mindfulness meditation

July 8, 2018

In Which Part of Life Do You Live: Past, Present, or Future?

How much is well-being or its absence – depression and anxiety – dependent on what you pay attention to? I mean the present moment, the past, or your future? Does one best way to focus your attention exist?

Let’s look at each of these three possible orientations to time. Today I’ll start where your body is, even if your mind isn’t:

THE PRESENT

Philosophers remind us that the present is all we really have. The past is gone and the future might not come.

At least three paths allow us to live within the fleeting instant:

1. MINDFULNESS BASED ON MEDITATION PRACTICE:

Much effort is needed to develop and maintain this kind of “in the moment” way of being; daily meditation practice for the rest of your days. In doing so you can train the mind to stay in the present and refocus whenever attention begins to move toward a distraction, worry, preoccupation, memory, or anything else but your being within one second at a time. No before or after. No holding on to feelings. You observe the world rather than dwell on it. Thus, for example, pain is less fraught because you do not obsess about it. A benign sense of detachment comes to master meditators. They notice everything, but don’t pile meaning and intense emotion on everything, thus freighting the bad into something worse. Research suggests these are the most contented people on earth.

2. EMOTIONAL OPENNESS TO THE PRESENT AND WHATEVER LIFE OFFERS IN THE NOW:

Unlike the meditation experts, those in this group lead intense lives. Their openness allows for much joy, as it does for sorrow. At their best they are unguarded and brave. I am not speaking here of people with ADHD, who risk being caught in a whirlwind of thoughtless and impulsive action, untroubled by the past or future. Rather, I refer to those who are free with themselves, not self-consciously governed by what others might say or see. They are quite natural, unaffected, and spontaneous. Their self (and self-consciousness) is lost.

Such lives are not full of rigid angles and rectangular shapes. They don’t always conform themselves to boundaries drawn on hard surfaces, as one must in formal sporting events, with perimeters decisively marked as fair or foul, in or out. Think ocean or sky, not ground, when you behold them: creatures who swim or fly. Theirs is a life of discovery and bright eyes. They wish to play, not keep score; celebrate while the sun still shines.

These gifted people (whether by nature or choice) don’t achieve the dispassionate serenity of meditation gurus, but they are more “alive.”

As William Blake wrote in Auguries of Innocence,  the talented few are able

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
And Eternity in an hour.

3. ACHIEVING “FLOW:”

This is a cousin of #2, but applies best to work, competitive play, and hobbies. Here the path is not so much social or relational, but the singular focus on a task. In the case of elite athletes, for example, their concentration is extraordinary: They have been known to so “tune out” the sound of the crowd, that overwhelming cheers (when they finally do break through) can startle them, bringing them back to the amphitheater from the smaller arena of man against man. They had lost awareness of a stadium full of 60,000 observers. The psychologist Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi tells us, “this is a feeling everyone has at times, characterized by … great absorption, engagement, fulfillment, and skill … during which temporal concerns (time, food, ego-self, etc.) are typically ignored. The ego falls away. Time flies … and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

The mastery and experience within you is matched to the challenge at hand. You won’t get this often watching TV (only seven to eight percent of the time). Neither will relaxation transport you into “flow.” You must do something. Csíkszentmihályi would have us believe ecstacy is possible in the “flow.”

Some suggest, however, we be careful of too much “in the now” living as defined by the first two paths. Isaiah Berlin, the philosopher and social/political historian, thought the detachment achieved in a Buddhist type meditation (Category #1) could be a cheat of life experience, a kind of defense mechanism against injury; valuable, but missing the full essence of life.

Those taken by the moment (Category #2) also risk some of the avoidable misfortunes that those who spend more time looking ahead might dodge. Members of this group would push back, however, claiming the reward of emotional and behavioral vulnerability is worth the risk. Take opportunity on, they might say: this life is the performance and not the rehearsal.

Nor should we forget, people suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) are characterized as living in painful extremity too often. They can miss or discount the notion that nearly everything they are feeling at this instant is temporary, therefore potentially succumbing to passing emotional catastrophe. For them “the now” seems endlessly excruciating.

Want some homework? Ask yourself which “time zone” you usually occupy and which makes you happiest.

Stay tuned. One of my upcoming posts will deal with living in the past, which also has its ups and downs. An essay on future orientation will follow, along with some thoughts about the three types of time-focus and how to manage them.

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The second image is Macaca fuscata in Jigokudani Monkey Park – Nagano, Japan, by Daisuke Tashiro. It was sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

August 20, 2016

Treating Insecurity and Anxiety: Eight Roads to a Solution

512px-Anxiety_cloudImagine you are considering therapy for the first time. Or perhaps your treatment isn’t working. You stand at a crossroads, like the hub of a wheel where eight spokes beckon for attention. How should you choose among them?

Not all are good and you may even realize that as you decide. Here is a guide to thinking about what to do (and what not to do) with the weighty package of insecurities velcroed to your life. Click the link for a comprehensive list of the signs of insecurity.

ALCOHOL AND DRUGS. The issue of substance dependency should not be ignored. Recall the old Chinese proverb, “First the man takes the drink, then the drink takes the man.” Alcohol’s comforting relief and buoyancy is commonly replaced by longer term emotional darkness. Marijuana (cannabis) might mellow the smoker out but leaves underlying insecurity and anxiety untouched when sober. If you are attempting psychotherapy, best to tell the counselor the extent of your substance use straight away. The deepest wounds are slippery things. Grasping them is harder (if not impossible) when alcohol or drugs add to the excess lubrication.

WILLPOWER AND SELF-ANALYSIS. The old saying tells us, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” Yes, some few people manage their own psychotherapeutic project. Indeed, Freud analyzed himself. What is required? Although I know of no research on this, I suspect one needs a strong capacity for self-reflection, high intelligence, some degree of emotional openness, the courage to look in the mirror, tenacity, and knowledge gained through reading about treatment. Willpower is necessary because the self-analyst must inevitably get out of his head and leap the wall of fear to master behaviors blocked by insecurity: good eye contact, self-assertion, saying no, asking for things, making uncomfortable phone calls, inviting someone on a date, public speaking, etc.

THE SEARCH FOR A STRONGMAN. Some rely on a mate to perform avoided tasks. The significant other becomes a caretaker or body-guard, an individual who is sought to do the jobs the hesitant one believes he cannot: return a product to a store, accompany him to events otherwise avoided, and so forth. This is no solution to anxiety or insecurity, but a human crutch to sidestep the need to change. Another danger: too often the protector becomes an overlord, pushing you around or worse; the mister turned monster you hoped he would protect you against.

PSYCHOTROPIC MEDICATION. Medications, like other drugs, carry possible side-effects. Antidepressants can impair sexual performance, anti-anxiety tablets often have addictive properties. While a good psychiatrist will carefully watch for these, pharmaceuticals do not create a sense of security and confidence beyond the time you use them. Moreover, to the extent that the psychotropics help you feel better, your motivation to tackle underlying reasons for your symptoms may be reduced. That said, sometimes susceptibility to anxiety and depression is inherited and biologically-based, making the booster of drugs a necessary and permanent mode of treatment.

Girl_suffering_from_anxiety

AVOIDANCE AND THE INTERNET. Anticipation of discomfort, humiliation, or failure translates to turning down invitations — limiting chances for growth, accomplishment, and joy. The troubled soul is assaulted by hatchet-bearing ideas that have become permanent, non-rent-paying residents in the head. The data set of the insecure is based on an unfortunate history. The job of recovery translates to writing over your old history by gradually taking on social challenges and accumulating successes reinforcing your effort.

Beware the false god of the internet! The more time you worship at its alter and “let your fingers do the walking” on the keyboard, the less you have for direct human contact (involving actual walking out of the apartment). For all its marvels, this deux ex machina can become a screen behind which to hide the human face, trading yours for a virtual one. Yes, social media can be a stepping stone to a life beyond the keypad. For many, however, it’s another form of concealment and self-distraction. You can identify too fervent online social network disciples by the pain they will suffer for their god: a malady called text neck, the product of bending over their smartphone.

PSYCHODYNAMIC PSYCHOTHERAPY. Psychodynamic treatment, the traditional talking cure, can be a foundational part of counseling. It helps one clear the life-history undergrowth undermining a healthy self-image, planting  seeds of sturdiness to deflect the inevitable defeats we all encounter. Such counseling also lifts the weight of self-blame by recognizing the fingerprints of others on one’s problematic background story. It cannot stop there, of course. Grief and grieving demand attention.

Beyond relieving submerged pain, one must eventually take psychoanalytic insight for a test-drive: try new behaviors just as one would a new car before purchase. However much a “depth psychology” approach is needed, empirically based (research supported) interventions provide the practical impetus for emotional availability, symptom reduction, and behavioral change.

COGNITIVE-BEHAVIORAL THERAPY (CBT). Many of the well-researched and effective treatments just referred to fall into the category of CBT. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), for example, is among those problems amenable to this set of tools. Indeed, attempting a solution for OCD psychodynamically is, in contrast, a therapeutic cul-de-sac. CBT can often, however, be combined with more traditional talking therapy to join the best of both worlds.

