COVID-19: Self Care & Discovering Positivity

Resistance and frustration is an inevitable human reaction to the stressful conditions we are living in. We can learn to allow, observe, and be with our responses as they are, without creating more tension or negative self judgment. Self care means treating ourselves with kindness, learning how to be gentle when needed and how to turn our minds away from thought patterns that sap our vitality and well-being. 

Working with tools such as breath, body scan, or love & kindness all affect different parts of the brain and produce different long term changes if we keep practicing. We'll touch on what creates changes in our state experience and what leads to lasting effects or changes in our personality traits. We will also look at conditioned guilt or habit of minimizing positivity in order to seem more "empathetic" and consider the value and importance of accessing the irrepressible positivity of life. 

Transcript

Welcome to the conscious classroom podcast, where we're exploring tools and perspectives that support educators and anyone who works with teams to create more conscious, supportive, and enriching learning environments. 

I'm your host Amy Edelstein, and I'll be sharing transformative insights and easy-to-implement classroom supports that are all drawn from mindful awareness and systems thinking. The themes we'll discuss are designed to improve your own joy and fulfilment in your work and increase your impact on the world we share.

Let's get on with this next episode.

I've been reading a very interesting book. It's called Altered Traits by Daniel Goldman and Richard Davidson. Daniel Goldman was a science writer for the New York times for 10 years. Both of them Graduated from Harvard with a psychology degree. Davidson went on to become a neuroscientist and head the neuroscience research lab at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. 

Daniel Goldman has continued to write New York Times, best sellers like emotional intelligence and all kinds of books. They're both long-term meditation practitioners. And ultra traits is a really interesting book. It's about It came out, two years ago and it's the summation and exploration of the deep research on the effect of meditation.

Basically talking a lot about what's commonly touted is the positive effects as not being as well documented in science as the marketing would like you to believe while some of the more significant findings are not reported. And so it's just been fascinating. 

It's a little geeky at parts, but Dan's a great writer, so  he always makes things readable. One thing that I found most interesting was some studies that they did on long-term meditators. 

Now, these are mostly, People from Asia who had, have and continued to spend many, many, many hours, totaling decades of time and intensive retreat. And when they put them in FMRI machines and they measured what was happening in their brains, particularly when they would show them images of stress and suffering.

Compared to the ordinary person's brain response to stress and suffering that they would have a heightened scale of an empathetic response of care and concern for another suffering when they were shown those images or played those audios, you know, babies crying and other things. And then their brain returned to normal very quickly.

So what is revealed, which was very interesting was that their ability to be open and compassionate in response to another suffering was very well developed, but they didn't carry that, over empathetic response with. After that immediate stimulus was gone.

Now for people who didn't have the same practice in empathy building tools, those brains showed that there was a slower and less intense response to suffering, but there was a longer tail of being caught in that sphere of suffering after the event had passed.

I hope I explain that well enough, but what that means is that the more we practice tools  of mindful awareness and compassion building, we are able to be very humanly present. When we're a witness in front of suffering, we're also able to let that go and return to a resting point. That is one of wellbeing.

When I lived in Dharamsala, North India in the early eighties. I spent four years there. I would see this  in many of the monks and especially in the Dalai Lama. When I lived there, it was before he won the Nobel peace prize so he was pretty accessible, he's very available anyway still, but he was quite available then.

And he would meet with the Tibetan refugees, regularly. And these were people who, had recently come from Tibet or areas surrounding that, where they'd witnessed a tremendous amount of suffering - villages destroyed, monasteries destroyed, relatives, imprisoned, or tortured or killed. And they, everyone would stand in a line and he would greet everyone one by one.

He would also greet the Westerners who were there and answer our questions. And I would watch him. And when he would be direct with someone who was telling them the stories of their escape and they would be crying, he would be shedding tears, just, you know, in incredible presence and emotion and responsiveness and care.

And when they left. It was like the sun would come back out from behind the clouds and he would be fully present for what was gonna come next and what was gonna come next might be somebody, you know, a westerner who would come and who was very excited about discovering meditation for the first time and very happy.

