Category: Psychology

You can be free: How fear holds you back

I’ve been reading Ryan Holiday’s inspiring Courage is Calling. Holliday practices Stoicism, a way of life that’s become my life credo, though I confess my frequent failure to live up to its tenets of courage, temperance, justice and wisdom.

Stoicism is a discipline requiring daily practice. It’s taught me how much fear lies behind our modern anxiety and behavior. As Holliday writes, “This is how it goes, whether you’re a billionaire or an ordinary person, no matter how physically tough or brilliant you are. Fear determines what is or isn’t possible. If you think something is too scary, it’s too scary for you. If you don’t think you have any power . . . you don’t. If you aren’t the captain of your fate . . . then fate is the captain of you.”

Anxiety with its burden of worries culminates in stress, and we know its harsh consequences for our mental and physical health.

Worry teaches you that the future is happening now.

It falsely tells you that worry will make it go away.

Worry makes you care more about what others think.

It inhibits your boldly attempting new things like falling in love again, having children, resuming your education, investing your money, traveling to new places, changing your residence, trying a new doctor. Maybe even quitting your job for something, even if for less money, but more fulfilling.

It says you can’t ever escape your past, whether a bad childhood or failed marriage, a hurtful friendship or demeaning rejection.

Fear anchors you to what’s familiar, seemingly safe. It forfeits possibility and, with it, the future.

The truth is life is inherent with risk. Loss, illness, grief, death embrace every nook and cranny of life. Its remedy is to step up and step out, doing what you can.

Paradoxically, mastering anxiety begins with acceptance of what you can’t change. Uncertainty is inherent with life. In his book, The Liberated Mind, psychologist Steven Hayes writes that “people like to think the world is ‘happy happy joy joy,’ but if you live long enough, you start running into pain and illness and loss and tragedies of all sorts. It’s just part of it. That’s part of life.”

But there are things you can change. Yes, you can master living in a temporal world of vicissitude, but you must be willing to sign the bottom line.

Take inventory of what inhibits your resolve.

It may cost you money, even estrangement, but how much better to walk away free. One of life’s caveats is knowing when and how to jettison habits and worries weighing you down.

You can be courageous in every day life in so many ways.

It takes bravery to ask for a pay raise, confront injustice, leave a demeaning relationship, find a new hobby.

Don’t let fear bully you.

Don’t let routine dictate your everyday doings.

Happiness doesn’t just happen. It requires flexibility, resilience and daily practice. Frequently, it’s a life of sips more than gulps to get there.

So much of life is living in the moment. You do what you can, attempt what you’ve wanted. You act to realize yourself, becoming agent of your own destiny.

Mastering your fears begins a new portal. Yes, you can find freedom in an unfree world.

–rj

Morning Thoughts

I begin my day daily, reading the news, the wrong way to commence a new day, heavy with humanity’s burdens I can do little about.

I would do better in rising with the sun, to set my day’s course like a compass pointing to true North on what matters, enriches, and contributes to well-being, not only for myself but, more importantly, for others.

I remember lines from one of Mary Oliver’s last poems: “Wherever I am, /the world comes after me. /It offers me its busyness. /It does not believe that I do not want it.”

We think of ourselves as separate from the main. Prisoners of self-interest, we’ve relinquished poet John Donne’s maxim, “No man is an island.“

As humans we crave togetherness.

We abhor loneliness.

We require bonding and the cohesion it brings.

I’ve traveled to many places, often alone, but the trips I remember most were those I’ve shared with others. To experience something awesome, but with no one to share it, somehow bottoms out its delight.

Like leaves on a tree, individual in their shape and shimmering on their branches, we feed into a trunk that flourishes when its leaves work collectively. We are citizenry of a greater Self.

We live in a time of electronic fellowship. Billions turn to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, ad infinitum, in a desire to connect, ample evidence we need one another to complete ourselves.

We find the relational in other, more meaningful ways. We love, we marry, we have children, we make friends, we frat with those sharing like interests, we bond with our pets. And yes, we write books—and even do blogs!

Unfortunately, since Descartes with his “I think, therefore I am,” we’ve weighed our lives down with ego indulgence, mindless of that greater entity of collective humanity and of Nature that grants us being and sustains.

In Victorian times, Bentham’s notion of utilitarianism was in vogue, its thesis that what promotes happiness is good; what promotes pain is bad. Essentially hedonistic, it was vehemently satirized by Dickens in Hard Times as serving the wealthy at the expense of the working class.

Modern psychology hasn’t helped mend our ways. Self-validation defines its focus. Witness the plethora of books on self-improvement. I was schooled in behaviorism at the grad level with its notion that humans are little more than pigeons, subject to stimulus response, driven by self-interest. Accordingly, prescribed behavior can be reenforced through operant conditioning that awards the positive; conversely, extinguishing the negative via the punitive. Anthony Burgess, whom I met briefly many years ago, deciphered it rightly in Clockwork Orange (1962), one of the 20th century’s most profound books.

In economics, capitalism is founded upon the same a priori of what’s in it for me, ushering in the Adam Smith credo of self-interest and competition as prerequisites to prosperity. Its consequences are with us daily, the one percent owning half the wealth, the exponential decline of the middle class, the continuous emphasis on growth despite diminishing natural resources.

In his widely published The Selfish Gene (1976), evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins tells us that genes act to preserve their self-interest, with altruism, when it does exist, functionally symbiotic as in bees and ants. In fairness, Dawkins does propose that humans have potential capacity with growth in moral intelligence to modify evolution’s predilection for self-interest. Harvard’s eminent psychologist Stephen Pinker, who sets out in The Angels of Our Better Nature (2011) to statistically validate the decline of violence, should be pleased.

On a human scale, I think of Japan, unique in its protocol of collective behavior in the interest of public welfare that critics might disdainfully dismiss as herd mentality or, essentially, a vestige of Hobbes’ “enlightened self-interest.” Nonetheless, Japan is one of our few stable nations, high in economic equality, rare homelessness, and little crime. When the tsunami struck in 2011, unlike in other nations, there were few reports of looting. No need to send in the National Guard. My own memories of Japan confirm a pervasive politeness and honesty I’ve found unequaled in my travels.

In contrast, I think of what took place with the COVID outbreak, nearly a third of Americans not getting vaccinated and, even more, refusing to mask. As one business man told me, “It’s a personal choice.” But then this isn’t confined to America. In France, Belgium, and Germany gargantuan anti COVID protocol demonstrations, some of them violent, have occurred. Theirs is the right to infect others and continue the pandemic. By the way, Japan’s COVID mortality rate was 14.52 versus 233.8 in the U.S. as of Nov. 21, 2021, according to Johns Hopkins University stats.

Reading the news reminds me of the human folly behind the headlines, whether of individuals or nations, in pursuing self-interest. Sowing greed, we have reaped social dissonance with high crime, economic disparity, and homelessness among its results.

Frost wrote a renowned poem, “Mending Wall” in which the persona tells us of his neighbor, who advocates “Good fences make good neighbors.” I’m for tearing down walls that separate us.

In mutuality we find our common denominator, making for a better world.
In discovering the Other, we find ourselves.

–rj

Tom Brady’s Finest Moment

Yesterday’s Tampa Bay come-back win, led by legendary Tom Brady in the final two minutes over the Jets, highlights Brady’s remarkable career. His greatest moment, however, may have come with his compassion for troubled teammate Antonio Brown, who quit the team in the third quarter, tossing his shirt into the crowd and running into the exit tunnel. “I think everybody should do what they can to help him in ways that he really needs it. We all love him, we care about him deeply. We want to see him be at his best, and unfortunately it won’t be with our team.” Johns Hopkins Medicine reports that 26% of AmerIcans over 18 suffer from some form of mental illness, including anxiety disorders; of our homeless, an estimated 25% from mental illness. Obviously a troubled man, Brown, needs professional help, like so many others in these stressful times. “I think everyone should be very compassionate and empathetic toward some very difficult things that are happening,” Brady added. Thank you, Tom, for showing us the way. —rj

The Vanishing World of Touch

Not long ago I celebrated in my brimmings blog the realm of touch, so wonderfully depicted by my favorite nature writer, Diane Ackerman, in A Natural History of the Senses. What she doesn’t touch upon is the increasing loss of that tactile dimension in a virtual age powered by Artificial Intelligence now pushed to the forefront by the corona pandemic. Nearly a third of us now work from our homes. Fewer of us are needed. Sadly, we are probably witnessing the loss of a way of life to which we won’t fully return: fewer teachers, doctors, etc. , increased surveillance, a cadre of workers, many of color, working as grocery clerks, industrial farm laborers, or from remote warehouses.