ACT (ACCEPTANCE AND COMMITMENT THERAPY). ACT is described in the following way on its website: “Developed within a coherent theoretical and philosophical framework, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a unique empirically based psychological intervention that uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies, together with commitment and behavior change strategies, to increase psychological flexibility. Psychological flexibility means contacting the present moment fully as a conscious human being, and based on what the situation affords, changing or persisting in behavior in the service of chosen values.”

Plowing through this technical language, ACT deals with the losses most patients have sustained, traveling from a grieving process toward acceptance of those life circumstances that can’t be changed, reduced avoidance, learning to live in the moment via meditation, deciding what is most important to you, and choosing behavior consistent with your stated values.

WE ALL TAKE TURNS at life’s crossroads. Sometimes the best advice is to make no movement, patiently waiting for the traffic to clear. Do remember, however, not choosing is also a choice. The clock is always ticking, even if, in the digital age, we must strain to hear it.

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The top image by John Hain is called Anxiety Cloud sourced from Wikipedia Commons. The photo beneath it is Girl Suffering from Anxiety by Bablekahn at Kurdish Wikipedia.

May 30, 2016

Speeding through Life and What To Do about It

Running_man

It is difficult to take a long view of things from a perspective free of the hurly-burly of life. We are mostly preoccupied with what is in front of our nose. Still, there are trends we might observe from a distance that may be more important than whether we get a weekend date. Here are a few impacting our lives:

  • Being with friends face-to-face is more difficult than when America was rural, cities were smaller, and cars and super highways didn’t exist. We try to substitute electronic contact, but the relationships are different, less easeful because they are hurried and perhaps shallower. Communities of friends are harder to assemble once past school years. We are more atomized, separated, and detached. The availability of email and tweets create an escape from those who are socially uncomfortable. Face-to-face contact, formerly a pleasure, has become a luxury if you enjoy it and a job you skip if you dislike it.
  • Families, too, are more distanced by geography (once the children are grown) than they were even 50 years ago.
  • Americans, especially if they are young, are less captured by a particular religion. Worship communities used to bind people together in a way seen less often today.
  • The TV and computer present us with the possibility of witnessing the “lives of the rich and famous” and comparing ourselves to celebrities in a way impossible for almost all of human history. Fewer of us might think of ourselves as a “big fish in a small pond” because such ponds have been dried up by competition and contact with the entire world. This fuels the pursuit of material wealth and power, but also dissatisfaction with our station in life.
  • As noted regularly, the income inequality between the corporate executive class and the rank and file workers is enormous, fueling further discontent.
  • We work more hours and/or travel greater distances to work than recent generations, leaving us less time for other things. On the highway of urban life we live in little boxes, whether cars or homes, and gridlock — stuckness — is the norm.
  • The creation of a volunteer army and the elimination of the military draft robbed the nation of a common experience and sense of responsibility to our neighbors and country, not to mention activities and goals pulling people together, including the families of those serving the country.
  • We are in danger of feeling smaller and less significant as everything gets bigger and change is faster. Life becomes unmanageable despite all the labor saving devices. Lifelong careers doing one task for one employer disappear as the demands of work change and computerized machines make humans expendable.

Where does this leave us?

We are less interwoven with other people, for one thing. More isolated. More dependent on entertainment by ourselves, unlike those days in which others were more or less unavoidable and solo diversion consisted mostly of building or crafting something, or reading. Since we live without lots of family members around us (as was the historical standard), we spend more time alone — more time focused on ourselves. Thus, man’s innate self-interest is stoked even further.

We humans also must deal with our evolutionary baggage, including a tendency to get used to things (habituation) and want some new object or activity. We pursue money, status, and other goals which we hope will be attractive to others, but don’t counterbalance the mission with effective moral or religious messages to get ourselves “out of ourselves” and on to thoughts of being a part of something bigger. Moreover, in the absence of easy intimate contact (not necessarily sexual) we substitute sensation and material pleasures, which are only satisfying for a short period before we habituate to them and search for a new diversion. No wonder the USA is rated 18th in life satisfaction of the 38 countries measured by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), despite our historical affluence.

256px-Nude_man_running_(rbm-QP301M8-1887-068a~6)

What can be done? Several things:

  • Join with others. This might include participating in government by attending meetings at which your elected representatives speak or legislate, finding a cause worthy of volunteering for, creating your own philanthropy, reading to children at your library, or joining a religious community or a park district sports team. Alexis de Tocquiville wrote that one of the benefits of worship was to get your mind off yourself and on to something bigger and more distant, not so focused on the day-to-day minutia and irritations we all experience.
  • Mindfulness meditation is another way to get outside of yourself and in-the-moment, accepting whatever the present conditions are, and reducing your tendency to wring your hands and worry about yourself.
  • Try to reduce your addiction to the rapid-fire stimulation of electronics. Spend a day free of your computer and phone. Read a great book. As Oscar Wilde said, “It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.”
  • Buddhist philosophy focuses on developing compassion for oneself and others, an antidote to the selfish motives residing in each of us and a mercantile world encouraging them.
  • Get away from the city. Walk more outdoors. Let yourself assume the tempo of a life more like your ancestors, the one your body was built for.
  • The liberal arts have fallen on hard times. The importance of knowing such subjects as history and philosophy are dismissed. “Be practical,” people are told. “Learn about those things you can turn into dollars.” I’m no philosopher, but I will admit that there are few fields of higher learning as hard to turn into a fortune or even a living as philosophy. Getting a tenure track university job as a philosophy professor is only a bit less difficult than flying without wings. Yet such learning has enormous relevance to our lives. Despite great technical advances, the most important issues are the same as they were 2500 years ago: life, death, love, loss, morality, and purpose. What does it mean to be human? How can one lead an honorable and productive life? Often in therapy, especially with those who are beginning to overcome anxiety and depression, these concerns arise. We can do worse than consult the wisest minds in the world’s history, an oasis in the dog-eat-dog struggle to get ahead. Getting ahead, as it is defined in the West, can leave your soul behind. If your life is focused on making money and spending it for things inessential, you will have earned whatever emptiness you find at day’s end. Should you measure yourself by the size of your bank account or reflection in the mirror, the result is the same. What have you learned from your time on the planet? What do you know about the human project that you didn’t 10 years ago? What is important to you and what are you willing to give up? The world has changed, so we all must change with it. Ask yourself similar questions and chart a new course.

It is hard to find repose — peace of mind — these days. But, I suspect, it is more necessary now than ever.

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The first image is called Running Man, by amandasqueeze. The second is Nude Man Running, an 1887 photo by Eadweard Muybridge. Both are sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

January 11, 2014

Can Morton Feldman’s Music be a Key to Meditation?

Morton_Feldman_1976

We cannot escape the press of worldly events, expectations, and anxieties — the noise, the computers and the pressure to be the best. Indeed, to talk about the drivenness of the world only adds to the inescapable tension. Too many of us feel like a child’s old-style wind-up toy, impelled along a track we did not choose until finally we stop moving at day’s end, awaiting the next morning’s rat-race and another twist of the key to the clockwork motor. The world wins, stress wins, and we lose. And performers lose especially, by the anxiety that precedes and impedes their performance.

Enter Morton Feldman, composer, who has not been with us since 1987, when he died at age 61. A man who worked in the garment industry until he was 44. Feldman was no therapist, but his music just might add something to the much commended and researched antidote to the crazy-making nature of contemporary life: mindfulness meditation. I can offer no scientifically validated proof that his music makes a focus on “being centered in the moment” easier, but offer my anecdotal observations for your consideration.

For too many, mindfulness meditation is an elusive solution, despite its well-documented benefits to overall well-being. As meditation newbies we sit quietly and concentrate on our breathing, nothing more. We are told that it will be hard and that it should be done daily, usually shooting for 30 minutes at a time at the start. Eventually — so the research tells us — our brains will be retrained.

The object of such a practice is to permit us to live in the moment, alert to (but untroubled by) the single instant in which we are immersed. Its practitioners claim that it is a path to seeing the world as it is, accepting it without judgment. By doing that, they indicate, we stop ourselves from adding to the internally generated interpretations and pressures — and the self-consciousness — that can make life unbearable. We are advised that true mindfulness does not look back or forward. Nor is it freighted with worry, regret, or rage. They remind us that the past is gone and cannot be changed and the future is unknowable. The only thing we have with certainty is the present instant of time and our ability to really “live” in it.

Ah, but mindfulness meditation is difficult, more than you might think. The mind wanders from the breath. We are distracted by small noises and random thoughts: How much time has passed? What about today’s doctor appointment? What did my voice teacher or boss really mean when she talked to me yesterday? Anything and everything intrudes, including troubling dead-end ideas. We are instructed to expect this; and then, when we notice that our focus on the breath has been lost, to gently return our attention to that target. Our attention and focus will, with enough practice and dedication, get better — so the experts say. Until then keep practicing.

At this point, many people give up in frustration. Here is the opening through which Morton Feldman enters, this unlikeliest of composers: a man of 6′, approaching 300 pounds; a non-stop, cigarette-smoking talker with a strong New York accent. Alex Ross described his music this way in The New Yorker issue of June 19, 2006:

The often noted paradox is that this immense, verbose man wrote music that seldom rose above a whisper. In the noisiest century in history, Feldman chose to be glacially slow and snowily soft. Chords arrive one after another, in seemingly haphazard sequence, interspersed with silences… In its ritual stillness, this body of work abandons the syntax of Western music… Legend has it that after one group of players had crept their way as quietly as possible through a score of his, Feldman barked, “It’s too fuckin’ loud, and it’s too fuckin’ fast.”

Feldman requires us to listen to music without the expectation of conventional melody fit into a recognizable musical form and provides a kind of experience that creates that new way of listening.  Unlike most Western music, Feldman’s does not seem to be leading us anywhere. We do not come to anticipate the next note or chord, as we do in a popular song or symphony. We have entered an unfamiliar space with nothing ahead of us, nothing guiding us, no forward or backward. Lacking “landmarks” we can be certain only of where we are right now. We are simply “in the moment” with the delicate sound he most often provides us — and the decay of that sound, as can be heard in this example from For Bunita Marcus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-Kl0eOo1VU

The importance of being neither judgmental nor critical, just experiencing what is present, is crucial. It is easier to listen to Feldman’s music with this type of “accepting” attitude than almost any piece of Beethoven, Brahms, or The Beatles. Their music “leads us” to judgment — too loud, too slow, too fast — once we have established even a bit of familiarity with it. For purposes of enhancing mindfulness, however, music like Feldman’s that provides us with no map is actually more beneficial. It does not “progress” and is harder to know than that which presents a formal structure that can be grasped and notes that can be anticipated, leading our thoughts to interfere with our attention and the mind to drift away from the sound.

Much of Feldman’s work can magnetize our focus so that the pull of external or irrelevant thoughts (including self-criticism) is vanquished, but only if we give up the conventional expectations built from years of listening to “tunes” and apply ourselves to the task he requires of our ears and our brains. With this new attitude, judgments about ourselves and about the music no longer gain an easy point of entry to the mind.

The compositions he offers us don’t seem to make headway except by extraordinarily subtle and quiet changes that are riveting. We are drawn in. To give a visual analogue, it is like looking at a kaleidoscopic image that is changing almost imperceptibly (much slower and without the formal structure of the example just below) with the slightest rotation of the tube, barely enough to be noticeable.

Teleidoscope_animation

As T. S. Elliot put it in Burnt Norton, Feldman finds “the still point” without which “there would be no dance.” But it is a dance in excruciatingly slow motion that can sound boring as described, but is absorbing when experienced and heard; where background silence is as important as foreground, ever-so-careful sound.

With or without Feldman’s music as an alternative to focus on the breath, mindfulness meditation (with sufficient practice) is able to reduce the “chatter” in the brain — all the extraneous and debilitating ideas and judgments inside our head. And to accept life’s inevitable discomforts without so much of the suffering that we seem to add by our anxious anticipation, over thinking, hand wringing, and the belief that things must change in order to create a state of satisfaction.

The regular practice of that discipline attempts to assist us in finding contentment in the terms that life allows, not by virtue of some dramatic achievement or the elimination of all that most of us might wish were different. And, by helping anyone who frets about his own performance to focus on what is being performed (the music or the play or the speech he is giving) rather than the self, the actual execution of that work may reach the state that athletes describe when they are “in the zone” (or in a “flow” state*), fully captured by what they are doing (and achieving the best of which they are capable) rather than observing themselves doing it, or painfully aware that others might be watching critically.

Does Morton Feldman’s music have therapeutic value in the mindfulness enterprise or in dealing with performance anxiety, beyond its shimmering, otherworldly beauty? There is a Ph.D. dissertation or two waiting to be written on the subject, I’m sure. And wouldn’t it be ironic if a man who once said “Where in life we do everything we can to avoid anxiety, in art we must pursue it,” wrote music that might help refocus our troubled souls.

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*For a further description of the “flow” state, see my response to the first comment below.

Here is a short example of Feldman’s music, the first 15 minutes of “For Bunita Marcus:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-Kl0eOo1VU

Here is a 20-minute talk by a monk and master meditator about the benefits of brain-retraining that can come with meditation: Matthieu Ricard: The habits of happiness

The top image is a photo of Morton Feldman taken at the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam on May 31, 1976 during the Holland Festival. It is the work of Rob Bogaerts. The second image is a Digital Teleidoscope Animation by nadjas. Both are sourced from Wikimedia Commons.