Dharma Quote of the Week - The Path of the Bodhisattva

THE COURAGE TO FEEL
Buddhist Practices for
Opening to Others
by Rob Preece
more...

Dharma Quote of the Week

The story is told that when Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of compassion, was looking at the lives of human beings upon this planet, he saw how much pain and suffering we inflict upon each other, and for a moment his compassion faltered. He almost abandoned his vow to liberate us from suffering. At that instant, his body exploded into a thousand pieces, represented in the image of the thousand-armed Avalokiteshvara. If this can happen to the figure who, in Buddhism, most exemplifies compassion, then perhaps we can be forgiven for not always finding it easy to sustain a compassionate heart in the face of so much suffering in the world.

We may live in times when material, economic, and scientific progress is moving at a rate never before seen, yet our capacity to live peacefully alongside each other seems to remain elusive. When confronted with the constant evidence of so much brutality and corruption present in the world, whether this is seen on the news or experienced closer to home, it is common to feel a sense of anger and outrage, and to feel powerless to do anything to change the ignorance, greed, and hatred that motivate most of the atrocities our fellow humans inflict upon each other. Are we, individually or collectively, able to go beyond the dominance of our instinctual selfishness that reaps so much harm?

...Whatever spiritual tradition we may be part of, if we wish to live our lives with greater openness to others, and with the courage and heart to cope with adverse conditions, we have much to learn from the path of the bodhisattva. The bodhisattva, sometimes translated as "the awakening warrior," dedicates his or her life to the welfare of others and is willing to face the challenges of life to do so. The bodhisattva's way of life does not lead to a spiritual escape from the reality of the world. Rather, the bodhisattva cultivates the capacity to live within the raw reality of suffering on the ground and transform life's adverse circumstances into a path of awakening. A bodhisattva makes a clear decision to remain embodied and in relationship to life even while reaching states of awareness that go far beyond our normal reality. Such a person is said to renounce the peace of nirvana and overcome the fear of samsara. What gives this attitude to life a particular significance is that it recognizes that only through fully awakening our innate wholeness can we achieve the greatest benefit to others.

Central to this approach to life is a quality of intention called bodhichitta, often translated as "the awakening mind." The awakening mind is most often described as the clear, compassionate intention to attain the state of buddhahood for the welfare of all sentient beings. While "the awakening mind" may seem like a relatively simple phrase, its actual psychological, emotional, and social implications are huge. It is a reorientation of the whole of an individual's direction and meaning in life, rooted in a deep sense of compassion and responsibility towards the welfare of the world.

~ From The Courage to Feel: Buddhist Practices for Opening to Others by Rob Preece, published by Snow Lion Publications

Tags: Buddhism, compassion, Dharma, Quote, The Path of the Bodhisattva, The Courage to Feel, Buddhist Practices for Opening to Others, Rob Preece, Snow Lion Publications

Transformational Bias in Integral Psychotherapy?

I don't know that there is a transformational bias in integral psychotherapy, but I definitely experience such a bias on occasion in how I look at clients - and I am sure that it does not serve the client's best interests. I want to explore that possible bias here.

This musing/exploration was inspired by a discussion in my individual therapy class this week, a case study on a man named "George." I'll provide details below.

First, let's define some terms so that we are clear on what I am talking about here.

Integral Psychotherapy:

Integral Psychotherapy is a term that has been developed independently by both by practicing psychologists and psychotherapists who are also students of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother (such as Brant Cortright, Alok Pandey, and Soumitra Basu) and by Ken Wilber and the Integral Institute. It is therefore used in two different contexts, although both within the context of integral thought: referring either to the synthesis of western psychology and psychotherapy with the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, or to to the application of Wilberian Integral theory to psychotherapy and personal development.

I am using the Wilber version here, as outlined in Integral Psychology. Essentially this entails the use of his quadrant model, developmental lines and stages, as well as states of consciousness and personality types - all of which is generally referred to as AQAL. For an overview of integral psychology, check out this article by John Rowan, or this video featuring Jeff Soulen.

Translation:

A horizontal change in surface structures or patterns; the shuffling and stabilizing of
those surface structures. (Includes agency and communion as primary expressions.)

Essentially we are talking here about change within a stage - an expansion of tools or perspectives within a given developmental stage.

Transformation:

A vertical change in deep structures. The emergence of deeper forms of agency and wider communions. A shift to any higher level in a holarchy. (Includes Eros and Agape as driving forces.)

Most often, transformation is talked about as an upward shift in developmental stage, though not exclusively.

Both of the preceding definitions are taken from the AQAL Gloassary - see the glossary for meanings of other terms in the definitions

For the purposes of this discussion, transformation will be seen as the transition from a lower, less complex perspective to a greater, more complex perspective. The stage model I will be referring to will be Robert Kegan's subject-object model of complexity of mind, mostly because the case study under examination lends itself to that particular model more than others.

The Case:

I'm going to abbreviate the case study we were given in class for the purposes of this blog post, so here are the particulars:

George is a 54-yr old man whose wife made an appointment for him two months after he had found that his father (who was living in a guest house on their ranch) had shot himself to death with a shotgun. Since then he had become withdrawn, had lost his appetite and lost weight, had stopped going into work at the business he had taken over from his father years early and expanded considerably, and had began to sleep poorly and have nightmares when he did sleep. George was an only child and his mother had passed away two years prior. He was married with two sons and an 18-year-old daughter still living at home.

George stated he had been a hard worker his whole life, but recently had no desire to get up in the morning, and even less desire to go to work. In fact, he was questioning whether or not he wanted to continue with the family business at all. He felt like simply riding and raising horses (he can afford to do this due to his success as a self-made business man).

While George felt sincere grief and some responsibility over his father's death, he recognized that his father's health was failing and that his father never wanted to be a burden on anyone. More troubling to George was his lack of interest in the family business and his considerable guilt over not caring about it any more.

He seemed to be questioning what he wanted to do with his life at this point and was experiencing dissatisfaction and restlessness.

So the assignment was to discuss the treatment plan we would develop for this man. There was some disagreement as to whether we treat the depression or the grief first, and what to do about the potential PTSD (too early to diagnose in many opinions). We concluded that dealing with and resolving the grief would most likely reduce and/or remove the depression, which is how it played out in the real world.

So I'm sitting there thinking, "WAIT! There is a huge opportunity here for this man to evolve a bit."

I could clearly see that this death was a transformative crisis that had opened George to a potential new way of being in the world, a more authentic and more complex perspective. George was deeply embedded in what Kegan calls the interpersonal stage and now refers to as "socialized mind." He followed his father into the family business, as had one of his two sons. He was a man of responsibility and loyalty to his family. Those qualities are great, but he also seems to be constrained by self-imposed limits on what he can do in life.

This perspective had been shaken by his father's death. He no longer had interest in the family business. He did not seem to want to follow the same path his father had followed (who had continued going into the business every day even though he did not actually work). He was restless and not satisfied with how things were going in his life. He was thinking about raising horses and spending more time riding.

There was a tremendous opportunity here for George to shift from socialized mind to "self-authoring mind." Even if there was not a full stage-shift, he was in that liminal space often created by loss when one is open to change (see this article on the ritual structure of change for an understanding of liminal space in the change process) and could have certainly broadened his perspective with the right guidance.

As I sat in class thinking these thoughts, it occurred to me that he did not go to therapy to evolve. In fact, he had no intention of going at all and did it simply because his wife of 30 years wanted him to go.

As an integrally-informed (student) therapist and as someone who has done a tremendous amount of self-work in seeking transformation, I have a bias toward transformation over translation - and I think that many integral folks do. Even Kegan, a well-known father of the integral psychology movement, seems to express this bias in his books (all of them are designed to help people evolve through stages by identifying language and immunities that block evolution).

But is this the best thing for the client?

In George's case - and to an extent I see him as a fair John Doe representative - I'm not so sure that what I would have wanted for him was the best thing for him. I suspect that the outcome generated by our professor (his therapist) was more appropriate to his needs and life.

Is there a bias toward pushing clients into transformation among those who practice integral psychotherapy? I don't know, but I certainly can entertain that bias - and it's something I need to look at closely. It is not my job to "grow" clients (as Don Beck has been known to say regarding his Spiral Dynamics Integral model). It is my job to serve the client as best I can.

Tags: Psychology, Integral, therapy, Transformational Bias in Integral Psychotherapy?, transformation, translation, Integral Psychology, Robert Kegan, socialized mind, self-authoring mind, change, AQAL

Shambhala Sun - Waking Up to Your World by Pema Chödrön

Another great dharma lesson from Pema Chodron and Shambhala Sun.

Waking Up to Your World

By Pema Chödrön

Throughout our day we can pause, take a break from our usual thoughts, and wake up to the magic and vastness of the world around us. Pema Chödrön says this easy and spacious type of mindfulness practice is the most important thing we can do with our lives.

One of my favorite subjects of contemplation is this question: “Since death is certain, but the time of death is uncertain, what is the most important thing?” You know you will die, but you really don’t know how long you have to wake up from the cocoon of your habitual patterns. You don’t know how much time you have left to fulfill the potential of your precious human birth. Given this, what is the most important thing?

Every day of your life, every morning of your life, you could ask yourself, “As I go into this day, what is the most important thing? What is the best use of this day?” At my age, it’s kind of scary when I go to bed at night and I look back at the day, and it seems like it passed in the snap of a finger. That was a whole day? What did I do with it? Did I move any closer to being more compassionate, loving, and caring—to being fully awake? Is my mind more open? What did I actually do? I feel how little time there is and how important it is how we spend our time.

What is the best use of each day of our lives? In one very short day, each of us could become more sane, more compassionate, more tender, more in touch with the dream-like quality of reality. Or we could bury all these qualities more deeply and get more in touch with solid mind, retreating more into our own cocoon.

Every time a habitual pattern gets strong, every time we feel caught up or on automatic pilot, we could see it as an opportunity to burn up negative karma. Rather than as a problem, we could see it as our karma ripening, which gives us an opportunity to burn up karma, or at least weaken our karmic propensities. But that’s hard to do. When we realize that we are hooked, that we’re on automatic pilot, what do we do next? That is a central question for the practitioner.

One of the most effective means for working with that moment when we see the gathering storm of our habitual tendencies is the practice of pausing, or creating a gap. We can stop and take three conscious breaths, and the world has a chance to open up to us in that gap. We can allow space into our state of mind.

Before I talk more about consciously pausing or creating a gap, it might be helpful to appreciate the gap that already exists in our environment. Awakened mind exists in our surroundings—in the air and the wind, in the sea, in the land, in the animals—but how often are we actually touching in with it? Are we poking our heads out of our cocoons long enough to actually taste it, experience it, let it shift something in us, let it penetrate our conventional way of looking at things?

If you take some time to formally practice meditation, perhaps in the early morning, there is a lot of silence and space. Meditation practice itself is a way to create gaps. Every time you realize you are thinking and you let your thoughts go, you are creating a gap. Every time the breath goes out, you are creating a gap. You may not always experience it that way, but the basic meditation instruction is designed to be full of gaps. If you don’t fill up your practice time with your discursive mind, with your worrying and obsessing and all that kind of thing, you have time to experience the blessing of your surroundings. You can just sit there quietly. Then maybe silence will dawn on you, and the sacredness of the space will penetrate.

Or maybe not. Maybe you are already caught up in the work you have to do that day, the projects you haven’t finished from the day before. Maybe you worry about something that has to be done, or hasn’t been done, or a letter that you just received. Maybe you are caught up in busy mind, caught up in hesitation or fear, depression or discouragement. In other words, you’ve gone into your cocoon.

For all of us, the experience of our entanglement differs from day to day. Nevertheless, if you connect with the blessings of your surroundings—the stillness, the magic, and the power—maybe that feeling can stay with you and you can go into your day with it. Whatever it is you are doing, the magic, the sacredness, the expansiveness, the stillness, stays with you. When you are in touch with that larger environment, it can cut through your cocoon mentality.

On the other hand, I know from personal experience how strong the habitual mind is. The discursive mind, the busy, worried, caught-up, spaced-out mind, is powerful. That’s all the more reason to do the most important thing—to realize what a strong opportunity every day is, and how easy it is to waste it. If you don’t allow your mind to open and to connect with where you are, with the immediacy of your experience, you could easily become completely submerged. You could be completely caught up and distracted by the details of your life, from the moment you get up in the morning until you fall asleep at night.

You get so caught up in the content of your life, the minutiae that make up a day, so self-absorbed in the big project you have to do, that the blessings, the magic, the stillness, and the vastness escape you. You never emerge from your cocoon, except for when there’s a noise that’s so loud you can’t help but notice it, or something shocks you, or captures your eye. Then for a moment you stick your head out and realize, Wow! Look at that sky! Look at that squirrel! Look at that person!


The great fourteenth-century Tibetan teacher Longchenpa talked about our useless and meaningless focus on the details, getting so caught up we don’t see what is in front of our nose. He said that this useless focus extends moment by moment into a continuum, and days, months, and even whole lives go by. Do you spend your whole time just thinking about things, distracting yourself with your own mind, completely lost in thought? I know this habit so well myself. It is the human predicament. It is what the Buddha recognized and what all the living teachers since then have recognized. This is what we are up against.

“Yes, but…,” we say. Yes, but I have a job to do, there is a deadline, there is an endless amount of e-mail I have to deal with, I have cooking and cleaning and errands. How are we supposed to juggle all that we have to do in a day, in a week, in a month, without missing our precious opportunity to experience who we really are? Not only do we have a precious human life, but that precious human life is made up of precious human days, and those precious human days are made up of precious human moments. How we spend them is really important. Yes, we do have jobs to do; we don’t just sit around meditating all day, even at a retreat center. We have the real nitty-gritty of relationships—how we live together, how we rub up against each other. Going off by ourselves, getting away from the people we think are distracting us, won’t solve everything. Part of our karma, part of our dilemma, is learning to work with the feelings that relationships bring up. They provide opportunities to do the most important thing too.

If you have spent the morning lost in thought worrying about what you have to do in the afternoon, already working on it in every little gap you can find, you have wasted a lot of opportunities, and it’s not even lunchtime yet. But if the morning has been characterized by at least some spaciousness, some openness in your mind and heart, some gap in your usual way of getting caught up, sooner or later that is going to start to permeate the rest of your day.

If you haven’t become accustomed to the experience of openness, if you haven’t got any taste of it, then there is no way the afternoon is going to be influenced by it. On the other hand, if you’ve given openness a chance, it doesn’t matter whether you are meditating, working at the computer, or fixing a meal, the magic will be there for you, permeating your life.

As I said, our habits are strong, so a certain discipline is required to step outside our cocoon and receive the magic of our surroundings. The pause practice—the practice of taking three conscious breaths at any moment when we notice that we are stuck—is a simple but powerful practice that each of us can do at any given moment.

Pause practice can transform each day of your life. It creates an open doorway to the sacredness of the place in which you find yourself. The vastness, stillness, and magic of the place will dawn upon you, if you let your mind relax and drop for just a few breaths the storyline you are working so hard to maintain. If you pause just long enough, you can reconnect with exactly where you are, with the immediacy of your experience.

When you are waking up in the morning and you aren’t even out of bed yet, even if you are running late, you could just look out and drop the storyline and take three conscious breaths. Just be where you are! When you are washing up, or making your coffee or tea, or brushing your teeth, just create a gap in your discursive mind. Take three conscious breaths. Just pause. Let it be a contrast to being all caught up. Let it be like popping a bubble. Let it be just a moment in time, and then go on.

