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A significant source of emotional chaos in anyone’s life is decision making. No doubt you have been faced with many decisions in your life and know full well how difficult it can be, at times, to choose between alternatives. The reason you may struggle with making up your mind is that you haven’t yet developed skillful means for making decisions. Without a clear path for making decisions, you can easily lose your direction as you try to resolve issues in your life. You can end up totally avoiding a decision that needs to be made; you can freeze out of fear of making the wrong decision; you can become distracted by factors that are irrelevant to your decision; and, of course, you can make poor decisions. Once you lose your way, your mind becomes fuzzy and your willpower weakens, which leads to a lot of second- guessing about your decisions afterward. The consequence of all this emotional chaos is that often you are not very effective in implementing your decisions once you finally make them. The good news is that you can develop a conscious, deliberate approach to making decisions (both large and small), which will give you greater clarity in resolving and implementing your choices.
I often counsel students seeking help with making various life choices. The most common decisions they present are about whether to take a new job, have a baby, leave a marriage, take an ethical stand against some wrongdoing, undergo a medical procedure, or make a life change in order to dedicate more time to their spiritual journey. The two questions they most often ask may well apply to you: “How do I clarify my thinking when it is muddled by the stress of deciding?” and “How do I stay in touch with my deepest values when I’m feeling anxious?”
Before you can begin to make a wise decision, you first need to be real with yourself about the situation: is there a genuine decision to be made, or are you just postponing the inevitable? For example, one student, Gloria, came to me for advice about her job, saying she was thinking about quitting. As I questioned her, Gloria realized that her choice between staying in the job and leaving was not real. In fact, she was at such odds with her supervisor that there was almost no chance of her staying. Meanwhile her self-confidence was being destroyed. She came to understand that believing she had a decision to make was actually a way of avoiding the anxiety and fear of job hunting. By thinking she had a choice, and getting stuck on it, she was denying herself the chance to proactively seek new employment. Gloria was ultimately able to transform her avoidance into an active decision, and she now has a job in which she is supported and stimulated.
Another student, Alicia, also wanted advice about changing her life, but she was in a very different situation and faced a genuine decision. Alicia’s company had just hired a new president, who valued Alicia’s abilities and wanted her to take on more responsibility. But Alicia felt burned out and wanted more free time in order to explore her spiritual life. The problem was that she wasn’t sure she could afford to quit and knew that if she changed her mind later she might not find such a great opportunity again. “Should I just hang in there a few more years, despite how I feel, or should I take the plunge, even if I regret it later?” she asked me plaintively. After many months of deliberation, Alicia decided to leave her high-profile job and now works for a nonprofit organization with a flexible schedule that allows her to pursue her spiritual interests.
Like Alicia, you too probably experience suffering in the form of stress, anxiety, and uncertainty when facing a genuine decision. However, it is possible to relieve the mental suffering you feel in connection with decision making by applying mindfulness.
Although I teach a number of skills to employ in decision making, they all rely on becoming ever more mindful of what is happening in your body, mind, and heart when you are making a decision. Mindfulness allows you to know what’s true for you now, keeps you focused in the moment, allows you to stay real with yourself, and helps you overcome the many emotional and psychological issues that may arise when you are dealing with a complex decision. I call this approach mindful decision making.
Mindful decision making enables you to go beneath the surface level of your moment-to-moment life experience, which is clouded with emotions, to see the truth of what is happening. In daily life mindfulness helps you see clearly what needs to be done, what you are capable of doing, and how it relates to the larger truths of life. Applying mindfulness to decision making leads to clearer thinking and to staying connected to your core values, which is crucial to your peace of mind. There are three stages in the mindful-decision-making process that I instruct students to repeat until a clear decision emerges. I consider these three stages to be the basis for all skillful decision making, and they will serve you in any situation, including when you are participating in a group decision. If you learn to be skillful in making your own decisions, you will automatically become more skilled at facilitating group decisions.
When faced with making a decision, first direct your attention to the felt experience of this particular decision. How does it feel in your body right now? Do you feel pressure? Anxiety? Does your stomach hurt, or do your eyes burn? Do you feel as though you’ve left your body? Often you don’t notice what’s really going on and miss the body’s signals telling you what to do. By feeling the decision in your body, you connect with your intuition.
Oftentimes there is a vital piece of knowledge about the decision that your mind has not tuned in to, but your body knows and is trying to tell you. For instance, one woman who came to me for an interview during a meditation retreat told me that she had said yes to a marriage proposal and thought it would be great but also said that she felt a “strange tension” in her body whenever she was with her fiancé. As she stayed with the feeling in her body, she was shocked to discover that she didn’t trust her fiancé at all! After she left the retreat, she called off the wedding.
Next start to name the actual decision you are making, as best you’re able, which will help bring it into focus. At first you may not be able to clearly articulate what the decision is. Other times you will be able to name it right away, but then change that description over time, especially if it’s a big decision. For example, if you are weighing whether or not to stay in your current job, you may initially think, “I don’t want to stay in this job because there’s too much pressure,” then a week later think, “No, I don’t want to stay in the job because I don’t like my boss very much.” Another week goes by, and you realize, “Actually, I don’t like the values that are involved in this type of work.” By staying mindful of the decision over a period of weeks, you discover that your actual decision is whether or not you can work for a company when you are at odds with its values. You are able to see that it was the company’s values that led to the creation of an unlikable boss and unbearable pressure. Therefore, even if the boss left or the pressure eased, your unhappiness would not go away.
Naming may be the single most useful skill you can develop for decision making. By naming the question, you clarify it to yourself. You may be surprised at how hard it is for you to correctly name the decision in highly charged situations—no wonder you are struggling with clarity around it! I urge you to practice naming the decision even when it seems obvious what the decision is and even if you know what you are going to decide.
The act of naming alone can help release some of the tension around making a decision. One Life Balance client was offered a major job with the federal government and had spent many hours agonizing over whether to accept it but was unable to decide. As we explored his dilemma, it turned out that he did not have a question about the job—he definitely wanted it—but taking the job meant that he had to give up his current lifestyle, which he was very attached to. He had been asking himself the wrong question. His decision was not whether to take this job, but whether he was willing to take any job that would require him to change his way of life. Naming the correct decision led him into a deep exploration of what he wanted the remaining years of his life to be about. Many valuable insights arose from this process for him. He recently told me that he now helps other leaders name the decisions that they are facing in their organizations.
Another important step in being mindful of a decision is to notice if you’re obsessing over the decision instead of engaging in making it. If you are replaying the same thoughts over and over in your head, this is often a sign that you’re avoiding making the decision. Your obsessive thinking means you are focusing on your fear of not getting it right rather than focusing on the decision. When you become mindful that you’re just recycling your same old anxious thoughts about the decision, redirect your mind elsewhere. Often just noticing obsessive thinking and naming it will help you to stop obsessing.
After becoming present to your decision, the next step is to clarify the decision through investigation. First consider the scale of the consequences of the decision. There may be times when the long-term effect of a decision is minimal and you’re getting distraught over something that’s really not all that important. Or maybe it’s not a genuinely hard decision; you just don’t want to face it, and that’s creating stress. Also, be realistic about the deadline for when the decision needs to be made. Are you becoming stressed about a decision that doesn’t have to be made for a long time?
