Category Archives: resistance

There’s no wrong way to practice mindfulness

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There’s no wrong way to practice mindfulness.
It’s impossible.
You either do it or don’t do it.
But you can’t do it wrong
Because it’s not about right and wrong.

It’s not about sitting still,
It’s about letting something inside get still.

It’s about attention and where it goes.

So go ahead and walk, move, do something,
Something that doesn’t need thinking.

And don’t be fooled.

Don’t think you don’t think when you’re mindful.
You’ll think.
You’re a human and humans think.
That’s why we practice.
To notice that we are such great, grand, relentless thinkers.

It goes like this: you’re following your breath, just like you’re supposed to.
And next thing you know, you’re thinking.
It happens. A lot.

Don’t get on your case.
Just notice.

As a noticer, you notice that you can always notice your thoughts instead of engaging with them.
{Except, of course, when you can’t. Or don’t.}

And then, the magic comes.

Sometimes you notice a tiny clear voice inside.
It sounds different from the usual voice, the one that’s there distracting you.
It’s different because it’s the voice of Truth, and it has no agenda.
It simply whispers in your ear and something inside you goes Ping! and that’s really cool.

But then there’s that other voice. The Nag. The Worrier. The Scold.

Be gentle with her.
When a thought about a problem comes up, gently tell yourself you can solve it later.
When a thought about something interesting comes up, promise yourself that you can daydream about the new shoes you want later.
{Be sure to keep your promise.  Daydreams are important.}
When a thought about something ordinary comes up, remind yourself that you can make the grocery list later.

Remind yourself that you are a noticer, an observer,
A scientist in a white lab coat observing microorganisms dance on a slide.
You are the Scientist of You.
You with the urgent, interesting, enticing, dancing thoughts.

When those thoughts get harsh,
Remind yourself that you are not your thoughts.
You are flesh and blood and hair and guts and spirit and energy,
And heart.
That’s what you are.
You are not your thoughts.  Listen again.
You are not your thoughts.

And if you notice you don’t want to go back to your breath, then
Notice your resistance.
Observe it with the curiosity of a child watching a bug crawl on a leaf.
Notice what color your resistance is and how it speaks to you.
Is it scratchy or smooth, fast or slow, high or low?
Does your resistance come in words, images, feelings?
Notice that your resistance, too, is just a thought.
And an I-don’t-want-to temper tantrum of a thought is still a thought, just like the other ones.
The ones that tempt you with visions of dinner.
The ones that rerun crappy conversations a million times and tell you that you have to do something about this RIGHT THIS MINUTE.
{Isn’t that funny?  What’s the big hurry?}

So go ahead and resist with your wholehearted approval.
Because there’s no wrong way be mindful.

Accepting Good Fortune When It Comes

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wave-on-beachSometimes good fortune arrives in our lives so effortlessly that we can’t believe it.  We think it can’t be this easy.

Smaller, more painful lives seem so familiar. We’re suspicious so we shrink from the beauty and magic unfolding before us.

Rumi urges us to seize life fearlessly, to let go and merge with it, and to embrace with ease the joy and opportunity as it comes to us:

The Seed Market

Can you find another market like this?
Where,
with your one rose
you can buy hundreds of rose gardens?
Where
For one seed
you get a whole wilderness?
For one weak breath,
the divine wind?
You have been fearful
of being absorbed in the ground,
or drawn up by the air.
Now, your waterbead lets go
and drops into the ocean,
where it came from.
It no longer has the form it had,
but it’s still water.
The essence is the same.
This giving up is not a repenting.
It’s a deep honoring of yourself.
When the ocean comes to you as a lover,
marry, at once, quickly,
for God’s sake!
Don’t postpone it!
Existence has no better gift.
No amount of searching
will find this.
A perfect falcon, for no reason,
has landed on your shoulder,
and become yours.

Has a perfect falcon landed on your shoulder?  What do you want to do with it?  Can you welcome it wholeheartedly?  Will you honor yourself, believe it, and allow it into your life?

Or are you thinking “this can’t be real if it comes so easily”?  Or “this can’t be valuable if it has come so easily”?  Are you believing that struggle is a necessary component of your life?

