Mindful Magazine Winter 2020 - Be Kind to Yourself

MINDFULNESS • The Science of Deep Sleep

be kind

to yourself The art of acceptance, forgiveness, and compassion

FIND TRUE JOY

how mindful journaling can help you heal

WINTER 2020 mindful.org

CONTENTS

PHOTOGRAPHS BY PRAKASIT KHUANSUWAN / 500PX / GETTY IMAGES (COVER) AND BY AGENCIA / STOCKSY (THIS PAGE)

THE KINDNESS ISSUE

Be Kind to Yourself

When we feel belonging, writes Sebene Selassie, we are able to meet people, situations, difficulties, joys, life itself, with more kindness, generosity, and ease.

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34

On the Cover

The Science of Deep Sleep

20 FIND TRUE JOY

Supercharge your energy levels, strengthen your brain’s resilience, and relax into restorative slumber.

40 8 SCIENCE-BACKED

44 PANDEMIC BRAIN How to protect yourself from high stress

How mindful journaling can help you heal

SLEEP TIPS Simple strategies for establishing a sleep routine that encourages optimal health

50 BE KIND TO YOURSELF

The art of acceptance, forgiveness, and compassion

STORIES 20 Mindful Living

50

You Belong Meditation teacher Sebene Selassie makes the case that we belong. To everything. Simply by being here.

58

Letting Go Her deep mindfulness practice helped Jessica Morey empower iBme to adopt a collaborative leadership model.

24 Mental Health

Staggering Under the Weight of It All

28 Inner Wisdom

Don’t Fear the Clown

30 Brain Science

Are We Over Reacting?

EVERY ISSUE 4 From the Editor 6 In Your Words 10 Top of Mind 18 Mindful–Mindless 66 Bookmark This 72 Point of View with Barry Boyce

VOLUME 8, NUMBER 4, Mindful (ISSN 2169-5733, USPS 010-500) is published quarterly for $29.95 per year USA, $39.95 Canada & $49.95 (US) international, by Mindful Communications & Such, PBC, 515 N State Street, Suite 300, Chicago IL. 60654 USA. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Mindful, PO Box 469018, Escondido, CA 92046. Canada Post Publication Mail Agreement #42704514. CANADIAN POSTMASTER: Send undeliverable copies to Mindful, 5765 May St, Halifax, NS B3K 1R6 CANADA. Printed in U.S.A. © 2020 Mindful Communications & Such, PBC. All rights reserved.

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY NEOLEO / ADOBE STOCK, LUKE MATTSON / STOCKSY, MICHAEL PIAZZA. ILLUSTRATION BY VLADYSTOCK / ADOBE STOCK

Connect with Your Story

from the editor

A Kind Space

live We’re bringing our content to life with Mindful Live —a series of in-depth, online conversations and events featuring mindfulness experts on how we can enjoy better health, cultivate more caring relationships, and create a more compassionate society.

Sign up to learn more at mindful.org/mindful-live

Heather Hurlock is the editor-in-chief of Mindful magazine and mindful.org. She’s a long-time editor, musician, and meditator with deeps roots in service journalism. Connect with Heather at heather.hurlock@mindful.org.

Wishing you all moments of joy and kindness,

…all winter long

With virtual programming available to everyone, anywhere, all the time, it’s never been easier to MIND THE MOMENT.

PHOTOGRAPH BY CLAIRE ROSEN

JOIN US

We’re all being called to tap into our deepest wells of resilience and expand with skill and compassion.

But how do we do that right now when there’s so much vying for our attention all at once? From the national trauma of racial injustice, to climate change, to cultural fragmentation, social unrest, and targeted, purposeful trust erosion at the highest levels of leadership—not to mention a global pandemic. Our brains are overloaded.

Neuroscientist Amishi Jha has a name for moments like this. She calls them VUCA events: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. She’s been studying what happens to our brains under these circumstances. Hint: It’s not pretty. On page 44 Dr. Jha explains what her research says about how mindfulness can help protect you from the kind of constant stress we’re dealing with.

These difficult days are leading to restless nights, with many of our readers saying they feel like they’d be able to manage their emotional and physical health a little better if only they could get some sleep. So, we tapped veteran health writer Caren Osten Gerszberg to explore the science of deep sleep. What she uncovered is fascinating. Not only is there a master clock inside your head that keeps all of the cells in your body running smoothly, protecting you from disease, it’s also the orchestrator of deep, rejuvenating sleep. She offers a roadmap to your optimal sleep routine on page 34.

With this issue you’re holding in your hands, our team here at Mindful endeavored to create a companion guide that will not only help you meet this extraordinary moment with skill—for yourself, for your family, and for your community—but we hope it also reminds you to be kind to yourself right now. There is always compassionate space available to you, in every moment. Space to pause. Space to breathe. Space to reclaim your attention. To communicate with wisdom and skill. To forgive yourself and others. And to remember that joy is your birthright.

We’re all in this moment together. Let’s cherish our connection, our diversity, our essential humanity, so we can tap into our deepest compassion for each other. As Sebene Selassie so beautifully reminds us in her feature, You Belong, on page 50: “You are not separate. You never were. You never will be.”

BRINGING THE COMMUNITY TO YOU

Looking for a more personalized experience?

Ask us how we can design programming tailored to your organization’s unique needs.

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in your words

I WAS JUST

thinking...

Like it or not, having thoughts is part of meditating. Mindful readers share what’s top of mind.

What pops into your mind when you’re meditating?

“How do I get better at living my life every day?”

Cedric D. “Colors! Vibrant, swirling colors of blue, fuchsia, yellow, and green!”

Jane A. “I’m here. Come back to here. Breathe.”

Carrie

How do you feel toward your thoughts while meditating?

Accepting Irritated Anxious Bored

53% 16% 22% 9%

“When I start meditating, I see my entire body on the top of a very tall mountain looking at a canyon. It’s a very peaceful place.”

Patricia V. “The beans are almost done.” ↑ @naturalprogression_garf and friends seized the day, meditating in this lush valley in Cumbria, UK.

edgar_mindfulness “Most often it’s things that I have not yet accepted.” ckdaddy72 “Little mini movies of worry, usually involving my adult children.

→ @serendipitysimplisticsoul writes: “Everything becomes magnificent in the light of an uplifted perspective.”

During meditation, do you tend to notice a lot of thoughts?

kellysvaillancourt “Visions of food.” drsusanalbers “How amazing I am at ruminating!”

NO 15%

YES 85%

psikologelifpeksevim

Next Question… ← @wholisticallyhannah_ shared this vivid memory of summertime blooms and sunsets.

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How do you speak to yourself with self-compassion?

Send an email to yourwords@mindful.org and let us know your answer to this question. Your response could appear on these pages.

Healthy Mind, Healthy Life

Welcome to

We are dedicated to inspiring and guiding anyone who wants to explore mindfulness to enjoy better health, more caring relationships, and a more compassionate society.

By reading Mindful and sharing it with others, you’re helping to bring mindfulness practices into the world where the benefits can be enjoyed by all.

Thank you!

mindful magazine • mindful.org Founding Editor Barry Boyce

Editor-in-Chief Heather Hurlock

Creative Director Jessica von Handorf

Managing Editor Stephanie Domet

Associate Art Director Spencer Creelman

Senior Editor Amber Tucker

Contributing Editor Anne Alexander

Associate Editor Kylee Ross

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mind Keep up with the latest in the world of mindfulness.

BUY NOTHING, HAVE IT ALL? Consumerism?

Next, please.

Friends Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller are shifting that paradigm. In 2013 they

founded The Buy Nothing Project—which aims to create “hyperlocal gift economies” around the world. The rules are simple: Post anything you’d like to give away,

lend, or share; ask for anything you’d like to receive or borrow. As we buy less and give more, fewer items go to landfills, we save money, and all build more connected neighborhoods. Hundreds of groups have sprung up in over 30 countries. During the pandemic, Rockefeller and Clark write, the

community-care ethic underlying the project is more important than ever: “There are many other ways we can help each other that do not involve the movement of items from one person to another,” they write on BNP’s website, but rather “gifts of self” including virtual check-ins, sharing

information and empathy. Their book, The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan, was published April 2020.

A SEAT AT THE TABLE Moved by the racial reckoning in the United States, Kirsten IveyColson and Lynn Turner created The AntiRacist Table. The online platform explores anti-racism as an intentional daily practice and offers education on African American history

TEACHING THE TEACHERS At the Centre for Mindfulness Studies in Toronto, clients have been able to access

PHOTOGRAPH BY VLADYSLAV BASHUTSKYY / ADOBE STOCK

TOP OF

and the Black experience.

“We feel the urgency of the moment and don’t want it to fade without meaningful change,” the cofounders write.

While Ivey-Colson and Turner have full-time jobs as an attorney and a teacher, they’ve devoted their spare time to being a voice for social justice and building a resource for anyone who wants to fight inequity.

Among their offerings are Conversations Around the Table with mindfulness teachers, doctors, and allies, and a curated 30-day anti-racism challenge. Through videos, readings, and meditations with the principles of mindfulness, nonviolent communication, and conflict resolution at the forefront, The AntiRacist Table challenge encourages participants to deepen their awareness of existing oppression and privilege.

PHOTOGRAPH BY CLAY BANKS / UNSPLASH, THE BUY NOTHING PROJECT

top of mind

online training since 2017, but this spring, CMS began offering teachertraining intensives and workshops online too.

Pat Rockman, director of education and clinical services at CMS, says much hinges on the workshop leader’s ability to “embody the practice and convey the content in the online space in a way that models how the work is to be delivered.” This includes staying calm when the technology inevitably goes awry.

Online is not just the venue for the intensives—it’s also part of the content, which includes basic guidelines for online privacy, and “how to deal with dysregulation or emergencies

online and various techniques for delivery.”

And though students are learning at a distance, Rockman says, “There is no question that people feel bonded in the online space, especially if they are given time to communicate with each other informally, outside the teaching sessions—we learned this over time and had not initially provided this—and if they are assigned or choose learning buddies throughout the training.”

Rockman was reluctant to move online, but she acknowledges that it was a matter of survival. More than that, she says, “I have actually been quite delighted with what we have been able to achieve.”

NOT A DROP TO WASTE When lockdown forced bars to close in late March, breweries in South Australia were left with stale ales and lagers.

Instead of letting it go to waste, local breweries supplied their expired beer to power the Glenelg Wastewater Treatment Plant.

The plant uses organic industrial waste and sewage sludge to produce biogas as a source of renewable energy for their operations. By adding 150,000 liters of beer to that mixture weekly, the plant produced record amounts of biogas in two months— roughly enough to power 1,200 houses.

ACTS OF kindness An unlikely friendship began when four-year-old Camryn Radcliff of Colorado yelled “Black Lives Matter!” recently to a stranger at Home Depot. When that stranger—Sherri Gonzales— stopped to thank Camryn, she learned of their shared love for the Denver Broncos, and Camryn invited her for a sleepover.

Since then, the pair have raised more than $2,000 for clean water and women’s education in Kenya, through Sherri’s organization: Sherri’s Girls Empowerment.

At Drexell & Honeybee’s restaurant in Brewton, Alabama, guests can eat their fill with no expectation of a bill

to be paid. Instead, they can leave a contribution, even if it’s just a token of thanks (monetary donations go back into the pot to help feed the hungry).

For restaurateurs Lisa and Freddie Thomas-McMillan, “Feed the Need” is their mission statement.

A stray dog who kept showing up at a car dealership in Brazil got a sweet deal recently. Dealership staff adopted the dog, named him Tucson Prime, after one of their vehicles, and put him to work greeting customers.

Manager Emerson Mariano told a local media outlet: “The company has always been pet friendly, so now, we decided to embrace this idea in practice too,” noting a local increase in abandoned animals.

Winter 2020 mindful 11

top of mind

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Research News

by B. GRACE BULLOCK

Research gathered from Ohio State University, Capital Medical University Beijing, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and others

MINDFULNESS PRACTICE BENEFITS ADULTS WITH MS New research from Ohio State University suggests mindfulness training may help people with multiple sclerosis improve their cognitive function and regulate negative emotions. In the pilot study, 61 adults with MS attended either a mindfulness training (MT) group or an active cognitive training (ACT) group for four weeks, or were placed on a waitlist and

received training at the end of the study. Those in the MT group practiced paying attention to the present moment and learned how to focus on their breath and do mental body scans. People in the ACT group played computer games that helped them to focus, plan, and organize information.

At study’s end, adults in the MT group reported being better able to manage their emotions and showed greatly improved informationprocessing speed compared to the other two groups.

These results are promising, as the mindfulness exercises used can be practiced regardless of physical ability,

making them easily accessible to most people with MS. MINDFULNESS BEATS BREAST CANCER SURVIVORS’ INSOMNIA The stress following a breast cancer diagnosis and treatment can lead to sleep troubles. Mindfulness training for insomnia may promote relaxation and improve sleep, a new study finds. 136 women who’d completed treatment for breast cancer were assigned to either a mindfulness group or a waitlist control group. Mindfulness participants attended six, 90-minute group sessions per week where they learned

sitting and walking meditation, body scans, and yoga, and were given instruction on stress management and sleep hygiene.

They were asked to practice at home for 20–40 minutes each day, and log their activities in a diary. Participants’ surveys of mindfulness and insomnia, practice logs, and sleep data from wrist-worn actigraphs were examined before and after the intervention,

even six months later, suggesting that those recovering from breast cancer may sleep better when practicing mindfulness.

PARENTS WITH CHILDREN WITH AUTISM Learning how to parent children with autism can be stressful for

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, which can reduce stress and improve sleep, may offer some benefit to parents of children with autism.

then again three and six months later. Results showed that the mindfulness group had significantly less insomnia and better sleep quality than controls.

These improvements persisted

their families. A pilot study led by researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center has found evidence that Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), which

can reduce stress and improve sleep, may offer benefit. Parents of three-year-old children with autism were randomly assigned to attend either a 12-session parenting education program alone, or the same program combined with an additional six one-hour individual sessions of MBSR instruction. At the end of the study, both groups showed fewer symptoms of stress, depression, and anxiety, but those receiving mindfulness instruction also showed less parental distress and fewer unhealthy parent-child interactions.

While parents in the MBSR group reported being more mindful following the program, those in the other group were less mindful in the end. This suggests that mindfulness instruction may help to ease the stress of parenting young children with autism.

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PICTURE A PERSON. Visualize a person in your life who has hurt you—maybe not the most extreme example, but it could be a family member, a coworker, or a stranger. Get a sense of the actual event or events that occurred that hurt you.

OBSERVE THE FEELING. Tune in to how the body feels in this moment, and also what emotions are present. Is there a sense of anger, or sadness?

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SEE THE THOUGHTS. Be aware of the thoughts that are circulating around this person.

Notice if there are thoughts of hate or spitefulness. Feel this burden that lives inside of you from holding on to past hurts.

ASK YOURSELF IN THIS MOMENT: Who is suffering? Am I willing to forgive?

And if not, that’s perfectly fine.

Perhaps this isn’t the time. And if so, just continue on with this short practice. Breathing in, acknowledge the hurt and pain that’s here. Breathing out, forgive and release this burden from your heart and mind.

With Cara Bradley

Q

I’m struggling with adding movement to my day. How can I use my mindfulness practice to make exercise more intuitive?

PHOTOGRAPH BY RAYMOND FORBES LLC / STOCKSY

It can be difficult to forgive past wrongs, but we are the ones who hurt most when we don’t. Explore this practice from Elisha Goldstein to find your way forward.

TAKE YOUR SEAT. Take a moment to close your eyes or keep a soft gaze toward the floor. Take a few deep breaths.

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PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY CARA BRADLEY, ILLUSTRATION BY VECTEEZY, DJVSTOCK / ADOBE STOCK

The Freedom 1 TO FORGIVE

A

Set a clear intention before you begin. An intention is like a compass: It directs your mind, keeping you motivated and focused.

Here are a few examples of powerful intentions: I am going for a run to clear my head.

During this yoga class I will be kind to myself.

On my walk, I’ll let these prickly thoughts fly.

I’m going swimming to increase my strength.

I won’t judge myself during this weight training class.

Then, while you’re moving, start paying attention to the coolness, heat, tingling, or throbbing you feel. Doing so

will help you tune in to when you need to modify, hold steady, or pick up the intensity.

During your next workout, notice your muscles burning toward the end of your walk or run, the sense of expansion during a deep yoga pose, or the fire in your legs during those last few squats. Your body feels different from day to day. Some days you may rock and roll, other days you may only crawl. Acknowledge your highs and lows. If you can, commit to moving a little bit. This is how you build consistency and momentum.

Negative self-talk will just drain your energy. Start where you are. Let go of what you can’t do. Embrace what you can.

Cara Bradley is the best-selling author of On The Verge: Wake Up, Show Up, and Shine, and the founder of Verge Body-Mind Center in Philadelphia, PA.

MINDFUL

interrupter LOREM IPSUM

$$

(149 Reviews)

Doomsurfing/doomscrolling A recent coinage that describes the repetitive habit of refreshing social media news feeds, endlessly consuming upsetting news stories.

May we suggest instead: S.T.O.P. Stop what you’re doing. Take a few deep breaths. Observe your thoughts and emotions. Proceed.

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THE YOUNG AND THE MINDFUL

E V ERYDAY M I N DF U L N E SS

Mindfulness is increasingly taking its place alongside math and social studies. Here’s the latest on mindfulness for kids and teens.

APPS FOR EVERYONE m e di tati on

Salvador Montes, a social worker at Oak Lawn Community High School, has been helping students deal with feelings of anxiety and overwhelm by offering video game meditation sessions.

Montes streams feeds from games like Spider-Man and Destiny 2 and invites his students to focus their attention on the game—three things they can see, feel, and hear, all while taking steady deep breaths.

Check out three new mindfulness apps that caught our attention.

f ur ni shi ngs , j e w el r y, inc e ns e

FitMind is a vigorous meditation trainer delivered via iPhone. It teaches the science behind the practice, tracks your progress, and provides numerous levels and daily challenges to keep you mindfully engaged.

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EXHALE, designed by coach Katara McCarty, helps to serve and heal her community of Black, Indigenous, and Women of Color (BIWOC) who are underrepresented in wellness spaces.

The app inspires self-care, mindfulness, and rest through practices like Soul Medicine Meditation and Ancestors Guided Imagining. “By teaching BIWOC how to rid their nervous systems of trauma, I can do something about the disparities,” says McCarty.

Your Mindful Garden was introduced by CBeebies, a BBC children’s network. The appbased game has nurturing activities like mindful breathing, movement, and noticing emotions. Bonus: It’s narrated by award-winning actor Stephen Fry.

PHOTOGRAPH BY SEYI ARIYO / UNSPLASH

c us h i ons ,

The Holistic Life Foundation (HLF), a nonprofit based in Baltimore, MD, expanded to two satellite locations: the Saint Regis Mohawk Reservation in Akwesasne, NY, and Miami, FL. The efforts to branch out and bring the benefits of wellness to underserved communities started this summer in Akwesasne. Senior HLF staff will spend a year in the community facilitating yoga and mindfulness classes in schools.

They’ll also be training 15 community leaders to help grow their programming in the community.

The Art of Coping, a program created by the nonprofit TRUE Skool, offers kids and teens in Milwaukee, WI, new ways to relax and express their emotions. Now through classes held online, kids are given tools to deal with everyday stress—and added stress caused by the pandemic—through daily practices, meditation, affirmations, creative writing, and art. Each week the live classes explore a new tool to give kids the opportunity to identify which practices they can incorporate into their life.

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MINDFUL OR MINDLESS? Our take on who’s paying attention and who’s not

by AMBER TUCKER

One in five Philadelphia residents suffers food insecurity. The Community Fridge Project, started in July 2020, installs fridges outdoors, restocked daily with nourishing goodness. The joint effort run by women of color serves neighborhoods where produce is scarce. Live and breathe that Philadelphia free food!

Malone Mukwende, a medical student from Zimbabwe who is studying in London, found his classes weren’t teaching how to recognize skin symptoms on darker skin. He’s now researching to write a handbook and website to educate physicians and improve diagnosing for Black and brown patients.

MINDFUL

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A free-roaming emu was captured in Totowa, NJ. Officials couldn’t determine where the animal came from, but as the Chief Animal Control Officer reported, after the emu had been safely apprehended, “I can tell you it needs a bath.”

She’s been fondly deemed the “Lasagna Lady”: Michelle Brenner in Washington state was furloughed from her job due to COVID-19. She used her stimulus check, then fundraised, to buy ingredients and has cooked hundreds of lasagnas, which she gives to anyone in need.

Cultural appropriation strikes again. A leather store in Wellington, NZ, and a brewery in Medicine Hat, Alberta, were called out for their ill-informed use of the word huruhuru in their products and advertising. In te reo Maori (the lanugage of the Maori of New Zealand), huruhuru can mean “pubic hair.”

A bureaucratic error made a woman in Centerville, TN, draw a blank: When her new driver’s license came in the mail, the photo was simply of an empty chair, without her. The DMV employees had to see it to believe her. ●

MINDLESS

mindful living

Connect

WITH YOUR STORY

Writing mindfully can loosen the grip of sticky emotions by bringing them out of the dark. With just a pen and paper, or an app, we can create the habit of being there for ourselves.

PHOTOGRAPH BY HELEN RUSHBROOK / STOCKSY

By Amber Tucker

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The practice of writing in a journal, a diary, or just scribbling notes to ourselves on pieces of paper, has both a rich history and present-day appeal. The famous 20th-century diarist Anaïs Nin believed writing serves “to heighten our own awareness of life…to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection.” She was on to something. Writing has a remarkable way of shifting our awareness— keeping a journal can be an accessible way to experience that shift.

As a hobby, journaling is inexpensive, portable, and can brighten our quality of awareness, making sense of our thoughts, feelings, perspectives, our own developing story line as it happens.

It gives us a chance to slow down, breathe, turn to a fresh page, and “get real” about what we’re thinking and feeling—also referred to, particularly in therapeutic settings, as expressive writing. Although we refer here to writing, journaling is not only about putting words on paper. Visual journals filled with sketches, doodles, or any form of art you desire, vastly expand the options and the accessibility of journaling practice.

You don’t have to erase your doodles, correct your grammar, or worry about garnering Likes and emojis from a virtual fan club. In other words, expressive

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Amber Tucker is a senior editor for Mindful. She lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia) and prefers to journal while cuddled up with a cat or two.

journaling is expressing yourself, for yourself.

Writing to Be Well Scientific research conducted over the past two decades also finds that expressive writing can offer a multitude of mental and emotional health benefits. Journaling can decrease stress, help to level out your most turbulent emotions, and increase your sense of gratitude and optimism. A 2001 study found that college students who took up expressive writing about their troubles had fewer intrusive, stressful thoughts, and even improved their working memory. Researchers think that writing about difficult experiences or ruminations helps the brain to process them, freeing up mental resources.

Journaling has also shown promise as a way to help ourselves deal with anxious thoughts. In a 2018 study, people struggling with anxiety were asked to do a reflective writing practice online for 15 minutes per day, three days per week for 12 weeks. Others were assigned to a control group with their usual anxiety treatment. Within the 12 weeks, those who did the writing practice (compared with the control group) reported lower levels of anxiety and mental distress, less perceived stress, greater resilience and self-reported social integration, and fewer days

on which pain prohibited their usual activities. Other studies have reported even more possible benefits, including improved markers of immune health, blood pressure, and ability to cope with grief and trauma.

How do these benefits come about? Zindel Segal, a Distinguished Professor of Psychology in Mood Disorders at the University of Toronto It doesn’t matter and a pioneering specialist in the what you end up use of mindfulwriting, or how ness to treat mood disorders, explains many pages you that “the very act writing takes fill, or how messy it of information, that looks. Remember, is often only dimly perceived, such as this is for you. quick judgments, fears, worries, and concretizes by putting them in written form on paper.

It requires that they are formed in language and also, once seen ‘on the page,’ they may be experienced with less of an emotional charge than when they were only ‘in the head.’”

Segal notes that programs such as Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction incorporate elements of expressive writing, which can help participants to externalize their experience, so that it becomes more available for mindful investigation. “Whether it involves writing about pleasant or unpleasant moments in MBCT or journaling in MBSR, the goals are the same: Make that which is fleeting more vivid and bring a kind curiosity to what is revealed,” Segal says. →

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BeingYou, By the for You Book A mindful journaling practice also provides an opportunity to let go of judging yourself, to freely explore what you notice, what you feel, what makes you tick.

Amy Spies, a meditation teacher and writing teacher based in Los Angeles, says that mindfulness and expressive writing share “the concept of finding a way to not be attached to self-criticism and doubts—to not suppress them, but let them float around you, as you stay in the present.” Spies teaches that meditating for even five or ten minutes before you write can inspire kind-hearted awareness.

No matter what you end up writing, or how many pages you fill, or how messy it looks, this is by you, for you. The gift of fearless self-expression also blooms into self-compassion.

Mindful journaling allows the space to show up for your own emotions—contentment, anxiety, hunger, exhilaration, even sheer boredom—and just hang out with them for a little while.

As with any consistent mindfulness practice, this opening-up with kindness for yourself can’t help but spread to those around you.

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The multitude of notebook styles at your local bookstore will offer plenty of notebook possibilities.

Consider what you want to get out of your journaling practice. Are you hoping to ground yourself with a structured, daily practice?

Record your dreams, or insights that come to you?

Sort out your quagmire of thoughts? Any blank, lined, or dotted pages may strike your fancy. You may want to peruse different sizes of notebooks, different types of bindings (spiral binding? sewn-in pages? soft faux-leather covers?).

An abundance of guided journals help you to hone in on cultivating gratitude, or mindfulness, or on a particular experience, such as a travel journal or a parenting journal.

Let yourself stay open to where the writing process leads you. As Hayley Phelan, a journalist who began her expressive writing practice while going through major life shifts, wrote for the New York Times, “Writing in your journal is the only way to find out what you should be writing about.” If you feel yourself getting lost, come back to your breath and your underlying intention to be honest and kind with yourself. Spending this quality time with what is present for you, and holding compassion for it all, is at the heart of mindful journaling. ●

mental health

mental health

ever-changing tapestry. It seems that the harder we try to keep up, the further behind we fall, which generates further raw material for our ongoing weaving project. You blame your father for his lousy timing. Your sister in Connecticut who’s never around when you need her.

Your boss whose lack of boundaries drives you crazy. Your spouse who blithely drifts through life in spite of the latest emergency. But the sum of all these complaints doesn’t begin to match the immensity of your feelings. Alexis Zorba (Anthony Quinn) coined the phrase “the full catastrophe” to describe the phenomenon, in the movie Zorba the Greek. Jon Kabat-Zinn borrowed the phrase for his first book on mindfulness, Full Catastrophe Living.

How We Hold Uncertainty and Stress

STAGGERING UNDER

the Weight of It All

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Andrew Safer is a mindfulness instructor and trainer, workshop facilitator, and author based in St. John’s, Newfoundland. He develops and implements applied mindfulness programs for mental health and addictions, as well as workplace applications.

24 mindful Winter 2020

then spending your evenings wading through 83 years of his life, deciding what to keep and what to throw out.

