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Joy and Meaning

Attention, Mindfulness, & Active Imagination

February 11, 2022 by Cornelia

Experience The Benefits Of Attention, Mindfulness And Active Imagination

Attention, Mindfulness, and Active Imagination changes our brain, changes our thoughts and changes our feelings.  

Many would like to experience less anxiety, less frustration, less depression and less confusion.  Mindfulness practices can assist you to experience greater calm, ease, energy, purpose and joy.

By reading this ‘primer’ and integrating some of the practices you will begin to identify what no longer serves you and you will understand what resonates deep within you. 

You may also begin making new choices and learning new habits.  

Just by reading through this you will identify areas you see thriving in you life and areas that you want to change.  You will also experience a calming and learn skills as you read. 

What is Attention, Mindfulness &  Active Imagination?

Attention is required for mindfulness.  We have to decide something is important; more important than distraction, more important than being right, more important than the past.

When we talk about mindfulness we are talking about taking coming home to ourselves.  We regain control of our mind.  We are talking about taking control of our thoughts, our emotions and our feelings.  We are the ones taking control.  The people outside of us won’t change necessarily.  We will be the ones learning skills and making changes.  These changes will impact how we feel and respond. 

Why should we make these changes?  Will this make our workplace better, our spouse more compliant, or our children listen?

How we respond in our thoughts, feelings and emotions will undoubtably impact the behavior of people outside of us. But that’s not why we learn these skills. We learn these skills because we want to have the experience of greater inner freedom, authenticity and control of our reactions and responses. This is skill born out of self knowledge rather than control that seeks to manage the world around us. 

All of us want to be making choices from the depths of our knowing and the depth of our own integrity, rather than reacting to the external ‘weather conditions’ of others.  To do this, to feel we are living authentically, to feel satisfied, we need the skills to choose our thoughts and feelings – to express our creative nature – rather than be subject to thoughts and feelings.  To access an understanding of this direction we often need another tool, active imagination.

Active imagination has long been used as a ‘tool’, expanding our considerations towards understanding, meaning and depth.  In the west, Carl Jung popularized active imagination as a means of exploring unconscious material and soulful material.  Throughout history philosophic and spiritual traditions have made use of this tool.  Our scientific inquiry follows a similar pattern. Stretching our imagination is how we grow.

Learning Any New Skill Is A Process

There are techniques to learn.  There are skills to learn.  Learning any new skill is a process.  At first we are slow at the new skill and uncomfortable.  In this stage it serves us not to judge ourselves harshly or give up on the process.  We are our own worst judges most of the time.  

Meeting Resistance

We intellectually understand a new skill and ‘think’ that integration is complete with understanding.  This is not so.  Whenever we learn something new there is resistance.  Resistance shows up in many forms.  Resistance often appears as judging ourselves or judging the process.  Resistance is pushing us to give up on the change.  Our safety is associated with stability, even unhealthy stability, so part of our inner survival mechanism will resist learning new skills.  This is natural.  Homeostasis is the word describing the body/mind auto-regulating mechanism.  Stability is considered safe.  Operating outside the bounds of the norm triggers the impulse to return to whatever was normal, even when the ‘norm’ was unhealthy.     

Persistent Commitment Is Essential 

This is where we make a deeper commitment.  This is where we reconnect to ourselves; just to ourselves.  Other people can’t make this commitment for us.  We have to be the ones making the commitment. 

If you want more control over how you feel, how you think and the emotional energy swirling through you, then ask yourself if you are willing to learn some new skills?  If the answer is yes, then be prepared to recommit to this process multiple times until you’ve achieved a level of mastery.  Once we’ve achieved a modicum of mastery, the benefits are profound.  The benefits alone reinforce our choice to stay with a new discipline, to stay with continuing the learning and the re-training process.  In time a new level of homeostasis is set.  It will be easier to stay here, easier to maintain the new habits.  So decide if you are willing to commit energy and time to change.Pay Attention – Accept Things As They Are

A Baseline – Accepting What Is

The first steps in any change process include identifying where we currently are.  What’s currently happening?  This is the time to be honest.  This is the time to pay attention to what thoughts we think in the morning, how we feel and what thoughts we think throughout the day.  How do we feel in the morning?  How do we think and feel at the end of the day?  How do we talk about our work and our life?

Response

We pay attention to how we react and respond interpersonally.  What triggers us?  What is easy?  What is not easy?  Identifying these patterns is research.  Often paying attention to how things really are NOW can be painful.  We want to deny what is obvious.  

Research

With research we identify our habitual thoughts, feelings and emotions.  We see the behaviors that we wish we did not have; wish we did not live.  We have turned the mirror around.  We are looking at ourselves, inside and out.  To do this well, we stop blaming all the others in our environment and the situations around us for ‘the problem’.  We look at our own behaviors and responses.  We look at what we really can do to shift things.  Inevitably there are uncomfortable moments.  Used correctly, these uncomfortable moments deepen our commitment to master skills that help us to navigate both internally and externally.

Getting Out Of The Inner Prison With Skill

Now we can start to learn some skills.  We can start to ‘name’ the times when we are distracted, controlling, judgmental and overly attached.  Just seeing these moments will release many of them.  Others habits of thought, feeling and behavior need to be untangled using greater skill than simple observation. 

Seeing our own habits, where are we avoiding, where we judge, where we make excuses, where we feel impotent, where we overreact; all of this stirs the winds of change.  We loosen the grip of existing habits and attachments through observation and inquiry.  We start to shift to a process of witnessing and release, witnessing and release.  We start to break out of the inner prison that is controlled by reflexive response in thought, emotion and behavior.  There are many tools from various traditions which can help us untangle habitual responses.  Often it requires a trained professional to assist you.

Attention Is A Skill

Attention breaks up the habitual spiral that our thoughts, feelings and emotions take.  Attention stops the reflexive response.  We have more space.  We are gaining some freedom.  We avoid flying off on an emotional or mental journey that we may not want to go on.  Practice, learn to pay attention to your breathing and to how your body feels.

Persistence Is A Skill  

The witnessing and the release process is often emotionally intense.  We learn to breathe through this.  We learn to go for a walk in nature and ground ourselves.  We learn to sweat and exercise the ‘angst’ and the ‘somatic imprint’ out of the physical body.

We learn to understand the complexities of our life thus far, as well as understand the collective-consciousness of the society we live in and the specific micro collective-consciousness of our home and work environment. 

Just naming stories, just seeing habits for what they are detaches us from being overly identified with them. In a small way this is releasing.  We have started to create more inner space, we are acting, not just reacting with unconscious reflex.  We have integrated useful skills.

Breathing Is A Skill

Basic breathing techniques help us further detach ourselves from thoughts and feelings.  There are many specific breathing techniques which achieve specific outcomes.  A basic breathing technique is to simply slow down our exhale and inhale.  Most people in fast paced environments have a short incomplete exhale.  Notice your own breath.  Can you lengthen the breath on both the inhale and the exhale?  Are they about equal?  Can you count to 5, 6, 7, or 8 as you slowly breath in and then again as you slowly breathe out?  Use the breath to soften the addiction to ‘knowing the answer’.  Practice.  

Somatic Awareness Is A Skill

After breathing, we learn to pay attention to our body.  What is the body feeling and where?  Anytime we are constraining our body we are also constraining our mind.  Learn how to pay attention.  Use the breath to soften the relationship with your physical pain or tension.

We can, in a simple way, pay attention and notice how we feel in our jaw, shoulders, belly, hips, legs and feet.  We can learn to breathe, pay attention to the breath, then start to expand our attention to the body.  To start all we need to do is be attentive for five or 10 breaths.  This helps.

Feeling our physical body also lets us know in what part of the body we feel angst or pleasure.  Perhaps one particular person starts to speak and our belly gets tight.  What would it be like to breathe through the tightness, let the belly relax and not react physically?  We’d have more mental capacity to choose how to respond both internally and externally.  Pay attention to what it feels like to be exhausted, to be overwhelmed and to be frustrated.

