My friend was confused and frustrated that her child’s experience of camp, with all its remarkable activities, gorgeous setting, and kind people, could indeed be so negative. But, alas, such was the report coming from Vermont. 

This past summer, I heard many similar reports from parents. Their kids also came home from camp early or seriously considered it, and struggled with anxiety, relational difficulties, and other emotional issues. I checked in with the director of a popular summer camp, and she confirmed that at her camp, and many other camps, more kids this summer left or talked about leaving than she’d seen in her decades as a camp director.  

Exodus of the Uncomfortable

From my unscientific research, it seemed that children wanted to leave because they felt too anxious, annoyed, excluded, emotionally bullied, and sad (formerly called homesick). Children described an overall difficulty getting along with cabin mates, navigating social situations, adjusting to other people’s wants and needs, and figuring things out without their parents’ help.  

One 10-year-old girl, in explaining why she wanted to come home, described her bunk mate who twice told her that she shouldn’t wear “that” shirt with “those” shorts.  Another described the  rejection she felt when she was excluded from swinging on a hammock with other girls. For one tween, it was the overwhelming annoyance of a girl continually sitting on her bed, without asking. At the end of the day, the experience of summer camp was just too difficult to manage, and maybe more to the point, not something that should have to be managed.  

The experiences these children described can most certainly be challenging and painful, and it’s hard to live (often for the first time) in close quarters with other kids who aren’t family, and who are also navigating the turbulent social landscape of building identity and independence. Learning how to speak up for yourself, draw boundaries, and ask for what you want and need are no small tasks (at any age). Still, it behooves us to think more deeply about why these situations that used to be considered just regular life—the basic aggravations of living in a world that includes other people—have become so impossible and overwhelming for our children. Why do our kids seem less and less able to handle—for lack of a better term—life?  And indeed, according to a recent study published in Jama Pediatrics, children and teen depression and anxiety has increased over the last five years.  Furthermore, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently reported a startling statistic on teen suicide: Emergency room visits for attempted suicide among teenage girls were up 51.6 percent in the first months of 2021, as compared to 2019.  This is a real issue.article continues after advertisement

COVID and Modern Problems

Is there something about our parenting that contributes to our children’s lack of resilience and difficulty with accepting, compromising, and, most importantly, finding solutions in challenging and uncomfortable situations? And why does it sometimes seem that our children, who often are given so much more than we were given, appreciate and enjoy so much less? 

The reasons our children lack resilience and feel so overwhelmed by life are, of course, multiple and complex. So, too, the aspects of modern parenting that contribute to this troubling quandary are intricate and difficult to discern. The reality, however, is that our kids are growing up in a world filled with profound and scary problems—frightening realities that children of previous generations didn’t have to consider. Will there be a planet at all for them to live on? Will they get shot when they go to school? Will an unseeable virus from a monkey or pangolin, or created in a lab, somehow kill their family, or them?

When it comes to things to worry about, our world is overwhelming, and not just for kids, but for all of us. So, when we think about why the small situations of everyday life might feel overwhelming and unmanageable, we have to remember that our children are already filled to the brim (and overflowing) with scary stuff.  It may be that there’s just no more room for worry and anxiety, about anything.

In addition, for more than two years, we’ve been isolated because of COVID-19, living in our own private bubbles, separated from everyone but those closest to us, which means separated from other people’s differing ideas, preferences, and needs. During this time, when we’ve lost control over so much, we’ve also, in some ways, ended up with more control over our immediate environments. Our kids haven’t had to work things out with their peers, compromise, be resourceful, or navigate challenging situations. As a result, they’ve missed out on two important years of emotional and social development, and the opportunity to build critical skills for living in their community.article continues after advertisement

Screened In

In addition to the pandemic, there’s the profound and inescapable issue of what screens and social media are doing to our children’s emotional resilience and ability to cope with real life (or, what they now call “RL”). While our screens have the capacity to connect us, they also isolate us, leaving each of us in our own individualized universe. Our screen is a place where we can hide, surround ourselves with our personal preferences and opinions, and minimize contact with any kind of other with whom we might disagree.  Our screen is a world in which we are the master, and we rarely, if ever, have to put up with anything we don’t approve of or want.

Other people—their behavior and choices—don’t need to bother us inside our self-designed universe. If they do, we can usually just delete them (which we can’t do as easily in RL). Our screens present an image of reality that isn’t real, a shiny, airbrushed image that’s absent two of the most reliable aspects of reality: difficulty and discomfort. Sadly, we’ve come to expect the real world to be like our screen world, and yet it isn’t.

Problems in Parenting?

This seeming diminishment in emotional resilience may also be tied to the increasing phenomenon of helicopter parenting—namely, overly involved and controlling parents who swoop in to take care of every problem their children might have, but without allowing their children to solve issues for themselves. In what’s usually an effort to be helpful and to protect their children from pain, such parents do their kids a disservice, depriving them of the opportunity to be resourceful and to learn how to manage life for themselves. Such kids can end up helpless, without the emotional and mental skills to work with other people and to manage the challenges of regular life.article continues after advertisement

Yet another contributing factor in camp exodus is our culture’s prevailing attitude that everything should be easy and comfortable—always. Our culture conditions us to believe that life should be how we want it to be, that we shouldn’t have to struggle, and that our children shouldn’t have to, either; we can’t bear our children’s discomfort and we’re teaching them that they can’t and shouldn’t have to bear it, either. 

Comfortable Expectations

We no longer view difficulty and discomfort as normal parts of life that offer opportunities for growth. If life is uncomfortable, something—or someone—must be changed to correct the situation, immediately.

I’ve written a lot about the importance of empathy and compassion in parenting, for both our children and ourselves. The essence of well-being is the ability to care about and be kind to our own experience—there’s nothing I believe more firmly. And yet, for the first time ever, I’m questioning whether our generation may have swung too far from previous generations, when “suck it up” was the only advice for kids who found themselves in a hard situation.  While a dismissive admonishment to “suck it up” doesn’t help children to develop an emotionally healthy internal life, treating every irritation and struggle as something that’s monumental, shouldn’t exist, and must immediately be fixed–might not be the right solution either. Perhaps the work, for now, is in parents learning to tolerate our children’s discomfort—and our own as well.

Difficulty and discomfort build resilience and character; we don’t do our kids any favors when we treat these normal parts of life as the enemy and something that must be  eliminated. In fact, when we do, we create people who are dissatisfied and unhappy, and ultimately, are unable to deal with real life.  While it might not be easy (which might be a good thing), we can do better for our kids, and ourselves.

The post What’s Happened to Emotional Resilience? appeared first on Nancy Colier.

But over time, I realized that despite all the thinking humanly possi­ble, there were important questions in my life that I couldn’t know and couldn’t solve, not yet anyway. This truth was unavoidable and irrefut­able. I had to admit and accept that, with all my pseudo-knowing, my proposed and attempted solutions, I was still not any better off. Any knowing I had thought myself into was illusory. The more I tried to know, the more I felt like I didn’t know. On the other side of that admission and acceptance however, I found something unexpected…utter relief.

We live in an age of reason and science. We worship information, research, and logic so much that we named our era for it: the age of information. To reason is to think, to use the rational mind, understand, and make sense of our world. Over time, we’ve put more and more eggs in the reasoning basket, betting on thinking to save the day. The thinking mind is the road to salvation. At this moment in history, we’ve lost interest and, to some degree, respect, for all the other ways of knowing: bodily, intuitively, experientially, and so forth—all the ways we can know other than through thinking and logic.

When I present material as a public speaker, despite three decades of professional experience with human beings and their thoughts and emotions, I am almost always asked what MRI studies or research I can offer to support my observations on human behavior. Reason and scientific proof have been anointed as our kings. Thinking, we believe, will solve whatever questions and challenges life presents. And, with technology exploding, our faith in and reverence for thinking are only intensifying.

Living in the Question

“The only true wisdom is in knowing we know nothing,” said Socrates. A lot has changed in the 2,500 years since Socrates uttered those words. Our society now seems to disagree with the great philoso­pher on the issue of knowing. Here, in the 21st century AD, we believe that we should and can know everything. Our unceasing need to know the answers along with our unwillingness to accept the unknown sit at the root of our excessive thinking, and our anxiety.

Mystery, in our society, is not a real thing…it’s a flaky or woowoo thing. Not knowing the answer is not an acceptable answer. We’re taught from the time we’re born that knowing is good—we are good, worthy, if we have the answers. “You should know better” is what we hear when we’re young and have done something wrong. We feel shame and inadequacy when we don’t have the answers: It makes us feel weak and defective, vulnerable and lost. Not knowing is a form of failure.

At the same time, knowing feels safe; it feels like we’re in control. With the answers in place, we don’t have to face the impermanence that underpins our life, the reality that everything is constantly changing, whether we like it or not. We don’t have to feel how out of control we really are as human beings on this mortal and mysterious journey. As a result, we do a lot of faking it, “impostering,” when it comes to knowing. Simultaneously, we rush to answers that aren’t true or sustainable. We’ll do anything, essentially, to not reside in the unknown.

But despite what we’re conditioned to believe, life is forever deposit­ing us in situations where we cannot know and don’t have access to the answers we want, don’t know the way forward, to say nothing of the larger not knowing—what we’re all doing here, existing, in the first place. Given the frequency with which the experience of not knowing or at least not yet knowing shows up in life, we would be wise to learn how to inhabit it and, even better, to do so with a sense of acceptance and relaxation rather than judgment and fear.

It may feel unfamiliar, unwise, and even dangerous to sit with a chal­lenging, unresolved situation, to not know what it means, what we need to do about it, or how to get out of it. Uncomfortable though it may be however, it behooves us to learn how to not know, to feel what it’s like in the not knowing, and to await more clarity and the arrival of a path through. Living in the question, if we can drop our judgments about it, can become its very own place to reside. With practice, we can learn to actually relax with not having the answer.

When we offer ourselves permission to not know, we allow life to reveal what it wants to reveal, in its own time—without forcing it. The questions then, remarkably, become their own destinations. What’s more, we find that not knowing is a place that, if we have the courage to trust it, can deliver deeper and wiser solutions, real solutions, paths forward that are more reliable than anything we can mentally muscle our way into knowing.

Surrendering to living in the questions feels like dropping through a trap door. Suddenly we are deposited into the present moment; we have permission to be here, to experience what life is like—now. We have permission to get interested in the experience of this reality and allow the answers to reveal themselves on their own timeline. Just for now, we don’t have to do it all ourselves, don’t have to push our way through with our mind, as we’ve been taught. Relaxing into the questions, unexpectedly, allows us to join a larger unfolding, a process bigger than ourselves, and thankfully, one in which we don’t have to be respon­sible for controlling our life at every turn. At last, it isn’t up to only us. Living in the questions, no matter how uncomfortable it might feel, is living in the truth, which, once we get the hang of it, contains its own safety and trustworthiness. The safety we experience in the truth, however, is not because we have all the answers or because the truth is comfortable (the usual markers of safety), but rather because the truth is inarguable…because the truth is what is. Surrendering to not knowing means planting our feet in moving ground and accepting that we’re in a process without a known outcome and that the process is the destination for now.

The post How to Relax When You Don’t Have the Answers appeared first on Nancy Colier.