You are on your way to whatever you need to do for the day. Maybe you are in your car, or on the bus, or standing in line. But you can still create that gap by taking three conscious breaths and being right there with the immediacy of your experience, right there with whatever you are seeing, with whatever you are doing, with whatever you are feeling.


Another powerful way to do pause practice is simply to listen for a moment. Instead of sight being the predominant sense perception, let sound, hearing, be the predominant sense perception. It’s a very powerful way to cut through our conventional way of looking at the world. In any moment, you can just stop and listen intently. It doesn’t matter what particular sound you hear; you simply create a gap by listening intently.

In any moment you could just listen. In any moment, you could put your full attention on the immediacy of your experience. You could look at your hand resting on your leg, or feel your bottom sitting on the cushion or on the chair. You could just be here. Instead of being not here, instead of being absorbed in thinking, planning, and worrying, instead of being caught up in the cocoon, cut off from your sense perceptions, cut off from the power and magic of the moment, you could be here. When you go out for a walk, pause frequently—stop and listen. Stop and take three conscious breaths. How precisely you create the gap doesn’t really matter. Just find a way to punctuate your life with these thought-free moments. They don’t have to be thought-free minutes even, they can be no more than one breath, one second. Punctuate, create gaps. As soon as you do, you realize how big the sky is, how big your mind is.

When you are working, it’s so easy to become consumed, particularly by computers. They have a way of hypnotizing you, but you could have a timer on your computer that reminds you to create a gap. No matter how engrossing your work is, no matter how much it is sweeping you up, just keep pausing, keep allowing for a gap. When you get hooked by your habit patterns, don’t see it as a big problem; allow for a gap.

When you are completely wound up about something and you pause, your natural intelligence clicks in and you have a sense of the right thing to do. This is part of the magic: our own natural intelligence is always there to inform us, as long as we allow a gap. As long as we are on automatic pilot, dictated to by our minds and our emotions, there is no intelligence. It is a rat race. Whether we are at a retreat center or on Wall Street, it becomes the busiest, most entangled place in the world.

Pause, connect with the immediacy of your experience, connect with the blessings; liberate yourself from the cocoon of self-involvement, talking to yourself all of the time, completely obsessing. Allow a gap, gap, gap. Just do it over and over and over; allow yourself the space to realize where you are. Realize how big your mind is; realize how big the space is, that it has never gone away, but that you have been ignoring it.

Find a way to slow down. Find a way to relax. Find a way to relax your mind and do it often, very, very often, throughout the day continuously, not just when you are hooked but all the time. At its root, being caught up in discursive thought, continually self-involved with discursive plans, worries, and so forth, is attachment to ourselves. It is the surface manifestation of ego-clinging.

So, what is the most important thing to do with each day? With each morning, each afternoon, each evening? It is to leave a gap. It doesn’t matter whether you are practicing meditation or working, there is an underlying continuity. These gaps, these punctuations, are like poking holes in the clouds, poking holes in the cocoon. And these gaps can extend so that they can permeate your entire life, so that the continuity is no longer the continuity of discursive thought but rather one continual gap.

But before we get carried away by the idea of continual gap, let’s be realistic about where we actually are. We must first remind ourselves what the most important thing is. Then we have to learn how to balance that with the fact that we have jobs to do, which can cause us to become submerged in the details of our lives and caught in the cocoon of our patterns all day long. So find ways to create the gap frequently, often, continuously. In that way, you allow yourself the space to connect with the sky and the ocean and the birds and the land and with the blessing of the sacred world. Give yourself the chance to come out of your cocoon.


This teaching is based on a talk given to the monks and nuns at Gampo Abbey in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where Pema Chödrön is resident acharya (senior teacher). It has been adapted for a lay audience.

Waking Up to Your World, Pema Chödrön, Shambhala Sun, September 2008.

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Tags: Buddhism, Shambhala Sun, Waking Up to Your World, Pema Chödrön, dharma, mindfulness, practice, meditation

Body Posture Affects Confidence In Your Own Thoughts

Further proof that body (objective) and mind (subjective) are much more intimately linked than many people like to think. From Medical News Today.

Body Posture Affects Confidence In Your Own Thoughts

Main Category: Psychology / Psychiatry
Article Date: 07 Oct 2009 - 3:00 PDT

Sitting up straight in your chair isn't just good for your posture - it also gives you more confidence in your own thoughts, according to a new study.

Researchers found that people who were told to sit up straight were more likely to believe thoughts they wrote down while in that posture concerning whether they were qualified for a job.

On the other hand, those who were slumped over their desks were less likely to accept these written-down feelings about their own qualifications.

The results show how our body posture can affect not only what others think about us, but also how we think about ourselves, said Richard Petty, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at Ohio State University.

"Most of us were taught that sitting up straight gives a good impression to other people," Petty said. "But it turns out that our posture can also affect how we think about ourselves. If you sit up straight, you end up convincing yourself by the posture you're in."

Petty conducted the study with Pablo Briñol, a former postdoctoral fellow at Ohio State now at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Spain, and Benjamin Wagner, a current graduate student at Ohio State. The research appears in the October 2009 issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology.

The study included 71 students at Ohio State. When they entered the lab for the experiment, the participants were told they would be taking part in two separate studies at the same time, one organized by the business school and one by the arts school.

They were told the arts study was examining factors contributing to people's acting abilities, in this case, the ability to maintain a specific posture while engaging in other activities. They were seated at a computer terminal and instructed to either "sit up straight" and "push out [their] chest]" or "sit slouched forward" with their "face looking at [their] knees."

While in one of these positions, students participated in the business study, which supposedly investigated factors contributing to job satisfaction and professional performance.

While holding their posture, students listed either three positive or three negative personal traits relating to future professional performance on the job.

After completing this task, the students took a survey in which they rated themselves on how well they would do as a future professional employee.

The results were striking.

How the students rated themselves as future professionals depended on which posture they held as they wrote the positive or negative traits.

Students who held the upright, confident posture were much more likely to rate themselves in line with the positive or negative traits they wrote down.

In other words, if they wrote positive traits about themselves, they rated themselves more highly, and if they wrote negative traits about themselves, they rated themselves lower.

"Their confident, upright posture gave them more confidence in their own thoughts, whether they were positive or negative," Petty said.

However, students who assumed the slumped over, less confident posture, didn't seem convinced by their own thoughts - their ratings didn't differ much regardless of whether they wrote positive or negative things about themselves.

The end result of this was that when students wrote positive thoughts about themselves, they rated themselves more highly when in the upright than the slouched posture because the upright posture led to confidence in the positive thoughts.

However, when students wrote negative thoughts about themselves, they rated themselves more negatively in the upright than the slouched posture because the upright posture led to more confidence in their negative thoughts.

Petty emphasized that while students were told to sit up straight or to slump down, the researchers did not use the words "confident" or "doubt" in the instructions or gave any indication about how the posture was supposed to make them feel.

In a separate experiment, the researchers repeated the same scenario with a different group of students, but asked them a series of questions afterwards about how they felt during the course of the study.

"These participants didn't report feeling more confident in the upright position than they did in the slouched position, even though those in the upright position did report more confidence in the thoughts they generated," Petty said.

That suggests people's thoughts are influenced by their posture, even though they don't realize that is what's happening.

"People assume their confidence is coming from their own thoughts. They don't realize their posture is affecting how much they believe in what they're thinking," he said.

"If they did realize that, posture wouldn't have such an effect."

This research extends a 2003 study by Petty and Briñol which found similar results for head nodding. In that case, people had more confidence in thoughts they generated when they nodded their head up and down compared to when they shook their head from side to side.

However, Petty noted that body posture is a static pose compared to head nodding, and probably more natural and easy to use in day-to-day life.

