Positive Philosophy

• Meditation as a Tool

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• OLLI
• May 2024
• Day 3

Breathe.

Agenda

• Review
• Discussion: How’d it go?
• Working with our Thoughts: noticing the gap between our thoughts and reality
• Common Cognitive Distortions
• Deeper Long-term Patterns
• Meditation: RAIN

REVIEW

STRATEGIES

Focus on sensations

Notice your thoughts

Take it moment by moment; notice changes

Move to a different area of the body that is at ease

Anchor in a easy place, just touch the edge of pain, go back and forth between pain and ease

STRATEGIES

Put the discomfort in the context of the whole body

Offer compassion and validation

Connect to the breath, use breathing strategies

SELF-COMPASSION

Self-kindness vs. self-judgment

Common humanity vs. Isolation

Mindfulness vs. Over-identification

Places for Escape

• Consider your Window of Tolerance and stay inside of that window.
• We’re regulated.
• Not necessarily comfortable, but not at all shut down.
• We feel we can tolerate what is happening.

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• Hand model of the brain.

Places for Escape

• Open your eyes.
• Feel your body in the chair/on the floor.
• Think about a loving and peaceful person or place where you are at ease and safe.
• Get up and walk around.
• Hand on your heart. Soothe.
• Stick with what’s manageable.

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DISCUSSION

Guidelines

• Speak about yourself only.
• Don’t give each other advice. Practice mindful listening.
• Recognize there are only a few people in the room, but many more online. Further, the recording of this session will be available in a library.
• Take home learning, but don’t identify anyone when you talk about it later. Observe the confidentiality of our space.
• We are all growing. Celebrate the victories.

Discussion

• How’d it go?
• Say something about your practice, comment, question, thoughts that occurred to you…anything.

MINDFULNESS OF THOUGHTS

Mini-Meditation�A cat at a mousehole…

Thoughts

• Waterfall – allow the thoughts to pass by like a river flows
• Flood – let them rise and fall like the waves of the ocean
• Thoughts are like clouds in the sky. Watch them float by.
• A loud TV or radio – turn down the volume, listen with compassionate attention, say:
• “OK. I hear you. Thank you.”
• “Thank you for your opinion.”
• “Thank you for trying to keep me safe. I’ve got it now.”

Thoughts

• Notice how it feels the moment you shift from being swept away by a thought to naming it and stepping aside.
• Notice what types of thoughts have an effect on your body. What thoughts trigger you the most? How do they make you feel?
• Notice the interplay between thought and emotion. Some thoughts bring up big emotions; some emotions automatically trigger thoughts.

Include Thoughts

• Now, we can add thoughts to the mix of what we observe when we meditate.
• Sensations, emotions, sounds, thoughts…
• Sometimes, one thing will speak up most clearly. Other times, it’s constant parade, a running commentary, like a sports announcer calling a game.
• We don’t have to get lost in it; we don’t have to identify with it. Minds create thoughts – lots of what is happening in our heads is simply regurgitating what we’ve heard from our environment.

Identify Thoughts

• Pictures or words? Audio?
• Might help to label them:
• Thinking
• Noting Technique: touch with a feather or put in a bubble and watch it float away
• Past, future
• Planning, remembering, worrying, judging, doubting, imagining, wanting…
• If a thought is repetitive, then ask what’s going on here? Is there an emotion underneath the thought? A concern?
• (There are lots of reruns. We can even name our top 5 thoughts after a while…)

Growth

“A more skillful way to work with the thinking mind is this: when you realize you’ve been thinking, instead of feeling frustrated or discouraged, appreciate that you’ve just become aware that thinking is happening. You’re once again here in the present moment.”

Mini-Meditation�Let’s try it.

Working with Thoughts

• Name them, acknowledge them.
• Normalize having thoughts – we all have them.
• “The point isn’t to get rid of them. The point is to see them for what they are.”
• Invitation to hold things lightly.
• “Those who are wise are free from clinging to opinions.”
• What is the story I’m telling myself?
• You don’t have to believe your thoughts.

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Working with Thoughts

• Another step on this path is to notice the process of thinking itself.
• Just like our emotions rise and fall, get more and less intense, so do our thoughts.

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“As you settle back into loving awareness…you begin to notice that thoughts dissolve like clouds under sunlight….Thoughts are insubstantial, like a star at dawn, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, an echo, a phantom, a rainbow, a dream….”

Jack Kornfield

Thoughts

• We are often lost in thought.
• Anytime we can become aware of that state of mind, we disrupt a lifetime of conditioning.
• Conditioning includes:
• Common cognitive distortions
• Deeper long-standing patterns
• How they all got there: keeping us safe.