Why we get stuck in negative thinking loops

Thinking gives us a sense of agency, makes us feel less vulnerable and afraid, less at the mercy of change and what we can’t control. We don’t know another way, don’t know how to let go of what we see as our lifeboat. We are so heavily invested and reliant upon thinking as the way to keep ourselves safe that we don’t stop for long enough to get a glimpse of a way of living that doesn’t necessitate constant thinking.

We hold the deep conviction that thinking will make whatever we’re thinking about better. It’s ingrained in us from the time we’re born: Thinking is the solution—to every problem and non-problem. But what if it’s not? What if the premise at the center of everything we believe and do is faulty? What if thinking, the way we do it, is actually the problem, not the solution?

People often ask me if it’s possible to recover from chronic overthinking. The answer is yes, it’s possible. But in order to recover, you have to be ready to fall out of love with your thoughts and with your thinking process. You have to stop believing that your thoughts are the most important thing on Earth and, of course, the absolute truth.

Furthermore, you have to hit rock bottom—your bottom. You have to be sick and tired of being sick and tired, anxious, frightened, stressed, distracted, unhappy, and all the rest of the states of mind that your thoughts inflict upon you. In short, you have to get fed up with your thinking process and what the voice in your head is shouting or whispering at you. You have to find a new way of responding to your thoughts when they arise and a new way of thinking about thinking.

How to stop overthinking

The first step in breaking free from overthinking is making a commitment to listen to your own mind. In other words, to make the leap from being the one doing the thinking, the thinker, to the one the thoughts are talking to, the listener (or, if you choose, non-listener). When you’re caught in a thought loop of any kind, what you’ve lost is space … the space between the one listening to the thoughts and the thoughts themselves. When you’re caught, your thoughts don’t appear separate from who you are. Thoughts are you, and you are thoughts.

But the moment you recognize what’s happening inside your mind is the moment you start to feel relief. Acknowledging the presence of thoughts, ironically, allows you to feel disentangled from the thoughts and the whole thought tsunami. With awareness and acknowledgment, suddenly, there’s a separate shore from which to observe the thoughts without being drowned by them.

It is helpful in this acknowledgment, too, to give a name to your negative thinker or thinkers. When you label this voice of negativity inside you, it lightens and further separates you from the negative messages. Naming creates space.

You can use different names, too: one for your catastrophizer, the one who reminds you of everything that could (and will) go wrong (I call her Aunt Mathilda); one for your self-critic, the one who reminds you of everything wrong with you; one for your grievance keeper, who reminds you of every injustice anyone has ever done to you, right down to how the bus purposefully splashed you this morning. If you like, you can match the kind of thoughts to the names of people you’ve known who remind you of such sentiments. What’s paramount is that when the thoughts arise, you take a moment to acknowledge the voice with its proper name: Oh look, it’s Aunt Mathilda, here to tell me that I’m going to fail and that it will all end in disaster. Thank you for sharing, Mathilda. Now you can go!

When you recognize that the negative thoughts have (or are trying to) seize your current reality and that your present moment is being injected with this toxic content, you can name this truth as well. You might take a moment to pause and consciously offer yourself a dose of compassion right there, at the center of the storm. You can acknowledge that you are really trapped in the thoughts, down the rabbit hole, and suffering, wishing you could get out but not knowing how to do it. This compassionate pause, stepping back and acknowledging your own experience at that moment, is, in fact, critical in the process of breaking free from your self-inflicted unkindness.

The most important discovery in freeing yourself from excessive thinking is recognizing that your thoughts are not you. You, and all of us, have what is essentially an out-of-order computer firing all day and all night inside your head. Sometimes, that out-of-order computer tells you interesting things or maybe helps you put together a grocery list, but for much of the time, it’s spewing out contents that are not particularly helpful and often harmful to you. That said, it behooves all of us to expand our awareness when it comes to our own thinking and start deciding for ourselves which thoughts we want to engage with and how we want to be treated inside our own minds.

The post Putting the Brakes on Overthinking appeared first on Nancy Colier.

Before the pandemic, Vicki used to go out with people all the time—for meals, drinks, coffees, whatever was suggested.  If somebody invited her, she just said yes. She never stopped to ask herself if she wanted to go, she just went because “it’s what you did.”  Yes was a habit; more socializing meant she was living a better, more exciting life.  But since the pandemic, since stepping off the social treadmill, Vicki’s changed.

Throughout this shutdown, so many of us have realized that a lot of what we were doing pre-Covid, how we filled our time, was simply because we’d been conditioned to do it that way, because we were following social norms that told us we should live that way, and everyone else was living that way.  Pre-pandemic, we were busy doing a lot of things because it’s just what we did, but not necessarily because it’s what we wanted to do, or for that matter, what actually made us feel well.

The cultural narrative running right now is that we all can’t wait to get back to our busy social lives, to fill up our social calendars.  But in fact, many people, maybe you included, feel something very different; many report being surprised by how much they’ve enjoyed not having to socialize, not being on the go all the time, and not doing everything that might potentially be interesting—getting off the doing horse.

When what you should do is off the table because it’s no longer possible, often, you discover something truly remarkable, namely, what you want to do.  What many people have realized over this time is that what they want to do is a whole lot less than what they were doing pre-pandemic.  It may have felt like a great relief to not have to run around and see everyone, to get to have time to yourself, to pay attention to your own wants and needs.  If so, you’re more normal than you think.

This is one of the true silver linings in this pandemic. We’ve become more aware of what’s true for us, and how we actually want and like to spend our time.  This time off the grid has made it clear that our life would look a whole lot different if we were given (or gave ourselves) permission to consult our own gut for how we want to spend our time and with whom, as opposed to just following the rules, acting from conditioning, and doing what we think is normal.

You may also feel a sense of dread in returning to your social calendar.  There may be anxiety around getting back to regular social interacting, fear that you no longer know how to be with other people, what to say or how to behave.  Or, that you won’t be able to bear small talk anymore.  As if the time away has rendered you socially disabled.  This, too, is normal.  You’ve gone into your cave and it can feel hard to come back out.  You may like it there.  Rest assured, your social skills will return and you will remember how to talk to people.  As you get back into the world, it will feel less daunting and laborious.  And yet, as it gets easier and more second nature, what’s important is that you stay awake to how much socializing, what sorts of it, and with whom you actually want in your life.  As getting together with other people becomes more routine, don’t lose the precious question that’s in front of you right now: How do you actually want to do this thing we call socializing?

As you prepare to launch back into the world, don’t squander the glorious silver lining this pandemic has offered.  Don’t just mindlessly throw yourself back into the same life you were living before Covid, before you were given this profound opportunity to stop and see what kind of life you really want.  If you choose to get back on the social hamster wheel, the doing treadmill, do it mindfully, because you want to do it.  In this moment, you are standing at a crossroads, choose wisely how you want to proceed.  You are about to start building new habits so let them be habits you want to create.

You’ve discovered how you want to spend your time, who you want to see, and how often.  Consider how much should you want in your calendar, and how much want; perhaps the balance has shifted.  Contemplate what you’ve learned about your own attention and whether you are someone you want to spend time with going forward.  Hold onto this newfound reverence for your own company, and heed it.  Put time with yourself in your calendar as you reenter your social world.

The post Has the Pandemic Changed Your Desire to Socialize? appeared first on Nancy Colier.

Have you ever noticed how frequently your mind returns to problems and situations that cause you pain, and insists on rehashing what’s wrong? It’s a strange phenomenon really, our addiction to thinking about problems. Even when we don’t want to think about what’s bothering us, still, we keep thinking about it. Why do we do this, and how can we break this thinking addiction?

We return to painful situations because, at the root, we believe that more thinking (about our problem), will fix it. We imagine that every problem can be figured out with more thinking. We are conditioned from the time we’re born to trust that thinking is the solution to everything that ails us. And so, painful though it may be, we keep thinking over the same issues, believing that we can think up a way to make the problem not a problem. Ultimately, we are trying to make ourselves feel better, but the solution we have come up with — more thinking — actually makes us feel worse.

Simultaneously, we keep rehashing our problems because it feels like thinking about the situation is a way of empathizing with our pain. Going over the difficulty again and again is our attempt to offer ourselves compassion. We keep repeating (to ourselves), can you believe this, how could they do this, isn’t this crazy; we do this so that we can feel heard and known, even if it’s just inside our own head.

Furthermore, we keep returning to what hurts because if we let it go, stop thinking about it, then it’s as if we will be dis-honoring how much it hurts. To stop thinking about our problems would be (we imagine) to behave as if our pain doesn’t matter. In essence, to abandon ourselves. In this way, our obsessive thinking is an attempt to award our suffering with importance and care.

Finally, we are addicted to thinking about our problems because we are identified with our suffering. Who we are (or think we are) is a tapestry of what we’ve lived through, endured, and survived. We derive our identity, in large part, from what we suffer. That said, when we dive into what’s bothering us, what’s not okay, it feels like we’re coming home, returning to some fundamental aspect of ourselves. Rehashing our difficulties allows us to feel alive. We can feel our own existence, our self, when the mind is gnawing on a problem. There’s nothing in fact that makes us feel more here than when we have a problem to figure out.

How to Let Go of Thoughts on Repeat

So, with all these reasons to keep thinking about our problems, how then can we stop and unstick from these stickiest of all thoughts?

The first step in any change process is always the same: awareness. We can’t change anything if we’re not aware of it. So, we have to notice how and when we are yet again rehashing a problem or difficult situation. We have to become a witness to our own mind and see how it keeps drawing our attention back down the rabbit hole—into suffering.

Once we become aware, we must be able to be willing to consider the idea that we, as we are, cannot figure out this problem. And therefore, we have to give up the fantasy and delusion that more thinking about it will solve it and make us feel better. We have to accept that there is no diamond at the bottom of this rubble of thought, no magic bullet in this latest round of thinking that wasn’t there in the last nine thousand rounds. In essence, we have to give up the hope that more thinking will deliver us to peace. And instead, open to the possibility that the way to peace may well be in turning away from the problem and thinking less. Surrendering to not being able to figure it out rather than trying harder to figure it out, may indeed be our refuge.

Furthermore, in order to stop the constant ruminating on our pain, we need to remember that our pain comes with us, whether we are thinking about it or not. What we’ve suffered is woven into who we are; it’s part of us. We don’t need to keep thinking about our pain in order to make it matter, take care of it, or keep it with us. We don’t have to keep thinking our pain into existence in order for it to exist.

Just for today, try noticing your own thoughts, where your attention is going, and what tapes are playing in your mind. Become aware of when you are returning, yet again, to a problem you’ve visited many times before. Try noticing what returning to this problem does to your mood and how it makes you feel.

Consider this: Maybe you cannot figure out this problem, not in the way you normally try, not with more thinking about it. As an exercise, contemplate the possibility that the way to peace and feeling better might be something ultra-radical, like not thinking about it, like turning away from the problem and leaving it there—unfixed and un-figured-out. As crazy as that might sound, try out the reality that you simply cannot figure out this problem, not with what you know and who you are right now.

Just for today, instead of moving into the problem yet again, searching for that diamond in the rubble, do something revolutionary: Turn your attention away from the problem and back to your present moment. Opt out of what’s wrong and move toward what’s here now. With the simple intention to not do what you’ve always done, and therefore, not end up with the same result you’ve always ended up with, try out the reality that you simply cannot figure this out, that you have to leave it undone. So too, know that you will not find peace through more thinking. If you’re looking for peace, be willing to try a different route.

The post Why We Can’t Stop Thinking About the Same Problems appeared first on Nancy Colier.

After four years of going to bed with our stomachs in knots, hearts heavy and brains on fire, trying to make peace with yet another horrible thing, it will be a while before our shoulders fully drop and the knots in our stomachs unravel. It will take time to trust that the world might, at some point, be fundamentally OK.

At the same time, more than 73 million people chose to support our outgoing leader. This fact gives pause to the many others who cannot fathom that choice. And yet it happened, which leaves us with a difficult conundrum.

This conundrum is not a place to stop and get comfortable with a new kind of outrage, a new version of “what the hell is wrong with them?” If we use this conundrum as a doorway, not a destination, perhaps we can move the dialogue forward and create something that brings out our humanity once again.

In a country where the average American has to work more than a month to earn what the average CEO makes in an hour, there’s no doubt that our rage wasn’t born in 2016. But, even if this leader didn’t officially create the hatred and contempt that now pervades our society, he did create a system in which everyone feels the right to shout their opinions and disgust through a megaphone, to publicly point fingers at whomever they think is to blame for their discontent. This leader has empowered the mental garbage that floats through almost every human being’s mind and entitled it to an audience.

Over these last four years, there’s been no attempt whatsoever to rein in our grievances, to be kind or behave in any sort of civilized manner. The current leadership has modeled an attitude of bullying, blaming, and shaming, an attitude utterly devoid of empathy. A leader who feels perpetually persecuted and is always looking for someone to blame creates a sentiment that mirrors his own.

Many moons ago, there was a saying … if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Today, this saying might sound absurd, ignorant, and even dangerous to free speech. Most Americans believe that not nice words are important for creating change and making the world a better place. I agree; the idea that we would only speak if we had good things to say sounds like a recipe for becoming sheep.

But over these last four years, with a leader who spews venom and toxicity, we have twisted that original expression into its modern form, namely, if you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me.

I frequently find myself wondering, what happened to our basic sense of decency and decorum, to integrity and basic kindness? While it may seem old-fashioned to follow some sort of public etiquette, at this moment in history we could use an infusion of old-fashioned values. We could use what Senator Cory Booker called a “resurrection of grace.”

It’s hard for us to agree on anything these days, but I hope we can agree that a regular diet of anger and intolerance does something dreadful to us, to who we are as a species. It poisons our consciousness and brings out the worst in us.

What if each one of us made a commitment to stop contributing to this cesspool of hatred? What if we each made the choice to stop using the public square to announce and celebrate every angry thought or grievance that floats through our minds? Just because we think something doesn’t mean it’s true, and it doesn’t mean that we have to say it. In fact, when we stop awarding our angry thoughts with so much attention, stop providing these floating mental flotsam with a megaphone, they tend to get a lot quieter inside our own heads.

We cannot control anyone else’s behavior, but we can control our own. What if, crazy though it may sound, we just acted a little kinder than we felt, or thought?

We don’t have to wait for our leaders to change our country. We can start a revolution right now by making the choice to use our words and our own behavior as a means to resurrect decency and decorum, to bring back goodness and integrity as fundamental societal values. And maybe even, to invite grace back into the conversation.

The post What If We Acted a Little Kinder Than We Felt, or Thought? appeared first on Nancy Colier.

So, what are we to do with all this anxiety? When the new normal is anxious, when living with a constant sense of fear is just how it is, can we, also, feel peaceful and even well (without being delusional or in denial)?

While it may not be what we want to hear, the only way through our anxiety is through it. In order to ease our anxiety, we have to stop running from it and actually experience it.

Amped up on caffeine, I had spent the morning busying myself with one task after another. With a hyper-zealous, Virgo-style efficiency, I was getting an inordinate amount done, which was good, but I could also sense a kind of franticness in myself. As productive as I felt, I also knew that it wouldn’t have been possible to stop moving, stop getting stuff done, stop accomplishing, stop checking the boxes, just plain stop. I could tell that I was running, internally and externally. And so, after 400 years of spiritual practice, lo and behold, it occurred to me to stop and ask myself what I was running from.

When I asked myself this question, however, I was careful not to frame it as an intellectual quandary. Such an inquiry can easily become an invitation to describe (to ourselves) all the things we’re anxious about, to mentally regurgitate the list of scary things and remind ourselves why we have a right to be afraid. But ultimately, this is not helpful, not in any deep sense. We already know what we’re afraid of and why. Naming it may be helpful for our mind, but it doesn’t usually make us feel any better at a gut level.

When we become aware of the fact that we’re running from something inside ourselves, when we feel like we can’t stop or desperately don’t want to stop doing or “tasking,” that’s our cue that we really do need to stop. We have to (compassionately) override the instinctive part of our brain that’s desperately trying to keep us away from what scares us.

My advice is the last thing on earth you want to hear. I get it. I spent years, even decades, running, literally and figuratively, moving and doing, accomplishing anything and everything. I got all sorts of accolades for my running, but my real work was in learning to stop. That is, to get inside here and feel its edges, no matter what here contains.

When we feel the anxiety of what’s happening in our world these days, we can invite ourselves, albeit counterintuitively, directly into the experience of what we’re calling anxiety. Not our story or narrative on it, but the experience itself, what it feels like in our senses. We can literally say to ourselves, feel this, feel its edges, feel its uncomfortableness. Simultaneously, we can give ourselves permission to not have to understand it, figure it out, solve it, make it feel better, or make it go away. But simply to get inside it, step into it like a wet suit you wear scuba diving.

Maybe it’s all my years of being a serious athlete, of pushing my body and mind past what felt possible, but there’s something challenging (in a good way) and even exciting about experiencing something hard, about getting inside the experience of uncomfortableness. There’s a real payoff when we do hard things and stretch outside our comfort zone. Dropping into our actual experience, whether it’s anxiety, fear, anger, sadness, whatever it is, can in fact be a fascinating and beneficial exercise.