"Sitting up straight is something you can train yourself to do, and it has psychological benefits - as long as you generally have positive thoughts," he said.

For example, students are often told when taking a multiple-choice test that if they're not absolutely sure of the answer, their first best guess is more often correct.

"If a student is sitting up straight, he may be more likely to believe his first answer. But if he is slumped down, he may change it and end up not performing as well on the test," he said.

Tags: body, mind, Psychology, confidence, Body Posture Affects Confidence In Your Own Thoughts, posture, Richard Petty, Pablo Briñol, Benjamin Wagner, European Journal of Social Psychology

Wired - Supermassive Black Holes Collide to Become Even More Super and Massive

Nice article - love black hole theories . . . and cool pictures.

Supermassive Black Holes Collide to Become Even More Super and Massive

• By Betsy Mason
• October 7, 2009

New X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory added to an image previously captured by the Hubble Space Telescope created this amazing composite image of two black holes on the verge of colliding.

The two supermassive black holes, which show up as two points of light in the center of the galaxy NGC 6240, are only 3,000 light-years apart. Astronomers think the two will eventually combine into a single, larger black hole.

Also combining to make a whole greater than the sum of its parts are the two pieces of this image, shown below. Space photos are often a combination of multiple images and sets of data, designed to bring out the details and beauty of the subject. In this case, Chandra’s X-ray data and Hubble’s optical data come together to create an image so stunning that it looks like it must be an artist’s rendering.

Images: X-ray: NASA/CXC/MIT/C.Canizares, M.Nowak. Optical: NASA/STScI.

Tags: Space, Science, NASA, Wired, Supermassive Black Holes Collide to Become Even More Super and Massive, black holes, physics

Peter Bregman - To Change Effectively, Change Just One Thing

Peter Bregman's history and qualifications:

Peter Bregman speaks, writes, and consults about how to lead and how to live. He is the CEO of Bregman Partners, Inc., a global management consulting firm, and advises CEOs and their leadership teams. He is the author of Point B: A Short Guide To Leading a Big Change. You can sign up to be notified when he writes a new post or email him at pbregman@bregmanpartners.com.

What he proposes here is very similar to what Robert Kegan talks about in Immunity to Change - many of Kegan's clients talk about change in terms of the "one big thing."

His approach to weight loss isn't going to work for most people, but his basic approach is sound. This is a good idea, to focus on one thing only, but for most people, simply dropping one food from the diet is not the answer. It needs to go deeper.

We need to find the things that are working counter to our desired change. For example (based on a client of mine), a woman wants to lose 30-40 pounds, but every time she gets close to the goal, she begins to get attention from men and falls off the program, gaining back a lot of the weight. The real problem for her is not the diet/exercise, it's the fear of intimacy. Until she fixes that, all the diets and exercise will never work. We need to find the hidden assumptions that sabotage our desire to change.

Anyway, here is the article.

To Change Effectively, Change Just One Thing

2:42 PM Tuesday October 6, 2009

I lost 18 pounds in the past month and a half.

I didn't exercise harder or longer than usual. I didn't read a new diet book supported by evidence and filled with rules and recipes. I didn't eat prepared meals from a diet organization.

I've done all those things in the past and some of them worked but none of them lasted. They were too complicated or too expensive or too cumbersome to continue.

So I made a different decision this time. A much simpler one.

First a little background on losing weight. Every new diet book explains why it's better than all the previous ones. This new plan, the author claims with enthusiasm, holds the key to losing weight and keeping it off forever. It will succeed where the others have failed.

So we decrease our fat consumption. Or increase it. We eat more protein. Or less. We raise our intake of carbohydrates. Or reduce it. And the question lingers: which is the best diet to lose weight?

Well, we now have the answer. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine earlier this year put 811 overweight adults through four different diets, each one a different proportion of fat, carbohydrates and protein.

The result? On average participants lost 12 pounds after six months and kept nine pounds off after two years. No matter which diet they followed. Certainly some diets are healthier than others. But in terms of losing weight? No diet was better than any other. Because all diets work through a single mechanism — they restrict your calorie intake. People lose weight when they eat less.

If that's true, then the best diet is the simplest one. So I asked myself: what's the one thing I can change that will make the biggest difference in my calorie consumption? Everyone has one thing.

Mine was sugar. Sometimes I would eat three bowls of ice cream in a day. If I changed that, everything else would work itself out. Cutting out sugar was the one thing that would give me the highest return.

So I stopped eating it. No more cookies, candy, cake, ice cream. That's the only change I consciously made. I sidestepped millions of complex little decisions most diets require — counting, weighing, choosing, deciding. No phases, no recipes, no thinking.

Each person's one thing could be different. For some it might be fried foods. For others, meat. For others still, soft drinks. What's important is to keep it simple.

The implications of this are huge, not just for diets but for all behavior change (after all, what else is a diet but behavior change?).

Typically, people overwhelm themselves with tasks in their eagerness to make a change successfully. But that's a mistake. Instead, they should take the time up front to figure out the one and only thing that will have the highest impact and then focus 100% of their effort on that one thing.

A few years ago a Fortune 100 client asked me to design a new leadership training program. They already had one and had spent several years training people in it, but now they wanted a new one. Why? Because the current one wasn't having the impact they wanted.

I asked to see the old one. Honestly? While I'd love to say my leadership ideas are far superior, I thought the ones they were using were equally good. Leadership models are no different than diets — most of them are just fine. The brilliance is rarely in the model, it's in the implementation.

Don't start from scratch, I pleaded with them. You've already spent years spreading the word, inculcating the language, and socializing the concepts of the old leadership methodology. People are familiar with it. Don't get rid of it.

Just simplify it. Reduce it to its essence. What's the one thing that will have the greatest impact on their leadership?

After some thought they concluded that if managers communicated more with their employees it would solve the majority of their issues. Great, I suggested, focus all your efforts on that. Let everything else go.

Sam, an entrepreneur friend of mine, called me disheartened after his business didn't work out. He's taking a few months off before starting his next venture, and we discussed how he should spend his time. It turns out that Sam's dyslexic and has always had difficulty reading.

We agreed he should do one thing in his time off: read every day. That's unusual advice from me. Usually I tell people to forget about their weaknesses and focus on their strengths. But in Sam's case the dividend will be huge. If he can tackle reading, not only will it open doors for him, he'll conquer the one thing he thought he couldn't do. That confidence will change everything else in his life.

If you're going to work on a weakness, never choose more than one.

A large retail organization with stores all over the world — we'll call it Marla's Clothing — developed ten "Gold" behaviors they wanted all sales associates to exhibit. Things like greet each customer, ask customers if they want an accessory at the point of sale, measure customers for a good fit, and thank each customer for shopping at the store. Stores in which sales associates exhibited all ten behaviors saw a substantial increase in sales.

After some time, Marla's Clothing sent in mystery shoppers to see how the sales associates were doing. Management was pleased: on average the associates were displaying nine of the ten behaviors.

I asked the project lead if they had seen a change in sales as a result of this 90% success rate. After a short inspection of the data it turned out they hadn't.

So we looked to see if the associates were each missing different behaviors or if they were avoiding a specific one of the ten. As we suspected, they were all skipping the same behavior: measuring customers for a good fit.

"You don't have ten Gold behaviors," I told the project lead, "You have one. Measuring customers for a good fit is your one thing." We instructed the sales associates to focus solely on doing that one thing. Marla's Clothing sales shot up.

"18 pounds!" a friend of mine exclaimed. "You should write a book about it."

I considered it for a second but quickly realized I'd only have one thing to say.

"Not a book," I responded, "but maybe a blog post."

Tags: Peter Bregman, Change, Effectively, Change Just One Thing, Psychology, change, Robert Kegan, Immunity to Change

While Adolescents May Reason As Well As Adults, Their Emotional Maturity Lags, Says New Research

We recently learned that adolescents are just as rational as adults, including a greater ability to grasp long range outcomes than we had previously suspected. But we now know that emotional development, or the lack of it, may explain some of their behaviors.

