New Blog

Dear friends,


I have moved my blog to a Wordpress site. The new software allows me to have pages, more interactive comments, and links. It's called loving-community.com 


I hope you like it!


Warmly,
Kristen

Loving-Kindness for the Holidays

The last easy way to calm that I learned from Greg Crosby and Donald Altman was a meditation for Loving-Kindness. This particular meditation has been clinically studied and shown to be effective for creating high gamma waves in the brain http://www.brainwavesblog.com/gamma-brain-waves-information/

It helps depression, anxiety, and addiction. You can do it with your eyes open. You don’t need to visualize it: just saying it to yourself works. It goes like this:

May I be safe, happy, healthy, peaceful, and secure.

May my family be safe, happy, healthy, peaceful, and secure.

May my friends be safe, happy, healthy, peaceful, and secure.

May my clubs be safe, happy, healthy, peaceful, and secure.

May my organizations be safe, happy, healthy, peaceful, and secure.

May my world be safe, happy, healthy, peaceful, and secure.

May the world be safe, happy, healthy, peaceful, and secure.

May the environment be safe, happy, healthy, peaceful, and secure.

May all creatures be safe, happy, healthy, peaceful, and secure.

Happy Holidays! I'm off to visit family and friends.

I’ll be back after Christmas.

Gratitude Brings Peace

The second wonderful way to calm is gratitude. (here is a TEDtalk video about gratitude that always inspires me http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXDMoiEkyuQ, )My professor Greg Crosby tells a story about a clinical study where a third of the participants were asked to write down random events that happened in their day, another third were asked to write down only the negative things that had happened, and the last third were asked to detail only positive things they were grateful for. They followed them for ten weeks. The grateful third were 25% happier and more optimistic than the others. Gratitude focuses our attention on what is present instead of what is missing.

OK. So check it out. Aunt Bertha is going on and on about your weight as usual. You breathe from your belly. Calm. Calm. It’s kind of working, but not quite. Part of you wants to clobber dear Aunt Bertha. Stop for a moment. What about Aunt Bertha are you grateful for? Umm. She’s a great cook, she is very generous with her time and does more than her fair share for the holiday get together. Just by noticing what is wonderful about her, you might be able to calm your frustration with gratitude.

Take Home Point: When we notice what we are grateful for; we become present to the gifts all around us.

Stay Calm with Belly Breathing

I just came back from a wonderful class all about staying calm by Greg Crosby and Donald Altman, author of One Minute Mindfulness, at Portland State University. They had some great advice for staying calm. I’ll go over a few of them this week. They are easy to do, yet make a huge difference.

First of all breathing. Use your belly instead of your chest. Here’s how to do it. Hold your hands behind your back. That's it! Putting your hands behind you stretches the intercostal muscles between the ribs and your body automatically breathes from the belly. Belly breath releases serotonin in the stomach lining, has a calming effect on the vagus nerve that runs up the spine, and slows the heart rate. Three minutes with your arms behind your back and you will be able to handle a little holiday chaos.

Take Home Point: Need to feel calm right away? Put your hands behind your back and breath .

Why We Don’t Want To Visit Relatives For The Holidays

I suppose if I am really going to dwell on the topic of peace, then I should talk a bit about how to have a peaceful holiday with relatives. Most of my current relatives are a joy to visit. The ones who were not a joy are now dead. What made the difference? What did the non-joyful relatives do that was so stressful? It’s a very simple thing – they judged me. Isn’t that what the classic sitcom mother-in-law is doing with the critical and humiliating remarks? She is unsatisfied and expressing her dissatisfaction with her son or daughter and family by comparing them to some perfect ideal.

Let’s face it, it’s no fun to go home and have some well-meaning but shaming parent compare you to your siblings, someone on TV, a movie character, who you were five years ago, your classmate, your cousin, who they were twenty-five years ago, and so on. When I went home, I found out that I was too fat, too skinny, not dating a good enough guy, not working a good enough job, my hair was too long, my clothes too old, my ideas too new, my health about to tank, and my intellect suspect.

But here is the thing – have you ever been able to get the well-meaning relative to stop? Of course not. If you could actually get them to stop comparing and criticizing by simply asking them, well they would not be in the non-joyful category anymore.

Like Byron Katie, www.thework.com, says, they are on automatic – like a force of nature. I have never been able to talk a force of nature out of anything. The darn wave just bowled me right over.

Take Home Point: The only solution is to find inner calm while the wave is tossing us about.

Hugging For Peace

Ok, so let’s talk about peace. It’s that time of the year with doves and urgent prayers for armistice. But if you really want to promote peace in this world, touch somebody. As in, actually, physically, touch somebody.

There was a woman on the sidewalk the other day handing out free hugs. I definitely got one of those. As a single person I am not getting nearly enough hugs. Turns out – lack of hugs makes societies violent. I am not kidding. Here are two excellent articles on this subject. www.violence.de/prescott/bulletin/article.html

http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/hands_on_research/

Touching makes us more resilient, more compassionate, healthier, and happier. One article said that even a pat on the back had a noticeable effect on a student's interest in school or a medical patient's ability to recover. 

Take Home Point: Hugs are the answer. Give as many as you can this Christmas.

Friendship in the Age of Facebook

Now I am reduced down to just a face image and a sound bite without the sound.