And he would be very present for that. He was able to empathize and then let go, able to empathize and then let go. And so for those of you who described when we began carrying. You are suffering so that you're concerned for your students, you're concerned for, or just the kind of residual effect of the anger of people who feel very frustrated and confined by the homestay and have very little tolerance for suffering and discomfort and have very uncomfortable home situations with a lot of strife.

You're carrying that with you is causing you to feel exhausted. Of course, emotionally drained, physically drained.  And that's something we really want to guard against. We want to be practicing self-care and mindfulness of whatever form you do in a way that will rejuvenate you, that will allow you to sleep.

That will allow you to let go. When we think about the great role models of history who really were up against tremendous struggle. You know, we think about, I often think about Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. 

And there where there's stories of Martin Luther king, the day, the morning he was assassinated he was having a pillow fight in his hotel room with his two friends who were travelling on the road with him. He was, he was very exuberant and playful person, and he was able to do that in the middle of this very dangerous, civil rights struggle. 

Nelson Mandela was the same lightness of being. Jane Goodall, who has been advocating for the preservation of our natural resources and animals primates, especially for decades also has this beautiful lightness of being, you feel happy around her.  I've seen her speak at  large UN gatherings and she'll go through just a litany of what's happening to our natural world and all the creatures in it and the effect on us and bringing out our sense of connectedness to all things, but she's not depressed. So how do people like that do that?

They have an inner resource that they're always tapping. Yesterday was my birthday and I usually don't care about my birthday that much. Thank you.  but it, what was interesting was I woke up and I was really happy. I felt really happy. And I generally experience a tremendous amount of frustration at the ineptitude with which our country has responded to the violence of our times and the pandemic when I know we have so many resources and talent. 

I just find it so tragic and heartbreaking. So, I experience those emotions. But I also do have this residual  deep joy. I was reflecting on it because there was a condition part of me that didn't want to say to people that I feel joy in the midst of their suffering. Because, how can you say that you are grateful? You're happy you? Well, you're fortunate in the midst of so much suffering. 

I mean, Philadelphia is just so filled with so much suffering and I worry about what's to come. I just feel as we start opening up again, without testing with the density and poverty that we're, we're in for a lot more suffering, 

And I worry about that. I worry about the economic fallout and I worry about the people who are stuck at home without enough space, without enough food and supportive situations. So that's always on my mind at the same time, I was just experiencing this incredible sense of optimism of life.

That's optimistic prior and deeper to the circumstances that were in the midst of, and I feel that access to that experience of the goodness, the irrepressible, goodness of the life force of the way that shoots of crabgrass seem to like come through the cracked asphalt and the sidewalk, no matter how ugly and polluted that little piece of sidewalk is, there's still this irrepressible life force that comes through that.

I feel that that is what we want to access. As educators, as people work with other people, we are not individually gonna be able to solve rescue. Every child solves the problems of the angry parents and grandparents who are feeling trapped and confined, manage and unresponsive and unsympathetic bureau.

But we can maintain our stability in the midst of that without guilt and without guilt is important. We want to be as grounded and, filled with the optimism of possibility. That carries us through this. And that also helps everyone realize that how we respond to a crisis when we're in the middle of it builds character.

If we respond poorly, if we don't take care of ourselves, if we let ourselves burn or if we get overly angry about things that we cannot control, we will undermine our own sense of confidence. And if we allow ourselves to put our attention on self-care, put our attention on our the well-being and the small things that we can control, we'll be able to come through this, recognizing that we have a small degree of choice.

That's gonna help us. It's gonna help our families, the people we live with, it's gonna help our coworkers. And it's gonna enable us to, at times also not complete all the demands of the paperwork and the school district, because we simply can't we're human beings. And that is, it's just really important.

If 10% of the district workforce gets sick and another 50% burns out, we're not gonna be in very good shape in September. So we just need to monitor and measure and pace ourselves and allow ourselves to work on that resilience and positivity.

I think we haven't in the course of the six weeks, I think we haven't done a thought bubble, which I know at a time was Kelly's favorite. So she might enjoy this. I'd like to do one and then I'd like to do a few others. Practices. So you can get a sense of how to work with these and pay attention to your experience so that you can ask any questions, about this, about how to do it, about what you noticed or what you didn't notice.

