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Making your resolutions reality

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Debbie Ford wrote that “New Year’s resolutions often fail because toxic emotions and experiences from our past can sabotage us or keep us stuck with the same old thoughts, patterns and regrets.” It can be scary to look closely at ourselves, to acknowledge some of our fears and emotions. That’s why having a plan for dealing with those negative voices boosts the staying power of your resolutions. Here’s part 2 of stress management as a foundation for resolutions:

Live purposefully — What drives you? What are you passionate about? When you combine  your values with the gifts and strengths you offer to others, that synergy helps you feel engaged, connected, and part of something larger than yourself. If, as Sean Johnson suggests, you ask yourself every day, “What is worth my time, attention, prana, love?”, and then follow that path, your actions will bring you an authentic feeling of happiness, rather than anxiety.

Move more — This advice doesn’t have anything to do with a resolution you might have about exercising more. This is movement for the joy of motion. Just move more, even when you don’t exercise. Walk somewhere that you usually drive – you’ll notice different things! Dance when you’re cleaning the house. Go ice-skating. Take the stairs instead of the elevator at least once a day. Movement is what our bodies crave when we are overloaded with the products of stress. It just feels good to move, so do it!Skaters

Practice compassion — starting with yourself! This is probably the most helpful thing you can do for yourself if you are trying to stick to resolutions. Don’t beat yourself up when things aren’t going as planned. Observe your own struggles, and those of others, with compassion. Try this meditation from Jack Kornfeld: “May I be held in compassion. May I be free from pain and sorrow. May I be at peace.” After you have directed these thoughts toward yourself for a while, turn them to others you know.

Learn something new everyday — Knowledge is power. Are you trying to have a healthier diet? Instead of following the latest fads, read some reputable nutrition literature and educate yourself in a way that will make your actions more successful. Try a different source for the news of the day to get another perspective. Read a book about something you know nothing about — it may be a great distraction from the focusing obsessively on what you are trying to change.Laughing woman

Laugh – then laugh again, and again. The other day I found a little collection of comic strips that I’ve cut out of newspapers. Even though I’ve read them many times, they still make me laugh every time I see them. We laugh for all sorts of reasons – sometimes it’s because things are genuinely funny, other times we laugh because a situation is so absurd, often we laugh just so we don’t cry. Like movement, laughter helps us rid the body of stress hormones. It also helps shift perspective, realize that we are not alone, and take the mind off of problems. Remember that your resolutions are supposed to make your life better, so don’t take them so seriously – resolve to laugh more in 2016!

How to revamp your resolutions

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So we’re eleven days in to 2016, and the tension might be starting to mount. Will it be the fresh start or the old ways that win out? Just how stressed are you about your new year’s resolutions? Are you wondering why a promise to yourself might be harder to keep than one you make to someone else?

If you’re having trouble, take heart. You’re not alone and there’s still a way to salvage your resolutions for 2016. But change is hard, and stress is a given as we fight against those entrenched habits of mind and body that just want to maintain the status quo. Dealing with the stress of change has to be the underpinning of the other resolutions.

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To help you out, I’ve adapted my top ten stress management tips to relate them to your new year’s resolutions and goals. I’ll share the first five here, and the others next week:

Know what you value — We all have core values, which may include things like health, family, religion or money; and then satellite values that we feel less strongly about. How are those values playing out in the resolutions you’ve made? If your core value is good health, for instance, and appearance is more of a satellite value, then maybe your weight loss resolutions need to be tweaked. Rather than setting a specific weight loss goal so that you can fit into a certain size, a health goal of consuming less sugar might be more aligned with your values.

Nurture your relationships — The support of the people around us can play a major role in the success or failure of our resolutions. How strong are your relationships with the people in your social network? Are there things that need repair in some of your friendships? Have you been supportive of other people’s goals? Think about how turning your attention to someone near you might provide emotional support to you both.

Practice gratitude — When we hit a roadblock, or cheat on a diet, or fall off the wagon, it’s easy to start berating ourselves and feel like we’ve failed. Use those moments to practice gratitude instead. Be thankful that you had five good days of healthy eating before something tempted you. Express gratitude for the sunny day that will allow you to get out and exercise, even if you didn’t yesterday. Say thank you to the employer who is paying for your smoking-cessation program.

Be present — Slowing down and paying more attention in each moment can make us more aware of the choices that precede our actions. When we’re trying to make “better” choices or break “bad” habits, mindfulness makes the choices more conscious, less rote. For instance, when you’re eating, just eat — don’t work, drive or watch TV at the same time. Sit down and look at the food, smell the food, notice the colors, before the first bite goes in your mouth. When we choose food deliberately, eat slowly, and savor each bite, we can feel more satisfied with less, because we have been fully engaged in the process of eating.

Don’t forget to breathe — Breathing mindfully can focus attention in a way that may clarify your resolutions for you. Thich Nhat Hanh has a breath exercise he suggests for bringing the mind back to the body. While slowly breathing in and out, you say “Breathing in, I’m aware of my whole body. Breathing out, I’m aware of my whole body.” If you’ve been living too much in your head, and neglecting your health, this can be a way of turning your attention back where it’s needed, while letting go of any tension that might have built up.

Wayne Dyer says that our intentions create our reality. It’s my hope that these five ways of bringing more intention to your resolutions will help make them your reality.

Out of the holidays, a home

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When you think of New York City’s Rockefeller Center at this time of the year, their famous Christmas tree probably comes to mind. It could easily be the most visible holiday tree in the world, because of its size (often close to 100 feet tall), its prominent role in many holiday movies, its presence in New York, and its annual lighting featured on live TV. But its most important role comes after the holidays, when it helps provide affordable housing for one lucky family each year.

Perhaps you’ve heard this story before, but it’s new to me. Every year for the past 9 years, the company who owns Rockefeller Center has donated the lumber from the Christmas tree to Habitat for Humanity for use in building a home. The lumber is marked with the year and “Rockefeller Center tree”. In addition, the company’s employees volunteer their time to work on the build, along with the family who will live in the home, transforming the Christmas tree into a safe and solid shelter. When these families celebrate their own holidays, in new homes far from New York City, they are surrounded by that glorious tree.

Habitat for Humanity estimates that one in four people worldwide lives in poverty housing. For almost 40 years, they have been building, rehabbing and repairing homes for people in need around the world. With the help of 2 million volunteers each year, they have served 6.8 million people in that time period, offering them hope and a chance for stability.

A lack of affordable housing affects people of all ages and races. The MacArthur Foundation is funding $25 million in research to determine what the impacts are, and how best to address the need. Their premise is that “affordable housing may be a ‘platform’ that promotes positive outcomes in education, employment, and physical and mental health…” In other words, if we address the housing issue first, other things may fall into place.

The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard once wrote, “If I were to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”

So how does a Christmas tree live forever?  When it becomes a home, the platform on which dreams are built.

Wishing you peaceful dreams for the new year…

Lessons from an amateur parent

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Parenting, for all its joys (and they are abundant) is an endeavor fraught with the potential for second-guessing. When children are young, we ask, “Am I a good enough parent? Will I screw it up? Do I do too much for them, or am I doing too little? Am I too tough, or am I not tough enough?” Later, when they’re all grown up, the refrain becomes, “Should I have done things differently? Would he be happier if I had done X, would she have an easier time if I had done Y?”

 

You begin your life as a parent fooled by the child’s complete dependency into thinking that you are in control; in reality, almost nothing is in your control. Andrew Solomon, in his book “Far From the Tree” says that we think we are reproducing – making a newer, better version of ourselves – when, in fact, we really are producing someone completely different, whose life story is her own to realize.

 

Solomon’s book focuses on families whose children have what he calls “horizontal” identities, which sometimes become more important for them than the “vertical” identity of the family. In chapters covering children who are deaf, who have Down’s syndrome, autism or dwarfism, for example, he writes about how, for them, the community of people who share their deaf or autistic identity might be more comfortable or necessary than that of the family. He shares the experiences of dozens of parents who have had to completely change their expectations of what their child would be like.

 

While Solomon writes that many parents “are unprepared for children who present unfamiliar needs,” we don’t have to be talking about very extreme instances of disability or difference to know what he means.  Those parents just realize sooner than the rest of us how little control they have over the outcome of their child’s story. The beauty of life is that each of us is a unique individual, but that can make us feel like mysteries to each other sometimes, or as Solomon says, “Parenthood catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger.” Instead of trying to make the stranger into a copy of ourselves, we need to be brave enough to accept the child as he is.SF trip.Monterey_26

 

When I was growing up, especially as an adolescent, I didn’t think my parents could see me for who I was at all. I chafed under the strictures of the family, craved independence, felt that I belonged someplace else. During my teens and twenties, I would get irritated when I would hear my mother talking to someone about me, partly because she would sooner brag about me than praise me to my face, and partly because she would invariably get some detail of the story wrong. I moved to San Francisco when I was eighteen, where at the time, the local radio station would sign off from the news by saying, “If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own!” That slogan seemed to perfectly convey my own mindset: “Yes, I will write my own story, and it will not be anything like my parents’ story.”

 

Fast forward to the present. Now I’m not just a daughter and sister, but also a wife and mother. Yes, I have my own story, but I realize that it is inextricably interwoven with the versions other people tell. I can’t ask my mother to get my story right, or not to tell it, because she has her part in it, just as I have my part in my kids’ stories. I try not to cast myself as the hero or the villain of their stories — all I can do now is give them the love and freedom to tell their own version.

 

I’ve discovered that I can live with the stories as they tell them. When my daughter calls on our anniversary and says, “Thank you for getting married,” or my son acknowledges how much of an influence his father is on him, it tells me that they are comfortable with the identity they got from us, even as they so beautifully establish their own.

Meet the beautiful people

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So I’ll confess – I’m kind of addicted to Doctor Radio on Sirius XM. The satellite radio show from the NYU medical center features programs dedicated to different medical specialties, with opportunities for calling in and talking to medical experts. But there are two programs that I don’t listen to – the plastic surgery show, and often the dermatology show – because they make me start obsessing too much about my appearance.

Screenshot 2015-11-19Recently, however, I did listen to a dermatology program because the topic was about beauty and our perception of it. One of the guests had done research using before and after photos of facial rejuvenation patients, to see if people rated the faces differently on a list of perceived personality traits. Basically, the question was, what do others think your face says about you? That discussion led to talk of other research showing that people who exhibit positive traits, such as honesty and helpfulness, are perceived as better looking. People who are smiling are perceived as more attractive than people who have neutral expressions.

It’s not news that our expressions and behaviors affect people’s perceptions and judgments. But have you thought about them as what makes you beautiful to someone else? One of the themes of the show was about investment in beauty, not by having plastic surgery or buying cosmetics, but by thinking about what’s shining out of us. Do you smile? Are you kind? Do you look people in the eye? Are you healthy and rested and compassionate?

After listening to the program, I started thinking about some of the truly beautiful people I know, and what makes them beautiful. There’s my sister-in-law, who is unfailingly encouraging and hopeful, with a wonderful, infectious laugh. There’s the friend I met at yoga class a few years ago, who chatted with and befriended literally every person who walked through the doors of the yoga studio. There’s my son’s childhood friend, who never wavered from being kind, even in adolescence when most kids are jerks at least some of the time. There’s my sister’s husband, who will help anyone with anything, at any time; whenever he comes to visit, he fixes something in my house or brings me something he thinks I need. There’s my painter, who had a casual conversation with my neighbor months ago about something that wasn’t working in her apartment; last week, when he came back, he brought her something to fix it.

These are just a few examples of people who are beautiful because of the positive traits they exhibit on a daily basis: kindness, friendliness, helpfulness, integrity and honesty.

A few weeks ago, I met a woman while I was working who was very beautiful, physically. She had lovely skin, beautiful hair and stylish clothes; I couldn’t help admiring her. But then I heard her ask a co-worker to do something that clearly wasn’t the co-worker’s job. The “beautiful” Spain-Barcelona (9)woman was exercising the power she had due to her position in the office hierarchy. My admiration for her was immediately diminished because of her behavior.

My dictionary defines beauty as “The quality that gives pleasure to the mind or senses and is associated with such properties as harmony of form or color, excellence of artistry, truthfulness, and originality.” While people who possess physical beauty may give pleasure to the senses, the people I know with true beauty give pleasure to my mind. They have a harmony of spirit, and values, that transcends anything on the exterior. People often talk of inner beauty, but I would argue that it can’t exist alone; anyone with inner beauty has a beautiful outer light that shines on everyone they meet.

Splish, Splash

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When are chores not really chores? When a spoonful of mindfulness is added, of course! While it’s not exactly front page news, a recent study out of Florida State University found that students who washed dishes mindfully — by focusing on sensations — experienced a reduction in nervousness and an increase in “mental inspiration”.

The researchers may themselves have been inspired  by Jon Kabat-Zinn, whose best selling “Wherever You Go, There You Are” included an essay on “Cleaning the Stove While Listening to Bobby McFerrin”. Kabat-Zinn wrote, “I can lose myself and find myself simultaneously while cleaning the kitchen stove…I get into the round and round or the back and forth, feeling the motion in my whole body.”Handwashing with salt 3

In fact, it is attending to the sensory experience that uplifts both washing dishes and cleaning the stove. We start to notice the smell of the soap, the soothing warmth of the water, the hard or soft surfaces being cleaned, and the sounds of scrubbing, scraping, and water running. If a jumble of sensations has been metaphorically going in one ear and out the other, mindfully cleaning offers the opportunity to stop and focus on each one separately.

Educator Maria Montessori once said that, “We cannot create observers by saying ‘observe’, but by giving them the power and the means for this observation and these means are procured through education of the senses.”

Just as the Montessori method of learning emphasizes exploring and manipulating things in the environment, our practice of mindfulness can also be enhanced by educating our senses, and manipulating them to discern the separate inputs. Our everyday lives provide many moments when we can practice this, but we can also benefit from designated exercises from time to time. Here is one from the book, “Sense Relaxation Below Your Mind””:

Hand Washing with Salt:

Close your eyes and wash your hands.

Take some ordinary table salt and rub it gently over the back and front of the hands. Do each of the fingers. Rinse, and feel the skin. After drying your hands, rub in some oil or cream.

Experience how your hands feel.

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For those of us who sometimes think that our sense of touch has been reduced to tap, swipe and pinch; our sense of hearing to beeps and buzzes; and our sense of sight to the glow of a retina display, practicing sensory awareness can restore and renew us. Become the observer, rather than the thinker, for a while. The means to do it are there if you choose to use them. So if a few weekend chores are hanging over your head today, consider them an opportunity to lose yourself  — and then find yourself anew.

 

Seeing gifts everywhere

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David Brooks has written a wonderful piece in the New York Times about people who have dispositional gratitude — the ability to be awed by everyday kindness and beauty. He reminds us that our seeming independence is built on gifts we’ve been given by others. If you have a moment, check it out:

The Structure of Gratitude

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Savoring a sunny day

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What do you want your day to feel like? The question isn’t what do you have to do today, or what do you want to accomplish today — but how do you want it to feel as you are going about it? What emotion or sensation do you want as an evocation of your day?

I want my day to feel like sunshine.

How did I choose sunshine? I started my day with an on-line meditation from Amy Ippoliti. With a paper and pen nearby, the practice began with gratitude – what do you feel good about, grateful for, right now? The next few minutes were spent contemplating yesterday’s successes or positive moments. In each case, I meditated on the question, then wrote things down. And for the final step of the meditation, the question was, “What do you want your day to feel like?” Is it a feeling of joy, or fun, or ease?  Can you visualize it?

Sometimes when we’ve been going through a succession of bad days, or are under a lot of stress, it’s hard to remember that we can often choose how to feel, just as we can choose how to react. I know that’s true for me. A series of mishaps in my home, a lot of travel recently, and some new responsibilities have overwhelmed me at times. I focus on the negatives, let myself get carried away with anxiety, and forget that these are very, very small problems compared to what some people face.

