Reasonably Happy

Some Good News

My friend David Gerbstadt is a local artist who shares messages like “Be Kind” throughout his community with signs, buttons and street art. He’s even been live streaming drawing lessons and what he calls the “art machine” where one can watch him develop new creations.

After David offered free signs for essential workers, he was asked by a nurse to make the sign below. She insisted on paying him but he refused. Minutes later . . . he began receiving payment for these signs from out of the blue! Strangers, neighbors and friends who saw his work on Facebook reached out and sent money to help David make even more art to comfort and inspire. He now has several commissions queued up! You can contact him at davidgerbstadt@gmail.com.

If you are a fan of John Krasinski (Jim from “The Office”), you probably already know about his amazing web series, “Some Good News,” an idea we definitely need these days. There are several episodes including wonderful cameos from Steve Carrel, the cast of Hamilton and more.

So That I May Be Reasonably Happy

Many of us are familiar with The Serenity Prayer:

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

the Courage to change the things I can,

and the Wisdom to know the difference.

 

This reflection is full of Buddhist philosophy, highlighting the three poisons that keep us trapped in suffering – grasping, aversion and delusion. It is with acceptance, agency and deep discernment that we find our way to compassion and peace.

But did you know The Serenity Prayer has a second paragraph? Here is one version,

Living one day at a time;

Enjoying one moment at a time;

Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace;

Taking this world as it is,

Not as I would have it;

Trusting that the Universe will make all things right,

If I surrender to its will;

So that I may be reasonably happy in this life.

 

I’ve spent much of my life caught up in duality. Either I was happy or I was sad. Relaxed or stressed. Frustrated or at peace. If I was 60% joyful and 40% insecure, I rounded up to all joyful. Or vice versa. This dualistic view of the world doesn’t leave much room for the concept of “reasonably happy”. It is reinforced by our questions when we greet each other, “How are you?” Usually, the asker is looking for a simple one word or one sentence answer. Our experience is always more complicated than that. And in challenging times, it may be difficult to move our level of happiness above the threshold for expression. Especially if that is the goal. As Ajahn Brahm says in the video below, perhaps the task is “to be happy being sad.”

I hope you’ll take this post as an invitation to be Reasonably Happy today! Try out the meditation below to cultivate and harness the joy that lives inside you,

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Join Center For Self-Care online every Monday at 7:15pm EDT and Friday at 3pm EDT for Simply Meditation and Everyday Mindfulness. These drop-in workshops are full of teaching, practice and discussion to support you in your own journey (advance registration required).

Or check out Conversations on the Porch, a virtual discussion for men beginning at 7:30pm on Thursday, April 30.

Conversations on the Porch invites you into a new way of being and connecting. This is a safe, comfortable atmosphere to join together and experience authentic male friendship. Each gathering begins with a guided mindfulness meditation followed by a short teaching. Participants explore and write about their own experience and then share a story with the group. This invites us to step out of our small, isolated sense of self to rediscover a universal connection that has been there all along.

Empty Mind or Open Mind?

“The point of meditation is not to perfect yourself but to improve your capacity to love.”
– Jack Kornfield

“Familiarity leads to wisdom.” -Buddha

“The best way out is always through.” -Robert Frost

This is the first in a series called “Meditations on Meditation.” They are intended to help beginning and experienced meditators consider their intentions and motivations as they walk a mindful path.

When I began to meditate, I thought of it as a new tool to help me figure things out, to fix or eliminate whatever was bothering me. I had all of these questions, “Why am I feeling so frustrated?”, “What am I going to do with the rest of my life?”, “Am I past my prime?” I figured that as I became more focused, I would answer these questions and move on. I would literally meditate my worries away. But that’s not what happened. Thankfully, by sticking with it, I learned that this practice is not yet another self-improvement project but a way of living and thinking. The questions didn’t get answered but I was able to reflect on them without needing to figure them out.

This common graphic can easily be misunderstood as suggesting mindfulness is about blocking out everything that isn’t happening right in front of your eyes. As it turns out, our thoughts ARE in the present moment. Sure, we might ruminate on regrets of the past or opportunities in the future. That’s okay! What is most important is how we relate to them.

Should I “empty” my mind or be with what is?

