Braincalming

Brainstorming works wonders. When we let loose a flood of ideas, freely associating and playfully combining anything and everything that comes along, we often see past old boundaries and discover solutions to vexing problems. The stream of consciousness becomes a torrent that blasts through every snag.

If brainstorming opens formerly clogged channels, then what is braincalming?

Braincalming shifts us into a state of ease and placidity, trading frenetic energy for generative stillness. As the stream of consciousness settles and gathers in pools, real reflection becomes possible. When you’re talking, it’s hard to hear. When storms are raging, it’s hard to see straight.

When faced with an intractable problem, a stalled creative endeavor, a relationship snag, or any other kind of challenge, try one or more of these braincalming techniques and see if solutions arise on their own out of the depths of stillness.

Go Outside

Get away from your desk, your device, your office, your car, and step out under the sky. Leave the world of human machinations behind and return to the natural realm. For hundreds of thousands of years we lived outside. Rooms with ceilings are a recent invention on the long-term scale of human evolution. Electric light was invented yesterday. So many of us have lost touch with the elemental world that gave birth to us. Somehow, when we walk in the wind and stand under the sky, something shifts in us and we lean a little more willingly into the unknown. Held in the embrace of a wide, unobstructed horizon with the infinite space above, the impossible begins to seem possible.

Watch a hawk spiraling on an updraft. See how she chooses her flight line – a perfect synthesis of effort and effortlessness, assertion and submission. See a green leafed cottonwood tree in a dry creek bed, and know the sustenance running just beneath the surface of all things. Find a crow feather in a field of boulders and feel with your own hands the harmonious union of rigidity and delicacy. Such is the range of the manifest world. In the face of these apparent contradictions we come to peace with our own paradoxical nature.  

Sleep

Most Americans suffer from significant sleep deprivation. The results of this easily-remedied deficit are well documented – moodiness, irritability, diminished cognitive function, weakened immunity, relationship problems, stress, anxiety, depression, increased drug and alcohol dependency, just to name a few. And it gets worse – some estimates claim that 5,000-6,000 traffic fatalities a year are caused by drivers asleep at the wheel. Sleep deprivation endangers us all and unnecessarily complicates our lives. If you think that sleep is cutting into your productivity, you’re wrong. It’s the other way around. Sleep deficit chokes your output and steals your happiness. Depriving yourself of the enormous health benefits of sleep is a sure way to drastically reduce your quality of life across the board. It’s a perfect example of how stillness feeds us in ways activity never can.

Spiritual Practice

In longevity studies, researchers have identified a rather small number of factors that most contribute to long, healthy, happy lives. One of the most consistent is religion. And it doesn’t matter which one, or how traditional. It’s simple really – when people believe in God or some kind of higher power, they move into a more peaceful relationship with the conditions and circumstances of their lives. In spiritual or religious consciousness, you know that your ego doesn’t run the world. You relax. You do your part and let go of the rest. I know this is not what atheists like to hear. They gravitate toward the claim that religion is what’s destroying the world on an individual and global basis. Negatively judging the legitimacy of a metaphysical claim by the idiotic actions of a tiny minority of zealots is not only short-sighted, it’s demonstrably, logically unsupportable. The vast majority of people living within the guidance of any particular religion live lives of community, compassion, pluralism, and tolerance. We’re not arguing about the definition or existence of God – we’re simply noticing that an extremely beneficial shift in consciousness occurs when we surrender to the grace of the universe and allow it to do what it does so well – support us. Nor does any of this have anything to do with the tiresome arguments about which religion is the right one. Most of us have moved way past that. We’re simply recognizing that spiritual practice in all its forms moves us from the agitation of self-will and into the wide-open willingness of serenity.

Got Art?

Nothing calms, emboldens, and enlarges the soul like beauty. Art, in all its forms, celebrates the mystery of existence and calls us to our higher sensibilities. Some media like literature and poetry use words while other media like painting and sculpture uses color, line, form, shape, and composition. Film uses both, and more. But the real thrill of art is its inherently seditious nature. It defies the very forms it employs by making us see past the surface and feel the depth of our own lives – something we have been desperately longing to feel. Art brings us home to ourselves and leaves us awash in the stillness of our own infinite value. We know more now, we feel more. We see a little farther. And we take this empowerment into our moral action, our loving-kindness, and our willingness to talk less about the problems and move more into the embodiment of solutions.

In his poem The Great Wagon, 12^th century Persian poet Hafiz wrote, “Today, like every other day, we wake up empty/and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study/and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument./Let the beauty we love be what we do./There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” Whether we play a musical instrument or not, music has the capacity to break us out of the captivity of our own thought-cage.  Listen to music that has power and meaning for you. Let it lift you like wind lifts a wing. Let it carry you over your worries and endless mind-puzzles. As Beethoven reminds us, “Music is a revelation higher than all wisdom and philosophy.”

Braincalming

There’s more. But you know the rest. Eat better. Move your body. Get out of your isolation. Trust community. Travel. Take risks. Trade safety for love. Give away whatever it is you want to receive. Learn, again and again, the art of letting go. In these ways and others we move out of the maelstrom of thought-addiction and into the serenity of the eye of the hurricane – a place of calm and stillness where we finally see and feel our authenticity rising up through the cracks of the chaos of our former lives.

The Missing Link

[This piece originally appeared in the column "A to Zen" in the January/February 2015 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

 
The use of antidepressant medication in America has jumped 400% in the last two decades. One in ten Americans over the age of twelve is taking them. Women are two and a half times more likely to take antidepressants than men, a gap that grows wider in middle age – one in four women between the ages of 40-59 are being treated with antidepressants. And it’s not just depression we’re talking about. Antidepressants are frequently prescribed to treat anxiety as well.

Here, in the most prosperous and comfortable society in human history, millions and millions of us are struggling to cope with deep and abiding feelings of disconnection, fear, sadness, and alienation. Complex problems never have a single solution because no event or condition stems from a single cause – all phenomena are the result of multiple causes. This is what makes fixing anything so difficult. In our current age – the age of psychology – all maladies of consciousness are called “mental illness” and are treated by medical professionals. For most of human history we called them “spiritual problems.”

Psychology, with its modalities of psychiatry and talk-therapy, is about 100 years old. Philosophy and religion are as old as humanity. Throughout our history whenever the world grew dark and began closing in, we turned to the shaman, the priestess, the seer, the sage, or the spiritual healer. Setting a broken bone is one thing. But how do you treat free-floating, debilitating fear or deep, pervasive hopelessness? How do you bring someone back into the fold of their own best life?

The origin of the word “religion” is obscured somewhat by antiquity, but modern scholars believe it comes from the Latin root re-ligare meaning “to bind, to link back or to reconnect.” In our usage, “religion” has come to mean any system of myth and ritual that binds a community together in a shared experience of the ineffable, transcendent divine. In this sense, religions aren’t themselves true or false – they point to the truth, a truth that can only be experienced and verified in the depths of the individual through reverence, prayer, meditation, ecstasy, or ritual. All words, concepts, teachings, doctrines, texts, and traditions are fingers pointing at the moon. They show us where to look. But they are not the moon.

If in this ancient sense religion and philosophy are healing modalities designed to re-integrate those among us who are disintegrating, then job number one is returning our prodigal sons and daughters to the loving embrace of the tribe. But this re-integration goes way beyond a few warm hugs from loved ones. Real and painful existential crises have to be addressed and repaired. Sadly, we cannot love someone well. If it were only that easy.

What the world’s wisdom traditions do offer is this – a vision of the cosmos as an orderly whole in which each of us has purpose and infinite value. But a simple, straight-forward explanation of this concept is insufficient. Replacing old concepts with new ones is a start, but it’s not enough. Being told about delicious food doesn’t quell one’s hunger.

To be linked back, bound, and reconnected to one’s original wholeness requires a direct experience of unity. Medications and psychotherapy are helpful. The spiritual teachings, methods, suggestions, and practices of others are helpful. Any journey benefits from a map. But then the walking begins.

There are many hands to hold us up when we are too weak to stand. There are many voices to speak truth when we have forgotten it. There are many hearts full of kindness. There are many feet that have walked out of the valley of the shadow of death and know the way. None of us does any of this alone. But no one can stand for us, know for us, speak for us, feel for us, or walk for us. If we have the ears to hear, the universe is forever singing us home. It too disintegrated when we unlearned our unity. Its longing is our longing. Begin from where you are. With a word, yes, we can reconnect the sacred cord. Our resolve is the missing link.

Good Enough

Striving for excellence is all well and good, but the fact remains, most days we’re lucky just to make it through without burning down the house. Somehow in our culture the expectation has taken shape that every experience must be a peak experience, every moment an amazing moment, and every effort a stroke of genius. That’s a lot of pressure. Believe it or not, it might be time to lower our expectations. Maybe it’s time to get reacquainted with good enough.

The shadow side of every motivational speech is the implication that who you are right now isn’t good enough. Maybe that’s the wrong message. Do more? We’re already the busiest generation, scrambling like crazy people, multitasking, running on caffeine and nerves. When do we get to rest? When is it OK to simply enjoy the fruits of our labor? When is good enough good enough?

I’ve been thinking about my dad a lot lately, and how different his life was from mine. I race from one obligation to the next. His hours and days were filled with a kind of reverence, illuminated by a slow motion glow brought on by letting things take their sweet time.

When he died last year at the age of 90 we found an old diary he’d kept for the year 1963. It was a simple journal filled with brief entries chronicling each day’s events. Our family had just moved from New Jersey to Ventura, California, a quiet town on the beach just south of Santa Barbara. He was picking up shift work as a printer typesetting at the Ventura Star-Free Press. Like a lot of families back in those days, our family had only one car and after work he’d often walk down to the beach for a stroll along the sand or even a swim if the weather was warm. Then my mom and I would come meet him, I was only 4 at the time, and we’d all swim or walk on the beach. As the sun set we’d amble on home for dinner and a quiet evening. Maybe the neighbors or some of my parent’s friends would come by for a visit, or we’d watch some TV, one of the three channels. My dad seemed content in the knowledge that he was a father, a husband, a worker, a thinker, a homeowner, and the simple of act of being alive was enough. There was no ambitious scheme to be more, do more, own more, or in any other way stand out from the ordinary. Ordinary was good enough.

Of course I realize I’m romanticizing his life – he was subject to the same pain, disillusionment, and endless hunger that any man or woman feels, but none of that worked its way into his diary. But I do remember as a boy often wondering where does he go when he’d just sit in a chair and close his eyes after a long, hot day of working in the yard. My dad had a rich interior life, and that’s another thing that’s increasingly difficult to maintain in our modern, busy world of hyper-connectivity. Being quiet and being alone are increasingly rare and precious jewels buried under the clutter of our busyness.

When my dad was at work he was at work, and when he was off, he was off. That’s something I don’t have. Because of the nature of my work, I’m never off. As a professor and department chair I’m immersed in the life of my college in many ways, and I’m a mentor to 180 students. Not to mention the tens of thousands of former students who I bump into everywhere I go. They message me through Facebook at all hours of the day and night and ask all sorts of questions, and I love staying in touch, but it’s challenging. And in my work as a singer songwriter, public speaker, and writer I am constantly in self-promotion mode pitching shows, talks, my blog, and my upcoming album. I use Facebook and Twitter to build my brand and strengthen my platform. I wake up at three a.m. and ponder a web design decision or a media contact I should make. I run lyrics in my head or think through guitar solos. In my mind’s eye I peruse the photographic styles of noted local photographers and deliberate about who to use for my next photo shoot.

It may be hard to believe, but I’m really not complaining – I chose this life and I eagerly seek the next opportunity to expand my reach. I love singing, playing, recording, performing, speaking, writing, teaching, and being a part of a vibrant and thriving community of fellow artists, speakers, thinkers, and teachers.

In this crazy life many of us live, we have to work hard to make our own sabbaticals, our own Sabbaths, our own days off, our own vacations. If you don’t schedule down time you’ll go crazy, because there is always a deadline, there is always a long list of urgent emails, voice mails, texts, Tweets, and Facebook messages to respond to. If you aren’t careful, your entire life becomes one long to do list, and all human interactions are reduced to increasingly insistent demands for your time. Total strangers message me on Facebook and say things like, “Hey, I love your work, we should really hang out. I play too. We should jam and write a song together.” While I’m touched that I seem that approachable, and that people feel connected enough to reach out, I can’t help but laugh. Dude, I don’t even have time to hang with my best friends, how on earth can I carve out a minute let alone an afternoon for a jam session with an absolute stranger?