This raises interesting legal issues, as the article points out.

While Adolescents May Reason As Well As Adults, Their Emotional Maturity Lags, Says New Research

ScienceDaily (Oct. 8, 2009) — A 16-year-old might be quite capable of making an informed decision about whether to end a pregnancy – a decision likely to be made after due consideration and consultation with an adult – but this same adolescent may not possess the maturity to be held to adult levels of responsibility if she commits a violent crime, according to new research into adolescent psychological development.

"Adolescents likely possess the necessary intellectual skills to make informed choices about terminating a pregnancy but may lack the social and emotional maturity to control impulses, resist peer pressure and fully appreciate the riskiness of dangerous decisions," said Laurence Steinberg, PhD, a professor of developmental psychology at Temple University and lead author of the study. "This immaturity mitigates their criminal responsibility."

The findings appear in the October issue of American Psychologist, published by the American Psychological Association.

Steinberg and his co-authors address this seeming contradiction in a study showing that cognitive and emotional abilities mature at different rates. They recruited 935 10- to 30- year-olds to examine age differences in a variety of cognitive and psychosocial capacities.

The participants took different tests measuring psychosocial maturity and cognitive ability to examine age patterns in numerous factors that affect judgment and decision-making. The maturity measures included tests of impulse control, sensation-seeking, resistance to peer influence, future orientation and risk perception. The cognitive battery included measures of basic intellectual abilities.

There were no differences among the youngest four age groups (10-11, 12-13, 14-15 and 16-17) on the measures of psychosocial maturity. But significant differences in maturity, favoring adults, were found between the 16- to 17-year-olds and those 22 years and older, and between the 18- to 21-year-olds and those 26 and older. Results were the same for males and females, the authors said.

"It is very difficult for a 16-year-old to resist peer pressure in a heated, volatile situation," Steinberg said. "Most times, there is no time to talk to an adult to inject some reason and reality to the situation. Many crimes committed by adolescents are done in groups with other teens and are not premeditated."

In contrast, differences in cognitive capacity measures increased from ages 11 to 16 and then showed no improvements after age 16 – exactly the opposite of the pattern found on the psychosocial measures. Certain cognitive abilities, such as the ability to reason logically, reach adult levels long before psychosocial maturity is attained, Steinberg said.

"Medical decisions are those where adolescents can take the time to understand and weigh options provided by health care practitioners," said Steinberg. "Rarely are these decisions made in the heat of the moment without consultation with adults. Under these circumstances, adolescents exhibit adult maturity."

Two friend-of-the-court briefs filed by APA in cases heard by the Supreme Court spurred questions about these maturity differences and the apparent inconsistency between APA's positions in the two cases. In its amicus brief filed in Roper v. Simmons (2005), the case that abolished the juvenile death penalty, APA presented research showing that adolescents are developmentally immature in ways that are relevant to their criminal culpability. In an earlier brief filed in Hodgson v. Minnesota (1990), which upheld adolescents' right to seek an abortion without parental approval, APA presented research regarding cognitive abilities that bear on medical choices, showing that adolescents are as mature as adults.

APA differentiated these two scenarios by looking at the decision-making processes required for each situation. In the Hodgson case, APA described adolescents as being competent to make informed and sound health care decisions. In the Roper case, APA characterized adolescents as too short-sighted and impulsive to warrant capital punishment, no matter what the crime. APA placed the research about psychosocial development of adolescents in the context of a court's need to determine as part of a death penalty sentence that the perpetrator can reliably be assessed as among the "worst of the worst."

In November, the Supreme Court is slated to hear two cases concerning the constitutionality of sentencing juveniles to life without the possibility of parole. "Similar questions about adolescent development may be raised in these cases," Steinberg said. APA has filed an amicus curiae brief in those cases presenting relevant research, including Steinberg's most recent study, to the court.

Adolescents' legal rights, said Steinberg, should be guided by accurate and timely scientific evidence on the nature and course of psychological development. "It is crucial to understand that brain systems responsible for logical reasoning and basic information processing mature earlier than systems responsible for self-regulation and the coordination of emotion and thinking," he said.

---

Journal reference:

1. Laurence Steinberg, Elizabeth Cauffman, Jennifer Woolard, Sandra Graham, Marie Banich. Are Adolescents Less Mature than Adults? Minors' Access to Abortion, the Juvenile Death Penalty, and the Alleged APA 'Flip-Flop'. American Psychologist, 2009; Vol. 64, No. 7 DOI: 10.1037/a0014763

Adapted from materials provided by American Psychological Association, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Tags: emotions, intelligence, teens, Psychology, development, APA, legal rights, While Adolescents May Reason As Well As Adults, Their Emotional Maturity Lags, Research

Michael Dirda - These Foolish Things

Very interesting and entertaining article - I love fools. The trickster, or wise fool, has been a favorite character of mine in myth and fiction - and sometimes, in life.

These Foolish Things

There are three kinds of fools: Real Fools, Professional Fools, and Unsuspecting Fools. The professional, a staple of Shakespeare’s plays, is, in reality, nobody’s fool.

By Michael Dirda

Aristotle is sometimes called the Master of Those Who Know, which may explain why most people find him easier to admire than to like. By contrast, his own teacher’s famous teacher might be dubbed the Master of Those Who Haven’t a Clue. Informed by an oracle that he was the wisest of men, Socrates immediately recognized that this must be some kind of Delphic joke. Wise, pshaw! At best he was just a lover of wisdom — etymologically a philo-sopher — rather than a possessor of it. Really, Glaucus — he might have said — if I’m so smart, why do I have to go around asking all these questions?

Still, Socrates does at least look the part of antiquity’s Yoda. Everyone knows that to be wise means to be old, with lots of wrinkles around kindly eyes that have seen much and forgiven much and are full of pity for the fools that mortals be. But that, in short, is the trouble with wisdom. It implies a superiority to or withdrawal from the hurly-burly of life. While most of us are surrendering to what Joseph Conrad called “the destructive element,” and probably drowning in it, the wise guy is there on the shore warm and dry in his old flannel dressing gown and his new fluffy bunny slippers, and he’s probably murmuring something like, “Grasshopper, only a fool would go into the water on a day like this.” Shaking his head, he will soon pad on back to his snug little burrow and a nice cup of chamomile tea.

This is living? Wisdom plays it safe, avoids occasions of sin, sits home on Saturday night with an improving book. Elvis used to croon that “Wise men say, ‘Only fools rush in.’” But like the king he was, he knew that a brokenhearted clown understood more about the heart than any cautious Polonius. What would love be without impetuousness? Who can love and then be wise? “The heart has reasons that the reason doesn’t know.” No proverb says that love should be the end product of careful calculation, that it’s the smart move. This is why computerized dating seems repulsive to so many people; you just know the machine would be happier working on a spreadsheet. Besides, who would trust his emotional life to a program written by some Caltech brainiac who’s spent his entire geeky existence playing Halo and Warcraft? To quote Mr. T, “I pity the fool.”

As every truly wise man or woman knows, love is just one of those crazy things, and there’s no logic to what attracts us to one person and not another. You can tot up the pluses and minuses of a relationship all you want, meditate on the possible outcomes of commitment, consult past experience, but you’d do just as well, or better, to listen to a lot of country and western music. You want an explanation for falling in love? “Maybe it was Memphis.” Montaigne, whose Socratic motto was “What do I know?” accounted for his love for his friend Etienne de la Boetie perfectly: “Because he was he and I was I.”

In other words, when it comes to falling in love, who can explain it? Who can tell me why? Well, the goddess Folly can. In Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly she proclaims that she oversees love, that folly embodies the intuitive and passionate side of life and is far more fundamental to our human well-being than propriety or reason.

