Bits & Pieces

In Bits & Pieces, I share some brief insights, sparks of creativity and interesting lessons that may or may not constitute further, more elaborate work. Below you can read the most recent ones!

Treasure map (poem)

I awaken to a journey
treasures on a map
 
golden trinkets
dream-come-trues
 
at the touch of a finger
the grasp of an eye
 
fade to dust
 
a promise
carved in every tree
a promise
 
deep down below
bread, water, and a wisdom in death
 
I awaken to a journey

Reconnecting with your body

How can I reconnect with my body? Learn to access your emotions and improve your well-being through regular body scans and mindful practices.

Experiencing emotions and urges mainly in your head suggests that you are disconnected from your body. When you experience feelings of numbness, emptiness, or ‘dead inside,’ the disconnection is particularly strong. This is common in the cases of trauma or major depression.

You can get better at accessing your emotions if you practice tuning in to your body. Learning to do so has other benefits, too:

  • You will gain a sense of vitality,
  • experience more the positive feelings (joy, happiness, contentment, love…),
  • greater control over your actions by not getting hooked by thoughts,
  • better choices and decisions,
  • develop a better intuitive sense,
  • feeling safer in—not in tension with your body, and
  • stronger, deeper relationships.

Exercise: body scan

One of the best ways to reconnect with your body is to do regular body scans. These can be as short as thirty seconds or take as long as 30 minutes. Try to do them as often as you can, at least once a day, to make progress fastest.

You may find that some areas are particularly numb, or there are areas that you tend to avoid. Challenge yourself to gradually explore these areas, do not brush over them because there is ‘nothing to feel.’ When there is really nothing to feel you can create a feeling, either move, massage, or tense up a muscle in that area.

Being present, living life

How can I be more present in my daily life? This page offers mindfulness techniques to help you stay focused and fully engaged in the moment.

Caught up in our thoughts, our attention wanders away from what we are doing. We are physically present but psychologically absent. Being absorbed in thought can be useful when it is life-enhancing (for example, while solving a complex problem at work). When it takes us away from the life we want, we are simply hooked.

When we are not psychologically present, we (1) miss out on life and/or (2) do things poorly.

How to be more present

Mindfulness is a set of psychological skills for effective living. It entails paying attention with openness, curiosity, and flexibility. 

We can imagine life as a stage show. On stage are your thoughts, feelings, memories, urges, and sensations. But also, everything you can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell.

There is a part of you that can zoom in and out of that show, lighting up any aspect at any time—the noticing self, essentially: you. The noticing self is central to every mindfulness skill.

Sometimes it illuminates thoughts or puts a particular emotion in the spotlight. At other times, it directs attention toward the world around you, noticing sights, sounds, and smells. Sometimes it zooms in and spotlight one area. At other times it zooms out, floodlighting the entire stage.

This is called flexible attention. It is the ability to narrow, broaden, sustain, or shift your focus, depending on what is most useful in the moment.

Everything we have learned so far incorporates various aspects of mindfulness. Mindfulness helps us to be present, so we can act more effectively and get more fulfillment (eudaimonia) out of life.

Below are four manfulness practices that you can immediately incorporate into your life. If distracting thoughts and feelings should arise, acknowledge them, and put your attention back to the task at hand.

  1. Notice your environment. Notice as much as you can about what you can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell.
  2. Notice your body. Inwardly scan your body from head to toe.
  3. Notice your breath. Notice the rise and fall of your rib cage and the air moving in and out of your upper body.
  4. Notice sounds. Just focus on the sounds you can hear, either from yourself or from your environment.

Curing boredom

When these thoughts hook us, they obscure our view of the world. But life is very different when we pay attention with openness and curiosity.

We tend to get bored when our mind takes our present experience for granted, when we have experienced it many times before. The stage show of life is still there, but the lights are so dim we barely notice anything of it.

In such moments, we can use our noticing self to turn up the luminosity. Often you will find that there is a vast length, breadth, and depth of human experience, even when we have been there before.

Take a book for example and try to experience it as if for the first time in your life. Feel its weight and texture, the pages as you turn them. See the colours and shapes on the cover, the space around the letters inside. Smell the paper, and listen to the sound the pages make…

Exercise: a thoroughly enjoyable practice

Find at least two things every day that are enjoyable, important, meaningful, and life-enhancing. Not something you do to distract from unwanted feelings or thoughts. Nevertheless, it can be as simple as eating lunch or stoking a cat.

