Scott E. Spradlin's Blog
August 18, 2023
Wise Marriage: Being With/To/For One Another
As couples orient toward cultivating willingness, and connecting with their deeper values and desires for loving and being loved, for truly sharing life I ask them to remember, and practice, these three movements of a wise marriage: With one another, To one another, and For one another. As you read along I invite you to consider your marriage, your relationship with your children or other family members, and your friendships.
Read more here: Wise Marriage: Being With, To, and For One Another
Read more here: Wise Marriage: Being With, To, and For One Another
November 14, 2022
Wise Marriage Practices
Cultivating a wise marriage requires willingness and:
1. Mindfulness;
2. Emotion Regulation;
3. Validation.
Read the brief here:
Practices of a Wise Marriage
1. Mindfulness;
2. Emotion Regulation;
3. Validation.
Read the brief here:
Practices of a Wise Marriage
June 4, 2022
Attention: A Marital Superpower
When couples present for therapy they typically come following chronic disruptions in respective and mutual attention. The problems they bring into the consulting room, or to telehealth, as the case may be now in our post-covid times, are the result of depleted attention, fractured attention, or diverted attention.
Attention is a superpower of human beings. Susan Sontag has written, “Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.” Stay eager indeed. Stay present. Be intentional. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, a lyrical heroine of mine, wrote, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” Attention is work. Attention is endless work. And it is our proper work. She also said that "Attention is the beginning of devotion." Attention is power. Simone Weil, wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” She is also saying that attention is a power and a gift.
Attention helps us to carry out the most basic of tasks, say, dressing and getting to work on time, self-monitoring thoughts and emotions, and decision-making on where to allocate our internal energies for effective outcomes in work, love, and play, and when our attentional processes are depleted, fractured, or diverted, we experience, chaos, suffering, addiction, and relational distress.
Attention can be sapped, neglected, or fractured with the causes of these impairments being myriad. To help our clients, we introduce our couples to mindfulness practices. And we begin by exploring aspects of attention, and why it's so important to our capacities for love, meaning, and connection.
In this blog, we identify three thieves/vandals of attention: depletion, fracturing, and diversion. And then we touch on how we can cultivate mindfulness practices to increase our attention, intention, and presence to life itself and to/for/with our spouses.
Read the full blog here:
Attention: A Marital Superpower
November 9, 2021
Love in the Intervals
Read the full blog here Wise Mind, Wise Life: Love in the Intervals
Turning Toward and Togetherness
Thanks to the work of Doctors John and Julie Gottman, we have decades of consistent evidence that shows togetherness and turning toward patterns are key to mutual appreciation, love, and respect. And even where there are patterns of conflict and turning away, couples can learn to do otherwise by learning skills for making effective emotional bids as well as skills in reciprocating emotional bids, with turning toward behaviors. With mindfulness training, couples can further cultivate shared relationship awareness and intentionally cultivate relationship awareness. Relationship mindfulness can help us to increase the frequency of our intentional turning toward our partners to better make and reciprocate emotional bids. And these daily little habits, seemingly so mundane that some of us risk seeing them as irrelevant, are what actually build lasting intimacy.
These practices in turning toward and making/reciprocating emotional bids help to prevent marital drift into parallel lives or mend ruptures in our together-ness, our proximity, to continue to share inexperienced emotional nurture that can only occur in proximity to one another. Proximity and togetherness open our shared presence to one another so that we continue to learn and know, together, our internal worlds, our shifting dreams, desires, and experiences.
Proximity and Intervals
And yet, there is a kind of togetherness that is stifling, smothering, which levels us down into indistinct sameness. Such togetherness, called enmeshment by some, impedes fresh and novel experiences for each person, with each becoming a copy of the other, and both become essentially crippled by such sameness, unable to be spontaneous and vivacious. On a larger scale, such toxic togetherness misses authentic common life, even levels a community down to a crowd. As Thomas Merton wrote about community: “The common life can either make one more of a person or less of a person, depending on whether it is truly common life or merely life in a crowd.” And he goes on to distinguish the crowd as togetherness that shares only common distractions and noise, which ultimately separates us from reality.