And that’s just for starters. Folly points out that Christ endured the “folly” of the cross and reminded His followers to imitate “children, lilies, mustard-seed, and humble sparrows, all foolish, senseless things, which live their lives by natural instinct alone, free from care or purpose.” Folly represents the “natural” in all its senses, standing in opposition to the mind-forged manacles of societal norms and expectations. Eventually, notes Erasmus, this sort of folly can even modulate into mystical distraction and ecstasy. Plato asserted that the madness of physical love, during which we forget all about thinking and our spirit seems to leave the body, is the highest form of ordinary happiness, while Christianity offers a similar joyful and irrational dream state when the soul temporarily unites itself with God.

Humanity, that dialectical animal, likes to look at things as binary opposites: raw and cooked, gay and straight, Laurel and Hardy. Just so, foolishness is the usual antithesis of wisdom. But foolishness, as Erasmus reminds us, is one of those qualities with a bit of range to it, so that another possible opposite is prudence. In fact, prudence and wisdom are practically roommates, and while sometimes being wise can look attractive — Gandalf, anyone? — almost nobody, except perhaps investment counselors, really wants to be thought of as prudent. Might just as well be an old maid in sensible black shoes or a Mr. Peepers with a coin purse. No, no, no; give me stiletto heels or give me death! If you can’t say “keep the change,” why bother to go to the bar?

In truth, there are essentially three kinds of fools: Real Fools, Professional Fools, and Unsuspecting Fools. Real Fools are the innocents, the simpletons, the idiot savants and “naturals” who react to situations and people with an Aspergian lack of restraint or decorum. They speak their unmediated minds, and great truths sometimes emerge, as “out of the mouths of babes.” Any of them might have blurted, “The emperor has no clothes.” Forrest Gump is our great modern examplar of this kind of fool. Heaven looks out for such as these.

Professional Fools include court jesters, clowns, toadies, con artists, and a whole range of yes-men. By pretending to be stupid or servile, the Professional Fool coolly aims to reinforce his client’s conviction of his own obvious superiority. In fact, these performance artistes always quip and caper with a purpose: a salary, behind-the-throne power, a scam. In literature one of the most memorable of these professional fools is Rameau’s Nephew, who in Diderot’s famous dialogue of that name toadies to the rich and powerful in return for a snug berth and regular meals. In the film The Usual Suspects, Kevin Spacey is a more complex example: Hunched and crippled (as were many professional court jesters), he’s slightly pitied by the tough and obviously much smarter people all around him. But Verbal Kint is far more than the “talkative child” that his name suggests.

As for Unsuspecting Fools, they are essentially everyone else in the world, starting with you and me. Everybody plays the fool sometimes; there’s no exception to the rule. More particularly, the Unsuspecting Fool is the supposedly wise figure — a sovereign, a pedantic scholar, a pillar of the establishment — who is blind to his own vanity and self-importance, ignorant of what’s really going on, puffed up with hubris. Pride goeth before a fall. In tragic vein, Oedipus and Lear are Unsuspecting Fools.

If you want to understand the power of Real Foolishness, read fairy tales. If there’s one thing that such stories teach us, it’s to trust animals. The simpleton who befriends the local forest creatures will find the treasure and win the princess. Every time. Not the clever older brothers with some Mission: Impossible plan. The guy who takes the thorn out of the lion’s paw, who doesn’t trample on the ants, who is careful not to crush the wildflowers will be rewarded.

Why is this? Because such saintly or holy fools possess a primitive, almost prelapsarian goodness. They are close to Nature, and they are empathetic and kind and humble and unsure of themselves and maybe not very good-looking either. They’re picked on by society and were probably in the lowest reading group, and their good souls shine forth like shook foil. Think Shrek. It’s no accident that the Feast of the Holy Innocents is also the date for the Feast of Fools. Over and over again, the Bible reminds us that the humble will be exalted.

In Shakespearean comedies (and tragedies) you’re certainly smart to play the Professional Fool or clown. When Bottom the Weaver is “translated” into an ass, the very symbol of the fool, what happens? The gorgeous Titania leads him away for some quality time in her bower. Hamlet knows that with his “antic disposition” on, he can do or say whatever he’d like. There’s no need to act the conventional young intellectual like his earnest schoolmate Horatio, who probably wears a bow tie and always makes the dean’s list at Wittenberg. As for the late Yorick, that fellow of infinite jest was obviously the only person at the gloomy court of Denmark who ever brought a spark of joy into the life of the melancholy Dane: “He hath borne me on his back a thousand times!” Even the greatest of all Shakespearean characters, Falstaff, is essentially a fool writ very, very large. Wherever Sir John goes, it’s party time, Carnival, and he is the Lord of Misrule. Certainly this jolly fat man is a lot better company than, say, the rather cold-hearted and manipulative Prospero. But even that magician finally decides to drown his book and give up his power. Being superhuman isn’t half as much fun as being human.

As for those Unsuspecting Fools, take a look at King Lear. Here the best and the brightest — the king himself; the clever, upwardly mobile Regan and Goneril; that shrewd bastard Edmund — wreak nothing but havoc and sorrow. Everything goes wrong. But why, how, could this happen to them? They took every precaution, they carefully plotted and schemed, they made Venn diagrams and flow charts, and they were careful not to let people or human feelings interfere with their big plans. By contrast, the most admirable characters in the play are terribly naïve (Cordelia), insane (Edgar as Tom O’Bedlam), or simpleminded (the Fool).

One might argue that Shakespeare’s wicked characters aren’t wise but merely worldly wise and usually too smart for their own good. They’re the sort of people to whom Paul offers his famous advice in his first letter to the Corinthians: “If any man among you seem to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise.” They are, in fact, self-centered egotists who have suppressed the springs of natural affection. In this respect, if not in any other, they aren’t really so different from the great sages and Buddhas, who remove themselves from this world, who keep a safe distance from the bonfires of desire. The austerity of spiritual life, the quest for perfect understanding or oneness or transcendence, asks that we give up being human. Is any abstraction really worth so much?

The English author Walter Pater suggested that we should seek experience itself, rather than the fruit of experience, i.e., wisdom. Of course, he was an aesthete with an ornate style, so it’s easy to dismiss what he said. It’s important for human beings to make mistakes, to do stupid things, to go overboard, to be foolish — even if it’s painful — and not to judge themselves too harshly when they’ve been burnt. As Zorba the Greek used to proclaim, “Life is trouble!”

Let me bring this foolishness to an end by repeating the advice from the closing lines of The Praise of Folly: “Clap your hands, live well, and drink!” In other words, meine Damen und Herren, life is a cabaret. What is the use of sitting alone in your room? Come hear the music play! And, then, if you’re really wise — or do I mean foolish? — you might as well dance.

.....

Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize–winning book columnist for the Washington Post and the author, most recently, of Classics for Pleasure (Harcourt).

Tags: culture, trickster, fools, In Character, Michael Dirda, These Foolish Things, fiction, myth

Shambhala Sun - Thich Nhat Hanh on Loosening the Knots of Anger

Nice article on working with anger - I was just looking at Thich Nhat Hanh's book on this subject for a paper - Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames. This is an excerpt from that book.

Thich Nhat Hanh on Loosening the Knots of Anger

By Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich Nhat Hanh teaches us how to relax the bonds of anger, attachment and delusion through mindfulness and kindness toward ourselves.

To be happy, to me, is to suffer less. If we were not capable of transforming the pain within ourselves, happiness would not be possible.

Many people look for happiness outside themselves, but true happiness must come from inside of us. Our culture tells us that happiness comes from having a lot of money, a lot of power and a high position in society. But if you observe carefully, you will see that many rich and famous people are not happy. Many of them commit suicide.

The Buddha and the monks and nuns of his time did not own anything except their three robes and one bowl. But they were very happy, because they had something extremely precious: freedom.

According to the Buddha's teachings, the most basic condition for happiness is freedom. Here we do not mean political freedom, but freedom from the mental formations of anger, despair, jealousy and delusion. These mental formations are described by the Buddha as poisons. As long as these poisons are still in our heart, happiness can not be possible.

In order to be free from anger, we have to practice, whether we are Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or Jewish. We cannot ask the Buddha, Jesus, God or Mohammed to take anger out of our hearts for us. There are concrete instructions on how to transform the craving, anger and confusion within us. If we follow these instructions and learn to take good care of our suffering, we can help others do the same.

The Knots of Anger

In our consciousness there are blocks of pain, anger and frustration called internal formations. They are also called knots because they tie us up and obstruct our freedom.

When someone insults us or does something unkind to us, an internal formation is created in our consciousness. If you don't know how to undo the internal knot and transform it, the knot will stay there for a long time. And the next time someone says something or does something to you of the same nature, that internal formation will grow stronger. As knots or blocks of pain in us, our internal formations have the power to push us, to dictate our behavior.

After a while, it becomes very difficult for us to transform, to undo the knots, and we cannot ease the constriction of this crystallized formation. The Sanskrit word for internal formation is samyojana. It means "to crystallize." Every one of us has internal formations that we need to take care of. With the practice of meditation we can undo these knots and experience transformation and healing.

Not all internal formations are unpleasant. There are also pleasant internal formations, but they can still make us suffer. When you taste, hear or see something pleasant, then that pleasure can become a strong internal knot. When the object of your pleasure disappears, you miss it and you begin searching for it. You spend a lot of time and energy trying to experience it again. If you smoke marijuana or drink alcohol and begin to like it, then it becomes an internal formation in your body and in your mind. You cannot get it off your mind. You will always look for more. The strength of the internal knot is pushing you and controlling you. So internal formations deprive us of our freedom.

Falling in love is a big internal formation. Once you are in love, you only think of the other person. You are not free anymore. You cannot do anything; you cannot study, you cannot work, you cannot enjoy the sunshine or the beauty of nature around you. You can only think of the object of your love. That is why we speak about it as a kind of accident: "falling in love." You fall down. You are not stable anymore because you have gotten into an accident. So love can also be an internal knot.

Pleasant or unpleasant, both kinds of knots take away our liberty. That is why we should guard our body and our mind very carefully, to prevent these knots from taking root in us. Drugs, alcohol and tobacco can create internal formations in our body. And anger, craving, jealousy, despair can create internal formations in our mind.

Training in Aggression

Anger is an internal formation, and since it makes us suffer, we try our best to get rid of it. Psychologists like the expression, "getting it out of your system." And they speak about venting anger, like ventilating a room filled with smoke. Some psychologists say that when the energy of anger arises in you, you should ventilate it by hitting a pillow, kicking something, or by going into the forest to yell and shout.

As a kid you were not supposed to say certain swear words. Your parents may not have allowed you to say these words because they are harmful, they damage relationships. So you went into the woods or to an isolated place and shouted these words very clearly, very strongly, in order to relieve the feeling of oppression. This is also venting.

People who use venting techniques like hitting a pillow or shouting are actually rehearsing anger. When someone is angry and vents their anger by hitting a pillow, they are learning a dangerous habit. They are training in aggression. Instead, our approach is to generate the energy of mindfulness and embrace anger every time it manifests.

Treating Anger with Tenderness

Mindfulness does not fight anger or despair. Mindfulness is there in order to recognize. To be mindful of something is to recognize that something is there in the present moment. Mindfulness is the capacity of being aware of what is going on in the present moment. "Breathing in, I know that anger has manifested in me; breathing out, I smile towards my anger." This is not an act of suppression or of fighting. It is an act of recognizing. Once we recognize our anger, we embrace it with a lot of awareness, a lot of tenderness.

When it is cold in your room, you turn on the heater, and the heater begins to send out waves of hot air. The cold air doesn't have to leave the room for the room to become warm. The cold air is embraced by the hot air and becomes warm—there's no fighting at all between them.

We practice taking care of our anger in the same way. Mindfulness recognizes anger, is aware of its presence, accepts and allows it to be there. Mindfulness is like a big brother who does not suppress his younger brother's suffering. He simply says, "Dear brother, I'm here for you." You take your younger brother in your arms and you comfort him. This is exactly our practice.

Imagine a mother getting angry with her baby and hitting him when he cries. That mother does not know that she and her baby are one. We are mothers of our anger and we have to help our baby, our anger, not fight and destroy it. Our anger is us and our compassion is also us. To meditate does not mean to fight. In Buddhism, the practice of meditation should be the practice of embracing and transforming, not of fighting.

Using Anger, Using Suffering

To grow the tree of enlightenment, we must make good use of our afflictions, our suffering. It is like growing lotus flowers; we cannot grow a lotus on marble. We cannot grow a lotus without mud.

Practitioners of meditation do not discriminate against or reject their internal formations. We do not transform ourselves into a battle field, good fighting evil. We treat our afflictions, our anger, our jealousy with a lot of tenderness. When anger comes up in us, we should begin to practice mindful breathing right away: "Breathing in, I know that anger is in me. Breathing out, I am taking good care of my anger." We behave exactly like a mother: "Breathing in, I know that my child is crying. Breathing out, I will take good care of my child." This is the practice of compassion.

If you don't know how to treat yourself with compassion, how can you treat another person with compassion? When anger arises, continue to practice mindful breathing and mindful walking to generate the energy of mindfulness. Continue to embrace tenderly the energy of anger within you. Anger may continue to be there for sometime, but you are safe, because the Buddha is in you, helping you to take good care of your anger. The energy of mindfulness is the energy of the Buddha. When you practice mindful breathing and embrace your anger, you are under the protection of the Buddha. There is no doubt about it: the Buddha is embracing you and your anger with a lot of compassion.

Giving and Receiving Mindfulness Energy

When you are angry, when you feel despair, you practice mindful breathing, mindful walking, to generate the energy of mindfulness. This energy allows you to recognize and embrace your painful feelings. And if your mindfulness is not strong enough, you ask a brother or a sister in the practice to sit close to you, to breathe with you, to walk with you in order to support you with his or her mindfulness energy.

Practicing mindfulness does not mean that you have to do everything on your own. You can practice with the support of your friends. They can generate enough mindfulness energy to help you take care of your strong emotions.

We can also support others with our mindfulness when they are in difficulty. When our child is drowning in a strong emotion, we can hold his or her hand and say, "My dear one, breathe. Breathe in and out with mommy, with daddy." We can also invite our child to do walking meditation with us, gently taking her hand and helping her calm down, with each step. When you give your child some of your mindfulness energy, she will be able to calm down very quickly and embrace her emotions.

Recognizing, Embracing, Relieving the Suffering of Anger

The first function of mindfulness is to recognize, not to fight. "Breathing in, I know that anger has manifested in me. Hello, my little anger." And breathing out, "I will take good care of you."

Once we have recognized our anger, we embrace it. This is the second function of mindfulness and it is a very pleasant practice. Instead of fighting, we are taking good care of our emotion. If you know how to embrace your anger, something will change.

It is like cooking potatoes. You cover the pot and then the water will begin to boil. You must keep the stove on for at least twenty minutes for the potatoes to cook. Your anger is a kind of potato and you cannot eat a raw potato.

Mindfulness is like the fire cooking the potatoes of anger. The first few minutes of recognizing and embracing your anger with tenderness can bring results. You get some relief. Anger is still there, but you do not suffer so much anymore, because you know how to take care of your baby. So the third function of mindfulness is soothing, relieving. Anger is there, but it is being taken care of. The situation is no longer in chaos, with the crying baby left all alone. The mother is there to take care of the baby and the situation is under control.

Keeping Mindfulness Alive

And who is this mother? The mother is the living Buddha. The capacity of being mindful, the capacity of being understanding, loving and caring is the Buddha in us. Every time we are capable of generating mindfulness, it makes the Buddha in us a reality. With the Buddha in you, you have nothing to worry about anymore. Everything will be fine if you know how to keep the Buddha within you alive.

It is important to recognize that we always have the Buddha in us. Even if we are angry, unkind or in despair, the Buddha is always within us. This means we always have the potential to be mindful, to be understanding, to be loving.

We need to practice mindful breathing or walking in order to touch the Buddha within us. When you touch the seed of mindfulness that lies in your consciousness, the Buddha will manifest in your mind consciousness and embrace your anger. You don't have to worry; just continue to practice breathing or walking to keep the Buddha alive. Then everything will be fine. The Buddha recognizes. The Buddha embraces. The Buddha relieves, and the Buddha looks deeply into the nature of anger. The Buddha understands. And this understanding will bring about transformation.

The energy of mindfulness contains the energy of concentration, as well as the energy of insight. Concentration helps you to focus on just one thing. With concentration, the energy of looking becomes more powerful.

Because of that it can make a breakthrough that is insight. Insight always has the power of liberating you. If mindfulness is there, and you know how to keep mindfulness alive, concentration will be there too. And if you know how to keep concentration alive, insight will also come. So mindfulness recognizes, embraces and relieves. Mindfulness helps us look deeply in order to gain insight. Insight is the liberating factor. It is what frees us and allows transformation to happen. This is the Buddhist practice of taking care of anger.

Every time you give your internal formations a bath of mindfulness, the blocks of pain in you become lighter and less dangerous. So give your anger, your despair, your sorrow a bath of mindfulness every day—that is your practice. If mindfulness is not there, it is very unpleasant to have these seeds come up. But if you know how to generate the energy of mindfulness, it is very healing to invite them up every day and embrace them. And after several days or weeks of bringing them up daily and helping them go back down again, you create good circulation in your psyche, and the symptoms of mental illness will begin to disappear.

Mindfulness does the work of massaging your internal formations, your blocks of suffering. You have to allow them to circulate, and this is possible only if you are not afraid of them. If you learn not to fear your knots of suffering, you can learn how to embrace them with the energy of mindfulness, and transform them.

Reprinted from Anger, by Thich Nhat Hanh, with permission of Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright © 2001 by Thich Nhat Hanh.

Loosening the Knots of Anger, Thich Nhat Hanh, Shambhala Sun, November 2001.

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Tags: Shambhala Sun, Thich Nhat Hanh, Loosening the Knots of Anger, Buddhism, anger, meditation, mindfulness, attachment, tenderness, mind

Christian Science Monitor - As Justice Sotomayor Hits the High Court, A Defense of Empathy

Nice article - found it at AlterNet, but it comes from The Christian Science Monitor. Strange that empathy became a dirty word during the confirmation hearings.

As Justice Sotomayor Hits the High Court, A Defense of Empathy

By Rick DeJesús-Rueff, Christian Science Monitor. Posted October 7, 2009.

Weighing and balancing perspectives with empathy is a better recipe for justice than "blindness," which can cause us to miss the glaring injustices of our legal system.

Rochester, N.Y. - The U.S. Supreme Court returns to work this week, Justice Sonia Sotomayor begins her first term, and the highly charged debate over "empathy" is, for the moment, dormant.

But now -- in this less heated environment -- is a good time to reconsider the value of empathy as one qualification for nominees to the court.

President Obama cited empathy as a quality he sought in nominees, yet empathy suffered criticism and derision from opponents of Justice Sotomayor. Listening to the critics, you might believe empathy renders a person incapable of rational and fair judgment.

"I'm afraid our system will only be further corrupted as a result of President Obama's views that, in tough cases, the critical ingredient for a judge is the 'depth and breadth of one's empathy,' as well as 'their broader vision of what America should be,' " claimed Sen. Jeff Sessions (R) of Alabama, a critic of Sotomayor and empathy injustices.

Read the whole article.

Tags: empathy, law, ethics, government, Christian Science Monitor, Justice Sotomayor, High Court, A Defense of Empathy, Supreme Court, Rick DeJesús-Rueff, blind justice

Van Gogh's Letters

Very cool - wish I were in Amsterdam. From The First Post.

The publication of 800 letters written by or addressed to Vincent Van Gogh is an unprecented window into the artist's private life

By Robert Fox

FIRST POSTED OCTOBER 7, 2009

At times in his life he could barely give away his paintings, let alone sell them. But today Vincent Van Gogh, long one of the world's most sought after and loved artists, conquers a new literary stage, with the publication of more than 800 of his letters.

Some 120 of the letters form a major exhibition at the museum named after him in Amsterdam. They are surrounded by some of his most celebrated paintings - the sunflowers, irises, the roasting sun at Arles, the stars whirling like Catherine wheels, the threatening cloud of crows above the wheatfield painted at Auvers sur Oise just days before he shot himself, never to recover.

The project to edit all the known correspondence - 819 of his own letters, and 93 of those to him from his brother Theo and painters including Gaugin - has taken 15 years. The glory of the letters is the matching of the words with sketches and diagrams. "They're really an extension of the paintings and pictures - a form of art in themselves, sketch-letters," says Leo Jansen, one of the designers of the project.

The idea that he was a madman slashing the canvas with paint in frenzy is rubbish

The letters portray Vincent's terrible suffering from epilepsy and breakdown, his loneliness when only his devoted brother Theo believed in his art and genius. Yet taken together the letters show how he developed into a fully fledged artist in less than ten years - and created a revolution in art in just under three years, from the time he left Paris in February 1888 and went to live in Arles.

In that time he voluntarily committed himself to the asylum in the cloister at St Remy. "Through the iron-barred window I can make out a square of wheat," he wrote to Theo on Thursday, May 23, 1889, "where alone each morning I see the sun rise in glory."

St Remy was a welcome refuge from the world. For his fellow sufferers he had nothing but compassion: "Although there are some who howl and occasionally rave, there is much true friendship that they have for each other."

In the letters the method far outweighs the madness - and this is one of the great revelations of the show and the book. "The letters are one of the great correspondences of the century, comparable to the letters of Keats, Byron and Wilde in their energy," says Philip Watson, who has edited the letters in six volumes in English for Thames and Hudson.

"What emerges here is somebody deliberately planning a campaign in his art," says Hans Luijten, one of the editors of the Dutch edition and curator of the Amsterdam show. His colleague, Leon Jansen adds, "Every move was thought through - every brush stroke planned. The idea that he was a madman slashing the canvas with paint in frenzy is rubbish and these letters show this."

Some of the letters have been stitched together from sheets that were sold separately - and they'll have to be parted again after the Amsterdam exhibition closes in January. Some are too delicate, the ink too faded, to go on public display again. So the show will be different when it travels to the Royal Academy from Amsterdam - more pictures, but fewer letters.

It's worth seeing the letters now on display at the Van Gogh museum because it is one of the most sustained essays on art by any painter of any age. "They show he knew what he was doing and that he was so far ahead of his time - that's why they thought him mad," says Hans Luijten.

You can get all two million words and 2,000 images of this great project for a cool £325 for the six volumes - if you buy before the New Year, when the price rises to £395. If you can't run to that, you can read and view it all online.

As for the Amsterdam exhibition, it will open to the public after the visit this evening by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.

The fact that she is there at all might raise a smile to the gaunt and grizzled features of Vincent himself, wherever he may be now. He was no court painter. Indeed he only ever painted one person of substance and status in his entire short but brilliant life - and no one is quite certain what became of the canvas.

'Van Gogh's Letters: The Artist Speaks' at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam runs from October 7 to January 3. It will transfer to the Royal Academy, London on January 27. 'Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters' is published by Thames and Hudson at £325.

Tags: Art, literature, Vincent Van Gogh, letters, Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters, books, museums