Let Change Happen

Still Point Meditation for Stressful Times

2011-07-11T15:25:00.000-07:00

Sometimes life hits us from multiple directions at once. It can be hard to know which front to deal with first and the stress can build to a point of overwhelm pretty quickly. No matter which issue we give our energy and attention, the others still pull and we get drained.

I have a meditation that I use for just such times that actually developed out of my love of storms when I was a kid. I still love them, probably because I live in So Cal! Some of my favorite times were spent snuggled down in bed, listening to a storm outside and feeling completely safe inside. It was like being in a protective bubble where I could see and hear the violent winds and rain around me, but remain safe and undisturbed where I was. I call the meditation Still Point, as in the still point in the center of a hurricane, or tornado. If you can imagine what it might be like to be sitting in the center of a tornado, legs curled up comfortably underneath you, while the wind whips things around you at hundreds of miles per hour with deafening noise, rain, and hail. There you are, in the center, where it is safe and calm. You are surrounded by drama, distress, disaster, violent change and everyone’s stuff. But in the center you are peaceful, you are grounded and you have the choice to reach out into the storm to connect to something or not. If you decide to connect to something in the storm, and you leave your still point to reach it, you risk getting sucked into the storm with it where you will be whipped around and around and end up some place in Kansas under a house. If you connect from the still point and stay sitting there, you can bring what you wish to connect to into the still point with you and deal with it there where it is calm, and where you know that you are safe.

Try it for yourself.

Get comfortable and imagine yourself sitting on a cushion. Your legs are crossed, you are comfortable and your body is relaxed. As you relax you start to hear the sound of a storm all around you but you are not disturbed. You can see and hear the storm, but where you sit it is calm and there is no storm. As you look into the swirling winds you see people, places and things that have been troubling you. Relationships, money, work, health issues, whipping past you as you watch from your still point. Pick one that has energy to it for you. Take a breath and exhale and then reach for it staying planted on your cushion inside your still point. Bring it to you and examine it closely. What does it hold for you? Sadness? Fear? Anxiety? Loss? Helplessness? Hurt? Longing? Is there something you need to do? Something you need to say? Or is this just about feeling and letting things be for now, or maybe letting go? Now let that one go back into the storm, reestablish yourself in your still point and then repeat this for any other ones you want to deal with for this meditation period.

When I do this meditation I am immediately hit with the feeling of the situation or the relationship that I have chosen from the storm. I am not distracted or defended which allows me to see much more clearly what is actually in front of me. We are constantly surrounded by the people, places and things of our life and it can begin to feel like we are being sucked into the swirl of it all. I find that this simple meditation can create a space where clarity and mindfulness become the ground of our engagement with our external lives. In this space, we can find equanimity in chaos and amazing change can take place.

Nobody thanks the doormat

2011-06-21T09:10:00.000-07:00

I was out to dinner with my friend Lucy the other night. We were catching up and she was sharing about her feelings of being unsupported at home. She said that she had a wake-up call the other night when the family was playing a game and one of the questions was ‘what one word would you use to describe your mom?’. Her 13 year old daughter, Marissa, answered ‘maid’. She was hit by the realization that this is what her daughter really thinks of what she does for her. She said she was starting to feel resentful and angry and doesn’t want to just try to make her daughter appreciate her, but really wants to make a change. She gets that she somehow did this, but has no idea how or how to change it now.

The good news for my friend is that she gets that she is responsible for her daughter’s view of her. She has worked so hard to be a good mother that she created an environment where all of Marissa’s needs were met timely and competently that Marissa wasn’t required to meet many of them herself. This was ok when she was little, but Marissa is now an adolescent and has come to believe that her world is a world of low responsibility and high care. She is required to take care of her basic hygiene and schoolwork but Lucy admits to struggles with trying to make Marissa meet time schedules and needing to cue her to do simple things like brush her teeth. Marissa doesn’t have any other responsibilities as Lucy felt that she should concentrate on her schoolwork. She also said that things just went faster when she did them herself.

The fact is that we teach people how to treat us. This means everyone from our bosses to our children. What we bring to those encounters on a moment to moment basis teaches others about what we will and will not accept. It shows them how we feel about ourselves, our self-respect, our self value, our integrity, our yes’ and our no’s. We don’t even have to say much to communicate all of this, we carry it in our body language and in our presence.

In my friend’s case, what she hoped to teach her daughter through all of her care, attention and good-mothering, was that she is loved, and that she is capable of doing well in school and in life if she attends to things in the way she taught her to, i.e. meeting deadlines, finishing tasks, doing quality work, doing her best at everything, and being willing to go the extra mile. What she actually taught her was if you are loveable, and maybe a little helpless, those who love you will do for you and everything will be fine. Because Lucy was just as committed to feeling like a good mother and winning everyone’s love and respect as to being a good mother, her need for mirroring kept her from expecting more involvement by Marissa in her own care and work as her development progressed. She has never had to do chores, doesn’t have any responsibilities except to feed the cat, and most of the time forgets that.

Here are some tips I gave my friend to turn her train to martyrdom around:

1. Have a meeting with her family and come clean as the angry doormat that she has become. Show them the list of all the jobs involved with keeping the house and family running, and which ones she is doing. Let them know her feelings about them not stepping in during summer vacation, or while her husband hasn’t been working, etc. Be honest and openhearted about her desire for a more balanced family system that keeps things running but is shared more equally. Then allow the other family members to come forward with suggestions, ideas and discuss which things they would like to take on and set up a plan. Investment by all members is a key. She needs to step out of the Directors seat and allow for more input and less control on her part.

2. Seek support for her feelings along the way through groups, classes, etc.. Lucy needs to build tolerance to feeling frustrated and scared when she isn’t sure if Marissa is going to complete her tasks at home or school the way she would, or the way she thinks Marissa should. She will need to learn to find the right place in this developmental piece with her adolescent, so that Marissa can begin to learn self-discipline, self-manage and experience the joy of her own successes, as well as learn from her failures. There are many support groups available that can be very helpful in making changes in how we deal with the people in our life.

3. Marissa and her dad will need to form a different alliance as family members with voting rights, but also with responsibilities. At this point their biggest felt responsibility is to keep mom happy. That isn’t a skill set even if it is used by millions of people. Pleasing isn’t loving and it is never experienced as authentic. It is based in fear and manipulation and never in love and respect.

4. It would be very good if the family could do a few sessions of family therapy to learn better communication skills, team building and to help rebalance the power structure that is there right now. A family that wants to make a change like this often benefits from outside help. It is very hard to do it on their own with patterns that have become entrenched like these. More times than not the family just falls back into conditioned behaviors and ends up where they started.

5. Communicate, communicate, communicate. Have set family meetings and try and make sure that there are regular family dinners. My friend has the tendency to let her daughter occupy the conversation during dinners, and rarely talks about herself or her day. It isn’t up to others to draw us out into conversation. That is more about our own early history in our families. When we are treated like our feelings don’t matter, or are unwelcome, we learn to try and get them out through cuing. We might use body language, or silence, or looks that cue others to ask after our feelings. It is manipulative and based in fear and shouldn’t be a part of healthy communication.

Hearts are meant to be broken

2011-06-13T08:45:00.000-07:00

Your pain

is the breaking of the shell

that encloses your understanding. ~K. Gibran

When I came out of my house the other day, my neighbor and his two little girls approached me. Dad was carrying a bird’s nest and I commented on it. Julia, who is 4 and precocious, piped right up “We are going to have a funeral.” Dad filled in that they had been watching a nesting Mourning Dove pair for a few weeks and were anxiously awaiting the baby birds. “It fell and the eggs got squished!” announced Julia’s older sister Tamara. “Oh no!” I said and immediately my mind went to who knocked it down, who do we need to talk to about, it etc. Julia brought me back though. “Yeah, we are going to go later and scoop the eggs up. They are all bloody.” At that she winced, and then teared up a little, “it’s sad” she said. Her older sister had moved away and dad was ready to talk about the ‘whodunits’ with me, but thank goodness for Julia. Her little heart was broken for these little squished eggs and brought the two adults back to theirs. “I think it is sad too.” I said. Dad adds, “we are going to have a little ceremony later on.” I nod looking at this beautiful open-hearted girl work through her grief at lightening speed. “Maybe we can bury them in our back yard so that we can visit them and they won’t miss their mommy and daddy.” She was sad, feeling the loss of the little birds that she was waiting for and now would never see, making sense of the bloody eggs and what they meant, and sorting out how to deal with the separation that loss brings by burying them close to her. “Maybe we can leave a note for their mommy and daddy birds so they know where to find them?” With that dad and the girls moved into the house talking about why birds can’t read.

What I was reminded of from all of this is that hearts are meant to be broken. Put another way, hearts are never meant to become unbreakable. We are supposed to feel the ordinary losses of our day to day lives and have it deepen our compassion for ourselves and for others. The goal has never been to live unscathed by our pain, even though you would never guess that by what we see all around us these days. It seems like every where we look, especially in the media, we see messages telling us all the ways we can move away from discomfort - physical, emotional and spiritual. We have been conditioned to believe that pain is unnatural, sadness is a problem and that we are supposed to be happy all the time. Not only is that impossible, it would be horrible for our culture if it were possible. The Narcissist would reign, and empathy and mercy would leave our world. It is through our experience of our own pain that we find our way to our humanity, and to letting go of our delusion of perfection.

We all start out like little Julia, openhearted children, vulnerable to our feelings, impacted by the world around us. Then we meet the world of the adults that have gone before us. We are taught, through word or deed, the consequences of having an open heart. Sometimes it is a positive thing, but most of the time it isn’t. We learn to protect our hearts from the world and the other people in it, believing that if we don’t it would not survive the pain of it all. We cover it with layer upon layer of protective batting, or we find a safe place to keep it, away from the world of others hearts. A lot of the time we just find ways to numb our selves to our feelings, period, removing the risk of vulnerability to them. We learn to shift from heart-centered to head-centered and think our way through our relationships and our lives.

There is really no such place as safe when it comes to our hearts, there is only alone. The distance we maintain from our pain translates into our distance from those we love. By risking a broken-heart, or an unprotected one, we allow our hearts to cover the distance to each other that our minds have created trying to keep us safe from feeling. As Stephen Levine said, “The mind creates the abyss but the heart crosses it.”

Letting Go of Personalizing and Reclaiming Your Self

2011-06-06T10:57:00.000-07:00

“Don’t take it personally!” We have all heard it. We have all said it. But what on earth does it mean? How can it not be personal when it feels so personal?

Personalizing is one way we use to try and make sense of our experience. Most of us learned it at home when the adults were struggling with their own lives and creating confusion in ours. One of a child’s most useful survival mechanisms is to make it about them. It helps them make sense of the confusion and creates a false sense of control for them by letting them believe that it is about them and therefore they can do something about it. Much easier to sleep when dad’s anger can be calmed by good grades and helpfulness, or when mom’s sadness can be lifted by taking care of younger siblings and letting her sleep. We did it then because it worked. We do it now because we don’t know anything else.

The truth of our childhoods is that we were the children, they were the adults and in charge. As adults our parents were responsible and accountable for their choices. The fact that it impacted you is also on them, but, time isn’t negotiable and here you are now. You can’t change how you learned to personalize other’s stuff, but you can change it.

Childhood tools aren’t going to be very effective in our adult worlds. They may be useful in the same way they were in our childhoods, i.e. give us a good false sense of control, but they won’t contribute to our growth or our happiness. They also derail adult communication and leave us wondering what we did wrong or why the other person is such a jerk or both. The truth is that communication is only as adult as the people involved. You can assume that there is an emotional adult on the other end of the relationship string, but that doesn’t mean there is.

Some things to remember about personalizing that may help you steer clear of it:

1. When we personalize our experience we are not in our adult selves. We are in our vulnerable child selves and possessed by our unmet need to be valued and have our feelings matter. Not that those aren’t fine things, but, the adult version is more tolerant of disappointment and can allow for other people and their lives, their unavailability and their issues. Our child selves just get confused and hurt.

2. Feelings don’t determine behavior. I know that is hard to accept. We all want to believe that if someone loves us that they will make good choices when it comes to things that may impact us. That doesn’t mean feelings for us don’t factor in, they do, but they don’t always stop a bad idea.

3. People are people, good, kind, selfish, self-centered and chronically disappointing. They usually mean well but they mess up all the time. It is not a good idea to project an idealized parent on one of them as an adult. You are going to be very unhappy if you do.

If you find yourself in an ‘it’s about me’ moment, try the ‘Pause, Look and Listen” approach:

Pause. Just take a beat before you react. Don’t pick up the phone and call a friend, don’t collapse into to your hurt feelings. Pause, breathe and then,

Look. Most likely you know the people involved with this situation if it is getting to you. Look closely at what they did, why, who you know them to be, not to be, their history with you, their trustworthiness, etc. This is where you want ‘just the facts ma’am’ and no assumptions or projections. People are who they are and not who we need or want them to be, and they have usually been that way all along. Then,

Listen. Listen to your feelings, even the yucky, vulnerable ones. No one likes to feel disappointed but it is part of life and happens to each of us daily. All we really know when something doesn’t go our way, or the way we hoped, expected or thought it would, is that it didn’t and that we have feelings about it. Good! Feel them, get to know them, and learn from them. They are part of your internal feed-back system that keeps you on your own path, not just a follower of some one else’s.

When the going gets tough, the tough feel

2011-05-30T15:57:00.000-07:00

Everyone who knows my friend Jane would say the same thing, she is an angel on earth. Jane is one of the last survivors of childhood polio, and at 60 something, has lived her life with hope, grace and a positive attitude even in the face of multiple surgeries, being wheelchair bound, eventually needing a respirator, developing breast cancer, bed sores, and horrible nerve pain. Not even being bed-bound on a trache for years at a time dented her ability to see the positive in her situation and never despair.

Several months ago Jane was diagnosed with kidney stones in both kidneys. She developed an infection that hospitalized her for over a month during which she found out that they are inoperable because of her physical situation and that she will have to be monitored closely to keep future infections from going septic. It was decided that Jane would need to be transferred to a sub-acute care facility instead of being released back home to home health care. Her family found her a wonderful place and she has gotten better, physically.

In the past 2 months this loving, cheerful, positive woman who had been able to live independently in her family home with her cats and her garden, lost everything but her life. One of her life long friends died. Her beloved cats went to live with family and bonded with them. She was informed that her kidneys were no longer working well and that eventually the stones would block them and they would fail. She was told that it wasn’t safe for her to live in her home even with care and that her care giver of 20 years was not going to be able to work for her any more. Through all of these losses Jane prevailed. Sick, sad, and frightened, but hopeful.

I saw Jane yesterday at her new home. I was impressed by its beauty and cleanliness. Lots of things going on, people awake and involved and the staff was available and pleasant. Jane looked healthier than I had seen her in a year while living at her home. This was great, I thought. Great place, she is in good shape, holding her own. They treated the recent infection quickly and well. All good in my mind.

Jane was sitting up and eating lunch when I came in and we chatted a bit . I mentioned to her that she looked sad and she started to cry. I asked her if she wanted to talk about it and she said ‘What’s the point.” And here it was, despair. I could have tried to sell the wonderful place she was in, or the great care she is receiving. I was tempted to remind her of how much safer she is here and I even may have for a second, but Jane didn’t need to hear any of that. Jane needed to be heard. Jane needed to know that if she wasn’t cheerful, if she wasn’t positive and good, that people would still want to visit. That if, as her lifetime experience of being dependent had taught her, she didn’t act pleasing, and make people like her, she wouldn’t get the care she needed to survive. At the same time, she was angry, and grieving the loss of her life as she knew it, and did not want to be cheerful. She wanted to be pissed off, unpleasant, protest, complain, bitch, moan and carry on for as long as she needed without fear of more loss, reprisal and/or abandonment.

Jane talked about not wanting to live. She said with her kidneys the way they are it is just a matter of time and that it would have been better if her family hadn’t intervened to keep her safe. In that moment I could feel my fear of the loss of her come up in me. I wanted her to live, selfishly maybe, and her despair was new to me and scared me a little. In that second or two I had to make a choice: avoid my feelings and distance from Jane, or feel my feelings and be there for Jane.

