Keeping Your Shit Together in Troubled Times

These are troubled times. Even if it weren't for Trump, we'd have climate change and nuclear weapons. If we could somehow deal with that we have pollution, genocide, overpopulation and endless war.

How do we deal with this personally? I'd say the first thing is to realize that we do have a problem dealing with it personally - this is not at all the same as just worrying about world affairs which, admit it, we can't do anything about. Most of us feel helpless and depressed about all that, but fail to deal with these feelings separate from the endless bad news that causes them. It is these personal feelings of despair that we need to deal with. Most importantly, we need to see that these feelings have real-life consequences.

In what follows, I tell you about how I build a personal "air raid shelter". I think of it as a "home base" where I can go at any time. From a foundation of peace and security, I am able to "keep my shit together" in spite of all the chaos going on outside my shelter. This may or may not work for you. Hopefully, there are suggestions you can use to live a happier life in spite of the times we find ourselves in.

Buddha's goal was to end suffering. In fact, his larger plan was to get us off the wheel of re-birth. In modern times, we need to cut that agenda down to size. With effort, we can end or dramatically reduce self-imposed suffering. Buddha's plan, cut down to size, is called "mindfulness". If you are already a mindfulness practitioner, you will notice that I cut the plan down even further. For me, the "core" teachings have little to do with meditation, although meditation may help. The problem is that most people have problems figuring out why to meditate. They look for more or less instant improvement as they might get from taking a magic pill. The improvement is, in fact, rather subtle at first and doesn't require meditation at all.

FIRST, NOTICE HOW SICK THE CHAOS IS MAKING YOU

The first step is to be aware of the effects, especially the physical ones, that all this crap is having on us. For example, I have a little adrenaline surge whenever I think of Trump. My body is waking up as if I'm under immediate threat of personal attack. I can feel it. This awareness is the first step to being able to step back and "label" these thoughts, along with the feelings they cause. This is the goal of mindfulness meditation, but it can be accomplished on its own and by other means.

We can't avoid these scary thoughts. What we can do is avoid becoming these thoughts. We want to avoid having them take over who we are. To do this, we need to cultivate our ability to step back and know what we are thinking. This is an amazing feature of human consciousness: the ability to watch ourselves think - to think about thinking. On the other hand, this is an ability that can lie dormant for days, weeks or years. We can become so lost in our thoughts that we never step back and ask if they are the thoughts that are helping us.

SITTING ON THE SHORE

The time-honored trick to establish this twin-brain way of seeing things is to pay attention to our breath. Just think breath in, breath out. There is no technique or magic to it. No wrong way to do it. The idea is to direct your thoughts inward to the body. It turns out to be a great way to get a glimpse of "what was I thinking?".  Very quickly, your thoughts will trap you and drag you away again. With a bit of effort, you can simply bring attention back to your breath and ask again "What was I thinking?"

In the end, you want to exercise control over what you are thinking but you can't do this unless you have a method of at least being aware of what you are thinking. There are lots of reasons why thinking of your breath is a good choice, but the most obvious is that it's totally uncomplicated and unlikely to get you upset all by itself.

On a theoretical level, breath is unique among your body functions. It can operate without thinking or you can control it consciously. This corresponds to two major brain systems. When you switch from conscious worry about say, climate change, to paying attention to breathing, you give your brain a little signal to switch from one system to another. If you are persistent with this method (which is thousands of years old), you can develop the habit of simply letting troublesome thoughts float by like clouds in the sky. You will be physically better off for it, since anxiety is bad for you (look up "cortisol"). You are also not sacrificing anything since the most worrying thoughts are about things that you can't do anything about anyway.

LABELING

Once you can manage to answer the question "what was I thinking" and resist being swept away again by that thought (or some other), you can label the thought. For example, if I catch myself being outraged by Trump's latest outrage, I label the thought by putting it in a bag and attaching a tiny orange penis. The idea is to create distance from the thought and treat the thought as an object or perhaps an invading virus.

Sometimes my thoughts are about "bad days" at work that happened decades ago. I think about what I should have said or done instead of what I did do that got me into trouble. But you can't change the past and there is rarely any insight to be gained for thinking about the situation for the thousandth time. It's a "poor me" thought.

Closely related are the "how wonderful am I thoughts".

There are many other categories that I won't go into. You have your own.

If you do this for awhile, you will come to realize that there are an amazingly small number of thoughts - mostly useless - running through your head at any one time. This is in contrast to the time when you are really thinking productively or in a state of "flow" when you are doing something like sailing or kiteboarding. In the flow state, you are wrapped up in the details of the situation. There is no room for bullshit. But most of the time, your brain is free to think of all the bad things that have happened or may happen to you or somebody else, soon or in the far future.

JUST BEING

With practice, you get to coast awhile between the times when some new silly thought pushes its way into consciousness. You come to appreciate these gaps, which amount to just sitting and breathing - doing nothing. This is where the zen advice comes in: just sit (zazen), just walk, just drive, just look. Multitasking is your enemy. Don't walk the dog listening to music and reading your email. Cultivate the habit of doing nothing. No back channel. My experience with this is that the thoughts that do actually rise to the surface are relatively important. I can dismiss them or deal with them productively - actually think those thoughts instead of becoming them (if that makes sense).

This is perhaps a hint at why you may want to consider formal mindfulness meditation. With training and practice, the gaps can get longer and it can become easier to dismiss wasteful, harmful stories you have been telling yourself. There is no need to do this always. The idea is to do it sometimes - to develop the habit of stopping to "clear your head". You can do it at a stop sign. You can do it while driving. You can do it while walking the dog. Even in the middle of a heated argument, you can "take a breath" and ask yourself "what am I thinking?"

The idea is to develop and feed that "watching mind" and to experience the peacefulness it offers.

There is a lot more to this which I will get into. The big picture is to live in the moment, to become aware of what is actually happening to you, then build outward to decide what should concern you and not let the chaos decide for you. Once you are coming from a stable foundation, you can be more productive and helpful in the actions you chose.