How to Free Yourself from Personal Stories.

How to Free Yourself from Personal Stories.

This is from 'Living Your Heart Wide Open' by Dr Bob Stahl

An effective mindfulness practice for working with self-stories so you don’t get so caught up in yourself that you miss the irreplaceable moments happening right in front of you.

To feel unworthy is to suffer. It feels like you’re flawed and must conceal your faultiness from others or risk being shunned. But concealing, pretending, and holding yourself apart from others tends to make you feel alienated and then interpret these feelings as proof that you’re flawed. This is a vicious cycle of self-doubts and self-judgments that separates you from others and prevents you from feeling whole and complete. Though you may be stuck in this self-concept, it’s far more arbitrary and malleable than you may think. Mindfulness and self-compassion allow you to see and acknowledge the tenderness and pain in your story without falling under the delusion that the story defines who you are. It may be your story, but it isn’t you.

Exercise: AWARE

An effective way of working with self-stories is summed up in the acronym AWARE, which stands for allow, witness, acknowledge, release, and ease up.

Allow all of your thoughts and feelings to come and go as they will.
This will help you soften your reactions to whatever comes up for you in the space of mindful awareness. Allowing is a kind and curious attitude that enables you to look more deeply into your stories and learn from them rather than becoming entranced by them or trying to block them, both of which will just leave you more stuck. By allowing your experience in this way, you can learn to accept all thoughts as vehicles for insight rather than as proof of anything, including any inherent unworthiness or inadequacy. Allowing enables you to recognize that a thought is just a thought, whether you like it or not.

Witness the narrative with which you construct your sense of self.
Sometimes you’re the one who has acted: “I did…” “I should have…” “I shouldn’t have…” “I wish I could have…” Sometimes you’re the one who has been acted upon: “Somebody did this or that to me.” “Everyone ignored me.” “People always…” “No one ever…” Either way, it drones on and on as long as you indulge it. From the perspective of mindful awareness, you can witness the habitual ways your mind creates the narrative-based self without identifying with them. Witnessing is curious and non-judging. It doesn’t cling to or avoid anything. With this tool you can look more deeply into even very painful events with your heart wide open. Just as an emergency room physician looks deep into a wound without flinching and finds the shard at its core, you may discover things you no longer need to carry or blame yourself for.

how-to-change-your-story

When you use allowing, witnessing, and acknowledging to see the storyteller at work, you can finally stop identifying with the self created by your stories. You don’t have to believe everything you think. Why stay in a prison of self when the door is wide open? Let everything go. Let everything be.

Acknowledge what you experience happening in stories you tell about yourself.
Practice sitting quietly and observing whatever arises. Note the physical sensations, thoughts, and emotions you experience as they come and go. Use simple phrases to acknowledge your experience, such as “worrying,” “planning,” “thinking,” and so on. Is there a character you are attempting to create or assassinate? Notice any repetitive or habitual elements through which you create the narrative-based self. Is there a theme? Is the storyteller cruel or kind, brilliant or blind? Are there familiar judgments? Are there familiar longings? Acknowledge all that you notice.

Release the self-concepts that you’ve fabricated with these old stories and concepts.
Dis-identify from your habitual and familiar ways of thinking of yourself. Fame, shame, loss, gain, pleasure, and pain are all transient experiences, not attributes of self. When you use allowing, witnessing, and acknowledging to see the storyteller at work, you can finally stop identifying with the self created by your stories. You don’t have to believe everything you think. Why stay in a prison of self when the door is wide open? Let everything go. Let everything be.

Ease up and emerge from this trance of unworthiness.
When you’re stuck in a self-concept of inadequacy and unworthiness, a great deal of your self-talk involves comments about how you’re doing, looking, or performing, and so much of this internal dialogue calls forth comparisons to others and judgments about yourself. This is neither necessary nor skillful, and it’s never any fun. Everything isn’t about you. Plus, when you’re caught up in thoughts about yourself, you’re missing what’s actually happening in each irreplaceable moment of your life.

Allowing, witnessing, acknowledging, releasing, and easing up are primary skills in meditation practice and will also serve you well in the unfolding moments of your life—at work, at home, with friends, and in everything you do, particularly when you notice that your self-talk has become critical and unkind. The AWARE practice can become a way of life that helps you grow a little freer each time you practice it.

This article was adapted from Dr. Bob Stahl’s and Steve Flowers’ book, Living with Your Heart Wide Open.
Three Common Mind Traps That Sink Happiness

Three Common Mind Traps That Sink Happiness

Some habitual ways of thinking can keep us stuck in a negative loop.

Cultivating awareness of these "mind traps" can help you shift your attention.

There’s a funny print cartoon that shows a man and woman sitting on the couch staring at a TV screen, and the caption reads, “It’s 12 o’clock, do you know where your mind is?”

As time goes on and we grow from children to adolescents to adults, for many of us, somewhere along the way life begins to become routine. Day in and day out, whether we’re walking, driving, talking, eating, going to the grocery store, or spending time with our families, our minds get kicked into autopilot and continue to develop their habitual ways of thinking, interpreting, expecting, and relating to other people.

However, these habits also include habits of the mind that can keep us stuck in stress, anxiety, depression, or even addictive behaviors. Here are a few habits of the mind and a mindfulness practice to help you break out of autopilot and gain more control over your life.

Three Common Habits That Sink Happiness:

Catastrophizing — If you’re prone to stress and anxiety, you may recognize this habitual mind trap. This is where the mind interprets an event as the worst case scenario. If your heart is beating fast, you may think you’re having a heart attack. If your boss didn’t look at you while walking down the hall, you think you’re going to get fired. You get the picture. This style of thinking will support increased stress, anxiety, and even panic.

Discounting the positive and exaggerating the negative — The news is wonderful at supporting us with this one. This is where we habitually reject or minimize any positive feedback and magnify the negative. The glass is always half empty. If you catch yourself saying something positive and then saying “but” followed by a negative, you are practicing this. “I got a 95% on this test, but I didn’t get a 100%.” Without awareness, this style of thinking will likely land you in a depressed state.

Blaming — Be careful of this one. We all do it, pointing the finger at someone else for our woes or point the finger at ourselves for others’ woes. “If my boss wasn’t so hard on me at work, I wouldn’t be so anxious” or “It’s my fault my parents got divorced.” Just check in with yourself after noticing this style of thinking. It doesn’t cultivate any solutions, and just makes you feel stuck, anxious, or depressed.
Cultivating the ability to be more aware of these mind traps will help you break free from them and shift your attention to more effective ways of interacting with life.

For example, if you notice catastrophizing, actually say to yourself “catastrophizing is happening right now,” then bring your attention to your breath for a moment to steady your mind. Next, ask yourself, “what are some other possible reasons why my heart is racing (e.g., I just ran upstairs, I’m nervous)?”

If discounting the positive, come back to the breath, and then switch the “but” to an “and” so at least the positive statement get its equal weight, being more realistic and balanced. If blaming, call it out, say to yourself, “blaming is happening.” Remind yourself that blaming simply isn’t effective for anyone and then come back to your breath to steady your mind and return to the task you were just doing.

This is not an easy process, yet an important one for regaining control from the ineffective thought habits we develop. If we’re not mindful in our daily lives, our minds could just fall into their habitual states to the point we’re on our deathbeds asking, “where did it all go?”

Just check in with yourself during the day, look at the clock and say, “It’s X o’clock, do I know where my mind is?” You may catch yourself in some mind traps and if not, just notice whatever you are doing in the moment. Continue if you still want to be doing that or change if you’d rather be doing something else.

Try to be patient through this process and not judge yourself if you find mind traps arising. Judging yourself as bad or wrong is another mind trap that keeps you stuck. Breathe in, breathe out, and just redirect your focus.

