WillSpirit!

Where Will meets Spirit
∞ Love, Clarity, Balance, Peace, & Bliss ∞

A science, mental health and spirituality blog written by a physician.








  • Red_Exclamation_DotDisclaimer
    • Dear Visitors:
      Although I trained and practiced as a physician, my background does not include formal instruction in psychiatry beyond basic medical education. This journal presents ideas about treatment philosophy, but must not be considered therapeutic advice. Abrupt changes in one's psychiatric medications can trigger profound cognitive, emotional, and physical symptoms, including suicidal thoughts and actions. Consequently, pharmaceutical agents should not be increased or decreased without supervision by a mental health clinician.

    • ON THE OTHER HAND, your brain belongs to you, and your opinion counts. If you decide that changing your medication regimen will serve your best interest, then I believe your providers have an obligation to help you try to achieve your goals. I want everyone to be educated about their options, and do what will be most helpful for themselves. No one should feel pushed around by dogmatic and/or limited viewpoints, whether those of psychiatrists, anti-psychiatry advocates, or myself.


Joy in Turmoil, Bliss in Pain, Truth in Sorrow

With luck, I’ll be leaving the hospital tomorrow. A long convalescence stretches before me, starting with a minimum of two weeks without any sustenance by mouth: I’ll be receiving nutrition only via intravenous infusion. An X-ray after the first fortnight will show whether my intestinal blockage has diminished so I can start to add in actual food. I’m hoping for the best in that regard, since the alternative will be surgery to bypass the obstruction.

My body has been weakened by this episode. After a week of starvation I have lost both abdominal fat (yeah!) and muscle mass (ouch!). How completely I can regain my conditioning while being fed with milky fluid streaming directly into my heart remains unclear. Most likely, robust health will only begin to return once I’m on solid meals.

A friend visited yesterday morning and I told her that my default position on hardship is that it teaches me about life. Looking at setbacks this way is my main mechanism for sidestepping discouragement. You’d think, perhaps, that simply living through this life-threatening episode would be sufficient, but I’m perverse enough to still worry about the fate of my acupuncture practice. And I’m carnal enough to feel frustrated that I couldn’t join my wife last night as she ate at a restaurant with friends. Only by seeking meaning can I quell the riot of discontent.

How can we be sure meaning even exists? Some of us are convinced the universe is random and pointless; others believe in a creative God; many find comfort in spiritual practice but resist religious dogma. Whether reality as a whole seems of deep significance varies accordingly. But there is a difference between unveiling the purpose of the entire cosmos versus finding meaning in the stories of our individual lives. We can all discover meaning in this smaller sense of the word.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl paraphrases Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” My own personal why has become a quest for ever broader understanding of human life, suffering, and fortitude. This means I look for patterns in the cosmos that illuminate our daily lives. It means I examine when and how difficulty gets transmuted into wisdom. And I investigate why most of us continue to value life despite its trials.

Here is one pattern I’ve tried to keep in mind throughout this ordeal: all living things are connected so intimately that it is artificial to conceive of individual persons as separate from the whole. The appearance of division is superficial, whereas the reality of unity is profound. All that I experience is part of what everyone goes through, and vice versa. As a result, I feel less alone and beleaguered. This conviction that life is shared greatly reduces my sense of suffering. Moments of hardship are like the troughs among ocean swells: they are transient depressions that blend seamlessly with the peaks. At this moment I may be far from the higher, more pleasurable heights of living, but somewhere out there a couple is making love for the first time, or cradling their new baby, or sitting on a veranda appreciating nature and retirement.

Here’s what this disease taught me about how hardship can transform into realization: When pain gets extremely intense, past and future recede from consciousness and only the present moment remains. During my most agonizing hours of abdominal pain and vomiting, I no longer worried about my acupuncture practice, or even whether I might have cancer. I remained utterly fixated on my body and its insistent sensations. Since absolute present-moment awareness is the goal of many meditative practices, I see the tendency of intense pain to focus the mind as a surprising consolation prize that ameliorates its awful sting.

And here’s something I’ve known intellectually but understand on a deeper level after spending so much time on an inpatient ward, where the mostly elderly population deals with so much disease and discomfort: No one gets through life without hardship, illness, and death. It may seem that the first two get distributed unevenly, but sooner or later every person sees his or her share of life’s dark side. And yet, everyone also enjoys moments of contentment and affection. Life is not as unfair as it seems, since all are privileged to live it, all must cope with infirmity and mortality, and all discover moments in the sun.

These observations place my current difficulties in a larger context. I see how my tribulations are balanced by others’ joys. I appreciate that pain connects me with the instantaneous jolt of life. I recognize that illness and death are universal, but so are pleasure and love.

This major illness has proven a wise teacher. How much it has enlarged me! Even though my recent problems have been uncomfortable and disruptive, I see so much meaning in them that I feel grateful. Because I find lessons, I embrace my troubles despite the agony, uncertainty, and grief.

Do my words sound like hollow rationalizations? I suppose people will interpret this essay according to personal beliefs, but I’m sincere when I say that these perspectives helped me find precious moments during the past few weeks, despite the arduous challenges.

Many times in years past I believed my trajectory so punishing that I planned to truncate it. Now that I’ve learned to create meaning out of those same hardships, I can’t imagine wanting to shorten this spectacular span of living.

With luck, I’ll go home tomorrow. With Grace, I’ll keep seeing humanity as shared, imminent, and balanced even as my life gradually returns to normal.

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Joy in Turmoil, Bliss in Pain, Truth in Sorrow was published on February 4th, 2012 . 5 comments






The Third Dart

Pain, illness, fear, and hunger make clear thinking difficult. They undermine efforts to behave well toward others. These effects have become obvious to me in this hospital bed, where I’ve hung out for seven days without eating, feeling pain ranging from mild cramping to agonizing pressure, and suffering with ongoing nausea that at one point morphed into twelve hours of retching.

