There’s a been a lot of talking, blogging, etc. recently about hacks and tweaks we can use to get more out of, and have more control over our time and our lives, but I think there’s something to be said for being out of control, sometimes. Not running a muck in the streets, but rather appreciating the times where we don’t have that much sought after control over our time and place.
One example I can think of would be just a week or so ago when I crossed the country to see the Florida side of my family. Flying there to meet them presented an opportunity to abandon the illusion of complete control. Once I began my journey I gave up my control over my time and place. I had made the choices that brought me to that improbable seat, blazing across the sky at a few hundred miles an hour.
But once in the sky I was completely at the will of circumstance. In reality happened much earlier. Upon entering the airport my rights were waved and my control was relinquished. Even earlier than that I was on the shuttle to the airport where my fate was largely dictated by the driver and even to some extent by the state of other drivers around and for miles ahead of us. My helplessness didn’t ever enter into my mind, I just read comfortably and enjoyed the fact I didn’t have to keep my eyes on the road or sky. Even waiting in the airport I felt free, sick of watching news, but I had no obligations, none I could fulfill anyway. I couldn’t really even get any work done.
Certain situations readily allow me to give up that control, and really relax. During my delightful trip I missed a connection and became waylaid in the Atlanta airport, what’s that old joke… “when you die, no matter if you’re going to heaven or hell you still have to go through the Atlanta airport.”, anyway, I had hours and hours to watch cable news and drink coffee before the next connecting flight. I saw a lot of people in a similar situation, some people seemed to be enjoying it as much as I was, others hated it. They paced, pestered the poor gate attendant, made phone calls to loved ones and acquaintances to lament and modify plans, and still got to where ever they were going at the same time the calmer passengers did. Maybe thay had more pressing plans, maybe they were on the run, but most likely they just really WANTED to get to their destination and hated the inconvenience, and loathed not being able to do anything about it.
Here’s a delay much worse than mine.
Relinquishing this power is illuminating, if not even enjoyable. Not enjoyable because I’m a masochist or because I like waiting in lobbies in strange cities, but rather it was an agreeable exercise in giving up control over my time and place to some extent. Being productive means allotting time for work, creativity, family, and yourself. That You time is time to be out of control, to do that responsibly we have to have the rest of our time managed to some extent. I talked about this a bit in “Externalize Your Mind”, being ‘on’ 24/7 is neither healthy nor a productive long term paradigm. There are many other times all though out our day when we don’t have complete self determination, at work, on the road, and if we are at our core uncomfortable with that fact, we are crippled in our efforts to enjoy and get the most out of life.
When to give in:
When things are automated. If the gears are running, ie. the wing are being de-iced or what have you, experts are on the job. Automation can also refer to when your plan is made, hatched, and you could sit, sweat and tweak it, or you can let it go. Another example is when you have that goal in your mind, the seeds have been planted, and all you can do is stay on course and watch what happens. Trust the actions and choices you have made to bring you to this point. You can evaluate them, but sweating over them is useless.
Traps:
The Illusions of Imprisonment – Sometimes we think we have no control when in reality we have willfully given up that power. If one hates their job or where they live and consider themselves “stuck”, they are usually free to go and improve their situation at will, but are to afraid to leave their self-constructed prison, unless it really is prision. The unincarcerated have alot of freedom to un-stick themselves.
This young man is a sad example of theimprisonment illusion, please excuse the harsh language at the end.
False Productivity: Distracting ourselves with the illusion of productivity by doing anything we think might have an effect instead of doing the things that matter. Sometimes when we have no control because we HAVE TO focus on one thing, and I am guilty of this, we do every little thing we can to excercise some control, like the passengers who berate the attendance when no one can get the plane moving any faster.
So when in life do we have any control at all? We have to make the decision to get out of bed. There is no easier way to do that then when we can being present in your moment and enjoying it. In one way or another we are all stuck in our moment and when can realize that every moment is equally important we can accept our time and place not as compulsory but rather the result of a string of conscious choices we have made and become ok with having made them.
I don’t just mean the tiny white lies we tell everyday… ‘ oh that dress looks great on you’ or something like that. I’m talking about all the many ways we play character control when it comes to our own egos and the way we interact with one another. I’m not just talking about the times when we say something is true when it isn’t, I’m also talking about the times we withhold information that we’re worried might make someone hate us. We play rolls everyday, we hold back certain aspects of our personality that we think might ostracize us from the tribe, while we try to magnify and amp up the traits that we think will win us love and respect from the people closest to us. If you had asked me a year ago what I thought of this kind of behavior I would have told you that its the best humans could do, but in the last few monthes, my opinion has changed radically.
It all started when I caught this video on youtube about the therapist and author Brad Blanton.
Blanton puts forward a philosophy he calls ‘ Radical Honesty’ which he explains in his book by the same name is a form of ultimate transparency. Its about refusing to create the layers of self that pass for ‘normal’ in our society and making a commitment to being a single self with a single set of values, commited to telling the truth in every moment. This means not lying…. EVER.
Now I know what your saying… ‘but what if grandma asks me if the cookies are good and they taste terrible…. do I honestly express myself and tell her that her cookies are crap?!’ and I can see where you’re coming from… trust me I can. But I think the average Radical Honesty practitioner would respond by saying something to the effect of ‘ I bet your grandmother has lived through harder stuff than finding out her cookies aren’t any good, and she deserves your honesty more than your sympathy’. I can see the profound truth in a statement like this also…
Now I must admit that I don’t practice Radical Honesty 100% of time… I’m not on that level yet… and if the experiences of A.J. Jacobs are any indication… its a steep learning curve. However I have began to find a handful of people whom I can practice total transparency with. Radical Honesty withing a pair of mutually agreeing friends/lovers.
Practicing Radical Honesty isn’t about telling the truth for some kind of universally moralist reason. Its not because everyone Deserves the truth… its because telling the truth in a certain sense… just the way it is… sets you apart from the distorting qualities of the mind and language and into a state of describing things just as you see them. Blanton says in the book: “When you tell the truth, you are free simply by virtue of describing what is so. This descriptive language evokes a feeling of affirmation, a willingness to be, an appreciation for being alive in the world as it is. When someone speaks the truth, everyone around them is touched and there is hardly anything to say back except, “Ain’t it the truth.” The being within which the mind resides is then speaking and is in charge of the mind rather than getting used BY the mind”
Being honest serves the philosophy of mindfulness and present moment awareness by allowing us the opportunity to describe our feelings and state, moment by moment as it happens instead of as we would like to see it, or as we would prefer it, or any of the other filters through which we tend to perceive ourselves. Radical honesty is about taking away the layers of delusion between Being and mind and allowing there to be just this present moment description of whats happening in your own vast expanse of consciousness.
When you have to stop before you express yourself fully and think of the ‘right way’ to say something, you’re engaging in a type of strategizing… thinking about how to make your ego look good to the people you’re communicating with. I appreciate that this philosophy doesn’t always seem to work out when it comes to getting people around to your point of view… as can be seen in the recent attempt of Blanton to run for congress… Unfortunatly people aren’t always ready for the truth and their anger or marginalization of you as a truth-speaker is something you have to exept in order to walk the path of Radical Honesty.
Even though I don’t practice 100% Radical Honesty out of my own fear of rejection and insecurity… I do try to push myself harder and harder every day to be truly honest even when I might be afraid. One of the most important steps in this journey toward Total Transparency is finding a relationship with a friend or a partner and commiting together to have some time to sit down and share each others thoughts down to the nitty gritty details.
Now I realize this takes a serious amount of trust and courage on both parties involved but the benefits are endless. Taking the time to sit down with someone, face to face, eye to eye, and begin the process of laying your soul bare. Tell each other your own life story, with an emphasis on all the parts that you’ve always been too afraid to tell anyone. Realize that we all have embarrassing, awkward, immoral, or otherwise weird moments in our lives and no one is perfect.
Being there with someone whom you love and trust, and sharing your darkest most twisted moments in life with one another will blast open the insecurities of your mind. You’ll start to see the suffering that isn’t just an aspect of your life but an aspect of human life in general. The end result of this kind of true transparency and laying bare the real story of your life won’t just liberate your own energy from distorting and controlling. Blanton maintains that whenever people are naked both psychologically, emotionally, and even physically in front of one another…. they fall in love.
They realize that first the first time in their life perhaps, they are a single authentic being, raw, naked, uncut in their totality. Staring into the eyes of someone just the same, just as confused or lost. Recognizing even for just a moment that they’re together, that they feel for each other, that we’re all together in this and that true happiness can never occur in a vacuum. Please find at least one person in your life that you can have an honest, transparent, expressive relationship with…. we all need to feel what it feels like to be loved for being EXACTLY who we are, imperfections and all.
-Chris
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If You’ve ever been up late watching T.V. you have probably seen five or six commercials for different sleep aids. Forty million people in America alone are reported to have chronic sleep disorders. Thirty million more report intermittent sleep difficulties. Itís not all surprising that so many people are affected, between all the thoughts circling around in our heads from work and our personal life. The general pace the outside word is moving at has made it difficult to slow our brains down at the end of the day and convince them it is time for sleep.
However, using awareness techniques you can get great sleep every night, and even fall asleep on long flights or when your neighbors are having a raging party and you have to be at work at six in the morning. Here is one technique for easy sleep, an easy self hypnosis technique, popularized by Milton H. Erickson, actually invented by his wife Betty.[singlepic id=37 w=320 h=240 float=right]
-Lay in your bed/ plane seat / boring lecture. Focus on three things in your field of vision. Shift your awareness as fully as you can from one to the other, take in one fully, and slowly move on to the next.
-Focus on three things you can hear, listen to each one, experience the sound and shift your hearing to another.
-Now concentrate on things you can feel in your body. Remember to divert your focus as much as possible from your external senses and feel individual sensation from within.
-Move through the series again with only two visual, auditory, and tactile.
-Next concentrate on only one thing you can see, one thing you can hear and only one thing you feel
-Close your eyes.
-Imaging a visual images concentrate on it, see it fully. Now imagine a sound, imagine a sensation in your body concentrate on it.
-Now two imagined visual, two imagined sounds, and two imagined sensations.
-if you are still awake at this point, i.e. the party next door goes critical, you can proceed to three visual, three auditory, and three tactile imagined sensations but it almost never takes a third round. There are many meditative/self hypnosis techniques that will work as well or better then pills, with no side effects or dependency and they are all 100% free.[singlepic id=36 w=320 h=240 float=right]
Sweet Dreams
When George Lucas wanted an untouched forest on an alien world he chose the Redwood Forest of Northern California. Their eerie splendor has the same potent effect no matter how many times you find yourself beneath them. I walked today under some of those ancient towers and let their awe inspiring immensity diminish any illusions I had of time or space. Contemplating the ages they collectively experienced, reaching towards the sun, pushing new needles, slowly intertwining their ludicrously shallow roots, making widening concentric circles of new sapling that will see the next few hundred or thousand years of the earth go by, slowly reaching ever upwards.
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In old growth Redwood forests the trees climb to over 300 feet and create their own micro climate, as soon as you are beneath the canopy a misty silence overtakes you.
However today the acres I walked were new growth, having been forested to rebuild San Francisco after the business in 1906, smaller trees compared the giants up north. And the woods were not silent, hawks and eagles circle overhead, eluding my lens, calling to each other and scurrying into the shadowed nooks beneath fallen limbs and prehistoric ferns.
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As I sit with by back to a three hundred yeah old Redwood, I focus my awareness of my body, after a time I feel myself starting to become part of the forest. Neither allowing myself to be completely distracted, or completely focused, on the experience. I feel the wind in my nostrils and join it when I exhale. There is cold moss and stone beneath me.
Raptors call overhead, I can almost feel the downdraft from her wings. The winds pick up. The limbs above me come alive, ancient arms stretch into the sunlight. The winds eventually drive me back out into the light, back to reality and society. The moss continues to grow.
My day in the woods reminded me of some of my favorite quotes that can be applied to the practice of mindfulness.[singlepic id=33 w=320 h=240 float=]
ìAs a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.î Henry David Thoreau
Anthropologists can deduce a lot about early, hunter-gatherer man. Theories about their way of life are built on detailed observations of ëprimitiveí cultures: Aborigines, Kalahari Bush Men and others, fossil records, and mounds of artifacts uncovered in early settlements. Among other interesting conclusions it appears that prehistoric humans had nothing but time on their hands. Hours and hours every day to relax and reproduce. There were intermittent ice ages, droughts, famines, but on a normal Wednesday, circa 15,000 B.C.E, people like you and me were living their lives, and enjoying a whole lot more of it to themselves. Imagine no commuting, itís easy if you try.
One hundred and sixty eight hours in a week, subtract forty for work, fifty six sleeping, seven or so commuting you’re left with sixty five hours left to ourselves not even counting laundry, meals or standing in line at the grocery store. Nine hours left to develop as a person, connect with loved ones and engage in extracurricular activities.
Getting the most out of that time is imperative and must be done intentionally. Our lives are filled with distractions that could take up those last precious hours.
Intent is the First Step. It’s so much easier to be distracted, hence the popularity of mass distractions. So how do we anchor that intent and make it more attractive than the urge to be distracted. Anchoring, in classical conditioning, is used to describe the process of chaining together a state of mind and a gesture, sound, or image. Pavlov and his dogs, basically. This means conjuring up a desired state of mind on command by conditioning it to occur when a certain bell is rung. Only we find a bell we can ‘ring’ for ourselves when we have an opportunity to reflect and be a conscious, aware being.
Once you have allotted time for yourself Step Two is to use it wisely. Start with your body, down at the toes. Notice your feet on the floor. Relax your legs, feel your back adjust to it new unshackled state, shoulders allowed to droop slightly, neck loosening. Realize your arms and hands are yours once again.
Lastly moving up to your head, your mind is at liberty to meander through and issue or idea you please. Let it. Allow it to wander for a bit and then pick a posture, gesture, word, or image to anchor this state. Ideally two or more different sensory anchors to further strengthen the conditioning. It can be as simple as the image of something in your home that you see when comfortable, relaxed and focused. It could be a phrase as simple as ‘Home sweet home’ or something less cornball if you like.
Repeat this phrase, focus on the image, and be aware of your freedom to be and do as you will, however short lived that time may be in our busy lives. The more often you can repeat this technique the stronger the anchor will become and the more easily you will be able to call upon this state, in the midst of chaos or just when you have that free second.
-Matt
Here’s a Five Minute Meditation to utilize when that relaxed state is achieved, and you’re short on time.
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