Don’t Empty Your Head, Fill It!

A walk in the park can be one in which you are meditative or one in which you are considering the deadlines you have at work.  If you are doing the latter, you will certainly miss the experience of walking in the park.  To make it a truly meditative experience, you must decide in advance to notice as much as you possibly can.  If you are noticing what is around you, it’s impossible to be thinking about your deadlines at work.  Turn off that Blackberry and all other electronic devices for the duration of your walk.  Allow yourself this time in peace and utter awareness.

Because you are actively walking and intentionally looking,  you should be able to “see” what you may have previously taken for granted.  Notice the flora and the fauna – all trees, shrubs, grass, plants, seeds, dogs, squirrels, chipmunks, birds, fish, insects.  All stones, paths, fields, streams, lakes, puddles, soil.  Sky, clouds, temperature, breezes.  Sounds and smells.  Rustling of leaves.  Falling of leaves. Leaves under foot.  Sit on a bench.  Watch the people walking by.  Notice their clothing, their height, their facial expressions, the way they walk or jog, their voices (certainly THEY will be on their cell phones but YOU will not.)

Things that might come into your field of attention:  a Monarch butterfly, a white dove taking flight, a fish jumping up from the water, a heron swooping in for a landing, a  group of pigeons, a child blowing soap bubbles, a kite flying on high, two lovers kissing in the grass –  this could go on and on but you’re getting the message.  There are hundreds of things to see on your walk in the park, if only you would notice them.

You probably never imagined there would be so much to notice.  Stay focused on every detail for as long as you can.  You don’t have to label what you see, hear and smell.  You don’t need to form an opinion about it. If you try to form an opinion about any of it, you will miss the next thing you need to notice.  Just stay with noticing.  That’s all.

Meditation Requires You To Empty Your Mind of Thoughts and You Just Can’t Do That.

Meditation has no requirements beyond being in the moment.

There are many ways to practice meditation long before you ever sit down in the lotus position.  No sense trying to force this on yourself.  Meditation should come easily, naturally.  If you try to force it, it will never happen.

There are many ways to be ”in the moment.”  Practicing some of these will automatically take you out of your thinking mind and into your attentive mind.  Pick what appeals to you and give it a try.  Some of the suggestions are active, others more passive.  All serve to get you to the same place.  Bringing more and more attentive moments into your life sets the stage for a deeper form of meditation.  For now, just practice being in awareness.  The more you do, the better you will get at it.

Wash the dishes instead of placing them in an automatic dishwasher.  It sounds so retro, doesn’t it?  But give it a try. Fill up the tub of your sink with hot, sudsy water.  Use a natural sponge and go for it.  There’s something about having suds up to your elbows that is very satisfying. You can get lost in a sink full of dishes.  By lost, we mean that you can just stay with this project without having a million thoughts firing off in your head. Keep the focus on those dishes.  Enjoy the suds and the warm water.  Many people find washing the dishes to be a relaxing activity.  Just don’t try it with the kids and the dog running around the kitchen.  This needs to be a solitary endeavor after a satisfying meal when everyone else in the house has retired to another corner to do their own thing.  Washing the dishes while talking on the phone is also forbidden.   No television watching, no radio playing, no iPod earphones. You can’t get into a meditative state unless you give yourself over to those dishes.  No multi-tasking, please.

The idea is just to be one with the dishwashing.  It is an extension of you.  Allow yourself to “melt” into the motions, the sensations, the fragrances.  Scrub when necessary – give it your all.  Gently rinse.  See the shine, feel the clean.  Be one with the task.  Permit yourself to enjoy the experience rather than loathe it.  How does that make you feel?

Some of you will like this, others may not.  Don’t give up.  There are many more ideas for getting into the moment.  The important thing is that you enjoy it.  If you don’t enjoy it, you won’t do it.  The idea is for you to do it.  Not to feel forced or like you “should.”  There are no “shoulds” in meditation.

You Don’t Have Time To Meditate?

A meditation only takes a moment.  Giving over your focus to the moment you are in constitutes a meditation.  There, you’re done.  That was easy, wasn’t it?

With some practice, you may be able to string together several of these moments.  But take your time with it.  A good way to start is to make a conscious decision at least once per day, if not more often, to notice the moment you are in – or to gain awareness as the case may be.  Amazingly, we have a tendency to march through our day trying to accomplish many goals, crossing things off our to-do lists, and generally being efficient.  In the process, we tend to miss even the simplest of things.  Life just happens all around us but because we’re not focused on it, we miss seeing it.  Set an alarm clock if you don’t think you’ll remember to stop to notice a moment.  Let that be your signal to pause whatever you are doing and observe.  With any one or all of your senses.

An easy way to begin is to notice your breath. We take breathing for granted.  Our body’s autonomic nervous system keeps us breathing throughout the day and while we’re asleep but mostly, we never notice this.  Breath is the gift of life.  You can pay homage to your breath quite easily by stopping yourself every now and then to notice it.  We call this conscious breathing.  Take a deep breath and exhale slowly with a discernable sigh.  Do it again.  And a few more times.  You can do this sitting at your desk, driving in your car, standing on line – pretty much anytime and anywhere the mood strikes you.  No one will even realize you are doing it.  Since you breathe all day, you don’t need to set aside a special time to do it – you are already doing it, you’re simply not aware of it.  Bringing attention to the breath is the oldest and simplest way to meditate.

Anyone Can Meditate, Even You

If your idea of meditating brings to mind the vision of a swami sitting cross-legged in lotus position chanting Om for hours on end, then it’s time to update your thinking.  Meditation can take on many forms.  All that is needed is some experimentation to find what works for you.  The more rules you impose upon yourself, the less likely you will be successful at meditating.

Of course, you could end up growing your meditation into something akin to the mystical swami.  But that would require great devotion and plenty of practice.  When we decide we’d like to learn how to play the piano, we don’t think that from the very first moment we place our hands on the keys that a Beethoven concerto will miraculously come out of us.  We take it one step at a time, learning the keys, the fingering, the pedals, the sharps from the flats, the chords, the scales – each piece of the puzzle finally comes together and soon enough, we are able to play the concerto.

And so it is with meditation.  If you’ve taken a meditation class, chances are you were asked to sit on the floor, empty your mind of thoughts and focus on a mantra or a vision that would help you stay focused.  Perhaps, someone speaking words of wisdom guided you in your meditation.  And the longer you sat there, the more of a struggle it became.  Thoughts of every variety kept invading your mind space.  You might have kept trying to bring your focus back only to find your mind wandering endlessly away from where you were.

Instead of starting at the end, let’s start at the beginning.  You start wherever you are at the moment.  Just recognizing and giving credence to the moment you are in right now, is a form of meditation.  So stop right now, wherever you are, and pay attention.  Look around you and notice your surroundings.  Don’t put a name or a label on the place; just see it with eyes wide open.  Now listen to whatever sounds are around you.  Again, don’t categorize them or try to figure out where they’re coming from, just listen.  Now sniff the air – what smells are there?  As before, there is no need to know what the smells are or from where they emanate, just that they are there and you can discern them.  Try swirling your tongue around in your mouth and notice any tastes.  By now you know that you don’t need to identify the tastes but just to notice their existence.  Lastly, stroke a tree, a dog, or your pants leg.  Notice how it feels.  You don’t need to know that it’s soft or rough.  You only need to know that you have felt something.

In the few moments it took for you to do these simple things, you engaged all five of your senses and focused on each of them.  And in so doing, you meditated.  Congratulations.

My Father, Myself

I know, I know – it’s been a long time. I took this past year to mourn the loss of my father. He was an important force in my life. I really needed the year to grieve. In his honor, I am posting the eulogy I gave at his funeral a year ago:

My father was a mensch. Mensch is a Yiddish term meaning “a person of integrity and honor, someone to admire and emulate, someone of noble character. The key to being “a real mensch” is nothing less than character, strong moral integrity, dignity, a sense of what is right, responsible, correct. My father was the very embodiment of mensch-hood.

Underneath a sometimes gruff exterior, Dad was a gentleman. Beloved by every group of people he had ever encountered, it was sometimes hard to understand as his child how so many people could adore him. What they could see was his authenticity, his desire to give of himself, to help those who were in need, without expectation of anything in return or for unnecessary accolades. He was genuine, the real deal. He walked his talk and held himself to the same high standards he expected of others.

As a salesman in the schmata trade, he was the go-to guy. If a colleague found himself suddenly unemployed, Dad would work tirelessly to help him find a new job. He didn’t just do that once or twice, but numerous times over his 50 year career, endearing himself to countless garment center workers. He did this because he could and because it seemed right.

Dad also helped to found a small Jewish congregation in Yonkers, meeting at first in the basement of the historic St. John’s Church on Underhill Street, and later becoming the Midchester Jewish Center. But as the formation of the synagogue progressed, Dad became disenchanted with several of the board members whose motives he questioned. And true to his convictions, he upped and left rather than compromise his position. He was not one to play politics in order to fit in.

The highlight of his life was the 64 years of marriage to his wife, my mother, Irene. They met as teenagers in the Bronx, and married young. He was a skinny kid with a big nose and I’m sure he felt he had hit the jackpot marrying this beautiful strawberry blonde with big green eyes and freckles. He was devoted to her in a way few men can muster, caring for her in her own illness with love and dedication.

He was also a devoted father and family man. An expert at pressing clothing, learned from his father, a tailor, he admonished us not to share the family secret that he was doing all of our ironing. Men didn’t do such things in the 1950’s, nor change dirty diapers, do the laundry, or cook the best eggs for breakfast. But he did. He was a FATHER in every sense of the word, directly involved in our lives and offering the kind of love, affection and involvement that most men of his generation did not. This kind of love extended to his grandchildren. My daughter, Lily, became a friend and companion to her grandpa. I’m sure Lily was not supposed to tell on him when he made endless root beer floats for her. They would share these root beer floats while watching back-to-back reruns of Law and Order and CSI.

And Dad was a friend to many. But no one more importantly than his dearest friend, Sam Graff. Friends for 65 years, they shared countless pranks, laughter, and Dewar’s Scotch. After Sam moved to Texas to live with his daughter, Dad and Sam could no longer see one another. They worried about each other’s health and they spoke to each other by phone pretty much every week. When Sam could not reach Dad, he’d call me to make sure everything was okay. And Dad would do the same, calling Sam’s daughter, Shelly, or his son, Arnold, if he could not reach Sam directly. This past year proved to be a difficult one for both Sam and Dad. Sam passed away in September leaving Dad the last man standing. Dad went into the voting booth on November 4th and pulled the lever for Barack Obama. He and Sam shared a passion for getting Obama elected, progressive for men of their age. And Dad felt proud and happy to do this simple act on behalf of his beloved friend. But without Sam, Dad was never quite the same again.

Dad had gotten frail in the last few months. I quipped with him in the hospital the other day that he was looking remarkably like Mahatma Gandhi. On Wednesday afternoon, I closed the door to his hospital room and played a Tibetan singing bowl for him for over an hour – a Buddhist tradition – while chanting to him in Hindu. He had come to love these healing sounds, introduced to him by his favorite doctor. In the last several years, Dad willingly tried some new things – meditation, Hindu prayer services, extreme nutritional support, and traveling on his own. He crafted a new life out of one that had broken and left him feeling sad and less physiologically sound. And he kept on going, with purpose, with conviction, with grace. Later on Wednesday evening, after all of his children had left for the night, Dad passed ever so calmly and quietly into the void.

For the past five or six years, Dad and I have been almost connected at the hip. I am the child most like him, for better and for worse. So if I’m sometimes direct and in your face, you will recognize that I’m a chip off the old block. But also know that I’m true to my core, that I stand for decency and equality, and that I will defend my convictions with an amount of certitude that might frighten you. And then you might be tempted to say, “Just like Irv.”

Avoidance of Hunger

Hunger is a potent fear for many.  It is a scary fact that  many people snack all day long in order to avoid getting hungry.   And what will happen if we allow hunger to arrive? We would be ravenous and eat anything that was not nailed down.  We would eat our best friend’s first child. We would eat until we burst a gut. In other words, we would be hopelessly out of control.

Now let’s get a little rational here. I’m talking hunger, not starvation.  Food is never further away than your refrigerator or a local convenience store that is open 24/7. The scenario is not that you are on a deserted island with no food.  We tend to eat each meal as if it is our last.  Like food will never be there again for us.  But it is.  Three meals a day, every day.  We never need to eat it all right now because we can always eat it again later or tomorrow if we want.  We’re lucky that way.  We have an overabundance of food.

Where did this fear of hunger come from?  Dieting.  We eat those little tiny meals that the diet dictocrats tell us to eat on the schedule they prescribe and we are famished.  We hyper-focus on when we are “allowed” to eat again and count the minutes until the next rice cake.  The low calorie meals don’t satisfy.  An hour after eating, we’re feeling hunger pangs again.  The only way to quell it is to take a permitted snack.  And another.  And another.  We put up with the whole thing because we are desperate to lose weight.  And in the process we learn a distorted way of eating.  We override our natural instincts and become slaves to diet mentality. 

In one of my workshops almost none of the participants ate three meals each day.  When I asked them to fill out food diaries the first week, they fabricated meals to put into the breakfast, lunch and dinner slots.  Most said they were not eating snacks in between.  Except for one woman who admitted to only snacking and not eating meals.  One by one, the others fessed up – they, too, were grazing like cows on pasture all day.  They could not discern one meal from another because they ate constantly.  No one knew what it meant to feel hungry because they never got hungry.  And no one knew what it meant to be satisfied because they never stopped eating.

That would explain why the “meals” they recorded were so small – they were nothing more than snacks that happened to fall at mealtimes.  It’s easy to eat small “meals” if you don’t allow yourself to get hungry.  The funny part was that most of these women did not acknowledge all the eating that went on in between “meals.”  Like if they ate at other than mealtimes, the food didn’t count.  And that seemed really to be at the bottom of the whole charade – they could fool themselves into thinking that they really weren’t eating much – certainly those who ate “meals” with them saw small quantities being consumed.  It was all the eating that wasn’t seen, that wasn’t counted, that explained why these women were overweight.

Snacking is the antithesis of normalized eating.  If you eat enough food to satisfy at each of three meals, you should remain sated for at least 4 if not 6 hours after.  Sometimes, patients don’t believe me on this one.  It’s been so long since they ate only 3 meals per day (if ever) that they can’t remember what that feels like.  The diet doctors that told you to eat three small meals and snacks in between are wrong.  They’re blatantly telling you not to trust your intuitive ability to know when you want to eat and when you’ve had enough.  Continuing this practice keeps you in diet mentality.

If you are paying attention to your signals of hunger and satiety, you will not starve and you will not overeat.  If you have gotten yourself into the above scenario, it may take some time and practice before you can normalize your eating patterns.  And to trust your body to do the right thing.

Diet Mentality

What do I mean by “diet mentality?”  Of course, “being on a diet” means you are in diet mentality.  But many people who don’t think of themselves as “being on a diet” are also in diet mentality.  It occurs when you are eating in a prescribed way, usually involving the monitoring of food intake by some arbitrary guideline like calorie totals, fat or carbohydrate content of foods, glycemic index, portion size control, prescribed times to eat meals and snacks, avoidance of hunger, compulsively weighing yourself on the scale, obsessively thinking about food all day – what you can and cannot eat – and any other forced and unnatural relationship with food.  In other words, a way of eating that requires a deprivation of any kind.  Eating low-fat food is deprivation. Eliminating a food or food group from your eating repertoire is deprivation. Having to calculate anything is deprivation.

If you’ve lived most of your life in diet mentality, and most of us have, you may think this a normal course of events, a perfectly sane way to live.  It is not.  Dieting is something relatively new in human development.  And as soon as some people realized it would be a way to profit from other folks’ insecurities about themselves, the diet industry was born.   We’ve heard all the scientific information that will make the next great diet a success, but alas, it never is.  Yet for some reason we just keep on trying the next new diet, and the next.  Why?  Because we don’t seem to know that there is any other way. 

How about just eating what you want when you’re hungry?  Don’t trust yourself?  We’ve learned over the years that we are not to be trusted making a food choice. We obviously don’t know what is good for us or we wouldn’t be trying to lose weight in the first place. If we’re given free rein to make food choices we might always pick Twinkies rather than something good for us.  If we are not told what to eat and how much to eat, we will always make bad choices.  At least that’s what we think.  But maybe our bodies are smarter than we are.  And just maybe given free choice, knowing we can have a Twinkie anytime we want, that Twinkie will seem a lot less important to us.  Do you really think all you will ever want to eat again is Twinkies?  Probably not.

Millions of people make food choices every day without consulting the scientists or the diet doctors or the government agencies.  They eat balanced diets just the way their ancestors have always done.  They scoff at us for being so foolish.  And they stay slimmer, have less chronic disease, and have longer life expectancies than us.  Yet they’ve not spent one day of their lives in diet mentality.  You can be one of those people.

Hunger and Satiety

Eat when you are hungry.  Stop when you are satisfied.  Sounds pretty simple, right?  It should be simple but as it turns out, it’s not.  We all have the ability to do this naturally and as toddlers, we do.  Toddlers know when they want to eat and also know when they’ve had enough.  It is at this crucial part of our development where things generally go wrong.  Parents think they know better how much to feed their child and so exercise all kinds of tomfoolery, or worse, dictatorial authority, to get their little ones to eat more.  They also tend to choose the appropriate times for meals, regardless of whether that is also the time their child is hungry.  If you are a parent and you are doing this, STOP!  Your little one is perfectly capable of knowing when they want to eat and when they’ve had enough.  Just provide them with healthy food and then relax and let them make their own decisions about when and how much.  They do truly know better than you.

Chances are, you were also coaxed by your parents to ignore your body’s innate ability to know when and how much to eat.  I bet you can remember being told that there were starving children in the world and so it was your duty to finish everything on your plate lest it go to waste in a world where hunger was felt by millions.  There really is no connection between the hungry masses’ access to food and the scraps on our plates.  Just a simple trick to play at our guilt and cause us to eat more than we wish.  We are being asked by our parents to bypass our natural instinct to know when we’ve had enough and instead determine our “portion” by what’s on our plates – a dilemma that we will see later, comes back to haunt us in spades. 

If you have learned bad habits, it can be hard to change unless change is what you truly desire.  Diet mentality is not a normal response to food.  It’s a learned response to food.  The first step in shutting down your calculated eating patterns is to be aware that you practice them.  The only way back to our innate abilities is to bring awareness to our eating.  To stop eating at prescribed times instead of when we actually feel hungry.  To tap into our desires to eat certain foods and do that rather than what we were told to eat by a diet prescription.  To understand physically what it feels like to be satisfied by food and be able to stop before we reach the stage of overeating into a groan.  At first, it requires deliberate effort and practice.  But eventually, the natural instinct returns.  Soon it becomes the default reaction to eating.  When you are free to feel hungry and to satisfy that hunger with the food of your choice, you are liberated from diet mentality.  For many people, this alone is enough to cause weight loss and maintenance of a normal weight for a lifetime.

Stop Dieting NOW

Eating should be a joyful activity.  We do it, hopefully three times each day, to keep our bodies running.  However, diet mentality is so pervasive in our society that eating has become a painful activity fraught with psychological, emotional, and cultural implications.  We deprive ourselves, fret over food choices, and punish ourselves regularly for not getting it all “just right.”  These many dramas are played out with the support of corporate interests, government, the medical profession, and often, even our own mothers to the point that we don’t know there is another way to live, another way to eat.  Fortunately, there are many other cultures around the world where these daily dramas do not exist.  We have an opportunity to learn what works so well in those cultures that we seem to have forgotten over the last 40 years.  Overweight and chronic illness do not have to be the norm.  These conditions are mostly caused by poor lifestyle choices and can almost always be reversed by making better choices.

Key factors in any weight stabilization plan:

1.  Learning to eat when hungry and stop when satisfied.

2.  Procuring, preparing and eating food from quality sources – not fast food, junk food, processed and packaged food.

3.  No deprivation.  No calorie counting, no carb counting, no fat counting, no glycemic index counting.  Eat what you like and when you want as long as you start eating when you are hungry and stop eating when you are satisfied.

4.  Get some moderate exercise every day.  This is actually more important for your health than your weight.  You don’t have to go to a gym – just do what you were meant to do – walk, climb, lift, pull, push, bend.

5.  Don’t be fooled by ploys like Weight Watcher’s now saying they are not a diet.  It’s become fashionable to say diets are taboo but only if you are not a diet in sheep’s clothing.  For Weight Watchers to say they are not a diet, they would have to stop telling you to eat low-fat products and stop asking you to count anything, points or otherwise. If you are hyper-focused on how much and what goes in your mouth, you are on a diet.  Let go of diet mentality.

6.  Be aware of health issues that will thwart your efforts to lose weight.  Food addictions (most commonly to sugar, alcohol and caffeine) and food allergies and sensitivities (most commonly to cow dairy, wheat, egg, soy, corn)  – both may be indications of deeper health issues.  If you suffer frequently from indigestion, insomnia, fatigue, stress, frequent respiratory infections, thyroid or hormone issues, your weight may be affected.  If you take prescription or over-the-counter medications regularly, they may be causing overweight.  If you have one or more chronic conditions you may be unable to lose weight.  Dieting may have caused these conditions and can exacerbate them further.

You don’t need to give up; you only need to change the way you think about weight loss.  Bringing some sanity back to the way you approach food is at the very least, liberating.  But far more than that, it will most likely change your life for the better in myriad ways.  Walk this path with me.

LETTER: The New York Times

Children: Higher Expectations Help Fight Asthma
By Eric Nagourney

Published: October 13, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/health/research/14chil.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

To the Editor:

Having suffered asthma myself I can tell you that the best way to raise parents’ expectations for their asthmatic children is not by having them accept that asthma is a chronic ailment and administer drugs more aggressively as suggested in Mr. Nagourney’s article but to offer them the hope of curing the illness without the use of drugs at all.  I cured my asthma using acupuncture, naturopathy, and homeopathy after the conventional doctors had given up on me.  They told me that my asthma would be chronic and debilitating and the best I could look forward to was a lifetime using steroidal drugs and inhalers.  Refusing to accept those terms, I sought and found relief and a total cure elsewhere.  I’ve not had an asthma attack since 1995.

Unfortunately, conventional doctors have a limited bag of tricks when it comes to many so-called “chronic” illnesses.  Worse yet is that they won’t admit to their limitations and leave you uninformed that there may be options for a cure with which they are unfamiliar.  My asthma was so severe that had I not sought alternative ideas for healing, I might not be alive today.

Asthma in children is particularly difficult for many reasons.  These children tend to miss school, must opt out of activities that could bring on an asthma attack, and have drugs administered at school all of which bring physical and psychological hardship upon the child.  In addition, the drugs themselves could be doing more harm than good by causing a cascade of physiological events that can further debilitate the child. Not to mention the hardship of having to experience the inability to breathe.  This is a tough way to start out in life.

For parents who are interested in a cure, there are two books I recommend they read to inform themselves of their options – one is the newly published The Allergy and Asthma Cure: A Complete 8-Step Nutritional Programby Dr. Fred Pescatore and the other is Reversing Asthma: Breathe Easier with This Revolutionary New Programby Dr. Richard Firshein.  Curing asthma is possible.

Sincerely,

Lynn M. Klein
Certified Holistic Health Counselor