Respond, Don't React

Practice of the Week
Respond, Don't React

“Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear?” (Lao Tzu)

Category: Slogans to Live By. Carry these reminders at all times. These practices don't require setting aside a separate substantial chunk of time -- but they will slow you down a bit (and that's a good thing.) Resolve to get stronger at living by these maxims, day by day. Sometimes make one of them the focus of your daily journaling.

Adapted from Rick Hanson, Just One Thing

To simplify the explanation of a complex journey, your brain evolved in three stages:

• Reptile, fish—Brainstem, focused on avoiding harm
• Mammal, bird—Limbic system, focused on approaching rewards
• Human—Cortex, focused on attaching to "us"

Whether a person is a psychopathic criminal or a saint; these three systems—avoiding, approaching, attaching— are always at work. The key is whether they're at work in a good way—one that promotes happiness and benefit for yourself and others—or a bad one that leads to suffering and harm.

What's happening in your brain when these systems are functioning in a good way—when you're feeling fine, or even "in the zone," self-actualizing, or spiritually blossoming? The answer is important, because then you can deliberately stimulate and thus gradually strengthen the neural networks that underpin these good states of mind.

When you are not rattled by life—in other words, when you're feeling safe, fulfilled, and loved—your brain's avoiding system is calm (in a word), the approaching system is contented, and the attaching system is caring. This is the responsive mode of the brain, which delights, soothes, and refuels you. It's your home base, the resting state of your brain, which is real good news.

Now here's the bad news: we also evolved hair-trigger mechanisms that activate the fight-or-flight reactive mode of the brain and drive us from home when we're stressed, whether from the snarl of a leopard a million years ago or a frown across a dinner table today. When you feel even subtly threatened, the avoiding system shifts gears into hatred (to use a strong, traditional word that encompasses the full range of fear and anger); when you're at all frustrated or dissatisfied, the approaching system tips into greed (ranging from longing to intense obsession or addiction); and when you feel even mildly rejected or devalued, the attaching system moves into heartache (from soft hurt to awful feelings of abandonment, worthlessness, or loneliness).

The reactive mode was a great way to keep our ancestors alive in the wild, and it's useful today in urgent situations. But it's lousy for long-term health and happiness. Each time your brain lights up its reactive mode—each time you feel pressured, worried, irritated, disappointed, let down, left out, or blue—this triggers the same stress machinery that evolved to escape charging lions or lethal aggression from other primates or humans.

Most reactive mode activations—pushing you off home , base—are mild to moderate. But they're frequent and relentless in the lives of most people, leading to a kind of inner homelessness that can become the new normal. Besides feeling crummy, this is bad for your physical health, since chronic stress leads to a weakened immune system, disturbed digestion, dysregulated hormones, and increased risk of heart attack or stroke. Stress wears on your mental health as well, bringing: pessimism, blue mood, and depression; heightened anxiety and irritability; "learned helplessness"; hunkering down, playing it safe, dreaming smaller dreams; clutching tighter to "us" and fearing and even exploiting or attacking "them."

So—let's come home.

How

These Practices of the Week include many practices for calm, contentment, and caring—and there are lots of other good methods in the writings and teachings of many people. So I'm not going to focus here on any particular way to activate the responsive mode of your brain. The key point is to make it a priority to feel good, to look for everyday opportunities for peacefulness, happiness, and love, and to take all the little moments you can to marinate in well-being.

Because here's more good news: Each time you rest in your brain's responsive mode, it gets easier to come home to it again. That's because "neurons that fire together, wire together" stimulating the neural substrates of calm, contentment, and caring strengthens them. This also makes it harder to be driven from home; it's like lengthening the keel of your mental sailboat so that no matter how hard the winds of life blow, you stay upright, not capsized, and keep on heading toward the lighthouse of your dreams.

What's wonderful about this is that the ends of the journey of life—being peaceful, happy, and loved/loving— become the means of getting there. In effect—in a traditional phrase—you are taking the fruit as the path. Instead of having to scratch and claw your way up the mountain top, you come home to the meadow that is the natural state of your brain—nourishing, expanding, and beautifying it every minute you spend there. For as they say in Tibet, "if you take care of the minutes, the years will take care of themselves."