Where can you be more open to the rose gardens, the divine breezes, and the magnificent oceans which come to you?

How to Create Stress Whenever You Want

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Broken BowlA quiz:

1.  The electric drill breaks in the middle of a big project that you had set the whole weekend aside for. You:
a.  Tell yourself the drill shouldn’t break because it’s not that old.
b.  Curse the drill, the traffic on the way to the home store to buy a new drill, and the long checkout line in the store.
c.  Tell yourself and the person next to you in the checkout line that it’s a rip-off that drills cost so much and don’t last long.
d.  All of the above.

2.  Your printer is feuding with your computer when you need a document pronto for an important meeting.  You:
a.  Tell yourself that the printer should work because it was working fine a minute ago.
b.  Hit the print command over and over.
c.  Tell yourself you are an idiot for waiting for the last minute to print the document, and worry about losing your job.
d.  Tell yourself that bad things always happen to you
e.  All of the above.

3.  You leave late and hit a huge traffic jam on your way to your dental appointment.  You:
a.  Tell yourself the traffic shouldn’t be jammed at this hour.
b.  Grab the steering wheel tightly, clench your teeth, and curse the traffic.
c.  Think up dramatic excuses to tell the dental receptionist, the dentist, and everyone in the waiting room about why you are late.
d.  Complain to everyone in the waiting room that you have way too much to do and not enough time to do it in.
e.  All of the above.

4.  You are remodeling your kitchen and the granite you ordered doesn’t arrive on time, requiring your contractor to postpone the installation of your counters and new sink.  You have a big party at your house Saturday night, and you were planning to show off your new kitchen.  You:
a.  Chew out the contractor about how he missed an important deadline.
b.  Cancel your party and tell your friends (and yourself) how stressful it is to remodel.
c.  Get in a huge fight with your partner who doesn’t want to cancel the party, and who just doesn’t get it.
d.  Spend the afternoon crying.
e.  All of the above.

If you chose a, b, c, d, or e, it’s called arguing with reality, and it’s an argument you will lose.  Always.

Here’s the truth:  drills break, printers don’t print, and traffic jams happen.  Refrigerators and washing machines break, too, usually when they are full.  Kids forget to take their homework to school, granite doesn’t arrive on time for your party, and your last pair of contact lenses rip as you take them out of the container.  No matter what you are endeavoring to do, sometimes there will be glitches, delays, foul-ups, screw-ups, and mess-ups.  Count on it.

Now, answer one more question:

You are in the middle of something and a glitch, delay, or foul-up happens.  You:

a. Do what you can to solve the problem.
b. Forget about whatever is out of your control.
c.  Find your sense of humor.
d.  All of the above.

Can You Be Smart AND Happy?

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This morning, I was coaching very smart client.  She’s an academic at a renowned university, and feeling a little sheepish about the possibility that she could actually be happy.  She has a brilliant, highly-trained mind, and like so many in academia, tends to be suspicious of mooshy concepts like joy and happiness.  Especially her personal joy and happiness.

Another client, a genius with two PhDs, spent years as an academic.  For a while, he resisted some of the more imaginative exercises I gave him.  Even when they helped him stop procrastinating, the issue he’d been paralyzed by and sought coaching for, he feared that without empirical proof that the techniques worked, he was somehow being stupid for relying on them. “Are there any studies on this?” he’d ask me.  It seemed better to hang onto his dysfunction than to risk doing something that was possibly unproven hocus-pocus. Better to be a brilliant procrastinator than a productive dupe, I guess.

I’ve done my own time in academia, as a law professor, which carries not only the general fear of academia (the worst fate in life is that others will find out I’m not smart), but also the pessimism of legal thinking (if something can go wrong, it probably will, so I have to be prepared for every possible negative contingency).  I spent a long time rejecting the possibility that I could be happy, even when I began to feel happy. I felt sheepish about it.  It seemed so, well, improbable and foolish.

Ultimately, I got over it.  With practice and a bit of self-compassion my client can, too.

It’s crazy really. A smart person can  justify staying miserable or dysfunctional, because if others find out we’re happy, they might think we’re not so smart.  Sometimes the smartest people do the silliest things, in the name of intelligence.