I used to continually freak out at how busy I was. Now I see it differently. Keeping a gratitude journal for the last two years changed that. Now I see my work, all of it, as an opportunity for service. I am so deeply honored and blessed that the art I make, whether in song, prose, or oratory, is welcomed warmly in certain circles, and that the encouragement I receive from audiences and readers is profoundly nourishing. Like my father, I just want to know that I’m useful, that I fit somewhere, and that my passions have a place in this world. I think of him often, his quietude, his gentle nature, his steadfast commitment to his wife and his sons and to the proposition that life is beautiful and to be relished and enjoyed. There is no later. There is only now. If it’s a beautiful day at the beach, then you go to the beach.

Wealth is wanting what you have. Success is well-being. Happiness is a decision. Joy is a natural by-product of a virtuous life. These are not secrets, they are ancient insights taught in every spiritual and philosophical tradition. And they are born out in every life lived with integrity, honesty, vigor, and willingness. Life is only a problem if you try and figure it out. If you just live it, it flows pretty well.

Finding a place where your passion meets the needs of the world is the soul work of every man and woman. For my dad it was printing. He plied his craft setting type and playing an integral role in the publication of the news, making our Founder’s ideals of a free press a concrete reality. He knew that language and print media were essential to the human project and he humbly took his place on the mechanical side of the process. And he took it seriously. But when the type was set, he turned it over to the boys on the printing presses, punched the clock and walked down to the beach. He was free. I still see my father swimming in the ocean at the end of a long day, happy, in love, grateful, and reverent. And it was good enough.

Ten Steps Away From Anxiety

Nothing interferes with our peace of mind more than anxiety. Anxiety is our ever-present friend, stealing our joy, hampering our relationships, clouding our judgment, and wasting our time. Why is this malady so persistent, so resistant to treatment, so common and widespread? Maybe we’ll never rid the world of anxiety altogether. But we can learn how to manage it better, and how to walk away from it one step at a time.

1. Clear the Clutter
The first rule of feng shui, the Chinese art of spatial arrangement, is eliminating clutter. It is difficult to free your mind from chaotic thinking when your environment is chaotic. Clutter, dirt and debris trap the soul in a downward spiral of inertia. The Hopi people share a similar perspective, that the outer world is a mirror of the inner world, and that the way we arrange our homes and offices reflects the order of our minds. Take a long, hard look at your room, your house, your office, your desk, your closets, and your in-box. The office-kitsch witticism a neat desk is a sign of a sick mind is a clever bit of nonsense belied by this essential truth: simplifying and streamlining the world around you frees your mind of untold stress and needless ineffectiveness.

2. Get Back in Your Body
Anxiety is over-thinking, plain and simple. The most direct and immediate remedy is physical activity. Get out of your head and back into your body. Your body was designed to move. Modern life has us sitting down nearly all the time. Push back your chair, get up and go outside. Walk, run, swim, surf, bike, hike, play, work out, have sex, do yoga, dance – whatever you like. Or at least clean out your garage, wash the windows and mop the floor. That way you accomplish steps one and two simultaneously.

3. Be Present
Anxiety is future-thinking. Anxiety only exists in the realm of thought. It cannot exist in this now moment because this now moment is not a thought – it is Being itself. When we worry, we wallow in troubling fictional scenarios that have not happened yet, all of them centered on our victim-status and affirming our weakness. In other words, anxiety is a defense mechanism that prevents action, for if we do not act, then we cannot fail, thereby fulfilling our childish need to be flawless and perfect. Every action is necessarily flawed, ringed round with unintended consequences. It is so much easier to risk nothing and retreat into the safety of our anxiety and fear. To combat this well-worn pattern, drop out of future-thinking and down into this present moment – this room, this conversation, this priceless, fleeting miracle, this simple task. The world will never again be exactly as it is in this now moment. Stay in your thoughts and miss it. Come out of your thoughts and be it.

