Mindful Magazine June 2021 - Transform Your Life

ABUNDANCE

Embrace what you have and tap into true joy

+

A JOURNEY THROUGH GRIEF What you can learn from a broken heart

PSSST— GUESS WHAT?

How gossip works for the greater good

Transform Your Life

What neuroscience says about how you create your reality

JUNE 2021 mindful.org

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATION BY JAYE KIM / ADOBESTOCK

THE ABUNDANCE ISSUE

Nourish Your Connection to Joy

When you understand the power of your predicting brain, writes Lisa Feldman Barrett, you unlock the ability to transform the way you experience your life.

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The Fine Art of Failing Failure doesn’t have to hold you back, writes Katherine Ellison—instead, it can be a practice of accountability.

On the Cover 28 ABUNDANCE

Embrace what you have and tap into true joy

30 PSSST—GUESS WHAT? How gossip works for the greater good

44 A JOURNEY THROUGH GRIEF What you can learn from a broken heart

58 TRANSFORM YOUR LIFE

What neuroscience says about how you create your reality

STORIES 20 Mindful Living

Sewing Lessons

Sea Change The depths of grief can open us up to compassion, writes Bryan Welch on the value of a broken heart.

Rebalance Your Energy Levels

28 Inner Wisdom

Feeling Lonely in a Sea of Love

30 Brain Science

What Makes Good Gossip

EVERY ISSUE

58

Your Brain Predicts (Almost) Everything You Do Lisa Feldman Barrett on how our brains’ predictions create our reality.

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4 From the Editor 6 In Your Words 10 Top of Mind 18 Mindful–Mindless 68 Bookmark This 72 Point of View with Barry Boyce

VOLUME NINE, NUMBER 2, Mindful (ISSN 2169-5733, USPS 010-500) is published bimonthly 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. © 2021 Mindful Communications & Such, PBC. All rights reserved.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JAYE KIM / ADOBESTOCK, JORM S / ADOBESTOCK, RALH MOHR / PLAINPICTURE

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24 Health

from the editor

JOIN US

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 longtime editor, musician, and meditator with deep roots in service journalism. Connect with Heather at heather.hurlock@mindful.org.

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This past year has been hard. Currently, I have a torrent of gnarly emotions stashed behind a mental dam that I’m not fully dealing with—the dam cracks a little each time I acknowledge it so I’m choosing not to look at it for very long. I’m saving it for…later. For now, I’m channeling my discomfort into my own form of aggressive yoga (there are pushups), and practicing body scan meditations to check in with my body along the way.

In my mind I believe I’m letting my emotional dam release in a scheduled fashion: acknowledging it’s there, providing some safe spillways for processing, some tunnels for inspecting any damage, a few postcards in the gift shop for tourists. But I know this is not the way emotions like to be treated.

You may want to ask me: If you recognize this, why are you doing it to yourself? The answer is: because that’s just the way it is right now. I’m choosing to be kind to my stubborn unwillingness and forgive myself for not wanting to look at the hardest stuff right now. I know resistance is futile. Change is inevitable. And pain is certain. But thankfully, kindness, forgiveness, and compassion show up anyway.

For this June issue of Mindful magazine, we’ve gathered together a host of wise and flawed characters to share their stories of pain, joy, and wisdom with you. On page 40 Vinny Ferraro offers a practice on compassionate accountability for when you’re the one causing harm. Dr. Sará King (page 14) shares her work connecting mindfulness, social justice, and inherited trauma. On page 58, psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett offers a glimpse into how our brains predict our reality. And on page 44, our CEO Bryan Welch shares one of the most brave and vulnerable, raw and real essays I’ve ever read about the depths of suffering and deep wells of compassion that can come from a broken heart.

As I was editing this issue, Leonard Cohen’s famous words kept coming to mind: Ring the bells that still can ring, Forget your perfect offering, There is a crack, a crack in everything, That’s how the light gets in. May we all find ways to turn toward our pain and suffering, accept our cracks, and acknowledge our walls—remembering that there’s joy, love, and abundance to be found even in our brokenness, simply because we’re alive.

PHOTOGRAPH BY CLAIRE ROSEN

The Light Gets In

SPECIAL EDITION

Thrive, Forgive, Create

NEW! Learn to nourish connection, embrace compassion, and tune into your true intentions with the latest special edition from the editors of Mindful.

Available at mindful.org/shop and wherever magazines are sold.

Order today

mindful.org/guide-mindful-living

in your words

Let’s Get Real How each of us lives authentically is as unique as our fingerprints. Here’s what it means for Mindful readers.

What does it mean to be authentic?

“To accept myself with love and compassion, and follow my path with joy and gratitude.“ Candace Z. “It means to be honest about what’s in my head and heart, but in a way that’s mutually respectful and productive.” willingham2271 “My definition of authenticity is to be who you are, no matter where you are or who you are with. Truly yourself at all times.”

Marlene F.

← @megan.burnside made vision boards inspired by @balancewithburnside featuring artwork from Mindful.

“I think it’s when you’re unfiltered. You’re truly yourself.

And you are living into your core values. You’re not trying to fit in or impress anyone.

You willingly show your imperfections and vulnerabilities without shame or guilt.”

“When my body tells me ‘enough for now,’ I listen, I stop, and then I rejuvenate.” herwithin “By being present.” instajmarsh

Does mindfulness help you be your true self?

96% YES

Claire L. “Staying true to yourself <3” m0rethan.fitness “Authenticity is when our words, our thoughts, our actions, and our emotions are in alignment.” wellnesswithbryce

← @chillchief says her mindfulness practice has helped her embrace anxiety and stay in the present.

How do you show up for yourself?

4% NO

Next Question…

How has the meaning of connection changed for you?

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

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THRIVE

& SHINE

SWEEPSTAKES

Enter for a chance to win an intimate prize package of self-care essentials—designed to make you feel your best self this summer!

Mindful Movement for Strength, Clarity and Calm

Prize package includes: • meaning to pause® handcrafted bracelet • Radiant Rest by Tracee Stanley from Shambhala Publications • Lifetime subscription to HappiSeek + Apple’s new AirPods Max • 1-hour, virtual private Mindfulness Meditation session with Ellen Patrick, a Yoga Therapist and Mindfulness Meditation teacher • Turmeric Energizing Treatment from Eminence Organic Skin Care • Mindful Movement Course

Enter online by July 31st, 2021 for your chance to win!

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Healthy Mind, Healthy Life

Welcome to

mindful magazine • mindful.org Editor-in-Chief Heather Hurlock heather.hurlock@mindful.org Managing Editor Stephanie Domet Senior Editors Kylee Ross Amber Tucker

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.

Associate Editors Ava Whitney-Coulter Oyinda Lagunju

Founding Editor Barry Boyce Creative Director Jessica von Handorf Associate Art Director Spencer Creelman Junior Designer Paige Sawler

MINDFUL COMMUNICATIONS & SUCH Mindful is published by Mindful Communications & Such, PBC, a Public Benefit Corporation.

Chief Executive Officer Bryan Welch bryan.welch@mindful.org

President Brenda Jacobsen brenda.jacobsen@mindful.org

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.

Chief Financial Officer Tom Hack

Founding Partner Nate Klemp

Accounting Kyle Thomas

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Thank you!

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Get More Mindful 8 mindful June 2021

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has an app for that. Tinnibot is an online chatbot that supports those suffering from tinnitus through the use of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, mindfulness, and sound therapy. It features lessons based on relaxation and meditation, on how to transform negative thoughts and increase resilience. It also provides users with access to online counseling with a psychologist.

TOP OF

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

DRAW ON Nova Scotiabased graphic designer Melissa Lloyd founded Doodle Lovely in 2016 to draw our attention to the

here-and-now— creatively. In addition to a range of guided doodle journals and workbooks, in 2020 Lloyd also began facilitating Doodle Breaks:

guided sessions for organizations (over Zoom or in person), which she’s already brought to clients in the tech sector, first responders, and other highstress environments. Her years of mindfulness practice inspired her to study how putting pen to paper connects us to our natural

awareness—which encourages judgment-free, creative thinking, notes Lloyd. “If you can take even 5 minutes for a healthy break, that’s where all those ‘a-ha’ moments happen,” Lloyd told Mindful. “It’s about bringing the person into the present moment through the doodling process.”

NOW HEAR THIS The constant ringing or buzzing in the ears that is the hallmark of tinnitus can present itself as a low-level annoyance in some cases, but multiple scientific studies reveal that people with tinnitus have an increased risk of anxiety and depression. And while the Mayo Clinic notes that often tinnitus can’t be treated and must instead be endured, an Australian start-up

Necessary conversations about race don’t stop when the hashtag stops trending, or at the end of Black History Month. But Black, Indigenous, and people of color often carry the burden of educating their white peers.

Professors at two Nova Scotian universities, Dr. Ajay Parasram and Alex Khasnabish, invite white-identifying students to a monthly drop-in where they can ask questions about the complex race dynamics within society. “I just want everyone to reap the benefits

PHOTOGRAPH BY VIACHESLAV IAKOBCHUK / ADOBESTOCK, TEO ZAC / UNSPLASH

A LITTLE MORE CONVERSATION

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of safe intellectual space,” Dr. Parasram told his university’s newspaper, “but in order to build that, white people need to deepen their understanding of how race operates.” The first session of Safe Space for White Questions, held in person on campus, had only a few students in attendance, but when the session moved online, more than 200 students attended.

BRAIN TRAINING

PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEX / ADOBESTOCK

One positive outcome of the pandemic: increased conversations about mental health. For Dr. Richard Davidson and his colleagues at the Center for Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin-Madison,

2020 provided an opportunity to look for strategies for increasing mental wellness and resilience—even for those who are not experiencing mental illness.

Our brains are plastic, able to modify and rewire.

When the brain is faced with challenges, it adapts and overcomes.

With this in mind, Davidson and his colleagues Dr. Christy WilsonMendenhall and Dr. Cortland Dahl developed a framework they call The Plasticity of Well-being.

The framework is built on four pillars: awareness, connection, insight, and purpose, all of which, the study’s authors say, can be developed through mental training.

They hope the

framework will be broadly used by therapists, meditation teachers, and healthcare professionals.

CALL FOR CALM In an effort to inspire joy in the midst of pandemic-induced gloom, Canadian artist and musician Kathryn Calder set up a hotline people can call to hear soothing sounds. You can dial 1-877-2BECALM to choose from nine different recordings, from children’s laughter, to Indigenous stories, to a guided relaxation meditation. Calder is Victoria, BC’s artist in residence and says she was inspired by a directive often repeated by her provincial health officer: “to be calm.”

ACTS OF kindness

GOLDEN OLDIE

Calgary’s Donny Marchuk says that in tough times, his elderly golden retriever, Sully, was there for him. Now, he’s repaying the favor. Sully can’t get around like he used to, so Marchuk pulls him on hikes in a wagon he calls an “adventure chariot.” He says an added benefit is that it makes other people smile to see them.

PROOF OF LOVE

Seattle home bakers donated over 1,300 loaves of bread to a local food bank that’s seen increased

demand due to the pandemic.

Community Loaves is a volunteer network of about 500 bakers.

The home bakers are urged to keep one of every four loaves for themselves as thanks for their work.

ALL CLASS

British Columbia MLA Ravi Kahlon tweeted about a proud dad moment when his 10-year-old son asked a new kid in his class to hang out. At the end of the day, Kahlon’s son received a note from his new friend that said sitting with him “felt better than anything,” thanked him, and asked to do it again. The note features a drawing of a rainbow.

June 2021 mindful 11

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Research News

by B. GRACE BULLOCK

Research gathered from University of Connecticut, Cambridge University, University of Udine, and others.

More studies are needed to better understand these effects.

CONCUSSION CARE Each year more than 2 million Americans suffer from chronic difficulties like headaches, anxiety, and trouble focusing following a concussion.

Researchers at the University of Connecticut reviewed 22 studies where mindfulness-based interventions were used to treat symptoms related to these mild traumatic brain injuries. They found that meditation and yoga helped to lessen fatigue and depression, and improved mental and physical health, cognitive performance, and quality of life.

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NO SILVER BULLET Mindfulness programs are widely used to reduce stress in nonclinical settings, and practices like meditation and yoga are known to lessen symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression and increase well-being. These effects are far from universal, say Cambridge University researchers after examining 136 randomized controlled trials of mindfulness interventions.

Some studies reported reductions in stress, anxiety, and depression, while others showed little to no effect.

The take-home:

Mindfulness practices may work for some, while strategies like physical exercise may be just as effective for others. The researchers note it’s important to assess which types of mindfulness practices will work best for different communities.

MIND OVER MUSIC Interested in heart-rate variability as a biomarker of stress resilience, researchers from the University of Southern Denmark randomly assigned 90 adults to 10 days of 20-30 minutes of either app-based

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mindfulness training, listening to music, or a control group that did nothing.

All participants had their heart rhythms continuously monitored.

After 10 days the mindfulness group reported greater increases in mindfulness, less perceived stress, and fewer breaths per minute than the other groups.

The mindfulness group also

stress, anxiety, and depression as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic according to recent studies, researchers in Italy wondered whether meditation might help.

Sixty-six female teachers participated in a study, attending an 8-week meditation course and completing a personality profile that classified them

The mindfulness group showed increases in heartrate variability, suggesting an enhanced ability to cope with life’s ups and downs. showed increases in heart-rate variability, suggesting an enhanced ability to cope with life’s ups and downs.

TEACHER FEATURE With women at greater risk than men for developing symptoms of

as either high or low resilience. After the course, both groups reported less anxiety, depression, and emotional exhaustion, and greater empathy, body awareness, and mindfulness.

Those in the low resilience group showed greater reductions in depression and improvements in well-being than their higher resilience peers.

LOVE IN Is mindfulness or relaxation training helpful for romantic relationships? European researchers wanted to know.

They randomly assigned 989 couples to either a mindfulness group or a relaxation group.

Couples ranged in age from 21 to 83 years old and had been in relationships for an average of 23 years. Mindfulness training involved daily 10-minute audioguided exercises that included paying attention to posture and breath, directing attention to experiences, and being aware of thoughts and feelings during interpersonal interactions.

The relaxation group completed 10-minute daily guided relaxation exercises.

At study’s end, both groups reported similar levels of relationship well-being, suggesting that either strategy might be useful for relationship health.

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PEOPLE TO WATCH

Dr. Sará King Dr. Sará King has an idea she wants you to hear: Wellbeing and social justice are the same thing. King is a neuroscientist, medical anthropologist, and meditation teacher. She founded MindHeart Consulting and is a postdoctoral fellow funded by the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health at Oregon Health Science University, where she brings together her work in neuroscience, mindfulness, and social justice in a framework she calls The Science of Social Justice.

She wants people to understand that the effects of oppression and injustice manifest in our bodies and minds. Since trauma affects our physiology, psychology, mental health, and relationships, King says understanding that the pain permeates so many parts of ourselves helps us heal.

“When you integrate science and mindfulness and social justice, suddenly people understand that they have an incredible

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amount of power to enact positive change,” King says.

She has partnered with companies like Google and Nike, multiple universities, and the Museum of Modern Art to facilitate trauma healing circles and meditations based on the Science of Social Justice.

This increased attention and interest in her work is fueled by recent cases of police violence against Black people, and the tremendous shift we’re seeing as more people work to come to terms with how the trauma of systemic racism and violence is passed down through generations. And though she wishes that people weren’t in the state of intergenerational pain that makes her work so relevant, she sees the beginning of a shift in how we understand the relationship between awareness and injustice.

King’s goal is that “no matter what your education level, no matter where you’re from, you have access to really understanding how much power you actually have in justice.”

PHOTOGRAPH PROVIDED BY SARÀ KING

THE SCIENCE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE

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IT’S ALL RELATIVES

PHOTOGRAPH BY DAIGA ELLABY / UNSPLASH, JIMMY DEAN / UNSPLASH ILLUSTRATION COURTESY MYKINCLOUD

Like charity, mindfulness may well begin at home.

Here are some of the latest online resources for families.

Sober Mom Squad was born when Emily Lynn Paulson, a recovery coach and mother of five, realized in the early days of the pandemic that “there wasn’t a specific support for moms who also happened to be navigating an alcohol-free life.”

Welcoming all moms at any stage in their sobriety, the Squad dispels the idea that “mommy juice” is required to unwind: “Daily gratitude journaling, meditation, exercise, listening to music or shutting down technology are solid ways to regroup without alcohol,” says Paulson. The Squad hosts daily virtual meetings, a members’ forum, and a book and podcast resource library.

myKinCloud, styled as a “family mindfulness app,” offers a variety of mindfulness and yoga practices that members can access, and then post about what they did on their family’s private feed.

The intention is to strengthen bonds within families, through sharing each other’s mindfulness journeys. It’s available for both Apple and Android devices.

NAME IT to TAME IT

Pandemic Fine A recent viral tweet offered this definition: “A state of being in which you are employed and healthy during a pandemic but you’re also tired and depressed and feel like trash all the time.”

Try this: Take a moment for gratitude. Focus on one thing per day that you’re grateful for, and feel the experience of gratitude in your body. Practicing gratitude strengthens our relationships and bolsters mental health.

Mindful Life Project also has an app—it’s free, ideal for families with younger children, and bilingual in English and Spanish. In both languages you’ll find a definition of mindfulness and its benefits, as well as an impressive menu of “sits” (guided audio practices) in categories such as Listening, Breathing, and Body Awareness. Most practices are under 5 minutes long and are led by MLP’s founder, JG Larochette, and other MLP teachers.

O L is L me E a n Hmy LLLe O isO e s in m L aame iF E E n Hmmyy nm ic i ne H

e ic FFi ne d n Pa deem mic d PPaann

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TRUE HAPPINESS COMES FROM YOUR HIGHER SELF

By Board-Certified Hypnotherapist & HappiSeek Co-Founder, Cynthia Morgan

An authentic life is a happy life. When we follow the world’s cues, we move farther away from our authentic self—that wise, all-knowing part of ourselves I like to call the “higher self.” Your higher self knows you well. It recognizes your highest good in any situation and always has your best interests in mind. Unfortunately, we don’t often listen to our higher self, and, as a result, we find ourselves unhappy. The solution? Go within. Quiet your mind and find yourself moving closer to your source of true happiness.

The path to sustained happiness is an inward journey, not an outward excursion.

We created the HappiSeek app to help you access your own inner guide, reach self-realization, find true happiness and make the world a better place.

GO DEEPER WITH HYPNOTHERAPY There are many self-help meditation apps on the market that play soothing sounds and lull you into a wispy place, which is all fine and good. But what makes the new HappiSeek app unique is its combination of powerful spiritual hypnotherapy, support of a virtual community and cutting-edge technology to create an interactive journey to spiritual enlightenment.

Rooms for

IMPROVEMENT Corporate giants have been making the switch from cubicles to open concept offices over the past decade. A recent case study in the Journal of Environmental Psychology found that an increase in distractions from being in an open work environment can impair collaboration and increase stress. While mindful moments can be woven into any milieu, some companies are going out of their way to create stylish meditation spaces that take “alone time” at work to a new level. (No word yet on a meditation pod that works for Zoom meetings, though.)

HappiSeek is based on ten characteristics that all enlightened people commonly share, like trust and patience, which you too will develop through a series of 30 sequential hypnotherapy sessions.

Along the way, you will connect with your higher self, explore your life purpose, reframe your past, find forgiveness, discover sustained happiness and so much more!

ENLIGHTENMENT IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND The HappiSeek app is available for both iOS and Android systems and subscriptions are $17.99/ month, $99.99/year, and $199.99 for a lifetime subscription. Download the app today and enjoy a free 38-minute revelatory hypnotherapy session.

Your journey awaits, seeker.

HappiSeek.com

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OpenSeed has designed an egg-shaped meditation pod made of a sound-isolating wood and wool-felt shell. LED lights programmed to synchronize with guided audio meditations and calming sounds, an essential oil diffuser, noise-canceling headphones, and a touch screen to operate its functions make for a luxurious and private spot for a quick office cry.

PHOTOGRAPHCOURTESY OFFICE OF THINGS, OPEN SEED, RAINBOW ARCHES

The Immersive Spaces Series, an ongoing project by Office of Things, explores the effects of light, space, and sound through their meditation chambers—several of which are installed in the Google and YouTube corporate offices. Each chamber offers a calming experience heightened by sleek design elements, gentle sounds, and soft fuschia, blue, purple, and pink light.

Wake up to the fullness of your life and engage in a powerful practice of deep relaxation and transformative selfinquiry with this essential, introductory guide to yoga nidra.

A comprehensive approach to healing anxiety with relatable stories and accessible practices to help you find more peace by working with your body, mind, and spirit.

The ultimate holistic health guide to achieving overall physical, emotional, and mental well-being through herbalism and a reconnection to nature.

Rainbow Arches—a brand focused on meditation and therapy—contracted BEHIVE Architects to design their flagship-store-headquarter-office hybrid in Shanghai, China.

An open oval-shaped meditation salon is used as a meditation room for customers and employees or as a meeting space for staff, and can function as an entertainment or activity hall.

TIMELESS • AUTHENTIC • TR ANSFOR M ATIONAL June 2021 mindful 17

SHAMBHALA.COM

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

by AMBER TUCKER

Endangered Thai elephants are safe in rescue worker Mana Srivate’s care: He revived a wild baby elephant using CPR after it was struck by a motorcycle (the rider wasn’t badly hurt).

After a medical check, the baby was reunited with its mother.

A young, healthy man in the UK was surprised to get a priority appointment for a coronavirus vaccine shot.

When Liam Thorp called to find out why, he learned medical records mistakenly had his height at 6.2 centimeters rather than 6 ft 2, making his body mass index 28,000—which puts him in a weight class alongside heavy machinery.

Speaking of class, Thorp turned down the appointment, and will wait his turn.

In Salt Lake City, Utah, Darin Mann invited unhoused people to camp on his front lawn. While he told ABC News he thinks the city should step up to help, in the meantime he allowed 10 tents on his lawn, and opened his bathroom to the folks sleeping in them.

MINDFUL

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Monesk, a new startup, aims to support artists while helping more people access and savor (tiny) works of art. A monthly subscription (under $10) gets you a 4x6” print, a description, the artist’s bio, and a set of reflection questions.

The pants-free set will have to stay put this year. The “No Pants Subway Ride,” an annual performance-art event put on by NYC-based collective Improv Everywhere, has been cancelled due to COVID-19.

“Wellness drinks” are trendy concoctions that boast natural (in theory), medicinal ingredients. One such beverage brand, Moment, proclaims its products can “increase alpha brainwaves…just like meditation.” Bottoms up? ●

MINDLESS

Mindfulness for Healthcare FREE Online Summit May 20-23

Join leaders in the healthcare field, healthcare workers, and experts in mindfulness to explore the many ways mindfulness practices can support individual well-being, compassionate patient care, and an equitable and inclusive healthcare system.

Free event! Register today at

mindful.org/healthcaresummit

Exploring the benefits of mindfulness and meditation together.

mindful living

SEWING LESSONS

How to align with your values, love yourself more, and have a truly intentional wardrobe, just by taking fashion into your own hands.

I love clothing. And shopping. But shopping for clothing has rarely been a pleasure. I’ve always been hard to fit—short and fat, with a large differential in my waist and hip measurements. So pants that fit my hips gape at the waist and trail well past my feet, needing to be shortened or cuffed six or seven inches. Tops that fit my bust are loose in the shoulder and long in the sleeve.

And because fast fashion—the clothing available in every store in your local mall—has been the most accessible to me, because of budget and size constraints, I have always come home with what fits well enough, rather than what expresses my style or matches my values.

As I’ve become a more conscious consumer— preferring to support small businesses in my neighborhood over multinational chains, seeking out local farmers to supply my fruits and vegetables, meat, milk, and cheese, choosing companies that treat people and the environment well for goods I can’t find a local supplier for—I’ve been stymied that my clothing remained an outlier.

Until, that is, I learned to sew.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Stephanie Domet is Mindful's managing editor, and the author of two books. She lives in Halifax, where she sews all her own clothes.

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A Stitch In Time I learned to sew in 2016, at a little fabric shop and sewing studio around the corner from my house. I took a beginners’ sewing class, and learned to make an infinity scarf.

That first project was uneven, with seams that didn’t totally lie flat, but it led to many more (everyone got an infinity scarf for their birthday that year), and I was hooked. I took an easy alterations class and learned how to shorten the pants that were always too long for me. I took more classes, spent more time practicing, and eventually began making my own garments. Five years after that first class, I now have an entirely handmade wardrobe, from undergarments to jeans, to outerwear including a rain jacket, and a winter coat made from cozy boiled wool.

From a wardrobe point of view, not only do my handmade clothes fit, they are in the color, print, and fabric quality of my choosing. I know how and where they were made—and just how much time, effort, and skill go into something as simple as a T-shirt, as ubiquitous as a pair of jeans, as essential as a rain jacket.

Even when my sewing isn’t as careful as it could be, I know I’m still going to emerge with something better than what I could get at the mall—better in every way.

Sewing is the ultimate in slow fashion. Every part of it requires time and attenBy Stephanie Domet

PHOTOGRAPHS BY NEW AFRICA / ADOBESTOCK, SHINTARTANYA / ADOBESTOCK

tion, and a willingness to explore the minutiae of the garment at hand. When you sew for yourself, you engage deeply with the reality of your body as it is. That waist-hip differential becomes not a problem with your body, but a bit of math and a few pencil strokes on tracing paper to grade a pattern between sizes. A small shoulder or full bust adjustment happens without judgment, but simply with acknowledgment: This is what is, this is what’s needed. When I sew, I am less in conflict with reality, and spend much less time staring sadly into a mirror wishing things were different, or feeling bad about myself. Instead, I feel empowered to give my body what she needs—clothes that don’t gape, or dig in, or fall down, or feel like they were pulled from someone else’s wardrobe.

And while sewing for myself is practical, it also has the happy result that I am almost always wearing exactly what I want to be wearing, with lots of room for flights of fancy.

Though I now work (and grocery shop, and attend events, and visit with family, and everything else) from home, my sewing throughout these pandemic days has tended toward dramatic sleeves and luxurious fabrics—even though no one sees me in person but my spouse these days (who very happily snaps the photos that help me document my makes on Instagram). →

Material Gains You can learn a lot about life—and mindfulness— when you use your hands to create.

One

Creativity Is for Everyone and it feels great. Kids know this, but adults often forget: Making stuff is really fun. And if fun isn’t motivating enough for you, working with your hands on a creative endeavor also reminds you of your capacity for problem solving, ingenuity, and resilience. Plus, it underlines how capable you actually are— which can be hard to keep in focus in a world where we can sometimes feel at the mercy of forces larger than ourselves.

Two

Attention Is Key: There is no multitasking in the sewing room. When you’re pressing fabric, press fabric. When you’re sewing a seam, sew a seam. Bring your full attention to the task—and the moment—at hand, and you will be richly rewarded.

Three

Mistakes Are Not Permanent, and they’re not a referendum on your worth as a person. Anything that’s been stitched can be unstitched and stitched again. And if you can’t rip it out and start again, get curious about it.

Sometimes errors lead to lovely design features.

Four

Anything Is Possible, or, when you thought you’d have enough fabric for pants, but you only have enough for shorts. If shorts aren’t part of your wardrobe plan, maybe that linen could find new purpose as a top instead. In the sewing room, as in life, our plans don’t always work out the way we intended. Being unattached to outcome is as useful in your approach to crafting as it is to living.

June 2021 mindful 21

mindful living

SHOP I haven’t purchased clothing since early 2017, but when I did shop, an investment of a few hours would result in a bag or two of clothing items, some of which would never or rarely be worn. I probably spend at least as much on fabric as I used to spend on clothing—sewing for yourself is by no means inexpensive! But my wardrobe is more carefully chosen and much higher quality than it used to be. Slow and steady builds the wardrobe, and if I make something that for one reason or another doesn’t work, I can either take it apart and make it work, turn it into something else (a dress from my early sewing days that just didn’t fit right became a totebag, for instance), or save it to stuff a handmade floor pouf (the first one I made contains all the scraps and trial projects from my first three years of sewing, and is a comfy and stylish place to rest my feet while I’m reading).

Threading the Needle

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“Don’t pull it or force it,” my teacher advised as we learned to feed fabric through the machine.

Pulling it and forcing it were, at the time, two of my most-reached-for tools in life. Being in the moment of the sewing lesson let me see that pulling and forcing might not, actually, be optimal in life either. At my sewing machine, I learned that it was important to be present, paying attention to the fabric, the instructions, the machine, and my fingers. At the same time, it was important to relax, to find ease. I also received many lessons in grace and self-compassion.

During my first garment-making class, I messed up sewing the sleeve on a top. I made a common mistake—fabric from the body of the shirt got caught up in the sleeve. “The Stephanie Domet special,” I joked to my teacher, who replied, kindly, “You are so hard on yourself.”

Her comment opened a space for me to be with myself, noticing and interrupting my very chatty inner critic. It was, after all, the very first sleeve I’d ever tried to sew onto a shirt (never mind that I made the same mistake on the other side, which was, after all, only the second sleeve I’d ever tried to sew onto a shirt). It was a mistake easily undone. And, it turns out, rushing to judge myself before anyone else could was simply unnecessary—and it sure didn’t help me learn and build my skills.

22 mindful June 2021

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There’s a hashtag sewists use on Instagram—#smyly or, sewing makes you love yourself. That’s been true for me, whether because sewing has allowed me to clothe my body in a way that matches my inner self-expression, or because sewing has invited me to slow down, be a beginner (there’s always something more to learn, some more complicated project to undertake), or given me a sense of self-sufficient capability, or some combination of all of that.

There’s another hashtag popular with sewists—#sewingismysuperpower. The best part about that is that it’s a superpower that’s broadly available to anyone who cares to pick up a needle and thread—and it can lead to a lot more than a few handmade garments. ●

June 2021 mindful 23

mental health

REBALANCE YOUR

Energy Levels Trying to pin down why you’re constantly exhausted can feel, well, exhausting.

Experts say part of the solution could involve nurturing your adrenal health.

24 mindful June 2021

PHOTO BY NATHAN DUMLAO / UNSPLASH

The pattern goes something like this: You feel exhausted and unwell, so you open a search engine and type. Your symptoms are common enough that every condition seems possible, and you go down one rabbit hole after another in search of what’s wrong.

You easily dismiss certain possibilities, but your symptoms persist. With repeated searching, you might read “feeling tired” (yes), which “doesn’t get better with sleep” (yes again) and where you’re “craving salty snacks”

By Steve Calechman

mental health

(oh man, that’s me). And then you happen upon a term that covers all of the above: “adrenal fatigue.”

You feel a little hope, until you discover that “adrenal fatigue” isn’t a medical term yet. It is becoming more recognized by physicians, according to Rael Cahn, an assistant professor of psychiatry at University of Southern California who’s researched how yoga and meditation can affect the brain and cortisol levels. For now, the label is “still on the periphery,” says Cahn. That’s not to say that your adrenal health doesn’t affect your level of fatigue.

Keys to the Stress Response The adrenal glands sit on top of the kidneys. When the amygdala in the brain perceives a threat, the adrenals release hormones: Adrenaline gets the heart pumping, and if the threatening situation continues, cortisol is secreted to mobilize energy to deal with the threat. At the end of the cycle, the cortisol feeds back into the brain to shut down the stress response and return to equilibrium.

Apart from our stress response, cortisol production rises and falls with a diurnal rhythm. It’s highest

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Steve Calechman is a contributing editor for Men’s Health and a writer for MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program.

A journalist for over 25 years, he is also a regular contributor to Mindful.

in the morning, to wake you up for the day ahead; by midnight it’s dwindling, letting you wind down.

Stressors can cause cortisol production to spike up and down throughout the day, but overall, when all is functioning normally, it tapers off toward nighttime.

However, when adrenal function is “off”—the adrenals aren’t responding properly to messages from the brain, or the brain is telling the adrenals to secrete the wrong amount of cortisol— “the system can get out of whack,” says Linda E. Carlson, professor of oncology at the University of Calgary. While stress-induced cortisol fluctuations by themselves don’t cause symptoms, if stress persists for weeks or months, it may cause cortisol-induced problems like insomnia, weight gain, and fatigue.

To complicate things, symptoms of your adrenals being “off” can overlap and also be nonspecific, says Irina Bancos, associate professor of medicine and adrenal endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic. Trying to diagnose your own problem can lead to the conviction that your adrenals aren’t working properly. This may be true, says Bancos, but without a medical diagnosis, “adrenal fatigue” is a largely meaningless term.

Zeroing In on Adrenal Issues One challenge is that there aren’t definitive tests for adrenal health, as there are with diabetes and blood sugar levels. And an

“When we take time to stop and listen to our inner experiences, we become more attuned to when our bodies are out of balance.”

MICHAEL MANTZ Integrative Psychiatrist at the University of Calgary

underlying issue is that the adrenal glands are seen as all-or-nothing: They either work or they’re shut down.

Perhaps it would be more helpful to view adrenal health on a spectrum, like Type 2 diabetes (T2D), says Bancos. T2D impacts a gland (the pancreas), in which its capacity to make insulin becomes dysregulated and cannot meet the body’s needs, leaving excess glucose in the blood. Instead of “adrenal fatigue,” Carlson suggests a more accurate term is hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA) dysregulation, which is more encompassing and includes issues with the neuroendocrine system, which handles stress. Here, adds Carlson, the problems leading to elevated or lowered stress hormones are not only due to adrenal malfunction, but also in the signals sent to the glands from the brain.

Bancos adds another condition, adrenal insufficiency, in which there’s a lack of cortisol production either day-to-day or in response to stress. She agrees that making a diagnoses can be complex. →

m RESOURCE Manage Stress Better Find our best tips and practices to help you navigate and manage stress. mindful.org/ stress-guide

June 2021 mindful 25

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For example, if the problem is adrenal insufficiency, the treatment is straightforward (commonly hydrocortisone) and symptoms can go away quickly. But there’s also partial adrenal insufficiency, where people can have normal cortisol production for usual activities, but an abnormal response to stress, she says.

Bancos adds, “It takes time to untangle,” and many doctors don’t have that freedom. Symptoms could be related to more chronic issues like sleep apnea, fibromyalgia, anxiety, or depression.

Uncovering the problem “requires a pretty open, intense approach from both parties,” she says.

Off Balance Due to Stress These experts agree that stress can play a role, and mindfulness can

26 mindful June 2021

ease stress naturally.

Since cortisol is a stresstriggered hormone, how a person manages stress can affect whatever the condition is. Michael Mantz, a psychiatrist in Santa Barbara, California, says that a common result of adrenal issues is hypersensitivity to stimuli like light, sounds, even foods.

More things are perceived as threats: “You become more reactive to life itself,” he says. Research shows that regular mindfulness practice can support the parasympathetic nervous system, as well as regulate the sympathetic nervous system, which reduces our threat sensitivity and grounds us through daily stress. “When we take time to stop and listen to our inner experiences,” says Mantz, “we become more attuned to when our bodies are out of balance, and can respond efficiently.” ●

PHOTOGRAPH BY TABITHA TURNER / UNSPLASH

m e d i tat i o n g o n g s

mental health

6

WAYS TO BALANCE

Your Nervous System

Try these practices to rein in the stress that might be impacting your adrenal health.

1

4

One method is the ocean breath: “You partially close the back of the throat on your exhale, which gently lengthens its duration,” says Mantz.

He offers two guides: Pretend you’re fogging up a mirror, or breathing like Darth Vader.

Increasing the length of your exhale strengthens the parasympathetic nervous system and eases an overactive fightor-flight response.

Physical exercise helps the brain shift out of stress mode and activates adrenal hormone production, Cahn says.

But a moderate pace is best, since intensity can tax the glands. Keep monitoring your body’s response so you can adjust as needed.

BREATHE

2

BE PRESENT

Learning to see thoughts as just thoughts, and not threats, means you can step out of panic mode and your adrenals will be activated less frequently. Carlson says to envision a river with two options: You can be in the water, swept away with the thoughts, or you can be on the bank, simply watching the river flow by.

3

SCAN YOUR BODY

Start at your head and progressively move toward your feet, paying attention to the sensations in each area of the body. This is another way to strengthen the parasympathetic nervous system and keeps you grounded in your body, Mantz says.

MOVE

5

FIND CALM

Seated yoga postures and meditation help you deal with low-level stress and lessen reactivity, so that “the body is more poised to respond,” Cahn says. Research shows practicing yoga can help regulate the sympathetic nervous and HPA systems.

6

SLEEP WELL

Adrenal issues often sap our energy and sleep quality. You can reestablish your circadian rhythm by waking and going to bed at the same times every day. Aim to get 15-20 minutes of sunlight exposure within three hours of waking up: “The light is your body’s natural alarm clock,” Mantz says. And avoid bright lights for at least two hours before bed. “It’s like drinking coffee at 8 p.m.,” he says. “Your body is exhausted but your brain is still on and wired.”

June 2021 mindful 27

inner wisdom

Feeling Lonely in a SEA OF LOVE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 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 June 2021

A global pandemic is a very inconvenient time to fall into the arms of cancer, chemotherapy, and hospital hijinx. And yet there we were, my husband and I, suddenly facing zillions of jagged little decisions and challenges. Meanwhile, everyone we knew also seemed to be struggling— with health, money, or relationships. Yet somehow, even during this time of seemingly ferocious division on planet earth, our wide-ranging network revealed itself to be a community that rose up to support us. Who knew community even still existed?

When you live in a big city it is easy to imagine that no one cares. It can feel difficult to connect with others or hold relationships together. We might feel isolated, and that we are not part of a community. But consider this: Community is an abundant ever-changing flow of spontaneous friendliness that might only be there for a precious moment. It can be composed of long-nourished friendships or family; or, it could be a kind nurse you might never see again. When we open to seeing ourselves as part of a living, breathing organism known as community, we recognize

By Elaine Smookler

ILLUSTRATION BY SIMONA DE LEO

Even when you feel disconnected, you’re part of something larger than yourself. Your community is not just who you already know—it flows in abundance when you’re in need.

inner wisdom

Nurture Community Explore this meditation to help you nurture the buds of community that bloom where you might least expect it.

1

the communal interweave of the person we buy a donut from, the children who run by us on the street, someone crying on a bench, or singing in the park. As much as we might try to avoid this circus of humanity, we can’t escape each other.

Letting go of our expectation of how community is supposed to be there for us allows us to rest more easily in the ocean of love and support that might come from unexpected directions: the pharmacist, colleagues, people who haven’t been in touch for years, a fellow traveler on the street.

Community is a mindset, rather than a concrete structure. It’s ever-changing and can manifest in so many different ways.

In our case, some days there’d be a jar of soup, a casserole, or flowers left on our doorstep. Other days there might be heart emojis and rides to the hospital.

There seemed to be no end to people’s generosity and what I noticed was that so little was needed. The smallest AUDIO gesture of reaching out was a powerful Engage With and remarkable way to communicate Community connection and inclusion. We felt loved and held in so many ways!

Rhonda Magee The people in our community don’t teaches the necessarily know each other. Our comRAIN practice to munity is made up of people who have recognize how differing viewpoints and radically difour community fering lives. Some of them barely know shapes our us at all. In spite of all the things that world. don’t seem to make our community a community, there is a common desire to mindful.org/ care and be part of something. And out community of that desire, the supportive net known as community is formed. It doesn’t take much. Just the willingness to see the magic of connection—and leave or receive the odd jar of soup on the porch. ●

m

Imagine someone you are having some difficulty with.

Take a breath and allow yourself to look into the eyes of this person. Picture them as a little child, maybe four years old. Can you delight in the sparkle and beauty and uniqueness of this wondrous being? Imagine, if they were your own child, how you would wish them well, keep them safe. Picture them aging. See them take a blow, a shame, a hurt, an indignity.

Allow yourself to know they have experienced hurts you cannot imagine, burdens, terrors, sorrows, failures, losses, loneliness, addiction, disappointment, rage, and no end to sadness or despair.

2

Let yourself be open to knowing you don’t have to fix them or heal them, but perhaps you can just be with them.

Feel the ache and the terror and simply open to being there. As you look again into the eyes of this being, can you also see the spark of joy, the muddy boots running wild through the backwoods, the potential for happiness, the wit, the laughter?

3

Imagine reaching out and wishing them well.

Picture the potential for joyful camaraderie, the moments of ease, the relief of kindness. See the web of connection and know that we all want to be happy. We all want to be safe. We all want to belong. Open your eyes and see community flowing toward you, everywhere.

June 2021 mindful 29

brain science

WHAT MAKES

Good Gossip

Gossip can be a vehicle for meanness and chaos—but as Dacher Keltner explains, it can also be a social practice that works for the greater good.

For many, gossiping ranks among the great sins. Saint Paul placed whispering and backbiting on a par with murder, deceit, and fornication as vices deserving of capital punishment.

Teachers routinely ask middle-school students to not gossip or whisper with their friends. For good reason: Gossip can humiliate and harm in ways that might even shorten lives. Andrew Jackson’s wife, Rachel, had left her

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at University of California, Berkeley, and the faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center.

30 mindful June 2021

first marriage to run off with the future president in 1793, when divorce rates hovered between 0% and 5%. As a result, she was the target of vicious gossip during Jackson’s presidential campaign. When she first read of her damaged reputation, she collapsed in tears. Weeks later, she was dead.

There’s no question that gossip can be damaging. But these exceptional uses of gossip—typically by those who are abusing their power—do not prove the rule. In fact, gossip is an ancient and universal means by which group members give power to select individuals and keep the powerful in check.

Gossip is how we articulate a person’s capacity for advancing the

greater good and spread that information to others. We gossip about what might be true of a person’s character. When we talk with others about firmly known facts—a neighbor is in prison, a work colleague is in rehab, a friend on the softball team has cancer—we are passing on established information that does not buzz with the energized feel of speculation so true of gossip. We resort to gossip to explore potential flaws in a person’s character. Gossip seeks confirmation of character flaws defined by the flouting of principles that enhance the greater good.

Gossip, then, is how a social network negotiates and establishes a person’s →

By Dacher Keltner • Illustrations by Edmon de Haro

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brain science

reputation, in particular those who seek power and want to exert influence in Machiavellian fashion. For example, US presidential campaigns are defined by pitched battles over gossip, which hovers around every candidate and eventually targets every president at some point. Political gossip zeroes in on whether a politician does things that risk unraveling the culture, or things that are the foundation of the greater good. During the era of slavery, political gossip focused on candidates’ racial background. During Prohibition, gossip investigated politicians’ alcoholic tendencies and the potential hypocrisies of their imbibing. During the drug wars, the drug-taking habits of politicians became prominent. In 2021, that people gossip about the potential factors that produced the coronavirus pandemic is not surprising, given heated international tensions and the erosion of public trust in scientific and political leaders. Thomas Jefferson had a keen sense for the power of gossip in establishing political reputations. He catalogued the forms of political gossip during his day and concluded that the most damaging centered on selfish, backstabbing, socially destructive acts.

A Cap on Selfish Actions To capture Jefferson’s reasoning as it applies to a 21st-century social group, I studied the patterns of gossip in a network of sorority sisters at UC Berkeley.

In the first phase, I gathered measures of the sisters’ Big Five—their enthusiasm, kindness, focus, calm, and openness—and their Machiavellianism, or tendency to lie, manipulate, and coerce.

Then several weeks later I brought each sister to the lab and interviewed her privately about how often she gossiped about each of the other women in the sorority, and with whom she shared the gossip. The frequent targets of gossip were young women who most threatened the sorority’s greater good: They were well known and highly visible but, by their own reporting, unkind and highly Machiavellian, willing to

32 mindful June 2021

harm, lie, and manipulate to rise in power. As in this case, gossip typically targets individuals who seek power at the expense of others.

Other research has found that gossip’s purpose is to tarnish the reputations of individuals who diminish the greater good. Researchers who hung around a crew of strapping rowers at an East Coast college listened in on the teammates’ banter as they traveled to and from practice. The gossip systematically concentrated on one teammate who was not making practices on time, nor rowing hard enough or in sync with his teammates. He was failing to advance the greater good by literally not pulling his weight. Cattle ranchers in the western United States, in their spare, tight-lipped exchanges, gossiped about their neighbors who didn’t keep their fences in order. Again, gossip targets actions that undermine the trust of the community—for ranchers, the poor upkeep of fences. In huntergatherer societies, gossip is directed at coercive bullies who exploit others and steal food or sexual partners.

How gossip flows through social networks enhances its power to tarnish the reputations of those who do less to promote the greater good.

m AUDIO Gossip Awareness Follow this guided practice to bring awareness to how gossip affects you and those around you. mindful.org/ gossipawareness

brain science

On average, we pass along every act of gossip we receive to 2.3 people, typically to high-status, highly connected people like, in the sorority study, high-status and admired young women. Gossip flows to individuals who have the greatest power to define, and damage, the reputations of others.

Gossip Gone Wild So powerful is the social instinct to gossip that it gave rise to institutions that preserve its basic function. The first newspapers in 17th-century England to be widely read and financially sustainable were gossip rags about the neighborhood knaves and ne’er-do-wells, the flirts and drunks, the philanderers and squanderers, and the debauching aristocracy. One of America’s wisest citizens, Ben Franklin, wrote a gossip column, the first in America, that appeared in 1814 and was devoted to satirical commentary upon the scurrilous acts of people nearby.

In today’s digital world, gossip and the construction of reputations have gone viral on websites and blogs. Restaurants, stores, and hotels anxiously keep an eye on their customer ratings on Yelp. Politicians are tracked on Gawker and spoofed on The Onion. The Shittytipper Twitter feed names well-known individuals known to tip below the conventional 15-20%. A now-defunct blog called Holla Back NYC allowed women to submit photos of men who harassed, groped, catcalled, or leered at them.

Our obsession with spreading information about reputation has costs: intrusions into our private lives, mistakes in identity, and escalations into bullying, all indirect forms of oppression. Most of us have been the inappropriate targets of gossip and suffered in the moment. But on balance, the benefits of allowing groups to freely communicate about the reputations of others outweigh these costs.

In one study to first capture this idea, 24 participants came to the lab and were divided into groups of four.

They played six rounds of an economic game; in every new round they played with participants they had not played with before. In each round, each participant was given some money and presented with the chance to give some money to a group fund. That gift would increase in value and be redistributed among the four players. This game pitted the tendency to act on behalf of others—give money to the group fund— against the free-riding tendency to not contribute yet take money from the group fund built up by others’ generosity. At the end of the first round, players learned how much the three other group members had given to the group fund. Participants moved on to a new group of four players and played again, repeating this procedure six times.

After the first round, the study got interesting. In a gossip condition (that is, one of the subgroups within the study), participants could send a note to those who would be playing with their former partners about those individuals’ cooperative or selfish tendencies. As in real life, all players were aware of the possibility that they would be gossiped about. In an even more puritanical condition—gossip plus ostracism—participants had the

From The Power Paradox by Dacher Keltner, published by Penguin Press, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2016 by Dacher Keltner.

chance not only to gossip but also to vote to exclude their former partners from playing in the next round.

Who Can You Trust?

In a neutral condition lacking the opportunity to gossip or ostracize, people gave less and less to the public fund over time. After trusting others initially but being taken advantage of by the occasional individual with low commitment to the greater good, most people abandon their cooperative instincts and give less. In the condition in which participants could gossip, participants actually gave more. And in the condition allowing for gossip and ostracism, participants’ gifts to the group fund actually rose over the course of the experiment.

Social penalties like gossip, shaming, and ostracism are painful indeed and can easily be misused (in particular by those in power). But they are also powerful social practices, seen in all cultures, by which group members elevate the standing of those who advance the greater good and prevent those less committed to it from gaining power.

Power is the capacity to influence. It is the basic medium of our social lives.

In the past 50 years, power—in politics, in the workplace, in our communities—has become more diverse and collaborative. Yet, we can still find examples, particularly in the political landscape, of coercive, deceptive, violent approaches to power. We have also seen, though, that such forms of power will not be tolerated forever.

In the absence of wisdom, power leads to empathy failures, selfish and destructive acts, and racist, polarizing attitudes. Yet our social systems, from neighborhoods to democracies, are expressions of our power to rein in those who abuse theirs through accountability, assessing reputations, and uplifting what we esteem.

We all suffer from power irresponsibly wielded. Let’s turn toward compassionate power. ●

June 2021 mindful 33

OOPS

self-discovery

THE FINE ART OF FAILING PHOTOGRAPHSBY PHOTOGRAPH BYPLAINPICTURE ALAN SHAPIRO/ RALF / STOCKSY MOHR

Our failures only hold us back if we don’t engage with them mindfully. Katherine Ellison learned the hard way the value of failing with presence— and recovering with slow accountability.

June 2021 mindful 35

self-discovery

hen I was 23 and just starting out in journalism, I made an awful mistake. While covering a high-profile trial in San Jose, California, I wrote that a woman who hadn’t been charged with any crime had plotted a murder.

The woman I’d wrongly incriminated sued me and my newspaper for libel, demanding $11 million. Had she won, it would have killed my career and financially damaged my employer.

Alas, this wasn’t my first reporting error.

In the preceding weeks I’d made a series of smaller mistakes, mostly getting names and dates wrong, although once I’d quoted a rancher as telling me he had to leave to “shoot a horse” when he’d really said “shoe” a horse. He called the news desk the morning that story appeared to demand a correction, saying his sister worked for the Humane Society and had given him hell.

As these errors piled up, I feared my days at the newspaper were numbered. But I still couldn’t seem to slow down and take the time to check my work. Instead, whenever possible, I blamed the flubs on others. The rancher had mumbled. The copy editor hadn’t done his job.

My editors were overworking me and I was tired.

By the time of the libel lawsuit, I’d run out of excuses. But surprisingly, instead of firing me, the paper’s managing editor—a tough-on-theoutside Lou Grant type who until then had been my biggest fan—suspended me for three days, giving me just one more chance. He also bluntly suggested I use the time to get professional help.

“You’re sabotaging yourself,” he warned.

I took his advice and, even before I left the newsroom that day, tracked down a psychiatrist to make my first appointment. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing a job that was then my whole identity, and understood in that moment that I had no choice but to change: to stop looking for excuses, and to do the hard work to become

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Katherine Ellison is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, most recently, of Mothers & Murderers: A True Tale of Love, Lies, Obsession …and Second Chances.

36 mindful June 2021

the kind of person I’d long wanted to be—both more competent and more trustworthy. In other words, I had to start being more accountable.

The main problem was, I still had so little faith that I could make such a big change.

Slow Down to Speed Up This was (ugh, how time flies!) 1981. Mindfulness wasn’t a mainstream thing yet. But Freudian psychoanalysis, couch and all, was available for those who had really good insurance or could otherwise find the money to pay. My psychiatrist was still in training, reporting to a supervisor. He offered me a hefty discount that made it just affordable.

His mantra was, “Mistrust your sense of urgency,” which was at once the most helpful thing I’ve ever heard and the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. Again and again, he urged me to sit still and experience my feelings, rather than doing what I most yearned to do, which was to run from them, in any way I could. It’s embarrassing to look back on all the hours I wasted in ridiculous debates with him about whether I really needed therapy at all, and in trying to change the subject, and in throwing myself harder into work and pleading exhaustion as a reason to cancel appointments. But at last something shifted and I managed to face my all-but-overwhelming shame at having screwed up so repeatedly—and, more deeply, in believing I was destined to keep screwing up. Only then could I see how much shame had determined my behavior until then, particularly in my insistence on looking for other things and people to blame for my own mistakes.

My editor was right—I had been sabotaging myself, for reasons that would take a long time to understand. Four years, to be precise.

A couple of decades later, when I was bringing up my kids, a wise swim coach observed my eldest son’s fast but awkward freestyle and told him, “You’ve got to slow down to speed up.”

Sparing the grisly details, my own speed, just as clumsy, had some roots in childhood events that had conditioned me to tune out whenever I was stressed. Sticking with the therapy helped me first slow down enough to bring my brain’s →

PHOTOGRAPH BY PLAINPICTURE / YVONNE RÖDER

W

“

Once you stop to notice, you may be surprised by the prevalence, variety, and depth of human error.

self-discovery

For Shame Once you stop to notice, you may be surprised by the prevalence, variety, and depth of human error. From the simple fender-bender on your way to work to immensely more devastating plane crashes, botched surgeries, and downright horrific cases of parents leaving babies in hot cars, we constantly, mysteriously, act against our own self-interest.

My own experience with a far less consequential but still potentially devastating error early in my life has made me obsessed by human error, and particularly how people recover from the shame of seemingly incomprehensible mistakes. Mitch Abblett, a clinical psychologist and former executive director of the nonprofit Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy, shares this interest, writing powerfully about the way shame can paralyze us.

“The shame response is very old and comes from a primal part of the brain,” he told me in a recent interview. “As a psychologist I think of our evolutionary biology: Tens of thousands of years ago, if we did something that caused us to feel shame, it was related to our very survival, to fear that we’d be rejected from our social group and die.”

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Abblett says a mindfulness practice can help people move past seemingly intolerable shame, as they ride out the physical sensations arising from shame and the “indignant arrogance” he says often accompanies it to arrive at regret, an emotion that more easily allows us room to make wiser choices—and to be more accountable. He gave the example of the 2007 documentary film, The Dhamma Brothers, which followed four convicted murderers on a 10-day meditation retreat in an Alabama prison. The prisoners said it was agonizing at first to sit still with the awareness of what they’d done to others and what others had done to them. But once they stuck with it, it was also liberating.

Fail Fast?

It’s interesting to contrast the Dhamma Brothers’ experience with the movement, over the last several years, to destigmatize failure in a hurry.

“Fail fast, fail often!” and “Move fast and break things!” are the relentlessly cheery slogans of Silicon Valley, a place in which three-fourths of startups go bust. The archives of the TED Talks—the Valley’s influential e-sermons— include more than a dozen presentations about failure, many of which tout its “surprising” benefits. A paean to “celebrating failure” by Astro Teller, the “Captain of Moonshots” at Google’s idea factory, X, has been viewed more than 2.6 million times. In 2009, the same ethos inspired a popular program called “Fuckup Nights,” in which entrepreneurs take the stage to talk about their business disasters. The Mexican entrepreneur Leticia Gasca founded the project after her startup, a philanthropic effort to help Native women sell their handicrafts, went bust.

Since then, “Fuckup Nights” have been held in more than 250 cities in 80 countries. Gasca’s organization also offers workshops to businesses to help “create a culture that celebrates trying, rather than stigmatizing failure,” according to their website. Using storytelling and a Q&A session, the workshops aim to “eliminate shame to turn it into accountability and autonomy.” FailCon, a similarly themed day-long conference, was founded around the same time by Palo Alto

m AUDIO Tame Your Shame Patricia Rockman leads a 10-minute practice to help loosen the hold of difficult emotions. mindful.org/ art-of-failing

PHOTOGRAPH BY PLAINPICTURE / MIEP

pilot back into the cabin and stop making those mistakes, and then to patiently learn why I’d been making them. As time went on, my psychiatrist also helped me stop playing the victim whenever I was challenged. He insisted that I behave with integrity, beginning by charging for missed appointments whenever I canceled without a good reason.

Eventually, this practice—although it still wasn’t popularly called that—of learning to be aware of when I felt like outrunning my feelings and then patiently returning to face them would help make me not only a more careful journalist, but also a better listener. That, in turn, helped me be a better friend, wife, daughter, and mother than I otherwise ever could have been. I’m not suggesting that four years of therapy is the best solution for anyone making errors at work. But for me, slow accountability saved my life.

self-discovery

“

I had no choice but to change: to stop looking for excuses, and to do the hard work to become the kind of person I’d long wanted to be.

software designer Cassandra Phillips and has also gone global.

My reporting errors were in another class than the Silicon Valley sorts of failures, which mostly involve mistaken strategies and decisions. But both kinds of blunders share two important things: the potential to harm other people—say, when livelihoods are lost after businesses go bankrupt—and the corresponding need for someone to take responsibility and make changes. Both, in other words, demand accountability. And that might require something more mindful and systematic than just sharing stories of failure.

Sam Silverstein agrees. A former manufacturing business owner and author of several books about accountability, Silverstein’s main point, which he stresses repeatedly, is that accountability never happens in isolation. “It’s always a matter of being accountable to someone,” he told me. “Accountability is keeping your commitments to people. We’re responsible for things, but we’re accountable to people.”

I thought back on my tough-love treatment by the managing editor, and how much I’d wanted to redeem myself in his eyes. I also remembered the bond I’d established with my psychiatrist, who so skillfully, over months and years, had gained my trust and respect. It made sense that accountability depends on these kinds of strong relationships, which require long and steady investments of time. Still, I don’t believe you can achieve it without also devoting a lot of individual effort. As I recalled all that work with the psychiatrist, predating the mindfulness movement, it felt as if he’d helped me build up my muscles to face down shame on my own the next time it emerged. At the end of our time together, it was up to me to keep those muscles in shape, by honestly questioning my behavior and, importantly, by making sure I always had other relationships in my life—both in and out of work—that would help hold me accountable.

My slow accountability practice has helped me in my marriage and in deepening friendships, but it’s probably helped the most in my relationships with my children. I grew up with the notion—handed down from my own mother—that mothers should be perfect, that →

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PRACTICE

When You’ve Caused Harm Finding our way to true accountability requires a willingness to sit with the discomfort of having caused pain, allowing true compassion to arise.

By Vinny Ferraro

Whether it’s pain in the body, a mind that doesn’t seem to know peace, or a world at war with itself, we can pay attention to the hurt and care for the wound, honoring it, instead of just trying to get away from it. We can then rest in the simple truth that we’re here and we care about what’s difficult.

When we truly tend to our hearts and allow them to be touched by what is difficult, let them break, from the fear of pain or hurt, what arises is a natural tenderness. As Stephen Levine wrote, “to heal is to touch with love that which was previously touched by fear.” So when we bring compassion home to include ourselves, especially when we have failed, we finally get to honor the hurt. This is the alchemy of presence.