For Journaling

Describe a time in the recent past when you were reactive. What would you have done differently if you had been more responsive and less reactive?

Describe a time in the recent past when you were responsive. What were the reactive impulses that you set aside in order to be responsive?

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Rick Hanson on responding, not reacting:

Longer video: Tara Brach, "Learning to Respond, Not React" (53:32)



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PRACTICES INDEX

Relax Anxiety about Imperfection

Practice of the Week
Relax Anxiety about Imperfection

“Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.” (Lao Tzu)

Adapted from Rick Hanson, Just One Thing

"Imperfections" are all around, and they include: messes, dirty clothes, weeds, snarled traffic, rain during a picnic, wine stains on carpet; injury, illness, disability, pain; problems, issues, obstructions, losses—including with others; objects that are chipped, frayed, broken; mistakes, errors; confusion, lack of clarity; war, famine, poverty, oppression, injustice.

In a nutshell, an imperfection—as I mean it here—is a departure from a reasonable ideal or standard (e.g., dog poop on your shoe is not ideal, nor is the hunger that afflicts one in six people worldwide). These departures-from-ideal have costs, and it's reasonable to do what you can about them.

But we usually don't leave it at that: we get anxious—uneasy, nervous, troubled, stressed—about imperfection itself, rather than recognizing it as a normal, unavoidable, and widespread aspect of life. Instead of dealing with conditions as they are—weeds, injuries, conflicts with others—and just handling them, we get caught up in worrying about what they mean, grumbling, feeling deflated, becoming opinionated and judgmental, blaming ourselves and others, and feeling woe-is-me and yet again disappointed/mistreated/wronged.

These reactions to imperfection are major "second darts" (as described in "Don't Throw the Second Dart"). They make you feel a lot worse than you need to, create issues with others, and make it harder to take skillful action.

Here's the alternative: let the broken cup be a broken cup without adding judgment, resistance, blaming, or worry to it.

How

Make appropriate efforts to improve things, but realize the impossibility of perfecting anything; even the most sophisticated technology cannot produce a perfectly flat table. You just can't perfect your personality, thoughts, or behavior; trying to do so is like trying to polish Jell-O. Nor can you perfect others or the world. Open to this fact: you cannot perfectly protect your loved ones, or eliminate all of your own health risks, or prevent people from doing stupid things. At first this opening could feel poignant or sad, but then you'll likely feel a breath of fresh air, a freedom, and a surge of energy to do the things you can now that you're not undermined by the hopelessness of making anything perfect.

We need standards and ideals—from the strike zone in baseball to the aspirations in the world's sacred teachings—but we also need to hold these lightly. Otherwise, they'll take on a life of their own in your mind, like petty tyrants barking orders: "You must do this, it's bad to do that." Watch out for righteousness, for self-important moralizing insistence on your own view of how you, others, and the world should operate. Know if you have tendencies toward perfectionism; I do, and I've got to be careful about them or I become a difficult person to live with or work for, as well as unhappy inside.

Further, many things transcend fixed standards. For example, could there ever be such a thing as a perfect rose or a perfect child? In these cases, anxiety about imperfection is absurd—which applies to trying to perfect your body, career, relationships, family, business, or spiritual practice. Nurture these, help them blossom, but give up on perfecting them.

Most fundamentally, all conditions, no matter how imperfect, are perfectly what they are: the bed is perfectly unmade, the milk is perfectly spilt. I don't mean morally or pragmatically "perfect"—as if it would be just perfect to tear a shirt or start a war—but that all conditions are utterly, thoroughly themselves. In this sense, whatever is the case—from dirty diapers and everyday hassles to cancer and plane crashes—is the result in this instant of the perfect unfolding of the entire universe. Try to see that unfolding as a vast, objective process in which our personal wishes are as consequential for it as a patch of foam is for the Pacific Ocean. In this light, perfection, and imperfection vanish as meaningful distinctions. There are only things in their own right, in and of themselves, without our labels of good or bad, beautiful or ugly, perfect or not. Then there is no anxiety about imperfection; there is only simplicity, directness, engagement—and peace.

For Journaling

"Instead of dealing with conditions as they are—weeds, injuries, conflicts with others—and just handling them, we get caught up in worrying about what they mean, grumbling, feeling deflated, becoming opinionated and judgmental, blaming ourselves and others, and feeling woe-is-me and yet again disappointed/mistreated/wronged." When was the last time you did this? Write about what it would be like for you instead to accept that condition with equanimity.

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Rick Hanson on relaxing anxiety about imperfection:

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PRACTICES INDEX

Forgiveness - Reflection & Resources for Families

Children are often told, “Say you’re sorry.” The offended person is expected to accept the apology and “forgive.” Sometimes the words are meant sincerely and felt by the other person; sometimes they are not, but there is still the expectation to forget the offense. However, true forgiveness is an internal process that relates more to a shift in perspective than a relationship outcome. If we can help children accept human fallibility and process the hurt they have felt or witnessed in another person, then they develop a deeper emotional intelligence and life-changing tool.

The lesson on forgiveness in the Unitarian Universalist Religious Education curriculum Moral Tales, which the CUC fourth-grade class is using this year, begins by asking the children to think about acts of goodness that they and others have done. The children are then asked to name the virtues behind the acts, e.g., generosity, courage, honesty. Before they think about what it means to forgive themselves and others for hurts that have occurred, they need to be holding the sense of goodness that exists in all of us. In order to process hurts in a healthy way, we need to remember that goodness abounds and we hold virtues within us, despite our foibles.

The session then focuses on an old Middle-eastern story about two friends who travel together. The friend who is slapped by the other in an argument writes the hurt in sand and it is blown away by the winds of forgiveness. The same friend is then saved from drowning by the friend who had slapped him. He etches that act in stone and when asked about the difference replies, "When someone hurts us, we should write it down in sand where the winds of forgiveness can erase it away. This way our hearts are free from bitterness, and we can renew our friendships. But, when someone does something kind for us, we must engrave it in stone and in our hearts so that we will never forget.” 

The curriculum tells the children that

the act of forgiveness is one of the most important choices we can make. Forgiveness can help us keep our relationships with others. It can help us have hearts full of love rather than bitterness.

It is pointed out that the word forgiving is made up of “for” and “giving.”

Forgiveness means giving kindness, empathy, and love to another person, even if they have hurt us. When we are angry at ourselves and forgive ourselves, we are giving kindness, empathy, and love to ourselves.

It is stressed to the children that this does not mean we forget the hurtful act or excuse it. The interaction may still affect the choices we make, e.g., not lending a personal possession to someone who has destroyed one, but we make efforts to let go of the resentment.

Similarly, psychological studies on forgiveness have defined it as a

freely made choice to give up revenge, resentment, or harsh judgments toward a person who caused a hurt, and to strive to respond with generosity, compassion, and kindness toward that person. It is a process that involves reducing negative responses and increasing positive responses toward the person who caused the hurt, across the realms of affect, cognition, and behavior. Importantly, forgiveness is not condoning, excusing, denying, minimizing, or forgetting the wrong. It can occur without reconciliation, which requires the participation of both parties, if the person who caused the hurt is absent, deceased, or remains unsafe.

Forgiving is not forgetting, but it is changing our perspective toward the incident. The key is that forgiveness is an internal process that helps us shift how we feel and determines our relationship to ourselves, as well as others. It may or may not change the interaction with the person who caused the hurt or who we hurt, but it changes the way we move forward on our life paths. The studies have shown that this choice of forgiveness directly affects health outcomes and mortality rates.

In teaching our children what it means to forgive, we are empowering them with a tool that will positively affect their health and their ability to relate to the people around them. In helping children accept our human imperfections, we enable them to give understanding, empathy, and kindness to themselves and others. They are freed to act boldly in transformative ways because they have let go of burdensome resentments and unhealthy self-criticism. Learning the process of forgiveness is vital to personal well-being and the continuation of peace-making in the world.

