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Tiny Beautiful Wild Things

This piece was first posted as the Mindfulness Virtual Drop-in from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy.

In 1995, the writer Cheryl Strayed hiked a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, aged twenty-six, alone. Four years earlier, Strayed’s mother had died of cancer at forty-five, just seven weeks after her diagnosis. The young woman’s life, marriage, and family fell apart in the wake of her sudden loss, and she became embroiled in heroin.

When Strayed decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, she did it – she said – in the hope that it would be her way back to being the woman her mother had raised her to be, rather than the woman she had become. And so she walked a thousand miles across the deserts and mountains of California and the forests of Oregon, past rattlesnakes and bears and cougar scat. In the desert, she rubbed sage between her hands and inhaled the scent, bright and fresh, as her mother had taught her, for energy.

Later, she became a writer. She wrote a memoir about her hike, called Wild, that topped worldwide bestseller lists in 2012 and was turned into an Oscar-nominated film. She also wrote a weekly column for the online magazine The Rumpus. In one of these, she wrote about what she would say to her twenty-something self, if she could speak to her now. She said:

‘One hot afternoon during the era in which you’ve gotten yourself ridiculously tangled up with heroin, you will be riding the bus and thinking [how worthless] you are when a little girl will get on the bus holding the strings of two purple balloons. She’ll offer you one of the balloons, but you won’t take it because you believe you no longer have a right to such tiny beautiful things. You’re wrong. You do.’

I thought about Strayed’s words when I read, some days ago, about the ‘rebel botanists’ who are using street graffiti to label the wild flowers growing in the cracks of streets, paths, and walls across Europe. They scrawl chalk with arrows to alert passersby to the daisies and the herb Robert, the scarlet pimpernel and the wild fennel – these tiny beautiful things that we don’t usually see.

I smiled when I read this, because a couple of weeks ago, on my daily walk in local woodland, amidst the usual green of dock and nettle I glimpsed something else: a pale green spike, like the hood of an elf, or the flame of a candle. When I saw it, I realised that the whole woodland floor was carpeted with pale green spikes. They were everywhere, rising out of the natural compost, glowing in the sunlight. I had walked through the wood every day for a week, and not noticed. These were wild arum lilies, also known as lords and ladies; the wild cousins of popular houseplants and the majestic titan arum of Indonesia. I love the arum lily, common as it is here in ditches and woodland, because its ethereal green flowers are hidden in plain sight. You don’t see them – and then suddenly you do, and you realise that, like magic, they are everywhere.

It could be woodland; it could be pavements (183 different plants, Sheffield); it could be walls (186 species, Cambridge). So many! Why didn’t I spot the arum lilies? Why do we not see the wild pansies in the sandy corner of a sun-baked wall? (They really are stunning, when you find one.)

Sometimes we look past the tiny beautiful things because we are busy; we are en route somewhere else. Perhaps we feel, as Strayed did, that we don’t deserve them because of our own personal failings. Or perhaps it feels, at this moment in our life, as if no small thing could be meaningful, given the magnitude of our suffering. In the time of coronavirus, perhaps we feel the burden of others’ sorrow so greatly that we feel guilty for enjoying a wild poppy. We have any number of ways to discount tiny beautiful things. In the case of wild flowers, we call them ‘weeds’, untidy disruptors of concrete and clean lines. But what else do we discount, if we turn away from what is small and beautiful? The tiny act of kindness, the smile, the purple balloon.

What if a tiny beautiful thing is not just one thing; what if, when you catch sight of it, you realise that it is all around; what if someone, somewhere, is drawing a chalk sign that says, let’s look at this together; and what if for every tiny beautiful arum lily that you see, there is a giant arum lily growing, silent and majestic, in the rainforests in Indonesia?

When we look at the world a different way, it speaks to us anew. William Blake saw ‘A world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wildflower.’ When we look for the tiny beautiful things, we see what is large, and more beautiful. We are brought back to ourselves, and to each other.