Many beginning meditators come to Center For Self-Care feeling overwhelmed or at their wits’ end. Others have a basic familiarity and want to learn more. Either way, there are some common pitfalls that can make the benefits of meditation elusive. It is worth considering what the “point” of meditation is. In the early days, I’ll hear complaints like “I can’t stop thinking,” “This is just making me more frustrated,” or “I’m afraid I’m doing it wrong.” If you are thinking these thoughts, you are probably doing it right!

For me, the point of meditation is not to empty one’s mind or reach enlightenment, or even become more focused and productive. It’s about feeling what we are feeling while we are feeling it. It’s about being aware of what’s happening in this moment and relating to it with kindness. Ultimately, this allows us to respond thoughtfully instead of reacting habitually to whatever arises. The good news: relaxation, stillness, clarity and happiness are wonderful byproducts of intentional and consistent practice

Below, I’ve listed some of the motivations our clients have shared as they come to meditation. Take a look at the right column to consider a different way to approach these questions. Allow yourself to rest in these questions without needing to answer them or get them right.

If you’re hoping for this . . .	. . . try this out instead
I want to feel relaxed I want to empty my mind I want to figure it out I want to get it right I want to be happy	Can I pay curious attention? Can I let thoughts come?  Can I become intimate and familiar? Can I just put my body there?  Can I cultivate resilience?

This work takes practice. Consider three components of a vibrant mindfulness practice,

• Regular Meditation
  • Try 7 Mindful Minutes or Meditation Challenge or visit us on iTunes or Insight Timer
• Supportive Community
  • Join us every Monday at 7:15pm for Simply Meditation in Devon, PA
• Time for Intensive Exploration
  • We offer one-on-one training or try out our retreats including Meditations on a Meaningful Life: A Retreat about Aging and Change this April 17-19 near Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania

Give the Gift of Meditation For The New Year

Would you or your loved one like to …

… be more patient and relaxed?
… be less reactive and stressed?
… be more present and engaged?

Give the gift of Meditation this holiday season.

Marc Balcer, Josh Gansky and Center For Self-Care have been teaching mindfulness meditation with a special focus on men, middle age and the workplace for nearly a decade. We help people create space in their experience to respond thoughtfully instead of react habitually. Many see improvements in sleep, focus and relationships. 

Get started today with our Jumpstart Package, three customized 30-minute online or in-person meditation training sessions for just $150. Introductory 75-minute session for $125 and a 5-session Mindful Tools for Stress Management for $495 are also available.

These time-tested practices can help let go of:
• grudges
• the need to be right
• exhaustion as a status symbol
• unreasonable expectations

Visit tiny.cc/C4SC to purchase a package today.

Meditation For Beginners: Loving-Kindness

“Repetition of simplicity leads to insight.” – David Nichtern

This winter, Center For Self-Care, in conjunction with Balanced For Life Yoga Therapy, offers four stand-alone beginner’s meditation workshops in Wayne, Pennsylvania. The series is called “Cultivating The Heart.” Each week, two meditations are offered, one from the tradition of insight meditation and one from the tradition of mindfulness meditation. We’d love you to join us. But if you can’t, you can find resources and recordings to try this out yourself at home.

We began our second session with a simple practice from Jonathan Foust called, “Moving From Thought to Sensation.” We spend so much of our days analyzing, judging and comparing. This important function kept our ancestors alive 20,000 years ago when they were being chased by wild animals. It also serves a critical role in advances in the field of science, technology and medicine. But sometimes, a different state of mind is called for. A state where we use our sense to arrive in the present moment.

Next, we explored the practice of loving-kindness. In practice, we bring images to mind and offer our wishes of kindness to an expanding circle of beings. We start simply, with ourselves and a being for whom our love and care comes easily. We continue with a benefactor, a neighbor, friend or a neutral person, before arriving at a person who may be more difficult, someone who has caused us challenge or suffering. Through this practice, we explore an opening of our heart. This practice is for you. The beings you bring to mind needn’t know you have offered these wishes. It may be that loving-kindness to others doesn’t come easily and in that case, you might offer it to yourself. Just like training a puppy, our task is to pause, reset and begin again. The traditional phrases are May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you be safe. May you live with ease but you may create your own phrases, just like I have in the Loving-kindness Practice below.

May you be seen. May you be comforted. May you be loved.

Loving-kindness takes practice. At first you might find it mechanical. Stay with it. It may transition to feeling a bit awkward and then to natural and organic!

