Uncategorized – Kitty Wheater

The Escape Artist

Avoidance and Other Disappearing Acts

This piece was first posted as the MindLetter from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy. You can subscribe by emailing mindfulness@ed.ac.uk.

You have a meeting first thing, and you’re thinking about the email that came in at 6am. ‘Ready for school?’ you say to your child in the kitchen. The child is quiet, and looks withdrawn, as they have done for some time. You have to get to your meeting, so you head to your study.

Your dissertation is due in a month. You are not sure what you are writing, and you are worried. You’re reading and making notes, but it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Hours go by. You have not achieved enough to earn a weekend off, so you try to work, but you seem just to wind up on Instagram. You are tired, and scared about the deadline.

You have been living on your own during lockdown. It’s tough, and you have been drinking more than usual to wind down after work. You feel groggy in the mornings, and so you stop going for your run before work. This means you don’t sleep well, so you have an extra glass after dinner, too, to help you drift off. You slow down at work, and are starting to forget things.

Do any of these look familiar to you? One of these scenarios may resonate more than others, depending on whether you are a parent, a student, a runner, or all of the above; whether you live alone, or not; whether you are a morning person, or not.

But what ‘too much’ really means is that your personal history, multiplied by the unique set of circumstances in which you find yourself in this moment, divided by the resources you have to meet it, equals more than 1. The parent’s meeting is perhaps the culmination of a big project; his child’s unhappiness makes him uncomfortable, because he was unhappy at that age, too. The student was a star pupil at school, but she has no job lined up for when she graduates, and she is terrified of failing. The runner was doing OK despite the lockdown until her cat died, suddenly.

The balance tips. It happens to all of us. And when stresses are multiplied, as in exceptional times, we may be surprised at the strength of our own reactions. But in the simplest terms, when you are operating at more than 1, you start running on an energetic and emotional deficit. What happens next?

1. The Stress Equation

As the camera pans over the Edinburgh skyline, the setting for our story becomes clear: it’s stress. It’s seeping up through the floorboards, washing around the main characters as they head to the meeting on Teams, sit grimly at the computer on a Saturday, and turn off the alarm, groggy and headachy.

Simply put, the parent, the student, and the runner are experiencing stress because they are experiencing too much: information, emotion, time alone, unstructured time, maybe even red wine.

‘Too much’ is, on the one hand, subjective. We all know someone who can take phone calls while also brilliantly comforting their child at 6am, or spend weeks happily in their own company, or down several pints on a Friday night and come top of their age group in the Park Run the next morning. This means that we may be tempted to tell ourselves, if we are struggling, that we are ‘being weak’. When it comes to others, we may indulge in competitive stressing, to establish that we have more to be stressed about than they do.

But what ‘too much’ really means is that your personal history, multiplied by the unique set of circumstances in which you find yourself in this moment, divided by the resources you have to meet it, equals more than 1. The parent’s meeting is perhaps the culmination of a big project; his child’s unhappiness makes him uncomfortable, because he was unhappy at that age, too. The student was a star pupil at school, but she has no job lined up for when she graduates, and she is terrified of failing. The runner was doing OK despite the lockdown until her cat died, suddenly.

2. The Escape Artist

The main character of our story is not the parent, the student, or the runner. The main character is the mind.

The mind under stress typically responds in one of two ways. It may jump in and try to solve the problem: fixating, ruminating. The parent, up too early reading emails, is doing this. But then something else happens – the child is unhappy – and rather than jumping in, the mind withdraws. The parent literally leaves the room.

Later, he may berate himself for not lingering a little longer; he may even internally accuse himself of being a ‘bad parent’. But this is the same mind that learned, on a visceral level over many millennia, to bolt at the hint of a large be-furred face in the grassland. The mind looks to escape under stress for very good reason: there are times when running, jumping, or flinching can save our life. Lions aside, avoidance of what’s difficult makes an awful lot of sense. And usually, it’s fine to wait until the meeting has passed to check in with the child; it’s sensible to question whether your thesis is going in the right direction; a glass of good wine is a pleasure in a quiet evening.

The problem arises when we get really good at it: when the deficit accumulates over time, as with chronic stress, or happens all at once, as with trauma. When this happens, the mind turns escape into an art form, and the mind will react to emotional threats as if they are lions. Fear that our child is unhappy, fear of the future, or frustration with a lonely lockdown, morph into a be-furred face. And so we may leave the room either literally, or metaphorically. The student hides from her thesis; the runner disappears into Scotch.

What happens next?

3. Escalation

Here’s the thrust of the plot: if the mind chronically escapes, things may get worse before they get better. A child’s silence stretches into months, and the parent retreats into work. The dissertation is fumbled together in a sleepless last week, and the student’s self-criticism is entrenched. Perhaps the runner, who no longer runs, slides into depression.

Things get worse because escaping, well-intentioned as the fight/flight system is, moves further away from the emotional nub of the matter. Emotions like fear, anger, and sadness are as old as the first human who ran from a lion. But for the stresses where fleeing doesn’t work – with the child, the dissertation, the loneliness – we must try something else.

What might that look like?

Photograph of a woman running on a road away from the camera. There are trees in the background and the sun setting

The escape artist thrives on two things: automaticity, and isolation. Interrupting its Cirque-du-Soleil-type flight through the air means addressing both of these.

First, step out of automatic pilot. Learn to recognise your triggers, and your reactions. Which scenario above did you relate to? Which cause of stress, and which response? You may find it helpful to write these down, in a diary, or on a post-it.

When you can start to recognise these as they occur in daily life, you are already doing something different. In the moment that you spot it, pause and settle yourself with a three-step breathing space. Later, put aside twenty minutes to explore it in more depth, with a RAIN practice.

Second, step out of isolation. We often feel tremendous shame around our stress responses. We may perceive that they make us look weak, or fear that they will burden others. But they are as human as the very blood in our veins, and you are not alone. Message a loved one, or call someone you trust.

We can make sense of the stories that we carry inside us; we can catch our own escape artist in the act. Some will surrender their running shoes swiftly, others may take more patience, inquiry, and support from outside. But the genre can be changed. The next act is unwritten.

© 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.

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.

When Distance is an Act of Love

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.

As you read this, I know that many of you – like me – will be working from home. Among you, there will be many going beyond that. This week I have been in touch with a number of students who are self-isolating, to protect themselves, partners, and family members. The coronavirus pandemic may be a public health emergency, but it is something else, too: it is an ethical emergency. Ethical, because it asks us to question all the invisible and banal ways in which we usually interact with those around us – our families, colleagues, and strangers – in order to care for us all. Emergency, because it does so with a suddenness, urgency, and ubiquity that is not found in the flow of ordinary life.

The etymology of the word distance means ‘to stand apart’. We often don’t like this: we call it aloofness, detachment, disengagement, or apathy. Distance doesn’t seem like care. If you listened to Desert Island Discs last week, you will have heard Daniel Radcliffe describe the best piece of advice he ever received, from his dad: ‘Whenever you meet somebody, always get your hand out first to shake their hand.’

It seems all the more strange to be in a situation where ‘taking care’ means being physically distant from others. Now, care is measured in metres, rooms, and buildings apart, and the new rules of caring for ourselves mean we must even be distant from our own faces: keeping those hands where you can see them, and using your elbow to hit the light switch. (Perhaps that’s just me.)

And that feeling that this is all a bit strange, and drastic, is the sign of extraordinary rather than ordinary times – emergency, rather than just emergence. Times like these make the invisible visible and the normal strange. In a society with a duty of care to its vulnerable – even if they look ‘young and healthy’, like my students with asthma, and other underlying health conditions – social distancing asks us to imagine and enact a new kind of care for ourselves and each other, a care in which distance is an act of love.

Right now, to stand apart is to be close, to ourselves and each other. It’s new, and not easy. But in our ordinary lives of the mind, and with each other, there are other forms of distance that we are used to celebrating. We talk glowingly of critical distance, perspective, and equanimity. When it comes to ethical qualities, we know from research on compassion that compassion is not being without boundaries – rather, it’s dependent on them.

That’s why I like this week’s short talk and meditation practice from Ruth King. It’s a ‘metta’ practice – metta being the Pali word for friendliness. It invites you to draw on your experience of when others have been kind to you, and bring that friendliness and kindness to yourself and however you might be feeling in this moment, and in these times.

Metta practice demonstrates the paradox of distance and closeness beautifully. Formal meditation practice is in itself a kind of distancing, a deliberate stepping out of clock time and of the ordinary day, to move in close to and cultivate the qualities we will need to take back into it. ‘Stay close to yourself in this practice, if you can,’ Ruth guides. In so doing, we move in close not only to ourselves, but also to how others can care for us, and how we might for them.

Sometimes, to distance is to move in close, and in that movement, a new horizon appears.

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

Responding Wisely to Fear and Worry

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.

The spread of coronavirus around the world is creating ‘understandable fear and worry,’ writes Willem Kuyken, director of the Oxford University Mindfulness Centre. ‘This is a double edged sword that on the one side is an appropriate call to action and on the other can create panic, reactivity and additional problems…A public health and psychological response, together, can help us find a way through these challenging times.’

