When I visited with my father the other day. He was back in his room with the door closed. I knocked but he didn’t answer, so I slid the pocket door open (I love those things) and saw him sitting in a chair in the dark just staring in to space. I always wonder what, if anything, he’s thinking about when I find him like that. Is he going over his life or just zoning out?

I came across these two wonderful videos of Jon Kabat-Zinn giving a talk on mindfulness to the folks at Google. He’s an eloquent speaker who explains the practice & benefits of mindfulness in ways we can all understand. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

Stress Reduction and Healing

Note to self. It’s a good idea to heed your own advice. Don’t listen to sad music.

I made the mistake of listening to iTunes today, specifically some country songs I’d downloaded last year. My favorite kind of music is the blues and they say country music is just the blues for white boys and that would be me. Over the years I’ve developed a taste for just about all kinds of music and since I hadn’t played these in a while I started the playlist.

Years ago I came across the book Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life by Jon Kabat-Zinn. I liked it so much I followed it up with another of his books, Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness. Well written and easy to understand, both books deal with the practice of mindfulness and how it can enhance out lives.

An eloquent little exercise to help break anxiety by my friend at Devyou.com

At 4:37 a.m. I woke up to my mind jumping from thought to thought. As I lay there trying to go back to sleep there was a loud bang in the house. It had snowed all day and was very cold so I thought a water pipe may have frozen & burst in the basement under my bed. I had unhooked the garden hoses over a month ago and insulated the area so this was really unlikely but it just shows you how a black dog seizes on any little thing and turns it to the negative. The bang was probably some part of the house settling or my dog in another part of the house knocking over something.

Many people are desperate for something to quiet their mind so they try therapy, medication (prescribed or not), Yoga, etc. They may even try excessive amounts of work, exercise or some other activity in the hopes that if they distract themselves long enough their mind will stop racing around and settle down. To varying degrees some of these things may work but others make things worse.

I just watched the movie A Night in the Museum (with Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson) over the weekend and woke to the sad news that Owen had apparently tried to commit suicide over the weekend.

In my post about mindfulness yesterday, I had mentioned the value of meditation in calming our minds and helping us focus on just this moment. One of the effects of this slowing down & observing our thoughts is developing the ability to let go of judging ourselves. We learn to stop comparing how we feel on the inside to how we imagine others are by viewing their outside.

You may not think that becoming more aware of your thoughts is a good thing. The black dog makes sure that you’re painfully aware of the thoughts racing around your head and the last thing you want to do is pay more attention to them. What I have found though is that the understandable tendency we have to avoid unpleasantness, whether it’s thoughts or situations, actually causes our anxiety to grow. With more anxiety comes deeper despair and even more desire to run away from what’s bothering us. Like a child afraid of what’s in their closet at bedtime. The fear will remain until the light is turned on and mom, dad or the child opens the door all the way and plainly sees what they thought was a monster is really just shadows of some clothes or a toy or a product of their imagination.

We’re all experts at tension.

Everyone reading this is old enough to be a ‘black belt’ in their body’s use . . . so why aren’t we? Why aren’t we smarter about how our bodies and minds work? We go about our day thinking that we’re relaxed but if we really paid attention we’d realize we’re not. Maybe we hold our shoulders a little high, hunch our back or slump a little in our chair. We wonder why we have a knot in our back, a stiff neck or get headaches. Why are we constantly rewinding and replaying events in our mind or fast forwarding to what we hope is a better future? We’re black belts all right . . . at tension.