The Doing

Aspiration, intention, commitment, determination. These words form a sequence toward doing what we value. An aspiration is an ideal to work toward. I may have an aspiration to be kinder or more organized. It is not something we achieve, but something that guides our movement, like a lighthouse guides a ship. We are not trying to hit the lighthouse, even if that were possible. We are using it for direction.

An intention is a specific or series of acts, thoughts or feelings that we decide to engage in for the purpose of moving toward our aspirations. Sometimes we form intentions and do not carry them out. This leads us to distrust ourselves and to assume we are incapable of acting on an intention. Intention is not enough.

But after intention, there has to be a commitment. Not only an idea of what I want to do, but a promise to do it. We make that promise to ourselves. Whatever means we use to check that we are following our commitment, whether it is an “accountability partner,” a log, or a coach, ultimately the promise is to ourselves. The commitment stands as a reminder of our intention and behind that our aspiration and behind that what we value. In this way, we make our lives match our values.

And with commitment, we begin. But somewhere along the way, and possibly not too far along the way, our motivation flags, our commitment feels like a burden and our everyday life distracts us. And this is where determination comes in. Determination is the inner strength we bring to doing what is difficult, whether it is the last push up or forgoing a desire. Determination is the very ordinary, flawed, human effort that keeps pushing toward what we have decided to do even when that effort seems inadequate or off-base.

In Japanese there is a term–kessen–which means the last battle or the decisive battle. And through our values, our aspirations, our intentions, our commitments, and our determination, we are finally struggling with ourselves to become our own version of an ideal version of ourselves, and this idea is specific to each of us. Fortunately, it takes a lifetime to work at this refinement of ourselves. And really, we need a lot of time to practice.

 

Engaging

Like most primates, for human beings our superpower is our capacity to join with others to accomplish tasks, maintain safety, and become our best selves. We do not have wings, or prehensile tails, or claws. We have cooperation. We know how to band together to do what will enhance our lives, ensure our safety, and promote the development of our families.

Unfortunately, we have come to the idea that we are supposed to be independent and we should not need help. We are usually pretty ok with helping other people, but we often feel diminished when we need to turn to other people to help us. When that happens, we have to recognize our vulnerability in an impersonal, uncertain world. And because we have a fantasy that the best people succeed through their own individual effort, vulnerability brings with it the shame of our limitations, what feel like inadequacies.

It is, however, the strongest, most adaptable and most competent people who know that together we are better than we are alone. It takes a village to make one life work, and fortunately we are each a part of many other people’s villages. We offer to each other our knowledge, our strength, our perspectives, our wisdom, and our helping hands. This is reciprocal, but not directly so. My dentist fixes my teeth. I do not fix his teeth. But I help my community in the ways I know how to do. And my community helps me.

Being able to engage with the people who enhance our lives and to enlist their help and care is our human superpower. It is not platitudes and lip service but a deep and lasting reality that we need each other. This is not because we are inadequate. We do better when we get over our egoic need to go it alone and realize after all, we have to get some help. We have hands and language and a yearning for connection that arise from our capacity to work together to manage this beautiful, uncertain reality of being alive.

The Behavior and the Meaning

So I’ve been reading in linguistic anthropology. I know. Another rabbit hole of ideas. But here’s the thing. Every interaction with another person contains the behavior, whether it is speech or action, and the meanings that behavior carries. The meanings include what it means about you, what it means about me and what it means about the relationship between us. What sometimes happens is that each person is interpreting that meaning in a slightly different way, and that can lead to misunderstandings and bad feelings.

So if you say, “Mr. Jones, can I ask a question?” it tells you something about your relationship with the other person–perhaps he is a teacher or other expert–and it assumes he has some knowledge you do not have. Under most circumstances it represents a kind of respect to use a person’s last name. But that same statement could also be sarcastic, ironic, or inaccurate.

The same perspective applies in parenting. So recently I had the occasion to talk with a parent about how to deal with a frustrated child. With children particularly, people use compliance or “good behavior” as a measure  of the child. If that is the perspective, the adult, parent or teacher, is paying attention to getting the behavior that the adult wants to see. But if you do that with no regard for the way it feels to the child, you define the relationship in an authoritarian way. Even if you are really nice about it.

