Buddhism – Page 2 – Daphne Eviatar, Coaching & Consulting

A Question About Meditation

I like to read about meditation – the shelf on my night-table is filled with books by Pema Chodron, Mark Epstein, and various other Buddhist-inspired meditation teachers, whose words and ideas I find soothing, especially before bed. But actually sitting on a cushion and meditating every day? Not so much.

I like meditating in groups, and I’ve enjoyed going to various meditation centers in New York City, which has plenty of them. But I can’t always get myself to a group sitting, and I’ve been especially reluctant this winter.

Meanwhile, I keep seeing new studies studies touting the benefits of meditation – to treat insomnia, reduce stress, improve creativity, even prevent brain shrinkage as we age. So lately I’ve been thinking I really ought to be more serious about doing it.

What I love about the books is learning about Buddhist philosophy and psychology, and its application to daily life. I’ve found the practice of mindfulness incredibly helpful, for example, in getting me to really pay attention to, and appreciate, what I’m doing at any time. I also think it’s invaluable for coaching – encouraging clients to slow down and experience the moment they’re in, or an event or emotion they’re struggling with, has immense benefits and can be really important to the ability to make lasting change.

But I’ve still found it hard to just sit for 20 or 30 or 40 minutes a day with my eyes closed, or staring at the floor, depending on the particular style of meditation involved. I sometimes meditate on the subway, which is always calming, and I’ll practice that kind of one-pointed concentration on the breath or on my movement when I’m running or at the gym or doing yoga, at least for short periods. I even use it to take a nap in the afternoon or fall asleep at night. It’s the sitting still part – and staying awake – that I have trouble with.

I imagine it’s because all my life, I’ve had the feeling that I’m supposed to be doing something – often, something other than what I’m doing. I remember in college, if it was a beautiful day outside and I was in the library studying, I’d feel like I should be doing something outdoors. If I was outside, say, hanging out with friends or going for a run, I would feel like I should be in the library studying.

Now, when I sit down to meditate, that struggle comes up constantly. I immediately think of all the other things I have to do. Within minutes I’ll find myself jumping up and making a to-do list.

I remember being on a weekend meditation retreat once at a retreat center in the picturesque Hudson Valley, and telling the meditation teacher in my interview that I was wondering the whole time why I was sitting on the floor inside all weekend, when I could be outside doing something. He just smiled his wise smile, and told me that was okay, I can just let myself feel that. That sort of helped.

I know it’s in part the way I was raised – in a very traditional, achievement-oriented Jewish immigrant family, where we were always expected to be doing something aimed at achieving some concrete, demonstrable result – studying or practicing the piano, for example. That attitude helped us get into good colleges and graduate schools and landed us professional degrees and accolades, but I think both my brother and I still have a hard time settling down – accepting and appreciating things as they are — just being, as the Buddhists would say. Which is a problem. Because we can’t, and we won’t, always be achieving something. And even if we are, we likely won’t be achieving it as much or as well as we want to, or we’ll be thinking we really ought to be achieving something else.

One of the cornerstones of Buddhism is that life is filled with a “pervasive feeling of unsatisfactoriness,” as the Buddhist psychoanalyst Mark Epstein describes it in his book, Going on Being: Buddhism and the Way of Change, about his own exploration of Buddhism and psychology. “We want what we can’t have and we don’t want what we do have; we want more of what we like and less of what we don’t like.” Seeing this clearly is part of the point of meditation – to illuminate how our minds work and cause us suffering. The idea is that if you see your mind doing this – and as in my retreat, it will start doing this pretty quickly when you sit to meditate – we’re able to recognize those as just thoughts, not necessarily “truths” – and create some space around them, lessening their grip. I understand and appreciate the theory, and it’s helped me become more aware of my thoughts (including the absurd and dysfunctional ones), which has been really helpful. But I still can’t get myself to sit down and meditate every day.

What are other people’s experiences with this? Do you need to have a formal practice of daily sitting meditation to truly incorporate mindfulness and its insights into your life? I’d really like to know.

March 4, 2015March 13, 2015 by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

The Trouble with Branding

Sometimes when I see what other coaches write, it makes me want to run the other way. I’m not THAT, I tell myself, wanting nothing to do with the sort of aggressive over-the-top promises and platitudes I see some “life coaches” or “executive coaches” or business consultants using to promote themselves.

Other times, when I look back at what I’ve done all day for my job, whether it’s watching terrorism trials or Congressional hearings and fuming at the state of American politics, I want to scream. I don’t want to be THAT person either, immersed in and getting all worked up over awful things in the world I can’t control.

Of course, if I have some perspective, I can realize that these things all serve some purpose right now, whether it’s helping me find my way in a new field I enjoy, advocating for something I believe in, or just earning a living. But when I’m in the thick of whatever it is, or face embarking on a new project, those inclinations to define myself by what I’m doing at the moment can really get in my way.

Consultants are all about “branding” these days, and the importance of people creating a “personal brand” that tells the world who you are. The prevalence of social media and our “digital footprint” has intensified the pressure, but it even arises in the sort of cocktail-party conversations we have when we meet new people. Marketers will tell you to pull out your “elevator pitch” right then because it’s a perfect opportunity to try to convince someone to hire you — and you’d better not miss any opportunities. Plus there’s the general social pressure to label ourselves as something solid and impressive.

I think it’s exactly this kind of ubiquitous “branding” that leaves many people feeling stuck and hopeless. Lots of us have jobs we don’t love that pay the bills, for example, but we don’t want to “brand” ourselves by it. We’re not cattle. We have lots of other interests, and maybe we’re developing a whole new skill or talent or career on our own time. A public “brand” isn’t going to capture that. It could even limit it.

I was once told by a friend who’s a communications professional that I have a “great brand.” I was flattered – who knew I had a “brand” at all? – but it also had the effect of limiting me. Suddenly I felt like taking a different path I was considering would be foolishly wasting my “brand” – for whatever it’s worth.

The truth is, we’re not one thing, and the complex of our skills and interests and personalities don’t fit neatly into a label or a tagline. To try to cram ourselves into some set form means we’re cutting off other essential parts of ourselves. It prevents us from learning and trying new things, exploring latent talents and interests, and just generally from growing and expanding. It seems to me like a recipe for misery.

Many of my clients seem to struggle with this kind of self-branding pressure. A freelance writer, for example, has an assignment he thinks is stupid, but those assignments pay the bills so he can also do the writing he wants that, for now, at least, is not paying him. As soon as he sits down at his computer to start working on the assignment, though, he balks: I don’t want to do THIS, he thinks; I’m not THAT person, who writes this sort of idiocy. What have I done with my life? Now, he not only has an assignment to do that he doesn’t find interesting, but he’s blocked from getting started because he can’t get over the negative labels he’s slapped on himself for being the person doing it.

The other, related problem with branding is how it interacts with the human tendency, at least in Western culture, to view ourselves negatively. I make a mistake so I immediately call myself “stupid,” for example. Or I eat or drink too much and now I’m a person with no self-control. We tend to label ourselves negatively at every opportunity, and that labeling actually makes it much harder to change. Seeing ourselves as fixed and “branded” entities only digs us deeper into that hole.

Stephen Cope talks about this in his book, The Wisdom of Yoga, which I’ve written about here before. Instead of seeing human beings as fixed, solid entities, Cope explains, Yogis (much like Buddhists) discovered that we’re composed of many different “patterns of consciousness,” which may or may not fit well together. “It is partly the driven attempt to make all of the pieces fit nicely together that keeps us so often at right angles to life,” writes Cope. Yogis found that clinging to an idea of a unitary self causes suffering because it narrows our sense of who we are and makes us very small in comparison to the rest of the world. Now we have to defend “ourselves” against that world, and exert huge amounts of energy bolstering our egos in the face of it.

This can be particularly tiring when we’re dealing with parts of ourselves we don’t really like. If we see ourselves as a solid entity, then it’s extremely painful to confront our mistakes or bad habits. Because we see them as us. We take them very personally. As a result, we tend to avoid confronting those parts, and the habit continues.

If, on the other hand, we see ourselves as various and intersecting patterns of consciousness that are constantly growing and changing, then past mistakes or habits can feel a little less solid. They’re a pattern we’ve developed, not an essential part of our character. It’s not so scary now to look at them, to notice what triggers them, and to see how and where we can interrupt the chain reaction. And it’s only when you can see and accept that part of yourself without judgment, as Cope explains, that you can begin to take steps to change it.

What does this all have to do with branding? Branding seems to me to be a trend towards doing the opposite: a call to define and present ourselves as solid and unchanging entities, available on demand for perfect presentation and sale — and then to act accordingly. Just writing that makes me feel like I’m choking.

