Fall Mindfulness

For the kick-off of the 2020-21 Academic Year, the #GrinnelliansTakePause (#GTP) team felt it was important to create a series of entries focused on beginnings. Whether you are a first-year student or are entering your thirtieth academic year as faculty or staff, this truly will be a new experience for everyone due to the pandemic. While this is a profound and unique moment in history, remembering that every moment is a new beginning can help us get through this moment and the next. The pandemic has tremendous breadth in impact on people individually and collectively. Yet we successfully face significant challenges and adjust all the time.

To get the most out of each new moment, and each moment that follows, it is advantageous to have a mindset and skills that will prepare you for whatever stands before you. The #GTP team has identified six areas of particular importance as we launch into the 2020-2021 academic year. You may find that some speak to you more than others. We are each on our own journeys and at different stages in our lives. As we grow and our lives change, it can be helpful to address these areas on a regular basis for review and integration.

For the kick-off of the 2020-21 Academic Year, the #GrinnelliansTakePause (#GTP) team felt it was important to create a series of entries focused on beginnings. Whether you are a first-year student or are entering your thirtieth academic year as faculty or staff, this truly will be a new experience for everyone due to the pandemic. While this is a profound and unique moment in history, remembering that every moment is a new beginning can help us get through this moment and the next. The pandemic has tremendous breadth in impact on people individually and collectively. Yet we successfully face significant challenges and adjust all the time.

To get the most out of each new moment, and each moment that follows, it is advantageous to have a mindset and skills that will prepare you for whatever stands before you. The #GTP team has identified six areas of particular importance as we launch into the 2020-2021 academic year. You may find that some speak to you more than others. We are each on our own journeys and at different stages in our lives. As we grow and our lives change, it can be helpful to address these areas on a regular basis for review and integration.

Managing Expectations

We all have expectations for ourselves, our experiences, and the world around us. We have pictures in our minds about how life will play out. If there is discrepancy between the pictures and reality, we can feel let down and dissatisfied. Unfortunately, we can get so caught up in what should be that we can miss out on what is.

• Mindfulness can help you move past unmet expectations.
• Read about the tyranny of expectations and how to take steps to move from expectations to possibilities.
• Those of us that are perfectionists can learn to lean into the discomfort and look at things from a larger perspective.
• Finally, read about how you can set realistic expectations for yourself.

Radical Acceptance

When confronted with challenging circumstances, we have four options for responding: 1. change the circumstances, 2. change our perspective of the situation, 3. radically accept the situation, or 4. be miserable about the situation (Linehan, 2015). If the first two don’t work or are not possible in the present moment, we might want to give radical acceptance a try.

Radical acceptance is a concept with Buddhist origins that has been used in secular mindfulness work and in the field of mental health. In dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), a central tenet is the importance of achieving balance between dialectics, which are concepts that exist on opposite poles. In the case of radical acceptance, we see a dialectic between acceptance and change. According to Dr. Linehan, radical acceptance is a necessary condition for change: in order to change the trajectory of the future, we have to accept the facts of the past and the present moment, which cannot be changed. Acceptance is not the same as approval and does not equate to passivity or lack of emotion about the past or present moment. In this framework, pain is inevitable, but suffering is not. Instead, pain plus nonacceptance results in suffering. Essentially, painful emotions are difficult, but not as difficult as suffering.

According to Dr. Linehan (2015), there are 10 practice steps to take to build the skill of radical acceptance. As you’re starting off, consider first practicing with minor inconveniences or irritation, such as a traffic jam or weather that is disruptive but not catastrophic. As you develop the skill of radical acceptance, you'll be increasingly able to apply it to more challenging or painful situations.

1. Observe that you are questioning or fighting reality. For example, notice when you’re focused on what “should” or “should not” be.
2. Remind yourself that the unpleasant reality is just as it is and cannot be changed in the present moment.
3. Recognize that there are causes for the reality, regardless of how we feel about those causes. The reality of past and present moments is the result of a vast series of factors and events and as a result, events had to occur just as they have.
4. Practice accepting with the whole self, including with the mind, body, and spirit.
5. Practice “opposite action.” Consider how you would behave if you accepted the situation, and then engage in those behaviors.
6. Cope ahead with events that seem unacceptable. Imagine fully accepting what you don’t want to accept. Rehearse in your mind what you would do to cope if you accepted what seems unacceptable.
7. Attend to body sensations as you think about what you need to accept.
8. Allow disappointment, sadness, or grief to arise within you. While these emotions can be painful, it is by trying to avoid them that we suffer.
9. Acknowledge that life can be worth living even when there is pain.
10. If you find yourself resisting the practice of radical acceptance, make a list of pros and cons of radically accepting the situation. See where that leads you.

Responding to Challenges with Self-Compassion

For most of us, change is hard. The one thing we all have in common this fall is that it is unlike anything we’ve ever experienced. While change can be exciting, it can also be disappointing and stressful.

Patience and compassion will be key to making this a time for growth and not just frustration and discouragement. We will need to be patient and compassionate with others AND with ourselves. We are all going to be new at doing the ever-changing “this.” We are also all grieving the loss of what we anticipated for the year (see also grief and loss). That’s a lot. Collectively, we are very tender right now. It is important that we recognize that and take care of ourselves.

According to University of Texas self-compassion researcher Dr. Kristin Neff, self-compassion is extending compassion to one's self in instances of perceived inadequacy, failure, or general suffering. As Dr. Neff puts it, self-compassion is treating yourself like you would treat a loved one. Many of us are very good about affording our loved ones leeway and forgiveness but aren’t nearly as compassionate toward ourselves. If you can adopt self-compassion, a lot of energy can be shifted to healing and improving instead of breaking yourself down.

So what might this look like? A good place to start is listening to your self-talk. What are you saying to yourself? Most of us have a critical internal voice. But some have critical voices that lead to self-loathing, excessive fear of failure, and overly harsh criticisms that can literally shut a person down. What is your critical voice saying to you? How can you reframe this critique? Let’s try this out with a practice chart:

 

Notice how the self-compassionate reframes are responses we might hear from a supportive loved one who believes in us? That shift in thinking is supportive of growth and learning, as opposed to the harsh criticism that can become debilitating. Is this easy? No. Our brains are naturally wired to be more critical of ourselves, so it takes some learning and practice to develop a self-compassionate default response. To work more pointedly on developing self-compassion, fill out a chart of your own to help you reframe your thoughts to be more compassionate. You can also engage in exercises and meditations by Dr. Neff to develop your self-compassion.

So yes, change is difficult, awkward, uncomfortable, and challenging (feel free to stop me here). The cool part is that during this uneasy and novel time we also have a chance to grow, if we take on the challenge. But like most living things, we can only grow where growth is supported and provided with the right nutrients. Be that person for you.

Self-Care and Routine

Most New Year’s resolutions reportedly involve improving self-care. Why? Well, heaps of research tell us that we’re not doing well enough at making the right choices to take care of ourselves (i.e. poor diet, lack of sleep, high levels of stress, etc.). Secondly, people don’t prioritize their self-care sufficiently, and therefore it gets way-sided when something else comes up. Unless we experience the direct negative outcome of poor self-care, we frequently defer to shorter-term mind sets. A good example of this is the well-worn college phrase, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” Since self-care activities don’t usually have deadlines where people are forced to atone for their lack of discipline , such as not completing assignment for a boss or a professor on time, self-care goals get bumped for more “pressing” items like work or academic projects. At what cost? Well, both short- and long-term effects of self-care are well documented.

As you start this academic year, a critical component of a self-care routine is time management. To accomplish your goals and get the most out of life, you will need to manage your time by first prioritizing what is most important to you. You may for the first time in your life have more expectations for your time than you have hours in a day to accomplish them. Therefore, managing time will mean getting the most out of the minutes and hours and days that you have. Will you be able to fit everything in? Probably not. However, it is important to make sure your top priority is taking care of yourself. As Stephen Covey of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People fame noted, if you don’t “keep the saw sharp” (aka engaging in good self-care and balance for a healthier you) you won’t be able to take care of the other aspects of your life. Hence, prioritizing self-care can make the other parts of your life more likely.

A good place to start with effective time management for self-care is to:

• Set realistic goals for yourself. What do you want to prioritize?
• Operationalize your goals. Maybe this will mean getting 8 hours of sleep a night, exercising 5 days a week, eating a meal with a different friend daily, and meditating 10 minutes daily. Does this seem too optimistic for you? That’s fine; it is important to personalize it to you.
• Put your plan into play by putting it in your schedule. Schedule your days to meet your obligations and increase the likelihood of success. If you’re not a morning person, don’t schedule yourself to get up at 6 a.m. to meditate. Find a time that you’re more likely to follow through.
• Assess your schedule compliance weekly. Do you need to tweak it to be more successful?
• Find a way to include supportive others (friends, family, teammates) to help you be more accountable.

Lastly, remember that you are doing this for you. Be patient, be flexible, be self-compassionate, but also remember that this is an important life skill. You need this if you’re going to get the best of you now and into the future.

Grief

Above, we considered the concept of radical acceptance when confronted with challenging circumstances. Now, we turn to grief -- a natural response to loss, one of the most challenging and inevitable circumstances that all of us will face.

Rarely are we able to change the fact of loss or change our perspective on loss and so we are left to try to radically accept loss and the grief we feel in the face of loss. As noted in this post on mindfulness as an approach to loss, grief is a response to any significant loss, not merely to bereavement.

Grief, then, is very likely an emotion that many of us are experiencing in the midst of this global pandemic, and the lessons of radical acceptance we considered are uniquely and acutely relevant to this current moment. In addition to the approach to radical acceptance posted previously, grief journaling and a guided meditation for grief allow for awareness of and support through your grief.

In addition to radical acceptance, there is value in exploring the way different individuals and communities -- particularly those often made invisible by the mindfulness community -- have created their own space to take pause:

• Black Girl in Om, Instagram
• Mindfulness for the People, Facebook
• The Nap Ministry, Instagram
• LGBTQ Mindfulness and Meditation, Facebook