• Embrace the suck!

    I first heard the expression “Embrace the suck!” from an interview with David Goggins. It’s a phrase used a lot in military contexts but also in modern self-help contexts like Stoicism. It’s meaning is quite simple – when you find yourself in a situation that’s unpleasant or uncomfortable, don’t complain about it (which doesn’t change anything) but rather welcome it as a stimulator of your growth and development into a better version of yourself.

    In other words, if you can’t change the reality, change how you relate to it, how you interpret it.

    The phrase is often meant to encourage toughness, the opposite of being sensitive. It conjures up (and is often associated with) images of a tough, young soldier in full gear withstanding incredibly difficult circumstances. But I think it goes well beyond that.

    Every leader, every entrepreneur, indeed every one of us will someday find ourselves in circumstances that suck. Life is hard sometimes. We aren’t always in a position to change our realities. Shit happens. How we respond to that shit when it does happen makes a world of difference.

    If we start to adopt a victim stance, or whine about how unlucky we are, the external circumstances don’t change AND we make our internal experience of our current reality feel even worse.

    On the other hand, if we view every moment of our lives as an opportunity to build our character, to become a better version of ourselves, and to really appreciate the mere fact that there is a reality to be experienced and we are alive to experience it, well, that also doesn’t change the reality, but it can totally alter the quality of our experience in that moment.

    I’d like to propose a variation on “embrace the suck”: “Embrace the now”.

    “Now” is this moment and whatever your reality is right this minute, pleasant or unpleasant, easy or hard. Sometimes now is wonderful and sometimes now is terrible.

    You don’t have to like it. You also don’t have to be resigned to just fatalistically live with it. But what I’m suggesting is that you embrace it, which is to say, get to know it more intimately. Yes, it sucks, but this is what’s happening now, so I might as well be awake to it.

    When you do this, you come out of the victim stance. You look around. You notice things. You may see possibilities for action that you didn’t see before. And if nothing else, you remain grateful. Grateful that you get to experience this experience, even if it sucks. You are here.

    This isn’t an easy shift to make. It takes practice. Try it out: when you’re in a situation that sucks and there isn’t any immediate action that you can take to change it, explore it. Study it. Try to experience it more fully, rather than blocking it out or bemoaning it. In that moment, it IS your life. Embrace it. Despite the suck.

    This is your now. Embrace it.

  • A magic mindfulness Question

    It’s so easy to over-complicate things. Esoecially for me! I love digging into a topic, learning about it, and coming up with new ideas and theories around it. Mindfulness and meditation are perfect examples.

    If you want to read about meditation and mindfulness, I could easily give you a list of my top 100 books on the topic. On the other hand, if you want to be more mindful, you don’t need to read a single book. You just need one simple question – the magic mindfulness question: what’s happening?

    “What’s happening” is a wonderful question because it’s wide open. It assumes nothing. It doesn’t point you in any direction. You could add some specificity to it if you like, but it’s not necessary.

    You could ask:

    • what’s happening in my body right now?
    • what’s happening between me and my partner these days?
    • what’s happening emotionally with me today?
    • what’s happening with the weather?
    • what’s happening in nature?
    • what’s happening at work?
    • what’s happening with my pursuit of my goals?

    What’s happening could mean what’s happening this very second, this minute, or this month.

    What’s happening could mean inside of me, outside of me, or with other people.

    It could mean what am I doing or even why am I doing it.

    It’s a question that engenders a slight pause and a look around. And pausing and looking around pretty equates with mindfulness. Especially when you do consistently.

    So that’s today’s practice – the simplest one of all. Ask yourself the magic mindfulness question, right now, what’s happening?

    Ask it again in 5 minutes. Ask it 100 times a day. Or 1000 times – I don’t care. Just ask it! Make it a practice. Make it a habit.

    One more time…

    What’s happening?

  • How to not struggle with Thoughts

    “Thought is a wonderful servant but a terrible master.”

    I first heard that quote about 50 years ago, when I first started exploring meditation. (Yes, I was a pretty weird 15 year old, something my siblings reminded me of constantly!) I liked the quote’s pithiness and the insight it contained. After all, I had already struggled mightily with intrusive, ruminative thoughts as I sat cross-legged trying to follow my breath. It was quickly becoming clear to me that thought was definitely not my servant.

    At the same time, there were moments – when I wasn’t meditating – when it seemed that thought was a useful tool that I was using to figure out hard problems, to learn, and to make sense of the world. So I wondered: what’s the difference between the thinking I do when I’m studying for an exam and the the thinking I do when I’m trying to meditate?

    I realized that the only difference is whether those thoughts are wanted or unwanted. The thoughts didn’t change but my relationship to them did.

    My struggles with unwanted thoughts changed when I began to think of thoughts simply as outputs of brain activity. If you have a brain, you have thoughts. A brain “manufactures” and pumps out thoughts the same way your liver manufactures and pumps out bile. It’s completely natural – the way we’re “designed”.

    I started to view myself as the perceiver or receiver of those thoughts, rather than as the originator of them. I realized that I simply don’t know what my next thought was going to be until it arrived in my awareness.

    I developed a curiosity around the whole process of thinking and I arrived at my own little practice, which I’m sharing with you now. The begins by asking the brain to “send the next thought.” Then I would watch really closely as the thought began to take shape. It would start as a vague, amorphous blob, then gradually take shape. Then words would be added to it, and what I would describe as a voice, a tone. Finally, it would arrive fully into my awareness, in the form of a spoken sentence or image or series of images. Then I would ask my brain to produce and send me another thought, then another.

    It can be quite fascinating to just watch your thoughts take shape like this They come from somewhere that isn’t accessible to awareness, they travel closer and closer to awareness, taking on clearer and more distinct shape as they come closer, and they finally arrive in finished form. Watching this process completely shifts your experience of the thought and your relationship to it.

    I suggest you try this practice for yourself. Sit quietly and ask your brain to produce a thought and send it to your awareness, then pay really close attention to the process as it unfolds. You’ll find that the content of the thought is much less important than it usually is. And the thought has less impact on how you experience the world when it does arrive. It holds very little sway over you. It ceases to be your master.

    Paying attention to this process makes your thoughts less solid, less substantial, and less impactful. Thought, in the end, is neither a master nor a servant, but just a feature of what it’s like to be a human being with a brain. Try this little practice for yourself and see what happens!

  • A wandering Mind – Good or Bad?

    In 2010, an interesting headline appeared in hundreds of sources, including Scientific American and the National Institutes of Health: “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind”. In 2018, very different headlines, including one on the same National Institutes of Health website, read: “Mind Wandering Boosts Creativity”.

    What gives?

    Is mind wandering good or bad? A 2020 study concluded: “Our results indicated that frequency of mind wandering was linked to a risk of poorer mental health as well as to higher divergent thinking ability.” In other words, creativity.

    In my experience, mind-wandering can indeed be both good and bad; it all depends on the content of the thoughts.

    So what exactly is mind wandering? I looked up a bunch of different definitions (and there are hundreds!) and the one that I think best captures it is this one: “mind wandering has been defined as the state that occurs when attention drifts away from the current context and engages in an internal stream of thoughts, ideas, and imagery”.

    Mind wandering is your attention wandering away from what you’re actually doing or where you actually are right now. Your body is sitting right here but your mind has travelled to a different time and place. And research shows we spend an awful lot of time in exactly that state.

    So, what’s going to determine whether your mind wandering leads to unhappiness or to creativity? Intentionality and focus. Since we spend so much of our lives (at least half the time, according to research, and more like three-quarters of the time according to yours truly!) engaged in mind-wandering, much of that is just going to be habitual, or default. The trick is to accept that that’s just what human minds do, and figure out how to make it work for you.

    A great way to do this is to always have a problem that you’re working on solving. If you’re an entrepreneur, it could be “how can I increase customer satisfaction?” or if you’re a leader it could be “how can I increase the level of engagement on my team?” You keep this “problem” in your mind, you remind yourself of it every day, even several times a day, so that when your mind wanders (which it will) it gravitates back to this problem. You turn a habit (mind wandering) into a tool. You’ll find that you have more and more creative solutions to your problem over time. It also helps if you make it a concrete, real-world problem, and relatively precise.

    Practicing meditation can help with your ability to focus when you need to, but I’ve found that it’s best to accept that mind-wandering will happen in any case, and rather than fight it, harness it. Let your mind wander, but not just anywhere, and certainly NOT to self-obsessed, ruminative thoughts. That way lies unhappiness! Instead, let the wandering mind circle around solving a real-world problem. In time, your mind will make random connections and generate more creative solutions.

  • 3 Reasons Why I Love Teaching Meditation

    Last week, I wrote about 3 reasons why I hate teaching meditation. This week, I want to share 3 reasons why I love teaching meditation.

    The first reason why I love teaching meditation is that there’s a method out there for everyone. For instance, my favourite app, called “Insight Timer” contains a library of over 220,000 guided sessions. Just think about that – 220,000! There are sessions with music, with nature sounds, or just brief instructions with 20 minutes of silence. It’s amazing!

    When I was teaching meditation at Shopify 5 days a week, I had a set of 15-minute practices that I designed and would choose from – probably around a dozen practices that I’d landed on, after experimenting with maybe 25 or 30 different techniques. The folks at Shopify were super generous in giving me feedback on the various methods I tried out, so I was able to quickly eliminate the ones that didn’t resonate with that particular group of people.

    The wide variety of methods available to choose from means that one can almost tailor practices to each individual, leveraging their strengths, especially at the start, so that they can both start to master their attention quickly, and start getting the benefits of practicing meditation right from day one.

    The second reason why I love teaching meditation is that I get to hear from people about all the ways in which the practice is improving their lives. People have told me that meditation helps them to focus at work, that it helps them fall asleep at night, that it improves their communication with loved ones, that it reduces their levels of stress, that it makes them less emotionally reactive, and on and on. It’s extremely gratifying to know that what I’m teaching is having such a positive impact on people’s quality of life and well-being.

    The third reason why I love teaching meditation is that, through teaching it, I increase my own mastery of it. I gain tremendous benefit from meditation, and teaching it has truly accelerated and increased those benefits. I see lots out there that purports to be meditation but which I instantly know is not going to increase people’s mastery over their attention. Teaching meditation has helped me identify what really works when it comes to attention mastery. And attention mastery is really the key – if you can develop that, the benefits will enhance your life in ways you can’t even imagine.

    I think that attention mastery is a kind of meta-skill, an overarching capability that supercharges all of your other skillsets. You become more effective at whatever it is that you do, you learn faster, you are more productive, healthier and happier once you master your attention. Teaching meditation has allowed me to gain insight and understanding of the incredible power of developing this capacity.

    So, there you have it – three reasons why I love teaching meditation. My takeaway for you? Experiment with many, many different techniques, find the ones that work best for you, and practice those. You’ll be more motivated, you’ll enjoy practicing more, and you’ll start reaping the benefits of practice sooner.

  • 3 Reasons Why I hate teaching Meditation

    I’ve taught meditation to many hundreds of people over 35 years, so why do I hate it?

    In this blog, I’ll explore this question, but first I want to clarify a few things:

    1. I believe in the value of teaching meditation. I’ve seen the incredible results, firsthand, with many, many leaders and entrepreneurs.
    2. I love teaching and coaching people, introducing them to new practices and new ways of looking at things. It’s what I do best.
    3. I love my own meditation practice, even after nearly 50 years. The difference it’s made in my life is hard to over-state.

    Given these 3 points, you would think that I would love teaching meditation, right? Not necessarily. Each of those points is true in isolation, but the actual teaching of meditation brings its own special difficulties. I’ll explain three of difficulties here.

    The first difficulty with teaching meditation is that the practices are deceptively simple yet extremely frustrating to do. That is to say that when I present the instructions, they sound really easy, like “really listen to all the sounds arising around you”. People tend to assume that because the instructions are so simple and straightforward, the actual doing of the practice must also be simple. But when they sit down to actually do the practice, they discover that their minds are totally out of control. A common response to this is “well, I guess this practice isn’t for me”,

    As a teacher and coach, I have to really prepare them for this moment by giving lots of caveats, like “don’t be fooled by the simple instructions! Start small! Even following five or ten breaths is amazing at the start!”

    Often, even these caveats don’t help. The drop-out rate is ridiculously high. In my experience, maybe one out of five students and coachees stick with the practice and make it part of their daily routine. And those who need it the most, namely super-busy leaders and entrepreneurs, are usually the first to give up.

    A second difficulty is that despite the promises of many different schools, apps and books, the truth is that the results that people are seeking don’t show up for quite a while – usually a few months. In a culture obsessed with speed, it’s not uncommon for folks to expect a “quick turnaround”. Meditation muscles take time to build up. Mastery over one’s attention is not achieved quickly. It takes patience and consistency and persistence. The rewards are amazing, if (and this is the big if!) you can stick to it long enough.

    A third difficulty is simply the competition with other forms of stimulation. We are pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding organisms, and the actual practice of meditation offers up a fair bit of pain (in the joints and neck, in the form of unwanted thoughts, and occasionally coming face-to-face with unpleasant aspects of ourselves) and precious little pleasure.

    The seeking of pleasurable experiences and the practice of meditation are almost completely incompatible. There are so many other activities that are a lot more fun than meditation! If it’s fun you want, meditation is not the place to go looking for it! Meditation practice is more like good hygiene: you do it because it’s just really good for you, like sleeping, showering or brushing your teeth. In time, if you are diligent, you will vastly increase your mastery over your attention. And yes, the results will be life-changing. But I don’t think it would be honest of me to promise that it will ever be fun.

    So there you have it: three reasons why teaching meditation can be really frustrating at times. My recommendation? Lower your expectations. Celebrate small, baby-step progress. Don’t expect it to be pleasurable but do it as a practice for your well-being. And lastly, be patient. It absolutely is possible to gain mastery over over one’s attention, and the benefits of doing that are truly amazing.

    Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for me to meditate!

  • Dealing with Distractions

    I once read a simple line that said, “The mind is wild. Mindfulness tames it.” It brought home for me the notion that the mind has tremendous power, but we often never fully harness that power. That word “harness”, btw, suggests the difference between a wild horse or ox and one which is used to plow the fields, through the use of a harness.

    Author and professor Cal Newport wrote an excellent book titled “Deep Work”, in which he argues that if one is able to focus deeply, then one accelerates learning and greatly increases productivity. And deep work is really nothing but focused, undistracted work. This requires that the mind be “tamed” before its full power can be harnessed.

    In my years of teaching meditation and mindfulness, I found the most prevalent challenge to new and intermediate learners was distraction. My goal today is to explore some of the reasons why this might be, and what to do about it.

    As rather vulnerable creatures, for hundreds of thousands of years of our evolution, constantly scanning our environment for threats had huge survival value. If we could see or hear a predator in time for us to escape, we got to live another day. Our ability to quickly detect danger would get passed on to future generations.

    We carry this ability with us today, though its survival value is much lower in today’s world. Still, our ability to detect threats remains as sharp as ever, as we constantly scan the world for flashes of light, loud noises, strange people, and other potential dangers.

    When we sit down to meditate or practice mindfulness, these threat detection systems are fully active. They, not our intentions, direct the attention. This should come as no surprise. Our threat detectors are just doing their job.

    And therein lies the key to successfully dealing with distractions as you try to master your attention: appreciate that these capacities exist, that they are evolutionarily much older than the modern structures of the brain, and that they are simply doing what they were designed to do.

    As you work and play with your attention muscles, you will notice the tug-of-war between the older brain and the more modern cortical brain. The intentional brain wants to learn to control the attention, while the older structures have a job to perform of scanning for threats and hijacking the attention when any form of threat is detected.

    Note that, since much of the thinking that we do concerns our place in the social world, we frequently imagine scenarios involving threats to our social standing. These also hijack the attention, and for the same reasons. A threat to our status is just as real to the limbic system as a threat to our physical survival.

    My suggestion for those who wish to increase their mastery over their attention is to adopt a stance of curiosity about this tug-of-war, noticing with interest just how powerful these ancient threat detection systems are. We can set the intention to focus the attention on, say, the flow of air at the nostrils as we simply breathe, only to find that every few seconds, our attention is hijacked by the threat detectors.

    When that happens, and this is something you might want to practice, try to really appreciate these ancient systems. Wonder at their amazing sensitivity. Thank them for having kept you alive and kept 12,000 generations of ancestors alive long enough to pass their genes down to you.

    As you practice doing this for both physical threats and imagined social threats, you will find the tug-of-war starts to tone down. The intention brain, or the modern executive functions, make a certain peace with the much older and more powerful survival systems. In time, the intention to master the attention will prevail. The threat detectors will be integrated into a larger, more powerful way of being in the world.

    In time, the threat detectors will start to relax in the relative safety of your mindfulness practice. They’ll stop hijacking your attention at every sound or thought that suggests a potential threat. The wild mind will have been tamed and its power harnessed.

    That’s the practice for those who choose to try it. When you work at training your attention, notice when the threat detectors are activated, and say “Thank you. You’re doing an excellent job. But right now there isn’t any real threat, so you can relax.”

  • What you’re Not Noticing

    One of the essential skills of paying attention is meta-awareness: the ability to notice where your attention tends to go. It can be quite surprising to see where your attention goes when you stop trying to control it in any way. I like to use the metaphor of letting a puppy off the leash and just watching it to see where it goes. This helps you to identify your attentional habits. It can be quite useful to become familiar with your default patterns.

    Another way to increase your awareness of your awareness is through what might be called “negative inquiry”. In other words, asking yourself, “where does my attention NOT go? What do I regularly NOT notice?”

    When you let the so-called puppy off the leash, you get to follow it around, and that will reveal certain tendencies. But it won’t highlight for you where the puppy DOESN’T go. For that, you need to see a somewhat larger landscape, so that you can notice if there are certain areas that the puppy of attention tends to avoid.

    Perhaps certain areas are avoided out of fear. Perhaps certain areas are avoided because you aren’t even aware that they exist. Perhaps you tend to stay on the same path all the time, for example, getting on a very similar train of thought, one that follows a predictable route and always arrives at pretty much the same place, whenever your attention is allowed to wander.

    That’s this week’s suggested practice: let the puppy off the leash, (that is, let your attention go wherever it wants to go,) and observe it to get to know it’s patterns. Then follow that up with negative inquiry. Ask yourself, “where does my attention NOT go when I just let it wander?” Notice what you’re not noticing. It can lead to insights about certain blind spots you have about yourself or the people in your life or the world around you.

    One pattern that I noticed when I asked myself what I tend not to notice is my posture. I tend to focus outwardly, to notice sounds and sights, but rarely do I notice what my body is up to. This was an insight that then led to a curiosity: what am I avoiding noticing? That led me to notice that I have a head-forward posture, and I started doing exercises to correct that.

    What will you discover when you let the puppy off the leash? What will you learn about where your attention tends to go, and perhaps even more importantly, about where your attention tends NOT to go. Notice what you’re not noticing. You may well learn something important about yourself.

    Until next week, keep paying attention to attention!

  • My favorite way to pay attention

    In the past couple of posts, I’ve suggested that you try paying attention to complaining, and also that you play with attention.

    For some people, these might not seem like “real” mindfulness practices, but in fact, they are. When you practice these, you strengthen the pathways in the brain that are responsible for the control of attention.

    Controlling the attention is a skill that must be learned, like acquiring language or learning to walk. Babies have little or no control over their attention. As children, one of the most important skills we learn is to pay attention to what our teachers are saying (usually under threat of punishment!)

    As adults, most of us gain a fairly high degree of control over our attention, but sadly, we fall far short of mastering it. We are typically pretty good at focusing on activities and sensations that we enjoy, like watching a good movie. But that’s setting the bar pretty low.

    To really gain mastery over one’s attention means to be able to place the attention on something quite boring or even unpleasant, and leave it there for an extended period of time. Which is essentially what meditation is doing.

    One of my favorite meditations is to focus on sounds. When you start trying to listen to all the sounds that just appear around you, you notice just how MANY different sounds keep showing up. You hear the wind. You hear distant vehicles. You hear voices in other houses or apartments. You hear your own breathing; your stomach gurgling, and maybe even your own blood pulsing past your eardrums with every beat of your heart.

    And as cool as it is to notice all these different sounds, it’s even cooler to notice that sounds just show up, unannounced, and they go – they don’t stick around for very long. And when they’re gone, you’re left with a kind of echo of them – you can replay the sounds in your mind, but they’re not quite like the original.

    Another thing you’ll often notice is that as soon as you start thinking, you stop hearing. You might hear a loud sound like a siren or a train, but the subtle sounds are gone; the richness is lost. Thought automatically gets such a big chunk of your attention that you’re not really HEARING any more.

    This is the practice that I’m suggesting in this week’s post: REALLY listen. For 2 or 5 or 25 minutes, try to really listen, to hear all the sounds that come up around you, near and far, and even inside you. See if you can increase the duration with practice. And I invite you to notice the difference between the quality of your listening when thoughts subside (which I call “really listening”) and the quality of your listening when thoughts are active and engaging you (which I call “kind of listening”).

    Heck, why nor try it right now? Pause for 30 seconds right now, and notice how many different sounds you can hear. I’ve found that almost anyone can REALLY listen for 30 seconds. But it isn’t long before thoughts elbow their way into your awareness, and you go from “really listening” to “kind of listening”. Try to extend your bouts of really listening as long as you can. I hope you’ll enjoy this practice as much as I do.

  • Don’t just pay attention, play attention!

    Last week, I suggested that you pay attention to complaining – yours and that of other people around you. I hope that you tried this practice and increased your awareness of just how pervasive and pernicious complaining can be.

    For this week, I want to propose a practice that isn’t really a “practice”: play with attention.

    My first introduction to meditation came from Carl Jung, when I was just 15 years old. Maybe I was a strange kid, but I was curious about it and decided to learn more about this Eastern practice. From the little gem of a book called “The Secret of the Golden Flower”, I learned the basics of meditation practice, and started practicing on my own.

    My interest in meditation and mindfulness grew from there, leading me to read hundreds of books, try countless techniques, attend retreats, and study a number of different teachers. But the one thing that underlay my pursuit was a certain playfulness. it was never something that I took overly seriously, even when I was pratcicing for 45 minutes a day, 7 days a week, for several years.

    Looking back, I am grateful that I approached meditation, mindfulness and the mastery of attention with a curious, playful mind. I think I learned a lot more as a result of it.

    So the “practice” I’m going to suggest this week, is to try to bring a childlike inquisitiveness to your own attention. Inquire into just what the hell attention even is, but not through books and study. Rather, just play with it. Just how focused CAN your attention be? How open can it be? What’s hard? What’s easy? What happens when you focus on something REALLY intently? Is it possible to focus on nothing at all?

    One of the beauties of mindfulness practice is that nothing is taken at face value. You have to try it for yourself and find out for yourself what happens when you experiment with different ways of paying attention.

    If you’re unsure how to start, you could search the web for different exercises to train the attention, and playfully experiment with what comes up. There will be HUNDREDS of exercises for you to play with.

    A final word: have fun! If any of the exercises bother you or don’t seem to be working for you, for heaven’s sake, switch to another one!