Of course, if you’re trying to start a new business or change one, developing a brand can help let people know what you offer. But personal branding is far more than that – it’s carefully crafting your own presentation to the world, which in turn can become how you lead your life. It’s turning yourself into a commodity available for sale in the marketplace, rather than acknowledging and relishing being a multi-faceted human being who has far more to offer than you probably realize.

In other words, branding is fine in its place, but it’s not you: you’re much more. As Walt Whitman put it: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

February 7, 2015February 7, 2015 by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

Finding Joy at Work

I joined a meditation group in my neighborhood recently, and the other night the teacher’s talk was about Joy.

Joy. It’s not something many of us tend to think about much. We focus on getting work done, on what’s annoying us, on the onslaught of problems we need to solve or that we’re hearing about in the world, but joy is something that many of us – maybe especially New Yorkers – tend to overlook.

When do you experience joy?

Of course, there’s joy to be experienced in everyday life: in the enthusiastic face-lickings I get from my dog when I arrive home, in the savoring of a good meal or a good conversation or the company of good friends. But one thing I realized listening to this talk, which came after a particularly intense day at the office, was that I rarely experience joy at work.

As I reflected on my work (I’m talking about my office job, not my coaching work), I realized that so much of it is spent focusing on awful things going on in the world that it’s hard to even think of joy in that context. I imagine that’s true for lots of people working as advocates, whose job it is to focus on some problem in the world and try to fix it. But that itself creates a problem.

Joy is essential. It’s what motivates us, and allows us to appreciate our lives and the world around us. Without joy, can we really bring our full selves to anything we do, and can we really do a good job? I don’t think so. But most importantly, without joy, work will leave us feeling pretty miserable.

How do you cultivate joy at work when your job involves things that are inherently a bummer? That may be some big social justice issue or a problem in your neighborhood or your company or with a product. Whatever it is, the potential for joy may not be apparent.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. When I work with coaching clients, there may be parts that are difficult, but I find joy in the interaction itself, and in the feeling that I’m helping somebody, even if just by listening and helping them reflect on what’s on their mind and what might be getting in their way. When I work as a legal advocate, though, there isn’t that immediate connection with another person, or that satisfaction at the end of a session. Instead, it’s a long, endless slog toward improving a long-term situation that really sucks. You may never see the outcome, and anyway, the outcome probably won’t be what you’re hoping for. Where’s the joy in that?

Still, I see a lot of value in people advocating collectively for justice or other kinds of social and political change. It’s important work that in the long run, can make a difference. But can it be joyful?

I’ve written before about the importance of making your work meaningful, setting your own goals and acknowledging your successes. But I’m talking here about the daily experience of a job, which is a little different. As an advocate, you may know you’re part of an important effort to, say, stop global warming, but that may not make lobbying a Republican Congress led by climate change-deniers to pass laws reducing carbon emissions any more joyful.

So I’ve decided to embark on an experiment. I’m going to dedicate myself to bringing joy into my work every day. It may be in making a point to have one really good conversation with a colleague in the office, or in writing an advocacy piece that I really put my heart into. It could just involve going out of my way to acknowledge the great work done by one of my colleagues – a kind of “sympathetic joy” as Buddhists would call it . (“Sympathetic joy” is taking pleasure in other people’s happiness or success.) If none of those are possibilities, maybe it’s just taking time out of the day to quietly savor a good lunch or cup of coffee or listen to some really good music. Whatever it is, it has to be something that I actually stop and notice as joyful in some way, whether the process itself or the outcome.

Consider trying this with me. Because no matter what our work may be, if we can’t find one thing a day in it to truly enjoy in it, then in the long run, we’re not going to be doing anyone very much good.

January 18, 2015January 19, 2015 by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

Skip the New Year’s Resolution

New Year’s resolutions seem to me like a recipe for disaster. Another commitment you make to yourself that you inevitably end up breaking. I’m going to exercise every day, or lose weight, or cut out alcohol, or always be nice to my family, or whatever. Then you slip up, and bam – you feel like shit again. The resolution goes out the window.

But I like the idea of living deliberately – in fact, I think it’s crucial to a happy and fulfilled and meaningful life. Being conscious of our actions and making deliberate choices seem like basic building-blocks for that. So how to reconcile?

To me, setting an “intention” rather than making a “resolution” seems a bit more promising. An intention is something you want, plan and hope to do, but when you slip, as you inevitably will, you just dust yourself off and get back on the path you’ve chosen. I know, they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but that seems to me more using the term “intention” as a cheap band-aid covering up a deep and massive delusion that you’re not dealing with. A true intention is something you set for yourself, because it’s something you truly and deeply want, and you use it as a compass to move forward. Sometimes you get lost and veer from the path, perhaps caught up by some shiny delusive object you encounter in the woods along the way. But the compass helps you eventually find your way back and steer your course again.

I think one key to living by “intention” without getting discouraged when we screw up is just acknowledging that we’re human, and change is difficult. I’ve been reading a terrific book by Stephen Cope, a yoga teacher and psychotherapist who writes about the intersection of Western psychology and the Eastern philosophy of yoga. (I also participated in a weekend workshop with him at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in the Berkshires after Christmas.) In The Wisdom of Yoga: A Seeker’s Guide to Extraordinary Living, Cope explains this phenomenon as being part of what yogis call karma.

This isn’t the sort of oversimplified notion of karma we tend to hear about as determining your life because of something you did in your prior life as a dog or the idea that people are suffering through a vicious war or in some horrible refugee camp as just desert for something bad they did in their past lives. This is a much more subtle and, to me, convincing notion of karma that’s also backed up by Western psychology and contemporary neuroscience. It’s simply the idea that our actions and reactions to circumstances create patterns in our minds, and the longer those patterns continue, the more deeply they become embedded in our unconscious and the harder they are to change.

A child might react to abuse by withdrawing, for example, and withdrawal from other people at the first sight of conflict might become her unconscious pattern. For someone else addiction results – alcohol, drugs, food, whatever. We all do things to avoid pain, and those things become part of the patterns that shape our lives. So when as adults on New Year’s Eve we decide we’re all of a sudden going to stop doing that thing, good luck – karma or brain patterning or whatever you want to call it is going to make it very difficult.

The yogic approach to changing this, according to Cope – which is very much like the Buddhist approach, which grew out of yoga philosophy – is simply to begin to focus our attention on the chain of events that leads to the unwanted action. Without judging or condemning it, simply notice when the craving or withdrawing or whatever problematic action arises. What is happening at that moment? What is the underlying feeling you’re fleeing?

Continue to watch it. What happens next? Do you reach for a drink, a cookie, or walk out the door? Do you get angry and yell at someone, or pick up your phone and get absorbed in your Twitter or Facebook feed? Whatever it is, just start by observing it. We tend to be so judgmental of ourselves that we refuse even to witness this chain of events, because it causes us so much shame. But as Cope explains, “[w]hen we pare away judgment, something remarkable happens. We’re free, for the first time, to observe how the pattern really works.”

So the key is to approach this all with compassion. Recognize it’s not “you” that’s doing this, in the sense of some fixed sense of yourself as a bad person. It’s just a part of your patterning, and we all have patterns that make us suffer. Only by letting go of the judgment and being willing to look at those patterns can we truly see them, and then take steps to interrupt them.

I’m not saying this is easy. Last night I was feeling sick, and tired, recovering from some sort of a bug I’d caught after not getting enough sleep on New Year’s eve, which I was still angry at myself about. When I feel shitty, my impulse is usually toward sugar. Preferably chocolate. While I usually try not to keep that stuff around, lots of it ended up in our house over the holidays, and it was calling to me. Fortunately, I was reading Cope’s book, and after a couple of chocolate kisses I reminded myself to slow down and just feel what I was feeling. Tired. Pain in my stomach. Feelings of regret and disappointment at having let myself get to this state, after having set all sorts of intentions to live more deliberately and be healthier. I let those feelings wash over me, and reminded myself to be compassionate about it all. I felt the urge to run away from them slowly dissipate. The need for chocolate melted away. I realized that what I really needed was to sleep. I went to bed soon after.

Obviously some habits are more difficult than this one, but the process is basically the same. (For a highly simplified and overdramatized but compelling version of how exposing unconscious habits helps them unravel, watch Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Marnie, which I watched for the first time the other night.) Whether it’s Western psychology or yoga or Buddhism or any other contemplative tradition, the idea is the same: become aware of the internal chain of events that leads to the action you’re taking that you want to stop. Observe it without judgment.

Eventually, let yourself have the feelings that are arising, without reacting to them. Maybe at first you can ward off the reaction for just a few minutes. Over time, as you continue to make conscious and interrupt the chain of events, they have less power over you. The urge to act begins to dissipate. And you’re able to interrupt the chain earlier and earlier in the process. The practices of yoga and meditation (and probably some Western practices of prayer as well) are designed to get us to slow down and focus enough that we can become aware of what’s happening internally, so we can make deliberate choices about how we want to act.

