Waking Up Together: a mindfulness blog

Look around - what do you see? To our eyes, we appear to see solid objects before us, unchanging in this moment. But this stability is an illusion. Seeing is a creation of our brain. And research at MIT and Berkeley reveals this creation of seeing is an amalgamation of the information arriving at our eyes over the past 12 seconds. 

Now take a moment to count: "1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3 Mississippi"… all the way up to 12 Mississippis. How long did you remain focused on the task of counting? Did you drift off during a “Mississippi?” According to research by Matt Killingsworth, 43% of the time our mind wanders or drift off. And where do we drift off to? Research from Amisha Jha reveals we drift into a rumination about ourselves and experience a negative mood.

What do we discover when we combine these findings: our current perception is created over the past 12 seconds; about half of those past 12 seconds we are not even present; during those 5 seconds of mind wandering, we are ruminating about ourselves and feeling depressed. Let’s extrapolate that out to 24 hours - now that sounds like a fun day!

So where can we intervene in this neural process of creating our perceptions of the moment? What aspects of our perceptions are malleable? Or are we doomed to our neural hardware? Mindfulness research demonstrates that even for a beginner to meditation, our capacity to focus is not only easily accessed, but enhanceable. Not only can mindfulness act as software to enhance our capacity to focus, but it also can alter the hardware of our brains. Changes in connection and density of brain structures attributed to focus and compassion occur with a consistent mindfulness practice.

So, with the influence of mindfulness, we can limit our wanderings into self and negativity and arrive at the unfolding moment of these 12 seconds.  Welcome to Here-Now (or at least as close as we can get!).

http://www.medicaldaily.com/imperfect-visual-perception-system-how-our-brains-weave-story-out-broken-bits-273528

Tags: perception

Early in life, it’s simple. Our days are filled with playing, eating, and sleeping.  As we grow older, new tasks to do appear. With only twenty-four hours, we cut back on the play, eat, and sleep to make room for these tasks - but we still make time for playing, eating, and sleeping. We know, on an intuitive level, that playing, eating, and sleeping are vital to our well-being.

At some point, like the proverbial boiled frog, our To Do list overflows, and the tasks become a higher priority than playing, eating, and sleeping. While the drivers for this flip are many, the outcome is the same: playing, eating, and sleeping are relegated to the “Later List.” A funny thing about this list - like the horizon, we never arrive in Later land. Our field of vision becomes a narrow slit, focused on the ever-demanding tasks of the To Do list.  Any activities that divert from these tasks receive the pre-requisite knee jerk of “I don’t have time for that!”  Welcome to the “Too Busy” trap - where playing, eating, sleeping or any activity that promotes health, creativity, and re-energizing are nowhere to be found.

Are we doomed as adults to be slaves to the unrelenting To Do list? Perhaps not. Our path to reclaiming balance can be found in the Zen proverb, “You should sit in meditation (or play, eat sleep) for twenty minutes every day - unless you're too busy; then you should sit (play, eat, sleep) for an hour.”  In other words, when our lives have become out of balance, we need to make balance a priority - balance between the modes of being and doing.  As children, being was the only mode we knew - we fully embraced each unfolding moment.  As we grew older, we first experimented then honed our talents and skills, but we retained the capacity to shift from doing mode back into being.

The older we grow, however, we are swept away by our culture's high value of doing.  Rather than viewed as equal partners, being becomes relegated to a lower rung on the “success” ladder.  Even when we attempt to embrace enjoyable activities, we are challenged to shed the doing mode. While playing, eating, and sleeping, the drum beat of To Do list is never too far from our attention. The toll of this go, go, go can be seen on our bodies: studies reveal over half of our visits to our primary care doctors are stress-related. “All work and no play make Jack” and Jill not only dull but literally sick!

Back to our Zen proverb - a return to balance requires intentionality.  The practice of mindfulness, no matter how brief, places us in being mode.  Create a space in your day to step off the To Do list and slip into being mode. Perhaps instead of eating lunch at your desk, take your food outside and enjoy a beautiful day.  Instead of walking and reading emails, raise your gaze and greet the eyes of the person approaching. Even a task such as doing dishes can become a moment of being by feeling the warm water, smelling the suds, and observing the sheen of the bubbles.  Within each moment is the opportunity to shift from doing to being. And reclaim balance. Or in the melodic words of Frank Sinatra, “Do Be Do Be Do.”

Tags: balance, stress

A friend offers you three apples but discovers they only have two to give.  At another time, a friend initially offers you only one apple but then discovers they actually have two for you.  

Now the question: do you feel differently about these two exchanges? The outcome is the same – from a simple numbers perspective. But in multiple studies, the loss of the former item outweighs the gain of the latter one from an emotional perspective. Not only has this reaction been replicated several times with humans, but our primate cousins also demonstrate loss aversion. In other words, this tendency to feel loss more than gain goes way back in our evolution! 

We seem to have evolved to avoid loss.  We can easily see how this would be of benefit to us when our very survival depended on getting adequate food, shelter and clothing. Loss could easily mean death. But despite our nice cozy homes and overflowing grocery stores, this evolutionary fear remains. The same neurological networks are applied to any loss, be it tangible (“Who ate my cookie?!”) or less tangible (“Why has he not called me?!”). 

When these old emotional connections begin to ring out, we also have a multitude of well-honed coping tools (such as the cookie, a Friends marathon, or a deep dive into TikTok).  While these habits offer short-term relief, the “loss” ping still rings deep in our emotional brain.  What is a person to do?

Mindfulness creates a “one-step-back” stance to observe this old emotional reaction.  Not only can we see it, but in this pause, a choice appears. Rather than the old knee-jerk “reach for the cookie,” we can hold both the reaction and our tendency to distract in our field of awareness. This holding space lessens the reverberations of the loss as well as offers us the opportunity for a new alternative – to go for a walk, phone a friend, feel the warmth of the sun or pet our dog.  Each time we allow ourselves to be with the sense of loss, we discover we are more than that feeling and the feeling is transitory.  Over time, we experience loss as an event in the moment, no more or less than a gain in another moment.  Over time, we shed our evolutionary bias and arrive anew, in this moment.

Tags: loss

How will you engage this moment?  Will you flip the switch into autopilot? Or will you accept the invitation to step fully into the here-now?

Within every moment, we have an opportunity. We can continue to reinforce the habitual, the tried and true, the known. And in doing so, we will continue to arrive at the same outcome of all the past moments.

Or we can accept the invitation to step fully into this moment. To completely inhabit body.  What might we discover in this exploration of the here-now?  Who knows? And this is exactly the point. For it is in this moment that Life is unfolding. It is only in this moment that the answers dwell. It is only in this moment that we experience all that Life offers.

Leaving the familiarity of auto-pilot can be scary. Even though auto-pilot leaves us at the whim of our thoughts, at least the territory is known. At least the demons that dwell there carry no surprises as we have done battle time and time again. But what would it be like to drop the sword, expose those demons for the illusionary wisps of thought that they are? What would it be like to shift our energy not to the known battle but back into this unfolding moment. We just may discover that those demons cannot dwell in the fresh light of day. They run and scatter as we empower them no more. We just may find a Bigger Me that has no need for those battles of old.  A Bigger Me that breaths in the cool clear air of here and breaths out into the expansiveness of now.  A Bigger Me, free from shackles, free to run and play!

“Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’
doesn’t make sense anymore.”

   ~ Rumi

Tags: freedom, mindfulness, thoughts

Tags: health behavior change