It takes time to fall in love with friends, romantic or platonic. Face to face time. There is almost no way around it. I am meeting a new friend on Skype and so I at least have a face to look at. Still, it’s difficult with so much information missing. The heart and subtle mind need lots of ways to pick up reciprocity signals. Friendship is more than words. Friendship is the way your face lights up at a joke. Friendship is the movement of your hands as you make some point. Friendship is the pause to look at a cloud. It’s a grin while looking away and the quick wiping of a tear. Some friends say little, but feel much. Some friends quietly hold my arm as we walk.

I recently saw a video on the courtship dance of pigeons done by dancers. The pigeons kept an eye on each other’s dance and as each mimicked or creatively spinned off the other’s movements, the courtship went well. But when the researcher presented a fake pigeon in the form of a prerecorded female who did not reciprocate the male pigeon's movements, the courtship stymied, stuttered and stopped. The male was looking for attuned behavior. The girl's was clearly out of tune and the poor guy didn’t know what to do.

Human beings are doing a far more complicated dance. When chunks are missing such as physical contact, eye contact, body language, tone of voice, and facial expressions, we are left with a small band of information.  Intellectually we may understand one another but our hearts aren’t talking at all.  Our bodies are mute.

I believe that the loss of heart and body contact leaves us feeling horribly lonely.

I saw an email from a woman asking what to do about her painful loneliness. I immediately asked her to tea, but she lives in Sante Fe. She lives in a city many states away, but she asks voiceless, bodiless,  strangers on the internet for help. What happened to seeing friends in her own city? I’ll tell you what happened.  They are all too busy to sit face to face. They pretend that they are getting social contact when they post a few lines on Facebook.

Living in Packs

You want to know what is natural to human beings? Look at pre-domination, non-hierarchical cultures. In none of the cultures that I have ever studied did people live isolated from one another. People hung out in packs – usually gender packs. Now that’s the human being I know! Guys hanging together, gals hanging together. Actually, a lot like kids in school. All through school, we would tend to hang out in gender packs. Then at some point the culture says that we are supposed to be in couples. So people desperately look for a mate. Women keep a few friends, but men often do not. For men, a mate often becomes the only way to get one’s need for companionship, attention, and sensuality met.

This cultural norm is not good for men. Unfortunately, women, too, will tend to drop friends when they are in relationship. Lots of women do not have time to nurture friends when they have a partner and children. Then if anything happens to the family, wham, the woman will find herself isolated as well. I don’t suppose we should be surprised to find depression and anxiety rampant in our culture.

Maybe Christopher Ryan, author of Sex at Dawn, is right. Monogamy is one choice, but not a natural human choice. I’m not thinking about sex here. I’m thinking about intimacy. Knowing another so well we can read their thoughts across the room. I crave intimacy. I know I’m not alone.

What would happen if instead of looking for the one and only, we looked for a group? What if the choice before us as young adults was not to look for the one person who would meet all our needs for the rest of our lives, but instead it was to look for the one group? I got a very short taste of such a life in my college dorm. What made the dorm experience so rich was the intimacy I felt with a group of friends. I felt secure in their attention. And if one person was busy, there was always another. More important – I didn’t have to be in a couple relationship to have intimacy like this – good thing, since I was single for most of my college experience.

I wonder. I would welcome any thoughts you might have on the subject.

True Guru

Speaking of having someone pay attention to you as if you were something lovely, I read somewhere, I wish I could remember who said this, that you could always tell a true Guru or spiritual person because he or she looked at you as if you were the only person in the world. I know what that kind of attention feels like. When Byron Katie talked to me during her weeklong workshop, she looked at me with her total attention. That kind of attention contrasts quite dramatically with the partial attention we are used to from most people.

What really surprised me was the falling in love feeling I felt around her. Although it wasn’t a romantic/sexual in-love feeling, it was the high feeling from being appreciated and seen. I suspect that part of falling in love with another person is falling in love with their focused attention on me. Being seen is the best feeling in the world. It doesn’t have to be only during love affairs that we experience being the center of attention. It’s just that lovers are usually the only ones who take the time.

But what if there is no lover? Then in this culture, that predicament often means no one is looking at you with focused, curious, total attention. Especially if you are a guy. I’ve been looking around at the men at some of the events I’ve been going to. Contrast their behavior with the women – the women are goofing around with their friends – the men are either single or with a partner. They are not goofing around with friends. They seem lonely to me. And these are the adventurous men willing to join a yoga or dance class. I know so many men who do not go out because they have no friends to go out with. No wonder these guys look so hard for a partner – often the partner will be the only intimate friend they have. This can’t be right! Human beings don’t do well in isolation. Hmm. Now that I think about it. Many of my single male friends suffer from depression. I used to think that was coincidence. 

Click here for a thoughtful study on the relationship between lack of physical touch and war.

Best Teacher on Love

I suspect the reason why so many of us love dogs is that they always seem to wear rose colored glasses when it comes to their human companions. I have a friend with an adorable King Charles Spaniel and that dog wriggles in ecstasy whenever she comes into the room. He can always shift her mood with his consistent presentation of pure adoration. I once tried that with my family. I thought, hey, let’s see what happens if I imitate the attitude of a dog – that is if I look happy to see them.

I found out that being like a dog is not easy. For one thing, a dog does not wrestle with a crashed computer twenty minutes before a deadline. Nor does a dog have to get dinner on the table before the soccer game. So there are all kinds of things distracting me as a human, which my dog doesn’t have. I have to really make a mental effort to put the computer down, look at the beloved face, and remember in that moment how grateful I feel to have that person in my life.

The rewards are great whenever I choose to pay attention, my enthusiasm would often get mirrored into their enthusiasm, plus gratefulness tends to make me feel, well, grateful to be alive and to have loved ones in my life – which remembering makes me feel really happy.