One Life Balance client kept bringing up a purchase decision in session after session, so I finally asked her how much money was involved in making this decision. I was surprised when she said fifteen hundred dollars. I pointed out that she made that much money in two days of work, therefore her anxiety about the decision could not possibly be related to money. As soon as I said this, her anxiety immediately disappeared. She then made the decision with ease. So, what was her real issue? My guess is that she was concerned what other people would think if she made the wrong decision, and more important, she couldn’t admit to herself that she lacked the confidence to make the decision. She had such a strong need to do everything right that it was a self-limiting attitude and caused her to exaggerate the import of her decision—it was just an opportunity for her to practice mindful decision making.
You learn how to make a right decision by making wrong decisions, and what matters most is that you stay mindful during and after the decision-making process so that you learn from the decision. If you are mindful in this manner, you will always receive a meaningful return from making a wrong decision, and sometimes it may be even more valuable than if you had made a better decision.
The next step in clarifying your decision is to ask, “What kind of decision is this?” (See “Five Kinds of Decisions”.) More than likely, you don’t realize the nature of the decision you’re making—you just experience it as pressure. Identifying what kind of decision it is can in many instances immediately ease your mental suffering or make the best choice obvious. For example, let’s say you’re trying to choose between two options that you’re neutral about, such as moving to a new home, which your spouse would like to do, or staying where you are. You may well be getting tied up in knots because you think you’re supposed to care a lot about the decision and be passionate about one of the choices. In fact, it’s not that big a deal to you, so you relax and just let the decision go either way. But beware of telling yourself that you don’t care when in fact you are avoiding the pressure and hard work of having to make a decision. Likewise, avoid saying to yourself, “Since my partner cares so much, I will just ignore what I care about and will just go along with whatever he wants.” Both of these situations represent quitting on yourself and do not work out well in the long run. It’s okay to allow someone else’s preference to count more, but it is not wise to deny the truth of your own feelings.
You will also benefit by clarifying how others who are involved in the decision feel. Oftentimes, when you’re making a decision that affects other people whom you really care about, you can become enmeshed in their feelings without realizing it. Or you may project what you think they want, which clouds your thinking. Simply restating the decision without a view to pleasing anyone else can help you discover what’s true for you. One student took a job she wasn’t all that thrilled about because every single person close to her kept telling her that she could not refuse such a great opportunity. Did she ever regret it!
It may seem obvious, but an important step in clarifying a decision is to determine whether or not you have all the information you need to make the choice. It’s surprising how often people don’t make the effort to gather all the information they need or don’t organize the information in a way that facilitates making a decision. If you’re prone to either tactic, it could mean that you’re avoiding making the decision (or you may have developed lazy habits regarding decision making). Sometimes you discover that you are postponing a decision by claiming you need more information when in fact you don’t, or you find that it isn’t possible to obtain more information; therefore you just need to go ahead and decide.
As you continue your investigation, ask yourself, “Why is this decision so sticky for me?” Your struggle with the decision may have to do with factors other than the question at hand. For instance, maybe you can’t decide which house to buy because your real decision is whether or not you’re going to stay in your relationship, but you haven’t been willing to admit that to yourself. The decision about the house is an opportunity to face your true question, but will you? So often people don’t; they simply go along rather than face up to the decision that truly needs to be made.
If you’re facing a really difficult life decision and you can’t embrace any of the options, you may be stuck because there’s some inner change that needs to happen before you can make the decision. When I suggest to someone that they simply aren’t sufficiently resolved within themselves to make a particularly difficult outer decision, I am often met with hostility, as though I were saying they weren’t good enough. You too may feel that admitting to such a situation in your life is a sign of inadequacy, but it’s not true. It simply means that you are being called to resolve a conflict between competing priorities or to clarify some ambiguity or ambivalence you have about the direction of your life.
The final step in clarifying your decision is to restate the decision and write it down on a piece of paper, along with what you perceive the inner and outer consequences of your choices to be. Cross-check your options with your core values and ask yourself whether they are aligned. You will be much more likely to feel at ease with your decision, no matter what the outcome, if you have made a choice based on your values.
Observe whether you’re clinging to the idea of making the right decision. When you insist on a perfect outcome, you’re only deluding yourself and procrastinating. Applying mindfulness, you’ll recognize that there is no perfect outcome and that it’s impossible to know what all the consequences of your decision will be, no matter what you choose. Consciously let go of your attachment to the decision being right. You’re never going to know if you really got it right. It may be that it is the right decision for a while, but then it turns out to be wrong later; or maybe you made the wrong decision now, but it leads to making a much better one in the future.
As a further act of surrender, write down what your mind is telling you to do, then what your heart seems to want, and finally what your intuition seems to be saying. People are often surprised to discover that these three centers of knowing are in conflict and that the conflict is paralyzing them. My usual advice is to go with your heart and intuition, if they agree, but to do so utilizing the practical planning capability of the mind. One Life Balance client was trying to find someone to be the president of her company while she remained the chief executive, because she wanted to be able to spend more time away from the business that she had built. When she came to see me, she was on her second president, and he was frustrating her and making her paranoid; the first one had been a failure as well. When I asked her how she chose people for the job, she described a process that was very rational and primarily based on the candidate’s previous experience. She had not allowed her gut to tell her whom to hire or let her heart say who would be fun to work with. It was no wonder her selections failed her. She resolved that she was going to let the current president go and choose a replacement that “felt” right to her.
Before implementing your final decision, you can try it on for a few days without acting on it, to test how it feels. Oftentimes valuable insight will arise from an imagined trial run. I describe this process of living with a decision as acting as though it were true. For this active-imagination process to work effectively, you must completely step into the reality that this choice is your final decision and there is no turning back. You hold to this pretense and maybe tell a few trusted people what you’ve decided, or perhaps write something to yourself about what comes next for you, or maybe interact with someone involved in the decision as if you have made your decision but don’t tell them. After a few days of acting out your decision, the body may send you signals, or you may suddenly have a new perspective on the situation that hadn’t occurred to you before. You may also discover heaviness in your heart if the situation isn’t sitting well with you, or peacefulness if it’s feeling good. I have used this process in making a number of major decisions, and it has helped me avoid making decisions I would have regretted later.
You’re now as ready to make your decision as you possibly can be. The one thing you may not have done is to make the decision knowing that you have done so as best you are able and to surrender to living with the ramifications of the decision, whatever they may be. You will ultimately discover that it is not the decision but rather how you live it out that truly matters.
Even if the outcome of your decision is disappointing, there’s still meaning in it because you were developing throughout the process of making it. You were being genuine and acting from your core values; therefore you’ve grown. You have more confidence in your decision-making ability, and others will feel this maturity in you. The result is that you will be wiser when making future decisions and more relaxed about the whole process.
When it comes time to implement a decision, some people freeze. They can’t pull the trigger, say the words, sign the paper, or walk out the door. This may happen to you if you have trauma in your back- ground, or have lost all confidence in yourself, or the stakes of the decision exceed the limits of your nervous system. At this point you may appeal to others to make the decision for you, which is seldom a good idea, and one that undermines your ability to make decisions in the future. Or you may frantically go around asking one person after another their opinion about what you should do and waffle after hearing what each person says. I’ve only ever seen poor results from doing this.
If you happen to freeze, don’t feel ashamed or guilty; your paralysis is coming from impersonal causes and conditions. Eventually these conditions will change, and you will find the agency to act once again. In the meantime, you will have to bear the feelings of helplessness or inadequacy, so please do so with a compassionate and forgiving attitude toward that part of you that is immobilized. You are suffering enough from being in a freeze; there is no need to punish yourself further.
