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Don’t Tell Me What To Do

Since starting my training in Positive Psychology, I’ve been bombarded with all sorts of helpful suggestions about what I ought to do to make myself happier. “Make a daily list of five things you’re grateful for,” or “meditate every day,” or “exercise regularly,” or “clean your closets.” All good ideas, and I’m sure if I did them all I’d be a happier person. But as soon as someone else tells me what to do, I find myself resisting it. I know I’m not alone in this, because I’ve noticed that when I try to tell other people what to do to be happier, they don’t follow my instructions, either.

I guess I’ve always been suspicious of adopting other people’s rituals, which remind me of religion, which reminds me of manipulation. And I’m equally suspicious of the self-help gurus and celebrities that promise a quick fix of all my problems if I’ll just follow their five steps. It all feels fake and simplistic to me.

Still, as I’ve delved deeper into the scientific studies of how people actually make lasting change, I’ve become convinced by the experts’ view that the best way to change old habits or create new ones is by establishing new rituals. According to psychologists and neuroscientists, by practicing something new over and over, we create new neuropathways that eventually turn that new behavior into a pattern — a new habit. At that point, it takes much less energy (what we often refer to as “willpower”) to keep doing it.

It turns out human beings have very limited amounts of willpower. It’s why most people give up pretty quickly on New Year’s resolutions and other promises to change. The psychologist Roy Baumeister has studied this extensively, and found that creating new habits is far more effective than attempting to muster enough willpower each day to do something new. (His findings are explained in an excellent book he co-authored with journalist John Tierney called Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.)

So while I’ve resisted adopting other people’s rituals, I realized recently during a week-long Positive Psychology training immersion that to get the benefits, I don’t have to follow someone else’s practice; I can create my own. In fact, I’m much more likely to adopt a new habit if it’s something I came up with that suits my schedule and temperament than something someone else devised to suit theirs. In other words, I don’t have to clean my closets or make daily gratitude lists or write in a journal if I don’t want to. But if there’s something I do want to change – whether it’s developing certain qualities or dropping bad habits – I’m far more likely to be successful if I establish a daily practice that moves me in that direction. And I can use the wealth of evidence about the effectiveness of rituals to create a ritual that feels not like I’m fulfilling some external obligation imposed upon me, but one that I’ve chosen and created to help me pursue my own goals.

It may sound exhausting to have to do something new every day. (Another reason I’ve generally resisted it.) But making one decision in advance to do something and making it part of your daily routine drastically reduces the amount of mental energy involved. It would take far more willpower to re-convince yourself of the value of a new practice and to have to re-commit yourself each day to doing it.

And the truth is, we’re always practicing something. If we’re not consciously deciding what it is we want to practice, then we’re usually letting old habits decide for us. And often those aren’t taking us where we want to go.

Willpower, then, is not something that requires heroic strength. It’s simply a choice to use our awareness to make conscious choices. Creating a new ritual doesn’t have to demand Herculean effort. As Anthony Trollope, the prolific writer who never wrote more than three hours a day said: “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.” A new ritual can take all of five minutes to complete, depending on what it is and how you want to implement it. But it can make a big difference.

Don’t try to change too much at once, though. People who try to take on too many new behaviors at once often end up abandoning them all. Studies show that people who implement small changes, one or two at a time, are more likely to sustain them. Committing to them in the presence of someone else (such as a friend, spouse, coach, etc.), to whom you’ll feel accountable, also greatly improves your chances for success.

The biggest effort required is the decision to create and practice the new ritual itself. To overcome your inner skeptic’s resistance, make it your own.

 

 

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

A Hole in the World

images-4I came across Portia Nelson’s wonderful “Autobiography in Five Short Chapters” recently and wanted to share it here. It encapsulates perfectly the challenging and often painstaking process of changing our most entrenched and destructive patterns of mind.

 

“There’s a Hole in My Sidewalk”

Chapter 1

I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost… I am helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.

Chapter 2

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I am in the same place.
But, it isn’t my fault.
It still takes me a long time to get out.

Chapter 3

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in. It’s a habit.
My eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault. I get out immediately.

Chapter 4

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

Chapter 5

I walk down another street.

Since the terrorist attacks in Paris, I’ve also been thinking it applies equally to how we collectively, as a society and political order, approach our most vexing problems — only it’s not clear we ever get past the first couple of chapters.

“I would bring back waterboarding,” declared Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on ABC News’ Sunday show, This Week with George Stephanopolous, talking about how he would respond to terrorism if he were president.  Surely Trump doesn’t think that’s the answer, given the wealth of evidence that torture undermines rather than promotes national security. But with so many fearful Americans eager to see leaders do something, anything, to ensure their safety, Trump probably figured it would grab more headlines and score him more votes.

Donald Trump is an extreme case, of course, but whether it’s global warming, income inequality or terrorism, there seems to be a general societal instinct to respond immediately to our most entrenched problems with a defensiveness that clouds our ability to see our role in the problem and how our reactions perpetuate it.

An individual wanting to change can make a commitment to approaching the situation with renewed awareness and, eventually, choose to walk down a different path. But how can we do that as a society, in a political system governed by leaders focused only on short-term gains?

 

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

“Killing People is Too Superficial”

images-3I love riding my bike, but lately I’ve noticed that within minutes of setting off on a ride in the city, I usually want to kill someone.

I love the feel of the breeze, and the ease of getting around far faster than walking and without waiting in lines of backed-up automobile traffic. But I find I’m also on hyper-alert for danger – a car parked in a bike lane, a spaced-out pedestrian crossing the street, a monster-sized SUV speeding up behind me.

That reaction is understandable, even necessary. But living with that kind of vigilance also gives me a warped view of the world around me, leaving me feeling like a victim of what seems like the city’s endlessly aggressive energy. It’s exhausting.

As psychologist Rick Hansen explains, “humans evolved to be fearful — since that helped keep our ancestors alive — so we are very vulnerable to being frightened and even intimidated by threats, both real ones and “paper tigers.’ ” This is part of our brain’s “negativity bias” – we react more intensely to negative stimuli than to equally strong positive ones. As Hansen puts it, “the brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones.”

So my intense reaction to someone making a wrong move – opening a car door without looking or swerving their truck into my bike lane – may be perfectly natural. But cursing out the careless driver or pedestrian, fantasizing that I had a rock to throw at his windshield, isn’t actually a very helpful response.  In fact, it can ruin my bike ride, or at least make it much more stressful than it needs to be, which also makes it more dangerous.

Plus, it can send me on a downward spiral: I start to feel like riding a bike in the city is just a lethal exercise. Then, I wonder, why do I live in a city where everyone is out to kill me?  Finally, I turn it inward, and I’m just angry at myself for living in this crazy place.

I think the key to anger and fear of any sort is perspective—stepping back to see what’s underlying it, and how our minds, caught up in those emotions, distort reality. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t let ourselves experience them. As psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar says, the only people who don’t experience painful emotions like fear and anger “are the psychopaths and the dead.” The key, it seems, is to let yourself experience the emotion, but to pause before reacting to it – or at least to question your reaction, if it’s automatic.

Marshal Rosenberg, a psychologist who created a powerful method of conflict resolution called Nonviolent Communication, talked about anger as a sign of unmet needs. If we can recognize the anger, pause, and identify our unmet needs, he explained, we can focus our energies on meeting those needs, rather than on judging or harming other people. That turns out to be far more productive.

“Killing people is too superficial,” Rosenberg wrote in his groundbreaking book, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. The process he recommends “does not encourage us to ignore, squash or swallow anger, but rather to express the core of our anger fully and wholeheartedly.” That would be after figuring out what needs are underlying it.

In the case of riding my bike, of course, my need is for safety. And yelling at the person who just stepped in my way isn’t going to make me any safer. It may do the opposite. What will make me safer, and what I’m increasingly trying to do, is to just accept that there are some people on the road who will park or walk in the bike lane, and that they’re going to do it whether I fume at them or not. If I can accept that it will happen and be alert to but relaxed about it, I don’t have to get so angry.

My anger also compounds the problem by distorting my perception of the situation: most of these people aren’t actually trying to hurt me, they’re just not paying attention. In fact, if I think about it, far more people are actually complying with the traffic restrictions than aren’t. Cars are parked in a line all along one side of the bike lane, and the vast majority are not crossing it.  The same is true for the people driving the cars in the street; although some are careless, most actually don’t cross into the bike lane, or try to hit me when they pass me by. I rarely stop to think about that (that’s the Teflon at work), but keeping it in mind can help me relax and direct my anger at the transgressors a bit more skillfully.

The truth is, the anger that arises in these sorts of situations can be really useful, if understood and well-directed. Cyclists’ anger at the dangers posed by motor vehicle drivers has led to an impressive movement in New York City to support more, safer, and more visible bike lanes around the city. Transportation Alternatives is one of the advocacy groups leading that effort, and I think it’s done a great job harnessing and directing cyclists’ and pedestrians’ anger about the very real dangers on city streets, including calling attention to the deadly car crashes that happen on pretty much a daily basis.  It’s a great model for how to use anger to promote a common good.

But learning to respond to anger constructively isn’t easy. It takes conscious intention, effort and practice. Which is yet another reason to get out and ride.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

The Power of Positive Psychology

istock_000005349409xsmall-300x299I’m taking a certification course in “positive psychology,” and I’ve realized lately that I feel a little sheepish telling people about it. There’s something about the idea of studying something so unabashedly “positive” that sounds a little silly, fake, Pollyannaish.

It also sounds very corporate, like the kind of thing they’d teach in business school so owners can convince employees that they’re really happy toiling away at meaningless jobs while they’re actually being exploited to make the owner huge profits.

Of course that’s not what “positive psychology” is really about, although it has become popular in the business world. It’s actually a growing branch of the field of psychology taught at such eminent universities as the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard.  Still, I’m realizing that I’ve so bought into the popular culture of cynicism that it feels like it takes an act of courage to admit I’m interested in what makes people happy. After all, given what’s going on in the world these days, (and especially what we see in the news), what right does anyone have to be happy?

As a therapeutic tool, the term “positive psychology” doesn’t inspire much confidence, either: it sounds like learning to sweep all the painful stuff under the rug and to just look at the bright side, which doesn’t seem like a very honest or effective strategy.

That’s not how the lead course instructor, psychologist and Harvard lecturer Tal Ben-Shahar, describes it. In his talks and books – some of which I’ve read and think are very good and not at all simplistic – he describes positive psychology as a sort of antidote to the field of psychology’s traditional focus on the negative – the pathologies and illness that make people suffer. He wants to focus on what works: what makes people happy, successful, and fulfilled.

But isn’t that just looking at the other side of the same coin? I wondered initially. People who aren’t happy, successful or fulfilled tend to be depressed, anxious and neurotic, right? So what difference does it make if we ask them why they’re depressed and anxious, as opposed to what makes them happy?

From what I can tell so far, the difference appears to be the focus. Let’s say I’m depressed and anxious because I hate my job, for example. I can focus on why I hate my job – because my boss is an idiot, or the work seems meaningless, or the hours are too long – and those would all be legitimate reasons to be miserable and want to quit. After all, it’s normal and even healthy to want our work to be fulfilling and in balance with the rest of our lives.

But I think a positive psychologist would first ask a few key questions. What do I like about my job? When do I enjoy it, or find my work interesting or fulfilling? The idea wouldn’t be to ignore my negative feelings, but if I can find and focus on the positive ones, that may lead me to a broader understanding of what’s going on, and to a wider range of options. Once I’ve identified what I like, I can consider how I might be able to increase those parts of my work. In the process, I can consider how I might decrease the parts I don’t like. For example, if a toxic boss is the problem, maybe I can limit contact with her, do the things that I know will satisfy her and get her off my back, or explore whether it might be possible to report to someone else. Now I have more options than just quitting, which may or may not solve my problem, since I don’t know what my next boss or colleagues or workplace situation will be like.

One advantage of positive psychology seems to be that it puts us in a position of power rather than leaving us stuck, feeling helpless. (Interestingly, the man considered the founder of the modern “positive psychology” movement, former American Psychological Association president Martin Seligman, is the same psychologist who coined the phrase “learned helplessness,” in which an animal or human being has learned she has no control over a bad or painful situation and therefore stops trying to change it.)

Positive psychology also reveals how much power we have to affect other people in a positive way. Rather than criticizing or focusing on what’s wrong with others, we can be the voice of encouragement, the one who finds the jewel in those around us and helps them polish it.

I was driving as I was thinking about this, returning home after a particularly grueling period of work, for which I was feeling generally unappreciated.  I turned on public radio. Terri Gross, host of the show “Fresh Air,” was interviewing country singer-songwriter Iris DeMent about her new album.

DeMent, who writes and sings soulful, plaintive songs in an oddly appealing high-pitched twang, was describing growing up as the youngest of 14 children in a religious Pentecostal Christian family. While music and singing were a big part of her upbringing, mostly connected to the church, school wasn’t, and she dropped out of high school by the 10th grade.

At 23, she decided to go back. DeMent had always loved writing stories, she said, and though she had little confidence in her writing ability, she enrolled in an English class at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas. What she remembers about it was her teacher who, instead of commenting on the misspellings and bad grammar that littered her papers, would praise her imagination and creativity.

“She was so kind to me and so – just little, simple teacher notes, you know?” DeMent told Gross, her voice trembling as she recounted it. “But her red pen, you know, she’d say these really kind things and – you know, you have an imagination. You got the – and it encouraged me. She didn’t criticize what I didn’t know how to do.”

DeMent “sunk herself into that class,” she said, and then took another. She soon wrote her first song. From then on, she knew that was what she had to do.

From her telling of it, that one teacher, who saw and focused on the best in her, made all the difference. And that, from what I can tell, is the power of positive psychology.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

How to Help

Refugees-at-Bicske-railwa-009It seems almost impossible these days to listen to the news without getting depressed.  Whether it’s the flood of refugees fleeing war-torn Syria or another idiotic inflammatory statement by Donald Trump, the deluge of information about the world’s disasters and our political system’s incapacity to respond effectively often leaves me feeling hopeless.

What can any of us possibly do to help?

I hear the question a lot these days.  I was listening to WNYC radio the other day when Brian Lehrer was interviewing a BBC journalist reporting on refugees arriving in the Balkans. A woman from suburban Westchester called in, sounding almost desperate.  “I think the Syria story has touched us immensely,” she said. “I feel personally an incredible frustration… what can we do to make these people’s lives better?”

It’s an understandable, even laudable, reaction.  We all have a natural desire to help people in need. And while we can give money to aid organizations, or sign a petition asking our government to do more to help, I think there’s a human desire to want to do something more direct, something where we see the result of our efforts and feel some real connection to those who are suffering. At a deeper level, I think we want to feel our own lives are about something that matters — something beyond the daily grind of our jobs or household obligations.

With the 24-hour bad news blaring, it can be difficult to remember that how each of us lives our lives – whether at the front lines of a humanitarian disaster or in a comfortable middle-class suburb — can actually make a big difference.

I’m reminded of this quote by the German poet Johan Wolfgang von Goethe:

I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized.

I heard this recently from a meditation teacher, Christina Feldman, in one of her many excellent talks (available online here). Feldman was underscoring the power of our minds to determine our own moods, perspective and experience, and thereby also our actions.  Those things, in turn, shape our world, as they shape the world of those around us.

Feldman often cites the Buddhist teaching that what we dwell upon frequently becomes the shape of our minds. The shape of our minds, of course, shapes how we see the world, and how we see and interact with others in it.

We may not have the power to provide safe havens for the thousands of refugees fleeing war zones daily, or even to get Donald Trump to stop talking — though we can turn off CNN. But we have a great deal of power over how we view and respond to the world. And that is one way that we can actually make our lives matter.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

The Refreshing Practice of Repentance

images-1“We are not in bondage to even our most grievous mistakes,” says Louis Newman, a professor of religious studies at Carleton College in Minnesota.  I find that helpful to consider today, on Yom Kippur, the Jewish holiday of repentance.

For anyone observing the holiday or just interested generally in the subject of repentance — not as an immersion in guilt but as an opportunity for renewal — it’s worth listening to Krista Tippett’s interview with Louis Newman on her NPR show, On Being.

Newman, who wrote a book on repentance, approaches the idea as a practice that’s healing, rather than punishing. So long as we’re willing to look honestly at what we’ve done, make amends, and choose another path, we can be healed.

As Newman tells Tippett, our human tendency to run away from the bad things we’ve done, to hide them or pretend they never happened, actually keeps us in bondage to them. Repentance, on the other hand, “is about coming to terms with who we really are.” It’s about claiming and owning our own mistakes, with an understanding that deep down our essence is good. So by repenting and correcting our path, Newman says, we can “return to the original wholeness that we strayed from.”

What’s more, you don’t have to change everything altogether in order to acknowledge and correct a past wrong. Even small changes may be effective and allow you to set a new course, says Newman. “If you’re headed in one direction, and you turn only one or two degrees,” he explains, “over an extended period of time if you now walk in that direction” instead of in the one you were headed in before, you’ll end up in a completely different place.  In other words, we don’t have to make a radical move to make a meaningful change.  We need only acknowledge that we must pay attention to a particular habit or weakness or failing that’s caused harm, and act differently next time.

That’s how change begins.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

Balancing the Terrible and the Beautiful

The_ScreamAnyone involved in social justice work of one sort or another, whether providing direct services or advocating for better laws and policies, will find themselves spending an awful lot of their consciousness wallowing in the world’s muck. It can be exhausting. It also sometimes leads to the obvious question: why am I doing this?

Of course, we get involved in social justice work not because it’s fun, exactly, but because it seems meaningful. Living a happy and fulfilling life is ultimately as much about finding meaning as it is about pleasure, as thinkers from Aristotle to “positive psychologists” like Martin Seligman and increasingly, even neuroscientists have recognized.

Still, throwing yourself into a cause to the detriment of other parts of your life doesn’t turn out to be so fulfilling. Early in my career, for example, first as a lawyer and then as a journalist, I tended to throw myself headlong into a new project, abandoning other interests and neglecting my own mental and physical health – and often, the people around me. Whatever it took to succeed, I thought, I would do. Each time, though, after a few years, the “success” wasn’t what I had hoped – the injustice I was fighting was still there, and my personal success didn’t feel as good as I’d expected. I ultimately felt frustrated, exhausted and defeated. Plus I wasn’t very pleasant to be around. Eventually I would quit and move on to something else.

The psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar writes about the perfectionist tendency many of us have that leads us to believe something is only worth doing if we do it perfectly or 100%. This necessarily means neglecting other things in our lives, as well as ourselves. That tends to be self-defeating. In part, that’s because we keep moving the goal post further away as we approach it, so we never feel we’ve really succeeded. At the same time, the things we’ve neglected are often important, and in fact, nurture the other goals. “To ignore one’s feelings and needs,” writes Shahar, “is a prescription for unhappiness and, ultimately, failure.” Instead of perfectionism, he recommends “optimalism” – doing the best you can balancing all the things that are important to you, but accepting reality (including your limitations) as it is – not insisting it’s what you think it should be.

Social justice advocacy represents a twist on the perfectionist problem, because at first, it feels virtuous to focus 100% on the work. But that means not only neglecting other things (and people) in your life, but also immersing yourself in events or other people’s lives that may be traumatic, not just for clients but for service providers and advocates as well. It can also lead to “compassion fatigue,” making us ultimately less effective.

So advocates face a dilemma: how much can we focus our work on awful things while still living a good life? And can we enjoy our lives and our own good fortune, without feeling guilty about it?

Ultimately, we all have to engage in a constant balancing act, juggling passionate advocacy with soothing self-care — and a keen awareness of our immediate interactions with the world around us. It also requires keeping in mind that happiness is not a finite resource: you don’t owe it to your clients or to any larger cause to be miserable.

Here are some guidelines for doing that:

First, you don’t have to spend ALL your waking hours immersed in awful and depressing subjects. Continue to pursue other, more uplifting interests (for me, it’s coaching and writing), which offer different perspectives on the world and remind you it isn’t all horrible.

Second, take care of yourself, physically and emotionally. For me, that means regular exercise, yoga, and meditation.

Third, be patient and careful about how you define “success.” I know, for example, that my efforts aren’t going to eliminate human rights abuses, no matter how hard I try. My role will be merely one small piece of a larger effort made by many dedicated people, that’s frustrating for all of them, but still worth doing. I’m lucky to have the opportunity to be among them. I can do my best at the work, but my sense of personal fulfillment can’t hinge on its outcome.

And finally, it’s just as important to treat the people and the world in my immediate surroundings with as much care and patience as I treat any cause. Because no matter how hard we work, our impact on them will be much more direct.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

Be Here Now

The cover of the book Be Here Now by Ram Dass
The cover of the book Be Here Now by Ram Dass

Whenever I start to do something, I have an annoying habit of wondering if I should be doing something else. Whether it’s reading, or writing, checking e-mail or doing household chores, or even relaxing on a Saturday afternoon, I often have this nagging feeling that there’s something else better or more important or more meaningful I should be doing. I’ve noticed the same thought pattern seems to plague some of my coaching clients, too.

We’re often told we should “make the most of every moment” or “live life to the fullest” because our lives are so short, but I find that also creates a lot of pressure:  How do we make the most of every moment? How do we know if we’re living our lives to the fullest? What does that even mean? I think that’s a lot of what’s behind that nagging feeling I often have that I should be doing something else.

The best answer I’ve heard to this dilemma was from a woman I know who was diagnosed with cancer seven years ago. After her diagnosis, she said, people would say to her: “well, carpé diem – enjoy your life now!”  It left her feeling confused and frustrated. What was she supposed to do, go skydiving?

“I’ve come to realize that what it means for me,” she said recently, “is just be present.” Be present for whatever you’re doing, whenever you’re doing it, whether it’s talking with a friend or drinking your morning cup of coffee. Really be there. Have the experience. If it’s a good one, you can savor it. If it’s an unpleasant one, stick around, because there’s probably something you can learn from it. Either way, show up for it – stop worrying about what else might be out there that you don’t know about; stop planning for the future or stewing about the past.

This is the essence of mindfulness. In his book, Choose the Life You Want: The Mindful Way to Happiness, psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar advises readers to read — and re-read — an essay written by Helen Keller that appeared in the January 1933 issue of The Atlantic.

Titled Three Days to See, the essay concludes:

I who am blind can give one hint to those who see — one admonition to those who would make full use of the gift of sight: Use your eyes as if tomorrow you would be stricken blind. And the same method can be applied to the other senses. Hear the music of voices, the song of a bird, the mighty strains of an orchestra, as if you would be stricken deaf tomorrow. Touch each object you want to touch as if tomorrow your tactile sense would fail. Smell the perfume of flowers, taste with relish each morsel, as if tomorrow you could never smell and taste again. Make the most of every sense; glory in all the facets of pleasure and beauty which the world reveals to you through the several means of contact which Nature provides. But of all the senses, I am sure that sight must be the most delightful.

Since reading this, when I find myself restless or dissatisfied, I’ll occasionally close my eyes for a few moments, just to imagine what it would be like not to see.  When I open them, I have a renewed appreciation for what I find.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

You Can’t Own It All

jetskier

When I go on vacation, I like to find a remote and quiet spot. In fact, much of the reason I go on vacation is to escape the sounds of sirens and jackhammers and car alarms and blaring music I confront on a daily basis in New York City.

Inevitably, though, when I get to my carefully chosen vacation destination, I’m at least a little bit disappointed. There are other people there, for one thing, and they’re usually doing things I don’t like.

Yesterday, as I sat on the deck of the rustic cabin we’d rented for a week along the coast of Maine, for example, I was suddenly shocked out of my reverie by the roar of speeding engines:  a family on jet skis, screaming and whooping as they circled round and round the quiet cove we’d spent a chunk of our savings to spend a week on.

I could feel my stomach tie into knots, and all that compassion I’ve trained to muster fly right out the window.  I wanted to kill these people.  Literally.  It wasn’t just my peace and quiet they were destroying, I was thinking.  I imagined the local harbor seals rushing off in terror, the sea birds abandoning their nests, and the jet skis leaving behind a slick of oil that would sink behind them into the ocean water. They were not only destroying my peace of mind, but they were destroying the planet. I was outraged.

There’s a curious possessiveness that comes over me when I come to a place like this. On the one hand, I feel immediately relaxed just visiting here, being so close to nature. Yet almost immediately, I start to feel like I want to own it. I check Trulia for house prices and start fantasizing about how I’d fix up this run-down rental cottage if it were mine.  Something about liking the place makes me want to possess it, to control it, to keep it for myself.  And as with any sort of grasping, that desire makes me suffer. Even if I could afford a waterfront cabin in Maine, which I can’t, it wouldn’t be enough:  I couldn’t possibly own, and control, the entire wilderness.

The jet skiers brought that point home. It’s a similar sort of grasping, a desire to own and control, that leads to the sort of destruction and disruption of precious nature that I saw the jet-skiiers engaged in. Their aim, too, was to “own” the bay, but they weren’t just imagining what it would be like; they were seizing the whole harbor and turning it into their play area. That excluded anyone else who might be there seeking more quiet enjoyment.

This all reminds me of a memorable passage in philosopher Michel Serres’ book The Natural Contract:

I’ve often remarked that, just as certain animals piss on their territory so that it stays theirs, many men mark and dirty the things they own by shitting on them, in order to keep them, or shit on other things to make them their own. This stercoraceous or excremental origin of property rights seems to me a cultural source of what we call pollution, which, far from being an accidental result of involuntary acts, reveals deep intentions and a primary motivation.

Let’s have lunch together: when the salad bowl is passed, all one of us has to do is spit in it and it’s all his, since no one else will want any more of it. He will have polluted that domain and we will consider dirty that which, being clean only to him, he now owns. No one else ventures again into the places devastated by whoever occupies them in this way. Thus the sullied world reveals the mark of humanity, the mark of its dominators, the foul stamp of their hold and their appropriation.

A living species, ours, is succeeding in excluding all the others from its niche, which is now global: how could other species eat or live in that which we cover with filth? If the soiled world is in danger, it’s the result of our exclusive appropriation of things.

Ironically, one of the only ways to protect natural land these days, it seems, is to buy it – hence The Nature Conservancy was created to buy large tracts to protect the wilderness from “development” – that is, from people defecating on it.

Most of us can’t afford to buy hundreds of acres to preserve. And so we travel ever farther – in earth-destroying automobiles and airplanes – to find that peace and quiet and natural beauty we all viscerally long for, yet which human “development” – stemming in part from our desire to possess and control — has increasingly destroyed.

Inevitably, this grasping will lead not only to the destruction of our own peace of mind, as we arrive at our destination only to find ourselves surrounded by car traffic and jet skis, but to the destruction of the planet itself.

How can this possibly change? Given the short-term thinking that controls our culture, Serres points out, our political system has failed to address this. He believes we need politicians who are not just lawyers but also scientists and philosophers, which sounds like a good idea. We certainly need politicians who are sufficiently enlightened and independent to be able to promote and motivate others to support our collective long-term interests.

I reached a similar conclusion myself the other day, in a different context. I was speaking to a class of foreign law students about human rights advocacy, particularly in the face of the endless war our country seems to have embraced. I ended with the usual lament that with our current state of politics, with politicians serving their own short-term interests, which often turn out to be the interests of defense contractors, it’s hard to imagine significant change anytime soon. Certainly international human rights law wasn’t going to accomplish it. One of the students refused to accept that downer of an answer, and asked:  So what would change things?  I thought about it, and realized that the only thing I could imagine is a new kind of politician – a long-term thinker interested in more than his or her own re-election and willing to stand up to the powerful short-term interests that control much of our society.

Of course, there are small changes that happen in small ways, and I don’t mean to diminish those. But anyone who believes in anything faces the constant challenge of appreciating what you’re doing without getting too hung up on its limitations – and angry at the people creating them. That can be hard.

I’ve managed to enjoy my time in Maine despite the obnoxious jet-skiiers  (thank god they go in at low tide) and the sound of cars in the distance whizzing by on the local highway.  I’ve had to remind myself that I, too, share that tendency to grasp, possess and control things, so focusing on how other people have done the same (albeit in what I consider a more destructive manner) is a bit absurd.  I’ve also made a point of taking time out each day to meditate, to encourage a sense of inner peace and stillness, wherever I am and whatever’s going on around me. (I’ve found the meditation app Headspace really helpful for that, by the way, and recommend it for anyone who has trouble meditating on her own.)

I still think jet skis ought to be outlawed and all our use of motor vehicles more strictly regulated.  And I’ll do everything in my power to support those sorts of policies, whether advocating for more bike lanes back in the city or voting for whatever political candidate seems to truly share my concerns.

