Sugar is Out!

Between November and February, I got covid twice. I hadn’t had it in the preceding 2+ years and frankly, I did not like it (surprise!!!). Not just because it was deeply unpleasant, but because I thought of myself as someone who lived in such a healthy way, that I might be able to sidestep covid altogether.  I don’t drink, use drugs, eat wheat or use caffeine. I eat whole foods and I manage stress well. But apparently, the terrain was still vulnerable. I got covid twice in a few months.

I had a teacher who used to talk about “germ theory” and emphasized that the presence of a “germ” was just one part of the equation. The germ had to engage with the “terrain” of your particular body and immune system (particularly, she’d say, the tube between nose/mouth and anus). So last February, I got to thinking about what was really going on in my wellness practices.  I wasn’t exercising that much and when I did, it was inconsistent. I was "clinically" overweight and there was one thing I believed was driving that realities...sugar.

Sugar was the last of my addictive substances. I got sober from alcohol almost 19 years ago, but sugar still had its claws in me. I’d use it to numb, despite the fact that it made me feel hungover and was driving my weight gains. Where covid is concerned, sugar had shown itself to run down my immune system. I could see that over and over in my own direct experience. Sugar was addictive and had negative health effects. Over the decades, I’ve watched myself go through countless cycles of stopping sugar consumption, feeling better within a few days, losing some weight.Then, in time beginning  to dabble again, and watching the cycle play out. One day became three, became a week, became a month and eventually I’d start to feel like I was getting sick, I’d get a cold sore (an indicator that my immune system was down) and think I was getting a cold.

So after my second covid experience, I did a few things.

   1. I quit sugar completely. I mean, I quit eating all processed sweeteners, sugar, maple syrup, high fructose corn syrup, honey (which my teacher used to say was “processed, just by bees”.)

1. I embraced a largely carnivore diet minimizing grains and carbohydrates in general, especially simple ones. Corn and rice are the only grains I use.

2. I start d hiking almost every day. Sometimes 25 miles a week.

3. I started working out at the gym I’d been paying for but not ever going to.

I’ve been off sugar completely for many months now. I’ve lost 30 lbs on the scale (while also gaining muscle). I lost something else… a persistent cough. For years I had an annoying cough, which I’d always attributed to having bad genes since my mother had always claimed she had asthma. Turns out, quitting sugar took care of my “bad genes”. I no longer cough when I laugh or (and this should have been a clue) eat sweet things.

I rarely feel depression anymore. I had noticed, a few years ago, a moderate, consistent depression which was hiding under the dominant anxiety that took years to get under control. The anxiety is rarer too! Turns out a lot of our anxiety is tied to the gut. I have to think my gut is healthier sans sugar.

I feel like I’ve somehow arrived at a place I’ve been aiming at since I got sober, 18+ years ago. My diet could not be more dialed in. I cook almost all my meals. I exercise 6 days a week. My body feels as healthy as I’ve ever felt.

It’s amazing that sugar was the thing that took the longest to overcome. Sugar is a drug. It’s a powerful one. Everyone is doing it. It causes obesity, heart disease, cancer and metabolic problems. It ages you, physically and mentally. Some think it's tied to dementia. It drives anxiety and depression in some people. It’s bad shit. It’s in everything! I think this is not only worth looking at, but very seriously considering putting out of your life.

Wanna know something else? All these changes didn’t stop me from getting covid a 3rd time a few weeks ago.

Womp wommmp !!!

Equanimity as an Absurdist Play.

Equanimity as an Absurdist Play.

By Pablo Das (HHC, SEP)
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Put your absurdist theater cap on. Imagine a Beckett-like scene where our character is standing at the ready with their feet planted and knees bent. Determined look on their face. A giant pendulum swings slowly and with weight, back and forth, to and fro, just over their head. Its the kind of pendulum that can swing in any direction, north, south, east, west, northeast, southwest, etc… It swings low enough that our character could, if they wanted to, try to grab it and redirect it. They try. But it’s very heavy and they frequently get knocked into the dirt as they try their best to leap up and grab onto it. Over and over again the valiant character tries and tries to challenge the pendulum but is repeatedly demoralized and physically battered trying to redirect the swing of that giant pendulum.

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Now imagine a swing of that pendulum in any direction represents a kind of experience one might have in life. A swing to the north represents being loved by others while a swing to the south means people are suspicious of you and see you as responsible for bad things that have happened. A swing to the east represents one having lots of resources and money, while a swing to the west represents the loss of such things. Another pair of directions equals pleasure vs pain, yet another pair represents prestige and disgrace.

These swings of the pendulum represent the things that happen to all humans over the course of our lives. Our character takes these swings very personally. The unfortunate swings mean something about our character in their own mind. They have made meaning of the swings. They represent failures, unlovability and pain etc...they are desperate not to let loss, change, disappointment or death happen. They try to control what people think of them. If they could only redirect, restrain or stop the pendulum they could be relax and be happy. But the pendulum is unstoppable and it continues to swing. Birth, youth, aging, health, sickness, death, gain, disappointment, love, loss, rich, poor, fame, blame, connection, isolation, status, obscurity, the swings go on and on. Our character reacts and stresses and gets hurt and stresses more as they try to control the pendulum. For a time they stand off to the side in the dark and try to ignore it all together. They try to hide as the losses and disappointments mount. They do what they can do to numb the pain. They miss opportunities and lots of joy and beauty. They can hear the whoosh as it swings, but they try to forget, try not to look. It doesn’t work.

Eventually, they come out of the dark, they can’t stay there, alone and numb, it’s unsustainable. All the pain is there waiting for them, now it’s back logged, they go into deep despair. It’s all too much and finally they give in. They just stop fighting. They lay on the ground and they cry for a long, long time. They cry until they’re done. Life wins. It just...wins. Something else has to happen.

Then something does happen, they feel lighter, they miss the good things, they become willing to orient to what’s good and beautiful and wonderful about life, while accepting that along with the joy and beauty of life comes some difficulties too. What else do you do here on the planet, they think? Be present to it all. Try to heal. They decide it’s worth it. They’ve also learned something else. The grief won’t kill you. They learn that they can handle the grief and the loss as it comes. They learned that there’s even a poignancy and sweetness in the grieving times. Grief means you’ve loved and been loved.

Slowly, they get up and they stand right in the center of the stage, right in the spotlight and they plant their feet as the pendulum swings. It swings just as it always has. But our character is different. They no longer try to control the swinging, they just feel what they feel as the pendulum does what it does. They release helplessness and victimhood. They embrace life on its terms. They recognize a certain amount of agency in it all. Particularly in their own internal relationship to the pendulum. Mostly, they just open up to the ride that is life. Life is a balance of pleasure and pain. And as they stay more present, embracing what’s hard, they learn so much about themselves. Even the pain is enlightening, maybe in ways that pleasure isn’t. Numbing it isn’t an escape. The pain will not be denied it's audience. It will be there waiting for you when the ways you numb don’t work anymore. How had this not occurred to them? The pain shapes you into a better version of yourself if you let it.

Being willing to stand with your feet planted as the pendulum of life swings. Pleasure, pain, gain, loss, praise, blame, prestige, disgrace, life, death. Whatever comes. Being willing to feel. Being willing to give up controlling what cannot be controlled. To take agency and responsibility where it is available to you. Orienting to joy and beauty and all that’s good in life. Letting pain inform and shape you when it comes.

This is equanimity.

Thank you for listening.

Leaning into Pain Requires Equanimity. It can be developed.

Leaning into Pain Requires Equanimity. It can be developed.

By Pablo Das (HHC, SEP)

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Yesterday I wrote about the value of leaning into and exploring emotional pain when it’s present. I wrote about that in the context of recovery from addiction related behaviors. In Buddhism, the ability to lean into and be present to unpleasant, difficult or painful experiences is consciously developed. This ability to turn towards and  investigate painful experience is called equanimity.

