Dear Cali Chica:

You flew to AZ to settle her there and you frenzied yourself in nyc to settle her there- resolve to never do that again. Let her settle herself.

Aim not at fixing your relationship with your sister, it is as good as it can be at this time. She needs to continue to contain her anxiety in her communications with you and you need to limit your interactions with her because she triggers you. It takes a lot of time and energy to respond healthily to this kind of triggering and you don’t have that time and energy, this is why limiting get- together times is wise.

Focus on yourself and your husband, a team of two, your inner circle.

When you notice this rushing of the brain.. hush it, again and again. As you practice this more and more, prepare for that despair or anger, or whatever other emotions will make themselves known to you, and don’t get alarmed.

Keep walking your emotional healing path, keep going and pace yourself. No rushing the process.

anita

Dear Cali Chica:

You are welcome. “Point is, I am no longer letting anything get in the way of my inner circle- a team of two- and my emotional path”- excellent, glad to read this!

Regarding meeting with the therapist this evening, that will be very interesting. If she only took the time to read your posts on your threads here, she would know so much about you, save a lot of time.

anita

Dear Cali Chica:

Good mindful practice this morning, a hush the rush practice. I heard of EMDR before and once again googled Wikipedia entry on it. It was developed in the 90s by a Shapiro, has to do with eye movements. Did you ask the therapist you saw how the work will look like (my therapist gave me that document I copied for you, having my name, his diagnoses of me, goals, strategies and so on. Does she produce such a document for her clients (after a few sessions)?

I went over more of my notes from 2011 yesterday and I want to process them further here with you, thinking it relevant to you now. But before I do, I don’t think I mentioned this to you: part of my therapy homework was to listen to one or more guided meditations by Mark Williams. They are available online and are all about Mindfulness.

Here is a quote from Meditation 4: Breath and Body: “The deep stillness we seek does not arise because the world is still or the mind is quiet. Stillness is nourished when we allow things to be just as they are for now. In this moment, moment by moment, breath by breath”.

Quote from Meditation 5: Sounds and Thoughts: “As you sit here, bringing the focus of your attention now to hearing, opening to sounds as they arise from near or far… There is no need to try to control your thoughts in any way, letting them come and go on their own, just as you did with sounds… From time to time you may find that your mind gets caught up in your thinking, no longer observing your thoughts and feelings, but lost inside them. When this happens, congratulate yourself for waking up.. renewing your intention to observe these mental events as they arise, stay awhile and dissolve…”.

Meditation 6: Exploring Difficulty is about focusing on unpleasant sensations in the body, “to explore them, to see them clearly.. You are not trying to change the sensations, but exploring them with friendly curiosity.. It may be helpful to say to yourself silently: It’s OK to feel this; whatever it is- it’s OK to allow myself to be open to it. Giving these sensations your full attention, breathing with them letting them be… Seeing if it is possible to stay with the awareness of these bodily sensations and your relationship to them, breathing with them, letting them be, allowing them to be just as they are”

It is best to listen to these in order, and each one repeatedly before moving to the next on another day- this in itself is therapy.

I liked the affirmations in Meditation 7: Befriending, “when you are ready, bringing kindness and friendship to yourself by silently saying to yourself: May I be safe and free from suffering. May I be as happy and healthy as it is possible for me to be. May I have a ease of being”.

In my next post to you I want to go over notes I made outside of therapy (not part of homework) in 2011 about mindfulness, paraphrasing those as I integrate those with what I learned recently, years later.

anita

Dear Cali Chica:

To me, the term “Being” in what follows, means Life. The term “mind” means overthinking and the negative feelings involved in overthinking, another term for this overthinking, overactive mind is “monkey mind”, operating like a monkey in a cage. Each time I use “mind”- I means monkey mind. When I use “observing mind” I am referring to the non-monkey/ evolved mind. Here are then my notes from what I read in 2011, summarized and a bit paraphrased here and there:

Being is the eternal, ever present, indestructible, invisible one life deep in & beyond all the many forms of life. It is my own deepest self, my permanent nature. I can know it only when my mind is still, when I am present, my attention fully in my body and in the Now.

Being can be felt but it cannot be cognitively understood.

