11-21-18

Meditation Notes 1

What follows is a set of notes for a meditation class I taught fall, a year ago. I tried to gather some ideas about what meditation might entail for someone first starting out with the practice. The course lasted eight weeks and I had some notes for each class and so I will post those notes over the next few weeks so that anyone interested can see what my orientation is. They are intended to be my own opinions and only an introduction and I would imagine that anyone else might develop a very different approach to meditation practice. There are some breaks in the first set of notes that originally included some simple graphs which I am not able to transfer over to this format. I think the information in the notes is enough to go on.

COLLOQUY FOR CLASS 1

This colloquy is based on a set of notes I put together for presentations before hospice nurses and volunteers. It was intended to address the ongoing needs of these healthcare workers for self care. When I made the presentations, I said that the concerns for self care and how to approach it would apply to anyone dealing with stresses and traumas, which is just about everyone in the world today. So, when I was asked to present a course on meditation, I turned to these notes as a skeleton outline of what I thought might be important for anyone first approaching meditation or for those with some experience with it. The notes include many of the threads I have tried to weave into the course and which I try to highlight in each of the 8 classes. This colloquy is a useful way for me to consolidate my ideas and to bring some coherence to them for purposes of sharing them with others.

The original talk had as its basis my own experiences with workplace burnout and the onset of depression. I wanted to use my own experiences as a backdrop example for what others might experience in their lives. I accepted the vulnerability that accompanied revealing this personal information. In fact, as I told the hospice volunteers, accepting the vulnerability was part of my own process of self care. Personal vulnerability is one of the threads in the course on meditation. It is as much a part of understanding one's own vulnerability as that of someone else in a situation of stress and distress. We like to think we get better at helping others through crises but don't often tend to our own. When we are vulnerable, then we are opening to a vast landscape of possibilities for self care and so accepting that we are vulnerable can lead to meditation as a refuge. When we deal with stresses or traumas, we respond to them with reactivity and unleash a cascade of physiologic activity. We will look at this more closely a bit later, but it is important to point out that traumas can be of the big “T” variety, such as the death of a child or a difficult divorce or loss of retirement savings, or they can be the little “t” kind; such as miscommunications, minor arguments, misplacing car keys, personnel confrontations in the work place. Fortunately, most of our daily traumas are in the latter category and not in the former. All traumas result in some version of the physiologic activation of the fight, flight, or freeze response.

My notes point out how burnout can lead to the perception of loss of identity when one leaves the matrix of a job or relationship. In my own journey I came to question who I was and this led to posing several questions that turned out to be very important in my own emergence from depression. They are:

Who am I? (How could this happen to me?)

What am I here for? (What is happening to me?0

What then shall I do? (What can help me?)

I have subsequently added another question which precedes the others and that is: Where am I? This emphasizes locating ourselves in space and time, especially in the physical setting of the moment. It relates to how I want all meditations (guided or otherwise) to begin—in a place, in a body. It is where I begin each guided meditation for classes and for my own meditation sessions at home. I have now translated those questions into a slightly different language that looks like this:

Where am I?

Who am I? into What is the context of this moment or period of my life?

What am I here for? into What is my relationship to this context?

What then shall I do? into What is my interaction or action that emerges from the first two

questions?

“Where am I?” relates to grounding the body in a space and place that connects with sensory experience. This makes biology and physiology the focus of life relationships. Our behavior under all conditions of life experiences is determined by our physiology and, for the purposes of meditation, by the autonomic nervous system functions. There are many other contributions but a simplistic understanding of the streams of the autonomic nervous system help guide us in our responses to stress and trauma. The stream lets of the autonomic nervous system intermix and complement each other. One streamlet is the sympathetic nervous system (sns) and it is engaged when we encounter stress, trauma, or threat. It produces increases in heart rate, respiratory rate, it diverts blood flow from organs not immediately required for fight, flight, or freeze, which are the ways in which our bodies respond to stresses and traumas. These responses produce an increased awareness, vigilance, and anxiety. In essence, they lead to a state of reactivity, in itself a protective and desirable physiologic default.

The parasympathetic nervous system (pns), on the other hand, when engaged leads to a decrease in heart rate and respiratory rate and fosters a state of relaxation, calmness, and equanimity. This is a state of general responsivity (vs. reactivity).

It is the balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic systems that is described as the resilient zone. The resilient zone in balance looks like this:

sns activation pns calming

By contrast, this is a disregulated resilient zone leading to fight, flight, or freeze and their consequences, but also showing how one can reenter the resilient zone with normal spikes of reactivity followed by calming:

stuck on hyperarousal: hyperactivity, hypervigilance,

anxiety, panic, rage, pain

trauma or other

trigger

                                        

stuck on hypoarousal: disconnection, exhaustion, fatigue,

freeze, numbness, depression

All disregulated consequences stem from or lead to fear and suffering.

 

In mundane life, our everyday life, our physiology tracks our experiences from morning to night and even when we sleep. When we wake and become conscious of our surroundings, we become aware, focus our attention and become mindful. Mindfulness focuses our attention and we can be brought to a state of bearing witness. In the case of our own stresses or those of another, we experience sympathy, the next stop on the path of caring. Sympathy engages us at a distance. As we get closer to suffering, we experience empathy where we engage emotionally with our own situation or someone else's as if it were our own. We are attuning in each instance and activating what neuroscientists call “mirror neurons”. The final emotional state in this process is compassion, an opening to action.

When our lives or our jobs call for the above path of emotional responses, we can get stuck at empathy. Every marker on the path leading to compassion is a mental function and it isn't until we reach the junction between empathy and compassion that we pass from a mind function to action. I believe it is this crucial transition that serves self care in important ways. If we think of this process of emotional engagement as the Department of Unclaimed Baggage (to use a workplace example) where we are in charge, then every episode of stress, every request for some unclaimed baggage unsuccessfully met, represents an inability to satisfy the customer in distress over being unable to calm the physiology of loss. In the workplace this leads to a build up of empathy until the accumulation of repeated episodes of reactivity (hyperarousal) lead to hypoarousal and numbness. Some have called this compassion fatigue. In effect, however, we experience empathic exhaustion. Compassion is believed not to fatigue but draws on available energy sources, never draining away more than can be spent and renewed.

When we are able to make the transition from empathy to compassion, even if it is only to tell the stressed customer that you understand what this means to them and assure them of your full attention, the shift from mental focus to action and interaction has occurred. We do this with others and we do this with ourselves. We have shifted from knowing our own pain to action that leads to care.

At any point during the day, we are able to pause, to step back, to contact our bodies (Where am I?) in time and space, to observe the context of the event (Who am I?), and to ask what my relationship (What am I here for?) is to what is happening; good, bad, or indifferent, but just to notice what emotions (or none) are present. This can take us all the way along the chain of emotions to empathy and the transition to compassion (What then shall I do?) In the pause, we are managing all of the transitions and we are the subjects of our lives. We are able to entertain options and make choices about what to do. Fight, flight, or freeze might still be good options, but others may also be viable. We get to choose and we can act. We are not stuck on empathy. In some cases, we are tending to self and, in others, we are tending to someone else (but maybe also tending to self in subtle ways).

“Who am I?” is not just about location in space and time and about physiologic processes essential for life and survival. It is also about the integration of this body, this mind, and this spirit in what I like to call the Wholeness Axis. The axis implies an integration of everything that contributes to one's sense of “self”, to one's sense of identity. Of course, the elements of wholeness are of a whole and we take them as separate pieces only to point out how important each is to being someone.

BODY is where we begin to reconstruct the physiologic resilient zone. The body we have is the only one we will ever have, a fact that tends to elude us some days. It is a refuge as well as a sanctuary where calm and equanimity can be accessed. How do we do this? Some of the compassionate (emphasizing the transition from empathy to compassion) actions we can take include the following entry points or doorways to self care:

sleep

posture

breath

nutrition

exercise

yoga

meditation

relationships

community

nature

prayer

faith traditions

song

dance

poetry

pets

MIND is where our sense of “self” is located, embedded in the miraculous and complex channels and networks of the brain. A very simple schematic for MIND looks something like this:

the human brain>evolution of mind>development of the core self (personhood)>growth of

the autobiographical self (personal identity)

MIND is where we access our unconscious and make conscious effort, in part, to:

store data

revive memories

solve problems

analyze

make decisions (the executive functions of our left brain)

The core self is the background knowledge that we are humans and not some other being or thing. The autobiographical self, where we perceive ourselves to be individuals and where we become the subjects of our own lives in relationship to others and were we exercise the power of a personal narrative, is the evolving self based on the contexts of our lives and which we can access through memoirs, journaling, companionship (self and other in dialogue), the arts, and therapy. It is often a combination of actions that assist us in transitioning to compassion and an appreciation of ourselves as whole beings.

SPIRIT is where we source innate wisdom and explore anything other than body and mind. It is where we develop lifelong meanings in core values, personal interests, and religious or spiritual traditions as well as deep emotional ties to other individuals and our communities. The life of the spirit is also where creativity is nourished and shared. Because it is part of the axis, we open to it when we open to compassion. Once again, the inquiry that brings us to an awareness of self and to compassion also makes us aware of the existence of others.

What is the work of renewal? What nurtures the wholeness axis?

Acknowledging change, especially the evolution and growth of the “self”

Acknowledging the context of one's unique life

Choosing vulnerability, loosening one's hold on the myth of omnicompetence

Choosing self-trust

Choosing curiosity

Choosing to participate in an inner dialogue of “self talk” and the practice of inquiry

Choosing to do an experiment, enacting compassion

Choosing community, practicing “I don't know” and asking for help.

Acknowledging and choosing lead to positive and prosocial experiences that include:

becoming inquisitive without falling into a stalled narrative of rumination,

slowing down mental activity, leading to a pause and the state of responsivity (vs. reactivity),

to support parasympathetic nervous system activity,

reestablishing “self” as subject, to thwart disconnection of parts of the wholeness axis,

reinforcing curiosity and choice,

encouraging relationships and community,

moving from pure mental processing (up to empathy) to a transition to compassionate action

in the resilient zone,

disrupting the burdensome myth of omnicompetence,

disrupting the feeling of guilt that often accompanies actions we feel are forced on us in a

state of reactivity.

It is my belief that anything we can imagine is possible and everything is useful.

I believe that everyone has the resources required to make a daily journey of wholeness.

I believe we can make appropriate choices to be:

vulnerable

self-trusting

curious

in dialogue

in community.

I believe it is possible in most situations to ask oneself clarifying questions, that the process of inquiry supports the wholeness axis.

I believe that acting compassionately leads us to experiments in living that lead to openness and personal growth, acknowledging that failure is part of the process of experimentation.

I believe in the fundamental truth of compassionate action towards self and other as the path of healing in the daily journey.

This colloquy on self ends by pointing to what care of self looks like. We will explore this theme in the next class.