There have been too many days lately when the world seems to be changing too fast. So much of the human world screams at us to be on guard that we can feel crowded out of our own lives. We can feel there’s no room for us to be ourselves. To enjoy. To breathe. So, how do we give ourselves the space we need to breathe and be ourselves?
Sometimes, I find myself rushing out of an unformed now to an already completed idea of later. I wake with the ring of an alarm and I’m on my way someplace before I even remove the quilt covering my body. The day already belongs to the past. Or instead of being in bed in the morning in my sleep clothes, I am already dressed in a costume to play a role someone else wrote. To leave my bed is to step onto a stage. Or I feel myself driven by an expectation or self-judgement that is so old I don’t even remember where or how it began.
This is how anxiety can arise with me in the morning and continue through the day. It is how we can both fear the future and want the present already over with. When we concentrate solely on how others will see us, we are never seen. If the day is already determined, we have little say in it.
Recently, before getting out of bed in the morning, I‘ve been reminding myself⎼ This is my life. I even put up reminders, a photo, artwork, saying, or just the word⎼ ‘remember.’ As much as I can, I stop for a moment to imagine what I do that helps me stay open. That adds to my feeling of strength and agency. That allows me, right now, to learn from and deepen my awareness. To enjoy living. To meet others as more like friends or at least unknown beings rich in possibility. It is my life. So, why not sit for a moment remembering that?
And throughout the day, if I’m driving myself and rushing too quickly, I stop and breathe. I question the voices in my head and notice the movement in my body. Judgmental words are visualized as birds flying off toward the sun. I notice them, learn from them, and let them go.
This first practice re-affirms what I was already doing⎼ remembering how to take it easy on myself and not let fear or anxiety take control. The second is inspired by a book I am reading about learning different forms of attention. The way we focus, or the quality of our attention, can either increase or decrease the pain we feel. This is equally true with emotional and physical pain.
We could do this anywhere, except not right after a meal. For now, imagine we take a seat in a quiet spot and not after a meal. When ready, and with eyes open, we ask ourselves: “Can you let your mind and body naturally and effortlessly respond to the following questions?” 15 seconds later, we continue: “Can you imagine paying attention to the feeling of space that the whole room occupies?”
This is the beginning of a practice from a fascinating book called Dissolving Pain: Simple Brain Training Exercises for Overcoming Chronic Pain, by Les Fehmi and Jim Robbins. It comes with a CD of guided exercises. Doing the exercises, in my opinion, is no replacement for the depth of meditation. But they are a wonderful complement to it. They teach open-focus attention and how to discern and use whichever form of awareness is appropriate to a situation.
It is easy to get stuck on favoring one form of attention. Fehmi and Robbins talk about RAS, Rigid Attention Syndrome, where we so favor a narrowed, focused attention our body and mind are perpetually in threat mode, muscles tensed as if in preparation to flight or fight. Heart rate is elevated. Perception limited. It can cause pain to develop, or it can increase the volume of any pain already present. It can also inhibit our thinking ability and isolate us from what or whom we think about or speak to.
This narrow, object-oriented attention is so useful, but one our society over uses. Many of us grew up with being yelled at to “Pay attention.” “Do your work.”
It is also easy to misread pain. We know it can be a message that something is wrong, but often conceptualize it as unwanted discomfort and miss the emotional component. We just want it gone. But the way we respond to pain is as important as the fact of pain. The authors remind us of a now famous saying congruent with Buddhist teachings on suffering (but not from Buddha): “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
When we experience pain, we could respond in 4 or 5 different ways: we could fight the pain, which adds a second level of fear to the original and thus increases the tension, which increases the pain. We could medicate it away, which is sometimes necessary, but the medication could become a different form of threat. We could divert our attention, or do the opposite and worry about the pain, focusing exclusively on it, which also increases it. Or we could use a more diffuse, objectless attention, open our eyes, expand, and soften our focus, taking in not only the pain, but everything else⎼ the space of the room we’re in⎼ the space our body occupies⎼ the space our hands inhabit⎼ the distance from the center of the pain to other parts of our body.
The same holds true with emotional pain. We can feel spacious instead of crowded, open instead of walled in by worry, fear, anxiety⎼ or by words or roles we don’t recognize as our own. It is this second practice, with attention, that showed me that the first, time, remembering, slowing down, is linked with space, emptiness, quiet. We can take in everything around us instead of narrowing our focus to only one thing or in one way.
When we speak with others, we sometimes speak to what we expect they want to hear. Sometimes, to an image of what we want them to say. And sometimes, we give both others and ourselves space to be whomever we are. We write our own lines as we speak and feel them. We make speech and action more empathic and loving. When our words are not only tuned to the truth of ourselves but to the eyes and heart of those we speak with, this changes everything. It returns us to ourselves in this moment. It gifts us a sense of our power to act to help others and better our world.
When I hear about all of us who have been sick or who have died from COVID, or all the threats on our rights and environment, I can feel threatened just getting out of bed. But this feeling is so much worse when I think I am merely an actor with limited capabilities on someone else’s stage. But my life⎼ our lives are ours to live, but only in the truth of who we are and always in the context of everyone with whom we share this time and world.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock