I define calm as creating perspective and mindfulness while managing emotional reactivity. When I think about calm people, I think about people who can bring perspective to complicated situations and feel their feelings without reacting to heightened emotions like fear and anger. As psychologist and writer Harriet Lerner says, "Anxiety is extremely contagious, but so is calm too." The questions becomes... Do we want to infect people with more anxiety, or heal ourselves and the people around us with calm? If we choose to heal with clam, we have to commit to practicing calm. Small things matter. For example, before we respond we can count to ten or give ourselves permission to say, "I am not sure. I need to think about this some more." It is also extremely effective to identify the emotions that are most likely to spark your reactivity and then practice non-reactive responses. For me, breathing is the best place to start. Just taking a breath before I respond slows me down. I immediately start spreading calm. For myself and for others around me. Sometimes I actually think to myself, "I am dying to freak out here! Do I have enough information to freak out? Will freaking out help? The answer is always no. The Gifts of Imperfection Brene Brown |
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Transformation is a journey without a final destination.
As long as we are willing and open to change, we keep growing and growing. We grow at different rates and come to different depths of truth, and of peace, and of understanding. Being flexible to change takes courage, to let go of our rigid positions and be open to listen. Often when we have settled into a time of understanding and serenity, and something new might appear that creates new growth and insight. To continue to experience life can be a great joy or can be a time of fear. Here we can make the choice to go with faith into the unknown or continue to live with fear. To choose to let go of fear means accepting that we will never arrive at the place where we know everything. As long as we are alive, there will be something new to learn, something new to experience. How exciting for each of us! Today I choose to walk forward in faith. Faith that I believe that I will be o.k. with decisions that I make and that I can handle experiences that come my way. If I continue to put one foot in front of the other and face with world trusting myself, I will be in a safe place. I will live today in the present, rejoicing in each precious moment. For far too long, I have lived in the pain and shame of the past or in fear about the future. I have spent most of my life inside my head, cut off from the rich experiences of the present moment. Today, I will not deny or repress the pain from my childhood but I wont get stuck there either. I will comfort the hurt child within me and seek to leave behind the bitterness that is robbing me of my life. Today I will also resist the temptation to live in my elaborate plans and worries about the future. I will relieve my inner child of the need to anticipate the future in order to avoid danger. I was unable to relax and enjoy my childhood but I will not miss what life offers me in my adulthood. Today I will embrace with joy all that this day has to give. I am larger, better than I thought,
I did not know I held so much goodness. --Walt Whitman Much as your body is built from the foods you eat, your mind is built from the experiences you have. The flow of experience gradually sculpts your brain, thus shaping your mind. Some of the results can be explicitly recalled: This is what I did last summer; that is how I felt when I was in love. But most of the shaping of your mind remains forever unconscious. This is call implicit memory, and it includes your expectations, models of relationships, emotional tendencies, and general outlook. Implicit memory establishes the interior landscape of your mind-- what if feels like to be you--based on the slowly accumulating residues of lived experiences. In a sense, those residues can be sorted into two piles: those that benefit you and others, and those that cause harm. But, here's the problem. Your brain referentially scans for, registers, stores, recalls, and reacts to unpleasant experiences; it is like velcro for negative experiences and teflon for positive experiences. Consequently, even when positive experiences outnumber negative ones, the pile of negative implicit memories naturally grows faster. Then the background feeling of what it feels like to be you can become glum and pessimistic. Negative experiences do have benefits: loss opens the heart, remorse provides a moral compass, anxiety alerts you to threats, and anger spotlights wrongs that should be righted. But do you really think you re not having enough negative experiences? Emotional pain with no benefit to yourself or others is pointless suffering. And pain today breeds more pain tomorrow. For instance, even a single episode of major depression can reshape circuits of the brain to make future episodes more likely. The remedy is not to suppress negative experiences; when they happen, they happen. Rather, it is to foster positive experiences-- and in particular, to take them in so they become a permanent part of you. Buddha's Brain - Hanson & Mendius |
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