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Address Your Stress

Living with anxiety can be exhausting, especially if it is your own. If you find yourself stressed out there are some simple things you can do regain control of your life. Anytime you feel anxiety or stress, the first thing you can do is address your stress. Give it a wink or a nod to let it know that you’re onto it. You could even put your palms together and bow to your stress, giving it both acknowledgement and respect. Addressing your stress is important because it gives you the opportunity to redefine your relationship to it.

Your anxiety can become anything for you. You get to decide what it is by how you work with it. It could be your teacher, your student, your friend, your parent, your therapist, an annoying kid you have to babysit for, your own child, your dog, your boss, or your kidnapper. Some of these relationships put you in charge, some put your anxiety in charge. As you address your stress, your aim is not to drive or be driven, your aim is to assess the relationship. In the long term you are in charge of your stress. In the moment, sometimes it feels like the stress is in charge. As you begin to deal with stress it will often feel more like a boss or captor who pushes you around, largely against your will. As you make dealing with your stress a priority in your life, it will take on the characteristics of a teacher who challenges you, but gives you insight into your self. With practice it could become like a trained dog who will sit and stay on command.

The act of recognizing your stress and categorizing it, sets you apart from your anxiety. It gives you some breathing space. Breathing space is key to working with stress. A conscious breath is a message to your stress that you can handle it. As you address your stress, take in a deep breath, relax your throat and breathe out from the back of your throat. If your stress is so great that you can’t even breathe, then you wait until you can breathe again to demonstrate your control and to celebrate your ability to survive.

Stress can be a great teacher or a horrible boss, how much you learn from it determines what kind of teacher it is. If it feels like a boss, get help in addressing it. Find another boss for the boss. You are in charge. It’s your head. You live there. The anxiety is only visiting.

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Enlighten Up

The reason we suffer so much existential angst is because we think that we are something separate from everything else. That sense of separateness leads to a longing for wholeness, which turns out to be an elusive and moving target. The knowledge and intellectual understanding that we are completely connected to everything, does little to ease our personal sense of separation. It would be nice to be able to sit, close our eyes, and spectacularly experience that cosmic oneness in a brilliant flash that would, once and for all, vanquish all thoughts of being anything but that. Fortunately, we can do that...read more

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Resisting a Rest

The pressure of daily life builds up over time, making it seem like living in a pressure cooker is normal. The race against time, meeting deadlines, earning enough to pay the bills, trying to do all that needs doing each day, creates tension between all the competing demands. Juggling jobs and families, schools and friends, sleep and social media, sanity and success, has us hustling, here and there, day and night, to keep all those fragile eggs in the air. That high wire balancing act, juggling, racing, cooking, has a momentum of its own and it can feel like if we ever slow down, even for a moment, all the moving pieces will crash down around us and crush us under all the weight. We are so used to running and so committed to the grind, that when the opportunity presents itself for us to take a rest, we habitually resist.

Carrying the weight of the world would crush anyone. Fortunately, the way things actually work is the world carries our weight, effortlessly. Carrying around our brains, the three pounds of meat in our heads, is no effort for us, but dealing with all the things our brains produce can take a lot of work...read more

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Controlling Anger

To control anger you have to pay attention to anger. It is a hard emotion to control because when it arises it takes over your mind, cutting off your reasoning ability and pushing you into angry action.

Angry action is generally destructive action, so a big part of controlling anger is controlling what we do when we are angry. We have to try to limit the destruction and harm our anger does to us and to others. It is like anger makes us radioactive. We need to limit how we expose others to our radiation and how long we endure it ourselves. Recognizing the toxicity of our anger helps us to break its spell.

When you are under anger’s spell and you want to let it go, you can channel the angry energy into helpful actions. You can write about whatever is making you angry, go for a walk, do some physical labor, do something constructive to burn it off. Figuring out where to channel your anger is the immediate safety plan. Changing your anger habit is the long-term approach.

To change your approach, pay attention to how much time you spend angry each day. From one day to the next, you spend a consistent amount of time being angry. Once you get a sense of how much of your life you spend angry, you can work on lowering it. Lowering the amount of time you spend angry is like quitting smoking. Your body will crave anger like a smoker’s body craves nicotine. The world will provide just enough problems to get you however much anger you are used to.

Also, pay attention to the situations that get you angry. As you become more familiar with the kinds of things you use to get angry about, you will be able to see them coming and make an effort to respond differently. Anger seems like an involuntary response to situations, but when you learn how you get angry and become curious about how it arises, you will find that there is a brief opening, between when something happens and when anger begins. That opening allows you to come up with a more aware response. For example, if you get road rage, you can notice when another driver makes a bonehead move and, instead of becoming enraged, notice the fear you feel for your safety. Instead of screaming, take a breath and wish for everybody on the road to be safe from accidents.

With a strong anger habit, anger becomes an overused emotional response that overrides more subtle emotions. Anger often arises from feelings of fear or helplessness. As you practice approaching your anger with awareness, you will get better at feeling the more subtle, less comfortable emotions. Feelings of vulnerability may be less comfortable than flying off in a fit of rage, but those feelings are necessary and are less destructive to you and the people around you.

When you act angry at people, defenses arise and they try to protect themselves. When you become sad around people, compassion arises and they try to comfort you. It is a great life skill to be able to control anger because, without that skill, anger will control you.

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Counter Culture

Ours is a culture of counting. We like to measure things. We like to keep score. Even when we find ourselves apart from the dominant culture, we still fall into the habit of counting and rating ourselves and others. There is no end to the categories that we can use to measure ourselves. We measure physical characteristics, like height and weight, skin color or gender. We love to measure ourselves by our sexual preference or orientation. We measure ourselves by our IQ, by our level of education, or by our emotional intelligence. We measure ourselves by our possessions, by our wealth. We measure ourselves by our religions or spirituality, by which god we believe in, or don’t, and how we express that belief. We measure ourselves by our health, both physical and mental. We measure ourselves by our appearance. We are endlessly creative in the ways we measure and define ourselves. We create and belong to cultures related to our measurements. If a lot of people are in our group, we are a dominant culture, if we are in opposition to a dominant culture we are a counter culture. As long as we count and measure who we are, we belong to a culture of counters. If we don’t, we are in the counter culture.

All this measuring and keeping score is fine as long as we understand that we’re doing it. If we start to feel like we don’t measure up, then we are keeping score in a way that makes us feel lousy. Who and what we are is not really the problem, the question is how we count ourselves. We can also have problems with the way other people count us, and measure us. That can affect the way people treat us and we might count ourselves by their standards. When we notice that happening, either to ourselves or others, we can simply stop counting. We can join the counter culture to the counter culture. We are perfect just as we are. You can count on it.

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Pork-Opine

Like a porcupine’s quills, our opinions about things and people can be pointed and dangerous. At least for a porcupine, the quills are are only pointed outwards to defend them from predators. Our opinions, however, may be directed outwards, but they are double ended, so as they point out, they jab in. Those things we think about other people, about their shortcomings and personal defects, will sometimes hurt others, but always hurt us. Unchecked opinions about ourselves or others can tear our self-esteem to shreds.

Fortunately, as porcupine quills come out easily and grow back quickly, our opinions can be dropped and reformed in ways that help us instead of hurting us. Like our negative opinions bring us down, our positive opinions lift us up. The sweet spot though is in the middle, where we can see positive and negative attributes all around us without them reflecting back on us at all. In order to find that sweet spot, we have to pay attention to all the thousands of opinions that cross our minds each day.

On the surface, it may seem like recognizing immorality and stupidity in others may lift us up by making us feel morally secure and intelligent. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way…read more

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Unraveling the Dream

It is easy to recognize the difference between our sleeping dreams and our waking experience. It is not so easy to recognize the dreamlike quality of reality. Dreams seem intensely real while we are in them, then often absurd when we recall them when awake. In dreams, people who have died are alive and people who are alive may die. Although, dreams defy time and physical boundaries, they maintain an internal logic where, no matter how unlikely, impossible, or ridiculous something may be for real, it all seems natural within the dream. When we are awake, our waking life feels natural too. In that way, it is dreamlike.

This natural way of experiencing life involves constantly making sense of the world around us. Because the world is so complex and unfathomable, we have to break it down into little bits that we can pretend make sense to us...read more

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Only Inner Peace

The world is currently at war with itself. People are killing people. The suffering that all this killing creates touches us all. We all find ourselves taking sides with the killers and the killed, and we stew in hate, anger, fear, and grief. You would think that with our big brains, meta awareness, and basic morality, we would come up with a way to stop all the killing, but we’re not there yet. Even in these violent circumstances, each of us has the ability to create inner peace. By working on our inner peace, we can help our big brains deal with those violent and painful feelings that leave them so confused.

Our complex brains operate in a state of general confusion, which makes it possible to trick them into being at peace...read more

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Breathing Underwater

Humans, on our own, can’t breathe or see well underwater. However, with a simple mask and snorkel we are equipped to observe the wonders under the sea. Meditating doesn’t require any equipment but it is like putting on a mask and snorkel to observe the wonders of our minds.

Meditation is not complicated. It is essentially holding your body still and focusing your attention somewhere. Focusing your attention on your breath is like dropping anchor. Although your attention may wander, your breath continues its rhythmic ins and outs and you can bring your attention back there, again and again, and be centered and alert in the present moment.

Throughout our normal busy and emotionally charged lives, we breathe according to our activity level and emotional experience. When we’re happy, we breathe happy. When we’re relaxed we breathe relaxed. When we’re scared we breathe the fear. When we’re stressed we breathe stressfully. Our pervasive moods and ways of being in the world become so normal to us that we flow with the tides and currents, wherever they take us. When life gets overwhelming, we struggle to keep our heads above water. Fortunately, we are the water…read more

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It Is What You Think

Mindfulness is a term for being present and compassionate with whatever we encounter. It works by engaging our minds to take care of our minds. When we don’t use mindfulness, our minds tend to make problems for us. We habitually think whatever occurs to us, and whatever we think is how things are. We have no choice but to believe that things are how they seem, so when they seem bad, they are bad. Things seeming bad is suffering. Being mindful, being present and compassionate with that suffering is how we use our minds to ease the suffering....read m

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The Magic of Meditation

There is no trick to meditation. It is a simple process that anybody can do anywhere at any time. It can be done in any position, sitting, standing, lying down, or during activities. You can meditate for a few seconds, minutes, or for hours. The process of meditation involves focusing your attention on your attention. Because attention can be so squirrely, it helps to focus your attention on something more steady like your breath. When your attention jumps to the next most interesting thing in your life, notice the jump and let that interesting thought go, bringing your attention back to your breath. The basic mechanics of meditation are so simple and are so similar to the regular workings of the mind that it is surprising that it has any effect at all on your psyche. When practiced regularly though, it can change your whole world...read more

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Meditation to Build Self-Esteem

Here is a guided meditation you can use to help build self-esteem. Sit in a comfortable position, with your back straight, breathe in as you read the breathing in lines and breathe out as you read the breathing out lines.

Breathing in, I am aware of my breath going in

Breathing out, I am aware of my breath going out

Breathing in, I am present in my body

Breathing out, I am present in time and space

Breathing in, I invite a new perspective on myself

Breathing out, I empty my mind

Breathing in, I give myself the gift of fresh air

Breathing out, I give back to the world

Breathing in, I recognize that I suffer from my self-esteem

Breathing out, I wish to change that habit

Breathing in, I recognize that I am human

Breathing out, I know that being human hurts

Breathing In, I feel the pain and sadness

Breathing out, I give that to the world

Breathing in, I feel the world’s suffering

Breathing out, I send the world peace

Breathing in, I am connected to all people

Breathing out, I wish people to be free of suffering

Breathing in, I am connected to myself

Breathing out, I wish to be free of suffering

Breathing in, I invite peace into my life

Breathing out, I share peace with the world

Breathing in, I see all people are equal

Breathing out, I join the sea of equality

Breathing in, I am no better than anybody

Breathing out, nobody is better than me

Breathing in, I am only what I am

Breathing out, I am enough

Breathing in, I connect with my essential goodness

Breathing out, I share my goodness with the world

Breathing in, I know new thoughts may unsettle me

Breathing out, I let my thoughts go.

Breathing in, I am present in my body

Breathing out, I am present in time and space

Breathing in, I am aware of my breath going in

Breathing out, I am aware of my breath going out

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A New Kind of Mind

The Dalai Lama, the spiritual and secular leader of Tibetan Buddhists, has often claimed that his true religion is kindness. He is a very nice person. Kindness is part of every person’s basic nature, as nobody would survive if people were not generally kind to each other. Despite all that kindness out there, there is also a significant amount of meanness. As it is in the world, so it is in each of us. Most of us are generally kind, and then we have our moments of meanness. The problem is that even a little bit of meanness can wipe out a whole lot of kindness, and it rarely works the other way around. It can take a whole lot of kindness to fix even a little bit of meanness. Kindness does heal though, which is why it is important to practice it, a lot.

Our bodies carry physical scars of our past injuries and our minds carry emotional scars of all the times people have been mean to us or to each other around us. Our minds have built themselves around our experiences of kindness and meanness. We have developed habits and patterns of having kind and mean thoughts. Some of those thoughts are about other people and some of them are about ourselves. Whether we are thinking of ourselves or others, all of the thoughts occur to us and so affect us directly. For example, we can think something mean about somebody, but if we don’t do or say anything about our mean thought, that person will be completely unaffected by it. We however, will always negatively experience that moment of negativity...read more

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Monster Moods

We experience our lives through the filters of our moods. How we feel about ourselves is reflected in our moods. Like the chicken and the egg, it is hard to tell which comes first, the self or the mood. We may be in a bad mood and start thinking bad things about ourselves, or we may start thinking bad things about ourselves and fall into a bad mood. Bad moods and negative self-talk can perpetuate themselves and spiral into monster moods like depression and rage.

We like to think of our moods as our own personal experience, but moods are socially contagious and carry momentum. A person in a really bad mood will feel antagonized when confronted with cheery people. An angry person will lash out and create bad moods all around. This kind of interaction is what may turn a person in a monster mood into a mood monster...read more

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Mind Power

We think that we can’t control things with our minds. That is the only way we can control things. We have amazing abilities to make breakfast appear on the table, flowers in vases, monkeys in space, all with our minds. Our minds make us get out of bed in the morning and dictate where our fingers go on the keyboard when we type. While our minds do these regular things they are also amusing themselves by travelling through time into a remembered past or an imagined future. As our minds facilitate travel through time and space, they also manufacture emotions to add dimensions of texture to the experience.

There is incredible creative power in our mind, but if we don’t pay attention to what our mind is doing, it can create an uncomfortable, or uninhabitable, living space. Living space becomes uncomfortable when it is filled with opinions about what is wrong with the world accompanied by the sense that nothing can be done about it. The mind that creates the discomfort has the power to fix it.

To gain some control of our mind, we need to see just what our mind is creating and where it goes. If it spends too much time in a better past or a scary future, it needs to be brought back to the present. That is the most basic form of control we have over our mind. With a deep belly breath, we can always bring our mind back to the present, where its power is most effective.

The present is where we feel our emotions, so if there is a difficult emotion happening, we need the power of our mind there to help us deal with it. When we remain alert to where our mind’s power is going, we can direct that power for the benefit of all beings.

Our mind’s power is like a giant elephant. Our breath is the leash that can keep the elephant from trampling villages, making them uninhabitable. All we have to do is tug on that leash regularly and we will see our mind’s power create a brilliant world.

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