We Have the Power: Maybe We Can’t Just “Let Go.” But Maybe We Can Stop Feeding What’s Eating Us

People tell us, “Just let go!” Or “let it go.” Let go of that thought circling continuously in our mind. Let go of that memory, that pain, that habit. Let go of the attacks we launch against ourselves. But there’s no “just let go.” We usually can’t do that. It would be wonderful if, when a hurtful thought arises, we were aware enough to “just” say “bye bye now,” and we kicked it out. Whoopee! It might be that simple for some of us; but usually, when we kick it, it kicks back.

 

It’s a hypnotic technique; if we want someone to think of something, we say “don’t think of this.” Like the famous example, “Don’t think of an elephant” and we think of an elephant. Or we tell children, don’t touch my computer and there they are at the computer.

 

And what’s worse is the expectation; the thought that it should be “just” that easy is an added weight on a weighted soul. We can carry around these selfies of expectations, of ourselves glaring at our “mistakes,” ourselves with others glaring or staring at us.

 

Instead of pushing a thought away, we can pause, stop whatever we’re doing for a second; take an easy, longer breath. And notice where we’re standing. We can’t easily stop a thought; but we can add another more aware, generous, or compassionate one. In my dreams, when something pursues me and I try to hide or turn away, the dream becomes a nightmare, the pursuer expands exponentially into a monster and chases me in a manner too terrible to see. When I face the pursuer, it shrinks and becomes just another living being to recognize. There’s great power in facing and knowing when to face our monsters.

 

One memorable insight I got from mythologist Joseph Campbell and others was that sometimes what seems threatening can be a “call” to us, to step up, try something new; and by doing so, we find ourselves. What once seemed a fright becomes something like an adventure. Writer C. K. Chesterton agreed with Campbell’s point when he wrote: “an adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.” And the bible: “For the turning away of the simple shall slay them…” Of course, sometimes, we should just turn away.

 

So, one thing that can turn thoughts into torture is letting them chase us from right now; or chase us from looking into what’s living in and around us. We might think the thought itself, and the object of thought carries the whole package of hurt. However, the loss of a moment, of clear seeing, hurts. The running hurts. The negative verdict on ourselves binds and blinds us. It’s how we respond to events or news that matters most. There’s great power, perspective, and freedom in spending time to clearly consider how we respond. Maybe we can’t just “let go.” But maybe, maybe we can stop feeding what’s eating us.

 

And some things we’re not always ready to face. In that case, being caring of ourselves is perfect. All of us have such times, such traumas or hurts. And noticing as much as we possibly can, in that moment, whatever is there for us, with caring and compassion is such a gift. No expectations, just noticing. Such kindness opens us; being judgmental closes us.

 

Instead of being absorbed by an emotion, we can use our attention to “just” notice it. We can break apart what plagues us by noticing what the sensations are and where they‘re located. We can name the quality of feeling and the volume. We can, of course, also talk with others about them, say what we feel safe to say, or say what’s just a little bit beyond safe; or say what feels right. By noticing what feels right and honest in ourselves, and what is right and honest in relating to others is great power. Instead of trying to be a hero in anyone else’s dream, be honest in ours….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

 

Myths that Can Be Bought Are Never Ones to Live: Moods, Myths, and Emotions

I was visiting friends in the town of Woodstock, NY. I could feel the town not only in my memory but in my bones. It was that visceral. I’d been visiting there for years. And it wasn’t about the music festival. The visceral feeling I had was very different from drugs, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll. In1969, I was in Sierra Leone, West Africa, in the Peace Corps and didn’t attend the festival.

 

I did go to a festival a year or two later, to see Joe Cocker. I also went to Woodstock to stay in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery for a few days. I went there to climb a mountain nearby, to visit a native American site, and a Zen Monastery. And then friends began moving to the area.

 

And now I notice that whenever I visit, or wherever I walk in the town, I am engulfed in a mood, and expectation. Except for when I see my friends, everywhere I look, everything I see—the mountain just out of town, the central square, the tourist shops, bookstores, art galleries are covered by some deep-seated sense of a reality originating somewhere beyond sight; it’s more of a walking myth than a touchable reality.

