Adventures in Waiting...

Do you ever go through periods in life when it feels like NOTHING is happening? I know that the Autumn is supposed to be the season for harvesting, and the Spring is for planting, but I have somehow got the cycle reversed. Lately, it seems that I am planting seeds all over the place--with agents for my book, with potential corporate clients, with interesting seminar possibilities, with media outlets to discus CHANGE (a subject near and dear to my heart...and very much in VOGUE right now!), and on and on--yet, days go by and none of the seeds sprout. Harvesting, in fact, feels a long way off.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm a big believer in the power of seed planting, and readily point out to clients that no matter what time of year it may be, there are times in life when the currents of change may be swirling, but the tide has yet to turn. Changes occur in mysterious ways, as we are all becoming more and more conscious of disturbances in the systems in which we live--in the weather, in politics, in the economy--and the empowered stance to take is to go with the flow. Get in the groove--plant seeds, get out and nurture the possibilities...then be patient. So why is waiting so hard?

I remember when I was the director of HR for a major corporation and I would ask potential job applicants that classic question: what are your weaknesses? Of course, being schooled in interviewing, and hesitant to admit any failings, most of the candidates used for an answer that old saw: "Well,I tend to be impatient at times." Of course, in corporate-speak this was meant to convey that their only real weakness was their desire to constantly push ahead and get results. Hence, impatience would be a strength. Right? I'm not convinced. Patience is clearly a virtue. Impatience--that urgent need to constantly push towards a result--is surely a vice; a vice that trips up most of us from time to time, robbing us of the amazing adventure called "Now"...

Waiting is difficult. When in the "waiting mode," we tend to focus our thoughts on the future and easily lose hours, days, even weeks languishing in our attachment to an uncertain outcome, all at the expense of the beauty and freshness of experiencing life as it happens, in the moment.

Ironically, at some deep level, we all know the truth: the only moment we actually have to experience is NOW. Everything else is a fantasy, an adventure lived purely in our minds. As Eckhart Tolle beautifully reminds us in his book The Power of Now all of the energy we spend mired in the past or speculating about the future is the province of fear, anxiety and ego: "When the pressures of future and past thinking disappear, fear and frustration also vanish, conquered by the moment that life springs forth within you....waking you up."

So my question for today is this: How do we shift from the enervating energy of "waiting" into the life-affirming energy of NOW? It is simple, really, involving three easy steps--recognition, re-focusing, and re-invention. A shift in perspective is all that is really necessary: what I sometimes call "coming home", to yourself.

Here are the three simple steps:

1. Recognize: First we have to wake-up to the fact that our thoughts are spinning fearfully away in to an unknown place, called the future. To shift back to the present moment, use your breath and your body as tools for the mind. Wherever you are, sit down on the floor, cross-legged, back and neck straight, legs relaxed. Take a few deep breaths, and place your hands on each side of your rib cage. Take a deep breath and feel your lungs expand and your hands move in and out with the rhythm of your breath. Recognize where you are RIGHT NOW. Allow your awareness of the focus on the future--what you are waiting for--to shift downward--to your abdomen, to your rib cage, your seat, your entire body, and finally your breath. Welcome back.

2. Re-focus: Next, shift the focus of your attention to the room you are in, the space around you, the objects, smells, sounds, and textures of everything you see, right now. Think about this moment, this day, this hour, and finally...this minute. How does it feel to be alive right now?

3. Re-invent: Finally, think about one thing you could do right now, as soon as you stand up, to re-invent your experience of this day. Ask yourself this question: regardless of how things unfold in the future, how could you make today an adventure? Ask yourself: what does it mean to be alive right now? Ask yourself: what do I have to be grateful for right now? How could I make this day a day of joy, for myself, for those I love, for those I don't even know?

There's no time like the present. Wait no longer. The adventure awaits.

Happy Now!

Dr J

Starting Small

Well, not one to typically court controversy, I have to admit that my last blog post created a bit of a stir. It seems that some folks were less than thrilled to hear that boredom, worry, anxiety--and fear!--cannot always be blamed on biology. I have to admit that I may have erred on the side of sounding draconian (or just Republican?) in suggesting that my client needed to take responsibility for dealing with his life/work circumstances...that perhaps he was not "hardwired" to be miserable.

The point that I was trying to make still holds: fear is a natural response to the changing circumstance of life. Fear, which shows up in the guise of boredom, anxiety, stress, a whole panoply of symptoms, is not typically CAUSED by biology or brain chemistry--genetic or otherwise. Fear is simply our natural, bio-chemical response to the deeper truth that life is constantly shifting. Like the weather, circumstances in our work, relationships, finances, and physicality are always in flux, and as much as we might like things to stabilize and settle down (which they appear to do occasionally, thank god!), sooner or later the winds of change will always come blowing across the landscape of our lives.

What I do acknowledge about my last post, is that I was perhaps a bit too cavalier about just how difficult it can be to get in the flow of life's constant shifts, given that so many of the environmental and external factors are obviously beyond our control--like the general malaise in the country we live in (in this case, the sad state of the U.S. economically and politically...); the shackles we get bound up in financially--like mortgages, credit cards, and car loans; and the mercurial state of the job market. AND, that's before we head off into relationship territory, where the winds of change can bring their own hurricane season (it is any wonder that we personify hurricanes with names?). Being in an intimate relationship can certainly bring on its own perfect storms.

I don't want to minimize the struggle and challenge of moving through major change in life. What I do want to emphasize is that we need to be careful that we don't reinforce the walls of our own self-created prisons--of worry, stress, and anxiety--by being too quick to blame our woes on biology. We all get stuck at times; in fact, on the flip side of any major pinnacle or peak experience there is always a plateau, a leveling off...and that can feel like a real downer.

The key to breaking through the malaise is often quite simple: break the pattern.
Of course, whenever we start to think about breaking a pattern that has become stuck in our lives, the first question is always: how do I do that? the good news is that the answer is simple: start small.

Think about it: ever discover a tiny tear in a pair of jeans or a shirt and then find a day or two later that the little tear has become a rip? Small shifts in a pattern, repeated over time, become BIG CHANGE. Yes, big change is always daunting, sometimes overwhelming...and usually a show-stopper when viewed by itself as the endgame. So start small. Need to lose 30 pounds? Start by focusing on what it would take to lose just one. Then celebrate. Need to reinvent your relationship? Start back at the beginning: take your lover on a date. Need to renovate your career? Start by allowing yourself to daydream about what you love to do. Need to get out and network? Start by figuring out how to meet one new person this week. Just one.

So the next time you feel worried, bored, anxious, or just plain fearful, stop for a moment and think about where you may feel stuck. Remember this paradox: when you feel stuck it means that change is in the works. Ask yourself: what aspect of my life might have outworn its usefulness? What needs to be re-invented, reinvigorated, re-born? Then...take a small, tiny, even infinitesimal step in a new direction.

Soon you'll be off that treadmill of anxiety, worry, and fear...and on your way.

Best of luck,

Dr J

Check the Wiring

Yesterday I had one of those classic moments with a client that never fail to bring the conversation to a dead stand still. He was sharing with me his tendency to, as he put it, "always feel anxious and worried about everything". Like many of us in these economically and politically unstable times, he finds himself constantly fretting about his job, his relationship with his boss and peers, his health, and any number of additional factors that feel "outside of my locus of control". His habit, which many of us can relate to at various times in our lives, is to over think and over analyze just about everything. Of course, hiding out under the guise of worry, anxiety, and stress, is FEAR: fear that he may have screwed up somehow with his boss or co-workers, fear that his job may be in jeopardy, fear that his economic future may be bleak, fear that change is in the works.

The truth is, of course, that change IS in the works. Always. And there's the rub. Yet, recognition of this fact, rather than being the beginning of a conversation about how to move with greater ease through the inevitable shifts that accompany the cycles of life, seems to shut us down. His response to the situation was to declare, in a very off-hand manner--as so many of us do: "oh well, maybe I'm just hardwired to be anxious. I've always been this way."

Really? Hardwired to be anxious, worried and fearful? Have you looked at a baby lately? Or hung out with small children who are living in a secure home with at least one loving parent? In general, well-fed kids (poverty is another thing entirely) are relaxed, spontaneous, playful, and full of life. Since when did it become in vogue to blame our adult anxieties, fears and worries on so-called "hardwiring"? What does "hardwiring" mean anyway?

It seems that with the advent of "clinical depression" and other psychologically-based ailments (e.g. anger-issues, addiction, childhood attention dis-orders, etc.)more and more often getting blamed on biology, just about every mysterious ailment has become hereditary. In the great arc of the endless debate between nature versus nurture, nature is by far away taking the causal lead on just about everything these days. I have no doubt that the pendulum will swing back over time, and that recognition of environmental, cultural, and developmental factors will once again be recognized as playing a significant role in bringing us to whatever sorry state we may find ourselves. But, for now, at least, most of us seem to take umbrage in labeling our issues, challenges and deficits hardwired--hence, unchangeable.

Ironically, it is science itself, which may restore the nature/nurture conundrum back towards a more nuanced and balanced approach to human behavior. Science has a wonderful habit of de-bunking its own theories as a matter of course, and today it is rapidly re-discovering what Freud, even with his limited purview on the human mind, understood implicitly with his theories of the unconscious and developmental psychology: the brain itself--the supposed home front of "hardwiring"--is malleable, adaptable and changeable.

Brain scientists are beginning to understand that the neuronal pathways, nerves cells, and the web of synapses that comprise the deep cellular structure of our brains, is always evolving, re-organizing, re-aligning and being re-born anew--even well into adulthood and beyond. New research bringing together the best knowledge of neuroscience and psychiatry, such as, "The Brain that Changes Itself" by Norman Doige, MD. relates amazing tales of human adaptability that truly call into question the notion that the so-called "wiring" in our brains is "hard" in any way, shape or form.

So if the latest research is accurate, and our brains ARE quite adaptable and changeable, what are we to do about this tendency to default to the "hardwiring" narrative?

In the context of my work around "Life-Shifting", what I've come to see is that these kinds of expressions, especially when spoken in the context of anxiety, stress and worry, are usually a cover-up for FEAR....and fear, in this case, is a very understandable response to CHANGE IN THE WORKS. In other words, when you find yourself defaulting to "I'm hardwired to be ______",(e.g. anxious, fearful, worried, fill-in-the-blank with your favorite), it usually means that some aspect of your life is ready to shift, ready to release, ready to be, in fact, re-newed. BUT, because change is uncomfortable even for the most adaptable of us, our minds will resist the pull towards change, and in an effort to "protect" us from the unknown, hold us hostage for a period of time--until we just LET GO.

Life is a continuous cycle of renewal--birth, growth, decay, death, re-birth--and we are not immune to nature's ways. What we find discomforting is the reality that we can't control when, how, or in what manner change may arrive. Life is a joy, yes, but it is also a mystery.

So the next time you find yourself feeling down, distraught, anxious or depressed, and you begin to ask if perchance you're "hardwired" for misery, try asking yourself a different question:

What pattern might I be stuck in--at work, in my relationships, in my life? in the case of my client above, when he stepped back, took a deep breath, and contemplated the change that might be in the works for him, he realized that he was BORED with his job, his living situation, and many aspects of his life. He actually DESIRED change...but feared it....and worried about it. As do we all. That is nature's way...but it is not hardwired to any circuit that can't be broken...with a deep breath, a shift towards recognition that change is inevitable, and an opening towards releasing that which no longer serves us.

So check your wiring..and don't be afraid to blow a few circuits now and again...you may just re-wire the system...and light up your life!


Dr J