Pretend that this is the first time you have ever done it. Pay full attention to what you can see, hear, smell, touch, or taste, and savour every moment. Focus completely on what you are doing, using all your five senses. When thoughts and feelings arise, acknowledge their presence, let them be, and refocus on what you were doing.

Exercise: a not-so-enjoyable practice

You can do the same thing for something that you usually do routinely, or things you (would rather) avoid. Give this activity your full attention. Notice whatever you can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. Approach it as if you are a curious child discovering it for the very first time.

Keep practicing these exercises throughout the day. The aim is to progressively extend to more areas of your life, until you reach a point where you no longer think of them as practice. You are just naturally being present.

Over time, this leads to a profound change in the way you live: rather than missing out on life, you start making the most of it.

Kind self-touch and urge-surfing

How can I practise kind self-touch and urge surfing? Learn techniques for self-care through kind self-touch and managing urges effectively.

An (often more effective) alterative to compassionate self-talk is self-touch. It can help us to be there for ourselves in a caring, supportive way, at a level much deeper than words.

Exercise: kind self-touch

Evoke and observe a difficult emotion like you did in the chapter before this one. Take one of your hands, palm upward, and see if you can fill this hand with a sense of kindness. Now rest this hand gently on your body, either on top of the feeling or on top of your heart.

See if you can send that kindness inward—a sense of warmth and support, flowing into you. Hold yourself kindly and gently. Connecting with yourself, caring for yourself, offering comfort and support.

Alternatively, you might like to experiment with some of the following options:

  • placing both hands on your chest or your tummy,
  • hugging yourself gently with or without gently stroking your arms,
  • gently massaging an area of tension or tightness, or
  • holding your face in your hands with or without massaging your temples.

Exercise: urge surfing

Like waves, urges start off small, steadily increase, reach a peak, and drop off. When urges show up, we usually respond with by giving into or resisting them. While urge surfing, we do neither; instead, we open up and make room for them.

An urge ‘wave’ usually lasts about three minutes when we do not resist them but let them be. When we fight with them, ruminate about them, worry about them, try to distract ourselves, or try to push them away they can last much longer.

Urge surfing is very similar to the practice for taming your emotions:

  1. Take note. Notice and name the urge. Where do you feel it most in your body?
  2. Allow. Give your urge permission to be there.
  3. Make room. Open up to the urge; allowing it to freely rise, peak, and fall in its own good time.
  4. Expand awareness. Broaden your awareness to the rest of your body, and then also the world around you.

The main difference with the TAME technique is that we imagine the urge as a wave; watching it with curiosity as it rises, crests, and subsides.

Unhooking from, and taming your emotions

How can I unhook from and tame my emotions? This guide provides steps to manage and understand your emotions for long-term well-being.

Painful feelings tell us that we care. They arise when the reality we have does not match with the reality we would like. This chapter will focus on the sensation-component of our emotions. Before learning to unhook from them, we need some preparation.

Preparation task 1: get clear on your motivation

Your motivation to unhook from painful sensations should not arise from a desire to experience pleasant sensations or get rid of unpleasant ones. Your goal should be to engage in toward moves to improve your life over the long-term.

Look at the answers you gave to the questions from chapter 10. Do they motivate you enough that you are willing to face the uncomfortable? If not, further reflect on them until they do.

Preparation task 2: choose your degree of difficulty

You can apply unhooking skills to any emotion, urge, or sensation, no matter how small. Do not begin with ones that overwhelm you, then gradually, work up to bigger ones later.

Preparation task 3: expect your mind to interfere

Your mind will not help you in what you are about to attempt. It will throw distractions, judgement, or rationalisations that prompt you not to do that for which you set out. Be ready for this. Do not try to push these thoughts away, but (thankfully) observe them instead.

Preparation task 4: be ready to drop anchor

Make sure you have decided on your anchor and to have it ready. Although we should not need it (since we start small), you should have it in case you get overwhelmed nonetheless.

Preparation task 5: contact a difficult feeling

Try to evoke a difficult feeling. You can do this by…

  • vividly recalling a (not too) painful memory,
  • recalling an unpleasant upcoming event, or
  • dwell, for a minute or so, on a major problem you are currently facing.

Tame your emotions

Once you are ready with a difficult feeling, you can close your eyes and start to practice ‘taming your emotions.’ Taming your emotions or urges always follows the same, 4-step process.

  1. Take note. Notice what (1) you are doing: how you are sitting, breathing, what you are touching… notice how (2) you feel throughout your body, and (3) where you feel the emotion or urge most clearly. Then, take a moment to name what you are feeling.
  2. Allow. Give your feeling permission to be there.
  3. Make room. Breathe into the feeling: imagine your breath flowing into and around what you feel. Then open up around the feeling, make space for it (rather than squeezing in on it). As you continue to observe this feeling, also open up to any feeling underneath it. Conceive the feeling as an object inside of you what is its shape, colour, form, or substance? 
  4. Expand awareness. Now expand your awareness beyond the emotion. How does your body feel? What can you notice around you?

It is up to you to decide which of the above suggestions you find most helpful in each step, as well as the order by which you like to go through them. The book has a host of extra questions and pointers you can use in each step.

Throughout each day, practice making room with a range of different feelings—both strong and mild, pleasant, and unpleasant. Each time you TAME an emotion; it is a step toward the life you want.

Learning from your emotions

Once you have gone through the steps, you can take a minute to tap into the ‘wisdom’ of your emotion. To do so, ask yourself two simple questions:

  1. What does this emotion tell me I care about?
  2. What does it suggest I need to attend to?

There will not always be an answer or a wisdom to share, so do not try to force out an answer.

The emotional struggle switch

How can I stop struggling with my emotions? Learn to turn off your ‘struggle switch’ to let emotions flow freely and avoid unnecessary suffering.

When we struggle against our emotions, we end up in a vicious cycle only making things worse. For example, when we have anxiety, and thing about ow much we do not want it to be there, we get anxious about our anxiety! When the anxiety gets worse, we may turn sad or angry, further spiralling down the cycle of despair.

When our ‘struggle switch’ is off, we acknowledge it and allow it to be there. The struggle switch is an emotion amplifier, prompting us to pull out all our struggle strategies. Turn it off, and…

  1. our emotions can freely flow through us;
  2. we do not waste time and energy, meaning we can invest it in more meaningful and productive actions; and
  3. we avoid additional suffering.

Leave it on and…

  1. our emotions get stuck and hang around for longer;
  2. we waste a lot of time and energy struggling with them; and
  3. we amplify them and create unnecessary pain.

Cultivating self-kindness

How can I cultivate self-kindness? Learn to acknowledge your pain and respond with kindness through kind self-talk and actions.

You can summarise self-compassion as “acknowledge your pain; respond with kindness.” We acknowledge the pain as of a friend who was suffering. This is what we have been practicing in the past few chapters.

We can extend the naming convention we have developed by introducing notions of temporality. When we say, “here and now, I’m noticing anxiety,” it helps us remember that our thoughts and feelings change over time.

Kind self-talk

Kind self-talk means speaking to ourselves in kind, encouraging, and supportive ways. Remember, the brain changes through addition, not subtraction. We are not trying to suppress or ignore harsh self-talk. We are laying down new ones on top of them to bring in self-kindness.

Throughout the day, whenever difficult thoughts and feelings arise:

  1. acknowledge they are present,
  2. acknowledge it is painful or difficult to have them, and
  3. remind yourself to respond with kindness and caring.

To help with this, it is useful to have a simple catchphrase you can say to yourself. It should be short and memorable, for example: “this hurts, be kind.”

Kind actions

Self-compassion is also about what we do for ourselves. It is also about actions of kindness, caring, and support. These could include reading this book, stretching, savouring a coffee, eating healthy, exercising, practicing your unhooking skills, etc.

Exercise: kind actions

Take a few minutes to write down what acts of self-kindness you can do (1) in the next few hours, and (2) in the upcoming days. Over the next few hours and days, actually do these things. Notice what it is like to do so. Also notice how your mind tries to talk you out of it: what reasons does it give you not to? What rules does it impose on you?

Leaving your comfort zone

How can I leave my comfort zone? Discover strategies to expand your unhooking skills and connect with values and goals for a more meaningful life.

As soon as we start to do something new, our mind will send us warnings. These consist of negative thoughts, disturbing images, bad memories, and uncomfortable emotions, urges, and sensations. This keeps us from doing what matters and we keep doing the exact same thing as we did before. We stay in our ‘comfort zone,’ or better our ‘stagnation space.’

There are two strategies for leaving this space:

  1.  continually expand the range of your unhooking skills, and
  2. connect with something that makes it worthwhile leaving.

The second strategy is what this chapter is about.

Values and goals

Values are your heart’s deepest desires for how you want to treat yourself and others and the world around you. They are personal qualities you want to bring into existence in the things you say and do. Values can be our inspiration, motivation, and guidance. They help us do things that make our lives more meaningful and rewarding.

Goals are things you are aiming for in the future: things you want to get, have, achieve, or do. Most of them are either…

  • emotional goals (describing how we want to feel),
  • behavioural goals (describing how we want to behave), and
  • outcome goals (describing what we want to get or have).

The empowerment capacity of values

Outcome goals are future oriented. As long as we have not achieved them, we can become frustrated, dissatisfied, disappointed, sad, or even hopeless. However, we can live our values right here and now, even when our goals are out of reach. That is why living your values is empowering; you can always ‘achieve’ it.

Exercise: finding your values

Pick an area of life you want to improve (e.g., work, health, leisure, relationships). Then consider which values best complete this sentence: In this area of my life, I want to be…

You can find comprehensive lists of values online that will help you in this process.

Exercise: finding your goals

Suppose all your difficult thoughts and feelings disappear…

  • What projects, activities, or tasks would you start, resume, or continue?
  • What or who would you stop avoiding?
  • What would you start doing or do more of?
  • How would you treat yourself differently?
  • How would you treat others differently, in your most important relationships?

Thinking about these questions probably brought up negative thoughts, painful memories, and uncomfortable emotions. Again, this is completely normal. If anything, it is a good opportunity to practice your unhooking skills!

Stage show of life

How can I cultivate mindfulness through meditation? This page explains how to focus on the breath and other techniques to enhance mindfulness.

Our internal experience has two components: the thinking self and the noticing self. The thinking self (in this book referred to as the mind) produces thoughts, images, and memories. The noticing self observes those thoughts, images, and memories, but also sounds, smells, sights and feelings. The more we focus on the products of the mind, the less we are engaged with the world around us.

Our mind is like a radio in the background. And like such a radio, you can ‘forget’ to hear it by focusing all your attention on something else. This is what we should do when our mind is broadcasting things that are not useful to us.

We can cultivate this skill through mediation. For example, by focusing completely on the physical sensations of the breath. When thoughts or images arise, acknowledge them, and then come back to the breath. 

When you meditate regularly, you gain three important skills. Namely, you will learn. how to…

  1. let your thoughts freely come and go,
  2. focus on a task or activity and notice when your attention has wandered away, and
  3. unhook from the thoughts and refocus your attention on what you are doing.

When you do not like to focus on your breath, you can alternatively:

  1. walk with full attention,
  2. ‘scan’ through your body and notice all the sensations you encounter, or
  3. focussing on your muscles extending while doing stretching exercises.

Unhooking from memories and images

How can I unhook from painful memories and images? Learn techniques to manage and reduce the impact of distressing thoughts and memories.

We all get hooked by frightening images of the future or painful memories of the past. Your mind creates these cognitions to keep you safe.

When hooked by images or memories, we…

  • give them all our attention,
  • react to them as if they are happening right now, and
  • treat them as things we need to avoid or get rid of. 

This happens especially because these images can trigger unpleasant emotions, urges and sensations.

When we manage not to get hooked, we…

  • recognise their true nature: pictures in our mind,
  • give them full attention when they are useful, and
  • realising that they are not threats to get rid of.

Unhooking from memories and images is like that of words, so that previous methods (such as naming) can be applied here as well. However, because of the strong physical response, ‘dropping anchor’ first will often be necessary.

Some techniques specific to memories and images are the following. First, imagine a difficult image or memory and notice how it is affecting you. Then…

  1. Imagine it on a small television across a room. Turn the tv around, fast-forward, play back, turn to black-and-white and back to colour… The goal is to see the image for what it is: a harmless picture.
  2. Add subtitles. For example, “the story of…” when it is a memory or image that often reoccurs.
  3. Add a fitting (or intentionally un-fitting) soundtrack.
  4. Imagine the image on different ‘screens:’ the T-shirt of a jogger, a poster in a bedroom, a flyer on the street.

Repeat this exercise as often as you can manage. Through practice, images and memories will slowly fade to the background, like an actual TV.

All prior techniques are essentially a form of exposure therapy. They trigger the old neural pathways for you to lay new ones (new responses) on top of them. Just like with actual exposure therapy, practice is essential.