What might such a psychological response look like? In the current climate, equanimity – engaging steadily, pragmatically, and with care – may seem a quality easier said than done. That is why mindfulness is inherently a practice, and not just something good to talk about. To respond wisely to fear and worry, we look this week at how the mind typically reacts to difficulty, and then we look to Tara Brach’s practice RAIN: Recognise, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture as a way of working with it.

Our psychological reactions to difficulty, stress, and uncertainty are made up of many interlocking layers. There may be initial anxiety: thoughts take the form of questions – ‘what will happen?’ ‘What should I be doing?’, or images, or statements: predictions about the future – ‘THIS will happen’ – that feel just as real and solid in the moment as this screen in front of you now.

When difficult emotions and thoughts come up, the mind catapults into its age-old protection and survival mode, and so our secondary reactions usually fall into one of two camps: avoidance, or ‘fixing’. Avoidance strategies are myriad: distraction, procrastination, various kinds of addiction, and so on. In ‘fixing’ mode, the mind jumps in and tries to help. We may ruminate, creating endless lists and possible scenarios in the imagination, all with that underlying sense that if we can only think of everything, we’ll be ok. We may scroll repeatedly through Twitter for opinions and news. We may clean the Co-op out of tinned sweetcorn.

Avoidance and fixing both have their place. The mind is after all trying to protect us; it is important to give yourself psychological respite from difficulty, and to act sensibly to safeguard your health. If you have a history of trauma in particular, it is wise to tread lightly when working with fear and worry: sometimes right now is not the time to try a new strategy, and that is ok.

So wise avoidance, and wise action, are vital – and often have a sense of clarity to them. But the most intense varieties of avoidance and fixing, like denial or panic, often feel foggy and blobby. If we were to put them under a cognitive microscope, we would see that they are made up of layer upon layer of inter-reacting thoughts and emotions, whizzing around and feeding each other without interruption. We rarely notice all the elements of this complex inter-reactivity happening, because the protect-and-survive mode of mind is so powerful. We may only be aware of a sense of compulsion, escalation, and conviction about the truth of the potential scenarios playing across the cinema-screen of the mind. And so getting stuck in avoidance or fixing typically happens when we are most frightened of, or angry about, our own fear and worry, so that we do not fully acknowledge and investigate it, enabling clarity of thought or action, but rather compound it.

It is important, therefore, not to bat away our anxiety, fear, or anger, but to recognise it with care, curiosity, and gentleness. To notice what’s here, it helps to drop in some questions: what emotions am I feeling? What thoughts are coming up in the mind? Recognising and naming difficult thoughts and feelings can bring a sense of clarity. OK, anxiety is here. So that’s what I’m feeling.

Once we see what is here, it is important to allow it to be here, again bringing as best you can a sense of gentleness to your emotions. You might even mentally note, ‘it’s ok that I feel this’; ‘it’s understandable that I am thinking this’. Allowing our fear and worry to be here in experience is not the same as saying that the situation is ok. Rather, it is acknowledging that it is ok for you to feel the way that you feel about it. Wanting to get rid of those feelings and thoughts, instead of allowing them to be there, is what tends to drive a sense of denial or fear.

Once we have recognised, acknowledged and allowed what we are feeling, Tara writes, we can investigate this experience a little more. ‘To investigate, call on your natural curiosity – the desire to know truth – and direct a more focused attention to your present experience. You might ask yourself: What most wants attention? How am I experiencing this in my body? What am I believing? What does this vulnerable place want from me? What does it most need?’ Notice if the mind tips over into rumination or avoidance again, and as best you can, bring it back to a sense of embodied listening. ‘Whatever the inquiry,’ Tara writes, ‘your investigation will be most transformational if you step away from conceptualizing and bring your primary attention to the felt-sense in the body.’

When we gently attend to and investigate our intense experiences with a sense of care and curiosity, we can nurture and tend wisely to what we have discovered. It often helps to drop a question into the mind, like a pebble in a pond: what does this need?

Often a thought or an image will arise in response to that question. While denial mind would have us continue on autopilot, and panic mind would have us do the biggest thing imaginable, often the small things are powerful: remembering to eat lunch, or drink a cup of tea; a phone-call to a friend, or a particular action or conversation. When we create space through reflection, sometimes a certain line from a poem, or something someone once told us, emerges as a source of comfort, wisdom, and good sense.

On that note, I leave you with my favourite poem on this theme, below.

If you can sit quietly after difficult news;

if in financial downturns you remain perfectly calm;

if you can see your neighbors travel to fantastic places without a twinge of jealousy;

if you can happily eat whatever is put on your plate;

if you can fall asleep after a day of running around without a drink or a pill;

if you can always find contentment just where you are:

you are probably a dog.

By Jack Kornfield, after Rudyard Kipling

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