Category: Behaviour change

We all know mindset one. That’s binary thinking. On – off. Failure success. The  one that is constantly on our case for not being enough. The controller inside that tells us when to start and end.

In an addiction, mindset 1 would say once crossed the line  doomed to fail. No turning back . What’s the point. Loose even more control when in the failure zone. Just let it all go and deal with the consequences another time. Its binary and not able to operate in shades of grey. Mindset 1 keeps us in a narrow gaze and not open to the life intelligence in and around.   In this perspective we don’t see  that there can be success in failure and the other way around. It’s simply not so clear cut.

Mindset 2 is a completely different perspective with very different attitudes about what is possible in any given moment. So in an addiction for instance, we would not need to draw the line between success and failure.  In this mindset its more about playing the game and that means staying in the body. If we find ourselves doing too much of something, this mindset would enable us to wake up and come back to centre at what ever point in the addictive cycle we found ourselves in. It thrives in the grey because life mostly happens in this zone anyway. 

Mindset 2 is founded in kindness and celebrates micro victories. We can build a new character in ourselves based on these little wins. A character that already embodies all the strength, courage and resources to live a life of authenticity and mystery.

Ask yourself, did you ever get anywhere by being hard on yourself ? Does that really work when you think through it?

In my experience all it does is make an enemy out of myself which leads to a whole host of problems I don’t already need.

Kindness on the other hand means we can be how we are for once without the incessant voices in our heads about how I think I ought to be or how  I’m not good enough or whatever story is running in one’s head. Kindness lets it be just the way it is and relies on all the creative forces  in life to find all the right movements.  

It’s like we really don’t need to force ourselves into shape. The shape can emerge organically with our attention rooted in kind awareness.  Always coming back to giving a holding space to you first. If we can hold the best and worst  in us, then I think quite naturally we move towards health on all levels. Our work  is to stay in the game and that means we need to start checking  in more.  Staying with the experience in the body. Playing close attention to the sensations we feel and especially the ones that we tend to run from.

From this place, rooted in kindness but also firmness, we are resourced in all the ways we need. We give ourselves the best chance to catch the life that is only ours to live.

Greg Braden said on the London real channel recently that we are in a collective process of grief right now, whether people know it or not.

We have lost our way of life, our routines, meeting points and ability to gather socially. Being social creatures, this is a significant loss. Although many people are recognsing many positive aspects from the lock down ( for me whats most apparent is clean air and hearing the birds), we should also be paying attention to deeper emotional experiences that we are going through in both personal and collective capacities.

That means first of all acknowledging that grief is in the room. We might look to welcome grief like an old friend, she belongs just as she is. I use the feminine because we’re speaking about strong emotion and its the feminine that reminds us how to hold this – with kind attention.

The next important piece of Braden’s message is a reference to Elizabath Kubler-Ross who has written and researched extensively on death and dying . She identified the stages of grieving that we move through when faced with loss. In this instance, the loss is about our ways of being and moving in the world and ability to meet socially, in person as a central theme. The stages are really useful because we can better orient ourselves emotionally in relation to whats happening collectively. The idea is that we want to aim to move through these stages in a healthy way and that means meeting and acknowledging what we are feeling.

Here are her stages:

1. Denial – fear, shock, confusion
2. Anger – anxiety, frustration, overwhelm
3. Depression – helplessness, sadness, stuck-ness
4. Bargaining – looking for meaning, reaching out, making inner deals
5. Acceptance – meeting life as it is.

The research shows that we can’t bypass any of these and that the sequence holds true for most people. We can also go ‘to and fro’ while we are moving toward acceptance. To recap the idea is to get to acceptance is quickly as possible in a healthy way by staying with our emotional experience, giving our feeling centre a space to breathe so to speak. The key is just as we are with kind attention. No need to be any other place than the one we are in.

The reason its a good idea to move toward acceptance is because it feels better there. We are resourced ,connected, rooted and open to the movements in life that will best serve ourselves as well as all humanity.

When I look at the cycles that we perpetuate, I think its a really good idea to question how much control we have over them. I know in my own experience how easy it is to walk around with the idea that I am in control. But am I really ?

Not even looking at the outside, but just my own personal patterns. Can I really stop them if I wanted to? The answer for most of us if we look carefully is a definitive No. There are habitual ways of being that run us. Patterns that we can’t control but we fool ourselves into thinking we can if only we apply a little more will or if we really had to get ourselves in gear.

But will power doesn’t attend to the underlying reason that the behavior is there in the first place. We have pause and go a little deeper with this. Ignore the symptom for now and look at what drives the behavior.

From this place we can be in relationship with the unwanted pattern or behaviour without condemning ourselves for having it. We are no longer saying it shouldn’t be this way or I should have more control over it.

Rather, with kind attention and acceptance we look at what motivates us, which usually stems at the core from what we didn’t get in childhood. Those wounds shape varying degrees of somewhat broken adult personas that go out in the world and unconsciously look to soothe those wounds. If we hold the behaviour with kind attention, we can begin to move towards the roots of why we do what we do.