Tag Archives: practice

Emotional Polar Therapy (sequel to Practicing Acceptance)

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All my life I have struggled to keep my emotions under good regulation.  When I wasn’t worried or anxious, I was angry or depressed.  Joy was nearly unknown to me, and I thought it belonged only to those who had won some great victory.

When the series on Integral Life Practice came to an end, I wanted to work with someone on my shadow self in the context of the enneagram.  One of the presenters referred me to an Emotional Polar Therapist.

My first visit to this woman was very strange, yet powerful.  We had an interview.  She tapped on my shoulder and took some notes.  She had me push against her hand while thinking some thought and took more notes.

She put magnets under my feet, a pillow on my lap, and a kind of bicolor needle work between my hands. Then she laid hands on me and had me breathe deeply in unison with her.  She had me repeat after her affirmations like, “I am a valuable person,” or “I deserve success,” etc.

The odd thing was that it was a struggle for me to say these things.  In fact, at one point I began to choke and weep.  This was my first visit, mind, and all the while I’m asking myself whether I’d been referred to some kind of witch doctor.

When that was done she gave me some homework of breathing exercises, and “kriyas” to do.  I left feeling like something had “happened,” like I’d seen a light after a long stay in a cave.

I did the exercises daily, returned to her periodically, and began to notice a gradual change in my emotional state.  The frequency and duration of my negative emotions steadily decreased.  The same measures of my positive emotions trend upwards.

I even experience joy now, and have discovered that it has less to do with great victories than it does with recognizing small ones.

Practicing Faith

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How do you practice your faith?  Or perhaps you don’t think you have faith.

We all believe in something.  We couldn’t even get out of bed in the morning if we didn’t believe something was true, meaningful, or valuable.  Whatever those things are, that’s your faith.

I think faith has at least three parts:

  1. Understanding our faith.
  2. Connecting with like minded individuals in a community of faith.
  3. Practicing our faith.

By understanding our faith I mean drilling down into those writings, traditions, and ideas that are the underpinnings of our faith.  If our faith has scriptures, then those scriptures are the foundation that faith is built upon.  So it is important to know them, understand them, and to reflect on your life in the context of those scriptures.

If your faith has no scripture, then ask yourself what are the writings or the sources of the ideas upon which your faith is built.  Again, dig into them, know them, understanding them.  And reflect upon your own life in the context of those writings.

What can you do to embody those ideas on which your faith is built?

It is important to connect with others who share your faith.  We are social animals.  We need other people.  We want our faith validated by others who value the same things we do.  We can encourage each other in our faith, and pick each other up when we fall down.

Finally we need to practice our faith.  We want our actions to embody those ideas we value.  And it is easier to practice in groups than it is alone.  If you believe in public service, then find a group that is doing work you value.

Act on your faith and passion with those who share your faith and passion, and you will make a lasting difference in the world.

But ask yourself whether you and your group are a blessing or curse upon the world.  And if it is that later, perhaps it is time to reexamine your faith.

The Socially Healthy Person

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Coming up with a social practice has been a struggle for me, in part because it is not clear to me what the end of that practice ought to be.

Note that while I separate emotional from social well-being, I’m not sure the two domains are separable.

So what does my socially healthy person look like?

She has friends she trusts and can confide in.  She is willing to be vulnerable with those she trusts.  She enjoys being with people, and people enjoy being with her.  She is approachable, and approaches those acquaintances she wants to know better.

She wants to broaden and deepen her relationships.  That is, she wants to extend her circle of acquaintance.  She wants to get to know and understand the people she is already acquainted with.  If she finds someone she is acquainted with both interesting and admirable, then she wants to turn that acquaintance into a friend.

She keeps an eye out for those people she finds intriguing, who nevertheless challenge her point of view.  For example, suppose both she and another person like to read nonfiction, but have opposing political points of view.  They might find they both have to stretch a little in order to understand the other person’s perspective.

In other words, she will make an extra effort to befriend someone who will add a measure of diversity to her social circle; not only for diversity’s sake, but to gain some perspective.

So the socially healthy person has a broad and diverse circle of acquaintance, together with an inner circle of deep friendships based on trust and a willingness to be vulnerable.

Do you agree?  What do you think the socially healthy person looks like?

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.

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.