You can freeze up over decisions that have either small or large consequences, and it can happen when making decisions about work, relationships, or your inner life. What matters during this period of feeling immobilized is that you stay connected to your intentions and that you not abandon your goal to make a decision. If you’re really paralyzed, I recommend talking about what’s going on with someone you trust or a therapist; otherwise keep your mind state to yourself. I once worked with a young man who froze on the day of his wedding. It created quite a drama. But once I helped him feel that he could say no, he was able to unfreeze and say yes.
One last piece of advice: Making difficult decisions is hard work and there is tremendous uncertainty in it. It can be physically as well as mentally exhausting and can overload your nervous system. Therefore, when you are dealing with a decision, it is critical that you cultivate a nonjudgmental, forgiving, and kind attitude toward yourself throughout the process. Not only does such an attitude provide the calm space necessary for making the decision, it ripens these qualities, which are crucial for a meaningful and joyful life, within you.
You may be interested in reading “Five Kinds of Decisions” which you can find here.
As much as we would all prefer that it wasn’t so, difficult times are an unavoidable part of the ever-changing stream of life. Difficulties come on their own accord irrespective of whether they are deserved or fair and regardless of our ability to bear them. The difficult can manifest in any aspect of life, including physical, mental, or emotional health; career or job; financial situation; and relationships with friends, family, and intimate partners. Sometimes the difficulties we encounter are minor and tedious but numerous. For example, you might have a difficult relationship with a sibling who constantly criticizes you; although no single instance of their judgment constitutes a significant hardship, you have an abiding sense of being treated unfairly. Sometimes difficulties are major and dramatic, such as the unexpected death of a loved one or losing your job. And sometimes you’re faced with a difficulty that is constant and cannot be changed, such as a physical disability or chronic illness. It’s essential that you learn to live skillfully with the difficult; otherwise you may collapse into destructive, negligent, or self-defeating behavior, which will only compound your suffering.
I use the phrase “learn to live skillfully with the difficult” because it points to the fundamental truth that each of us has the capacity to accept, accommodate, and adjust to what cannot be changed. The process of learning to live skillfully with the difficult is gradual and not easily or happily accomplished, but once learning has occurred you will discover that even in the midst of extreme difficulty, when the quality of your outer life may be greatly diminished, you still have an inner experience of well-being.
The untrained mind naturally reacts unskillfully to difficulties because it does not realize that there is an alternative response, which is to soften into the experience. By this I mean that you can learn to relax your attention and cease to resist the unpleasant feelings that arise in response to difficult situations.
Attention is the capacity of your mind to focus where you direct it, and the quality of your attention can vary dramatically depending on your life circumstances. During difficult times, when it is disturbed by tension, your attention may have a jumpy, rigid, fixed, or fuzzy quality. As a result you may be unable to effectively respond to difficult circumstances. Therefore it’s crucial to cultivate relaxed attention.
In relaxed attention your focus is neutral. There’s no tension in your attention, so you feel more at ease in the face of difficulty. You cultivate relaxed attention by practicing noticing the tension underlying your attention whenever you experience something difficult and remembering your intention to relax your attention. Most of the time the tension will release immediately. If you are deeply enmeshed in a difficulty, it may take some time for this release to happen, but with continued practice you will develop the ability to focus on any degree of difficulty without added tension.
Relaxed attention sets the stage for softening into your experience. I like to use the phrase softening into your experience because it captures the felt sense of relief that occurs when you become mindful of your resistance to the difficult and then release it. Softening into your experience isn’t about collapsing or quitting on yourself but rather about fully accepting that difficulty is a natural part of life. When you stop objecting to the difficult, two benefits arise: you suffer less, and you have more energy at your disposal to skillfully deal with the difficult when it arises.
Jim is a Life Balance client who separated from his wife three years ago, after being married for several decades. The primary reason for the separation was that his wife is an alcoholic. After trying everything he could imagine to help her overcome her addiction, Jim finally decided to leave the marriage for the sake of his own survival. It was a very hard decision for him, and he continues to support his ex-wife in numerous ways.
Since the separation, Jim has been consumed by feelings of helplessness and survivor’s guilt and has wrestled with the question of whether he was an enabler in his ex-wife’s addiction. For more than a year after leaving the marriage, he lived in a barren apartment while his ex-wife lived in their beautifully decorated home, because he did not feel he had the right to create his own place as long as she was still struggling with her problems. As we’ve worked together, Jim has come to realize just how traumatizing it has been for him to watch the slow, steady deterioration of this woman he deeply cares for.
I had Jim explore softening into his experience and accepting that he could not control the situation. He now sees how tense his mind becomes each time he focuses on his ex-wife and has learned to relax his attention whenever he speaks to her or does something for her. Moreover, he sees how rigid his mind had become and how that rigidity was preventing him from moving on and creating a life for himself. In the process he also realized that he was angry and he behaved defensively toward her, which caused huge amounts of tension, and that his fear for her combined with his sense of helplessness had hardened him in a way that was causing him to disassociate from life.
The change in Jim has been remarkable. It hasn’t happened quickly or easily, but he has definitely developed a more easeful, openhearted relationship to his ex-wife’s difficulty. He remains very sad about her situation, but he is no longer caught in a reactive mind state in his relationship to it.
Like Jim, you too may be forced to live with a difficult situation and may be unconsciously identifying with the limitations it creates and living out your role as a person with that difficulty. For instance, maybe you have a physical or mental condition that is chronic, such as Lyme disease or ADHD, or maybe you’re a cancer survivor. It’s easy to define yourself in terms of these conditions because it takes so much of your time and energy to deal with the difficulty, to begin to believe that “I’m a person with Lyme disease,” or “I’m a person with ADHD,” or ”I’m a person with cancer.”
If you find yourself anticipating how your difficulty will limit you in a situation or using it as an excuse to not show up, or if at every opportunity you tell friends or new acquaintances about your difficulty, then you have identified yourself with it. You are literally addicted to your difficulty. You are separating from life and denying yourself the possibility of unknown and unexpected joy by placing such distinct limits on who you can be.
You are not your difficulty; it is only one of the many things that characterize you. All your other characteristics—your generosity, friendliness, kindness, curiosity, willingness to learn, humor, loyalty, etc.—define you more accurately than whatever difficulty you may have in your life, no matter how great that difficulty is.
Once you’ve learned how to soften into your experience, you can begin to shift the way difficulties affect your body and your emotions and start to reframe the way you describe your situation to yourself and others. I once again recommend starting with awareness of the body; every strong emotion manifests in the body, so you can often recognize it as a physical sensation first. Moreover, when dealing with difficulties, you may harm your body in various ways: from the tension in your attention or the stress of your uncertainty, or from losing sleep or abusing food, alcohol, or drugs, etc. Softening into your experience allows you to realize the damage you are causing to your body and to take responsibility for nourishing it as best you’re able during difficult times.
Likewise, softening into your experience allows you to become mindful of your emotions and to see how they are triggered by difficulties in your life. Notice how you relate to each of these emotions. Do you feed the emotion? Are you ashamed of it or do you deny its existence? Are you so identified with your difficult emotion that it is distorting the truth of your situation? Are you so overwhelmed by emotion that you are locked in an endless cycle of despair? Observe these emotions with great compassion and sympathy, for it’s hard to cope with what’s difficult in your life. It’s very important that you be truthful with yourself about the emotions that arise in you in reaction to difficulties and not to judge yourself for having them. As with the body, do what you can to comfort the emotions, give yourself mental breaks, and find support from others.
Whatever emotions you are having, repeatedly remind yourself that they are just emotions, which arise and pass, and that they are simply the result of impersonal causes and conditions outside you. As you cease to be identified with these emotions, your mind will come back into balance.
Once you’ve regained a level of balance in body and emotion, you can start to reframe the way you describe your difficult situation to yourself and others. You may discover that your language is embedded with self-criticism, hopelessness, or self-pity, which not only makes you feel worse but also alienates and isolates you from others. Likewise, the narrative and prognosis you’ve internalized, the story you’ve identified with, may ignore what is good in your life.
Set an intention to practice being open to living with the difficult. You might say to yourself, “I’m going to make a practice out of living with difficulty. It is my value to meet difficulty and to interact with it as deeply as I can.” By simply doing this, you already start to shift your orientation—the difficulty is no longer something that’s separate from your life because you’re no longer objecting to life being difficult sometimes. You’re avowing your willingness to interact with and respond to what’s difficult and to find meaning in it, even if the difficulty is something that’s going to come again and again.
A few words of caution: If you’re living with a difficult situation and find yourself in this moment at peace with it, don’t go looking for the “ouch.” It’s unskillful to think, “I’m in a difficult situation, and therefore I’m supposed to feel how difficult my life is right now.” When you do start feeling weighed down by the difficulty, repeat loving-kindness and compassion phrases, such as, “May I have a calm, clear mind in this difficult moment.”
Another skillful means of building your capacity for living with the difficult is seeking support. That support may come from friends or family or a pet or being in nature. It might also be professional sup- port, from a psychotherapist, perhaps, or a spiritual community. Sometimes you simply need to feel the presence of another person, or to know that someone cares about you, or to sense the beauty of the world. At other times you may need professional guidance to make your way through a difficulty. It isn’t weak to seek help; it’s an act of courage. You aren’t being a burden to others by asking for help, as long as you respect their time and needs; instead you’re giving them an opportunity to make a difference in the life of another.
One of the great challenges in life is to not allow the presence of the difficult in your life to shut down your heart. The Buddha taught that awareness of certain universal truths can prepare your heart for living with the difficult. The first of these truths is that everyone experiences difficulty, not just you or the people you care about. The second is that life is always changing, and there’s no way you can ever get it to be just right. The conditions of your life—your financial situation, health, relationships, etc.—will change, and so will everyone else’s; therefore you are having a shared experience in this perilous journey we call life.
Ultimately you are faced with this question: are you willing to accept life on its own terms? I have a friend who was riding his bicycle one evening when he lost consciousness because of an undiagnosed medical condition. When he awoke, he was lying on the ground and quadriplegic. He was in the prime of his life, an athlete, and he had done nothing careless, but he was suddenly faced with a dramatically life-altering difficulty.
It would have been so easy for my friend to quit, to become bitter about life, and to feel sorry for himself. Instead he accepted life on its terms. As he lay in the hospital, not knowing whether he would ever recover from his spinal injuries, he simply started trying to move some part of his body. Day after day he practiced moving some- thing until finally one day he was able to flex the thumb on his right hand. It was several more days before he could move his other thumb and many more days before he could move the rest of his fingers and many weeks before he could move his arms. Months passed and he regained his ability to move his whole body, although in a limited manner.
My friend’s recovery is an inspiring story; however, his life and the lives of his family are now dramatically different than before the accident. His life is simply like this. Living with the difficult is just one factor in his life among many, including his knowledge, his strong work ethic, and his love for his wife and daughter. Just as my friend continues to embrace his life with these new, difficult conditions, you too are challenged to find the beauty, joy, and meaning in the life you have.
You can develop your capacity for making skillful change by reflecting on the following questions and writing your responses in a notebook.
1. Think about the times when you’ve made major changes in your life.
2. In which areas of your life (i.e., job, family, friends, relationship with your significant other) do you deal well with change and in which areas are you weak?
“Practice” getting better at making change by choosing an issue from your area of greatest weakness and make it the focus of a daily mindfulness practice.
3. As you go about your daily life, practice noticing the truth that everything that is based on conditions is always changing.
See for yourself that you navigate in a constantly changing stream. If you persist, you will feel more at ease with change over time.
4. How would you describe your mother and father’s relationship to change?
5. Think back to a time when you were not skillful in dealing with change.
Did you have compassion for yourself? Or did you judge yourself harshly? Did the harsh judgment serve you in any way? It is crucial that you be able to discern when you are being skillful with change and when you are not. There is a difference between discernment and harsh judgment; can you feel the difference?
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To everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn)
And a time to every purpose, under heaven
The Byrds
In the work I do as a Change & Transition Strategist and workshop leader, it’s become apparent to me how modern life encourages a blurring of the seasons (outer and inner); those rhythms and plot points that in ancient times were easy to see and surrender to. The production of food, and light to facilitate that production, and countless other creations being the most obvious examples. But now, light through the darkest of nights prevails, and it’s always summer somewhere to behold. Our seasons now run together.
When one sees and feels life in this more modern way, the natural rhythms of life get thrown off, the compass spins, and true north goes missing. Where are we? Where should we be?
The Moffitt Method℠ has something to say about this.
I often begin working with clients by asking them how they would like their life to feel two, three, or perhaps five years on? We have to be able to imagine what we want (before we can reach for it), and we have to separate why we want it from the many voices that have already encouraged us to want it. I strongly believe that living a fulfilling life entails in a substantial way living it in alignment with our values.
Part of the process of navigating change and transition begins with the development of clarity around our values. From there, we can minimize and eventually eliminate the things that aren’t in alignment with our values, as well as add the things that promote those values. A key point in Changes & Transitions Workshops and individual sessions entails helping participants uncover clarity about their values as distinct from what they ‘think’ they should find valuable. We are all products of our conditioning, and the values we hold may be too limiting or even outdated. They may be the values we ’inherited’ from family, society, gender orientation, race, economic status, and such, and as such, may not incorporate, or may in fact subordinate some of the values we actually hold deep down, or have matured into.
Part of a Changes & Transitions Workshop or individual strategy session involves learning and acknowledging the season you are in and comparing that to your goals and the models social science puts forth based on certain ages and cycles in life. Having a map is of course not the terrain, but it can offer a clear direction to take based on our goals. Change & Transition Strategy work helps us clarify those goals, based on our current and ever evolving values, while also helping us identify the attitudes and beliefs that may be in conflict with our best intentions.
In one of my recent workshops, a student in his late 40’s found himself at a crossroad based on achieving his work, financial, and familial goals. He could carry on, as all the external forces (and outside opinions) in his life pointed to, or he could answer the call to change something he could feel but was afraid to articulate, because it would mean change. It didn’t make sense. His life was quite good and stable. Through the weekend course he was able to embrace the fear that comes naturally with accepting the call to change, realign his feelings and actions with his updated values, and have a real reckoning with the season he was in (late 40’s), which fostered the courage to make a tremendous change and transition. He uprooted everything and moved back to his native culture (Jordan) and reported a tremendous sense of joy, vitality, and renewed purpose.
The Moffitt Method℠ offers a template as well as encouragement for what can and should be engaged and transformed (think “transitioned”) at any age. If nothing else, what could be more valuable?
We can know ourselves in ever deepening ways, and act appropriately on that knowing, especially if we know our season. As The Byrds sang and expressed so beautifully….
A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time you may embrace, a time to refrain from embracing
I swear it’s not too late.
Did you know that naming the type of decision you’re trying to make will help bring clarity to the process? Our Lead Strategist, Phillip Moffitt, guides us through the five different kinds of decisions we’re faced with (often every day!), and how we can skillfully handle a decision whether it brings up joyful anticipation or uncertainty.
All of your options are good, for instance choosing between two good job offers or between spending time with your family vs. taking a personal retreat.
What seems like a benevolent decision can sometimes indicate a deeper, hidden conflict you’re avoiding acknowledging because it’s too unpleasant. Ask yourself, “Am I creating options for myself in order to escape facing a deeper issue?”
You don’t have a preference for any of your choices, yet you can’t make the decision. This paralysis is usually a sign of a hidden conflict that’s trying to express itself through the decision. Sometimes the conflict is with another person.
The skillful way to handle a neutral decision is to be compassionate with yourself and be mindful of how the decision feels in your body right now. Oftentimes, the answer will reveal itself.
There are gains and losses inherent in all of your options, and it’s not clear which is the wisest course, such as the choice between committing to a relationship vs. keeping your independence; whichever choice you make, you have to give up something you desire.
Beware of trying to have your cake and eat it too. Likewise be careful of fantasy decision-making, such as telling yourself that although the person you’re dating isn’t really right for you, making a commitment will change him into a new person.
All of your options have unpleasant consequences, for example deciding whether to keep silent or speak out about a lie one of your co-workers has told, which will affect workplace morale. There’s not a good outcome no matter what you decide, so it’s a really hard choice to make.
In this circumstance, listen to your heart: Which choice will be the easiest for you to live with, despite what’s likely to be unpleasant external conditions?
The consequences of the decision are unclear, such as whether to have a risky operation or an experimental medical procedure. It’s a tough decision to make because you really don’t know how it’s going to play out.
It’s best not to make such a decision until you absolutely have to, and then clearly state to yourself the full consequences of making the choice vs. staying with your current situation. People often underestimate the risks and downside of the unknown and exaggerate the negative aspects of the status quo.
Learn how to make skillful decisions
As anyone who has ever studied with me will tell you, I emphasize how to apply mindfulness in daily life. Recently I have been focusing on how to use mindfulness to self-soothe during times of difficulty. We’ve all experienced how unsettling and uncertain life can be and how easily we can be knocked off center at any moment. When we’re not in balance, we can become defined by whatever’s happening and get caught in what I call “reactive mind.” But through the skillful application of mindfulness we can learn to self-soothe whenever life delivers us a blow and soon regain our balance. When we lack the ability to self-soothe, we resort to using less skillful strategies to deal with difficulty such as escaping into fantasy, or overindulging in drugs, alcohol, or food, which usually prolongs our suffering.
Self-soothing begins with softening into your experience and then applying mindfulness to recognize that “this moment is like this.” From within the spaciousness that this softening creates, you can start to investigate the experience and gain access to insight. Specifically, there are three phases to the self-soothing process:
Calm yourself using whatever strategy works best for you. Examples of how you might do this include focusing on your breath or your feet touching earth. One person I know holds one hand with the other and imagines that the universe is embracing her; another calms herself by looking up at the sky. Next, name what’s going on and acknowledge that you’re upset. Can you identify the aspect of yourself that is upset? Allow the part of you that knows you’re upset to comfort the part that’s upset with compassion and loving-kindness.
Once you’ve returned to equilibrium, reconnect with your intentions. As you begin to remember your intentions, you become less and less defined by the difficult experience. You have more clarity of mind; although it may not be clear to you what to do, you remember what you’re about. I call this “self-remembering.”
Lastly, as your clarity returns and you re-engage with life from your intentions, begin to redirect your attention. What dharma insights can you apply to this difficult situation? For instance, you might reflect on the impersonal nature of life. Although you are having a personal experience, it is just causes and conditions that are creating this experience. This too is going to change because everything changes. Life is hard; therefore, it’s not a mistake that your life is hard in this moment. This insight alone can be a source of great comfort.
1. Notice what your mind does when something good is happening to you. Is it able to stay fully present and really receive the joy of it? Or do you start thinking about how the experience could be even better or how you could have more of the source of your happiness? Or do you start thinking about something else that’s unpleasant? When you catch your mind acting in this manner, go back to experiencing the happiness with gratitude.
2. Begin to familiarize yourself with each of the three kinds of happiness that are discussed in the article “Three Kinds of Happiness.” Can you find examples both past and present of each kind of happiness in your own life? Be particularly interested in distinguishing between happiness based on conditions and happiness that comes from being in a good mood.
3. Observe those moments in your life when happiness is replaced by suffering. They may be small moments of happiness, such as finding a parking space or enjoying a good meal, or something greater. But notice that when your happiness is based on conditions it always disappears or changes. Next observe that at times your happiness is so buoyant it is not affected by unpleasant conditions that arise. Begin to observe that these states of mind also don’t last. Be interested in what causes them to disappear.
4. You are most likely able to get a foretaste of absolute happiness during meditation practice or immediately afterward. Your mind will be characterized by stillness and spaciousness in which painful body sensations or thoughts concerning difficult situations in your life may arise, yet they don’t disturb your mind. Although this foretaste may be brief, notice that your mind doesn’t object to how life is in such moments.
5. Begin to place more attention on those times when you’re happy, and deliberately pay less attention to those times when you’re discontent. Notice if you’re more compassionate toward others when you’re happy and if your heart is more open such that you see more clearly what is suffering and what is not.
You can enhance the degree of well-being you experience in your life by committing to and cultivating an attitude that focuses on your effort rather than on the results of that effort. We call this “as best I am able” practice. The goal of this practice is to align your values with your words or actions as you carry out the tasks of your day.
1. Ask yourself if you truly want to make this practice a core attitude in your daily life, and if so, what it means to you.
2. Engage in this practice each morning by stating to yourself, “I intend to treat each part of this day as an offering by living it as best I am able.”
3. Throughout the day practice being mindful of your attitude as you do your various activities.
4. Remind yourself throughout the day that you intend for all your words and actions to arise from an attitude of “as best I am able.”
5. Notice when your attitude is one of judging yourself for not doing your best, and cons]ciously remind yourself, “Even in these circumstances, I wish to do the best I’m able.”
6. Be mindful of those times when you actually speak or act from this attitude, and acknowledge to yourself that you have lived out your commitment.
7. When others demand that you meet their expectations, respond by saying that you are doing the bst you are able to do. Beware of making a false claim, and don’t fall into the trap of using hindsight to redefine your best effort.
Identifying your core values and then creating a few essential intentions that you are mindful of moment-to-moment in the midst of the chaos of daily life can help you stay in balance and clear-minded. Here is a worksheet we use with clients and in workshops that you can download and fill out to identify your own values and intentions.
You may find it helpful to read this short article before completing the worksheet: “Differentiating Goals, Intentions, and Values”.
A crucial skill for minimizing emotional chaos and sustaining clarity in your life is the ability to distinguish between your experience and your interpretation of your experience. Your experience is simply whatever is happening in the moment—a sound, a taste, a bodily sensation, an emotion, any kind of interaction, etc. Your interpretation is your mind’s reaction to that experience. One way to understand this difference is to picture that when you are directly experiencing a moment of life, you are within it; when you are interpreting it, you are outside it.
Interpretation occurs as the result of a combination of several factors. The mind has an automatic tendency to interpret an experience and create a story about it based on memories, past associations, and attitudes you have about yourself and others. It then selectively gathers data from within the experience to support its interpretation. It may seem to you that your mind is simply trying to figure out your experience, but really it’s screening for evidence to support the story it’s clinging to. However, this story is a delusion because your mind is being clouded by the strong emotions of the moment.
You can easily become committed to a particular interpretation to the point that it becomes a habit, a story that you repeat in similar or related circumstances. For example, “nobody wants to date me” is a story I often hear from both single men and women between the ages of forty and sixty. This belief is usually based on a very limited effort to make contact with potential partners that is undermined by unrealistic standards they have held since they were in their twenties. But when I point out that they’re more mature now and may need to change their criteria, I am often met with an exasperated look that says, “You don’t understand.” They cling to their interpretation of the problem rather than allowing the challenge to evoke the change and inner growth that is necessary given the arc of human life.
When confronted with a difficult experience, the untrained mind wants to be anywhere but in the present moment, where it perceives acute unpleasantness. The mind becomes anxious whenever it’s uncertain and reacts as if one’s survival is at stake. So rather than staying with the experience and determining the best possible way to relate to it, the mind jumps to creating a story that involves worrying about the future or judging oneself or others based on past experiences. This pattern of resistance to staying present in experience is an automatic response arising from the limbic brain as it detects threats. Ironically, the story imparts a false sense of knowing what’s going on and therefore can seem temporarily soothing.
When we start to interpret an experience, the thoughts generated by our reactive mind become our primary experience, as opposed to whatever is actually happening that needs our full attention and considered response. Usually we continue on with the activity, but our attention is split or less than complete. Is it any wonder that we don’t do our best under such conditions? And sometimes we just can’t continue the activity. For example, Scott, a Life Balance client, suffers from what he describes as “shutting down” at work. Although Scott is a high-performing manager, whenever his colleagues critique his ideas, his mind starts spinning and he has to wait for the episode to pass. He reports losing two or three hours a week due to being “triggered.” Scott interprets his peers’ feedback about his ideas as a personal attack.
You too may have triggers that cause you to get lost in interpretation rather than staying present; you may even have a pattern of interpretation that shuts your mind down but have never realized it’s happening because you are so accustomed to it. For sure, there are so many different experiences vying for attention in any given moment that in order to deal with what seems like an overwhelming amount of stimuli the mind rushes to interpretation to gain a sense of control. In reality, though, interpretation creates a false impression of stability. As you start to become aware of your patterns of interpretation, be kind and nonjudgmental toward yourself. It’s not helpful to fall into self-blame or self-loathing, both of which are forms of interpretation.
You can begin to break the habit of automatically interpreting every experience by practicing anchoring your attention firmly within the experience. Notice any physical sensations and emotions that are arising and observe the state of your mind. Is it racing, agitated, fuzzy, or clear? For instance, if you feel that someone has not lived up to an agreement they made with you, rather than contracting into an interpretation of them or their motives, simply stay with the feeling of what it’s like to be let down by another. You might say to yourself, “I’m just going to be interested in this,” and then watch what
happens. Just be in the moment and let the experience form.
I realize that what I’m saying sounds easier to do than it often is, especially when the experience you’re having is going badly. Staying with the experience can seem impossible if you don’t know what to do or think, and it’s getting worse. But everything you’re noticing and feeling, even your resistance, becomes part of the direct experience. If the situation doesn’t feel safe, you obviously need to respond as skillfully as you’re able to avoid getting hurt. However, if you’re willing to let loose of controlling the experience, there is a greater possibility that you will intuitively find a more skillful way to respond than what your pattern of interpretation might dictate.
For instance, when you and your spouse are having a disagreement and she’s not being the way you want her to be, it can be confusing or threatening to you. It’s a disagreement you’ve had numerous times before, and so you jump to your usual interpretation, to reassure yourself. Sometimes that may work, but it’s unlikely, because what you’re really doing is recycling the experience. What would happen if you just noticed what you’re experiencing? “In this moment, I’m hearing her words. My heart is troubled. But my body feels comfortable. What else am I experiencing? I’m having this moment that’s
emotionally unpleasant. It’s so unpleasant that my mind is jumping to interpretation and it’s grabbing hold of it.” Could you just stay with that experience and see what unfolds? Sometimes we feel so compelled to respond to a situation that we rush to interpretation. But do we really have to? What would happen if we didn’t give in to the drama of the situation? Maybe if you paused your spouse would take advantage of the silence to say something unexpected that could shift how you respond and therefore establish a new way of relating to each other.
The next step toward breaking your habit of automatically interpreting every experience is to practice being mindful from moment to moment of the distinction between experience and interpretation. Begin to notice, “Is there a difference between my direct experience of what’s going on and how I’ve interpreted it?” You’ll need to practice noticing over and over again before you really start to know the difference. The more you’re able to distinguish experience from interpretation, the more you’ll be able to stay in the moment, the calmer you’ll be, and the more choices you’ll have for responding skillfully to whatever circumstances arise.
For example, you may have a habit of collapsing into interpretation whenever you receive any form of rejection. If so, first observe the thoughts that pop into your head. Then notice what you’re actually feeling, physically and emotionally, right at that moment, and ask yourself whether you can stand to be present with those sensations. Most of the time the answer will be yes. Finally, examine your ego. Does it feel demolished, insecure, or angry as a result of the rejection? Is your ego doing the interpreting? Have compassion for your ego and appreciate that it just received a blow, but don’t let its compensating interpretations define you in the moment. If you don’t buy into the interpretations, they will eventually cease.
Once you begin to recognize that interpretation is only your view of an experience, it becomes possible for you to begin to release your compulsion to interpret every moment. Ideally, your goal is to create a new habit, a new default setting for responding rather than reacting to all types of experiences. Establishing this new habit starts by staying with the experience. When you find that you’ve jumped to interpretation, just notice the difference. The noticing gradually becomes automatic. There are many activities in your life that you do automatically—driving, cooking, typing, etc.—and that you more or less notice without noticing. In the same way, you can develop the habit of automatically noticing the difference between your experience and your interpretation of the experience.
When you discover that you are interpreting rather than staying with your experience, you don’t have to stop doing it. I’m not saying that you must get rid of all interpretation, but I am encouraging you to learn to distinguish between experience and your interpretive reaction to it. As with any kind of mindfulness practice, being curious helps. Ask yourself: “What will happen if I practice noticing the difference between my experience and my interpretation of it?” “What does it feel like right now?” “How many times today can I notice? Twenty? Fifty?” Just be curious.
The opportunity to practice in this way occurs many times throughout the day and requires persistence. You may be in a meeting, driving your car, talking on the phone to a friend, or having a heated discussion with your child and notice the difference between your experience and your interpretation of the experience. The more you get used to it, the more you will notice it. The more you notice it, the more you will tend to notice it.
There undoubtedly will be moments when you won’t be able to stay with your experience and you will become lost in interpretation, so it helps to reflect afterward. For instance, on your way home from work you might stop to pick up groceries for dinner. After leaving the store and driving halfway home, you realize that you forgot something. In that moment your mind becomes filled with frustration and you think, “My evening is shot. I either spend thirty minutes going back to the store or I heat up leftovers for dinner. Either way the family is going to be disappointed in me. How could I have forgotten? I’m so stupid!” At that moment you are being consumed by your interpretations and there’s no stopping it. However, once you’ve resolved what you’re going to do about dinner, you can then reflect back on what just happened. Imagine saying to yourself later, “So I forgot. I had this experience of forgetting, and then I had this interpretation of my experience. What was it like?”
You can also cultivate your ability to make this distinction by observing other people as they’re acting out their interpretation of an experience or telling you about something that happened in their life. You can tell the difference between what actually happened to them and how they’re interpreting it. I repeat: their interpretation isn’t wrong, necessarily—it’s just different from the real experience.
There are certainly times when you need to be able to respond to an event that’s unfolding in your life while simultaneously interpreting it. For instance, you need to be able to interpret the body signals and emotional vibes of others in order to be a good communicator. Likewise, you need to be able to recognize and interpret patterns in people’s behavior in order to be effective and anticipate change. Moreover, sometimes someone may harbor ill will or jealousy toward you or see you as a rival, in which case you need to take steps to protect yourself.
You can really harm yourself when your interpretation of your experience overrides your intentions and priorities. Charles, another Life Balance client, is a good example of what can happen when you base your actions on misguided thinking instead of your intentions and priorities. Charles was a high achiever who was chosen to represent his company in negotiations with another company about how the two companies might collaborate on a project. In preparation for the negotiations, I helped Charles identify some crucial points that needed to be included in the partnership agreement. However, when during the meeting his counterpart at the other company suggested the same agreement we had
defined, Charles responded by saying, “Let me think about it.” When he told me this afterward, I asked him why he hadn’t said yes on the spot. Charles replied that he didn’t want his counterpart to perceive him as being too quick to agree and therefore weak; he also thought that there might be a chance of getting an even better deal. I was dismayed because what mattered was getting this particular agreement settled, and he had it in hand. But Charles got lost in his interpretation of what the other person would think of him and his ideas about how he was supposed to act in such situations. Sure enough, when Charles later contacted the other negotiator to accept the offer, he was told, “Since we didn’t reach an agreement, I thought more about it myself and I no longer want to do it.” Charles was devastated, but he learned a valuable lesson.
Each year at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, I help teach a daylong course in meditation for beginners, which hundreds of people attend. When you first learn to meditate, it’s not unusual for your mind to decide that since you aren’t doing anything else this is the perfect time to deal with your most challenging problems. The mind, therefore, can become quite agitated, so the students are given an opportunity during the day to have a ten-minute individual interview with one of the teachers, to talk about their experiences. A few years ago, a woman who interviewed with me presented a long list of seemingly unsolvable problems. I listened attentively as she described her difficulties, and when she finished, I spoke to her about the importance of practicing loving-kindness toward herself. As for resolving her problems, I had no suggestions other than that she focus on the experience of them and not on her interpretation of them. Recently the woman showed up at my weekly meditation class and said, “You won’t remember me, but I am the woman you told to stay with my experience, not the interpretation.” I did not remember her name or face, but I did remember her interview. “Well,” she said, “those words were what I really needed. I now speak to all sorts of groups, and I tell them about that interview with you and give them the very same advice.” She had learned to show up for her life by being willing to be present for what was difficult in her life. The same can be true for you.
Here is a 5-minute video of Phillip Moffitt speaking about the importance of distinguishing between interpretation and experience.
Some years ago people used to wear a T-shirt printed with the slogan, “Life is difficult, and then you die.” I once asked a group of people at a yoga retreat what they thought when they read those words. One person found it funny; a way to laugh at the hard truth of life rather than be overwhelmed by it. Another read it as justification for taking what pleasure you could out of life, while still another saw it as cynical and nihilistic, an excuse to give up. Someone who was active in a spiritual group said it was a call to action much like the Buddha’s teaching of suffering contained in the Four Noble Truths.
I asked for their thoughts because I wanted to see if anyone would say it wasn’t true, which no one did. My own experience was that the slogan is composed of a half-truth and also a full truth, but one that obscures rather than clarifies. The half truth is that indeed “life is difficult,” but it is not just difficult, it is also incredibly wonderful, puzzling, and routine, all in an ever-changing cycle.
“Then we die” is also true, but stating the truth in this manner implies that death is simply a personal failure. To me death is not a failure but rather a necessary part of the life cycle of being incarnate. Imagine if plants didn’t die, or if the note of a piano didn’t fade into oblivion, or if a thought didn’t arise and pass. Life would come to a standstill; it would drown in its own accumulation. Therefore, rather than viewing life and death as separate, I see them as part of one continuous, mysterious experience of redemption and renewal. Spiritual practices provide a means to relate to this experience in its mystery and vastness.
Still, there remained in my mind the all-important issue that the words on the T-shirt implied: If life is difficult and brief, how do we cope? How do we find meaning or happiness? I had already repeatedly explored these questions using different spiritual traditions and later came to devote my life full-time to this inquiry. Though not always finding answers, my explorations slowly led to certain discoveries about what makes life a struggle.
One of these discoveries is the degree to which we make life difficult for ourselves by being violent or violating to the body and the mind in the routine of our daily lives. Through the way in which we schedule our time, push our bodies, and compare and judge ourselves against others, we repeatedly create an inner environment that is filled with violence. If you can understand that this is so, it may have a profound impact on your experience of life being difficult.
Initially, you may not identify some of your daily thoughts and decisions as moments of violence to self, but most likely they are. If someone was hitting you in your stomach, squeezing your neck, or not letting you breathe, you’d quickly call such behavior violent. Yet when these same painful sensory experiences arise in reaction to your own thoughts or actions, you fail to recognize your behavior as violent. In your daily life, have you not repeatedly experienced these bodily sensations or others like them?
Whenever I introduce the topic of violence against self in a Dharma talk, almost everyone squirms. No one wants to hear it. I will directly ask the question: Are you, in an obvious manner or in a series of subtle, covert actions, being violent with yourself? Usually people want to assure me that while they may work too hard at times, stay in an unhealthy relationship, eat too much, or sleep too little, they would not characterize their behavior as violent toward themselves. Yet, person after person, once they’ve closely examined their lives, experiences a moment of self-recognition that at first can be painful and embarrassing. This initial discomfort is often followed by a sense of liberation as new possibilities arise in their imaginations for how to live more peacefully.
Most people perpetrate this violence against self through mistakenly identifying with various thoughts that arise due to impersonal conditions coming together. The body and mind’s well-being are the innocent victims. Each individual has a unique pattern, but the common ground is that you relate to yourself in a manner that results in your life being more emotionally or physically violent than it need be.
You may have limited your understanding of self-violence to physical abuse or other blatant self-destructive behavior that calls for a 12-step program. The word “violence” may sound too harsh to you, but its dictionary meaning is “an exertion of extreme force to cause injury or abuse in the form of distortion or infringement.” The extreme force can be a mental act that then shows up in the body or an act that is done repeatedly to an extreme.
You can think of violence as any highly energetic form of relating to a person, including yourself, that is jarring, turbulent, and distorting. Can you identify any times in the last few days in which you treated yourself in a discordant, abrupt, or distorting manner?
The Trappist monk and spiritual author Thomas Merton once said, “To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is itself to succumb to the violence of our times.” Obviously Merton wasn’t speaking about pathologically self-destructive behavior. Instead he was drawing our attention to the shadow side of normative, even seemingly positive, culturally approved behavior. He was referring to how we do great violence to ourselves simply in the manner in which we go about arranging our lives.
