How to Think of the Future in Times of Uncertainty

At times of crisis and uncertainty, thinking of the future can be a real source of anxiety. Our creative minds can come up with all kinds of peril, which can either be a resource for preparedness or a recipe for an upset stomach and a stiff neck.  Folk wisdom offers a direction: “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”  Makes sense, but still we can often find ourselves caught in imaging our financial or physical demise in some personal dystopia. In the practice of mindfulness, we receive practical guidance on how to get good at remaining in the present moment while not ostriching our heads into the sand; we learn to distinguish between two kinds of tomorrows: the strategic future and the psychological future. 

We all need to think of tomorrow, and prepare with our best guesses of what we need to show up, ready to engage. We need to use our imagination to open options that didn’t exist before.  And we need to create reminders of our obligations so we stay on track.  That way we can use creativity, memory, and experience to identify the best tactics and strategies to engage life as “the future” unfolds day to day. 

The psychological future, however, is different. This is an unconscious process whereby we imagine what life will feel like when X happens, or when Y doesn’t happen.  It’s the narrative that includes our sense of safety as well as suffering. It’s a way for the brain to create a “self of the future” and activate the body through feelings so we take action. 

However, as we live in a much more complex physical and social environment, this evolutionary function of projecting ourselves into an imagined felt future is typically overwrought and inaccurate. It doesn’t serve us well all too often. 

Many of the difficult circumstances that were legitimately present in my life (for instance, my mother’s rapid Alzheimer’s decline) were imagined to be much worse than they were in later experience. Her disease was so much more horrific in my imagination than what actually transpired.  At first I suffered tremendously  - in fact, more than she did by the estimation of her doctor and what we, her children, observed in her.  But once I was able to stay with what was actually happening moment to moment, I saw that most of the time she was at peace, and I was able to let go of what I imagined was yet to come.

Being identified (lost in thought) with the psychological future makes us suffer long before the actual suffering, and usually in a more intense way.  It also can, in extreme examples, create a confirmation bias that seeks to validate our beliefs about ourselves and the situation, despite evidence to the contrary. We can cling unwittingly to our suffering because we can’t see any other way to interpret the events and our experience of them. 

To practice this in life under after-effects of over a year in quarantine and the ongoing relationship with COVID-19 that seems inevitable, prepare with good facts and sensible application to your situation by imagining what you would need to do if you or someone important to you were to become sick; but guard your mind from imagining the horror of it. 

Speak with your financial planner about your monthly budget, investments, and portfolio, and make good decisions, but guard your mind from imagining being fearful, destitute, and desperate as a result of global markets or the effects of climate change on economies. 

Mindfulness offers us the ability to become pragmatic and rational; when our inner resources are not expended by fearful and anxious “future tripping”, we open to the truth of being safe right now, this moment, and open to a stronger sense of compassion, connection, creativity, and hope.

A recent study from North Carolina State University finds that people who manage to balance living in the moment with planning for the future are best able to weather daily stress without succumbing to negative moods.

"It's well established that daily stressors can make us more likely to have negative affect, or bad moods," says Shevaun Neupert, a professor of psychology at NC State and corresponding author of a paper on the recent work. "Our work here sheds additional light on which variables influence how we respond to daily stress."

Specifically, the researchers looked at two factors that are thought to influence how we handle stress: mindfulness and proactive coping.

Mindfulness is when people are centered and living in the moment, rather than dwelling in the past or worrying about the future. Proactive coping is when people engage in planning to reduce the likelihood of future stress.

To see how these factors influence responses to stress, the researchers looked at data from 223 study participants. The study included 116 people between the ages of 60 and 90, and 107 people between the ages of 18 and 36. All of the study participants were in the United States.

All of the study participants were asked to complete an initial survey in order to establish their tendency to engage in proactive coping. Participants were then asked to complete questionnaires for eight consecutive days that explored fluctuations in mindfulness. On those eight days, participants were also asked to report daily stressors and the extent to which they experienced negative mood.

The researchers found that engaging in proactive coping was beneficial at limiting the effect of daily stressors, but that this advantage essentially disappeared on days when a participant reported low mindfulness.

"Our results show that a combination of proactive coping and high mindfulness result in study participants of all ages being more resilient against daily stressors," Neupert says. "Basically, we found that proactive planning and mindfulness account for about a quarter of the variance in how stressors influenced negative affect.

"Interventions targeting daily fluctuations in mindfulness may be especially helpful for those who are high in proactive coping and may be more inclined to think ahead to the future at the expense of remaining in the present."

And it all can begin right now, this moment, as you are reading this.

The Soldiers of Compassion

I remember where I was when Elvis died, and Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson.  And Prince.

Those moments awaken us in the middle of our daydreams with the incomprehensible, the tragic. So it was Sunday, January 26th, 2020, when I learned of the tragic death of former Laker, Kobe Bryant, along with eight others, as their helicopter crashed into the fog-shrouded terrain of Calabasas, CA.

I’m not by nature a sports fan, but I’ve worked with sports teams and athletes in applying mindfulness skills to manage stress and optimize performance, and I was deeply affected by the sudden and horrific nature of the accident and the epic loss of innocent life.  I was also deeply touched by the world’s public cries of loss and grief.  

In the days that followed, I sat in my therapist’s chair across from several men who confessed many things: they’d lost a hero, and seemingly a part of themselves; they’d been shocked by their naivete’ in their unchecked belief that people like Kobe are safe from harm; that there was sometimes guilt for having not truly recognized how deeply his story affected them, and now it felt too late. 

Many men also were struggling with how to express their feelings.  They were unsure of what grief was, what it should look like, whether it was OK to share it with another guy beyond statements of shock or disbelief.

I shared with them what I myself had experienced directly that fateful Sunday, something which galvanized just what it might be to live in this in-between place of stability and insecurity.

On January 26th I was at a seminar along with about fifty others at the Inosanto Academy of Martial Arts, six hours of training with two amazing masters: kung fu phenom, Francis Fong, and the world-renowned Dan Inosanto, Bruce Lee’s best friend, training partner, and heir to Lee’s legacy of ideas about combat and self-actualization.  At 84-years old, with a wry smile and radiant generosity, “Guro” Dan moved like a dancer and relayed the history of Filipino, Indonesian, and Malaysian martial arts like a scholar.

We were deep into the end of a training block, repeating drills to music, when the music stopped.  We all turned towards Guro Dan to receive the next drill.  Instead we saw he was on the phone, and assumed he turned the music down to take the call.  We went back to doing our reps when soon he walked to the middle of the floor with tears in his eyes.

“Kobe Bryant just died in a helicopter accident.  So we’re going to break and come back after lunch.” He couldn’t hold his gaze anywhere near us.  Stunned, we walked to our gear and our phones to learn more.

At a somber lunch, we learned from a senior instructor that Guro Dan had known the Bryant family for years, and had even trained some of Kobe’s bodyguards in tactical self-defense.  This loss was global, immediate, and for him, personal.

We returned to train for the second half of the seminar with Sifu Fong, Guro Dan nowhere to be seen.  At the end of the seminar, as we broke to leave, I gathered my things and made my way to the exit.  And there, on the driveway, sat Guro Dan in a lawn chair next to a student.  He was silent, staring out into infinity, eyes moist, tears streaming down his cheeks. 

My presence stirred him, and he bid me farewell, I paid my respects, and drove home.

It struck me, what had just transpired: Here was an enormously accomplished martial arts master, who could dispatch most assailants with his bare hands or with a rolled-up magazine, a man who is synonymous with lethality and discipline and embodied knowledge. And when he could have toughened up and shown a stoic face, launching into a lecture on how “death can come at any moment”, or could have retreated to his office to hide his emotions from his students, he instead chose to embody his authentic experience: his heart was breaking. And he not only wasn’t ashamed of it, he was willing to share it with all of us.

Each man with whom I shared that story in therapy seemed to take it in as a new possibility, a new archetype to model oneself around, and to nurture into their own unique expression.  In the coming weeks, guided by each client’s own needs, we might explore how to rest with difficulty, how to sit in the fire of anger, how to be present with mortality, and how to open to joy.

That archetype, one we need for the 21st Century, for the Sixth Extinction Period, the Anthropocene, is the Soldier of Compassion: striving to blend dialectic qualities of being – strength and vulnerability, rest and action, aggression and tenderness – in an adaptive, creative, flexible process of becoming.  It’s not a martial arts thing, or even a male or female thing.  It’s a human thing – a demonstration of the range of emotion and connection that make a man or woman capable of responding to the beauty and terror of life with dignity, authenticity, resilience, and meaning.

The Heart of Mindfulness

The Heart of Mindfulness

“Mindfulness” refers to a particular kind of meditation practice, as well as a particular state of awareness.  But it also refers to the skill of “keeping in mind” or remembering, and for a long time, that may be its most important meaning as we struggle to unlock its potential.

Remembering what?

We have been given the capacity for attention, the directional viewfinder of awareness itself, and because what we are aware of shapes our reality, attention is precious.  Like a compass, mindful attention can help us find our way back to ourselves in the midst of turbulence while moving into the experience of Now.  We have been given attention, but almost immediately we forget!  So in the beginning, and for a long time after, we need to remember to use what is given.

When we do remember to pay attention – intimately – to our inner and outer experience, we also need to learn how to fully accept and let go.  The path toward becoming whole, becoming fully human, is to continually develop equanimity in the face of all we experience, the good, the bad, and the uneventful.  Then we might see that our awareness is always there, in the background, like the boundless blue sky that is always there no matter the weather, if we look far enough.  That awareness, when it’s related to the whole range of my human experience through mindful attention, is called presence.

When I am more present, I might be moved by perennial questions: Who am I?   Why are we here?  What way shall I live?  When these questions are alight in us, we are empowered to set out to find our path.

Can Mindfulness Become a Habit?

In one of my classes last year a very perceptive student asked this question: can mindfulnes become a habit?

She asked it sheepishly, as if she were treading into fuzzy territory.  My answer?

Yes and no.  Fuzzy as it gets!

There are many prominent teachers who use the word "habit" in describing what comes from consistent practice of mindfulness meditation.  And, of course, there are habits that skilfully support one's values, aims, and actions, and there are those that don't.  But although the act of bringing oneself to practice mindfulness can be supported by habit, the state of mindful awareness itself cannot become habitual.  Let me say that again:

You cannot phone-in mindful awareness.

Just as there are several dimensions to 'mindfulness' (a particular collection of exercises; the act of remembering; a state of awarenesss), so, too, are there multiple definitions of 'habit' (images of The Flying Nun come to mind). Because we're concerned primarily with qualities of awareness in this conversation, here is the definition that seems most apropo:

"habit: an acquired mode of behavior that has become nearly or completely involuntary."                                  (Merriam-Websters 2013)

It is true that we can create skillful meditation practice habits.  I can cultivate a habit of practicing sitting meditation every morning after a cup of coffee.  I can nurture the habit of reflecting each morning on how to bring mindfulness into my day.  I can invite the habit of choosing to eat my weekly dinner with my dad with mindfulness.  Here neuroscience paints a clear picture: neurons that fire together, wire together.  By repeating the timing and associations of these activities and paring them with efforts of directed attention, 'good' habits are formed.

How is that different from mindful awareness itself being a habit?

From living a life that includes meditation, we see with experience that higher states of awareness are rarely involuntary, though that can happen (think: moments of crisis, physical danger, shocking news, falling in love, etc.). For most of us, most of the time, it is our ordinary states of awareness that are habitual; in, fact, research shows that our default state of awareness is mind wandering.  Anything beyound that requires either an outside stimulus or an inner, voluntary action.  To expand our often narrow field of awareness, it takes something intentional, like sitting still for twenty minutes, letting go of control, and watching very closely.  It's something akin to swimming against the stream.  However, once the effort to attend is let go of, the current (habitual ways of being) sweep us away again.

The relationship of meditation skill to mindful awareness is similar to what a musician achieves through practice. They rehearse a piece of music until it is memorized and 'in the body'; when it comes time to perform, there is an aspect of technique that is involuntary and habitual (body position, finger movements, keeping time, etc.), but the life of the music is brought about by an opening to feeling.  This can only be accomplished through a voluntary awareness of what arises in the experience of playing the music, moment by moment.

Could you imagine Dizzy Gillespie blowing his trumpet habitually?  Phoning it in?

Similarly, in the practice of mindfulness, I can create habits that reduce the obstacles, distractions, and contradictions that threaten practice so that there is less resistance to arriving 'on the cushion'.  After a while, engaging practice gets easier.  But the act of opening to awareness itself?  This requires my being fully awake to what I'm aware of in the moment, and the inevitable, immediate reactions that follow, which tend to narrow my awareness as I become identified with what's going on rather than observing it intimately. This can only be voluntary.  

That's why we often hear in various teachings that in each moment there is the possibility of choice: I can become gently aware of my being in whatever condition I find myself, notice the reactions with kindness, and open further to remain aware of all that follows in my immediate experience.  But it's a living, dynamic, fragile choice, not a habit.  When I know this through experience, I may have many more moments of music in my mindfulness.