Mindful Self-Indulgence

I am in a bad mood. The kind of bad mood I'm in is not grumpy or mean; it's bad because it has equal parts self-recrimination, self-loathing, and self-pity. Are you seeing a theme here? For convenience sake, I am saying that I am blaming my homeopath.

About 5 or 6 weeks ago I took a homeopathic remedy. We're talking classical homeopathy here. The kind of deal where my intake was over two hours long, and ended up with my being sent one very tiny pill. I popped it down on a Sunday morning and went on with my life. The most immediate result was that I became ADD girl. For that whole day (and probably then some) I was interrupting people, failing to provide my attention appropriately to those who were sharing their important feelings and experiences with me, and, most disturbingly, spilling confidences.

The interesting part of this was that I could see myself doing these things and yet felt helpless to stop it. I don't know which part I am suffering from the most, knowing that I did them or bearing helpless witness to it. It has been a fascinating exercise in mindfulness as I have also been watching myself go through the suffering I've felt as a result of my actions. This level of observance has somewhat mitigated my suffering as the attending personal drama is being fed less and I have a different perspective - less blindly immersive in the experience.

I still feel bad. Nausea inducing, hide under the covers bad sometimes, but being able to step outside of the experience a little bit has kept it from becoming overwhelming and allowed me to see that there is some part of me that is outside of this experience. It does not define who I am.

The Sky is Falling

Last Friday was a weird day. It began with a phone call at 7:15 am from my mother saying, "I don't know if you have the national news on..." The last time she did that it was about the same time of day on 9/11/01, so I was a little weirded out. This time she went on to say, "A plane crashed in Clarence Center and I wanted to let you know that we're okay." It was a mile from their house.

Along with watching a fair amount of CNN that morning, I watched myself. I noticed what I was and wasn't thinking and feeling, and my reactions to the fact that I was thinking and feeling what I was or wasn't.

It was: shocking, exciting, cool, interesting, sad - kind of in that order. I couldn't help but wonder if there was something wrong with me for putting sad at the bottom and exciting near the top. I was also aware of my emotional distance from the circumstances. Although I was all of these things, I was never very much of any of them.

Some conclusions I have drawn:

• Despite our best intentions, we are all nascent gawkers at heart. Curiosity is an important human trait and crucial to our survival as individuals and as a species, we just have to remember to have manners.
  
• It is easy to be conditioned to believe that you must feel sad/bad/glad on behalf others, or you are cold, unfeeling or indifferent to the well-being of others. Tragedy can be acknowledged without enmeshment.
• Tragic circumstances are generally an excuse for us to indulge ourselves in drama. Drama is an addiction that feeds on itself and off the indulgences of others, and tragedies are great justifications for throwing ourselves into it head first.
  
• Disasters have a coolness to them that it is okay for us to acknowledge. Pyroclastic flow from a volcano is nightmarish (currents of hot gas and rock which travel at speeds as great as 450 mi/h, at temperatures of about 1,000˚C), but as any 8 year old boy will admit, incredibly cool. Acknowledging the coolness does not detract from the tragedy. It is, among other things, a way of being comfortable our lack of control over circumstances.

I will admit that it took me a couple of days to understand that my distance, and my ability to observe and question my actions and reactions, was something I should see as an accomplishment of sorts. It is a measure of "skillfullness" in relationship to my goals of experiencing greater equanimity. I strive not to be Chicken Little.

Notice the Itch, But Don't Scratch It

The phrase above was a "pull out" quote for an article about meditation. I don't know or remember the content of the article - I likely didn't actually read it - but the phrase entered my brain and began to bounce around like a pinball, setting off all kinds of lights and bells.

DING! The first light goes on and I am confronted by my own actual tendency to actually scratch my actual itches when I'm sitting in meditation. I can be notoriously twitchy, much to the "delight" of my fellow meditators and my own dismay.

This set in play the question of, "What is it that causes me to regularly indulge myself this way? Do I not understand this principle or is it something else?" I had to admit that I do it without bothering to think about it first. I just do it. It's a subtle kind of laziness.

This shed an insight into how this translates into our interactions with our environment in general. My day is full of little pings of input, itches of irritation, distraction and annoyance. We scratch them (react) without any thought to whether they require a response or not. What would happen if we just sat with them? Just let it be, without the necessity to counteract?

Being present with our interactive "itches" creates a space for us to develop a relationship with them, providing an opportunity for insight. When we don't indulge in automatically dismissing them with a reactive "scratch", an awareness forms around them. This awareness is the first step to clarity, and the breaking of bad interpersonal habits.

Just once today, fail to scratch that itch, and see what happens.

Hand Cream, Electric Shocks and Self-Determination

A quote from Jonah Lehrer's book, How We Decide:

"A few years ago, Tor Wager, a neuroscientist at Columbia University, wanted to figure out why placebos were so effective. His experiment was brutally straightforward: he gave college students electrical shocks while they were stuck in an fMRI machine. Half of the people were then supplied with a fake pain-relieving cream. Even though the cream had no analgesic properties⎯it was just a hand moisturizer⎯people given the pretend cream said the shocks were significantly less painful. The placebo effect eased their suffering. Wager then imaged the specific parts of the brain that controlled this psychological process. He discovered that the placebo effect depended largely on activity in the prefrontal cortex. When people were told that they'd just received a pain-relieving cream, their frontal lobes responded by inhibiting the activity of emotional brain areas (like the insula) that normally respond to bodily pain. Because people expected to experience less pain, they ended up experiencing less pain. Their predictions became self-fulfilling prophecies."

I began to wonder how often we provide our own placebos, create our own self-fulfulling prophecy. The power of anticipation to color our experiences is something that I believe we all instinctively have a sense of. It is not, perhaps, given as much weight and consideration as it should. It is, apparently, a neurological phenomenon. If we anticipate pain, we experience it; if we anticipate a lack or diminishment of pain then we experience that as well.

The corollary to anticipation or self-placebo being a determinant in whether our experience is painful or not, is that our experiences of pleasant versus unpleasant color our reactions to our experience, which then influence the outcome.

So, those "creating our reality" people are right, at least on this point. Fearing the worst can contribute to creating the worst and vice versa. The crucial piece of this construct is that you can't think or suppose that things will be painless; you must know it. This difference is importance in the brain's response where the "reality" is created and is where it becomes more difficult. It is not a matter of pasting on a smile (although your mother was right; a smile does have some part in changing how you feel); it is deep seated trust in the character of the experience.