 

And it’s clear that nothing I touch can live up to that myth. That’s one nature of a mood, and myth. They don’t fit into normal boxes. A mood sets the tone for emotion and actions. According to psychologist and pioneer in the study of emotion and facial expression, Dr. Paul Ekman, moods “lower the threshold for arousing” emotions. They set us up, ready us. Think about a time you were in an irritable mood, for example, and how ready you were to get annoyed, or angry. We pick from the world whatever will call forth the anger, or depression, sadness, frustration, inadequacy, etc. and we become less willing and able to stop the emotion.

 

If we’re in a “good mood,” or we feel open, then euphoria, joy, insight all might come more readily. Emotions are more short-lived. Moods can go on for much longer, for hours, maybe on and off for years.

 

Ekman asks, what brings forth a mood? One source can be physiological changes. For example, lack of sleep or food can make our children, or us, cranky. Sometimes, lack of sleep can also do the opposite. We get out of bed in the morning, and our cat or dog sees us, rolls over onto its back, shows us it’s belly, and puts its paws behind its ears. And we start laughing crazily.

 

But Ekman also speaks of dense emotional experiences, ones of high intensity, and often repeated, as causing a mood. For example, someone insults us, repeatedly, and a mood forms around the person and the place we experience them. And if we don’t get the chance to fully respond to the communication or provocation, to honestly express our emotion or to fully experience what we needed, there’s more of a chance a mood might develop. And we no longer see the person and place as an immediate, alive presence. Our freedom of mind, of action can be narrowed or lost. I remember as a nine-year-old having to harden myself in preparation for rebuffing the efforts of another student to insult or make me look foolish and hide my fear. It didn’t take long before the sight of the schoolroom began to evoke a mood of threat.

 

And this fits the myth of Woodstock. My visits to monasteries were short. I never stayed for a long enough session to fully grasp the meaning of the place, its teachings and practices. The experience was just a hint, a mere taste. A bell was rung but never allowed to ring in me. And now I enter a store and have an expectation of finding a book that will reach deeply into my heart or provide me with what the monastery promised. A mood can narrow our mind or remind us of expanded visions we haven’t yet seen. Stores sell myths; but myths that can be bought are never ones to be lived.

 

One day during our recent visit, my wife and friends went off shopping for flowers and I was alone. I went down to a stream in a wooded area, sat on a chair someone left on the rocks probably for just this purpose, and meditated. I started by counting my breaths; but once focused, I let go of the counting and just listened. Cars and trucks were passing by on a road nearby. There was this constant, steady, almost humming sound, which, as my mind quieted, was recognized as the stream speaking. And so many birds. So many I hadn’t heard until then and didn’t name until later– crows, robins, nuthatches, the harsh, loud voice of a pileated woodpecker. The quieter I was, the more I heard. And the less– no more myths or moods. No more getting lost in thoughts and memories….

 

*To read the whole post, please go to The Good Men Project.

 

 

When All that Remains of Me is A Deep and Gentle Laugh

It was about 9:00 am. I opened my eyes and got lost in colors and sounds, some of those sounds soon becoming voices. The voices were possibly from outside the house or inside, outside my head or inside a dream. They were just sounds, with a hint of something familiar. And I was just there, listening; listening to everything, and not wanting to do anything but lie there in the easy tired warmth that can come at the end of night.

 

I remember one time sitting with one of my cats. She gets so happy she almost talks, her words a language of cries, snorts, and kneading of the blanket. It’s a language I of course didn’t totally understand, but I get the drift. She also loves to rub noses, which always evokes a deep smile in me. I feel so full in her presence that all that remains of me is a deep and gentle laugh.

 

In both instances, I’m right there. But let’s say I want to tell someone about it. I get an urge to write this blog, for example, to talk about my funny cat or my taking refuge in the deep comfort of a warm morning, and I lose it. To write about her, I need to step out of my deep loving laugh as a snorting cat and look at me thinking about, and distinct from, her. But I guess writing can be another way to feel full or immersed, another sort of magic.

 

I was reading Zen master teacher Dainin Katagiri’s book, You Have to Say Something: Manifesting Zen Insight. He talked about there being a subtle feeling that exists before we decorate, expand, separate from or bury it with words. Before we move to approach, avoid, or stay still; before like, dislike, or feeling neutral arises. There’s a subtle state, he says, that we usually zoom right past. In that state, there’s “a oneness of our feeling with the object of our feeling.” A oneness with no sense of someone looking at it, no impulse to speak about it. His words shook me up and felt so alive and fresh. But as soon as I wrote them down

that life of meaning disappeared.

 

Back in February, I wrote a blog about re-discovering a leonine version of a Teddy Bear that I was given back when I was 5 or 6 and now lives on the back of the couch in the den of our home. That lion has seen so much of my life.

 

I look out my window at an apple tree that has been living outside our front door since we first built that door in 1972. That tree is so old, and so many limbs have fallen off, that what remains is a shell of what it once was, hollow, seemingly held up only by history and memories. And that tree goes back to other trees, a maple that had once lived in front of my ancestral home in Queens, NYC, back to when I was gifted with the lion. It goes back to pre-school, to a drawing of a tree that was used to formally teach me the word. It goes back to when I first spoke any word, probably Mama— Mama maybe being the root of all words. It goes back to ancient Sumeria and the roots of written language. It goes back to prehistoric caves like Lascaux in southern France and maybe the first symbolization. It goes back to the first humans or first hominids or first creatures to draw a breath. Or back maybe to the wind.

 

The tree isn’t me. Yet, without me and my wife and cats, who would know it, enjoy it, tell stories about it?  When I see it, a universe of me can appear….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project:

Freeing Ourselves from Fixations, Opening to Joy: The Paradox of Sky, The Revelation of Breath

Sometimes, I have a wonderful revelation and write or think about writing an article about it. And then I pick up a magazine, or read a book, and there, right in front of me, is the revelation. But it’s by another person. It’s by a Buddhist teacher, a Christian, Jewish, or Muslim mystic; a philosopher, a neighbor, or a friend. Often, the first impulse of feeling I have is frustration; what will I write now? There’s envy there, jealousy maybe, although how can I be jealous of Buddha or Jesus?

 

I need to remind myself there’ve been thousands of years of people on this planet. There are over 8 billion of us right now. Do I really expect myself to come up with something no one else ever thought of? The particulars, the context I write about might be different, the flavor. But total originality? And isn’t a revelation a revelation whether or not another person was graced by it before I was so graced? Do I have to compete over joy or get jealous over sharing whatever I think distinguishes me from others?

 

And would searching for total originality be just another way of isolating ourselves from others?

 

Occasionally, I notice a very different response. Oh, wow. I’m not alone. This is exciting. Or: I wonder how this other person describes it? I sort of know where the idea came from for me; but what’s the story for this other person? I feel curious, and a sense of joy for both of us. This response feels so much better.

 

It reminds me of what Buddhism calls Mudita, one of the Four Immeasurables or mental habits that liberate the heart. The other three are loving-kindness, compassion, and equanimity, or being able to discern, adjust to, and move with whatever occurs. Mudita means sympathetic or empathetic joy, or when we feel joyous in the happiness, achievement, good fortune, or in the skills and revelations of another person.

 

When we notice in ourselves these feelings, of envy, jealousy, or the like, and let them go by kindly recognizing how human the feelings are yet limiting. And we wish them good fortune. There’s relief there. There’s a sense of freedom, from fixations and walls of fear. We feel more cared for, and more able to create relationships and community.

 

Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg shares how we sometimes, like my first response above, begrudge another’s happiness or achievement. Some of us are even inclined to glory in another’s setbacks or failures. We might think there’s a limited stockpile of success or happiness; that if they get it, we won’t.

 

Yet, we can look up at the sky and feel a beauty that seems to go on forever. It might seem familiar, like it’s just sky, like we know it already. Or it can scare us, wake us up to how small we are in the universe. It can provide a revelation of infinity in the midst of the limited, normal, and every day. The sky is just so different from the trees and buildings that reach into but stand apart from it. The infinity of sky seems so different from the immensity of matter.

 

I remember standing on the great lawn in the middle of Central Park in New York City and looking downtown toward 59th Street. The contrast between the trees and the buildings shook me up for a second. The two sights, great trees and big buildings, just didn’t seem to go together. And then I looked up and saw the sky above— it didn’t fit at all. It was so vast it couldn’t be contained by any mass of trees or grid of streets.

 

Such a paradox: at a distance, there’s the vastness of sky. It’s blue, orange, gray, black or something that includes all or none of those choices. But close up, it’s air, invisible…

 

*To read the whole piece, please go to this link to The Good Men Project.

When Our Wanting Wants the Wanting to Never Cease; When We Feel Present, We Feel More Powerful, and are Less Likely to be Manipulated

May I be happy….

 

Like so many of my friends and neighbors, I sometimes feel that to spend any length of time other than fighting injustice, going to work, dealing with health issues, or caring for others is a waste of time. Having fun can get lost. Fun is fiddling while the earth burns. It’s putting flowers in the window of a building about to be demolished. It’s sitting silent while our rights and lives are being stolen from us.

 

May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I be at peace. May all beings be free from suffering.  I learned this loving-kindness practice, meditation, and wish from author and Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg and others. Visualizing myself happy, smiling, for example, can free me from ruminating, worrying, especially right now, in today’s world. We need to feel we can have moments of happiness despite the multiple threats to our world. If we feel we can’t be happy, we might give up and do nothing.

 

To feel we can be happy we need to feel that we have agency, that we can make changes in ourselves and the world around us.

 

To feel we can make changes, it’s helpful to feel present right here, right now. When we feel present, we more easily feel joy.

 

A few days ago, I heard a program on NPR. The program was an interview by Alicia Garceau of Michaeleen Doucleff, author of a new book called Dopamine Kids: A Science-Based Plan to Rewire Your Child’s Brain and Take Back Your Family in the Age of Screens and Ultra Processed Foods. The book applied evidence of how research paid for mainly by gambling industries was utilized by social media platforms and the food industry to addict us to their products.

 

Doucleff is a science writer and trained biochemist. Several years ago, she wanted to figure out how to reduce her family’s dependence on new tech and ultra processed foods. She found something surprising.

 

We think of the hormone and neurotransmitter dopamine as the pleasure molecule. What she discovered was dopamine doesn’t give us pleasure; instead, it ties us to what we’re doing. It creates a feeling of wanting. We eat chips and we keep eating them, not because they really satisfy us. They have little to no nutrition. But the more we eat, the more we want. We get caught by wanting.

 

And when we want, we feel empty. We feel what Buddhist philosopher David Loy describes as lacking; we feel that what we have, what we are is not enough. It’s part of the Buddhist understanding of the cause of suffering or feeling our lives are unsatisfactory. Wanting wants the wanting to never cease. It robs us of joy and agency.

 

Children intently desire and get focused on their screen time. They get caught up in “the infinite scroll” not because it brings them joy; the screen experience robs them of that. It promises so much, a sense of belonging, community, support. But this is a trick. It’s like a game advertised by a casino that promises us riches but delivers financial loss instead.

 

Casinos aim to create in the player a continuous, timeless, flow-like state so we more easily feel we have won something when we haven’t….

 

*To read the whole post, please go to The Good Men Project.

How Accepting Aging Can Heal Loss and Pain; Finding Ourselves in the Sound of Rain

When my father was in his nineties, he said one of the worst things he was facing was the sense of being alone; that almost everyone his own age or older was gone. Sure, he was lucky to have lived so long and been mentally clear, able to remember all these people, able to manage his own life. Able to even do his own taxes. He was an accountant, so this was especially important to him. He was also lucky to have sons and other, although younger, friends and relatives. But the number of losses in his life, and the sense of emptiness was staggering.

 

He also thought about how his aging and dying would affect others. One morning he called my wife and me to tell us he was going to die that day. He wanted to say goodbye. I found out he also ordered presents for several people, baskets of fruit. But he did not die that day. The next day he did go into a rapid decline and died 2 weeks later.

 

He lived 8 hours away from us, so we immediately packed the car and drove to see him. I didn’t realize it then, but the act of thinking about and caring for others made his own passing, for the moment, less fearsome. Caring for others, compassion, love just has this benefit. It surely can hurt, and terribly. But that hurt, that grief, placing ourselves in another’s heart and mind, and valuing their life and perspective can help us value, understand, and expand our own perspective. By feeling some responsibility to others, feeling the need for kindness, compassion, we feel more able to be kind to ourselves.

 

I know that some of us think about others and their judgments of us, more than we recognize ourselves. We impose an image we think others hold of us on top of our sense of self, obliterating our sense of ourselves. This is different from what my dad talked about. He was actually giving up his self-concern, not replacing his own inner awareness with what he imagined others thought of him. Not replacing a living feeling of his own sense of inner reality with an abstract thought. And this allowed him to notice and be more.

 

I don’t want to romanticize this. My dad wasn’t entirely selfless, certainly not fearless. He greatly feared a painful death. The end was not easy. But for several days his concern for others helped him approach his own death with more grace and maybe less suffering.

 

And there’s great research on this, on the link between compassion for others and compassion for ourselves. By looking beyond ourselves to others, we think more clearly and better notice the larger context we’re part of. We feel ourselves right here, not in some time in the future or past, not as a thought or memory, but as right now.

 

We don’t put things off or separate our feelings and awareness from thoughts or with thoughts. We come alive in what gives us life, now.

 

I thought of this because I’m now having similar feelings as my dad did. As I lose more people I once knew, and so many of those around me have severe medical issues, I appreciate what he had told me more now than I did then. His experience then is educating mine now.

 

I wrote a short story years ago that was published by Sunlight Press and my website. It was about a walk I took with the headmaster of my school in 1969, when I served in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone. We were debating whether political change was possible. He said no; I argued yes. It started raining. I opened my umbrella and said, “I just changed the situation. We’re no longer getting wet.” He replied, “No, you changed nothing. It’s still raining.”…

 

*To read the entire article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

It’s So Overwhelming: Rediscovering the Core of Our Being

DT continues to do all he can to stir up the chaos, the shock, the abuses so we can’t keep up. My e-mails are flooded with petitions, unbelievable news stories, information on protests that happened and ones to join, and requests for money to fight back against the assaults. Never before did I so anticipate and cheer on suits against the government. I used to automatically delete 95% of emails; now, 95% seem too critical to ignore.

 

This morning: Scott Dworkin, Massive Anti-DT Protests Erupt Everywhere and More Good News. And: Opinion You Don’t Want To Miss. Trump IRS Pick Just Enriched by Tax Schemers, Trump Relaunches His Tariff Corruption Game. Articles on DT’s threat to the economy and threat to our ability to afford our lives. The Supreme Court denying or sometimes affirming DT’s lust for absolute power at our expense. The illegal imprisonment of immigrants, the attempts to destroy due process and the rule of law. Articles repeatedly appear on the destruction of health care, environmental protections, and all government functions that support the well-being and the very lives of most Americans.

 

And notably, an article in the New York Times on Easter Sunday about how Americans desire and are turning to a belief in a god, soul, afterlife, a spiritual dimension to their lives. 92% of Americans claim they have some kind of spiritual belief. The article, Believing, by Lauren Jackson, appears in a section of the Times dramatically titled America Wants a God. It’s part of her now yearlong project studying a significant shift in American life, after decades of people turning away from religion. A good number of us, 40 million Americans, had left their churches, synagogues, etc. and looked to jobs, gym classes, mysticism, meditation, mostly secular replacements.

 

But since the pandemic, the environmental emergency, and DT, more and more of us have felt an “existential malaise.” Our world, our lives are threatened on so many fronts, and we want somewhere to turn for support, for reason, for care. And studies, including one by the Pew Research Center, show that people who practice a religion, or have some sort of regular spiritual practice, tend to be happier, and one from Harvard on how religion contributes to being healthier. (Yeah, Harvard.)

 

This revival of spiritual longing, or maybe desperation, rings very true to me. We see this in the great interest in mindfulness over the last 40 years. And on the other hand, we see it in the maybe one third of Americans who have declared DT their new God or savior. I don’t know how believing in the Donald’s holiness makes people happier. I mean, he sells bibles for extra cash and seems to sell access to power to evangelicals for votes.

 

If godly means moral, caring about the well-being of others, living by the Golden Rule or Ten Commandments, and knowledgeable of the content of whatever Holy teachings one says one believes in, I think DT is probably one of the last people on earth to be called godly. But he nevertheless claims the title so absolutely others seem to accept his insistence as proof. When an assassin’s bullet just grazed him, he claimed God intervened in his behalf. Maybe spreading hate has a happy edge to it, or makes people feel united in a community of shared bitterness. Or maybe people can mistake autocratic political power for power over eternity.

 

Since even before the early Middle Ages, religion was often pitted against reason. With a 20th century decrease in church membership there was an increase in trust in science, research, rationality. And, at the same time, an increase in materialism, in a commodification of every aspect of life. Our own attention, our very mind, became the biggest commodity to sell. Although maybe this effort of commodifying the human mind, of controlling the mind of others, has always been the biggest power that certain humans hungered for?…

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

Reducing Anxiety so We Can Live Through the Next Few Days. Final Thoughts: In an Autocracy, We as Citizens, Consumers, Patients, and Workers Lose Our Rights

First, a personal concern:

How do we reduce the anxiety most of us are feeling about the election to something we can live with? DT has done all he can to make this difficult. He has worked to make the election as chaotic and threatening as possible. He’s done all he could to try to fix or hold up election results and frighten election workers. He’s promised if he wins to rule like a dictator, use the military against those who oppose him, and violence if he loses. He has falsely claimed for years that the 2020 election was rigged, and now he claims this one’s been rigged, so whether he loses, or wins, we won’t know who our next president will be for hours, days or weeks after Tuesday. But the evidence shows that the only candidate in the 2024 race who’s tried to illegally interfere in the election process is DT himself.

 

I’m tired of him. I want him to just lose, again, but this time, disappear from the political stage. I’m trying different strategies to keep my eyes open while keeping my heart rate as comfortable as I can. One strategy is to do whatever and as much as I can to get out the vote, or as Michelle Obama said, to do something.

 

I’m also considering my own health, mental and physical. One way I’m doing that is to study how, in the worst of times, maybe we can get stronger. In the midst of my fright, maybe there’s buried the way to face what frightens me. In a book about the Japanese Zen teacher and philosopher Dogen Zenji by Shinshu Roberts, the author quotes Dogen and other teachers on facing what we don’t like. The mental states that we wish would just disappear, he says, might just reveal the wisdom that we need. We don’t find wisdom in a vacuum. There are things we must put off; it’s difficult to talk about wisdom when our mind is focused on survival. Yet our lives are so much better when we can bring as much awareness as possible to whatever we face.

 

Maybe if we can just stop what we’re doing, and sit, stand, exercise, or take a walk in a beautiful area; maybe take a breath. Feel our feet on the floor. For one minute we can take a holiday and feel this moment, now, so fully we won’t have the space to imagine later. Maybe when it’s possible and with as much awareness as possible, we can write down or dance out the thoughts in our mind or the feelings in our body, without editing or hiding them. Then we will better perceive how to face the next moment, no matter what occurs. And, if we haven’t done so already, we can be relaxed yet alert when we vote.

 

A last argument before the election:

A week before election day, Kamala Harris gave a powerful final argument for her campaign. She said we all know who DT is and what he’d delver, more chaos, hate, and division. More power and wealth to the rich at the expense of the rest of us. For example, his 10-50% tariff on imported goods would raise the burden on most of us hundreds to  thousands of dollars while proportionally reducing the burden on the rich. Many economists warn his plans could crash the economy.

 

But what needs to be said more clearly is that the economy and the cost of living is not a separate issue from that of democracy….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

The Magical Realism of Worry: When We Worry, We Might Feel We’re Keeping the Unbearable at Bay

Worry magical?  How can I call it magical? Disastrous, yes. Devastating? Painful? Certainly unpleasant. But magical? It can seem so devoid of redeeming qualities, but the emotion evolved to serve a purpose.

 

Worry is such a part of our lives. We can worry about so many things, of so many degrees of importance, from the outcome of a sporting event to whether climate change will the make the weather unsustainable for human life. We can worry about ourselves, our friends, family, students, or humanity as a whole.

 

I remember waiting for the results of a medical test. It was torturous, imagining different results. Luckily, I was soon able to put the worries away and not ruminate over the possible outcome. But ruminating is so easy to do. Not-knowing can be so difficult. When we worry, we can feel like we can’t let the emotion go.