Gradually I’ve come to realize that violence against oneself is one of the great denials of our time. People are very willing to talk about the violence that the world does to them, but they’re much less willing to own the violence that they do to themselves. Violence against self can most easily be recognized in your experience of the body in daily life. You already know the general health problems that come about because of stress, sleep deprivation, and constant strain. You may not identify them as examples of violence to self, but anytime you make yourself sick or dysfunctional, it is an act of violence for which you need to take responsibility. We all know people who are overworked or have too much stress, which causes problems with the digestive system, heart, or other parts of the body, but who never label their behavior as violence to the self. But is there any description that is more apt?
One of the yamas, or moral restraints, in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra is ahimsa, the practice of nonviolence, and this includes nonviolence toward yourself. Of course, you may well want something in your life so much that you are willing to take a chance of hurting your body by driving it too hard. But usually a conscious, short-term exertion to reach a goal is not what causes violence to self. More often it is a matter of long-term disregard of the signals of imbalance. This disregard comes from repeatedly getting so caught in wanting or fearful mind-states that you’re unable to reflect on your own behavior. You may have a surface-level awareness of the distress you are feeling in your body, but you don’t sincerely respond to the discomfort. In such instances you are in a driven state, controlled by your mind’s imaginary creations rather than your inner values.
Inner development and maturity come from acknowledging to yourself that you are being violent with a human being; the fact that you happen to be the human being who is being hurt does not change the truth of the violence. From a spiritual perspective, it is never right to hurt any human being; including yourself; for selfish reasons or because of sloppy attention to the consequences of your actions. Understanding this is your first step in practicing ahimsa toward yourself.
It is often hard to make the distinction between the mind-states of fear and wanting and your inner values because there is such a strong tendency to identify these mind-states as “you.” But if you observe yourself, you will see that an endless number of mind-states arise each day independent of any intention on your part. The way to freedom from self-violence is to separate from these thoughts by getting to know your mind. This is the underlying purpose of yoga, mindfulness meditation, and selfless service, called karma yoga or seva.
Violence against self through the body can also occur in situations where you are ostensibly taking deliberate care of your body, such as in doing yoga. How many times in a yoga class do you get lost in your willfulness to get a pose right and actually add tension and strain to the body rather than freeing the tissue for movement? It is good to hold a pose longer or to work to get more lift in a backbend, but not if you tense or harden the body as part of the effort. The skin should stay soft even when the muscles underneath a particular area are engaged, the face should stay relaxed, and the breath be free of any holding. Even more importantly, the mind needs to stay soft and gentle; my teacher describes it as the “mind staying cool.” Practicing yoga in this manner can help you learn how to release the tendency toward violence to yourself in the rest of your life.
When you go to a hatha yoga class, if you don’t observe and work with all of the emotions and moods that arise, you are missing half the value. Watch yourself the next time you go to class: Do you get angry at your body? Do you load it with the frustrations of your day and then expect it to do what you want? See for yourself how every strong emotion; from frustration and fear to longing; is felt in the body as tension, pressure, heat, tingling, and so on. In turn, each of these bodily sensations can be released through the yoga, which will free the body from violence and usually quiets the mind. Once you learn to do this in yoga class you can utilize this awareness; at work, driving in traffic, or in difficult home situations; to release the body when the mind starts to feel pressure or anxiety. Moreover, the cultivation of a soft spaciousness of body and mind points to the true intention of yoga, which is liberation from our separateness. It is this fear of separateness that leads to self-violence.
As the Thomas Merton quote points out, if you abuse your time, you are participating in violence against self. This may be in the form of overscheduling to the point that you rob yourself of the experience of being alive. Or it may be in the form of allocating your time in a manner that doesn’t reflect your inner priorities. Both create a distortion or infringement of self through strain and turbulence. When you treat your time as though you are a machine; a doing machine; you are committing violence against the sacredness of life itself. Whenever I do Life Balance work with organizational leaders, I have them make a list of their values and prioritize them, then compare their priorities with how they actually spend their time. The disparity is usually shocking.
Another abuse of time that disturbs your well-being occurs if you succumb to the modern-day compulsion to avoid boredom at all costs. In our stimulation-based culture, there is near hysteria around constantly seeking fulfillment through activity, which leaves no time for the quietness of simply being present with yourself. Do you allow yourself time each day, or even weekly, to exist without an external purpose and without even background music or television? Empty time is vital to your well-being, and to deny yourself this nourishment is an act of violence.
You may ask why you continue to abuse your time and your body when you have the option to live more peacefully. Or you may say that you feel as though you have no choice but to be harsh toward yourself because your life situation is such a struggle. Under either circumstance you push the body and strain the mind violently because you are filled with the tension that comes with the feeling that there’s not enough of something in your life, whether it’s money, love, adventure, or confidence.
Feelings of inadequacy, vulnerability, longing, or not having enough are an inevitable part of the human experience. If you, like most people, have not found spiritual freedom, you cannot stop them from arising. But you can stop such feelings from controlling your life by changing how you perceive them. If you refuse to identify with these feelings, disown them as being neither you nor yours, thus seeing them simply as emotional states of mind that come and go, you will discover there is the possibility for some inner harmony even under difficult circumstances.
For instance, let’s assume you cannot change your work schedule, and it seems so overwhelming to you that you regularly get very tense and anxious about it. You can experience the schedule as much less violent by not thinking about it in its entirety except when you are in planning mode. The rest of the time you just do what the plan calls for, concentrating on the task in front of you without adding the thought, “Here I am with all this work and so much more to do this week.”
Said another way, don’t make a panoramic movie out of your difficult schedule such that you are constantly seeing yourself doing all that has to be done, as if it were going to be done all at once. Instead just do what has to be done right now, for that’s all you can do. It may sound like a simple thing to do, but it is very subtle and difficult, yet so liberating!
Another method you can use to cope with overscheduling is to notice each time you experience fear or wanting while thinking about all you have to do. Consciously label these feelings as fear and wanting in your mind and then see for yourself that they originate as impersonal mind-states, the way a storm forms due to weather conditions. The land that receives the storm does not own it, and the storm is not the land; it’s just a storm, which due to its own characteristics can cause damage. So it is with the stormy situations in your life where there is a tendency to both deny and take ownership of fear or wanting. This misperception leads you to believe you should be able to control them, which in turn causes the physical contractions and the mental anguish that constitute violence to self.
In seeking freedom from violence to self, practice noticing over and over again that you are constantly, and usually unconsciously, wanting things to be different than the way they are. You become a little dictator to yourself, sitting on a throne, arms crossed, pouting and demanding that things you like should stay the way they are forever and what you do not like should disappear immediately. This craving to hold on to what you like and to get rid of what you find difficult is considered the source of suffering in life and the origin of violence against self. By practicing living with things as they are, you will discover that while life may not be less painful, your experience of it is immeasurably better. Also, fully accepting what is true in the moment is the only firm place to begin to make changes in your life. Living in the moment is not a one-time commitment but something that has to be done again and again.
Nonviolence to self is a lifetime practice of which there are ever more subtle levels to discover. The more you are able to be with yourself in a nonviolent way, the less harm you will do to another. Be gentle with the body and mind; refuse to get caught in believing that things have to be a certain way in order for you to be happy.
At some point each day, softly close your eyes, relax your shoulders, let your mind settle on the breath without trying to control it. In the ensuing quietness, see for yourself how mysterious life is. Maybe we should create a new T-shirt, one that reads: “Life is interesting, and then I’m not sure what happens!”
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