Living with an undefended heart is a profound expression of freedom and the promise of the sure heart’s release. We do this inner work so our lives can become an offering to all those we dare care about. Because ultimately, compassion is a verb.

PHOTOGRAPH BY JUJ WINN / GETTY IMAGES

Compassion is a kind, friendly presence that allows us to stay in contact with the pain we may feel when we’ve caused harm, so that we can deepen into it rather than turn away from ourselves.

It has the same connecting quality as empathy, but has a desire to help as well.

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self-discovery

A PRACTICE FOR BEING WITH THE PAIN OF FAILURE, AND TAKING ACCOUNTABILITY

Find a comfortable seat.

Settle, and breathe. Now, begin your inquiry. To start, the two components we’re looking for are clear seeing and willingness. Ask yourself: “Am I seeing clearly?” and in this moment, “Is there willingness present?”

Since self-criticism is not helpful, don’t get lost in the story of why things shouldn’t be as they are.

Instead, allow yourself to feel the pain and quite naturally there’ll be a compassionate response to it. Because If we can’t feel it, we can’t heal it.

Don’t take it personally by becoming over-identified with the role you played in the situation. You didn’t give birth to these energies, they are universal, they belong to this realm, not you.

When it’s not taken personally, we realize we can practice with anything we come into contact with—stress, frustration, pain, nothing is outside of our care.

When something painful or difficult arises, allow yourself to feel that compassionate response, and see that pain is not the only guest at the party.

Allow yourself to experience yourself fully. Then you can wrap yourself up with warmth and affection and kiss your wounds, as you would anyone you care for.

Open up to not only your own pain, but the pain. Not lost in the story of why me, but opening to all the beings that know this particular pain.

Only when we understand that, can the most caring part of ourselves become known.

With the courage of the undefended heart it can transform into something beautiful.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Vinny Ferraro has been a practitioner of insight meditation since the early 1990s. He is a nationally recognized leader in designing and implementing interventions for at-risk adolescents and is Senior Trainer for Mindful Schools. His focus continues to be delivering direct services to folks who have limited access.

we’re older and thus wiser and our mandates shouldn’t ever be challenged. But times have changed, and I do believe that even as parents should set limits for our children, we should also model virtues, including being humble and owning up to our mistakes. So even though my first instinct, after forgetting, for instance, to pick them up from Hebrew School (leaving them waiting an extra 20 minutes) was to deny it ever happened or to make an excuse, I instead took a breath, took the hit, and apologized (sincerely but not excessively) for losing track of time. One of the greatest and also most painful things about having children is they inevitably give us so many opportunities for humility, as long as we’re willing to recognize them and not get defensive or play the victim.

That kind of accountability happens over time, and because of deep relationships. Contrast that with Fuckup Nights, which offer the hope of a quick catharsis: a funny, self-deprecating story in the spotlight and you’re done. But the more I thought about them, the more they seemed like just another version of running away.

In fact, the slapdash Silicon Valley approach to failure has been getting some pushback from the people you might least expect. “Every time I listen to Silicon Valley types or students bragging about failing fast and often like it’s no big deal, I cringe,” Gasca said in her own TED Talk last year. She was now extolling the notion of failing “mindfully,” which she described as being aware of the consequences of what you’ve done and the lessons learned—and the responsibility to share those lessons with the world.

Somewhat similarly, Phillips, the FailCon founder, told me she’d recently abandoned that effort out of frustration. “I was tired of people not discussing the actual takeaways, the next steps, and taking ownership for what really happened,” Phillips wrote me in an email. Something like that would demand regular, smaller conversations over time, she explained—something she wasn’t then interested in doing. But I understood her point. Genuine accountability depends, as Silverstein told me, on relationships of trust, which take time to develop, as well as on each of us building the habit of rigorous introspection.

Any way you look at it, it’s not a speedy process. ●

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Q&A VINNY FERRARO

The Heart of Humility

PHOTOGRAPH BY BLAKE FARRINGTON

True accountability requires us to be open to being wrong, and open to change. And as meditation teacher Vinny Ferraro tells Stephanie Domet, mindfulness can help us get there.

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STEPHANIE DOMET: How can mindfulness help us work with failure and shame?

What do we have to do to be truly accountable for our actions, especially ones that cause harm?

VINNY FERRARO: Mindfulness can help interrupt the shame response that can overwhelm us with its historic baggage. Mindfulness brings me back to the present moment and helps me discern what I am in the presence of, so then I can learn from my mistakes, actually face them, instead of getting lost in outdated programming.

The first on the list for me is getting clear on the ways I may have caused harm. This is where listening becomes essential. And listening requires an openness to being wrong. As long as we’re stuck in defensiveness or justification, we aren’t really ready to let it in. The next step is taking responsibility for what is ours.

What can I own here? And apologies may be in order, but they’re not enough, right?

The final step is from this moment forward, committing to doing it differently. And to do something habitual differently can be difficult. So it may mean that I’m actually committing to additional support. What practices might support this change?

That outdated programming is really beguiling, isn’t it?

It’s amazing how effective it is. I had a teacher that would stay in it with me. He was very patient. He’d say, “OK, don’t go all the way there.

But can you just see how this could have been done differently? Let’s just parse out the behavior from your essential nature.”

Because we’re not our actions.

We may have learned a busted way to do it from people we don’t want to be anything like. But nobody’s taking the time to tell us there might be a better way or maybe we weren’t able to hear it, or maybe we weren’t open to it. But how else do we learn, besides our mistakes?

Can you talk about the role community plays in helping us stay accountable?

We can’t solely rely on the mind to tell us what’s real.

If there are multiple people coming to me with similar feedback, since I’m the common denominator, I have to look at it. But I want to define community, because there are a lot of people around me. And so there are going to be people who are willing to soothe me and make me feel better. And then there

are people who I trust to give me honest feedback even when it’s uncomfortable. And that’s who I go to when I need accountability. I ask them, “What can I take responsibility for? What could I have done differently?”

tiplicity of the experience of truths. We need to acknowledge that my reality is not the only one—since I’m making it up and all. So we’ve got to come to terms with the fact that our truth is but one, and that is incredibly humbling.

And you have to be willing to go to those friends and ask your question and to get past the shame.

So if someone’s really struggling with being in relationship that way, what would you advise?

Because those are the very people you don’t want to know that you made a mistake, right? But one step before that is having such a community. Do you surround yourself with yes people, or is there a deeper level of connection there? I’ve seen people leave a community because they didn’t like the reflections that their most trusted people were giving them. That’s heartbreaking.

If we rely on our thoughts and our feelings and our intentions above everyone else’s, it cuts us off from the connection. Community is essential in helping us see what may have been invisible to us.

Humility asks us for an open heart. And if we’re so closed off we’re unable to sit with our own pain or regret, we’re going to have a hard time with humility. Heart practices— forgiveness and compassion practices—give us the strength to endure our own mistakes. We will make mistakes. But how we respond to our mistakes is where we can actually have impact. And in the repair of our relationships is where real growth comes, and real connection. What has contributed to my own liberation is that surrender to, “OK, you make mistakes.

Compassion is right here ready to hold that.” We get to be real and meet that which is difficult, that which is beautiful. The heart practices, for me, are where it’s at. I’m grateful for it; it made me feel so at home. I didn’t have to pretend anymore that it’s not hard to be alive, it’s not hard to lose people we love. And love doesn’t have to be a gated community.

So how do we square that with our own insight and knowledge?

I’m not suggesting we abandon or forfeit our own knowing, trusting ourselves, which many of us have a hard-won relationship with, but we have to be willing to let in the mul-

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ILLUSTRATION BY JORM S / ADOBE STOSCK

grief

Sea Change Grief can hold our heads beneath the waves, but, as Bryan Welch writes, its tides can also open us to compassion for ourselves and others, showing us the value of a broken heart.

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A

decade ago I set out to write about compassion.

In our increasingly connected world, I believed compassion was going to be very important if we wanted to preserve human creativity, health, and prosperity. So I decided to write about that.

I wasn’t up to it.

I discovered that I didn’t know much about compassion. And I was very disappointed to find that I really wasn’t very good at it.

Every human being has an innate gift for compassion, me included, but I had never tried to work much with it. Confidence, irrational certainty, and various civilized forms of aggression were the tools I picked up most often to address a problem of any kind.

Until I began this project I hadn’t noticed that I was like that. I just figured I was a really compassionate person who was forced, by circumstance, to be kind of an asshole once in a while.

People who knew me seemed to think that, too.

Habitually, I believed that my intellect, my healthy habits, and my virtuous views—in a word, my superiority—would provide some kind of safety. But in that arrogant cocoon I was cut off from others, especially those who were suffering. That separation was intentional.

Not conscious, but intentional. I unconsciously worked to preserve my sense of security. I quietly avoided coming into direct contact with suffering people, especially if that encounter might reveal the obvious fact that I wasn’t safe at all, that I was very much like anyone else, vulnerable to all the human pain the world has to offer.

And in my various, illusory states of psychological refuge the muscles of my compassion were gradually atrophying.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Bryan Welch is CEO of Mindful Communications, the company that owns Mindful Magazine and Mindful.org.

He is the author of Beautiful and Abundant: Building the World We Want (2011). He and his wife, Carolyn, raise organic, grass-fed cattle, sheep, and goats on their farm near Lawrence, Kansas.

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Suffering Finds Us To offer authentic compassion to others, we may first need to acknowledge our own vulnerability, and our experience of suffering. Our own suffering helps us build empathy for others, and empathy provides the musculature of compassion. We exercise those muscles by acknowledging our vulnerability and experiencing our own pain as fully as we can.

This is not to say we should seek to experience suffering. No need. We are human beings.

Inevitably, suffering finds us.

In August 2013 our son Noah died. He was about a month shy of his 26th birthday.

He had struggled with his drug addiction for years.

He died alone in an apartment we rented for him near our home, the culmination of years of addiction concluding in a suicidal drinking binge.

For most of us, I think, parenting is our most heartfelt responsibility and the most cherished task of our lives. Most people would probably say that the love they feel for their children is the most powerful emotion they have ever felt.

We would, as it is so often said, do anything for our children.

When our child succumbed to drug addiction and gradually descended into a hell of delusions and self-loathing, we naturally tried to help in any, and every, way we could think of. And involuntarily, but with equal desperation, we searched our memories for a cause.

Forever we ask ourselves, What did I do wrong? What did we do wrong? And more fundamentally, How did this happen?

I suppose any honest parent can remember thousands of mistakes they made, each misstep a possible cause of some psychic injury to a child. Certainly I can. When your child suffers from the illness of addiction you have a reason to compulsively sort through the full catalog of those errors. I have. Of course there’s no direct line of cause and effect. We reexamine the record endlessly, and fruitlessly.

When our child died we were left permanently without answers. We faced a few grim truths. We had loved him with all our hearts.

We had invested all our hope in his recovery.

And we had failed.

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Noah was a sensitive, beautiful, loving kid. Left to right: Noah, age 2, in 1989 with Linc, a friend’s dog, in Taos, New Mexico; on his grandparents’ ranch in Texas in 1994, age 7; and in 2005, at age 17.

To fail one’s child can be, emotionally speaking, equivalent to failing as a human being.

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF BRYAN WELCH

What It Means to Have a Broken Heart The animal pain I felt when Noah died was, to me, shocking. Just the sense of loss was overwhelming. I realized that I would love him and miss him for the rest of my life, and that I might never love him less or miss him less than I did on that first terrible day.

Through years of watching his disease progress we had, of course, had many reasons to worry for his life. We braced ourselves. We prepared for the worst. We visualized how we would cope. I can’t say any of that was very use-

ful. There are some experiences that just can’t be prepared for.

When I tell someone I had a child who died their most common response is, “I can’t imagine how that must feel.” That is a wise and accurate observation. You can’t. I couldn’t. I advise you not to try, because attempting to imagine that loss is painful and the visualizing won’t do any good. At least it didn’t do me any good.

When Noah died I felt I knew, maybe for the first time, what it meant to have a broken heart.

In the dark canyons of my deepest grief, I found I had been stripped of the armor I had worn to protect a sense of security in this uncertain and threatening world. I lost the sheltering illusion of my self-image as a good person and a good dad. I lost any sense of my family’s safety from suffering or bad fortune, any sense that we were protected, successful, or privileged. →

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ILLUSTRATION BY JORM S / ADOBE STOSCK

grief

When I tell someone I had a child who died their most common response is, “I can’t imagine how that must feel.” That is a wise and accurate observation.

You can’t. I couldn’t.

I advise you not to try.

The worst could happen to us.

Noah was a wonderful kid. He was a beautiful little boy with blonde ringlets and bright blue eyes. Always physically affectionate, we called him “monkey baby” for the way he clung to us, emphatically, resolutely, lovingly.

He was a sensitive boy. From the time he could talk, you could see he was working hard to say things that would make us feel good. As a toddler he knew how I relished a hug and a kiss from him and his sister before I left for work and when I got home. So he made the hug and a kiss his sacred responsibility. Having missed me one morning when I left early he told his mother, crestfallen, “I can’t believe it! I didn’t kiss my dad!” I think of that particular story often because it says so much about who he was and would always be.

When he was about 10 his classmate’s father died. He insisted on attending the funeral. I was a little worried about that, because Noah’s sensitivity made him vulnerable to painful situations and sometimes that caused him to act out. I didn’t know how he would handle it.

In fact he was poised, sympathetic, and graceful. He stayed close to his classmate and her family. He asked quiet, appropriate questions and listened intently. He laid a consoling hand on a shoulder or gave a hug at, it seemed to me, precisely the right moments. He was brilliant.

We came to rely on his grace and sensitivity in social situations. Noah knew how to be good to people. →

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m ONLINE COURSE Embracing Impermanence Frank Ostaseski leads a 4-part mini course in fearless open-hearted awareness. mindful.org/ fearless

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He also had a sophisticated, deadpan sense of humor that belonged to someone much older and more worldly. Sometimes I would realize that one of his offhand comments had been, in fact, a jab so finely crafted that I didn’t feel it.

The humor in his gentle criticism would dawn on me, finally, and I would laugh about it days later, and for weeks after that.

His friends loved him. Our friends loved him.

We really loved him.

His sensitivity also had its dark side. At home he could fly into a rage for the smallest reason, or no reason at all. We all lived in dread of his next tirade. He hated uncertainty, insecurity, and transition. Any morning we were to leave on a trip—even a vacation he very much wished to take—we could generally rely on him to procrastinate his packing until the last moment and then explode when he was reminded that we needed to leave in 30 minutes to catch a flight.

His anger was volcanic. Furniture was broken.

Holes were punched in walls.

But on the whole he was wonderful. He cruised through school with good grades and good friends. He played music, partially to please his mother. He played tennis, partially to please me. Right up through high school graduation he was delightful, successful, and apparently sober.

He once told me, during a healthy interval later in his life, that he had never felt truly free of anxiety until the first time he got high. For him, prescription painkillers—Vicodin, OxyContin, fentanyl—were a revelation. He had always been in pain. When the pills caused that pain to recede he said he knew immediately that he wanted to feel better, that way, all the time.

In retrospect we can recognize his rapid descent into full-scale addiction. After his sophomore year in college he was perpetually ill. His symptoms were varied, and vague. He interrupted our family vacations to make emergency visits to clinics and pharmacies. We tried to provide better doctors, to find some clarity about his health, but he stubbornly maintained control over his treatment. We thought he was just exercising his independence, demonstrating his self-sufficiency. I should have recognized the signs. But of course I didn’t want to. His mother, my wife Carolyn, was more perceptive. Several times, she suggested the obvious. I stubbornly resisted. I wanted to maintain my illusions.

With some apparent effort, he held his life together. He studied finance and Chinese, and seemed to do pretty well. He had a wonderful girlfriend, whom we loved. They moved to Hawaii to start a life together. We felt he was launched.

A year later, though, he still didn’t have a stable job. Finally he was hired by a bank. Then he failed a drug test.

After years of overlooking his symptoms and rationalizing his inconsistencies, I heard that news with a growing sense of dread. His relationship fell apart. He collapsed, emotionally.

He came home.

Holding Tight to Hope I’m very surprised, thinking about it now, that he only lived three more years. Those years seem, in retrospect, like a much, much longer time. He seemed to have hit bottom when he got home. He confessed his addiction. He went through an excruciating period of withdrawal.

He refused conventional treatment but apparently stopped using drugs. He got a job and did well for a while. He worked for the company I ran. For business he traveled to China and Vietnam. He was intelligent and charming. His work was pretty successful. His contribution was appreciated.

Then, after about six good months, he started disappearing. He contrived reasons to be out of the office. Then he contrived reasons to work from another office in a nearby city, then from home. Sometimes he just didn’t show up for meetings. His voice mail was full and wouldn’t accept new messages. It took him days to respond to an email. His coworkers were kind, then confused, then exasperated. Finally, confused myself, I was forced to fire him. He was very angry, then he was remorseful.

We took him to detox. We took him to rehab.

He got kicked out of rehab. He went into and then abandoned a different rehab. He went in and out of treatment. He went everywhere with Gatorade bottles full of vodka. He wrecked our cars. He got arrested. He got in fights. He was drunk at my mother’s funeral. He called in the middle of the night, telling psychotic stories of violence and illness, hospitals and murders, and his own various unverified diseases. He called

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PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF BRYAN WELCH

Noah was well loved by friends and family. Left to right: At age 19, Christmas 2006, Noah, on the left, with his mother Carolyn, father Bryan, sister Caitlin, and brotherin-law Aaron, driving across the midwest to spend Christmas with extended family; in May 2005 at his high school graduation with Carolyn; two months later with the family at Iguazu Falls in northern Argentina.

in the daytime with lucid reasons we should buy him a car or pay his rent. He moved back in with us until his rages and psychoses scared us so badly that we asked him to leave. Then, shattered, we asked him to come back. Then, terrified of him again, we rented him another apartment.

Then we stopped paying his rent, so he moved in with a “girlfriend” we never met. When he was abandoned by the girlfriend and evicted by the landlord, we rented him a new apartment. He had a new job, or was about to get a job, or was just waiting for a space at a treatment center—the one that was going to finally help him.

Physically and emotionally, he deteriorated.

He was thin and gray. He seemed relatively sober when he came over to see us. He was sweet, and sad.

Carolyn and I reached the obvious conclusion, finally, that we were subsidizing his selfdestruction. I told him we wouldn’t support him anymore, unless he was in treatment. We knew he needed months in a residential facility to treat the disease in his body and his mind.

He thanked me, told me he understood, and promised to check into a treatment center right away. I told him I could take him. He said he had a friend who wanted to drive him.

Then he went silent and unreachable. That was not unusual, and we fantasized that he →

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m AUDIO Working With Grief Judy Lief leads a practice for journeying with grief. mindful.org/ working-withgrief

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might have actually gone into treatment. But we hadn’t gotten a bill from any treatment center.

We hadn’t received a call. It was early in August, 2013. I decided to go and check on him. Then I thought better of that. Instead of going to his apartment myself I asked the police department to do a “welfare check.” I left my office and went home to be with Carolyn.

The police detective showed up at our door two hours later with the news. Our boy was gone.

In the Deep Ocean of Grief Grief can be like the ocean. Its surface is turbulent. Waves tumble us about. We struggle to catch a breath before we’re submerged again, then we’re inverted 10 feet down, the pressure excruciating. Then, inexplicably, a flash of light and a breath of air at the surface again.

Deep grief can be like the deep ocean. In the midnight zone, too deep for sunlight to penetrate, there’s no sign of the storm on the surface.

It’s cold and dark. It can be very still. Not much is living there. One can feel the slightest current from something—or someone—swimming near in the darkness.

In my abyss I felt newly connected to the suffering in the world. My own sadness was strong, so pervasive, so much a part of my moment-tomoment awareness that it didn’t feel practical or

necessary to protect myself from the suffering of others anymore. I couldn’t disguise or anesthetize my vulnerability. I cried, uncontrollably, in front of the television at home. I cried in business meetings. I cried in restaurants. I cried on airplanes.

The currents of those passing in the darkness of my deepest grief became important to me. It was dark, but there were others there. I didn’t have the strength to push myself to the surface, but I could follow the current as others passed, moving upward. I could sense a subtle eddy, a brief pressure buoying me up, fractionally, a few inches at a time. We are not alone down there.

Far from it. But to benefit from others there, I had to become more sensitive to them and the almost imperceptible evidence of their buoyancy, as an example for my own.

My broken heart was damaged, for sure, but it was also more open than it had been. I grew more interested in the sadness and pain of other people, pain I realized I had been blocking all my life.

Usually when I cried, I cried because I remembered my specific loss. Sometimes, though, I was brought to tears by other losses, experienced by other people, sometimes far away. I was emotionally vulnerable to the news.

I was absurdly vulnerable to sentimental commercials. Even greeting cards could make my eyes well up. →

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF BRYAN WELCH, ILLUSTRATION BY JORM S / ADOBE STOSCK

In March 2006, Noah age 18, on a family vacation in Costa Rica.

A successful freshman year of college behind him, studying finance and Chinese.

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Eventually, of course, there was healing. The pain subsided. Old emotional comforts and habits showed up. I sensed myself subconsciously rebuilding the protections I once had against the sadness and pain in the world.

And to my surprise and confusion, I wasn’t sure I wanted that to happen.

To say that the loss of a child is devastating is in part to relate the way it tears down the structures of our certainty and confidence.

Fundamentally, you can’t be sure that your own nature—the way you were—wasn’t responsible for the disease and destruction of a person you loved. And so all your other certainties about your own value and virtues, if you had them, are swept away with this discovery: You can only be certain that you will never know what role you might have played in your child’s disease.

If you, God forbid, have lost a child, please also remember that you can never know that you WERE responsible at all, either. You may have been the absolute best parent your child could have had, among all the human beings in the world. Addiction is a disease against which there is no reliable vaccine or protection. Maybe Noah’s addiction was aggravated by stressful experiences. Maybe I could have saved him by preventing those experiences. Maybe not.

I think we must accept that we cannot know.

We must live in uncertainty.

If we are forced to live out our lives uncertain of whether we were a wonderful parent or a failure, then what, of any consequence, are we left with to be certain of? Precious little, I think.

If you possess, as I do, hundreds of internal narratives about how you are healthy because of some fine personal quality; or safe because of some other virtue; or good because you have accomplished this or that, those kinds of self-mythologies can become very hard to sustain under the pressure of a catastrophe. The truth becomes obvious. The simple fact is that no life is granted such certainty. Not only are we vulnerable, we may be culpable.

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ILLUSTRATION BY JORM S / ADOBE STOSCK

The Certainty of Uncertainty

grief

My broken heart was damaged, for sure, but it was also more open than it had been. I grew more interested in the sadness and pain of other people, pain I realized I had been blocking all my life.

When our protective narratives rupture and begin to drain, punctured by trauma or grief, we have the opportunity to acknowledge a fundamental fact: The narratives are false. We are not superior. We are not safe. We are not even, necessarily, good.

Which means, of course, that we are like everyone. And we have the capacity, if we work at it, to give others our compassionate understanding from a place of actual knowing.

We Are All Connected Losing a child is in many ways like an amputation. Carolyn and I lost an essential part of ourselves and we will never be the same. As my grief subsided I realized, at some point, that I was manufacturing a sort of emotional prosthesis. If I could never be the same, perhaps I could seem the same. I hobbled around on my emotional stump. I thought I seemed fine, at least for a while.

But then it occurred to me that I didn’t want to seem fine. I didn’t want to feign selfassurance. I wanted to maintain the connection I had felt in the depths of my grief to the grief of others, to all the grief. If my broken heart or my amputated identity made me a little warmer, more understanding, friendlier to any degree, then I wanted to cultivate those qualities to whatever extent I could.

Maybe if I could warm and open my heart a little, that could be a small tribute to my son.

Perhaps, if I work at it, I can allow him to help me be a slightly better person. I could be a positive part of his legacy.

Of course this is not to say that I don’t wish, with every fiber of my being, that Noah was alive. I want him back. I wouldn’t have him suffer more. I wouldn’t have him inflict more suffering on others. But I want him back. Alive.

Flesh and blood.

In his absence I have this broken heart. And maybe I am improved by it. I was not kind enough or patient enough or generous enough or sweet enough when he was here. Today, though I’m no epitome of any kind, I think I’m a bit more of those things. If Noah’s terrible sacrifices helped me grow a little, I guess I should honor that, to the best of my limited ability. ●

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PRACTICE

Transformed

By Grief Our hearts break, but our hearts also heal. The thread that pulls us from heartbreak to healing is love, says Judy Lief in this practice for working with grief.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Judy Lief is the author of Making Friends With Death.

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Every goodbye is a moment of connection. Grief teaches us how very attached we are to everything. We don’t want to let go of anything, but through grief, we learn to love and appreciate what we’ve had and lost—friends, family, a way of life, a job, our youth, we grieve it all. Grief is heavy, painful, difficult, and powerful. We need to touch into it at all levels, really acknowledge it, before we can release it.

ILLUSTRATION BY JORM S / ADOBE STOSCK

Death is a natural part of life. From the beginning to the end, life is constant change and nothing stays fixed. And that gives life its vitality. But it also causes a certain heartbreak when we face the difficult truth of impermanence. Grief is a recognition of endings, but it’s also a birth and a beginning.

We enter into a difficult and solitary journey and we come out transformed.

There’s nothing really to be said about grieving that doesn’t sound trite. There’s no simple way through it. It is extremely difficult to put the gravity or the force of grief into words. And there’s no one way to grieve. Neither is there a cure for our fragility and vulnerability. We have only one option, which is somehow to figure out a way to love and embrace it.

A PRACTICE FOR WORKING WITH GRIEF

1 To begin, take a comfortable seat and rest.

Slowly, breathe deeply, in and out. Relax and settle, coming into a present-moment experience. What is really happening to you here and now?

2 Now bring to mind a personal loss. This could be the recent death of a friend or relative or a loved one; it could be a loss you’ve been carrying as a burden for a long time. It’s not something you’ve read about or something at a distance or abstract, but something personal, a person or experience or aspect of your life.

3

6

7

Start with your body and your immediate somatic experience. What bodily sensations do you notice?

Do you feel grounded?

Spacey, tight, hollow, full, edgy, dull, squirmy? What do you notice? Don’t interpret, just feel.

What is your body saying to you right now?

Then direct your attention to what emotions are arriving. Sorrow, anger, a quality of love, disappointment, there could be a sense of intensity or a sense of just being dull.

Note what emotions are arising; don’t be embarrassed or afraid to feel whatever you’re feeling.

Don’t judge what you’re feeling. Just feel. Let your emotions manifest.

Welcome them. Don’t suppress them and also don’t feed them. Emotions are the energy of our grieving. And they change. They’re always changing, like life itself.

Be gentle. If you start to feel overwhelmed, take a break, rest, breathe.

Resettle. Allow yourself time to rest in your present-moment bodily emotional experience.

Just rest, just feel, just be.

Let grief do its work.

Let it heal you. Don’t push. Don’t be impatient.

Let yourself grieve. Process this change in your life. Let it teach you.

4 Now, bring yourself to your heart, in the middle of your chest, and simply feel the heart holding the grief, being filled and heavied by that grief. Your raw, tender, loving, vulnerable, beating heart. And rest with that.

5 Now rest in your throat center. So often the throat is connected with grief.

And it wells up in tightness and has a kind of ache that can arise when we’re about to cry, when we’re shocked or have a sense of loss. Notice where else your grief is being held in your body—it could be your heart, your throat, your stomach. They all hold something, they are processing something— without words, without direction, naturally, the body knows.

8 Reflect on grief in your life, on the losses you’ve had and how your losses connect you with so many others. Just bringing your attention to that fact can be so healing. It happens to everyone. It’s hard to accept change. It’s hard to say goodbye. But when you stop fighting the inevitability of loss and change, a new and deeper love and appreciation is possible. We no longer take our friends, our loved ones, or our life all together for granted. We liberate our love, liberate our joy and appreciation in a very powerful way, through this difficult journey, through loss, through grief, through sorrow, with a vulnerable and tender heart.

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neuroscience

YO U R BRAIN PREDICTS (ALMOST)

EVERY THING YO U DO

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JAYE KIM / ADOBE STOSCK

The notion that our brains’ most important job is “thinking” is incorrect, says neuroscientist and psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett. Our brains are actually prediction organs creating vivid hallucinations based on sense and memory.

Illustrations by Jaye Kim

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neuroscience

F

rom the moment you’re born to the moment you draw your last breath, your brain is stuck in a dark, silent box called your skull.

Day in and day out, it continually receives sense data from the outside world via your eyes, ears, nose, and other sensory organs. This data does not arrive in the form of the meaningful sights, smells, sounds, and other sensations that most of us experience.

It’s just a barrage of light waves, chemicals, and changes in air pressure with no inherent significance.

Faced with these ambiguous scraps of sense data, your brain must somehow figure out what to do next.

Your brain’s most important job is to control your body so you stay alive and well. Your brain must somehow make meaning from the onslaught of sense data it’s receiving so you don’t fall down a staircase or become lunch for some wild beast.

How does your brain decipher the sense data so it knows how to proceed? If it used only the ambiguous information that is immediately present, then you’d be swimming in a sea of uncertainty, flailing around until you figured out the best response. Luckily, your brain has an additional source of information at its disposal: memory.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, has received numerous scientific awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in neuroscience and an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award.

She is a University Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University, with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. She is also the author of the bestselling book How Emotions are Made (2017) and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain (2020).

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Your brain can draw on your lifetime of past experiences—things that have happened to you personally and things that you’ve learned about from friends, teachers, books, videos, and other sources. In the blink of an eye, your brain reconstructs bits and pieces of past experience as your neurons pass electrochemical information back and forth in an ever-shifting, complex network.

Your brain assembles these bits into memories to infer the meaning of the sense data and guess what to do about it. Your past experiences include not only what happened in the world around you but also what happened inside your body. Was your heart beating quickly? Were you breathing heavily? Your brain asks itself in every moment, figuratively speaking, The last time I encountered a similar situation, when my body was in a similar state, what did I do next? The answer need not be a perfect match for your situation, just something close enough to give your brain an appropriate plan of action that helps you survive and even thrive.

This explains how the brain plans your body’s next action. How does your brain also conjure high-fidelity experiences out of scraps of raw data from the outside world? How does it create feelings of terror from a thundering heart? Once again, your brain recreates the past from memory by asking itself, The last time I encountered a similar situation, when my body was in a similar state and was preparing an action similar to this one, what did I see next? What did I feel next?

The answer becomes your experience.

In other words, your brain combines information from outside and inside your head to produce everything you see, hear, smell, taste, and feel.

HOW YOUR BRAIN PREDICTS WHAT YOU SEE Here’s a quick demonstration that your memory is a critical ingredient in what you see. Take a look at the three line drawings:

Excerpted from “The Ultimate Droodles Compendium”

by Roger Price.

PHOTOGRAPH BY DARINA KOPCOK / STOCKSY

What do you see in the drawings?

Inside your skull, without your awareness, billions of your neurons are trying to give those lines and blobs meaning. Your brain is searching through a lifetime of past experiences, issuing thousands of guesses at once, weighing probabilities, trying to answer the question, What are these wavelengths of light most like? And it’s all happening faster than you can snap your fingers.

So what do you see? A bunch of black lines and a couple of blobs?

Let’s see what happens when we give your brain some more information.

The first image is a spider doing a handstand, the second is a submarine going over a waterfall, and the third is a ski jump and spectators as seen by the ski jumper.

When you look back at the line drawings, you should now see familiar objects instead of lines and blobs.

Your brain is assembling memories from bits and pieces of past experiences to go beyond the visual data in front of you and make meaning. In the process, your brain is literally changing the firing of its own neurons.

Objects that you might never have seen before now leap from the page.

The lines and blobs haven’t changed —you have.

Artwork, particularly abstract art, is made possible because the human brain constructs what it experiences.

When you view a Cubist painting by Picasso and see recognizable human figures, that happens only because you have memories of human figures that help your brain make sense of the abstract elements. The painter Marcel Duchamp once said that an artist does only 50% of the work in creating art. The remaining 50% is in the viewer’s brain. (Some artists and philosophers call the second half “the beholder’s share.”)

Your brain actively constructs your experiences. Every morning, you wake up and experience a world around you full of sensations. You might feel the bedsheets against your skin. Maybe you hear sounds that woke you, like an alarm buzzing or birds chirping or your spouse snoring.

Perhaps you smell coffee brewing.

These sensations seem to sail right into your head as if your eyes, nose, mouth, ears, and skin were transparent windows on the world. But you don’t sense with your sensory organs.

You sense with your brain.

What you see is some combination of what’s out there in the world and what’s constructed by your brain.

What you hear is also some combination of what’s out there and what’s in your brain, and likewise for your other senses.

A CAREFULLY CONTROLLED HALLUCINATION In much the same way, your brain also constructs what you feel inside your body. Your aches and jitters and other inner sensations are some combination of what’s going on in your brain and what’s actually happening within your lungs and heart and gut and muscles and so on. Your brain also adds information from your past experiences to guess what those sensations mean. For instance, when people haven’t slept enough and are fatigued or low energy, they may feel hungry (because they’ve been hungry before when their energy was low) and may think that a quick snack will boost their energy. In fact, →

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neuroscience

they’re just tired from lack of sleep.

This constructed experience of hunger may be one reason why people gain unwanted weight.

You’ve almost certainly had an experience where the information inside your head triumphs over the data from the outside world. Have you ever seen a friend’s face in a crowd, but when you looked again, you realized it was a different person? Have you ever felt your cell phone vibrate in your pocket when it didn’t? Have you ever had a song playing in your head that you couldn’t get rid of? Neuroscientists like to say that your day-to-day experience is a carefully controlled hallucination, constrained by the world and your body but ultimately constructed by your brain. It’s not the kind of hallucination that sends you to the hospital. It’s an everyday kind of hallucination that creates all your experiences and guides all your actions. It’s the normal way that your brain gives meaning to your sense data, and you’re almost always unaware that it’s happening.

I realize that this description defies common sense, but wait: There’s more. This whole constructive process happens predictively. Scientists are now fairly certain that your brain actually begins to sense the moment-to-moment changes in the world around you before those light waves, chemicals, and other sense data hit your brain. The same is true for moment-to-moment changes in your body—your brain begins to sense them before the relevant data arrives from your organs, hormones, and various bodily systems. You don’t experience your senses this way, but it’s how your brain navigates the world and controls your body.

But don’t take my word for it.

Instead, think of the last time you were thirsty and drank a glass of water. Within seconds after drain-

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ing the last drops, you probably felt less thirsty. This event might seem ordinary, but water actually takes about 20 minutes to reach your bloodstream. Water can’t possibly quench your thirst in a few seconds. So what relieved your thirst? Prediction. As your brain plans and executes the actions that allow you to drink and swallow, it simultaneously anticipates the sensory consequences of gulping water, causing you to feel less thirsty long before the water has any direct effect on your blood.

YOUR BRAIN IS A PREDICTION ORGAN Predictions transform flashes of light into the objects you see. They turn changes in air pressure into recognizable sounds, and traces of chemicals into smells and tastes. Predictions let you read the squiggles on this page and understand them as letters and words and ideas. They’re also the reason why it feels unsatisfying when a sentence is missing its final.

In a very real sense, predictions are just your brain having a conversation with itself. A bunch of neurons make their best guess about what will happen in the immediate future, based on whatever combination of past and present that your brain is currently conjuring. Those neurons then announce that guess to neurons in other brain areas, changing their firing. Meanwhile, sense data from the world and your body injects itself into the conversation, confirming (or not) the prediction that you’ll experience as your reality.

In actuality, your brain’s predictive process is not quite so linear. Usually your brain has several ways to deal with a given situation, and it creates

a flurry of predictions and estimates probabilities for each one. Is that rustling sound in the forest due to the wind, an animal, an enemy fighter, or a shepherd? Is that long, brown shape a branch, a staff, or a rifle? Ultimately, in each moment, some prediction is the winner. Often, it’s the prediction that best matches the incoming sense data, but not always. Either way, the winning prediction becomes your action and your sensory experience.

So, your brain issues predictions and checks them against the sense data coming from the world and your body. What happens next still astounds me, even as a neuroscientist.

If your brain has predicted well, then your neurons are already firing in a pattern that matches the incoming sense data. That means this sense data itself has no further use beyond confirming your brain’s predictions.

What you see, hear, smell, and taste in the world and feel in your body in that moment are completely constructed in your head. By prediction, your brain has efficiently prepared you to act. When your predicting brain is right, it creates your reality.

When it’s wrong, it still creates your reality, and hopefully it learns from its mistakes: Your brain incorporates the prediction errors and updates its predictions, so it can predict better next time around.

WHICH COMES FIRST? PREDICTION OR ACTION? Now here’s the final nail in the coffin of common sense: All this predicting happens backward from the way we experience it. You and I seem to sense first and act second. But in your →

brain, sensing actually comes second.

Your brain is wired to prepare for action first.

Yes, your brain is wired to initiate your actions before you’re aware of them. That is kind of a big deal. After all, in everyday life, you do many things by choice, right? At least it seems that way. For example, you chose to read these words. But the brain is a predicting organ. It launches your next set of actions based on your past experience and current situation, and it does so outside of your awareness. In other words, your actions are under the control of your memory and your environment. Does this mean you have no free will? Who’s responsible for your actions?

Philosophers and other scholars have debated the existence of free will

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As the owner of a predicting brain, you have more control over your actions and experiences than you might think and more responsibility than you might want.

pretty much since the invention of philosophy. It’s not likely that we will settle that debate here. Nevertheless, we can highlight a piece of the puzzle that is often ignored.

Think about the last time you acted on autopilot. Maybe you bit your nails. Maybe your brain-to-mouth connection was too well oiled and you muttered something regrettable to a friend. Maybe you looked away from an engaging movie and discovered that you’d downed an entire jumbo bag of red Twizzlers. In these moments, your brain employed its predictive powers to launch your actions, and you had no feeling of agency. Could you have exercised more control and changed your behavior in the moment? Maybe, but it would have been difficult. Were you

neuroscience

responsible for these actions? More than you might think.

The predictions that initiate your actions don’t appear out of nowhere.

If you hadn’t chomped on your nails as a kid, you probably wouldn’t bite them now. If you’d never learned the regrettable words you tossed at your friend, you couldn’t say them now.

If you’d never developed a taste for licorice…you get the idea. Your brain predicts and prepares your actions using your past experiences. If you could magically reach back in time and change your past, your brain would predict differently today, and you might act differently and experience the world differently as a result.

It’s impossible to change your past, but right now, with some effort, you can change how your brain will predict in the future. You can invest a little time and energy to learn new ideas.

You can curate new experiences. You can try new activities. Everything you learn today seeds your brain to predict differently tomorrow.

REWIRE YOUR BRAIN, CHANGE YOUR EXPERIENCE As the owner of a predicting brain, you have more control over your actions and experiences than you might think and more responsibility than you might want. But if you embrace this responsibility, think about the possibilities. What might your life be like? What kind of person might you become?

Here’s a thought experiment: All of us have had a nervous feeling before a test, but for some people, this anxiety is crippling. Based on their past experiences of taking tests, their brains predict and launch a hammering heartbeat and sweaty hands, and they’re unable to complete the test. If this happens enough, they fail courses

or even drop out of school. But here’s the thing: A hammering heartbeat is not necessarily anxiety. Research shows that students can learn to experience their physical sensations not as anxiety but as energized determination, and when they do, they perform better on tests. That determination seeds their brains to predict differently in the future so they can get their butterflies flying in formation.

If they practice this skill enough, they can pass a test, perhaps pass their courses, and even graduate, which has a huge impact on their future earning potential.

It’s also possible to change predictions to cultivate empathy for other people and act differently in the future. An organization called Seeds of Peace tries to change predictions by bringing together young people from cultures that are in serious conflict, like Palestinians and Israelis, and Indians and Pakistanis. The teens participate in activities like soccer, canoeing, and leadership training, and they can talk about the animosity between their cultures in a supportive environment. By creating new experiences, these teens are changing their future predictions in the hopes of building bridges between the cultures and, ultimately, creating a more peaceful world.

You can try something similar on a smaller scale. Today, many of us feel like we live in a highly polarized world, where people with opposing opinions cannot even be civil to each other. If you want things to be different, I offer you a challenge. Pick a controversial political issue that you feel strongly about. In the United States, that might be abortion, guns, religion, the police, climate change, reparations for slavery, or perhaps a local issue that’s important to you. Spend five minutes per day deliberately considering the issue from the perspective of those you disagree with, not to have an argument with them in your head, but to understand how someone who’s just as smart as you can believe

the opposite of what you do.

I’m not asking you to change your mind. I’m also not saying this challenge is easy. It might feel pretty unpleasant or even pointless. But when you try, really try, to embody someone else’s point of view, you can change your future predictions about the people who hold those different views. If you can honestly say, “I absolutely disagree with those people, but I can understand why they believe what they do,” you’re one step closer to a less polarized world. This is not magical liberal academic rubbish. It’s a strategy that comes from basic science about your predicting brain.

While you might not be able to change your behavior in the heat of the moment, there’s a good chance you can change your predictions before the heat of the moment. With practice, you can make some automatic behaviors more likely than others and have more control over your future actions and experiences than you might think. ●

Excerpted from Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett.

Copyright © 2020 by Lisa Feldman Barrett.

Published and reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.

Droodles are excerpted from “The Ultimate Droodles Compendium ​— ​The Absurdly Complete Collection of All the Classic Zany Creations of Roger Price,” © 2019 Tallfellow Press, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Captions for the Droodles are: SUBMARINE GOING OVER A WATERFALL; SPIDER DOING A HANDSTAND; SKI JUMP AND SPECTATORS SEEN BY JUMPER. Tallfellow.com.

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PRACTICE

wellness

W H AT YO U R B O DY K N OWS B E FO RE YO U DO Michelle Maldonado offers a practice for tuning in to the wisdom of the body.

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work on how the brain predicts everything we do—how it’s creating our perceptions of reality—helps us see how we cocreate the conditions that we are all trying so desperately to transform. When the brain predicts what’s going to happen next, it’s pulling from a narrow data set called our life experience.

Or, more specifically, the conscious and subconscious imprint of our life experiences—that’s what colors our perception of the world, other people, ourselves, and our relationships. And we carry the information from all of our life experiences in our bodies, at the cellular level.

There’s wisdom in the body that we can benefit greatly from if we cultivate our awareness to notice it and access it. That’s why mindfulness is a critical practice that allows us to skillfully navigate the world by becoming more aware of the information our brains use to predict our social and affective realities when we tune in to our bodies.

CREATING A BODY MAP OF EMOTIONS

I like to help people create a body map that reveals how their life experiences are stored in their bodies. I start by inviting people to think of an emotion.

The one I usually pick is love.

I invite people to bring a person forward whom they really love, and then I ask them to pause, as they’re thinking about that person, and bring their attention to the body to notice what they are feeling: Are there specific locations where you notice something? What type of sensation do you notice in that location? Is it tingling? Is it warmth? Is it tightening, or is it blossoming like a flower?

Is it neutrality?

Next, we turn our attention to the quality and nature of our thoughts while we’re thinking of this person we love: What’s the accompanying narrative or story? We usually think things like: They’re amazing, they’re brilliant, they’re so sweet. Or, perhaps, we are reflecting on how they are suffering

in some way and we wish to help alleviate it. Then, after this reflection, I invite them to take a piece of paper and mark all of that sensory information on a silhouette of the human body, and label it “love.” And then we pick other emotions like frustration, anger, joy, or fear, and we create body maps for those emotions as well. In this way we can begin to understand the wisdom held in our bodies: where it sits, what it feels like, and what thoughts are associated with it.