Perhaps you start tensing the shoulders and feel afraid when working on a particular project or in discussion with a certain person.  Maybe every time you have to make a presentation your head starts to swirl.  This is the perfect time to feel your feet.  Take that energy right out of the head and pull it down to the feet.  It’s amazing how quickly this can clear a swirling head.

Pay attention to what it feels like to be competent.  Pay attention to what it feels like to be strong.  These are important feelings to know and understand.  How do you feel when you are confident?  Likely you body feels stronger and your mind feels clearer.   

Relaxations Is A Skill

The relaxation response is our friend.  Our nature is to engage stress and then release to relaxation.  Fast paced society expectation retrained most of us away from this natural rhythm.  At its best the cycle of tension release, tension release increases our capacity and brilliance.  Chronic tension limits our thinking and limits our ability to understand others. Anxiety is magnified.  

Choosing Authenticity Is A Skill

Pay attention to what it feels like to be fully aligned.  When we are true to ourselves there is a grounded sense of personal power and satisfaction.  This feeling increases over time as we commit to greater mindfulness.  We may or may not agree with the preference of another.  Pay attention to what it feels like to be clear.  Pay attention to what it feels like to experience true joy.  Authentic joy has a strong feeling.

Active Imagination Is A Skill

Engaging active imagination, we escape from our own biased tendencies. Consciously asking questions, we gather profoundly valuable information and may get a more accurate read on a current situation.  When engaging in active imagination, have a set of questions you cycle through to glean perspective.  Also, let your imagination and imaginative conversations shift in the direction intuition or whimsy leads you. You may be pleasantly surprised.

Enjoy The Benefits – Be Brilliant!

Basic breathing and simple attention help us to step out of the habitual reaction.  The moment we’re not feeling our body we have reduced our capacity for brilliance.  Science is showing this now.  We have greater access to both the left and right hemisphere of the brain when we’re fully embodied.  Thinking and feeling –  jaw, shoulders, hips, belly, legs and feet.  This attention makes us smarter, gives us access to an increased range of responses.  Eventually we can simply cut and paste – replace the unwanted feelings with the felt experience of a wanted feeling.  We learn to memorize the empowered joyful feelings, the ones that give us access to our ability to choose wisely.Ask Questions, Active Imagination

New Choices

Blame, judgment, avoidance and the need for control all arise out of an assessment our body has made about safety and survival.  We can fix the habitual aspect of this.  The response is a learned reflex.  To be free to live our adult lives, we do the work of paying attention rather than outsourcing our responses to decades of conditioning.  We make new choices today.  

Thoughts often arise because of feelings.  This is our brains answer.  We often take the fastest answer we can get.  We take the answers that our four year old self might have decided on the first time she or he had a similar experience.  Our four year old is choosing our thoughts today.  That’s not how we want to live. 

Question Assumptions

Inquire, ask questions and create space.  This is the time when suspending assessment is useful.  Just suspend having to know the answer.  Ask more questions.  Ask the questions internally and externally. Asking questions creates space.  Space accommodates new information and insight. 

Asking questions is part of the mindfulness process.  Asking questions is one of the most important things we can ever do.  Once we have enough space created, by attending to our breath, attending to our body, attending to our thoughts, our feelings and emotions, then we add asking questions. 

All assumptions from the past can be questioned.  Most often assumptions need, at a minimum, tweaking, perhaps even changing entirely.  The step of questioning assumptions alone can build bridges where before there were walls.  Questioning also clarifies areas that truly need fast and strong action now, not sometime in the future.  Learn to ask questions.  Make asking questions dominant, relative to stating or assuming answers.Inner Freedom

Skill building and questioning stirs up our inner world and begins to free us from the grapples of an outmoded paradigm that has held us imprisoned.  We are now grown up.  We can be free and yet most of us are imprisoned in a room far too small for our nature, potential and being.  We feel frustrated, sometimes hopeless.  We’ve tried so many times to break out of the prison with no success.  Yet there is a way.  Mindfulness, attention, active imagination are profoundly useful beginning points as we claim our freedom and explore our actual potential.