All of this helps explain why I don’t like the idea of New Year’s “resolutions.” A “resolution” is “a firm decision to do or not do something” and “the action of solving a problem,” and as we’ve seen, such deeply ingrained problems can rarely be “solved” simply by deciding to take any one action.

An “intention,” on the other hand, is “an aim or a plan,” or “a design.” It’s more like setting a path toward reaching an eventual destination. An intention allows you to be human – to stray from the path on occasion, as you’re inevitably lured by shiny objects that catch your eye along the way. But if it’s a true intention that’s important to you, and perhaps you create reminders for yourself of that, at least some outline or markings of the path remain. You’re still laying that path along the way, but the intention acts as a compass that aims you toward your ultimate goal.

I like that.

January 4, 2015January 6, 2015 by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

Birdman and Turkey Day

I finally saw the move Birdman, and I can’t recommend it enough. From the first to the last scenes, it’s an amazingly beautiful, provocative, dark, funny and even uplifting movie, in a weird sort of way. I won’t give anything away (here’s a good review if you want to know more about the story), but the movie struck me as being ultimately about how we’re all deluded about who we really are. Which made me think of this wonderful and unlikely quote from Albert Einstein:

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Worth keeping in mind as we approach the holidays.

Have a great Thanksgiving!

November 23, 2014 by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

Should You Go on a News Diet?

A couple of years ago, I went on a silent meditation retreat after a particularly grueling period of work. I had just returned from a week at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, where I was monitoring hearings for prisoners stuck in indefinite detention. It was all pretty depressing. So I’d decided to take a break. But even on retreat in the Berkshires in February, I couldn’t help checking my e-mail and news feeds. The drumbeat of bad news was continuing, and what was I doing isolating myself in the mountains?

One afternoon, Jack Kornfield, the renowned Buddhist meditation teacher who was leading the retreat, gave a talk about the importance of checking out sometimes – turning off the news and maybe listening to beautiful music or just enjoying silence for a while. While I appreciated the sentiment, I also thought to myself: “that’s fine for other people, but I have to know what’s going on for my job – and besides, how irresponsible to just cut ourselves off from the real world!”

Determined to tell Kornfield that this just wasn’t possible, I lined up to speak to him after his talk, and explained my dilemma. He smiled his wise and kindly smile, looked me in the eye and said: “you need to go on a news diet.”

Kornfield’s prescription was to cut news out of my life for 3 days a week. I listened and nodded politely, but I thought “I’ll never do that.”

I’ve thought about his advice a lot since then. I realized he was right — I needed to seriously limit the amount of time I was spending reading and listening to and watching the news. The onslaught had become toxic, and it wasn’t helping me or anyone else do anything to change it.

It’s a fine balance – between burying your head in the sand to take care of yourself, and being so alert to the problems of the world that you unwittingly bury yourself under their weight. It’s not an easy balance to find. But it’s really important.

In journalism school I had a professor who used to say “you are what you read.” She was referring to the quality of the writing, of course, but it’s equally true for the subject matter. Not surprisingly, psychologists have studied the impact of following all that bad news and found it causes major physical and psychological stress.

I think it was the Dalai Lama who pointed out that we shouldn’t be too discouraged by all the bad news we hear these days, because the fact that it’s on the news is itself a positive sign: it means it’s an event that’s unusual, and hence, newsworthy. It’s not like everyone out there is killing and raping and pillaging; and that’s why those that are make the headlines.

That might not seem like much comfort, but it’s a truism of the media that “if it bleeds it leads.” And with the 24-hour online, cable and social media news cycle, we can easily become engulfed in it. But if you immerse yourself only in the day’s headlines, you’re not experiencing “reality” any more than you would be if you immersed yourself only in the sounds of birds and waterfalls. They’re all real. It’s a question of what you want to focus on.

I’m not advocating focusing just on birds and waterfalls. Being aware of the Ebola crisis in Africa, wars in Iraq and Syria, terrorist attacks in Pakistan, and global warming all over allows us to make informed choices about how we live – and whether and how we might affect any of those situations. We can support aid or peace organizations, vote for anti-war candidates, and reduce our energy consumption, to name a few examples. But it’s also important to allow ourselves the space to rise above the bad news, to notice and seek out good things happening in the world, so we can consider alternatives and what role we want to play. Sure, our government is at war, but there also people volunteering their time to tutor people in prison, deliver meals to the homebound, or just clean up the neighborhood. And that’s inspiring.

