What Does it Mean to Be a Spiritual Grown Up?

For many (dare I say most) people, spending time with parents can unleash some pretty strong emotions. No matter how grown up we are, our original family can put us in touch with deep hurts, primal longings, unmet needs… a tsunami of feelings. If we want to challenge every ounce of peace, wellbeing, compassion, wisdom and strength we’ve earned over a lifetime, we need only spend a weekend, day, evening, hour, few minutes, or maybe just say hello with the person who is our parent. 

Jane, a woman in her 40s, recently had an experience with a parent that set off a strong and somewhat unexpected reaction in her. She met her father for a meal and he behaved the way he always behaved, asking her no questions, acknowledging nothing about her, completely invisibilizing her, while simultaneously demanding that she act as a mirror to reflect his own grandiosity. It was an experience Jane knew intimately and one she had been living for decades. But on this particular day, sitting across a table from this man she called her father, a man who had never shown Jane the kindness of acknowledgment or curiosity, it all broke—the dam that had protected her from her actual experience was gone. Without warning, Jane discovered that she could not keep pretending this kind of interaction was okay. Even if she had wanted to continue the same relationship with her father, her body had decided otherwise: being unseen and unknown, receiving nothing, inauthentically playing the role of the loving validator, was no longer possible. 

Midway through the meeting, Jane took off the hat she had been wearing her whole life; she stopped confirming her father’s importance, and also stopped playing the role of the grateful daughter, who would happily enjoy the glow of his greatness while remaining forever invisible. She even went so far as to suggest that something he had said about himself might not be true, a first. The encounter ended abruptly and with obvious prickliness. While no words were spoken about the tectonic plates that had just shifted between them, it was clear to both father and daughter that their usual way of interacting was suspended, if not finished for good...  

Read full article... http://nancycolier.com/when-we-shame-ourselves/

When Is It Time to Stop Trying to Fix Ourselves?

Are you a self-help junkie?

Even if you don’t have a stack of books on your bedside table detailing the newest ways to fix yourself, you still might be. And it wouldn’t be your fault if you were. Our  conditioning from a very young age is to believe that we need to become better, new and improved versions of ourselves, even if at first we don’t know exactly how or why. But soon enough we have filled in the why's with our shortcomings and failures, and self-help provides the how-to's with unending methods for self-correction. Armed with our story of deficiencies firmly in place and a surplus of paths toward improvement, we set off on our life mission—namely, becoming someone else. And we are proud of, and celebrated for, this mission. Growing and evolving, becoming a better person—it all sounds so virtuous. Who would turn down such an opportunity?  

And yet, growing and evolving are too often code words for what is really "fixing" or correcting our basic unworthiness. From the time we are young, we are infiltrated with the belief that the basic problem underlying all other problems is, put simply, us. We are what’s wrong. As adults, we search the globe for the right teacher; we attend seminars, buy books, hire coaches, consult shamans, and everything else under the sun—all in an effort to make ourselves into something good enough or maybe just enough.

But are we good enough for what or whom? Did you ever wonder?

If we boil it down, we keep fixing ourselves in the hopes that we can, finally, just be as we actually are. Once we're fixed, enough, worthy—whether that means more compassionate, more disciplined, or whatever shape our more's have formed into—then we'll be entitled to feel what we feel. We can think what we think, experience what we experience—in essence, be who we are.

The fear that fuels our self-betterment mission is the belief that we are, at our core, notwhat we should be: We're faulty, broken, unlovable, or some other version of not okay. To give ourselves permission to be who we are, to give up the mission for a better version of ourselves, would be tantamount to accepting our defectiveness and giving up all hope of fruition. And that, of course, would be unwise, naive, lazy, and a cop out. To suggest that we stop striving to be better than who we are is not just counterintuitive, but frightening and dangerous. Such a suggestion incites fear, scorn, anger, confusion, amusement, and an assumption of ignorance.

Self-help, while useful in certain ways, strengthens our core belief that we are inherently defective. Self-help starts with our defectiveness as its basic assumption, and then graciously offers to provide us with an unending stream of strategies by which to fix our defective core—which, once fixed, will award us the right to be who we are.

The problem is that the strategies keep us stuck in the cycle of fixing—and more important, in the belief that we are broken. If you notice, we never do become that person who is allowed to feel what we feel, and experience what we experience. We never do get permission to just be who and as we are. 

This is where spirituality enters, and offers something radically different than self-help. 

Most people think that spirituality and self-help are the same thing. They’re not. In fact, they are fundamentally different. We have tried to turn spirituality into self-help, another method for correcting ourselves, but to do so is to misunderstand and eradicate the most profound (and beneficial) teaching spirituality offers.

True spirituality is not about fixing ourselves spiritually or becoming spiritually better. Rather, it is about freedom from the belief of our unworthiness, and ultimately, about acceptance. Spirituality, practiced in its truest form, is about meeting who we really are, and allowing ourselves to experience life as we actually experience it. 

In this way, it is more of an undoing than a doing. 

In truth, we need to take the risk that it is to lean back into who we actually are. We need to do that before we even know that who we are will be enough, or even that there will be anything there to catch us. We need to relinquish our self-improvement plans before we believe that we have the right to stop improving. The whole thing—true spirituality—requires a kind of faith. It's not faith in a system, story, or methodology, but a faith that trusts that we can’t think our way into what we truly want. No matter what path we practice, there comes a point where we have to let go of the reins; when we have to give up the quest to be good enough.  

What happens when we stop trying to change ourselves into something better is nothing like what we imagine: We envision stepping off the self-help train and landing smack inside someone incomplete and unsatisfactory. And yet in truth, the simple (but not easy) act of inviting ourselves into our own life has the effect of placing us at the center of something beautiful and extraordinary. Giving ourselves permission to be as we are miraculously creates a kind of love for ourselves—not so much for our individual characteristics, but for our being. It's not just for our being, but for the truth, whatever that is. It is as if whatever we find inside ourselves, whether we wish it were here or not, is okay and we are okay. Ultimately, we shift from trying to become lovable to being love itself. And amazingly, from this place, the not-enough person we thought we were has simply vanished, or more likely, never was.

Try it out for a moment—this moment. Just let yourself be. Give yourself permission to have the experience you are having, whatever it is, with no story about whether it is right or wrong, good or bad. Feel how you actually are. It’s that direct and that simple. No judgments allowed. It won’t make sense...it takes a leap...so leap.

When Is It Time to Stop Fixing Ourselves?

Are you a self-help junkie? Even if you don’t have a stack of books on your bedside table with the newest ways to fix yourself, you still might be.  And it wouldn’t be your fault if you were.  We are conditioned from a very young age to believe that we need to become better, new and improved versions of ourselves, even if at first we don’t know exactly how or why.  But soon enough we have filled in the why-s with our shortcomings and failures and self-help provides the how-to-s in its unending methods for self-correction.  Armed with our story of deficiencies firmly in place and a surplus of paths towards improvement, we set off on our life mission, namely, becoming someone else.  And, we are proud of and celebrated for our mission. Growing and evolving, becoming a better person, it all sounds so virtuous.  Who would turn down such an opportunity?  

And yet, growing and evolving are too often code words for what is really "getting fixed" or correcting our basic unworthiness.  From the time we are young, we are infiltrated with the belief that the basic problem underlying all other problems is, put simply, us.  We are what’s wrong.  As adults, we search the globe for the right teacher; we attend seminars, buy books, hire coaches, consult shamans, and everything else under the sun, all in an effort to make ourselves into something good enough or maybe just enough.

But good enough for what or whom?  Did you ever wonder?

If we boil it down, we keep fixing ourselves in the hopes that we can, finally, just be as  we actually are.  Once we're fixed, enough, worthy--whether that means more compassionate, more disciplined, more grateful, more peaceful, more attentive, more informed, more important, more even-tempered, more spiritual, or whatever shape our more-s have formed into, then and only then we'll be entitled to feel what we feel, think what we think, experience what we experience, in essence, be who we are.

The fear that fuels our self-betterment mission is the belief that we are, at our core, not what we should be, faulty, broken, lacking, nothing, unworthy, undeserving, unlovable, or some other version of not okay.  To give ourselves permission to be who we are, give up the mission for a better version of ourselves would be tantamount to accepting our defectiveness and giving up all hope of fruition.  And that, of course, would be unwise, naive, lazy, a cop out, and despairing. To suggest that we stop striving to be better than who we are is not just counter-intuitive, but frightening and dangerous. Such a suggestion incites fear, scorn, anger, confusion, amusement, and an assumption of ignorance.

Self-help, while useful in certain ways, strengthens our core belief--that we are inherently defective.  Self-help starts with our defectiveness as its basic assumption, and then graciously offers to provide us with an unending stream of strategies by which to fix our defective core, which, once fixed, will award us the right to be who we are. The problem is that the strategies keep us stuck in the cycle of fixing--and more importantly, in the belief that we are broken. If you notice, we never do become that person who is allowed to feel what we feel, and experience what we experience.  We never do get permission to just be who and as we are. 

This is where spirituality enters, and offers something radically different than self-help. 

Most people think that spirituality and self-help are the same thing; they’re not.  In fact, they are fundamentally different.  We have tried to turned spirituality into self-help, another method for correcting ourselves, but to do so is to misunderstand and eradicate the most profound (and beneficial) teaching that spirituality offers.

True spirituality is not about fixing ourselves spiritually or becoming spiritually better.  Rather, spirituality is about freedom from the belief of our unworthiness, and ultimately, it is about acceptance.  Spirituality, practiced in its truest form, is about meeting who we really are, and allowing ourselves to experience life as we actually experience it.  In this way, it is more of an undoing than a doing. 

In truth, we need to take the risk that it is to lean back into who we actually are and to do that before we even know that who we are will be enough, or even that there will be anything there to catch us.  We need to relinquish our self-improvement plans before we believe that we have the right to stop improving.  The whole thing, true spirituality, requires a kind of faith, not a faith in a system, story or methodology, but a faith that trusts or a wisdom that knows that we can’t think our way into what we truly want, can’t ultimately make happen what we really need.  No matter what path we practice,there comes a point where we have to let go of the reins; we have to give up the quest to be good enough.  

What happens when we stop trying to change ourselves into something better is nothing like what we imagine.  We envision stepping off the self-help train and landing smack inside someone incomplete and unsatisfactory.  And yet in truth, the simple (but not easy) act of inviting ourselves into our own life, has the effect of placing us at the center of something so beautiful and extraordinary. Giving ourselves permission to be as we are miraculously creates a kind of love for ourselves, not so much for our individual characteristics, but for our being.  And not just for our being, but for the truth, whatever that is.  It is as if whatever we find inside ourselves, whether we wish it were here or not, it is okay and we are okay. Ultimately, we shift from trying to become lovable to being love itself.  And amazingly, from this place, the not-enough person we thought we were has simply vanished, or more likely, never was.

Try it out for a moment—this moment.  Just let yourself be.  Give yourself permission to have the experience you are having, whatever it is, with no story about whether it is right or wrong, good or bad.  Feel how you actually are.  It’s that direct and that simple.  No judgments allowed.  It won’t make sense... it takes a leap... so leap.

Mindfulness: How Far Can You Go?

Mindfulness practice is like Russian dolls. Just when you think you have gotten to the biggest doll in the set, you discover that that doll too is inside an even bigger doll. In mindfulness practice, we are continually discovering thoughts behind thoughts behind still more thoughts, seemingly ad infinitum. The more evolved our practice, the further back (behind thought and emotion) we can travel, and the more layers of thought and feeling we can see before becoming identified with what’s arising. Ultimately, mindfulness practice increases our capacity to witness what is happening inside and outside of us, until there is no more self to do the witnessing.

The difficulty or limitation we often run into in mindfulness practice is that we put the brakes on too soon, close our eyes and dive into or become aligned with the material that our mind is presenting. Specifically, we witness an aspect of our mind but then we get caught in the next layer of thoughts, the ones that say something about what we just witnessed. What’s different about this second layer of thoughts is that we believe them, and thus are not able to see them as something separate from us. There is no longer an I to witness them.

Two cases in point:

A woman practicing mindfulness notices that as she walks on the street her mind never stops announcing its preferences and judgments about what she is seeing. Her mind shouts out “Wow, I hate that haircut, darn that’s a big behind, I wish I had that handbag, and on it goes.” She is not particularly interested in the judgments that come, but that fact doesn’t keep them from coming. Through her mindfulness practice, she becomes aware that her mind ceaselessly judges everything it sees. (In other words, she has a regular human mind.) Step one of her mindfulness practice is successful in that sense. But then, as a result of this newfound awareness about her mind, she hears new thoughts. The mind generates new material. The new thoughts tell her that she will never be a spiritualperson, that she is judgmental by nature and in fact hopeless and awful. At this stage in the process, she and her thoughts become united. She believes them. They are one thing. What she doesn’t do is move to the next Russian doll and see that these judgments of herself are just another set of thoughts that the mind is presenting. At this stage, when her thoughts become self-critical, she believes them, merges with them, and thus loses her perspective on them.

This woman is a classic example of what many people do with their mindfulness practice, namely, use it against themselves. This woman learns something about her mind’s nature and then silently, cleverly, the mind slips back into the driver’s seat and generates new thoughts about the person who would have such a mind, blaming the person for being the wishful thinker of such unacceptable thoughts. The witness however believes these new thoughts and doesn’t see them as the most recent incarnation of mind that they are. At this point, the mindful witness joins forces with the mind and the practice of mindfulness is suspended until further notice.

In a second example, a man who is attending a business meeting notices that his mind becomes very agitated and busy when a female colleague starts telling a personal story to the group. The thoughts he hears are angry and blaming of his colleague, for taking up everyone’s time with her nonsense. Using mindfulness practice, he sees these thoughts and is able to refrain from trying to change them or get involved. He is aware of having the thoughts without the accompanying anxiety and inner turbulence that has accompanied such thoughts in the past. But then his mind gets sneaky, telling him that he is an angry person, just like his father before him, and that he will never have a partner if he feels this way when women tell their stories. He believes these new thoughts and does not see them as just the next layer of thought that the mind is generating. Because he cannot see them as yet another (stepped up) version of his mind, he becomes afraid of them—afraid of his own mind. At this point, he is back to being a hostage of the mind and his mindfulness practice is derailed.

Behind every thought is another thought. As we go further in our mindfulness practice, we get better at seeing the thought behind the thought, without combining ourself with it. We have to keep our witness goggles firmly in place as the mind morphs into subtler manifestations of itself, and gets more and more difficult to keep track of and visible, out in front of us. The mind is a master chameleon and an expert at becoming whatever it needs to become in order for us to stop seeing it as separate from who we are. Mindfulness practice is an effort to see even that chameleon-like quality.

Furthermore, mindfulness practice is often practiced without one of its most important elements, namely, curiosity. The attitude that accompanies mindfulness is one of kindness and interest. When we learn something new about the nature of our mind, whether we want that to be its nature or not, we take the attitude of “Huh, wow, look at that, that’s what my mind does. Curious!”

Mindfulness practice is not conditional; we are not observing our mind in order to make a case against it or ourself. The eyes that are looking at the mind in mindfulness must be compassionate eyes, or at least neutral, understanding that this wild animal called human mind is after one thing, survival, which is synonymous with being in charge. Mindfulness practice helps us realize that we don’t choose the thoughts our mind spits up but we do choose whether or not to listen to or believe them. In truth we are the one the mind is talking to, the one whose attention the mind is trying to keep, but the mind doesn’t want us to know that.

When you reach the thought or feeling that you believe is the last one, the witness itself, the ultimate observer of mind, don’t stop there. Notice that you have stopped looking and pull the lens back yet again. Ask yourself, who (or what) perceives even that last thought, the one that feels like truth, who you are, or just what is? Get behind even that “last” thought or feeling, and then see where you are. There’s always further to go… until there isn’t, and you aren’t.

Has Social Media Turned Life Into a Popularity Contest?

Is it my imagination or has life regressed into a giant popularity contest, measurable (thanks to the Internet) in numbers of followers, views, “likes,” etc.? Is the new goal for our existence, the new virtue to aspire to, being popular, or at least perceived as such?

A young woman recently came to me excited and proud of herself. When I asked why, she told me that she had managed to acquire 20 new Instagram followers, cracking a ceiling that she had been unable to reach. She had achieved this “accomplishment” by using her Instagram credits in a particular way that I didn’t quite understand. While it was not clear if the new followers actually signed up themselves, she was quick to inform me that they were indeed real people, even if she didn’t know them personally. This is the new definition of “accomplishment"—raising your numbers of followers, thereby achieving the impression that you are interesting and, of course, popular. Who needs actual athletic, personal, or academic accomplishments, when you can feel the real pride that comes from having your selfie earn a one-minute spot on Instagram’s front page!

It’s sad enough to value popularity as a goal in life, but tragic when we realize that the so-called followers we consider valuable and important are not actually followers at all, in the true sense of the word. Followers used to mean people who believed in us or our ideas—devotees. It had a qualitative meaning. Now followers are numbers we amass by using the Internet in increasingly clever ways. Often our followers know nothing about us or what it is they are supposedly following. The new follower is simply a statistic that we buy with the “like” of someone else’s post or the promotion of someone else’s page. People even advertise: If you follow me, I will follow you. It's a game of smoke and mirrors.

In even more extreme cases, some followers are not even real humans but rather BOTs, otherwise known as web robots. These followers don’t exist at all, except as lines of computer code. They are in fact computer programs designed to behave like humans. Such lines of code pump up someone’s followers number, which then makes it look as if they are more popular. And here’s where it gets really high-school-ish: Other people then follow that person because they think he or she is popular. The emperor not only naked, but downright mad!

There used to be a developmental stage in life, usually sometime in our thirties, when we moved from the outside to the inside. That is, we would stop defining ourselves by what others thought of us and became more interested in what we thought about ourselves and the world, regardless of whether it was popular or not.

This stage could also be called “growing up.”

It seems, though, that this stage of life has now been canceled. More and more, no matter our age, our sense of self and what is important to us is determined by what others think, or at least what it looks like they think.

Young adults run much of the internet industry and for that generation, popularity as a pursuit is not appropriate. But as the internet becomes more pervasive in our lives, the rest of us, who are not creating code, and not twenty-somethings, are gradually taking on the values of the generation that is.

In truth, we still have a choice of how we want to behave. All great movements of change began because someone was willing to stand for something that wasn’t popular. I wonder if we still have the courage to put our name on something that has no followers? If it had always been this way, could any great revolution ever have come to pass?

Is being popular really what we want to hold up as the most meaningful aspect of life, or the truest sign of achievement? Because this is precisely what we are now modeling. We are encouraging children to chase approval, no matter how shallow, and view their own worth as determined by external sources, often people they don’t even know or respect. “Likes” are flimsy planks on which to build a house of self-worth and moral structure. If we adults don’t re-establish a firm gauge for what is important in life, for what sustains and nourishes us, makes us feel genuinely well, and gives us a deeper sense of meaning, we will emotionally and spiritually bankrupt ourselves and future generations.

We will certainly rob our children of the experience of true self-esteem. 

The values I consider important may be irrelevant in 10 years. Perhaps by then, "followers" will come to mean something entirely different, and take on a profundity we can’t yet imagine. Perhaps there won’t even be a private, internal self left to consult with on what is important, and all that will remain is a universal, internet-based selfie.

In the meantime, I will encourage my children to like themselves, to become their own destination regardless of what’s gone viral, and to view accomplishment as something internally-driven, earned, and reliable. This is the best lesson we can offer. At the very least, it gives children a chance at having real confidence, and a life that will nourish them with substance and meaning. But, we adults have to model this mindset and behavior—by assigning worth back where it belongs, and not letting the internet dictate our larger human priorities and values. We can do better than popularity as our mission statement and purpose in life. We can all graduate from high school—yet again.

Enough About Me, What Do You Think Of Me?

My 10-year-old was invited to a party this weekend, a camp reunion sleepover given by one of her closest friends. Unfortunately, this same weekend, she has an event that she can’t and doesn’t want to miss—a competition for which she has trained diligently and for many months. But the other little girl is very angry with my daughter and has accused her of being a bad friend and bad person because she won’t give up her event in order to attend the party. She wanted to know why my daughter was doing this to her, and purposely spoiling her event.

This reaction may be age appropriate for 10-year-olds, but too many “grown-ups” behave in a similar fashion—which is definitively not age appropriate.

I was recently at a party with a friend. Knowing that I had to get up early for something important the next day, I left the gathering before midnight. My friend, a woman in her 40s, was furious that I would do that to her. She was having a good time, had met a man she was interested in, and didn’t want to stay there on her own. She felt that my leaving was unkind, and that I should have stayed longer to support her.

At another time, some years ago, after sitting for a full day with an ill friend, I decided to go for a drive to spend some time with myself, which I desperately needed. To this day, that friend tells me that I left her in her time of need, and wasn’t willing to stay with her unconditionally. The fact that I also needed some self-care was and still is experienced as an abandonment and even an aggression against her. The 10 hours spent with her that day, as far as her internal world is concerned, never existed.

Me, Me, and What About Me?

It is very difficult for some people to see anything as happening separate from and not in relation to them. People who suffer with this view of the world experience everything as a reflection and commentary on who they are—an abandonment or affirmation of themselves. Whatever you do, even things that have nothing whatsoever to do with these people, are still somehow either for or against them. Such people simply can’t see anything as not being tethered to them. Sometimes it can be baffling to figure out how your action could possibly have been related to them, for or against, but through this kind of lens, everything you do is indeed about them, even when it makes absolutely no logical sense.

This form of narcissism is in fact quite prevalent in our culture, and very challenging to know how to handle in close relationships.

Weathering the Storm

A painful aspect of being in a relationship with this kind of person: Since nothing can be about you and your life, you end up feeling not seen and not known—invisibilized—except as an object they use to make themselves feel better or worse. The experience is of not really existing at all—you are continually invalidated, not permitted to express yourself as a separate being who might actually have her own experience. Why you might make a particular choice, for yourself, is viewed not only as untrue and absurd, but yet another aggression—against them—that you could dare to think that you have your own internal world, and separate life. Imagine! How could your choices possibly be about you and not them?

It is nearly impossible to feel truly cared by a partner, friend, or relative when that other person is not interested in knowing you in any way other than how you make them feel—about themselves. You might feel liked when your behavior is interpreted as favorable to their self-worth, but this is not the same as feeling genuine friendship or love. In a relationship with this kind of narcissism, it can feel like your life and very self are kidnapped—dis-allowed by the other. In truth, your very existence separate from them is the ultimate betrayal, and what they seek to obliterate. Related to as an object that needs to be either controlled or obliterated, love is a difficult and unlikely endeavor. As a result, such relationships are fraught with profound loneliness, grief and eventually, raging frustration as you fight desperately to be visible and known for who you genuinely are.

Some time ago, I gave a memorial for a close family member. As I was shopping for cookies for the gathering, I reached for the vanillas because my kids enjoy them. Immediately, my mind shot back with the thought that I was choosing vanilla to punish this relative, the one who had died, since she would have chosen chocolate. I waved hello to my old thought tape and bought the vanillas.

Being Yourself, Finally

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of a relationship with this kind of narcissist is that you come to experience your own life as actually being about the other. You lose touch with your own intentions, as if their narcissistic lens, pointed at you, gradually corrupts even your knowing your own truth, and simultaneously, steals the dignity that comes with that knowing. You not only start changing your behavior, morphing yourself into a deformed system, refraining from doing things that (while not about them) they will experience as about them, but also, you stop believing in your own experience and intention. The fact that your actions are for and about you, not them, stops being completely clear.

You begin to doubt what is really true for you, as you are no longer quite connected to your own truth. In this way, their narcissism acts as a toxin to your connection to self. You may defend that what you are doing is about you and not them, but some part of you stops believing this fully, and the strength behind this knowing is lost. While you may go on fighting to be seen accurately and truthfully, the other has taken away your ability to own and believe this accurate and truthful version of yourself. Your truth (being true) comes to depend on their believing it—being able to prove it to them. Even the struggle for you, they eventually own.

Most important in this sort of relationship is to stay in touch with your own intentions. Rather than defending yourself, proving your own truth—as if you should ever have to—be that separate entity that they refuse to acknowledge. A simple, “I am sorry that you are experiencing what is about me to be about you”, can suffice. Chances are you are not going to get this other person to see you clearly, without an umbilical cord between the two of you. Let the attempt to be seen accurately go, if at all possible. The more you try to be known, the more you threaten your own connection to self.

We all have the right to be the keepers of our truth and no one has the right to determine or corrupt our intentions, to turn our being into an extension of them. With each moment that you are misunderstood and your truth distorted, spend two moments confirming and marinating in what is for you, your actual truth, uncorrupted.

And think carefully as well about whether you want to be in a relationship with someone who doesn’t want to or have the capacity to genuinely know you, as a being unto yourself. Ask yourself if this kind of relationship strengthens your sense of dignity and self-worth, encourages your authentic nature, makes you feel known, understood, loved, or just plain good about yourself. If the answer is no, then what is the best choice for YOU, the choice that is in line with your well-being? Sometimes the only way to honor your separateness is to make the choice to separate.

Has Technology Killed Downtime?

A woman I know is afraid to go to bed at night. She’s not afraid of the dark or of having a nightmare. She’s not afraid of someone breaking into her apartment or of dying in her sleep. What she’s afraid of is open time with herself, the unfocused down time that bedtime brings, time when she is not doing anything specific, not focused on any external something.

Someone else I know described the experience of lying in bed one morning, not having anything particular to get up for, and not being able to "find" anything to really think about. He said he felt like he had nowhere to “put his mind" and as a result, felt like he was going insane. The lack of a focus for his attention sent him into a full-fledged panic attack.

These scenarios may sound strange, but they are more common than you might imagine. With the advent of the digital age, our attention is almost always focused on something. We are playing a game, texting, researching, watching, or talking, but always doing something, with our mind turned toward and engaged with something outside of ourselves. We treat our own undirected attention like a parent might treat a toddler on a long plane ride, frantically shoving activities and videos in front of his face until he either passes out or the ride comes to an end.

Today we share this same fear of our own unentertained adult mind.

The gap, that space between activities, or what we used to call "down time" is disappearing from our lives. Our attention is now almost always narrowed onto a task or activity and we are losing the spaces in which our attention is open, without a specific focus. People say that we are becoming unfocused as a society but in fact we are becoming hyper-focused, always looking at something and never just looking—without a specific object or goal of our gaze.

Open awareness, down time, the gap—whatever you call it—serves an important  purpose in our lives. When I have a problem I can’t solve, I will often go for a walk and drop the problem altogether. Later that day, after not thinking about it for some time, the solution generally appears in my mind. I am not unique in having this experience. Something is actually happening in that down time. The mind is putting things together, making associations, doing a different kind of work, that happens outside our awareness. For many people, it is in these gaps that they have their best flashes of insight, as if we need to take our mind off of something in order to gain access to our intuition and really, to our everything.

So too, the mind needs recess periods in its day—like a child does—when it can just run and play, jump from thing to thing and not have to direct its energy toward any particular object or event. The mind needs to be able to flow freely from thought to thought, or simply rest in no thought. Down time between tasks allows our mind to rest. Gaps in our day give us time to just float about, space out or take a much-needed break from mental activity. This float time then allows us to re-boot our system and come back with renewed juice to bring to the next object of our attention. With our attention flipped on and at something all the time, we become mentally exhausted and while more time is spent focusing on tasks, we in fact become, qualitatively, less productive.

Furthermore, unfocused attention in our day allows us to spend time with ourselves, to make ourselves the focus of our attention. While not playing a game or engaging in a Google search, we can contemplate our own experience, check in, and discover how we are doing in the middle of all this noise, this life. Now, because our attention is always focused on something else, we have ceased to be a destination for our own attention. 

And yet the media says that we are becoming pathological narcissists. Aren’t we focusing more on ourselves than ever? Yes, we are spending far more time reporting on ourselves, focusing on our identity, describing where we’ve been, what we are doing and so on, but at the same time, we are spending far less time actually being with ourselves, inside our own attention, asking and answering to our self. As a result of always having an external focus, we have, sadly, come to view being with ourselves, without something else to focus on, as a void, a panic-inducing non-place.

From a spiritual perspective, the spaces between—between tasks, between thoughts, between breaths, between all the objects of our attention—are profoundly important. It's the space we inhabit during meditation. It's in the spaces between thoughts that we connect with the awareness within which thought happens. It's in this open awareness that we gain a sense of detachment and freedom from the mind. When we lose the ability or opportunity to live in the gaps, we become slaves to the mind, and subsequently terrified of any moment when the mind is not occupied. Gaps then become a kind of death—when we cannot feel our mind’s presence or experience our own presence, as if we cease to exist. On the other hand, a deep and lasting confidence arises when we can tolerate and even enjoy open, undirected space, when being with just our self is not something to be feared.

Breaks from focused attention are beneficial in myriad ways. They bring insight, allow us to solve problems without trying, give our mind a chance to rest, and to play without an agenda. Gaps give us time to spend time with ourselves, to experience our own being, and to know ourselves as more than just what we are doing and thinking. Gaps give us the confidence to stop trying to out-run open space, escape down time, and ultimately, dodge ourselves.

In the digital age, we value action, information, and entertainment, and we are encouraged to keep the mind busy at all times. If we want to create down time, to make space, we have to actively do it. Ironically, creating space in which we can be unfocused now takes focused attention.

On a practical level, you can create down time in very small ways, by taking five minutes every day and consciously resisting the urge to give your mind something to chew on. When your mind tells you it’s time to play a game, email a friend, research a vacation, figure out a work problem, or write a to-do list, just say, "No. Not now." The mind will always search for something to attend to. You however, can practice being present without having an object of that presence, being aware without having to direct your awareness atsomething. Try it in short stretches, and notice what unfolds, and if you feel differently. Or, similarly, take a walk without your phone (or any device) and let your mind just wander, or slip away. Set aside times for an approved space out. Give yourself the gift of the gap, the privilege of the space that used to be built into life but is no longer.

As a result, you may not only feel less brain-weary and mentally fatigued. You may also discover a sense of internal spaciousness, a wider and more panoramic view of life which is not frantic and not dependent on external material to escape an internal void. With enough practice, your own presence may become a place unto itself, and you may discover that it is in the spaces between your objects of attention that you feel most spacious, whole, calm, and ultimately, well. 

Are You Feeding On Your Pain... Past Its Expiration Date?

Intimate relationships include pain, at least every intimate relationship I have ever been in or witnessed. And most, if we’re lucky, include pleasure, too. We cannot change the fact that pain is included in intimacy, but how much pain we endure is, in part, up to us. As a therapist and a wife, I think a lot about how we can decrease the pain that we experience in relationships, and increase the amount of joy and gratitude that we feel.

Once we’ve been in a relationship for some time, most of us have written a plethora of stories about our partners: we have many ideas about what they do that we don’t like, what their problems are, why they are the way they are, how and why they hurt us, and on it goes. Basically, we have figured out what’s wrong with them. Some of our story lines we share with our partners and some we don’t. We could fill volumes with the convictions we have compiled on our partners, most if not all of which we believe to be the truth. Our story lines have a lot to do with what increases our pain in relationships.

When difficulty arises with our partner, we might feel hurt, angry, frustrated, or perhaps a cocktail of all three and more. We might feel intense pain for some time. But then, oddly, we do something which intensifies and extends that pain. You could say we throw gasoline on the fire of pain. The incident or fight is over, in real time, but not for us, not a chance. We’ve still got a long way to go with the story of it. The hurt might have passed, its shelf life in our body over, but we opt to spend days, weeks, sometimes even lifetimes rehashing it in our minds, crafting new stories filled with our partner’s crimes and our grievances, breathing new life into what is in fact ready to pass. If our pain were a child, we would be nursing it long into its adulthood.

The shelf life of most intense feelings is quite short. A strong feeling, which is not fed by our thoughts about it, can pass through us in a rather short time. It is our mind that, counter-intuitively, does not want us to let go of our pain. The mind desperately wants us to pay attention to our pain, and to how any new hurt fits into the larger script that we have written on our partner and the relationship. Perhaps it is the mind’s effort to figure out the pain, to make sense of what seems nonsensical, not understandable. Or maybe the mind believes that if we allow the pain to pass when it has come to its natural end, it is not enough somehow, that we haven’t done the pain justice if we do not extend it by way of our own continued attention. Perhaps the mind believes that we further punish our partner by holding onto and ruminating on the pain they have caused us. Or, maybe the mind wants us to keep chewing on the pain simply because the mind loves a problem; a problem for the mind is like an extravaganza with which to entertain itself. In truth, spending more time re-thinking and rehashing our pain does not serve our pain, or us.

When we start paying attention to our mind, we see that it is always beckoning us to reenter the story of our pain. Something amazing happens, however, when we make the choice to refrain from taking the mind’s bait, resist engaging with such thoughts. Our relationship gets a whole lot better, and feels, suddenly, like it’s happening in the present tense, like we're meeting our partner freshly. I am absolutely not suggesting that we deny pain when it is felt intensely and directly, in the body, but rather that we choose not to extend, intensify and freeze it, keeping it alive in our mind when it (possibly) might not need to be there. Pain is a truth, but if we don't feed it, it has a natural life span. It is we who (often) make pain immortal.

To this end, it is important that we notice when we are actually feeling okay, not in pain, not resentful, not hurt, and we still choose to jump on board a thought train to pain. It is important that we become conscious of this habit to get back in the saddle of hurt. It is an odd choice really, but one that we all make, until we don’t anymore, until we become aware that we are choosing it. 

The next time you catch your mind inviting you to dive into the negative story line of your relationship and your partner, to again crack open the great tome on their failings, politely decline the mind’s invitation. Return to where you are and the breath about to happen. By simply decreasing the amount of time we spend telling ourself the story of what’s wrong, we can profoundly improve the experience we have in our relationships. The more we can refrain from stoking the fire of how we have been hurt, the more room there is to discover how we actually appreciate our partners, and to see them in the moments when all is well. The less we obscure our present moment with the history of our scars, the more possibility there is for new relationship skin to grow.

We need to pay attention to what is actually true for us; to meet ourself and our partner, as freshly as we can in each new moment. We need not go looking for past pain, need not dive into every pain story the mind presents. Simply by choosing to decline the invitation to engage with old pain, we end up feeling a whole lot lighter, happier, more present, and available to love.