As part of our beginner’s work, we bring compassion and loving-kindness because it isn’t easy. We will find our human system of judging and comparing jumps at the chance to keep you from pausing to open to a broader awareness. We described the practice of mindfulness as encompassing three steps:

Catch Yourself

Be Gentle

Begin Again

One way to support this is through a practice called “Name it to Tame It.” In this practice, we note or name what arises in our mind, whether it be a thought, memory, emotion or felt sensation. It can be as simple as saying, “Thinking, Thinking” and then returning to the anchor of our breath. If you’ve ever been upset and said aloud, “I’m just really frustrated right now!” you may have experienced a feeling of relief.

Author and Doctor Dan Siegel has shared research on the impact of naming our states on settling our mind. In this process, our emotional system, which senses threats for us and warns our body that something is amiss. But when we involve our thinking brain, the prefrontal cortex, we are able to soothe emotions through an integrated connection of neurons and synapses that send messages to our emotional system that the perceived threat is not quite so urgent and doesn’t require a reactive response. It is best to practice this in a quiet, calm space then use this practice to enter the world with an approach of thoughtful responses instead of habitual reactions.

Join us on Thursday, March 7 at 6:30pm for our next session of Meditation for Beginners, Cultivating the Heart. Our focus with be Joy.

Want more? Register today for A Mindful Pause: Finding Refuge and Peace in a Busy Life on Sunday, April 28 at Bryn Mawr College. Choose from a morning or full-day option. This offering is by donation and is suitable to all levels of experience including brand-new beginners.

The recording below is the full workshop from a previous Meditation for Beginners class,

“The practice is not about mastery. It is about trying.” – Ethan Nichtern (David’s son)

Cover art from the “Be Kind” series. Please support the artist, David Gerbstadt, by visiting his Facebook or GoFundMe page and getting some for yourself. 

Meditation For Beginners: Compassion

This winter, Center For Self-Care, in conjunction with Balanced For Life Yoga Therapy, offers four beginner’s meditation workshops in Wayne, Pennsylvania. The series is called “Cultivating The Heart.” The title recognizes the practice of mindfulness and meditation as a process. There is no sudden awakening or enlightenment. Instead, by gently tending the garden of our mind and heart, we set an intention that inclines us toward kindness and compassion. It just takes regular practice. We’d love you to join us. But if you can’t, you can find resources and recordings to try this out yourself at home.

Grant yourself a moment of peace,
and you will understand
how foolishly you have scurried about.

Learn to be silent,
and you will notice that
you have talked too much.

Be kind,
and you will realize that
your judgment of others was too severe.

-from The Tao of Wealth

We spend so much of our days analyzing, judging and comparing. This important function kept our ancestors alive 20,000 years ago when they were being chased by wild animals. It also serves a critical role in advances in the field of science, technology and medicine. But sometimes, a different state of mind is called for. A state where we use our sense to arrive in the present moment. That’s what meditation and mindfulness can offer.

The session was structured to engage our minds through brief talks, experiential practice and small-group discussion. These steps reinforce each other and deepen our understanding. Two disciplines we worked with were Mindfulness and Insight Meditation. In Mindfulness Meditation, we bring a non judging awareness to our experience using our senses and mind states as an anchor when we become distracted. Insight Meditation sits right next to Mindfulness, as it brings in the qualities of compassion and kindness.

At its simplest, meditation is a practice of returning. We find ourselves lost in thought, distracted by sounds or memories or just simply carried away. I offered the following aspirations for a practice of meditation and a practice of living:

Catch Yourself

Be Gentle

Begin Again

Try the focused breathing practice below to get a sense of it. Just like training a puppy, our task is to pause, reset and begin again.

Meditation a simple practice but it sure isn’t easy. It’s radical because our evolutionary biology is based on avoiding pain and seeking pleasure instead of allowing our experience to unfold. Our culture reinforces that by emphasizing comfort and convenience over actually feeling what we are feeling when we are feeling it.

Just as we go to the gym to build physical strength, we practice in meditation to build mental strength. And it ain’t easy. It’s basically “failing practice,” right? We intentionally sit and allow ourselves to become distracted so that we can practice returning. So it will require one more thing: compassion. Without compassion, we may turn this work into a grim duty, a mechanical act that mimics all the other things we are trying to perfect about our life despite the utter impossibility of arriving at that state.

We worked with a traditional compassion practice that you can try out yourself. In this practice, we combine an image, a wish and repeated phrases to soften and open our heart to a deep compassion for ourselves and others. As we repeat these phrases silently, we slowly expand the circle of our care to include others, even all beings.