It would have been easy to avoid my fear of losing her by getting her to move away from her feelings of despair and anger. I could have pointed out that she was safer here, talk about the future, encourage her to be positive, etc. She would have shifted off her feelings and I would have left telling myself I had helped her , but in reality she just would have just stopped making me uncomfortable with her grief and loss. But that wouldn’t have been helping Jane. Helping Jane in this situation required that I set aside my need for her to make me less afraid of losing her, face that fear in the moment, and accept that it is there along with my love and deep respect for her and what she is going through. Jane needed me to be ok with her feelings and with her not being cheerful. She needed me to just be there, connected to her and letting her have her experience. She needed to know that even in her ‘uglies’, the feelings that she had suppressed all of her life, she would still be loved and cared for.

There are times in our lives when we are faced with our own Jane moments. We fear that if we aren’t pleasing, or accommodating, that we will lose love or the object of love in some form or another. I wish I could tell you that it wasn’t true, but, I don’t know that and neither do you. What I can tell you is that your need to know is important and that risking the displeasure of others to know the pleasure of being true to you is going to be worth it. Maybe not right away, but it will be worth it.

That evening I had dinner with Jane’s family and let them know what Jane and I had talked about that day. They were shocked to hear that she was afraid that if she wasn’t cheerful no one would visit. They all visited the next day and let Jane know in their own ways that she was free to be and feel and express herself to them without any fear of losing their love or attention. I heard from her niece today that Jane felt much better after our visit and able to share her feelings much more freely.

There are so many times in our lives that we run up against a situation that we feel we can neither survive nor change. By being present to the feelings of that place and meeting ourselves with kindness and compassion, we may find that a space opens up for change. Even if that change is just in how it feels to be in it. That by itself can mean the difference between peace and suffering.

The Courage to Feel

2011-05-18T11:04:00.000-07:00

Lately I have been keenly aware of just how we as human beings handle unwanted feelings. The entire menu of addictions from food to sex is one way. It is a lot easier, or it seems a lot easier to pick something up than to let a feeling up. There is also busyness, distraction, avoidance through getting into other people's feelings, projection and its best friend co-dependency, that last one is always fun. It seems more and more that we, as a race not just a nation, are adapting and evolving our behavioral lives in an effort to avoid unwanted feelings.

What ones am I talking about? Well the top 3 would be fear, anger and sadness, not necessarily in that order. Wanting someone or something you can't have, having someone or something you don't want, fear of losing something or someone that you have, those are big too. When we feel our feelings, we are vulnerable to them. Not just that, when we are vulnerable to them then we have to connect to the truth of what we are doing, and whether or not it is right for us. We end up having to face the music of needing to change, which most of us hate worse than a bout of food poisoning. We might need to leave a relationship that is unhealthy or just over. We may need to tell the truth in a situation that will cause someone pain. We may need to let go of someone or something that has kept us feeling safe and comfortable but also stuck in our development. Change.

The reality of feelings is that they are not optional. The chemical piece is boring but just know that there is one and we can't change it. What we can change is how we choose to suffer in our lives by avoiding what happens when we allow the feelings to be, and we meet them as they are. Yes is true that we might have to face some facts and may have to make some decisions that might not be pleasant. But it is also true that the only way to be free of the prison of self-delusion is to live a life of accepting 'what is'. When 'what is' feels bad, we make 'what is' go away through some behavior even if that behavior is sleeping. Trouble is there is no 'away', and we repeat the process of feeling and avoiding feeling for years and years until we don't even know why we are so numb and can't stop buying stuff on QVC. At this point we have developed a strategy for dealing with unwanted feelings and it now runs on automatic.

Take a risk today and let yourself feel just one unwanted feeling. When you feel that uncomfortable stirring that signals 'don't feel this', just pause. You don't have to go after it, just don't do anything about it. Pause, take a beat, and see what happens. I promise you it will be ok. Feelings are there first before our defense against them so, you have already been living, and surviving whatever it is you think you need to avoid feeling. You are safe, your feelings can't hurt you but the avoidance of them can imprison you and steal the joy that was your birthright as a human.

Finding Your Way Back to You

2010-06-14T22:27:00.000-07:00

"...Bring your self back in again
And allow yourself to blossom

Don’t worry about time
Don’t count minutes
Orient yourself to your truest north
And proceed..."

excerpted from Poem in Defense of Geraniums by Amy Shimshon-Santo

I was fortunate enough to hear Amy Shimshon-Santo read her poem, Poem in Defnse of Geraniums last week. An excerpt is above and the full poem is posted on her blogsite [ shimshona ]. I would highly recommend that you take a moment to go there and read it. She is an amazing poet and her words touched my soul and made me ponder the question: Just what does it mean to ‘orient yourself to your truest north?’

First of all, orienting to true north implies that there is a compass involved, that it is working and that it belongs to us. There can be many ‘norths’ when the compass isn’t ours or when it is being magnetized by someone else either inside and outside of us. We can spend years thinking that we are heading due east only to end up heading south every time. As children we learn to orient to our own truest north by being allowed the space to locate ourselves in our Self rather than in our parents, our environment, our school, or our world. We need to be able to rest in our internal focus free from structured time and external demands long enough to show up on our own map. Without sounding too anachronistic, things were simpler before. There was always unstructured time in a child’s day where they could hang out with themselves and explore the far reaches of their inner worlds.

Even in normal, trauma-free childhood the tendency these days is to organize the child’s world from the moment they wake until the moment they go to sleep in alignment with some external norm, preference, goal or electronic distraction. The infant’s environment comes to bear on the newborn from the moment his skin registers temperature and eyes are forced to adjust to light. He meets his world like a car meeting a wall at 60 mph and learns quickly that adaptation is the way to survive. Protest is an option but adaptation is the path of least discomfort. Little by little the infant learns to focus externally and adjust internally to match their environment. This becomes a strategy that becomes a way of being and as an adult it is hard to even connect with our experience enough to know how we are when asked.

Orienting to YOUR truest north is not about knowing ‘who’ you are. Everyone asks that question at some point in their lives but it is a rather Alice in Wonderland question given that it is being posed to a Self that at the moment isn’t online enough to tell the asker, the self, that they don’t need to ask the question. ‘Who’ we are evolves from an experience of ‘that’ we are and to get there you need to ask yourself 3 things:

Where am I? Where are my feet, my legs, the house to my brain and my being located? Where am I in space and in time. Am I here? Am I present or am I a floating head using my eyes to try and know everything about my experience? Anxiety, insomnia, addictions, stress related digestive issues and obsessive thinking are what show up when we try to live our lives without ground, without our feet being planted and knowing where those feet are right here, right now.

How am I? How are things with me, with my body, with my mind, with my heart, with my soul? Am I recreating myself, am I resting, nourishing and caring for my Self in the ways I know, in the truest sense of ‘know’, my body-mind needs? We all know what we need. The knowledge is there, where you left it, in that inner safe that you haven’t opened in years and can’t exactly remember the combination to. You left it in your box of secret things; you left it in your 5th grade diary with ‘KEEP OUT’ written in glitter ink on the cover; you left it in the can that you filled with your special stuff and buried in the yard for safe keeping. It is not childish to have special things, or to need cookies and milk, or a hug from a soft and warm friend. It not selfish to know what we need and to give ourselves that even if it means someone else will have to wait for what they need from us. We give best from a place of fullness. When the cupboard is bare even the best Mother Hubbard can’t feed anyone else. A wonderful African American poet Nikki Giovanni said it best in her poem ‘The Women and The Men’ when she wrote, “Show me a person who is not full of themselves and I will show you a hungry person.” FEED YOURSELF FIRST!

What am I? Are you animal, vegetable or mineral? Remember that game from childhood where one person would pick an object and the others would guess what it was by asking about its qualities like animal, vegetable or mineral? You are your own object in that you have mass, exist in space and time and have certain defining qualities. That said, these qualities change and are subject to the experience of our Self meeting our worlds on a moment to moment basis. To know your truest north you need to know what you are. The belly of the lion is hungry for the hunt and for fresh meat and the feeling of satiety after gorging. The belly of the humming bird is sated by a few drops of the sweetest nectar and rarely lingers long at a feast. You are animal, that is a given but what animal on any given day and in any given moment is not. Ask yourself today ‘what am I today?’ Do my muscles need to move, do they feel restless and longing for a good chase? Am I feeling feline and languid and would be fed by a good stretch and a nap? Are you feeling your fins and longing for fluidity of movement and to be buoyed by the water of your world? Care isn’t care unless it meets the need. Tomatoes are all full and juicy but hate to have their feet wet. Know the plant that you are in this moment and water yourself appropriately!

Do You Believe That Love Trumps Hate?

2010-05-17T10:31:00.000-07:00

"Hatred paralyses life: Love releases it. Hatred confuses life; Love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it." Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

There is so much hate in our country at this moment in time. Polarizing camps spewing angry rhetoric and claiming ownership of the truth. The situation is much like the situation during the struggle for civil rights in the 60's. Dr. King knew then what we need to remember now that hate will never win against hate. That only ends in violence and more hate. The only thing that wins against hate is love. Someone once said that "hatred and anger are powerless when met with kindness."

History has proven that to be the case and it is still the case today. It has been proven again and again that positive thought directed at a situation can diffuse the tension. In a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Social Indicators Research reports on one of the most dramatic sociological experiments ever undertaken. Researchers predicted in advance that the calming influence of group meditation practice could reduce violent crime by over 20 percent in Washington, D.C., during an 8-week period in the summer of 1993.

In fact, the findings later showed that the rate of violent crime--which included assaults, murders, and rapes--decreased by 23 percent during the June 7 to July 30 experimental period. The odds of this result occurring by chance are less than 2 in 1 billion.

The demonstration project involved assembling nearly 4,000 practitioners the Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi programs from 81 countries. Participants were housed in hotels and college dormitories throughout the District of Columbia and at the University of Maryland.

Hagelin says previous research had shown that these meditation techniques "create a state of deep relaxation and coherence in the individual and simultaneously appear to produce an effect that spreads into the environment, influencing people who are not practicing the techniques and who have no knowledge of the experiments themselves."

I am proposing that we take this information and use it to diffuse the hate that is bubbling in this kettle of fear and threatening to overflow at any moment. In the study they had 4000 participants. I have over 2000 Facebook friends and another 500+ contacts. How many people do you have on your Facebook page, email list, etc. who would join us for 3 minutes per day to stop Hate? I think we can top the 4000 participants from the gate.

Here is what we will do. At noon everyday for the next 90 days, we will stop for 3 minutes and send Metta, or Loving-Kindness, into the heart of the Hate in this country. Metta is like a prayer that is born from our compassion, from our understanding that at base all human beings are alike in their desire to be safe, happy, healthy and at peace.

Do YOU believe that LOVE trumps HATE as Dr. King did? If so, then join my group People Who Believe That Love Trumps Hate where you will find the instructions for sending Metta and more information on the group. Then add your positive energy to ours everyday a noon by doing 3 timed minutes of meditation focusing on the people who are filled with anger and hatred that we see and hear in the media daily, and sending them our Loving-Kindness. If you are at all uncomfortable with my suggestion you can use a prayer, image, thought or just the intention to send peace for that timed 3 minutes instead. It is all about energy and intention and if that is there, we can't help but make a positive difference.

So, please send this out to all of your friends and family. Let your spiritual leaders know and encourage them to put it out to their congregations, sangha, and groups. Spread the word on Facebook and Twitter. Let's really try to blast the cancer of hate with a huge laser beam of Love.

21 Day Complaint Free Challenge - Pt 3 of 3 Gossip and Criticism

2010-05-02T15:07:00.000-07:00

"Gossip gossip evil t'ing, much unhappiness it bring, if you can't say somet'ing nice, don't talk at all is my advice." sung Calypso style by Jester Hairston

This is part 3 of 3 of my blog posts covering the 21 Day Complaint Free Challenge. In the first post I talked about the Challenge, its origins, the rules (21 consecutive days without complaining, gossiping and criticizing) and my inspiration for doing it. In part 2 I talked in depth about 'complaining', its origins in our human history, what it is, what it isn't and its impact on our brains, our relationships and the world. In part 3 I will talk about 'gossiping' and 'criticizing', two of the most poisonous of human behaviors.

I played the violin in the orchestra all of my school life and each year I would play with the Honor Orchestra at Stairway of the Stars. One year Jester Hairston this amazing African-American choral composer and actor performed with us and sang 'Gossip'. The chorus is 'Gossip gossip evil t'ing, much unhappiness it bring, if you can't say something nice, don't talk at all is my advice'. I was about 10 and really didn't know much about gossiping but his song stuck with me all these years. I think it is the word 'evil' associated with gossiping. I don't think there are many people out there that are really aware that they gossip, or when they are gossiping let alone that it is more than a bad habit. But it is much worse than that. Gossip is defined as 'idle talk or rumor especially about the personal and private affairs of others.' The truth is that there is nothing 'idle' about gossiping.

Gossiping is like poisoning the village well. The gossip, hungry for attention but feeling empty of anything worthy of mention, finds narcissistic fulfillment in being the one 'in the know'. Unable to control their need for attention, they spread rumors and hearsay about other people without a thought as to the potential consequences. What they always forget is that 'what goes around, comes around'. The well that they poison with their words is the same well that they draw from. What we do, we become. If we gossip, we are gossipers. And gossipers are usually seen as untrustworthy, self-serving, and ill intentioned. Instead of the specialness they so long for, they usually end up with people angry at them.

Gossiping is never done in the spirit of seeking something good for the object of the gossip, it is always about seeking attention for the gossiper. Information that is shared through gossiping becomes coated in negativity and maliciousness and harms the speaker as well as the one spoken of. If we give in to our baser natures out of a belief that this is our only way of feeling special or important, then that is all we will ever be. A rumor-mongerer feeding of the bad choices and misfortunes of other because we don't feel we have anything interesting or noteworthy to add to the conversation. Websters defines 'evil' as "morally reprehensible: arising from actual or imputed bad character or conduct." When we give in to our insecure ego's need for attention at the cost of some other person's reputation or well-being we are behaving in an evil manner.

'Criticizing' per Websters is "to consider the merits and demerits of and judge accordingly; find fault with." Synonyms for criticize are reprehend, censure, reprobate and denounce. None of those sound positive, helpful, supportive, encouraging, understanding, loving or kind. Now, unless you are being paid to criticize, to judge the merits of someone or something and report, then you shouldn't be criticizing. Anyone. Ever. Period. No this doesn't mean you can't correct your children, or teach your pupils, or discipline when disciplining is due. What you can't do is hold yourself as superior, find fault, judge and point that out through criticism.

People who criticize have been criticized, usually a lot and usually maliciously. They grow up having swallowed a lot of judgement, ridicule, and meanness and they are unconsciously waiting for the day when they will be top of the pecking order. The best example of this is college and military hazing. Participating in the next generation of hazing makes up for what you endured when it happened to you, or, so they say. As a child we have to swallow whatever the adults in our world have to say about us. Internally we have yet to develop the ego strength to consider the source, and externally we lack the power to do anything about it anyway. As children we come to judge ourselves as we are judged and then spend our adulthood fighting that self-limiting false belief by judging others and making ourselves feel superior.

Criticizing is mean. It was mean when it happened to you and it is mean when you do it. There are at least 50 ways to express whatever it is that is coming up for you when you want to criticize and 49 of them have nothing to do with the other person. The only thing that has to do with the person you want to criticize is that they are there, in your presence, doing something that you think you could do better, faster, smarter, neater, etc. My challenge for you is this: the next time you feel that urge to 'correct' someone's something, you pause and just watch. Then take a breath and remember the last time you felt criticized and judged and what that was like for you. Did it feel helpful? Did it make you want to do better, to improve, or grow? Or did it just hurt your feelings, make you feel diminished and make you angry? Then go do something that makes you feel good about yourself, by yourself, and don't give in to the urge to do it at the expense of another person's feelings.

The 21 Day Complaint Free Challenge is a group that I am hosting on Facebook. The goal of the challenge is to go 21 consecutive days without complaining, gossiping and criticizing. There are 330 people participating and it is one of the most incredible growth experiences of my own life, and others. It is ongoing and open so please come join us in this effort to change our 'negative speak' and the world one mindful moment at a time.

21 Day Complaint Free Challenge - Pt 2 of 3

2010-04-27T14:32:00.000-07:00

"Don't whine. First it does nothing for the reason for your complaint. More importantly, it lets a brute know that there is a victim in the neighborhood." Maya Angelou

This is part 2 of the 3 part series on the 21 Day Complaint Free Challenge. In this post I will update all of you on the challenge and then go into what 'Complaining’ is in more detail.

This is day 7 of the event and there are now 329 people participating in what has been an incredible awareness-building week for us all. During this first week of the challenge we have all come to see how subtle the habit of complaining can be in our lives and that it isn't dependent on the words we use but can be communicated in our tone, affect and body language. So much of what is actually complaining can seem like protest, but, lacking even the smallest action is still complaining. Complaining, criticizing and blaming are very close in energy and tone and in communication all share ‘you statements.’ Self-pity, entitlement and superiority have shown themselves to be at the core of these mindless speech habits and it becomes very clear just how much when you stop complaining.

Complaining is so common in our culture that it has become a part of our conversation. Some people use it as a greeting, complaining about the weather or the traffic upon meeting another. Others use it as an ice-breaker in conversation engaging the other person in shared complaint as a form of camaraderie. Some even use it as a pull for attention unable to offer something more worthwhile to the conversation.

We move through our lives using ancient human communication patterns that were meant to broadcast warning not even aware of the effects. When we complain to another person we are not only venting our frustration, or displeasure, we are infecting that person with our negative energy. Not only that, but by focusing our attention on the source of our complaint, we are actually drawing to us more of what it is we are complaining about. Complaining doesn't help, nor does it make anything better even if it feels better to the complainer in the moment.

Complaining is also a rejection of what is. Put another way, when we complain we reject the 'now'. As T.S Eliot said "All is always now." If we are experiencing it, it is now. Otherwise we would have already experienced it or not have experienced it yet. If our soup is cold, that is our now. Accepting that but wanting hot soup moves us into action which leads to changing the next moment, but does not impact the moment before. As Eliot says "..The past is unredeemable." Complaining changes nothing but more than that, it keeps us from actually being able to change the things that need changing. When we whine, we are immobilized by our bruised egos. Entitlement to perfect service, care, attention, weather, etc. underlies the complaints we utter day in and day out.

In our relatively blessed world here in the west, it is the exception not the rule when we have something to truly complain about such as grief and profound loss. And even then, it is less of a complaint than a lament when we voice feelings from that bereft place. Only when we accept what is, the truth of our experience in this moment no matter what that experience is or how we feel about it, are we present and able to take action to change it. Brother David Steindl-Rast said it best when he said that "complaining is the little self's attempt to block change" and that it is up to us to find the 'opportunity' in the moment of wanting to complain to change the situation or change our thoughts about it.

There are things in our world that call for protest. We know what those things are because of how they call us forward for the greater good and move us to act. A complaint is not useful, it doesn't help or change anything. It is like a virus that breeds a sense of discontent in all that hear it. I read someplace: "complaints are like bad breath - you notice it coming out of another person's mouth but not your own".

Be sure to read next weeks blog when I will be posting the insights and awareness of the 21 Day Complaint Free challenge and talking more about ‘gossiping and criticizing’. You can still join, it isn’t too late many people have just joined. I will be keeping the group going until everyone has finished the 21 Days. It is a Facebook group and you find it via this link:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=119241354758253

21 Day Complaint Free Challenge pt 1

2010-04-14T12:51:00.000-07:00

"If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain." Maya Angelou

I was listening to a recording of a conversation between Brother David Steindhal-Rast and Joan Halifax Roshi the other day and they were talking about 'gratitude' which is Brother David's main practice, and 'complaining'. During the conversation Brother David mentioned that a friend had given him a purple bracelet with "www.acomplaintfreeworld.org" on it and told him about the 21 day complaint-free challenge. He then wore it to a Peace Conference and man came up to him and said "I started this." That was Will Bowen a minister from Kansas City, Missouri who wanted to find a way to help his congregation become more positive and decided to challenge them and himself to go 21consecutive days without complaining, gossiping or criticizing. Brother David decided to take the challenge thinking 'Well, I don't complain much. I will probably be looking for opportunities to complain." He was surprised to find that even as a Benedictine monk andBuddhist, living in a religious community and teaching all over the world for the last 30+ years, he still complained about the same silly stuff that most people do.

I was inspired by the talk and went to the website to check it out. I read the story of Will Bowen and his congregation and how they went from helping that group change their attitudes and their lives to distributing bracelets to over 6 million people worldwide. They started distributing purple silicone wristbands to be used as a reminder during the complaint-free challenge. The agreement was that you start on one wrist and began your count, but if you complained you would shift the bracelet to the other wrist and start your count over. It is fine to complain to yourself but not to complain to someone else. Some people dropped out but the majority kept with it as did Will Bowen and it changed their attitudes, their relationships and their lives in significant ways. More than that it started a movement that to date has over 6 million participants worldwide.

I was so excited by what I read I decided right then to do the challenge myself and invite anyone who wanted to step up for positive change to join me. I have set up a group page, 21 Day Complaint Free Challenge where I will be posting my thoughts, my experience and my progress during the challenge and where I hope you will be joining me to share your experience as well. Anyone who joins the challenge on the 21 Day Complaint Free Challenge group page will get a free purple wristband from Complaint Free World, the non-profit organization that started the challenge. Wearing the bracelets is a wonderful way to track your progress, foster community and show our support for this global effort to change our behavior and evolve as souls.

That's it! Now don't wait, go to the event page and sign-up for the challenge and make today day one. The rules for the challenge are on the group page and you don't need a wristband to start a rubber band will do, but if you want one just send your mailing address to me in a Facebook message. Be sure to tell your friends, post it on your Facebook page and Tweet it. We are trying to change the world by what we energetically put into it and the greater the effort the greater the impact.

Let Change Happen: The teaching of the butterfly

2010-03-26T16:22:00.000-07:00

"It takes great courage and inner strength to change from what is known and comfortable to something which is new and fresh. That which is unknown often contains our greatest potential. To seek our unknown potential by risking change is the path of true greatness. Such action brings untold blessings and much favor." unknown

The inspiration for the title of my blog, Let Change Happen, came to me many years back when I was working on my website and immersed in the topic of Change and image of the butterfly which is my logo. How people change and why they don't was what got me interested in psychotherapy in the first place. I was deep in my own therapy, working on the wounds from my childhood when I discovered meditation and began to study and practice Buddhism. That began a deep and profound study of the mind and how people change that included western education, eastern thought and training, metaphysics, spirituality and creativity. I have never met a person who hasn't at some point wanted to change themselves or their lives in some way. Sometimes in big ways such as through dealing with an addiction, sometimes in smaller ways such as getting out of a dead end job or pursuing a passion or creative dream.

Most have succeeded in at least an attempt or two, but, the majority have run into internal obstacles that kept them from actualizing their desire for change. For some the obstacles are self-limiting beliefs about themselves and their potential for success. They are great at the start, full of focus and commitment but deflate at the first set-back or disappointment. These people are fighting an internal war with an old opponent, winning the day but losing the battle again and again. For others the obstacles are issues of low self esteem being masked by grandiosity which doesn't believe in a learning curve. These folks are overcompensating for a fear of inadequacy and start a process of change needing to be perfect and needing it to happen now. Most of the time this is a setup for failure because change has its own pace and doesn't serve the ego. We ask 'change' to dance but we are the follow not the lead. The process will take us where we need to go in order to have what we say we want. It is our choice to say yes or to say no to what it asks of us along the way.

The biggest obstacle to change by far is our resistance to it. We constantly ask for things, say we want to let go of old habits, old beliefs and old behaviors, and then make choices that keep them locked in place. We blame it on our luck or we blame it on our life but the truth is that change is the rule not the exception. When you hold onto a resentment, when you resist love because it makes you vulnerable to your own feelings, when you reject greatness because you secretly don't believe you deserve it, when you lash out in anger because the pain feels too big to survive, these are the moments that you block the energy of change. These are the moments where you chose to stay put by refusing to let change happen through a shift in energy, a smile or a tear.

It takes great courage to let the certainty of the known go and abandon oneself to the unknown of the next moment. This is the way of transformation. This is the teaching of the butterfly.

Blog Talk interview on Borderline Personality Disorder and relationships

2010-03-18T23:57:00.000-07:00

I had a wonderful time tonight doing my very first radio interview on Alan Roger Currie's Blog Talk Radio program. The show title was Emotionally Unstable Romantic Relationships and was about how Borderline Personality disorder affects the lives of those that love them. It was a great panel with myself, Dr. Randi Kreger of the famous book 'Stop Walking on Eggshells' fame, Dr. Talia Witkowski, and man and a woman sharing their front line experience of being the romantic partners of someone with BPD. You can listen to it for free or download it on Itunes, here is the link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/upfront-straightforward-alan/id268827929. I come on in the last 35 minutes of the show and Dr. Kreger is right before me but it really is a show worth listening to. If you were impacted by the movies Single White Female, Fatal Instinct or Mommie Dearest, you will get something from this show.

How to make a happy brain in 5 easy steps

2010-03-01T16:15:00.000-08:00

The key to happiness lies in that moment of connection with ones experience: if you can't meet yourself where you are, then, you will never truly 'be' happy anywhere else.

I want to thank the commenters to my last post on Happiness for their input and questions. A couple of you asked if I would go more into the ‘how’ of tip #3 and I have decided to do that here. To save you from reading back, here is what I wrote:

3. Stop focusing on what you don’t have or what you don’t want. Most of the world decides on what they want to have, do and/or feel whether more money, a better job, less weight, healing from an illness, and then they focus on its opposite. Someone who wants more money thinks and complains about being in debt. Someone who wants to lose weight thinks and complains about being fat. And so it goes. Our brains only know what we tell them and they are very compliant. If you want to be a fat person, complain about not being able to stick to a diet and your brain will help you out. Taking what you believe as real, it will produce the depressive neurochemistry to support the feeling of ‘I can’t’ and’ what’s the point’, and you won’t be able to make the changes necessary to have the physical body you say you want to have.

Let me first give the disclaimer. Although I am a mental health professional I am not a scientist and don’t want to present myself as one. My explanation is that of an educated lay person and nothing more.

How we think determines how we see things, how we relate to our surroundings and how we then feel. We can’t choose what comes our way in life but we can choose what we do with it. We can choose to interpret it from a place of good intent or ill intent; good natured or malicious; friendly or unfriendly, etc. When we choose to negatively interpret what goes on in our day to day world, a cascade of depressive neurochemicals gets released from the neural networks that control them in our brains and we immediately take the position of the victim in our life’s play, and proceed to embody those characteristics and feelings. Poor us, bad them, life sucks, and ultimately project all of that back out into our world.

When we choose to interpret these daily experiences in a positive or even just neutral way, we get the release of safe and happy neurochemicals from the neural networks that control them, and we stay out of victim mode. Our world seems inviting and positive in its regard for us and we end up feeling good. We then project those feelings back into our world and we get to have the experience others as pleasant, cooperative and holding us in positive regard.

What happens in the brain is the same for each case. The brain responds to our interpretation of our experience and produces hormones and neurochemicals to help us deal with that perceived environment. Positive interpretation = happy, safe, connected chemicals and hormones, negative interpretation = unhappy, anxious, and/or depressive chemicals and hormones. This cycle of perception directly influences the size and thus chemical dominance of those particular neural networks based on activation. The more the negative or positive feeling networks are activated the bigger they get and others get smaller to make room in the brain through a process called pruning. We eventually become addicted to the neurochemistry of our biggest neural networks and start to behave in ways that will trigger their cascade without even knowing we are doing it. The good news is that we can become just as addicted to the chemistry of feeling good as we are to feeling bad.

How to create a happiness generating brain in 5 easy steps:

1. Accept responsibility and reclaim your power to change. Read the above a dozen times and remind yourself that YOU have the power to change the size and quality of your neural networks by how you interpret your experience. None of us controls what happens to us, but we all have dominion over how we interpret and respond to it.

2. Focus on the positive and ignore the negative. A good way to see this effort is like strengthening a weak muscle. You have to target that muscle and work it to build its strength and let the overdeveloped ones weaken for balance. Focus on thoughts, feelings and images that automatically generate a positive feeling in you and then amplify those feelings by adding to them. Let the negative thoughts just go, don’t give what you don’t want or don’t have attention. Focusing on them doesn’t make them better anyway and you will be working against yourself.

3. Stop complaining! Our brains at their most basic levels only register ‘ok’ or ‘not ok’ from our reactions. When we complain, we are not ok and our brains tell our bodies to get ready to fight, run or freeze by triggering stress hormones. Not good when you want to feel happy. So, when your chicken comes out underdone, send it back with clear request to fix the problem. Do NOT complain to your dinner mate and the waiter and the chef and the woman sitting at the next table and then go home and post it on Facebook. Complaining doesn’t do anything; it isn’t an action towards any positive solution. It just increases the negativity inside of you, in your relationships and in the world.

4. Practice the art of appreciation. Seeing the world through eyes of appreciation is probably the fastest way to change your brain into a happiness-seeking organ. A good exercise for this in the beginning is to use the time in your car as ‘appreciation school’. As you drive look at the world around you with the intention of finding things to appreciate. This is a wonderful time of year for this because spring is upon us and there are flowers and trees in bloom everywhere. Build on the feeling of appreciation by going from object to object until you really start to feel uplifted and energized. This is a lot better than Prozac and you can’t lift your mood in minutes. Do this every time you are in your car and you will see the difference is just days.

5. Be silly on purpose. Shake up your habitual tendencies by wearing socks that don’t match, your shirt inside out or a clown nose to work, or in public. Don’t explain anything or make the excuse that you read it on some therapist’s blog, simply allow your experience to be whatever it is and see if you don’t end up laughing along and having a surprisingly fun day. This is a positive surprise to your old ways and really gets the positive chemistry pumping.

Negative thinking is a habit. When we have the tendency to stroll down that path to sit by our ‘little river of misery’ as Marianne Williamson so wonderfully put it, it is going to take some time and practice to change it. Make a decision, stop complaining, cultivate appreciation and have some fun at it!

If you really want to be happy, rearrange your mind, not the furniture.

2010-02-21T23:47:00.000-08:00

"Happiness is something you decide on ahead of time. Whether I like my room or not, does not depend on how the furniture is arranged. It is how I arrange my mind.” 92 year old woman.

I came across the above quote while doing some research and got to thinking about ‘happiness’. It is the secular nirvana of our human experience and one desire that we all share. The Buddhists say that our desire to be happy is one of the main things that connects all sentient beings. We all want to be happy and none of us wants to suffer. Happiness in modern media is also a product such as soap, that is fastened to products like big red bows to stimulate us to want them and buy them.

The trouble we humans run into with happiness is that we think it is something that we have to make happen through our work, our money, our religions, our fantasies and our relationships. If we do ‘x‘ then we will be happy. The ‘x‘ depends on who we are asking but the equation is always the same. The truth is that happiness isn’t a state to be attained, nor is it a place in our lives that we arrive at. Money, thinness, celebrity, you name it, all have been touted as the path to happiness. None of them are. They can each make life easier and more fun, but none of them can guarantee happiness. All you have to do is glance through a celebrity magazine to see the sad reality of that.

The truth is that happy is something that you decide to be. It is the product of our perceptions and our perceptions are driven by our beliefs about ourselves and the world. These beliefs are formed early in life and reinforced by the world as we learn and grow because we never challenge them. We merely strain to see out of the same glasses we were given as children and never think to get a new pair. If we are lucky those glasses get dashed along the way by some life shaking experience and we end up seeking a new pair through counseling, spirituality, or other paths of inner exploration. Emerging later with a pair of glasses of our own, we can then make new decisions that lead with the belief that happiness is where we start, not where we are going. As the old saying goes, ‘happy is as happy does.’

Here are 5 Tips for ‘arranging your mind’ towards happiness:

1. Take responsibility for everything in your life right now. This includes body, money, relationships, health, state of mind, work, all of it. This is very important because vicitms refuse to be happy no matter how hard they try or how much they have.

2. Decide that the power to be happy is in you, is something that you own, doesn't lie outside of you and isn’t someone else's to grant you. Very little, if any of how we feel, happy or not, has anything to do with anything outside of ourselves. Yet most of the time we look to someone or something else to fix us, or give us something that we can use to feel better.

3. Stop focusing on what you don't have or what you don't want. Most of the world decides on what they want to have, do and/or feel whether more money, a better job, less weight, healing from an illness, and then they focus on its opposite. Someone who wants more money thinks and complains about being in debt. Someone who wants to lose weight thinks and complains about being fat. And so it goes. Our brains only know what we tell them and they are very compliant. If you want to be a fat person, complain about not being able to stick to a diet and your brain will help you out. Taking what you believe as real, it will produce the depressive neurochemistry to support the feeling of ‘I can’t’ and’ what’s the point’, and you won't be able to make the changes necessary to have the physical body you say you want to have.

4. Happiness is not a goal but a moment to moment experience that comes from a decision to feel good. This creates an intention that will inform your choices and help you always go in the direction of what you want, what feels good to your body, mind and spirit, and what will create that feeling of happiness and joy, in every moment.

5. Understand that we are meant to be happy. Life is supposed to be fun, or, what's the point since no one is getting out alive. Lighten up, laugh at yourself, risk making a bad decision or seeming silly. None of us are really that powerful or important in the grand scheme of things. Isn't that a relief?

A Valentine's Day tip: 5 things to pack for your relationship journey

2010-02-03T11:10:00.000-08:00

With Valentine’s Day quickly approaching, I wanted to write something about love. Not the hearts and cupid kind of romantic love that we are all so familiar with thinking about when we talk of love, but, of human love. Love between two human beings in all their wonder and imperfection. Immediately loses its sexiness doesn’t it? That isn’t a surprise given that since humans began to portray love on the stage, love has been associated with the process of bonding for mating purposes, which involves a high level of oxytocin and dopamine, and which by design was meant to be short lived. As dull as it sounds in its biological form, this is being ‘in love’. It is wonderful and worthy of all its praise, but, it isn’t what keeps people together. It isn’t what sustains a relationship. Mature love, not love for old folks but love that lives into the mature phase of a relationship, is something you pack for. It isn’t a weekend trip where you only need your toothbrush and best underwear, it is a journey you are embarking upon that will hopefully last your whole life and take you to amazing places together, most of them without leaving home.

When packing for this trip of life most people unconsciously, or sometimes even consciously, pack their mates suitcase instead of their own. I have known self-help gurus that tell women to carry around lists of characteristics of their ideal mate to help guide them in their choices. That is well and good as far as it goes, but, the first list to make is a list of our ideal characteristics as the mate of such a person. The first question to ask in any such search is 'am I a person today who could attract, could meet and could be a loving partner to the one I say I am looking for?’ A bit of time pondering this question could clear up the confusion around ‘why do I seem to end up picking the same person again and again?’ Simple answer is because you are doing the picking, again consciously and unconsciously, and we are the common denominator in all of our relationships. If we want to be with a different type of partner, we have to become a different kind of person, one capable of making new choices, not just repeating the old ones.

So, say you are here, you have chosen outside of your old patterns, and you are ready to commit to a life together with the person of your dreams. What will you need to pack in your suitcase for this unpredictable, sometimes exciting, most the times not, wonderful, disappointing, fulfilling, frustrating and humbling (if you do it right) life-long adventure? Now this is a list I would encourage you to create and carry around with you.

Here are 5 suggestions for that list from my personal and professional experience:

1. Be sure to pack your sense of humor. Life on its own is a challenge at times and without the resilience that a sense of humor brings, it can be like trying to ski without bending your knees. The bumps (and in relationship there are a LOT of bumps) might be the same size, but, they feel a lot smaller when you have some give. When I talk about having a sense of humor here, I am not just talking about laughing at a joke. I am talking about not taking ourselves and the world so seriously. Being able to see the light side of even the darkest moments but not just using humor to avoid feeling uncomfortable. Being a human is a moment to moment humbling experience. If we are doing it right we are reminded on a daily basis of our 'right-sizedness': not as big as we imagine nor as tiny as we fear. We all fit someplace in the middle of the sea of humanity in all of our measurable qualities, and if we were to be honest we would have to admit to messing up and falling on our behinds constantly. And, the truth is, that is funny. It is funny to observe, just look at the movies, and it is funny to experience IF we let ourselves be a human among humans.

If we still hold out the unfortunate notion, admitted to or not, that we are somehow better than the rest of the species, then it is going to be a much tougher go. This is because we won't be able to admit our imperfection, and will have to disavow our mistakes, and therefore will always end up defending ourselves, our position and our behavior. We end up in a self-made prison of perfection, terrified of making a mistake, falling on our behinds, and seeming the fool in front of others. Absolutely not fun at all. I encourage all of you to practice making mistakes, every day, and to pick something once per week that is guaranteed to make you feel foolish like telling a joke, wearing a silly hat, or going to work with mismatched shoes. It won't take long before you are feeling more relaxed and things, your mate, your life and yourself, are seeming a bit lighter and more humorous.

2. Include the traveler's guide to 'fair fighting' and 'being right vs. being happy'. There are some people who will vote for being 'right' every time, believing that it will make them happy, and it might. What it won't do is make the relationship a happy or peaceful one and that can trump personal satisfaction in being right any day. There are a LOT of books on the subject, or you can just Google it. Many married male comedians like to joke about this one saying that before their wife says anything they blurt out ‘I’m sorry!’ funny, not off the mark, but, not what we want to pack. This is just avoidance of confrontation and is actually very passive aggressive because swallowing an argument to quiet someone is still quieting someone. It looks like you are just rolling over, but, what you are actually doing is displacing your anger onto your mate and making them into the aggressor and then surrendering to them. This ends up with one partner acting like a victim and the other feeling like a bully. You think you are trying to keep the peace, but, this will just lead to resentment and more fights as your mate tries to give back your bully projection through trying to show their 'right-ness' in this or future arguments.

All couples fight, it is a natural, healthy part of every relationship and I would be concerned if you didn't. That said, all couples need to know how to fight and to have some agreements. These can be to stay in the moment and not bring out the list of priors and witnesses to the crime (you know, the 'you do that all the time', 'my therapist says that I am right', 'Dr. Phil had someone on who is just like you', etc.), not to name call, not exit the fight without an agreement as to when to take it up again, and the permission to call a break again with the stipulation of a time to take it up again. These are just some ideas for some 'rules of engagement', but talk to your mate and come up with your own.

3. Do NOT pack the net but don't forget your mittens. The inability, or refusal in some cases, to let things flow under the proverbial bridge with the river of life, can become a real problem for some couples. It can foster resentments, and make it impossible for them to stay in the moment. Either by nature or by training they have become adversarial in their interactions. Collecting evidence, making lists of errors and omissions, basically arming themselves for future battles with their mates. This would be a good time to restate the importance of packing #2. Using the river analogy, they put a net on the down current side of the bridge to capture anything that tries to ‘go by’, and then drag it all back up for reevaluation and rearming. Knowing when to stand your ground, and knowing when to let things go is important, but always better decided while holding hands. The best example of this is to imagine that you and your mate each put on one of those connected mittens that are often seen on children. Two mittens connected with a long piece of yarn. With each of you wearing one of these mittens it is impossible for you to completely disconnect from the other even if you want to. I realize you may do the 1000 things to do with a paper clip here and start thinking of ways you could cut the yarn, but, bear with me a minute. If the yarn stays intact, and the connection remains even during a bad fight over 'right', the worst that can happen is that you go in circles. But, if you drop hands, disconnecting from each other and taking up polarizing positions ready for battle, then the need to be right can take the fight, and the day, and the energy of the connection won't be there to hold the love while you fight. By staying connected, the blame game goes back and forth, defending, proving, etc., but, eventually you will get tired and if you let it, it will just lose steam. One of you will crack a smile, or make a funny comment, and again, if you let change happen, you will remember why you like each other and move on to something more enjoyable, move you back to 'happy'.

4. Pack only your TRUE Self, it is the only one you will need. Accept this remarkable human being that you picked as your partner on this journey, completely, just as they are, right here right now. Better yet, acceptance of the remarkable human being that you are, completely, right here, right now. It all begins there anyway. If you don’t accept yourself then you won’t be able to accept your mate, period. You will love them more on days that you are feeling good about yourself, and less on days you aren’t. You will be doing relationship in projection barely seeing the other person as a separate, autonomous, human being with rights and priveleges thereof. If they become your means of making yourself feel better, then it will become very important to you that you are able to control them in some way. If they get all independent and act on their own, who knows if they will make you feel as loved and special and important and beautiful/handsome, and strong and safe, etc. as you want and need them to make you feel? Think about it. You make another human being the source and solution to your good feeling about yourself and then just let them do what they want? Dicey at best, duct tape at worst. The end to this story lies in the divorce statistics that we all know so well. My advice here is to make sure you pack your true Self for this journey and make sure you take it with you on the first date. Never lie, never try to please and never morph into someone you think they will fall in love with. You might just get what you want and end up not wanting what you have.

5. Put on top the user's manual to your own heart. The kind of love that stays and grows requires that we accept complete for our own feelings, especially the love that is in our own hearts. Over the course of a relationship feelings can wax and wane, but, 99.9% of the time that we are ‘not feeling the love’ anymore, we are discontent with some aspect of our own being, or our own life. The mates we chose are basically the same people for the course of their adult lives. They can grow and change for good or not so good, but, at core they stay the people we picked and were so in love with at the start. The trouble is that our feelings towards them don’t and that can be confusing and troubling when it happens. When this happens I encourage people to pause and take an inward look instead of an outward one. We tend to use our world and the people in it to help us act out feelings and questions that we are having trouble dealing with internally. It is sometimes easier to locate the blame for a lack of joy or satisfaction with our mates, rather than take responsibility for what we aren’t changing in our own lives. It is my experience that relationships end up carrying the burden of the individual’s unprocessed stuff, sometimes to the point of being made the sacrificial lamb. It is very important that each party in a relationship take 100% responsibility for the care and feeding of their own physical and emotional beings and that looks like seeking help for what feels like diminishing feeling, before it is made into a relationship issue. So, refer back to #4, pack your true Self, and your commitment to the care and feeding of that Self, and don’t be afraid of wavering feelings in the course of a relationship, they happen.

There you have it! Now, make your own lists and pack your suitcase wisely and you can look forward to a rewarding, unpredictable, imperfect, love-filled journey together through life.

A letter to the bulimic who still suffers

2010-01-24T23:58:00.000-08:00

I am heading off to a meeting this morning to take a candle celebrating my 15 years of abstinence from bulimia. I decided to post about this because the truth is I didn't do it, I didn't cure myself. Bulimia was lifted from me when I was finally ready to give up the fight, and for 15 years I have just done whatever it took, including losing 70 lbs. and maintaing it, to not take it back again. So the candle isn't for me, it is for those of you out there that are still suffering. You need to know that we are out here, those that have found a path out of that hell called bulimia, and that we know what you are going through. You are not alone. You also need to know that hope exists, that freedom is possible, and that when you are ready, you will seek it out and we will be here waiting for you. I don't know your stories, but, I am sure they are very similar to mine and millions of other bulimics around the world. We know you because we are you. Bulimia is an obession of the mind that translates into behavior that becomes addictive. We become addicted to the chemistry produced by the behavior and it can be as hard to quit as any other chemical addiction. But, it is possible. You don't need to struggle, you just need to understand what it is, that it is bigger than you will ever be and toss in the towel and seek help now. Doesn't matter where the journey for freedom starts, just that you start it. It can be here, it can be online, it can be in books, it can be a therapist or an OA meeting. It only matters that you know that you will never win against the disease. I was bested each time I took up the fight, and I am a stubborn fighter. The only way to freedom that worked for me, and many many like me, was in giving up completely, not in fighting harder. I liken the battle with bulimia, and any addiction really, to those Chinese finger traps. The more you struggle to free yourself, the tighter it's grasp on you becomes.

Keep this thought in mind, in the time you have been reading this post you have been abstinent from purging. That is something, it counts, and it is how recovery happens, moment by moment.

I send you love and blessings for your journey.

Stephanie Rasband

The buddha in the bank line

2010-01-24T22:02:00.000-08:00

A few months ago I was standing in line at my bank waiting, thinking, people watching as usual. A girl about 7 years old was walking around the bank, clearly bored and waiting for a parent. I was starting to look around to see who that parent might be when she appeared and in a pathetic voice only a bored 7 year old can make said to the woman behind me, 'mommy I want a chocolate'. I thought to myself, kind of early but ok, works for me! They evidently had some kind of an agreement because her mom replied that she might want to think about waiting to have her chocolate until later because they were going to be going to a few more places before they would be done and ready for lunch. The little girl wasn't having it and upped the pressure, and the tone. 'But I NEED a chocolate!' she pleaded. Again I could relate, but the transformation of the mother's facial affect and her posture had my attention. Mind you I was trying not to pry but at this point it was hard not to watch. I had absolutely no idea what was going to happen next and in my entire life, my education and my experience I would never have thought to say it myself but I wish someone had said it to me. Might have saved me a lifetime of addiction, isolation and body obsession. The mother looked at her young daughter and said in a tone that could have righted a wobbling plane, 'you do not NEED chocolate. No one NEEDS chocolate. You NEED to pray! Did you pray today?' The little girl sulked and mumbled, 'no' but her mother wasn't done. 'You are going to pray right now for everyone in this line and then everyone behind the counter and then all the people in their desks. You are going to pray that they stay healthy and that they have good lives.'

The little girl sulked off, I suppose to pray, but that would be amazing even for the most obedient 7 year old, and I was struck, gob-smacked, pick your expression, but I was in awe of this woman, this mother, this amazing human being who actually knew to intervene with her child in a place of pure boredom and self-centeredness and redirect her to think of others. I commented to her as much and we had a wonderful conversation about it all but that really isn't important here. What is important is that I met the Buddha in line at the bank that day and she taught me 3 things:

1. She taught me that the lessons of life are ongoing, every moment of everyday of my life. They never stop, I am just available to receive them or I am not. If I had been distracted into busyness, talking on the phone, checking my email, I wouldn't have been present for this moment and would have missed one of the biggest teachings of my spiritual life. We can either stay awake and be present for these remarkable moments, or, we can collapse into the static that is always waiting, leaving us to sleep-walk through our lives.

2. That as parents we are our children's first spiritual teachers. It falls on our mostly unskilled, unprepared and unknowing shoulders to guide these little hearts and minds towards the positive mental and emotional choices that will eventually become part of how they see their world and themselves in it. Most parents these days are so overwhelmed with the fundamentals of life and parenthood, this can't come as good news, but it is. The mother in this case was middle class, had a business and a second job, a single mom and taking care of a sick mother. It isn't about free time. It is about paying attention. It is always about paying attention. If you pay attention to your kids, to what they say to you, to each other, to the tv, to their toys, to themselves, you will learn a lot about how they are. They will tell you with what they ask you for when they are tired and frustrated. They will tell you with what they settle for instead of your attention, what you buy them off with so that you can get a bit more done. They will tell you with what they chose to console themselves with then they are sad or disappointed. The one major quality that is present in all great spiritual teachers is their capacity for being present. The quality of their attention in that presence is like the rays of the sun for whomever is there with them. This is what it is supposed to be like for our children when we are really there with them. Our attention is manna for our offspring and they can't thrive without it. They can live without it and do, all the time, but that doesn't mean they should have to, and they will not thrive. They will survive and adapt and develop into adolescents that don't need it and then adults that can't cultivate it to give to themselves, their lives, their mates or their offspring. And so it goes. We become a culture of parents who run with their toddlers in strollers while talking on the phone and we blame school lunch programs for childhood obesity and put our sad children on antidepressants. A very sad state of affairs.

3. She taught me that the antidote to craving, of wanting something outside of me to make me feel better, to make me feel less bored, to make me feel loved and wanted and safe, is prayer, is getting out of ourselves and into someone else's life. When we are in a place of 'I need', we are rarely actually 'in need' of anything at all. There are definitely some situations where 'need' is real and is serious and should be met quickly, but, for the most part, our needs are usually wants. We have just gotten used to using the word need, for want, and I admit it does sound better and makes it seem much more justified. The trouble is that over time we have become immune to what the energy of 'need' really is supposed to be and have developed into a lazy, addicted, instant-gratification seeking culture with little capacity for learning curves, waiting, or working for something. Unfortunately for the sake of 'I need it right now' we have given up some wonderful things such as anticipation, appetite, satisfaction of accomplishment, savoring and enjoyment. I know for me that there is very little that I really 'need' other than the obvious basics, but, at any given moment I can give you a list of wants that are presenting as real needs. When I sit with the feeling of that need, something else arrives, a discontent, an absence of something that I just can't quite put my finger on. My impulse is to 'do something' to satisfy this feeling as though its mere presence was a cause for alarm and action. When I don't act, I feel and when I feel I am here, present and connected to my experience. I may like it, I may not like it, but it is happening regardless.

The key to happiness lies in that moment of connection with ones experience: if you can't meet yourself where you are, then, you will never truly 'be' happy anywhere else. Sometimes standing still is the deepest kind of prayer. Asking someone how their day is going is another. Next time you think you 'need' chocolate, a drink, a cigarette, that pair of shoes in the window, whatever, be still a moment and see what comes up. Then look around and see who is there that could benefit from your attention in some way. Sometimes just a sincere inquiry into their day can make a big difference for them and for you.