Category: mindfulness

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

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

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

Tend Your Own Garden

DEKale
The kale in my garden.

Roger Cohen has found the secret to happiness, he claims in his latest New York Times column, musing on what awaits his daughter after high school graduation. “Want to be happy?” he asks. “Mow the lawn,” he advises. “Life is a succession of tasks rather than a cascade of inspiration, an experience that is more repetitive than revelatory, at least on a day-to-day basis. The thing is to perform the task well and find reward even in the mundane.”

I appreciate the sentiment. Life isn’t always fun and exciting, and if you’re always expecting it to be, you’ll find yourself frequently disappointed. Still, this doesn’t represent the whole picture, especially for someone thinking about how they want to chart their path in life – or, later in life, whether and how to change course. Yes, you want to find joy in ordinary tasks like mowing the lawn, but first you need to decide: do you even want a lawn? That’s a better place to start.

Sure, Cohen is right that most things worthwhile don’t come easy – whether love, friendship, caretaking, advocating for what you believe in or making great art. But the key to happiness isn’t just putting your head down and doing what’s in front of you. It’s getting to know yourself well enough so you know what’s really important to you, naming those things, and making them central in your life as you pursue them.  Yes, there will be difficulties and challenges along the way, and a good end-goal in itself isn’t sustainable; you need to find pleasure in the path.  But if you haven’t stopped long enough to decide what you really want in life and let others decide that for you, it’s going to be really hard to do all those inevitably mundane repetitive tasks involved without getting really resentful.

I see this often with coaching clients. They’ve committed to some goal that intellectually they’ve decided has value – maybe it will earn them some money they need or status they’d like to have — but their heart isn’t really in it. They believe it’s what they should do, but it’s not a path they feel they’ve really chosen for themselves. So they suffer every step of the way.

Of course, there are lots of things we need to do that we don’t want to, and they often involve making a living. But within those requirements, we have some choices, even if only over the way we think about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. The more you feel like it’s the choice you’ve made for a purpose you’ve chosen – even if it’s unpleasant sometimes – the easier it will be to find joy in the process.

The same goes for mowing the lawn. I, for one, don’t really like lawns. Worse than lawns, to me, are lawnmowers. Using loud heavy machinery to cut delicate green plants seems absurd to me, and the sound of the motor ruins my whole experience of being outdoors to begin with. But that’s just me. Mowing the lawn wouldn’t be my path to happiness.

On the other hand, I have a garden at my home in Brooklyn, which I love. Yes, it requires a lot of work, and sometimes that feels like a burden. But I enjoy the peaceful feeling of being among plants and flowers and birds and squirrels, and I love just looking at it from my back deck or my office window. It takes the edge off urban life for me. So to me, pulling weeds out of the barrel of kale I’ve grown or clipping dead roses to encourage new buds to bloom is a pleasure. It’s the task I’ve chosen, and it has meaning to me.

Figure out what you want to plant, then tend it. That’s where true happiness lies.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

A Deceptively Simple Practice

rumiI’ve written before about my difficulties with a daily meditation practice, but since I’m increasingly convinced of the benefits of mindfulness meditation and other forms of mind training on health and overall well-being, I was particularly pleased to come across a short meditation recently that’s both easy and effective.

It’s also a great coaching tool.

I spent five days on a wonderful retreat at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health last month, learning about the neuroscience of Buddhism and yoga. Jim Hopper, a psychologist and neuroscientist who teaches at Harvard Medical School and co-led the retreat, introduced us to a simple but powerful practice.  It’s perfect for those of us who sometimes feel we’ve veered off track from what we really care about, and need some help re-focusing on what that is — or what it may have become over time — and how to incorporate more of it into our lives.

Adding a slight twist to a popular quote from the 13th century Persian poet, Rumi, Hopper turned it into the following meditation:  “May I be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what I really love.”

Simple.  Yet I found that when I sat and quieted my mind, then spent some time focusing on that one line, something happened.  What I really love came to mind:  people, places, passions.  And I felt sincerely motivated to make them a more central part of my life.

I’ve returned to this meditation repeatedly since then, and have just allowed it to have its effect.  It’s not pushing or forcing anything, just allowing whatever comes up.  And I’ve found it not only motivating, but strangely soothing.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

Advocacy + Complexity of Mind = Patience

ME_113_PatienceOne of the hardest things about being an advocate is the slow pace of change. As advocates, we assume we know the answer to how to fix some vexing problem, and it’s just incredibly frustrating that the powers-that-be don’t seem to get it. We have to repeat ourselves interminably and try to come up with new, ever-more-creative ways of saying the same thing simply in order to feel like we’re being heard. It can be exasperating.

So I found it encouraging to read Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s book called Immunity to Change: How to Overcome it and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization. Although their book is most helpful for providing a simple and effective method for challenging our own built-in immunities to doing things differently – which I’ll write more about another time — before they even get there, the authors, experts in adult learning and development, first explain the importance of complex thinking, which involves the ability in all situations to see beyond your own point of view and keep in mind its limitations. And they note that very few people – including leaders of massive organizations — are really good at it.

It sounds obvious, in a way: of course we know we don’t know everything. But that’s not how we tend to operate in the world. Managers often fail to keep an open mind to others’ ideas, for example. I’ve written before about how a lack of mindfulness – which is very similar to what Kegan and Lahey call complexity of thought – leads to unhappy employees and bad outcomes for the organization.

There’s a similar lack of this sort of mindfulness in the world of advocacy, where we tend to over-simplify a problem. At times, of course, we need to simplify a problem to explain it to a broad, non-expert audience. But if we become too attached to that simplification, and fail to remember its own limitations, we’re likely to see little progress and become tremendously frustrated.

Say, for example, you’re advocating for reduced reliance on fossil fuels. It seems like a no-brainer, given the problems of global warming, pollution, and wars being fought over oil. But there are obviously complicating factors, such as the livelihoods of people dependent on the fossil fuel industry and communities or whole countries (or at least their governments) that benefit from oil and gas extraction. They’re obviously going to fight the effort. If you just assume they’re evil – as it’s easy to do, looking at the problem through your own perspective – then you’re going to find your work pretty frustrating. No matter how many times you’ve repeated yourself, or found new creative ways to say the same thing, nothing seems to change. Why bother?

But is it really true that nothing changes? And how does change actually happen?

This is where I think complexity of mind is interesting. It’s only by recognizing the complexity of the problem that we can understand where others that disagree with us are coming from. And it’s only by recognizing that we may not always have the complete picture that we can see where small changes and improvements might actually be possible, and may even already be happening.

This is not the exciting theory of change that drives people to become advocates. When I was in law school and read the great civil rights cases like Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade, I got the fantastical impression that you became a lawyer, made a winning argument to the Supreme Court, and that changed everything. But anyone who’s practiced law — and anyone who’s ever fought for racial justice or reproductive freedom — knows that’s definitely not the case.

That doesn’t necessarily make it less frustrating. Years of making arguments about why the Guantanamo Bay detention center should be closed (a key part of my legal job) doesn’t make it happen. But recognizing the importance of complexity of mind also helps me remember that it may not – indeed, it almost surely won’t – happen the way I, and others I agree with, insist it should. Progress is slow, and some bad moves made years ago can take a very long time to correct.  I don’t have to abandon my values or beliefs to recognize that. To satisfy my own needs, I may need to pursue other things that are more gratifying on a short-term basis, such as coaching. But like anyone advocating for legal and policy change, if I’m going to sustain my commitment to a larger cause, I’ll need to keep in mind its complexity. And I’ll need to train my own mind to better see and accept the many facets to the problem — and to the obstacles to real change.

I guess this is why patience is considered a virtue.

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by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting