Words of wisdom _a collection prt 1

 “Energia Kobiet” is a new book comprised of interviews with Poland’s most influential women, by journalists that I know, like and respect. In this article from Gazeta Wyborcza, Polish readers find a summary of the debate that followed the premier of the book. In it, guest speakers and psychologists sought to define what it means to live a life of meaning. A few of the conclusions are about mindfulness, though not in name. It seems that, even though Poland is not on the breaking crest of the mindful revolution, the need for non doing, reflection and a non judgemental apprach to ourselves is already very present.

Words of wisdom _a collection prt 2

I often find inspiration in articles from Fast Company magazine. Their editorial approach speaks to me even though I am not in thier core target group, which is innovative business people. I am, however, fascinated by creative people and thier endevours. Whether they make art or innovations in business – I think the process and attitude are remarkably similar. Indeed, I think a successfull business is not that much different from a succesfull play, book, song or work of art. All these are manifestations of someone’s or a team’s vision that finds resonance in the outside world. If an artist makes art that no one cares about, he is exactly the same kind of bankrupt as an entrapreneur whose innovative product no one wants to buy. Actually, the first place where I doscovered mindfulness was Fast Company magazine. I continue to find inspiration there, which I will occasionally catalogue here for use during my course. And for your reading pleasure :-).

Read the article: The Quotes That Motivate The Most Successful People

My take away quotes:

“Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” — Steve Jobs
“I did then what I knew how to do and when I knew better, I did better.” — Maya Angelou

Just being yourself is a lonely business

Gollumn and his precious…self

I’ve taken an interesting turn on my road to MBSR trainer – I’m on a streatch that’s suddenly pretty lonley. Being a teacher in training requires giving meditations and the proces as well as its effects a lot of attention and time. Maybe this is the reason I have begun to feel isolated from friends and family. Somehow though, I think it’s a symptom of coming into closer contact with myself.

When you look into yourself regularly, with no expectations and the intention to not judge but simply to meet what you see, the perspective is practically bottomless. You see that stories you have told yourself about the way you are, the things you can and can’t do, the things you like and those that scare you, are all literary works of fiction authored by your thinking mind. But not by the „you” that is the sum of all your inherent parts: your mind, your body, your heart. When you put those parts together you get a living, pulsing spark that twinkles. By that I mean – it changes. It shifts. It’s lighter, darker, stronger, weaker. Being alive means being in flux.

This becomes clear when you look into your mind and heart one day and find strong convictions, optimism, and a sense of direction and then the next day find all those things in an uproar. Your precious (think Golumn) „self” is a boat being tossed about by many different types of weather. So how can one story be true for long about a being that is in a constant state of change? It can’t. It’s true for a moment. And then it grows, morphs, unulates and takes on a different form.

MORNING GLORIES (and the art of infrequent celebrations)

No, not the flowers. This is NOT a blog about the world’s pretty things. Although the world is full of wonderous…shrubbery, writing about it is not my calling. The glories the title of this post refer to, are the moments of peace and quiet that you find when you get out of bed before eveyone else does. A simple thing. But so hard to do.

I spent roughly twenty years celebrating the late night hours. Mainly because I was such a nerd in grade school. Years of being the rejected kid, the one even other nerds didn’t want to hang out with, created a deeply rooted drive and ambition to show them all just how cool I can be. This is a recent discovery. I found them there in my head during my practice – a chorus of grade school kids that my memory had drawn up and cast in the role of coolness jury. I have been tirelessly performing for them since college. 10 points for clubbing, 20 for house parties, bonus points for dancing until dawn, negative points for going to bed early and missing a premier, opening or costume ball. I had convinced myself that partying, including during the week, was who „I was”. The price of this stubborn conviction was going up with every year. Kids were born and needed time and attention. Work became more challenging. My body needed more rest and nourishment. Despite these convicing circumstances, on and on I danced. Until recently.

Use your mind to change your brain – from psychology today

Rebecca Gladding (medical docter, expert in anxiety, depression, mindfulness and the Four Steps) summarises what happens on an organic level, when you meditate everyday. The effects, sometimes had to define, explain or account for, are happening on a neurological level that has been examined, tested and defined. This empiricism is exactly what got mindfulness into the increasingly despiritualised mainstream. As a catholic raised gleeful athiest, I can atest to the attraction that this scientific proof has.

Bookmark this! http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/use-your-mind-change-your-brain/201305/is-your-brain-meditation

Highlights:

[…] if you meditate on a regular basis, several positive things happen. First, the strong, tightly held connection between the Me Center (specifically the unhelpful vmPFC) and the bodily sensation/fear centers begins to break down. As this connection withers, you will no longer assume that a bodily sensation or momentary feeling of fear means something is wrong with you or that you are the problem!

Mind the gap.

drawing by Norbullo

I was never drawn to yoga. The dynamic was too slow. I need sport to wind me up, to be fun and exhausting and adventerous. I would run while listening to TED talks and sight seeing in Łazienki Park. I would kick box with friends to have an excuse to see them and interact, even if it meant punching them with a side hook. Yeah! Excitment made sport worth doing. Yoga is not about that so it was never, ever on the list. Not even as a backup. Slow and silent with none of the form building, fat burning benefits that make getting out of bed early worth it? Forget it!

And then Katharina Meinhard showed me „The Pause.” During the second session of the MBSR teachers course we covered mindful yoga with Katherina, a very experienced instructer from The European Insitute for Mindfulness Based Aproaches (http://www.institute-for-mindfulness.eu/). With her, yoga was not about streatching muscles, it was about meditation in fluid form. As eye opening as that was, what grabbed me was a discovery that she helped us make. It’s a really small thing, a detail that is a part of everyone’s life from the day we are born until the we end the trip, but few of us notice that it’s there. I call it „The Pause” (to be read in a deep movie trailer voice) because it is in fact a miniscule moment of rest between one breath and the next. In everyday life, it’s hardly perceptible. But in mindful yoga this moment of pause between the end of an exhale and the beginning of an inhale grows into a tangable, perceptible moment. A new, unexplored area of our breathscape that is, in my opinion, absolutely awesome. Like a little death, a foreshadowing that ends in the reawakening of another breath thanks to which we travel forward. And I never knew it was there! A built in Pause button that proves even constant organic processes have stillness built into them.

It’s something cartoonists uncovered long before I did. You know the scene, where Wile E. Coyote races accidentally off a cliff and hangs in space for a moment before dropping 50 stories and splattering on the dessert rocks below? That’s it. It’s one of those details we have in common with everything else in our physical universe. I look for it now and long to „press it” during yoga classes I attend on my own now.

Yes, I’ve made the leap. Ms. Adrenaline is now a regular at a morning Hatha Yoga course. To be fair, I run before class. Otherwise I would be obsessing about stretching my fat cells and frowning at my stomach folds as I try to hold a pose instead of feeling myself breath and groping around for that fantastic little pause button that seperates one swoosh of air through my body from another other.

Intro

In november of 2013 I enrolled in an 8 week MBSR program in Warsaw, my hometown. After reading about all the tech executives, high powered CEOs and media tycoons like Arianna Huffington who have suddenly become „mindful,” I was curious. A gap between jobs serrendipitiously coincided with the start date of one of the few MBSR programs that Warsaw had to offer, so I went. Durring the course, thankfully towards the end, two tremendous typhoons collided with my life: the death of a close family member and the falling apart of an important, game changing business relationship. I’m not sure if my determination to continue exploring mindfulness would be as strong, had those two catastrophies not shown me so explicitly how mindfulness can make a difference. Had I not had that miniscule sliver of space, that tiny distance between my own tumulteous mind and emotions that mindfulness had helped to wedge between my thoughts and “me”, I would have been floatsom. It turned out, Mindfulness Based Stress Reducation was not, as I had imagined going in, a tool towards becoming a better manager, more focused problem solver or creative executive. It was a technique for befriending chaos, facing yourself, and not striving to find anything except what is already here. I had no idea it was worth doing, or that it would be so hard.

When the course was over, I did not feel done. Visting open mindfulness sessions was helpful but I discovered a drive to grow in my understanding and practice that casual group sittings did not satisfy. In may 2014 I enrolled in a MBSR instructers course. With every session my grasp on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s method becomes stronger but the further I get the more expansive the view of how vast this area of knowledge is, both practically and theoretically.

I have a history of becoming fascinated with things, people, places … cheese. And now I have become enamoured with an idea that feels like it’s wiping away the fog on my glasses and giving me back the things I have been overlooking for years.

The process is very personal, but somehow, because I am not so unlike other people, it seems like a story that could be about anyone who stummbles through the same door. Hence the blog. A catalogue of change, a story of being on the road back to going nowhwere and liking it. Welcome.