This week, look for the tiny beautiful things. They may be wildflowers or birdsong. They may be your neighbours’ smiles across the road each Thursday, clapping for carers. The green of a tree. The colour of a favourite piece of pottery. A message from a beloved friend. A pile of really good books. The smell of flapjacks, made from oats at the back of the store cupboard, best before August 2016; or maybe a piece of chocolate, with this guided chocolate meditation.

Allow yourself to receive these. Dwell in them, soak them up. They are just as real as anything else that is hard and sad. But what we pay attention to matters, and if we don’t pay attention to the tiny beautiful things, we miss the answering hum of the world and its solace, amidst the sadness.

Soak up that hum, too; you are part of it. Mary Oliver wrote, in her poem ‘Sometimes’:

‘Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.’

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.

Zoom Fatigue: Staying Embodied Online

This piece was first posted as the Mindfulness Virtual Drop-in from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy.

‘Shall we use Skype, Zoom, Teams, or Facetime?’ someone asked me wearily the other day. I was struck both by the dizzying multiplicity of the technologies we currently need for work and life, and by the weariness.

‘Zoom fatigue’ is officially a phenomenon, writes Julia Sklar for National Geographic – and this has come as a surprise to many of us. Yet across the board, students and staff report that online meetings are tiring in a way that in-person meetings are not. Staff describe needing more time to decompress after meetings, while conversations that in person would have been energising seem unexpectedly to drain.

Why is this? As Sklar explains, ‘During an in-person conversation, the brain focuses partly on the words being spoken, but it also derives additional meaning from dozens of non-verbal cues, such as whether someone is facing you or slightly turned away, if they’re fidgeting while you talk, or if they inhale quickly in preparation to interrupt.’

As social beings, this interpretation comes naturally to us and takes place below the level of conscious effort. But ‘a typical video call impairs these ingrained abilities, and requires sustained and intense attention to words instead.’ Online, we can’t see much of a person’s body language; if the lighting is poor, or the image pixelated, we don’t catch the details of their facial expression. In meetings with multiple people, the tiny images on Zoom remove even more of this information, while on Teams, we can only see the last few people to have spoken. We lose the sense of the people in the room, the energy, the mood, the interest.

Meanwhile, that sustained and intense attention to words is tiring, particularly as our attention is also being fragmented by video’s partial visual cues. When this happens, we are essentially multi-tasking, which is known to be psychologically stressful and inefficient. In a long meeting with lots of people, we may find ourselves mentally checking out, or becoming bored. When we ourselves feel unseen, it’s even easier to quietly disappear into some other task. We’ve all been in the meeting where someone’s emails are perfectly reflected in their spectacles.

A Tweet from Gianpiero Petriglieri, professor of management at INSEAD, seems to sum up the human challenge: ‘I spoke to an old therapist friend today, and finally understood why everyone’s so exhausted after the video calls. It’s the plausible deniability of each other’s absence. Our minds tricked into the idea of being together when our bodies feel we’re not. Dissonance is exhausting.’

Posted on April 4^th, nearly 37,000 people have liked Petriglieri’s Tweet so far. It seems many of us are having this experience. So how might we reduce some of that sense of disembodiment and dissonance – that gap between what is, and what seems to be, in which boredom, irritation, dissatisfaction, and fatigue emerge?

1. Remember Your Body

One approach is to check in with the felt sense of your own body throughout an online call. Notice the soles of your feet against the floor, the sensations of your seat on the chair, and the weight and contact of your hands in your lap or on your desk. When you begin doing this, it may feel like a surprise to remember that we have feet, or hands. This shows how disembodied the attention has become while online: pulled into the screen and trying to make out the nuances of facial expression; or pulled to the words, and straining to understand their conceptual content. You may pick up on this if you tune into your own body language: are you tilted or hunched forward on your chair, towards your screen? If apathy has set in, you may be slumped back completely. When you pick up on these, bring your attention back into the felt sense of the body sitting. You may also find it helpful to shift your posture; something to remind yourself that your body is here, sitting and breathing. This helps to close the ‘gap’ between body, sitting at your desk, and mind, in the substance of the call.

Over time, you may find that keeping some of your attention in the felt sense of your body sitting actually allows you to ‘receive’, with less effort, the meaning of the words being spoken in the call. Online you may not be able to tune into the nuances of others’ bodies or faces, but your own body picks up on more than you realise. Staying connected to it will help you process the cognitive and affective information being transmitted at the level of conversation.

2. Take Time to Transition

A second approach is deliberately to take time to settle and ground yourself both before and after an online call. By acknowledging these transitions, they come as less of a surprise to your social nervous system. You might take a three-step breathing space before and after a meeting, to help you consciously clock the content of the mind, and step back into the present moment. For a long call, have a glass of water to hand, and check that you are comfortable and your back is supported in your seat.

3. Move and Stretch

You may have noticed that when you hang up after an online meeting, you yawn, stretch, or sigh; this is your nervous system down-regulating, so follow the wisdom of its cues, and take some time to follow it through. For a short and structured way to go about that, this mindful movement practice is just 9 minutes long. If it’s been a particularly stressful or discombobulating meeting – or you’ve simply been online all day – this half hour of gentle stretching followed by a sitting practice could be just what’s needed to help bring your attention back into the body, and the here and now.

Zoom and its parallels are, in myriad ways, a complete boon at this time – and there’s growing awareness that particularly for those on the autism spectrum, video calls may actually be easier and less anxiety-provoking than large in-person meetings. But it’s also understandable that for many of us, with our social minds as human beings complexly evolved over millennia, the ramped-up use of video conferencing presents some unanticipated challenges. You’re not alone in this, so take time to breathe and move – and if all else fails, there’s Britain’s standard energy-lifting go-to: an old-fashioned cup of tea!

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.

Against Productivity in a Pandemic

This piece was first posted as the Mindfulness Virtual Drop-in from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy.

How should we use our time in this strange era?

As the lockdown continues, two different approaches have appeared. One we might term mission productivity. Nick Martin pastiches this in his article for The New Republic, ‘Against Productivity in a Pandemic.’ ‘Did you know Shakespeare wrote King Lear while he was quarantined during the plague? Have you tried baking as a form of corona therapy? How about turning your living room into a home gym using soup cans for hand weights?’

We have all this free time now, we think. We must optimise it, and ourselves. During this pandemic we can master Collaborate, write more papers, develop COVID-19-relevant syllabuses, and ‘sprinkle COVID-dust’ on our grant proposals. On the side, we might become better bakers and level up in Duolingo Italian.

But, Martin goes on, ‘This piece, the one you’re reading right now, took roughly an hour longer for me to write than it normally would have because I am currently sitting in my New York apartment thinking about a million different things: Are all my grandparents properly secluded? Is my extended family taking this seriously enough? Should I rent a car and drive home and get away from the city before it all really goes to hell? Are rental car companies going to be price gouging? When will the money from my cancelled vacation return to my account? Did I order enough cat food? Do I have enough food? What will things look like two weeks from now? A year from now?’

It turns out that time is not a zero-sum game. Albeit you may be working remotely, so your commute has disappeared; perhaps we spend less time around the biscuit tin in the common room or the work kitchen. But when the world turns upside down, fears and worries infuse our time with their frenetic tug. There are the logistics of managing the roof over your head, food, healthcare, looking after vulnerable family or neighbours. For many in our University, time demands are increasing, not diminishing. Work requires more phone calls, exam revision needs more chasing emails, or there are small children at home to care for.

And, in the end, life is more than 2 + 2 = 4. The disappeared moments of connection or humour do not add up to an extra half hour of ‘free time’, tidily re-allocated. Meanwhile, at the heart of many fears and worries are important questions: what might the future hold? How do we want to inhabit it – personally, institutionally, and societally? To tend our worries, and use our fear wisely, we need time and space irreducible to the metrics of productivity.

And so another approach has taken shape. In her article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Aisha S. Ahmad lays out beautifully ‘Why You Should Ignore All That Coronavirus-Inspired Productivity Pressure.’ Ahmad is assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto, and she speaks from first-hand experience of crisis, having conducted fieldwork in war zones across the world.

Ahmad shows how beneath the drive for productivity is an assumption that all this is temporary; that we can ‘buckle down for a short stint until things get back to normal’. We see this as an interruption of ordinary business, a lacuna to be plugged according to the usual rules. We wait for the clock to begin to tick again, as it always has. So we bust a gut to produce, or beat ourselves up because we’re too distressed, exhausted, or beset by small crawling people to do so.

But in times of global crisis, Ahmad writes, ‘All of that is noise – denial and delusion. Denial only serves to delay the essential process of acceptance, which will allow us to reimagine ourselves in this new reality.’ So honour your straitened circumstances, she says. Attribute value to the care you give yourself and your loved ones. Once you have recaptured some sense of security and stability in your circumstances under lockdown, ‘The emotionally and spiritually sane response is to prepare to be forever changed.’ And to undergo change, we need a fundamental shift in how we think about productivity and time.

With this in mind, this week’s suggested practice is a twenty-minute sitting meditation in which you can simply sit, be, and allow your mind to be as it will. We need not ‘achieve’ anything in meditation. There are no targets, and no spreadsheets to track our progress. Mindfulness is only ever about gentle, curious awareness of what is actually here. We don’t need to clear the mind, or become calm; we need simply honour things as they are, moment by moment. So acknowledge your mind’s sense of busyness and urgency, see it clearly, know that it’s understandable, and come back to the breath; note your fears and preoccupations, with gentleness. Listen to sounds, the chatter of your own mind, the landscape of sensation in the body. Attend to what is really here, and in so doing, know that this is not ducking out of reality, but rather turning towards it.

When we turn towards what is real and present, we move forward on solid ground. So this week, begin to make mental space around the edges of your to-do list. Notice when you are lost in mission productivity, and begin to experiment with something a little different.

To finish with Ahmad, ‘Be slow. Let this distract you. Let it change how you think and how you see the world. Because the world is our work.’

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.

The Tiger Who Came To Tea

This piece was first posted as the Mindfulness Virtual Drop-in from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been struck by how many in our University community are currently guests or hosts. Vulnerable family members have moved in, or we have moved to be with them; friends are in the spare room, caught off guard by travel restrictions or closing borders. With the onset of online studying and meetings, even if there are no literal extra persons in your home, we are visiting each other in unusual ways. We become conscious of the artwork on the wall behind us; small children grumble in the background; and of all our fears right now, our greatest is that we will have to stand up unexpectedly on a call with our manager or tutor, revealing…pyjama bottoms.

As guests and hosts, with end-dates unknown, we are thinking more carefully than ever about how to sustain ourselves and those around us. As I steadily work through the soya milk I took, by special request, when I travelled to be with family in the south, I keep thinking about Judith Kerr’s 1968 illustrated book for children, The Tiger Who Came To Tea.

For those who didn’t grow up with this treasure, Sophie and her mum are sitting having tea when the doorbell rings. It can’t be the milkman or the grocer’s boy, says mum. Indeed not. It is an enormous tiger, in search of his own tea. In he comes to join them. He eats all the sandwiches and all the buns and biscuits on the table, and drinks all the tea and the milk. Then he eats everything in the kitchen, drinks every last pint of dad’s beer, and even drains the taps. Off he goes eventually, sated – but now there is no water left for Sophie’s bath, mum has nothing to cook for supper, and hungry dad’s arrival is impending.

I’m thinking about The Tiger Who Came To Tea partly because the world it conjures up – a world where the milkman and the grocer’s boy come to the house – seems to have reignited afresh, as those with underlying health conditions self-isolate, online supermarket delivery slots remain elusive, and vegetable-box sellers, milk producers, and bakers ramp up their provision.

But I’m also thinking about it because it invokes the physical, social, and psychological guests, hosts, and hungers of this pandemic.

