Long, long before smart phones, a walking stick was our support staff when on-the-go.  A good walking staff was the ultimate assistive device.  If you missteped, the staff helped regain your balance.  If tired, the staff was there to support you.  The staff offered the benefit of a probe if you needed to explore an unfamiliar object along the way.  It could be used as a gauge to test the depth of water if you had to ford a stream.  If you needed to commit something to memory, you could notch the information down on the staff more or less with same ease as we do it with flash-drive memory sticks of today.  And if necessary, a staff could be readily transformed into a weapon.  All in all, the staff helped clear the way from the obstacles.

Whereas acceptance of the ordinary perfection of what is is the destination of our walk, mindfulness – metaphorically speaking – is your walking staff.  Mindfulness – as an assistive psychological device – will help you traverse the turbulent streams of your consciousness; it will prop you up when you stumble over some imperfection; it will help you remember what you are and what you are not; it will clear away the debris of illusions on your way to wellbeing. 

Mindfulness is not only a kind of psychological walking staff, but it’s also a source of direction.  In my experience, most of the enduring self-help insights come directly from the experience of mindfulness.  I believe the entire human civilization as we know it began with mindfulness.  First, living in the jungle of life, we were too busy surviving to sit down.  When we finally figured out how to use fire to protect us, we got a chance to relax.  When we sat down in a circle around the first fire, for the first time in the history of our species with nothing to do, we noticed ourselves and our Selves.  We noticed the fire dance of our mortal impermanence and the circular interdependence of us all.  This was our first zazen, …

1.
As a competitive swimmer of the river of consciousness
I never understood the idea of a false start.
What do you mean I have to wait to compete?!
2.
But now that I don’t compete I get it:
I have to synchronize first
Before I competitively get out of synch.
3.
Here’s what I like about team sports:
You got somebody to share your losses with. 
That’s cool.
4.
Here’s what I don’t like about team sports.
Your team gangs up on “others” like they are a single object.
That’s not cool.
5.
We are all plural.
We are all one.
We are all subject-object.
6.
Un-sports, America!
If we play politics as we play sports,
we’ll all lose.
7.
Empty your super-bowl-mind, sports-monk!
These black-and-white, red-blue dichotomous distinctions are all in your head!
Let’s play united!

Assuming you were hungry in the first place, the following three sensations happen after you begin eating:

• First, the sensation of hunger goes away. This is a moment of hunger relief.  This happens almost too fast for us to have time to enjoy a meal. If you stop eating at this point, then you no longer feel the painful emptiness of hunger, but you also do not yet feel full.
• If you keep on eating, you will next experience a moment of pleasant fullness as the food distends the lining of your stomach, but not so much as to cause pain.
• If you keep on eating, you will eventually experience a moment of unpleasant fullness as the stomach distends to a painful degree.

The following exercise will help you tune in to the differences between pleasant fullness and unpleasant fullness through the language of fullness. Print out several copies of the word-lists below. After you finish eating, look over both lists to see which fullness-words tend to describe what you feel. Circle the words that apply. Note the trends. Draw your conclusions.

Unpleasant Fullness Word List

stuffed                        swollen            distended        full                   overfed                        blown up

ballooned        engorged         bloated                        satisfied           sated                satiated

dissatisfied      displeased       unhappy          frustrated        disappointed   uncomfortable

awkward         ill at ease         clumsy             graceless          bulky               cumbersome

difficult to maneuver              large                massive            mammoth        enormous

bursting           sated                insatiable         gluttonous       voracious         excessive

fat                    overweight      heavy   stout    plump              large                corpulent

chubby                        big       obese   portly   podgy  rotund fleshy  tubby   round   flabby  soft

unfit                sagging                        chunky                        tired     exhausted        sleepy  drowsy

fatigued           worn-out         out-of-breath   all-in    drained                        pooped            beat

done-in            gasping                        winded                        panting                        indigestion      puffy

heartburn         repulsive          bad      nasty    disgusting        hideous                        gross

sick                  queasy             nauseous          upset    sickening         irritated           annoyed

inert                 sluggish           torpid              passive             slow     lethargic          slothful

slow-moving   apathetic          gloomy                        melancholic     pessimistic       depressed

glum    sad       low-spirited     despondent     miserable         fed-up             undisciplined

out-of-control  impulsive         wanting to throw up               aching              tender  sore

burning            negative           cynical             irritable            touchy             moody  regretful

Pleasant Fullness Word List

contented        fulfilled                       pleased                        happy              comfortable     at ease

satisfied           disciplined       enjoyable         good                easy                 relaxed

laid-back         calm                 peaceful           stress-free        casual              mellow

smooth                        placid              sedate              settled             rewarded         on the ball

aware               alert                 sharp                capable                        competent       sensible

level-headed    mindful                       conscious         thoughtful       nourished        attractive

optimistic        positive                        in control         upbeat             certain             clear

confident         constructive     decisive           poised              balanced          controlled

composed        reasonable       well-adjusted  stable               together           organized

unruffled         up                    on top of things                                   proper              purposeful

reflective         social               cheerful           complete          whole              …

Un-speak
the domino effect of your words
back to the Original Silence of Metacognition*. 
To a moment
before your Mind
created the word “mind.”

*Metacognition is cognition about cognition, thinking about thinking, thinking in reverse, so to say, from thought to thinker.

Related posts:

Eating Meditation Inspired by Rg Veda

Keeping Cool When Mind is On Fire

Pattern Interruption Hall of Fame: people that wake us up from monotony of mindlessness.  These are iconoclasts, straight-shooters, rascal sages, and eccentric oddballs of all walks of mind - i.e. the denizens of the brave new world of self-aware unorthodoxy. 

Zach Galifianakis In His Own Words

“I am from the foothills of North Carolina. I now live in the mountains of that state. And also live in Brooklyn.  I come from a strong family.  I enjoy tractors and red wine.  I feel that living your life in contradiction keeps one confused and happy.  I dislike those that litter.  Sometimes I like to go to the zoo and ride on the backs of bison.  I dream of Iceland from time to time.  It makes me laugh when people miscommunicate.  I like walking over bridges and hate Donald Trump or anything like him.  The entertainment business is both poison and honey.  I drive a Subaru.  It is an automatic.  I cry sometimes in that car.  I perform my routines around America.” (1, my italics)

Watch “Between Two Ferns” to see Zach Galifianakis at his pattern-interruption best.  Galifianakis seems to have an intuitive grasp on paradox and nonduality. 

Galifianakis – Modern Day Diogenes

Zach Galifianakis strikes me as the modern-day Diogenes of Sinope, a philosopher-punk.  Diogenes (412-323 BC) was a Greek philosopher who who was the original philosophical “dog” (the word “cynic” by the way derives from Greek “kynikos” and “kyon” for dog, thus the “canine”). 

A nomadic beggar-philosopher Diogenes extolled the virtue of poverty and denounced societal definitions of wealth.  Diogenes is said to have shocked Athenians by masturbating in the public market square.  He reportedly urinated on Plato’s  dininig room carpet, and apparently flipped the bird to none other than Alexander the Great for standing in his sunlight while Diogenes was tanning.  In his defiance of the norms of behavior, Diogenes was trying to devalue the “coinage” of modern-day customs.  An oddball patriot he barked on the tree of society (and raised his leg on it too!).  Eventually, he ended up being sold into slavery.  While being auctioned off as a slave, he announced …

I am still getting a good bit of correspondence regarding my harm-reduction, moderation-focused, Middle Way approach to dealing with emotional eating.  While the idea is beginning to sink in, there are still lingering questions about how to cultivate mindful emotional eating partnerships and whether doing so would be a form of enabling.  So, I am re-posting this essay (with a section on “enabling”).  Be well.

EMOTIONAL EATING ISN’T A PROBLEM, MINDLESS EMOTIONAL EATING IS

As you might recall from the “Eating the Moment” self-help program for overcoming overeating, there are 3 reasons we eat:  just because, mindlessly; to satisfy biological/physiological hunger; and to change how we feel/for emotional reasons.  Emotional eating is extremely common.  In fact, it is pretty much hard-wired into our eating culture.  Take the concept of dessert, for example.  What is dessert?  Dessert is something yummy, tasty.  Does your body need dessert?  Of course, not.  So, why do we eat desserts?  Because we want to enjoy the taste of what we are eating.  That’s an emotional reason.  Dessert is for the mind, not for the body.

Same goes for any kind of taste-focused cooking.  As a culture, we spend endless hours pursuing various gustatory highlights.  Why?  Once again, because we want to enjoy what we are eating.  That’s emotional eating.  Why?  Because your body doesn’t really need for the food to taste good.  What your body needs is the right amount of food and a certain combination of nutritional value.  Our obsession with the taste of food is nothing other than an attempt to kill two birds with one stone: to fill up our stomach and to caress the palate of your sensation-seeking mind.  Nothing’s wrong with that!  Let cosmonauts eat spam!  The point I am making is that emotional eating is pretty much hard-wired into all of our eating.  If you want for your food to have a nice taste, let alone if you want a dessert, you are looking at food to satisfy your emotional desires for pleasures.  Once again: there is absolutely nothing wrong with that!

The Impasse of Certainty

As a perfectionist, you like being “right” and doing the “right” thing.  This emphasis on being “right” can lead to dogma.  Certainty is rigidity.  Doubt is tentativeness. 

A mind that is certain is a closed mind.  A mind that is in doubt is an open mind. 

When a mind is uncertain it searches for knowledge.  A mind full of certainty is full of memory: it knows what it knows and needs to know nothing else.  Such mind is asleep, it is not interested in what is, only in confirming what was.  Thus, certainty is mindlessness.  Langer wrote: “mindlessness is the rigid reliance on old categories” whereas mindfulness is “the continual creation of new ones” (1989, pp. 63-66).  If I started watching a movie and I don’t like the first ten minutes of it, I might categorize it as a movie I don’t like and stop watching it.  If, however, I remain open minded and continue to watch it, I might discover that I do, after all, like the movie and will re-categorize it.  Certainty is a foreclosure on the ever-coming flow of information.  It’s the end of analysis, the presumption that reality will remain in the future what it is at the moment.  But the reality is, of course, changing every moment and creating new information.  If you are not creating new categories, you are missing the new information.  As a perfectionist, you tend to be certain beyond doubt about your version of what’s “right.”  Certainty becomes a handicap: after all, how can you learn something new without willing to revise your old categories?  How can you revise your old categories if you are dead certain that they are right?   And how can you let go of your certainty if you are afraid of not-knowing?  You can’t, unless you cultivate a “don’t know” mind.

Certainty Stands in the Way of Creativity

In addition to inhibiting learning, certainty might be also standing in the way of your creativity and playfulness. Langer explains that creating and re-creating categories is at the heart of recreation and …

Year 815 AD: Sadnalegs, a Tibetan king who was first to officially pledge support for Buddhism in Tibet, dies. An inscribed pillar commemorating this initiative is erected near Lhasa. Dharma spreads.

Mind is a pattern-weaving, pattern-extracting monster of a thought-hive that roams the islands of human consciousness dividing reality into us and “Others.”

Koan is an un-answerable quest-of-a-question used in Zen training to rescue one’s mind, lost in chasing its own tail, and to help it return to the oceanic sense of nonduality.

What do you see?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A plot-line? But there is no line here! What you are seeing is a projection of your own mind. There is no connection between these unrelated dots whatsoever other than the connection made by your mind. Neither is there any connection between the verbal data points italicized in the paragraphs above (815, Dharma, initiative, monster, Others, lost, rescue, oceanic). But you sensed a possibility of connection and you chased it. That’s what mind does: it follows (the conditioning). And now it brought you here. You read the post-title. You followed the bread crumbs of meaning-laden words. That’s the dharma of it: hypotheses hold attention.

The word “dharma” has a nuanced cultural history and I am no expert on it. But the Sanskrit (Proto-Indo-European) origins of this word still shed light on all of the later meanings of this concept – like a set of ancient halogen head-lights that beams a path of clarity through the ages. The word “dharma” stems from the verb to hold, to support, to sustain. Dharma is a kind of crutch (of meaning). Any teaching, any story-line, any ideology plots reality data-points against some kind of vector and in so doing pivots the mind’s eye towards some kind of time (be it past or future) or towards some kind of idea, distracting us from what presently and immediately is.

A koan crashes this mind-flight of fancy smack down to the plane of the here-and-now. It kicks you out of your theorizing and forces you to acknowledge the plain urgency of moment-to-moment survival. Whereas the show …

Obama wasn’t just presidential during his meeting with GOP (that comes easy to this fellow and is hardly news), he was a group-therapist-in-chief. That’s the news.

CliffsNotes on Concept of “Process”

Walk into just about any practicing psychologist’s office and there is a pretty good chance that you will see Irvin Yalom’s brick-sized book Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy. Yalom’s book isn’t just a quintessential manual for group therapy; it is a sourcebook on the elusive concept of “process.”

Here’s what Yalom says about process: “The single most important point I make in this entire book: the here-and-now focus, to be effective, consists of two symbiotic tiers … The first tier is an experiencing one: the [group] members live in the here-and-now; they develop strong feelings toward the other group members … These here-and-now feelings become the major discourse of the group. The thrust is ahistorical: the immediate events of the meeting take precedence over events both in the current outside life and in the distant past of the members … But the here-and-now focus rapidly reaches the limits of its usefulness without the second tier, which is the illumination of process.”

Now, let me unpack this riveting gem: a) there are relationships, b) relationships must be discussed, c) before relationships are discussed, there needs to be a discussion of discussion itself. A discussion of discussion is what is known as “process” or meta-communication. Let’s listen to Yalom one more time as he fine-tunes the definition of “process”: “It is useful to contrast process and content. Imagine two individuals in a discussion. The content of that discussion consists of the explicit words spoken, the substantive issues, the arguments advanced. The process is an altogether different matter. … Therapists who are process-oriented are concerned not primarily with the verbal content of a client’s utterance, but with the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of that utterance.”

Content Notes on Obama/GOP meeting

I got this particular dose of news from CNN.com. First, I watched the video. Then, I read the write-up. I walked away with two different stories. As a psychologist, watching this meeting, I was impressed with the fact that …