it. In the physical world, that works really well. Stray dog trying to steal your picnic? Get rid of it: shoo it away, or throw a stick at it. Crap weather? Well, you can’t get rid of that, but you can avoid it – stay indoors, or wear protective clothing. Dry ground, no good for farming? You can choose to plant elsewhere, or get rid of it by irrigation. So, our mind is like a problem-solving machine which is great for the external world, and it is very good at it. So if it is very good at the material world, it is only natural that our mind tries to do the same with our internal world – the world of thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories and urges. What we learn is that what we try in the external world only works in our internal world in the short-term, if at all. And often, even if it does work, we end up creating a lot of pain and struggle for ourselves in the process.

Do you think you can control what happens in your internal world? Completely?

Try this:

• Take a second and remember how you navigated to this web page today. Done that? Ok, now delete that memory. Wipe your history. Just get rid of it.

How did you get on? You can’t completely get rid of it. Try another one.

• Imagine that I have recruited you to a completely unethical experiment where I have wired you up to a lie detector. This detector will detect the tiniest bit of anxiety in your body. You can’t kid it at all. Even the teensiest hint of anxiety, and the bells will sound. And in this experiment, you’re not allowed to feel even a mere hint of anxiety. And if you do, I’ll pull the lever and you will be electrocuted. What would happen?

You can’t control what you feel. Not completely. Ask yourself, why are you continuing the struggle?

If it is because you don’t know what else to do, think again. There is plenty you can do. Flick through some of the pages of this blog, elsewhere on the web, or consider developing a coaching relationship.

Psychosocial support after disasters

The work I do at the Joint Centre for Disaster Research is chiefly focused on psychosocial support before, during and after disaster events. I’ve written about this extensively on my companion blog after the current sequence of Canterbury earthquakes began.

The videos I’m posting up now take you – dear interested reader – through a presentation I did three years ago (note the terrible beard) which walks you through the major issues to think about. In this series of videos, I cover:

• Foundations of Psychosocial Support
• The Principles of Psychosocial Support
• The IASC Guidelines / residual difficulties for people after emergencies
• Disasters and their impact upon mental well-being – Part 1
• Disasters and their impact upon mental well-being – Part 2
• Disasters and their impact upon mental well-being – Part 3
• Disasters and their impact upon mental well-being – Part 4
• Disasters and their impact upon mental well-being – Part 5
• Ordinary reactions to extraordinary events
• Psychological First Aid
• The process of helping
• Guidance on helping children and adolescents
• Assisting adults and older adults
• Individual and community supports after the Canberra bush fires
• Learning from the Matata flood and landslide
• Taking care of staff and yourself
• Staff and staff care
• Risk communication
• Some final tips and examples

This is the link to the YouTube Channel, and the whole suite of fact sheets and video files can be found here.

Let me know if you find it helpful.

The power of noticing emotions

In this series of blog posts, I have talked about the importance of acceptance, and how suppression can work in the short-term, but only serves to rebound and even intensify our difficulties. In order to accept a feeling or sensation (or a thought), we have to notice it first. The metaphor of observing like a curious scientist helps to foster openness and curiosity towards our own feelings – approach instead of avoidance. The simple act of observing or noticing a feeling with curiosity rather than being caught up in in often leads to acceptance – and if not, at least it is a step in the right direction.

Here’s a guide to how to take that step in the right direction:

• When you have a feeling, notice that you are having it. Notice where you feel it. Notice where it is most intense.
• Many people (but not all) find breathing into a feeling helps them make room for it. Slow, diaphragmatic breathing seems to be particularly helpful. So try noticing the feeling, and gently breathing into it.
• When you notice the feeling, and where you feel it, see if you can just imagine opening up around it a little. Give it some space.
• If this feeling was an object, ask yourself what it would look like? When you notice the feeling, you might notice that it starts to change. Notice if it does, but don’t force it. Does it get smaller? Perhaps it might get bigger. Remember though – no matter how big the feeling gets, it can’t get bigger than you. So notice it, observe it, breather into it, and make room for it.

Losses that we experience can leave us with painful feelings – this is only natural. You can notice and make room for those feelings without getting bogged down in a struggle with them. This will leave you much more able to engage fully with life, and doing what matters to you. When we recognise that it is normal and natural to have painful feelings – that it is an unavoidable and inevitable part of being human – we are more likely to accept them. If you have a story that you tell yourself that normal people don’t feel this way – there must be something wrong with me, this is going to have a big influence on your attitude towards your feelings.

Here’s an exercise to try – read the opening paragraph first

Most people agree (with some quibbling around the edges) that there are nine basic human emotions. As you read through the list below, I want you to classify them as either negative / bad emotions, or good / positive emotions. One or the other – thumbs-up or thumbs-down – no hesitation – just your immediate response.

Ready? Start reading.

• Love
• Joy
• Curiosity
• Anger
• Fear
• Sadness
• Guilt
• Shock
• Disgust

I’m guessing that you gave the thumbs-down for 6 out of the 9 basic, normal human emotions. Does that tell you anything about what it means to be human? Two-thirds of the emotions that every person will experience throughout life do not feel great. But we live in a feel-good society that tells us we should feel good all the time.

How realistic is that?

• Self-compassion – being caring and kind to yourself – adds another dimension to acceptance. Let’s go back to you noticing a feeling – which may be one you don’t like. Place a hand on where you experience most intensely, and see if you can open up around it. Hold it gently.
• Sometimes, we want to focus on our emotions, like when we are learning to notice them (like now), or if we are grieving. At other times, if we are too intently focused on our emotions that can get in the way of living life. When we can notice that the feeling that we struggling with doesn’t have to have the spotlight – that it is one of many actors on a well-lit stage, we can start to notice that the feeling we are struggling with is just one of many. It isn’t the only actor on stage: it isn’t the whole show.

Notice that feeling and notice your breathing. Notice your body, and notice the room around you. Notice that there is a lot going on.

Working? Keep on moving

Sitting down all day is not good for us. Not good at all. But, even if you’re sitting at your desk, there are ways for you exercise different muscle groups to keep active. Stretching your upper body muscles keeps your neck and back from becoming stiff; wrist rolls will help you to avoid carpal tunnel syndrome; and, sitting on an exercise ball (if your workplace will allow it) will help you to engage and work out your core muscles and stabilisers. You’re only concern is getting passed the first day when people may look slightly askance at you. But hey, this is your opportunity to lead, right? 😉

Number 3 in the info graphic below if really good if you tend to suffer from lower back pain after remaining seated for a while. You can also tilt your tailbone so that you tuck in and draw it towards your tummy, and the push out behind you. Do that 5 times, and then again every 30 minutes or so that you remain seated. It’s not a full-work out by any means, but combine this with your walking breaks and it certainly makes a contribution to your wellness.

Oh, and make sure you have a bit of room before attempting move number 4!