The loss of a tactile world undermines the human enterprise for which social media becomes a poor substitute. And then the outcome for families, the stress of uncertainty and limited horizons of opportunity in a touchless society where we no longer shake hands, give hugs, or bestow a kiss upon the cheek, airport embraces of coming and going reduced to impalpable memory.

As never before in a world such as ours, we are children in the night needing to be held and to be loved. We cannot live happily in a world of reduced signifiers of human belonging. Touch is the lingua franca fundamental to our destiny.

—rj

Touching Matters

We cannot thrive without touch. Of the five senses, it’s the one we can’t do without. And oddly, the most underrated. Through touch we are known and make ourselves known. Without touch, we’d not be here at all.

Recently I viewed a TV episode of long-running Doctor Who (Season 2, Episode 2, “New Earth”), whose eponymous protagonist lands on a remote planet in a distant future. Confined to multi-tiered isolation cells in a hospital setting, underclass humans are reduced to abstract entities, or guinea pigs, serving the health needs of a privileged oligarchy of feline nurses. Doctor Who to their dynamic rescue, their cells spring open, unleashing a meandering human stream.  Bewildered in a strange freedom, they wander into a coterie of fellow feeling and mutual touching, conferring healing.

I knew a family well where touching was remote, not even a hug, and a handshake at best. The children, five of them, turned into adults, responsible, hard-working, charitable—yet each lacking self-regard, competing for love, but never finding enough, questing inevitably for a validity always elusive. The father rebuked me on one occasion: “Don’t talk to me about love. Isn’t it enough that I feed and clothe them and provide a place for them to sleep?”

I came from a working class Irish family, my mother absent; my father, a quick-tempered alcoholic who boozed away income, often leaving us nibbling on tawdry white bread salt and pepper sandwiches. And yet we, four children, found love in each other over the years bonded by childhood memories, visiting, confiding—yes, in that time unlike our own—transcending space, exchanging letters. In person, we greeted each other with hugs, kissed cheeks, slapped backs, conversing into the night’s meandering hours, reechoing childhood venues.

Numberless animal experiments exhibit the dismal results of tactile neglect. In a Duke experiment with rats, neurologist Saul Schanberg found that rat offspring, deprived of maternal licking and grooming, experienced a loss in growth hormones. Even though hormone secretion increased on return to their mothers, an incessant need for stroking to return normalcy was required.

In parallel, we’ve found that neglected children sometimes stop growing and that children not sufficiently touched often grow-up reluctant to touch others, or what I call an inability to show love.

Diane Ackerman reminds us in her voluptuous exploration of our sensory dimension (A Natural History of the Senses) how densely populated our language is with references to touching: “Language is steeped in metaphors of touch. We call our emotions feelings, and we care most deeply when something “touches” us. Problems can be thorny, ticklish, sticky, or need to be handled with kid gloves. Touchy people, especially if they’re coarse, really get on our nerves.”

Similarly, one reason why I find novelist D. H. Lawrence’s work so appealing over a lifetime is its pervasive reiteration of the centrality of touch to our well-being, or at the core of what defines our essence; in Lawrencian parlance, what titillates the solar plexus. It was why art patron Mabel Dodge Sterne invited him to Taos, New Mexico, this artisan sage with “the feel and touch and smell of places.”

I’m point man now, my siblings vanished into that perennial Night all of us must inevitably embrace and yet, as though it were yesterday, they remain presences, gifting me with their palpable love.

–rj

And a Child Shall Lead Them: Healing What Ails Us

Image result for and a child shall lead themI was talking just a few minutes ago with my better half, wondering just how I used to spend my idle hours before the Internet came into vogue. As is, I’m cuffed to a binary lodestone, whether smart phone, iPad, or desktop, dulling awareness, squandering time, exponentially addictive.