Equanimity means something like balance or grounded-ness in relationship to pleasure and pain. Built into the entirety of Buddhist practice and philosophy is the acknowledgment that life involves constant cycles of pleasant and unpleasant experience. The first noble truths in Buddhism is an explicit acknowledgment of aging, sickness, death, disappointment, loss and having to contend with uncertainty, difficulty and unsatisfactoriness as a part of life. It’s not the whole of life experience, but it is a significant part of it. Life is difficult, it’s painful sometimes and it doesn’t always give us what we want. The encouragement in a Buddhist approach to life is to acknowledge and normalize the difficulties and develop a capacity to be as present with pain as we are to pleasure.

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In fact, it goes a little deeper than that. Really, the message of equanimity is to be unswayed, not just by aversion to pain but also by the compelling nature of pleasure. Especially the kind of pleasure involved in addiction related behaviors. The concept of the famous  “middle way” in Buddhism is defined as not falling into either of two extremes. The first is self denial and extreme renunciation, the kinds we might see in extreme aesthetic spiritual practices. This was considered veering off the path. On the other side is overindulgence in pleasure, the kind we might see in addiction. Addiction is also off the path.

What allows us to stay on the middle path between these two extremes? Equanimity a grounded-ness in the face of the pendulum swing of life’s pleasure and pains. It is the ability to stay present and responsive (as opposed to (unconscious and reactive) as pleasure and pain moves through our lives. It’s an ability to resist unconscious impulses to push away pain and grasp after pleasure. It’s a rather counter-intuitive way to be with life. But it  is at the very core of what it means to be sober. Not pushing away pain and not running after pleasure. Simply relating to life on its own terms without following the prompts of pleasure and pain is equanimity.

Tomorrow: more about equanimity.

Wanna Recover from Addiction? Lean into Pain!

Wanna Recover from Addiction? Lean into Pain!
By Pablo Das (HHC, SEP)
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Last week I wrote about three themes relevant to Buddhist recovery. One of the themes I emphasized was impermanence. I wanna go a bit deeper into why that’s important in recovery. It has been my experience that most people who have committed to be sober are not most likely to relapse from the simple thought that they’d like to experience the pleasure associated with their favorite addictive substance or behavior, but rather they relapse in periods of great discomfort and pain. Most of the time, addiction related behaviors are a solution to pain and sustain themselves as such. Addiction has a string relationship to pain. An aversive one.

Two days ago I was having an amazing day. I was out in the world taking photos. Earlier I had roasted a bunch of vegetables in olive oil while listening to piano music on vinyl. It all of the sudden occurred to me that just a few weeks before I had been in such tremendous and challenging emotional pain related to a loss I had experienced. It’s an amazing thing to be present to pain in such a way as to directly experience the end or absence of suffering that had felt so deeply compelling at one point in the recent past that you (I) spent 8 days doing little else but trying to manage it skillfully. But nevertheless, the pain was gone and it was now replaced by such simple pleasure of living.

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For me, there are two important take-home insights from this.

1. Staying present to pain allows one to experience its end which allows you to directly experience impermanence. This is the message of the four noble truths in Buddhism. The four noble truths is the first attempt of the human being known as “Buddha” to articulate the nature of his awakening. In practicing (and it IS a practice) the four noble truths, we acknowledge the existence of pain as normal, hold our reactivity to it lightly and with restraint and pay attention to the end of any particular round of suffering. We get to experience pain as impermanent. The more we do that in life, the more we integrate the truth of impermanence not as Buddhist philosophy, but as the way things are in life. Doing this requires presence. When we know pain is impermanent, we can relax a little and explore it. So…
2. Lean into pain! In my opinion, any practicing Buddhist worth their salt will lean into pain when it comes and when it’s manageable (we’ll talk about the sometimes overwhelming nature of trauma content later). When the pain comes and you lean into it and get curious about it and investigate it deeply, it can be very revealing. In my experience you get access to parts of yourself in grief and loss and fear that you don’t otherwise get access to. If you can stay objectively aware as you’re crying and feeling taken over by emotion, you can notice a lot of interesting things. You get to notice your stories, your orientation to others and the world, you may notice mental images that connect you to specific events in your past. Sometimes the mind even presents symbolic images that, like dreams, give you valuable information. You can notice what your impulses are. Do you reach out for help or isolate? Do you want to lash out or act punitively towards yourself? Who are you when you’re in pain? What’s there when the clarifying earth shaking loss comes? What is your relationship to loss and death? And maybe most importantly, what actually matters most? When you do not lean into grief and loss and pain, you miss an opportunity to be taken apart and put back together as a better, wiser person. You miss the opportunity to root out helplessness and victimhood and transform it into agency and self possession. You miss the opportunity to ask for help and go to connection. You miss the opportunity to give your grief the audience it demands. There is so much available to you in terms of insight, growth and healing in these moments. Don’t miss them!

Here’s another way of thinking about this. It is my experience that you ONLY get access to these enlightening parts of yourself in the painful spaces. You could begin to look at periods of grief and pain as a short window of opportunity to get the gifts it offers. I know it sounds sorta crazy. But I believe it completely. As a person interested in healing you should look to the painful places as nothing less than an opportunity to access material that can transform you. The impermanence not only allows you to lean into this material because you can relax the fear that it will somehow last forever, but it actually places a limit on how much you can “mine” from the experience and learn about yourself. You better get in there and look around while the door is open. Impermanence will close the door on access rather quickly.

How do we extend this logic to people who lean instead on addiction related behaviors? Addiction is the precise opposite of presence and wisdom developing curiosity. It’s the precise opposite of what has been described here. There’s little possibility of healing or insight or compassion or connection in addiction related behaviors. There is only aversion to pain, an attempt at escape, and an inevitable compounding of suffering. It’s absolutely understandable to do so. But it’s not generative. It doesn’t lead to awakening and wisdom. It is as the Buddha described it in the four Noble truths, a dead end.

Buddhist recovery requires a sort of spirit of warrior-ness. That may sound counterintuitive, but it’s true. It requires us to plant our feet, take a stance, fight off that which is not helpful and move towards what scares us most.

It’s not easy. But it holds the potential to change everything.

May you find the will to plant your feet.
May you find the will to take a stand.
May you successfully fight off the stories, impulses and behaviors that don’t serve you.
May you go towards the pain.

What you find there may change everything.

Putting it Together. How to Live a Fulfilling Life.

Putting it Together. How to Live a Fulfilling Life.

By Pablo Das (HHC, SEP)
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Over the course of the last month I’ve written a series of articles on a number of variables involved in establishing and maintaining higher level wellbeing. I’ve talked about intention, renunciation, healing, mindfulness, sleep, water, movement, food, relationships, financial consciousness and the three things rule. What I’ve done is outlined the mental model that I’m holding when I work with people in my coaching practice. These are the variables that we contend with as human beings when we’re trying to establish balance and wellbeing. They are the variables we engage when we’re trying to establish a wellness program. They are the variables we wrestle with when we’re trying to put our lives back together after some disruption. What I want to do here before I leave this model and move on to other kinds of content, is simply talk about how to work with this stuff on a daily basis.
Tto live intentionally means that we have reflected about our lives we have made some decisions about where we are putting the bulk of our attention and energy. We are choosing pursuits. We are aware of the finite nature of our lives. We’ve chosen to focus on what is most important and what we project will support a fulfilling life. As a practice I suggest taking a few moments every day to remind yourself what you’re doing on the planet. Whether it is raising a family, creating a body of artistic work or spiritual development, be intentional about what it is you’re doing with your time on the planet.

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Then, reflect on what behaviors you engage in that stand in the way of the life that you’ve imagined. What are the things you do that are not generative? For some of us drugs and alcohol stand in the way. Some of us need to minimize our exposure to media. Some of us have stuff around food or sex that gets in the way. The idea is to make conscious and set aside behaviors that get in the way of a fulfilling life. Know about them be honest with yourself about them.

Sometimes what’s in the way of fulfilling life are physical, emotional psychological challenges or wounding. Healing is simply an engagement with the issues that are barriers to living a life we love. We engage them to the point where they are no longer a meaningful barrier to a fulfilling life. There are many ways to heal. But we must do our work. It's so important to take full responsibility for your life, even when things outside of your control have happened. we must heal, we must do our work, so that we can live.

