Paula tells Jon that she’s upset and hurt by something he said, a way he responded to her opinion on a family matter.  She asks if, in the future, he could say that same thing with an attitude of kindness and/or curiosity and not be so critical, simply because her opinion differed from his.  Jon reacts to Paula’s feelings and request by aggressively inquiring why he should offer her kindness and curiosity when last month she had shut down his experience over a different family matter and treated him unkindly.  Paula then attacks back, explaining why she deserved to behave the way she did in the interaction last month, and why her response last month was a reaction to what he did two months ago, which she believes was unkind and aggressive.  Jon then barks that he was entitled to his behavior two months ago because of the unkind and critical thing she did three months ago… and back and back in time it goes, to a seemingly un-findable place before the hurting began.

Couples do this all the time; they fight for who’s deserving of empathy, whose experience should get to matter, whose hurt should be taken care of and whose experience should be validated.  Often, partners refuse to offer empathy to each other because they feel that, to do so, would mean admitting that they are to blame and thus giving up the chance to receive empathy and validation for their own experience. Boiled down, if I care about the fact that my words hurt you then I’m to blame for causing you that pain, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the truth of why I said those words, or more accurately, my experience of why I was entitled to say those words, will never be validated or receive its own empathy. Empathy for you effectively cancels out empathy for me.

As hurt and resentment accumulate in a relationship, it becomes harder and harder to empathize with your partner’s experience because you have so much unheard and un-cared-for pain of your own. When too much unattended pain is allowed to sedimentize between two people, it can be nearly impossible to listen much less care about your partner’s experience. Over time, unhealed wounds create a relationship in which there’s no space left to be heard, no place where some injustice or hurt from the past does not disqualify your right to kindness and support, which just happen to be the essential components of intimacy.  For this reason and many others, resentment is the most toxic of all emotions to an intimate relationship.

So, what is to be done if you’ve been in a relationship for some time and hurts have built up and led to resentment and unresolved anger and pain.  Is there hope for empathy to regain a foothold in your relationship so that true intimacy can begin flourishing once again?  What is the way forward when it feels like there is too much toxic water under the bridge, too much wreckage under your feet to find your way back to a loving bond?

If you asked me if it’s possible, if there’s hope for empathy to re-emerge in your relationship, even when resentment abounds, the answer is probably.  But if you asked me whether there are ways to try and rebuild the empathic bond in your relationship, I would answer with a resounding yes. Yes, you can try and yes, the only way you can know if what’s probable can become possible is to name it as a problem and give it your very best effort.  One thing you can know for sure is that if you don’t try and address the resentment, it won’t go away by itself.

So, what to do?  I suggest, first, that couples set an intention, together, to re-create empathy in the relationship.  While this is not necessary, it helps to start with a conscious decision that’s named. Perhaps both of you want to deepen the intimacy or trust, or perhaps just ease the resentment.  The intention can be different for each of you, but what’s important is that there’s an agreed upon desire and willingness to bring attention to this issue in the relationship. Sometimes one partner is not willing to set such an intention, often because of precisely the resentment that’s being addressed. But if that’s the case, nonetheless, you can set an intention on your own; while it’s not ideal, it can still bring positive results.

Once an intention has been named, I recommend making a deal to officially press the re-start button on your relationship.  You can ritualize/celebrate this relationship re-start date as perhaps a new anniversary, the day you committed to begin again—without the poisons of the past.  It’s important that you mark this re-start date in some tangible way that makes it real and sacred.  A re-start date means that as of a certain day and time, you are beginning again, so that when you express your feelings to your partner, those feelings matter simply because they exist, and cannot be invalidated because of something that happened in the past.  Pressing the re-start button means you get a new point zero, a point at which you are both innocent and entitled to kindness and support.  A clean slate.  This one step, albeit manufactured, if agreed upon and followed can open up a brand-new field in which to be loving and meet and take care of each other once again.

Along with this, I recommend beginning a new way of communicating with each other.  I call this new way the taking turns way.  Taking turns means when one partner brings upset or anything difficult or less that positive to the other, she is heard and understood fully.  The experience of the other partner, what we might say caused him to behave in the way he did that created the upset, is then held for the next day. While again I am suggesting an imposed way of communicating around difficult issues, this process can encourage non-defensive listening and even compassion.  Because you know that your time to tell your side of the story is not coming until tomorrow, you are more able to hear, listen and be present for your partner’s experience.  You can also try mirroring back to your partner, through words, what you are hearing him say and feel.  And to do this mirroring until he feels that you have correctly “gotten” his experience.  Being able to hear your partner without defending yourself (since it’s against the rules for now) can lessen the chances that the exchange will end up feeding new resentments. So too, taking turns at expressing your experience, knowing that you will get to be listened to, without rebuttal, that there will be a guaranteed safe place for your experience to be heard, will ease your anxiety, anger, desperation and despair.  It will also vastly improve the possibility of building a newly empathic bond.  By communicating one at a time (with a breathing and sleeping break in between), at least for a while, you are creating a garden for kindness, curiosity and support, the defining aspects of intimacy, to at least have a chance to take root and bloom.

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Jane, a woman in her 40s, recently had an experience with a parent that set off a strong and somewhat unexpected reaction in her. She met her father for a meal and he behaved the way he always behaved, asking her no questions, acknowledging nothing about her, completely invisibilizing her, while simultaneously demanding that she act as a mirror to reflect his own grandiosity. It was an experience Jane knew intimately and one she had been living for decades. But on this particular day, sitting across a table from this man she called her father, a man who had never shown Jane the kindness of acknowledgment or curiosity, it all broke—the dam that had protected her from her actual experience was gone. Without warning, Jane discovered that she could not keep pretending this kind of interaction was okay. Even if she had wanted to continue the same relationship with her father, her body had decided otherwise: being unseen and unknown, receiving nothing, inauthentically playing the role of the loving validator, was no longer possible.

Midway through the meeting, Jane took off the hat she had been wearing her whole life; she stopped confirming her father’s importance, and also stopped playing the role of the grateful daughter, who would happily enjoy the glow of his greatness while remaining forever invisible. She even went so far as to suggest that something he had said about himself might not be true, a first. The encounter ended abruptly and with obvious prickliness. While no words were spoken about the tectonic plates that had just shifted between them, it was clear to both father and daughter that their usual way of interacting was suspended, if not finished for good.

Very shortly after the meeting ended, Jane’s body started crying and vomiting and didn’t stop for hours. At the same time, her mind was in an intense swirl, trying to make sense of what had just happened, to create the narrative that would give her some ground in this emotional storm. The casing that had contained decades of grief, rage, and longing was broken open.

Interestingly, within a day or two, Jane had moved on from the experience. She was feeling fine and also empowered by a new-found, never before experienced clarity. She knew at a cellular level, without any doubt, that she was no longer going to continue subjecting herself to her father’s unkindness. A new reality had emerged entirely on its own. While she would have to continue seeing her father in family settings, she would no longer be participating in a “close” relationship with him or playing the role she had formerly played. She wasn’t angry, just clear and decided. She was lovingly and steadfastly on her own side.

And then, shame appeared. While Jane was aware that something profoundly important had taken place within her, and that she had behaved in a radically new way, and that she would not be continuing the relationship with her father in any kind of similar manner, she also felt a sense of shame. She shamed herself for having had such an intense response to her father, for being so impacted by him. So too, she was upset with herself for visibly reacting, which she believed shamefully revealed to her father that she was indeed affected by their relationship.

As someone who had meditated and practiced spirituality for many years, Jane began convincing herself that her reaction to her father meant that she was a spiritual failure. And furthermore, that her pain meant that she was also psychologically weak, someone who couldn’t be flourish unless in ideal, kid-glove circumstances.

And, as it turns out, Jane was not alone in administering shame and blame. Jane’s partner was pouring his disdain into the mix with a common cultural belief, namely, that after years of spiritual practice, she should have found a way to be immune to her father’s behavior, to build appropriately thick walls around herself. If she knew that this was how her father behaved, which she undoubtedly did, she should expect and be prepared for his behavior. She should not, still, be so devastated by her family. He accused Jane of being “fragile” and too sensitive to live in the real world. This was how he chose to support her in her transformation.

After being subjected to her partner’s and her own shaming however, something magnificent happened.

The same grace that had allowed her to know the truth with her father showed up and awakened Jane to yet another truth. Jane realized that she was indeed a spiritual grown up, now. She understood that spiritual and emotional wellbeing has nothing whatsoever to do with being able to deny, not feel, push away, or become immune to our experience. Indeed, quite the opposite. Spiritual maturity means having the courage to welcome whatever emotion is happening, to let reality be what it is. It means being willing to allow the full mystery, majesty and catastrophe that is the human experience, being willing to live with what is, which includes pain.