Armed with this information, you can use it to check in with your body and mind any time of the day as you’re going about work, parenting, play, or anything else. For example, the next time you are in a work meeting, take a moment to do a quick body scan. Are your shoulders tight and hunched up by your ears, or are they relaxed and in a natural position? If you know from your body map that when you experience frustration you have corresponding sensations in your shoulders, that is a good first place to check in. When you

do, you can ask yourself, Am I frustrated about something right now? You might be frustrated without being aware that you’re frustrated—but your body knows.

One helpful and easy in-the-moment response could be to simply take three full, gentle breaths in and out with an intention to relax the shoulders and give your mind a moment to pause and reset. You can even accompany your breaths with an intention repeated silently to yourself—something like, “Breathing in, I do my best; breathing out, I reset.” By tuning in to your body’s wisdom, you are practicing mindfulness and self-awareness, both of which, in part, help you to more skillfully navigate life experiences and expand perceptions of your worldview and social realities.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Michelle Maldonado is Founder and CEO of Lucenscia, a firm dedicated to human flourishing and mindful business transformation She’s an internationally certified mindfulness and emotional intelligence teacher.

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BOOKMARK THIS read…listen…stream

by BARRY BOYCE, AMBER TUCKER, KYLEE ROSS, OYINDA LAGUNJU, and AVA WHITNEY-COULTER

AN ANATOMY OF PAIN How the Body and the Mind Experience and Endure Physical Suffering Abdul-Ghaaliq Lalkhen, MD • Scribner

Anyone whose doctor ever asked them to describe pain on a scale from 1 to 10 knows just how hazy our understanding of pain is. There is perhaps nothing more private, or more lonesome, than your own pain. Even though pain is the main event that causes us to seek medical attention, if a doctor can’t find the source of the pain, and treat it, they’re very unlikely to have much sophisticated help to offer you for managing the pain.

Dr. Lalkhen, who has been helping patients with pain for over two decades, and who is on the Faculty of Pain Medicine at UK Royal College of Anesthetists, hopes to advance all of our understanding—medical professionals and laypeople alike—of the subtleties of pain. And in so doing he asks that we get past some fundamental and harmful misconceptions: “Simply put, we need to stop viewing our bodies as machines that medicine can fix when they go wrong. If people are educated about their body and about pain, perhaps we might put an end to the undulating fashions of medical meddling—meddling that, in some cases, has far-reaching consequences appreciated only decades later.” The opioid epidemic is a prime example of one of these consequences.

His mission, he says, is to “explain pain in all its forms” so that with “renewed knowledge and understanding, we can become active participants in the art of caring, understanding, and coping with an experience that can become all-consuming.”

He fulfills his mission well, beginning with the anatomical mechanics of pain and a history of human relationships with pain, concluding with helpful prescriptions—including mindfulness—for changing our relationship to the way we suffer. – BB

68 mindful June 2021

LOVE WITHOUT REASON The Lost Art of Giving a F*ck LaRayia Gaston • Sounds True

This easy-to-read book is a friendly, motivating companion for those who want to make a difference in the world, but find themselves intimidated by big calls for even bigger solutions. LaRayia Gaston says it isn’t our personal responsibility to fix the world, but rather to try to have a positive impact on those around us. She offers stories and lessons on mindfulness, scarcity, and humanity from working with people experiencing

homelessness on Skid Row in LA. She reminds us why we should allow ourselves to care, and offers pathways to caring without being overwhelmed by the world’s problems. This message is interspersed with research on humanitarian issues and thoughtful quotes from authors, poets, and volunteers. Simple “heartwork” exercises suggest opportunities to take the content off the page and into your own life. – AWC

THE INVISIBLE CORSET Break Free from Beauty Culture and Embrace Your Radiant Self Lauren Geertsen • Sounds True

It’s easy to mistake The Invisible Corset for yet another selfhelp book, but you don’t need to dive too deep to realize it’s not. Opinions long perpetuated by culture—for example, the notion that “Beauty is pain”—have been taken as law and rooted as core aspects of how we view our bodies.

Although Geertsen is directly talking to women, her book

has a lesson for everyone.

Society enforces a lot of expectations, many of which are unattainable or unsustainable, and that, if internalized, are warped into self-hate. This book is for those ready to go beyond the idea of body love (in its more shallow versions) into self-love: from loving your body as it is, to loving your life as it is. – OL

PODCAST

MINDFULNESS FOR ADULT ADHD Lidia Zylowska, MD, and John T. Mitchell, PhD • Guilford Press

This manual for clinicians presents a wonderfully thorough, informative, and compassionate guide to the science and practice of applying mindfulness to treating ADHD in adults, from two authoritative voices. Lidia Zylowska, an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Minnesota, also wrote The Mindfulness Prescription for Adult ADHD (2012), which speaks directly to those diagnosed with ADHD. John T. Mitchell, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University and a faculty member in Duke’s ADHD Program, conducted the first controlled study of the mindfulness-based intervention (MBI) detailed in this book: MAPs (Mindful Awareness Practices) for ADHD, a program Zylowska pioneered.

Treating a so-called disorder of attention using the largely attentional tools of mindfulness might sound like a nonstarter. In fact, as the authors note, adult ADHD is a disorder of executive functioning and self-regulation: two areas addressed by both Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and MAPs, one of MBSR’s therapeutic descendants. In reviewing the research, the authors summarize that MBIs, “particularly MAPs, have demonstrated improvements in core symptoms of [ADHD] as well as characteristic features of the disorder, such as executive functioning and emotion dysregulation.”

The first section offers an overview and conceptual foundation, and a research review, of MAPs for ADHD—thoughtfully addressing such questions as “Is mindfulness training secular?”

“Is MAPs a group or individual therapy?” and “Can MAPs exercises be adapted for individuals with physical or sensory difficulties?” Next, the authors explore a session-by-session treatment manual, including scripts for mindfulness exercises. They explain the program’s structure, while emphasizing the need to creatively adapt that structure based on each patient’s needs.

Finally, in part 3, they place MBIs in the context of typical treatments for adult ADHD, and advise on next steps to consider with patients who have worked through the initial 8-week MAPs training. – AT

reviews HIGH IMPACT PHYSICIAN Episode: “The Science of Resilience (Dr. Jonathan Fisher)” Cardiologist and meditation teacher Dr. Jonathan Fisher wants us to consider how we’re taking care of our hearts. He isn’t strictly referring to the physical organ, but also to our minds and our hearts— emotionally. In this insightful conversation with host Sandy Scott, Fisher talks about stress and resilience through the

lens of cardiology and how promoting emotional wellbeing in health care can help patients and providers alike. “[Self-care] coincides with the evolution of healthcare,” Fisher says. Where healthcare advice was once prescriptive, we’re now moving toward “shared responsibility for caring for ourselves.” – KR

LIFE KIT Episode: “Poet Maggie Smith On ‘Trying On’ Hope” Maggie Smith wrote Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change at a time in her life when everything felt unsure. By mere happenstance, the book was released during a global pandemic when the world began collectively grappling with the same feelings.

Prompted by perceptive questions from host Kat Chow, Smith explains the “notes to

self” found in her book, in the context of holding on to hope with “self-pep talks” and daily practices like making time to do something “that makes you feel like you.” Smith says this felt like “trying on hope every day, even though it didn’t fit well, like it was scratchy and oversized.” But after a while, she says, she was able to connect with a “kinder story” about herself. – KR

VOX CONVERSATIONS Episode: “We don’t just feel emotions.

We make them.”

Neuroscientist, psychologist, and author Lisa Feldman Barrett talks to Vox Conversations host Ezra Klein in this densely scientific, but enlightening episode about emotions and how they don’t actually work the way we think they do. Feldman Barrett explains current research that shows emotions aren’t inherent in our biology, but

are constructed throughout our lives (the principle at the heart of Barrett’s 2017 book How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain). This highly individualized view of emotions means we’re past due for a major rethink of our systems, our behaviors, and even the way we understand reality (to learn more, see page 58). – AWC

June 2021 mindful 69

read, listen, stream

TUNE IN TO

mindful Visit mindful.org for featured meditations from Vinny Ferraro, Atman Smith, and Jon Kabat-Zinn 3 PRACTICES TO DEEPEN INTO LOVING-KINDNESS

1

Directing Compassion Toward Ourselves from Vinny Ferraro

We’re typically our own harshest critics. We tend to hide our flaws and mistakes, projecting a perfect outward image. In this practice, we can bring compassion to our imperfections and mistakes. This shift helps us approach the very difficulties that we’ve been desperately trying to avoid, so that they can become the sources of our awakening, of our wisdom, of equanimity. (For another practice with Vinny Ferraro, see page 40.)

2

Many a high school student has written what they were told was an essay or answered an “essay” question, but those versions lack the essential ingredient of a genuine essay, the kind invented by Michel de Montaigne in the 16th century, which wandered aimlessly.

Straying like a lost dog. Appropriately, Tom Lutz—Chair of the Department of Creative Writing at University of California, Riverside and founder and editor-in-chief of the LA Review of Books—begins this celebration of drifting and wandering by discussing the essay, after which he stumbles into poetry,

beginning with renowned Japanese poet Bashō, who encouraged readers to “listen recklessly.” Lutz doesn’t limit his beautifully haphazard musings to writing. He touches on workaholism, the nomadic life, restlessness, travel, and drugs, among many other topics, like a box marked “miscellaneous.”

To be without aim is not a lack in Lutz’s book. It is fulfilling. So as his lovely little book closes he seems to suggest that our endless striving to make and to do is most unnatural, for “There is nothing more natural than aimlessness, nothing more aimless than nature.” – BB

A Loving-Kindness Meditation for Your Loved Ones from Atman Smith

Relationships are complicated. Conflicts can arise in ways that make it difficult to express love to those we care about the most, or perhaps to those we care about who are no longer with us. In this practice, we focus on sending love to the people we hold dear in a way that is nonjudgmental, non-discriminatory, and honest. In this way, we tap into the love we already have around us and practice sending our dear ones love.

3

AIMLESSNESS Tom Lutz • Columbia University Press

Loving-Kindness Heartscape Meditation from Jon Kabat-Zinn

Loving-kindness can allow us to soften our approach to difficult events and emotions. Working with this intention allows us to observe pain and other difficult emotions without completely succumbing to them.

Compassion humanizes our emotions and makes them more approachable. In this guided practice, we observe difficult emotions in a way that embodies loving-kindness and compassion. This approach lets us be strengthened by our flaws and mistakes, not feel defeated by them. – OL

70 mindful June 2021

UNWINDING ANXIETY Judson Brewer, MD, PhD • Penguin Random House

“I had a lightbulb moment when I realized that one of the reasons so many people fail to see that they have anxiety is the way it hides in bad habits,” writes psychiatrist and neuroscience researcher Judson Brewer. You might expect that a book about the anxiety that permeates our lives right down to our habits—and why much of the conventional advice for dealing with it doesn’t work—is unlikely to be a rollicking good time. Unwinding Anxiety defies that expectation. It’s richly pragmatic, down-to-earth,

and (truly) fun to read, while making leading-edge neuroscience on habits and anxiety easy to grasp. Drawing from his own clinical practice, research, and personal experience, Brewer guides readers from identifying our anxiety triggers to understanding why we get trapped in fretful thought-loops. The result is an accessible guide to uncovering what you may unconsciously be doing that perpetuates your anxiety, and breaking the cycle through awareness and curiosity. – AT

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point of view

CAREFUL CARE-GIVING

by BARRY BOYCE, FOUNDING EDITOR

72 mindful June 2021

are limitations on long-accustomed freedoms (e.g., driving, hearing conversation, a healthy appetite, a good night’s sleep, meaningful livelihood, and so on). My learning has been helped along by a number of people who know mindful caregiving, such as Frank Ostaseski, Susan Bauer-Wu, Toni Bernhard, Judy Lief, and Dr. Christiane Wolf.

I rarely ask. I try finding ways to convey caring and let the other volunteer whatever it is they wish to offer or ask, to let them have more agency, rather than being the object of my caring. It’s possible to offer the gift of warm or cool space, what Frank Ostaseski calls “bringing your whole self to the experience” and finding “a place of rest in the middle of things.”

If you’re truly present, there will be pain, and your heart will break lots. I keep learning, though, how resilient the heart is. It can break limitlessly.

Among the first lessons I learned was that presence takes precedent over words. I would arrive at my mother’s nursing home wrapped up in my thoughts, distracted by my important little entrepreneurial pursuits, and end up talking at my mother rather than with her. When I slowed down, listened with my whole body, and attended to her fully, I noticed how much my heart was breaking and how I’d been trying to run from that.

If you’re truly present, there will be pain, and your heart will break lots. I keep learning, though, how resilient the heart is. It can break limitlessly.

I’ve learned that continually asking “How’re you doing?” or even “What can I do?” doesn’t necessarily offer real caring. It can force someone into an evaluating mindset. When you do that to yourself a lot, you become more anxious or claustrophobic, assessing rather than living. Now

You may even be able to anticipate someone’s wants or needs by observing or gently probing, trusting in the intuitive bond that can develop.

Continually touching in with your body rather than your chattering, narrative-making thought process can foster a non-verbal link that announces how much you care.

Thank heaven for the many caregivers who have given so much of themselves during the pandemic. In their embodiment of genuine caring they speak loudly and poignantly by repeatedly showing up. We owe them a great debt of gratitude. ●

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 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

My mother lived to 97, the last survivor of her generation within her family, her extended family, and her circles of friends. In her last years, her body was wracked with pain. As her pain and loss mounted, I saw how small my pains were by comparison and yet I complained as much or more. I better toughen up if I live that long, I thought.

Caring for her fell mostly to my brother and his wife, who lived nearby. I may have done as much harm as good trying to relieve their burden during my visits. Taking my mom out to lunch, I absentmindedly put her purse on the car roof before pulling off. Its contents, strewn along a highway, were fortunately recovered by a good Samaritan, but it took him a long time to figure out how to get in touch. I learned that day just how anxious a person in advanced age can become when routine is thrown all to hell. Another time, I thought I’d do my mother a favor by buying her a toaster oven, while in fact I created another fire hazard in her apartment for my brother to be concerned about.

When it comes to extending care to others, good intentions may indeed pave the road to hell. While I screwed up a lot, giving care to my mother did teach me a few things, and I’ve had to keep learning more, because it turns out that as you get older, you’re likely to be called upon to offer care for more and more people (not to mention learning to accept some care yourself ). Duh. With age comes infirmity, and lots of other complications that spring from that, many of which

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