meditation

Default State of Mind

This little rant comes from a reply to conversation I was having with my Mom:

I trust that I am easily fooled. I fool myself all the time. Maybe fool is too harsh a word, but surely I am easily confused and misdirected. As much as anyone else.

I'm very curious about how people become aware of their blind spots. Everybody has a story in their head that's playing out while the real world is ticking away in front of them.

Where do people go when they are on autopilot? Do they know they've checked out? By that I mean, what story is being told- what narrative is unfolding- while the real world streams on by.

The problem I see here is that most people don't know they live in a story and don't believe they are easily confused. Maybe there is a disconnect in that having a thought isn't what I would consider thinking.

Thinking is a directed action. Having a thought is more like having gas. It just bubbles up.

What I am most curious about is the stimulus for expanded perspective and objective reorientation to an internal narrative.

What is it that helps people go, "Oh, well that's just silly."

I trust people when they display the capacity to scrutinize their own thoughts, language, and actions. This character trait Is often noticeable by how good someone is at getting other people to relax and smile.

Remember what the Buddha said, "Enlightenment arises from the realization that we are all full of shit most of the time".

Why Are We Yelling?

I recently had a falling out with a friend that I have known for many years. My friend had strong opinions and felt comfortable sharing them. I’m not known for my lack of opinions either. A fair amount of unspoken frustration had been building over various issues. We didn’t agree on a great number of items that our country now seems comfortable listing in the issues of the culture war. 

My friend and I live far apart so most of our communications existed on social media. Eventually there was the infamous back-breaking straw and I ended our digital connection. I didn’t like what they had to say nor how they believed they needed to say it. There was a quick back and forth that was more than enough for me to remove their access to my platform of choice. This led to intense name calling on their part and short derisive follow ups comments on my part. 

I don’t call people my friends lightly and considering how powerfully demeaning my friend’s responses were, I believe they were genuinely hurt by me shutting them out. Nobody won anything, and we both lost something.

I wasn’t proud of my part of the escalation and so I felt it was a positive step to try to learn how to better understand why arguments happen and how they transform into combative situations. Sense one of my vocations is teaching martial arts, I felt an added responsibility. Somebody once said, the best way to win a fight is not to have one. With this in mind, I felt arguing well was an important thing to study. Learning more about how to have a disagreement without creating an enemy would be helpful on a number of levels. 

Buster Benson’s book Why Are We Yelling?  Was the first book I competed for 2020. It helped me understand my own tendencies as well as increased my awareness of how other people are moved. Here are a quick set of notes from reading his important book.

-3 categories of argument: Head, Heart, and Hand. Sometimes we are arguing about very different categories. If we can’t identify what perspective we arguing from, then nothing can be resolved. Being right doesn’t change a persons heart. Not being able to appreciate where someone is coming from emotionally means we are blind to the reason they feel so moved by their point of view. Focusing on what is useful usually comes second to trying to change someone’s mind. 

-4 voices: Power, Reason, Avoidance and Possibility. The first three are our go to reactions. Power rarely solves the problems, but sure does make us feel safer. Reason makes us feel smarter, but facts can, no matter how many you find, don’t change minds and most figures and statistics can be argued to support a different point of view. Avoidance seems helpful when we are just tired of the same items of conflict that never change, so why bother, just ignore them. This leads to a festering issue that often becomes to big to handle. The last voice, Possibility, tries to move beyond narrow concepts of truth and tries to discover the person behind the argument and examining the unique events and personal experiences that lead us into positions we are compelled to stand our ground, even if that ground is quicksand.

-Cognitive Biases: There are 200-plus and they corral our brains ability to see past our own limited reactions to stress. You can’t escape them but you can learn to understand how they shape our patterns of thinking. 

CBs are mental strategies that help us deal with too much info and not enough time in a world where the more choices we have the poorer our decision making faculties seem to preform.   Rather than trying to discuss every single CB, Benson groups them in away that allows for us to see that CBs work as sets. 

-Benson covers big issues: immigration and gun control as well as abstract concepts like the belief in ghosts. He talks about creating safe spaces for discussion and the power of generous listening. And while it might seem obvious in bares repeating, the way a question is asked places us on better footing for the journey toward understanding what the best answer might be. The more open ended the better. Yes/No questions are moe likely to cause issues than they are to help resolve conflict.

The book covers a lot of ground.  Way more than I have glossed over here. I feel that whatever your personal opinion maybe, you owe it to yourself and the people you care for to consider how you might be wrong about needing to be right. Certainty isn’t as useful as actual problem solving. Being able to avoid deciding who is right allows to get to what will work. How is it we go about setting aside our need for a stark contrast of black and white and discover the world is made up of shades of grey? 

Just last night a friend and I were talking about climate issues and I listened carefully to the words he used to describe those who disagreed with him.  Much of what he thought about the people o the other side of the issue limited his capacity to work with those others who would be needed to make actually make the changes we all very desperately need. 

Much of the ammo we use to deride the other side comes from media. The media isn’t designed to make us better at solving our problems. One might argue that no matter what side of the argument you fall on about whatever argument you are having, most of our reasoning is given to us by a system that profits from escalating our differences into fears that produce conflicts that keep us from working together to help one another. 

Most of our talking points are not sought out to transform us, but to confirm what we already think.  Every opinion we have deserves to be examined with an awareness that we are afraid to be wrong. Benson’s book asks if we are brave enough to accept information that transforms how we think of ourselves. 