You’re also in the middle of an online course you’re taking to qualify for a higher-paying position at work. You’re living on a budget without a hair’s breadth of wiggle room. You begin adding up the time you’ll have to take off work. The calculator in your head never stops.

Your ongoing swirl of concerns, hopes, and fears creates a mental dust

cloud, reminiscent of the one that followed Pigpen in the Peanuts comic strip. I shouldn’t have said that to Dad. I bet that hurt him. The next time I see him I need to soften the blow… I’ll never be able to prepare for tomorrow’s meeting… I know there were some groceries to pick up, but what were they?

I forgot to reply to Sally’s message on Snapchat…

Through some mysterious, ongoing process, the mental threads of our lives morph into an

By Andrew Safer

PHOTOGRAPH BY HAYDEN WILLIAMS / STOCKSY

Your father who has dementia has to move out of his house and go into a home. First there’s the emotional toll, and then the practicalities: finding a suitable and affordable place, getting him oriented to moving, and

PHOTOGRAPH BY HAYDEN WILLIAMS / STOCKSY

Sometimes we get overwhelmed by circumstances that just feel too big, threatening catastrophe. Take a breath. Being in this moment leads us toward the calm simplicity within ourselves.

You’re trapped in a seamless web woven from the flotsam and jetsam of your life. It’s anybody’s guess just how your boss’s need for an answer right smack in the middle of little Julie’s piano recital, your rent arithmetic, and your father’s imminent move produce your current state of mind.

Since you don’t have a clue where this runaway train is headed, anxiety lurks in the background.

There is nothing unusual about a father succumbing to dementia, children taking lessons after school, a boss texting whenever he feels like it, or taking an extra course to advance your career. But when you simmer them all in a pot and add a dash of road rage, a looming tax deadline, running out of toner on the last page of your report, and a crick in your neck—you’re staggering under the weight of it all. With each new demand, whether it is placed on us by circumstance or we generate it ourselves, another straw lands

on the camel’s back. Each additional straw finds its way to the proverbial pile, and soon, the famous “last straw” adds its minuscule grace note, and all hell breaks loose! It’s lack of awareness on our part that allows these pressures to build to unsustainable levels.

Mindfulness practice doesn’t teach us the ins and outs of stress management, but it helps us develop awareness. We might find that we are showing up more in our own lives— noticing both the magnolia tree when it starts to bloom, and the hurtful thing we’re about to say. Becoming better acquainted with our own mind helps us to recognize our patterns to overcommit and overpromise, which keep us stretched too thin. Instead of blowing past the early warning signs of stress—such as a knot in our gut or our voice getting hoarse—we start to see these body cues as allies. They are signals to disengage from what we’re doing, take a mini-break, and come back to address our circumstances with an open mind. Heeding these cues can be the first step toward lightening the load on the overburdened camel.

That’s all well and good, but we want a solution! We want to catch a break! We want to get anxiety and stress off our back! Period! If we have an infection and go to the doctor, she’ll write a prescription for an antibiotic. We do as she says, and presto!

We’re on the mend. Why doesn’t it work that way with mindfulness?

We can go see a doctor, but we still have to do the work. If we practice with a goal in mind—“If I do this, then my anxiety is going to disappear”—we have an objective outside this present moment and this circumstance.

We might as well be chasing butterflies when we need to be stacking firewood. When it comes time to do mindfulness practice, that approach doesn’t hold water. We can’t subtract manual labor from the process. If we hang on to our goal-orientation through it all, we’ll end up killing the goose that lays the golden egg. →

Winter 2020 mindful 25

mental health

Let’s say you inherit a baseball stadium and all you do is throw some pitches in the bullpen. You’re wasting the rest of the property! Mindfulness practice makes use of the whole stadium. There’s an unbiased, open mind that accommodates everything. We’re introduced to this vast mind and the opportunity to explore it.

Stepping Out into the Open When you’re trying to do too many things at once, it’s easy to get overloaded.

Simplicity is always available to us, but when we rush ahead we miss it over and over again.

Simple situations can become complicated quickly. On the way home, you stop off at the grocery store to pick up something for dinner while troubleshooting a problem at work. Later, you’re ready to cook supper and realize you forgot the tomato sauce for the spaghetti and meatballs, so, after giving yourself a good swift mental kick, you head back to the store. You’re busy beating yourself up for your inattentiveness, so you don’t notice the school zone:

26 mindful Winter 2020

we become a bit less invested in our thought processes. More and more, we stick with simplicity.

As we begin to appreciate simplicity, trimming back unnecessary and frivolous activities starts to come along of its own accord. We don’t require as much stuff—materially, activity-wise, and psychologically.

This natural thinning-out process allows space into our previously crowded life. ●

Antiques selected for sound

Excerpt reproduced by permission from Andrew Safer, Anxiety, Stress & Mindfulness: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Wellness (Wimberley, TX: 2nd Tier Publishing, 2018)

PHOTOGRAPH BY XIAOLIANGGE / ADOBE STOCK

Instead of blowing past the early warning signs of stress—such as a knot in our gut or our voice getting hoarse—we start to see these body cues as allies.

30 km per hour. Sure enough, a police officer pulls you over and hands you a whopping ticket. Your routine trip to the store morphed into a mishmash of dramas, subplots, and painful consequences. Through our lack of attention and awareness, and our tendency towards complexity, life can become very involved, very quickly.

The simplicity of mindfulness practice can help thin out our dust cloud and interrupt our perpetual mental tapestry-weaving project, even if it’s just for a moment. As we’re rushing down rabbit holes, a moment of mindfulness creates a spark of sanity in the midst of the barrage of thoughts, feelings, emotions, urges, and sensations.

Following the lead from our meditation practice, we keep coming back to now, which provides a check on our tendency to complicate things. As we begin to become more familiar with the practice, we become less mesmerized by the content of our thoughts—the storyline—and more interested in the fact that we can recognize the whole picture as thoughts. Gradually, over time, as our connection to now strengthens,

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inner wisdom

they offer without getting lost, disarmed, or tangled in them. We don’t need to avoid any of these masks, we simply need to know we are wearing and using them.

How might you uncover some of your clown masks?

Picture a scenario from your life that evokes strong feelings in you. Notice your body’s response. What is your mask urging you to do?

You might find a clue if you notice whether your mask wants your fists to be open or closed. Does your mask want you to stand or sit? Are your teeth bared or smiling? Is your breath shallow, deep, or are you panting with fear? It’s OK to feel it all; these are all just masks.

The clown is by its nature curious and resilient.

It bounces back because curiosity wins out. Looking

Don’t Fear

THE CLOWN When things are at their worst, the rules of clowning can help us find resilience.

Elaine Smookler is a registered psychotherapist with a 20-year mindfulness practice. She is also a creativity coach and is on the faculty of the Centre for Mindfulness Studies in Toronto.

28 mindful Winter 2020

helped the audience take a journey into parts of themselves they would rather not see or know about.

We call these anxieties and insecurities “masks.”

Our masks are a rich source of insight. One of my masks was created out of my experiences with adolescent pain and hostility. Another of my masks hungers for connection. Other masks I can inhabit are wacky, seductive, playful, and judgmental.

By viewing these aspects of myself through the clown, I give myself a way to feel all kinds of strong and difficult emotions without getting trapped. I can feel them without being overtaken.

For example, once during a performance, I accidentally dropped a bottle of pills all over the stage. My usual reaction would have been to berate myself for being such a klutz—on stage, no less!—and make the situation worse with my own chorus of mental chatter and anxiety. Instead, as the clown, I got on my hands and knees and spent a long time looking for every pill.

The audience grew very excited and wanted to help me. It could have been a disaster. Instead it was fun.

The clown invites us to be aware of our masks. We can hold them with tenderness, and use all the energies

By Elaine Smookler

Rules to live by Richard Pochinko devised a set of Clown Rules that lay out the parameters of a way to live onstage and off with a sense of vividness, fire, presence, and electricity. Many of them offer a path for how to proceed when chaos and sadness might cause us to hold too tightly to our masks.

PHOTOGRAPH BY NEW AFRICA / ADOBE STOCK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

trained as a clown I understand when they step back in primal terror and run away, screaming and sobbing.

Clowns stir up uneasy feelings even for the tough nuts. But fear not, kiddies, the clown has some helpful things to teach us about being free and alive and present when everything seems wretched, horrible, and hopeless.

Richard Pochinko, a visionary teacher and director, created the Pochinko Method, which trained performers to draw on their own anxieties and insecurities to create believable and compelling characters.

These masked tricksters

PHOTOGRAPH BY AUDREY SHTECINJO / STOCKSY

When confusion and anger turn you inside out, when you feel like you’ve lost your rudder and aren’t sure whose rudder to trust, this is an excellent moment to turn toward the wisdom of the clown.

All the world loves a clown! Actually, not so much. Let’s face it, clowns scare the bejesus out of people. When I tell folks that I

at the world through the eyes of the clown becomes a way to offer ourselves an outrageous opportunity to respond to what might otherwise squash us. When I am on the phone and feel myself growing irritated or impatient, I can see one of my clown masks revving up. Seeing it helps me gain some playful distance rather than giving in to my moody intolerance. We can experience it all, finding the common humanity that exists behind every mask.

Explore each aspect of yourself with loving curiosity. Welcome and get to know the entire you, even the part you think you don’t like or want. Play around with the combustible urges, the clingy tendencies, the intolerant stances. Stay open to whatever comes. ●

CLOWN RULES INCLUDE • care enough not to care • be honest • have fun • take us into your world and bring us back with a new awareness • ride the wave • physicalize • be zany • listen to us (the audience) • listen to yourself

• surprise us • surprise yourself • drop the script—you can always go back • know when to leave • keep the conversation going • breathe • go for the unknown • trust • believe • break the rules!

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brain science

ARE WE OVER

Reacting?

Feeling empathy for others’ pain is innately human, but it can be stretched too thin. Here’s why we get numbed to horrific events— and how to preserve our tenderness and our desire to help.

There is only so much the human heart and mind can take. Even just in the United States in the past few years, collectively we have had to process scores of US school shootings: 70 in 2019, 110 in 2018, about 40 every year from 2014 to 2017. Hundreds of ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sharon Begley is senior science writer with STAT, a national health and medicine publication. She is also author of Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain and Can’t Just Stop: An Investigation of Compulsions.

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mass shootings: 417 in 2019, 337 in 2018, 346 in 2017, 382 in 2016, on and on, the pitiless numbers receding into the past like tombstones. Opioid death after opioid death, tens of thousands every recent year, and, as of publication, more than 200,000 deaths from COVID-19 (in the US alone). And this doesn’t even begin to account for the human and environmental crises that are unfolding internationally.

While some turn their anguish and anger into action, many others are unable to even acknowledge that

there’s a problem. Call it what you like: Habituation. Outrage exhaustion. Desensitization. Compassion fatigue (a now-popular term; some experts prefer empathy fatigue). All describe how the emotions that the brain generated the first time we witnessed, even at a remove, something that incited anger or heartache or shock become exhausted in the face of repeated tragedy or horror, with the result that the tenth, or hundredth, repetition provokes a mere shadow of the initial reaction. →

By Sharon Begley • Illustrations by Edmon de Haro

brain science

Why that should be has long fascinated psychology. Researchers have examined the general phenomenon, as well as specific instances of it (Americans reacted with less shock to the 2003 explosion of the space shuttle Columbia than to the 1986 explosion of Challenger, not only because of the poignancy of a teacher dying on the first, but because it was the first). Outrage exhaustion has, literally, life-or-death consequences.

From the beating of Rodney King in 1991 to the murder of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman sleeping in her home in Louisville, KY, during March 2020, police killings of Black people have stirred public outcry and protest for a long time now—but movement against violent oppression takes a long time to birth real change, in part because the ongoing outrage needed to fuel systemic change dies down after a short time. It’s a particularly damaging function of privilege that allows people to more quickly “forget” that these injustices ever happened: Even though they happen repeatedly, we react with shock each time, but so rarely with sustained calls for change.

Understanding the causes of outrage exhaustion would satisfy more than academic curiosity. For if we did, we might overcome it, sustaining public pressure for changes that prevent recurrences of violence. We might also sustain genuine care and compassion for those in pain, including ourselves.

Emotional Self-Defense To be clear, emotional desensitization isn’t always maladaptive. The effect is so strong that it is the basis for a widely practiced form of psychological intervention: exposure therapy. Used to help people overcome obsessive-compulsive disorder, phobias, post-traumatic stress, and other conditions rooted in anxiety, the therapy involves giving the patient increasing “exposures” to whatever memories, experiences, or other triggers set off the disorder. For a veteran

32 mindful Winter 2020

with post-traumatic stress, a psychologist uses virtual reality to walk her through the roadside bombing or other horror that left a lasting mental scar.

For someone whose OCD arises from the belief that the world is awash in germs, a therapist will have him touch an office doorknob, then a doorknob in a public restroom, then a toilet seat… ratcheting up the anxiety but—and this is meant to be the therapeutic part— getting him accustomed to the anxiety and realizing it didn’t kill him.

When exposure therapy succeeds, it’s because individuals learn, over time, that the dreaded experience, object, or memory is tolerable. In other words, the original emotion fades.

That’s great if exposure therapy helps someone with OCD. It’s less great if repeated exposure to an outrage or tragedy bleeds away the emotions needed to spur us to action.

“One result of trauma, including the collective trauma of losing

“One result of trauma, including the collective trauma of losing thousands of lives every year to shooting or a pandemic, is numbness.”

MICHAELA HAAS Author of Bouncing Forward

thousands of lives every year to shootings or to a pandemic, is numbness,” said Michaela Haas, author of Bouncing Forward: The Art and Science of Cultivating Resilience. “Unless we have support and methods to address these wounds, a majority will choose numbness”—almost always unconsciously—because the alternative is too painful.

Psychologist Steven Lynn calls it “normalizing what had initially been a source of outrage.” By the umpteenth time we see pictures of horrific deaths in conflict zones, or Black Americans shot by police officers, or another once-pristine ecosystem turned to ashes for corporate profit, we think, yes, that’s awful…but it’s just the way the world works.

“There were so many shootings when people thought, This is really a turning point,” Haas said. But “despite the overwhelming outrage and, later, sustained and eloquent activism, policies did not change.

Outrageous violence against Black Americans continued. People learned that no matter how sophisticated or sincere their activism, they are unable to effect change. This is where empathy fatigue sets in. To feel grief, sadness, anger” at every report of outrage or tragedy “would result in emotional chronic fatigue.”

Can you imagine always feeling as horrified or depressed as you did when you first heard of George Floyd, or Newtown? Or first saw the picture of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi, whose family was fleeing the Syrian civil war, dead on a Turkish beach? No wonder there is little outrage at some 2,000 people dying at the hands of police officers in Rio de Janeiro in a single year. “People have to turn their thoughts away,” Lynn said.

The resulting desensitization builds on itself, leading to the psychological phenomenon known as “learned helplessness,” akin to the self-protective distancing that an abuse victim engages in, to preserve a few shreds of sanity and the will to live. When nothing we do makes any difference, emotional self-defense produces the

“Mindfulness trains us to think about our thoughts as ‘just thoughts,’ including the thought that tragedies and outrage are part of life or that trying to effect change is hopeless.”

STEVEN LYNN Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Binghamton University distancing necessary to convince ourselves either that what we witness is not all that terrible or is simply the way of the world.

“If we can’t change it,” Lynn said, “we have to come to terms with it some other way.”

Re-sensitizing Our Mind For many people, that “other way” is by activating cognitive resources to quell feelings of outrage and profound sadness, including by spinning stories about tragedies being inevitable—a coping mechanism to keep at bay what would otherwise be crippling anxiety and pain.

The reason the brain is so good at switching into self-protective mode, dialing down our outrage, is because it has evolved to pay selective attention to novel and surprising stimuli and to ignore repeating ones, in order to conserve finite processing capacity. Oh, we’ve seen this before, the brain says; nothing new to absorb, we can move on.

You don’t have to be involved in social activism to weep for what’s lost as a result of this emotional distancing, Lynn said. Every time it happens,

our collective store of compassion shrinks a little more, leaving less for both nameless strangers and those we love. It happens in the caring professions, too: The newly-minted social worker or therapist feels distress at and compassion for the suffering of those she is trying to help, while the grizzled veteran has seen it all, growing emotional armor.

Outrage exhaustion may be preventable, however. Lynn and graduate student Craig Polizzi found in a 2019 study that even brief mindfulness practice can increase people’s compassion. Can it overcome compassion fatigue? “Anything that reduces fear and anxiety and preoccupation with the self can increase compassion for others,” Lynn said. “Mindfulness trains us to think about our thoughts as ‘just thoughts,’” including the thought that tragedies and outrage are part of life or that trying to effect change is hopeless. Part of desensitization and empathy fatigue is that “we become numb and disengaged, lacking in introspection and compassion for others,” Lynn said.

Mindfulness practice can keep us engaged and actively compassionate because the practice helps us remain with the present moment. And there is a steadiness in the present. “Much of what we fear resides in moving our thoughts from the present moment, where there is often no immediate threat, to a future marked by fear, doubt, and uncertainty,” Lynn said.

“We create space for compassion by accepting our fears and watching them play out on the stage of our minds.”

We don’t have to continually fan the flames of our outrage to remain engaged—doing so would likely lead to burning out, which leaves us unable to help at all. What we do need is to cultivate a compassionate awareness of the present moment in order to sustain action toward a more just and peaceful future. Compassion practice can serve as a foundation, protecting us from accepting tragedies as inevitable, while motivating us to ask: How can I show up in this moment? What impact can I have? ●

Winter 2020 mindful 33

health

Understanding the new science of sleep can supercharge your energy levels, strengthen your brain’s resilience, and help you relax into a deeply restorative night’s rest.

PHOTOGRAPH BY NEOLEO / ADOBE STOCK

By Caren Osten Gerszberg

34 mindful Winter 2020

Winter 2020 mindful 35

“

health

here’s a master clock inside your head. Tucked deep inside your brain, this expert timekeeper keeps all of the cells in your body running smoothly, protects you from chronic disease, and helps you have deep, rejuvenating sleep. To keep these systems ticking along, this internal clock relies on a steady diet of healthy habits and mindful routines.

Unfortunately, steadiness and routine can be hard to come by, especially since overload and uncertainty seem to be the hallmarks of 2020.

Many of us are navigating strained relationships due to lack of physical proximity (or political proximity), souped-up tech algorithms leading us down information rabbit holes, and a generalized din of dread caused by the pandemic.

In the best of times, stress can interrupt our sleep patterns and cause us to lose hold of the daily habits and rhythms that keep us healthy. In today’s culture of disruption, it’s

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Caren Osten Gerszberg is a writer and certified positive psychology life coach. She contributes to publications such as the New York Times, Psychology Today, and Mindful, covering health and well-being, mindfulness, and education.

36 mindful Winter 2020

even more important that we create daily habits that support our well-being so we can get rejuvenating sleep and allow our minds to remain receptive and open in order to meet the unique challenges of the COVID era.

What most of us may not realize is how nearly all of our cells, tissues, and organs rely on internal daily rhythms, or circadian clocks, to keep our bodies running smoothly and in peak health under the watchful eye of the master clock. And those internal daily clocks rely on routines and timing in order to keep ticking for our optimal health.

The master clock is headquartered in the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN) in the brain’s hypothalamus.

There are peripheral clocks located all over the body—in the heart, lungs, kidneys, pancreas—and they are synchronized with the master clock through both hormonal and neuronal signals. These clocks make up our circadian system, which controls the functioning of each bodily process, including sleep, metabolism, hormone release, alertness, blood pressure, heart function, cognitive function, and the immune and reproductive systems. Take a moment to read that list again. Together, the circadian rhythms synchronize most of our brain and body functions. “The master clock in the brain is the con-

ductor of the orchestra. The other clocks are the ‘players’ fine-tuning local timing under the guidance of the SCN clock,” explained Dr. Steven Lockley, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

In order for our bodies to be in peak health, timing, rhythm, and habit are key.

“We need to do things at the right time; for example, eating in the day when our meta“The master clock bolic efficiency is in the brain is the optimal, and not at night when the conductor of the brain is promotorchestra, and the ing sleep and other clocks are the fasting.”

As humans, ‘players’ fine-tuning we evolved to local timing.” follow regular patterns of light-dark DR. STEVEN LOCKLEY exposure—we Associate Professor of need the sun’s Medicine at Harvard blue-enriched Medical School light during the day for alertness and activity, and the dark to prime our sleep, recovery, and repair mode.

“The key to healthy sleep and circadian rhythms is stable, regularly timed daily light and dark exposure,” said Lockley. “These daily time cues are needed to reset our circadian clocks each and every day, which will not only determine how well we sleep but our very cellular health.”

What connects our internal, circadian rhythms with the outside world is the light that enters through our eyes. The light—the →

PHOTOGRAPH BY NEOLEO / ADOBE STOCK

T

Healthy circadian rhythms rely on regularity and stability—for the timing of light, timing of exercise, and timing of meals.

Winter 2020 mindful 37

“

health

PHOTOGRAPH BY NEOLEO / ADOBE STOCK

In today’s culture of disruption, it’s even more important that we create daily habits that support our well-being so we can get rejuvenating sleep and allow our minds to remain receptive and open.

38 mindful Winter 2020

strongest synchronizing agent—stimulates a neural pathway to the “master clock,” which signals other brain regions and the peripheral clocks in the body that control hormones, body temperature, and other physiological processes that help regulate when we feel sleepy or awake.

“Light is free for most of us, and you don’t even have to go outside to get it,” said Dr. Phyllis Zee, professor of neurology and the director of the Center for Circadian and Sleep Medicine at Northwestern University.

Dr. Zee was one of the authors of a recent study that showed office workers who had exposure to light through a window tended to have longer sleep duration, better sleep quality, greater physical activity, enhanced mood, and better quality of life compared to office workers with less light exposure.

Ultimately, healthy circadian rhythms rely on regularity and stability—for the timing of light, timing of exercise, and timing of meals. “This is so your body’s physiology can anticipate what you’re going to do, and be prepared rather than reactionary,” said Dr. Zee. If you exercise too close to bedtime, for example, it can delay the timing of your rhythms, making it more difficult to fall asleep. Similarly, your blood pressure rises before you wake up in the morning, so if you get up at 2:00 in the morning, you’re more likely to feel

more unstable because your blood pressure didn’t anticipate your need to get up. “The circadian system is the top dog, and regulates all of these systems, including sleep,” she said.

How Circadian Rhythms Impact Our Health In today’s world, disruptions in circadian rhythms are common, especially when we are overloaded and operating in “react” mode rather than mindfully making choices about our behavior. “We override our natural rhythms by staying up late, using electric light, and eating any time of night, more than we think,” said Dr. Lockley. If you live in New York, for example, and stay awake two hours later than normal, it’s as if you’ve traveled two time zones west. Add a third hour on the weekend, and when you wake up on Monday morning, you have what’s called “social jet lag,” because your body clock is set to California time even though you never went anywhere. “The more frequent the flip-flopping between light and dark, the more problems you will have with social jet lag and imperfect synchronization with the outside world,” said Lockley. “Stability is key.”

When frequent sleep disturbances, night-time screen use, or high caffeine

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intake throw our light exposure out of whack, the natural circadian rhythms of the body are reset—to either speed up or slow down the internal clock, which influences all the systems that it controls.

Extreme circadian instability—as seen with shift workers, such as nurses, doctors, transportation and factory workers, and first responders—can cause a variety of chronic health problems, increasing the risk of cardiovascular disease, impaired immune function, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, depression, and some forms of cancer.

Most of the research on circadian disruption and health comes from looking at shift workers, who typically work out of phase with their internal clocks— which can be off by as many as 12 hours. It is the continuing misalignment of their behavior from the clock, such as sleeping and eating at the wrong time, that leads them to develop health problems. “Shift workers adapt a little to the night shift, but not fully, and then they adapt back to the day shift, but not fully, and this lack of stability affects cell processes, metabolism, hormone levels, and many other systems and causes of chronic disease,” said Dr. Lockley.

A few helpful suggestions include: minimizing the number of night shifts in a row, keeping the same sleepwake schedule on your at-home days as on your work days, if possible; →

Winter 2020 mindful 39

TRY THIS

health

40 mindful Winter 2020

of light you’re exposed to.

(See the facing page for research-backed strategies to move toward optimal circadian health.)

You may not be able to make all of these changes to your daily lifestyle, but being mindful of your body’s internal clock and modifying schedules to support your body’s exposure to natural light and dark cycles can be beneficial to your overall health.

Sleep Tips

Establishing a routine that recognizes the body’s natural response to light and dark can help keep your circadian rhythms in sync. Here are some expert-recommended strategies to move toward optimal circadian health.

Where Mindfulness Meets Circadian Health Maintaining optimal circadian health can present a major challenge in normal times. In the COVID era, for many of us, daily life necessitates more screen time than usual, often extending into the evening (sometimes illuminating the bedroom). Meals can easily slide into the late evening (not to mention latenight snacking). All of our routines have shifted. But mindfulness can help bring added awareness to our daily behaviors, offering an anchor for healthy circadian routines that can support the natural rhythms of our body’s internal clock.

Throughout your day, mindfulness can support your ability to take a pause—a flash of awareness about what will serve you best—so that you can respond, rather than react,

PHOTOGRAPH BY NEOLEO / ADOBE STOCK

getting out into the sun once you wake up, which will cue your biological clock that it’s time to be alert; and staying away from alcohol as a sleep aid, which may appear to calm the brain to help fall asleep, but will disrupt your sleep later. Melatonin has also been shown to help night-shift workers sleep in the day, but should be taken under a doctor’s supervision.

In non-shift workers, a similar thing happens, but it is less severe, and being off by as little as two hours of sleep regularly over time can affect our physiology and mental state. “If you’re chronically sleep-deprived, it can affect your immune system, making you more vulnerable to infection, and less able to mount an antibody response,” said Dr. Zee. “Lack of sleep can also throw circadian rhythms out of sync, which can further exacerbate difficulties with attention, mood, and memory.”

Establishing a routine that recognizes the body’s natural response to light and dark can help keep your circadian rhythms in sync. This means going to bed at the same time every night, trying not to eat three hours before bedtime, making sure you get some sunlight exposure every day, trying not to reach for your phone if you wake up in the middle of the night, and establishing a nightly wind-down routine that helps settle your body and mind, while also tapering off the amount

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Stick to a Sleep/Wake Schedule

Consider the Quality of Light

Try to maintain a consistent sleepwake cycle (and thus a consistent dark-light cycle) by going to sleep and getting up at the same time every day. Try not to deviate more than an hour on weekdays, and more than two hours on weekends.

Get as much daylight exposure as possible during the daytime. If natural light is not available, you can use bright, blue-enriched white light bulbs indoors. Sleep in the dark, at night, or wear an eye mask to block light from reaching the eyes.

Create Natural Wind-Down Lighting Between Dusk and Dark

Pay Attention to Your Nighttime Light

5

6

7

8

Sleep at Night

Eat Smarter

Focus on getting all the sleep you need at night, so you don’t need a nap during the day.

If you need to nap, make it short— no more than 20 minutes.

Avoid eating three hours before bedtime. Ideally, you want to consume more of your calories in the daytime when your metabolism is most active.

Practice Screen Hygiene

Establish a Wind-Down Routine

Dim the lights and don’t use screens within two hours of bedtime. The blue light emitted from TV, tablets, phones, and computers can have a delayed, negative effect on your sleep, even with the use of apps or eyeglasses that block blue light.

Create a transition time that separates day from night. Do something relaxing before bed, such as breathing exercises or yoga.

This is a good way to calm the mind and body.

Just as the sun goes down, you can mimic that fading light by minimizing bright light and moving toward a warmer orange light, which promotes sleep, ideally three hours before going to bed.

Any light tells the brain it’s daytime, encouraging alertness, and suppresses melatonin, the hormone that tells the brain that it’s night. If needed, use a dim red-orange night light in the hall or bathroom.

–Caren Osten Gerszberg

to a given situation, trigger, or challenge. “The role of mindfulness is in helping you make a choice about how to look after yourself in the bigger picture,” said Zindel Segal, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Psychology in Mood Disorders at the University of Toronto.

“You can make mindful choices about what time to exercise, how much caffeine to drink, and how many YouTube videos to watch before bed, by asking yourself whether these activities will support your sleep.”

For most people, daily life tends to take on certain rhythms—you may walk the dog and meditate in the morning, exercise before lunch, and read a book or journal before bed. Eventually, the choices you make and rhythms you create will define your days and nights. “The things you do repeatedly before going to bed, like reading a book or writing in a gratitude journal, have a Pavlovian connection to sleep, which can be helpful,” said Dr. Segal.

It is worth bringing more awareness to how we treat our days (Am I getting enough natural light?) and meal schedules (Can I eat dinner before it turns dark?) and routines (Can I meditate or do yoga before bed?). And each of these choices, supported by our mindfulness practice, can help create steadying routines that can support our mental, physical, and emotional health, not to mention set us up for deep, healing sleep at night. →

Winter 2020 mindful 41

health

Winding Down Before Sleep In times of uncertainty, stress increases, and rhythms and schedules go awry. So, too, can sleep.

Practicing mindfulness— through mindful moments, meditation, body scans, and yoga—can be an effective way to create those essential daily habits and a nightly wind-down period to prep for a good night’s sleep, calm the mind, and bring awareness to the body.

The journey to better sleep includes cultivating awareness and open curiosity about how you prepare your body and mind for sleep. “You can’t be doing taxes or another stressful activity at 8:59 p.m. and expect to fall asleep at 9:00,” said Dr. Sat Bir Singh Khalsa, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. “Stress and emotional activation generate physiological and cognitive arousal, which makes falling asleep more difficult.”

An effective way to prepare the body for sleep is to do gentle yoga poses, or some mindful stretching and breathing exercises before bed. In a recently published study on the impact of yoga-based programs for workplace professionals, results showed improved sleep at both the end of the three-day program and two months afterward. “People who practice before bedtime may be able to fall asleep easier,” said Dr. Khalsa,

42 mindful Winter 2020

one of the study’s researchers. “Stress reduction is a strong contributor to improved sleep, and the longer you practice yoga, the more your system starts to reduce its chronic stress levels over the long term.”

Once Your Head Hits the Pillow As you’re about to doze off, it’s easy for thoughts, emotions, worries, plans, projects, and regrets to take over, sending us into repetitive loops of anxiety and frustration. Practicing mindfulness, the nonjudgmental awareness of our present-moment experience, can help you notice your thoughts, emotions, and body sensations. Focusing your attention on what you’re feeling can help you step out of the habit loop that often turns worrying into more worrying.

Judson Brewer, MD, PhD, a professor and researcher at the Mindfulness Center at Brown University, calls this awareness the “bigger, better offer.”

A racing mind is the top complaint his patients report when it comes to sleep. (See “You’re Overwhelmed” on page 44 to learn how our brains slip into overload during uncertain and volatile times.)

“Awareness helps us see how unrewarding anxiety is, and it feels better to be aware of worrying rather

VIDEO Yoga for Sleep Sara Ivanhoe guides a 20-minute breath and movement routine to wind down and prepare your body for sleep. mindful.org/ sleepyoga

than worry itself,” says Dr. Brewer. “Once you have awareness, you can use curiosity to notice places of tension, which then relax as a result, and this helps you step out of the loop.”

Dr. Brewer recommends mindfulness to help his patients shift their mental energy from feeding mental habit loops to noticing the physical sensations in the body. “My top two suggestions are body scan and then body scan, because it’s that good,” he says.

Simply listening to your body can help you regulate your sleep. “When doing a body scan, you may start to discern between sleepiness, a state characterized by drowsiness and difficulty maintaining alertness, and fatigue, a state characterized by a lack of energy,” says Jason Ong, PhD, a sleep psychologist and professor of neurology at Northwestern University. “If you’re feeling fatigued and lie down intending to sleep, you probably wouldn’t fall asleep quickly.”

Recognizing where your mind is (racing?) and how your body feels (energized?) is at the core of developing the regular behaviors to promote better sleep. “It sounds complicated, but just listen to what your brain and body tell you and bring your awareness to what’s happening to give yourself a chance to allow falling asleep to unfold,” said Dr. Ong. A recent meta-analysis (a study that combines the results of multiple, previ-

PHOTOGRAPH BY NEOLEO / ADOBE STOCK

m ously conducted studies) by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that looked at the impact of mindfulness meditation on sleep, found that mindfulness interventions were significantly effective in improving sleep quality, but more research is needed. “There are two key elements connected to mindfulness that can help with sleep,” said Heather Rusch, PhD, a research fellow at the NIH, who led the meta-analysis. The first is awareness, and the second is equanimity. “If you become aware of your thoughts or sensations but say ‘I hate them,’ that won’t be helpful, so responding to whatever comes up in a balanced way is important.”

When it comes to mindfulness practices, what works for one person may not work for another.

“It winds up becoming a buffet—with breathing meditations, walking meditations, mindful movement, and body scans—where people can find something that works for them,” said Dr. Rusch.

While there’s yet to be the discovery of an instant solution for difficulties falling and staying asleep, you can influence your environment and cultivate healthy circadian behaviors with the hopes of getting more and easier slumber.

It is the regularity of your body’s circadian rhythms, as well as the consistency of your mindfulness practices, that can lead you to better sleep and, hopefully, sweet dreams. ●

“

Two key elements of mindfulness can help with sleep: The first is awareness, the second is equanimity.

Winter 2020 mindful 43

neuroscience

1

YOU’RE OVERWHELMED

CREATES YOUR REALITY The reason we have “attention” is to solve one of the brain’s big problems: There is far more information in our environment (and in our own minds!) than the brain can fully process.

Without a way to filter, the relentless sensory input would leave us overloaded, incapable of functioning effectively. The attention system is like a flashlight. It allows us to select and direct our brain’s computational resources to a smaller subset of the information. We can narrow our sights onto our conversation partner and boost her voice in a crowded room while dimming down other sights and sounds; it allows us to focus on a particular problem or happy memory from our past. During COVID, your attention is what allows you to hold, at the front of your mind, the new rules for living to successfully keep yourself and others safe.

So realize this: Your attention is powerful. It determines the moment-to-moment experience of your life—what you perceive, feel, remember, think, and do.

(and it’s not your fault)

We’re living in Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous times. Here are ten ways your brain reacts—and how mindfulness can help you survive, and even thrive.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Amishi Jha is a neuroscientist and associate professor of psychology at the University of Miami.

She’s the author of a forthcoming book (2021, Harper One) on the science of attention.

44 mindful Winter 2020

and look for ways to protect and strengthen it.

Right now, nine months into a grueling and unpredictable global pandemic, we are all living in VUCA conditions. Compounding the constant health and economic concerns, we are facing unprecedented levels of social upheaval, environmental destruction, and political discord. All of these events influence our cognitive capacities—and it’s not for the better.

If you’ve been feeling overwhelmed or unfocused; if you’ve struggled with staying on task or been blindsided by emotion during this time—me too!

But this is precisely what our prior research regarding the human brain’s attention system would predict.

Your attention system is complex and multifaceted, but the more you know about how it works, the more able you will be to navigate VUCA events. So here are 10 things you need to know about your attention—and how to protect it—that will serve you not only through this crisis, but for the rest of your life.

PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHANIE DIANI, ILLUSTRATION BY VLADYSTOCK / ADOBE STOCK

By Amishi Jha

Volatility. Uncertainty. Complexity.

Ambiguity. In my lab at the University of Miami, these four words (shorthanded to “VUCA”) describe the type of high-stress, high-demand scenarios that can rapidly degrade one of our most powerful and influential brain systems: our attention.

My research team and I study people who regularly experience VUCA conditions as part of their jobs—soldiers, firefighters, organizational leaders, and more. We investigate the powers and vulnerabilities of the attention system, pinpoint the forces that degrade and weaken attention,

YOUR ATTENTION

2

YOUR ATTENTION

IS VULNERABLE TO STRESS, THREAT, AND POOR MOOD Attention is, in some ways, your brain’s superpower. But like many superpowers, it has kryptonite: threat, stress, and poor mood will rapidly degrade your capacities. And these are things that occur quite regularly in VUCA conditions like fire season, military deployment, corporate bankruptcies and restructuring, or a global pandemic. COVID is producing circumstances that accelerate the rate at which attention is degraded as it jacks up attention’s kryptonite. During this protracted pandemic, we’re all experiencing a heightened sense of threat, new and constant stressors, anxious feelings, and more. →

Winter 2020 mindful 45

“

neuroscience

In any particular moment, there’s a 50% chance you’re not really here… Your attention gets hijacked by mental content tied to stress, threat, and poor mood.

3

YOUR ATTENTION

4

5

YOUR ATTENTION

Working memory is an essential partner to attention: It’s what allows you to do something with the information you focus on. It’s what you use when you need to hold something in mind for a few seconds—for example, remembering that six-digit confirmation code, composing a phrase in your mind as you tap out a text, visualizing the route to a new location as you drive. Think of it as a mental whiteboard: a temporary scratch space where you can jot down crucial information.

But just like a real-life whiteboard, it’s only so big. You can fit about three or four items on it before you max out the space. And it has one important quirk: It uses disappearing ink.

Anything you “write” on your mental whiteboard will start disappearing within a few seconds. If you want to keep it there longer, you have to keep focusing on it. In this COVID era, we are all running up against the limits of our whiteboards, all the time. We’re spending a lot of our vulnerable and limited attentional resources policing our instincts and behaviors, as well as overcoming impulses and habits. This sucks up our limited attention and our finite working memory capacity, leaving few cognitive resources for anything else.

46 mindful Winter 2020

wandering. And what most often captures our attention and pulls it away from the task at hand is our own thoughts and preoccupations. Our attention gets hijacked by mental content tied to stress, threat, and poor mood, the kryptonite for attention I mentioned earlier. And when this happens, we are more error-prone, our perception is dulled, and our mood sours.

Right now, we’re seeing an increase in people reporting “intrusive thoughts” about—you guessed it—COVID. And these COVID-related thoughts and worries that pop into our minds have a lot of pull. They can yank the flashlight of our attention away from what we’re doing, and it’s hard to pull it back. We experience uncertainty-related stress (How long will this go on?). We feel a threat, not only to our physical safety (to our health) but also our psychological safety, our norms, familiar routines, life as we knew it. And we struggle with poor mood, often heightened by a sense of isolation and loneliness. This pandemic has created the perfect circumstances for our attention to get easily, and constantly, hijacked.

IS LINKED TO YOUR EMOTIONS

ILLUSTRATION BY KRAS99 / ADOBE STOCK

IS LIMITED—AND WANDERS OFTEN SO IS YOUR WORKING In any particular moment, there’s a 50% chance you’re not really here. We’ve seen this in MEMORY study after study: Half of the time, we’re mind

YOUR ATTENTION

One of the biggest surprises about attention is how deeply it’s connected to emotion. Think about it this way: When we recall a happy memory or something sad or upsetting, we use our attention and working memory to do so. We fill up our whiteboards with the appropriate imagery, memory, and thought, and all of this is needed to construct the fullness of our emotional experience.

And it goes in the other direction as well— you need attentional bandwidth to regulate emotions as they come along. Example: You’re overcome by some feeling, and you need to get steady. What do you do? You think through the problem, or you distract yourself by focusing on some other topic, or you reframe the situation (Maybe it’s not as bad as I think…). All of these tactics require attention as their fuel. And if your fuel is in short supply (because it is idling on ruminative loops of distressing thought), you just won’t have the cognitive resources to regulate your emotions effectively. You end up feeling unsteady and dysregulated.

6

YOUR ATTENTION

IS ESSENTIAL FOR CONNECTION Until now, I’ve been describing attention as a resource for your own private use—you direct the flashlight of your attention to your own sensations, thoughts, feelings, and memories, and to the external environment. We also direct it toward other people to communicate and connect. Fascinatingly, we also use our working memory collaboratively. We use it to create a shared mental model so we can have a mutual understanding of what’s being communicated.

“We’re not on the same page,” you might say to a friend, when you realize that your mental models are misaligned. We often need to be able to see things through someone else’s eyes. This is a critical aspect of connection.

Paying attention is one of the most compelling ways by which we can show our interest, care, and love for others. Yet, while physically distancing, we can’t offer up our attention in the usual way right now—COVID is depriving us of the essential ways in which we connect. →

Winter 2020 mindful 47

neuroscience

7

“

YOUR ATTENTION

CAN TIME-TRAVEL

Paying attention is one of the most compelling ways we can show our interest, care, and love for others.

It’s an amazing capacity we have, to fast-forward our attention into the future, and to rewind back into the past. We can recall precious memories; we can imagine and plan. But under VUCA conditions, this capacity gets harder to control.

We end up—without much choice or agency— trapped in the past and future. We long for the way life used to be. We worry, catastrophize, and hope. All this uncertainty makes us much more likely to play out various possible scenarios over and over again. This ends up being unhelpful and unproductive planning, as we burn attentional fuel on imagined situations that may never come to pass. A recent study we conducted found that the more COVID-related intrusive thoughts people reported, the more depressed they were, and the poorer sleep quality they reported. These are some of the unfortunate consequences of mental time-travel run amok—especially now.

8

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CAN BE A BAD BOSS

YOUR ATTENTION

IS EASILY FOOLED

48 mindful Winter 2020

m VIDEO The Science of Attention

ILLUSTRATION BY VLADYSTOCK / ADOBE STOCK

Your brain is an incredible virtual-reality machine. You can simulate all kinds of imagined scenarios and predictions. And you can do it all so vividly. But sometimes a simulation can be so convincing and transportive that it leads your attention system to recalibrate many brain networks as though it’s really happening. That means you often end up filtering out or overriding what’s really happening, right in front of you.

The uncertainty of the COVID era means you’re simulating a lot more. You’re imagining possible outcomes constantly—What if the vaccine isn’t effective? What if it isn’t safe? Will social upheaval transform our society for the better?

What if it doesn’t? And during VUCA circumstances, our attention is more prone to being wholly transported into a simulated doomsday of our mind’s own making. And a critical aspect of attentional control may falter: our ability to realize that simulations are mental creations, and not reality. We forget that thoughts are not facts.

YOUR ATTENTION

Discover your brain’s attention system with this four-part mini course with Amishi Jha. mindful.org/ science-ofattention

We all know that stress makes us feel bad. But long periods of stress are especially taxing, working our attention overtime and rapidly degrading it. What once was our superpower turns against us.

One of my colleagues in the military has written about “shelter fatigue”: Highly trained individuals facing a long period of isolation will suddenly break quarantine, even while fully understanding the consequences. At a certain point, our cognitive capacities can become so degraded that we are unable to maintain new rules and goals in our working memory. They go out the window (or off the whiteboard) and instead, our attention leads us to do what is comfortable and familiar. Overcoming our social habits, for example, can be attentionally exhausting to work against. I think back to a visit from a close friend over the COVID summer; when I saw her, it took so much self-control not to rush up and hug her.

So, keep in mind that sometimes your attention may “direct” you to do something that isn’t in your best interests. It’s a bad boss.

10

YOU CAN DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT

YOUR ATTENTION IS TRAINABLE Right now, you’re in high-kryptonite conditions.

What can you do about it? Well, this is the question we’ve been studying in the lab for many years, and we’ve found an answer: Practice mindfulness.

Mindfulness meditation, practiced regularly, protects attention under VUCA conditions.

Because mindfulness practice is about keeping your attention in the present moment without judgment, elaboration, or reactivity, it becomes a kind of “mental armor” against some of the most damaging habits of mind: mind wandering, rumination, and catastrophizing, which significantly rachet up under VUCA conditions like the times we are living through now. Mindfulness practice helps restore attention so you can regulate your emotions and relate to them differently by allowing them to arise and then pass away.

The practice trains us to keep our attention in the present moment and increases our ability to maintain an awareness of what’s happening in the mind so we aren’t as easily hijacked or fooled into believing that our thoughts are reality.

While it’s helpful to start training before you enter a period of high demand, you can start now and still benefit. In our studies, we’ve noticed three things: 1) Short-form programs of eight hours of training show beneficial results within four weeks. 2) There is a minimum effective dose (you need to have a regular daily practice in order to see measurable attentional improvements—we’ve found that as little as 12 minutes a day for 3 to 5 days a week is protective over high stress intervals). 3) We see a dose-response effect (the more you do, the more you benefit).

With mindfulness practice, our mental fogginess begins to fade as our attention and working memory are protected and strengthened. Mind-wandering decreases, and our sense of clarity and well-being can bounce back. In this way, we are training our attention to be battle-ready for the VUCA circumstances of this pandemic and all those we may encounter for the rest of our lives. ●

Winter 2020 mindful 49

going deeper

YOU BE LONG

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sebene Selassie received a BA from McGill University and an MA from the New School, where she focused on Buddhism, Hinduism, cultural studies, and race.

She was the executive director of New York Insight Meditation Center, where she currently teaches.

A native of Ethiopia, Selassie lives in Brooklyn, New York.

50 mindful Winter 2020

Belonging is not dependent on things being as we want them to be. It is not necessary to achieve (some definition of) success, behave like everyone else, have the perfect partner, be the perfect size or shape. In fact, the forces of oppression need not even magically disappear (though that would be cool) for us to experience belonging. And get this: We also don’t need to feel belonging to belong. Belonging is truth and it is the fundamental nature of reality right here and now, whether we feel it or not. For me, it’s often been not.

I explore belonging precisely because for most of my life I felt I did not belong anywhere—forget everywhere. I was plagued with feelings of not belonging no matter where I went. I was a toddler when my family emigrated from Ethiopia in the early seventies (I am half Ethiopian and half Eritrean). I felt out of place in an American culture that was a lot less diverse than it is today and in an immigrant community that was much smaller than it is now. I grew up Black in white neighborhoods, and I didn’t feel like I connected to any one racial culture. I was a girl who was not interested in girlie things (so, yes, on top of everything else, I was the tomboy Black immigrant girl).

“Difference” does not equal “not belonging,” but as many of us live farther away from our families and as we connect to multiple commu-

nities and cultures, our sense of belonging feels tenuous. Race, gender, class, sexual orientation, ability, religion, ethnicity, culture, size, politics, profession, lifestyle, and even clothing can highlight differences that delineate borders between us that become (false) barriers to belonging. Into my thirties I assumed there were certain ways to be(long). I did not seem to get them. I was too blackish for the white folks. Not Black enough for the Black folks. Too Americanized to get my roots. Too immigrant to get American idioms.

Too feminist for heels. Too femme not to do my brows. Too intellectual for the intuitives. Not sufficiently read for the academy. Too political for my party friends. Not radical enough for my activist friends. Too hetero to call myself queer.

Too queer to care about most hetero nonsense.

Too woo-woo for the skeptics. Not spiritual enough for the renunciates. I had too much money. Not enough.

Lifelong practice with feelings of not belonging has made me a belonging specialist. Almost everything I’ve pursued in life connects to this longing to belong. I majored in religious studies, feminism, race, and cultural studies searching for answers about belonging. I journaled, doodled, and made videos about belonging. I smoked it, drank it, popped it, and snorted it in an attempt to belong. I went to countless →

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF SEBENE SELASSIE

So much of our pain comes from feeling out of step with ourselves, our peers, even our world. But in her new book, meditation teacher Sebene Selassie makes the case that we belong. To everything. Simply by being here.

going deeper

PRACTICE

“YO U A RE N OT SE PA R ATE .

YO U N E V E R W E RE .

YO U N E V E R W I LL B E .”

Win a Copy of You Belong To celebrate the publication of You Belong

by Sebene Selassie, we’re offering you a chance to win a copy of the book. mindful.org/ you-belong

Excerpted from You Belong by Sebene Selassie, reprinted with permission from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Copyright © 2020.

52 mindful Winter 2020

classes, seminars, and retreats chasing belonging. I practiced yoga and meditation, seeking out teachers in my quest to find belonging. I protested and petitioned to belong. I fasted and juiced to belong.

My friend Nidhi describes not belonging like going to the mall gift shop every week and spinning the display with the personalized key rings, searching for your name even though you know you’ll never find it. We search externally for belonging (hint: It’s not out there). It took me time and practice to unlearn this outside searching, to understand that the key to belonging is within. Belonging is my nature: Therefore, I belong everywhere and so does everyone else.

Including you.

But at some point, in your life or in the past fifteen minutes, you have probably felt you don’t belong. Maybe you felt insecure, angry, anxious, fearful, sad, disconnected, frustrated, or all of these things at once. It’s not wrong to have these feelings come up. The only problem with feelings is thinking there’s a problem with feelings.

We mostly don’t like unpleasant feelings and want to get rid of them.

You’re not alone in feeling unpleasant feelings. There’s a lot to feel unpleasant about (and a lot to which we don’t want to belong). Hate crimes are on the rise in the US. Politics are polarized everywhere, with xenophobia and racism fueling a resurgence of populism across the world. A global pandemic altered all of our lives.

Uprisings ignited across the world in defense of Black lives. Our planet is in severe environmental crisis and there is no agreed-upon remedy for the fact that we are hurtling toward destruction.

Feeling bad can make us feel worse. Anxiety and depression have skyrocketed among young people, affecting close to one in three young adults. Loneliness is at epidemic proportions as studies show that social isolation increases stress hormones and can even lead to illness and premature death. Though US rates are the

highest, governments around the world are addressing loneliness as a crisis (and this was before corona shutdowns). The UK created an entire ministerial commission on it. While loneliness is exacerbated for older people by physical isolation, some speculate it plagues young people even more. Not belonging doesn’t only affect people who are alone; one study shows that half of those reporting chronic loneliness are married people.

If we belong to it all, we all belong to this, too.

Do you believe it? Do you believe that you belong? Because you do. You belong. Everywhere. Yes, you—with all your history, anxiety, pain. Yes, everywhere—in every culture, community, circumstance. You belong in this body. You belong in this very moment. You belong in this breath...and this one. You have always belonged.

When I forget, I recall this: Belonging is an imperative—be longing. Our desire to belong is what makes us human precisely because feeling like we don’t belong opens us to belonging.

If we didn’t long for it, our species would have perished. Our longing to belong is, as Irish poet David Whyte says, one of our “core competencies.” Try it right now. Connect to any ways you feel you don’t fit in, aren’t accepted, or are separate. Can you sense that longing for connection within you? Is there a part of you that knows the universality of that longing? Can you recognize the humanness of that desire?

If we don’t feel belonging, it turns out we can learn to feel it because it’s wired into us. Kindness and generosity are encoded within each one of us. And when we feel belonging, we are able to meet people, situations, difficulties, joys... life with more kindness, generosity, and ease.

At the heart of not belonging is what I refer to as “the delusion of separation”—the belief that you are separate from other people, from other beings, and from nature itself. And it is a delusion. You are not separate. You never were. You never will be. ●

R EC L A I M YO U R J OY Experience the truth of your inherent belonging by connecting to the essential elements of the earth and remembering that we’re all made of the same stuff.

We’re not separate from anyone, or anything—we are nature, too, and we all belong to all of it.

PHOTOGRAPH BY TATJANA ZLATKOVIC/STOCKSY

m

Belonging is the sense of ease and joy we feel when we are truly present, and this is possible in any moment alone, or with others. Often, we don’t feel like we belong because we’re caught up in feelings of loneliness, anxiety, and doubt.

Feelings of not belonging can be learned over time and lead us to think there’s something wrong with us, that we’re not enough—but, by the very nature of our birth and our existence, we are enough and we all belong.

The global pandemic is revealing our interconnection as the whole world continues to be affected by the COVID virus. The recent uprisings for Black lives show us that the long history of racial injustice continues to impact us all. Mindfulness helps us remember the truth of our belonging by allowing us to experience the ease and joy of truly belonging at any moment.

By Sebene Selassie

At its simplest, mindfulness is paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, nonjudgmentally. That nonjudgmental part is actually imbued with kindness and care. When we can ground and love ourselves, belonging is possible.

But our minds can have a hard time staying grounded in the present. It’s our meditation practice that can help us connect to our body and our breath, allowing us to build our capacity to be present with what is with kindness and care. And when we’re truly present with each moment, we can feel the truth of our belonging.

One of my all-time favorite meditation practices to help cultivate a sense of belonging is the Mindfulness of the Four Elements practice.

MINDFULNESS OF THE FOUR ELEMENTS Earth, Air, Fire, Water

Mindfulness of the elements is a classical practice, but it’s not as well-known as body and breath meditations, or even loving-kindness practice. I think it’s one of the most powerful ways we can connect to the sense of belonging to everything. Connecting with nature is a great way to experience the power of our interconnection. Many of us feel like we belong when we’re in the presence of the ocean, a majestic mountain, or an old grove of trees. Our pets can help ease our sense of disconnection. There’s a mystery at the center of nature, and that mirrors the mystery of the truth of belonging—that we’re not separate from anyone, or anything. Our meditation practice can connect us to that wonder of belonging.

For this meditation, the elements of earth, fire, water, and air are used as objects for contemplation the same way the breath is an anchor for practice. Connecting to the elements helps us connect to our bodies in a way that also connects us to everything else in nature, because of course we are nature, too, and we belong to all of it. →

Winter 2020 mindful 53

RECLAIM YOUR JOY

THE PRACTICE

EARTH As you settle in, begin to notice the weight of your body. Here, the solidity of your body is the earth element. This element is heavy, it’s stable. As you connect to that sense of solidity, allow your body to soften and rest deeply into the ground, into the floor. Feeling the density of the body, your bones, your flesh, the fat of your body—all that is solid and dense, this is the earth element. As you feel the stability of the earth within you and around you, you can know that it’s connected to all of the earth around us—the ground, the trees, the rocks, the mountains, all that is solid and stable.

The earth element in you is connected to the earth element all around you. Explore what it feels like to know this connection to the earth.

FIRE Now begin to notice the temperature in your body. Fire is heat, warmth, vibration. Where do you feel your internal heat? Sometimes you can connect to the fire element in the belly, the heart area, anywhere that feels warm and hot. Know that this fire element in you is connected to the fire element all around you. For example, the sun is the epitome of the fire element in nature, keeping the planet warm and alive. Know that the fire element, the warmth and heat within you, is connected to the fire element all around you. Explore what it feels like to know that connection we all have with fire. →

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LUKE MATTSON/STOCKSY AND ILYA/STOCKSY

Let’s start by getting grounded in the body with love and compassion: Find a comfortable position, whether you’re standing, or sitting, or lying down. I invite you to close your eyes; you can also just keep your gaze soft. Check in and notice, what do you feel? Ask yourself, What’s happening in my body right now? Bring your attention to your heart area, and notice any sensations there. Ask yourself, Can I meet this with kindness, or can I meet this with love? You can also bring a hand to your heart to feel more deeply that sense of connection, that sense of kindness and care. Just explore this sense of groundedness and love for a few moments.

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RECLAIM YOUR JOY

AIR Air is movable and changeable—it’s light and ephemeral. Of course, in our bodies, the air element is the breath. Notice the air as you breathe in and out, connecting us to lightness and changeability. Your breath, your air, is connected to the air all around you—to the sky, to the wind, to the air that circulates around our planet, breathed in and out by many, many beings. Rest your awareness on the breath for a few moments as we finish this meditation. Explore what it feels like to know that you are connected to all of nature through the air you breathe— through all of the elements.

W AT E R Water is smooth and flowing. Most of your body is water. Perhaps you can sense the water element in the moistness of your eyes, in your mouth, in the blood coursing through you— in all that is fluid and flowing through your body. As you feel this water within you, perhaps you can sense that this water is in balance with the water that covers our planet. Our planet is also mostly water, just like us—the oceans, rivers, lakes, rain, mist, clouds, and the dew. Know that this water element in you is connected to the water all around you. Water is life. Explore what it feels like to know this connection we all have with water.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY KAAT ZOETEKOUW/STOCKSY AND ACALU STUDIO/STOCKSY

As you open your eyes, you can orient to the space around you. Remember: You belong in every moment, just like the trees, the sun, the ocean, and the air.

Nature is always right here, connecting you and me and everything else on our planet. We belong. ●

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profile

Letting Go How a deep mindfulness practice helped Jessica Morey loosen the reins at Inward Bound Meditation Education, and empower the organization to adopt collaborative leadership.

PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL PIAZZA

By Stephanie Domet

Jessica Morey was burned out. The executive director of iBme, Morey was leading a team of six office staff, sixty retreat staff, and about a hundred volunteers, doing work she believed in wholeheartedly—serving mindfulness and meditation practices to teens on summer retreats.

Despite her love for the work, it was stressful. “I was overwhelmed and exhausted,” Morey recalls. And when she looked around at other nonprofits, she saw their executive directors in similar straits. “How are we going to find that person who’s going to do this?” she remembers thinking, of the job that required all the hours and energy she had available to pour into it—and more. “I’m only willing to do this because it’s the center of my heart.” And the situation at work was increasingly uncomfortable.

“When I’m stressed out, I become a general,” Morey says. She narrows her focus to what’s required to survive, and her tone becomes brisk and businesslike, instead of warm

and relational. “I probably would be good on a battlefield, but that’s not the paradigm and world I want to live in, actually.” Morey acknowledges that while her staff wanted her to be a loving presence—which she sometimes was—she was just as often disruptive to them. “I could see how I was behaving,” she says now. “I was not aligned with my mindfulness practice values at all.”

A New Way to Work Frustrated, she was browsing the Animas Valley Institute’s website, thinking perhaps she’d go on a wilderness program. On their “About” page, what she saw rocked her world: “Since 2008, we have structured ourselves as a team-led, service organization with no executive director.”

For Morey, it was a glimpse of a possibility she didn’t know existed. A second glimpse came when her friend Oren Jay Sofer introduced her to →

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“Collaborative leadership is a way to counteract the power, privilege, and patriarchy that we experience.

It’s deliberately deconstructing a sort of top-down system in service to everyone.”

Miki Kashtan, who Morey describes as “an intellectual driving force, in human relationship and capacity.”

With Kashtan’s help, Morey began to see a way to have the kind of organization she wanted, “a highly effective, but very relational, warm environment.”

Kashtan asked her to start by reading Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux, a groundbreaking book about companies that are using an integrated form of leadership— relying neither on consensus nor on a top-down approach. Laloux calls them “teal” organizations. Morey was fascinated especially by a chapter on budgeting and strategic planning. “A teal organization wouldn’t do long-term budgeting or planning. That scared me a bit—but so did all of it in the beginning, each step of the way.”

And so, in autumn 2016, Morey and iBme began a rigorous process of selfexamination and transformation.

SARAH WREAN iBme Programs Lead

Kashtan uses a framework she calls Collaboration in the Workplace to help organizations in addressing five critical systems: feedback, decisionmaking, conflict engagement, information flow, and resource flow. She began by widely interviewing all of iBme’s office employees, teachers, and other staff, to ask questions like: Where are the biggest pain points?

What are your purposes and values?

Because Morey and the organization were so tightly wound up in each other, the process required a deep dive into Morey’s own purposes and values, along with the organization’s, and a process of disentangling the founder from what she had founded.

“There was a lot of conflict in the organization,” Morey says. “Mostly with me.” Kashtan provided individual coaching to Morey throughout the process, and facilitated conversations between the executive director and employees. “It was like spiritual

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iBme helps teens “develop self-awareness, compassion, and ethical decision-making” through retreats, expeditions, and more. Top, teens meditate during a morning sit on New Year’s Retreat in Massachusetts, 2019. Teachers (left to right) Mark Wax, Jessica Morey, Rod Owens, Doug Worthen. Middle, an expressive arts workshop, New Year’s Retreat 2019 in Virginia. Bottom, Jessica Morey and teens take a short hike in North Andover, MA, to watch the sunset, New Year’s Eve 2019.

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF IBME

Pain Points and Purpose

bone-setting,” Morey says. “It was so painful.” There were times she thought she’d break, or the organization would. But Kashtan was a steady guide, and Morey’s deep mindfulness practice—a constant in her life since childhood—was instrumental as well.

“Now, I look back and it’s so much better. I see the pain I was causing, the pain I was in, the delusion, the lack of skill, the way I was controlling out of fear.”

Not an undertaking for the faint of heart. And it comes down to heart for Morey. “I care so much about the organization and its long-term sustainability. I want it to thrive.” And at the same time, for Morey herself, “It was like doing intensive therapy. And I actually enjoy seeing my blind spots, and growing.”

One major blind spot for Morey was power. “I didn’t think of myself as having power or coming from a powerful position in almost any relationship—including with colleagues and staff on retreat. I didn’t attend to the role of the power dynamics in our interactions. This is incredibly common for folks in power and privilege. It’s almost like we don’t want to see our power—but those without power are very clear about the power dynamics and who has it.”

Further work allowed Morey to see where she was clinging to control. “I don’t like to think of myself as controlling, but I got to see how in some situ-

ations I want things to happen exactly how I want them to happen—and I justify that as the right way, the best way, the obvious way—but it’s really just the way I think and want it to be done.”

The work was hard and emotional, but ultimately nourishing. “I was learning how to be in line with my own values in profound ways. That was deeply hope-inspiring.”

Not every moment of that was enjoyable, however. Kashtan led the group in a process to set up robust and transparent feedback systems. Early in that process, Kashtan facilitated a feedback session between Morey and a retreat staffer. “He had built up three years of resentment toward me,” Morey says, that stemmed from a small incident during a teen retreat where the two differed on how to lead an icebreaker event. “It was a snowball that became an avalanche,” Morey says. “We could have talked about it three years ago; it was not that big a deal.” Instead, Kashtan organized two ninety-minute sessions. “She was like, ‘OK, Jess, you’re going to have to just hold yourself and your own goodness. Hold that while you listen, really openly, to everything he’s going to tell you.’ He’s sitting there, and she says, ‘Jess, you can also know that I hold you with the deepest respect. OK, now let’s go forward.’”

Morey credits her mindfulness practice with helping her stay moored.

“Being able to receive really intense,

critical feedback, being willing to be in the discomfort, giving and receiving critical feedback, and being able to distinguish what’s my emotion and reactivity versus what’s actually happening in the situation—it was the first time I was deeply able to translate that insight into a human relationship.”

Into Alignment During this time, there was an almost complete turnover of staff at iBme. Morey was inclined to blame herself at first, but Kashtan pointed out that not everyone wants to work in this deep way, and the staff who left weren’t aligned with the values iBme has, which came to the fore during the feedback training and process.

Kashtan spent about half her time in one-on-one coaching of Morey, and the other half training iBme’s staff and community members. The people who stayed, and the new staff who came aboard (the organization now has five core staff members, and is in the process of adding a sixth and seventh, along with about 60 teachers) are better aligned, and, Morey says, they report a ripple effect from this relational way of working. “They’re like, this is improving my whole life.

I’m able to have an adult conversation with my wife, or my contractor, that I never would have had if I didn’t have this experience and training.” →

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“I was learning how to be in line with my own values in profound ways. That was deeply hope-inspiring.”

JESSICA MOREY Former iBme Executive Director

Working at iBme in development and communications was Arielle Pierre’s first job right out of college.

She began work last spring, and says she can’t imagine working without collaborative leadership principles. She says she uses what she’s learned about feedback in her personal relationships, as well as at work. “Feedback is happening all the time. Even if we don’t call it feedback. People’s actions could be feedback, and even saying I like this or I didn’t like this—it’s always happening. People think feedback is a scary, hard, really difficult process, but in reality, it’s really common to our culture already. It’s just that we’re articulating it and formalizing it.”

Feedback was transformational for Morey in an unexpected way. “I can be blind to my own positive power, qualities, and impact, the amount of respect and trust that is there.” This would often lead to her projecting herself negatively in other people’s reactions to her. “When they are actually holding me with much higher regard than I could imagine. It’s part of the habit of low self-esteem. And actually itself causes weird, confusing dynamics. So feedback systems have also shown me the amount of care, respect, and positive impact that is also in the space that I wasn’t aware of.”

That care, respect, and trust is necessary organization-wide in order for this transformational work to happen. And it was key in the next piece that needed overhauling. The decision-making piece is where the nonhierarchical rubber really hits the road. The core staff, including Morey, made a matrix of all the kinds

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of decisions that need to be made along the side, and every person’s name at the top. Ways of contributing to decisions were plotted out with a numbered system, from One (I want to decide) to Five (I don’t want to be involved at all). “There always has to be a One, and only one One,” Morey says. The team talks through the matrix outcome—ensuring that the self-appointed Ones have the skills, abilities, and capacity to be the decision-maker.

The team revisits the matrix quarterly, and uses it to see where there are gaps in their team that need to be addressed.

Sarah Wrean has been working in programs at iBme since October 2017.

She describes the decision-making process as one in which she consults broadly with anyone who might have expertise, or who might be affected by the decision. And while that may result in more work up front, she says it is absolutely freeing. “It’s liberating and it’s transparent to say, I asked for input from these 10 people, they all agreed with my decision, and that’s how I came to make it. And then when something doesn’t go right you can go back and say, ‘Hey, we all thought this was the right decision and it wasn’t.

What did we learn?’”

Values Added The work requires the presence and spaciousness that can result from deep practice—and it gives rise to curiosity about the usual benchmarks of corporate health, efficiency among them.

“It’s using your resources well towards your goal,” Morey says. “Plants are efficient, ecology is efficient. The question is, What are you being efficient with, and towards what?”

“Collaborative leadership is a way to counteract the power, privilege, and patriarchy that we experience,” Wrean notes. “It’s deliberately deconstructing a sort of top-down system in service to everyone.”

The result is a more humane way of working—and that’s reflected in the values iBme lists on its website, where, Morey says, they made a conscious decision to also list their unexamined values, or shadow values. “One of our unexamined values is ‘sacrificing warmth in a relationship for productivity.’ Another is ‘valuing growth for growth’s sake,’ and ‘working to a point of the lack of well-being.’” Morey says Kashtan emphasized the importance of acknowledging those values.

“Because you keep doing them unless they’re made explicit.”

Much like a meditation practice, this transformational work is ongoing.

“It’s a lot about letting go of control, and building trust in people, but also developing skill sets that are outside of ‘command, control, demand,’” Morey says. “There are other, more pleasant ways to have your needs met.”

Ultimately, Wrean and Pierre say, this way of working results in less conflict. Pierre points to something she learned from Kashtan: “Conflict is feedback not given.” So even though this way of working requires more care and effort, and more openness to giving and receiving feedback than many workplaces do, in the →

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Q&A: MIKI KASHTAN

Fearless Heart

end, it has its own efficiency, because resentments don’t have a chance to build up—and it allows teams to work toward equity.

Changing the way we work requires open honesty, a cooperative spirit, a willingness to cede control, and, yes, a fearless heart, says collaborative leadership facilitator Miki Kashtan.

What made Jessica Morey and iBme good candidates for the kind of transformational work you do with organizations?

The utter willingness to learn, receive feedback, and be honest; the commitment to collaboration that is real and genuine, which means, in particular, the willingness to ultimately not be able to control the outcome; the capacity to engage with discomfort.

The organization had almost complete staff turnover during the years-long process.

What do you make of that?

It’s not at all surprising to me that this happened, because the shift to fully collaborative functioning is a profound paradigm shift, and not everyone is ready for it. Sometimes “not ready” means not ready to make the commitment, and sometimes a person may have the commitment and the desire, and not the capacity to overcome reaction and stay engaged when the going gets tough.

I read that when Zappos decided to adopt the Reinventing Organizations form

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of functioning, they gave their employees the book and offered a severance package to anyone who wasn’t ready to make the shift with the company. My understanding is that 25% of the company then left, and that, too, made sense to me.

What kinds of companies are engaging in this work, adopting non-hierarchical leadership?

All the companies that Frederic Laloux is talking about, and probably others.

And I am unsure how genuinely collaborative many of them are. The obstacles are immense, because they are also internal.

I think the kind of organization that I would anticipate fits the bill can be either for- or nonprofit, and would benefit from having these elements in place: • Very clear shared purpose that the people in the organization feel intrinsically motivated to pursue. Any place that is populated by many people who are simply there to advance their own careers is less likely to succeed.

• A strong culture of values that provides an anchor and a sense of connection. The

reason is similar: a need to provide a moral anchor. However, values without clear purpose can actually make it harder, because it’s the focus on purpose that increases the trust and allows people to not have to lean so much on personal connection in order to align with collaboration.

In that sense, then, I predict that a company that makes a product or sells a service that isn’t clearly serving needs would have a harder time coalescing around the excitement and commitment to make the shift.

Can adopting this kind of nonhierarchy have a positive impact on a company’s bottom line, or is this mostly about making a humane workplace— or something else?

My understanding is that actively engaged teams do become more productive, and that collaboration, when successful, increases engagement and collective wisdom. That said, I believe that the fear of losing control interferes with these kinds of experiments, and I have read of quite a number of successful collaborative efforts that were nonetheless discontinued and the hypothesis given

Leading by Getting Out of the Way

for why was precisely fear of loss of control. A similar conclusion can be inferred from David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs. Because of all this, I have come to believe that control is ultimately more important to many in decision-making positions than purpose or even profit.

Shifting to collaborative structures is ultimately about prioritizing purpose. That purpose can be improving the work conditions for the employees, increasing capacity for serving the needs the organization is serving, or, even, being pioneers at shifting humanity as a whole to realign with life.

Can you/do you undertake this work with leaders and organizations that don’t have a foundation of mindfulness?

Yes, I don’t believe it has to be mindfulness per se. I do believe that some kind of practice is needed that allows people to find support for the challenge that this transition requires.

–Stephanie Domet

This interview has been condensed and edited.

On that front, and with processes in place to fully empower every member of the team, Morey has stepped out of her staff position. “The real instigating moment was George Floyd’s murder and some of the intense conversations with Black teachers, who are giving intense unfiltered feedback,” Morey says. She adds the leadership team recognized that though power has been distributed to the staff and the board, the vast majority of people with power at iBme are white, middle-class cisgender women. Morey stepping aside will make room for a second person of color to join the staff. And the organization has added a Teachers’ Advisory Council made up of seven BIPOC teachers who will choose teaching teams and curriculum, and who control about a tenth of the organization’s overall budget.

These are steps Morey says iBme wouldn’t have been able to take three years ago. “If I had quit I don’t think iBme would still exist—and now staff is like, ‘Yeah, we think you should not do anything for three months. We’re cool.’ There’s just so much more resilience in the system.”

There’s still work to be done with Miki Kashtan. The collaborative leadership team is working on resource flow, starting with a collaborative and transparent compensation system— where compensation decisions will happen at budgeting time, and will not be linked to evaluations. And they’ll need to do some restructuring at the board level. They’ll also be working on information flow and conflict resolution in the years to come.

Morey thinks the organization is in good hands. “I have confidence in the systems to transform people. And I think our practice is at the root of what makes it possible.” ●

m DIGITAL RESOURCE Mindfulness Working See how top companies are bringing mindfulness into the workplace to support skillful flourishing. mindful.org/ working

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Stephanie Domet is the author of two novels, including Fallsy Downsies. She was the host of Mainstreet on CBC Radio One and lives in Halifax, where she destresses mindfully by puttering in the garden and sewing her own clothes.

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BOOKMARK THIS read…listen…stream

by AMBER TUCKER, BARRY BOYCE, and STEPHANIE DOMET

DON’T TELL ME TO RELAX Emotional Resilience In the Age of Rage, Feels & Freak-Outs Ralph De La Rosa • Shambhala

Spiritual bypassing, a term first coined in psychology, refers to misusing spirituality or wisdom teachings by zeroing in on their “feelgood” aspects, while minimizing the reality of pain (our own, as well as others’). But is the only alternative to feel paralyzed by raging despair?

Don’t Tell Me to Relax, De La Rosa’s second book, arrives at the perfect time to inform a growing cultural awareness that neither approach will get us very far. “May we never forget: Often the deepest truths are the ones that challenge us,” he writes.

Skillfully drawing on neurobiology, mindfulness teachings, and psychotherapy, De La Rosa acknowledges that suffering is caused by a multitude of factors: from the systemic, like racism, ableism, homophobia, and economic disempowerment, to the personal—dysfunctional upbringings, traumatic losses, physical and mental health struggles. Having faced some of these himself, he doesn’t negate their importance in our lives, nor claim we should just get over them. Instead he empowers us, through direct and insightful prose, to touch in with these parts of ourselves that hurt.

The book’s focus is “on radical nonpathology, embedding it in an empowerment model: the truth that the inherent wisdom, clarity, and freedom of our deeper nature need not wait for anyone or anything else to come along.”

Throughout, De La Rosa offers seemingly simple yet transformative practices to help us (re) discover our innate curiosity and introspection. When we don’t “relax” but instead deepen into awareness and compassion, we can channel our efforts in the direction of healing—both for ourselves and for our world. —AT

66 mindful Winter 2020

THINKING AND EATING Recipes to Nourish and Inspire School of Life • School of Life

A cookbook unlike any other, Thinking and Eating explores “how the sensory realm can be deployed to help with the transmission of ideas.” Food, like art, can inform us about how we should live. In the first section, a list of virtues—each paired with a single ingredient—accompanies delicioussounding recipes. Hope is a lemon, for instance, maturity a fig. Subsequent sections

offer recipes and menus for a variety of moods: when alone (I don’t like myself very much), with friends (Why do we keep talking about house prices?), and in relationships (How can I graciously withdraw from a sulk?). What’s not to love about a book that asserts, “the mushroom is an edible treatise on the oddity of existence”? Seconds for me, please.—SD

MIND, CONSCIOUSNESS, AND WELL-BEING Edited by Daniel J. Seigel and Marion Solomon • Norton

At 350+ pages, Mind, Consciousness, and Well-Being is a door-stopper, as they say in publishing. But it’s also a treasure trove of content presented by a fine collection of teachers and researchers, covering a wide array of topics: self-compassion, mindfulness in the workplace, love, habit-formation (and breaking), depression, race and interconnectedness, and attention, among

many others. It’s not the sort of book you breeze through when you’re about to turn in for the night. It’s more of a state-of-the-art overview of the value that mindfulness and related practices can bring and an opportunity to join in an ongoing conversation, as editor Dan Siegel says in his introduction, “reflecting inside your own mind, as well as in conversations that might emerge with others.” —BB

read, listen, stream

PODCAST

reviews A KINGDOM OF TENDER COLORS A Memoir of Comedy, Survival, and Love Seth Greenland • Europa Editions

Screenwriter, playwright, and novelist Seth Greenland brings his considerable powers as a storyteller to bear on recounting the journey he and his family traveled after his diagnosis of stage 4 lymphoma at 37. With a baby daughter and another child on the way and a writing career in mid-stride, he faced the prospect of losing it all—possibly leaving his new family in dire straits. His in-laws sent him a letter: “We hope you make the most of the time you have left.”

And indeed he has, in the three decades following, as evidenced by the free flow of this narrative, which he was inspired to write during the worst days of his illness, vowing that should he survive he would write the kind of book he wished he could have read while going through the darkest of dark nights. Dark yes, but also funny, since shtick runs thick in his veins.

Greenland was a writer and producer on HBO’s Big Love, a satiric treatment of Mormon polygamy, and that irreverence is in full flower here, as he describes grappling with the eternal questions and finding various cosmologies seriously lacking. As he talks to God and asks the divine to please not kill him, he can’t help but share that he’s pretty sure He doesn’t exist, reprimand Him for the inquisition and the holocaust, and throw in a few choice f-bombs to boot.

It’s not all fun and games. We are gripped and moved and intrigued, as he traverses chemotherapy and complications leading to near death; meditation, tai chi, and other mind-body approaches; topped off with far-out alternative treatments that would be inappropriate to mention in polite company. Along the way, his wife Susan takes up meditation to help herself and her kids, leaves her career as a lawyer, becomes the successful author of The Mindful Child, and founds a groundbreaking program of mindfulness for children. Even the darkest clouds hide silver linings. —BB

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BEING WELL WITH DR. RICK HANSON Episode: “Can We Do No Harm?”

Psychologist Rick Hanson and his son Forrest (a writer and consultant) dive deep in this conversation on the time-worn ethical tenet “Do No Harm.” Questions they explore include: What is a compassionate response to the systemic forms of harm we participate in (often unknowingly)? Is causing harm ever necessary? And how

can we balance our personal needs with the sometimesconflicting needs of others?

“Being well isn’t just about how one individual maximizes their happiness,” says Forrest. “It’s about how we as a collective can be well together, work through this stuff together…

You have to be understanding and accepting of the experiences of other people.”

THE CUT Episode: “Optimism” Optimism? In 2020, the word seems fluffy and unreal.

To investigate the true nature of optimism, host Avery Trufelman turns to the docuseries Cheer. For competitive cheerleaders, she says, it’s “the cognitive equivalent of spinning 360 degrees in the air and landing on one hand. They train like hell for it.” Constantly at physical risk in training,

and gaining little if any recognition, they’re still the epitome of positivity. Emily Esfahani Smith, author of The Power of Meaning, defines this rigorous optimism as “the narrative you tell that allows you to move forward.”

It means actively seeking opportunities for meaning, relationship, and joy, and believing that the pain along the way is worth it.

ON BEING WITH KRISTA TIPPETT Episode: “Marilyn Nelson: Communal Pondering in a Noisy World” From her struggle to blaze her own writing path amid the pressures of academia, to teaching poetry and meditation to army cadets, American poet Marilyn Nelson has spent a lifetime refining her sense of where poetry lives—in our bodies, our minds, and our world— and why we need it more than

ever. She talks with Krista about her conviction that poetry is a contemplative practice. “I think poetry and the silence of the inner life are related, are connected. Don’t you think? You read a poem, and you say, ‘Ah.’ And then you listen to what it brings out inside of you. And what it is is not words; it’s silence.” —AT ●

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point of view

A WAY OUT OF NO WAY

by BARRY BOYCE, FOUNDING EDITOR

72 mindful Winter 2020

at the year 1400. Soon, in a cramped, dark space meant to convey the traumatic breath-stealing conditions on a slave transport, you’re introduced to the transatlantic trade in human beings: the many ships, how Africans were kidnapped, their eventual destinations, and the appalling numbers.

Exhibits evoke the tight quarters, the backbreaking labor, the astounding cruelty of enslavement.

from stories above into a shallow pool. As you sit in the immense space, a healing mist and gentle sounds envelop you. There, grief over lives horrifically lost can inspire a resolve to examine causes and conditions and help bring about change.

The rest of the museum rises three more stories, where struggle mixes with glory, more light pours in, and a major theme is “Making a Way Out of

In the museum’s contemplative court, cooling waters rain from stories above into a shallow pool. As you sit, a healing mist and gentle sounds envelop you. There, grief over lives horrifically lost can inspire resolve to help bring about change.

After the Civil War and Emancipation, a ramp takes you to the second floor, which depicts segregation, Jim Crow, and the birth of the Civil Rights movement. The third subterranean floor begins in 1968—a tumultuous time that included the death of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—and ends with the election of President Obama and the present day.

After visiting and experiencing the museum many times herself and observing people in the space, Ericka saw that “the feelings and emotions are extremely palpable and I want to design programming that caters to those aspects of the experience.

Whether that’s creating space for guided reflection and contemplation or giving people permission to just take a moment and breathe.”

When you emerge from the lower floors, the museum offers something extraordinary: the contemplative court, a cavernous room with a circular shower of cooling waters raining

No Way”—a motto that helped Black people rise against all odds.

We also see the evidence of how much farther this journey has to go.

We need many tools—as individuals, families, organizations, communities—to transcend bias and inequality, and make change. As Ericka demonstrates in her work, finding a few moments of nonjudgmental, open space in one’s mind can be one of those tools. As she told me, “Some people are encountering this information for the first time, and even if not for the first time, for the first time all at once. I hope to assist visitors as they reflect on notions of liberation and freedom, and to draw inspiration from this incredible story of triumph and this magnificent museum.” ●

Barry Boyce is the founding editor of Mindful and Mindful.org and author of The Mindfulness Revolution. He has been an avid mindfulness practitioner for over 40 years.

ILLUSTRATION BY TOM BACHTELL

In December 2019, I traveled to Washington, DC, to visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), at the urging of Ericka Phillips, a lifelong meditator, mindfulness meditation guide, and community organizer who also develops mindfulness-centered, community-focused workshops. She’s a rising thought leader in the mindfulness world, which is why she was asked to collaborate with the museum to design programming that incorporates mindfulness to engage audiences and enhance and support the visitor experience. “The museum,” Ericka told me, “is a representation of the journey of Black Americans and the story of America. And that story is one of liberation. It is a story of a journey toward freedom. Similarly, meditation is a practice of liberation. I want to help visitors see and experience meditation as a way we can practice our own liberation and experience freedom in the present moment.”

(Since the museum had to close its doors during the pandemic, we’ll report on the specifics of the on-site mindfulness program when the museum opens again. In the meantime, its events page lists online offerings, including mindfulness.)

I‘ve seen many incredible museum spaces, but nothing prepared me for the magnificence of the NMAAHC. It immerses you in a way that makes knowledge visceral. As founding director Lonnie Bunch conveys in an introductory video, the experience is about what you need to know, not what you think you know. The journey begins with time travel: You enter a large, dimly lit glass elevator and descend three floors, watching the dates on the wall decrease until you’re