Empathy, resonance, and the mysterious dance of lover and beloved
On my flight from Denver to Oahu yesterday, I sat next to a lovely couple who must have been in their early to mid 70s. I was struck by how attuned they were to one another – the slightest cue from one was met by the other and responded to. I could literally feel in my body that they each felt fully contacted by the other, while from time to time they would go silent, return to their own individual activities, infusing the environment between them with a warm, tender space. They remained connected, but separate simultaneously – and would meet each other’s glance from time to time as if to assure the other that all was well in the world. No words needed. It was as if I could feel their mirror neurons coming online together, empathically in resonance with one another, tuned into just what was needed in a given moment.
For some reason their dance, their play, their love… it really touched me, so much so that I actually found myself crying. I didn’t want to make a scene or make them uncomfortable so kept to myself as much as I could (I know, those that know me, it’s not like me to ‘not make a scene’ or refrain from ‘making others uncomfortable,’ especially when it comes to tears, love, vulnerability, and falling apart. I really was trying to behave; it was only 45 minutes into a long flight after all).
It was then that they pulled out their video player and were going to watch a movie together. I was curious how they would be able to remain connected and do this as there was only one headphone jack on their iPad. Would they alternate? Knowing them (as I had for about 20 minutes now), I was sure one would just sacrifice the sound for the other, and they’d switch periodically. Before I realized exactly what was going on, the gentleman pulled out a Y-shaped thingy which allowed them to both plug their headphones in at once. I lost it. It was so perfect – and so them. Just more attunement and connection, this time taking shape as some weird looking modern electronic device. The tears flowed even more in reveling at their sweet connection.
They finally glanced over at me, my intention to not create a scene lost to the crushing power of love that flows between two people. They both just smiled at me and the man patted me on the shoulder, his eyes near bursting into tears himself. We all just shared a moment together, outside all time and space, with me so grateful that they allowed me into their sacred world for just a moment, and into the mystery of lover and beloved as it unfolds here, into eternity.
Postscript: I just shared this post with them (couldn’t help myself). Now the three of us are just sort of silently weeping together, holding hands… as we descend into Waikiki… three new friends, held by the beloved and her mysterious ways, and the sweetness of a Hawaiian sunset. I feel quite confident I could die now. To know even one sliver of this love… I’ve been given so much more than enough.
Mindful Kids in Context
Mindful eating, mindful burgers, mindful sex . . . pretty much everything is mindful lately. Paying attention has value, but what’s the goal of all that mindfulness?
Defining mindfulness exactly is like trying to define psychology or exercise in one line; you can do it, but it never quite captures everything. To summarize, mindfulness means aiming to be more aware of our immediate experience, with less reactive habit. Even that language may feel abstract to the average parent or child trying to find some peace and happiness. More than any single definition, what matters most is that there’s an intention. We spend an awful lot of our lives reacting to things we like or dislike in ways that aren’t always useful. When we break patterns and handle the uncertainty of life more easily, that’s beneficial. However you define it, mindfulness means living with less mindless habit and more ability to manage the fact that life is awfully hard sometimes.
So what does mindfulness with kids mean? Another way of framing mindfulness is as a group of mental traits. It’s not that anything specifically gets fixed by a practice of mindfulness; it’s guiding children toward long-term skills that make life easier. We teach children to become more attentive, less reactive, more compassionate, and resilient. From that perspective, mindfulness is a way to build life management abilities, but far from the only one. We offer children tools to handle the challenging road ahead through any means that fit.
When we say that mindfulness means “paying attention to what we’re doing,” we transfer this to our children by paying more attention to them when we’re together. “Staying calm under pressure” means taking a few breaths and not blowing a gasket when homework falls apart. When we say to treat others with compassion, that starts with how we speak to the frazzled guy at the airport dealing with our flight cancellation. Acknowledging honestly and openly that no one is perfect, we also recognize that we won’t stick to our own intentions all the time. We make mistakes and learn from them and keep going. Drawing our children into that part of life teaches them something too.
When it comes to teaching mindfulness, focus on the skills you want your children to develop. That matters more than whether they commit to a “mindfulness practice.” We build resilience by developing EF (Executive Function) and attention, emotional awareness, self-confidence, self-compassion, positive relationships, and all the rest that comes from being raised in a mindful, aware household. That doesn’t mean specifically meditating, but it does mean emphasizing a balanced lifestyle.
Mindfulness implies living with clarity in a certain way. We guide kids to pay attention every way we can — by taking moments to pause and look at a sea shell or by prioritizing activities that build attention (like reading, chess, and board games) over those that disrupt attention (excessive screen time). We discuss emotions and describe our own emotions. We live compassionately, read books that reflect other people’s perspectives, and generally immerse kids in compassion, while gradually considering if they’re ready for a compassion-based mindfulness practice.
Mindfulness is a tool kit for a different way of living, one that provides kids skills to manage life on their own one day. The good news is, kids don’t even have to practice it themselves to get there. They learn from watching us and from the overall way they live themselves. Of course, they eventually can learn from their own practice of mindfulness too. As you practice yourself, you’ll know exactly how to encourage your children to join you (links to books supporting mindfulness in kids can be found at howchildrenthrive.com). But it’s the big picture of how they are raised that counts most.
Consider This:
Imagine yourself from your child’s point of view. How would your child describe you to a friend? What’s fun and easy about you, what are your strengths, and what areas might you want to change?
Excerpted from How Children Thrive: The Practical Science of Raising Independent, Resilient, and Happy Kids.
Mark Bertin, MD, is a bestselling author who specializes in integrating mindfulness with other evidence-based neurodevelopmental care. His previous books include Mindful Parenting for ADHD and The Family ADHD Solution.
Buy your copy of How Children Thrive at your favorite bookseller!
Sounds True | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Indiebound
Bigger Isn’t Always Better (and Other Cultural Myths)
Some of our beliefs aren’t even ours. Like old wives’ tales passed down through generations or reflected back to us through society, we inherited certain cultural and familial narratives, adopted them, and left them unquestioned as “Truth.” Sometimes these inherited narratives and beliefs manifest as unquestioned traditions. For example, when making the Thanksgiving turkey, my friend’s mother always cut the breast of the bird off and roasted it separately. This process was embedded in my friend’s view of “how to cook a turkey.” When she moved to New York and began hosting her own Thanksgivings, she also sliced the top off the turkey and cooked it separately. Naturally.
One year a guest asked her why she didn’t cook the turkey whole, which got her to thinking. She didn’t actually know why. It’s just the way it had always been done. So she called her mother to ask about the tradition: Why do we cut the tops off our turkeys? Her mother replied that she had always taken the top off because her mother had always taken the top off; it’s just the way she had learned how to cook a turkey. Naturally curious as to where this learned behavior all began, her mother called her mother, my acquaintance’s grandmother, and asked: Why do we cut the tops off our turkeys?
The grandmother, stumped, thought for a long, hard minute. “Oh,” she remembered, “the oven in my very first apartment was too small to fit an entire turkey, so I had to cook it with the top cut off.” Sixty years later, in a city across the country, my acquaintance was still cooking turkeys as a result of an oven that was too small. This is how inherited narrative works.
Here are some of the narratives that I inherited over the years, in order from most helpful to least: You can be anything that you want to be. Money isn’t very important. It is what it is, and it can’t be changed. Men prefer pretty over smart. Asking for help means you’re weak and needy. These are the ones that I’ve managed to tease out; I’m sure there are plenty more operating in the background that I can’t see.
Part of developing a wholesome or Beneficial View is identifying the stories that we live by, where they came from, and, perhaps most importantly, whether or not they are helpful on the path of waking up to our worthiness. Shariputra, one of the Buddha’s chief disciples, described Beneficial View as the practice of identifying which of our views spring from beneficial beliefs and which spring from harmful beliefs, and then choosing which to nourish and cultivate. Sometimes this also means looking at the views of the culture that we live in.
A few times every year, I host group coaching programs for a rather large online training institute with a global reach, drawing students from a dozen countries, primarily women of varying ages. These groups offer an encouraging environment in which we can speak openly about our fears and hesitations. Over the past decade, working as a coach has revealed to me just how many of us feel a chronic sense of falling behind and a nagging suspicion that we’re not quite _________ enough. You can fill in the blank here with your own particular flavor of not-enough-ness. Not educated enough, smart enough, good-looking enough, likable enough, thin enough . . . You get the picture. A consistent element of these groups has been a gobsmacking number of women sharing that they view their capabilities as insufficient or lacking. Sometimes this feeling extends to the way that they view themselves as people. It’s said that if one fish washes up on the shore, the scientist will call it what it is: a dead fish. Nothing of note, really. However, if hundreds of fish wash up on the shore, the biologist won’t look to the fish for answers. They’ll test the water that the fish are swimming in. So what’s up with the water that we all seem to be swimming in?
In the Western hemisphere, there is a deeply embedded narrative of scarcity that is nearly invisible. I don’t know about you, but I clearly remember playing the childhood game of musical chairs. It begins as a cheerful romp around the circle, with kids squealing and running to nab a chair once the music stops. As the game progresses, however, the stakes get higher. The chairs begin to disappear. The slowest, smallest, and most accommodating kids get disqualified. And the fastest, most aggressive kids advance amidst the dwindling resource of chairs. Good, clean childhood fun. Also, a wonderful way to implicitly teach kids this prevailing myth of scarcity: There is simply not enough to go around. And you better get yours before someone else takes it.
Author, activist, and fund-raiser Lynne Twist illustrates this phenomenon exquisitely in her book The Soul of Money. She likens the scarcity narrative to a “helmet” of insufficiency that we wear throughout our day that flavors every interaction we have. For example, our first thought when getting up in the morning tends to be I didn’t get enough sleep. As we get ready for the day, we think, I don’t have enough to wear, I don’t have enough time, I don’t have enough room on the subway, I don’t have enough help to get this job done well, There aren’t enough good men or women on Tinder, I don’t have enough energy to meet up with my friends, and then our final thought before falling asleep is I didn’t get enough done. This view of not having enough is truly pervasive. It’s no wonder that the women I’ve worked with consistently communicate that they don’t feel like they can live up to their own, or society’s, expectations.
Even if we try to address the messages we might tell ourselves about what we have and don’t have, we can’t avoid them altogether. I was riding the subway to Brooklyn one day when a father and his daughter, who was all of five or six years old, entered the train and stood toward the center of the car. She was chatting to her dad about her day at school until one of the many subway ads caught her eye. In it, there were two juxtaposed photos of a blonde woman. In one photo, the woman was frowning while holding a lemon in each hand, which were hovering at chest height. In the other, she was holding two grapefruits, also at chest height, but she was grinning. “Dad, why is she happy in that one and sad in that one?” the girl asked, pointing to the ad for breast augmentation. I swear the entire subway car went silent in anticipation of how her father would respond. He awkwardly and skillfully lobbed the question back to his daughter. “Well . . . what do you think?” The girl waited a beat and then answered, “She’s happy there because she has big ones and sad there because she has small ones.”
Clearly she had understood the message this poster was communicating to us all: a message of scarcity, insufficiency, and how one might always be “better.” And in that instant I understood how conditioning works. Hello, demon of self-doubt. Just like the fish in the ocean, we’re bound to swallow the water that we swim in. When considering what it means to develop Beneficial View, and the view of our own worthiness, it can be helpful to identify why we might not feel worthy to begin with. If our cultural perspective is rooted in the myth of “not enough,” it would logically follow that we would inherit this not-so-beneficial view of ourselves. Through looking at our own mind in meditation practice, we begin to take stock of the stories and beliefs that are not serving us, unraveling this myth of “not enough,” and revealing the Beneficial View of our innate wholeness and worth.
This is an excerpt from Tea and Cake with Demons: A Buddhist Guide to Feeling Worthy by Adreanna Limbach.
Adreanna Limbach is a personal coach and a lead meditation instructor at MNDFL, NYC’s premier drop-in meditation studio. Her teachings have been featured in the New York Times, Women’s Health, and Refinery29. She lives in New York City. For more, visit adreannalimbach.com.
Buy your copy of Tea and Cake with Demons at your favorite bookseller!
Sounds True | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Indiebound | Bookshop
Holiday Help for Those in Grief
There is no doubt that the holiday season adds an extra measure of pain to people already bearing more than they can, more than they should ever have to. Death, illness, massive life events — they all sour the season in ways those outside your loss can’t understand.
Whether you’ve always loved the holidays or avoided them as best you could, the first several seasons after a death or massive life event are always difficult. So many people want to make this a “good” holiday for you, but first and foremost, you need to understand what is best for yourself during this rough time. Understand how to find a comforting place through all the chaos:
Say no a lot. Really. Other people will tell you you should say yes to things, get out more, be social. But if “being social” gives you the hives, why on earth would you do that? Remember that “no” is a complete sentence. You can say “no, thank you” if you must say more.
Choose your gatherings. If you do choose to attend something holiday-ish, choose wisely. Sometimes a big crowd is easier than a small one because you can slip out un-noticed as you need to. While a small gathering might have been most comfortable in your life instead.
Find ways to be alone-together with others. Musical offerings, candlelight meditations or services — check those little local newspapers and see what’s going on in your community.
Volunteer. If you are feeling stressed by family obligations, choose this as a good opportunity to get some space and serve others who may need some lifting up too.
Have a plan. Before you go to a party or an event, be sure to make your exit plan clear — with yourself. Give yourself an out, whether that is a specific time limit or an emotional cue that lets you know it’s time to go.
Check in with yourself. This is true not just for events and gatherings but for every single moment of life. Take just a minute to take a breath, one good inhale and exhale, and ask yourself how you’re doing. Ask yourself what you need in that moment.
Leave whenever you want. Stop whatever you’re doing whenever you want. Please remember that this is your life. You do not have to do anything that feels bad or wrong or horrifying. Even if you agreed to participate in something, you can change your mind at any time.
The holidays are going to hurt, my friend. That is just reality. Whether you are missing someone who should be part of the festivities or someone who shared your love of quiet winter evenings over raucous partying, this season will add some to your grief.
Companion yourself. Care for yourself. Listen. Reach out where it feels good to reach, curl in when that is what you need. Make this season as much of a comfort to you as you can. And when it is not a comfort, know we’re here. All of us who are grieving over someone we lost: We get you. We understand.
Looking for more great reads?
Excerpted from It’s OK That You’re Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand by Megan Devine.
Megan Devine holds a master’s degree in counseling psychology. Through her many articles and speaking engagements, she has emerged as a bold new voice in the world of grief therapy. She recently released her first book, It’s OK That You’re Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
The Urban Monk’s Inner Stillness Training
Dear readers,
I’m honored and proud to announce the release of The Urban Monk’s Inner Stillness Training. It’s the work I’ve been longing to do because the world has been saturated with superficial “how-to” advice and quick shortcuts to enlightenment, peace, happiness, weight loss, and whatever else can be promised.
That’s not reality.
In actual reality, we work to find our inner truth and delve deeply into the awareness that’s cultivated through our practice. It’s a process and it brings us home. The real work is authentic, meaningful, and restorative. It isn’t always easy, but it is raw and it is real.
When I entered dialogue with Sounds True, I laid it out there. I wanted to speak freely about the work and deliver a proper download from my lineage that can help people really get there. They jumped on the idea. I’m proud to say we have produced a very powerful program that “goes there” and doesn’t pull punches. It doesn’t make silly promises and doesn’t linger on the tabloid nonsense. It’s what I got from my teachers and what you deserve—an authentic path toward inner stillness.
The premise of the Taoist alchemical work I’m teaching is about cultivating the light of awareness and turning it around to discover one’s true Self. It is profound and rewarding— should you choose to do the work.
I invite you to take a journey with me and explore the inner realms. There’s so much richness, wisdom, peace, and strength you can draw upon once you’ve found the connection. It’s yours to discover.
Let’s take a walk,
New York Times Bestselling Author, Producer, and Founder of Well.org
The invitation of intimacy
If you choose intimate relationship as the crucible for your own awakening and healing, you extend an open invitation to *everything* that is unresolved within you to come to the surface – to show you in excruciating detail those areas of your heart that have been numbed and abandoned, and are now calling for your love, attention, and awareness. There are parts of you that have been crying out for your holding for so many years now; it is your beloved that will reveal these to you.
The beloved, like no other, will take you right into the unknown. She will root out all of your hiding places and reveal your nakedness. She will show you that even those most scary and disturbing parts of yourself are pathways home. This is her gift to you.
It can be helpful to look into each of your relationships to start to see the landscape of the (unconscious) agreements you’ve made with “the other” to avoid the experience of too much exposure, vulnerability, and uncertainty. It is quite natural to unconsciously start to define a “good” relationship or a “great” partner or “my one and only soul mate” as one who doesn’t really question these agreements, and who supports your enacting of the survival mechanisms which arose in your early environment. It doesn’t take much – just a few words or not returning a phone call or a particular glance or some apparent distance or simply seeing how your needs are just not getting met – and you are raw, tender, vulnerable, unprotected, and unsure; the ground has fallen away. The beloved has arrived, bearing gifts from beyond.
The survival-level panic comes rushing in, the anxiety has returned, confusion has filled the space between. Where did the beloved go? Where is the love? Am I safe? I have given so much; will I be met?
This is the opportunity of a lifetime, to metabolize that which the beloved has activated. By entering the unknown with your beloved, by stepping into the groundlessness together, you will meet these orphaned pieces of your own heart. They only want one moment of your holding, your care, and your touch. Be naked, be willing to fall apart, be willing to break open, take the risk that love always demands! Let love take you apart and put you back together again, over and over.
Love is not safe. The beloved’s touch is the end of your world. There is nowhere to hide for you have now come to see that your heart is everywhere! You will always be touched, you will care so deeply, you will remain vulnerable forever to the transformative movement of love. You are left as a transparent vessel through which love can pour out into this universe, reorienting everything it touches; everything that is less-than-whole within is burning away, friends, and the beloved is revealing your translucence.