Resources

Moral Tales, Session 5: Forgiveness http://www.uua.org/re/tapestry/children/tales/session5/index.shtml

Study on Forgiveness and Health Outcomes http://www.academia.edu/1007805/Forgive_to_Live_Forgiveness_Health_and_Longevity

The Forgiveness Toolbox: A skills-based toolbox enabling individuals and groups to transform the impact of harm and violence and nurture peaceful co-existence http://www.theforgivenesstoolbox.com/

Barbara Marshman, What If Nobody Forgave? A story about letting go of grudges. http://www.uua.org/worship/words/readings/5955.shtml

CUC Music: Sun Nov 30

In the waning days of autumn, Sunday morning’s musical selections include a seasonal work by Tchaikovsky, along with brooding, introspective inspirations by Schubert, MacDowell, and Rachmaninoff. Join us to embrace the darkening season through these timeless classics. Read on for program details.

Prelude:
Impromptu in C Minor, Op. 90, No. 1            Franz Schubert

Opening Music:
To an Old White Pine, Op. 62, No. 5                        Edward MacDowell

Interlude:
November: Troika Ride, Op. 37, No. 11                        Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Offertory:
Prelude in B Minor, Op. 32, No. 10                        Sergei Rachmaninoff

CUC Bird Walk Report: Sun Nov 23

Bird Walk Report

November 23, 2014

When we feed birds, they teach us their language in gratitude.

And when we understand them, they feed us.

Today we reflected on gratitude and practiced it as we walked through the woods and over creeks.  Much gratitude was given for the calm weather, one another, and the abundant birds on the walk. We didn't have a great variety of species (that we could identify) but there were a lot of birds, including flocks of gulls and sparrows flying over that we couldn't identify.

Our gratitude practice included:

What we are grateful for in our lives

What we are grateful for about birds

What we are grateful for when others do something for another

What we might be grateful for in loss and discomfort

What we might be grateful in the short, cold days of winter

What we are grateful for during our walk this morning

There was great delight in the tree full of mourning doves as we pondered that they are the only group of birds (along with pigeons) that take in water through suction, and not through gravity.

Please join us for our next bird walk, Sunday, December 21st, 2014 - It's solstice!  If there is inclement weather, join one another inside for warm tasty beverages and watching the birds at the feeders.  As usual we will have time for reflection and sharing.

LoraKim

Today’s sightings:

4 Titmouse

33 Mourning doves

4 House Sparrow

3 Black-capped Chickadee

11 European starling

4 Canada Geese

2 White-breasted nuthatch

4  House finch

5 Blue jay

2 Downy woodpecker

2 Cardinals

1 Red-bellied woodpecker

16 gulls

What's In a Name?

Since 1972, we have officially been called the “Community Unitarian Church at White Plains." Over the past 20 years, the thought has surfaced and resurfaced numerous times as to whether our current name continues to reflect who we are as a congregation. This fall, our Board of Trustees appointed the What's in a Name? Committee to engage our members in a process for group consideration of our name. The goal of the What's in a Name? Committee is to get input from every single member and friend through this process. We have met with several committees and groups to date and are now ready to schedule small group meetings for members and friends who have not yet had the opportunity to complete a survey on our current name and alternative options.

We would like everyone’s input. PLEASE PLAN ON ATTENDING ONE OF THESE MEETINGS if you have not done so yet:

Sunday, February 1st at 11:40 in room 24.
Sunday, February 8th, at 11:40 in room 41.

THESE MEETINGS WILL NOT TAKE MORE THAN 20 MINUTES as our mission is simply to gather information from you. Child Care will be provided. Grab your coffee and come on over.

It is important that you read the short, informative packet that can be accessed through the CUC website -- Or: CLICK HERE -- before completing a survey at one of the meetings. If you are not able to do so, let us know and we will be glad to e-mail you the packet. Hard copies are also available on the welcome table in the lobby.

If you have any questions, please contact any one of us on the committee. We look forward to meeting with all of you.
Karen Dreher
John Cavallero
Karen Schatzel
Scott Damashek
Adine Usher

Don't Throw the Second Dart

Practice of the Week
Don't Throw the Second Dart

“When touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, & laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical & mental -- just as if they were to shoot a man with a dart and, right afterward, were to shoot him with another one, so that he would feel the pains of two darts.” (Shakyamuni Buddhi, Sallatha Sutta)

Adapted from Rick Hanson, Just One Thing.