 

And I noticed in myself that if we’re worrying, the unthinkable we worry about isn’t happening. When we worry, then for the length of a thought, we feel we’re keeping the unbearable at bay. We’re locking the future into the realm of the bearable, into the realm of imagination. We delay and delay. The emotion becomes a magical incantation. If we repeat the worry over and over, we stop the imagined awful from becoming awfully real.

 

But, to delay is to delay living or really to live delaying. To worry is to live in some form what we worry about. We keep it close to us. But the future is just another possibility, just another thought. What’s real is what we’re doing, feeling, thinking now.

 

There’s also a double quality to many emotions. We can fear fear (as well as enjoy it, as in watching horror movies). The fact we feel fear is itself fearful. We can get angry at anger, or at ourselves for being angry. We can also enjoy joy and love loving. With worry, we can, for example, worry about ourselves for “having” the emotion as well as worry about the object of worry.

 

We also might imagine rumination opens us up to those we worry about. And that can be true. The imaginative component of worry can help us understand what other people might be thinking or feeling. But it can also do the opposite. It can keep us in what’s called the default mode network (DFN) of the brain, the network we’re in when not involved in a task or focused activity.

 

As medical journalist James Kingsland describes in his book Siddhartha’s Brain: Unlocking the Ancient Science of Enlightenment, the default mode network allows us to bring up events we’ve lived through and to imagine what we haven’t experienced. It allows us to construct an image of who we are but looks at others more in relation to ourselves and less in terms of who they are in themselves.

 

The DFN allows “mind-wandering” to imagined possibilities. This ability to imagine is quite an amazing achievement of the human brain. It allows us to build ships to fly to the moon and write novels. And we might think we wander mentally to avoid psychological suffering as well as examine possibility after possibility. But according to research by Harvard psychologists Mathew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, the “mind-wandering” itself can be the cause, not the consequence, of negative emotions. Worrying can cause more worrying.

 

Yet the emotion serves a purpose….

 

*To read the whole article, please click on the link here to The Good Men Project.

Are We All Just Trying to Figure It Out? Changing Hurtful Habits

In Mary Oliver’s spectacular poem, The Summer Day, she asks,

 

“…What is it you plan to do

With your one wild and precious life.”

 

Of course, for some, life is more frightening than precious. But her evocation of such a spectacular day is so visceral and truthful.

 

And maybe we’re all always trying to figure this out, in our own ways. It’s certainly a question as old as humanity, as old as self-reflecting awareness. What can or what must we do with our lives?  Who or what are we? How can we or must we respond to a situation, to just waking up or going to work or school⎼ or to the threats that loom over all of us? Like the threat from those who are trying to impose a white nationalist dictatorship on all of us? The threat of the climate emergency, from wars, and who knows what else? Every moment the question of Who are we arises. We create ourselves through our answers to this question. And for most of us, our answers change.

 

Mary Oliver talks about attention, deep attention, as she rolls in the grass. As she feels herself as the grass or the creatures around her. And maybe this is one thing for all of us to do. We might let ourselves simply be with as much of what’s around us as feels right⎼ grass, trees, streams, and other living beings. This is one way to help save it, or them. To get us to care deeply enough to take action to save it, or us.

 

Did you hear that sound? The air disturbed by a moving car? The cough-talking of a raven? That peeper? That sparrow? That raven is cough talking not only the beauty of the day, but the grief it feels over the depleted air. Do you hear that sparrow? It’s not only calling its mate. It’s calling out in grief over the diminishing food resources it can find to feed its children.

 

I notice that when I regret something I did or didn’t do, maybe I misunderstood something, or treated someone unfairly, and I might call myself names. Wonder how I could ever be so mistaken. And this hurts. I might even imagine that mistake is frozen in time⎼ that I’m frozen in time, merely a memorial to a mistake. And that I can’t change or free myself from it. We might even try to blame someone or something else for what we’ve done so we no longer feel the pain.

 

Why do we do this? It’s such a weird way of thinking about ourselves and our lives, isn’t it? So distorted and inaccurate. If instead we listen deeply to this self-talk and imagining and go beyond it, not get stuck in it, so much might be revealed. Recognizing a mistake is the first step in correcting it. It can be a growth of awareness if we just listen mindfully and take it and our response as a lesson.

 

We might do the same anytime we look at ourselves….

 

*To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.