Therefore, the greatest obstacle to experiencing this Being is my identification with my mind.

Not being able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don’t realize it because almost everybody is suffering from it, it is considered normal. This incessant mental noise/ mind prevents me from finding that place of inner stillness and therefore, from accessing Being. This mental noise causes fear and suffering.

The compulsive thinker lives in a state of separateness from Being, separated from oneself, from others, from nature, from Being.

The thinking brain is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, it becomes very destructive. It is to one’s detriment when the instrument, unsupervised, takes over the person it is meant to serve, and instead it does the person a great disservice, day after day.

The mind, without awareness, interprets the present in terms of the past. It often imagines things going wrong. The moment I am aware of my thinking (watching/ observing my thinking), my observing mind (and a higher consciousness) become activated.

Listen/observe/ witness the voice in your head as a witnessing presence: There is the voice- and here I am listening to it.

When you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the thought but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. Once consciously witnessed, the thought loses its power over you, because you are no longer energizing the mind through the activation of the emotions closely following the thought. This is the beginning of the end of involuntary and compulsive thinking.

With practice, a sense of stillness and peace will deepen. You will also feel a subtle emanation of joy arising from deep within: the joy of Being.

The thinking brain is an instrument, a tool. About 80%-90% of most people’s thinking is repetitive, useless, dysfunctional, often negative and therefore harmful. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy.

Enlightenment means you still use your practical thinking mind when needed, mostly for practical purposes, but in a much more focused and effective way than before. You are then free from the involuntary internal dialogue, and there is inner stillness. This is a higher level of evolution.

Allow an emotion to be without being controlled by it. You are no longer only your emotion; you are the watcher, the observing presence. Make it a habit to ask yourself: what is going on inside me at this moment? Don’t analyze, just watch.

Often a vicious cycle builds between your thinking and the emotions that are energized by your thinking: they feed each other. Your thoughts energize the emotion, which in turn energizes the thought pattern and so on.

One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove emotional pain- but it fails. The hardest the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain. The mind can never find the solution because it is itself an intrinsic part of the problem.

True joy, love or deep inner peace are aspects of Being which has been often obscured by the mind, but not lost or destroyed. When the sky is heavily overcast, the sun hasn’t disappeared. It’s still there on the other side of the clouds.

Much of human pain is unnecessary. It is self created when the mind runs your life. The mind perceives the timeless Now as threatening. It therefore tries to deny or escape it. The more you are able to accept the Now, the more you are free of pain and suffering. Make the Now the primary focus of your life.

Observe how the mind labels the present moment, how it judges it, creating pain and unhappiness. Make your present moment your friend, not your enemy. Always work with what is present, with whatever the present moment contains. Accept the present, then act.

The Pain-Body is your accumulated pain. It is a negative energy field that occupies your body and mind. It an be dormant of active. Anything can trigger the dormant pain-body: any thought, sensation, something you hear… Watch out for any sign of unhappiness in yourself, in whatever form. It may be the awakening Pain-Body: irritation, impatience.. Catch it the moment it awakens from its dormant stage: Does it ‘take you over,’ becomes you? Does it maintain itself? Is your thinking and behavior keeping the pain going on and on?”

You can cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection- you can not cope with the future.

The mind is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as being constantly under threat. Therefore, it keeps sending the body ongoing messages of being in danger, energizing anxiety. As long as the mind is running your life, you cannot be at ease; you cannot be at peace except for brief intervals when you obtain what you wanted, when a craving has been fulfilled.

This compulsion to live in the past and future, but not in the Now arises because the past gives you an identity and the future promises salvation.

Salvation is in the present, not in the future.

My mind knows only labels, judgments, facts and opinions about me. Only Being knows me and it knows me because it is the One Life in all its  forms. Make it your practice to withdraw attention from past & future when not needed.

Whenever you are able to observe your mind, you are no longer trapped in it. Identification with the mind gives it more energy; observation of the mind withdraws energy from it.

If all your problems, real or perceived  were miraculously removed from you today, but you had not become more present and conscious, you would soon find yourself with a similar set of problems or new problems. You may win $10 million, but it is a skin deep change. You would continue to act out the same conditioned patterns of thoughts & feelings in more luxurious surroundings.