The extra hungry bodies in the house, who may ask politely, and be beloved – in Kerr’s illustrations, Sophie curls up with the tiger, stroking his tail, and playing with his whiskers – but will nonetheless clean you out of house and home. If you are living on the breadline, the clue in that word: the real chance that you will run out of food. The fear that you are the tiger, and that you are burdening others. The sense that there is a tiger at the door, who will take everything you offer and more, draining your very taps, until you have nothing left to give. The sense that however much you try to nourish yourself in this time, it’s not enough, and that nothing can give you what you most need.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ says Sophie’s mum, when the tiger has finally gone; and that can be exactly how we feel.

How might the story end? In The Tiger Who Came To Tea, Sophie’s dad comes home, and Sophie and her mum tell him what happened. They go to a café for supper, and the next morning, Sophie and her mum go shopping. They fill the house up with food again, and Sophie buys a tin of tiger food, too, just in case.

I like this ending for two reasons. I like it first because it begins with people talking to each other about what has happened to them. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ said Sophie’s mum – and yet she does: the first thing to do is just to talk about it.

The second reason I like this ending is that it’s not just one deed that saves the day. It’s multiple deeds, triaged. First, people gather round. They tell the truth of what is here, and what has happened. Then, together, they attend to what is needed right now: they are hungry, and must eat. Next, they prepare themselves for the hunger that may lie ahead. And finally, they bolster themselves against what made them hungry: not with a gun, or a trap, but by preparing to feed the hungry tiger, should he return – with tiger food, and not their own sandwiches.

It can be difficult to talk about our hungers. We may feel ashamed, or think that nothing can be done. But the response to the pandemic – the hundreds of thousands signing up as NHS volunteers; the flood of Whatsapps and text messages from neighbours, colleagues, friends – has shown us that we are not alone. We can talk to each other about what we need, whether it means turning to the person next to us, picking up the phone, or writing. In so doing, we treat our hungers and fears as honoured guests. We nourish ourselves, so that we are full enough to feed another.

In the spirit of this, for this week’s practice I invite you to try a body scan, by Melanie Fennell. The body scan attends to each part of the body in turn, from the tips of the toes to the top of the head. It listens to everything, and neglects nothing. By gently acknowledging what is here, the body scan creates a wise foundation for observing what is really needed. And then, perhaps, you might like to talk about it – with your family, a friend, or just with yourself, in a diary or on a walk.

May you and your tigers keep safe and well over the next week.

I leave you with a poem, The Guest House, by Rumi.

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.

Interrupting a Spiralling Mind

This piece was first posted on For Times Like These: Blogs from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy to help us through COVID19 lockdowns and meltdowns, and to raise our spirits.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how the mind usually reacts to stress and difficulty. One typical reaction is that we ruminate: the mind creates an endless thread, infinite possible scenarios in the imagination, all with the underlying sense that if we can only think of everything and pre-emptively solve it, we’ll be ok.

Sometimes we do eventually wind up at a solution, and it’s that sense of hitting the idea jackpot that reinforces the compelling feel of this mental process. It works! We think. Except, of course, all the times that it doesn’t, and instead keeps us up at 3am, or side-tracks us on an afternoon of remote working…

Unpleasant though it can be, a spiralling mind is a fascinating thing to watch. ‘I am an old man and have known a great many troubles,’ Mark Twain is reported to have said, ‘but most of them never happened.’ If you observe closely, there will be an initial trigger: it could be an article or Twitter post that you read, a comment from a friend, a frustrating email. Sometimes, the trigger is itself a creation of the mind. An apparently harmless amble along a familiar mental track takes an unexpected twist, and then, like racehorses out of the gate, we’re off, thoughts bolting for the distant finish line.

When the trigger for a spiralling mind occurs, if you were to slow the moment right down, you would notice two things happen next. First, something physical: a lurch in the stomach, a stony cold feeling in the face, shoulders hunching, chest tightening. These bodily signs are completely normal. They’re an indication of the second thing: an emotion has been triggered. Fear, anger, sadness, and anxiety all show up in the body, and we often feel them physically before we realise that they’re present.

