1) The most healing thing you can offer another being is your complete attention and presence.

2) Health is unique to each being. There is no one size fits all approach.

3) When there is suffering, stay present. Even if it means standing, walking, and hopping on a broken leg.

To read the entire article, click here.

“You have to feel to heal.” ~ Julia Butterfly Hill

When people come to see me for therapy, we inevitably end up talking about emotions, and how they need to be felt, not just talked about. And inevitably, I will hear some version of the following: “I can’t feel my feelings!  I’ve got to go to work! I’ve got to be with my kids! I’ve got to keep it together!  I just can’t go around crying all day!” And my response is usually something like, “Why not?”

Why Not!?

Work! Kids! Didn’t you hear me? Yes, of course I heard you, and, I can’t help but wonder why we have all bought in to the mindset that it’s not ok to cry, especially in front of others. Crying is a part of the human experience, a function of the body as natural and essential as any other. We tend to think that crying is some kind of design flaw- some demonstration of weakness or worse yet, an admittance of personal failure. In reality, the opposite is true. Crying takes incredible courage and confidence, and it’s healing.

The Emotional Backlog

When we suppress our emotions they don’t go away. They get stored in the body, and they just keep piling up.  Have you ever experienced the “volcano syndrome?”  Somebody looks at you wrong and you end up crying or shouting hysterically?  That’s emotional backlog. It’s the release of an accumulation of un-felt emotion. In addition, when we suppress emotion fear gets layered on top of the original emotion. We desperately try to control our environment so that whatever it is we don’t want to feel can stay safely locked up. For example, if we are avoiding our grief, we may avoid talking to people about loss. If someone brings up a loss, we may find ourselves feeling anxious or tense. Or, we may avoid situations where we might experience loss, such as a relationship.

Crying in the Dentist’s Chair

Jan. 5th, my grandmother died. Jan. 17th, my grandfather died. Jan. 18th, I had a dentist appointment. Of all days! I didn’t want to cancel it.  I had childcare, I’d juggled my schedule, I’d have to wait 4 weeks to re-schedule it, etc.! And, I was overwhelmed with grief. I cried the whole way there and sat in the parking lot crying before I went in. “I’m about to put my money where my mouth is,” I thought and had to laugh, “literally and figuratively.” I walked inside and sat in the waiting room crying.  They called my name and took me to the dental chair. The hygienist stared at me. “I’ve lost 2 people I was very close to in the past 2 weeks,” I said, “And I’m grieving.  Please, do what you need to do.”  She looked at me like I had 2 heads. “Do you need a minute?” She asked, looking away.  “I don’t think a minute will help much,” I said.  So she proceeded to do her job, and I kept on crying. The interesting thing was I didn’t feel embarrassed, or ashamed, or uncomfortable.  Oddly enough, I felt empowered. Had I tried to suppress my grief, I probably would have felt embarrassed and ashamed, because suppressing my grief is synonymous with suppressing myself. When I suppress myself the message I’m sending myself is, “There is something wrong with you!”

The Benefits of Crying:

Research is showing that crying:

• Flushes toxic chemicals out of our bodies.
• Reduces stress
• Creates a feeling of calm afterwards
• Releases emotion, allowing for the natural progression of the emotion to take place (that is if we don’t shut it down)
• Strengthens relationships through the act of allowing ourselves to be vulnerable

As far as I can tell, life is a series of losses we have to grieve. Creating the time and space to do this is essential whenever possible. When it’s not, I propose that we create the space by being authentic and taking the risk to share what’s really going on- even if it means crying in the dentist’s chair.

So What’s the Jig?

The jig is that we have all this compassion for the pain of others, when in reality, we don’t.  At least not in the true sense of the word. (For more information on what compassion is, read my article,  “Compassion Confusion”).   Not having compassion for ourselves is a way of avoiding our own pain. It is also aggressive.  If we cannot fully be present with (feel) our own pain, the pain of others will intimidate us.  It will scare us.  We will need to shut it down so that the fortress we have built to protect ourselves from our own pain is not threatened.

The Fortress:

We start building it at a young age.  The people that cared for us most likely had emotions that they had no idea what to do with.  So they suppressed them, and then suppressed them in us.  And every time some experience came along that threatened to un-suppress them, we turned away.  We hardened our hearts and strengthened the fortress.

So What’s the Problem?

