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Downloading Future, Please Wait

BEING HERE NOW

When I posted this picture without title or further explanation some time ago, I was astounded at how many people said “huh??”

The point of the post is not some intent to confuse or create a clever play on words. 

Rather, it is to invite you to contemplate two things:

(1) The computer mindset in which we all spend way too much of our time (downloading content); and

(2) The future-oriented frame of mind in which we all have the tendency to live our lives.

The problem with waiting for the future to finish downloading is the idea that we have Time.  People tend to live facing towards the Future with some sense that “It” will be arriving from that direction.   “Someday” we’ll get all our ducks in a row and then life will begin.

Waiting for “It” to arrive (whatever we take “it” to be) distracts us from the only moment in which we can ever be happy, which is Now. 

Life is not a dress rehearsal; it’s the actual event.

Mindful Conversation

MINDFUL CONVERSATION

Communication is a mutual act;  it takes two to communicate,  one to speak and the other to listen.    As Henry David Thoreau once said, “the greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when someone asked me what I thought and attended to my answer”.

Since we spend a large part of our lives talking to people, mindful awareness of speaking and listening provides a wonderful opportunity to open the senses, heart, and mind to receive the moment more fully.

The following are some important guidelines:

• Listen to others with appreciation for the gift of what is being communicated.
• When participating in conversation, rest quietly and receptively in open awareness.      If I am not present with me, I cannot be present with others.
• Listen to emotion, facial expression, and tone of voice as well as meaning. Listen to the silences between words or between speakers.     You are listening to a fellow human being.   Listen with kindness.    Let the words, the stories, touch a compassionate heart.

Are Relationships Becoming Obsolete?

It was several years ago when I first heard about a new smart phone app which touted its ability to listen to and decipher the complexity of baby sounds to help the new mother discern whether the baby was hungry, wet or tired.   As a relational therapist, I was appalled by the potential significance of such substitutions for natural human empathy.  Woefully few parents are relationally adequate as it is.    A poor omen for a society which already seems so dysfunctional and disordered.

I thought of this in the context of the chillingly frequent scene of families sitting silent around a restaurant table, each person individually absorbed with their own phone.    Another observation that woke me up was this:    A patient told me about a painful incident with his son, in which another 11 year old boy came to visit and spent the entire three hours of their “playdate”  engaged with solo video games on his device.  Only one or two sentences were spoken between the boys in the entire afternoon, and my patient’s son reacted by becoming quite despondent.    Fortunately for him, his father— an extremely relational and psychologically minded man — was able to help his son recognize his feelings and put them into words, and the incident became a wonderful (and intimate)  learning moment between father and son.

And now enter “SNOO”, the smart bassinet from a company called Happy Baby, which for $1200 will swaddle, rock, vibrate, and soothe your baby with white noise while you sleep.   Described by its creator as a “4^th trimester”,  SNOO promises to “hear your baby’s cries and automatically respond with 5 levels of gradually stronger white noise and motion to find the best level to soothe fussing”.

Undoubtedly a dream come true for a sleep deprived young mother.   But what, I wonder, will be the psychological consequences?    Will the SNOO’d baby be exceptionally well-regulated and emotionally balanced?   Autistic for lack of human connection during basic distress?  Or maybe both??

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We can abstract this question to the future of Relationships in the era of Artificial Intelligence.   In 2013, the futuristic fantasy film “Her” envisioned one possibility.   It told the story of a man who became enthralled by—

or fell in love with—  his operating system, an intuitive entity in its own right whose bright voice and playful personality enabled him to form a romantic attachment to “her”.  

Fast forward to 2018:   A recent television documentary aired footage of young Chinese men and women who related to Siri (or her Chinese equivalent) as a best friend.

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Dystopian prophesy?

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What do YOU think?

Wise Relationship to Narrative

“stories are not just stories. They teach us what is real, what is valuable and what is possible. Without stories there is no way to engage with the world because there is no world, and no one to engage with it because there is no self.” ……… David Loy

Buddhist psychology teaches that we must differentiate between the stories that we tell and the direct experience of life.  Thus, in mindfulness practice, the first step in working with the storytelling mind is to notice the endless stream of thoughts and commentary that accompanies our experience. We must not identify, it is taught, with story-teller mind. 

Accordingly, the question “what story am I believing now?” is a useful inquiry.   In the very act of asking this question, we have already taken a stance of observation which changes the way that we are relating to our narratives. This inquiry invites disidentification from belief: it creates space in which we can reflect upon what we may previously have assumed to be true.

However,  not all stories in the mind are created equal.  While our narratives may reinforce emotional patterns in the mind which are dysfunctional and which have the effect of keeping us stuck in old ways of being, others, in contrast, illuminate where we have been stuck and in doing so may open the possibility of transformative change.

Particular narrative themes hold important clues as to the unresolved emotions that has been stimulated in the mind.  Some stories in the mind are conscious: they are associated with explicit stories, thoughts or images that occur in the course of daily life and/or during sitting meditation.  However, other narratives are quite unconscious.  They might escape our notice entirely were it not for the presence of painful affect that is associated with them!