But I know – and will continually have to remind myself – that I can’t hinge my happiness on the outcome.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

You Are Not Who You Think You Are

1379524090-self+other+smallWhen I was a child, I used to regularly freak myself out by the thought that one day I would no longer exist. How could I – my consciousness – simply disappear from the world, when to me, at least, it had always been there? Something about the disappearance of my self terrified me.

Looking back on it, it seems a little silly, since I won’t actually have the experience of not being conscious when it happens. But that sense of self – a sense that “I” exist in some fundamental, immutable way – is something pretty basic to the human experience.

As an adult, I’ve come to realize that it’s exactly that sense of the self as a concrete, identifiable thing that makes us suffer so much. And that the more we can release our grip on it, accept the “self” as a more fluid concept of ever-changing consciousness, the happier we’ll be.

Think about it. Much of our suffering comes from either regretting the past or worrying about the future. We regret the past because of a sense that “I” did something wrong – as if “I” were one immutable being to be constantly judged and evaluated. In fact, all of those judgments – of ourselves and of others – come from an assumption of a core “self” that we tend to see as good or bad, deserving of praise or blame. If there were no solid, core self, the judgments would lose a lot of their force. We might not like something we (or someone else) said or did, but that doesn’t have to entail a judgment about who we (or they) are. It’s a lot easier to let that go and move on.

The same for our worries about the future. What if I don’t get what I want – money, fame or love, for example? If “I” am not such a solid entity that I can judge as successful, attractive, or lovable, then not being those things is no longer such a tragedy. “I” am not a failure – maybe I just didn’t get something I wanted this time.

Too much sense of self actually makes it difficult for us to act and interact with others in the world: the more “self-conscious” we are the more paralyzed we feel.

Of course, it’s normal to have some sense of self, and even necessary for healthy functioning. As psychologist Rick Hanson explains in his book, Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom, which I’ve written about before here, we’re born with a sense of self, which develops over time. This was important for evolutionary purposes, Hanson explains, since a sense of self is important to reading others and expressing ones own self effectively, which was necessary to form alliances, mate and keep children alive.

Today, a sense of self is still necessary to having a sense of continuity over time, forming relationships and taking responsibility for one’s actions. Indeed, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor describes the modern sense of self as defined by how we judge actions and define a good life — our moral beliefs and values.

But that concept of self is not solid; it can change and develop over time. In the brain, “the self is continually constructed, deconstructed, and constructed again,” says Hanson, forming a conscious experience that seems coherent and continuous, but isn’t really. The self is ultimately composed of a myriad of causes and conditions, and continues to evolve in response to new causes and conditions, including those we create. Surrounding ourselves by loving people, living a healthy lifestyle, and practicing compassion, for example. The problem arises when we get caught up in seeing ourselves, or others, as fixed entities – bad or good, valuable or worthless. That’s all a fabrication of our minds.

Unfortunately, our culture encourages that. Politicians talk of other people as “evil,” and may brand whole groups of people, or cultures, as “barbaric,” backward or violent, often as a way of seeking or maintaining power. Companies try to sell us products by suggesting we’ll be someone better, more successful or more desirable if we have them. And on a personal level, we routinely apply those sorts of labels to ourselves. How often have you called yourself “stupid,” “lazy” or worse, simply for making a mistake or not getting something done?

Our judgments, our expectations and our hatred and anger pretty much all come from assumptions about the solidity of a “self” that are just flat-out wrong. As Hanson explains it:

from a neurological standpoint, the everyday feeling of being a unified self is an utter illusion: the apparently coherent and solid “I” is actually built from many subsystems and sub-subsystems over the course of development, with no fixed center, and the fundamental sense that there is a subject of experience is fabricated from myriad, disparate moments of subjectivity.

I probably wouldn’t have been comforted by that as a child, when I was freaking out about the fact that one day “I” would not exist. But as an adult, I see it as hopeful. Whatever or whoever we are we’re always changing, and have a lot of power to shape that process. We can dislike something we or someone else did, but let those judgments land lightly. They’re something to learn from and use to influence our future choices. But in most cases, “I” – or its eventual disappearance — is not something anyone needs to suffer over.

As Hanson puts it: “who you are as a person – dynamically intertwined with the world – is more alive, interesting, capable and remarkable than any self.”

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting