Self-Parenting 101: Learning to Take Your Own Side

How would you treat yourself if you were someone you loved? This is one of my favorite questions. It is not only instinctive to take good care of someone you love, but also to take good care of yourself. Unfortunately, we are trained to un-learn our loving instincts when it comes to ourselves. Many people are unaware of how they treat themselves. They spend their lives angry about the kind of care they received as children but end up offering themselves the very same kind of care. There comes a point in life when you have to take ownership of your own caretaking -- to consciously choose the kind of relationship you will have with yourself.

Ask yourself: What kind of self-parent are you?
Are you a:
What Did You Do to Cause the Problem? Self-Parent
This inner parent is always there to inform you why you are to blame for whatever bad thing happened and whatever pain you feel. If you fall down and skin your knee, it is because you were running too fast.
See it from the OTHER guy's perspective, Self-ParentThis inner-parent is very good at reminding you why the person who hurt you had a good reason fo doing what he did, and why you should understand HIS side.  The man you love broke up with you? Certainly you should empathize with why he would want to leave his options open, and not settle down so quickly.  Ultimately, HE was right to disappoint you!
What Are You Going to DO to Fix It? Self-Parent
This inner parent doesn't comfort you, but instead tells you what you need to do to fix the problem that you caused. If you are feeling sluggish, then get yourself to the gym already!
There's Something Wrong With the Way You Feel, Self-Parent
You are hurt because you are too sensitive, upset because you are too dramatic. This caretaker reminds you that your feelings are not what they should be, and that ultimately, your response (and you) are the real problem.
There's No Reason to Feel the Way You Do, Self-Parent
This inner parent is quick to tell you why your feelings make no sense in the world of logic. If you have an important recital and are anxious about it, your anxiety is irrelevant since everyone in the audience loves you. The facts simply invalidate your experience.
I'm Not Interested, Self-Parent
This inner parent is just not interested in your feelings regardless of what they are, and thus ignores your inner experience altogether. The message is that you are not important enough to acknowledge, much less comfort.

Do you recognize yourself in any of these self-parents? If so, what would it mean to start treating yourself as if you were someone you love? What would need to change? While it might seem ridiculous to suggest that we need instructions for how to properly care for ourselves, regrettably, we do. To create a new system, you must become aware of the system already in place. What do you say to yourself (on the inside) when you are in need of support, feeling hurt, not at the top of your game? Listen to the words and tone you use with yourself. Imagine uttering these same words or using this same tone with someone you love.

Consciously, actively, begin a practice of self-care. Decide to be that good parent who is automatically on your side, without your having to defend yourself or prove why you deserve their support. Be that friend who assumes that the way you experienced it was the way it happened, who takes your goodness to be a given. Be that big brother who when you get bullied on the playground leads by asking the question, "What did that bully do to make you feel this way?" Be all of these -- for you!

Throughout this practice, the word "No" must become a strong presence in your internal life.
No, I will not...
Automatically take the other person's side.
Assume the worst about me.  
Hold myself as responsible and to blame for the way I feel and whatever has gone wrong.
Discredit my own feelings.
Talk to myself as if I do not matter.
Shame myself for what I am feeling.
Reject or ignore myself when I am upset.
Put myself last.
Terrorize myself with potential disasters.
Be mean to or bully myself.
And finally: No, I will not accept being treated this way -- by me.

So too, the word "Yes" becomes equally important. Yes, I will treat myself with the same kindness that I offer those I love -- no matter what.

Even if at first you don't know how to implement these new behaviors, continue to repeat the phrases and pay close attention to how you actually do self-parent. Catch yourself in the act of mistreating yourself and stop it. By simply noticing your current self-treatment, and simultaneously suggesting a new, kinder system, some part of you is saying that it knows that you deserve better care. The more you voice that part of yourself and offer it a seat at the inner table, the stronger it will grow and the more it will feel entitled to be there! A day will then come when the majority (if not all) of you will know that not just those you love, but you too are good -- and equally deserving of your own kindness.

In life, the person you spend the most time with is yourself. You are always in your own company. Why not keep company with someone who loves you as opposed to someone who does not particularly like you, or worse? With even the smallest degree of proper self-parenting, you will start to notice that you feel more relaxed, more loved, that you are more trusting, happier, and more alive. Proper self-parenting is like watering a seed. You are that seed and with the proper attention and care, you too will bloom.

Copyright 2012 Nancy Colier

Searching for Now: How to Be Where You Are

As someone who turns out several blogs each month, I am deeply grateful for the invention of the diner. It is at the diner -- a true laboratory for human behavior -- that I gather much of my material. This morning, eavesdropping again, I overheard the woman in the seat beside me ask her male companion if he had any advice for her on how to be here, tips or techniques for how to get herself into the present moment. In the off chance that my dining neighbor reads this blog, I offer a how-to for being where you are!

Oddly, the question of how to be here relates to our cultural relationship with happiness. We are brought up believing that there is something somewhere that we can attain that will make us happy. If we are happy, then we will be able to be where we actually are, maybe even want to be there. In other words, there is a future that will lead us to now, a there that will allow us to enter here. If this weren't our cultural creed, it might be used as a definition of madness.

Besides being a recipe for unhappiness, this belief causes us to be in a constant state of searching -- if only we could find a better moment, then we could really be in it. Our beliefs about how our life is supposed to go, and what our now is supposed to look like, cause us to continually reject our now, and therefore our life. This moment is never the one we should be living. We don't know quite where or when the right moment is, but we will know it when we see it. Unfortunately, the right now never shows up because the one thing the right now can never be is... right now. Only an idea of now can be the right now.

In addition to our addiction to searching for a better moment, we are desperately afraid to land here. We relate to our now as something that has the power to victimize us. We believe that the thoughts, feelings, and sensations moving through the present moment are entities that can harm us. As we see it, experience is something that happens to a separate self, and is therefore potentially dangerous to that self. We say, "I don't want to experience suffering." In fact, we are not experiencing suffering, but rather suffering our experience -- a radically different thing.

So too, if there is a difficult feeling, thought or sensation, any "negative" experience that appears in now, our very identity is threatened. We cannot be here with this "negative" feeling because that would mean that we are a person who is having this negative feeling. What would that say about who we are or what kind of life we are living ? Certainly we would not be living up to our "happiness potential." We don't want to be this somebody, nor a somebody whose life is like this. The only answer then is to get away from now.

Furthermore, we turn being here into an effort-filled exercise in order to appease the mind's relentless need for a task. The mind is constantly in need of something to do, fix, accomplish; it needs material to keep it occupied. The mind is like a hyperactive child on a long airplane ride, it needs a toy. If we were to stop trying to be where we are, and simply be where we are, what would be left for the mind to do?

We have spent a lifetime trying to get to there with the hope that when we get to there, we'll finally be able to be here. The problem is not that we haven't found the right way to get to there, or haven't tried hard enough. Rather, the reason we are flailing is that in truth, we don't need to get to anywhere else, or do anything. Here is already here. We are already here. How sad that the mind has convinced us otherwise, and made us feel responsible for what is already provided. This is the great irony and tragedy of our lives.

Here and now are our birthrights -- like life. Do we need to do anything in this moment to be alive? No. Life takes care of life. Do we need to do something to be in now? No. It is already -- and always -- now. It can only ever be now. Do we need to go anywhere to create here? No. Here is already here. We cannot not be here. When we stop trying to be present, there is just the present. If there is a task for the mind to accomplish, it is to stop trying to figure out how to get us here, how to insert us into now. Such is a task for which its efforts are not needed.

For the woman next to me at the diner, I offer this: Simply notice what's here when all the effort and searching stops, when nothing at all is added or taken away. When the trying to find here, now and yourself ceases, you will discover yourself right here -- in right now.

The Death of the Real?

When I first heard Eric Whitacre talk about his virtual choir and its debut on YouTube, a virtual choir and the power of crowds, I got the chills.  First, I was chilled by the music, Lux Aurumque (light and gold), which is heartbreaking and captivating, and like all great music, has the power to connect us with our own divinity. But at the same time, my blood ran cold as if the virtual choir had injected me with a dose of vast isolation, and a great fear of what all this means to the human experience. 

Eric Whitacre assembled a technological collage of sound and sight that is remarkable, but other than the fact that the project involves music and humans, it has almost nothing to do with the experience that takes place in an actual, real life choir. There is a magical and transcendent experience that happens when we come together as human beings to create music, side by side, heart to heart, an experience that Whitacre himself describes as the moment that changed his life, the first time he felt a part of something larger.

The magic and mystery of the experience is a result of living something together—co-creating and sharing an experience that unfolds before us, larger than us but containing us nonetheless.  When we come together as individuals in a creative process, we become a part of the whole, our separateness melting into the experience itself, into one another, as we become vehicles for the universe to express itself through our seemingly separate embodiments. When our body experiences this, we are fundamentally changed.

When we omit the together part of the experience—when the process no longer happens together, is no longer shared, we cut out the key ingredient in the experience, entirely change its nature—extract its very soul. As I witnessed Whitacre conducting alone in front of a black screen, in silence, watched the singers’ faces float by in individual boxes—a mosaic of separate lives pieced together in the ether, creating the illusion of togetherness, I was certain that I would rather live connection than know that I had lived it.  I wonder, is this what the future holds? It feels apocalyptic.

No matter how we try to recreate the experience of together in an end result, inserting it through a separated process, we simply cannot manufacture the experience of together.  If we want to experience the profundity that being and creating together can offer, we must actually be and create together.  Everything else is just an idea.

The virtual choir informs its participants that they have become part of something larger than themselves, that they were indeed connected.  But in the experience of living it, they were alone and disconnected.

The experience of the virtual choir, to use Whitacre’s own words, is an expression of  “Souls on their own desert islands sending electronic messages in bottles to each other.” I believe that Whitacre used this image to suggest a kind of optimism about humanity and our longing to connect. I did not find his analogy to be optimistic, nor do I see sending out electronic messages from my own desert island as an acceptable substitute for experiencing connection. To celebrate the virtual choir is to celebrate the end of the direct experience of connection, of living the actual experience we are talking about.  It is to say that going forward, we agree to be nourished by the concept of connection—to let technology live fully, while we humans stand by and hear about it, delighting in our ability to re-create something that looks like real connection—and now actually calling it real. 

In one particularly chilling testimonial, a singer writes about how wonderful the virtual choir was because she got to “sing with her sister.”  A cultural amnesia is setting in, a forgetting of what direct experience actually is, what it feels like to have the experience itself.  In truth, this young woman did not sing with her sister.  She did not have the experience of singing together; her body’s cells do not contain the experience.  She sang alone, as did her sister. What she lived was something entirely different; she had the experience of knowing that recordings of her and her sister’s voices were brought together in a technological feat.  It looks and sounds like she and her sister were singing together and that simulation of reality, that notion of being together, is what she gets to take home as the experience itself.  In place of the direct experience, she gets to have an idea of the experience—and here’s the terrifying part: she believes that they are the same thing.

“People will go to any lengths necessary to find and connect with each other.  It doesn’t matter the technology,” says Whitacre.  Yes, people are desperate for connection, but it does matter the technology.  Technology is replacing the direct experience of connection with the concept and simulation of connection, and we humans are losing the capacity to tell the difference!

At one time, technology may have been intended to bring people together, to create actual connection, more time together, more personal experiences, a richer experience of life.  Regardless of its original intention, it seems that the system has flipped on itself.  People feel more disconnected, more like they are on their own desert islands, while technology gets to do all the connecting. We sit alone in our isolated pods, while the invisible wires and cables do the interacting—together.  I fear that we are losing sight of what actual connection feels like, believing that our computers’ connections are our own. The more we congratulate ourselves on our ability to simulate the experience of being human, the more, little by little, the direct experience of being human slips away.

After listening to the virtual choir, I am left with a haunting echo, and I cannot help wonder if the haunting comes not only from the poignance of the music, but also from the poignance of what’s being lost, from the experience of virtual connection itself—the sound of humans singing alone into empty rooms, like lost birds calling out for their mothers to find them, to save them from the loneliness, and bring them home. 

Craving Silence? Reach for Your Cell Phone!

As many of you know, I have been a concerned critic on the topic of technology and its affect on our ability to relate to each other and on consciousness in general.  But today, in honor of the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, I feel moved to express my gratitude to technology and specifically, the modern device known as the cell phone—for one unexpected reason, which I will lay out with a story. 

Today, as I approached the park where my 9-year-old daughter’s fourth grade class was holding a running race, I spotted a huge group of parents huddled together, anxiously awaiting the appearance of our children.  Enter my friend, the cell phone—and my gratitude.  Suddenly, my silent device found its way to my ear and that was that… problem solved.  For this purpose, I bow in gratitude to technology, to save me from the ritualistic and repetitive exchange of information we call small talk. 

I speak to people for a living so I feel somewhat qualified to make the following claim…  Some people love small talk but in fact, many hate it.  Regardless of where we fall on the spectrum however, there is an enormous pressure to engage in it.  If you follow people after a small talk conversation and ask them if they had wanted to be in the exchange that just occurred, often (amazingly), both people will report wishing they could have avoided it.  This is the fascinating part.  Neither person wants to be doing it, and yet, like well-behaved citizens…off we go, chatting away, our mouths moving, making noise, as we wish we could just be quiet. This brings me to the next question.  Why do we feel we have to?  Why do I (ironically) hold up a cell phone to keep me in a chat-free zone?  What are we afraid of in the silence?  Meeting ourselves?  Losing our minds?  Death?

Technology creates noise in the mind.  Our devices keep us jacked up, distracted, protected from ourselves.  Talking, checking, searching, playing—technology makes sure there is always something for the mind to do. We never have to face our difficultly with being still or being with ourselves.  Furthermore, technology strengthens our belief that the answer to our discomfort, distraction and inability to be where we are, is somewhere to be found in the distraction itself, somewhere in the infinite morass of the information technology offers.  While we claim to be learning all sorts of new and important things, mostly we are learning how to keep the internal chatter going, and stave off our ever-increasing fear of silence. To steal from the movie “Spinal Tap,” technology has turned the mind’s volume up to 11 when the dial is only set to reach 10. 

We are terrified of silence. And yet, tragically, what we fear is precisely what we crave.  In our deepest hearts, quiet—relief from the inner and outer noise—is what we long for.  In truth, we do not want more ways to make our mind screech, we want to be able to stop the screeching and be where we are—within ourselves.

In this culture, to be quiet while in company is viewed as a rejection of the other.  In order to acknowledge being together, we believe there must be words, to document the experience.  And yet, when we crave silence, it rarely has anything to do with the other.  Rather, we simply want to be in company with ourselves—nourished by the silence that sits under all the noise.  Our desire to refrain from small talk is about longing to turn down the volume of life, and stop trying to fill up every moment with contents and chatter.  The longing for silence is a longing to land where we are—to come home to the stillness that is our essence.  Deep down, we know what we need and it is not more noise.

So in honor of Thanksgiving, I bow to my cell phone. Not for the reasons we usually think of—not for the “more” that technology offers, but for the “less” that it paradoxically can provide.  I bow to the power that technology holds to keep us in the silence that we so crave—and so desperately need to stay well.  I express my deep thanks to the opportunity that a dead cell phone against an ear can offer… the chance to connect with my own being—to reside, blessedly, in the silence that is the essence of our deepest nourishment and true well-being.

         

If It Goes So Fast Then For G-d's Sake, Let Me Enjoy It Now

Nearly every time I am out with my nearly two-year old daughter, someone cheerfully instructs me to "Enjoy the time with her now because it goes so fast."  The same was true and continues to be true with my nine year old.  I guess you could say that I have been listening to this line for the last... well, nine years.  Since the very first time I heard it, I found that my body had an immediate distaste for this advice. 

I have tried a variety of responses over the years, to behave agreeably, but the response that I truly want to utter when someone offers me these kind words is "For G-d's sake then, let me enjoy this moment NOW." 

We are taught in this culture that there is something somewhere outside of us that will make us okay.  When we have that thing we will be able to rest, to be, to finally land in our NOW.  Sometimes we get that thing and for a little while, we feel okay.  We feel we can be present in the moment as long as we have that thing.  Sometimes we lose that thing and we lose our okayness, and we believe that the okayness went away with the thing.  And so we begin searching again for that same thing or another, that will again return us to okayness. 

But often, it does not even take losing out object of okayness to find ourselves back in a state of searching and longing, for the something that will make us be able to bare being here. 

Soon after we get what we thought we wanted, we turn our attention to the time when we will lose it.  Enjoy this time with your children because soon enough it will be gone.  Or, once we have the thing that makes us feel okay we instantly begin thinking about how we are going to keep it.  One friend describes being in her favorite yoga class spending the entire class thinking, I should really do more yoga, and mentally planning her schedule for future yoga classes.  Even when we have what we want, we still can't land in this moment.  We cling to the illusion that there are indeed a set of circumstances that, once we achieve them, will finally, miraculously make this moment inhabitable. We will be able to rest--here--and stop striving to get somewhere else. 

The truth is our mind is allergic to now, regardless of what it contains!  Good or bad, we can't be in it.  No matter the contents of now, the mind races ahead--searching for the next thing that will make us want to be where we are.  Quite simply, the mind is programmed to take us somewhere else--anywhere but here.  That is its job and the task upon which its survival depends.  When we enter now and stop striving to get something or somewhere else--to a better moment--there really is nothing left for the mind to do.  Our attention, our being, has dropped below the neck, and our "I" disappears into the experience itself.  The mind is off duty, and as far as the mind is concerned, off duty means dead. 

What are we to do with this mind and its allergy to now?  The remedy to this allergy is first and foremost, the recognition of the  allergy itself.  Once aware of the mind's adversarial relationship with the now, we can then include this relationship (its striving, its fear) into the moment itself.  That is to say, rather than moving our attention to the future that the thoughts are about--getting involved in the contents of the thoughts--the thoughts simply become part of the landscape of this present moment.  Because your mind is generating thoughts about the vacation week in December when you will finally be able to relax and be present, does not mean that your attention needs to jump to December, or that you can't relax and be present right now, here, in October.  We simply meet this now with the thoughts about December noticed and included. 

In this way we are not controlled by the mind's terror of now and not continually kidnapped by the future-oriented thoughts that the mind generates.  We watch the mind scurry and strive, desperately searching for a role--something to do, somewhere else to take us--as we simultaneously remain still and present, here, experiencing this moment--with all that it includes.   In so doing, at last, we come to know ourselves as the spacious landscape within which the monkey mind--in its full rash of hives--is welcome to keep scampering and searching, but without our having to react or--ever--abandon this now.  This is freedom.

What If This Moment IS Your Olympic Moment?

I am a runner—a reluctant runner. After nearly three decades of pounding the streets, my runner’s high has reached an all-time low, and unless I am filled to the brim with caffeine, I mostly grin and bear it, and wait for my run to be over.  And yet, I do enjoy the post-exercise endorphins, and the feeling of presence that physical activity so reliably delivers.  I also know that running is good for me physically and thus I continue to lace up my sneakers—because I should.

During a recent outing, as I gnashed my teeth and counted the minutes to thirty, my mind posed an interesting question.  What if—right now—I were running the final lap of the Olympic marathon? What if this minute were the minute I had trained for all of my life.  Suddenly, miraculously, I felt an incredible rush, as if hurled down a magic tube into run itself.  The trap door had opened and I was deposited into now.  The “me” who had been enduring it, who should be exercising, was gone without a trace. The run was no longer something happening to me; no longer something I needed to get through until I could return to my life.  There was just this body moving. Furthermore, I no longer needed to protect myself from the experience, to reserve my energy or control my movements in order to keep “me” from suffering some imagined future consequence.  I had made a conscious choice to transform my relationship with the moment, to turn it into the moment that mattered.  Poured into my legs, my feet, my breath, there was only an experience unfolding, and my absence was exhilarating.

As a long time equestrian athlete as well as a practitioner of Advaita Vedanta, I have had the good fortune to dip into the “flow” state on many occasions.  But what struck me about this particular event was my mind’s participation in the process.  Never before had I been able to employ my mind in order to gain entry into the non-mind state.  In the past, when “flow” occurred, it was organic—something that resulted effortlessly through my passion for and engagement in the experience at hand.  But in this case, I had somewhat initiated the non-separate state with a proposal from my (normally) separating mind.  Had my mind known the consequence/benefit of what it was suggesting when it came up with its Olympic proposal?  Or perhaps was it awareness itself that had used the mind as a tool to realize itself?

Regardless of the answer, my mind was delighted to claim credit and assume its new role as the “one” who could remove itself—could successfully “do” the disappearing.  It wanted this feather in its identity hat.  Nonetheless, it was clear that something important had happened.  My mind had participated in its own disappearance, and in the realignment with awareness itself.   If I could harness my mind to help in this uncovering process (and keep it from taking over) then I had discovered a potentially powerful tool in accessing the pure state.  Perhaps I had—at last—discovered something that the mind could actually “do” to help me lose it. 

What if we were to choose to live every moment as if it were the last experience that we would ever get to experience?  If this were my final moment as an embodied human being with the gift of senses, would I stand on the shore clinging to my small and separate self, denying myself a last experience, a last swim?  Or, would I surrender into the gift of this last sensation, dive into its fullness, swim it with full gusto?  Me thinks I would go swimming!

To say that we should pay closer attention to now is a good start, but not the whole story.  Running those last strides as if they were the final lap of the Olympic marathon, I was not paying closer attention to the now, but rather, I was it.  I was not running because of what it would do for me or say about me, nor for the ego goodies that would come with my imminent gold medal.  It was not “about” me at all.  While it sounds like it would be a loss—to take away the “I” who would get to “have” the experience, to live it, and then later keep it as memory.  But as it turns out, being the experience ends up being far more direct and delicious than any thing I could ever “have.” 

We have a choice as to how we live each moment—as something to get through, to have, to use as proof of who we are—or simply, blessedly, as the moment itself—from within its very unfolding.  For me, it was the Olympic scene that cracked the barrier and deposited me inside now.  But discover your own scenario, your own Olympic moment.  Invite yourself to dive into now, with whatever words or ideas point you there.  If we can harness the mind as an ally in this process, we may just be able to initiate our own passage into the epicenter of experience and being—the eternal now.  

BOOK RELEASE!!!!!!!

Monday, October 1st, my new book is available for purchase!!!!!

Inviting a Monkey to Tea: Befriending Your Mind and Discovering Lasting Contentment

Inviting a Monkey to Tea

The Myth of Happiness and Why it Makes Us Un-Happy

We want to be happy. Everyone, everywhere, is trying to find—and hold onto—happiness. We do everything we are supposed to do: diligently follow the instructions, practice the techniques, and still, more often than we should be (given the amount of effort we are putting in) we are not consistently happy. As a psychotherapist and interfaith minister, I have spent the last two decades watching people feed their addiction to happiness; they get their short term fix here and there, but end up back on the street searching for happiness yet again, even more desperate.  The thing we want most and spend the majority of our time trying to accomplish eludes us.

We human beings are remarkable creatures,.  We can do anything we set out to do. So why not lasting happiness? Why is there such a split between our desire for happiness and our ability to hang onto it? After many years of listening to people talk about their failed attempts to hang onto a state of happiness, I began asking myself the following questions: What is this thing we call happiness? Is it achievable? Is it reliable? Is it sustainable?

As I studied the state of happiness, I became intensely aware of its fragility.  When our life circumstances change and we lose the object that’s been making us happy…poof, our happiness is gone. When uncomfortable feelings appear within our state of happiness or the object that was bringing us happiness no longer works, happiness again disappears. We are constantly acquiring and losing happiness.

I began to see that it is not our efforts to create happiness that are flawed, but rather, our choice of happiness as a goal.  Happiness is the wrong goal for this life.  Happiness relies on our ability to control circumstances that, no matter how hard we try, we cannot control. Happiness relies on circumstances staying the same. Life always changes, uncomfortable feelings always arise, and what we want is always in flux. This is the nature of life.  The choice of continual happiness as a pursuit is irreconcilably flawed.

Normal life is not easy for anyone.  Why then do we expect ourselves to be happy all the time? This foolish expectation creates tremendous suffering. Rather than trying to hang onto something whose nature is transitory, we can discover a state of wellbeing that is able to withstand and flourish within the inherent volatility of a human life.  We should be grateful for happiness when it is here, but as a goal for life, it is unwise.

Is there something larger, deeper, more lasting than happiness? Is there a state of well-being that can sustain itself in the midst of the changing circumstances and emotional shifts that life includes? Is there a way to feel grounded and well even when the contents of our life are not?  If so, what shift must we make to discover this state that is deeper and larger than happiness?

For a long time, I used my spiritual practice to try and achieve peace and happiness.  And I did, in stretches. And yet, again and again, when life presented its toughest challenges, inevitably, the peace and happiness that I had achieved slipped away.  Somewhere along the path I got tired—luckily, tired of trying to get to peace and happiness, or rather, of getting there and watching it disintegrate. And with my weariness came an interesting development: I got curious about what was actually true.  I stopped trying to do something with what I was experiencing, to change it in any way, and just let myself see what was there, to experience what I was experiencing.

No longer trying to get to somewhere else, my meditation practice, and consequently my life, could then be what it was, whatever that meant at any particular moment.  It was through this shift that I began to glimpse a state of being that is radically different and amazingly okay, a state that is deeper and more eternal than happiness.  Indeed, it was not until I stopped trying to create happiness—as a way out of now—and started investigating what is here—a way in—that I discovered a doorway to something far more blissful than happiness had ever offered.

We spend our lives trying to get to some imaginary there, where lasting happiness awaits.  What we don’t know how to do is to get to here, where we are.  We discover well-being when we shift our focus toward this moment and what is actually here. The secret to well-being is counter-intuitive: allow whatever is happening inside you to happen; don’t do anything with it.; don’t judge it; don’t try to change it; don’t turn it into an identity—something that says something about who you are.  Allow the feelings, allow the thoughts, allow all experience to happen within you without turning any of it into a story about you and your life.  When we let go of achieving a particular outcome with our experience and meet our experience as it is—wanted or not— we discover a state of deep contentment that relies on nothing and no one, and is inherently and eternally ours.  Indeed, we discover who we really are.   

Excerpted from the upcoming book, Inviting A Monkey to Tea: Befriending Your Mind and Discovering Lasting Contentment.  (October, 2012, Hohm Press)

The Dial-In Conversation: When Auto-Responders Meet

At a certain age, does everyone feel like they have had every conversation they are ever going to have—that every conversation (other than those with intimates) is pre-packaged, as if chosen from a sampler menu on an airplane playlist?  Is it an inevitable part of living longer, that conversations begin to feel like some kind of strange dance in which we follow pre-determined scripts with no real meaning?  Or, possibly, is conversation itself changing?

From what I can remember, in just the last couple days I have successfully (or so I imagine) dialed in the following pre-digested conversations:

- having a dog in the city

- city versus suburb life/car vs. walking/peace vs. energy

- country house vs. new weekend adventures

- change in air travel experience

- pre-school admission process

- real estate (everywhere) in relation to New York

- date night for mom and dad/need for

- the glassification of the urban landscape

- career nanny vs. young vibrant babysitter choice

- youth texting/screen time addiction

- children’s birthday parties/costs/frequency

- overscheduled children/old days when we had to create a game from a stick/organized classes vs. street play

- Costco shopping/bulk toilet paper

And these are just the handful I can remember. 

The 100-calorie conversation—all subjects available for purchase in snack-size pouches. 

Within these pre-packaged interactions can be found an infinite array of standardized danglers, the little niceties we toss at one another that mean less than nothing. Perhaps we do all this because we believe that this is what we are supposed to do as members of society? “Safe travel,”  “Everything good?”  “Where did the summer go?” “Take good care of you,”   “Better to end vacation when it’s raining than sunny!” “Enjoy it now, it goes so fast.” “Three kids, two hands.”  And on it goes…

While I don’t recall agreeing to play a part in this grand performance, nonetheless, every day I watch as I too cheerfully embark into the land of canned dialogue, as if I were reading words off an internal teleprompter.  Like puppets, we lip synch our pre-scripted parts with the proper enthusiasm and feigned newness, dutifully behaving as good members of society.  Despite the ease with which it all unfolds, in the midst of it, I often hear myself silently asking, “Really… are we going to do this… this dance that we are trained to do, this exchange of language that means nothing, and that we have done a thousand times before?”  So too, I wonder who wrote this script that we all recite from cellular memory for reasons that we don’t even know?  Nonetheless, as the thoughts stream through, I continue dancing the touch-less dance.  With furrowed brow, the seal still balances the bowling pin on her nose. 

Recently, while pondering these questions, my attention was drawn to my cat and dog, who were playing on the floor below me.  The two are best friends, as if brother and sister… the boy being so active and the girl so relational right from the start (oops…I accidentally pressed the son vs. daughter switch on my conversation playlist).  In any case, the two animals spend a lot of time (and seem to deeply enjoy) just bumping and nudging each other.  But the scene got me thinking. Maybe conversation is not really about the content of the words but rather a way of simply establishing contact that is friendly and acknowledging.  It might be that all these pre-scripted conversations and time-consuming niceties are akin to my Shiba Inu smushing her nose into her big orange companion; a way to acknowledge those with whom we share the same floor/planet at the same time in history.

I am an optimist and thus I enjoy a warm-hearted interpretation of our pre-scripted conversations as some form of human bumping and smushing.  And yet, deep down, I worry that this societal play that we are performing has more pessimistic implications. I can’t help but wonder if the rise of technology, as the primary form of communication in our culture, is not related to our conversations sounding more and more like computer-generated recordings.

I am fairly certain that we used to use conversation as a way to connect, get closer, bridge the separation we feel.  Conversation is now becoming a means to just the opposite end—something that we use to disconnect and avoid contact; a dance in which nobody touches.  The pre-packaged interaction that we are dialing in with increasing ease and regularity acts as a foam pad through which we humans are less and less able to pass. 

Is it possible that conversation itself is being kidnapped by the technological milieu of our time?  Is conversation becoming a franchised product, like a mahogany side table at Restoration Hardware—and thereby disappearing into a corporate-sponsored vacuum?   As conversation morphs into pre-digested, bite-sized portions, I wonder how, where and if we will go about forming bridges with those we don’t know.  Perhaps new means will be found—computer programs that bypass the need for conversation or sharing experience.  Or perhaps, like our tail, the need for conversation and connection will simply be bred out of the species—no longer necessary for optimum productivity.  For now, I suppose we are left to watch and wait, and most importantly, refrain from turning this dialogue into another pre-packaged and disposable version of itself.  Stay tuned…

Dreams to Dollars... Says Who?

Live your passion and the money will follow... or so the story goes. If we ignore the thought that says, "I can't afford it," and replace it with the thought that says, "Trust the universe," then all of our material desires will be fulfilled. Like a Burger King, we simply put our order in with the universe and the universe delivers. If we design the right vision board, repeat the right affirmations, "believe in" the universe, inheritances will show up just when they are needed (without losing anyone we know), bank errors will appear in our favor, and competitions that we didn't know we entered will be won. The list of fortunes awaiting us is endless and endlessly delicious.

The idea is that the universe is a good parent who rewards its good children (with things) and punishes its bad ones with deprivation. We are good when we think only good thoughts and follow our dreams and successfully block out anything that hints of doubt, fear or "negativity." In practice, this myth causes enormous suffering and is in fact false. Many people are doing exactly what they want to be doing with their life and yet never financially gain from it, not even a penny. The absence of capital gain is not a contradiction to the correctness of the path, as the myth-makers claim. However, those who are doing everything "right" and still not receiving cash windfalls or job offers by the dozen are left feeling inadequate and to blame for their inability to manifest material abundance. "I am supposed to get what I want from the universe! Everyone else does! What am I doing wrong that makes the universe not reward me?"

The dreams to dollars myth sets up an expectation that we should be rewarded financially for what we like to do. Says who? Why does the universe owe us this? What's more, why is financial reward the gauge for whether or not what we are doing is the right path? Isn't the fact that we enjoy what we are doing, that it interests, awakens or challenges us, enough of a reason to do it?

But perhaps most toxic about this myth is that it turns our attention away from the real reward that it is to live our passion, namely, to live our passion. What gets missed is the reward that is right here -- already. The reward is the passion, the wanting, the intention, the experience itself. The destination is the process. We need not look any farther than right here for our passion's value and legitimacy. The myth that we should be financially compensated for doing what we love vacuums the love from the process itself. So too, it burdens the experience with an expectation that it deliver something that the experience is not responsible for delivering. As a result, the expectation transforms something joyful into something disappointing and resent-able. Really, is it not a thing of wonder that we wake up in the morning at all, much less wake up, want to do something, and actually get to do it? Is that not remarkable enough?

We are constantly wishing for some larger entity that will reward us when we are good and punish us when we are bad. We so want to believe that some one, some thing, is in charge of us, and if we play by the rules it will all work out and we will get everything we want. We construct myriad larger than us, solid structures to feel safe and in control. Oh how we try to create a knowable order in all this mystery we call life. In the process of trying, however, we infantilize ourselves and reject life as it is happening.

The universe begins and ends within us. The structure we impose is a construction. Our rewards and punishments all exist right here in our own consciousness. In truth, we don't need a larger anything to be fulfilled. In expecting a sign from the universe to assure us that we are on the right path, a cash reward for listening to our own wisdom, we are abandoning the very wisdom that we seek to validate. After all, what is the universe if not our wisdom -- the wisdom we have mysteriously been gifted with?

Paradoxically, we reject and ignore the universe when we expect and demand that the universe appear to and for us. The gold stars that are supposed to appear are in fact already here -- if we dare follow the glitter into ourselves and this very moment's experience!

Technology: Your Mind on Crack

If generating "to do" lists were an Olympic event, the human mind would surely take home the gold.  While undoubtedly useful for many tasks, the mind is also an unsettled and frantic creature whose basic state is agitation. The mind is in a state of constant craving; desperately seeking something to do, fix or figure out.  The mind is not wired to land here, but instead, always beckoning our attention into the past or future.  The mind does not want us to live this moment directly, but rather seeks to turn this moment into a project about which something can be done, or alternatively, a statement about our identity. What do we need to do about this moment, what does this moment mean about our past or future, what does this moment say about what kind of person we are?  These are the things the mind wants to know about now, but certainly not what now actually is.  The mind acts as a moderator between our life and us.  To the mind, being equals death--doing equals life.  

Enter technology.  Injecting technology into the human mind is like shooting a wild, agitated, drunken monkey with a thousand CC's of adrenaline.  The mind is thrilled, but what about we who have to house that wild monkey? 

If you ask a crack addict what will make him well, he will tell you more crack, and he will be sure of it.  The crack addict is the wrong one to ask what he needs. More crack will not make him feel well, but will only calm his shakes... for a short time.  And then his suffering will return--with more ferocity. Similarly, the mind is the wrong part of ourselves to ask what will make us well.  The mind tells us that more will satisfy us--more information, more entertainment, more choices, more everything.  More will make us whole--and ironically--give us a place where we can rest and finally enjoy less. In truth, the mind is painfully mistaken.  We do not need more frequent communication; we need deeper connections.  We do not need more sound bites of forgettable information; we need more meaningful dialogue.  We do not need more entertainment; we need to get interested in our own imagination and creativity.  We do not need more ways to get away from ourselves and now; we need to meet ourselves and discover the wonder of this moment. Well-being can only live in this now and if we are not in it, we will never experience it.

When I ask people what makes them feel truly well, I generally hear one of three things: connection with other people, creativity, and spirit-oriented activities.  In all my years asking this question, never have I heard the answer: technology. People that spend all day checking and re-checking their devices--checking for what they do not even know--do not feel well at day's end. They are addicts seeking relief--relief ultimately from the belief that there is somewhere better, more important, more fun, or simply more bearable than here.  At the end of all their frantic information and entertainment-gorging, they feel despairing and anxious--bloated yet ravenous and mal-nourished. Their addiction has grown stronger, along with their belief that something somewhere will complete them and offer them a place to—at last—be, if they could only find it.

Technology is breeding the addiction to distraction into the human species, just as you would breed long ears into a dog breed.  It is breeding out the capacity to be with ourselves or anyone else, and worst of all, to be here, the stuff that true well-being is made of.  

Our heart and spirit need something very different than what our mind craves.  As a society, we are living entirely out of sync with what really nourishes and makes us well.  The drunken, feverish monkey mind within us has taken over the controls and we are sailing into despair.  An entertaining, lightning-paced, bespangled despair for sure, but despair nonetheless.  It is up to us and well within our power to wrestle this life back from the misinformed (and suffering) monkey.  As human beings who, unlike other species, have the incredible gift of awareness, it is our responsibility to stop bingeing on what is ultimately starving us, to dismount from the frantic wheel of distraction.  If we tune into our deeper wisdom, we can see what the monkey is up to, the path the addicted mind is leading us down.  We can then choose to change our course and turn our attention instead to those experiences that truly nourish us, that lead us back to our natural well-being—reacquai

How to Stop Hating (and Fearing) Fear

My dear friend is in a new relationship.  It is her first in nearly a decade.  It has been only a short time, but she is positively head over heels in love with this new man.   We went out the other night to celebrate and it was a delight to listen as my friend sang her new boyfriend's praises and expressed her deep joy and gratitude for having met him.  But then something happened that saddened me.

My friend began to express fear, specifically, fear that her new relationship would not last, that this man would end up rejecting her or that it would turn out not to be the amazing union that she had hoped.  It wasn't the fear however that saddened me, but rather her response to that fear.  Within seconds she had shifted from feeling confident and reveling in her joy to attacking herself viciously--for being afraid.  She told me that fear was her worst enemy--always sabotaging her life.  If she could not get past and rid of her fear, she was certain that she would destroy this relationship and lose her chance at happiness.  Put simply, she--like most people--despised her own fear.

In this culture we are taught to believe that fear is the enemy; if we are afraid, it means that we are weak, that there is something wrong with us.  We believe that if we allow our fear to be heard or considered, it will prevent us from getting what we want, that fear is bigger than and separate from us.  Furthermore, if we let fear win--we are losers. 

After my friend had finished attacking herself, I asked her a simple question. Does she love this man and does she want this new relationship to last?  <em>Yes and yes</em> was her answer.  I then asked another question. Could she be certain that it would work out, that he would be the one?,  to which she replied, <em>Of course not, nothing was ever certain.</em> I then asked a final question.  Given the answers to the first two questions, how could she be angry with her fear, and at herself for having fear? 

With the invitation to consider the validity of her fear, to hear from the fear itself, she immediately broke into a smile.  Fear's experience was not something that she had ever imagined she could welcome into the dialogue.  She had never had a relationship with her fear that was made of anything other than anger, never been anything but furious at and afraid of her fear. I was suggesting the rightness of the enemy--not that fear was right that the relationship would fail--but rather the rightness of how scary it was to want it to work and not know if it would.  Indeed, I was encouraging a handshake between lifelong opponents.   

It is not my friend's fear that has hindered her, but rather her relationship with fear. Our fear is actually on the same side as we are. My friend's fear exists precisely because of how joyful this relationship actually is. Her fear is born out of wanting to hold onto all that joy. It is present because it knows that the future is unknown and not  entirely up to her or in her control.  In truth, fear is the ultimate joy protector.  When seen through its eyes, fear is in fact is quite sensible.

We must stop judging, blaming and shaming our fear.  It doesn't mean that we spend all day negotiating with it, listening to its worries--we do not let it run the show--but we must have compassion for its wish to protect us from loss, to hang onto our joy.  What could be saner that such a wish?   When we stop rejecting and running from fear, we disarm it, and remove its power. Fear stops being frightening and disruptive.  What we reject becomes fiercer and scarier; what we welcome eases and lightens.

