Room to breathe, or, how not to throw a spear through your boss’s face

I recently started reading a guide to meditation, Meditation: Simple Steps for Health and Well-Being by Andrea McCloud. It provides a more practical approach than becoming a monk. Of course, there are benefits to putting a lot of work in the practice of meditation, etc., but there has to be something to be said for accessibility. For myself, I would be happy putting in 30% effort into meditation to get 70% results back.

Anyways, I do really like the perspective this guide offers to meditation. Here’s the definition it starts off with:

“Meditation is a fancy word for paying attention – paying attention to yourself and paying attention to your world. Any time you are focused on one thing or you are absorbed in a specific activity – be it painting or running or eating – you are meditating.”

I feel like the core concept is the practice of bringing yourself back to yourself. It’s so easy to get overwhelmed and caught up in the moment. Just imagine, you’re sitting at your desk at work, doing your own thing. Then suddenly someone catches you off kilter and nails you with a, “LOOK AT THIS TERRIBLE THING, THIS IS YOUR FAULT!” The stress-inducing HPA-axis of the brain lights up, and the stress hormone cortisol flow through your veins. Your pupils dilate, your heart rate increases, you even think defensively and aggressively.

I heard somewhere that the first ten seconds of an anger response is beyond your control. The hormone instinctively gets released as a shock to the yelling and you can’t help but be defensive. But after those ten seconds, if you can realize you’re misbehaving and bring yourself down from your cortisol high, you can stop, or at least blunt the overreaction.

This of course, is where I think meditation can be handy. Going back to the definition of meditation, “Meditation is a fancy word for paying attention.”

In those times when you want to react violently or negatively, you have to bring the attention back to what’s going on. Is this really a big deal?

Evolutionary biologists hypothesize that the HPA axis existed for a “fight-or-flight” response when a hunter encountered a potential prey or predator. The hunter’s stress axis would turn on, and the hunter could make a quick aggressive decision, to flee or to fight. Either way, the increased heart rate, blood flow, and pupil dilation all contribute to the instinct. These days, of course, our stressors are different. When our bosses criticize us, it’s not really appropriate to throw a spear through their face. And realistically, they are probably just trying to help us do our job.

Anyways, I’ve been trying to practice the first chapter of the meditation book. It’s pretty simple, and probably how every single book on meditation starts, but it’s called “Room to Breathe.” It suggests responding to stress by focusing on your breath, and shifting the emphasis off of whatever brought on the stress. It’s definitely helped me keep my emotions in check, and make sure that I can respond appropriately.

I won’t say using this strategy has been successful in eliminating stress, nor has it always prevented me from overreacting past that ten second free zone. That said, I think it’s been a step in the right direction. Now I feel like I’m at least being intentional about being patient. In the lifelong battle that is self-control, I’ll take it.

from ken

Are you thinking about something? Write about it and post it here! Email me! ken.e.noguchi@gmail.com

What do you do everyday?

I was sitting at church, zoning in and out, as I tend to in the mornings. One head bob jolted me back like a slap in the face, and they were talking about 90x prayer, an activity in which you pray 13 minutes a day to develop the discipline of prayer.

13 minutes broken up over the course of the day doesn’t seem that overwhelming or even that significant. But when you look at it over the course of a week, it quickly adds up to 90 minutes.

It got me thinking, man that’d be great to be like Martin Luther King Jr. who was once asked, “I heard you pray three times a day, but what do you do those days when you’re so busy?” To this, King replied, “Those days, I pray five times.”

On an unrelated note, one of my coworkers, Carl, a new dad, was telling me about his parenting struggles. He’s an incredibly hard worker, and he spends most of his time slaving away in the lab. Unfortunately, this means that there isn’t much time left to spend with his daughter. His daughter, Anna, spends most of his time with her mom, and she breaks out in a crying fit whenever her mom leaves the room, even when Carl is there. I’ve hardened myself to deal with failure, but I don’t know if I could swallow rejection like that.

Another one of our labmates, a veteran mom, interjected, ”Oh it’s just a phase, you just need to snap her out of it. Just go home everyday around four o clock for a couple hours and spend time with your daughter, then when she goes to sleep come back and work some more. It’ll take a while, but soon enough she’ll love you.”

The 90x prayer and fatherhood struggles reminded me of Amulya’s post on small change. It’s easy to make one or two glamorous decisions every once in a while. That doesn’t take that much work. But how come small change is so much more important to your true character?

I wrote about this thought a while back but it seems important so I’ll rehash it,

“There is no such thing as a courageous person, only acts of courage.”

If you pray once, it’s a nice heart-warming experience. If you pray every once in a while, other people will probably think you’re spiritual. But if you pray everyday, you become a person who prays. You are conscious of your surroundings, you are someone who cares about people around you, you are humble enough to ask for help. Prayer becomes a part of your identity.
There are no innately great dads. There are only dads that greet the sun every morning and sacrifice their own free time and well being to spend time with their kids to slowly but surely develop relationship.

And as I sat in the coffee shop drinking my decaf Americano, I got to thinking…

It’s hard work to pray everyday! Do my ideas have any idea how busy my schedule is? I just don’t have the time for it. I’ll make some other form of small change.

But maybe that’s why small change is so important. Because it gets right up in our face to challenge us, everyday.

If you made a couple big decisions in your life, like you moved to a brand new city. You might just be someone that other people think is a risk-taker, because other people will see you through the big stories in your life.

But if you take small risks everyday, risk losing control of your schedule to a discipline you might be trying to develop, or risk losing sleep for the sake of an important relationship, then, maybe, with time, those small decisions become ingrained in our habits, and become a part of our character.

from ken

Are you trying to change your life? I'd love to hear about it! ken.e.noguchi@gmail.com

photo by Enid Yu