And here’s the thing: When we stop running and drop into whatever is here under all the running; when we let ourselves travel into the eye of the storm and the center of our experience, remarkably, we feel better. It’s the paradox of all paradoxes: When we allow ourselves to experience our anxiety, we feel less anxious (and that’s true for most everything). It’s as if the anxiety benefits or is soothed by our own presence.

But, I repeat, experiencing it is not telling ourselves about it, listing its causes, or trying to solve it. Experiencing it is not blaming ourselves or anyone else for it. Experiencing it is not collapsing into our emotional storylines about it. It is just (and yes, I’m laughing as I write “just”) a matter of inhabiting the experience itself, getting inside it, and if it works for you to imagine, feeling its edges.

So, give it a whirl. The next time you feel anxious or any other unwanted emotion, try thinking of it as a challenge. If you’re like me, you can make it a kind of athletic or spiritual challenge, like climbing Mount Everest. Instead of distracting yourself from the emotion, do the least intuitive thing possible: Stop and drop into the experience itself, lean into the feeling you’re running from. Feel what it’s like, get inside its edges. Wear it. Hey, if the experiment is a disaster and experiencing it proves worse than running from it, you can always peel off the wetsuit and put your sneakers back on (and unsubscribe from my blog). Let me know how it goes.

The post Surviving 2020, One Panic Attack at a Time appeared first on Nancy Colier.

The workshop started with a simple question: What do you want? That question was followed shortly with What is your deepest intention? And then, What do you want to create in your life? Out then came the magic markers, poster boards, glue sticks, glitter, and all sorts of other art supplies. We were to start drawing, mapping, and fleshing out a future life and future self, complete with the action steps that would lead us to our deepest wants and intentions.

From the time we’re very young, we are conditioned to be strivers. We are trained to want and keep wanting for more and better. Better versions of ourselves and better experiences for ourselves—this is where we are supposed to aim our attention.

Truth be told, when confronted with these kinds of broad, future-oriented questions, I often find myself blank, unable to identify what I want for my future in any real detail. I usually use the magic markers and glitter to make a picture for my daughter. It’s not to say there aren’t things I want to do and create: I want to spend more time in the desert, I want to build my speaking business and I want to do more silent retreats. But mostly what I feel in the face of these five-year-plan questions is a big fat “should” with a sprinkle of confusion and a splash of fogginess. The strong sense is that I should have a clear plan and an overarching vision of the future. And, that there’s something wrong if I don’t or don’t even want to participate in the exercise. 

But then I remember: We take our progress-oriented, more and better, capitalistic mindset and apply it to ourselves and our time on the planet. We relate to ourselves as an object in our model of unending progress. We focus on the future, where we want to get to, what else there could be, and what we are aiming for. At the end of the day, we assume that wanting means wanting for something, and specifically, something else, something external, and something new and different. 

After years of asking myself these sorts of well-intentioned questions, I discovered that they’re not the right questions for me or for many of my clients. The question, What do you want?, while wonderfully helpful in some ways, can become another demand on us, another thing we’re supposed to accomplish, another bar to reach. We are supposed to have a to-do list for our future and a plan to get there, and if we don’t, we are certain to miss out on that future of our dreams. 

After thousands of workshops and too many hours spent journaling, talking, meditating, singing, and every other ing, I realized that what I really want is to get to be here. That is, to experience this moment, this dare I say ordinary moment, and to experience it as enough. The intention I hold is to stop trying to get to somewhere else, stop becoming someone else, and stop figuring out a better reality. While there’s nothing wrong with any of that, for me, the work is in diving deeper into this present moment, and finding the wonder and awe in this. My five-year plan is to show up for all of the individual moments on the way to that moment in five years, which itself will then be just another now.

We are trained to think of time and our life as something that’s moving forward on a horizontal line, hurtling into the future. Progress is our north star. It gives us a place to move towards, and with it, a sense of purpose and meaning. At a deeper level, the idea of progress protects us from our existential fear of meaninglessness, from the vastness that comes with just being here, one now at a time. If we are not heading somewhere else, somewhere better, then we are left simply with this moment, heading nowhere in particular. If now is all we have, then what? Can we bear that existence?article continues after advertisement

But what’s remarkable is that when we enter this present moment fully, dive completely into now, with no next, and nowhere else to get to, we discover that time feels more like a vertical experience than a horizontal one. With each now, we drop into a kind of vertical infinity that is its own destination.

After diligently searching for an impressive “want” that would warrant a giant poster board and bright green sparkles, I discovered that what I want is far simpler than what I thought I should want. What I want is to be completely where I am, and to stop having to want something else all the time. I want for this moment to be everything, whatever it is. Furthermore, I want to feel a more consistent sense of awe for the fact that I get to be here at all. 

I offer my own experience here so that you may know of an alternative to the habitual striving and wanting that we are encouraged to participate in. But please, if these sorts of intentional inquiries are useful; if they help you gain clarity and move the dial forward in your life, then use them without hesitation. But, if you find yourself feeling blank or lacking when asked about what you want and want to make happen, about where you are headed, then perhaps you can give yourself permission to stop striving to get somewhere better, and instead, strive to just be here. 

Getting off the five-year-plan highway can feel like getting off the “normal” grid, opting out of the way we do life in this society. But that’s okay. Getting off the striving highway and turning your attention to where you are can lead you to a far better and richer life, which paradoxically, is exactly the kind of life you are supposed to be striving towards. article continues after advertisementhttps://26087277e0629cab930157be009c0c8d.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

It is the ultimate challenge to just be in this moment, with no agenda and no need to improve it. To arrive here and stop trying to get somewhere else may be the most difficult and remarkable achievement of our lifetime. When we’re able to truly show up for this moment, whatever we create and wherever we find ourselves in five minutes or five years will be just that. That “there” will be our new “here” and that “then” will be our new “now.” In a society that values striving above all else, we can add “striving to be in our life (as it’s happening)” to our want list. We can add “here” to our list of sought-after destinations. At the end of the day (and the beginning and middle too), the journey to where we are is the most important journey we will ever embark on. What do I want? Truth be told, I want to be here.