It was on that same retreat with Jack Kornfield that I remember being struck by the thought, during a silent walking meditation in the snow, that I needed to allow more beauty into my life.

When I got home to Brooklyn, I enrolled in a life drawing class – returning to a way of honoring beauty that I’d loved when I was younger but had given up as an adult. And I eventually decided to study coaching — connecting with people in a positive way to help them discover what makes them happy and hopeful.

I rarely manage to pull off three whole days a week without news, but I’ve gotten much better at shutting it off in the evenings and on weekends. I’m also careful to not check my Facebook or Twitter news feeds too often, which can feel like another kind of assault. Sometimes, it’s important to create temporary barriers to limit the stuff bombarding us from outside in order to have enough quiet space inside to consider and make real choices: How do I want to live? Where do I want to focus my attention? And how can I really make a difference?

October 28, 2014 by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

The Little Engine That Could

When I read David Sedaris’s piece in The New Yorker recently about his obsession with his FitBit, I thought it was a little silly. Sure, the little black wristband that counts your steps could make you slightly compulsive about your activity levels, but his story about running around England picking up garbage while he clocked 30,000 steps a day seemed really over the top.

Then, on my birthday, my partner gave me a fitness bracelet as a present. I guess I’d expressed interest in them, mostly in the fact that they count your sleeping hours (and quality of sleep) as well as the number of steps you take in a day, and I thought that could be good to know.

Little did I know that once I put it on, I would feel like a little engine had been strapped to my wrist. Suddenly, I had more energy: I wanted to climb those extra flights of stairs I thought were a drag before, and getting off the subway three stops early seemed like an opportunity more than a way to risk being late to a meeting. When I found myself clocking in at 173% of my 10,000-step goal, I was thrilled. David Sedaris was onto something.

I’m not encouraging fitness bracelets or obsessing over how many steps you take each day – though I do believe moving and fitness are really important. But it’s interesting how just wearing a little rubber wristband has changed my activity level – and gotten me to make extra efforts to try to get in 8 hours of sleep. These are goals I’ve set for myself: no one else is counting, or watching, or cares. But it tells me something about the power of setting personal goals, and of having something that consistently calls my awareness to them – even when it involves an activity that in the past I’d pretty much taken for granted.

It also tells me something about the power of perspective: instead of seeing the stairs to my apartment as an exhausting and unfortunate aspect of where I live, I now see them as a fitness opportunity: a chance to boost my step count.

So what if I shifted my perspective on other things in my life, beyond how many steps I walk in a day? What if, for example, when I wake up in the morning, instead of feeling weighed down by the pressures and obligations of the day ahead, I consciously choose to set those thoughts aside and contemplate five things I’m grateful for? Those things could be as simple as my morning cup of coffee, my dog snoring next to me, or just being alive. It’s amazing how quickly they come once you start counting them, and the internal change that occurs from focusing on that gratitude for a few moments. From that mindset, I can set one positive goal or intention for the day – say, practicing patience or compassion. With that goal in mind, my day’s responsibilities are no longer a drag; they’re an opportunity to practice.

In The Buddha Walks Into the Office: A Guide to Livelihood for a New Generation, Lodro Rinzler writes: “Knowing your intention for what you do is the difference between schlepping through your life and living a life with meaning.” Rinzler recommends contemplating an intention for the day each morning, and checking in with yourself at the end of the day to see how you did. The idea isn’t to berate yourself if you didn’t follow through, but simply to be aware of what you did, consider how it felt, appreciate your successes and decide whether you want to do something differently next time. The next day is another opportunity. You can write down your day’s intention someplace where you’ll see it during the day to ensure you keep it in mind.

We all need — and can create for ourselves — regular reminders to follow through on our best intentions. And while someone’s making a lot of money off that FitBit idea, our reminders don’t need to involve a hi-tech rubber bracelet.

October 10, 2014October 11, 2014 by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

Start Where You Are

I’ve been trying to get outside more. I love the outdoors, but the noise and congestion of New York City can make being out on the street pretty unpleasant, so lately I’ve been escaping to the roof. I’m lucky to have access to a rooftop, and I’ve discovered that sunset yoga up there can be pretty amazing — and free.

The problem is that getting to the roof requires climbing up a ladder that’s in a really disgusting old utility closet. The closet was disgusting when I moved into this place 17 years ago, filled with corroding old paint and stain cans, various kinds of cements and glues and solvents and other toxic substances that inevitably leak and spill and are really hard to safely (and legally) dispose of. So somehow, I’ve never cleaned it out. But now that I’m climbing that ladder to get to the roof more often, the nastiness of the space has really struck me.

I’ve also been reading Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze’s book, Walk Out, Walk On, which I’ve written about here. One of the most striking stories in the book is of a group of people in Brazil who took an abandoned apple warehouse filled with sludge — “layers of dirt, asbestos, syringes and excrement” — and turned it into a thriving community center. Organized by a group of Brazilians who started the “School of Warriors without Weapons,” the community of Paqueta, realizing that no one else was going to come clean up that old warehouse for them, decided to take on the task themselves. Working just 15 minutes a day each, volunteers who’d created a vision for what they wanted the place to be cleaned out the 11,195-square-foot warehouse and transformed it into something their community really needed: a healthy public space.

It’s an amazing story that inspires me in all sorts of ways, especially as I think about how coaching skills could help advocacy and community organizations. But what it inspired me to do the other morning was to clean out my closet.

After descending the ladder, I was about to just close the door once again on the dirt and muck and leave that project for another day. Maybe I was influenced by that post-yoga feeling of well-being, but it suddenly struck me that no one else was going to come and clean that closet up for me. And that actually, doing just a little at a time wouldn’t be all that difficult. Sure it’s kind of gross, but I can wear rubber gloves. It’s really not that big a deal.

So I pulled out the gloves and some sponges and paint scrapers and I cleaned the damn thing up. And you know what? It wasn’t that hard. I haven’t gotten rid of all the old containers in there yet, but it only took me about an hour to clean up the layers of grime that had built up on the shelves and the molding, and the chunks of debris scattered on the closet floor. And man, did I feel better afterwards.

We’ve all had that experience: some task looms before you that you don’t want to tackle because it seems really impossible and unpleasant and like it will take forever. But imagine how nice it will be when it’s done; then just start where you are. Eventually, you’ll get there.

“Start Where You Are” is also the name of a Pema Chodron book I like that makes a really helpful point. You can’t get to the good stuff without going through some bad stuff too. Pema puts it more eloquently:

Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both. Appreciating the gloriousness inspires us, encourages us, cheers us up, gives us a bigger perspective, energizes us. We feel connected. But if that’s all that’s happening, we get arrogant and start to look down on others, and there is a sense of making ourselves a big deal and being really serious about it, wanting it to be like that forever. The gloriousness becomes tinged by craving and addiction. On the other hand, wretchedness–life’s painful aspect–softens us up considerably. Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person. When you are feeling a lot of grief, you can look right into somebody’s eyes because you feel you haven’t got anything to lose–you’re just there. The wretchedness humbles us and softens us, but if we were only wretched, we would all just go down the tubes. We’d be so depressed, discouraged, and hopeless that we wouldn’t have enough energy to eat an apple. Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us. They go together.

I’m not equating cleaning out my closet with life’s most painful moments. But the point applies even to the simply unpleasant and annoying tasks we try to avoid: if everything were easy and good and clean and beautiful all the time, we wouldn’t really see and appreciate it. Nor would we appreciate how difficult life can be for others, whose lives may be dominated by many more annoying, difficult or even truly wretched circumstances. Even in taking on grubby little chores, we can find compassion for others, and greater possibilities for ourselves.

September 24, 2014October 8, 2014 by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

It’s Okay To Be Blue

Now that we’ve passed Labor Day, there’s all sorts of advice out there about how to beat the post-vacation blues. Tips range from immediately unpacking your suitcases to going for a run to taking stock of your life and your work. All good ideas.

But in a culture obsessed with the quick fix — things you can do, buy, eat or drink to make you happy — there’s one bit of advice you rarely hear: let yourself feel lousy.

You’ve left your idyllic vacation spot, returned to a noisy city, a boring or stressful job, and re-immersed yourself in all the day’s bad news. It’s not surprising you don’t feel great.

After a recent week of traveling and being completely checked out, I made a huge effort to appreciate my return to home and work, ease back into my life, etc.. And I still felt crappy for a while. That’s okay. In fact, it can be a good thing to let yourself actually experience your emotions rather than pushing them away. One surprising thing I’ve learned through coaching is that really sitting with my emotions for a while allows them to slowly transform — and can lead to some pretty amazing insights.