Even when a narrative theme is quite conscious, its meaning is often poorly understood.  At the very least, there are usually blind spots in what someone can see of the mental structure that underlies problems.  Whether understood or not, our mental narratives reveal what needs to be “worked through” psychologically.

It is true that sometimes we may need to “let go” of a particular story, hold it more lightly, or make it not so significant. But at other times, we may need to delve into the story: reflect on it more deeply, think about why we are so invested in believing it, and understand why we may have told it. This is wise relationship to narrative.

The Dharma of Trauma

One way to understand the effects of meditation is in terms of the slow but steady ‘unwinding’ of experience that occurs as relaxation deepens. ‘Knots’ of energy in the body/mind are held as patterns of somatically encoded sensation, muscle contraction, emotion, and memory, all intertwined (“non-experienced experience”). When we meet each experience as it presents itself, without resistance, these knots begins to dissolve into the space of open awareness.   

https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B01N24V17T p. 179

But encountering the knots of energy in the body/mind during meditation can also be overwhelming.  According to Dr. Willoughby Britton, who has studied the adverse effects of contemplative practices for more than a decade,  meditation can “lead people to some dark places, triggering trauma or leaving people feeling disoriented”.   Contrary to the expectation of psychological improvements, meditation experiences can be difficult or distressing or even impairing. And this may happen even in people who have no prior psychological or trauma history.

Now, Britton and her colleague/ trauma specialist Dr. David Treleaven have created a program called First Do No Harm to help people work with these challenges. The program is aimed at meditation teachers and providers of mindfulness-based interventions—therapeutic techniques rooted in mindfulness practices—but the lessons are helpful for anyone who meditates.

In the trauma-sensitive approach, meditators are taught techniques such as ‘dual awareness’: keeping most of your awareness on something that’s safe and pleasant, but dipping into a negative emotion or trauma with 10 or 20 percent of attention.  In this way, negative experience can be titrated.

For more information: [https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/trauma-meditation]

Asking Questions

“The act of asking questions breaks open the unexamined and stagnant shell of the present, revealing the hidden and stale surfaces of the way we think about things”.  … Fran Peavey

The practice of asking questions systematically is called INQUIRY.  Inquiry means investigation, exploration, but mostly it means wanting to find out. It is a questioning. “What is this? Why is that? What is happening? Where is it going?”

INQUIRY is not the same as analyzing or thinking about a question.  It means to live in the question of something, to consciously engage our experience in a way which invites it to unfold. Exploring experience from a place of inquiry is an invitation, a receptivity to discovering something new. 

To be genuinely curious about what we DON’T KNOW has the potential to turn life on its head, revealing things in unexpected and marvelous ways.

Mindfulness and Psychoanalysis: Deepening The Conversation

The overlapping surfaces of Buddhism and psychoanalysis have been examined by psychoanalytic thinkers for more than half a century. Given the centrality of ‘mindfulness’ in today’s cultural narrative, a clear understanding of the role of mindful awareness in the clinical encounter is more relevant than ever.

‘Inquiring Deeply’ is a therapeutic framework which blends relational psychoanalysis and Buddhist wisdom into a single coherent frame. It borrows the methods of deep inquiry and investigation from mindfulness practice in order to amplify and unpack subjective experience. It can be conceptualized as awareness practice which focuses on the psychological world of our lived experience with others.

Inquiring Deeply within the framework of psychotherapy is a form of psychoanalytic treatment in which the focus of therapeutic inquiry remains the ‘relational field’, contemplative awareness deepens the experience of intimacy in the therapeutic encounter and privileges the felt sense of the emergent relational moment.

Psychological Healing

Because psychological wounds are fundamentally relational wounds, relationship is also a natural path of healing.  By inquiring deeply into the upsets that occur for us in relationship, it becomes possible to begin to understand what is wounded, missing, or dysfunctional in us.  

Deep emotional understanding of developmental psychological wounds, such as childhood trauma and neglect, and recognition of their impact on present-day life, lays the groundwork for healing in psychotherapy.

What Is Inquiry?

“Inquiry” is an attitude of mind.  It means to live in the question of something, to consciously engage our experience in a way which invites it to unfold. When we ‘inquire deeply’ into a problem or concern, we approach our experience with the attitude of delving into it, feeling whatever it is more fully, and inviting it to reveal itself.   Through this practice of awareness, presence, and self-reflection, we become more Real; more fully who we are.

The Mind Is Always Itself

When someone engages in both psychotherapy and meditation practice, it can become difficult for them to delineate between the two lenses of view.  A “mixing of minds” occurs;  or, more accurately,  we can notice that experience does not neatly sort itself into one category or the other.  Our experience lends itself equally well to interpretation within both of these narrative contexts (and many others).

We could say that the mind is always itself,  exactly as it is in any particular moment;  and yet never the same in any one moment and the next.   A constant stream of “minding” in process.

It is exactly as Heraclitus famously said:  no man steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.