The problem is that we want to be compassionate.  It’s in our nature and at the core of who we are.  It is also quite possibly the answer to all conflict that arises in the world. When we are less inwardly aggressive, we are less outwardly aggressive.  We can’t do for others what we can’t do for ourselves.  In addition, the problem is we are creating an incredible amount of unnecessary suffering for ourselves.  As the Dalai Lama says, “We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.”

A Lesson From the Horses

Today I walked out to the pasture to halter Hermano and bring him in for a vet visit, which is not my favorite thing to do.  It was cold, I’d forgotten my jacket, and I had no gloves.  I was lost in my mind and aggressive thoughts. “This sucks.  I’m cold.  Why did you forget your jacket and gloves?  That was stupid. (Inward aggression).  It was 65 yesterday. Why do they have to be out in the pasture today?  Why can’t they just be in?  I should bring Aubie’s halter too- Hermano won’t come in if Aubie doesn’t follow….” (Outward Aggression)  Then I caught myself creating misery for myself with my thoughts.  I noticed I was fully engaging my fortress- hardening to my experience, being self-aggressive as well as projecting aggression outward- wanting the horses and the weather to be other than how they were.

So I slowed down my pace, took some conscious breaths and checked in.  I felt irritated and tense.  That was enough awareness for me to shift my focus.  I began to allow my experience gently.  I felt the cold in my fingertips and cheeks.  I relaxed and felt my feet on the ground.  I looked around and noticed the clouds in the sky and the horses on the side of the hill.  Then an amazing thing happened.  Hermano saw me, and he started galloping towards me excitedly.  Aubie and the others quickly followed and all the horses came running in to greet me.  Hermano walked right up to me and gently placed his nose in the halter. By allowing myself to be present and compassionate with my actual experience, I opened myself up to having an experience other than a miserable one.

How Can I Practice Self-Compassion?

To practice self-compassion we need to put our awareness on the energy inside our physical bodies and allow ourselves to feel our experience.  This is the beginning of the dismantling of the fortress.  Our minds want to judge our experience and ourselves.  Becoming curious about what happens if I just allow my truth is the first step.  We often feel resistance at first. That’s ok- just start there and feel the resistance.  Life will give us plenty of opportunities to practice every day.  Someone cuts you off in traffic? Practice.  Your child is being willfully defiant? Practice.  Someone you care about is dying?  Practice.  Ask yourself, “How can I open to my experience, rather than shut it down?”  This practice will enable us to cultivate compassion for ourselves and others.

On Work:

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.”

“I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”

On thinking:

“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

“That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

On Money:

“You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it’s humorous, all the attention to it, because it’s hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that’s happened to me.”

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me …Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful…that’s what matters to me.”

On the Universe:

“I want to put a ding in the universe.”

On having children:

‘It’s 10,000 times better than anything I’ve ever done.’”

On Life and Death:

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. … Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”

Steve Jobs Commencement Speech Stanford University:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Maria’s Story:

Maria had been in a relationship for 2 years.  Often when she and her partner would disagree on something he would become very angry and yell at her, saying hurtful things that he later would regret.  Sometimes she would just take it, and sometimes she would yell back.  She shared with me that neither response felt very good.  “I don’t know how to respond.  When I’m quiet, I feel like I’m suppressing myself and it builds resentment.  When I yell back, I feel terrible about myself, because I’m doing the very thing that I wish he would stop doing to me.”  We began a discussion of what a compassionate response would be, both to herself, and to her partner.

What Compassion Is:

There are a lot of great teachings on compassion, so rather than re-invent the wheel, here is a sampling:

Compassion is made up of two words.  ‘Co’ meaning together, and ‘passion,’ meaning a strong feeling.  And this is what compassion is.  When we see someone in distress and we feel their pain as if it were our own, and strive to eliminate or lessen their pain, then this is compassion. ~ Center for Inner Quality

Compassionate people are boundary people… The heart of compassion is really acceptance.  The better we are at accepting ourselves and others the more compassionate we become.  It’s difficult to accept people when they are hurting us or taking advantage of us or walking all over us. ~ Brene Brown

Loving-kindness and compassion are the basis for wise, powerful, sometimes gentle, sometimes fierce actions that can really make a difference- in our own lives and those of others. ~ Sharon Salzberg

Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things. ~ Thomas Merton

What I want in my life is compassion, a flow between myself and others based on a mutual giving from the heart. ~ Marshall Rosenberg

What Compassion Is Not:

• Being responsible for other people’s feelings or actions
• Allowing someone to physically, emotionally, or verbally abuse you because “they don’t mean to” or “they’ve had a hard life”
• Pity
• Repeatedly saying “yes” because you think that’s what the other person wants you to say when you really want to say “no”
• Disregarding your own needs, feelings, and emotions in order to “make someone happy”
• Having no boundaries

3 Stages of Emotional Liberation

Marshall Rosenberg describes 3 stages on the path from emotional slavery to emotional liberation in his book, Non-Violent Communication.  Stages 1 and 2 are what I call the “compassion confusion” stages.  Stage 3 describes compassionate communication and action.

Stage 1: We are responsible for the feelings of others, and we must constantly strive to keep everyone happy.  This can easily lead us to see the very people we are closest to as burdens.

Stage 2: We no longer want to be responsible for others’ feelings. We feel angry at how little we have responded to the call of our own soul.  We have yet to learn how to be responsible to others in a way that is not emotionally enslaving.

Stage 3: We respond to the needs of others out of compassion, never out of fear, guilt, or shame.  We accept full responsibility for our own intentions and actions, but not the feelings of others.

How Can I Be Compassionate and Still Assert Myself?

To assert one’s own feelings and needs in no way has to discredit the feelings and needs of another person.  We can share what is true for ourselves and still be open to the reaction and experience of the other person.  I wrote an article about this a few years ago called Getting Over the Doormat Syndrome.

Maria’s Compassionate Response

Maria decided she was ready to respond to her partner in a compassionate way.  The next time he yelled, she was ready.  First she stayed present with her own experience and shared it.  “I see you are angry.  When you yell, I feel scared, and I need safety in our relationship in order to talk to you.  Would you be willing to have this conversation when you are calm?”  Her partner was shocked at her response, and didn’t know quite what to say.  So he kept yelling, but with less volume.  Encouraged, Maria asked him, “I’m wondering what you need right now, because I know you are upset.”  What happened next shocked them both.  Her partner burst into tears and said, “No one has ever asked me that before.”  Maria’s anger toward him for yelling at her immediately evaporated.  This was the beginning of the two of them working together to change the way they communicated.

Ending Compassion Confusion:

1. Get clear on your own feelings and needs and communicate them.

2. Listen to the feelings and needs of the other person.

3. Be open to how everyone’s needs can be met.

4. Practice!

Not Being Authentic

This is a good description of what we all do from time to time.  We think we are doing the other person a “favor” by not sharing the truth of our experience- the little ways we feel hurt and unappreciated, or what we are needing.  We think that by keeping it all to ourselves the other person will somehow intuitively know our sacrifice and they will finally give us the love, appreciation, and attention we deserve because we have been so good.  We will finally be rewarded for all our self-sacrifice!  So why doesn’t this happen?  Most likely because the other person is doing the same thing.

Cheri Huber’s Description

Cheri describes victim math in her own way in her book, There Is Nothing Wrong With You, and says the reason we do it is self-hate.

Self-Hate Accounting System:

“-I add up everything I do.  I subtract everything everyone else doesn’t do.

-I add up everything everyone else gets.  I subtract everything that I don’t get.

-I add up all the luck everybody else has.  I subtract all the luck I don’t have.

-I add up all the advantages everybody else had.  I subtract all the advantages I didn’t have.

You get the picture.

I am so far in the hole because all I do is good things and all I get is bad things.  So…. how can I not feel myself to be a victim? And why should I not try to even the score?  And, of course what we fail to see is that almost everyone sees themselves as victims and others as victimizers so people continue to victimize one another.  Who of us will stop?”

What does self-hate have to do with it?

Everything.  Some people don’t resonate with the phrase self-hate because it is so strong.  In my experience, most of us are struggling with self-hate to some degree.  It goes by other phrases such as:

I’m not ok

There’s something wrong with me

I’m not deserving of love, connection, happiness, etc.

It’s ok for people to walk all over me

If I take care of myself I’m selfish

I shouldn’t have needs

If I say what I feel or need I’ll be alone

I have to be perfect

I’m too fat, too short, too ugly, too sensitive, etc.

I’m not successful

Self-hate keeps us locked in to doing victim math.  It keeps us from loving and nurturing ourselves so that we can genuinely do that for others.  It keeps us stuck in victim-hood.

How Can I Stop Doing Victim Math?

To stop seeing ourselves as victims means we have to own up to our truth.  We have to believe that our feelings, needs, and experiences are as valid and deserving of expression as anyone else’s, and are not to be ashamed of.  It means that we have to express things that make us feel vulnerable- like what we are feeling and what we are needing- on a daily basis. A great resource for how to do this in a skillful way is Marshal Rosenberg’s book, Non-Violent Communication.

Stop Tip-Toeing Around

When I discussed putting an end to victim math with my client he said, “So basically, I’ve got to quit tip-toeing around and just be out with it!”  Yea, pretty much!  The more we can “just be out” with our experience the more we can relax into who we are.  This is the foundation of confidence.

What is Social Anxiety?

The Social Anxiety Association defines social anxiety as: “The fear of social situations and the interaction with other people that can automatically bring on feelings of self-consciousness, judgment, evaluation, and criticism. Put another way, social anxiety is the fear and anxiety of being judged and evaluated negatively by other people, leading to feelings of inadequacy, embarrassment, humiliation, and depression.” Individuals who suffer from social anxiety often experience severe emotional distress in the following situations:

• Being teased or criticized

• Being the center of attention

• Being watched while doing something

• Meeting people in authority (“important people”)

• Most social encounters, particularly with strangers

• Making “small talk” at parties

• Going around the room in a circle and having to say something

What can I do to get over my social anxiety?

• Work with your mind.  Remind yourself that all eyes and attention are not on you.  For more information on working with your mind, click here.
• Open up to a trusted friend or family member about your social anxiety and talk about it.  I often find that people with social anxiety keep it a secret because they feel ashamed.
• Engage in social situations such as parties with a supportive friend or two that will agree to stay by your side.
• Take slow, deep breaths to calm yourself down.
• Try positive visualization.  When you know you will be going to a social event or having a conversation with an important person, take time before to visualize yourself in the situation feeling calm.  Think about what you might say and practice saying it out loud.
• Focus your attention on what the other person is saying instead of your anxious thoughts.
• Remember that people love to talk about themselves.  If you don’t know what to say, ask the other person a question.

What if my social anxiety is so bad I can’t get myself to attend any social events or even go to the grocery store?

Social anxiety can be very debilitating.  Try not to be too hard on yourself.  If you are stuck, consider seeking individual therapy or a social anxiety group.  There is support and relief for you.  You don’t have to struggle with this for the rest of your life.

The Fly

We have all had the experience of being annoyed by a fly.  You swat it away only to have it come back.  You kill it only to have another one appear.  This is how the mind works as well; our thoughts being like a fly.  An annoying one pops up and goes away. Then an angry one enters.  Then the aggressive one – the one you just can’t get rid of no matter how hard you try.  Watch this amazing 3 minute animated video called The Fly which illustrates this point.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Mind

The mind is a powerful force.  As demonstrated in this video, it has the power to create a feeling of pure torture or serene peace.  If we want to stop suffering so much, we have to build the skill of working with the mind, and train it to come back to the present moment- the only moment that actually exists.  One way to do this is through meditation.

What is meditation?

Meditation is the practice of choosing where you are putting your attention.  Usually, our minds choose for us. They say, “Over here! Put your attention on me!  What I am saying is very important!” As it turns out, this isn’t true very often.  The mind engages in mostly negative and repetitive thinking that actually gets in the way of our ability to fully experience our lives.  So when we meditate, we choose an object of meditation – a focal point for our attention.  A common choice is the breath because it is always available in any situation.

How do you meditate?

You meditate by simply sitting down in an upright and relaxed position and then you start paying attention to your breathing.  That’s it.  Sounds simple, right?  Before you know it, you will be thinking about the future or the past.  This is just what the mind does- it’s a habit.  So you notice that, “Oh, I’m not actually paying attention to my breath right now.  I’m thinking.”  And you gently return your attention to your breathing.  You do this over and over- possibly hundreds of times in a 5-minute meditation period.  That’s ok.  The point is not to be thought free.  The point is to notice when your not present and return to the present via the breath.

How will this help me?

There is an ever increasing body of evidence that shows that meditation reduces stress, anxiety, and physical pain, helps create a sense of well-being, improves health, reduces conflict in relationships, and helps treat addictions.  To read more on the benefits of meditation, click here.

What if I don’t have time?

In our fast paced society, it is more important than ever that we slow down and check in.  Start with 1 or 2 minutes a day and then gradually increase the time as you realize the benefits.  If this feels hard, try fitting it into natural pauses in your day such as when you are stopped at red lights, standing in line,  or put on hold.

How long until I notice the benefits?

It depends on the individual, but most people will gain some benefit from doing this practice immediately.