freeing the mind itself

The mind, or the natural you cannot actually be split. As a zen poem says:
Like a sword that cuts, but cannot cut itself;
Like an eye that sees, but cannot see itself.
The illusion of the split comes from the mind’s attempt to be both itself and its idea of itself, from a fatal confusion of the map with the territory. To make an end of the illusion, the mind must stop trying to act upon itself, upon its stream of experiences, from the standpoint of the idea of itself which we call the ego. This is expressed in another Zen poem:
Sitting quietly, doing nothing,
Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.
What I do is help you see the ideas you have mistaken yourself for – as you see them rather than be them, you can make a relationship with them. If you’re not a Zen master they have a life of their own.

Bipolar and Internal Family Sytems therapy

Check out Peter Gerlach’s video on how to treat bipolar disorder with psychotherapy based on internal family systems.

NHS recognises mindfulness is good for depression

 
(in the Guardian on the 26 Feb)
 
Mindfulness meditation has been shown to give patients control over their own depression and anxiety levels and levels of chronic pain, according to a paper published earlier this month in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
Previous studies have found that mindfulness meditation can cut the recurrence of depression by 50%, and neuroimaging scans have shown significant positive change in brain activity of long-term meditators. But while scientists knew mindfulness was having an effect, they have not known how until now.
Catherine Kerr, lead author of the new study and director of translational neuroscience for the contemplative studies initiative at Brown University in Providence, in the US, says that when we are depressed, attention is “consumed by negative preoccupations, thoughts and worries”. Insteadnstead of disengaging and moving on, we find ourselves digging deeper into negative thought patterns.
Mindfulness gives patients control over this habitual chain via a “body scan” technique, where patients systematically engage and disengage with the sensations in each part of the body. As they do so, alpha rhythms, which organise the flow of sensory information in the brain, increase and decrease. Kerr describes this as a “sensory volume knob” and it is this flexible focusing skill which, the paper proposes, “regulates attention so that it does not become biased toward negative physical sensations and thoughts, as in depression”. Early Buddhists advanced a similar theory 2,500 years ago in a famous practice text called “Mindfulness of the body and breath”.
I came to mindfulness on a 10-day Buddhist meditation retreat in Thailand. Letting go of thought felt as impossible as tearing off a limb; particularly when the leg and back pains started from sitting cross-legged.
Years later, I came to see that it was unacknowledged emotions that gradually manifested as pain, on an emotional and sometimes physical level. Turning towards them, and accepting them fully, helped to resolve them.
Thankfully, the secular antidote that the NHS has rolled out is far easier than the one the Buddha taught. You don’t have to sit cross-legged, and the sessions, usually run by a clinical psychologist, take place once a week over a period of eight weeks.
Having recognised the health and cost benefits, some NHS trusts accept self-referrals, others accept referrals via GPs. The Mental Health Foundation, which has produced a list of some of the NHS-funded courses, estimates that as many as 30% of GPs now refer patients to mindfulness training.
However, these programmes are often bundled under “talking therapies” treatment, such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), which is misleading since talking is exactly what mindfulness practitioners aren’t doing.

Inner Judge Speaks!

Giving up hope for satisfaction outside yourself

 
‘Our life is always varying between happiness and unhappiness, or sometimes between relative happiness and relative unhappiness. It is shifting, changing, and we long for a bedrock of peace and stability. It is natural to do so, but most of us spend a lifetime seeking, seeking, seeking, for a bedrock we never find.
Can we find it? Yes—if we comprehend and deal with the problem involved. Until we do, we seek the bedrock outside of ourselves; we hunt with hope for the person or situation or belief system, which will supply us with that which we believe we lack. The illusions of romantic love, of the perfect (and nonexistent life) work or partner (or home or living situation) all beckon to us like the Sirens to Odysseus.
If we don’t understand, time after time our little ship will be shattered on hidden rock. But the other side of such disasters is the dawning recognition that each rough episode in life can be our true teacher; each difficulty is, as one sutra says, ‘the Buddha come to greet us.’
We slowly awaken to the knowledge that the spiritual bedrock we seek is not a life beyond disaster and pain, but the embracing of disaster and pain as they occur.
If we want a refreshing drink of water (of life), we cannot separate out the molecules that we think will be pleasing and tasty for us. If we do (or could) we would not be drinking water but a monstrosity of our own creation.
Similarly, if we refuse the direct, and sometimes painful, experience of this moment, we are left stewing around in our usual thinking muddle of blame, criticism, judgment, or avoidance.
To know the wholeness of life, we have to drink the whole glass of water; we have to experience the moment, as it is, not the distorted version of it that my mind can concoct.
Since the whole glass is nothing but the wholeness of each moment—unavoidable, ever present—when we are more willing to experience our fear and pain directly, the wholeness (bedrock) of our lives is revealed as the miracle it is.
Simple, yes. Easy, no. For most of us, this is practice for a lifetime. However, the bedrock (always there) is more and more known to us as being there. The good life.’  Joko Beck
 
‘The trapeze artist went on to say that the most important part of the trapeze action was something called the dead spot. The dead spot comes ‘at the end of the swing…when the swinging stops moving in one direction and starts moving in the other. Like when you’re highest on a playground swing. The whole idea is to use that change of momentum to create the trick. She explained that it is there, in that moment that the next trick is born.
 
The reporter noted that swinging on a trapeze is a lot like life – timing is all. But, as he also observed, ‘in life its hard to sit still and wait for the timing to reveal itself…life keeps moving and at predictable intervals there will be change. The pendulum will literally swing the other way. You can’t change that. You can only use it.
 
I like to expand the metaphor to include another aspect of trapeze swinging – the letting go between bars. I think of the dead spot as that place between swings, when the performer hangs at point zero before grabbing the next bar. It is the moment of nonaction and notknowing. The events of life offer all types of dead spots.
Our dead spots can take many forms. They can occur at the time of major events, like changing a relationship or profession. It can be the loss of a loved one or indecision over what action to take when faced with a job choice. Whatever it is, no matter how big or small, the dead spot appears when we cannot engage in our habitual way of holding and grasping for the bars, either because we are forced to let go or we wilfully launch ourselves into midair. Life pries our fingers loose and no matter how much we try to avoid it, we end up in the suspended moment, not knowing what comes next.
 
Our usual reaction to this type of situation is to grasp at whatever relief we can get. How we do this differs according to our systems of defence. For some it may be assuming the worse scenario. For others it may only be hoping for the best.
 
If approached with intelligence, the dead spot can be the key to understanding the reactionary behaviours spinning in the dream of self. We can learn how to work in that split second, when either there is no new bar for us to grasp or our usual favourites no longer work; we have the opportunity to know ourselves in a way that is open to whatever life brings our way.
 
When even for the briefest of moments we take pause in the dead spot, that moment of nonaction, before we react, we step through the door marked Enter Here and meet life just as it is, in just this moment. It is in the moment of Just This that the trapeze artist finds the most power and creativity. In Just This we meet the power and creativity to break away from our habitual thoughts, emotional matrix, body patterns, and energy that fuel and direct our reactions. So for example when someone insults us with practice can more quickly turn our awareness to our experience to thoughts like who does she think she is talking to ? We can breathe in the tightening in the shoulders and neck, the words wanting to form in outrage. Just this is exactly what the words suggest – there is only this right now. As one teacher has said, wherever you go, there you are. This is the core of our awareness practice – to challenge us to question our assumptions about what makes the world real to us.’ Diane Rizzetto

TED talk on IFS

English captions available
A precise and honest introduction to IFS from the new French IFS trainer

Disney-Pixar’s view of the Mind a la IFS

Mindfulness….an interview with Jon Kabat-Zinn

Having struggled to be mindful as a Buddhist monk building a road, tiling a roof, cleaning toilets, sitting through pain, I have often been puzzled by the way western psychologists have latched onto a convenient definition of mindfulness as non-judgemental awareness in the moment. Do they know how often emotions are raging, and carrying one away ?  How hard it can be to relinquish an opinion you based your life on ?  
They have taken the seventh step of the eight-fold path, and largely ignored the investigation that is needed to see through one’s conditioning.
That said I often think this style of psychotherapy (IFS)  is a very valuable adjunct to ‘mindfulness’ – in recognizing and understanding the defences they soften up, and are often willing to step to one side, so that mindfulness/compassion/courage/curiosity can be there and embrace and understand and identify what the defences were working so hard to contain and exile – then there can be a surrender to being the knowing.
 
The following article appeared in the Psychologist, and is an interview with Jon Kabat-Zinn who pioneered the growth of mindfulness in the West….
 
“Jon Kabat-Zinn is Internationally known for his work as a scientist, writer, and meditation teacher engaged in bringing mindfulness into the mainstream of medicine and society. He is Professor of Medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where he founded its world-renowned Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Clinic (in 1979), and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society (in 1995).
Edo Shonin is a research psychologist at Nottingham Trent University, and a Buddhist monk. He poses the questions here.
Why do you think mindfulness is growing in popularity within psychology?
There has kind of been a kind of explosion of interest around mindfulness that’s actually been going on for years but it’s reached the point where it’s kind of like – not just the big bang but the kind of inflation of the big bang. I think there are a lot of reasons for it. One is the kind of momentum in the science that’s built up over the years around mindfulness. So if you look at the plot of the number of papers in the medical and scientific literature over the past 30-35 years, it unfolds at a very low level during the eighties and right into the late 90s. And then it starts to rise and through the early 2,000s, it went higher and higher and now it’s almost going straight up so that [there were] over 700 papers in 2014 alone on mindfulness, and that’s not counting some of the kind of mindfulness approaches like ACT and DBT.
That’s one thing that’s driving it. Another thing that is driving it is the media has gotten a hold of it in a way where, say, in the past year, in 2014, it was the cover story, my work was, you know, the cover story of Time Magazine in February of 2014. Then there was CBS [news] 60 minutes with Anderson Cooper who did this thing in December. And so in 2015, Oprah Winfrey did an hour’s conversation on her big program with me about mindfulness. You know many of the people see these things in the United States and that drives it. Even internationally, I have just spent a number of days giving talks… Amsterdam was like sold out at 950 people, Belgium was sold out at 1,500 people. Paris was sold out at 1,700 people … and tomorrow night in London will be like sold out at like 900 people…
You have defined mindfulness using words such as ‘non-judgemental moment-to-moment awareness’. What exactly does this statement mean?
First of all let me simply say that we get almost no training in our education around awareness at all … It is in some sense trivialised and ignored how powerful the human faculty for awareness is. So what meditation practice in general does and mindfulness specifically is to intentionally cultivate access to awareness, intimacy with awareness. It is not that we have to set up awareness, it is actually already fully developed. What we need to develop is moment to moment access to it.
Why moment to moment? Well that’s really the only moment we are ever alive. But when we fall into extremes of thinking and emotion and so forth then often we are not in the present moment anymore … As children we naturally have the present moment but our education system in some sense squeezes that out of us in ways that are I think becoming apparent and the consequences – the very unwise consequences of it or damaging consequences of it – are becoming much better known now. So mindfulness in education and especially even in kindergarten and first grade and so forth, in primary schools, is becoming a major new vector of mindfulness in the mainstream world now.
I wanted to ask about the term ‘non-judgemental’. Don’t you think it is necessary to make some sort of a judgement call to be able to discriminate that which is right and that which is wrong?
That definition that you are asking me about is actually what I call an operational definition. It is not meant to be a final definition of mindfulness. It is more like a working definition of mindfulness. I don’t know if you know anything about the Zen tradition [of Buddhism] but it’s meant to be something of a koan – a deep question that is not completely amenable to a totally cognitive response. What the non-judgemental is pointing to is actually how judgemental we are. So you could think of it as an invitation to suspend judging as much as we can and just be aware of what is unfolding from moment to moment … I am also making a big distinction between judging which, in the way I am using the term, has to do with black and white thinking – I like this and I don’t like that, that’s good, this is bad – and discernment, which is what you are talking about, which is more the kind of operation of wisdom where you can see the subtleties – the thousand shades of grey between black and white – you know that kind of thing, which is absolutely essential to and part and parcel of the cultivation of mindfulness.
If you read that definition and you don’t know anything about it you might ask well why the hell would anybody want to do that – ‘pay attention on purpose in the present moment non-judgementally’? And you will notice in the definition I don’t give a reason for why one would do that. Again that’s part of the Koan, its part of in some sense what’s left unspoken has a kind of real depth to it. But you could say, if you wanted a reason for doing it, it’s in the service of self-understanding and the cultivation of wisdom and compassion.
Would you say mindfulness – in the manner that you teach it – is a spiritual or a psychological faculty?
Neither, just to be as provocative as possible. First of all, I really try to stay as far away from the word spiritual as possible. But what I will say is that if push comes to shove, my working definition of spiritual is what it means to be really human, which would be another koan because different people would say different things about that. But if I call mindfulness a spiritual practice then of course, there will be people that think that’s wonderful and there will be an equal number of people, or ten times as many people, that think well that’s kind of religion, voodoo, really its nonsense, and they won’t want to have anything to do with it.
I understand that while teaching it you might not want to use the word spiritual. But you personally, what do you think?
Here I have to say I am not a psychologist by training and I have never thought of what I do as a psychological intervention. I use a different terminology. So I would call it a mind-body intervention. We sometimes call the field that’s developed around this mind-body medicine. In other words, the recognition that the mind and the body are not two different things.
In what ways do you think mindfulness as a taught program, such as MBSR and MBCT, differs from the traditional Buddhist approach to teaching mindfulness?
It partly depends on the quality of the teacher. If an instructor is well grounded in the meditation practices that underlie MBSR and MBCT then the essential difference might be zero. What is taught in Buddhist monasteries and what is practiced in Buddhist monasteries is essentially no different from what is taught in MBSR and MBCT – in the sense that one has an ethical foundation to the whole thing. In our case it is the Hippocratic Oath – first do no harm. And of course how would you know if you are doing harm unless you are cultivating mindfulness? And then, you know, it really is about the nature of the mind and the nature of what we call the self – and that’s what Buddhist practice is all about.
Some Buddhist teachers and scholars have criticized the popular mindfulness movement and implied that what is being taught no longer reflects the traditional meaning of mindfulness or Sati. In fact, in some papers we find the term ‘McMindfulness’ popping up. What are your views on this?
First of all, that term first came out of one person’s mouth or one person’s mind. When you say it is popping up, of course, every term like that tends to just go viral on the web, but it just came out of one person’s mind. This is not McMindfulness by any stretch of the imagination. What it is – now I have to use some Buddhist terminology – it is the movement of the Dharma [the Buddhist teachings] into the mainstream of society. Buddhism really is about the Dharma – it’s about the teachings of the Buddha. You know, in various Buddhist traditions, there are actually very big differences among Buddhists about what it is all about and what the best methodologies are and all of that stuff. So Buddhist scholars you know, love to, you know, stew with each other about the nature of all of those questions. And now that this is moving into the mainstream, I think instead of seeing that it has the potential to actually elevate humanity in profound ways that are just completely in accordance with the fundamental teachings of the Buddha about the nature of suffering and the possibility of the sort of transformation and liberation from suffering, they get into, kind of, what I might call orthodoxies that allow them to continue to basically throw grenades at something that is at least 99% healthy for people.
Today mindfulness is described as a form of meditation in and of itself, but in the Buddhist canonical literature, mindfulness is described as a factor that regulates concentration (i.e., it is not actually a form of meditation). What are your thoughts on this?
I think different traditions describe it differently. When I developed the language to describe what it is that I do – what i call Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction or MBSR – there is no question its mindfulness. It’s often spoken of in the Theravada [Buddhist] tradition at least as the heart of Buddhist meditation.
There was a monk in Sri Lanka named Nyanaponika Thera who was actually a German who spent his entire adult life in Sri Lanka as a Theravadan monk, and he wrote a book called the ‘Heart of Buddhist Meditation’. It came out in 1962, and I quote from it in my books, and in that book it describes mindfulness as the heart of meditation, that’s what the book is about and the satipatthana sutta.
So you see I didn’t make up the idea that there is such a thing as mindfulness meditation. It is very much the case in the Theravadan tradition that it is seen that way. In the Vajrayana [Buddhist] tradition and in the Chan [Buddhist] tradition they don’t use that kind of language, but, you know, they also don’t necessarily refer to the Abhidharma understanding of mindfulness.
So yes in the Abidharma mindfulness is a factor – it is one of the seven factors of enlightenment. But I am also using the word, just so you know, as a kind of umbrella term for the Dharma in some much larger and more universal sense. Not just as my working definition.
A newspaper has described you as having done more to bring Buddhism into the mainstream than any other individual. Do you think this is an accurate statement and do you think this is a wise move?
The Guardian got it wrong. I remember that headline. If they had used the word Dharma, then I wouldn’t have an argument with it – the Dharma in its most universal form. But I was not happy with that headline at all, it is just not true. And just to say the Buddha was not Buddhist. This has never been about Buddhism per se as an ‘ism’. The word Buddhism was coined by Europeans in about the 17th or 18th century according to some scholars. So even the terminology sometimes creates a separation and orthodoxies that don’t actually exist.
Do you have any advice for psychologists wishing to use mindfulness in applied settings – such as in clinical contexts or with children, offenders, and so on?
I do have advice for them. I guess the most fundamental thing would be that mindfulness is not a concept, it is not a good idea, it is not a philosophy, and it’s not a catechism. It is a way of being but it requires practice. My strongest advice would be to actually practice it for an extended period of time and then applications for particular areas of psychology that are interested will become in some sense obvious – and from a very profound place of interest. And then they can change the field of psychology. At least I hope they will.”
 

The key to the heart…

I went to talk to a 10 yr old boy who had nearly strangled someone. His mother was screaming at me, ‘My son does not have mental health problems!’  I said, well we all do, and asked the boy, ‘What sort of animal is your anger ? He said, ‘Its a lion that kills its prey!’  Later he told me,’the lion and me think differently – he goes boo and I go eek!  Out of the mouths of babes…  I went on Radio 4 to talk about this on a programme about knife crime – my heart sank as they brought in someone else who said all psychologising is a waste of time – kids who are violent only understand firm handling. But listening to the programme later found out Dominic Grieve (Shadow Home Sec) and the presenter from the Centre  for Crime & Justice at Kings College had really liked it

Addiction: A Zen Perspective

Perhaps  should clearly point out I did not write this but liked it so much I have copied it here.
 
Addiction: A Zen Perspective
 
The Zen of Addiction
Whether consciously acknowledged or not, we live in an almost constant state of anxiety. We are concerned with what we may lose, or what we may not gain. We also live in grief and regret over what we have left behind or at least feel we may have indeed lost. We thus attach ourselves to the very things that we cannot, ultimately, control; the past and the future. In truth, there is only today, this moment, and this breath with which we are, and can actually be, connected. The past is gone, and the future has not yet happened. We are here, now.
From a Buddhist perspective, addiction might be considered the archetype of attachment. Addiction is, in fact, a collection of attachments. It is attachment to fear, attachment to loss, and attachment to longing, emptiness, and a lack of a sense of purpose. Whether we choose alcohol, drugs, sex, food, pornography, exercise or even shopping, we are simply employing the means serving the compulsion to fill a space and dampen our pain. The means does not matter; that is simply a gesture. The compulsion is the crux of it, and that compulsion is not so much to drink, or do drugs, or to spend; that compulsion, ultimately, is to fill that space.
 
 
And just what is that space? We might look upon it as the “God-shaped hole.” The wisdom teachings suggest that in identifying with a self, a “me”, we divorce ourselves from the true nature of our existence. From a psychological perspective, this division presents itself as inauthenticity, and the internal conflict that condition engenders promotes internal strife. In our attempt to reconcile this sense of inauthenticity, we cling even more desperately to establishing a sense of “me-ness” and can, in some cases, become morbidly self-destructive in our attempts to soothe the pain of failure in that reconciliation.
Addiction generally begins as an interest. As soon as we express an interest in something, we are expressing a preference. In expressing a preference, we are dividing our attention and creating an attachment to something in the world around us. As that interest turns into a fascination, our attachment deepens. Our attention becomes more and more exclusive, and we become increasingly imbalanced; emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually.
Fascination may then flower into obsession, and we become a slave to our attachment. We are no longer ourselves, and, rather than ‘losing our mind’, which would be the skillful means by which to escape our attachment, we are trapped inside the mind.
With obsession, our attachment becomes even more intensified, and our exclusion even more narrow. As we become slaves to our attachment, our mind, and our behavior, we lose the ability to exercise free will and, in that light, move from obsession to compulsion; from place of being driven, to a place of need.
At this point we fail the First Noble Truth; our attachment has become so involved that we have invited suffering. We are no longer willful, but, rather, subject to and at the sufferance of the will of our attachments. When we find ourselves in a place that we cannot live without exercising this attachment, whatever it may be, we have fallen into a state of addiction.
Within the context of addiction, people often feel that they do not have a choice. Nothing could be further from the truth. We always have a choice. When confronting someone who themselves is confronting an addiction, saying to them, “Stopping your behavior is your choice.” is, however, often met with profound resistance for their failure to see that choice.
The key to getting a grasp on this is recognizing that choice is a constant state; it is not a single moment in time. If the choice not to be addicted were a single choice point, then all we would ultimately do is move our attachment from something socially defined as negative (say, drinking or being promiscuous) to something that is socially defined as positive (not drinking or being chaste). In point of fact, we would become addicted, or at the very least attached, to not being addicted.
Buddha spoke of the Middle Way. Within the context of choice that suggests that if we are present in the moment, our choices are constant. We do not, then, go right or left, say yes or no, think good or bad, or see black or white; rather, we are aware that both opportunities are presenting themselves, we recognize this and acknowledge it, then choose neither.
When we lose the Middle Way and fall off our balancing point, we create our pain. We create our sense of emptiness, and our anxiety around loss. We deceive ourselves into believing that we are less than whom and what we are by virtue of attaching ourselves to things, objects, situations, emotions, and anxieties that take us away from ourselves. This is the engine of addiction.
Coming back to the present moment brings us back to our constancy of choice. We find ourselves in the Middle Way, on the balancing point and we are able to see both choices. Seeing both sides in balance and in perspective then gives us the opportunity to exercise compassion. Most importantly, it gives us the opportunity to exercise compassion toward ourselves. We are able to see the left and the right, and we are also able to see the left in the right and the right in the left.
Our frustration with the world and sense of victimhood thus becomes transformed into the recognition that we must set an intention in our lives. Our depression finds an antidote for itself in the gratitude that we can express simply for being alive. We begin to see outside ourselves with a clear vision and recognize that the things outside ourselves are, in fact, quite outside ourselves. In letting go of our attachments we also let go of the things that influence us and draw us into a state of mind where we feel less than we are, where we feel that something is missing, where we need to fill the space, or dampen the pain, or simply make it go away.
Coming back to the breath as a marker for the present moment, and exercising the constancy of choice in that moment and every moment also gives us an opportunity to break free of the bonds of this supreme state of attachment and begin to climb out of the pit of suffering into which we have gotten ourselves.
© 2008 Michael J. Formica, All Rights Reserved