Some physical and mental pain is inevitable. I remember being six and slipping on an icy sidewalk in Illinois and landing hard on my tailbone: ouch! Much later, in my fifties, when my mother passed away, there was a different kind of pain. To survive physically, you need a body that tells you it hurts when it's ill or injured. To flourish psychologically and in your relationships, you need a mind that sends different signals of distress—such as loneliness, anger, or fear—if you're rejected, mistreated, or threatened.

To use a metaphor from the Buddha, the unavoidable pains of life are its "first darts." We don't throw the first dart -- life throws it at us. But then we add insult to injury with our reactions to these darts. For example, you could react to a headache with anxiety that it might mean a brain tumor, or to being rejected in love with harsh self-criticism. We ourselves throw that second dart -- and we don't have to.

Moreover, the "first dart" might not even be a dart at all. It's common to have upsetting reactions when nothing bad has actually happened. For instance, you're flying in an airplane and everything's fine, but you're worried about it crashing. Or you go out on a date and it's fun, but then he/she doesn't call for a day and you feel let down.

Most absurdly, sometimes we react negatively to positive events. Perhaps someone complimented you, and you had feelings of unworthiness; or you've been offered an opportunity at work, and you obsess about whether you can handle it; or someone makes a bid for a deeper friendship, and you worry about being disappointing.

All these reactions are "second darts"—the ones we throw ourselves. They include overreacting to little things, holding grudges, justifying yourself, drowning in guilt after you've learned the lesson, dwelling on things long past, losing perspective, worrying about stuff you can't control, and mentally rehashing conversations.

Second darts vastly outnumber first darts. There you are, on the dartboard of life, bleeding mainly from self-inflicted wounds.

There are enough darts in life without adding your own!

How

Accept the inevitability of first darts. They hurt, but pain is the price of living. Try not to get offended by pain—as if it's an affront—or embarrassed about it, as if it's a personal failing.

When pain does come, hold it in a large space of awareness. In a traditional metaphor, imagine pouring a big spoon of salt into a cup of water and then drinking it: yuck. Next, imagine stirring that spoonful into a big bowl of clean water and drinking a cup: not so bad now. It's the same amount of salt—the same amount of physical or emotional pain—but now held and diluted in a larger context. Be aware of awareness: it's like the sky—pain passes through it like storm clouds, never tainting or harming awareness itself. See if you can let the pain be without reacting to it; this is a key aspect of an unconditional inner peace.

Observe second darts. They're often easier to see when others toss these darts at themselves—and then consider how you throw them at yourself. Gradually bring your recognition of second darts into the present moment, so you can see the inclination to throw them arise—and then catch them if possible before you stab yourself one more time.

A second dart will often trigger a cascade of mental reactions, like one boulder rolling down a mountainside setting off others in a chain reaction. To stop the landslide, start by relaxing your body as best you can. This will activate the calming, soothing parasympathetic wing of your nervous system and put the brakes on the fight-or-flight sympathetic wing.

Next, try to see more aspects of the situation that's troubled you, and more of your life these days altogether—especially the parts that are going fine. Because of the negativity bias, the brain narrows down and fixates on what's wrong, so you have to nudge it to widen its view to what's right. The bird's-eye, big picture view also deactivates the midline neural networks that do second-dart ruminating, and stimulates circuits on the side of your brain that can let things be as they are without reacting to them.

Don't put more logs on the fire. Don't look for more reasons to worry, criticize yourself, or feel mistreated. Don't get mad at yourself for getting mad at yourself!

When you throw second darts, you are the person you hurt most. The suffering—mild to severe—in second darts is truly unnecessary. As the saying goes, pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.

For Journaling

List and describe three "first darts" of pain that came your way in the last week.
Then describe what "second darts" of reactivity you added to the first darts.
How can you stop adding the second darts?

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Rick Hanson on not throwing darts:

PRACTICES INDEX