To Be Fully Alive

Double-crested Cormorants traveling over Lake Champlain, July 6, 2014

Excerpt from "The Pursuit of Happiness" by Phillip Moffitt:

Herein lies the paradox common to mystical teachings in most spiritual traditions: In order to be fully alive, you also have to die. When you cling to the past or future, believing you are holding onto something precious, you are denying what is sacred about life. Your life, with its unique pains and joys, can only be reconciled in your surrender to the truth of your experiences as they arise one moment after another, never fixed, always moving. A beautiful sunrise, a baby's smile, a broken heart, cancer, the loss of love; open fully to the experiences of your life in all their mysterious manifestations. Meet each of these moments with compassion, loving-kindness, and your very best response. Then let loose of each in turn, for however beguiling in their beauty or their horror, they are truly only life dancing."

Read the entire essay...

The Important of Kindness and Hush

Excerpt from Fine Line: Mental Health/Mental Illness, Michael Nye's portraits of the people experiencing mental illness and homelessness in San Antonio. 

My favorite place to be is a place that I'm most safe. It's a corner in my kitchen and I've got it fixed up to look like a tree house. On my left is a window with plants everywhere and everything a person would want—books, music—that's in my safe place. 

I spend three-quarters of my waking life in that safe place. 

How is it possible to love someone that beats you up, that uses you, that degrades you? I don't understand why a parent would grab a child's hair and twist it around and slam that child into a wall. How a father's who's going  through a drought of loneliness takes one of his children and strip that child of dignity and knowledge and give that child pain. Why would a parent deprive him of food, lock them in a cabinet—why would that happen? 

I'd like to wrap my arms around someone--whether my age or older, younger—wrap my arms around someone that is going through this until they finally believe it's not their fault, they're a beautiful person. 

Kindness is more important than anything else in this world. I think that every philosopher has probably tried to tell us that. That's what it comes down to. What else are we here for, but to take care of each other? To nurture the planet. What else are we here for? 

There's a thing when we're children we experience. It usually exists in libraries and it's called the hush. Like this magic world called Hush. There's not many places now to find hush. Somethimes I really do think if every person would experience hush—even if they almost have to force it on themselves for a while—just the bird, just the wind, nothing else, hush—there would be less violence. 

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See also:

• "Regarding the Pain of Others," To the Best of Our Knowledge, April 20, 2014
• Posts on pausing, silence, kindness, and soothing difficult emotions 

Pain and Response to Pain Teaches Understanding

Sherwin Nuland from "The Biology of the Spirit," On Being, September 29, 2005:

Sherwin Nuland (Dec. 8, 1930 – Mar. 3, 2014)Do you know what I learned from writing [How We Die], if I learned nothing else? The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are.

When you recognize that pain and response to pain is a universal thing, it helps explain so many things about others, just as it explains so much about yourself. It teaches you forbearance. It teaches you a moderation in your responses to other people's behavior. It teaches you a sort of understanding. It essentially tells you what everybody needs. You know what everybody needs? You want to put it in a single word? Everybody needs to be understood. And out of that comes every form of love.

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See also: 

• "Brain, Mind, and Spirit: The Wisdom of the Human Body," Sherwin Nuland's lecture given at the Chautauqua Institution (Aug. 22, 2005)
• "Fresh Air Remembers Surgeon And 'How We Die' Author Sherwin Nuland" (March 7, 2014)
• "How Electroshock Changed Me," TED Talk (Feb. 2001)
• "The Extraordinary Power of Ordinary People," TED Talk (Feb. 2003)
• Nuland, S. B. (1994). How we die: Reflections on life's final chapter. New York: A.A. Knopf. [library] 
• Nuland, S. B. (1997). How we live. New York: Vintage Books. [library]

Qualities of Mind are Skills We Can Cultivate

"Evidence for the connection between happiness and attention is found in neuroscience: attentional control is located in the pre-frontal cortex. Those with a weak pre-frontal cortex also have an inability to inhibit their limbic system (to control their emotions).  Most major mental health conditions are associated with a weak pre-frontal cortex.

Neuroscience has also found evidence for 'experience-dependent neuroplasticity.'  In other words, our brains change with experience.  We get good at (and grow thicker neuronetworks to support) the mental activities we engage in repeatedly. The most powerful way to change your brain is not medication, but behavior, and in particular, mental behavior.

With physical exercise, we can tell which muscles have become the strongest through exercise. Our strongest mental habits are the ones most easily activated, that are quickly and effortlessly available to our consciousness...the good news from neuroscience is that positive qualities of mind such as attention, kindness, and compassion are skills we can cultivate through practice and training. Contemplative studies point to an array of these practices to grow new mental habits."

~ Carrie Heeter, from "Why A Neuroscientist Would Study Meditation," Jan. 12, 2014

See also: Britton Lab

Bombarded

Excerpt from "Joan Halifax on Compassion's Edge States and Caring Better," On Being, Dec. 26, 2013:

TV Screens Wall (Photographer: Athewma/Flickr)We are subjected to distressing images through our media—bombarded. So we enter into a state of moral distress and futility. We see that something else needs to happen. Children need to be protected, we have to stop rape and violence toward women in the Congo, and we feel this profound moral conflict. And yet we can't do anything about it and we enter into a state either of moral outrage or we go into states of avoidance through addictive behaviors where we just, you know, don't want to deal with it or we just go into another state of withdrawal, a kind of numbness or freeze. I think a good part of the globe is going numb. 

I think what we're seeing is not actually compassion fatigue, but empathic distress where there's a resonance, but we're not able to stabilize ourselves when we're exposed to this kind of suffering. When we are more stabilized then we can face the world with more buoyancy, we have more resilience. You know, we've got more capacity to actually address these very profound social and environmental issues. So that's why I call these things edge states because they really call us to our edge... A near enemy to compassion is sorrow and that's that sorrow, that's me getting wrecked by the picture of the child in the newspaper so that I can't actually help them.

The theme of compassion has been important in Western culture and it certainly is important in Eastern culture, but it's a kind of fuzzy word. Antoine Lutz and Richie Davidson and others have been finding that certain areas of the brain light up when people are in states of compassion, and that they feel amore acutely the experience of another's suffering, but also they let go of it much more quickly.

From The Emotion MachineOne of the features that the neuroscientists have discovered is an area of the brain that's associated with the capacity to actually distinguish self from other. In other words, if there's such great resonance when you're in the presence of suffering with the other, you go into empathic or over-arousal. If I'm sitting with a prisoner on death row or I'm sitting with a person suffering from intractable pain, I can feel this resonance. I can sense into their suffering, but I also have simultaneously this insight—it's that person suffering and this is me. I'm not experiencing it in reality. It's true, but it's not...

From my point of view, the experience of grief is profoundly humanizing and we need to create conditions where we are supported to grieve and where we're not told, "Why don't you just get over it?" "Or, "It's time" or such as that. We in our lives experience one loss after another, and it can be loss of a breast, loss of a loved one, a child going into adulthood, which is a way of loss for many parents, loss of identity, loss of capacity.

My own experience of aging is that there are capacities I had ten years ago that I no longer have, and I have to reflect upon those losses. And, of course, the loss that all of us will face in anticipation of death. It is something that brings great depth and meaning into our lives and also helps us to articulate internally our priorities. What is really important for us? So for me as a human being and not identified as a Buddhist or a woman or a Western person, but as a simple human being, I value the experience of grief. 

Listen to the produced or unedited conversation...

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See also: 

• "Inside Compassion: Edge States, Contemplative Interventions, Neuroscience," Joan Halifax Roshi talks about empathy and compassion on the part of caregivers who are tending to the ill and dying.
• "Richard Davidson on Investigating Healthy Minds," On Being, June 14, 2012