How to Apply Mindfulness to Your Life and Work

Transcription

1 How to Grow Love and Compassion out of the Seeds of Suffering Jack Kornfield, PhD - TalkBack - pg. 1 How to Apply Mindfulness to Your Life and Work Shifting Focus through Mindfulness: How to Grow Love and Compassion out of the Seeds of Suffering a TalkBack Session with Joan Borysenko, PhD; Ron Siegel, PsyD; and Ruth Buczynski, PhD

2 How to Grow Love and Compassion out of the Seeds of Suffering Jack Kornfield, PhD - TalkBack - pg. 2 A TalkBack Session: Shifting Focus through Mindfulness: How to Grow Love and Compassion out of the Seeds of Suffering with Ruth Buczynski, PhD; Joan Borysenko, PhD; and Ron Siegel, PsyD Table of Contents (click to go to a page) What Stood Out Most... 3 The Importance of Mindfulness in Self-Care... 5 How to Alleviate Our Over-Identification with Suffering... 6 Practices to Help Recognize and Balance Difficult Emotions... 8 Self-Compassion Practices to Address Self-Hatred and Unworthiness About the Speakers... 12

3 How to Grow Love and Compassion out of the Seeds of Suffering Jack Kornfield, PhD - TalkBack - pg. 3 A TalkBack Session: Shifting Focus through Mindfulness: How to Grow Love and Compassion out of the Seeds of Suffering with Ruth Buczynski, PhD; Joan Borysenko, PhD; and Ron Siegel, PsyD Dr. Buczynski: That was quite a session. We are now going into our TalkBack segment. This is unique to NICABM. We are going to bring in two experts to help you digest what we have just covered, and we are going to get into a conversation about what was said and also how it can be applied. To do that, I have my two colleagues, Drs. Joan Borysenko and Ronald Siegel. Joan is a PhD, Harvard-trained, cell biologist as well as a licensed psychologist. She is the author of multiple books and I will tell you one of them Fried: Why You Burn Out and How to Revive. Ron Siegel is also a licensed psychologist; he is Assistant Clinical Professor at Harvard and is also the author of several books, including The Mindfulness Solution. So, welcome to you both it is great to be back together and working with you on this session. Let s dive right in to the session with Jack, and let s start out by asking: What stood out to you in the webinar? Joan, let s start with you. What Stood Out Most Dr. Borysenko: The first thing that really struck me about this talk was the incredible compassion and humanity of Jack Kornfield. We are the medicine and if we don't take care of ourselves, we become toxic instead of healing. Just being in his presence is a transmission in and of itself where your heart opens and your attention focuses. When he talks about the healing presence of the practitioner, you really understand what that is because he models it so beautifully. Within psychotherapy today, there is a much greater understanding than there used to be of this very simple fact: we are the medicine and if we don't take care of ourselves, we become toxic instead of healing.

4 How to Grow Love and Compassion out of the Seeds of Suffering Jack Kornfield, PhD - TalkBack - pg. 4 Jack was really very, very clear on that. The second thing that really struck me about his presentation was the part where he is saying neuroscientists have not been able to locate the sense of self within the brain and the nervous system because the sense of self is really a contextual, moving target. The way he discussed identity how we form identities, how we maintain our roles, and particularly the flexibility of our stories is very, very important. The sense of self is a contextual, moving target. There is another great movement within both physical medicine and psychology today, which is called narrative medicine, and that is about understanding how our story creates a sense of self. This is how, in particular, we use mindfulness, to get in touch with a larger context for our stories so that we are witnessing them rather than identifying with them. Jack just did a marvelous job bringing all of that to clarity for us. Dr. Buczynski: How about for you, Ron what stood out to you? Dr. Seigel: In some ways it was the same. I am always so moved listening to Jack. He was the first teacher I had on a silent meditation retreat some thirty-five-odd years ago and his presence shone through then, when we were both much younger and I still feel it today. I was also quite struck that he didn t use the term anatta, which is the Pali term for no self and what he We use mindfulness, to get in touch with a larger context for our stories so that we are witnessing them rather than identifying with them. was really talking about throughout much of this seminar. He looked at anatta from many angles. I am thinking of this quote from a Taoist philosopher he is actually British, but he writes under the pseudonym Wei Wu Wei who says, Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think and everything you do is about your self and there isn t any. That was a theme that I heard throughout Jack s talk and I think this is going to play an increasingly important role in healthcare, and particularly in mental healthcare as mental health practitioners begin to take seriously how the self is constructed, as Joan was saying, and how it is constructed in each moment through these various narratives, and how these narratives can constrict us. When we identify with a particular story about ourselves, we lose psychological flexibility. To the extent that

5 How to Grow Love and Compassion out of the Seeds of Suffering Jack Kornfield, PhD - TalkBack - pg. 5 we can see these stories being constructed as practitioners, we become much more skillful. Virtually every culture has some kind of model for multiple selves. We see this most obviously in the Greek and Roman gods, for example, with each one representing an aspect of the personality and we also see this with the Bodhisattvas in Buddhist tradition. When we identify with a particular story about ourselves, we lose psychological flexibility. As we start doing therapy from the perspective that there isn t some single, unified identity, but rather that there are always these shifting perspectives these different parts of us that are speaking at different moments. That becomes quite useful, both in gaining perspective on our experience so we don't identify so much with a particular point of view and in connecting to others. If I am not so attached to, I ve got to be this way/that way, then I can be with you however you are and we can be much more connected and more together. The Importance of Mindfulness in Self-Care Dr. Buczynski: It is interesting how the two of you had similar perspectives on what stood out to you there. Moving on, Joan, we briefly talked about the use of mindfulness in practitioners self-care. What would you suggest for practitioners who are interested in this? That s probably not something only practitioners need to be thinking about we could broaden that to teachers and really anyone. But go ahead and tell us how we can think about mindfulness and self-care and what you might suggest. Dr. Borysenko I was truly delighted to hear Jack talk about self-care because it is so important. If we don't If we don't take care of ourselves, then we really have much less to bring to the client. take care of ourselves, then we really have much less to bring to the client that we are working with. In particular, I found myself smiling when he was talking about being with Rachel Naomi Remen.

6 How to Grow Love and Compassion out of the Seeds of Suffering Jack Kornfield, PhD - TalkBack - pg. 6 She has done retreats for many, many years for healthcare professionals so that they can relax a little bit, become present, come back to their own lives. I think we are all alike in this culture, in being too hurried, in being In an attempt to be compassionate, we end up doing exactly the opposite: we end up burning out. too rushed, in having too many things to do and making too many commitments to too many people. In an attempt to be compassionate, we end up doing exactly the opposite: we end up burning out. When you meditate, you recover that place of the witness. It is very important for practitioners to have regular times of retreat because without that, you tend to lose your perspective. I think about going off on retreat in the same way that I might think about doing a meditation during the day. When you meditate, you recover that place of the witness. You are not so much identified with roles and to dos and all the rest. Going on retreat a couple of times a year is a terrific thing to do for your self-care. You could go on retreat with Jack Kornfield at the Insight Meditation Society at Spirit Rock on the West Coast in California. You could go to the East Coast with the teachers at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. There are many, many places to go on retreat. It is particularly wonderful to go on retreat because you get not only the silence, but also a direct transmission that inspires and refills your well. It is particularly wonderful to go on retreat with a fine teacher like Jack or with so many other fine teachers because you get not only the silence, the reflective time of being by yourself, which is so important, but you also get a direct transmission that inspires and refills your well. When you come back to your practice, you have more to give and more of a capacity of presence to offer to your clients. How to Alleviate Our Over-Identification with Suffering Dr. Buczynski: Thanks. Ron, Jack talked about what can be done when someone over-identifies with their experience of suffering. What would you add to that?

7 How to Grow Love and Compassion out of the Seeds of Suffering Jack Kornfield, PhD - TalkBack - pg. 7 Dr. Seigel: This is a fascinating area because it is really about the clinical application of what Joan and I were mentioning before, and it has been Jack s theme the idea of no self which is seeing our experience as unfolding impersonal events rather than all about me. The idea of no self is seeing our experience as unfolding impersonal events rather than all about me. My friend and colleague Paul Fulton has put forth this model to understand psychological development, particularly in terms of spiritual paths, but also generally as the shift from an experience of feeling like It s about me to more and more of an experience of feeling like it is impersonal unfoldings. This is like CBT on steroids instead of replacing maladaptive, irrational thoughts with more adaptive, rational ones, we are starting to see all of our thoughts as just these comings and goings of phenomena words basically appearing in the mind. That brings us to practices that we can do to help us to realize this. The simple practice, which is done in Vipassana Meditation, is the practice of noting. We begin with simply noting when thoughts arise. When a thought comes into the mind, we note it as thinking and that helps us not to identify so much with the content of the thought. We are starting to see all of our thoughts as just these comings and goings of phenomena. We can refine that further by creating a few simple categories such as judging, planning, and remembering as these different thoughts enter into the mind. When we see the various roles that we are playing as simply roles that we are adopting, we become much freer and much less As we do this, we start to identify with them a lot less; we start to see them much more as passing phenomena. The other thing that we can do is to simply notice when we are identifying with a particular role. Jack did a marvelous job when he was talking about the policewoman when she is being a policewoman, she is in the role of a policewoman, and when she is being a mom, she is in the role of a mom. When Shakespeare famously said, The whole world is a stage and we are actors on it, that is really true when we start to see the various roles that we are playing as simply roles that we are adopting, we become much freer and much less identified with them.

8 How to Grow Love and Compassion out of the Seeds of Suffering Jack Kornfield, PhD - TalkBack - pg. 8 All of these approaches have significant implications for us in psychotherapy. We can actually talk to our patients about the roles that they are playing what feels good about them, what feels bad about them, and when they might be able to lay them aside. Practices to Help Recognize and Balance Difficult Emotions Dr. Buczynski: Joan, Jack talks about the importance of recognizing and balancing difficult emotions. Do you have any thoughts on exercises or practices that would be helpful for that? Dr. Borysenko: I do. First of all, though, Ron just talked about the importance of really naming what your experience is, just in terms of how the mind works thinking or judging, for example. It is the same with emotions: to be able to stop for a moment and notice, This is sadness that is coming up from me. I am going to give you an example of that. I live in Boulder, Colorado and we recently had a big flood. Right here in the Boulder area, four or five people died in that flood and 290 people lost their homes. It is It is the same with emotions: to be able to stop for a moment and notice, This is sadness that is coming up from me. really unbelievable, and sometimes it is hard to feel feelings like that for some time. I was giving a presentation elsewhere, and all of a sudden I found that I burst into tears because I had not come into balance with my emotions. I was so sad, so terribly sad. For some of the people, their homes had burned down in the 2010 fire; they had rebuilt, but now were washed away in the flood. I was so just dealing with the emergency of the moment, trying to get to the airport and fly out to where I was giving a presentation, that I hadn t named my own feelings. I hadn t named that sadness. So that is the first thing to come into emotional balance. I got to where I was going and I felt absolutely overwhelmed and out of balance. What happens with the overwhelm is that you have become so identified with the emotion, it is just like acting out that emotion in yourself and acting it out in your behavior.

9 How to Grow Love and Compassion out of the Seeds of Suffering Jack Kornfield, PhD - TalkBack - pg. 9 To get back some distance, first you have to name that emotion in this case sadness and then it is a little bit easier to have compassion for yourself when you have an emotion that is difficult. So often, we don't invoke self-compassion when we are having a difficult emotion. Jack speaks so beautifully about the end of self-hatred and how we can be compassionate toward ourselves. Then, of course, mindfulness practice is so oriented toward seeing what the emotion is but not identifying So often, we don't invoke self-compassion when we are having a difficult emotion. with it. Jack was very clear on that. He had let s see if I can find it a great quote. He said, You need mindfulness to identify what you are feeling but not to identify with the feeling. In other words, as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross used to say, All feelings are great because they give you information, but they are not so great if you marinate in them. Emotional balance is that capacity to draw back to realize that all people have these emotions at some time. It is not a permanent state. It comes, and it goes. But what can you do, for example, if you are sad when people have lost their homes in the flood? That gives you information you want to be of service and you want to be useful. Maybe you need to do a little bit of volunteering or give money to the Red Cross. You can decide what you can do. This shows you that your heart is leading you toward some action. You take the information and are compassionate that the emotion is there, without becoming so overwhelmed by it. Jack is such a very good teacher of how to deal with the balance of emotions. Emotional balance is that capacity to draw back to realize that all people have these emotions at some time. Dr. Buczynski: Thanks, Joan, and I am so sorry that you had to go through that. D. Borysenko: Yes. Thank you, Ruth.

10 How to Grow Love and Compassion out of the Seeds of Suffering Jack Kornfield, PhD - TalkBack - pg. 10 Self-Compassion Practices to Address Self-Hatred and Unworthiness Dr. Buczynski: Ron, Joan briefly alluded to the self-hatred that Jack had been referring to and I would like to follow up on that a little more. Self-hatred and unworthiness is felt by a lot of people. Would you add any further thoughts to the practices of self-compassion that Jack discussed? Dr. Seigel: I thought Jack s contributions were wonderful and I would add to that some of the work done by my friends Kristin Neff and Chris Germer. Whenever we face disappointment we experience self-criticism, we get involved in self-isolation, and we get involved in self-absorption. They have done a lot of work in looking at exactly which practices are helpful for us when we are filled with a lot of negativity towards ourselves. Kristin has outlined three things that happen whenever we face disappointment, and in particular, when we are being harsh with ourselves. When we experience self-criticism, we start to get involved in narratives about All the things that are wrong with me / How foolish I was that I did what I did / How inadequate I am. We get involved in self-isolation. We tend to pull back from others when we feel bad about ourselves; we start to lick our wounds in private. We get involved in self-absorption, basically spending an awful lot of time focused on the first two on how bad I am and how nobody would want to be with me. We can specifically tackle each of those three with antidotes. The antidote to self-criticism is self-kindness. Most of our listeners are probably familiar with loving-kindness practices in which people will often put their hands over the heart, as I am doing, and repeat, May I be safe May I be healthy May I We can tackle each of those three with antidotes. live with ease May I be free from suffering May I be happy et cetera and those are helpful. One can write a self-compassion letter. This is a great method where we simply imagine that a friend who loves us is observing our circumstance and is writing a letter to us about that circumstance. Another practice that helps a lot with the self-isolation is the sense of common humanity and we get this in

11 How to Grow Love and Compassion out of the Seeds of Suffering Jack Kornfield, PhD - TalkBack - pg. 11 different ways. Joan pointed out how volunteering and being involved in the community can do it. Parables also work. There is this famous story of the mustard seed that is used in Buddhist psychological teaching which is basically a story of a woman who has lost her only son and she is just grief-stricken. She goes to the Buddha for advice and he asks her to go and get a mustard seed from a neighbor but she has to get that from a neighbor who hasn t suffered from some kind of painful loss. As she goes around from neighbor to neighbor, she hears more and more stories of the commonality of Now that we have so much opportunity for social mobility we need even more self-compassion. painful loss, and that becomes healing. Finally, I just want to say a word about something I read recently. There is a philosopher, Alain de Botton, who has written about status anxiety, which is a phenomenon that happens in our current developed cultures where there is social mobility. In the old days this sounds like it is a tangent but it is very connected if you were born a peasant, you stayed a peasant. If you were born a noble, you stayed a noble. If you were born into a certain role in the caste system, you stayed in that role. But now that we have so much opportunity for social mobility, if we are not at the top of the pack, we are filled with all these self-critical narratives about other people who are ahead of us and that s probably made worse by the Internet and Facebook. People see what all of their peers are up to, and there s this terrible feeling of inadequacy from not being an Olympic gold medalist or a celebrity we re just an ordinary human being. All this means that we need even more self-compassion because we don't all live in Lake Wobegon where all the women are beautiful and all of the children are above average! Half the time we are going to lose in these comparisons and we have to be kind to ourselves around this. Dr. Buczynski: This wraps up our TalkBack segment for this session.

12 How to Grow Love and Compassion out of the Seeds of Suffering Jack Kornfield, PhD - TalkBack - pg. 12 About the speakers... Joan Borysenko, PhD has been described as a respected scientist, gifted therapist, and unabashed mystic. Trained at Harvard Medical School, she was an instructor in medicine until Currently the President of Mind/Body Health Sciences, Inc., she is an internationally known speaker and consultant in women s health and spirituality, integrative medicine and the mind/body connection. Joan also has a regular 2 to 3 page column she writes in Prevention every month. She is the author of nine books, including New York Times bestsellers. Ron Siegel, PsyD is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School, where he has taught for over 20 years. He is a long time student of mindfulness mediation and serves on the Board of Directors and faculty for the Institute for Medication and Therapy. Dr. Siegel teachers nationally about mindfulness and psychotherapy and mind/body treatment, while maintaining a private practice in Lincoln, MA. He is co-editor of Mindfulness and Psychotherapy and co-author of Back Sense: A Revolutionary Approach to Halting the Cycle of Chronic Back Pain.