Ultimately we have to ask: what is the point of the argument? Isn’t it about being able to share the world we live in. Isn’t about living in a world that is worth sharing. Sometimes there may be no way around a fight, but before we get there, let's try to make sure we did everything we could to avoid it. 

I don’t believe mot of us want to make enemies, nor does anyone want to lose a friend.


 


  

Notes on Mark Epstein's, Thoughts Without a Thinker

This year I invested in reading, studying and practicing meditation. One of the best books I came across was Mark Epstein’s Thoughts Without a Thinker . Rather than try to regurgitate everything I’m just going to share a set of questions/quotes/statements from my notes.

  • Even pain can be interesting. Sitting in meditation is often about investing in the examination of discomfort. When it hurts is when you start learning. Pulling a way, trying to hide from pain gives it leverage. Welcoming it, trying to look at it closely, it transforms.

  • Other people, our own minds, and death. These are our challenges. Our greatest fear.

  • What are we afraid to learn?

  • Resistance, you are that which u resist.

  • Transitional space, your teddy bear, the security blanket. The totems that carry between the maturation points of our lives.

  • These weeds, these waves, they will help u. The things that obstruct you, you need.

  • Powers of observation, not judgement.

  • How do u contribute to your pain?

  • When something could have happened but did not. This lives in the flesh not the words.

  • Meditation on your mother...carefully tread.

  • The family is the worst invention of God that never existed

  • Meditation has a certain culture bias.

  • Am I lovable? Estranged or enmeshed?

Mindfullness Debate

How do you define Mindfullness?

“To be clear, mindfulness and meditation are not the same thing. There are types of meditation that are mindful, but not all mindfulness involves meditation and not all meditation is mindfulness-based.”

Self Compassion Meditation

BigThink has a research article on the health benefits of Self-Compassion meditation.

Which brings us to a new study, conducted at the Universities of Exeter and Oxford and published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science on February 6. The research team assigned two short-term self-compassion exercises to 135 participants alongside control conditions that involved negative, neutral, and positive valences. The results: people feel better, physically and mentally, when they practice kindness.

Specifically, when practicing self-compassion, the volunteers experienced reduced arousal — heart rate and skin conductance, increased parasympathetic activation, heart rate variability, etc. Their nervous systems responded better when their mindset invoked kindness instead of excitability and agitation. It's an interesting finding, however "the underlying processes for this," as the researchers explicitly state, are still "not well understood."


10% Happier

10% Happier is a personal story of how Dan Harris found his way to meditation. In comparison to a number of books I've read on meditation, this one isn't trying to overwhelm you with amazing facts about mindfulness practices, rather its concerned with addressing the field of meditation at large and how Dan navigated the various well known gurus and pundits that laud the benefits of meditation and ultimately how learning to meditate improved his life.  

The Heart and Brain Connection

Study on the link between meditation and stress reduction...

"Through a new method of processing HRV time series data, the researchers developed a way to measure the change in the level of stress provided by meditation. This measure assigns a number to the level of variability of heartbeat interval time series before and during meditation. This number indicates precisely how much stress is alleviated by control of the heart-brain coupling through meditation."

Breathing Meditation

Meditation

Focus on the speed of your breath. Without trying to change your natural breath, count the length of inhale and exhale. You will find it slows as your attention to it increases. Once you feel you are breathing naturally, Calmly and slowly build on your breath trying to put one second extra in each exchange. This exercise of the diaphragm stretches and squeezes the internal organs. Let the breath inform you of your internal state.

Become aware of your heart beat pushing against your chest. Feel it pumping blood into the large muscles of your body. Slowing your breath, inhale and scan your back, chest, arms, and legs. Feel for their connections, where they begin and end. Feel the weight of the muscles. Feel the stretching tension created at the joints as you inhale. Your ribs should be inflating, stretching the muscles of your neck and back. Assess your shoulders, knees, elbows, wrists, and ankles as you exhale. Allow that tension to sink down through you into earth. Inhale and lengthen your spine.

Bend your knees slightly as you exhale and feel the fascia connecting everything together. The fascia wraps around and and webs through you, encasing organs, tendons, ligaments, and bones. These tissues hold you together. Breath and feel the expanding body and contract as a whole, fascia connecting muscle, tendon, ligaments, and organs.

Breath into the long bones of the arms and legs. Lengthen between each vertebrae of the spine up to the skull. Imagine the bones of your skull, expanding and contracting, along with the bones in your hands and feet. Feel the bones that support you as you breath. Register the weight hanging on the scaffolding of your bones, from heel to crown, each breath reverberates through the skeleton.

Inhale and feel your skin stretch and contract around your body. Breath and feel the weight of the air on your skin. Feel the temperature of the room. Exhale and reach out through every hair to feel the world around you. Feel the air settle around you, the environment subtly pushing on you, air pressure, moisture. Be aware of gravity pulling you into the earth.

Exhale and send your attention to the distal parts of your body. Your eyelashes, toe nails, finger tips, the thin lens over your eyes. Breath and fill your muscles, ligaments, tendons, fascia, bones, and skin with oxygen enriched blood. Each breath stretching and moving your organs, pulling and pushing, contracting, and expanding fluids through your body.

Rushing through your tissues, blood and lymph pump thru you with each heartbeat, each breath. With each breath you take in oxygen in exchange for the co2, delivering energy and releasing toxins. Drawing in and expelling molecules. Each breath polarizing every atom in the body.