With spiritual and emotional maturity, we learn to welcome whatever emotion is arising and to do so without creating a narrative or personal identity out of its contents. As in Jane’s case, she could feel and internally validate the sadness of her relationship with her father and yet not cling to it, create a personal narrative or build an identity out of it. She could experience the sadness without being it. She had the wisdom to let the tsunami of emotion move into and through her, but also, by not grasping onto it, to allow it to move through and out of her, just as swiftly and effortlessly. Both processes, the in and out, are part of the same grace, of which we are not in control.

Furthermore, spiritual wellbeing is not about building thicker walls around our heart or finding freedom from difficult emotions. It’s about the willingness and bravery to deconstruct the walls around our heart, to let them dissolve so that we can live the full human experience: joy, sadness, and all the rest. We cannot reside behind walls and imagine that the emotions we want will get through while the ones we don’t will be kept out. A closed heart is a dead heart. When we live behind walls, we lose out on the whole enchilada that is life.

Growing up spiritually means living with a warrior’s heart, which is not a more armored heart but rather a less armored and more vulnerable heart. It means being willing to offer a seat at our inner table to whatever emotion is arising, and at the same time, to know ourselves as the compassion that holds the experience in company. It means trusting that the continually changing internal weather can move through us with great ferocity and yet, simultaneously, something can remain steady and well, holding the space in which life happens. A warrior’s heart contains the strength to open the doors and windows, to let life come in and also to let it leave.

There is a strong cultural belief that when you’re spiritually and emotionally well, you should stop feeling pain and stop being affected by life’s difficulties. This is a false belief. When we grow up spiritually, we don’t stop feeling difficult emotions or being fully and fallibly human. Rather, we stop fearing and judging our emotions; we embrace our imperfect humanness. With spiritual maturity, who we are evolves, from the one to whom our feelings are happening to the loving presence within which they happen. We feel our emotions and witness their comings and goings, both, simultaneously. Ultimately, we come to know that our heart can get bounced around and broken into pieces, that we can feel everything, and still know a wellbeing that perfectly holds the whole dance.

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https://na-newyorkcity.com/14513/digital-detox-workshop-teaches-power-off

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Or perhaps you know the experience of trying to organize a vacation (that later everyone will enjoy), and battling to get everyone’s schedules lined up so as to be able to buy tickets or make reservations that require advance planning, and then being told that you are a control freak who can’t relax.

I have lived both of these experiences (and countless similar ones) more times than I care to remember.

I travel a lot with my family in the summer months.  It’s a time filled with joy, laughter, silliness, frustration, irritation, despair and everything else in the tapestry of human experience.  As beautiful as the time is, every year a part of me is a little bit surprised that we all return home together, in the same plane or car, with no one having departed the trip early, and with everyone still speaking to each other, kindly for the most part, and all still committed to making this grand experiment we call family work.

While the examples I give in the opening here are lighthearted and meant to amuse, the truth is, families offer the most satisfying, profound, and nourishing elements of the human experience and also some of the most challenging and painful.

This summer I’ve been thinking a lot about family and specifically, about what makes a family work, what increases the experience of love and joy and decreases suffering and frustration. What is it okay to ask of each other as members of the same tribe, this small group of people with whom we are choosing to journey through life?  And perhaps most importantly, what decisions do we want to make and intentions do we want to set, as a family, about how we are going to relate to and be with one another?

And so I asked myself, What is the one practice that we could/can implement as a family that would radically improve our experience of being together?  Can we set intentions and expectations that come from the highest part of ourselves, and actually try and meet them?

Here’s what I came up with: What if, as a family, we made a deal with each other that no matter what happens (within a healthy context) we won’t throw each other under the bus? That is, regardless of the current situation or what another person is doing or saying, whether we like it or not, we will stay steadfastly on each other’s sides?  When someone is doing something we don’t like, rather than the habitual reaction of  blaming and criticizing, and succumbing to our (and the family’s) story about the other, what if we were to agree to pause and consciously insert empathy where previously there was only judgment and attack?  What if we were to try and imagine what the other’s deeper intentions were in that moment? What if we were to consider what they might be struggling with that’s coming out in this particular form? What if we agreed to not rush to judge or negatively label each other, simply because the behavior at that moment is not pleasing?  Instead of blaming those closest to us for the behaviors they’re exhibiting, what if we took a moment or two to ask ourselves what the deeper longing is under their behavior, the longing that’s trying to express itself through this moment.  And, most radically, if we can help this person we care about to receive what they actually need?

