Method or Madness

“It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it’s the pebble in your shoe.”

— Muhammad Ali

It’s that time of year when people’s fancy turns to self-improvement.  Everyone’s doing it!  We’ve indulged, we’ve rested, and enthusiasm for a fresh start is rising!  There’s nothing at all wrong with this—in fact it can make life fun to take part in seasonal and societal shifts as they happen—and joining with others can help to reinforce your own commitment to positive change.  If you want to jump on this bandwagon, here are just a few thoughts to help you add checks and balances to your process (not just for politics, people!) so that your decisions really suit your needs and purposes:

·      It seems that, in January, physical fitness goals dominate the day.  While improving your physical health and fitness is always a worthy goal, and one that supports pretty much everything else you probably want to do and experience, adding an aggressive exercise regimen is not the best place to start for everyone.  You may be tempted to think that you have to go whole hog or nothing, but this kind of thinking gets a lot of people injured before the month is out.  That will throw a monkey wrench into your momentum for sure.  Try to keep any schemes for physical exercise moderate for your current level of fitness so that you’re not adding unsustainable stress to your body, and so that you don’t get stopped short before you can begin to solidify healthy new habits.  This is one of those areas in which you will never be finished.  There’s no such thing as “done.“  So don’t freak out and overdo, but do plan activities that will qualify as your next phase of achievement.

·      For that matter, try to keep any resolution for change to a moderate scheme.  We’re often taught that in order to get anything worthwhile done, we need to decide what to accomplish and how, and then thoroughly ignore thoughts, feelings, and life circumstances that might make adhering to the plan difficult.  This is the best thinking of two thousand years of male-energy-dominant thinking, and while it has its merits, it also exposes us to unnecessary likelihoods of stress, burnout, unhappiness that results from an unbalanced approach to life, and shame if we fail in a pursuit that was woefully unrealistic to begin with.  I’m not saying that no one should take on big goals, but we need to make sure we’re thinking about fitting new items into the context of a whole life with multiple demands.  We need to think about building in flexibility, and appropriate moments for reconsideration when circumstances change, so that we can stay in the game for the long haul as life throws distractions our way.

·      Just because someone you know or read about is taking on something that sounds interesting or inspiring, that doesn’t mean you need to take on the same.  Focus.  Really think about what you feel called to learn and grow into this year.  There is such a thing as right timing.  Events and repetitive pain points in your life may be pointing to certain areas in which it would really behoove you to acquire new skills.  Spend a few minutes noting whether there has been a recurring situation in your life lately that you could handle better if you just noticed and addressed your part in it.  This might be a more appropriate focus for your energies than climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, or what have you.

·      No one is in a better position than you to decide what’s the right next step for your goals and your life.  Of course, it can be helpful to talk through decisions like this with someone supportive, but make sure you don’t turn to someone who has strong agendas of their own for you who might limit your sense of possibility.  It’s fine to give important people in your life input on the choice and timing of your projects, but it helps to start with your own opinions about what would be ideal for you before beginning any negotiations of this kind.  A great deal of your own power flows from following your heart about who you want to be and what you want to strive for in this life.  Don’t abdicate your opportunity to get clear on your own desires and intuition about you.

I hope this helps you to make good decisions for the year ahead.  Whatever you do or don’t decide to pursue in 2017, I wish you a happy, healthy year filled with blessings and challenges worthy of you.

Silence Is Golden

“Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.”

— Buddha

Even if you’ve never meditated, you’ve probably heard that one of the benefits of many kinds of meditation practice is supposed to be a quieter mind.  Since most cultures today place great value on the use of the mind, the benefits of a quiet mind can seem mysterious.  Use it or lose it, right?  Aren’t we supposed to be exercising our minds in order to stretch their capacities and keep them nimble?  Well, just as our bodies need both weight-bearing exercise, cardio, stretching, AND rest in order to function at peak capacity, our minds need various kinds of use and rest in order to provide us with the capacities we want from them. 

Modern life is so hectic, demanding, and distracting that we don’t generally get much time for silence and reflection.  This leaves is with a mind that is mostly running at high speed all the time.  With a mind so busily engaged, it’s harder to notice the patterns that are running on autopilot, keeping us stuck in ruts that we never seem to be able to break out of for reasons that elude us.  When we put ourselves into a situation where nothing is required of us, and practice meditation with the aim of quieting the mind, we allow the mind to rest a bit; by the way, this in turn allows the body’s stress response to calm down, which is great for physical health—a bonus side effect!  While it definitely takes practice to make progress in disengaging from normal patterns of thought, so that benefits may not be immediately felt, over time, it’s possible to build familiarity with new mind states.  This familiarity makes it easier to take them with you, or recreate them when you’re experiencing something difficult, so that you can function more smoothly throughout your life.  A hyper mind isn’t necessarily a resourceful mind, just as a chronically tense muscle isn’t always useful—it needs to be able to relax and stretch in order to do everything it’s meant to do. 

When you’re meditating for the ability to quiet the mind, there are numerous benefits that I know I immediately experience, and you may as well, such as:

·      As I head toward greater quiet, my mind will usually chime in a few times to reveal things I need to do or remember, which is legitimately helpful.  I can make note of these and continue the process.  Without giving myself a few minutes of quiet, I would not have remembered these, and opportunities would have been lost.

·      As my mind slows down, I become more aware of my body, and anything about it that I need to address. 

·      I start to notice more about what is really going on with me, how I really feel about things that have been going on recently in my life.  I begin to feel more like myself and less like someone just running around at the behest of every distracting thing I encounter every day.

·      I begin to feel that there’s more time available to me than I would otherwise. 

·      I begin to feel calmer, more at peace, and more powerfully able to define what’s important and where I will choose to put my energy and focus.

·      I feel more in touch with my intuition.

·      My body feels more pleasantly calm and peaceful.

·      I feel like my to do list falls away and I’m able to recognize the goodness of just being alive, which at this point is much more a feeling than a thought.

Once you’ve practiced an expanded state of mental quiet, there are many other meditation techniques to pursue depending on what you want, but being able to create that quiet space is a foundational skill without which only certain kinds of progress can be made.  This state also becomes something you can remind yourself to revert to when you find yourself getting hyper for any reason.  It can immediately help you to regain helpful perspective on the ways in which you may have been contributing to your own stress.  Bringing a greater sense of calm to challenge allows you to stay more creative, less reactive, and more reasonable.  You’re then more likely to be able to solve problems and work well with others, which makes you less likely to spend your time feeling stuck and confused.

In a seemingly unlikely way, spending time creating mental quiet leads to greater focus and energy, which can make it seem like you have more time rather than having lost it in the pursuit.  Even if you don’t think you can spend more than a few minutes practicing, you can still benefit from the attempt to create a few minutes of internal quiet throughout your day here and there.  I highly recommend making this a little game that you play with yourself.  You may have other mental games you already play, like doing crossword puzzles.  This is just another category of game that builds capacity your brain needs to function with excellence.