WHAT SUITS OF ARMOR DO YOU WEAR AND HOW DID THEY GET THERE?

“But when I grew up and left home, I began once more to be hammered into tight, tidy spaces of traditional expectation. I learned to conform to roles and wear all sorts of masks that hid my real self.”

Sue Monk Kidd

When the Heart Waits

WHAT SUITS OF ARMOR DO YOU WEAR AND HOW DID THEY GET THERE?

“As we attempt to adapt to and protect ourselves from the wounds and realities of life, we each create a unique variety of defense structures – patterns of thinking, behaving, and relating designed to protect the ego.”

Sue Monk Kidd

WHAT SUITS OF ARMOR DO YOU WEAR AND HOW DID THEY GET THERE?

“The central core of all of your mind activity consists of certain repetitive and persistent thoughts, emotions, and reactive patterns that you identify with most strongly. This is the ego itself.”

Eckhart Tolle

A New Earth

Reality Checking Our Thoughts

• We are constantly telling stories to ourselves and thinking in negative ways unnecessarily.
• Errors and Biases in our thinking.
• Awareness of our thoughts leads to an ability to reframe them.
• Since our thoughts lead to our feelings, and eventually to actions, reframing our thoughts can actually change how we feel.
• We feel differently, and then get to decide how we act on our feelings with more clarity.

Cognitive Distortions

• Black and white thinking
• Personalization
• Ignoring Positives/Filtering
• Jumping to conclusions or overgeneralizing 
• Catastrophizing  
• Emotional reasoning

Black and White Thinking/All or Nothing

• Create false dilemmas; assuming things can be only one of two ways.
• Examples:
• I am perfect or I am a failure.
• I am gorgeous or I am ugly.
• If I fail a quiz, then I’m going to fail the class.

Personalization

• Assuming that what others do or say is in reaction to us; that it’s about us
• Examples:
• You enter a room, then another person leaves the room; you assume they left because of you.
• Magical Thinking – small children do this. We assume as kids that everything is a result of us (Mommy and daddy are fighting. It’s my fault.)

Filtering

• Ignoring positive events by thinking that they don’t count; blocking positive experiences and focusing on fewer negative experiences
• Examples:
• Course evaluations/work evaluations

Overgeneralization/Jumping to Conclusions

• Decide on an outcome or make a broad conclusion based on little or no evidence; assume a pattern based on only 1 or 2 events;
• assuming you know what someone else is thinking (mind reading or fortune telling)
• Examples:
• Always, Never are key words
• “I’m sure they hate getting emails from me.”

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Catastrophizing

• Exaggerate a situation or focus on worst case scenario
• Examples:
• Roommate is late coming home; they must have had a car accident.
• I have a headache; it must be a brain tumor.
• Medical students often do this when they begin to study diseases. They see symptoms in themselves.

Emotional Reasoning

• Believe something is true based on how you feel.
• Examples:
• I feel stupid, therefore I must be stupid.
• I feel really anxious, so this situation must be really threatening.
• We’re OK, so it’s OK. (Covid)

Reality Checking: The Steps

1. Awareness – catch yourself in your biased thinking
2. Feel it in your body, feel your emotions
3. Reality Check/Argue with yourself
• Challenge questions list
4. Create a new, more helpful thought

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Reality Checking: Common Challenge Questions

1. What evidence do I have for this conclusion?
2. Do I have all of the information?
3. How likely is this really?
4. Is it objectively true or is it a story I’m telling myself?

We’re not denying how we feel. We recognize our feelings and the distorted thoughts that drive those feelings. We work to change the thoughts.

DARING GREATLY BY BRENE BROWN�THE ARMORY

THE ARMORY

• “Persona”: mask worn in Greek and Roman theater, the mask we put on to deal with the world.
• “In Jungian terms, the Persona is the mask which we show to the world, the outer personality by which we are known. Our lives are not unlike a play in which we hide our true faces under masks, and in which we know others primarily by the masks which they wear.”

(Wang, Jungian Tarot card called “The World”)

THE ARMORY

• The Buddha on Egolessness, as quoted by Pema Chodron in her book The Places that Scare Us:

“Buddha was pointing out that the fixed idea that we have about ourselves as solid and separate from each other is painfully limiting. It is possible to move through the drama of our lives without believing so earnestly in the character we play.”