To my chagrin, I’ve seen myself act more selfishly and distractedly than usual. When visitors arrive I sometimes talk about my dilemma non-stop, whereas other times I stare blankly without truly hearing what they say about their own trials. I try to remain focused on the needs of others, but it’s hard.

As never before, I understand how maturity and effectiveness can be undermined by adverse states of body-mind. But I’m trying to cut myself some slack and simply review the effects of starvation and pain on my actions and words. I want to learn from this experience but not suffer excessively because of it.

Life inevitably veers in unwanted directions. How much misery we feel depends to a large extent on how we respond to fate. This is true when life disappoints us, and also when we disappoint ourselves.

People sometimes slight us, leading to mild irritation. But as we mentally replay the offense later, we may build up resentment or even rage. Of course, we could instead view the occasion from a broader perspective and forgive the insult. Similarly, a personal gaffe can be made worse by negative obsession, or better by viewing it as a learning experience.

Before we begin to mature as adults, we may not be aware that such choices exist. Resentful obsession seems like the natural and inevitable response to an insult. Humiliated rumination seems like the deserved consequence of social mistakes.

Fortunately, as we gain skills we learn to transform resentment into forgiveness. We abandon narrow focus on a single slip-up for a broader and more compassionate perspective on our personality.

When we are faced with really serious illness or other trying circumstances, our resources can get overwhelmed. Our healthier skills are most likely to fail us when we are hurting, hungry, frightened, or lonely. Not only are we more likely to overreact to minor injustice, and to act childishly, we are more likely to punish ourselves afterward.

My system has seldom felt so physically stressed as it does now. As already mentioned (in this essay and the last), the duress has increased my tendency to behave with embarrassing immaturity and selfishness. Before I started paying attention to this cause and effect relationship, I had begun to berate myself for getting so far off track.

Yesterday during a conversation about these issues with a dear Buddhist friend, we talked about how the Buddha distinguished between what he termed the first and second darts.

Fate throws the first dart into our sphere. For instance, an unexpected major illness arises. It could be anything. For the sake of argument, let’s imagine sudden pain arises in the abdomen and doctors discover a nest of abnormal blood vessels near the pancreas, along with a bleeding aneurysm. Prolonged hospitalization becomes unavoidable, along with its discomforts and inconveniences.

We toss the second dart ourselves. Perhaps it penetrates consciousness in the form of worry: does a cancer lurk under that tangle of vasculature? Is death on the march? The second dart drives resentment and frustration: plagued by worry and feeling persecuted, we complain and act out. The second dart accentuates our misery. If we simply experienced unavoidable hardship without layering on toxic interpretations and retaliations, we suffer less.

During yesterday’s conversation with my friend, we came up with the idea of a third dart. We use this missile to attack our unskillful response to fate. Just as the second dart arises in reaction to the first, in that we worsen a bad situation by distorted thinking, the third dart flies as we reject our own negativity. We could choose to be compassionate toward the second dart: “Oh jeez, I yelled at that phlebotomist after he jabbed me a third time trying to suck blood out of my arm. How predictably human I am! When he comes back I’ll apologize.” Quite often, however, we instead launch the third dart and berate ourselves for shortcomings: “How ugly of me to sound so hostile! Didn’t I learn anything from all those years of meditation and acceptance practice?”

Notice we won’t be susceptible to such self-reproach if we don’t value skillful behavior. The red-faced tailgater leaning on his horn as traffic slows for a yellow light is unlikely to suffer from the third dart, though he is hitting himself hard with the second one. He probably won’t be blaming himself for his intolerance. In this sense, being self-critical shows more maturity than being self-righteous. Even so, the third dart does little to actually improve our responses. It simply makes us pay a higher price after we misstep.

The third dart is a danger to those of us who hope to tread a spiritual path, because we replace helpful noble intentions with damaging self-criticism. We feel painfully aware of our inadequacy compared to the highest exemplars, like the Buddha or Christ. To intend skillful behavior is edifying, but to punish ourselves for human failings is destructive. We gain nothing from the third dart.

I’ve been pulling a lot of third darts out of my butt lately. A prolonged hospitalization for a confusing, painful illness is a great way to lose one’s grip and begin acting unskillfully. Instead of giving in to my inclination to beat myself up afterwards, I’m working to recover my balance as quickly as possible: correct my behavior, apologize to whoever I hurt, and forgive myself. I yank out the third dart and keep aiming for my better path.

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The Third Dart was published on February 2nd, 2012 . 10 comments






Biology, Spirit, and Transcendence

My blog’s tagline includes the word spirituality, which has devolved into a vague term that can mean almost anything. In the interest of clarity and to balance the two previous posts that emphasized material takes on human life, this essay will outline my spiritual path and beliefs. Readers may or may not be interested, but it helps me to spell out my philosophy from time to time, especially since it’s still maturing.

What follows rambles through my ideas about different metaphysical stances, to my own personal experiences with them, to a description of my current stage of development. Since my understanding of the world’s religions is superficial, at best, don’t be surprised if my statements about faith and practice sound obvious or naive.

Two posts back I stated that our animal identity constitutes “the most central and accurate description we could give of ourselves.” After all, it seems unarguable that humans are mammals with large brains. Even while writing that sentence, however, I remained aware that many resist considering themselves ‘mere’ biological organisms. Indeed, when I posted the same essay on my Psychcentral blog, the following comment came in:

Hmmmm, so we are reduced to “cycles of carbon and calcium?” I prefer that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” by our creator. As a believer, I will be returned to Him.

This reader’s opinion probably resonates with many who consider themselves religious or faithful. Here’s an edited version of what I wrote in reply:

You bring up the other common opinion about ultimate identity: that we are best described as conscious entities (souls) inhabiting organic forms. But even if one takes that view, at death the body is still reduced to its constituent elements and recycled in the biosphere. The two viewpoints are not mutually exclusive. In fact, since our biological form is apparent, while our spiritual nature remains debatable, even believers should look for ways to interweave the two perspectives. To deny our biology is to deny material reality, just as to deny our divinity is to deny higher meaning.

Divinity, as I intend it here, is a loose term meant to suggest that we have inner measures of soulfulness that go beyond the solid, predictable qualities of organic matter.

In the opinion of Christians and Muslims, each person has an immortal soul that is born once to this world and then consigned to eternal bliss or damnation based on a lifetime’s accounting of virtue, sin, faithfulness, and redemption. The sensible person thus works toward righteous behavior in order to secure a place in Paradise.

According to many Hindus and Buddhists, a soul (or its equivalent) is reborn repeatedly through time because of karmic entanglements accrued in previous incarnations. The wise soul engages in right action to limit such attachments and thus escape the cycle of death and rebirth.

Not all religions postulate an eternal and personal soul. For instance, Western Buddhist teachers seldom mention reincarnation. They discuss the basic principles of detachment and right behavior without reference to rebirth. This obviates the need to discuss a soul-entity, and in fact the Buddha himself rejected the existence of a discrete soul, since he found no evidence for any consistent, fixed self in his deep explorations of mind. Most Buddhists in the USA seek direct, meditative insight into the nature of consciousness as the ultimate goal of practice and don’t worry about escaping the cycles of birth and death. The focus is on mental process without invocation of any divine or eternal soul.

Many contemplative traditions (including some strains of Sufism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism) also reject the personal soul-concept. However, they do so by invoking a universal consciousness that subsumes the individual. This is the non-dual stance, which sees no meaningful distinction between soul and body, or between spirit and matter, or between God and individual souls. According to this philosophy, all beings arise as creative expressions of one vast Presence that manifests in myriad forms but retains core unity, which unenlightened humans fail to grasp. Such analysis rejects boundaries as illusory, whether between individuals, between people and animals, or between people and Divine Nature. We are viewed as all of one body, in the deepest sense. This perspective is essentially ecological and fits well with what we see in the biosphere.

Those of conventional scientific persuasion bristle at mention of either soul or universal consciousness. They see any suggestion of mystical reality as unfounded, infantile, and dangerous. But there is no scientific evidence that rules out either individual souls or cosmic consciousness. Quantum mechanical principles such as entanglement and non-locality provide plausible, if completely unproven, mechanisms whereby enduring impressions of mental life could be retained in the cosmic matrix without violating established physical laws. These ‘recordings’ could possess all the qualities we expect of discrete souls or universal awareness.

Over the years I’ve explored many different metaphysical positions. Raised as an atheist and educated extensively as a biologist, I never seriously questioned the strict materialist perspective until age twenty-nine. At that time, as I entered Alcoholics Anonymous and felt encouraged to find a ‘higher power,’ fate connected me with the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). Quakerism eschews dogma and doctrine in favor of direct, experiential discovery of ‘the light of Christ’ within each of us.

In 2000, after a series of profound (even shattering) spiritual experiences, I converted to Catholicism. For many years I went to mass several times a week and tried hard to buy into the Roman Catholic worldview. But although I appreciated the call to mysticism and the sacred rituals, the Church’s dogmatism, reactionary sociopolitical views, and rejection of female priesthood alienated me.

As an alternative, I explored Buddhist meditation. For two years I went to local meditation centers for weekly sittings and occasional longer retreats. At the same time, I undertook an intensive program of reading about Buddhism. The emphasis on silence and detached observation of thought felt quite helpful and fit with the clinically oriented mindfulness meditation I’d learned ten years earlier in classes at a local medical center. But in the end, I had trouble with Buddhist emphasis on emptiness and detachment. Although I see the value of exploring these qualities, they offer little in the way of felt love or sweetness. Meditative consciousness is vast and reverberant, but not inherently warm.

Next, I explored a Hindu offshoot at a retreat center that opened a couple of miles from my home. The monastics taught me to visualize my soul as residing in the area of the third eye in the middle of my forehead. I learned to concentrate on my soulful qualities rather than my bodily identity. This approach challenged me at first, because so much noise and confusion seems to arise in my head, and focusing my attention there failed to quiet the uproar. At the suggestion of a skilled meditator, I adjusted the technique by moving my conscious centerpoint to my heart, where there is more peace and warmth. Before long, I awoke to the powerful illumination of an ancient inner awareness that has little use for my day-to-day worries, ambitions, and desires. This inner light feels like a combination of personal soul and universal Presence arising from the cosmos itself.

Oddly, and beautifully, I now find myself having gone full circle. After all my explorations I am back at the Quaker starting point, only with a much more palpable sense of that divine light within each of us. This is experience and not belief. I cannot justify it in rational terms and see no reason to try. All I can do is describe what happens when my meditations go well. It matters little to me whether my direct apprehension of love, unity, and rightness resides only in my brain or truly connects, as it seems to, with a cosmic consciousness. Because it is experiential and not referential, it feels quite solid and unshakable. Some days I interpret my soulfulness in mystical terms, and other days I think about it in purely neurological ones. But no matter what I believe about this state of mind, it brings me peace.

Every person must choose her or his own path, and I have learned to judge no one’s, not even my own. Those who prefer material atheism have adopted a belief system that requires no leap of faith and has a logically satisfying internal consistency. Those who believe in heaven or reincarnation, and who view souls as eternal and individual, have found a comforting formula that gives meaning to what happens here on earth. Those who meditate mindfully to enter spacious states of consciousness experience inexpressible mental stillness. Non-dualists, in turn, use their practice to find (what seems like) experiential confirmation of an ageless and infinite cosmic unity.

For my part, I know only that there is something that feels divine and non-egoic in the center of my chest. It beats like a spiritual heart throbbing in unison with the biological pump that moves my blood. My metaphysical position is neither more nor less valid than any other. It has features in common with the tenets of materialism, since my bliss seems deeply rooted in my biology. It shares some aspects of the soul-religions, because the brightness within acts like an eternal spark that illuminates my better nature. Consciousness also feels enhanced, as I tune into the infinite harmony that comes with silent meditation. My practice has non-dual aspects too, since in its highest expression I feel merged with all beings and all Nature.

This is my spiritual trail, which has been blazed through two-and-a-half decades of searching and introspection. I believe each of us must choose whatever path feels right. We should seek the tradition(s) that can heal both our own wounds and the troubles of the larger world.

So although I spent two posts honoring humans as living, breathing organisms, it feels vital to round out the discussion with my conviction that we also embody a loving, timeless Presence that permeates and transcends our material forms. This may be a personal soul, or a universal one. It may be pure consciousness or an artifact of brain physiology. No matter. It dwells within each of us, waiting for the day we abandon our desperate scheming and open to Life in all its terror, splendor, and Grace.

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Biology, Spirit, and Transcendence was published on January 15th, 2012 . 5 comments






The Body Didactic

Too many of us grew up in families wracked with pain. Emotional wounds accumulate in settings of neglect, abuse, bereavement, molestation, violence, and misery. As adults, these ancient injuries undermine our happiness. We often choose poorly in relationships, careers, and pastimes. Even if we don’t make gross mistakes, we lack the confidence to endorse our own choices. We feel uneasy in good times and overwhelmed in bad. This is the legacy of childhood trauma.

At times we shut down emotionally, closing ourselves off from the affection we crave. Other times we act out and hurt the ones we love or destroy our own reputations.

Still, healing can happen after even the worst of upbringings. It takes time, and backslides are unavoidable, but eventually we stabilize in greater maturity and emotional openness than we ever imagined.

In the last post we highlighted the body’s gentle wisdom and how often we ignore it. As I move further along the path to peace of mind, the importance of befriending physical nature becomes ever more obvious. The injuries of the past are stored in our biology, where they affect every aspect of our lives.

For instance, upon remembering painful events from our past, our minds recoil in shame, anger, or sorrow. In equal measure, our bodies respond with corresponding feelings of hollowness, tension, or exhaustion. Just as emotional surges reflect the state of mind that accompanied past trauma, somatic symptoms recreate the physical feelings recorded at the time of the original hardship. Often, such emotional and somatic reactions arise without any conscious memory of the childhood injury that caused them. For example, when a spouse criticizes us, we may feel ashamed and small, or furious and explosive, without overtly connecting these responses to the parental harshness that first established the pattern.

Before we learn healthier strategies, our habitual response to distressing sensations is avoidance. We turn our mental spotlight away from our body’s messages. We may lose ourselves in thought and analysis, ignoring the cramp in our gut, the ache in our shoulders, or the shallowness of our breath. We may evade direct, felt experience by focusing on the actions and misdeeds of others. We may use the distraction of intoxicants, food, sex, or television as shields against painful emotional and sensual turmoil. We become skilled escape artists.

The solution can be found in the body. In fact, we cannot fully transcend our pain until we face its somatic legacy. At first, this feels excruciating. When we begin to tune into our bodily responses, we become aware of a sensory universe populated by knots, soreness, burning, blockage, agitation, and numbness. These discomforts are the physical counterpart to the emotional uproar that also arises. We discover how underneath our superficial and obsessional thought, our core system buzzes with anxiety, grief, anger, and fear. It all seems so noisy and confusing that we may find ourselves pouring a bowl of cereal with little memory of rising from meditation and heading to the kitchen.

The good news is that as we reacquaint ourselves with our bodies, the sensations become less intense. We relax into nonjudgmental awareness, which lessens the stimulation of tension and pain. It can seem like our systems shout less loudly when they have our attention.

Furthermore, we can learn to enter even the most unpleasant symptoms with an attitude of openness, acceptance, and love. In my own case, I experience deep, burning pain in my neck and upper back that worsens during times of stress. It is easy to hate this discomfort and resist it, but doing so only increases the misery. A better strategy is to move toward the soreness with focused attention and gentle affection. I apologize to my neck for all the times my activities harmed it. I feel compassion for its burden of muscle spasm, arthritis, poor posture, and neglect. I honor the hard work it performs in service of supporting my head every day.

By treating my body with the same care I would treat any beloved animal, I send a message of acceptance and affection to my entire being. The self-compassion resonates on the somatic, psychological, and spiritual levels. It feels profoundly healing. Often, the pain seems to abate with this practice, but the goal isn’t to alter my experience in any way. I seek only to honor my body and whatever it communicates.

All painful experiences can be approached in similar fashion. Crushing sorrow, vertiginous loneliness, shattering fear, and even livid rage can all be embraced with this attitude of loving, wise embrace. One finds that life is full of pain, but that this does not mean it is going badly. For as we open to our discomfort and terror, as we accept uncertainty and loss, we automatically increase our ability to feel joy, love, and spacious bliss.

The body will teach us the inexhaustible majesty of life when we surrender to both its wounds and its strengths.

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The Body Didactic was published on January 10th, 2012 .






Let Your Body Seduce You

Imagine someone asks you this question: “What are you?”

We seldom get queried in this way, since the more typical questions are: “Who are you?” or “What do you do?”

So take a moment to answer the question of what you consider yourself to be, first and foremost. Some of us will answer with our careers: “I’m a physician.” or “I’m a writer.” Others will state an important social connection: “I’m a mother.” or “I’m an American.” A few will refer to religion: “I’m a Muslim (or Atheist, Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, etc).”

But few of us will reply, without forethought: “I am a warm-blooded animal that walks upright on its hind limbs and possesses an enlarged brain.” And yet, that is probably the most central and accurate description we could provide.

Look back in time some five-thousand generations, or one-hundred-thousand years. Anatomically modern humans walked the earth, but most contemporary roles didn’t exist. Concepts about personality and social function, if articulated at all, must have been of more limited scope. We have no way of determining the language environment of these beings. No doubt people back then related to others as parents, children, and tribal members. Some may have been Shamans; some may have been leaders. So as individuals they may have had feelings about basic categories of identity and perhaps even words for them. But my guess is that they were far more aware than we are of their kinship with other animals and nature at large. The biological urgency of nutritive, protective, and reproductive drives may well have dominated their consciousness in place of the concerns about money, time, and networking that occupy our lives in the information age. They probably understood much more intuitively than we do how similar humans are to bears, monkeys, wolves, and antelope.

Humans were living, breathing, eating, defecating, copulating, and nurturing as animals long before they were writing, analyzing, conceptualizing, and philosophizing as citizens. Despite this, today we give far more attention to our concepts, and our feelings about our concepts, than we do to the basic biology that keeps us in the game. How many of us read a newspaper at breakfast or a magazine while sitting on the toilet? How many of us listen to our iPods while running or watch TV while digesting dinner? All these practices act to divorce us from our bodies. However, unlike unions between lovers, matrimony between mind and body is always “’till death do us part!” There is no chance of divorce, only alienation.

The powers of silence that I touted in a recent post may offer a return to our native state of mind. Before we learned to escape into the constructed realm of symbols and society, we remained grounded in the given world of bodies and biology. Make no mistake, I believe that language can help people heal, as evidenced by my efforts in writing these essays. But even more healing is learning to live beyond words, to dwell as organic beings embedded in the biosphere and related to all other life forms through an elaborate, eternal interchange. The material of our bodies came from the earth and constantly exchanges with it. Every calorie that keeps us alive is owed to some other organism that preceded us. Once death meets us at the end of our days, our physical forms will be released so their elements can again enter the timeless cycles of carbon, calcium, and creation.

In the meantime, we can find simple, lovely contentment by embracing, in silence, our bodies with their constant throbbing, gurgling, aching, hungering, and aging. Rather than feeling beleaguered by our organismic limits and imperatives, we can learn to honor them. Rather than hating how time drains the bloom from our faces and erases the potency from our contours, we can honor the natural, inevitable, and majestic seasons of every life.

Whenever the opportunity arises, I like to watch insects and other small creatures. The delicacy of their movements, the purposefulness of their travels, and the incredible intricacy of their bodies all impress me. A warm feeling of affection for these little beings often follows. If even a gnat displays this miracle of life, imagine how impressive you are as an organism. Think of the formidable truth of your brain, with its thousand-trillion synapses mediating a torrential flow of information. Remember the marvelous fact that you grew from a single cell inside the body of another organism much like you in every way.

With the stillness of meditation one begins to feel the ticking of the body, the flow of consciousness in the brain, and the exchange of air in the lungs. These activities are never-ending while we live, and through them our bodies are continually inviting our affection. Our living processes can be seen as somatic seductions that can help us reconnect with our true forms and escape the complicated tangle of words. They reach out to us every moment, beckoning us back into the sublime experience of living as warm-blooded bipeds on this ancient and bounteous earth.

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Let Your Body Seduce You was published on January 9th, 2012 . 7 comments






Escaping the Whirlpool of Words

Even though I like to think of myself as a writer, my relationship with words feels conflicted. On the one hand, they’re fun to work with and they communicate ideas, but on the other they lead to big conflicts in society, relationships, and the human mind.

One problem is that language is unconstrained; you can say or think almost anything, whether it is helpful or not. Furthermore, a single object or event can be described in a multitude of ways, which invites disagreement. This leads to intense discord because we are programmed (either by evolution, society, or both) to take words very seriously. As people we attack our neighbors for saying ‘forbidden’ things, and we attack ourselves for thinking them.

Two essays back we discussed silence, which is key to resolving this language dilemma. The topic grew out of a quote a relative sent me, but it also tapped into concepts that I read recently in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (2011) by Steven Hayes, Kirk Strosahl and Kelly Wilson. My understanding of that book, in turn, was aided by an older text about language evolution called The Symbolic Species by Terrence W. Deacon. And no doubt the influence of Eastern meditative traditions on the ‘Silence’ essay is obvious.

Citing these sources is my way of emphasizing that none of what I wrote was particularly original. In fact, it is quite likely that almost anything anyone writes about mental life has been presented before but with different phrasing. Go to any bookstore and in the self-help/psychology section you’ll find vast numbers of tomes that cover more or less the same material.

Granted, neuroscience reveals new mechanisms in the brain almost every day. But despite all the impressive research into brain physiology, we know little more about how to thrive as a thinking organism than was understood in the Buddha’s day. As I’ve argued in an earlier essay, when it comes to coping with the felt experience of being human, the sophisticated models of modern neuropsychology seldom improve on ancient wisdom. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, as articulated by Hayes, Strosahl, and Wilson, basically retools the timeless truth that the best way to grow as a person is to gain the skill of silencing, or at least doubting, the verbal mind.

On the other hand, it can be very fruitful to look at established wisdom in novel ways. Doing so solidifies knowledge as information gets reinforced by repetition and nuanced by the alternate viewpoints offered by different authors. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT (pronounced as one word) elaborates a clinical method that guides people to the realm beyond words, where we can find greater stability and less ambiguity. The endpoint may be the same as the Buddha’s, but the path has been modernized.

My post about silence outlined the three consecutive benefits that I believe accrue as one works to achieve mental quiet. The ultimate goal for many meditators is the spacious emptiness that consciousness finds within stillness. But although this is certainly a powerful incentive for learning to dampen thought, the earlier stages offer important insight into the inadequacies of language.

Both ACT and Eastern philosophies teach that words are arbitrary and unsubstantial. Meditation can make this truth experientially obvious, but in fact it is easy to demonstrate with examples.

Imagine you’re at a party and you inform someone that you’ve had a headache for a couple of days. Your companion looks at you with brows furrowed and says, “that’s just what my sister said before they found the brain tumor!” If you’re a neurologist and fairly confident, this statement won’t trouble you much; you know that most headaches are not ominous. But if you tend to worry and your knowledge of medicine comes from online reading about the myriad illnesses that can kill, the string of words ending in “brain tumor” might spark a panicked obsession. And yet, even a hypochondriac could brush off the remark if the person speaking was known to be a habitual and mean-spirited liar. However, if a close friend confirmed that the liar’s sister actually did die of brain cancer, the potent sentence could propel you into your local clinic with demands for an MR scan.

See how the sentence shifts in meaning and import depending on who hears it, who utters it, what others say about the speaker, and so on? Context is decisive.

As another example consider this sentence: “Your dog looks dead.” If it’s spoken after your beloved pet gets struck by a minivan, the remark will sound devastating. If you hear it while your sweet, elderly dog rests on the hearth rug, you will likely feel annoyed. And if the comment follows your dropping a hot dog into the sand at a beach picnic, you’ll probably laugh. Yet even in these situations the speaker’s status will affect your interpretation. If a child pronounces your dog dead after the car accident you’ll be somewhat less alarmed than if a veterinarian does. And if your elderly neighbor with Alzheimer’s insults your pet sleeping by the fireplace, you’ll be more forgiving than if your sharp-tongued brother says the same words.

Today in a support group one of the members explained why she was feeling out of sorts. She spoke quite insightfully about how a painful situation affected her. Afterwards, she asked, “did that make any sense?” My reply was that yes, what she said sounded very reasonable. But I also added that she could have spoken in very different terms about the same situation, and she might still have sounded articulate and convincing.

Words are like this. Contradicting verbal statements can sound equally true in isolation. Meanings shift and change depending on context, speaker, listener, mood, history, prejudice, motivation, etc. Word strings cannot be relied upon as fixed determinants of reality (and yet they often are!). Two people can describe a single conversation in completely different ways, especially if they were arguing while it played out. What’s more, today’s “hell” can become tomorrow’s “heaven.” In fact, it happens all the time.

If language is this unconstrained and arbitrary during conversation, imagine how unreliable it is during mental self-talk, when words are generated continuously without any feedback or objective evaluation by others. No wonder we can drive ourselves insane.

Earlier, this essay highlighted the benefit of using different words to say the same thing. But I’ll end it by emphasizing the even greater value of not employing words at all. Just as re-phrasing helps learning, de-phrasing promotes wisdom.

That was the point of writing about silence. As long as we remain submerged in the murky swimming hole of words, we miss the fact that human life is meant to be lived on dry land. While lost in our fascinating but confining verbal turbulence, we miss the warm sunshine, the birds in the trees, and the children playing on the shore. We mistake both the medium and the message for reality. Most of all, we remain baffled by the unstable meaning, ominous implications, and contradictory concepts that come from words.

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Escaping the Whirlpool of Words was published on January 5th, 2012 .






The Triple Powers of Silence

At some point in every human life, pain threatens to unravel everything that matters. For some of us the day comes in childhood. We may suffer the death of a parent, unspeakable trauma, or simple grinding neglect. For others life feels fairly comfortable until adulthood, but sooner or later fate steers us off our desired road into threatening territory. Perhaps a child gets sick, or a marriage ends, or a career fails. Maybe illness strikes and the end of life comes into view. Grief, failure, and injury shatter our peace, so we begin to seek answers.

At first, we search in all the usual places. We ask our close friends and trusted relatives for advice. Some of us consult therapists or psychiatrists who guide us back into our past or write us prescriptions. Some of us enter houses of worship or meditation in hope of enlisting the help of profound mystical or mental forces. We pray and meditate, desperate for answers.

Even with all this exploration, solutions seldom come. All too often, life deals ever more hardship as we scramble to find a lifeline that will help us endure the escalating pain. We may begin to waver in our resolve to continue; we begin to question whether life offers enough enrichment to make its difficulties worthwhile. We wonder why, as we try so hard to solve our dilemma, we feel no better.

These despairing moments are fertile. They mark the ego’s looming defeat and the foundational collapse that allows deep wisdom to develop organically. Because the problem is exactly that we are trying so hard to find answers, but we do not need answers.

What we need is to break free from all seeking, all efforts to understand, and all analysis. What we need is to quell the mind’s ceaseless efforts to make sense of life, its endless construction of models, and its doomed dream of figuring out how to extinguish the inevitable pain of existence.

What we need is silence.

The first layer of silence is a respite from constant mental toil. We enjoy a break from churning our complicated facts, important memories, and worrisome predictions. We open to peace of mind. This is the introductory gift of learning to quiet the mind’s chatter: a chance to rest. In a spacious moment of stillness, we begin to appreciate how struggling to solve life never leads to solutions, only to confusion and exhaustion. A boundless relief comes with abandoning, even for a moment, all our strenuous, futile striving.

The second layer of silence is the recognition that verbal reasoning is only a shadow of life, not life itself. Before we get to this stage, we believe the stories we tell ourselves. For instance if we think, “I can’t continue in the face of such pain,” we believe our mind’s dire prediction and become paralyzed. As we wait for the sorrow to lift, or the fear to abate, the stasis that results simply worsens our mental anguish. But as we learn the value of quieting inner dialogue, we begin to see that these strings of words have no solidity. They are tokens of interpretations of models of our lives. Neither the tokens, nor the interpretations, nor the models are life itself. As we begin to quiet the inner verbiage, we recognize it to be arbitrary and unhelpful. Instead of thinking about what’s going on, we experience life as it is in this moment. Nearly always, life as it is entails far less pain than life as we think it is.

The third layer of silence is beyond description. It is simple and unalloyed bliss. This essay I’m now writing was inspired by a quote my aunt sent, taken from Listening to Your Life, by Frederick Buechner. The theologian provides a good description of this final gift of inner quiet:

I have been conscious but not conscious of anything, not even of myself. I have been surrounded by the whiteness of snow. I have heard a stillness that encloses all sounds stilled the way whiteness encloses all colors stilled, the way wordlessness encloses all words stilled. I have sensed the presence of a presence. I have felt a promise promised.

Buechner’s words come as close as words can to capturing the ultimate fruit of stilling the inner dialogue.

It is important to recognize that quieting the mind’s verbal stream yields benefits at every stage. Early on, we are granted rest. A little later, we gain insight into the emptiness of words. And finally, we discover what we were hoping for all along: an unshakeable foundation for peace of mind.


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The Triple Powers of Silence was published on January 1st, 2012 . 9 comments






My Beginner’s Mind

This entry is my twenty-fourth in November. With its publication, there will be precisely three hundred essays on the blog queue. With that many posts available, I feel comfortable planning a break in my blogging. For the month of December, if anything gets published at all, it will be poetry. My plan is to start penning essays again next year. I wish all my WillSpirit friends a Happy Holiday Season.

My final essay for 2011 offers concrete suggestions for quelling emotional distress. Many readers know more about mental healing than I do, so what follows may sound elementary. But some visitors are just starting out, and these suggestions can guide their initial steps. Besides, even advanced meditators don’t consider themselves experts, but strive to maintain the Beginner’s Mind. So one is never too experienced to practice the basics. What follows maps not just what I did when first embarking on recovery; it sketches how I continue to approach my life.

My most uplifted posts have sung the praises of meditation and right attitude. With the aid of such skills, my mental life has improved so dramatically that I now question the many diagnoses that were tossed my direction by doctors. Decisive recovery from longstanding problems shows the capacity of the mind to rework itself; resolution of symptoms also seriously challenges the “brain disease” hypothesis of mood disorders. There was plenty of cognitive detritus obstructing my path, but I doubt there was ever any organic problem in my synapses. By clearing out misconceptions and misperceptions, I found clarity and readiness to accept whatever happens in life. I am not immune to grief and disappointment, but I believe myself resistant to despair. Meditation succeeded where medication failed.

To see how dramatically I’ve improved, consider that my mother committed suicide when I was in the first grade. By late adolescence it seemed obvious to me that my own life would end the same way. It was merely a question of timing. How long would I put up with my awful heartache before deciding, in the words of Hamlet, “to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them?”

Despite years of thinking along those lines, my mind no longer attacks itself. By studying the errors in my perceptions and beliefs, by learning to not mistake feelings for reality or thoughts for truth, I have found freedom from such negativity. It now seems inconceivable that any emotion or circumstance could drive me to end my life.

This all sounds promising, I hope. It should offer reassurance to those who wonder if they could ever wake up from the nightmare of chronic severe depression. It can be done, I promise.

But how? If one is stuck in the depths of misery, the idea of meditating out of it probably sounds like an impossible dream. And early on observing the mind may actually increase awareness of emotional pain and cognitive obsession, which can seem like exactly the wrong result. The trick, in my opinion, is to start out with very small goals.

Don’t begin by signing up for a ten-day meditation retreat. Don’t even plan on sitting on a cushion for an hour. Rather, the next time you’re stuck in a waiting room or standing in line, pay attention to how you feel. Explore your sensations. Can you detect your heartbeat? Where do you find pain? Are you breathing or holding your breath? Get in the habit of checking in for a minute or two whenever there’s a lull in the action.

When you feel ready for more, adopt the same practice as you fall asleep. Take a brief break from reviewing and planning to feel your bodily sensations. Indulge in some slow, deep breaths. See how long you can focus on your body before your thoughts start churning again. Early on, you’ll be doing well if you can remain attentive for fifteen seconds. Be proud if you can achieve that.

Over time, you will extend your range. Maybe you will gaze inwardly a bit longer. Maybe you will catch an obsession and halt it. Every time you succeed, recognize your ability to steer your mental state, even if only briefly. The goal is to gain mastery over your mind, but this process takes years and is never completed, except by Buddhas. At first, consider yourself a champion if you can subdue a destructive thought long enough to choose a healthier one. As you gain skill, you’ll begin to desire more time for meditation. That’s when you should consider a retreat.

But don’t expect too much too soon. If at first you find it too painful to watch and feel, steer your mind toward pleasant memories or daydreams. This isn’t meditation as we usually define it, but it does involve guiding thoughts, so it can be very helpful. Such practice provides welcome breaks from inner misery. If you feel ambitious, you can use it to build up empowering visualizations. Paint a mental picture of yourself mastering a valued skill, or being generous to others, or feeling well and happy.

From just these brief suggestions, you can see there exist many ways to train the mind, and it can be fun experimenting with different methods. Check books out of the library, search for videos on the internet, or go to local gatherings (which often ask only for voluntary donations). If you have a religious faith, and if you feel comfortable in it, then it is a good idea to get more involved with whatever meditative or prayerful activities it offers.

I like to divide mental training into two explorations, though more knowledgeable students recognize many more categories. But for simplicity’s sake, just consider these two paths:

  1. A person can meditate to explore the ocean of consciousness by being mindful of the body, by observing thoughts, by focusing on feelings, by quieting mental activity, and so on.
  2. Alternatively, one can meditate to connect with cosmic love by centering on the warmth that emanates from the heart, by repeating sacred mantras, through visualizations, by attending spiritual rituals, etc.

I believe it is important for people who feel depressed to do both. Exploring the mind helps one learn to steer thoughts and not act on feelings. Nurturing love in the heart warms the inner child who feels lonely and unwanted. One does not need to believe in a Divine Being to find such comfort; just awakening to the affection that arises when holding beloved pets or watching children can accomplish the same end. But, of course, belief in a loving cosmic presence is a great way to find support if your philosophical prejudices will allow it.

Keep in mind as you work on meditating that other healthful activities remain vital. Exercise, good nutrition, socialization, creative arts, and compassionate acts all help improve mood and outlook. These days we can choose from a wide array of therapies and somatic practices that aid mental healing. Pursue as many avenues as you can to help yourself improve. Applaud yourself for every victory, but also treat yourself with tenderness. When you feel too depleted to do much of anything, accept your need for contraction and isolation. Compliment yourself for sitting up in bed, if that’s all you can manage. Eventually, when your energy improves, you can do more.

At all times, be aware that the aim is incremental improvement, not sudden sainthood. As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, “seek progress, not perfection.”

Good luck on your journey. My prayers are with you.

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My Beginner’s Mind was published on November 28th, 2011 .






The Value of Mixed Methods

In the last essay I sketched the advantage of merging scientific with meditative currents of knowledge. This marriage of the experimental with the experiential provides the mental health world with a new paradigm, one that promises to finally solve many of the mind’s most troublesome afflictions.

Still, a few questions remain. First, given that meditative traditions have produced a vast and venerable literature backed by centuries of experience healing mental ills, can we be sure neuroscience adds anything useful? Although experimental work has greatly increased understanding, has it improved healing?

In an earlier essay I argued that neurobiology has offered lots of information about the brain, but little inspiration for the mind. Most of the practical suggestions that come from brain science sound like ancient prescriptions restated in the language of neurotransmitters and neural circuitry. They don’t offer new approaches as much as new ways of describing old ones.

Readers might argue that medications and other material interventions (like shock therapy) clearly differ from the methods of meditative traditions. Leaving aside the fact that Chinese and other holistic medical systems have long employed herbal preparations to settle mental derangement, we need to ask whether these material therapies are effective enough to be considered breakthroughs. I wouldn’t argue that they have no value, but even when they work well (and they often don’t) they merely mask symptoms. They don’t transform mental life or lead to deep insight. Add to this fact the awful side effects, withdrawal symptoms, financial cost, and corruption of our health care system by profit motives, and we can legitimately question whether scientifically derived treatments are a boon or a bust.

So I am not willing to concede much to the materialist perspective when it comes to these sorts of intervention. But the scientific view remains very valuable. First, it legitimizes ancient knowledge. Spiritual texts describe consciousness and its various expressions in deeply thoughtful terms, but they also contain mythologic and metaphoric language that troubles moderns. Empirical approaches validate the wisdom attained by yogis and restate it in objective language, which helps us accept the truth of it.

Furthermore, the neuroscience perspective gives us information unavailable to meditators. Two posts back I showed how the idea of competing circuitry can explain the unevenness of our behavior. Looked at in the right way, many experimental findings can be valuable in this way. For instance, we hear about mirror neurons, which fire in the brain when specific actions are performed either by the self or another person. That our systems contain such cells shows how tightly bound we are to one another. Yes, meditative practice suggests the same interconnection, but less verifiably.

Finally, although one goal of meditative practice is escape from affliction, another is insight. There is no doubt that brain research offers us profound information about who and what we are. The brain is by no means an entire personality, but it is a big part of one. By understanding our nervous systems, we understand ourselves.

When I am feeling down these days, I sometimes visualize my dense, twining circuitry busily churning out electrochemical signals within my skull. Pondering deeply on this view of my mind, I understand in a concrete way why yogis refer to the world as Maya, or illusion. There is undoubtedly something real outside our bodies, but what we experience within are scenes manufactured by billions of interconnected neurons. Does it make sense, knowing that, to believe that a particular emotion is catastrophic? How could one seriously contemplate suicide knowing aberrant neural circuitry to be the ultimate origin of suffering? Why should one feel afflicted at all?

In fact, with that understanding held in mind, any state at all can be viewed in a detached and admiring way. What a privilege to experience the workings of this marvelous living brain, this complex organic structure, while embraced by the whole of the biosphere. Appreciating our true situation allows us to dwell in the body with wise detachment, at once dispassionate and tender. Enlightenment is thus informed by both meditative explorations and experimental findings. We are privileged to have access to these two sources of understanding. Dare I say we are blessed?

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The Value of Mixed Methods was published on November 27th, 2011 . 5 comments






The Ins & Outs of Mental Health

This a science, mental health, and spirituality blog. It says so right in the site’s header, so it must be true. Yet before now I’ve never explicitly linked the three.

Science is an analytic system that describes the world on the basis of observation, theory, and experiment. Spirituality is also based on observing, theorizing, and testing. In the former case we use physical instruments to query the external, material world; in the latter we use meditation to explore the interior space of mind.

Science would claim that mind is purely explainable on the basis of matter; religion would disagree. But for the moment let’s accept the claim that mind is a product of matter, with the proviso that we consider the shadowy quantum realm in the equation. With that step, matter contains enough ‘magic’ to account for the experiences of mystics and saints. (This is a controversial point that I’ve addressed in this earlier post, among many others.)

With this as our basis, we now recognize two legitimate modes for investigating mental life. Science looks at mind from the outside, whereas meditation looks from within. Each method has advantages and disadvantages. Although the book I mentioned last time (A Universe of Consciousness, by Edelman and Tononi), dismisses the introspective approach at the outset, this seems to me shortsighted. Fortunately, many other experts understand the value of combining interior exploration with exterior experimentation. The Dalai Lama regularly convenes gatherings of meditators and open-minded neuroscientists in order to dovetail the vast knowledge banks possessed by the two camps.

Last time I attributed the saltatory nature of personal growth to competing neural circuits. This shows how the scientific method can help us negotiate freedom from mental distress. But numerous other essays have drawn on my personal explorations of inner space through meditation. Mental health really does connect with both science and spirituality.

Why do I bother to write a whole post about this rather obvious fact? Because we are witnessing a revolution in mental health care that owes its genesis to the merging of the two realms. The best psychotherapists now stress the importance of spirituality, while the faithful increasingly turn to science to better understand human distress.

Our culture did not invent psychiatric turmoil; since the dawn of humanity people have endured pain and sorrow. And since all distress is experienced in the mind (even physical pain is mediated by the brain), all suffering can be considered a form of mental illness. The Buddha grappled with this dilemma twenty-five centuries ago, and Hindu sages worked on it even earlier. These traditions explain the workings of the mind in great detail, and also suggest how we can restructure mental processes to reduce psychic discomfort. Significantly, modern neuroscience shows layering within brain processes that is consistent with Eastern views, providing evidence that the two methods truly do investigate the same phenomena from different sides.

Combining interior knowledge with scientific understanding promises potent solutions for the pains of life. By merging science and spirituality, the mental health world is on the verge of decisively answering many psychiatric problems. My hope is that the historical antagonism between materialist and spiritualist views will not delay this welcome trend.

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The Ins & Outs of Mental Health was published on November 26th, 2011 . 3 comments






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