So this morning I looked at my gratitude list. It included feelings about my children and the comfortable life I have. I thought about a letter I recently received from someone who referred to my son’s smile as “a little bit of sunshine.”

I considered everything that was positive about yesterday — the helpfulness of the people I dealt with, the fact that I felt in control of things instead of overwhelmed, the nice mid-day run that I had, and most of all, the beautiful, sunny, cloudless day that it was.

So when I got to the part about how do I want my day to feel today, there was no question that I wanted it to feel like sunshine. I wanted it to feel like that beautiful cloudless day, my son’s smile and being bathed in light.

The thing is, though, that not every day is sunny and cloud-free. Some days are overcast, both literally and spiritually. So how do we capture the sunshine on those days? How can we sustain the positive emotions from one day to the next, no matter what happens?

A recent study by Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin showed that some people are able to savor positive emotions longer, while in other people they subside quickly. The difference is related in part to the activation of the reward center in the brain. So capturing sunshine on a cloudy day depends on keeping that reward center more active.

There’s no question that doing so requires making a choice to focus on those positive emotions. It might be by meditating on lovingkindness or compassion, or by calling up memories of a time that felt especially joyful or comforting. In either case, the goal is to really drop back in to that feeling, so much so that you experience it all over again. The more you practice doing that, the easier it will be to get back to that baseline of positive emotion.

This 5-Finger Exercise* is good way to begin (spend 2 minutes on each part):

Touch your thumb to your index finger. Think about  time when your body felt healthy fatigue, such as after an exhilarating physical activity. Can you capture the feeling again now?

Touch your thumb to your middle finger. Think back to a time when you had a loving experience, perhaps a warm hug or an intimate moment with someone.

Touch your thumb to your ring finger. Now recall the nicest compliment you’ve ever received. Can you really accept it now? By accepting it, you are giving a gift to the person who said it to you.

Touch your thumb to your little finger. As you do so, go back to the most beautiful place you have ever been and dwell there for a while.

 

 

 

 

*The 5 Finger Exercise is adapted from one I was given. I’m sorry I do not know who developed it.

 

What some women can tell you about stress

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We see the headlines all the time: “Stress makes you sick,” “Work makes you stressed,” “Stress makes you fat,” even “Stress Kills.” But why does all this happen? Why is stress so dangerous, and how do we know?

Luckily for us, there are a lot of outstanding neuroscientists, social scientists and others who are devoting their careers to answering these questions. Many of them are women, so in honor of Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day, I thought I would profile a few of them and the highlights from their work.

What socioemotional resources are available to us during stress and where do they originate?

Shelley E. Taylor is a Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA and winner of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Psychological Association. She is perhaps best known for the “Tend and Befriend” theory: the idea that our response to stressful situations is not always “fight or flight.” Sometimes primates, especially females, seek out social relationships to protect themselves and their offspring during stress. These “affiliative” behaviors may be mediated by the hormone oxytocin, or in men, vasopressin, which may act as a thermostat for social resources, triggering a hormone response when our social support goes too low.holding_hands1

How exactly does stress age us and why are we more likely to develop chronic diseases as we age?

It turns out that we have little caps on the ends of our chromosomes called “telomeres”. These are bit like the tips at the ends of our shoelaces. Just like shoelace tips, the telomeres stabilize the ends of the chromosomes and keep them from unraveling. Elizabeth H. Blackburn and Carol W. Greider (along with Jack W. Szostak) won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work on how telomeres protect the chromosomes and how the enzyme telomerase maintains the length of the telomeres even as the cells divide. If we don’t have enough telomerase, and cells keep dividing as they do, eventually telomeres get so short that cells die — limiting years of healthy life. And guess what has an impact on telomerase — stress!image

How does that cell aging manifest itself physically and psychologically?

Elissa Epel of UCSF studies cell aging in people with major depression and those who suffer acute and chronic psychosocial stress. She has focused on the role of telomerase and the stress pathways that lead to early aging, overeating, abdominal obesity and immune responses. She is also involved with interventions using mindfulness and social support to help lower stress reactivity and improve emotion regulation.

How does social status impact our stress levels and their health consequences?

Carol Shively, of Wake Forest University, studies monkeys and other primates to explore how social stress might lead to depression and greater susceptibility to disease. She has found that animals who are lower on the social ladder for extended periods of time have twice as much hardening of the arteries as dominant animals. Other studies have shown similar patterns in humans.

Why do we want to eat comfort food during stress, and why do we gain fat around the abdomen?

Comfort foods and abdominal fat actually reduce stress and make us feel better. Mary Dallman, also at UCSF, studies the brain-pituitary-adrenal interrelationships and how chronic stress effects changes in energy balance. She has found that every type of cell in the body has receptors for glucocorticoids [stress hormones], which means that stress can potentially cause havoc everywhere. It also leads to an increase in the synthesis of fat and glucose, while protein synthesis declines, throwing off how we process the food we eat.

In spite of all this stress, how can we be happy?

Sonja Lyubomirsky, professor of psychology at UC Riverside, and winner of the Templeton Positive Psychology Prize, studies human happiness, what makes people happy, and how people can become happier. Her work shows that while we all have temperaments that make us more or less happy to begin with, a fairly significant percentage of our potential for happiness is open to change. Her research has found that generally happy people tend to interpret events in a positive way that supports their happiness, while chronically unhappy people tend to interpret the same events in ways that bolster their unhappiness. So she also studies how the thoughts and behaviors of the naturally happy people an be encouraged or taught to those who are less positive.

The takeaways from all of this work are 1) stress is toxic; 2) it affects all of us; and 3) there are ways to reduce its impact on our health. I’m grateful to these scientists, and so many others, for the intellect and passion they have devoted to this work. It has informed my teaching, inspired my writing and improved my personal wellness.

 

 

Seeking truth and beauty

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On our journey to better health and wellness, the spiritual dimension can be like the elephant in the room. We know somehow that it is important, but talking about it and figuring out what it means can be uncomfortable. So we avoid it as long as we can, before realizing that a fit body and mind only go so far if your spiritual health is struggling.

What is spiritual wellness? Every definition stresses that it is personal and individual. No one can create a mold for spiritual wellness and fit you into it. It involves your values and beliefs, the meaning you attach to life events and your existence, your sense of purpose in life. But some general components of spiritual wellness include having and demonstrating some purpose, the ability to be compassionate to others, the ability to forgive, the ability to spend solitary time in reflection, and aiming for a certain harmony about your relationship to the world. One of the things that make people squirmy about spirituality is confusing it with religious practice. But while religion certainly encompasses a sense of spirituality, the inverse is not true. Spirituality does not have to include any religious belief.

When we write goals for wellness, we can include spiritual values and goals as part of the overall plan, as John Evans suggests in Wellness and Writing Connections. He also proposes affirming spiritual wellness by writing “notes to yourself when you notice beauty, truth, peace, hope, courage, kindness, love, compassion.” These notes can be an antidote to our daily dose of stories about conflict, violence and hate. Writing them down helps us to remember them, and gives us something to return to repeatedly for spiritual nourishment.  A few months ago, for instance, I wrote myself a note about a 10-year-old boy who was learning how to grow a garden. He told a newspaper reporter that, “You give it love and care like you would a baby. You feed and water it.” I often like to let my mind rest on that child’s simple message of truth and love.IMG_0121

I also wrote myself a note when I read And The Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini. He included part of a poem by the 13th century poet Jelaluddin Rumi that goes like this:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other

doesn’t make any sense.

Here too, I find truth and beauty that resonate with each reading.

Author Gail Radley writes that “Human beings are meaning-makers,” but “to make meaning and find purpose, we must expand our vision [by] stepping into the realm of spirituality, into belief in something larger than ourselves.” Stepping into the realm of spirituality means sensing unity with other people, with other creatures, and with nature, and seeing your connection to the larger environment. It means meeting the world from that inner soulful place that is your best self. That’s the place from which we say “Namaste” at the end of a yoga practice. It translates to something like, “The divine in me bows to the divine in you.” It is a way of expressing gratitude for the spark of goodness and beauty in another.

Where is the field of grass where you can let your soul lie down? Where do you find truth and beauty, hope and courage, kindness and compassion?