How can we experience deep joy without also considering its potential loss. Are they not two sides of the same coin?  Taking a walk with my 9 year old, I feel the deepest gratitude a human being could feel, for getting to have this blessed time together with my child.  And yet interlaced in that poignant sweetness is the knowing that it won't always be this way, that we won't always get to have this.  Fear is the flag that reminds us of what we cherish and want. 

The path is in offering fear a seat at our inner table, understanding its place, its side.  To befriend fear is to wrap our arm it--let it know that we are on the same side, that we too do not want to lose what is precious to us.   Rather than yelling at our fear, we can reassure it that we we are doing everything we know how to do to keep what it fears from happening. 

Fear doesn't like the unknown and doesn't particularly care for the certainty of change either.  As I stroll through the park with my little girl, her blond head still thirteen inches south, her rainbow-painted fingers intertwined with mine, I can't say that I disagree.

The Sweetness of Life: Joy as a Practice

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-colier/life-joy_b_1616177.html

The Joy of Connection in One Simple Step

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-colier/connecting-others_b_1562181.html

Why Meditate?

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-colier/why-meditation_b_1378059.html

Brands 'R' Us: Identity Crisis in the Age of Technology

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-colier/inner-selves_b_1414342.html

True Friendship Can Handle The Truth

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-colier/friendship_b_1340537.html

Happily Ever After?

In the online simulation game, The Sims, when an avatar accomplishes all of her lifetime aspirations, she achieves Permanent Platinum status, otherwise known as permanent happiness. Once Permanently Platinum, her mood bar cannot slip below a certain level and her environment no longer impacts her happiness.  She is frozen in happiness. 

Interestingly, when I spoke with players of the game, without exception, all felt that Permanent Platinum was a terrible fate.  Once permanent happiness had been reached, they felt stuck and disconnected from their alter ego, with nothing left to live for.  Their reason for acting, namely, to improve their mood bar, was removed.  As a result, everything felt washed out and pointless.  Most discontinued their permanently happy characters (aka killed them off) and created new avatars, who could experience discomfort and once again aim to achieve happiness.   

Despite this permanent-happiness-related depression, we in the real world maintain a Sims-ilar relationship with happiness.  We view happiness as, first and foremost, a state that comes as a result of something we accomplish, attain, achieve, or otherwise acquire.  We add something to our self or our life and we get happiness as a prize.  If we amass enough of the things we want in our life, we will be happy. On the other hand, if we fall below a certain level of things we want, we will be delivered into the dreaded… not happiness.  Consequently, we are constantly searching for that one magic thing that will deliver us into Permanent Platinum status; the right home, relationship, job, haircut, whatever our personal carrot may be.  It will be the thing that guarantees our everlasting happiness. And with any luck, after its attainment, we will no longer have to show up for our life.  Like in the Sims game, once we acquire this thing called permanent happiness, we will be free to stop paying attention to the now, and at last will have permission to go to sleep in our life.

Lucky for us real people, there is no such thing as Permanent Platinum stauts.  Happiness is not something that arrives in a finished package, and certainly not something that we can hold onto on a permanent basis.  In real life, happiness is a temporary state.  We enjoy it for a while and then we lose it, and then it shows up again and so on, eternally.  Happiness comes and goes like every other emotional state.  In real life, external objects only bring us happiness for a finite period of time at which point, they change or we change.  Change is the only thing that is permanent.  If it’s Zumba right now that is bringing us happiness, we might twist our ankle or the teacher we love might move away.  Poof: happiness gone.  Or, if the object itself does not go away, the feeling that it was offering will change. If it’s Magnolia cupcakes bringing us happiness, we might step on the scale after a few weeks of blissful red velvet happiness and poof: happiness is gone again.  If it’s our new boyfriend who makes every step a dance on air, then the day arrives when the pavement appears beneath our feet once again.  There is nothing wrong with any of this happening; it is in fact the natural evolution of life.   Happiness is not a feeling that is sustained; it is not static.  Happiness, when it comes from an external object (no matter what that object is) is always coming and going. 

And yet, despite the fact that happiness is consistently inconsistent, permanently impermanent, we judge ourselves as failures when we cannot maintain perpetual happiness. People who are not happy are seen as failures; it is our fault that we cannot hold onto a permanent state of happiness.  We are not trying hard enough, not living our life right.  And after all, no one wants to be a around a Debbie Downer, you might catch what she has. Regardless of unceasing evidence to the contrary, we keep demanding and expecting that happiness be something that it isn’t—that life be something that it isn’t. 

Happiness—as a goal in life—is the wrong goal.  Rather than chasing happiness, steadfastly defending the belief that somewhere, somehow, if we find the right thing, we will indeed be able to hold onto happiness for good—we need to find a new goal for life.  We need to uncover a state of well-being, deeper than happiness, a state that can survive the swings of happiness and unhappiness, of gaining and losing what we want, the feelings that make up every human life. 

Well-being is an internal state, not dependent upon any external circumstances.  It is a result of our attitude towards our feelings, not the nature of the feelings themselves and not the circumstances that are causing the feelings.  It is the comfort that we bring ourselves when disappointment is the cloud in our sky, the gratitude that we invoke when joy floats through, the kindness that we offer whatever feelings pass into and out of our inner landscape, regardless of what they may be.  So too, well-being is an ongoing process, not an object that we obtain. True well-being can only happen in the now and devolves into an intellectual concept when applied to the past or the future.  There is never a moment when we can assume we simply have it; well-being is sustained by paying attention to the moments of our life, being present and noticing what’s here.  The substance of well-being is our own compassionate presence—a compassion for what we are living now. The good news is that unlike happiness, the ingredients of well-being are entirely within us, and not reliant upon circumstances that are external, perpetually in flux and too often out of our control.  At last, we can call off the search for something outside ourselves!   Perhaps in the game of life, we can discover our own Platinum Well-Being Status, mindful that it is not a button that we press once and forget, but rather, a way of being that requires our attention in all of the nows that we get to live!