Recognize:

We need to try to be as aware of ourselves as possible and try to identify what it is we are feeling. Is it anger, hurt, or anxiety? Also, recognize how the emotion presents in our body; is our heart racing, our stomach hurting, are our shoulders tightening, etc?

Accept:

To accept is very hard to do because we habitually push hard emotions away because they don’t feel good and can feel scary. However, emotions are naturally very fluid and transitory so if we accept what we are feeling and do not resist then the emotion will flow through us much more quickly.

Inquiry:

In inquiry, we may observe the emotion shift in nature from one feeling to a different feeling and it may also begin to dissipate.

Non-Identification:

This is all about realizing that we, like all creatures, have feelings but we are not our feelings. We must realize that the way we feel is not “the truth”.

We all enjoy stories of adventure and people overcoming great odds to prevail in the end. Yet in our lives, we tend to want everything to be featureless plain sailing in which we somehow achieve our goals with minimal effort. This is because we always imagine ourselves at the finish line, not in the achievement process. Yet every very successful person has become that way because they loved and focused on the PROCESS of what they were doing. We need to see each obstacle as the wonderful opportunity that it is.

Modern technology platforms are designed to monetize our attention causing problems from minor time-wasting to significant exacerbation of anxiety and depression. Exploring the trade offs between this reality and the benefits the various platforms offer is an important group discussion and personal consideration. Everyone has a lot of experience with technology and we can use our collective experience to give detail to both the positive and negative sides of this equation.

Asking ourselves, “How do we want technology to function in our lives?” compared with “How is technology actually functioning in our lives?” gives us the opportunity to become more conscious and empowered. We can realize that despite norms of technology used everywhere, we are free to pick and choose when, where, and how we use technology. The psychology of social proof makes us feel that whatever is done by most people must be the right thing to do, but most adults used to smoke so social proof is clearly a dubious phenomenon to trust. Similarly, making choices about technology is not about willpower but about skill building and the use of choice architecture to make it easy for us to make the choices we decide we want to make.

Negativity is very common and very toxic. We feel negativity in the form of physical and emotional stress, anxiety, and even potential physical symptoms or depression. Negativity is not only a problem for us, it is also a problem for those around us because humans have things called neurological mirroring networks which means that emotional states are highly contagious. So positivity is very important, but it must be genuine. (NOTE: Positivity that is just a smile and a jaunty voice covering unhappy emotions is called toxic positivity because it is just as toxic as negativity. This makes sense because the negativity is all still there, it’s just being covered over, which doesn’t really fool anyone. We can feel it in our gut.)

In situations that are not optimal for us or even present severe challenges to us it is still possible, and highly desirable, to remain completely positive. In highly challenging situations like these, three positive options genuinely are available to us once we have developed the skill:

1. Take action or speak up to change the situation - if this is possible.

2. Leave the situation - if this is possible.

3. This option can be the hardest to understand and require the greatest growth. BUT IT IS SO WORTH IT!If neither of the above options is possible then we must accept the situation fully, until such time as one of the above options becomes possible. One helpful tool, when accepting a situation, is the concept of H.O.T (Helpful Other Thought). In order to fully accept a situation, we need to “flip the script” and begin to see the situation's other aspects/upsides. Once we are really good at this we embrace a situation for what it does have to offer us, as if we had chosen it. (This connects back to the earlier concept of The Obstacles ARE the Path.)

Surrender is often thought of as giving up, but that is not at all what we are talking about. When we consider any story of adventure and challenge there is always a moment when the protagonist has to let go of their previous ideas and attachments. In this moment the character is surrendering to the reality they are faced with. It is only after they manage to do this that they are capable of making decisions that respond to reality as it is. We are concerned with how this works in real life.

Movies, popular music, advertising, and common but misguided wisdom all imprint within us ideas of the perfect match of a person who fully understands us and can meet all our needs. Unsurprisingly, we fail to find this relationship. To add insult to injury every other real relationship in our lives with our parents, siblings, friends, and all romantic relationships falls far short of this mark. We can feel like failures.

WE need to see how bogus the idea of a person that fully understands us really is. How can one human being be all things to us? Realizing that no human on the planet has ever found a person who fully understands them is disillusioning but also liberating. We learn that we all need to put a kind of puzzle together of different people who can meet different parts of ourselves. We find that we CAN be understood, just not entirely by one special person. We also learn to value all our relationships for what they DO bring into our lives.

“Live in the moment”, “stay present”, and “take it a step at a time” are just a few of the many words of wisdom that have become increasingly commonplace over the last ten to twenty years. And yet it is incredibly hard to live in the present in our lives despite the HUGE benefits. We need a clear and literal understanding that time is purely a mental construct, a fiction, an illusion, and that we all live lives intertwined with this illusion. Let’s be very clear: It is an empirical fact that the past and the future do not exist except in our conceptual imaginations. Grasping this clearly is very helpful in increasing our ability to see how the concept of time is working hard against our ability to live in the present. If we learn that the past is nothing more than a memory trace in our brain we can see it more objectively and begin to liberate ourselves from replaying past moments (memory traces) over and over. We can learn that the future is nothing more than a fictitious mental projection of possible present moments to come as they may or may not play out. We must ask ourselves what value they have if they are not real. Both focus on the past and the future causing stress of different kinds. Focus on the present moment allows us to be at peace and let joy flow. (More detail on this in a later session.)

According to Adam Grant, we spend most of our time thinking as if we were a preacher, a prosecutor, or a politician. Essentially all of these are different variations of persuasion modes. The vast majority of us unconsciously use almost all of our mental energy trying to persuade others that our currently held beliefs are correct and they should change to our viewpoint (preacher), should join our bandwagon (politician), or that they are flat-out wrong (prosecutor). But if we can learn to switch from the habit of acting like a preacher, a prosecutor, or a politician and instead become more like an open-minded scientist then we gain all kinds of benefits: We are more relaxed because we are less invested in the outcomes of conversations, we have more fun because we are more likely to find flow in our conversations, and we learn so much more because we are not shutting out what others may have to teach us.

Time is a purely mental construct but we still need to deal with the reality that time is an integral part of our everyday life. For this reason, we need a clear distinction in our minds between what we can call CLOCK TIME (which we rely on) and PSYCHOLOGICAL TIME (which damages us).

CLOCK TIME is used to help us organize our daily life and to learn from experience. Examples of clock time are:

• Keeping a calendar and using schedules

• Referring to the time on a clock or a phone in order to be timely

• Thinking about something that went wrong in order to learn from it, before setting the memory trace aside and refocusing on the present

PSYCHOLOGICAL TIME is when the past or future becomes very real to us. We become identified with our past or future thinking and we are no longer available to the present moment and the reality unfolding around us. Examples of psychological time are:

• We know we have something important to do and we project many possible bad outcomes that stress us and make it harder to perform well when the event happens.

• OR we project some fantastic outcomes of the event creating unrealistic expectations that will not be met.

• Something went wrong and we replay it in our minds in a repetitive cycle over and over. As we do this we “relive” the event in our mind and re-experience the stress of the event. Our stress responses in our body are reactivated even though the event is over.

Being very clear about the difference between CLOCK TIME and PSYCHOLOGICAL is powerful. It enables us to become skillful users of clock time and increasingly good at non-identification with psychological time.

Being open to feedback is closely related to being open to rethinking, but this is a big step harder because it can feel even more personal. This is actually about us, not just some ideas we might have had. An additional huge benefit of feedback is a much more exciting life. Ordinary days become charged with adventure, vitality, and (believe it or not) joy once we are operating with a genuine feedback mindset. Becoming comfortable with feedback is very empowering because we feel so much less vulnerable. No longer do we fear criticisms because now we see them as useful information from which we can solve our problems. When we get good at feedback we stop taking things so personally, we are more relaxed, and the great added benefit is that we get better at the things we care about so much faster!

Feedback is also a very important element of ALL healthy relationships whether they be working or personal. There is no such thing as plain sailing in real human relationships. People are always going to rub each other the wrong way, miscommunicate in some way, and generally build up tension between them. Having the ability to communicate about these issues (feedback) with openness and without stress and resentment is literally relationship gold. As one inspirational piece of graffiti put it, “If you want comfortable relationships, you are going to have to have uncomfortable conversations.”

Nearly everyone gets caught up in cycles of thinking about the past that are repetitive, unproductive, stressful, and in essence negative. All of these unwelcome outcomes can be thought of as the result of too much past in our thinking. We can become increasingly aware of how this works within us once we know that too much focus on the past is the cause of guilt, regret, blame, sadness, and all forms of non-forgiveness of ourselves and others. These are all toxic states. With practice and increased awareness, we can literally feel the stress in our bodies once we become aware enough. Building our awareness of the toxicity of these states and their relationship to over-focusing on the past can empower us to refocus our thinking on the present because we actually have a greater understanding of what is stressing us. While mind control remains challenging, it is as if we have identified a clear area of danger from which we can walk away. Once our awareness builds up, we can feel our body relax as our focus moves towards more peaceful present moment locations.

Too much future in our thinking causes all forms of fear from anxiety to stress to nervousness all the way down to mild unease. What is the mechanism by which this happens? Essentially, when our thoughts are focused on future events we are very frenetic and very imaginative.

a) Frenetic: We might flit from one thing that needs doing to another, making a long list of everything we have not yet done. All of a sudden, we have taken a peaceful present moment and mentally picked up five, ten, or more, burdensome “to dos” and piled them on top of our psychees causing ourselves considerable stress and anxiety. Once we understand this very common mental trap we are better able to mentally put them all down again, enjoy a moment of inaction, or decide to take action one item at a time. When we do one thing at a time with all our intention we find flow. It is no longer burdensome, but fulfilling, peaceful, and pleasurable.

b) Imaginative: It is also common for our mind to focus on one significant future event of concern. When this happens our mind gets very creative, generating many possible “what if” scenarios. This is very stressful and anxiety-producing. We can often feel the significant effects of this in our poor bodies. All these mentally projected scenarios are so stressful because no one can deal with 5 things at once, which is what our minds are presenting us with. But in the present moment, the real world, outside our mental projections, only one reality is ever unfolding at once.

Living in a Winner/Loser culture creates great stress. Even if we are a “winner” today we always subconsciously know that we can be a “loser” tomorrow. When people in eastern cultures seek happiness they tend to succeed because their culture teaches them to seek well-being through community and connection. In contrast, when people in western cultures seek happiness they tend not to find it because our culture teaches us to seek it through status and wealth. Innumerable studies have shown that, despite every instinct we have to the contrary, power and wealth do not increase happiness at all. In fact, desiring status and wealth creates a cycle of aspiration that may be temporarily satisfied when a goal is met but will quickly turn to dissatisfaction and stress again as the fact that someone else has more status and wealth inevitably manifests itself. This all leads to the question, “HOW BIG SHOULD I BE?” Again, a lot of research shows that people are happiest and most at peace when they feel a part of something bigger than they are. For some people, religion can be very helpful in this way. For non-religious people, nature can help to “right size” themselves and realize that we are small in a huge universe. Counterintuitively, this realization, while it may be uncomfortable at first, comes with a sense of liberation and peace - as well it might. It is a return to our natural state.

Many of us have experienced the confusion of having set a goal for ourselves that then becomes very hard or impossible to achieve. It is very common to feel a sense of failure or believe that we lack the grit required to achieve this goal. Not necessarily according to Angela Duckworth. Contrary to popular belief, goal setting needs to be flexible and have a hierarchy. We need to establish high-level, intrinsically motivated, goals over a long period of exploration in which we learn what we really love to do. We also develop mid-level and lower-level “means to an end” goals that support our one to three highest-level goals. Having a deep understanding of our highest-level goals anchors us and can literally make us more gritty and persevering. When we have a clear long-term objective in our mind we can think strategically about how each day and each week fits into the whole picture. (And then we enjoy refocusing on the moment at hand, of course!) If our high-level goal has genuine intrinsic motivation for us, it can sustain us as we work on it for a long time. This process will rejuvenate us not wear us out. Having one to three highest-level goals allows us to make flexible, nimble, and adaptive decisions when our short-term goals need to be modified or swapped out for more effective short-term options.

Equally as important as knowing the value of highest-level goals and goal hierarchy is knowing that determining our highest-level goals usually takes a LONG time and LOTS of experience. It is very common for teenagers and young adults to feel bad that they do not know what they really want to do for the rest of their lives. But even young people who think they know what they want to do are unlikely to be right. They are unlikely to have had enough life experience to know what kinds of activities are really a good fit for them. Simply learning that not knowing is normal and is fine can be important and empowering in itself.