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Five Precepts: “Find a place of rest in the middle of things”

Posted in End-of-Life, Mindfulness & Buddhism, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 6, 2012 | 3 Comments »

The 4th precept of being a compassionate companion is:  Find a place of rest in the middle of things.

These 5 precepts are taught by Frank Ostaseski, co-founder of Zen Hospice Project and founder of Metta Institute.

If you haven’t read my introduction or the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd Precepts, please check them out — see related articles below this post.

I have so enjoyed going back over Frank’s tapes while writing these posts.  The last time I really spent any time with them, any time really meditating on them as a practice in and of themselves was on a trip to San Francisco for school a few years ago.  I remember taking pictures of them on the wall of a nursing home where they were posted.

I already had listened to the tapes, knew about ZHP, and was reading all of the literature I could on Upaya Zen Center‘s program for Being With Dying.  I was thrilled to see them on a wall in a building and not just in a book.  Being so far from some of the major centers for Buddhism and End-of-Life, my work with and adaptation of Buddhist practices for counseling has been a lonely journey.  I was “doing” hospice in a very stoic part of the Midwest and I was really trying to find the essence of the teachings to make them less threatening for the area.

But now, as I finish the series and am spending time meditating on them, I am passing them off to my dad who still has a few weeks to go before starting his own hospice volunteer training and I wonder what he will think of them when he starts to listen to them.

Find a place of rest in the middle of things.

In his training, Frank talks about the rest in the middle of things as spaciousness in the midst of chaos.  This place to rest is our settling into the moment.  It is cultivating our mindfulness of what is in front of us.

When we practice breathing meditation, we focus on the in breath and the out breathe but we often don’t focus the moments that come just before we move from exhale to inhale.  It is that spaciousness, that calm that can feel elusive in our rushing around in daily life.  Take a moment now and follow your breath.  Don’t try to change it, just notice it.

And sometimes this takes practice.  It seems so silly to think that we need to practice attending to our breath and yet thousands of times a day, it goes disregarded.  Can you sense the space?  Can you let your attention light on that moment before your lungs begin to expand again?  As you practice your breathing over the next few days, set your intention that it will be this in-between state that you allow yourself to be in as it arises.

Find a place to rest in the middle of things.

Frank reminds us that this tranquility is always available to us and we just have to tap into it.  I guess a more appropriate way of stating it would be that we need  to allow ourselves to be free enough to have an appreciation and awareness of this still point.

In this moment of stillness, there is no trying to fix, no manipulating, no being different, just acceptance.  There is an ease that comes as we allow ourselves to sink down into the non doing and relax into being.

As we foster this time to be more and more aware of our inherent pause for stillness, we open our hearts more deeply, and we can allow for more to come into our awareness.  We foster this gentleness and it softens our hearts and helps us get more in touch with our buddha nature.

Don’t wait for tomorrow or for your own deathbed.  Find a place to rest in the middle of things here and now.

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Five Precepts: “Don’t Wait.”

Posted in End-of-Life, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 5, 2012 | 10 Comments »

In 1987, Frank Ostaseski helped form the Zen Hospice Project, the first Buddhist hospice in America. In 2004, he created Metta Institute to broaden this work and seed the culture with innovative approaches to end-of-life care that reaffirm the spiritual dimensions of dying.

Being a Compassionate Companion is a 3 cd set of teachings that are based on volunteer caregiver training first used at the Zen Hospice Project.  It has so much heart and he conveys the teachings of the Buddhist Path and the hospice experience in such a natural, gentle way.

In these three cds, Frank gives guidance and explains these important teachings for cultivating a compassionate presence at the bedside:

So far, I have posted an introduction to these teachings — Attention, Attention.  I have also already posted on the first and second precepts

Now, it’s time for number three:  Don’t wait.

Two small words that have a lot of meaning attached to them.

One essence of these tiny words can be summed up by what I heard Ram Dass once say in a talk. . . You can wait.  You can be patience.  You cannot wait patiently.  There is a difference.  In waiting, we have a sense of expectancy and we are focused on what’s to come next rather than what’s going on in the present moment.  What’s so big about the present moment?  When you are at the bedside of a dying person, a moment can drastically change someone for a lifetime.