What would it look like to be on the other’s side instead of against them in this moment? 

We are conditioned and habituated to respond to another’s words and behaviors based on our opinion of those words and behaviors, whether we agree with them and they support our own ideas about the world and ourselves.  We make up all sorts of narratives and interpretations about the other based on our opinions. But our thoughts and opinions about the other are not the same thing as the other, and not the same thing as the truth of that other.

To live in an environment of empathy in a family (or any relationship) is to make a commitment to trying to understand the other person through their eyes, what they’re living inside themselves–not through our ideas or narratives about them.  In order to love another human being fully, family or otherwise, we have to get our own ego out of the way and stop defending our version of reality (and through it, ourselves).  We must be willing to try and know the world through the other’s experience, to consider their deeper intentions, fears, vulnerabilities and longings, and in so doing, to refrain from judgment and feeding our stories about them.  The challenge that we can hold ourselves accountable to in our loving relationships is to care about and for the other’s experience, no matter how different from our own.

You could say that our real job as family is to know our loved ones’ inner experience  and to hold that knowing in the most sacred of embraces inside our own heart.  That means that we assume the responsibility of  doing what we can to lessen their suffering, and to help them harvest their deepest longings.  Fundamentally, our responsibility to each other as family is to not be yet another force that our loved ones have to work against in order to get what they really need.

Our tendency as human beings is to defend our separate selves, which includes our  thoughts, our versions of reality and our personal identity, a kind of giant yet fragile “I” ball.  And yet, paradoxically, when we join another human being, in trying to know their truth, we often discover that the “I” we were defending, who had all these ideas about the other and what should be happening, the “I” we thought we needed to survive, simply drops away without much ado.  And at that moment we experience ourselves as that loving presence that welcomes all, unconditionally.  Without the “I” in the way, we get to feel the full force of love as a living entity.

Every time we respond to another’s behavior with kindness, trying to put ourselves in their shoes rather than blaming, judging, or creating more stories about them, it’s like we take a step into the divine—into bliss.  The choice to look out through another’s eyes and heart fills our own heart with love.

Setting an intention within your family or any relationship to not throw each other under the bus is a profound event in the lifespan of a family or relationship.  Try out the “Taking each other’s side” or “No throwing under the bus” challenge with those you love.  Put a sign up on your fridge or a picture of a bus with a stop sign through it.  No matter what’s happening in the moment, no matter what the contents of the situation are, take a moment to stop, pause, and interrupt the habit.  See the situation as if  looking out through the other’s heart.  Live this difficult moment through the other’s most vulnerable place, through their pain, fear or weakness, through the child in them. Know that, just like you, they are trying to create happiness, to find peace and feel okay—for themselves and possibly even for you.

One post note: this practice applies to healthy family dynamics only.  It is not to be used in abusive or dysfunctionally destructive contexts.  This practice is not an opportunity to excuse abusive behavior of any kind.  Abusive behavior should not be tolerated in any context.

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There is a belief in this culture that life is supposed to be happy; happiness is part of our definition of a good life.  In the face of the suffering that everyone’s life contains, we hold tight to our belief that life’s basic nature is pleasurable and fun.  The media presents life as some kind of amusement park ride with ice cream, laughter and prizes.  Our conception of what we are supposed to feel is based on a life that is not in alignment with what’s real.  Certainly, a part of life is joy.  Life is also challenging and painful at times.  All of these experiences are part of the ride.  We have to do things that we don’t want to do, we have to interact with people who hurt us, we have to live inside a body that gets sick, and eventually we have to let go of everything and everyone we love.  Expecting a joy ride is a recipe for disappointment.  And yet, remarkably, the cultural mythology persists: life is supposed to look good, and we are supposed to be having fun all the time.

In this society, when we are not happy, not only are we failures for not being able to create a happy life, but worse, we are missing out on the myth.  We are not getting what we deserve—what everyone else undoubtedly gets, the life that appears so convincing in our Instagram feed.  With such a cultural mythology, we spend much of our time feeling depressed about not getting to have something that doesn’t actually exist, thereby fueling the un-happiness that we so dread.

I was one who suffered with this belief system in my younger years.  A friend and fellow sufferer called it her “Kennedy” life.  We are convinced that for other people, life is one long series of touch football games held on large glorious lawns with large glorious extended families, and golden retrievers joyously chasing blond toddlers in playful tackle.  When we are reminded that the Kennedy family has also endured tragedy—violence and loss—we take the information in, but only on an intellectual level.  We know that the Kennedys have suffered, but still our touch football expectation of life endures.  In fact, we struggle to retain this fantasy.  It makes us un-happy, but at the same time, we are afraid to stop trying to get happy.

We make strong judgments about the person who achieves happiness and the one who doesn’t.  Happiness is our flag of success.  Not being able to accomplish it means that there is something wrong with us.

As a result of these beliefs, we are left in a desperate state.  We must be vigilant in controlling our experience, making sure that life feels good and that others know it’s going well.  But making the present moment feel good is a lot of work.  Happiness is a narrow destination at which to aim our life with an even narrower selection of paths for getting there.  We have balanced our okay-ness on something as ephemeral and uncontrollable as situational pleasure, and bet our wellbeing on our ability to keep it—with no net below if we fall or fail.  We dedicate the majority of our energy to achieving something that we cannot consistently achieve.  From a purely logical perspective, it seems that it would be wise to re-examine our goal.

Our attempts to be happy are not the problem.  The problem is that we are not aware of a workable alternative to happiness.  As we see it, the only alternative to happiness is misery or emptiness.  We do not know how to be without happiness and still be okay, whole, present, or even that it is possible.

The post Why Happiness Doesn’t Last, and Why That’s Okay–Part 1 appeared first on Nancy Colier.

What makes negative repetitive thoughts so challenging is that they often stem from core self-beliefs, like I’m not good enough, I won’t get what I want, or the world is not trustworthy. Because they’re built out of these deeply held beliefs, repetitive thought loops are powerful and sticky; we believe our repetitive thoughts, as if their persistence is somehow evidence of their truth. As a result, we are compulsively compelled to attach and engage with their content.

Further, we learn early in life that we need to do something with and about our negative thoughts: Either prove them wrong, convince them (and ourselves) that they’re false, or actively replace them with positive thoughts that feel less threatening. Either way, we’re taught, we need to put up a fight.

There is nothing inherently wrong with these strategies: Arguing with and disproving negative thoughts is sometimes helpful, as is actively replacing the negative with positive thoughts. But the most effective approach I have found (personally and professionally) for working with repetitive negative thoughts is actually the least intuitive:

• Stop trying to change negative thoughts.
• Don’t do anything about them.
• Leave negative thoughts alone.
• Stop fighting with what’s actually happening.
• Look elsewhere.

How can we be okay when what’s happening in our mind is not okay? How do we leave our thoughts alone and not get involved in their content?

We assume that by agreeing to not change our thoughts, we are also agreeing to believe and engage with them — that if we allow the thoughts to happen, we also have to pay attention to them and invest them with meaning. But what if that weren’t true? What if negative thoughts could appear in your inner world, and you could see and hear them, comprehend their content, but not have to do anything with or about them — not have to make them go away, invest energy in them, get involved in their stories, award them with a sense of importance, or even believe them to be true? What if the negative thoughts could mean nothing about who you are? Before we can practice this, however, we have to know it’s possible. And I can tell you with certainty, it is.

Source: BrainFacts.org

We are a culture of doers, and the instruction to not do, for some, can feel like not enough. It can be helpful, therefore, to reframe the not doing into a doing, or in this case, the not changing into a changing. Specifically, instead of focusing on not changing your thoughts, practice turning your attention away from the contents of the thoughts and placing it on who or what is actually hearing the thoughts. Ask yourself, who are these thoughts talking to? For whose attention are they vying?

As soon as thoughts appear, particularly negative ones, we tend to narrow our attention down onto the thoughts with the focus of a laser beam, thereby darkening anything else that might exist in our awareness. And yet, what if, when thoughts appear, we were to look beyond them, and contemplate what else is here? What is behind and under the thoughts? In so doing, we leave the thoughts alone, and direct our attention to the spaciousness within which the thoughts are appearing. If thoughts are like birds appearing in our sky, we shift our attention from the birds to the sky.

An important aspect of the practice of not changing negative thoughts involves another not — not judging the fact that you have negative thoughts. In truth, thoughts happen, with or without our consent. The fact that negative thoughts may come back again and again, in almost or entirely the same form, is just how it is — it’s a byproduct of our mind’s operating system. It is not a failing on our part; it does not make us less spiritual, or more troubled or tortured. The sooner we can accept this truth, the sooner we can get on with the business of living. Getting rid of negative thoughts is by no means a necessity for well-being.

Try it out for a day or an hour: Don’t change your thoughts, no matter what they contain — just leave them alone, and let them happen. Turn your attention away from the thoughts and toward the one who’s listening, the one whose attention the thoughts are beckoning. Sense the space in which the thoughts are appearing, the silence behind the noise, the stillness under the movement of thoughts. Notice your own awareness, that presence which is aware of these thoughts.

When we shift our attention in this way, something very curious happens: The thoughts start losing their power. They may still be there, but they contain less oomph. Simultaneously, the volume of the thoughts shifts from a shout to a whisper. And sometimes, as the thoughts figure out that they’re not that seductive to us anymore, or that their appearance no longer sends us into a tailspin, they start to fade altogether. But then sometimes they don’t fade. And while we would prefer that the negative thoughts subside rather than continue, neither is evidence of the success or failure of our process.

Repetitive negative thoughts are part of the human journey; we cannot stop them. We can, however, stop trying to stop the unstoppable, or to change the unchangeable. What matters is how we relate to the thoughts, what we tell ourselves we must do or not do about them, and the self-attack we propagate as a result of having such thoughts. We generate internal peace when we give up the fight with the inevitable and direct our attention towards new frontiers. Ultimately, the relationship we build with our thoughts and the agency we take with our attention is what creates our experience. And, as is always the case, life resolves itself in contradiction: When we stop trying to change reality, reality changes.

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I immediately flipped open my laptop and started researching. Researching what?  Everything, anything, something that would interest me, something to do, something to fill the space.

After distractedly surfing through movie schedules and museum exhibits, I had a thought, “sound baths.” Within seconds, Google had delivered a page of options on the the new auditory class that meditation and yoga studios now offer. I inattentively skimmed through several descriptions and testimonials on the bath experience, as well as schedules for five or six studios that offered it. Rapidly scanning the pages, I wasn’t able to find a class for the day at hand. In the process however, I bumped into a link for the ten hardest workouts in New York City. Wouldn’t that be a great idea, I thought, and so I flitted through a whole host of kettle ball, circuit training, and boot camp options, none of which sounded remotely like something I wanted to actually do.  I am not sure what happened next but I found myself inside a list of vacation destinations with direct flights from New York.  Seems I had followed a link for easy family holidays that won’t break the bank. Inside one of the hotel write-ups was a description of a garden that sat on the sea, which reminded me of a neighborhood park that I had read about but not yet visited.  I found the park online and superficially perused its history and hours for visiting.  But then I remembered, I needed a new pair of sneakers.  And so I sped over to the Nike site and discovered that there were so many new styles, all of which were fabulous, that I couldn’t decide. The only pair I investigated further wasn’t available in my size.  At this point I went back to movies because I had a thought about a documentary on a runner.  But it turned out the film was way downtown and that didn’t appeal.  What then followed was a speed train through hot yoga studios, great city walks, dog parks for shy dogs, independent book stores, places to buy cooking supplies and kirtan performances…which is where I woke up.

I shut my computer and took a deep breath, pulling the air down into my body.  “Stop” I said to myself. “Just stop.” I looked at my watch: I had been down the rabbit hole for two hours. Two of my five free hours were gone. I felt agitated, anxious, and paralyzed, entirely overwhelmed with possibilities but unable to move on anything. I was “twired,” tired and wired at the same time. I put my hand on my heart and felt the simplicity of stillness.

“Come home,” I said to myself. “Be here.” I then unhooked from all ideas of what I should or could do with the time and just felt into my body, felt my own physical presence. I took a few conscious breaths and invited myself to relax and land where I was, now.

What happened was that I felt an immediate sense of relief and peace, to be allowed to be where I was, to not have to do anything at all, nothing other than pay attention to what I was actually experiencing.

I then became aware of a longing to call a particular friend. I also felt the desire to take a walk, to be with myself and be outside. That’s what came, organically, when I dropped into my body and now.

One of the problems that technology is creating is a feeling that we should be constantly taking advantage of every opportunity available to us. And if we’re not, we are somehow missing out on life. We believe that there is something, somewhere inside Google, that will make this moment complete, some place else that is better than where we are, something more that we ought to be doing. We no longer ask ourselves, or let our selves discover what we want to do. Rather, we ask Google what’s possible or what we can do. The thing is, what we can do is often very different than what we want to do. We find, frequently, that what we want to do is much simpler than what we can do. And also, that when we listen in to what we actually want, from the body, the answer is clear and without ambivalence and confusion; it has a sense of “Oh yes, that’s right.” Unlike the “can and should do’s,” which leave us feeling murky and without the clear “Yes” that comes with truth.

Technology creates an infinite number of choices. We can do anything at any time.  And yet, while we may delight in the idea of choice, research shows that when we have too many choices, we actually end up unhappy, deadened, overwhelmed, fatigued, and immobilized. With unlimited choices, we frequently end up making no choice at all.  And, if we are able to make a decision amidst the mountains of choices, we generally feel less satisfied with our choice and more concerned that another option would have served us better. Unlimited choices also cause us to shut down our creative thinking.  When presented with too many options, we often revert to the simplest choice or consider only one manageable variable in making our selection.  The more that technology beckons with possibilities, the more we humans are pulling the covers over our heads and finding ourselves frozen, in a perpetual state of too much and not enough.

The issue too is that we are looking outside ourselves for our own truth.  When we have a free afternoon, we go looking to the internet, hoping to find something that will generate interest in us.  When we cook dinner, we go surfing on Instagram to find a picture of something that will tell us what we want to eat.  When something happens in our life, we post the experience to find out what it should and will mean to us.

We have forgotten that we can know things through our own experience.  We have forgotten that the process of knowing can be one that happens from the inside out and not the outside in.

The next time you find yourself with a chunk of unscheduled time, even just a little (standing in line, riding public transportation), try living it in a new way (differently than I did) and creating a new habit.  Instead of immediately searching outside yourself, to your phone or computer, to find something that might interest you, something to fill the time, do this: drop into yourself, into now. Feel your body, the sensations arising, feel how you are in that exact moment.  Pay attention inside; notice if there is a natural longing or interest already present. If nothing comes, that’s fine, just stay still and keep attending. Practice not doing, not filling the time, not habitually forcing something into every open space as soon as it appears. In so “doing” you are, in fact, turning yourself, now, into a destination and a place to be.

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Nancy Colier, Psychotherapist and Author of “The Power of Off”

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Let me say first that in some situations blaming is helpful and healthy—it’s not always a dysfunctional reaction. Assigning blame where it is appropriate can empower and protect you, and stop harm in its tracks. But the kind of blaming that I am addressing here is the unhealthy and chronic kind. It is the habitual and reactive sort that blocks your personal growth, damages your relationships, and gets in the way of your own well-being.

Try the following test:

1. Would it be normal for you to respond to someone with a problem by telling him why he is to blame for his problem?
2. In relationships with friends and family, do you often find yourself pointing the finger? Do you tell others how and why they are wrong, using phrases such as You did it, or, It’s your fault?
3. When you confront difficulties or inconveniences, is it common for you to identify and ruminate over who or what is to blame?
4. When you are upset or in a difficult situation, do you frequently blame someone for making you feel the way you do?

If you answered yes to any one of these questions, you are a blamer. If you answered yes to multiple questions, then your blaming behavior may very well be compromising your relationships, your well-being, and your personal evolution. That said, keep reading: Blaming is a habit and awareness is the first step toward breaking it.

First, I want to congratulate you on your willingness to look honestly at your behavior, and to address what may not be working in your life. It’s hard to investigate the parts of yourself that need improvement; such awareness takes courage. In addition, I congratulate you on the aspiration to grow and improve, which comes from your highest self. The intention to evolve is already evolved—just by continuing to read, you are doing something remarkable.

Your blaming, when it began, was probably an innocent defense mechanism meant to protect you from harm. If your sister was to blame for eating the cookies, then she would be punished—not you. But sometimes, blaming takes a turn toward the dysfunctional, when blaming becomes your default reaction to life, causing harm to you and others.

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