The post Must We Always Be Striving For A Better Life? appeared first on Nancy Colier.

To recap: After many years of explaining to her partner how and why his anger (and denial of that anger) was hurtful and not okay, his behavior continued, barely impacted by her rigorous and persistent efforts to change it. My client, as I reported, eventually lost the willingness and interest to keep trying to change her partner. At the same time, she realized that her partner’s behavior was not in her control to change.

It was at this point that my client decided to turn her attention away from her partner and toward herself, to get curious about her own response, her own relationship with her husband’s bad behavior. Since changing her partner was clearly not possible and she still wanted to stay married, she began investigating her own narrative, the story she was telling herself about his behavior, and what kind of partner she “should” have, how she “should” be treated, and what her relationship “should” include.

A number of people were angered by this article and believed that my client’s choice to shift her attention away from her husband and his problematic behavior and toward herself and her own process was to demonize herself, make herself to blame. And furthermore, that I was encouraging her to accept what she positively “should not” accept, to find fault in herself. But in fact, it was nothing of the sort.

Turning her attention to her own process was not about trying to figure out how and where she was to blame, nor about denying or condoning her husband’s behavior. Rather, it was about finding a way to free herself from the anger, helplessness, and frustration that her current reaction to her husband’s anger was triggering in her.

What she wanted was to hand her husband’s bad behavior back to her husband, to not have to carry it around as her problem, and to not have to wait for it to change until she could be okay. In short, she wanted to be in charge of her own well-being.

It’s abjectly false and dangerous, in fact, to suggest that focusing our attention on our own response to difficulty, prioritizing self-awareness above fixing anyone else, is negative or self-defeating in any way. For my client, the decision to stop trying to change a behavior she couldn’t change felt immediately empowering and liberating, as if she were taking the reins back in her life. With the shift in focus, she was no longer waiting for her husband to change so that she could be happy. With a better understanding of her own narratives, her husband’s outbursts could be just that: her husband’s outbursts, his problem that he would or wouldn’t address in his own time.

But most importantly, his outbursts could be not about or against her, not something she had to be in charge of correcting. Turning the lens on her own response, and doing what she needed to do to maintain her own peace, was about taking care of herself in the reality she was in, as opposed to fighting with reality and continuing to demand that it be different. One thing we know for sure, when we fight with reality, reality wins, every time.

We hold firmly entrenched beliefs and internal narratives on the topic of relationship. They range from the micro to the macro, the subtle to the obvious. The most troublesome “should” of all, however, may be this idea that we “should” be able to change our partner, fix what we don’t like. And consequently, we can’t be happy or content until we do.

To stay in a relationship with a partner we can’t change, to accept what we don’t like, is seen as a surrender to failure, giving up on our partner and, to some degree, ourselves. When we stop trying to change the parts of our partner we don’t like, we are judged (and judge ourselves) as weak, dysfunctional, and lacking self-respect.

The idea of focusing on ourselves when the problem is our partners sends us into the fiercest of “should” minefields. We get tangled up in the narrative that we “should not” have to live with this problem, “should not” let the problem continue (as if we have a choice), “should not” have to change who we are to accommodate our partner’s problem, “should not” let our partner get away with the bad behavior, and countless other “shoulds.”

But these “shoulds,” while sensible and maybe even true in some perfect universe, do nothing to change the problem, the partner, or the relationship. And most importantly, they don’t bring us peace. These “shoulds” keep us fighting with reality, convinced of our rightness but suffering nonetheless. But worst of all, they keep our well-being hitched to someone else’s capacity or willingness for change, which is never where we want to be.

Contributing to these “shoulds” is the belief that the relationship is either good or bad. If the relationship contains difficulties we can’t fix, then the relationship must be all bad and we “should” leave. If we don’t, we’re agreeing to stay in a bad relationship.

The truth is, we abhor contradiction in this culture; we’re not trained to hold co-existing and contradictory truths. Contradiction, which paradoxically is the essence of a relationship, terrifies us. We can’t wrap up contradictory truths and put them neatly on a shelf. Nor can we categorize a relationship as either bad or good, worth staying in or not.

And yet, every relationship is both bad and good (except perhaps the newest ones). Accepting that good must coexist with bad, and being loving amid the contradiction, is the ground of a healthy relationship. Please note that those bad aspects of a relationship are not abuse. Your partner can have shortcomings that are difficult to bear without them being intentionally hurtful toward you.

A relationship requires an attitude of “and,” not “but.” “But” is an eraser word; it wipes out everything that came before it. Opposing truths can indeed be happy bedfellows.

It’s a healthy drive to want to fix what we don’t like in a relationship, to change what’s not working. And the period of figuring out and fighting with the problem and our partner, in other words, the period of suffering, can go on for a really long time, sometimes the duration of the relationship. For some people, the lucky ones, a moment arrives when we realize that we’ve done everything we know how to do to try to change our partner, and still the problem persists and the partner remains unchanged. We then have the option to take a new tack and examine whether there’s a way to find peace even with the problem. Our partner may keep doing what they’ve always done, but we can do things differently.

At any moment in a relationship, we can choose to get curious about ourselves, our history, our triggers, our stories, and our response to a problem we experience with our partner.

We can unpack our narratives and consider whether there’s anything we can let go of that will ease our suffering and bring us peace.

We do this not to blame or castigate ourselves, but to liberate ourselves from the fight. We do this so as not to be tangled up and victimized by the problem any longer, but to use it as an opportunity for self-awareness and expansion.

The act of turning the lens on ourselves is a victory, a setting ourselves free and handing the problem off to the one whose problem it is.

We unhitch our own well-being from the other person’s wagon.

Once unhitched, we discover that we can live with that same problem, but not experience it as problematic, our problem, or even a problem. This is freedom. This is autonomy.

The post Freeing Yourself From Your Partner’s Behavior appeared first on Nancy Colier.

For a lot of people, this phase of the pandemic is bringing with it a new and unexpected kind of stress. The anxiety that’s bubbling up right now is not about life closing down, but paradoxically, about life opening up, and with it, the possibility of what we can and will do. It’s about “getting back out there” and what that will mean for our overall well-being.

As dreadful and devastating as this pandemic has been and continues to be, it has also brought with it a strange and unexpected sense of relief. So many people have confessed to me how relieved and thankful they’ve been over these last few months about the fact that there was nowhere to go and nothing to do. When nothing was possible, for everyone, when we couldn’t do most of what we do, what appeared, unexpectedly, was a sense of peace. So too, many people have confessed to being afraid that they will go right to living the way they did pre-pandemic, and forget all the lessons they’ve learned (and earned) through this hard time.

In our productivity-obsessed society, we feel like we have to do everything, be everywhere, see everyone; we suffer with the fear of missing out on the life we’re supposed to be living. The freedom and relief, therefore, that has come from not having to do anything (because there’s nothing to do) has been profound and life-altering. Permission to not have to be busy, productive or social, to not have to prove (to ourselves or others) that we’re living a good enough life, has offered us a much-needed break from the chronic shoulding, doing, and chasing by which we habitually live.

While change never comes in the form we wish it would, this pandemic has given (and continues to give) us a radical opportunity to step off the hamster wheel of doing, to disconnect from the relentless and mindless busyness with which we fill up our lives. With all future planning called off, this period has been a unique chance to fully arrive in this moment, now, to be present with ourselves, the people around us, nature, and everything else. We were handed an official permission slip, to award our full attention to washing the dishes, walking the dog, playing music, and making the bed, and to do so without guilt, shame, or deprivation. And maybe even, with a touch of gratitude.

When we couldn’t do any of the things we were used to doing, many of us discovered that we were quite OK, good even. We were OK doing a lot less; the things we always did suddenly didn’t seem so important or necessary. We may have realized that a lot of our doing and busyness was simply borne out of habit and conditioning, what we thought we were supposed to do, should do, or had to do. This crisis has woken us up from the anesthesia of our perpetual busyness, uprooted our pride in our busyness. Many of us have realized that we don’t want a lot of the things we thought we wanted, and don’t want to be living the way we were living before the pandemic shook us from slumber. Doing less has allowed us to experience more. Having tasted a radically different way of living, we have started asking the most important question: How do I actually want to live my life? When this is all over,we don’t have to keep living the same life we lived pre-pandemic.article continues after advertisement

During this crisis, the present moment, blessedly, felt like it was enough, no matter how simple its contents. Whatever we were doing, it was fine or at least good enough. We couldn’t make anything happen so we didn’t have to make anything happen. We were off the hook. There was no better reality out there against which to compare and denigrate our own. 

But, as things start to open up in the world and it’s possible for us to start doing again, this reverence for the present moment can easily slip away. If we’re not awake, appreciation will soon become dissatisfaction again. Undoubtedly, we will start to hear those familiar and dangerous whispers that tell us we should be doing, should be busy, should be keeping up with everyone else, should be taking advantage of what’s possible, should be socializing more, should be “living” more and better. If we’re not prepared for these whispers, aware of them when they come, then we will quickly slide back into the belief that the simple things, simple moments, simple experiences are not enough and that we are not enough if that’s all we’re doing, all we’re accomplishing. And, the accompanying and perhaps most dangerous thought of all, namely, that there’s something outside of us, some experience, achievement, acquisition or place, that can make us enough, make us content, and ultimately, make us want to be where we are. We will lose our sense of peace and return to that particular brand of suffering that comes from forgetting that happiness is an inside job. 

Our drive to get back to life in the world may be authentic and healthy, and yet, if we get back out there without awareness, we risk losing the profound gifts and insights from all this difficulty we’ve just endured. If we’re not mindful of our reentry into the world of doing, we’ll find ourselves back on the hamster wheel of habitual and chronic busyness and doing. Before we finish counting backwards from 10, we’ll be sleepwalking through our lives (or sleep-running), back to doing what we think we should do and have to do, mindlessly chasing after a better moment and a life that’s enough. We will have again lost touch with ourselves, with what we really want, and with a more present, grateful, and satisfying way of living. 

As we re-enter the world, my hope is that we can do it with awareness and intention, and with a deep respect and appreciation for what we’ve glimpsed through this powerful and unprecedented time. Let us not forget the way it felt to bake a pie, take a walk, or play cards with our child, when that was the only place we could be, and maybe even for a moment, the only place we wanted to be. Let us not lose touch with the experience of being deeply grateful for a good conversation, a good song, or a good cup of coffee. It is up to each of us to keep fresh the experience of being fully in this now, without the chatter of what’s to come or what we should be doing always running in the background. Long after we’re back out there, our practice is to stay tethered to the sense of relief we felt when we had permission, perhaps for the first time in our lives, to not have to do all the things we think we have to do. Simultaneously, to keep in the foreground of our mind and heart the way we felt when we were off the hamster wheel. Most of all, my hope is that we continue to ask ourselves the question, “how do I really want to live?” and then design a life that’s in line with our answer.

The post Keeping Your Life Simple, Even After the Pandemic is Over appeared first on Nancy Colier.