And you can be patient.  You can dwell in the present, attending to what is, rather than what might be.  I know that in meditation, there is a lot of talk about watching our breath and it may seem silly.  But imagine you are in ICU tonight, on oxygen and still unable to talk because you cannot catch your breath enough.  The breath becomes amazingly important then, doesn’t it?  So why would we want to wait until we are struggling to breathe to realize that breathing is the most important thing we do — maybe second only to loving.

But what else do these two words mean?  Don’t wait.

Because from moment to moment life changes, we don’t have control over what unfolds, no matter how much we like to kid ourselves into believing that with calendars, smartphones, and to do lists.  If something comes up for you, why are you going to wait?  Why do we take for granted that there will be another inhale after this exhale?  Let’s not wait until we are at the bedside or sitting in a grief support group.

People, including me, wait for the right time to live, the perfect situation to say what they want to say and we miss so much in the process.  For the last few years before Ida died, she kept telling someone close to me that he needed to get in touch with his sister.  He fought it for a long time, always thinking, “sure, at some point, I will do that for her.”  Ida died this year and it was when he went home for the funeral that he finally got in touch with his sister.

A few months since then, on Christmas, that sister is laying in the hospital.  Don’t wait.  Ida didn’t get to see that he had taken her advice and tried to mend the family and I know that is a regret for this friend.  But, he was able to make peace with his sister which was a blessing and relief to some in that family.  Who knows what will happen to his sister next, but he can sleep knowing that he kept his promise to his beloved aunt.

It’s an illusion to believe that there will always be time.  We numb ourselves out to that reality all of the time.  Think of all the situations in which you hesitated.  How many of them do you still regret?  How long have you tortured yourself with that regret?  How much energy have you sunk into feeding that regret or that procrastination of what you want to do or say.

When we are born, we come into this world with one specific agreement already made for us — we will either see those we love die (experience the loss of them) or they will see us die.  It’s a given that we don’t think about.  We don’t live forever and those whom we care about are just as fragile as we are.

I know I feel so much more at peace with the loss of my mentor, my brother, or some of my former AIDS clients than I probably ever will my grandfather who died suddenly when I was 16 years old or our family friend Harris who also died suddenly a few years after I moved away from home.  Did they know how much I loved them?  Did they know how much they touched my life?  How much psychic energy do we continue to pour into these heartfelt questions when we don’t make every day count and let those we love know how deep our love is?

Don’t waste time wondering, say what you need to, be where you need to, do what you need to do.

Don’t wait.

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Five Precepts: “Bring Your Whole Self to the Experience”

Posted in End-of-Life, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 4, 2012 | 12 Comments »

Have you started at the beginning?

Have you read my first two posts on the 5 precepts of being a compassionate companion?

If you haven’t seen the my introduction or the First precept, please click these links before you read about Frank Ostaseski’s Second Precept.

. . .

Now that you are up to speed, let’s take a look at the Second Precept:  Bring your whole self to the experience.

I don’t want to sound redundant, especially if you just read my introduction and what I wrote about the first precept, but suffice it to say, that I will.  .  . There is nothing simple about this precept and yet, if healing is to occur, bringing our whole self is vital.

My training is in humanistic/existential therapy and I have had some amazing teachers along the way.  I had a teacher my first year in college in NY tell us a story about a client that used to come to therapy every week, dressed to the 9s.  It was as if her clothing was her protective mask, the image she wanted to portray and to use as camouflage from letting her true self come to the relationship.

He told us that every week he wore jeans and a sweatshirt on the day he saw her.  It wasn’t like it was a mission but he just “came as he was”.  He said over time she experienced him as genuine and heartfelt and well, real.  She connected with him and as she did, that protective mask started to chip away.  When she could come into the consultation room, “just as she was”, with mascara running down her face, or scuffed sneakers, or cheeks inflamed from anger, her healing could begin.

Bringing your whole self to the experience means not relying on technique, distance, or feeling like you have some magic that the other person doesn’t.  It’s not about you fixing your family, the person whose home you are volunteering in, your elderly grandmother who is living with dementia.  It’s about being present and being genuine and congruent.  It’s about understanding that in any relationship there are two people who create the space.

There is no time when faced with dying to stand on ceremony.  There’s no time for platitudes like, “I know just how you feel.”  When we use nothing but techniques and hide behind our title (whatever it might be – daughter, therapist, best friend, lover, etc) we stay in the realm of false pity rather than being able to be truly open to one’s pain with genuine empathy.

Our head nurse at hospice used to say leave your baggage at the door (before going in to be with a family) and while that was true, you didn’t want to let your frustration about traffic distract you from your encounter, we can’t leave the important parts of ourselves by the welcome mat.

Bringing your whole self to the experience.  Frank suggests, in his training, that it is in our exploring our own suffering that helps us to create an empathetic bridge with the other.  I love that idea and believe it is because of this very thing that healing takes place.  And I think we have to be honest and face facts. . . whether you are a therapist or a companion to the dying, when you are together you are both touched, both changed forever, both healed.

Not too long ago, someone complimented me on my “skills” when talking to someone who was in the midst of grieving.  Although I knew the compliment was being truly offered in a sincere way, I chuckled to myself.  There was no pretense on my part, no thinking in my head, “what would Roshi Joan say” or “what task would Teresa Rando say this person is on in their grief process.”

It was about opening the heart, extending one’s self to a person whose heart might be hurting.  It’s about every so lightly, touching the memory of my own grief experiences and allowing that to be close to me.  It was about a genuine care and concern for another individual, even though it was someone I do not know very well.

And with that came curiosity, not rubbernecking, morbid curiosity but wanting someone to know that I wouldn’t side step her grief just because we were at work.  I wanted that person to know that I was open to listening if she wanted to tell her story.

To me, bringing your whole self to the experience is about not sitting with a desk between you and your client.  It’s not about wearing a white jacket.  It’s none of that professional coldness that gets drilled into us.  It’s not about never touching a patient who is struggling to talk and having difficulty breathing from the intensity of their anxiety about death approaching.

It is about being vulnerable and at the same time not letting the situation be all about me.  It’s about meeting a situation and being okay to see where it takes you, or more appropriately, allowing yourself to be led instead of trying to fix the other person.

Can you have enough compassion for yourself and the person you are with so that you can be open to the reciprocal gifts of the moment?

Bring your whole self to the experience.

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Five Precepts: “Welcome Everything, Push Away Nothing”

Posted in End-of-Life, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 3, 2012 | 21 Comments »

The other night I started a blog about the work of Frank Ostaseski who co-founded Zen Hospice Project and founded Metta Institute.

Over the next few nights, I will be writing about each of the 5 Precepts or teachings that Frank created in his years of working with dying people and training volunteers and caregivers.

The first precept is simply:  Welcome Everything, Push Away Nothing.

And there is nothing and everything simple about this first precept.

I almost wanted to write about this teaching last because it is so all-encompassing and I chuckled to myself every time I had that thought.  If I have learned nothing else about Buddhism (and dying) it is that everything is interconnected and the beautiful tapestry of life is in the weaving of all the threads to make the whole.  And yet we are linear thinkers and you have to start somewhere so why not with a welcome?

Frank describes the essence of this precept as receptivity.  With receptivity to another, we cultivate a non-judgmental attitude and I can think of no better time to practice being non-judgmental than as we accompany someone who is living their dying.

Welcome Everything, Push Away Nothing

As a hospice volunteer, caregiver, family member, etc we learn to let go of our need to control and allow the person who is dying to call the shots, to do it his/her way.  What a compassionate practice!  I wonder how many times in our lives we experience this kind of receptivity and acceptance in our own mind or in the presence of another person?  Sadly, I think it is few times for most of us.

Caregiving for the dying is messy. . . I don’t only mean the mess of changing bedding and dressings or spilled soup.  I also mean all of the stuff that I as the caregiver and “you” as the dying person bring to the encounter.  We each bring our judgments, ideas, values, histories, loves, prejudices, beliefs, and experiences.  We bring old wounds. . . thinking we aren’t good enough, we should be alone, I should be in pain to atone for my life, I’m no body, etc, etc, etc.

But cultivating the ability to welcome everything and push away nothing is like breathing in deeply when one has been trying to catch the breath.  It opens the spaces around us and in us.  It allows for lightness and mercy to be present.  We practice being open to all that is around us in the environment but also within us — like our how we hold our body, how we listen, and how we touch the person who we are with.

Welcome Everything, Push Away Nothing

When we sit on the meditation cushion, we sit with our backs straight but not rigid.  We allow our hearts to be open and our lungs the space to breathe in and out deeply.  We hold our hands on our laps lightly.  When I first started to meditate I loved using the image that Thich Nhat Hanh described. . . to hold our hands as if we were holding the baby buddha in them.  And with our presence at the bedside, we do just that.  We hold the person we are with enough support and enough tenderness.

It’s not easy to let go of control, to allow someone freedom to do what they think they should.  And many of us have very strong feelings of right and wrong or even how one should think, feel, behave, and yes, die.  But in that letting go of control, we meet each other together in an ocean of healing.  We allow the space for each person in the relationship to be present to the other and we allow the ground for the nakedness that comes with being wholeheartedly present.

Welcome Everything, Push Away Nothing

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Introduction to the Five Precepts: Attention, Attention

Posted in End-of-Life, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 2, 2012 | 18 Comments »

“You cannot go into the room where someone is dying

and not pay attention.  Everything is

pulling you into the moment.”  ~~ Frank Ostaseki

In 1987, Frank Ostaseski helped form the Zen Hospice Project, the first Buddhist hospice in America. In 2004, he created Metta Institute to broaden this work and seed the culture with innovative approaches to end-of-life care that reaffirm the spiritual dimensions of dying.

I love listening to his 3 tape series entitled, Being a Compassionate Companion.  It has so much heart and he conveys the teachings of the Buddhist Path and the hospice experience in such a natural, gentle way.

In these three tapes, Frank gives guidance and explains these important teachings for cultivating a compassionate presence at the bedside:

Over the next few days, I will be sharing more about each of these precepts (teachings).

I hope that I can share what I learned from Frank and from working at hospice.  Most importantly, I hope that when you encounter another person, you learn to take a deep breath and settle in and truly open yourself to the experience.

More to come.

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“The One”

Posted in Relationship Dharma, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 31, 2012 | 2 Comments »

image from colorbox

http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-4817/The-Secret-to-Finding-Your-True-Love.html

I would love to share this article with every middle school girl out there… but that might be too late.

We live our whole lives looking for the elusive one, sometimes not able to stand the “one” that we are. . . because we aren’t smart enough, not thin enough, or whatever else we’ve come to believe about ourselves.

If we don’t learn to foster compassion for ourselves we get into a relationship that might be good for us and then we start to think. . . I don’t think I’m smart enough, thin enough, etc. . . of course the object of my love, who I hold in such high esteem, must think that to.

And then comes, who do they think they are?

Or OMG, if they got close enough, they would learn that thin and smart are just the surface… there is so much more than is wrong with me.

And that perfect mate, perfect relationship, is sabotaged, wrecked, and over before it begins.

I tell my friends time and time again that I am not sure if we need to teach kids how to read, write, and do math when we can’t teach them how to be compassionate and can’t show them compassion.

Does algebra really matter if we haven’t been able to connect with others, develop some sort of healthy self-worth?

I hope that the current trend to teach kids mindfulness continues to flourish.  We have kids who are detached, self-absorbed, unable to parent when they get older, and believe, like many of our CEOs and politicians, that the “other” is just someone to take advantage of, no matter who that “other” may be.

Attachment parenting has been in the headlines since the cover of Time a few weeks ago and I know little about it.  I don’t know if we need to breastfeed for much longer than we need to or sleep with our kids to foster safety.

I do know that I see parents, good people, treat their children like objects.  Referring to them like, “I picked up the kid from soccer practice. . .”

I see teachers and parents not give attention to or appreciate the voice that children and elderly have.

We are so busy that it seems like it benefits us to see “the other” as an object because then they can be manipulated — tailgating until we push them around, used to climb the corporate ladder, livelihoods taken, etc.

There has to be some middle ground between seeing corporations having personal rights and depersonalizing the people in our lives but I think it goes back to basic things . . .

Fostering presence and acknowledging the person we are with

Deep listening

Compassionate, thoughtful speak that seeks to find compromise, clarity, and communion

Cultivating a broader perspective and being able to step back to see our basic interconnectedness or as it is called in Thich Nhat Hanh‘s tradition, Interbeing.

Slowing down and taking time — put down all of the distractions and things that won’t matter some day when we are at the end of our lives.

Taking care of ourselves so we can be stewards of our selves, our resources, and our relationships.

All of these things come with contemplative practices.  And I don’t mean to say that everyone needs to become Buddhist. . . MBSR has shown us that a practice does not need to be religious or even spiritual.

I think that any contemplative practice in any tradition of any kind will help us to work on the things that will make us healthier, create stronger relationships, and bring about true peace.

What are we waiting for?

We all have breath to follow.

We all have access to fire to light a candle to focus on.

We have a treasure trove of literature and spiritual/therapeutic texts out there to teach us about the present moment and how to foster awareness.

I ask myself these questions of our greater world and I ask them of myself every day.

Is it time to embrace our enlightened-nature and foster deep connections with the essential self of others?

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The Nine Contemplations of Atisha – Four

Posted in End-of-Life, Personal Thoughts..., tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 30, 2012 | 5 Comments »

Atisha with Twenty-eight of the Eighty-four Ma...

Atisha with Twenty-eight of the Eighty-four Mahasiddhas. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Your life span, like that of all living beings, is not fixed

I find what our assumptions are about death fascinating.

We assume we will die in our sleep at a ripe old age.

We think we will die of illness, never an accident, murder, suicide, etc.

We believe that a long life is a better life.

We take for granted that our kids will live longer than we do.

And I am not passing judgment on whether these things are right or wrong.

They are just things we believe.

We hold fixed ideas from what we are told, what we have experienced, what we hope, and what we fear to be the truth.

And we believe certain things about our own death and the deaths of others.

Your life span, like that of all living beings, is not fixed

Yet death is still a great mystery, not what happens when the valve in your heart explodes during a heart attack.

Not when someone has a relatively “normal” trajectory of an illness like cancer, ALS, etc.

We have books that tell us what happens, like Ira Byock’s Dying Well or Sherwin B. Nuland’s How We Die.

We have spiritual texts that teach us about things like the dissolution of the body, as in the Bardo Thodol.

And I am not even sure if the mystery lies in what happens to us after death — is there anything else, is there something better, etc?

I think the mystery lies in the space between what we believe to be true and what happens. . . when it happens and how it happens.

Your life span, like that of all living beings, is not fixed

I had a client that had major complications after a surgery that was supposed to be “routine”.  Multiple systems shutting down and getting restored which shut down other systems, etc.  It was like a negative feedback loop for a while.

We were sure that she was going to die.  I was totally convinced.  I was the hospice expert, I knew these things.

Well, not really.

I just am more okay with dying taken place when it may be the ultimate healing experience for that person.

But with today’s medical technology, we can sometimes sustain someone well beyond what nature may have had in mind and give them a chance they would have never had before now.

That, however, is not my experience, but it does happen.

My “for sure” was no match for crazy (or what I thought was crazy) medical and scientific intervention.  And she lived on.

Your life span, like that of all living beings, is not fixed

Yet, I remember someone I knew telling me that his mother had gone into the hospital for something acute and the family was told that she was riddled with cancer.

There was an emergency that sent her to the hospital.

She was diagnosed.

The family was trying to make sense out of what was happening that night; trying to wrap their minds around it.

She died the next morning… not from the cancer and not from the acute crisis.

As one of the other Contemplations states, we do not have control over when and how our death will ultimately come.

How many times have you heard, “She was the picture of health”?  That was the case with my mentor who died.  Running 5 miles every morning, yoga, healthy eating, great relationships, ideal jobs for her, etc.

Or how many times have you heard, “He smoked cigars since the age of 12 and his mom fed him lard” and he died when he was 97?

We have no fixed time or fixed amount of breaths that we will take.

We do not know if it will be right now, tonight, tomorrow, or in ten years.

And yet, we live like it we have been granted this fragile life forever.

Everyone we have ever known to die, whether a beloved grandfather or a teen idol, has not lived forever and has had that unexpected time come.

Why do we think that we are exempt and will be the one person to make it out of life alive?

And how many of us take so much for granted because deep down inside, we really believe that we’ll be that one?

How long will you suffer with what is before you create the life you want before it’s too late?

How many times will you walk away angry and not say I love you before you are left with the guilt of having not done that very thing?

I ask these questions, not just of you, but of myself?

Will I learn this time?

Will I be more present, more proactive, more loving, more compassionate, etc?

Your life span, (and my life span) like that of all living beings, is not fixed.

With that knowledge, can we learn to embrace it, in a lived, total way, and create the life that we want because we became active agents during the moments we do have here on earth?

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The Mystery of Living and Dying.

Posted in End-of-Life, Poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 29, 2012 | 5 Comments »

 

By Doug Smith, MDiv.

“When we label some deaths right,

and other deaths become wrong.

When we label some deaths good,

and other deaths become bad.

Living and dying create each other.

The easy way and the difficult way are

interdependent.

The long life and the short life are relative.

The first days and the last days accompany each other.

Therefore, the true caregiver of the dying does all

that needs to be done without asserting herself,

and saying all that needs to be said without

saying anything.

Things happen, and she allows them to happen.

Things fail to happen, and she allows them to fail

to happen.

She is always there, but it is as though she is not there.

She realizes that she does nothing,

yet all that needs to be done is done.

In letting go,

there is gain.

In giving up,

there is advancement.

Don’t practice controlling.

Practice allowing.

Such is the mystery of happiness.

Such is the mystery of wealth.

Such is the mystery of power.

Such is the mystery of living and dying.

Excerpt from:  Caregiving:  Hospice-proven Techniques for Healing Body and Soul.

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What is Death?

Posted in End-of-Life, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 25, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Light and shade

Light and shade (Photo credit: Ennor)

“Death is the omega of our existence, the vanishing point toward which all our moments rush.  Death is the price exacted by life — which always, without exception, is a fatal condition. . .

Yet who really understands that they will die?  Even those who have encountered the reality of death rarely do, other than in flashes.”

~~ Tracy Cochran & Jeff Zaleski, In Awakening to the Sacred in Ourselves

Do not wait until it is too late. . . allow yourself to be open to more than flashes of our nature.

Cultivate spaciousness in inhabiting the pause between breaths.

 

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Give Your Brain Mini Breaks

Posted in Mindfulness & Buddhism, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 23, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Clinical research shows Buddhist mindfulness t...

Clinical research shows Buddhist mindfulness techniques can help alleviate anxiety , stress , and depression (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Here is a simple to read article by Rick Hanson.

http://www.wildmind.org/blogs/on-practice/give-your-head-a-rest-from-thinking

Here is a small excerpt:

“When your thought processes are tired, it doesn’t feel good. You’re not relaxed, and probably stressed, which will gradually wear down your body and mood. You’re more likely to make a mistake or a bad decision: studies show that experts have less brain activity than novices when performing tasks; their thoughts are not darting about in unproductive directions. When the mind is ruminating away like the proverbial hamster on a treadmill, the emotional content is usually negative – hassles, threats, issues, problems, and conflicts – and that’s not good for you. Nor is it good for others for you to be preoccupied, tense, or simply fried.”

I really liked this article and would totally use it with caregivers, professional or otherwise.  It’s a skill we can all benefit from in one or or another, in our career and private lives, whether we are young or old.

I sometimes don’t like certain “techniques” because they feel so artificial.  They can seem a bit contrived but what Rick shares here, like much of the mindfulness practice work that is out there from Jon Kabat-Zinn, Daniel Goleman, Tara Brach, Chade-Meng Tan, Susan Bauer-Wu, Daniel Seigel, Jeffrey Brantley, Ronald D. Seigel, and so many more.

Take a second right now and do what Hanson suggests in this article from windmind.org. . . look up from your computer screen and breathe in and as you are breathing out, allow your exhale to be deep and long-lasting, really use the abdominal muscles and allow your whole body to benefit.

I did it as I was reading the article and I noticed a definite shift.  As I exhaled, I realized that my shoulders were sliding down and moving to the place that they were designed to be in, not clear up to my ears.

I noticed a bit of an electrical current and any fleeting bit of anxiety dissipated effortlessly.  And I had a shift in thinking.

Now, it’s easy to do this on a good day — little in the way of demands, pain, stress, etc. . . but the whole point is to do it on this kind of day so that when everything gets fired up — when the anxiety, discomfort, and frustration kick into high gear, that exhale just comes. . .

When we start a “practice”, things feel like a technique.

But they probably felt that way when we were learning to sit with a client or use proper body mechanics by the bedside but as we used the technique, to the point of it being burned into our muscle memory, it shifts from being a technique to a way of being.

And mindfulness is no different.

We practice on good and bad days, despite the weather or what else happens so that no matter what is going on, we can bring about calming the mind/body with the breath and with our mindful attention.

Check out some of the resources that I have linked with the author’s names above in this blog.  They are some extraordinary people bringing mindfulness to different populations and in slightly different ways.

Embrace mindfulness and give your brain (and the rest of your system and being) a much-needed break in this worrisome world.

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