Did It Stop When You Did?

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Thought I’d give you some time before talking with you further about your pause time. How did it go? Did you take the time at all or just let it be another reading experience? If the latter, it could be a good example of how hard it is to stop, pause, center and “reboot.”

It is so important at this point to not go into judgment of yourself, the exercise… or even me! Yes, the mind can be that jealous of its activity that it will displace responsibility in so many ways. So, OK. That’s just the “what it is” we’re dealing with.

So what can we do next? My inclination is not to revert to the conventional cries for more discipline. No, I’d follow the T’ai Chi principle of “Four ounces can move a thousand pounds.” I’d soften in the face of this resistance to simply stop and be.

I suggest beginning by moving out of your chair and maybe even the whole space you’ve been reading this in. Next, make a cup of tea or coffee. Find a new seat, somewhere that welcomes you to gaze outside, or if on a patio, look around and actually see the natural world around you in all its detail. Nurture yourself and the moment with the warmth and comfort of a satisfying “cuppa.”

Wherever you choose to sit, turn your attention to your sensate experience in the moment. Feel your muscles relax as you settle into your seat. Now don’t take this simple action for granted! Really and honestly attend to the sensations of your muscles. These sensations are so immediate (if you will actually feel them) and so pleasurable they move your shift of focus and relaxation instantly. Attend closely to which muscles relax the most and let your attention join them. Add the warmth of the cup in your hands and the pleasure of its flavor as you sip and swallow. If it’s caffeinated, try and feel for its very first stirring and follow it as it brings new energy to you.

And yes. Breath consciously. Recovering the feeling of the regeneration each breath brings to your life can be a mental and emotional renewal as well. Take a few deep ones to make those feelings vivid. Attend to the cycle of inhale and exhale. You’ll refresh your mind and sooth conflicted emotions and feelings.

Now slowly close your eyes and really open your ears. Listen closely to hear each and every single sound in your environment. Don’t let a single one capture and hog your attention. Hear one then move on to another, then another and on and on. Next, listen for the qualities of each sound; its timbre, volume and energy. Listen even more closely. Imagine you’ve stepped into a conversation between all the elements in the environment around you; as though you can listen to the chat between the trees and the grass, and what the air has to say to all it embraces. Listen to the wind’s caress as it blows across all things. Listen, listen, lissssennnn.

Now listen to all the sounds at once. Hear every single sound you inventoried. All…at…once. Hold them all in your full field of awareness. Feel the space left over in your awareness. Always room for another sound. Now listen to the space in-between and all around your sounds. Hear the silence of those spaces; feel the quietude that silence brings. Savor its effect on your body. The quietude slips into peace. Let the breath take in this peace. It’s subtly is its power to affect you deliciously.

Now, slowly open your eyes and look out into the world before you. Give it a good scan and actually inventory all you can see. Nothing is too unimportant for the gentle acknowledgement of your gaze. Yes, make it a soft seeing, one where you imagine the object comes to your eyes and touches them gently and your eyes return the caress. See them all in their separateness, not letting any one capture your gaze for too long. And after this visual inventory, see them all at once. Hold all things in your visual field of awareness all at once.

Now see your seeing. All things become seen as IN your visual field but don’t fill it entirely to block your seeing. Your seeing envelopes them, and to see any one becomes a functional choice—a chosen shift in the way you see. As you see this way, you become aware of the space before you too. Space itself becomes a feature of your seeing. You can see space’s own containment of all things, just like your seeing sees them all plus space itself. Notice how you’re free to choose what you want to look at. No thing demands your focus.

And now I’m sure you’re expecting me to suggest you watch the grass grow. Well yeah, but with the spin of maybe just feeling into its aliveness. All things before you are dynamic, no matter how hard or dense, and so many are alive and in relationship with each other, as we’ve been reminded by ecologists. And you are in relationship with them. You are not separate from them; just watching them. No, you changed the scene and the dynamics of all things there the moment you stepped out to be with them. You are irrevocably included…unless you shift your focus and put yourself separate from them. That’s a real perception and one that can aid your time-out and reconnection with yourself and your place in the world. You do belong.

This moment is all about you, all about your giving yourself a chance to open to the openness of awareness itself. It gives you the space to let new, more pleasurable and positive thoughts arise; ones that may bring new insights and remind you of more of who you are than you’ve allowed to come out and play.

All right and OK, enough reading these suggestions. Leave this page and employ the words. It will serve us all.

It Won’t Stop If You Don’t

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I’m talking here again about the need to Pause in your life, if just for moments. Between myself, my friends and my clients, I’ve recently noticed how even those of us who know better have not been taking time-outs to release ourselves from our compulsive actions and thoughts. And the obvious truth is, actions and thoughts won’t stop of themselves. We’ve got to choose to do it.

But you can’t very well choose when you’re not aware you even have a choice, right? The automaticity of our habits of thoughts, actions and worldly demands arise and weave themselves into such a tight—what—Maitrix, of course, that it takes a rupture of some sort to break that Maitrix’s spell.

What kind of rupture? Well, like this moment right now. My very words are calling you to attend to your automaticity and….pause. Go ahead. Choose. Take this moment. Take some breaths…conscious ones that you really feel. Look out the window. No matter the view, you’ll break your visual trance. But don’t stop listening. No. Listen exquisitley to EVERY single sound in your environment RIGHT NOW. Don’t ignore even one! Savor each and every one you can hear. And then listen to them all at once.

Choose. It will stop if you will. I’m stopping my writing so you can stop reading and pause…now.

Creating the “Ecology of Change”

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One of the most helpful insights from my coaching instructor Roger DeWitt is his notion of  “the ecology of change.” It provides a great way to ground my clients’ change processes with fundamental structures of understanding and practice. Thinking of the client’s self-system as an ecosystem comprised of both inner and outer resources, I marshal their awareness of these two poles of the self and coordinate them to ensure successful change.

To apply this insight most effectively in our work together, it is helpful for my clients and me to remember three of the most fundamental, structural understandings we establish in our work from the beginning:

1.  ADHD is not about character, but about one of our most intrinsic structures—our nervous system— and its challenges for meeting a social environment generally not receptive to its modes of operation. ADDers are measured at only about 10% of the population, which means that our social institutions from education to work performance standards and processes have been designed around the nervous system of the majority of people (often referred to as “Neurotypicals”).  Metaphorically, this makes ADDers  like left-handers in a right-handed world; it’s really hard to fit in! We extend this insight of, “it’s biology not character,” by further dispelling the cultural myth and internalized belief that we must draw upon our inner resources only to effect the changes we seek in our lives. This is simply not true. We all, Neurotypicals and ADDers alike, live in an environment surrounded by forces outside ourselves, from people to things that, if arranged and coordinated properly, can complement our own inner capacities and help assure our success.

2.  Identify where and how the client’s ADHD shows up in their lives: What is the nature of their attention patterns; in what situations are they compromised and in which are they strong? Knowing this helps us to better align their inner and outer environments.

3.  Differentiating the client’s own authentic values from those of the culture outside them. Like a ripening walnut whose inner meat pulls away from its outer shell, the client must learn to  “individuate” by wresting and condensing their own agency from their cultural surroundings comprised of rules, roles and values of family, friends and authorities who taught them their value sets of “shoulds.” Establishing the difference between the values a client really knows are their own, versus those they simply took on as “shoulds” from outside authorities growing up, is always a profoundly liberating insight.

This dance with the client’s interior world (their subjective processes) with the external environment of cultural values, beliefs, customs and expectations, as well as the physical aspects of home, family, friends, office, work mates, employer etc., continues as we identify other ways to bring the inner and outer worlds together in practices that harmonize the two.

Typically I use the following five structural support methods I learned from my coach academy to do this:

1.  Clear the decks

2.  New practices to guarantee follow through

3.  Establishing healthy habits of body and mind for greater effectiveness

4.  Identifying the client’s work pace and building in appropriate cycles of work and rest

5.  Negotiate/coordinate with family and employers for cooperation with all of the needs above

Let me round-out each one:

1.   Clearing the decks:

    1. Time:  The mind works at near light-speed, but the body and the whole world of matter much more slowly. It takes time for the impulse of change to move through our muscles and interact with the environment. In making change, taking time into account is of the essence. We must make/take the time necessary for this work. To do this, the client and I will go to the client’s calendar to see when they will commit the time for it.
    2. Significant others:  The client notifies family members, school counselors, office managers and colleagues of the plans for change so space and time is coordinated and these folks don’t become obstacles to the plan. An additional benefit is that such notification of the client’s intentions serves as a great reinforcement for the client to follow through on their intentions.
    3. The workspace: Whether at home or at the office, one invaluable support for a client’s success (especially ADDers) is an ordered and organized workspace.

2.   New practices to guarantee follow through: This structure requires some creativity. For this, I found the book Following Through by Steven Levinson, PhD and Pete Greider, M.Ed. to be an invaluable source for strategies and techniques to follow through on intentions. Examples:

    1. Creating compelling reasons to follow through: If you won’t act on something for the right reason, find a reason that compels you to follow through. Identify someone whose positive regard for you is terribly important to you. Tell them of your intention so that failure to do it is too embarrassing.
    2. Strike While The Iron is Hot: Take action the moment you identify something you want to do. Don’t give the intention time to cool.
    3. Going Too Far: When you find yourself wanting to resist an urge to eat chocolate, this strategy allows you not to fight the urge, but to make a deal with yourself that if you’re going to eat one, you must eat five. This makes the intention to quit stronger than the urge to indulge by amplifying the harm you recognize the chocolate causes your body.
    4. Utilizing alerting devices to remind you of your intention to fulfill a goal: Use a watch alarm, your computer screen saver or a program that will send you regular messages, or employ your Smart Phone alerting capabilities. While the authors prescribe this for everyone, we certainly know its value for ADDers with working memory challenges.
    5. Leading the Horse to Water: With any identified task, first simply show up to do the task with the permission to quit. With this release from the pressure to do the task, being there to do it makes starting easier, and once started with permission to quit at any time, the inclination to complete can grow.

These are just five strategies the authors of Following Through offer to make it too difficult to fail to follow through on your intentions. They are worth studying and practicing on your self to feel their convincing effectiveness. Understanding my clients’ ways of attention helps them identify the most effective strategy in any given instance.

3.   Establishing healthy habits of body and mind for greater effectiveness: The structure outlined above will make this support system more effective, as it pertains to establishing such things as regular exercise for physical and mental health. Brain scientists have clearly shown how invaluable exercise is for ignition and sustained attention in ADDers. The authors of Following Through also emphasize how essential fulfilling intentions are for knowing one’s effectiveness in the world, and how not fulfilling even the smallest of intentions creates a powerful pattern of erosion of one’s confidence and self-esteem.

4.   Identifying the client’s work pace and building in appropriate cycles of work and rest: Once again, knowing the client’s attention patterns is crucial for supporting their effectiveness. Distractibility and impulsiveness can be barriers to attention if the client tries to stay on task beyond their ability to resist outer distractions or inner impulses.

5.   Negotiate/coordinate with family and employers for cooperation with all of the needs above: Another way of describing this support is establishing “functional fit” with the external world. There are several facets to it:

    1. Commitments to family and work can become severe barriers to a client’s intentions if they don’t enlist the support of these others to help make time and space for the client’s efforts. It pays not to begin a commitment for change that doesn’t have a chance to succeed if there are already too many commitments to family situations or work projects.
    2. Overcoming the notion that one must do it alone. Enrolling others for support can provide further creative insights and strategies.
    3. Otherwise known as the “Buddy System,” enrolling companionship as one engages the tasks for fulfilling a goal can assist in keeping one on task, if not also getting help with the task.

Establishing structure for the client’s success means identifying, marshaling and aligning the inner and outer resources of the self’s ecosystem. My coaching relationship with my clients is one of their already precious and engaged resources, and an encouragement to recognize they’ve decided to reach out and garner support from their outer world. The supports we find together become foundational features of their reinvented selves, their world and the space of interaction between the two.

Sometimes a Great Insight….

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Was it the cumulative effect of over two years of extensively studying ADHD, or was it the clarity of his explanation? I can’t be sure. I only know that after Dr. Bill Dodson, one of our pre-eminent ADHD psychiatrists here in Denver, allowed me to read the manuscript of his soon-to-be-published book, my understanding of ADHD deepened.

The impact was like the moment when you’re learning a foreign language where you cease translating and begin thinking in the new language. Similarly, instead of seeing ADHD as an object of study, I shifted to understanding it from the inside. Since that moment, I’ve so better understood my own ADHD that my ADHD coaching has taken a great leap forward.

This shift was all the more remarkable since I had been so impressed with the clarity of instruction I was receiving from the ADD Coach Academy (ADDCA). During my training with them, no other book outside of their text added much of anything new to my growing understanding of ADHD.  I felt like I was garnering such a complete understanding of ADD that I could truly count on it providing me with professional expertise. I had no idea there could be a shift like the one tripped by reading Dr. Dodson’s book.

I would attribute much of the shift to the agreements shared between the school’s curriculum and Dr. Dodson’s view. Certainly there was simply further confidence-building in seeing the match. But I also suspect Dr.Dodson extensively explained one feature of ADD that touched me so personally that it made the difference.

He writes on page 15, “ADHD is a brain-based condition.  It is not a failure of character or will.” Epiphany! I’m not a slouch after all! Well, we certainly covered this at ADDCA, but later on Dr. Dodson went on to give this absolution from character flaw a name. Clinically it is known as Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria; basically a big word for defensiveness. He went on to elaborate at length about how this condition develops very early on as a child recognizes that he/she is not learning or responding to the world as “neurotypicals” do. On page 5 he writes:

People from the ADHD World have a hard time with self-appraisal and self-awareness.  While they can often read other people well, it is very hard for the average ADDer to know from moment to moment how they themselves are doing, what effect they are having on others, or how they feel.  Neurotypicals can misinterpret this as being callous, narcissistic, uncaring, or socially inept.  Taken together, this extreme vulnerability to the negative feedback of others and the lack of the ability to observe oneself in the moment create a witch’s brew that makes the development of a firm sense of Self even harder.  If a person cannot see what is going on in the moment, the feedback loop by which we learn is broken.  A person does not know what is wrong or in what particular way it is wrong, so they have no basis for knowing how to fix it.  Perversely, they also don‘t know what they are doing right so they can do more of it.  This is why people with ADHD nervous systems appear not to be able to learn from experience. (Emphasis mine.)

The first emphasized trait combines not just defensiveness but also a chronic sense of insecurity. The self-doubt that haunts many ADDers puts a great stress on their lives and and their defensiveness profoundly impacts their closest relationships. The second attribute, the inability to learn from experience, really illuminated for me why and how I have difficulty with administrative tasks like budgeting, and especially remembering how to do taxes every year!

These were revelatory and profoundly facilitative insights. It is surely one thing to learn of such ADHD traits and struggles by reading about them, but a whole other to have someone enable an integration of understanding the condition as Dr. Dodson did for me.

These are just a few of the gifts of insight Dr. Dodson’s book provided me and what you could look for when it is published. But you don’t have to wait to learn from this ADHD Treatment Master. Come see him at Denver-Metro CHADD’s monthly meeting this coming Monday evening. See the details on my ADHD Support link. And you can sign up for automatic notifications of Denver-Metro CHADD’s meetings and events at www.meetup.com/denver-metro-chadd-support. 

 

 

ADD, Interest, Attention, Intention and… Holiday Inspirations!

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Fresh and novel inspiration for my “spiritual” practices and the celebration of the Holidays comes from, of all places, my ADHD coach-training program. Truth be told, there’s no small embarrassment accompanying this gift. Tell you why:

As you can see, much of my service involves teaching T’ai Chi, a discipline and body of knowledge that includes awareness of the subtle anatomy of our bodies (think Acupuncture) as outlined by the Taoist Masters who created the practice. Even previous to my T’ai Chi training, however, I spent a lot of time learning the subtle anatomy involved in spiritual awakening from other Eastern traditions and a goodly amount of time trying to activate it and realize the Divine experiences available there.

The turn of my attention from even earlier spiritual and psychological studies and practices that emphasized only Mind and Spirit was a truly integral move; one that brought me back into the fullness of my Being by including the body as an expression of the Divine and not something separate or “lower” to it. As great as this move was, the embarrassing irony was how I attended to the body as outlined by the Eastern teachings, but I hardly gave equivalent attention to what our Western scientists and medical experts charted about our bodies. I was particularly neglectful of appreciating the impact of brain anatomy and the neurotransmitters so instrumental in its operations.

Well, I’m caught up now both in study and treatment! The ADD Coach Academy teaches a model called MACHINE-MIND-MISSION to help understand and work with ADHD, which illuminates so well for me the significance of the brain on our minds and our sense of place and purpose in life. I’ve had the connection between body, mind and spirit for a long time, but just never gave due consideration to the machine side of he equation for the brain’s significance to mind and spirit.

As we all generally know, ADHD is a challenge of the executive functions of the brain, located in the frontal lobes. The neurotransmitters in ADHDrs trend to deficiency there (for reasons not yet known, except that this condition is inherited, as my daughter has brought to my attention, lo! so late in life!) and need the special stirrings of exercise and interest to get them going.

Yup, that word interest makes a big difference. As David Giwerc and Barbara Butler have so succinctly put it in their ADD training: “The greater the person’s interest, the greater the intention of acting on what one is paying attention to.” Neuroscience clearly demonstrates that the ADHD neurology is wired for interest and not necessity for importance like “neurotypical” individuals. This means that to get the neurotransmitters flowing, the synapses and neurons firing, and the executive functions up and running, ADDers would do well to begin each day starting with what inspires them the most and get an exercise practice going. Dr. John Ratey’s book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain will not only convince you but inspire you to start your day moving!

Now I believe these are truths for all of us, ADDrs and non-ADDrs alike! Without taking time to engage practices that take us to our source of inspiration, meaning and purpose, where our neurotransmitters get stirred up and turn on our brains, how can we become our best, or get that there is a far more positive, natural functionality than our more mundane world and its requisite functions can provide?

Against all my aversion to western science’s reductionism to the physical to explain any and all things, I’ve had to return to the more holistic/integral wisdom I’ve otherwise known so well and appreciate what it takes to generate better brain chemistry to get me and keep me connected not only to my attention and the intentions to actualize what I’m attracted to, but to God as well! Employing all the means listed here to get my attention going like never before, my intentions to live a life fully connected from body to mind to spirit are moving me to experience the Spirit of Christmas and the Holidays more than ever before.

From studying scriptures East and West to meditation/prayer to physical exercise to medication, my personal practices now cover them all. The effect has been to make them inherently motivated and a welcomed necessity rather than an imposed discipline, more grace-fully moving me to go to bed earlier, get up earlier and engage in those very activities that feed me so Divinely.

Frank Sinatra, Taoist Philosopher?

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Hardly, but then there’s that great old graffiti that put him in great company with Nietzsche and Sartre (two of our greatest western philosophers) when the anonymous author scrawled on a bathroom wall:

To do is to be ~ Nietzsche
To be is to do ~ Sartre
Dobedobedo ~ Sinatra

OK, I’m stretching a point to be sure, yet such humor can bring delight to otherwise ponderous thinking. In your t’ai chi practice, however, the play between doing and being lies at the heart of the practice. Let’s see how this applies as we review two of Ben Lo’s Five Principles that he relentlessly drills into our practice as we hold postures endlessly, or when he’s not moving us through the form at glacial speeds:

       1.  Relax

       2.  Turn w/o Twisting

       3.  Body Upright

       4.  Separate Yin & Yang

       5.  Beautiful Lady’s Hands

Relax and Separate Yin & Yang bring the play of doing and being into exquisite focus when we practice with appropriate attention. Look for it as you stand in Opening Posture, seemingly still as a tree on a windless landscape. If the tree is alive, you know the sap, like the blood and breath (or chi!) in our bodies, is constantly moving through the tree. But even as you take the time to stand as still as possible, you can feel your muscles and sinew steadily releasing ever deeper. How deep? As Ben likes to say, “No limit!” Such relaxing is the most pervasive practice throughout the other four principles.

As we practice Separate Yin & Yang, the more outer practice may be separating weight, but the inner is emptying the unweighted leg. Here emptying and unweighting become the same “activity,” with emptying directing us to the far subtler releasing of the weight. Take a posture and feel it. You’ll find a near incessant oscillation between tension and release, a kind of closing and opening in your muscles, as you let go (relax).

This dedicated attention of reaching for simply being (openness) in the posture and constantly finding yet newer levels of tension needing release into the relative openness yet again and again, is still progressive. Slowly, slowly our eyes get used to the darkness of density and tension and come to see the ever progressive and endless deepening into fuller and fuller Being.

I invite you to leave your computer where you’re reading this, take a posture and notice what I’ve shared with you here. Like your efforts in practice, we’ll return and look for even deeper features of doing and being experiences in my next blog.