It’s emotional charge that gives the spiralling mind its energy. Emotions are the wind in the mind’s sails. You will have noticed this in good moods, as well as bad: an excited mind will spiral joyously, just as a sad mind will spiral despondently. This makes sense when we consider that emotions are a call to action – a sign for us to attend, and take care. Our mental resources prick up their ears, and get to work.

The trickiness of a spiralling mind is that because of its very energy, it rapidly takes us far away from whatever initially needed attention and care. It will zoom into past, future, and parallel universe, at great speed. Indeed, if you watch the spiralling mind play out, it has the rapidly rotating quality of a hurricane: it hoovers up every relevant fragment of memory, attention, and imagination available. What is ‘relevant’ is governed by the emotional charge. If you are feeling low, memories of previous times you felt low will play across your mind, as if feeling rubbish right now weren’t bad enough. This, incidentally, is why recurring depression feels so hard, because actually it’s not just the weight of this moment on your shoulders; it’s the weight of every other low moment you’ve ever had, bearing down on this one right now.

As well as dredging up the past, and making predictions about the future, the spiralling mind will hone in on everything in the here and now that seems to back up those racing thoughts. Run out of milk? Worry about that, too. Friend not picking up their phone? Fuel to the fire.

When we recognise this process, it’s tempting to get in there and problem-solve. How can I make it stop? Why am I up at 3am yet again? But at this point our problem-solving is running off the storm system itself. When the hurricane of thoughts, emotions, and body sensations gets going, we need something equally powerful to interrupt it – but of a fundamentally different nature.

If the spiralling mind runs on habitual networks of memory and hyper-vigilance, we need deliberate, open, and embodied attention. One of my favourite definitions of mindfulness comes from Ellen Langer, who describes it as ‘…a flexible state of mind in which we are actively engaged in the present, noticing new things and sensitive to context’. The spiralling mind cannot survive an open, flexible, and inquiring awareness, just like wildfire cannot leap across a big enough gap.

The Three-Step Breathing Space

Zindel Segal, one of the creators of Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy for recurring depression, describes how he, Mark Williams and John Teasdale created a short practice intended to make just this gap. The three-step breathing space is ‘about moving attention in specific ways to help us free ourselves or to get unstuck,’ he writes, and you can try this lovely guided track for it from Mark Williams.

Sometimes called a three-‘minute’ breathing space, the practice can be done in just a few minutes, or extended to longer if you wish. It has three key parts:

1) Acknowledging what’s here in your experience right now: your mood, thoughts, emotions, body sensations. There’s no need to change these, just notice what’s here, with some friendliness.

2) Gathering the attention to the sensations of the breathing somewhere that feels steady, like the abdomen. Notice this in-breath, and this out-breath, just as they are, breathing themselves.

3) Expanding the awareness, to include the whole body sitting, standing, or lying down, just as it is, being itself.

Practice this a few times with the track, and then try doing it by yourself: the beauty of the breathing space is that it’s portable. To remember its steps, you can use the acronym AGE: Acknowledge, Gather, Expand. In our mindfulness courses, we encourage people to practice it two or three times a day in ordinary moments. This helps train the attention to follow its hourglass shape – broad awareness, narrow, broad – so that in those moments when the spiralling mind’s tug is strongest, we have this internal resource at our fingertips.

The breathing space is a short practice, invisible to the onlooker, and can be easy to underestimate. Yet course participants and trainee teachers tell me that there have been times when the breathing space has saved their lives. It does not fix our problems, or make situations go away; at the end of it, there may still be strong thoughts and feelings around. Things still need our attention, and action.

But what the practice does is create space. Space, far from being a vacuum, is potent. Sometimes, it is enough at the end of a breathing space to notice, ‘wow, I really am upset right now,’ and to attend to that with care. At their simplest, the gap around the wildfire and the pause in the storm offer a chance for this moment to be different than it would have been otherwise. Short, and deceptively quiet, there are days when the breathing space’s slivers of difference make all the difference.

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.