The Needed Pause
We really hope you are well. With current events unfolding we continue encouraging empathy and compassion. While the news might be bleak, with market declines and xenophobia, Chair of Future Studies at UNESCO, Sohail Inayatullah, has suggested some more hopeful narratives.
One potential is that we truly enter the digital era, companies make the changes necessary with breakthroughs and innovations cascading through systems. The other potential is one of the needed pause; the frenetic pace of everything slows down, humans and nature reconnect.
In the meantime, how can we handle the stress and anxiety that a global event like this may cause? I leave you with some practical mindful techniques from one of our own directors and consultant/coach, Hannah Fitzhardinge.
Mindful compassion in a toilet paper frenzy
When all our conversations, all our media consumption, all the memes on Facebook are consumed with an issue as confronting as Covid-19, how do we stay sane? I don’t know about you, but the week for me has been full of conversations (many necessary, others because it’s all anyone’s talking about) about preparations for something that at this stage we have limited understanding of in terms of timeline, impact and consequence.
It left me feeling pretty despondent. I like to take action, get things done, plan and progress – but everything is up in the air. It’s confusing, and a bit frightening. It makes me feel anxious and a bit paralysed.
So – what to do? I was fortunate recently to attend some compassion training with Dr Amy Finlay-Jones and I realised how useful the practices we learned would be in this situation. To deepen my knowledge, I’m reading Pema Chodron’s ‘Welcoming the Unwelcome: Wholehearted Living in a Brokenhearted World’ which describes some of these practices in detail.
When I notice myself feeling paralysed by the uncertainty, I’m practising a version of the Buddhist ‘Tonglen’ (‘take and send’) breath meditation as described by Chodron. This practice feels like exactly the opposite of what you want to do with negative feelings – rather than suppress and reject them, you welcome those things into your heart (‘take’) in order to accept and process the suffering you are feeling.
Breathing out, you ‘send’ a feeling that’s the opposite of the suffering, the remedy to that feeling.
For example, if I’m feeling anxious, I would breathe in that anxiety – bringing it into my heart, acknowledging it – then breathing out I would focus on ‘calmness’.
While this can be a personal practice to manage your own feelings, in the Buddhist tradition it actually is used as a common humanity practice – breathing in and acknowledging the suffering in the world, and breathing out wellbeing for all humanity. Which is I’m sure what we genuinely are all wishing for. Without actually breathing on each other!
/Hannah Fitzhardinge