This 2020 self care blog was written with an intention to focus our attention on sustaining our own well-being through these chaotic times. A roadmap with points for reflection and a number of mind-body self-care practices were presented with an emphasis on developing skills to up our game in paying kind attention to ourselves and to others. We started where all well-being begins, with valuing self-care as an expression of self-compassion.

Attention training starts with developing presence to oneself. Simple yet effective methods for presencing were drawn from the domain of mindfulness, which has considerable scientific support as a necessary skill for cultivating compassion. Compassion was described as action taken to relieve suffering and suffering was simplified to represent the rub of resistance we feel whenever we want our experience to be different than it is unfolding in the here and now. In this way, suffering is recognized as an experience common to all humanity and therefore all humanity warrants compassion. The likelihood that this statement may feel like a tall order to you in these intensely divisive times is evidence for an opportunity to respond to your rubs with self-compassion!

The tradition of Yoga, a point of origin for mindfulness practices, has for millennia offered humanity a technology for relieving suffering; meditation. Yoga is actually a psychospiritual science of the mind that uses myriad physical practices as a tool to move the body into tolerating stillness. Yoga practices also prepare the nervous system by cultivating meditative states as preparation for meditation. Various forms of meditation have been vigorously investigated in the neuroscience literature and a fair conclusion is meditation is helpful to training attention in ways that generate states of well-being. How often we enter these states and how long we can sustain them is a function of frequency, duration and focus within the practice. Meditation is a teachable skill and much of the simple, secular practices that have been presented in these monthly articles are appetizers to inspire you to incorporate informal mindfulness practices into formal ones and perhaps even adopt meditation as a component of your self-care regime.

We have discussed attention to our embodiment via observing body, breath, thoughts, emotion and movement, then went further to curiously explore our experience of selfhood beyond embodiment. We have been encouraged to be gentle with ourselves by befriending whatever arises in our observations and to sanctify and savor all experiences we have each day that warm our hearts, generate gratitude or feel inspiring, awesome or wonderous. We have touched on forming intention as a way of being to support whatever aim we have established that nourishes our life force. I truly hope you have enjoyed the ride of reading these articles and working with the practices presented throughout this year.

In closing, the practice of Metta Meditation has been researched and demonstrated to assist in the development of self-compassion; a prerequisite for offering compassion to others. As health professionals, I imagine we recognize the absolute necessity to have an ongoing resource to refresh our compassion. Consider this merely a template, and comprise a meaningful metta meditation of your own.

Get in a comfortable position and become present. Consider use of soothing touch (hands on heart or face). Think of someone you love deeply to initiate feelings of warmheartedness, then offer these words to a loved one, to yourself, to both of you, to a neutral person you encountered today and to all beings. After some practice, you may progress to include a person or group that you feel your rub towards arise whenever you think of them.
May (you, I, we, all) be happy.
May (you, I, we, all) have the resources needed to be healthy.
May (you, I, we, all) know peace.
May (you, I, we, all) live in freedom.

It has been my great privilege to share this writing with you throughout this year. If you are interested to take a deeper dive into these topics, I gave a webinar for Medbridge entitled Self-care Practices Inspired by Contemplative Neuroscience and Yoga which has been recorded. You can find it at this link: https://www.medbridgeeducation.com/course-catalog/details/self-care-practices-inspired-by-contemplative-neuroscience-and-yoga-recorded-webinar-cheryl-van-demark/

Motivation to make the time may be discovered by considering the consequence of self-care’s opposite qualities. Given self-care promotes thriving, neglecting it may lead one to the opposite of care; disregard, neglect, oversight, omission and thoughtlessness or the opposite of thriving; withering. With the understanding we are bioplastic and therefore grow stronger at whatever we practice the most, it is prudent to acknowledge conditionality. In some circles, it has been suggested that the increasing emphasis on self-care and well being in the workplace may be one more way of shifting the responsibility for health and well being away from employer accountability for creating supportive environments and away from our struggling sick care-oriented health care system. Certainly, this a perspective to be aware of and something to reflect upon as it pertains to one’s workplace environment. In this monthly feature, self-care has been repeatedly presented from the perspective of an expression of self-compassion.

The present invitation is to engage in contemplative practice with the notion of the self we are caring for in our present scope of self-care. Such exploration relates back to prior articles that introduced the practice of regarding oneself as a continually changing happening as a way to encourage mindfulness of the series of present moments that weave the fabric of each day’s experiences. Contemplative neuroscience would suggest such conscious experience is responsible for our sense of selfhood. Contemplative practices are self- oriented in that they provide practical means to promote human thriving and flourishing by training attention in the domains of self-regulation, self-inquiry and self-awareness. So, this month let’s direct our self-care practice to exploration of who are you?

For many of us, our notion of selfhood tends to be enabled by our embodiment and all of the sensory machinery that comes with the package. Having continual somatic and visceral inputs to our nervous systems provides the primary reinforcement of our sense of I, me, mine selfhood. I am walking, those are my feet, wearing my favorite shoes. Contemplative neuroscience studies the nervous system mechanisms that are active when we engage in reflection, while contemplative practices map out an experiential path of inquiry into the nature of the self. So, as you reflect upon the question Who am I?, does your sense of self extend beyond your body?

As you reflect, it may be useful to take yourself through a process that allows you to arrive at a sense of selfhood by sorting out who you are not. When the activity is complete, rest assured you can reintegrate all you have sorted out. Begin by standing in a posture that embodies dignity. Take a moment to experience the feeling of the posture and its influence upon your breath. Spend a few minutes just standing there in an embodied experience of dignity. Notice if it feels familiar or unfamiliar. Next, imagine you are standing before a shelf on which you will now set all object forms of your societal identification- driver’s license, voter registration, passport, etc. Put all of it on the shelf, then repeat who am I? Next, imagine you place all subject ways you identify yourself up there too; child, parent, partner or spouse, sibling, health professional, athlete, artist, writer, even down to your gender identity. Put all of it on the shelf, then repeat who am I? Now add your five senses and the sixth, your mind as the meaning maker of your sensory experiences. Lastly, appreciating the body as the impermanent material form that it is, tenderly place your body with everything else on the self. There remains a faculty of awareness or consciousness unconnected to the senses, mental machinations and form just placed upon the shelf. Again, inquire who am I? I would not presume to offer an answer to this question other than to pass on the typical phrase from this yoga-based practice that invites a next level of reflection and contemplation, which is I am the one who knows or I am that (not subject to name or form).

This type of practice invites a consideration of extending self-care beyond supporting our body-mind tissue-based systems to other powerful, yet presently immeasurable, domains of healing that support our vitality, our life force. Whatever those domains are for you also, the point of this month’s writing is to call for the necessity of (its /that) inclusion in your self-care. An experience with that nature or essence of the self is likely to be the source of compassion and motivation to take whatever time is necessary for right action in your self-care.

Life always calls for compassion! Generating compassion for patients, family and community when we are all in this time of disruption may be more challenging than usual. Humanitarian, author and Zen Buddhist scholar Roshi Joan Halifax describes the following four conditions as a map for creating compassion: the capacity to attend to the experience of others; to feel concern for others; to sense into what will serve others and to act in order to enhance the well- being of others. That is the what of compassion.

We need to invoke grace to get to the how of compassion. To quote Thich Nhat Hanh, compassion is a verb. To be able to follow this map and navigate the terrain to generate these conditions for compassion, she teaches a process of G.R.A.C.E. To begin, we gather our attention. The affirmation Be Here Now is useful. To get here, use the instruction to put your mind and body in the same place at the same time. Do this preferably by placing attention on feeling one place in your body where you are already receiving strong input based on your homunculus (face, hands genitals, feet). Take a few slow breaths, with a long exhale. The next G.R.A.C.E. step is to recall intention. Connect to what is motivating you to do what you are doing right now and FEEL its alignment with your values. As you prepare to engage, attune to self and other. Using the perspective of yourself as a ” happening” in continual co-creation with your environment (inner, outer, other), pause and *sense into your somatic experience all that is happening in your interaction as it unfolds. While we may be conditioned to react to the situation at hand with either helping or fixing, Halifax reminds us to consider what will serve. When we respond with service, we are appreciating the whole context of the situation and acting skillfully to relieve the suffering we have attuned to by sensing what is happening in ourselves and the other person. Engage and end is her final step. Once you are clear on what will serve, take the compassionate action you are able to take with the resources at hand. Sometimes this engagement may generate creative solutions for meaningful change. Other times, engagement is bearing witness together the suffering we experience in the uncertainty of not knowing the outcome of our situation. End with creating some symbolic gesture, such as shaking out your hands, or momentarily bowing your head, to signal to yourself you are closing the encounter to prepare for a next encounter.

The acronym of G.R.A.C.E. described by Roshi Joan Halifax provides us with a map for generating compassion: gather attention, recall intention, attune to self and other, consider what will serve, engage and end.To know when to engage and end, it is helpful to check in with your ANS (Autonomic Nervous System). Your ANS regulates whether you get to respond to your present experience with a mode of fight or flight or tend and befriend. Is your ANS hyper-activated after taking in the nightly news? Adopting an ATTITUDE that reflects an intention to pay kind attention to yourself, to commit to the mantra BE HERE NOW and, once present to yourself to CONNECT to how you are feeling in the moment, will teach you the skills to answer the ANS status question What is presenting in society of late is a reflection of a many over activated autonomic nervous systems; a state not optimal for sound decision making or for healthy immune function. Not a helpful state for meeting the challenges posed by this pandemic!

To know how to engage in and end compassionate action involves exposure to practices that promote equanimity to arrive at a course of skillful action and practices that promote thriving so we have the vigor to sustain our engagement. Eastern traditions encourage contemplation of our challenges using a both and perspective that explores the interdependence of opposite qualities to arrive at insights that may generate solutions. For example, we are alive now and death may come without warning. Humans can both thrive and suffer. To thrive is to flourish, grow, radiate, succeed, arrive, shine, blossom and prosper. Suffering and thriving are opposites. When we fail to thrive, we suffer. To not thrive is to, shrink, shrivel, recede, languish or cease all. Which brings us back the Yoga tradition, one offered to humanity to overcome suffering- to thrive.

Recall compassion for self is the seed for compassion for others. To that end, consider working with these brief self care practices. Engage, then end in 5 minutes. Having cross trained and practiced for more than a decade as a yoga therapist, these practices reflect the integration of yoga into self-care. Why involve yoga? It is a time-tested practice that offers an embodied technology to directly address human suffering. Our body is generally a convenient tool 😊 Research is showing many of the practices used in yoga are in fact evidence-based in the regulating effect they have upon our ANS. The number 5 carries symbolic significance in yogic view: we are made of 5 elements and human beings are considered to have five treasures (a physical body, energies operating the body, mind and emotions, a conscious witness to body, mind and environment experiences and an animate spirit). It is also a convenient reminder as we all have 5 fingers and that worked with this graphic 😊. Visit this link to 52 different self-care practices to nourish your human treasures.

 

Mindfulness is often defined as paying attention in the present moment without judgement. If you have practiced this, you likely have become aware of a rather continuous flow of sensations and feelings that happen within you, around you and between you and others. Happenings are phenomena; observable occurrences. It is a mindful form of play to consider oneself a sort of happening. It is common to lose sight of how happenings (inner, outer and other) continually shape our responses, which in turn influences what unfolds as the next happening and so on through our days. Much is always happening, but our brains can actually only pay attention to one thing at a time. One.

Consider adopting a habit of pausing often through the day to notice the many pulls upon your attention via your five senses. Notice you can toggle your attention between phenomena attracting it, often quite rapidly like a fast scroll through your cell phone photo gallery but in reality, your brain is attending to one happening after another. It helps to name where your attention is going to appreciate how fast it moves. For example, screens, voices, smell of hand sanitizer, street noise, thirst, COVID statistics, political ad, neck tension, planning dinner, etc. Using this practice regularly reveals where our attention is most repetitively being drawn/what is our happening. Being both neuroplastic and bioplastic, we all become more proficient at whatever (thoughts, words, deeds) we repeat the most, including where our attention is drawn and the feeling states and emotions produced. When distracted, our brain activity typically migrates into a self-referential, self -evaluative mode, generating a vague sense of disease. You may have noticed an elevated level of distraction in yourself and others particularly in this time of deep societal uncertainty on so many levels.

Fortunately, the wisdom traditions have a work around! Once we mindfully observe if the dominant phenomena /most frequent object of our attention generates feelings of comfort or discomfort, we can choose to stay with our observation knowing it will inevitably change, or we can redirect our attention to explore for opposite qualities of whatever phenomena is most repeatedly attracting our attention. As suggested by the Yin-Yang symbol, opposite qualities are always co-existent. For example, disruption couples with stability, stagnation with creativity, fear with courage, fatigue with energizing, noise with quiet and so on. Whatever phenomena is happening, observe also its opposite quality. Over time, this cultivates a neutral sense of equanimity. Equanimity is an elixir for uncertainty.

As we each adapt to the increasing disruption of living through this phase of time, self-care may be compromised if not consciously held as a priority. In keeping with exploring opposing qualities of phenomena, consider self-care’s opposites as a path to appreciating the its value to you. We practice self -care to thrive! Let all tension drain with your breath out and take a fresh breath in affirming you care deeply about you! A quick thesaurus swoop provides these antonyms for care- disregard, neglect, oversight, omission, thoughtlessness and cites withering as an antonym to thriving. Feel the impact of each of these words. If and when we have one of those days where we believe self-care just cannot fit into it, experiencing even for a moment its opposites may lead us to a happening of the wise and self-compassionate choice to invest that five minutes.