Heart's Ease

Happy inside?

The way you feel is a partly about what you give attention to and partly about what’s going on in the physiology of your body.

We can create boundaries in the physiology by tightening muscles; something that begins early in life. In counselling there’s a term “epoché” or to put something in your pocket.

Say you had a row with your girlfriend before you left for work and no chance yet to resolve it. Rather than have it affect your day at work, cause anger, anxiety and distress you might be able to put it in your pocket.

We talk also about leaving it outside the door.

Your state of mind, from being “in turmoil”, can return to alert, focussed, ready for action.

Professional behaviour requires a certain pragmatism; difficult to maintain if your emotions are churning. Tensing the abdomen, back or throat can cause the biochemistry to dam up. A really useful practice in the short term to get on with work, to achieve a deadline, to do what you have to do. The problem is that in the long term, with all that discomfort to put in your pocket, you feel stressed and emotionally caught up more and more often. You also may get sick, your circulation and immune system become compromised by the tension and turgid emotions.

When you get home you’ll need to get some resolution. Process the feelings first and you’ll get a better result with the underlying issue, rather than move into another argument. Processing means letting the emotions that were churning, then blocked, move to completion. If you have a long term program of blocking emotion you may need to make some time for letting it go.

The benefit of doing this with a third party is that if they can empathise with you; i.e. you have a good and open relationship, you’ll find the whole thing a lot less uncomfortable as the physical feeling stuff is shared. Beware though of being with someone who goes into the emotion with you or pulls you into their own. This is about creating and recreating drama rather than healthy relationship.

Developing good boundaries is about knowing when the above is about to happen and maintaining your own sense of self, state of mind and autonomy to act.

There’s a way we humans subconsciously check out each other’s strengths and vulnerabilities and find a fit. Does the drama triangle of bully, victim and rescuer happen anywhere in your relationships? If it does see what happens if you stop doing the bit you usually do. Ask the question “what’s going on here?”

I was with a friend recently who I hadn’t seen for a while. We’d been having good conversation for some hours and then she asked me how things were with someone close to me who, last time we met, had been having serious troubles. I could see in her eyes, and feel in her heart, the potential emotional turmoil building that we could get well stuck into if we opened that up here and now. I chose the clear path, said that was a while ago and moved to another subject.

Would it have done any good to talk emotionally? I don’t believe so. I prescribe lots of good feelings; warmth, laughter, joy, vitality to assist the angst and sometimes anguish of life to dissolve away. In the resulting clear space inside all sorts of options become possible.

If you’re a tragic-romantic type at the moment you may have switched off here.

I did that on and off myself for a year or so until I realised that all that emotion was just churning around my heart muscle. If the heart was where I kept putting my attention that was all I noticed. The attention strengthens the angst and sometimes anguish. I noticed that some days were tragic and others were fine yet nothing much different was happening (life was generally challenging). Once I shifted my attention up a bit (head) or down a bit (centre) the whole world took on a different flavour and there was space for process. (See 3: attention mastery)

The trouble with maximising focus on the heart is that things can get heavy. The heart muscle is big and strong and doesn’t have much relaxation time with all that constant pumping. Easing the heart is an art and spending time with someone whose heart is eased gives a whole new perspective. In the west we have a tendency to issues and illness of the heart. We often don’t feel there’s room in our heart for the issues of the world. Time to shift gear I’d say and give the heart some space. People who take really good care of themselves have much more to offer others than those who run ragged trying to fix the world.

The same heaviness can develop with a maximising of focus in the thinking space.

Laughter has been in the news lately as good medicine. It has to be a good chuckle at least or best full deep belly laughter. Titters don’t open up the tissues in the same way, nor does the snide or cynical snigger, the unkind snigger, the inauthentic hoot. Find what makes you laugh and get plenty of it. Best of all find something that makes you laugh with others and spend lots of time doing it together.

The world will no longer come in shades of grey – the lights will come on!

Contagious Joy for Christmas!

As the Christmas season is upon us here’s some insight into spreading good cheer without alcoholic content.

Crowd behaviour, workplace stress, marital disharmony, classroom mutiny . . . all can be explained by recent discoveries in neuroscience. We pick up each others affective (feeling) brain waves and go on to feel the echoes of others experience.

Someone walks into the room angry; we pick up on body language (posture, movement, facial expression) and verbal cues but also we can find ourselves empathising with the feelings of a person close to us. It can happen even when we can’t see them.

We empathise with those that we give our attention to.

The boss is happy today, she truly impressed ed the CEO with her presentation, the whole place smiles with a celebratory mood. Yesterday she was stressed out preparing it . . . not such a good day.

So if you want to influence others in a positive way then the strength of your state of mind is of some importance. Even in the supermarket queue you can spread good cheer if your brainwaves are giving out the right signals and people pick up on your vibes rather than you picking up theirs.

Contagious clarity, joy, presence is entirely possible if your feelings are stronger than glums of the guy sitting next to you.

A stressed-out group of people isn’t going to enjoy the Christmas season so much as a group of enthusiastic, alert, clear-thinking and positive people. In a resourced state of mind we can do amazing things.

I saw a fantastic demonstration of this travelling on the London underground last summer. A group of school children about 8 years old were being ushered onto an escalator at Westminster. Some were chatting, looking around and fidgeting. The person in charge pointed out a child who was paying good attention, holding the rail, looking where she was going: “Look at Sally, how well she’s travelling on the escalator”. The children all settled down and followed suit. Their attention had been drawn to good conduct and empathic crowd behaviour created safety and calm for everyone.

Drawing our attention to problems and bad behaviour often results in more of the same. Don’ts don’t work so well as do’s.

An interesting idea is that, as your feelings are a result of the physiological soup you live in, then good quality attention to yourself and to your body will enhance your ability to be present and in good spirits. If you carry a sense of being burdened by your work, your shoulders and neck tense up, your circulatory and nervous systems become constricted, the biochemistry is less able to clear through and any stress in your body (adrenaline, cortisol) can end up circulating around your head. No wonder you feel fogged up!

You’re stressed, you can’t function as effectively as you want, the people around you feel it too, they tense up and the whole system slips into dissonance.

There are people around who have the sort of nature that constantly sends positive messages. They may have been lucky enough to be born easy, happy in childhood, parented and schooled with respect. They may have chosen optimism in the face of great hardship. These are people who keep the social wheels turning; remember birthdays, like the young woman in an IT department who decorated a colleague’s desk with balloons and collected to buy him a present for. Then there’s the guy recently retired who organised printing in a large international organisation’s headquarters, people suddenly realised how well he’d kept everyone in touch as he moved between departments and offices, creating community.

Who does that where you live, work and play?

At work, when budgets are tight, beware of looking to those who are most obviously productive. They may be functioning so well because they are supported in their state of mind by the older man (up for redundancy?) who infects everyone with laughter. They may be soothed by the young woman in IT whose personal skills are more valuable than her programming skills.

And finally why does laughter have such a positive effect?

Physiologically it vibrates through tension, gets the blood circulating, calls home the spirit and gets the belly processing all that stuck stress stuff. Of course it also points out to us that taking life so seriously when nothing terrible has happened doesn’t make sense. And yes there are days when something terrible happens but, unless today is one of them, live life lightly!