4. Practice Allowance
We all carry with us a long list of expectations, judgments and ego-demands that deeply interfere with our effectiveness and joy. Simply notice how much agitation is generated by your resistance to what is. Arbitrary and self-serving ideas about how things should be blind us to the only reality we have and lock us away in a fantasy state of alienation and loneliness. Making peace with what we cannot change, letting situations unfold on their own terms at their own pace and allowing people to be who they are frees us from the relentless and agonizing task of trying to control everything and everyone. Living in a perpetual state of disappointment and resentment is detrimental to our well being. Unskilled self-interest leads to bad habits and self-absorption. Genuine, enlightened self-interest leads to allowance and joy.

5. Let Beauty Happen
One of the gifts that arise when anxiety is relinquished is beauty, or rather, the ability to perceive beauty. Beauty is never hidden, but it often goes unseen. When we are lost in the fog of fear and future-thinking we fail to feel the utter perfection of the uplifting moments that make up our lives. The quiet heroism of our fellow-travelers, the shimmering light that bathes every leaf on every tree, the smell of distant rain on the wind from the mountains, the love in the eyes of those who forgive us in spite of our blunders – this aura of abundance shines around us in every moment. We have only to cultivate the eyes to see.

6. Take One Step
The journey away from anxiety is a path of action. We don’t need to think about it anymore. The time for reflection and contemplation is past. Now it is simply time to move our feet. One step is all it takes. Notice how the thought of all those endless steps before us stops us in our tracks. So don’t think. Act. You don’t have to know what all of the next 10,000 steps are. You know what the next step is. Take it.

7. Shift into Appreciation
 Instead of focusing on all of the unfinished tasks and challenges unmet, look back and marvel at how far you’ve come. Take the time to appreciate yourself and everything you have accomplished. Cultivate the consciousness of gratitude and let it be the lens through which you see the world. Journaling can be a helpful practice because it forms a chronicle, a written record of all of the myriad ways things go right and how we are surrounded by abundance and beauty. A gratitude journal forms a crucial counterpoint to the mind’s natural tendency to dwell in the consciousness of scarcity and fear.

8. Don’t Resist Anxiety
Instead of turning conquering anxiety into yet another stress-inducing chore on your to-do list, re-frame it as simply an inappropriate or disproportionate response to uncertainty, or as a necessary time of restlessness out of which great creativity will soon emerge. I imagine that a butterfly feels a lot of anxiety as it fights its way out of the cocoon. What if anxiety is as necessary as adrenalin? What if anxiety is an evolutionary adaptation, a needed jolt of juice to spur us to action? The caveman who worried about the saber tooth tiger (whether there was one around or not) survived to pass on his genes. His hapless brother, not a care in the world, got eaten. Turning anxiety into a problem only strengthens and deepens its grasp. Quite often, anxiety is just how change feels.

9. Stop Thinking You’re in Charge
One of the primary sources of anxiety is the groundless yet persistent delusion that we are in charge. Our ego continually mistakes its limited range of power and influence as omnipotence and as a result we take on challenges and tasks that are absolutely none of our business. We don’t have to run the whole world, and in fact we couldn’t if we tried. Gandhi called this shift renunciation and correctly identified it as the core principle of the world’s spiritual wisdom. Paul McCartney lost his mother Mary to breast cancer when he was fifteen years old. Years later, through the voice of her grieving son, she sang a mantra of renunciation to all of us: “Let it be.”

10. Find Your Higher Power
Atheists, have no fear, this works for you too. There is an order, a structure, a pattern, a presence, a force in nature that binds all individual phenomena into a singular whole. Some people personify and deify it. Others prefer to let it float just out of range of the conceptual mind. No matter how you conceive of it in the realm of thought, the Source is real. Make peace with it. Find it in meditation, prayer, service, nature, art, beauty, truth, or in the deepest recesses of your own beating heart. Gandhi didn’t have a personal god, he just called it Truth. When you are rooted in the depths of your higher power, you live in a peace that surpasses all understanding. In what the mystics call God-consciousness there is no room for ego, and therefore no room for anxiety or fear.

This then is how we begin. Don’t try to conquer anxiety. Simply see its uselessness. Even that simple awareness will weaken its hold. Then take one step, then another. This is how we move away from anxiety and toward the joyful life our soul is asking for.