Opening Minds & Hearts

     Significant traumatic events, such as making a fool of oneself in public, being diagnosed with cancer, being downsized, etc have very appropriately been called "shipwrecks" - see: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2013/07/361-beyond-stress-management-resilience.html

     While such events feel terrible, often they open up minds & hearts that are otherwise closed, narrow, and inflexible. Such rigidity is due to fear, is very common, understandable, but pathological - see: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2013/01/261-psychological-rigidity-i-will.html
     An open heart-mind or psychological flexibility, is about intentionally clearly seeing & engaging with what is - see: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/search?q=Psychological+flexibility
 
     Sadly, as soon as the traumatic event passes, some people quickly revert to their former rigidity. To maintain an open heart-mind with any degree of stability, one needs to have an ongoing formal practice such as mindfulness meditation.
     A consistently open heart-mind is associated with deep resilience, authenticity, maturity, and quality of life.

 

Mindfulness-based Therapies Require Skillful, Experienced Facilitators

     "It is to be expected that serious psychological transformation involves some level of discomfort and difficulty. Indeed, learning how to tolerate exposure to discomfort and gaining the ability to confront and overcome difficulty has a lot to do with what makes a person grow in new ways. The knack is to know how much of this is healthy, even if painful, and at what point it may become unhealthy. ...

     It is useful to distinguish between mindfulness as a mental state on one hand and the unskillful pursuit of this state on the other. Consider the case of a person plunging into the jungle, in search of a beautiful and healing flower, he gets torn up by thorns and battered by branches in the process. The problem is not that the flower itself is harmful; what is harmful is only the means of pursuing it. A similar confusion exists when researchers (or media reports of research) say 'Mindfulness can be harmful' when what they really mean is something like 'Going into prolonged situations of silence and isolation, with unrealistic or uninformed expectations, under the inadequate guidance of an unsuitable teacher, when one has a history of psychological fragility, can be harmful.' ”

       Andrew Olendzki PhD. "The Mindfulness Solution" Tricycle, Spring 2015.                     www.tricycle.com

Monet's garden, Giverny

On Being Conscious & Aware Enough to Choose

     "... I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about 'teaching you how to think' is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: 'Learning how to think' really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about 'the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.' This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull-value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out."

       David Foster Wallace "This is Water"                  http://www.metastatic.org/text/This%20is%20Water.pdf

Balancing Inner and Outer Intelligences, Skills, Opportunities, Needs

     "In part because of the blinding brilliance of our technological triumphs, we have distracted and dissociated ourselves from our inner world, sought outside for answers that can only be found within... latent but unexplored creative capacities, depths of psyche, states of consciousness, and stages of development undreamed of by most people."

       Roger Walsh, Frances Vaughan eds. "Paths Beyond Ego - The Transpersonal Vision" Tarcher, 1993.

Consciousness - the Big Picture

     "In the field of consciousness research - and also in physics and astronomy - we are breaking past the cause-and-effect, mechanistic way of interpreting things. In the biological sciences, there is a vitalism coming in that goes much further toward positing a common universal consciousness of which our brain is simply an organ. Consciousness does not come from the brain. The brain is an organ of consciousness. It focuses consciousness and pulls it in and directs it through a time and space field. But the antecedent of that is the universal consciousness of which we are all just a part."

       Joseph Campbell "Mythic Worlds, Modern Words - Joseph Campbell on the Art of James Joyce" New World Library, 2004, p286


     "Knowing": http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2015/04/knowledge-power-control-meaning.html

kate t. parker, National Geographic   http://photography.nationalgeographic.com

Time Also Changes Over Time

     "... the past is now barely present in my thoughts. I believe the main reason for that is children, since life with them in the here and now occupies all the space. They even squeeze out the most recent past: ask me what I did three days ago and I can't remember. Ask me what Vanja was like two years ago, Heidi two months ago, John two weeks ago, and I can't remember. A lot happens in our little everyday life, but it always happens within the same routine, and more than anything else it has changed my perspective of time."

       Karl Ove Knausgaard "A Death in the Family - My Struggle: Book 1" Vintage Books, London, 2014, p32.

Wisdom in Health Care

     "... we are ready for wisdom in health care. ... for leadership that fosters the capacities for wisdom in our healthcare organizations, capacities described in Monika Ardelt’s three-dimensional framework for wisdom (Ardelt M. “Empirical assessment of a three-dimensional wisdom scale.” Research on Aging 2003; 25(3): 275–324). 

     The cognitive dimension includes the capacity to see the deeper meaning of things, to understand complexity and tolerate ambiguity, to avoid over simplification of complex situations. It also includes awareness of the limitations of our knowledge, and avoidance of hubris. 
     The reflective dimension includes the capacity to see things from many perspectives, requiring self-examination, self-awareness and self-insight. 
     Finally, the affective dimension is compassion, and requires transcendence of self-centeredness. Fostering these capacities can be thought of as the wise leader’s virtuous cycle."

Are we ready for wisdom in health care?

By Margaret Plews-Ogan, MD, MS and Gene Beyt, MD, MS

- See more at: http://wisdomresearch.org/forums/t/1362.aspx#sthash.jyMoIpZk.dpuf

 

       Margaret Plews-Ogan, Gene Beyt.  "Are we ready for wisdom in health care?" 
http://wisdomresearch.org/forums/t/1362.aspx#

we are ready for wisdom in health care. Specifically, we are ready for wisdom leadership. What does that mean? We are ready for leadership that fosters the capacities for wisdom in our healthcare organizations, capacities described in Monika Ardelt’s three-dimensional framework for wisdom (Ardelt, 2003). The cognitive dimension includes the capacity to see the deeper meaning of things, to understand complexity and tolerate ambiguity, to avoid over simplification of complex situations. It also includes awareness of the limitations of our knowledge, and avoidance of hubris. The reflective dimension includes the capacity to see things from many perspectives, requiring self-examination, self-awareness and self-insight. Finally, the affective dimension is compassion, and requires transcendence of self-centeredness. Fostering these capacities can be thought of as the wise leader’s virtuous cycle. - See more at: http://wisdomresearch.org/forums/t/1362.aspx#sthash.jyMoIpZk.dpuf

Knowledge, Power, Control & ... Meaning

     "As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to keep a certain distance from it. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. At length we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilise it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. Throughout our childhood and teenage years we strive to attain the correct distance from objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make judgments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know what is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty ... Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance. Knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy of meaning."

       Karl Ove Knausgaard "A Death in the Family - My Struggle: Book 1" Vintage Books, London, 2014, p11-12.

missinghumanmanual.com

Buddhist Science of the Mind

     “When we speak of meditation, in the West people have quite exotic ideas of sitting under a mango tree, blissing out, having a good time for the rest of the day, like a relaxation thing. Or they often say when you meditate, you have to blank-out your mind from all thought. So there’s a real misunderstanding about what meditation means.
     Usually, when we start meditating, calming down the mind, we become aware of what’s going on in the mind, we say ‘Wow, there are so many thoughts! There are more than ever!’ Actually they’re not more than ever, you’re starting to be aware of what’s going on in your mind, from morning till evening – it’s full of thoughts. Because your mind is like a spoiled brat, constantly moving here and there, ruminating in the past, imagining the future, never in the present moment. So try to focus the mind. We say it’s like the butterfly. The butterfly stays on a flower, then it goes off for no reason, then it comes back. So it’s OK, you’ll be distracted, but bring back your mind. So meditation will help you become the master of your mind. 
     And becoming master of the mind is not the absence of freedom. Sometimes people think that oh, I’m going to control my mind, I’m sort of reducing my freedom. Take the example of the sailor at sea. What is freedom - to let the boat drift wherever the currents and the winds blow? That’s not freedom, that’s drifting. Real freedom is to take the helm, and navigate where you have chosen to go. That’s freedom. So if you’re in charge of your own mind, that’s freedom.”            

       Matthieu Ricard, from the National Geographic movie below "The Buddhist Science of the Mind", with Wade Davis

Optimal Self-care AND Professional Efficacy via MBSR

     How many of us feel that we worked hard, too hard, to get where we are? Don't we have to work too hard just to stay where we are, never mind advance in our careers? Meanwhile, we don't have much left to give enough of ourselves to our families, never mind our friends, and forget about taking personal time to adequately look after ourselves. Meanwhile, our secret dreams lie dormant, and are soon forgotten. Sounds like the perfect recipe for dysfunctional coping strategies like self-medicating, burnout, and all the other bitter ends to one's career & life! It's not at all what we signed-up for, is it?

     Could I combine an intelligent, gentle, evidence-based approach to re-connect with what's most meaningful & authentic in myself - to optimize my own health & quality of life and optimize the quality of my profession contributions? 
     Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) can help us accomplish both of these objectives. The proof is experiential - experience it for yourself. There are lots of scientific papers on the subject as well - just search under MBSR.
     

Golden Light by Alexandrya Eaton   www.fogforestgallery.ca