In this month’s Tool, I describe something that can helpful in negotiating shame, that force in everyone’s psyche that points at us with a deep disapproval. It blocks desire and hopes, and the actions connected to them, and can be a heroic project to shift. This tool isn’t meant to take away shame, but to perhaps provide a wedge to make a bit more space between it and you.
August’s Tool-of-the-Month is a kind of exploratory/diagnostic one, not so much intended to change something about your experience. But it’s pretty cool, because what it does is help us realize (in our own embodied experience) that there is a difference between reacting to someone’s, or some part of ourselves’, demand, and taking it as a request. We generally have no idea how much of our power and self-control we give away routinely, until we start to see this connection—between request and response—is not fixed.
May’s Tool-of-the-Month centers on the short question, “What is the most creative thing I can do?”, which is not easy to actually ask. Or if it’s easy to ask, it’s hard to act on. So, here are some brief thoughts about that question, and since experimentation is a big part of creativity, give the question a shot and see what happens.
The “Tool of the Month” for April is a simple test for a complex problem: is the belief that we hold as ours, actually ours, or is it being held because we either inherited it, or had to believe it for safety reasons? The answer is a very important one, because if a belief is congruent with who we actually are, if it truly is our belief, then it doesn’t cause friction. But if it is incongruent, then the friction between our self and our received belief cause stress, at some level, even though initially we may not be aware of that stress. So the Desert Island Test is a little thought experiment to help discriminate which belief belongs to whom.
Happy New Year! I hope it is starting off well for you all, and as usual, that you’re getting enough support to deal effectively with all the inevitable, and from the therapeutic perspective, necessary challenges.
In the current tool-of-the-month, I propose a practice of approaching “self-care” as “future-self care,” of practicing making choices based on our future self being a dependent who is subject to our present choices, but has no agency in actually making those choices. It creates an interesting ethical framework for our choices, without getting so entangled in the questions of society ethics and demands, that can help clarify what the actual consequences of our actions are on our self, or rather, on our selves.
Sorry for the six-week absence from the newsletters. I’ve been very busy with school work, which is amazingly immersive sometimes. However, I was not so busy that I couldn’t listen to a great podcast interview of Dr. Dan Siegel, where he discusses his mindfulness practice/exercise, called “The Wheel of Awareness.” It’s well worth a listen, both because Siegel is one of the great explainers of neuroscience and mental stuff in general, because the Wheel is a very useful practice, and also because Siegel is a great human being to hang out with for an hour.
I hope you find it useful and hope you all are finding, as we traverse the rocky current times, a balance of enough support, and enough challenge, to keep growing and unfolding.
The tool-of-the-month for this month is a description of the process by which we all learn, and the critical factor of getting and taking feedback. In doing this, having tools to help track our progress is important to correct for distortions in our own very human self-assessment, and to build confidence in our own ability to learn and change. This template for a “tracking chart” is applicable to virtually any definable change, and though it is not a panacea or change in itself—we are the ones having to do the hard work—it is an important support in the process.
The tool for this month is a skill that involves spotting the aliveness in our environment, when depression is telling us that it’s essentially all grey and dead out there. It never is, but depression can be pretty convincing. So we need to practice, as if we were carefully scanning for the subtle life in a desert, seeing what is already there in front of us, that carries a sense of life and interest for us. Give it a shot, but as I point out in the article, remember that healing from depression is work, and learning new tools requires work and repetition to get the hang of them.
This month’s tool…of the month…is a down and dirty way of engaging your nervous system if over- or under-activated, and helping it come back into balance. The breath is a remarkable tool for getting into parts of our nervous systems that our thinking mind can’t access (sounding like the adults in the Peanuts cartoons, i.e., making just nonsense noises). So here’s a simple pattern of breathing, with a link to a short demo, for you to experiment with and see what it does for your own system.
In this second edition of the “tool of the month,” I’m addressing the need to reorient to our bodies and surroundings when we are caught off guard, surprised, by the behavior of one of our fellow humans. Being startled does particular things to our attention and connection to, and groundedness in, our selves, so it’s important to reconnect and reorient as soon as we can, in order to have a clearer sense of how to deal with the situation.