Generally, my dawns begin not with photographing sunrises or heading to the gym, but grabbing my tablet, which accompanies me even to bed, for a wakeup breakfast of The Guardian, BBC, CNN, and NPR.

Unsatiated, I imbibe local news back home where I lived for 41 years before moving this past summer, all of this consuming at least an hour. I check for updates several times throughout the day.

I comb Facebook for friend posts, get off text messages as day tumbles into noon.

One of the inveterate things I do is to google this and google that. If curiosity killed the cat, it’s stuffed my brain into info overload.

According to a recent report in Ofcom featured in The Guardian, I’m not alone by any means. 78% of us now have smartphones, rising to 95% of young people, 16-24. Returning from work, we grab a fast meal, throw ourselves into a comfy chair, turning on, say, Netflix, for a few hours more of wasteful indulgence.

Bored and stressed, we moderns seek distraction. We have difficulty keeping company with ourselves.

Addicted, each day becomes a round of what Buddhists term Samsara, or the unenlightened repetition of daily round, captured famously in Bill Murray’s stellar performance in Groundhog Day.

And we pay a steep price for all of this in a lifespan never really long enough, missing out on the miracle of life that´s not only ourselves, and won’t happen again, but of those around us enveloped in a cosmos, earthly and heavenly, infinite, yet temporal.

It was Wordsworth, nature poet of a quieter time, who told us “the child is father of the man” in the ¨Rainbow.” What he probably meant is that what we are as children we become as adults in the maturation of habits and sensibilities acquired when children, particularly an early fondness for nature.

I’d extend its meaning to include a child’s sometimes extraordinary ability to show us the way as adults in their frequent exemplar of sensory delight in the nowness of things, each day a renewed cornucopia, at least before the advent of video games.

Maybe you’re getting my drift—that one way out of our electronic matrix is to rethink what we loved to do as children and rediscover it again. I loved studying languages, playing and watching baseball, walking to the library and the adventure of new book, traveling to new places, meeting new people, learning new things, the smell of country air, the touch of bare feet on cool earth in early morning in our garden.

Children teach us not to fret about tomorrow.
To stop if it isn’t fun.
To be curious.
Honest.
Passionate.
Hopeful.
Forgiving.
To savor the moment.
To forgive.
To love.

I hold to action over prayer, but were I a praying guy, I’d surely pray, “Lord, give me the mind of a child again!”

–rj

Alzheimer Breakthrough? Bredeson’s The End of Alzheimer’s: The First Program to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline

Death has many doorways. Yet most of us go by way of heart disease, cancer, or respiratory disease; in fact, 50%.

The good thing is that we can preempt these diseases, if not reverse them through lifestyle changes.

Not so when it comes to Alzheimer’s disease, ranking sixth for causes of mortality. Shockingly prevalent, some 5.4 million Americans have it, with 200,000 of them below the age of sixty-five. All of them will die.

Estimates have it that this number will swell to 14 million by 2050.

Cost wise, treating dementia comes to a mind-blowing $250 billion annually .

Alzheimer’s differs from other types of dementia in that ultimately you become totally unable to perform normal body functions and require round the clock monitoring. You also lose long and short term memory. Alzheimer patients live in an eternal present. There is neither a past or future.

Aside from stroke, it may consequently be the illness we fear most.

But it could be that a breakthrough has appeared, thanks to the diligent clinical research of neurologist Dr. Dale Bredeson at UCLA, who has researched the disease for 30 years. For the first time, we have evidence that those strictly heeding his protocol can both prevent and even reverse early Alzheimer’s. The proof lies in some 200 plus survivors of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and early stage Alzheimer’s who’ve experienced either remission or reversal.

Bredeson details his research in his just published (2017) The End of Alzheimer’s: The First Program to End and Reverse Cognitive Decline.  When I learned that Maria Shriver enthusiastically endorsed the book, along with several respected neurologists on the forefront of Alzheimer research, I was hooked.

In September, I lost my sister, though probably due to vascular dementia, not Alzheimer’s. Additionally, I had already become more sensitive as an older person to the the plight of those confronting cognitive decline in either themselves or their loved ones and, of course, my own potential fate in growing older.

I’ve now read the book, difficult going in some places because of the underlying genetic and chemical factors involved, but worth your time, though Bredeson says you can skip such chapters if you want. I read the entire book in three days, virtually mesmerized.

Presently, there are four principal drugs used to treat Alzheimer’s. At best, while perhaps relieving confusion or memory loss, they’re ineffectual in halting the ultimate ravages of this progressive illness.

Bredeson attributes this to the current medical paradigm of treating Alzheimer’s as a single disease rather than the consequence of several contributing causes. Almost always, Alzheimer’s is described as simply a build-up of beta-amyloid and tau proteins, resulting in abnormal plaque deposits that damage brain cells and promote consequent memory loss. Find the right pharmaceutical formula—and bingo!—you’ll slow or prevent the disease.

As to what causes the excessive amyloid/tau accretion, conjectures exist, but none of them validated. As with virtually all contemporary medicine, we treat the symptoms rather than cause.

Bredeson proposes that Alzheimer’s is primarily a response to inflammatory insults (e.g., infections, or trans fats, sub-optimal nutrients, trophic factors and/or hormone levels, toxic compounds including bio-toxins such as those from mole or bacteria), any and all of which contribute to an imbalance between reorganization of older and newer synapses, the latter not sufficiently produced to replace the former synapses and enhance healthy neuron molecule production.

Bredeson further contends there are three subtypes of Alzheimer’s inflammatory response initiated principally by the common genetic variable ApoE4, each requiring its own treatment protocol.

75 million Americans carry a single copy of ApoE4, giving them a 30 percent risk for the disease. If you have two copies of the ApoE4, one from each of your parents, you have a substantially higher than 50 percent risk for developing Alzheimer’s. Presently, that’s 7 million of us.

Symptoms of Alzheimer’s usually appear when you’re in your sixties or seventies, traceable in blood-work that identifies your subtype, requiring a specific treatment protocol, though we know Alzheimer’s can sometimes occur earlier.

Obviously, genetic evaluation is required as a starting point in treatment. Catching Alzheimer’s in its early stage, especially when asymptomatic, may halt or slow its progression. Simply following the present medical scenario of trying to reduce amyloid-beta production is ineffectual unless its inducers are eliminated.

Everyone 45 and up should undergo a “cognoscopy,” or genetic and blood work-ups, Bredeson contends.

Bredeson’s treatment formula, called ReCODE, is potentially expensive, requiring in addition to the usual lifestyle formulae of a healthy diet, sufficient sleep, exercise,  elimination of stress, numerous supplements, and brain exercise. In short, such treatment would seemingly exclude those with marginal income.

You may also find it difficult to locate a ReCODE physician in your area, although word is spreading and more physicians are practicing it.

Bredeson’s ketogenic diet recommendation, not the previously reported Mediterranean diet, may likewise prove challenging, if not unpalatable for many, requiring substantially reduced carbohydrate intake, replaced by healthy fats. No sweets or grains. It also includes twelve hour fasting daily. Meat choices should derive from grass-fed beef and free-range chickens. Be careful about mercury laden fish like tuna. Alaska salmon is your better choice.

Chapters 8-9 detail 36 factors that individually or collectively may induce Alzheimer’s. Eliminating these is essential and requires discipline, which perhaps many, even if they can afford treatment, will find difficult. You simply can’t cheat. Alzheimer’s doesn’t take holidays.

Bredeson also gives readers sample programs that two of his patients with mild cognitive impairment have pursued successfully, with the caveat that the regimen must be life-long.

Refreshingly cautious, Bredeson isn’t proposing he’s actually found a cure, but rather that those in Alzheimer’s early stages heeding his research-based protocol faithfully have proven to be successful thus far. Depart from the regimen in even minor aspects and you’ll retrogress.

As he’s commented elsewhere, “The longest we have a person on the program is four and a half years. We’ve not had a single example yet out of hundreds in which someone has gone on the program, gotten better, stayed on the program, and then gotten worse.”

Leonard Hood, M.D., Ph. D, National Medal of Science recipient, writes that “Dr. Bredeson has provided enormous hope for the heretofore intractable clinical problem of Alzheimer’s. Bredeson’s early studies suggest that this approach can halt and in many cases reverse early Alzheimer’s.”

This is good news!
—rj

Is Mindfulness Warmed-over Buddhism?

momentMindfulness meditation seems everywhere these days. Even the corporate world embraces it, e. g., Google, Facebook, EBay and Twitter. And in medical circles, it’s all the rage, particularly in psychiatry where it increasingly rivals pharmaceutical intervention as a primary therapy in treating depression and general anxiety disorders.

But is there any real science behind mindfulness, or is it simply Buddhism warmed over for Western consumers?

Supposedly, mindfulness is all about being in the present. Never mind regrets about mistakes you made or things you’ll do to make things better. Just let go.  What matters is being sentient in the Now.  In the sports world, you might call it, “Being in the zone.”

Mindfulness, as in Buddhism, has three steps; namely, concentration, insight and its sequel, empathy.

You get there largely by focusing on your breathing. While your mind will inevitably stray with what Buddhists call “monkey mind,” don’t worry about it.  Simply listen to, and not engage, any thoughts that press-in on you.  Mindfulness encourages acceptance and avoids being judgmental.

But why mindfulness, even if its does help relieve your stress?

Why not a pill?

Why not counseling?

Or soft music?

Or having fun with a good friend?

Or relaxing on the beach?

Why not just slow things down and sit still?

Where’s the research to back-up the craze or to validate it’s more effective than traditional ways of promoting well-being?

In short, mindfulness has its critics, some of whom argue that self-confrontation can even be dangerous for you.  Do you really want to probe repressed memories and labyrinthian chambers of loss, grief, and failure?

Melanie McDonagh, a writer for the Evening Standard (London), argues in Spectator that Mindfulness didn’t work for her, given her inability to stay focused.

Mindfulness is supposed to ultimately make you more compassionate. But where’s the proof of that?:

…as far as I can gather, it’s mostly About Me Sitting.  Concentration on your breathing is a good way to chill out and de-stress, but it’s not a particularly good end in itself. Radiating compassion is fine, but it doesn’t obviously translate into action. Where’s the bit about feeding the hungry, visiting the prisoner, all the virtues that Christianity extols? Where in fact is your neighbor in the practice of self-obsession?

In rebuttal, the test of properly practiced mindfulness is demonstrated outwardly in leaving ourselves behind and thinking of others. Any failure doesn’t lie in mindfulness, but those who really haven’t entered into what it’s all about.  I like how Shinzen Young  phrases it:  “The new self is not a noun, it is a verb” (The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works).

What really irks McDonagh is an underlying dislike of Buddhism. While extolling the virtues of Christianity, she glosses over its redolent history of crusades, inquisitions, misogyny, embrace of slavery, hostility towards gays, colonial genocide, etc. You’ll not find any of this in Buddhism.

Mindfulness, as in Buddhism, or even Christianity, teaches you to rid yourself of the sense of a separate self. In short, we’re all part of the experiential flux of time and the temporal.

Stephen Batchelor, a former Buddhist monk, puts it this way in his observations of its exemplum in the Dalai Lama, whom he has met and spent time with on several occasions:

At the heart of [his] sensibility plays a deep empathy for the plight of others, which seemed to pour forth from him effortlessly and abundantly…Such empathy requires that one undergoes a radical emptying of self, so that instead of experiencing oneself as a fixed, detached ego, one comes to see how one is inextricably enmeshed in the fabric of the world (Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist).

McDonagh is just plain wrong in her reductionism, which short-circuits any fair appraisal based on a thorough knowledge of mindfulness in its antecedents, methodology, and scientific appraisal when she asserts that mindfulness is just essentially warmed-over hash: “Think meditation, think Buddhism, and you’re there, so long as you don’t forget the breathing.”

On the contrary, while Western mindfulness owes much to Buddhism, it’s essentially rationalistic, eschewing metaphysics, and eclectic in its make-up, drawing from many strands to implement those methodologies congruent with current science, validated through empirical research, much of it utilizing brain imaging data.

It professes no deities, practices no rituals; has no hierarchy, and no theology. It attracts the best minds.

What it does share with Buddhism–and science for that matter–is a belief in the interweave of causality and effect and the primary role of empiricism, not speculation, in assessing evidence.

Hence its appeal to Western minds and the fact that it works for diverse needs and in a plethora of settings.