Left alone, emotions themselves last only about 90 seconds to 2 minutes. It’s the story we tell ourselves about them – that my life sucks, my job sucks, I’m stuck in this place I hate, etc. – that tends to drag out that emotion, and cause us to have it over and over again and feel stuck. Pema Chodron talks about this beautifully in her books, and suggests people “lean in” to the emotion rather than run from it. (This is a very different concept of leaning in from Sheryl Sandberg‘s.)

When I was feeling particularly lousy one evening, I called up my copy of Jon Kabat Zinn’s book, Coming to Our Senses. A professor of Medicine at University of Massachuseetts medical school and creator of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Zinn talks about the healing power of just focusing on the present and experiencing your emotions, without the overlay of thoughts.

As Zinn explains:

Enthralled once again, even when in great pain, with the story of me that I am busy creating, unwittingly, merely out of habit, I have an opportunity, countless opportunities, to see its unfolding and to cease and desist from feeding it, to issue a restraining order if necessary, to turn the key which has been sitting in the lock all along, to step out of jail, and therefore meet the world in new and more expansive and appropriate ways by embracing it fully rather than contracting, recoiling, or turning away.

So when you’re hit with that defeated or sad feeling, try just letting it be. Notice it, check in with yourself, with your body, and really feel it. Where do you feel it? What does it feel like? Drop the story line that’s feeding it, and see what else comes up. Does it begin to shift? What I’ve found particularly amazing about doing this is that by sitting with it, the pain not only goes away, but turns into something else — something new — that moves me forward.

September 8, 2014September 10, 2014 by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

The Importance of Being A Beginner

One of the biggest challenges of becoming a coach at this stage in my life is being a beginner all over again. Having spent years becoming an “expert” at things – first law, then journalism, then national security/human rights – it’s frustrating to go back to square one. Of course, no one ever totally masters anything completely, but after a few years doing something you get the hang of it enough to feel at least competent. Not so when you’re learning something brand new. It is, to say the least, humbling.

That can be true even for things that are supposed to be fun. I’m on vacation right now, for example, stretching the summer into September by spending this week in Maine. It’s beautiful up here, and I decided to bring some drawing materials with me to really immerse myself in that aspect of it. But the truth is, I haven’t done much drawing since I graduated from college. That was a long time ago. Over the last year, though, I’d decided I wanted to get back into doing something more creative, exercise the right brain a bit and let my more rational, judgmental side get some rest. So I’ve been taking the occasional drawing class (with this great teacher) – some life drawing, and an occasional pastel workshop. Surely, I thought, I could capture the beauty of Maine if I tried.

Not so easy. Two hours of pastel drawing while perched on the edge of a cove on an overturned canoe yesterday, trying to render an incredible landscape of wildflowers and beach grasses and evergreens, turned into a pretty big mess. There are a few parts of the drawing that kind of work, but there’s a big blob in the middle that I can’t make head or tail of.

At first, I found this really frustrating. I’d just spent half the afternoon to create this? It didn’t help when later in the day I stepped into a gallery in town and saw a perfectly-rendered framed pastel of a woman kayaking in a blanket of fog. I felt defeated.

I love what I’m learning, whether it’s coaching or drawing. But learning something new will always be hard, and sometimes even a bit humiliating. It requires going back to being a beginner while living in a culture that’s focused on celebrating expertise. For those of us raised to prize achievement and accumulate merit badges over the course of our educational and professional lives, it’s hard to start back at the beginning. But I’m finding it’s also wonderful: it allows me to truly value and appreciate and learn from others, while I grow and stretch myself.

This made me feel better about my lousy drawing, too: Scientists have found that learning new things actually rewires our brains and makes them function better, through a process called myelination. That requires practice.

I like the Buddhist perspective, which, unlike Western culture, actually celebrates “beginner’s mind.” As Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki puts it in his book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

The idea is not only to be open to the new, but to deliberately adopt a fresh perspective on everything — including on the things you do or see every day. Dr. Kevin Tidgewell, a professor of Medicinal Chemistry at Duquesne University, applies the idea to his scientific studies: “this beginner’s mind philosophy is the idea that you should come in your practice with no ego…. you should come with an open mind in that all things are possible, not simply the previously held beliefs and the standard beliefs of the field.”

Consider the alternative: if you’re not willing to brave being a beginner or to adopt a beginner’s mind, you never learn or see new things. And so, for the sake of maintaining a polished exterior and a comfortable, if somewhat stale, interior, you stay stuck – pretty much repeating yourself over and over again.

September 3, 2014September 4, 2014 by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting