I always find remembering ‘NACC’ helpful:
N – take some time to Notice – what is going on for you in this moment, what thoughts and feelings are here, body sensations, urges… A – Allow what is here to be here (e.g. anxiety is here, here is judging, anger is here...) C – with Compassion, hold whatever is here for you with curiosity, care and gentleness. This comes more and more with practice. C – Choice – once we are aware and open to what is here we can make a more skilful, compassionate choice about what to do (or not do) next to look after ourselves and others. I sometimes find there is a tendency for me to rush the middle two. Spend good time on them, they are central. Remembering this, or your own version of NACC, can help avoid getting caught up in unhelpful mental habits, acting on autopilot, and being hijacked by strong emotions.
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Jon Kabat Zinn says ‘life is the practice... whatever is here is the curriculum’.
My curriculum this week has been the morning school run – we are hot and tired, and we are tearing strips off each other. I really don’t like being so ratty. Mindfulness has helped, but mostly retrospectively rather than in the moment: - Thankfully after a turbulent morning yesterday I had time for a sitting practice – I chose ‘Gathering the scattered mind’ on the OMC app. It helped me stabilise an agitated mind by coming to my breathing, to notice what my mind was busy working on and the feelings bubbling up from this thinking. - I noticed feelings of guilt and sadness for how I had spoken to my eldest son. I let these feelings be there and was genuinely kind to myself – both towards my original hot-headed reactivity, and my subsequent guilt and regret. This is what it is to be human. Through practising, this kindness towards myself and my inner critic comes far more naturally to me than before. I made a promise to make a mindful apology later. - Note to my future self: when you have finally got the boys in the car (a captive audience hurray!) this is NOT the time to go ranting on about how things have got to change around here, how cross and upset you are, and to get all blamey and shamey… This is the time to take a prolonged breathing space! Otherwise you will regret it afterwards (see above). - My sitting practice also helped me to become aware of some unhelpful thought patterns and reactions hanging around – namely, a tendency to feel put upon and unappreciated, which only serves to escalate things if I bring it as baggage to the situation: “this morning I have done this for you, I have done that for you, I have done everything I possibly can around here to get us out the door and this is how you treat me in return….”. I love looking after our boys, and they are in fact a very caring pair. I can model genuine gratitude and compassion in all kinds of positive ways – but their appreciation is not going to be nurtured by throwing out sweeping blaming and shaming statements when I am angry. Now I am aware of these thought patterns, I can look out for them and choose what to do with them rather than let them speak for me in the heat of the moment. - And I am taking care of myself – which today meant stepping away from my phone, clock watching and the endless to do list, and spending time using my hands focusing on present tasks – assembling flatpack, weeding the garden, washing up… It did me the world of good. Here’s to learning from my miss-takes this week. 'I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. '
Walking meditation practice, like yoga, is a way of practising mindful movement - a brilliant way of bringing mindfulness into daily life. I always think of the essence of this Thich Nhat Hanh quote as I walk over the bridge to pick up the boys from school - for some reason this (refreshingly positive!) habit kicks in quite automatically now at the crest of the bridge and I think about 'the miracle of walking on this earth'. When we practice in class we sometimes intentionally slow our walking (and look like zombies to outside observers) but on the walk to school I don't change my pace, I feel my breath in my body, my feet on the ground, the movement of my muscles and joints, and the air on my skin. I notice thoughts about past and future and the pull ever onwards, and I feel very alive. 'People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child—our own two eyes. All is a miracle.' Thich Nhat Hanh Keeping on cultivating a strong sense of friendliness and kindness towards ourselves and our very human experiences is fundamental to practising mindfulness. Self compassion should be proactively taught and modelled, wherever the opportunity arises, in all schools from a young age.
From self compassion and a sense of common humanity comes compassion for others. To respond compassionately to something we must first allow it to be here. This can be quite subtle to grasp - "allowing" things is not the same as being passive and resigned to them. It involves allowing what is here to be here in an open, friendly awareness before making a choice about how to respond to them. Befriending/loving friendliness practices are a foundation stone of my daily mindfulness practice and I notice when I let them slip (like many of us I often find myself judging unhelpfully and under attack by a strong inner critic). The befriending and compassion practices led by Willem Kuyken and Christina Feldman on the OMC app are great (link below), as are books and guided meditations from Tara Brach, Pema Chödrön and Sharon Salzberg. Also Paul Gilbert's Compassionate Mind approach (an overview available here https://www.netmums.com/sup…/the-compassionate-mind-approach). http://oxfordmindfulness.org/news/oxford-mbct-app/ I am currently half way through 'The Five Invitations' by Frank Ostaseski. It is among the best books I have ever read.
From the foreword by Rachel Naomi Remen: 'He has written about life on the edge - about all of life, really - and invited us to join him in the space between the worlds. To sit at the table of unknowing. To wonder together. To become wise.' Elsewhere the book is described as 'deep, right, and rare'. The five invitations: Don't wait; Welcome everything, push away nothing; Bring your whole self to the experience; Find a place of rest in the middle of things; Cultivate don't know mind. Fresh air and feeling my feet on the ground have helped soften my spiky edges after clashing with the boys this morning. A tired bad-tempered small one, an impatient frustrated bigger one, and my jangling hormones conjured the perfect storm as we tried to leave the house, which I would like to have met with love rather than resistance and blame. 🙁
I could see it but I couldn't seem to stop it escalating. I didn't take the breathing space I needed. As always, meeting this with love rather than more blame in the aftermath starts with me and my kindness towards myself - kindness to others can only come from this. It is so easy to beat ourselves and others up emotionally. Caught up in the moment it's hard but not impossible to make different choices and take better care of us all. After school there will be time for telling them I'm sorry and hugs. An epiphany on my walk home from the school run this morning – we’ve been practising teaching MBCT session 4 this week, ‘Recognising aversion’ and our habitual reactions to aversion. Training to teach has given me a much deeper understanding of the theory behind mindfulness-based approaches and the intentions built into each session – but there is also a tendency to get caught up in the theory (and the big words) and to bury the felt sense of what this actually means for me and how I live. I need to keep this understanding based on my own personal experience at the forefront if I am going to convey mindfulness to others authentically.
As I walked home I was struck by how ‘aversion’ had been all around me this morning and in the last two busy weeks – it’s here whenever there is a feeling that things aren’t how I want them to be. It’s here when my son won’t do what I ask him to do to get ready in the morning. It’s here in the bathroom that has sprung a leak, when my face is itching with hayfever, when the cat won’t come in and I want to go to bed, when the inner critic snipes that I should have done something differently, when I am frustrated by a perceived lack of down time, when things don’t go to ‘plan’… The first step (and perhaps the hardest) is to become aware of this ‘aversion’ in the moment, and to see the additional layer of optional suffering I add by resisting and fighting against the way things are. The second step is to turn towards my experience (including my patterns of reactivity) and allow this to be as it is, with compassion, and the third to choose how best to respond. On my hayfeverish walk home from school I did a stock take of what hasn’t been how I want it to be these last few days and how my reactions to these experiences - avoiding, getting frustrated, ruminating, going into a frenzy of doing to create some sense of control and safety - has added an extra helping of crap on the top! For a time I woke up again, and enjoyed the rose petals along the way. ‘Difficult things are part and parcel of life itself. It is how we handle those things that makes the difference between whether they control our lives or whether we can relate more lightly to them.’ From MBCT, Segal, Williams and Teasdale (2013) |
AuthorI'm Claire - and I (re)learn something every day from practising and teaching mindfulness... Archives
March 2022
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