Being present... for the fun of it

We often forget to use our minds as allies. I find this odd considering just how thrilling it can be to harness our minds through mindfulness, meditation, and affirmations/positive thoughts. Whatever the reason, it has been surprising for me to see that mindfulness actually helps me enjoy life more, and create more positivity out of everyday life.

As a counselor in a community mental health setting, I noticed that most of my clients approached meditation as a serious task, almost as if it were a school assignment that they could pass or fail. I'd be willing to venture that many of us find it difficult to grasp the concept of meditation, feeling stuck inside this "pass" and "fail" mentality which is, after all, our most familiar M.O.. But the concept of meditation is that you neither pass nor fail; it's a practice of letting go of the whole construct of evaluating ourselves and others. For some, it's stepping into mental territory that they've never visited.

However, many of my clients were familiar with something I'd call accidental mindfulness - the kind of non-judgmental trance you get into when you're zoning out to the TV (or X-box), or cruising around a back country road with the windows down. Without any special training, they often created experiences that brought them into a state of non-judgmental relaxation, refreshing their minds and souls. Of course, there are also self-destructive ways of relaxing, like substance abuse, which more fully check you out of yourself. But many of us do have one or two activities we can use as a refuge, allowing us to relax the mind and integrate/process the things that are troubling us.

The cool part about mindfulness, in this respect, is that it broadens your ability to drop into accidental mindfulness in more situations. You may start out only being able to relax in front of a certain Rom-Com you enjoy, or playing a video game, and soon find yourself taking refuge in the painting on your doctor's waiting room wall, the sunset in rush-hour traffic, or your own breath as you deal with stress at work. (You may even find yourself being able to focus on the positive in others, instead of the things that trigger you!) You may find yourself enjoying a much broader range of things, since pleasure is one of the many feelings that mindfulness practice allows you to embrace.

Self-care and the importance of soothing

Therapy is not always the grueling process of deep self-excavation it’s portrayed to be in pop culture. Although it’s sometimes necessary to “excavate” ourselves – to dive through layers of the mind, childhood and all that – it’s equally necessary to know how to self-soothe and create positive experiences in our lives. And though this necessitates challenging our negative thought patterns and habits, it also be cultivated by acts of self-care that create positive experiences in our lives.

Self-care can include anything from having a bubble bath to hanging out with a friend, or even yoga and meditation. It really doesn’t matter what form it takes, as long as it feels relaxing. Engaging in something soothing on a daily basis can go a long way toward lowering your level of anxiety (which is often just another habit), because you’re taking a proactive step to stop thinking about your troubles, and start focusing on what you can do to improve your situation. It creates a new neural pattern in your brain that should allow you to relax more quickly, consider your own needs, and feel less pressured to over-work or over-stimulate yourself.

The habits of “busy-ness” often buffer us from our true emotional experience. Taking time for self-soothing may induce a vague sense of apprehension since doing so could potentially blow the lid off of any feelings you’ve been bottling up. Also, many of us simply haven’t been taught how to care for ourselves when this happens, instead reaching for distractions. If this is your fear, keep in mind that self-care need not be an intensely deep experience. Try watching movies, listening to dance music, reading a good book at a cafe, and then gradually move into more reflective activities if you feel up to it. It’s good to have a big toolbox of self-care tools, using the ones that feel right in each situation. Mental health is a journey of balancing the “excavation” of awareness with a nice deep breath of life. Because life, after all, is good.

Feeling Stuck? Mindfulness can help.

Do you ever feel like there's one aspect of your life that you keep getting stuck on? Maybe something in your marriage or relationship, your physical self-confidence, ability to receive, or a work issue like perfectionism? Something that influences you perhaps in just one sphere, or perhaps in many, but regardless, has that sense like, "if only I could resolve this, life would be so much better!"

In my own journey with mindfulness and yoga, I've found that even these core issues I'd come to take for granted can be altered. I informally call this integration, because I believe, like many other mental health people, that healing involves bringing to light aspects of ourselves that are broken, orphaned and abandoned, and re-uniting them with the more nurturing side of ourselves. (I also borrow the term integration from Daniel J. Siegel's book The Mindful Therapist (2010). According to Siegel, engaging with a mindful therapist, and/or having a mindfulness practice of your own, can help integrate neural synapses in the brain, helping with brain functioning and mental health.

The fact that parts of your life feel stuck, could mean that your brain is stuck - there may be aspects of your brain that function separately when they should function together. Research is beginning to show that mindfulness can help to integrate the disparate parts of the brain. This is another level at which emotional transformation is a process of brain change, and we can begin it anytime.

For me, this inspires yet more respect for the process of personal growth. When I think about my own and others' growth, I feel excited, in awe, and patient, trusting that the process has its own hidden timing. We are trained to think that it's possible to transform ourselves by sheer mental effort. But in reality, transformation belongs to the body, of which the brain is decidedly a part. The brain functions together with the entire nervous system, which controls your gut reactions to everything from stress to caffeine to sex.

Research is beginning to stand by that belief, long-held by many, that the brain can be changed by mindfulness. By training ourselves to notice things without reacting, we can learn to live from a less reactive, more responsive, and open-minded place. Mindfulness is a powerful tool. It may just help you move that mountain that's been in your way.

How to use Triggers as Growth Experiences

I wanted to respond to this meme I saw on facebook: "We will continue to be tested until we are no longer triggered".

It certainly seems true; as we become aware of our triggers, we start to notice how they manifest repeatedly, almost like we're being tested. This helps us make sense of why the triggers continue to happen, and implies a sense of responsibility over how we react. However, to call it a "test" implies that some higher power is throwing triggers our way, and the only way to make this painful process stop is to heal completely. But at times, thinking that only perfect healing will bring relief can feel overwhelming. After all, why should our experience of comfort and relief be tied to a standard of well-being that lies outside of present experience?

Fortunately, there is a way to find relief long before you achieve "complete healing". This involves becoming aware that you are creating your own triggers. This is not a statement of blame. It is simply true that once we have experienced a trauma, we often are drawn to situations that allow us to reenact that stress so we can come to understand: 1) why we did not respond fully in the first place, and 2) how we can respond fully in the present. Seen this way, triggers can be helpful, as they create learning experiences for us. But if they occur too often or too intensely, they are counterproductive, as the brain is not given a chance to turn off the stress response and process what has happened.

For example, in my 20's, I moved to the West Coast twice. The first time, it was to do an exchange study in California, and it was a great experience. When I returned to Ohio, I lived in 3 different places before moving back out, this time to Idaho. This time, the experience of being far from home with few resources was not an adventure - it was a trauma. When I came back home, I suddenly found it very difficult to stay in one place, and lived in 3 different places for the next few years. I came to realize that I was re-creating the trauma of moving so that I could understand my sense of uprootedness and become more grounded.

Once you become aware that you are unconsciously creating triggering situations, it is very important to take a stance of self-forgiveness and understanding. Once your brain has been traumatized, it is very normal to re-create situations as a way of learning. This can be a growth experience, especially when undertaken consciously. Consciousness of this process means knowing you can slow it down at any point. We all have an ideal level of stress at which we function best. This involves the right balance of comfort and challenge. For those who feel over-stimulated by life, it is really OK to follow your inner guidance and create comfort and stability. It is OK to avoid triggering situations. Just when you think you are not growing, you can think about creating a trigger and I assure you, it will happen! Another option is to create positive triggers, such as a spiritual practice, counseling, or therapeutic creative exercises. There is never a shortage of growth experiences. It's up to you to decide how often and intensely you want to experience them.

The Final Pieces

The final pieces fall into place: Presence. Soft allowing. Moving towards what's true and real, both within us and without.

No excuses this time.

We are willing to be changed. To go beyond what we said we were; beyond what it was once convenient for us to be. We give up those easy definitions, things which allowed us to think I'll be OK when.... No more excuses; we cannot be defined by what happened before, any more. 

The final pieces fall into place: Integrity, Responsibility. Knowing how to ask. Confidence in what we feel and know. Willingness to give, even when we're weary, for those we love. Moving into what is light and loving, both within and without.

We speak in light-splintering voices about our pain, about our growth. You could say it's a floating support group. You could say it's a bunch of narcissists. A sign of personal instability. You could say it's holy and shitty all at once.

Floating around, our hearts land on different people's shoulders like butterfly wings. We listen and let those wings flutter on when time has come. There is no need to become heavy in matters of the heart. Only better at listening.

What is the "goal" of mental health?

A misconception I've often heard about mental health is that our "goal" is to become totally self-aware, and by doing so, become the master of all that happens in the unconscious brain. This sort of amounts to a triumph of logic over feelings, which can, after all, feel like jack-in-the-boxes waiting to sabotage our best-laid plans. It can feel invigorating at first, but if not balanced with gentle allowing of the inner self, momentum can gets lost in a viscous cycle of of self-critique and backsliding.

This is one end of a spectrum, a belief held by people who tend to live more in their feelings and impulses. There is nothing inherently wrong with this way of being. The opposite belief, held by more logical people, is that mental health lies in "not over-thinking everything". But it's easy to see how the extreme of either one could be disastrous, as leading too much with the head can lead to repression of natural and valid feelings, and leading only with feelings can lead to carelessness.

The answer isn't in becoming fully, logically conscious of EVERYTHING. No matter how troublesome or sneaky feelings can be, they still serve a purpose. Any prolonged attempt to muzzle our feelings before they're out of the gate, will lead to them becoming even more insistent on bursting forth, this time heedless of warnings. The answer lies in letting our logical and feeling sides become friends. Letting that sneaky, often-selfish lower brain come out and have tea with the protective, logical side, and letting that logical side see that feelings aren't really as scruffy or incorrigible as once thought. Feelings actually have value that the thinking brain could never come up with on its own, but they are not the ultimate truth in life.

Mindfulness is a great way to introduce these sides to each other. Through things like meditation and yoga, you can develop a non-judgmental awareness of your "lower", reactive, intuitive self, and sense it as neither good nor bad, but simply there. Eventually, the higher brain can learn to trust feelings and allow them to shine, and the lower brain can learn to trust logic to balance raw energy with wise restraint. There is a way to be whole.

For information on therapy using mindfulness and yoga, email me at andreabussinger81@gmail.com.