Adapted from Mindfulness & Psychotherapy

Meditation to Tame Criticism

Meditation to Tame Criticism

[huge_it_share]Everybody has 'challenges'. People that have a slower rate of bouncing back, usually are very critical of themselves. Criticism, internal or external, can lead to a state of being similar to surrender or what I call the 'X' program. To surrender from stress as a default response can lead to depression so one thing you can do to bounce back is to discover how to use your mind in the meditation to help you tame criticism.

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Over the next several weeks practice noting your Inner Critic as you go about your daily life. Give this voice a nickname if you’d like.

1. Ask yourself, if someone were actually standing next to me and supplying the same commentary, how would I handle it? You’d probably respond with something like, Thanks anyway, but I’m leaving now.

2. Without getting sucked into debate, each time you notice the Inner Critic, take a pause.

3. Breathing in, recognize the voice of criticism, and whatever it’s implying about you or doing to your emotional state. Acknowledge that experience without needing to either banish it or rationalize it. This is how I feel right now: tired and insecure and angry.

4. Breathing out, let go. Instead of wrestling with self-judgment, see it for what it is, and turn your attention somewhere more useful. Focus only on the sensation of breathing as best as you’re able, without striving or forcing anything.

5. Wish yourself well, like you would a close friend in distress. Picture freedom, relief, or ease with each exhalation as an intention for now or sometime in the future.

 

This featured practice appeared in the June 2016 issue of Mindful magazine

Brain Circuits and the Science of Resilience

Brain Circuits and the Science of Resilience

richard davidson reprogramming mind"I began with most of my focus on the negative side of things and then when I met the Dalai Lama in 1992, he asked me, 'why have you been using the tools of modern neuroscience just to study anxiety and stress and fear and depression?
Why not use those same tools to study kindness and compassion?'

That was like the total wake-up call for me and it is in fact what we've been doing since that critical moment. One of the first ways in which we decided to begin something that his holiness encouraged us to do, which is to test individuals who spent years training their mind.   These people have spent on average about 34,000 hours of lifetime practice.

In that particular experiment we were looking for signs in brain electrical signals.   Whether those signals when individuals are actually meditating showed anything unusual and what we found was remarkable.

Gamma is a brain rhythm that is occurring at roughly 40 cycles per second and in the brains of advanced Tibetan meditators we found the presence of these gamma oscillations that went on for tens of minutes and they're very high input to the brains were also significantly different and these differences reflect the enduring traces if you will and it gives us some clue that in fact the baseline state of these individuals is transformed as a consequence of their practice.




Here we talk about healthy minds and well-being as skills and all of this scientific research is leading inevitably to this conclusion: these simple ancient practices that were developed 2,500 years ago are now being tracked with instruments that have just become available in human history for the first time.

We use Mri to analyze the structure of the brain, the function of the brain.  You can actually see changes in subtle blood flow to different regions of the brain.

So there is undeniable evidence that practices to cultivate well being influence the functioning of the brain.
Most of the time our brains are being shaped unwillingly.   

The invitation in all this work is that we can actually take more responsibility for the shaping of our own brains by engaging in healthy habits of mind.

One of the important constituents of well-being we call resilience.  We can actually track the brain circuits that are responsible for this.   We have shown that we can actually influence these circuits with training.

We can take someone who is not resilient and improve their resilience.  And they actually show improvements in their well being."

 

I think that one of the important insights from our work is that the mind can be transformed.  That we all are born with a capability for change and that the seeds of living a life that is compassionate, that is kind, generous, is within each of us.

If we all believe that, I'm absolutely convinced the world would be a much better and happier place.

- Richie Davidson, Neuroscientist, Pioneers series by Huffington Post




How to Cure PTSD Four Times in 5 Hours with Memory Reconsolidation Therapy

How to Cure PTSD Four Times in 5 Hours with Memory Reconsolidation Therapy

The client presented in this case study illustrated successful PTSD treatment using a novel, brief intervention requiring fewer than 5 hours of treatment. Using diagnostic criteria for Military trauma (PCL-M ≥ 50) his intake score was 73 and no longer met criteria for PTSD diagnosis following RTM. These gains were maintained, as reported above, at one-year posttreatment.

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