All of this requires a certain kind of awareness. This is where mindfulness is so powerful. I summarize mindfulness as a practice of presence and responsiveness. Mindfulness is an objective awareness that allows for choice in how we respond to whatever is going on. Practicing mindfulness means that we can consider the results of our actions. Those results become the filter through which we choose our actions. Choose wisely. Actions bring results.


On a daily basis every human being must engage four variables to optimize energy health, wellness, focus etc. I called these the foundational elements of wellness. They are daily practices around sleep, exercise, water consumption and food in balance for the individual .It’s amazing how hard it is to keep just these 4 variables in balance. I would argue that most people do not have them in balance and that you would go a long way if you only focused on these four variables and get them right.

Relationships are the strongest predictors of mental, physical and emotional wellbeing. Be conscious about connection. Have strong boundaries. Avoid too much isolation. Too much loneliness kills.

There is a lot of suffering that goes on around money. We must deal with it. Financial consciousness means having a model for a healthy relationship to money and working through your issues around it. Money is something we trade our most valuable possession to obtain. We trade our TIME for money. What if we treated money as if it was an expression of the most valuable resource we have, our time and life energy. Get out of debt. Have an emergency fund. Invest in your future and retirement. Stop spending your life energy on stupid shit. Liberate yourself from empty consumerism.

Everything that I’ve just described is in place to support a daily cultivation of your deepest intentions for life. I suggest you have three conscious pursuits or less. Most of the people I know who are successful really have only one pursuit. To make your pursuits manageable, to be effective, to go deep, to keep from burning out. You must make decisions, let some things go and show up consistently to do your work day in and day out over a long period of time probably. It’s a beautiful feeling to know what you’re doing to heal and sleep and eat and practice mindfulness all in the service of getting to the end of your life and looking back and feeling like you’ve lived your life right. That you lived with minimal regrets. Everything I’ve written about in the last month is in the service of getting to the end of your life and feeling like you did it right.

Now, do it!

Living Intentionally

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Over the course of the last month I’ve written around 20 articles on living well in the new year. What I’ve been doing is systematically walking through the mental model that I hold in my head as I’m working with my clients. Tomorrow I will summarize this in detail. What I want to talk about today is what everything else I’ve written about has been set up to support, which has to do with what do we do with ourselves each day, day in, day out.

Author and speaker, Zig Ziglar used to ask his audiences “are you a wandering generality, or a meaningful specific?” He was a fan of having specific goals and a course of action to bring those goals into reality. I’m not so much talking about goal setting, as I am being conscious of what you’re doing with your time on the planet, living deliberately and having your days be an expression of that set of intentions.

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As you may have read, I have borrowed from a friend a basic framework for intentionality in life which is that you only get three pursuits or less. If you really want to be affective not spread too thin and able to go reasonably deep into any pursuit you probably should only have three or less at any given time.

For example, I have my coaching business and I have “creative pursuits” currently manifesting in the form of music and photography.  Those are my 3 things. Now this doesn’t mean I don’t exercise, cook or go to the dmv. Those things are assumed. What I’m talking about are the things I’m dedicating meaningful amounts of time too. I publish an article like this every day. I am taking photography classes and spending time in a darkroom. I am recording a 4 song project. These things all take attention, time, money and energy.

Here’s what I do.

I wake up every day, I get up and I write. When I’m done writing, I eat and publish the article. Then on client days I have my clients and then I run to the dark room at my local college. At night I work on music. Fridays I take my black and white photography class which lasts all day. Weekends I usually travel and shoot film.

Everything is organized around these 3 things.

So, a critical thing to do is to sit down reflect over time and decide what your three things (or less). Then you organize your days and your weeks with those three things in mind. I wake up every morning and I think about what it is I’m doing with my time on the planet and I remind myself of the decisions I’ve made and my days are organized around those pursuits.

Know over the course of the last month I’ve written about many other things besides what I do every single day with my time. I’ve written about intentionality, renunciation, food, sleep, exercise, water consumption, healing, mindfulness and relationships.

It seems like a lot, but all of the other elements that I’ve just listed are in support of the three things. They are there so that when I turn my attention to what I decided is most important I have the energy and the focus and the mental physical and emotional health and the supportive relationships to do when I’m here to do. This is how I support people to construct a  life that is fulfilling.

I will have more to say about this tomorrow as I wrap up this Series.

——————

Pablo Das is trained as a Buddhist teacher and as a Holistic Wellness coach (HHC). He is a practitioner of Somatic Experiencing (SEP) and is an advocate for a trauma centered, Buddhist approach to recovery from Addiction Patterns.

Relationships and Wellbeing

Relationships and Health.

By Pablo Das (HHC, SEP)
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Every once in a while I’ll see a certain type of article or video go through my social media feeds. They’re usually titled something like “What predicts long term health and wellness? The answer will surprise you”. When I see these posts, I don’t have to read them because I already know the answer. It’s not food, exercise or career. The greatest predictor of longterm physical, emotional and mental health is the quality of ones relationships with family, friends and community.

For over 80 years, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has been tracking people and collecting data on their lives ,health and wellbeing. Very few of the original 268 men in the study (which began in 1938) are still alive but in many cases, they’ve begun tracking their children who number over 1300 in the study.

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What they found is that while taking care of your body is important, tending to your relationships is critical. Close relationships, not money or fame, stave off mental health issues, support long term happiness and predict better physical health.

In one variation on research, it was found that even casual relational interactions with people in your environment, like the grocery store cashier or a barista, had an important impact on one’s health.

The day I read that, I went to a pizza place and had a fun exchange with the guy behind the counter. We were joking and talking about music. He was friendly and we were both laughing. When I walked away, I could feel the positive chemicals flowing through my body. I was smiling, and felt really good. It was fascinating to be aware of the impact the interaction in my own direct experience having just read one of the relationship articles. Not only is it important to have good intimate relationships with a primary partner, family and friends, but it’s also important to have these small interactions with people in community. According to Robert Waldinger, the director of the Harvard study, good long term health is about “relationships, relationships and relationships” an he adds “loneliness kills”.

I’ve thought a lot in my own coaching practice about how to integrate this knowledge. What does it mean to cultivate a strong relational structure for one’s life? There are many different kinds of relationships. How do we break it down? Well there are family relationships. There are close friends. There are secondary friends. There the work relationships. There are what I call our tribes. Whether you meditate, do stand up or love the Philadelphia Eagles, it’s important to have our tribes. Then there’s the "Cheers effect" where we have our regular places where people know us. The taco spot, the coffee place, the bank. We have our helping professionals, teachers and therapists. And of course, there is the primary relationship with husband, wife or significant other. (Oh, and having cats is pretty glorious too. I have my 20 Lb cat , Tommy cuddling me as I write this. My cats bring me a non-trivial amount of happiness as well.)

If we are truly to cultivate deep and lasting wellbeing, we have to think about how to cultivate relationships on all these different levels. Cultivating a strong relational field is a matter of life or death! Boom! Big finish! Dig it!

How to Think about Food

How to Think About Food.

By Pablo Das (HHC, SEP)

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One of the great teachers of my life was a woman named AnneMarie Colbin. She founded a school in New York City called the Natural Gourmet Institute. It was primarily a chef training school, but AnneMarie also taught courses in deep food theory. I studied for a year with her in her “Food Therapy” program. It was life altering.

Her definition of health supportive eating went like this: “Health supportive eating means eating food as nature provides it with all of its edible parts intact”. It’s essentially a whole foods approach to eating. For her, a (real) food would ideally be thought of as a living system in which an appropriate (for human consumption) group of nutrients exist in the proper proportions to one another. Our human bodies have been engaging with these living systems for centuries.

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For AnneMarie, a health supportive food was one which was not in any way processed. So brown rice was on the menu. White rice was not. Carrots were on the menu, carrot juice was not. Milk was on the menu. Skim milk was not. She had a great faith in the engagement of food “as nature provides it” and the human body.

When it came to food selection, she suggested you ask two questions.

The first was “what was added or taken away?” When you look at a food, if you can perform e that something was added or taken away, this might not qualify as a “whole” food for her. If your bread is “fortified with essential vitamins and minerals” it didn’t qualify for her menu because things have been added which threw off the natural balance of nutrients and thus the engagement of the human body with it.  She would talk about how nutrients in the proper (natural) proportion work in the body to facilitate the work of each other nutrient. Added minerals in the body like calcium are often found gathered in joints of people who have passed away. In her mind this was because the body didn’t know what to do with them. I’m the other hand, white rice is brown rice which has had the nutrients and fiber removed. This will provoke the insulin system to work to reduce the damage of the sugar which it would otherwise not have to do if all the nutrients were there.

Her second question was to inquire how many steps away from its original nature it was. Again if you have brown rice on a plate in front of you, you can track that back like two steps. It was steamed and before that it was removed from the grassy plant it grows on. Two steps. Easy to track. On the other hand, if you had a pop tart in front of you, your mind would collapse just trying to figure out what the shiny specks on the top were and where they came from. AnneMarie thought the body would have a similar degree of struggle integrating such a “food like substance” into the body. It might be worth considering avoiding such a food.

Colbin was not strict, she suggested staying in this model 90 percent of the time and yes, having the ice cream and pizza and whatever else you wanted the other 10 percent of the time. She believed that food ultimately had to be enjoyable.

Tomorrow I’ll share her 7 criteria for food selection. Until then try out the two inquiries and make a conscious assessment of the food you’re eating.

Only in the last century have we seen the degree of industrialization of food that we live with. We are literally what we eat. Food partially conditions the functioning and overall health of the body, impacts our emotional life, moods, mind states and ability to think and concentrate. It is an incredibly powerful variable in our lives. We cannot function optimally and be careless with food selection.

Foundational Elements of Wellness.

Foundational Elements of Wellness.
By Pablo Das (HHC, SEP)
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Since the beginning of January I have been writing on 8 ways to experience deep wellbeing in the new year. I've written about the importance of living from a vision, renunciation, mindfulness and healing. Today I move into way number 5. The foundational elements of wellbeing.

If you are living life deliberately (executing a vision/intention for living), there are 4 things that should be tended to on a daily basis. Most people do not have these 4 things in balance. These 4 things create a foundation for everything else you do in the course of a day. They support, energy, focus, emotional well-being, resilience, capacity and a lot more.

The foundational elements of wellness are sleep, physical activity, water consumption and food in balance for you as an individual. If you engage these elements in the appropriate way on a daily basis, your life will be very different. This is particularly true for people who manage trauma, anxiety, depression or are in recovery.

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To put together a deliberate and well lived life is to make these 4 elements central every day. If you want to establish a wellness program for the first time, you can start here and if everything has fallen apart because of some event that threw you off track, start with these elements and you can put yourself back together in just a couple of days. These 4 elements exist in a kind of hierarchy with one thing conditioning the next. So put them together in order. Begin with sleep.

Sleep.

I believe your day begins the night before when you go to bed. Sleep is the most foundational element of well-being, everything else follows from it. Sleep makes the other three elements possible.

Exercise.

If you don’t sleep well, you won’t move your body. Whether you do yoga, go hiking, lift weights or ride a bike, physical activity is a game changer. If you got up right now and ran around the block you would feel totally different when you got back. That’s how immediate the impact is. Exercise combats anxiety and depression, some say as effectively as pharmaceuticals.

Water consumption.

Most people are dehydrated. Humans do not drink enough water. How much water is enough? According to the people who study this stuff the average woman needs 2.5 liters of water while the average man needs 3.7 liters. That’s like almost 2 of those large soda bottles. Nobody I know consumes that much water. Water improves sleep, emotional wellbeing, aids digestion, relieves fatigue, supports weight loss and more. It also influences how we eat as many people eat in response to signs of dehydration. For one day just drink tons of water and sense the difference. It’s really a profound thing.

Food.

The 4th element is food. I’m going write about this in detail tomorrow. “You are what you eat” is a famous saying. It’s true. What we consume becomes us. And it has deep implications for how healthy and happy we are. Food supports disease AND healing. It regulates mood. It influences weight gain and weight loss. It’s correlated with major health issues including heart disease, cancer and diabetes. Food is a monumental variable in our lives. It’s in the running for the most powerful variable In our lives along side relationships.

Putting it together.

Think of sleep as the beginning of the next day. Wake and move your body before you do anything else. Exercise promotes water consumption and all 3 of these together will change the way you eat. When we don’t eat because we’re tired, dehydrated, anxious or depressed, we eat healthier.

Relational Equanimity

Relational Equanimity.

By Pablo Das (HHC, SEP)

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Have you ever really thought hard about precisely what power one person has to condition the happiness or wellbeing of another person?

Here’s what we can’t do…

We cannot control what a person thinks. We cannot control what a person says. We cannot control a person’s actions.

We CAN control our own thoughts, speech and actions in such a way as to do our best not cause harm to others, but that’s not the same as conditioning someone else’s happiness and wellbeing.

In Buddhism there is a group of 4 teachings that are thought of a “heart practices”.  The last few articles I wrote cover the first three; kindness compassion and sympathetic joy. When practiced formally, they involve the recitation of phrases that represent wishes for others. “May you be happy, successful and free from suffering”. But what does wishing someone well really accomplish? The answer is two things.

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First, the practices are good for us. They each counter a type of self generated suffering involved with hatred, being punitive and jealousy. They feel better in the body and mind. They support positive emotions. Kindness compassion and appreciation are simply good for the practitioner.

Second, they serve as motivators for speech and action which support us to hurt others less.

But wishing someone well does not have a particular impact on the other person. It doesn’t condition their happiness and wellbeing. The fact is, each person is responsible for their own happiness. Each person must grapple with their own thoughts, stories and belief systems. They must manage their trauma, grief, emotions and challenges. Each person is responsible for their own speech and actions. The Buddha often talked about diligently working out ones own liberation.

There is very little we can do to impact happiness in another. Probably the most important thing we can do is be present. Sometimes we can offer some wisdom. We can teach what we know. Sometimes we can share our resources. Maybe even intervene once or twice. But in the end each of us is responsible to work out our own liberation from suffering. No one outside ourselves can do it for us. This is not to say that we do it alone. We can’t. We do it in community and with helping professionals and wisdom holders and friends. But in the end, we are responsible for our won lives.

This is why I love the fourth of the heart practices: Relational Equanimity.  It serves as a reality check to the other three. It says, it’s wonder full to cultivate kindness and compassion and wish people well, but “peoples happiness or lack of happiness depend on their actions and not one’s wishes for them.

When I truly grasped the profound implications of that teaching, I started teaching this one first in the group of heart practices. When we start by acknowledging that we are limited in our ability to condition happiness in others and that ones happiness depends on their actions and not anyones wishes, that changes the meaning of the other three. It tells you very clearly what you cannot do with those practices.

In real world practice, this is most obvious when someone is in active addiction. You can care for someone very deeply. You can wish for and even try to support an end to their suffering. You can try to get them into rehab. You can be present. But what you have to quickly come to terms with is that unless the person is willing to take full responsibility for themselves, there’s nothing you can really do to keep them well. And sometimes, because of how painful, disruptive and dangerous it can be to be around a person in active addiction, sometimes you have to cut ties altogether and hope that they re able to work out their own liberation from addiction.

In buddhist circles, relational equanimity isn’t a particularly popular teaching. There are entire retreats set aside for kindness. Lot’s of books on compassion. But this other truth, becoming clear on reality and the limitations of those practices to condition happiness in a mother person is essential in understand \ing the real meaning and power of kindness and compassion. Without it, we run the risk of enabling and codependency and just setting ourselves up to be hurt over and over again.

Sympathetic Joy

Sympathetic Joy

By Pablo Das (HHC, SEP)

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Over the last few days I’ve been non-explicitly walking through a set of teachings from Buddhism called the Brahma viharas. They are a group of what are thought of as heart-oriented practices. The thought is that if we cultivate these qualities in ourselves then they are there available as motivations for speech and action as we move through the world and encounter the wide range of what life has to offer.

The Brahma Viharas contain four practices, two of which I’ve already written about (kindness and compassion), the one I’m highlighting tomorrow (interpersonal equanimity) and today’s topic, sympathetic joy. One way I like to think of them is part of being responsive. They serve as filters through which we temper and color our speech and action. They are, in a way, philosophical stances we take in life when we decide we want to be a good person.

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Kindness is a word that actually describes a number of different qualities. Generosity, acceptance,  patience, friendliness and presence are some of the qualities that characterize kindness when you see it in the world. Compassion is what kindness morphs into when it encounters suffering and pain. Sympathetic joy is what kindness morphs into when it encounters other peoples success and happiness.

The great Morrissey has a song called “We Hate it When our Friends Become Successful”. It’s a funny thing about humans that we think about ourselves in relationship to other people’s success. We compare. As a result we generate all kinds of suffering for ourselves and for others as that jealousy bleeds out in the way we treat others. It isworth looking at the issue.

So we can understand kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and interpersonal equanimity as ways of countering self generated suffering. In the case of sympathetic joy, the suffering we are countering is that of envy or jealousy. When practiced formally in meditation, sympathetic Joy involves a recitation of phrases meant to help cultivate the quality. It works by bringing to mind somebody who is experiencing happiness and wellbeing and wishing for more of that in their life. It’s a way of counteracting a human tendency to either think of yourself or to think ill of somebody who is successful.

In practical terms, it can be used in a simple way. We draw a line in the sand with intention. We decide not to indulge jealousy and strive to respond to those impulses in ourselves by wishing people more happiness and success. It’s a practice of crowding out or countering thoughts that lead to suffering and filling the internal talk space of our minds with that which supports wellbeing.

Next time you feel jealousy, envy or judgement about the successful people in the world, try practicing wishing them enduring happiness.

Mindfulness and Compassion

Mindfulness and Compassion.

By Pablo Das (HHC, SEP)

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I’ve been writing a series of articles on 8 ways to cultivate deep wellbeing in the new year. So far, I’ve talked about (1)  having a vision and intention for life, (2) the role of behavioral renunciation and of (3) the healing process. Now I’m writing about the 4th way, practicing mindfulness both as a distinct kind of consciousness and as a way of responding to life through an ethical filter.

To be “responsive” is distinguished from being reactive. When we’re reactive we’re not reflective. We are impulsive and acting unconsciously. With mindfulness we can filter our thoughts, speech and actions through various ethical filters.

Yesterday I wrote about kindness being one such response. It serves as a kind of conscious motivation for action which supports well-being. I offered a phrase “G.A.P. Friendly” as a summary of the many qualities contained in the notion of kindness. Generosity, acceptance, patience and friendliness are qualities you might see when you see kindness on display in the world.

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What happens when we encounter pain and suffering? How do we respond to grief? How to we respond to emotional turmoil? Anxiety? Trauma? Physical pain?

For me, compassion is simply what kindness (with its G.A.P. Friendly qualities) turns into when it meets pain. Some of these qualities can be applied to pain and suffering. And should be.

One of the great sufferings of every human life is grief. Grief is the mental, physical and emotional response to loss. It’s a natural phenomenon that results from having loved someone who is no longer with you. Grief can be very powerful and it can get dark. What does it mean to have a compassionate response to grief?

First it requires acceptance. Most humans try to avoid pain. To have a compassionate response to grief requires you to turn towards and accept it.

One of the best lines I’ve heard this year comes from psychologist John Delony who said “grief demands an audience”. He’s right. A compassionate response to grief is to be present for it and to invite others to help carry it with you. You must talk to other people when grief is present.

Grief definitely requires patience. It has its own timeline as grieving may take months or years. Our acceptance and presence must be balanced with patience.

You get the point.

Compassion is what kindness morphs into when it meets pain. Its a way of consciously responding to it. It moves us from escaping and avoiding pain to caring about it.

So when the inevitable pains and sufferings of life arise we can ask ourselves those two questions I’ve talked about. 1. What’s happening? This invites us into an investigation of our internal and external experience. Then we can ask ourselves 2. how can I respond in a way that would support wellbeing? If pain is present then the wise response to pain is compassion with its qualities of presence, acceptance, its patience and a lot of generosity.

Be G.A.P Friendly

G.A.P Friendly.

By Pablo Das (HHC, SEP)
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I’ve been writing a series of articles on 8 ways to cultivate deep wellbeing in the new year. So far, I’ve talked about (1) having a vision and intention for life, (2) the role of behavioral renunciation and of (3) healing. Now I’m writing about the 4th way, practicing mindfulness both as a distinct kind of consciousness and as a way of responding to life through an ethical filter.

The Buddhist term “Metta” is usually translated as loving-kindness or just kindness. But the word captures a number of different qualities. As a teacher I used to ask my students to think of a time when they saw what they would consider kindness on display in the world. Then I would ask them to describe what they experienced without using the word kindness. Words or phrases that come up are usually “generosity” or “patience” or “acceptance” or “friendliness”.

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I’m taking a photography class right now. The class is full of people you might call "characters". One of the dominant characters on the first day of class was this woman who spent the first two hours falling asleep and snoring. She looked like she was going to fall out of her chair with these big swings of her body from upright to slumped. It happened over and over as she fell over and gave a loud snort. It was really over the top.

I would estimate that the professor approached her no less than 15 times, each time with a huge smile and encouraged her to “come back” and pointing to her thermos saying “coffee! Drink your coffee!”. Almost anyone else in his position might have quickly run out of patience and sent her out of the room. It was disruptive and distracting. He had every right to do so. But whether he was in a lecture or we were watching a documentary, he would keep swooping over, smiling, putting his hand on her shoulder and saying “Come back! Come back!”

To me this was all the different qualities of Metta in action. He was patient. He accepted her fully for where she was that day. He was certainly generous and very friendly. He was not punitive, exasperated or shaming. He never sent her away.

I’ve used the phrase “G.A.P. friendly” to remind myself of the dominant qualities of Metta as I experience them. “G.A.P.” stands for generosity, acceptance and patience. Obviously, friendliness means to be kind and pleasant.

I’ve been working with the idea that mindfulness can be reduced to two practice inquiries. At any point in time one could…
1. Ask oneself “what’s happening” and taking note.
2. Then ask “how can I respond in a way that supports well-being”?
We can use these qualities of Metta or loving kindness as a way of framing how we respond to things. Which is to say we try to have our speech and actions motivated by generosity, patience, acceptance and friendliness (G.A.P. Friendly).

In practical terms this means we meet people where they are. We give them space to be in their process. We let people screw up. We don’t penalize people for mistakes. We try not to condemn them. We don’t make fun of people for what they don’t know. We encourage people. We see the good in them and emphasize that. We compliment. We’re helpful. We share our resources when we can.

It blunt terms, it means being nice! And if you really wanna go there... this niceness is not just offered to people we like, but also people we dislike, people who annoy us and maybe even people who have hurt and threatened us (not without boundaries though). It also means offering that very same kindness to yourself.

As you move through your day, remember to step out of ordinary consciousness by asking “What’s happening?” and then trying to respond to what’s happening in a way that supports more wellbeing for everyone involved.

One way to do that is to be G.A.P. Friendly.

Have fun!

Renunciation and Mindfulness

Renunciation and Mindfulness.

In this series on 8 ways to establish deep wellbeing in the new year, I began by writing about the importance of intention and vision and then wrote about renunciation of what’s in the way of that vision. Today I want  to talk about the relationship between renunciation and mindfulness.

Renunciation isn’t a sexy topic. It runs counter to our materialistic consumer culture. There are no best selling books or popular retreats on the topic. Nevertheless, it’s a critical part of human wellbeing. Renunciation involves setting aside, mediating or stopping behaviors which bring negative results.