THE ARMORY

• The Buddha on Egolessness, as quoted by Pema Chodron:
• “We have two alternatives: either we question our beliefs—or we don’t. Either we accept our fixed versions of reality—or we begin to challenge them. In Buddha’s opinion, to train in staying open and curious—to train in dissolving our assumptions and beliefs—is the best use of our human lives…. It manifests as inquisitiveness, as adaptability, as humor, as playfulness. It is our capacity to relax with not knowing, not figuring everything out, with not being at all sure about who we are—or who anyone else is either.”

THE ARMORY

“Finding the courage to go to the places that scare us cannot happen without compassionate inquiry into the workings of ego. So we ask ourselves, ‘What do I do when I feel I can’t handle what’s going on? Where do I look for strength and in what do I place my trust?’

The Buddha taught that flexibility and openness bring strength and that running from groundlessness weakens us and brings pain. But do we understand that becoming familiar with the running away is the key? Openness doesn’t come from resisting our fears but from getting to know them well.”

THE ARMORY

• “AS A SPECIES, we should never underestimate our low tolerance for discomfort. To be encouraged to stay with our vulnerability is news that we can use. Sitting meditation is our support for learning how to do this.”
• “Sitting meditation cultivates loving-kindness and compassion…. It gives us a way to move closer to our thoughts and emotions and to get in touch with our bodies. It is a method of cultivating unconditional friendliness toward ourselves and for parting the curtain of indifference that distances us from the suffering of others. It is our vehicle for learning to be a truly loving person.”

THE ARMORY

“We clearly see the barriers we set up to shield us from naked experience. Although we still associate the walls we’ve erected with safety and comfort, we also begin to feel them as a restriction. This claustrophobic situation…marks the beginning of longing for an alternative to our small, familiar world. We begin to look for ventilation. We want to dissolve the barriers between ourselves and others.” 

THE ARMORY

• “Gradually, through meditation, we begin to notice that there are gaps in our internal dialogue. In the midst of continually talking to ourselves, we experience a pause, as if awakening from a dream. We recognize our capacity to relax with the clarity, the space, the open-ended awareness that already exists in our minds. We experience moments of being right here that feel simple, direct, and uncluttered.”
• “We are not trying to get rid of thoughts. Rather, we are clearly seeing our defense mechanisms, our negative beliefs about ourselves, our desires and expectations. We also see our kindness, our bravery, our wisdom.”

THE ARMORY

• Brown writes, “Armor makes us feel stronger even when we grow weary from dragging the extra weight around. The irony is that when we’re standing across from someone who is hidden or shielded by masks and armor, we feel frustrated and disconnected.”

THE ARMORY

• “Upper elementary school and middle school was where most of us started to try on new and different forms of protection.”
• “…believing that we’re enough is the way out of the armor – it gives us permission to take off the mask.”
• So, what are the shields/armor we put up and what are the strategies that allow us to drop them?

THE ARMORY/SHIELDS

FIVE HINDRANCES

• Grasping: wanting, clinging, greed, wanting something more/different than what’s happening right now.
• Aversion: fear, anger, hate…
• Restlessness: jumpiness, agitation…
• Sloth and torpor: sleepy, ennui…
• Doubt:
• “It’s no use.”
• “Maybe there’s an easier way.”
• “I can’t.”

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TAKING YOUR ARMOR OFF…

• Takes courage and compassion – lots of it. For yourself, and then for others.
• And though we make mistakes, it’s worth it.

James Hollis

SEVEN FACTORS OF ENLIGHTENMENT

• Mindfulness
• Investigation
• Effort
• Joy
• Calm
• Concentration
• Equanimity

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IN SUM…

Summary

• Noticing your thoughts works just like noticing your emotions.
• Notice patterns to our thinking to see things more clearly, staying in the present moment.
• “Some of your thoughts don’t have your best interests in mind. So why would you continue to think them?”
• Dalai Lama

Summary

• We don’t have to believe every thought we have.
• Hold them lightly, with interest and humor.
• “The world is divided into those who think they’re right.”
• Thoughts and emotions can be real, but not true.

Summary

• Thoughts and beliefs create division among people and within ourselves.
• “You’re in a position to relieve the suffering of thoughts that divide us….”
• There is nothing wrong with me. There is nothing wrong with you.
• Mindfulness alleviates some polarization.

MEDITATION RX

1. Try 3 minutes?
2. Notice your thoughts and common thinking patterns.
3. Try a strategy to loosen up called Three Possibilities
• When you notice yourself judging a situation or person, try to think of 3 possible explanations that would explain things in a way that help you soften.
• Traffic example.

MEDITATION: R.A.I.N.

RAIN PRACTICE