The thought bubble is fun. And sometimes for many people, it's easier than mindful breathing. Whenever you notice. A thought, an emotion, a sensation, a sound put it in a bubble, any color bubble, whatever you like, translucent rainbow, you can enjoy and just let it float away. So every time you notice a bubble, notice a thought sensation.

Feeling sound, put it in a bubble and let it float away. The goal of this practice is to cultivate the art of quick release. When we notice a thought we're paying attention. So we're cultivating the quality of our attention. We're paying attention. When we noticed thought, when we noticed that thought percolate up.

It starts to come into our awareness from the side or the bottom of the top, wherever they seem to come from. So you're cultivating your awareness. You're paying attention. You're not lost in daydreaming. You're not lost in worry. If there's a worry, you just put it in a bubble. Let it float away.

If there's daydreaming, put it in a bubble. Let it float away. Distraction. Put it in a bubble and let it float away. Self-doubt put it in a bubble. Let it float away, whatever it is. And we're practicing the art of quick release. Good things might come to your mind. Something that made you laugh, something that made you happy.

Something that was fun and overwhelming. I had some young friends call me yesterday and their two children, two and a half and four were so loud and outrageous. I just cracked up the entire time. They were just running around like the Tasmanian devils playing and laughing and then they put on a little shark face on the phone. 

So when you FaceTime, it turns your whole mouth to shark mouth. And they were having a great time talking to me as sharks and it was just hysterical. It was silly. It was nothing, to do good things that you remember put them in bubbles, let them float away things that make you laugh, put them in bubbles, let them float away.

What we're practicing is we're practicing the art of quick release. So when you're at. And you should be done for the day and your to-do list is too long. You just put it in a bubble and let it float away. You need rest. You need downtime. You need sleep. When you get off the phone with grandparents and parents who are venting their anger and frustration on you, keep putting it all in a bubble, letting it float away from your own emotions, put it in a bubble, let it float away.

Feeling hurt because that's hard to deal with. Put it in a bubble and let it float. Float. So we're practicing the art of quick release. So like those yogis, we can fall back to our reset button, our reset level of wellbeing. So let's start,  and we'll go for, we'll go for like six or seven minutes.

I'll keep reminding you, you can do it longer when you're on your own. Or you can do it shorter, but it tends to take some time. So bring yourself into a relaxed, but alert posture with your spine tall.

And just take a scan of your body, noticing your body and letting the tension roll off your head and your back. And imagine it's like the geese when they get out of them, the river and all the tension, just beads, like beads of water and just rolls off. 

And when you hear the bell, we can begin.

Let's start just centering with the breath, noticing the inhalation and the exhalation.

And now we'll turn our attention. To the exercise. And every time you notice a sound, a feeling, a thought, a physical sensation, all of those blips that cross the screen of our awareness, put each one in a bubble and let it float away. Don't hang on to them. Don't let them crowd your mind. Just let them all go. Like healing and balloons on a clear day, just let them fly away. 

 Be easy with yourself and relaxed. You may not notice though. So you can just put blankness in a bubble and let it float away. We're not trying to generate thought we're not trying to dredge our unconscious. We're just noticing what our experience is. As it's arising, noticing the objects of thought, feeling sound, sensation, and putting them in bubbles and letting them float.

If you notice happiness put that in a bubble, and let it float away. Enjoy the process of putting it in a bubble and letting it float away.

If you notice hurt or grief, be gentle with yourself. Put those in bubbles. Let them float away.

If you notice sounds in the room in an adjacent room or outside, put them in bubbles and let them float away.

If you notice the sensation pressure, where you're sitting on the chair, tightness in your back, warmth in your hands, coziness in your feet. Whatever you might notice as it passes the screen of your awareness, put it in a bubble and let it float away.

And now slowly begin to bring your attention back.

Thank you for listening to the conscious classroom. I'm your host, Amy Edelstein. Please check out the show notes on innerstrengthfoundation.net for links and more information. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please share it with a friend and pass the love. See you next time.