Lynne S. Gots, Ph.D.
Licensed Psychologist
MBSR, Weeks 5 and 6: Mindfulness is Getting Tiring
By Lynne Gots, posted on May 16th, 2014.
One topic of conversation in the MBSR class I’m taking has been how to keep up with our home practice. We’re now meditating for 45 minutes at a pop, and fitting it in has been increasingly burdensome.
Some people in the class have even been finding it hard to remember to do the exercises at all. I don’t have a problem on weekdays because meditating before work has become a habit. But on weekends, when I don’t have a schedule, I sometimes put it off and then find myself late at night reminding myself I need to practice before bed. A few slices of pizza and a glass of wine make me want to lie down and go to sleep, not sit upright cross-legged on a meditation cushion. So I’ve been trying to make morning meditation a weekend habit as well.
At the request of some of the group members, our instructor has been sending out reminders to prompt us to practice mindfulness. Call me childish, but his missives seem to have the opposite effect on me. Instead of getting jazzed up and motivated, I find myself irritated by the directives. My inner teenager starts rolling her eyes and acting sullen like my son used to do when I’d ask if he’d practiced his trumpet.
I guess I’m suffering from a case of mindfulness burnout. So I have to remind myself I’m practicing meditation out of choice, not obligation, and get on with it anyway,
But tonight I need to fortify myself for our daylong meditation retreat tomorrow. I’m planning an evening on the couch, watching Nashville reruns and mindlessly stuffing myself with potato chips straight from the bag.
Tags: MBSR, mindfulness
Posted in Acceptance and Mindfulness |
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Weeks 3 and 4: Everyday Pleasures and Pains
By Lynne Gots, posted on May 4th, 2014.
Formal meditation is only one part of mindfulness training. If you want to become more aware and present during the ordinary moments of life, you have to practice noticing.
Our assignment in the third week of MBSR was to keep a daily log of pleasant events, noting our physical sensations, feelings, and thoughts. We also paid attention to how we were “relating” to each experience. Were we pushing it away or hurrying through it? Holding onto it? Or just “being with” it—that is, staying in the moment and observing, not judging.
Most of us rush through our days oblivious to our moment-to-moment experience. When you start looking, you might discover, as I did, how many opportunities for pleasure slip by.
My week of recording pleasant experiences was perfectly ordinary. I wasn’t on vacation in an exotic locale. There were no birthdays to celebrate or parties to attend. I drove to work every day on the Beltway. I came home after work and cooked dinner. I packed lunch for the next day. I paid bills, booked dental appointments, scheduled household repairs, and vacuumed up the dirt the dogs tracked onto the living room rug. Sometimes the weather was dreary and unseasonably cold.
But I was able to discover pleasure in small, everyday events. I enjoyed drinking my coffee on Saturday morning, noticing the aroma of the freshly ground beans and feeling content to have some time to myself. I relished my Sunday ritual of completing the NY Times Crossword (in ink), feeling focused, engaged, and proud to be continuing my father’s tradition. I took in the bright yellow forsythia when I walked out onto the deck one day before work and appreciated the coming of spring. I even observed, while sitting in traffic one morning on the route taking me into the city, the sun glistening on the Potomac, the rowers gliding through the water in their skulls, and the greenery budding on either side of the road. Not a bad way to start the day.
The following week’s home practice was to observe unpleasant experiences in the same way, recording physical sensations, thoughts, and feelings, as well as how we related to the events. Not surprisingly, the predominant way of relating to unpleasant events is to push them away.
But here’s where it gets tricky. If you want to cultivate mindfulness and acceptance—attitudes helpful in dealing with pain, stress, and other aversive emotional and physical states—you need to allow yourself to “be with” the unpleasant experiences rather than avoiding them, bracing yourself against them, or actively pushing them away.
Why, you might ask, would you want to let yourself feel bad? Because, counterintuitive as it might seem, allowing the full range of internal reactions to unfold and observing them without piling on the negative interpretations we usually make can lessen the distress.
My unpleasant events for the week were mundane. They mostly involved driving: sitting in rush hour traffic on the way to work when I was running late, having the driver next to me speed up and cut me off when I was trying to merge into his lane, seeing another car beat me to the parking space I’d had my eye on.
So I noticed my chest tightening and my jaw clenching. My hand balled into a fist and pounded on the steering wheel. I heard myself cursing out loud once or twice. And I tried just to observe.
I can’t say I ever achieved a total Zen state of calm during my commute. But practicing being mindful made the experience a little more interesting and maybe even a touch less frustrating.
In my next dispatch from the mindfulness front, I’ll talk about another challenge: how to keep up with all the mindfulness exercises.
Tags: acceptance, MBSR, mindfulness
Posted in Acceptance and Mindfulness |
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Week 2: Finding the Time
By Lynne Gots, posted on April 22nd, 2014.
I signed up for an MBSR group because I wanted to deepen my personal meditation practice and enhance my professional use of mindfulness. I’m finding it eye-opening on both fronts.
Every week we leave with exercises for “home practice”—a term I, too, adopted some time ago to replace the traditional CBT “homework” assignments. It’s hard enough to do the exercises without adding the negative associations and guilt (when the assignments don’t get done) attached to the concept of homework.
But as Shakespeare said, what’s in a name? That which we call homework by any other name would still be homework.
And so it is with home practice. The biggest challenge so far for me has been finding the time, especially since the demands have been expanding exponentially. And it’s only the second week.
After the first session, we were instructed to practice a Body Scan meditation for 30 minutes a day. Piece of cake! For someone new to meditation, starting with 30 minutes would be hard. But I’d already extended my practice to 20-30 minutes each day, so I didn’t have any trouble working in the Body Scan.
I shouldn’t have felt so smug. Because this week our assignment was to continue with the Body Scan daily along with adding a 15-minute Mindfulness of the Breath meditation and a 15-minute Loving Kindness meditation. You can do the math. That’s an hour of meditating each day.
Along with the formal meditations, we’re also practicing mindfulness informally by being fully attentive while engaging in one ordinary activity—such as washing the dishes, showering, brushing teeth, cleaning—each day. And we’re noting one pleasant event daily.
I’ve used all these exercises in the mindfulness groups I’ve conducted, with one variation. I suggest the participants ease into the meditation practice by committing to only five minutes a day. My rationale (and other CBT practitioners would concur) is that consistency is more important than duration when trying to develop a new habit.
There’s something to be said, though, for the total immersion approach. If you sign up for an MBSR program, you know up front you’ll be making an extensive time commitment, at least for the duration of the group sessions. And, although even five minutes a day of meditation can be beneficial, extra time on the cushion can produce even more immediate and dramatic effects.
Finding the time in a tight schedule for any valued pursuit isn’t as hard as it might seem. But it does take a certain mindset, as I’ve discovered. You need to be highly invested in the activity, you need to plan ahead, and you need to be flexible.
It can be challenging, as it was for me today when I had appointments from 8 am to 7 pm booked back to back. But I planned ahead and reminded myself I didn’t need to stick rigidly to the prescribed 30-minutes, which allowed me to work in an abbreviated (20-minute) Body Scan before starting the day.
You don’t have to be a super hero to fit a valued activity into your life. Take the marathoner I know who manages to put in his miles despite being a full-time grad student with a three-hour, round trip commute from his apartment in Brooklyn to his program at Rutgers. Or my neighbor who sets out at four am for an hour’s drive hour to a farm in Leesburg, Virginia to train her four Border Collies for sheepherding competitions before going to her job in Maryland. Or the law firm partner who gets home at 6 pm and starts cooking a full dinner from scratch because it’s important for her to feed her kids right, then logs back onto her work computer after the kids are in bed to finish a brief.
Those people get tired, just like the rest of us. But their strong investment in the actions they’re pursuing keeps them going in spite of how they might be feeling in the moment.
We all have the same number of hours available to us in a day. Being mindful about how we choose to use them is the most critical step in finding the time for what’s important to us.
Tags: body scan meditation, loving kindness meditation, mindfulness of the breath meditation, mindfulness-based stress reduction
Posted in Acceptance and Mindfulness, Motivation |
