There is a tradition on the Mindfulness and Psychotherapy Blog where every Monday I cite a quote or a poem that is related to mindfulness and psychotherapy in some way and then explore it a bit and how it is relevant to our lives. For me, quotes and poetry can often sink me into a state of greater understanding.

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Now, this isn’t meant to be hokey, but real. Plenty of therapies advocate working through our bodies and behaviors as a source of bringing joy and happiness into our lives.

In Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) there is a piece called the “Half-Smile Experiment.” Here’s the idea:

Take a moment to notice how you are feeling physically and emotionally. Notice if you’re feeling calm, happy, sad, frustrated, guilty, shameful, or excited, etc… Also notice if your body is feeling loose or tense, just taking stock of yourself in this moment.

Now, get a pen and put it in between your teeth horizontally (please don’t try to put it in vertically). Now just breathe in and out and notice the sensations of muscles in your face and also notice any shift emotionally. When thoughts arise, “this is silly” or “why am I doing this”, just notice them as thoughts and come back to paying attention to how you are feeling.

You may want to try this with a friend, then see what happens. Remember, this is just an experiment!

Thich Nhat Hanh often recommends another way to bring smiling into our lives to bring us a great sense of peace and happiness during the day.

He says that when you’re walking, sitting or lying down try saying to yourself,

“Breathing in I calm my body, breathing out, I smile.”

You can shorten it so when you breathin you just say “calm” to yourself and when you breath out, you just say “smile.” Now, if you don’t actually feel like physically smiling you can cast a kind and gently smile inwardly at yourself …

For those of you who don’t know Sharon Salzberg, she one of America’s leading mindfulness teachers and authors and has played a significant role in bringing mindfulness and the practice of lovingkindness to all of us in the Western world.  She is co-founder of one of America’s premier meditation centers, Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Barre Massachusetts and is the author of many books and CDs, including her classic Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness and her newest work, The Kindness Handbook: A Practical Companion.

I am so happy to interview her at The Mindfulness and Psychotherapy Blog.

Question: Sharon, in your classic book Lovingkindness you begin by saying, “Throughout our lives we long to love ourselves more deeply and to feel connected with others. Instead, we often contract, fear intimacy, and suffer a bewildering sense of separation. We crave love, and yet we are lonely. Our delusion of being separate from one another, of being apart from all that is around us, gives rise to all of this pain. What is the way out of this?” Sharon, can you give us a glimpse into how you guide people out of their loneliness?

Sharon: Often we begin by generating some compassion for ourselves in the face of our feeling of loneliness. It is not something bad, or weak to feel. It is however very painful, and so instead of disliking ourselves for it, we can have some tenderness and kindness for ourselves. Then we use the base of that self-understanding and compassion to look at others. We know all of us at times act to automatically avoid feelings like loneliness, sometimes in quite destructive ways. We know that it takes some skill to hang in there with a feeling like loneliness, and to develop greater kindness from it. We do reflections like, “All beings want to be happy,” to reinforce the understanding that there are many things we all share – we want to be happy, we very often don’t know where genuine happiness is to be …

Therese Borchard, author of multiple books and the popular blog Beyond Blue, describes just the costs of depression and anxiety when avoiding feelings and shows us how unplugging from technology from time to time can give us the experience of allowing feelings to arise instead of keeping them walled up inside.  

She says:

Find out how much time you gain when you stop checking your emails every half-second. And wait for the uncomfortable feelings … of loneliness, fear, insecurity … to surface once you stop running from event A to event B. You’ll be surprised to find so many emotions that have been tucked inside, waiting for an opportunity to emerge when you slow down (which, of course, you don’t).

She goes on to explain the cost of not doing this:

However, I’m finding that if I don’t quiet down every now and then to hear what my feelings have to say, that my inner life will eventually erupt in an ugly mess of depression and anxiety. So this little hiatus from the world isn’t just a nice thing to do if you can afford it. It’s essential to staying well.

I would say that Therese was practicing being kind to herself in this process and this elicited these feelings of well-being.

We might be able to think of our feelings as little parts of ourselves. When we avoid, neglect, or repress them then we are only avoiding, neglecting, or repressing ourselves. As human beings, we don’t do well when we’re treated this way. However, we’re so conditioned to avoid discomfort at all costs that we’ve lost the ability to embrace our feelings (sometimes even the joyful ones). It is a practice to re-integrate all these parts of ourselves. When we do integrate them, we can reap great benefits.

I was sitting across from a couple in therapy recently and as the wife was explaining to her husband the various  insights she was having about how his behavior could improve you could see his body stiffening up, his arms crossing and his mouth moving saying the words, “uh-huh, yup, you’re right…” There was something not fitting in this picture …

I guess we can now say there is a new-ish tradition on the Mindfulness and Psychotherapy Blog. Every Monday I will cite a quote or a poem that is related to mindfulness and psychotherapy in some way and then explore it a bit and how it is relevant to our lives. For me, quotes and poetry can often sink me into a state of greater understanding.

Here is a Quote by Viktor Frankl, M.D.:

“Every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.”

In real life, this quote doesn’t always appear to be true. When you’re struggling with depression or intense anxiety or you’re already half way down with that bottle of vodka, it may not seem like there was any choice there.

However, in order to fully get the gist of this quote, let me lay out another quote that I’ve said before by the same Psychiatrist, Neurologist and Holocaust survivor.

“In between stimulus and response there is a space, in that space lies our power to choose our response in our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

I quote this one often because it is so true and so powerful. While there are genetic factors to our mental, emotional and physical challenges in life, there is often a moment in between when we get triggered by something and how we react. In that moment lies the opportunity to choose how we are going to best support ourselves.

The reason it seems like there is no choice in falling into a very deep depression, a panic attack, or using a substance, is because we are not aware of that space.

Mindfulness supports us in slowing time down a bit to cultivate a nonjudgmental awareness of this space and we become able to turn a kind attention toward this difficulty, acknowledging it and then choosing what will be the most effective action in that moment. In time we can identify with Frankl’s quote of having “the freedom to change at any instant.”

This may not mean that depression or anxiety is cured, but it may mean that it doesn’t have to fall to the depths it has in the past.

You can cultivate mindfulness …

The majority of us spend most of our time at work and our experience of work definitely affects or mental health and vice versa. So it seemed to be a really good idea to get support around how we can relate to our jobs in way with a greater sense of purpose and satisfaction. Jeff Klein, CEO of Cause Alliance Marketing, writes in his new book Working for Good: Making a Difference While Making a Living, “We live in a time of great change, significant challenges, and tremendous opportunity.” He encourages us to integrate work with positive social change and to bring mindfulness to the workplace. 

It is my pleasure today to interview Jeff so we can all glean some of his wisdom around a topic that is so relevant to all of us.

Question: What is Working for Good and why should people aspire to engage in it?

Jeff:  Working for Good is a way of showing up for work in which we cultivate and express our full humanity. In my pursuit and practice of Working for Good over the past three decades, I’ve found that how we work is as, if not more, important than what we do. We can work in a green business, a social service organization, or some other endeavor focused on making the world a better place, but if we treat others and ourselves with disregard or disrespect in the process, we end up creating something far short of our intention. The process is the product.

If people want to become more fully human, to pursue a path of self-actualization through their work (considering that work is an essential and substantial aspect of life, and if they want to fulfill their potential at all, they probably want to focus on it in the context of their work), connect with others more deeply and establish a deep foundation for collaboration, then they will probably want to cultivate the skills of Working for Good!

Question: One of the key points that you mention is how “awareness is essential, but if it isn’t embodied in actions, …