Maintaining Discipline

The next steps involve learning the specific skills required to maintain our new inner perspective.  New habits are essential.  Discipline is essential.  We have created a new identity and now must claim this, each day, each moment, to the best of our ability.  This leads to a new stable foundation.

Once we have stability in the inner domain it is easier to change our behavior in the outer domain; it’s easier to show up more authentically, more joyfully, powerfully and honestly.  It is easier to gain trust, cooperation and understanding when we have already stepped over the inner hurdles.  These inner hurdles are usually infinitely greater than the outer challenges.  

Filed Under: Joy and Meaning

Sea Otters; a Survival Story

May 20, 2020 by Cornelia

I love talking with people who are totally dedicated. When I speak with Isabelle GrocI know she is living her purpose.

Isabelle experienced a moment in childhood that set her on her path; protecting animals, sharing the voice of the under represented, and considering habitat complexities.

Her studies in both Journalism and Urban Planning are a unique lens as she tells her stories in both books and film. Balance is highlighted. When balance disappears from an environment, the entire system is weakened.

In her recent book a Keystone predator, the Sea Otter, is reintroduced to several areas, and as a result, restores multiple species; returning the environment to balance. 

Sea Otters a Survival Story, is published by Orca Press. Sea Otters is a delight for all ages. I loved learning the history, viewing the images, and coming to understand the complex interwoven species relationships. 

Enjoy listening to Isabelle talk with me about how she began her journey and also how she fell in love with Sea Otters.

Conversation with Isabelle Groc

Filed Under: Joy and Meaning

Energy Testing with Dreams

April 23, 2020 by Cornelia

Enjoy listening to Mies Bartholomeus talk with me about how she uses energy testing to work at a deep level.  Mies uses her techniques with babies, with children, for dream interpretations, and for other perplexing issues.

Filed Under: Joy and Meaning

Interview with James Hollis

August 12, 2019 by Cornelia

I love talking with people I respect and learn from.  

James Hollis is a contributor to ‘meaning making’ and the human journey.  He is a Jungean analyst and researcher.  In the decades I have followed his work, I have felt continually gifted through insights, and more importantly, with useful ‘living questions’.  

In this interview Dr. Hollis discusses:

  • being comfortable with large questions,
  • welcoming the Soul’s protest which arises as depression, sadness, confusion, frustration or anger,
  • learning to ask what our Soul is asking of us, what is our summons?,
  • accepting personal authority and humility,
  • having the courage to explore the richness of our human culture, moving towards what resonates, and discarding what holds us back,
  • meeting the ‘Other’ in ourselves,
  • taking our Soul’s promptings seriously,
  • sitting with what is inside until we know what is right for us,
  • being patient, and
  • experiencing authentic joy. 

Enjoy the video

Filed Under: Joy and Meaning

Judgement to Compassion

October 27, 2018 by Cornelia

A story worth repeating

Wednesday evening my friend was driving to visit me.  She left her home a few minutes late. You see, she chose to finish a conversation with her husband rather than leave in a timely manner.

As she came out of the side road they live on and turned onto the main road she found herself behind a particularly slow driver. She was a little frustrated at their slowness knowing that she had a few minutes driving time to ‘make up’ in order to be at my home when expected.  As the two cars approached the village my friend’s mind came up with the story that this ‘slow driver’ would likely pull into the shopping area getting off the main road. This story filled her head as if it was inevitable!  The slow driver did not turn in.

Past the village, around the corner, up the hill to the second shopping area; of course the slow driver would pull in at this shopping area. No.  Now frustration shifted to judgment and blame. New stories about the slow driver appeared in her mind. The slow driver was the ‘reason’ my friend would be late. The slow driver was to blame. As frustration and judgment heightened there was mental name-calling.

Past the golf course, up the hill to the next intersection; still no change in the speed of the driver and no opportunity to pass the slow car. Making a left turn at the intersection and heading exactly the same way as my friend, the saga continued, tension increased.  Stress chemicals (adrenaline, cortisol and norepinephrine) flooded my friends body.

Somewhere a few blocks before arriving at my home, my girlfriend’s awareness shifted.

A new mental image appeared. It was the vision of an elderly driver in front of her, someone timid to be driving at night. She imagined a cautious, light-sensitive, elderly person driving ahead of her. Her heart softened.

My friend shifted from frustration and judgment, in her head, shoulders and belly, to a softening at the chest and heart.  She felt more relaxation and recognized that being a few minutes late wasn’t the fault of the driver in front of her. The fault and the blame wasn’t to be placed on this ‘slow driver’. She realized that if she had truly wanted to be on time she would have finished her conversation with her husband in a timely manner, left the house with the extra minutes to spare, as she usually does.  Furthermore, being a few minutes late in this situation was also not extremely important.  Certainly not important enough to flood her body with stress.

I love that my friend was able to tell the story in its entirety. In the 10 minute drive she experienced multiple mental and physical states.  Frustration built to judgment and blame, then at some point a pivot happened.  She shifted as a new idea came into her awareness. The new idea gave her a new perspective.

She may never meet the driver of the other car. And it doesn’t matter. One thing that’s profoundly important is what was happening chemically within my friend’s body.

Stress chemicals flood the body

During the times when she was frustrated, angry and going through blame, her body was releasing stress chemicals.

Compassion heals

When she shifted to feeling curiosity and compassion her body relaxed, the surge of stress chemicals ceased and she stopped hurting herself! She stopped increasing the likelihood of disease that is caused through stress and anxiety.

This story is an example of the everyday ways we help or hurt our own health. Most of us understand that being in a state of stress, frustration and judgment releases a cocktail of chemicals which are hard on our body. Yet in the moment we still get frustrated with the driver in front of us. We still blame others for things that we could take care of ourselves.

The chemical benefit to the body being in a state of compassion and gratitude is the polar opposite of the detrimental effects of the stress. Once my girlfriend switched to feeling compassion, the increased available serotonin supported a healthy body function.  She was taking better care of herself by ‘cutting the other driver some slack’; by making up a story that could have been equally true to story number one.

Filed Under: Joy and Meaning Tagged With: Compassion, Relationships, Resiliance, Thought & Feelings

Mature Friendships

September 8, 2018 by Cornelia

What is a mature friendship?

I love the fact that we can consider being in relationship with others in a way that lets them be fully who they are, knowing that they are also letting us be fully who we are. 

This doesn’t always happen.

 In fact, you could even say it’s unusual. Very often in social groups there’s kind of an expected norm of how we should think and feel.

We come together as groups of people based on similarities, similar world views, similar values and aspirations. But there are nuances. Inevitably there are nuances. In some friendships, families and social circles, people often hold back from expressing their unique perspective on a given subject. They hold back because they want to be accepted. And there’s perhaps an unspoken rule that if we disagree with the values and feelings of the family or group, even in a small way, then we’ve become a little bit of an outsider in the group or in the friendship. 

Sometimes with close friends it can be even more complicated. We want our best friends to feel the same way that we do about important matters. The closer these matters are to our heart and to our sense of identity, the more important it can be for us.  We feel we want our friends to agree with us. We don’t want to hear a different perspective. It’s almost a knee-jerk reaction for most of us.

So where does this come from? 

Are we at fault because of this? Not necessarily. As a society, over the centuries, we’ve developed through various phases of safety. Certainly within a tribe it was important for all members to behave in a similar fashion, to have consistent values, to face the world that was outside and unsafe, with a united front. So it is natural that our reflexive thoughts and habits, that have evolved over the centuries, consider difference of opinion as a threat. Alternative perspectives and different habits tend to register as unsafe in a pre-verbal part of our brain.  This is so routine as a result of centuries of slow evolution, that part of our chemical structure registers this difference of opinion and perspective as unsafe. This is wholly unconscious on our part.  When someone disagrees with our perspective we feel them as ‘other’. We may feel we need to convince them. Or we may feel that in some small way they have betrayed us.

In the western world we live in relatively safe times. We also live in communities of many belief systems, all united within our western countries. We live with multiple religious and philosophical beliefs, multiple political beliefs, multiple views of what success and happiness looks like in the world.

We are profoundly fortunate to live in community where this is true. This is not true for most of the planet. So we are at the cutting edge of changing relationships and that requires us to step back and look at our assumptions. In this case the reflex assumption is that a different perspective is in someway ‘at root’ a betrayal. Or perhaps a different viewpoint is just that, a slightly different perspective.  

Perhaps we can see our own perspective in new ways by ‘in a small way’ considering alternative views. It often takes a lot for us as humans to question our reflexive beliefs. Sometimes it happens with tragedy. Sometimes it happens when we lose an important relationship. Sometimes it happens through the suffering of disagreements within our family. Sometimes it happens because we consciously make a choice to say, ‘I may not be right about everything’. I’m curious. I’m curious about the other ways of understanding the world.

So what does it mean to be in a rich, mature friendship? 

What does it mean to have a mature relationship with our partner, our adult children and with our parents? What does it mean to harmoniously live in community? A great place to start is to recognize and celebrate difference. Be curious about the difference. Invite the expression of difference by asking questions.  

I can be in a relationship with you, I can love you and we can feel totally different about one of our core beliefs. We can still respect each other. We can still care for each other. We can still know that essentially we are good people. And we can accept the fact that we ‘don’t have to be right!’ We can accept ambiguity regarding the absolute solution to a particular issue, problem, or consideration in the world.

The scientific world is a great model. We see how what was believed in the 12th century is overturned in the 15th century, what is believed in the 15th century is overturned in the 19th and 20th century.  We see this overturning and new understanding. 

So why should we believe that any of our current thoughts on a given situation are absolutely perfect? Why should we think that we personally have to be right? 

Can we create a little more space inside of ourselves and in our relationships so that we celebrate, or at least except difference? I love the ability to be curious about another’s perspective. Inevitably when I probe through thoughtful questions, my own perspective broadens or alters. My perspective may not change entirely, but inevitably it broadens. I love the idea of being able to be in mature adult relationships; where others let me be as I am, knowing that essentially I am good, as I know that they essentially are good. The difference does not divide us, but rather is a place of comfortable expansion.

Let this mature relationship not sublimate or hide disagreement. 

Let the mature relationship allow different belief or understanding to simply rest open. Whenever we tuck something away in a psychological or emotional corner, there are ways in which it haunts us. When we let difference have fresh air, we can coexist with the parts of the person, or community, we care about and value.  The difference does not act as a poison seed.

Rather than hiding the difference, name the difference.  Naming opens space and takes away some of the reflexive primal need to change another.  When we ‘name’, when we describe the difference, this moment brings a choice forward.  In this moment we can expand rather than contract.  We can accept our differences. We evolve our minds.  We can help ourselves and our relationships as we commit to expressing sincerely, without fear of repercussions and without expectations of compliance. Besides, it is the tension of difference that brings about most growth.  What will you discover while making a habit of celebrating difference?

Harvest

As we go into this time of harvest and sharing the bounty, let’s let one of the bounties we share be the ability to stand in mature relationships. Let us be able to allow others to have different perspectives without feeling the need to change them or change ourselves. When we see that another feels the need to change us, let us have the words to open this up, in a gentle and easy way, so they know we do not think they are ‘less than’ or are ‘wrong’ because they do not see things exactly as we see them.

Friendships and family bonds nurture us deeply and are a source of growth.  Inevitably relationships expand us.  By choosing to embrace difference, we expand the love in our lives.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Joy and Meaning, Meditation, Stress, Thoughts & Feelings Tagged With: Coaching, health, individuation, Relationships, Resiliance, Thought & Feelings

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