How I Finally Faced My Weight & Debt Problems
How I Finally Faced My Weight & Debt Problems |
- How I Finally Faced My Weight & Debt Problems
- Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 6/5/2013
- “May good qualities and happiness continue and increase”
- Inner speech: who am I talking to inside my head?
- Cutting through spiritual materialism
| How I Finally Faced My Weight & Debt Problems Posted: 05 Jun 2013 09:00 AM PDT By Leo BabautaThere was a time when I was overweight, but didn't want to admit it to myself. I didn't feel in control of my health, because I couldn't quit smoking or eat healthier for longer than a few days, nor exercise regularly. Thinking about my weight made me feel horrible, so I didn't want to even think about it. Of course, not thinking about it meant I never did anything about it. Not facing my problems made it worse, which just made me feel worse. It was a downward spiral, and really hard to stop. I had the same downward spiral when I was in debt (at the same time in my life, about 8 years ago). I couldn't pay all my bills, so I would stuff them in a drawer so I didn't have to see them. I had creditors calling me but I didn't answer their calls (I knew their numbers on the caller ID). I didn't know how much debt I was in because I never wanted to open the envelopes, much less add it all up on paper. I'd borrow money to pay bills, then owe more. And I'd skip paying lots of bills, and accrue interest. It wasn't a smart way to manage my finances, but I couldn't stand the thought of facing all of it. I felt bad even thinking about my finances, so I'd avoid them, and think about other things. Of course, this led to me seeking distraction in food and entertainment and shopping, which led to worse debt. Not facing my debt made it worse. How did I overcome all of this? I'll share it here, in hopes that it will help others facing the same problem — or not facing it. It's also important to note that if you know someone in bad health (or bad financial shape), they are probably also in denial. They don't want to even talk about it. How do you help them? I'll share that below too. How I Finally Faced ThingsSo how do you face a problem, so you can work on it, when you don't want to face it? There has to be a point when you say, "This isn't good. I need to do something about it." In truth, there usually isn't just one point — there are many. It's a building problem, where you get many data points over time — you see yourself in a picture and don't like how heavy you look, you get a comment from someone that's less than flattering, your pants don't fit anymore, you breathe heavy when you try to run for a couple of minutes. But then there has to be a point where you decide that enough is enough. You start to feel some resolve. You decide you can do something — it's not insurmountable. How exactly I got to that point, I can't fully remember. But I do know that there were several things that helped me:
I have to admit that it wasn't as simple as making a decision to change, and then continually making progress with no discouragements. Not at all. I would try to make a change, slip up, feel bad, then start again. And again. And make adjustments each time, learning about myself in the process, and over time getting good at the skill of change. But the first step — facing the problem — was made possible by inspiration, do-ability, motivation and finally commitment. How to Get Others to Face Their ProblemsI firmly believe that you can't force anyone to change. You can only inspire them to change, if you're lucky. That's not an easy task. If you have a friend or family member who is struggling with health issues, or financial problems, or something similar where they don't want to face the problem … it's tough. They probably don't want to hear it from you. However, that's not to say you should throw your hands up and forget about it. You can still help. Just don't try to force it. Here's what I would suggest:
Despite your best efforts, this might not work. You can't force change on someone. They have to want it themselves. And if they don't, you can make them want it. In that case, you'll have to back off, though showing concern and wanting to help is always something you can do. Change is possible. Facing problems is totally possible. You just might need a little inspiration to do it. Read More @ Source |
| Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 6/5/2013 Posted: 05 Jun 2013 07:00 AM PDT  "In order to be loved, we have to love, which means we have to understand." ~Thich Nhat Hanh      Read More @ Source |
| “May good qualities and happiness continue and increase” Posted: 05 Jun 2013 12:00 AM PDT
This is important because in the karuna bhavana meditation (developing compassion) we're inherently focusing on things that are, for want of a better word, "wrong" in life. We're focusing on pain and suffering, and the difficult side of life, and this can feed in to our negativity bias. We can, in consciously cultivating compassion, end up over-emphasizing the suffering that's in the world. Now there's no shortage of suffering in the world, but it's not all that there is to existence. In any given day, much goes right. Sure, bad things happen, but so do good things as well. People do things that hurt others, but actually many more people do things that help others. Mudita — joyful appreciation — helps remind us of all this. With mudita we're focusing on the good and on the joy that comes from the good. We let the good in, and we bather our minds in it. The Path of Liberation puts it this way:
So it's not just any happiness that we're rejoicing in. When someone is gleeful because they've just pulled off a scam, this isn't the kind of quality that meant here as being "esteemed by others." It's the happiness that comes from the development and practice of skillful qualities that's meant. In the practice of mudita bhavana we're generally rejoicing in skillful qualities and in the peace and happiness that come from those qualities. And we do so in a structured way.
I'll be writing about each of these stages in various ways over the next few weeks, but this should give you plenty to be getting on with in terms of developing appreciative joy. Read More @ Source |
| Inner speech: who am I talking to inside my head? Posted: 04 Jun 2013 11:00 PM PDT I talk to myself a lot. I'm doing that now. I don't really know what I'm going to say in this blog post until a voice speaks inside my head. It seems to speak simultaneously with both my thinking and my typing -- inner speech, thought, and communication all happening together in some mysterious fashion. This feels normal to me. And according to an article in this week's issue of New Scientist, "LIfe in the Chatter Box," most people do the same thing. Here's how the article starts out: Our inner speech turns out to shape our thoughts and decisions in more ways than you might have imagined IT CAN happen anywhere. I can be driving, walking by the river or sitting quietly in front of a blank screen. Sometimes suddenly, sometimes gradually and imperceptibly, I become conscious of words that no one else can hear, telling me things, guiding me, evaluating my actions. I am doing something perfectly ordinary – I am thinking– and it takes the form of a voice in my head. If you ask people to reflect on their own stream of consciousness, they often describe experiences like this. Usually termed inner speech, it is also referred to as the inner voice, internal monologue or dialogue, or verbal thought. But although philosophers have long been interested in the relationship between language and thought, many believed that inner speech lay outside the realms of science. That is now changing, with new experimental designs for encouraging it, interfering with it and neuroimaging it. We are beginning to understand how the experience is created in the brain; its subjective qualities – essentially, what the words "sound" like; and its role in processes such as self-control and self-awareness. The voice in our head is finally revealing its secrets, and it is just as powerful as you might have imagined. Fascinating. I looked around the Hearing the Voice web site referenced in the article, but came away disappointed. Mostly the project seems to be focused on inner voices related to schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. Yet the author, Charles Fernyhough (director of Hearing the Voice), does a good job in his article of discussing the pros and cons of inner speech for those of us who seem to be mentally OK, more or less. I'd hoped to find more on the web site along these lines: Quite how much our inner and outer speech overlap remains a matter of debate. According to one view, inner speech is just external speech without articulation: the brain plans an utterance, but stops short of kicking our muscles into action. If that is the case, our internal voice should resonate with the same qualities of tone, timbre and accent as our ordinary external speech. There are some hints that this may be the case. In their lab at the University of Nottingham, UK, psychologists Ruth Filik and Emma Barber recently asked participants to read limericks silently in their heads. One was: There was a young runner from Bath, Who stumbled and fell on the path; She didn't get picked, As the coach was quite strict, So he gave the position to Kath. The other limerick read: There was an old lady from Bath, Who waved to her son down the path; He opened the gates, And bumped into his mates, Who were Gerry, and Simon, and Garth. Importantly, some of the participants had northern English accents, with short vowels (pronouncing "Bath" to rhyme with "Kath"), while the others had the long vowels of a southern accent ("Bath" rhyming with "Garth"). By tracking the volunteers' eye-movements, the researchers showed that reading was disrupted when the final word of the limerick did not rhyme in that volunteer's accent – when a southerner read "Bath" then "Kath", for instance. Although this study suggests that inner speech does indeed have an accent – and presumably other qualities of our spoken voice – one concern is that the inner speech we produce when reading is not necessarily the same thing as our everyday, spontaneous inner speech, which means that more naturalistic studies are needed. So much for the subjective qualities of inner speech. What, if anything, does it actually do? Vygotsky proposed that words in inner speech function as psychological tools that transform the task in question, just as the use of a screwdriver transforms the task of assembling a shed. Putting our thoughts into words gives them a more tangible form which makes them easier to use. It may also be that verbal thought can allow communication between other cognitive systems, effectively providing a common language for the brain. One of Vygotsky's most enticing predictions was that private and inner speech give us a way of taking control of our own behaviour, by using words to direct our actions. While driving up to a roundabout in busy traffic, for example, I'll still tell myself, "Give way to the right", especially if I've just been driving overseas. Knocking out the systems responsible for inner speech should therefore impede our performance on certain tasks that require planning and control, offering a powerful test of the hypothesis. For many years I was an avid mantra meditator. Meaning, I repeated a mantra both during an hour or two of morning meditation, and also during the rest of the day as much as I could. The basic underlying hypothesis, though not exactly expressed as such, was that speaking less to myself with my inner voice was better than speaking more to myself -- the whole "monkey mind" thing. However, experiments have shown that inner speech enables us to do some things better. Not surprising, really. Such experiments typically require participants to repeat a word to themselves out loud to suppress their verbal thoughts while they perform a task (a technique known as articulatory suppression). Using this set-up, Jane Lidstone, one of my colleagues at Durham University, looked at the performance of children aged 7 to 10 on a planning task known as the Tower of London, which involves moving coloured balls around between three sticks of differing lengths in order to match a given pattern. Lidstone found that children performed worse if they had to repeat a word out loud, compared with trials in which they instead tapped repetitively with one of their feet. Similar findings have emerged from studies with adults. Alexa Tullett and Michael Inzlicht of the University of Toronto in Canada gave student participants aclassic test of control known as the Go/No-Go task, which required them to press a button the moment they saw a yellow square pop up on the screen, but to remain still when they saw a purple square. It is a considerable test of impulse control, and, as predicted, the students were less accurate during articulatory suppression, compared with when they were doing a spatial task. Although experiments like these seem artificial, they allow researchers the kind of control over conditions that good science demands to test something like self-control. So we know that inner speech has a role in regulating behaviour, but could it also have a role in motivating it? The research on children's private speech (Vygotsky's precursor of inner speech, remember) shows that it frequently has an emotional or motivational flavour. Athletes often give themselves pep talks before, during and after performances. In our study of the quality of inner speech, McCarthy-Jones and I found that two-thirds of students reported using internal speech that either evaluated their behaviour or served to motivate it. Inner speech may even help us to become aware of who we are as individuals. Some philosophers have proposed that awareness of inner speech is important for understanding our own mental processes, an aspect of what psychologists call metacognition. Children typically do not become aware of their own inner speech until around age 4, although it is uncertain whether that reflects their inability to reflect on their own thought processes, or the fact that inner speech is not yet fully internalised by that age. At Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada, psychologist Alain Morin has found that people who use inner speech more often show better self-understanding. "Inner speech allows us to verbally analyse our emotions, motives, thoughts and behavioural patterns," he says. "It puts to the forefront of consciousness what would otherwise remain mostly subconscious." In my current churchless frame of mind I'm considerably less concerned about shutting up my inner speech via a mantra or some other means. The New Scientist article provided some reasons for being skeptical about the oft-heard meditative claim that a silent mind is a wise mind. Sometimes, it seems. Sometimes not. It all depends. Inner speech must be good for something, or many things. Otherwise us humans wouldn't have evolved to have it. |
| Cutting through spiritual materialism Posted: 04 Jun 2013 10:01 PM PDT Cutting through spiritual materialism necessarily has to begin with a clearcut distinction between true spirituality and pseudo-spirituality. This is to further say that there is a false form of spirituality that works to keep the average beginner from discovering spirituality. But who has the wisdom to distinguish between authentic spirituality and spiritual materialism? We might end up with a situation of the blind leading the blind which further might engender the worst kind of spiritual materialism. But, in a way, this has already happened to some extent The Buddhist temple we attend might resemble a museum of Asian religious artifacts. Everyone gets to wear robes and learn various rituals. It is a kind of religious theatre. We all get to be actors. Our Zen center is the stage. Our teacher and the staff help us with our problems, for example, how to cope with our depression or a roommate who is irresponsible or our lover that we believe is cheating on us. Is this spirituality? No, it is not. It is spiritual materialism. All this is in service to Mara the Evil One who represents our temporal, psychophysical body, including our culture of materialism. Behaving this way will never lead us to nirvana or to the necessary insight into the luminous Mind. We need to remind ourselves that the young Siddhartha renounced the material world as being the highest reality. It cannot end our suffering. It is only capable of deluding us into believing that pleasure somehow is capable of rubbing out suffering. But it never does. The history of mankind paints a rather dismal picture of mankind's efforts to end suffering by way of pleasure. This is because of our addiction to materialism and pseudo-spirituality which makes sure that real spirituality is kept in the wilderness, so to speak, away from public consciousness. If Buddhism is going to thrive in the West, there needs to be a preliminary path, a path that helps us to break our addiction to spiritual materialism thus helping us to move closer to where Siddhartha was when he decided to leave his father's kingdom. |
Yesterday I wrote about how mudita — joyful appreciation — can help us overcome our inherited tendency to pay more attention to the negative than to the positive. | You are subscribed to email updates from BuddhaRocks ☸ To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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