Monthly Archives: September 2012

Meditation and Emotional Affect

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Affect is that term psychologists use when the rest of us would use words like attitude, outlook, or mood – a positive or negative disposition.

How’s your affect?  For years mine was passionate, anxious, and irritable.  I complained, criticized, and always expected the worst.

But now I am seldom anxious, accept myself where I am, and expect to bless and be blessed.  What happened?

Well I saw some good therapists, gradually became more self aware, accepted who I was, and began to meditate; more or less in that order.

But what I believe has had the greatest impact on my emotional state is meditation.  For years I was on medication for anxiety.  Now my only prescription is roughly ten minutes of meditation, three times per day.

The fruit of this meditation has been equanimity.  It didn’t happen all at once.  But with regular practice over the course of maybe 60 days, noticeable changes began to take place.

Moreover the meditation itself has been a process of experimentation, observation, and modification.  As you probably know, there are a myriad of ways to meditate.  Some work better for me than others.  I’ve tried:

  1. transcendental meditation,
  2. observation of the breath,
  3. various kinds of pranayama or yogic breathing,
  4. Chanting via kriya yoga.

The last has worked best for me; surprisingly so.  If my therapist had not assigned it for homework, I never would have tried chanting.  But chanting may not work best for you.  And there are many modes of meditation I still haven’t tried.

The empirical evidence is growing of the many positive benefits of meditation.  Moreover there is also growing evidence that positive affect leads to a higher quality of life in general.

I encourage you to try some sort of meditation, and to keep trying and experimenting until you find a method that works for you.  Especially if you, like me, suspect yourself of having a negative disposition.

Practicing Self-awareness

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Perhaps the most beneficial practice in my repertoire came from a book I read many years ago, The Artist’s Way.  In the book the author, Julia Cameron, described a practice called The Morning Pages that I have more or less continued ever since.

The basic idea is to write three hand written pages of stream of consciousness first thing in the morning.  Three pages, regardless and heedless of quality; just get whatever is in your head onto the page.

By doing this day after day I made a few discoveries.

  • First it gave me some separation from myself, and enabled me to see myself from another perspective.
  • Second, if I wrote just as fast possible without thinking or critiquing, something interesting would come to the surface.
  • Third, if I continued to write past the first and second page, my unconscious mind would seem to vomit something up on the third page that might be particularly telling.

By interesting I don’t mean interesting to the world in general, but to me in particular.  Something about that process would reveal me to myself; enabled me to face, and eventually embrace, my shadow self.

I have found this to be a very powerful thing.  It is hard to look into the eyes of our shadow, or to even admit it is there.  But to see it, to accept it, and to understand the desire or fear it represents is transformative.

Moreover hopes and dreams are expressed we might otherwise dismiss as unrealistic, or impossible.  How we interact with others, but especially how we feel about others and ourselves is revealed through these morning pages.

And it’s cathartic. It seems to still the voice of the inner critic, and purge oneself of negative thoughts.

Balanced Living through Domains of Practice

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What domains of practice enable us to do is shine a light on a particular aspect of our lives.

Suppose a person did not recognize these several domains.  She might say, “There is only one domain in life, and that’s the real world.”  So what?

That “real world” might mean different things in different cultures.  In America I think it’s safe to say it means being vocationally successful.  And yet a person can be vocationally successful and one day wake up to find herself lonely, unhealthy, stressed out, and searching for meaning.

A domain serves as a kind of lens that brings into focus an area of life that might otherwise get overlooked in the highly competitive world we live in today.  If there is only the real world, it’s easy to keep doing those things that make that needle the real world measures us by go higher and higher, until one day the oil light comes on and the engine seizes.

Dividing one’s life into domains and somehow observing or measuring what’s going on there is like having the dashboard on the car to tell you whether all those systems that keep the car going are functioning properly.

I learned this the hard way.  I would usually come to realize that a certain aspect of my life wasn’t functioning properly by some catastrophic failure.

It’s like that old Fram oil commercial, “You can pay me now, or pay me later.”  It is so much more cost effective to regularly change the oil in a car than it is to wait till it dies on the road from lack of oil.

Domains of Practice

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I consider a domain to be a subset of my life experience where a certain set of rules, relationships, or skills obtain that either don’t obtain or are of diminished importance in another such subset.

I have divided my life into nine of these domains of practice: spirit, mind, body, emotion, family, society, profession, personal finance, and household.

  1. I define spirit to be those ideas and processes I associate with meaning making, purpose, and faith.
  2. By mind I mean those cognitive processes by which I come to know and understand the world.
  3. By body I mean the physical vessel that I associate with me.
  4. By emotion I mean the interface between the mind and body, and the social sphere I move in.
  5. By family I mean my immediate family of spouse & children (including step) as well as extended family of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.
  6. By social I mean those relationships with people beyond family members of people I know, such as friends and acquaintances, as well as those larger communities and cultures of people that I may not know that I live and work with, yet which I may influence and am influenced by.
  7. By profession I mean the means or intended means of one’s livelihood.  The skill associated with, or required by such vocation.
  8. By personal finance I mean what a household does with the money it has earned, inherited, or borrowed.
  9. By household I mean the maintenance of the living environment, the preparing of meals, and activities related to the care of children that are not directly interpersonal (that is, a conversation or letter written to a child, or a date with a child where conversation or personal interaction is the primary intent I would categorize as family).

I believe I came to recognize these nine domains because I do care about whether I am competent in each, and because I have recognized some kind of skill deficit in that domain that did not carry over from some other domain in which I was already competent.  Your list might be different from mine.

Choosing What to Practice

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This may seem like a silly post.  We practice the thing we want to be good at, right?

Well, is there anything we do we don’t want to be good at?  Consider the domains of your life, such as spirit, mind, and body; or family, friends, and community; or professional, financial, and household.

In other words, a domain of life is a kind of abstraction, where a certain set of rules, skills, or relationships apply that do not obtain in another.  There may be a certain amount of overlap, but in general the different domains require different competencies in order to be successful.

Is there any domain in which you live that you wouldn’t choose to be competent? Suppose you are an accountant, married with children.  Just to be an accountant implies a certain level of competence.  In general a person would need to go to college and earn a degree in accounting to even be considered for an accounting job placement.

But beyond that, what do we expect?  Does the person expect to continue “practicing” accounting in the sense of going above and beyond what is required for her job in order to get better at accounting?  Does she have a professional practice?

What about being married with children?  How do we get better at being a spouse, or parent?  Being married with children generally implies we live together; that we pay our bills from a pooled income; that we maintain our home together; and that we parent our kids together.  But how do we become competent at those things?  Does being a good accountant imply we will be a good spouse and a good parent?

This week we will be looking at the idea of domains of practice.

Deliberately Gentle Practice

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There’s a lot of buzz now about deliberate practice, and rightfully so.  It’s the kind of practice that leads to expertise.

Deliberate practice is goal directed.  It provides the practitioner with feedback: you did this well, you struggled with that.  It focuses on the stuff you struggle with, and consequently it’s difficult.  You do that hard stuff again and again till you get it right. 

I am not an expert.  Don’t get the idea that I’m writing this blog because I am.  I’m writing this blog because I have struggled with practice all of my life, and because I’m convinced nearly everything worthwhile in life comes out of some kind of practice.

When I was young I hated to run.  I would set myself a goal to go out and run five miles, or maybe 40 forty yard wind sprints.  I’d be in agony, and probably not finish.  The next day I’d find a reason not to do it.

When I was in college one of my roommates, a guy who had won the state cross country championship, had a book called The Zen of Running.  I picked it up one day and opened it up to a page that read something like this: “Just go out and run.  Feel the joy of it.  And when you don’t enjoy it anymore, stop.

This one idea totally revolutionized my practice: practice as long as you enjoy it, and when you stop enjoying it, go on to something else.

I began to run – regularly.  Instead of dreading the run, I began to look forward to it.  It was a joyful experience, particularly if it was a bright sunny day.  I would go for a run, and immediately the tensions of the day would begin to melt away.

Now I have never won a race, but I did learn to make running a regular part of my day, a practice.  And my life was much better for it.

Serenity through Practice

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It occurs to me that what this blog is all about is maintaining equanimity in the face of an increasingly chaotic world.  That’s what practice inevitably leads to: a sense of certainty and security that stems from knowing what this day will bring: that is, our practice.

I guess that may not seem like much comfort to someone who may be about to lose their job.  But perhaps we place too much of our happiness in a position contingent upon job outcomes, or job status.

Not that we shouldn’t expect happiness from our work, but that it is rather only a part of our happiness, and our happiness needn’t come to an end just because our job does.

I think you can draw a link between equanimity and certainty of practice.  Maybe the equanimity comes directly from meditation, but I suspect it comes as well from the expectation that, whatever else happens today, I can rest in the knowledge that I Will Do My Practice – and that’s powerful.

It grows in power as we grow in our practice.  As our daisy-chain of days practiced lengthens, so does our expectation of doing the practice and our confidence from having done the practice.

What make the Five Tibetans so powerful for me are not their rigor, not that they make me physically powerful, but rather their very simplicity and ease of accomplishment.  I know that as sure as the sun rises, I can rise to do the rites; and therein lays their power.  They are rigorous enough to keep me healthy, and short and simple enough for me to consistently do them every day.

To the extent that I can develop such a practice in each domain of my life, to that extent I will have an expectation of accomplishment: that the house is neat and clean from having a place for everything, and everything in its place; of emotional equipoise that comes from meditation; of health from yoga and bike riding; of financial health from budgeting, saving, and investing; of mental health from reading, writing, and model building; of spiritual health from reading scripture, prayer, worship, and fellowship; of social health from broadening and deepening connections.

These expectations are what serenity is made of.

Mission

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Practice is the evidence of passion.  It is the path to mastery, to adaptation, and transformation.

Practice is that force in us that is opposite to entropy, to apathy, and to death.

We are dedicated to those who, like us, want to change but struggle with practice.

Our lives have a circular pattern formed by the rotation of a circular earth about its axis, and by the revolution of the earth about a circular sun.  We rise in the morning with the sun, and lay down to sleep with its setting.  And the practices we repeat in the course of a day, in the days of a season, and the seasons of a year determine our destinies over the course of our lives.

Moreover the circles of our friends, family, and coworkers codetermine our conversation, the thoughts of our meditation, and the confidences of our heart.

We seek to bring people together into a circle of practice, to learn from each other how we practice, what we practice, and why.

We believe that from this circle of practice we will lead each other into a new age of well-being and connectedness.