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The word “karma” suggests a simple cause and effect relationship between actions and results. What we do and say brings results. Those results can either contribute to more happiness and wellbeing or they look like more suffering and harm. Actions bring results, so it makes perfect sense that for us to experience the result of more wellbeing that we’d restrain ourselves from doing things that compromise it.

So we engage in a practice of drawing lines in the sand. We consciously set intention’s to renounce or reign in behaviors which bring negative results.

The very act of establishing limits on behavior does something very important. It helps us cultivate awareness.

If you decide that in 2023, you want to renounce raising your voice to your partner, you draw that line in the sand for yourself, you can’t help but become aware of when you approach that line…or even cross it. Because the line is there, we’re better able to watch ourselves, to pause and to inquire with ourselves about what’s going on. Drawing the line supports awareness.

Earlier I described “karma” as a cause and effect between actions and outcomes, but there’s more to that process. There is something that comes before action. That is intention or motivation.

We do what we do for extraordinarily good reasons. When we draw a line in the sand and boundaries on our behavior, then we have an opportunity to look at what motivates our behavior.

I’ve been through a few cycles in my life of quitting sugar. The reason I quit sugar is because the results of the behavior are bad. Eating sugar begins a cycle of craving. When I eat it, I eat too much. Sugar makes me feel terrible the next day. And if I continue the cycle too long it breaks down my immune system and I often get sick. Over the long term, sugar consumption is tied to metabolic syndrome, diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

Adopting a policy of abstinence with sugar allows me to study what happens in me that, in turn, motivates the behavior. For me, it’s very clear that stress and anxiety are the core motivators. Sugar has a numbing quality. As a “sober”person, sugar is really the last addiction behavior I have left.

But what gets revealed in stopping the behavior and studying the conditions in which the behavior arises, is that I realize that the behavior isn’t the most important part of the equation. While sugar does have its own addictive quality for me, the behavior itself is often secondary to the anxiety. The anxiety is the thing that needs attention. Then the question becomes, is there a different and more generative response to anxiety and stress than numbing? The answer is yes, there are many, many ways to address anxiety without an addictive behavior. Most ways are generative in the sense that they support  wellbeing, while sugar (like other addictions) ultimately compounds suffering.

All of this is revealed through the process of renunciation. When we stop something we have the opportunity to bring awareness to whatever is going on underneath the behavior. We can drag that stuff out into the light, study it and ultimately learn to respond in ways that support wellbeing instead of compounding our suffering.

Intention/motivation + actions = results.

Renunciation allows for awareness which supports a different response and therefore a different set of results.

4 Kinds of Healing.

4 Kinds of Healing.

By Pablo Das (HHC, SEP

In this series on 8 Ways to Establish Wellbeing in the New Year, I’ve written about the Importance of having a vision for your life and living deliberately. I then wrote about renunciation, consciously setting aside or limiting behaviors that are barriers to living the life you envision. Today I want to offer some thoughts on healing, which addresses a different set of barriers to a fulfilling life.

I have a simple framework for thinking about healing. Healing is the process of engaging the list of issues that hold you back (things you would like to be different as a result of the healing work) and do so in such a way that they are no longer barriers to living the life you’ve envisioned. Healing can mean just about anything because it depends on what the thing is that needs to be healed. A broken bone needs to be healed and so do poor boundaries, addiction issues and old grief. Clearly each of these “barriers” are very different and need to be approached using different modalities. Furthermore, what works for one person, might not work for another. There’s no one “right” way.

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I recently wrote a series of articles on healing, you can go back and read them, or go to the links in my profile, where I have videos and podcast episodes about how I think about healing. Today what I thought I’d do is highlight some common ways healing might occur.

Grief demands an audience.

Grief is what happens when we lose something or someone we really love. Whether to death or a break up, loss brings the natural process of grief. One of my favorite sayings related to grief is that “grief demands an audience”. It’s very important that we tell our story and have our grief witnessed. We need people. Grief is very personal and the process is very painful but we cannot heal alone. We must have friends, groups, therapists and others to hear our story. They don’t even need to do anything but be present. If you’re trying to help someone who’s grieving a loss just know your presence is everything. You don’t need to give advice or have answers. You just need to be the audience that grief demands.

Change your stories.

One of my favorite films is called “Lucky”, in it, a character grieves the loss of a pet Tortoise who “runs” away. He’d raised this Tortoise, called President Roosevelt, from the beginning of its life. In the beginning he’s struggling against the situation, blaming himself, and lamenting the loss. By the end of the movie, his story has flipped. He says he’s reflected on how much effort it must have taken for the Tortoise to plot the escape. He realizes the Tortoise “wasn’t  leaving me” he says, “he was just goin off somewhere else to do something he thought was important”.

Our stories about the things that happen can either trap us or free us. It’s a good idea to ultimately choose the most freeing and generous versions of the stories. It may require mental and emotional wrestling and feeling deeply, but we must work with our stories about ourselves, the world, other people and the things that happen to us.

Do we frame ourselves as victims? Did we make choices that led to the outcomes? When I think back on difficult things, I try to find the places where I’m responsible for what happened. Not to blame myself, but to avoid feeling as though the world is just constantly doing unfair things TO me. No, I am also responsible.

From helplessness to empowerment.

When it comes to traumatic experiences, I’ve noticed that helplessness and lack of agency are often the result of overwhelming experiences. Something happened that was too much and too fast and we had no good self protective response. Our boundaries were transgressed against, we were hurt, disrespected, unseen and no one helped. The sense of helplessness and victimhood can seep into us and almost become an identity or a core story or sense of oneself in the world. Moving from helplessness and victimhood to something more like agency, self possession and empowerment is one of the core journeys of trauma healing. It’s helpful to have a professional walk you through the process of reframing.

New outcome, new experience.

In Somatic Experiencing, the trauma resolution system I work in, we re-negotiate big and overwhelming experiences by walking in a slow and thorough way back through an experience to take in the details and have the appropriate internal responses.   Frequently, traumatic experiences happen so quickly, we can’t get caught up. In the process of renegotiation, we allow ourselves to slowly take in what happened. We stay rooted to our internal processes and feelings. We allow things to play out thoroughly and we pay attention to the conclusions we’ve drawn from them. In many cases we’ll even reimagine the outcomes of an experience in ways that feel empowered. In the end, what happens is this new version of the experience gets integrated into our systems and feels more real than the thing that actually happened. It’s a fascinating process and best facilitated by a helping professional.

Mindfulness Makes a Response Possible

Mindfulness Makes a Response Possible.

By Pablo Das (HHC, SEP

Mindfulness is an objective awareness of what’s happening within us and around us in the present moment.

“Objective” means there’s some space between awareness and experience. You’re able to step back with perspective. You know what’s happening. You aren’t captured by what’s going on.

To be mindful of anger, as an example, is not to BE angry. It’s to be aware that anger is present. You can investigate it, see what it’s made of, reflect on what brought it into being and notice your impulses in relationship to it.

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Mindfulness is different from ordinary consciousness. In ordinary consciousness, we are mostly driven by thoughts, feelings and stories. We are impulsive. We are captured by emotions. We are less reflective. We follow the prompts of liking and disliking things without thinking our actions through. We more willingly cause harm and self generate suffering.

My favorite thing about mindfulness practice is that moving from ordinary consciousness to objective awareness makes it possible to choose a response to whatever is going on. I’m Buddhism we make a distinction between responses and reactions. When we’re responsive we’re more free.

You can feel anger and not yell. You can decide to walk away. You can notice your tone rising and regulate it back to normal. You can resist violent impulses. Built into mindfulness is choice.

What’s the choice? Whether it’s managing your diet, regulating emotions, navigating trauma content or resisting addiction behavior, with objective awareness you get a pause, you get space, you can reflect and you can choose a response.

In Buddhism, along with mindfulness and responsiveness, there is something else…ethical considerations. Is what you’re thinking, saying, likely yo cause harm or generate pain for you? Not only can you choose a response, but you can filter it through your ethical commitments. If you’re committed to not lying, then you can choose a truthful response. If you’re committed to not causing harm, then you can decide not to sleep with someone’s partner. If you’re committed to non-intoxication, you can resist drinking, smoking and the rest.

My thought is that a “mindful”response to whatever is going on should be one that supports wellbeing. How can you respond to life in a way that supports well-being for you and the people around you?

For people who are grappling with trauma and addiction I suggest also looking through the lens of empowerment, asking what would constitute an empowered response? So often my clients with a trauma history will unconsciously choose disempowering reactivity. Conflict avoidance is a good example. If you never confront anything, then you don’t assert anything. If you don’t assert your desires, needs and boundaries, then you are acting in disempowered ways. That needs to be healed. So I suggest looking for responses to things that honor your needs, desires and boundaries.

Mindfulness makes a response possible. Most people operate in ordinary consciousness. They are defensive, impulsive, bias driven and unconscious to the results of their actions. With mindfulness the possibility of restraint, reflection and choice are available whenever you remember to use it.

Mindfulness and Anxiety.

Mindfulness and Anxiety.

By Pablo Das (HHC, SEP)

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————-

I’m a sober person. I stopped drinking in 2004. I had become increasingly aware that a large part of why I drank had to do with anxiety. I was fearful that if stopped drinking, I would be overwhelmed by it.

To be clear, I’m not talking about “oh man, work is stressful” kind of anxiety. I’m talking about intense anxiety and panic attacks. The kind of experiences that make you worry that you might “lose it” or go crazy. In my early 20’s and 30’s I had thousands of anxiety or panic attacks. They were very frequent and often destabilizing. I drank to control them.

I got sober in my 30’s with the the help of my Buddhist teacher at the time. I remember telling him that I had some resistance to getting sober because of my levels of anxiety. He said “you’re going to have to get in the ring with this and invite it to come kill you”.  What he meant, was that I’d have to welcome it in and come to understand that it can’t “kill you.”

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I had been dabbling in meditation for years by that point and had gotten pretty serious about it after meeting my teacher.  I had some confidence that I could manage my experience in ways that hadn’t been available to me in my 20’s. And so I got sober.

When the anxiety came, I would study it. With mindfulness, I could look objectively at the experience. What I discovered is that anxiety was just sensation. The sensations had specific locations in my body. Eventually I could discern different kinds of anxiety based on location. Relational anxiety lived in the middle of my chest. Existential anxiety and fear in the middle of my back. Horror involved the top of my head.

In deconstructing anxiety, I became aware that because anxiety had such specific locations that there were parts of me that were only sympathetically contracting. Those places could be relaxed. And there were parts of me that were not anxious at all (my elbows, feet and forearms were not anxious). What felt global and dominating was now local and compelling but not usually overwhelming.

From there I could study the conditions in which anxiety tended to arise. It was then that I figured out that caffeine was driving 80% of my anxiety issues. I stopped consuming coffee, sodas and chocolate. This made a huge difference.

The 20% that was not driven by caffeine was what I would grapple with for the rest of my adult life. In 2011, I had a major anxiety event at a residential meditation retreat and someone suggested that I learn about trauma. I began a training in Somatic Experiencing that same year and learned about the activation and deactivation cycles of the nervous system and how childhood trauma, single event shock traumas and the experience of being a gay kid/man growing up in a hostile country (the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s were a very different time) all sensitized the stress response system and made me a very sensitive person.

Somatic experiencing is very much built on awareness similar to the way mindfulness works. It involves anchoring your attention, spreading awareness to sensations, memories, thoughts etc…

To be mindful of anxiety requires the development of basic mindfulness skills including objective awareness of the body, heart and mind. It also requires developing equanimity.

Equanimity is a sort of grounded stable ability to stay present when things get rocky. You develop it by acknowledging the pleasant and unpleasant qualities of experience as they arise in meditation. You take a posture and you don’t react no matter what comes up, unless it’s too much. You develop an ability respond to pain and unpleasant experiences with compassion and presence rather than aversion and avoidance.

Mindfulness can be used to be present with, study, deconstruct and respond to any strong emotions: anger, grief, lust, craving, sadness etc…

People who have been impacted by trauma may need to develop a set of skills related to stabilization and emotional regulation otherwise traditional mindfulness can be overwhelming or even re-traumatizing.

Mindfulness = 2 Inquiries.

Mindfulness = 2 Inquires.
By Pablo Das (HHC, SEP)
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—————

In my coaching practice, I’ll often tell clients that mindfulness can be simplified into two inquiries:

1. What’s happening?
2. How can I respond in a way that supports wellbeing?

These two inquiries have practical value in so many of the scenarios I find myself working in with my clients. Managing addictive impulses, navigating trauma content, stopping eating sugar, relationships and of course, dharma practice.

In this article I’m gonna break down the two inquiries and how they can be utilized in daily life.

Inquiry 1.

The question “what’s happening?” immediately takes us out of ordinary consciousness into reflection. It’s a state of objectivity. As I write this, what’s happening is that the sun is barely coming up. I can feel the breeze on my left side from an air humidifier. I have excitement to be starting a film photography class on Friday. I have a cough that’s hanging on a little too long from that bad flu in December. My cat is in the litter box. My lips are dry. There’s hunger sensations in my belly.

Asking the question “what’s happening” has me looking, listening and noticing sensation and emotion. It’s not so much a state of making meaning but of taking stock.

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Traditionally, Buddhist mindfulness asks us to focus that reflective energy in a few very specific places. Those places are the body, the mind and in something called feeling tones. Feeling tone is an acknowledgement of the pleasant or unpleasant quality of any sensory experience (sights, sounds, tastes, smells and sensation). I’ll talk about the importance of feeling tones tomorrow.

Mindfulness notices (mostly) non-judgmentally. Mindfulness is curious. It studies what’s happening. It deconstructs it and looks at its parts. It notices nuance. It notices movement, intensity, duration, frequency and when things resolve or end. It can be a deep and subtle study of one’s internal and external experience in any given moment. It’s available at any time.

Mindfulness has, built into it, a pause. To be reflective means pausing to notice. Built into that pause is the possibility of choice. To me, this is the practical power of mindfulness. When that reflective pause happens, you can decide how to respond.

Inquiry 2.
“How Can I Respond in a Way That Supports Wellbeing”?

Earlier I said that mindfulness notices non_judgementally. That's not entirely true. What we could "judge" is how what we've done in the past has conditioned our experience now or how what we do next, might condition the experience we have later. IN that sense it "judges" through an ethical lens. Not only does mindfulness allow us to respond with intention rather than react unconsciously, but it offers shape to our response. I like to encourage my clients to think in terms of responding in ways that support wellbeing for oneself and others. There’s a kind of ethical framework built into that. It challenges us to consider the impact of our actions on others and to reflect on how we may self generate suffering for ourselves. We try to minimize both impacts.

Whether you are craving alcohol but sober, feeling overwhelmed by work, in conflict with a partner or family member, or considering how to respond to political realities, you can always filter what you do next through the framework of minimizing harm for yourself and others.

I’m a gluten free person. When I eat wheat, I want to pass out and then the next day, I feel like I drank all night. It’s super unpleasant. When I first stopped eating wheat, I did so with a friend. We had an agreement that when we wanted to eat pizza or bread or whatever, that we would text one another, describe what we were feeling and then say what we were gonna do instead. So I might have texted something like “hey, I so wanna go to Tony’s pizzeria but I’m gonna get some chicken and vegetables and a kombucha instead”. Chicken and vegetables happens to be a very grounding meal for me. This is a practical example of noticing what’s happening and forming a response that supports well-being. What I wanted to do was something that would have been a setback. But what I decided to do was to ground myself.

So. Here’s your practice:

1. What’s happening?

2. How can I respond in a way that supports wellbeing?


Pablo Das is trained as a Buddhist teacher and as a Holistic Wellness coach (HHC). He is a practitioner of Somatic Experiencing (SEP) and is an advocate for a trauma centered, Buddhist approach to recovery from Addiction Patterns.