Join us on Thursday, February 28 at 6:30pm for our next session of Meditation for Beginners, Cultivating the Heart. Our focus with be Lovingkindness.

Want more? Register today for A Mindful Pause: Finding Refuge and Peace in a Busy Life on Sunday, April 28 at Bryn Mawr College. Choose from a morning or full-day option. This offering is by donation and is suitable to all levels of experience including brand-new beginners.

The recording below is the full workshop from a previous Meditation for Beginners class,

The Power of a Question

What are you most excited about in your life right now?  This is a question I often ask when I meet someone for the first time. It usually comes as a surprise. Most of us have well-practiced monologues for that first impression, “I work at such and such company” or “I have such and such people in my family.” I marvel at the change in body language and long pause that usually accompanies the response to “What are you most excited about?” Questions such as these invite a different kind of conversation.

Talking about students, the poet David Whyte has said, “If you construct a question that is beautiful, it is something that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.” Beautiful questions challenge us to shift out of the mindset of problem-solving, thinking, comparing and judging that characterizes most of our everyday experience. We often have a narrative of “how things are” that may have gone unquestioned for quite some time. We might find responding to such questions difficult because they remind us of what’s not quite right yet. But it also opens the possibility for growth, meaning and understanding.

A perfect example of how questions open our minds and hearts comes from StoryCorps, whose mission is “to preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world.” You may have heard these stories on National Public Radio. Check out this list of list of wonderful questions for just about any questions that are sure to get right to the heart of the matter in almost any situation.

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Here are just a few of the qualities that inquiry and questions can generate:

• Reframing – Questions allow us look at our experience from a different angle. Approaching an issue with a different kind of question shifts our perception and our attitude.
• Softening – They can bring a compassion, an appreciation and even a forgiveness for difficulty, confusion and uncertainty we face.
• Opening – How many ways could I describe the situation? What are the new ways?
• Clarifying – What is really happening right now? Can I be with it? What is important to me? What will I do next?
• Identifying habit patterns that aren’t supportive of wholehearted living, happiness and resilience. We begin to recognize our reactivity and how it may harm us.
• Connection with our passion, our values, and our heart to create purpose and meaning.

At its heart, the practice of mindfulness asks two questions, “What is happening?” and “Can I be with it?” These two questions represent the two wings of the metaphorical bird. Wisdom to see clearly with awareness and compassion to nonjudgmentally be with our experience. In a sense, these are the questions that characterize the experience of mindfulness. As we practice mindfulness, we step out of the story we’ve created in our minds and into the genuine experience of being alive, with its joy, its sorrow, its uncertainty, its faith.

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If you can’t make our Mindful Problem Solving workshop on January 27, I welcome you to explore questions further by listening to Inquiry as Mindfulness Practice here or via iTunes, Soundcloud or Stitcher.

This episode includes a meditative inquiry practice called The Five Problem Solving Questions which I think you’ll enjoy experimenting with. You also might enjoy a visit to jonathanfoust.com or focusing.com to learn more about the tools of meditative inquiry.

How To Ask A Beautiful Question

For me, the guiding question “Does it have heart?” is most resonant of the beautiful questions. I can’t remember the last time my to-do list had fewer than 15 things I just needed to do ASAP. They won’t all get done. There are different ways to prioritize them: easiest to hardest, smallest to biggest, etc. But the method that most enlivens me is asking “Does it have heart?” to guide my next act. I must admit, this occasionally leads to sticky situations including unanswered emails or too much dirty laundry. But when the question reminds me to put away the cell phone and connect more deeply with my family, it serves me well.

David Whyte writes (lightly paraphrased), “if we are able to construct a question that is beautiful, it will stay with us for the rest of our lives.” Deep and open-ended questions lead us to connect with that which gives us meaning and purpose. Whyte has compiled a list of 10 Questions That Have No Right To Go Away. They include:

What can I be wholehearted about? Am I harvesting this year’s season of my life? Can I be quiet, even inside? Am I too inflexible in my relationship to time? How can I drink from the deep well of things as they are? Can I live a courageous life?

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On December 2, Your Mindful Coach, in cooperation with Center for Self-Care, hosted Asking The Beautiful Questions: A Mindfulness Workshop. The retreat was inspired by the work of Jonathan Foust and other teachers.

The questions we ask harness “the one who knows“, that unconditioned self that is absolute inside of each of us. Foust describes the dance of intuition  between “who you are, fully human, full of doubts and fears and anxiety and pettiness and need to control; and who you are free of anxiety, who you are free of fear.”

To find this place, we can begin with empowering questions. Questions that shift our mindset and open us to possibility. We began with the four questions as described by Foust:

• What do you love about this life?
• What gives you energy?
• What about this life enlivens you?
• What would happen if you did more of that?

Another approach is to engage with our lived experience. Noticing and allowing what is arising and passing. One way to practice is with this guided meditation from Josh:

Asking open-ended questions can support us in clarifying our next steps. Accessing our passions, our motivations and our heart. Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, offers a strategy based on questions for accomplishing what we want to do. Too often, we set goals without clear plans for achieving them. We get blocked by obstacles or procrastinate. Ferriss turns the goal setting process on its head by offering Fear Setting.

Here are Tim’s questions when faced with a problem, issue, situation or upcoming decision:

Define → What’s the worst thing that could happen?
Prevent → What could you do to prevent this from happening?
Repair → What could you do to correct it if and when it happens?

What might the benefits of an attempt or a partial success be?

If I avoid this action or decision & decisions like it, what will my life look like in 6, 12, 36 months?

The point is not to masterfully and fully answer these questions but instead to see what arises. When I last undertook this exercise, I used an example of a business opportunity I’m pursuing. Asking “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” elicited the response, “It might not work” and “I could be embarrassed“. As I felt into those worst cases, I felt a softening and a loosening because those weren’t actually all that bad when I investigated them. I did, however, consider the “repair” question to better plan for an adverse outcome and how I would respond.

In the talk below, Foust describes the non-dual, non-conceptual mindstates that become accessible to us as we come to presence and ask these beautiful questions. We move out of our “doing” and spend more time “being.” For many of us, the tasks of our work require judging, analyzing, comparing, debating. But that isn’t always the best way to discover peace and equanimity.

I have found questions to be helpful in the heat of the moment as well. When I am under stress and feel like shouting, screaming, arguing or even running away, I use the following questions to reset, pause and approach with a thoughtful response:

What am I doing?
Is it right?
What will I do next?

There are countless questions that open our mind. What resonates for you? What will you do next?

 

 

The Most Important Job

Meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg declares, “They say that the healing is in the returning. Not in never having wandered to begin with.”

The most important job is to begin again.

In mindfulness meditation, a core practice is returning your attention when it becomes lost. You may find yourself lost in thought. And that is okay. The point isn’t to perfect your meditation or empty your mind. Instead, it is to return over and over, no matter how far your mind has traveled or how long it has wandered from the present moment. We use our breath, our body, our senses to gently guide us back to now, the only moment that there really is.

Its simple but not easy. I regularly find myself in meditation ruts, barely making it into the chair each day. Sitting for a few minutes and then bailing out. At these times, I remind myself to begin again simply. I abandon the elaborate practices I’ve been forcing myself to do and move to a single instruction: “Just put your body there.” I may find myself sitting in a car, lying in bed or walking to class. It doesn’t have to be perfect. I just begin again.

Science tells us that meditation cultivates brain neuroplasticity. We can literally rewire our brain through intentional practice. Building new pathways in our brain that support positive habits. Jonathan Foust writes, “The neurons that fire together wire together.” This is one reason why consistent practice is so important. We are literally restructuring our brain.

Beginning again doesn’t just apply to meditation. The same thing is true in life. Routines and habits become ingrained and unconscious. But you can “teach an old dog new tricks.” Contrary to previous understandings, we now know that the brain is constantly growing and changing.

How do we begin again? Start before you’re ready. Start now, while you are reading this sentence. Begin again. Allow yourself to breath deeply. Lower your standards and let go of expectations. After all, the practice is in returning. So naturally, any new plan, system or resolution is going to run into trouble. The work will be to return, adjust, to begin again. This form of beginning again is a radical type of self-care. Recognizing our human fallibility and resetting our course.

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It seems a good time to consider beginning again as the weather starts to change and students return to school. For me, one new beginning is the launch of a business partnership, Center For Self-Care. We begin next week with the formal announcement and new programming focused on men and dads. After several years practicing and teaching, now is a perfect time to begin again by investigating my passion, my experience and my calling. The experience of being a man has resonated for me and deepened my practice as I’ve joined in fellowship with groups of men this summer. I look forward to sharing many wonderful stories with you.