On the other hand, Merton, as might Dan Siegel, might say that community provides a togetherness that honors our distinctiveness that makes real relationships with others possible, and where our distinctiveness is honored, and where we can find our truest humanity, over the course of our lives. If marriage is anything, it is a community of two or more if we live with extended family and children. We have a common life with our spouses.
Turning Toward and Togetherness
Thanks to the work of Doctors John and Julie Gottman, we have decades of consistent evidence that shows togetherness and turning toward patterns are key to mutual appreciation, love, and respect. And even where there are patterns of conflict and turning away, couples can learn to do otherwise by learning skills for making effective emotional bids as well as skills in reciprocating emotional bids, with turning toward behaviors. With mindfulness training, couples can further cultivate shared relationship awareness and intentionally cultivate relationship awareness. Relationship mindfulness can help us to increase the frequency of our intentional turning toward our partners to better make and reciprocate emotional bids. And these daily little habits, seemingly so mundane that some of us risk seeing them as irrelevant, are what actually build lasting intimacy.
These practices in turning toward and making/reciprocating emotional bids help to prevent marital drift into parallel lives or mend ruptures in our together-ness, our proximity, to continue to share inexperienced emotional nurture that can only occur in proximity to one another. Proximity and togetherness open our shared presence to one another so that we continue to learn and know, together, our internal worlds, our shifting dreams, desires, and experiences.
Proximity and Intervals
And yet, there is a kind of togetherness that is stifling, smothering, which levels us down into indistinct sameness. Such togetherness, called enmeshment by some, impedes fresh and novel experiences for each person, with each becoming a copy of the other, and both become essentially crippled by such sameness, unable to be spontaneous and vivacious. On a larger scale, such toxic togetherness misses authentic common life, even levels a community down to a crowd. As Thomas Merton wrote about community: “The common life can either make one more of a person or less of a person, depending on whether it is truly common life or merely life in a crowd.” And he goes on to distinguish the crowd as togetherness that shares only common distractions and noise, which ultimately separates us from reality.
On the other hand, Merton, as might Dan Siegel, might say that community provides a togetherness that honors our distinctiveness that makes real relationships with others possible, and where our distinctiveness is honored, and where we can find our truest humanity, over the course of our lives. If marriage is anything, it is a community of two or more if we live with extended family and children. We have a common life with our spouses.
November 3, 2021
ADHD, Wise Mind, and Acceptance
Excerpted from Scott's Wise Mind, Wise Life Blog
Regarding wise mind in working with Adult ADHD: "We incrementally, patiently, and with willingness live into sagacious knowing. We hone an instinct for where and how to become more fully human and alive, we become our true and best selves with growing integrity. We become truly integrated and continue to do so over the course of the journey over the respective courses of our lives.
Wise Mind, Acceptance, and Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria
As a message to other ADHD adults out there, and anyone who is intimately familiar with invalidation, criticism, and rejection, I commend to you the DBT core mindfulness skills to cultivate your own growing connection with life, deeper presence, increased attention as well as the growth in wisdom. These what and how tools that lead to this state of mind are welcome balms for countering rejection sensitive dysphoria and internalized invalidation. With the frequent and steady practices of mindfulness whats and hows, we befriend our emotions, learning how they work for us in survival and in connecting meaningfully in relationships."
Scott is the author of:
Regarding wise mind in working with Adult ADHD: "We incrementally, patiently, and with willingness live into sagacious knowing. We hone an instinct for where and how to become more fully human and alive, we become our true and best selves with growing integrity. We become truly integrated and continue to do so over the course of the journey over the respective courses of our lives.
Wise Mind, Acceptance, and Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria
As a message to other ADHD adults out there, and anyone who is intimately familiar with invalidation, criticism, and rejection, I commend to you the DBT core mindfulness skills to cultivate your own growing connection with life, deeper presence, increased attention as well as the growth in wisdom. These what and how tools that lead to this state of mind are welcome balms for countering rejection sensitive dysphoria and internalized invalidation. With the frequent and steady practices of mindfulness whats and hows, we befriend our emotions, learning how they work for us in survival and in connecting meaningfully in relationships."
Scott is the author of:
November 2, 2021
Accept & Redirect: Mindfulness for ADHD
Read the full blog at: Wise Mind, Wise Life Blog
"For us, ADHD folks, broken focus can linger beyond the limits of our neurotypical friends and family. It literally takes more effort for us to direct the current of emotions and to return our focus to what we intended to do. Be it savoring a novel, or organizing the kitchen. And depending on our own internal habits of thought, seasoned in a life of criticism and invalidation, we may be vulnerable to yielding to our own worst version of ourselves with harsh and critical thoughts about ourselves. And as we know, all of this turmoil eats up our precious time and sets us up for yet another "failure" to stew in. We lose time not only to the usual detail-related mistakes of daily life, but we also lose time to emotional suffering.."
"For us, ADHD folks, broken focus can linger beyond the limits of our neurotypical friends and family. It literally takes more effort for us to direct the current of emotions and to return our focus to what we intended to do. Be it savoring a novel, or organizing the kitchen. And depending on our own internal habits of thought, seasoned in a life of criticism and invalidation, we may be vulnerable to yielding to our own worst version of ourselves with harsh and critical thoughts about ourselves. And as we know, all of this turmoil eats up our precious time and sets us up for yet another "failure" to stew in. We lose time not only to the usual detail-related mistakes of daily life, but we also lose time to emotional suffering.."
October 30, 2021
Mindfulness: Thoughts
Mindfulness for Mental Health Professionals (and others)
NOTE: Updated 10/30/2021
Look for more blogging at Wise Mind, Wise Life
Mindfulness is a broad term that refers to any practice of non-reactive participation, intentional cultivation of awareness, and paying attention to the moment as well as bringing oneself into each moment as fully as possible. It is a simple yet many-layered and elegant thing to talk about. It is easy to talk about, difficult to practice, but worthy of the effort. More so, mindfulness is the patient and gentle cultivation of awareness of your thoughts, your emotions, and your bodily sensations as they happen. Mindfulness is the practice that helps you to know what you are thinking as you think, and a knowing what you feel while you feel. It’s not a retrospect, a backward-looking (as in getting "stuck"), but an immediate here-ness.
Within this wide swath of mindfulness is attentiveness, prayer, meditation, concentration, recollection, being present within the moment. There are many specialized forms of mindfulness that have emerged from various spiritual and philosophical traditions, and while these multiple traditions may diverge on their metaphysical foundations and ends,
they converge on the common agreement that we are subject to conditioning and attachments which become sources of misery and suffering for us. These traditions also agree that a foe to human health is inattentiveness which has many names: distraction, dissipation, scattering, and what we might even call dis-attention, as does John Kabat-Zinn (2005). Related to this inattentiveness are the cognitive phenomena of misperception and misattribution, which oft lead to mistakes (Kabat-Zinn, 2005).
Helpers trained in the Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) tradition have rendered from the ancient Greeks, the insight that it is not actual events that are the cause of our misery or disturbances, rather we are disturbed by our thoughts about these events (Aurelius ). Therapists and counselors, even those who practice CBT, are subject to being caught up in misperceptions, are we not, and their own habits of thought in which thoughts multiply from the first misapprehension, and become complicated rather than remain simple. Within these complicated thoughts you are often presented with your habits of comparison, taut hope (read attachment), an expectation that your clients will receive you, and your therapeutic wisdom, putting it all to practice and moving quickly along the path of healing.
When your taut hope and expectations are thwarted you may feel frustration, exasperation, and even despair over your effectiveness as a helper or client willingness to change.
These are the testing points of reality that reveal to you your deeply held assumptions and philosophies about self, others, relatedness, shoulds, and so on. The value of mindfulness to mental health practitioners lies in its utility for cultivating keen attention to your own experiences and reactions to your client, in the moment of your meeting, sharpening your receptivity to your clients’ para-verbal and verbal communication, taking in key emotional information you may miss if you have fallen into the fog of perfunctory engagement. As much as it will yield for you an enhanced reception of your client as you meet them, it can also yield your presence to your client, communicating to them true care and concern with your concentrated being.
In DBT, mindfulness forms the core skill around which all the others (distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness) are gathered and integrated. Citing John
Kabat-Zinn (2003), McKay, Wood, and Brantley (2007), these authors and practitioners identify mindfulness as a form of non-judgmental paying attention on purpose, in the present moment (p. 63). Should you cultivate your own mindfulness practices, beyond any simple engagement for the skills training groups you may lead, you will find yourself becoming more attentive, more present, and flexible in your practice with your clients. Beyond a mere gimmick, or something you “do in case of an emergency,” and beyond a form of relaxation, mindfulness is a practice that while honed through concentrated and intentional practices such as meditation or prayer, or short practices in simply sitting and observing your breath, it is a way and stance of life. In your sitting practices, breathing, meditations, concentrations are intended to increase your presence and attention to all moments. From meeting a client to shaving stubble and from enjoying an ice cream to managing stress, mindfulness is more than simply a response technique. It is a living practice, diligent attentiveness, and awareness cultivated in each and every moment as it comes and goes. It is even attention to inattention, returning you to attention. This nonjudgmental and purposeful attentiveness is also related to the cultivation of wisdom, that well-lived, big-picture kind of knowledge that lends itself to living in a fairly patient and measured fashion that nurtures human well-being.
NOTE: Updated 10/30/2021
Look for more blogging at Wise Mind, Wise Life
Mindfulness is a broad term that refers to any practice of non-reactive participation, intentional cultivation of awareness, and paying attention to the moment as well as bringing oneself into each moment as fully as possible. It is a simple yet many-layered and elegant thing to talk about. It is easy to talk about, difficult to practice, but worthy of the effort. More so, mindfulness is the patient and gentle cultivation of awareness of your thoughts, your emotions, and your bodily sensations as they happen. Mindfulness is the practice that helps you to know what you are thinking as you think, and a knowing what you feel while you feel. It’s not a retrospect, a backward-looking (as in getting "stuck"), but an immediate here-ness.
Within this wide swath of mindfulness is attentiveness, prayer, meditation, concentration, recollection, being present within the moment. There are many specialized forms of mindfulness that have emerged from various spiritual and philosophical traditions, and while these multiple traditions may diverge on their metaphysical foundations and ends,
they converge on the common agreement that we are subject to conditioning and attachments which become sources of misery and suffering for us. These traditions also agree that a foe to human health is inattentiveness which has many names: distraction, dissipation, scattering, and what we might even call dis-attention, as does John Kabat-Zinn (2005). Related to this inattentiveness are the cognitive phenomena of misperception and misattribution, which oft lead to mistakes (Kabat-Zinn, 2005).
Helpers trained in the Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) tradition have rendered from the ancient Greeks, the insight that it is not actual events that are the cause of our misery or disturbances, rather we are disturbed by our thoughts about these events (Aurelius ). Therapists and counselors, even those who practice CBT, are subject to being caught up in misperceptions, are we not, and their own habits of thought in which thoughts multiply from the first misapprehension, and become complicated rather than remain simple. Within these complicated thoughts you are often presented with your habits of comparison, taut hope (read attachment), an expectation that your clients will receive you, and your therapeutic wisdom, putting it all to practice and moving quickly along the path of healing.
When your taut hope and expectations are thwarted you may feel frustration, exasperation, and even despair over your effectiveness as a helper or client willingness to change.
These are the testing points of reality that reveal to you your deeply held assumptions and philosophies about self, others, relatedness, shoulds, and so on. The value of mindfulness to mental health practitioners lies in its utility for cultivating keen attention to your own experiences and reactions to your client, in the moment of your meeting, sharpening your receptivity to your clients’ para-verbal and verbal communication, taking in key emotional information you may miss if you have fallen into the fog of perfunctory engagement. As much as it will yield for you an enhanced reception of your client as you meet them, it can also yield your presence to your client, communicating to them true care and concern with your concentrated being.
In DBT, mindfulness forms the core skill around which all the others (distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness) are gathered and integrated. Citing John
Kabat-Zinn (2003), McKay, Wood, and Brantley (2007), these authors and practitioners identify mindfulness as a form of non-judgmental paying attention on purpose, in the present moment (p. 63). Should you cultivate your own mindfulness practices, beyond any simple engagement for the skills training groups you may lead, you will find yourself becoming more attentive, more present, and flexible in your practice with your clients. Beyond a mere gimmick, or something you “do in case of an emergency,” and beyond a form of relaxation, mindfulness is a practice that while honed through concentrated and intentional practices such as meditation or prayer, or short practices in simply sitting and observing your breath, it is a way and stance of life. In your sitting practices, breathing, meditations, concentrations are intended to increase your presence and attention to all moments. From meeting a client to shaving stubble and from enjoying an ice cream to managing stress, mindfulness is more than simply a response technique. It is a living practice, diligent attentiveness, and awareness cultivated in each and every moment as it comes and goes. It is even attention to inattention, returning you to attention. This nonjudgmental and purposeful attentiveness is also related to the cultivation of wisdom, that well-lived, big-picture kind of knowledge that lends itself to living in a fairly patient and measured fashion that nurtures human well-being.
Wise Mind for the Distracted Mind
DBT for Adult ADHD
Excerpted from the full blog which you can read here:
Wise Mind for the Distracted Mind
My Own Journey
I first began to investigate how DBT might be an appropriate treatment for adult ADHD after receiving my ADHD diagnosis at around age thirty and as an intensively trained DBT practitioner. Making this early connection between DBT and my ADHD, I found core mindfulness practices to be helpful with self-acceptance, opening paths within me to become a more integrated person, as I cultivated acceptance and self-compassion, I felt less anxious about ADHD and began to soften my efforts to project a “Super Scott” facade to those around me. No one was buying that facade, by the way. More recently, my relationship with my wife Mariah, an ADHD therapist and certified coach, inspired me to learn more about ADHD per see, and to more rigorously explore adapting DBT for ADHD adults. Together, we have begun to develop Wise Mind for the Distracted Mind. We have found that the DBT skills modules do address the array of ADHD-related problems.
Core Mindfulness and Beyond.
Core mindfulness is a framework for the practice of paying attention to present moment experiences with gentle and open curiosity that helps us to connect with our respective wise mind, a state of deep knowing in which we experience the balance of reason and emotion, and we connect with our intuition. We cultivate wise mind with the whats and hows of mindfulness. Mindfulness informs all the other skills and immediately germane to adult ADHD, mindfulness helps us increase sustained attention, task initiation, and completion, and even offset the pangs of Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD), become less subject to the negative effects of criticism or perceived criticism. Mindfulness entails a whole-person awareness, and shouldn’t be conceptually relegated to a strictly discursive or cognitive practice that takes place in the skull. As we learn mindfulness, we connect more fully with our whole selves, we cultivate mindsight as described by Daniel J. Siegel, MD. We become more integrated, relating more directly with our embodied lives, bodily sensations, thoughts, and emotions. More about this in future blogs.
Excerpted from the full blog which you can read here:
Wise Mind for the Distracted Mind
My Own Journey
I first began to investigate how DBT might be an appropriate treatment for adult ADHD after receiving my ADHD diagnosis at around age thirty and as an intensively trained DBT practitioner. Making this early connection between DBT and my ADHD, I found core mindfulness practices to be helpful with self-acceptance, opening paths within me to become a more integrated person, as I cultivated acceptance and self-compassion, I felt less anxious about ADHD and began to soften my efforts to project a “Super Scott” facade to those around me. No one was buying that facade, by the way. More recently, my relationship with my wife Mariah, an ADHD therapist and certified coach, inspired me to learn more about ADHD per see, and to more rigorously explore adapting DBT for ADHD adults. Together, we have begun to develop Wise Mind for the Distracted Mind. We have found that the DBT skills modules do address the array of ADHD-related problems.
Core Mindfulness and Beyond.
Core mindfulness is a framework for the practice of paying attention to present moment experiences with gentle and open curiosity that helps us to connect with our respective wise mind, a state of deep knowing in which we experience the balance of reason and emotion, and we connect with our intuition. We cultivate wise mind with the whats and hows of mindfulness. Mindfulness informs all the other skills and immediately germane to adult ADHD, mindfulness helps us increase sustained attention, task initiation, and completion, and even offset the pangs of Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD), become less subject to the negative effects of criticism or perceived criticism. Mindfulness entails a whole-person awareness, and shouldn’t be conceptually relegated to a strictly discursive or cognitive practice that takes place in the skull. As we learn mindfulness, we connect more fully with our whole selves, we cultivate mindsight as described by Daniel J. Siegel, MD. We become more integrated, relating more directly with our embodied lives, bodily sensations, thoughts, and emotions. More about this in future blogs.
Wise Marriage
New blogging emerges again, with better supports, resources, experiences, inspiration, and most importantly, commitment. To that end, you are invited to read the full blog at the Wise Mind, Wise Life website: Wise Mind, Wise LIfe
Wise Marriage Excerpt
Couples therapy is often prompted by a rupture, or ruptures, in connectedness, a breach in the relationship. Anything from a slow drift into parallel lives to active hostilities during heated arguments. These ruptures, whatever their nature, manifest wounds in the hearts of the couples. Couples typically come to therapy seeking tools for mending the ruptures and healing for their precious relationships.
Whatever the degree of severity of the ruptures, couples in crisis and conflict can change their relational patterns when they have the willingness to be vulnerable, which requires courage, and when they have the right framework and tools to mend the ruptures.
Our work with what we are affectionately calling the wise marriage framework guides couples into learning about the importance of mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and relational intelligence. The wise marriage approach emerges from a confluence of interpersonal neurobiology, Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and Gottman-informed marital therapy. This approach isn’t evidence-based by way of formal double-blind controlled and replicated studies, rather it is based on our anecdotal, in-the-trenches practice and encounters with distressed couples and the judicious and discerning research-informed reflection on sound interventions and what works.
Wise Marriage Excerpt
Couples therapy is often prompted by a rupture, or ruptures, in connectedness, a breach in the relationship. Anything from a slow drift into parallel lives to active hostilities during heated arguments. These ruptures, whatever their nature, manifest wounds in the hearts of the couples. Couples typically come to therapy seeking tools for mending the ruptures and healing for their precious relationships.
Whatever the degree of severity of the ruptures, couples in crisis and conflict can change their relational patterns when they have the willingness to be vulnerable, which requires courage, and when they have the right framework and tools to mend the ruptures.
Our work with what we are affectionately calling the wise marriage framework guides couples into learning about the importance of mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and relational intelligence. The wise marriage approach emerges from a confluence of interpersonal neurobiology, Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and Gottman-informed marital therapy. This approach isn’t evidence-based by way of formal double-blind controlled and replicated studies, rather it is based on our anecdotal, in-the-trenches practice and encounters with distressed couples and the judicious and discerning research-informed reflection on sound interventions and what works.
February 29, 2020
2020: Year of Clarity
A continued Happy New Year to all of you, even now on this "leap day" of February 2020!
2020 is upon us and many of us are already suffering the attrition of willpower to continue with our New Year resolutions we so fervently sounded out at the stroke of midnight, while some of us are working through our bafflement over the similarities and distinctions between resolutions and intentions. And some of us, I included, are drawn toward feeling clever for making 2020 our year of clarity. If we can stick with it.
Aside from the risk of being distracted by this amusing concept, this number, 2020, so vivid in mental resonance with ocular clarity of vision (20/20), has the potential to remind us that we are capable of achieving the clarity of wisdom for the present moment and the coming days of this new year. We don't always have to wait for hindsight, do we?
Please consider this modest entry your invitation into a new year of clarity. Why not begin with the beginning as so many wise men and women have suggested. Develop your written vision for this year, including a personal mission statement. As you linger over your vision and mission ask yourself these questions:
1. What is my legacy? Or, what will I leave behind? Will others remember me as a person of integrity? Did I live an authentic life? Did I better the lives of others? Did I leave an estate for my children, and if not that, did I leave an estate of example on how to live a wise and human life? Will I be remembered the way I hope to be remembered? How can I start to embody this today, even at this very moment?
2. How do I wish to live presently in consideration of enduring principles and my personal values? Do I want to feel that I've done my best to live the wise life I imagine for myself, both enjoying others and being enjoyed? Do I have relative balance in my life, with work and leisure? How can I live toward that relative balance? Am I present to others? Do I really show up for them with generous attention or am I am haphazardly nodding my head while others talk or do I multitask when others bid for connection with me?
3. What obstacles hinder me from embodying my values? What gets in the way of living with integrity and wholeness? How will I handle perineal bad habits that run counter to what I cherish most? How can I moderate my appetites? Honor my agreements? Do I need to practice more no means no, and yes means yes? How can I bring more of me into my work, into my love, into my playtime?
4. What Can I do to return to course when I drift? What tools, tricks and tips can I use to remind myself to come back to the path I wish to inhabit and travel? Can I use tech or old fashioned sticky notes? Are there people who can help me along my paths such as wise friends or mentors?
This is not a call to a steroidal and gung-ho commitment to unwavering technical precision in your day-to-day, moment-to-moment life, which will threaten you with discouragement and eventual burnout. This is an invitation for you to consider, even remember, what you want as a wise and fulfilling life. As we will continue with these entries we will consider mindfulness practices, the vehicle of wise mind, that when cultivated with curiosity, compassion and diligence can help you sense the directions and activities you should follow to the ends of your personal integration (integrity) and at least an approximation of the good life which will yield the legacy you hope to leave. It is a process living through a year of clarity. A gentle and relentless practice of paying attention every day and living intentionally.
2020 is upon us and many of us are already suffering the attrition of willpower to continue with our New Year resolutions we so fervently sounded out at the stroke of midnight, while some of us are working through our bafflement over the similarities and distinctions between resolutions and intentions. And some of us, I included, are drawn toward feeling clever for making 2020 our year of clarity. If we can stick with it.
Aside from the risk of being distracted by this amusing concept, this number, 2020, so vivid in mental resonance with ocular clarity of vision (20/20), has the potential to remind us that we are capable of achieving the clarity of wisdom for the present moment and the coming days of this new year. We don't always have to wait for hindsight, do we?
Please consider this modest entry your invitation into a new year of clarity. Why not begin with the beginning as so many wise men and women have suggested. Develop your written vision for this year, including a personal mission statement. As you linger over your vision and mission ask yourself these questions:
1. What is my legacy? Or, what will I leave behind? Will others remember me as a person of integrity? Did I live an authentic life? Did I better the lives of others? Did I leave an estate for my children, and if not that, did I leave an estate of example on how to live a wise and human life? Will I be remembered the way I hope to be remembered? How can I start to embody this today, even at this very moment?
2. How do I wish to live presently in consideration of enduring principles and my personal values? Do I want to feel that I've done my best to live the wise life I imagine for myself, both enjoying others and being enjoyed? Do I have relative balance in my life, with work and leisure? How can I live toward that relative balance? Am I present to others? Do I really show up for them with generous attention or am I am haphazardly nodding my head while others talk or do I multitask when others bid for connection with me?
3. What obstacles hinder me from embodying my values? What gets in the way of living with integrity and wholeness? How will I handle perineal bad habits that run counter to what I cherish most? How can I moderate my appetites? Honor my agreements? Do I need to practice more no means no, and yes means yes? How can I bring more of me into my work, into my love, into my playtime?
4. What Can I do to return to course when I drift? What tools, tricks and tips can I use to remind myself to come back to the path I wish to inhabit and travel? Can I use tech or old fashioned sticky notes? Are there people who can help me along my paths such as wise friends or mentors?
This is not a call to a steroidal and gung-ho commitment to unwavering technical precision in your day-to-day, moment-to-moment life, which will threaten you with discouragement and eventual burnout. This is an invitation for you to consider, even remember, what you want as a wise and fulfilling life. As we will continue with these entries we will consider mindfulness practices, the vehicle of wise mind, that when cultivated with curiosity, compassion and diligence can help you sense the directions and activities you should follow to the ends of your personal integration (integrity) and at least an approximation of the good life which will yield the legacy you hope to leave. It is a process living through a year of clarity. A gentle and relentless practice of paying attention every day and living intentionally.