Narrow your life down to this moment. Allow everything to be, within and without. A life situation needs to either be dealt with or accepted. Decide to no longer create any more pain for yourself. Should a problem arise in the future, your reactions in the future will be clear, intuitive & effective because you habitually live in the Now.

‘Ordinary Unconsciousness’ is a state not of acute pain or unhappiness but of an almost continuous low level of unease, discontent, boredom, or nervousness- a kind of background static. It is so much a part of ‘normal’ living. Many people use alcohol, drugs, sex, food, work, television, etc., to remove the basic unease. When this happens, an activity that might otherwise be very enjoyable, if used in moderation, becomes hijacked by a compulsive or addictive quality.

Make it a habit to monitor your mental state through self observation: ‘Am I at ease at the moment? What kind of thoughts is my mind producing? What do I feel?’ Direct your attention into your body: Is there any tension?

If you find your here and now intolerable, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally.

If there something you ‘should’ be doing but are not doing? Get up and do it now or completely accept your inactivity at this moment- either way, there is no conflict, no resistance, no negativity.

If you tend to worry, ask yourself: what is wrong with this moment (the here and now moment)? You can cope with the Now, but you can not cope with the future. The only thing that is real about your journey is the step that you are taking at this moment. This is all there is.

Only the present can free you from the past.

When paying attention to the body, you may feel a combination of sensations and emotions that are hard to label. What matters is not whether you can attach a label to it, but that you can bring the feeling into awareness as much as possible.

Allow life to live through you. The alternatives are pain and suffering, a greatly restricted flow of life energy, and in many cases physical disease. Pay attention to the silence in between sounds, in between words. As you pay attention to the silence, the dimension of stillness grows within you: Silence without, stillness within.

My added note this morning: the reason all my problems were not solved after reading, understanding, summarizing and paraphrasing the above, even practicing it back in 2011 was that there was too much pain in that “Pain Body, primarily too much fear. This is why Distress Tolerance Skills such as soothing oneself are necessary to reduce that pain/ fear before this mindfulness practice becomes adequately effective.

Also, this monkey mind situation is normal, because most people are anxious.. most people were trapped in a distressing childhood before coming out into a distressing adult life, further trapped in situations and places.

anita

Dear Cali Chica:

“I honored myself feeling triggered. As I am allowed to feel that way and it makes sense given the circumstance”- you are allowed to feel any which way at any time, at any circumstance even if it doesn’t make sense to you or to anyone else.

Particularly, you are allowed to feel angry at any time, at anyone, at any circumstance, regardless of it making sense or not.

“I noticed how it would take energy to have that battle with myself”- war is very tiring. Imagine a time when you are no longer at war with yourself, but at peace. How peaceful that would be.

“One side says don’t be triggered”- as long as one side is at war with you for having been triggered, you will continue to be triggered. To change you need peace, not war. Ongoing criticism is war.

“you have a right to roar”- you must roar-you need to. But roar I a way that will not trigger that war- in a way you know is just and right.

“oh my yes, you do have tons of energy!” is a nice little roar. Your MIL said something and you are not sure if it is an innocent remark or a jab- you roar the above, or something similar and later, when you are calm, think: was it a jab? (You can ask me for an objective opinion)- if you figured it was probably not a jab, then your roar did no harm. If the mean lady at work made a comment and you are not sure, same thing, same roar. Later you figure it was a jab, well, your roar was good enough.

Back to anger: when you feel anger at who you consider a good person, be it your MIL or your husband- say to yourself: it is okay for me to feel anger at anyone, at anytime, no matter if it makes sense or not. I am not a bad person for feeling angry. Everyone feels angry, even my husband and his mother!

When you feel angry and you are not sure if an offense was committed or you imagined it because of triggers from childhood- do one of those neutral roars, like the one I quoted, it will do good in either case. Later, when calm you can think about whether it was an offense, a jab, or not.

anita

Dear Cali Chica:

I read just a bit and am looking forward to read all & reply tomorrow morning. It is 9:40 pm your time, maybe your husband is home soon from his work dinner, hope you sleep well, rest best you can into the night.

anita