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#130: The power of our “slogful” years

I’m in the middle of a multi-year slog and I can see that it is an endurance game. Working hard over a long period of time isn’t the same as working hard for an afternoon or a week. We often use the analogy of marathon vs. sprint to land this difference. The longer slog is less about a looming deadline and more about a vision that we are trying to bring closer with every step. There are a lot of steps on a “slogful” journey. There are also a lot of thoughts! Our personal state of mind is an ever present companion.

The brain is a three pound personal universe that processes 6,000 to 70,000 thoughts each day. Over 90% of our thoughts are repetitive and over 80% are negative*. So as we are slogging, we may appear silent on the outside but the inside is constantly chattering. Imagine trying to do something important while the brain is quietly whispering “trouble…fear…caution…pain ahead…trouble…fear…caution…pain ahead….” Most of this happens subconsciously.

All contemplative practices are designed to free us from this deeply encoded pattern, and you can find one that’s a fit for you. However, what I find most useful is first acknowledging that nothing is wrong with any of us. This pattern exists quite naturally in every single person. It’s just how our nervous systems are designed. The second thing that helps is to notice first-hand how our thoughts change our everyday experiences. For instance, we behave differently when thoughts of doom are replaced with curiosity before a meeting.

People who go through a long slog note that the journey changed them. Of course it did! Long-term intensity leaves a mark and the thoughts that kick around inside us have a big role in shaping us. The years of slog can be empowering when they become more than just about reaching that precious goal. They are a perfect training ground for the mind because hard times trigger even more negative thoughts.

Most of what happens inside our brain is subconscious but we do have agency. Life yanks us around during our slogful years. Not sure we can fully stop, but we can limit how much we yank ourselves from the inside. We can use the slog as a golden opportunity to become more aware internal observers.

This is important because while we are not our thoughts, in time we become our minds.

“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” ― Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist

*  These numbers change depending on the study referenced but the point remains. We have a lot of thoughts and most of them are repetitive and negative.

Our negativity bias is a survival mechanism. Since the brain is designed to keep us alive, it over indexes on scanning for threats.

#128: Fasting for renewed intention

Growing up in New Delhi, India, I knew water was a scarce and valuable resource. The city’s water supply came through for a few hours daily and every household had to install pumps to haul it to rooftop tanks, so it could be stored for on-demand use. This is still the case in Delhi and I imagine many places around the world. Sometimes in the summer, the city’s supply would get interrupted and taps would run dry. We would then pool resources with neighbors to buy water privately; these big water trucks would come and fill our tanks instead.

Everyone knew that constant supply was only an illusion created by our overhead tanks. Over time, I started noticing the amount of effort it took to make water usable and drinkable.*

Then I came to the United States and saw that some people had a very different relationship to water. Many people brushed their teeth after lunch at work and a few would leave the faucet running at full force for the entire duration of their brushing session. I’m not exaggerating when I say that this made my insides convulse. We lived in Miami, Florida, which is surrounded by water so perhaps this created a subconscious sense of abundance.

While I never leave the faucet running quite like that, I noticed this sense of abundance quietly seeping into me over the years. I saw myself taking slightly longer showers when I was tired but what really bothered me was that on such days, it felt burdensome to turn off the warm water while lathering.

Then recently I visited Bogota, Colombia, where the city is facing a water-crisis due to lack of rainfall and each neighborhood has 24-hr water cuts a few times a month. We filled buckets with water in our Airbnb to ensure we could bathe and use the bathroom. Business establishments are impacted too, so the toilet at the neighborhood coffee shop was also non-functional.

I believe one of the most difficult tasks for humans is to keep our sensitivity and awareness fresh. It’s easy to forget the hard-earned lessons we learn during hardship. It’s easy to slide back into excess in the face of perceived abundance. I believe this is why most cultural and religious traditions have an element of periodic fasting.

Daily life keeps us spinning many plates with too many things to keep track of. So we deploy surface level awareness, which is perfect for managing overwhelm but doesn’t always create values-aligned action. I believe the goal of fasting is to re-sensitize us to the building blocks of a thoughtful life through intentional action. In fasting, we can’t partake in abundance unthinkingly. We are asked to remove ourselves from stimuli we take for granted, enough that we experience discomfort and take proper notice.

When we come back to re-engage with our daily life, we relate to it differently. Fasting is not an experience of lack, it’s an act of intentional forgoing. Conservation and waste, compassion and self-centeredness, gratitude and greed, self-discipline and overindulgence are all orientations and each of us carries their seeds. Any of us can slip into any of them given the right conditions.

Spiritual traditions liken intentions to seeds that grow roots when nurtured by attention, to create fruits of action. We mostly think seed to fruit, right? From intention >> to attention >> then action. But the seed is also in the fruit. We are products of our repeated actions. Our wise ancestors knew this. They knew that action sometimes needs to come first, especially when we have decision fatigue. That’s why all traditions also prescribe specific spiritual actions like fasting, selfless service and charitable giving (daana/tithing/zakat). Considerate action has the ability to wake up our intentions.

Fasting forces us to act first, notice discomfort, then notice the benefit on us and our environment as we slide towards a more thoughtful orientation.

When I got back home from Bogota, I found it easier to pause the flow of water while lathering. My awareness has re-sharpened and new habits have followed with ease. My showerhead has a pause slider that keeps the temperature mix while stopping water flow. It causes me zero-inconvenience to use it. Now when I’m tired, I leave the slider slightly open so I can get comforted by a warm water while lathering but it’s a trickle and not a deluge, and a choice not a default.

“Sow an act, and you reap a habit.”― Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and philosopher

*Only 3% of Earth’s water is fresh water and of that, only around 1.2% is drinkable. A lot of energy and effort goes into making water consumable.

#123: Moving from habitual internal stories to deliberate metaphors

Learnings from momentum, failure, and recovery
(Read the first one of this series here)

Stories are how we metabolize life situations. When we try to understand why something happened, the first thing that sprouts inside our head is an internal talk track. One internal story layers on top of another and—over time—they crystalize into mental models, or the default lens with which we view the world. Our brains are designed for survival and favor efficiency, so this process of solidifying repetitive thoughts into permanent shorthands is simply what our brains do. That’s how we learn and file away events for future reference.

Sometimes these stories and mental models can be adaptive and make us more resilient, but they can also be maladaptive and create psychological burdens that get in the way of thriving. Either way, all internal stories and mental models are subjective and never the complete picture.

Why habitual internal stories get in the way
It’s hard to know when our mind has become littered with maladaptive stories. We face three big challenges in clear seeing:

  • We don’t realize we have a talk track. Because we’re so used to living with this incessant sound, it camouflages as if it’s a part of our insides.
  • We wholeheartedly believe our stories. They are ever-present inside our head and we mistake this presence as the truth. 
  • Our stories act as psychological balms in our time of loss, so it’s even harder to disassociate from them when we’re in pain.

How metaphors can assist
Metaphors are when we refer to one thing by painting a picture of another. They help us bypass the habitual internal chatter and stories because:

  • Image first, words later. With metaphors, we don’t get lost in words right away. We experience the experience we’re having in that moment and then create a mental image to capture how we feel. Only after we have an image, we use words.
  • Words describe the image and not the event. When we finally use words, we describe the image of our experience and not the potentially charged event we’re dealing with.
  • Nuanced, yet not exhaustive. Metaphors don’t try to slice, dice and explain every little thing. They can help us zoom in or out and extract a key flavor of the situation without getting lost in unhelpful details or spurring rumination. We try to get to the core of “what is” going on inside us. Also, we can be more nuanced with images because sometimes words fail us.
  • The process is deliberate. The metaphorical images we create are deliberate (vs. habitual internal thoughts) and if one metaphor doesn’t resonate, we can adjust it till it does. This process itself offers clarity because we try to accurately see the experience we’re having.

My metaphor during this last round of injury was an ant working at the base of a massive tree, and believing that the world was entirely made of dirt. Through this metaphor I realized that there’s a lot I can’t know and will never know, so my stories and judgments about why I was dealt this blow will always be incomplete. There was comfort in simply letting go of the need to know definitively. Paradoxically, reminding myself of my profound smallness helped me move through this harsh experience faster. 

I know I’ll keep using stories as healing balms to adapt to a new realities. I also know that I’ll keep another eye on the imperfection of those stories, and use deliberate metaphors to hold complexity and nuance, and pierce through my internal chatter.

“Yoga teaches us to cure what need not be endured and endure what cannot be cured.”— B.K.S. Iyengar, Yoga pioneer and teacher

#103: To be proximal and yet love (India Diaries)

I started getting hives out of the blue a few years ago. It wasn’t clear what I was reacting to so the doctor recommended a food allergy test. The cause ended up being something else but the food test stayed with me. It’s not a yes/no result and there are gradients of reactions one can have―from itching, nasal congestion, and hives to anaphylaxis, which is the most severe reaction and is life threatening. I’m vegetarian and it was interesting that I had zero reactivity to meats and seafood, even the most inflammatory ones like shellfish. I was sensitive to things like beans (which is common) and basil (felt random and unexpected).

As I dug into the results, I realized that I was reacting mainly to foods I ate the most. Some foods might have been unsuited to my digestive system anyway but the frequency of consumption led to outsized reactions. Did I need a small pause? This is actually the wisdom behind detoxification diets. We limit exposure to inflammatory foods and then start adding them back bit by bit to see how the body does. A severe reaction means permanent avoidance, a minor discomfort means the need to be mindful while eating.

I wonder if this logic holds for the people in our life. Just like I wasn’t allergic to what I didn’t eat, I don’t have reactions to those I don’t engage with. I react only when there is interaction and, more importantly, relationship. The people I live with or interact with the most are likely the ones that trigger me the most, and I have an outsized ability to irritate them back. Our body carries the imprint of past interactions and reactions. If we’ve reacted in the past, we’re more likely to react again.

Our psyche stays on guard just the way our white blood cells do. Whether we realize it or not, our minds automatically filter current experiences as they are unfolding using the lens of our past, predict what will happen and behave accordingly. And like our overactive immune systems that might see basil as a threat, our mental predictions aren’t always accurate. We’re often unable to see what’s actually going on in our closest relationships and frequent interactions.

Could a relational detox help? Where we pay attention to who triggers us, whom we trigger, and then most importantly, cultivate the skill to see below our mutual masks of irritation to the underlying vulnerability in ourselves and others. Where we actively work on not getting triggered so kind and clear communication can flow.

Those we share the most time, space and life with are the ones we exchange our deepest imperfections with. A loving relationship with them needs a non-judgmental open heart and compassionate will. To be proximal and yet love is an unending practice.

“Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns…

We may want to love other people without holding back, to feel authentic, to breathe in the beauty around us, to dance and sing. Yet each day we listen to inner voices that keep our life small.”
― Tara Brach: psychologist, author and Buddhist meditation teacher

#91: Dressing for the weather

I recently went for a walk with a friend. We live about 2 miles apart and planned to meet midway and continue together. It was a bit cold and windy so I wore a full-sleeved top and grabbed an extra layer. When I bumped into my friend though, she was in shorts and a sleeveless tank top. She said it felt warm and windless in her neighborhood. Even though we’re geographically close, it sometimes seems we live in different microclimates. I’ve noticed on prior walks how spring and summer flowers in her less-shaded neighborhood seem to open ahead of the ones in our shaded backyard. She also lives in a south-facing home that traps heat and keeps her warm.

Even metaphorically, we dress for the weather outside our front door. Our day-to-day circumstances being the weather we plan for and our thoughts, emotions and actions being the metaphorical dress. How we “dress” is also based on the data points we’ve lived through. We assess our current circumstances but then call upon our personal histories while making decisions on how to behave. The unseen assumption is that our data points are complete and accurate, and our responses are based on the full picture. It’s easy to forget that our history determines what data we collect, and that our current reality is often different from another’s. 

Going back to the metaphor of clothing—we clothe ourselves based on context and when the context changes, we alter our outfit. It gets hot on a hike, we take off that extra jacket. It gets cold, we pull out our gloves and scarves. We don’t waste energy or get attached to the way we were dressed 30 minutes ago. We don’t question our actions or berate ourselves incessantly. We respond to the changing weather without attaching our identity to the artifacts of clothing. The response feels seamless.

Obviously it’s hard to be so detached from the trifecta of our thoughts, emotions and actions. But understanding the current and historical “weather” we or another human has lived through creates an awareness about the context within which they have had to operate. It creates flexibility, and is the first step towards relational ease and eventually shared sense making. It helps us know why they came to the walk in a tank top while we showed up in long sleeves.

“Perception precedes reality.” — Andy Warhol, artist, film-director