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Life is Short. Life is Long"

“Life is short. Life is long”.

By Pablo Das (HHC, SEP)

Yesterday I started this series on 8 ways to establish deep wellbeing in the new year by talking about Step 1 having a vision and intention for your life.

Today I want to dig a little deeper into this topic.

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I once had a Buddhist teacher that used to reference a line in the teachings where the Buddha says “life is short, you must live as though you’re hair were on fire!” The teaching was meant to underscore the urgency of this finite human existence. The message is you must not waste time getting clear on what’s truly important.  “Wake up. Death is coming! Don’t waste this life!” They shout. Buddhists must tend to “the great matter of living and dying”.  It’s a compelling message and there is deep truth there. Life is precious and fleeting, you better get clear on what you want and don’t waste any time.

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But I also had another teacher, Joshua Rosenthal at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, who used to regularly say calmly and with confidence  “life is a long time”. He’s not wrong. Most of us get 6, 7, 8 or more decades on this planet, to heal, explore ourselves, travel, create and work towards our goals. Life is a long time!

In his Tony award acceptance speech a few years ago, actor Andre Deshields (at age 73) said “Slow is the fastest way to get to where you wanna be”.  He’s right too. Everything worth doing, from cultivating an artistic craft, building wealth, getting in shape, building a business or getting a degree all  take years and years of focused, consistent and committed action over the longterm.

So who do we believe? Should we live lwith an urgency informed by life and its finite nature? Should we chill out and take our time because we are likely to get six or seven or eight decades to work it all out?

It’s an interesting thing to develop a life philosophy. Even the development of wisdom takes time. There’s an art to sifting through other peoples wisdom and fashioning something all your own. On this question of how to think about the finite nature of human existence, I have adopted and found a balance between both views; It’s urgent! And slow is the fastest way to get where you want to go.

Because most everything worth doing requires you to make clear decisions, let other things go and take consistent disciplined action on a vision for your life over the long term, it becomes even more important to acknowledge that the clock is ticking.

For alot of my life I was a person who was overwhelmed with possibilities. There are people who don’t know what they want to do with their lives. I’m the opposite. I can imagine a thousand paths. I have so many passions and interests, it can become debilitating. I spent many years frozen. No matter what I was doing, I was  always looking over the fence to see what else there was. There are terms to describe people like me. Author, Barbara Sher calls us “scanners”. We’re the people who open a college catalog and want to triple major in music, history and psychology with a double minor in literature and media studies. Another writer dubbed people like me “multi-potentialites”. We are curious and passionate about so many things, we freeze. It’s hard to make decisions because it means that you have to grieve the loss of other possibilities. At very least it means scanner types must acknowledge that you can’t do it all at once. This is why the “three things or less” rule has become so central in my life. As I said yesterday, if you want to be effective and not spread yourself too thin, you

really only get 3 pursuits at most (at any time) and should probably do less.

Given that the clock is, in fact, ticking it’s incredibly important to get a clear vision for what’s most important in your life and get started on deliberately cultivating that life.

The fact that most things worth doing require a long slow journey of focused and committed action over the longterm underscores the importance of getting clear and editing out the noise.

What if you really understood that we don’t have all the time in the world? What if you really understood what it means to consistently cultivate a meaningful life over the long term?

What would you do?

That’s the starting point for my formulation on how to live a life of deep wellbeing. Everything else I’m about to write follows from that.

———-

Pablo Das is trained as a Buddhist teacher and as a Holistic Wellness coach (HHC). He is a practitioner of Somatic Experiencing (SEP) and is an advocate for a trauma centered, Buddhist approach to recovery from Addiction Patterns.

8 ways to establish deep wellbeing in the new year.

8 ways to establish deep wellbeing in the new year.

In the next two weeks I’m going to continue my practice of writing articles on topics related to dharma, healing, wellness, recovery and spiritual practice.

As we move into the new year, I’m going to share 8 “causes” of well-being. These 8 steps are arranged in a hierarchy. The first supports the second, etc..

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The notion that things arise from their causes comes from Buddhism. Typically in Buddhism we hear a lot about what causes suffering and are interested in identifying and removing those causes. Here, for the next two weeks,  I’m flipping that idea on its head to explore what the causes of wellbeing are.  This is the model I use to help people establish and maintain a conscious and deliberate wellness model.  It begins with…

Vision and Intention.

One of the powerful assertions of Buddhist practice is an encouragement to be aware that our time on the planet is limited. One Buddhist reflection goes…

“Death is certain!

The time of death is uncertain!

Knowing this, how do you live your life?“

When we reflect in this way, we might begin to contemplate what really matters to us. Death can seem abstract. But the clock is ticking. You do not have all the time in the world.  So the encouragement is to reflect and get very clear about what you’re doing with your time on the planet.  What dreams do you have? What ideas do you need to bring into fruition? What needs to happen between now and the end of your life, so that you can look back on your life and feel like you lived it right?  This could be the most important reflection of your life.

For the purpose of this article I’m gonna suggest you contemplate this in three ways.

1. What are you doing with your time on the planet?

Writer, Zig Ziglar used to ask his audiences if they were “wandering generalities” or “meaningful specifics”. He noted that most people were living unconsciously. They were not heading anywhere deliberate but were pushed around by outside forces without a sense of purpose or agency.

I think it’s good to have a vision for your life. I think it’s good to follow through on accomplishing your goals. I think the structure that arises around intentional living is essential to human wellbeing. When I don’t have structure and meaning in my own life, I get depressed very quickly.  So whether it’s recording an album, getting a degree, raising a family or some spiritual or healing pursuit, I think purpose, intention and structure are critical to wellbeing.

3 things or less!

I have a rule for this. You only get 3 pursuits, or less, at a time. To be truly focused, effective and to avoid being spread too thin, you have to make choices, let things go and focus. You can’t do it all at once.

Of course you need to go to the dmv and exercise and get the kids to school. Those things are given. For the purpose of this model, I distinguish the stuff of daily life from these long term, intentional pursuits.

As I live life, I find myself editing more deeply. Here’s the thing. The people I have known in my life to be the most present, successful and focused don’t do 3 things. They do 1 thing. This is why I suggest  3 things OR LESS. I know it’s somewhat arbitrary, but generally speaking I have found that 4 pursuits are too many.  3 is somewhat more manageable. 2 is better. 1 is best.

All of this depends on the reality of your life and your personality and all kinds of other things. But I think there’s an essential truth. Anything worth doing in the long term (raising a family, losing weight, healing, artistic pursuits, saving for retirement, getting a degree) requires making clear choices, investing time and energy consistently over the long term. The more we have going on the less likely we are to follow through and the more likely we are to get burnt out and quit. Less is more.

1. What are your commitments to others?

Here, I’m mostly thinking about ethical commitments. What kind of person do you want to be? For me, Buddhist precepts have been helpful in framing my commitments to others. Setting personal boundaries on speech, sexuality, stealing, physical violence and intoxication have been very helpful.  But Buddhism isn’t the only framework. What does it mean to be a citizen in a representative democracy? What does it mean to be the head of a family or an employer? I think setting clear intentions for your interpersonal life is a huge part of being well. It’s an esteem-able act  to live ethically and it is hard to live well when you’re causing harm.

1. What are your commitments to yourself?

It’s important not just to

consider others but also to consider your commitments to yourself. What boundaries do you have as a person? Do you lean into or avoid conflict? Do you speak your truth or allow people to coherse you into silence?  Do you take risks? Walk the road less travelled? Do you come out of the closet in every situation? What about taking full responsibility for your life? Rejecting victimhood? What does your heart need? What do you need to do in this life that only you can provide to yourself? Those are the kinds of commitments I encourage people to contemplate.

I’m these 3 ways, we live intentional and ethical lives, we accept responsibility for ourselves and live with self possession and agency.  This is a solid foundation for wellbeing.

Tomorrow:

Should we live with urgency? Should we take our time?

Or both?