The difficult thing is maintaining our focus on our own ideals–how we want to be in the world and how we want to treat other people–rather than some external measure such as whether we get what we want, whether the other person agrees with us, or whether things “calm down.” Relationships can be stressful and messy, and that does not always mean there is a problem. People have different centers of motivation and different centers of agency and those differences can feel distancing. But the satisfying aspect of a relationship is coming to know a –different– person well over time. Not a person who is exactly like us or agrees with us about everything. Similarities can feel connecting, but differences can too.

So in a relationship, it is not so much the content of the conversation or the action of the moment, but what we are conveying to each other about mutual acceptance, appreciation, and curiosity. Our emotions get triggered by old patterns and old meanings, and that can make it hard to see the other person clearly. We attribute negative motives to them and we react to our own fantasies of what we are seeing rather than recognizing that our emotional responses are being generated inside of ourselves from meanings that are unconscious and imprinted from our pasts.

Being able to truly see and understand another person requires intentional effort to set aside our own filters about the world and other people and to be open to who that person really is. And as we practice freeing ourselves from the patterns of our own unique past experiences, we enter into the deep pleasure of connecting with another person in a real way.

Appreciation or Gratitude

It seems to me that we should stop talking about gratitude and start focusing on appreciation. It is a small shift, but with a real difference. Gratitude is about the feeling in me evoked by something outside of  myself. That means it is about me and not really about that other thing, even though it appears to be. And it carries the connotation that I am somehow lucky (meaning undeserving) of that good thing. Gratitude has a moralistic undertone.

Appreciation, on the other hand, is not about me. It is about the qualities of the other thing that make it a good thing. It is not about the feeling evoked in me, but the recognition of the qualities of the thing outside me. There is no implied moralistic tone with it. Appreciation is recognizing the value in something, whether it is within myself or in the outside world.

Every day we wake up to a new day with the gift of conscious awareness. We can direct our attention wherever we wish. This is the freedom of being alive: choosing what we allow ourselves to be conscious about. We need not manhandle that consciousness and make it into something. We merely direct it one way or another and notice what comes into it.

All of our current reality is available to us. The quality of our lives is determined by how we use this one guaranteed aspect of being alive: being able to be aware of what we direct our attention toward. It is not about positive thinking or illusional optimism. It is about knowing that within any reality there are gains and challenges, gifts and losses. It is about being a true witness to our complex circumstances and inner experience and doing the best with what life deals us.

We can appreciate big things and small. We can appreciate people and things. We can marvel at the complex way that life insists on living itself. That people keep trying and that circumstances keep throwing us curve balls. It’s ok. We will dodge some and engage some and put our hearts into our lives and make what we can of them. Sometimes we can feel wonder about what we notice and it does not need to be about ourselves. It can just be noticing.

What are you cultivating in yourself?

What you repeat becomes who you are. You create yourself by your choices. What are you focusing on within your own experience of yourself? What is your relationship like with yourself? How we understand who we are is fundamentally our internal sense of identity: “I am not a morning person. I like dogs. I am good at swimming….” These identifications are reinforced when we see evidence that they are true, and they also strongly influence our choices and our behavior.

If we want to make changes, improve our lives, we can interfere with those identifications we cling to, and we can free ourselves to leave our comfort zones. We don’t need to “think positive” or force ourselves to believe things we don’t believe about ourselves. We simply need to allow there to be some uncertainty about who we are and what we can do. We can recognize that we are constantly changing and growing, learning how to live our lives better, and moving through different circumstances.

People sometimes talk about goals as a direction we can aim for. And some types of wishes lend themselves to goal setting, such as running a marathon. But if we look back at the last five years, we can see that we have done a lot that wasn’t in response to goals. We continue to grow even when we are not forcing that growth. Because life teaches us lessons, like it or not. Sometimes it helps to take stock of how  much wiser, or better, we are than we were 5 years ago. We can see there is some kind of direction, even when we were not exactly directing it.

Every choice we make is based in some definition of who we think we are. At the same time, that choice reinforces that definition. Like everything, we get better at being who we are through practice. If we can allow ourselves freedom of choice about who we are, we can practice being the person that represents our best version of ourselves.

Plain Old Therapy

Jon Allen has written a wonderful book called “Restoring Mentalizing in Attachment Relationships: Treating Trauma with Plain Old Therapy.” I have become enchanted with the idea of “plain old therapy.” Allen writes that in medicine we can have many specialists who are expert in the one area of disease and treatment, but we need a plain old family doc to look at the big picture: all the systems and how they work together. He sees himself as that generalist who talks to people and helps them think about the challenges they are facing, and offers whatever perspective he has from his own experience. This is plain old therapy.

Sometimes we believe we understand something because we can name it, define it, or describe it. But a lot of times that doesn’t really add anything beyond our own direct experience. This makes me think about sitting in many meetings at the high school where I worked as a social worker. The teachers, psychologist, social worker, and parents would discuss whether a student needed additional support from the school in terms of special education, extra tutoring or study skills classes.

I was always struck by the very professional report from the psychologist, with many results of testing, many numbers comparing the student to other students, and what appeared to be a comprehensive assessment. The social worker would give a developmental history. The teachers would weigh in on how hard the student was or was not working and what he or she was struggling with. And finally the parents would say, “He does better if he likes the teacher.” I always thought we could save a lot of everyone’s time and patience if we just went there from the beginning.

People do better with plain old relationships with people who care about them. Because if someone they respect cares about them, it helps them care about themselves. For our emotional, and by extension, psychological well-being, sometimes we don’t need a hyper specialized professional. sometimes we just need someone to talk to. Someone who knows how to make a relationship with us that could be the basis of more confidence, more competence, and more self compassion.

Grandmother mind

One of the aspirations in Buddhist thought is to acquire what is called “grandmother mind.” Grandmother mind is the idea that you love unconditionally, guide and direct without judgment, share your wisdom, and accept all people with an affectionate understanding, (even when you do not collude with their conditioning or stories). Just like it sounds, grandmother mind is an indulgent, fearless interest in other people and the world.

So much of our current world is hurried, distracted, goal oriented, and fear-driven. We lose our connection with what matters to us in the busy-ness of our everyday lives. Of course, we do have to attend to the management of our lives, but we also need to attend to the quality of our time. The ongoing wish to return to “grandmother mind” is one way to keep the depth that makes our lives meaningful.

The term “grandmother mind” is taken from the Japanese expression “grandmother kindness,” which means that solicitous, slightly overly fussy attention that you get from your grandmother. In normal everyday speech it contains both the helpful aspects of this frame of mind and also the fussy over-attentiveness of it. In the Buddhist tradition, however, the focus is on a kind of non-grasping caring. It is a way of being optimistic, feeling good about our relationships with other people and the world, and also being able to allow the other person (or situation) to be what they are freely. We are not attached to other people, or aspects of the world or our lives, being a certain way in order for us to feel happy or to care about them.

Grandmother mind has a peacefulness to it, an engaged curiosity and interest, and calm good intentions or good will. Wishing you the best unfolding of your life and your circumstances, I am grateful for any time or connection I have with you, as you are. It is an aspiration, not a measure of our character. We move toward an easier, more joyful experience of ourselves moving through the world.

 

 

 

Effort Equals Growth

Carol Dweck is a research psychologist at Stanford who has studied what she calls the growth mindset. Some people think they are naturally good or bad at something, like math, or naturally healthy or naturally talented. And some people think they get good at it as they try and practice and learn. She says people who understand that you get good at something by working at it do better over all and she says that you can learn to approach your life with a growth mindset.

And this works all over the place. It turns out that there is a part of your brain, deep behind your thoughts and emotions, that regulates your body function: your heart rate, breathing and so on. It’s kind of a reptilian part of the brain. And it turns out this part of your brain determines if the system, your body, is in a growth stage of life or a decline stage of life. It regulates your body based on this decision. While everyone ages, we can see that some people seem to age with more difficulties than others. Even though we cannot control that process completely, our lifestyle choices go a long way toward determining how that aging process unfolds.

And here is what is interesting: you cannot affect that reptilian part of your brain with your thoughts or your feelings. You affect it by what you physically do. If you are physically active, that part of your brain figures you are probably still in a growth phase and if you are sedentary, it takes that to mean you are in a declining stage of life. In other words, physical effort equals physical growth. Just like mental effort equals mental growth and psychological effort equals psychological growth.

Ultimately, the interesting thing about organic life is that it generates and regenerates. You don’t use it up like a bar of soap and you don’t wear it out like a car engine. It’s not like a computer in a machine. It creates itself. If you lift a weight a few times, your bicep generates more bicep. If you read about new ideas, your mind starts turning them over and thinking about them and connecting them with other ideas and generating ideas of its own. In other words, if you make any effort, physical, mental, emotional, whatever, you can activate that particular part of you to build more better, stronger parts.

Okay, what’s better than that? The creativity that is life generates more new things we cannot even imagine before we experience them. Our effort creates movement in the direction of generation. The problem with understanding things only with our past experience and the metaphors we create is that it limits our imaginations. We are not like computers. Computers are a little bit like us. In some ways. We are not like engines or hydraulic systems. We are like flower seeds and puppies and penguins.  We are pure potential looking to continually create ourselves. And effort motors this growth.

People Change

People change over time. Often this is a result of relationships that affect them, unusual events in their lives, or accumulated life experience. Sometimes I will be talking with a couple and one of them will say to the other: “You’ve changed!” This can be an accusation or an appreciation. But often it comes with some sense of surprise. Even though we know, really, nothing stays the same.

People evolve. They think about things. They have loses. They have gains. They succeed at overcoming challenges, expected and unexpected. Or they fail at something that matters to them. They get clearer about who they want to be and they try to move toward that vision. They grow to love people and they outgrow other people. They change professions, locations, and whole identities.

With acceptance of the inevitability of change, and equanimity in the face of unfolding reality, we can remain curious, even about people whom we believe we know well. We can allow the space in a relationship to discover new versions of ourselves and for our friends and families to discover and create new versions of themselves.

Our own desires for the people we know to be predictable, emotionally reliable, and transparent can bind us in ways that prevent growth that could happen–for them and for us. We don’t even know what we are missing when we create limits. We operate out of a fear of loss, and we believe we are seeking reassurance or insurance.

But each living being has a will toward movement and growth, however that is imaginable and possible. We can be an obstacle or a facilitator. There is no standing still. And here we stop and reflect on who we want to be in our lives and in the lives of other people–our own ideals for ourselves–and how we can move toward those ideals, gradually becoming more like the person we want to be. How do we want to relate to the people we care about? What kind of impact do we wish to have in their own experience? What is our ideal about being a friend or partner? Because whatever we do, people change. They do and we do.

Hijacked by Emotion?

Our emotional experience is incredibly important. E-motion is what puts us in motion. If we have feelings, we do something. It is harder to mobilize if we are neutral. Actually it might not even be possible to act without some feeling about what we are doing. In some fantasy olden days, people did not care about their emotions or each other’s emotions either. I’m not sure if that was ever true.

But right now, right here, we sometimes think our emotions are the most real part of who we are. We expect that our emotions are somehow coming from some deeper, more authentic part of our make-up, and they expose us for our fallibilities and weaknesses. We want to honor our emotions; express them; understand them; analyze them; use them as “gut instinct” and just generally let them run our lives.

But emotions are learned. They are the responses we were taught to associate with various experiences and those we generated out of fear, misunderstanding, or rage. They are not meaningless; and they certainly deserve to be taken seriously. But they are data. They do not tell us something more true about ourselves or each other than our thoughts, values, or choices tell us. We are complex beings with multidimensional meanings attached to our experiences, and we act out of a complex web of motives that is informed by our place in the larger world, historic events, cultural meanings, early learning, and physical realities.

We cannot be truly free to flexibly and thoughtfully respond to the world, each other, and ourselves if we are reacting out of unrecognized habits of thought and feeling. Our freedom comes from seeing our distortions as clearly as we can and reflectively and intentionally choosing how to understand and respond to our everyday lives. Of course we do try to manage our feelings. It’s just important not to let our feelings manage us.