–rj

Happiness: What it is and How to Find It

happinessI came across this still proverbial Tibetan saying in my pre-meditation reading the other day that I wanted to share with you:

“Seeking happiness outside is like waiting for sunshine in a cave facing north.” In short, our happiness must be found within ourselves and not in events, goods, or even among those we love, for life often doesn’t reciprocate what we want, love, or even deserve.

Happiness can’t be imposed from the outside, since it derives from making peace within ourselves, free from the demons of self-doubt, jealousy, and anger and a critical spirit that can spill over into our daily lives, eroding relationships.

But if happiness is an inner thing, how do we go about having it? The Buddha tells us that our suffering, or unhappiness, derives from our craving. Modern psychologists like Freud and Skinner appear to confirm this, finding that we are creatures of Ego, perpetually seeking gratification.

We find happiness specifically in recognizing the temporality of everything, both of ourselves and of the world to which we belong. When we find it, we no longer react to life’s volatility of event and circumstance.

Accepting change and ourselves as a part of it, we are anchored even in duress.  What happens is that our egos dissolve when we discover the ability to let go through focusing on what really matters in a cosmos of entropy.

Such contentment derives from living mindfully in the moment, celebrating the treasure of being alive, or as Hellen Keller expressed it so wonderfully:

Use your eyes as if tomorrow you would be stricken blind. Hear the music of voices, the song of a bird, the mighty strains of an orchestra, as if you would be stricken deaf tomorrow. Touch each object you want to touch as if tomorrow your tactile sense would fail. Smell the perfume of flowers, taste with relish each morsel, as if tomorrow you could never smell and taste again.

We develop this capacity through practice, or meditation, being kind, not judgmental, about ourselves when our minds wander, as they always do.

Mindfulness meditation, which we can apply to every sphere of experience, disciplines us ultimately into intimate awareness and, with it, a rippling comprehension of not only ourselves, but of others in a wider empathy.

Mindful people find peace not only within themselves, but its enhancement in the outer world through service to others, which psychologists increasingly tell us yields that kind of gratification money, position and power cannot equal.

—rj

Postscript: A book I highly recommend as an amplification of my post is David Michie’s Buddhism for Busy People. I promise that you’ll find it difficult to put down. (While I’m not a Buddhist, I’ve found Buddhism, more a way of life than a religion, offers a redolent wisdom that modern psychotherapy has found worthy of implementation on a universal scale, and validated through empirical research.)

Leap Frogging

frogsI continue to read Shinzen Young (The Science of Enlightenment), and always with the thrill of discovery. No one, and I mean no one, has opened up the insides of mindfulness meditation more for me.

You know you’re keeping good company with a book you can’t stop scribbling in with notes and highlighting. Later, I become this grasshopper–or better–a frog leaping pages, landing on passages, sometimes amphibiously diving beneath, feeding on nuances that the residual of absence makes clearer and often multiplies.

My guru tells me that any experience, even if painful, yields relief when I pin it with concentration rather than avoidance as many of us do.

Doing so, we make a breakthrough, at long last, mining insight into our Self, that vein of subterranean opaqueness affecting so much of our surface life. The frog thing again.

If mindfulness begins with concentration, it succeeds with clarification, simply because it detaches us from the Self or Ego within us, affording us that rare objectivity.

A still further dividend is that our own wrestlings dissolve in a humility energizing our capacity to love each other more fully.

We measure mindfulness’ success in the amelioration it brings to our daily lives in the acceptance of the finiteness within ourselves and others, creatures never standing still, but always becoming.

While mindfulness can lead us to moments of ecstatic release from the shoulder heavy burdens of anxiety, worry, and resentment–even physical pain– it’s not really about that. Physical suffering, for example, may linger, but it no longer pervades.

Successfully done, mindfulness helps us live happier lives. independent of life’s circumstances with their undulations of good and bad:

Ordinary experience, when greeted with concentration, clarity, and equanimity catalyzes a process of insight and purification which culminates in the ability to have complete experiences whenever you want. This theory is quite elegant. It has all the marks of good science….It well deserves the name, “science of enlightenment.”

There’s so much more I !d like to say, but it’s early morning as I lie in bed, prepping for a new day with its granary for both promise and regret; but as Frost insists, “I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.”
–rj

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