Two Steps to Regain Your Power And Create the Life You Want.

Over the last few years of delving into the science, psychology, and practice of wellbeing, as well as working through my own personal efforts at improving my movement through life, I have consistently come across a two-step process that seems to be the start of any positive and meaningful shift. 

Our minds are the most critical piece in creating the life we want; it is the only thing we have true control over.  In fact, in our relationship to life, all we really have is our mind, it is the basis of all our experiences.  Without our mind, there is literally no experience.  Meditation teacher Sam Harris explained on his meditation app Waking Up (by the way I highly recommend this app for those who want to improve their meditation practice),

“The quality of our life depends on the quality of our mind.  Happiness and suffering no matter how extreme, are mental events; the mind depends on the body and the body on the world, but anything that happens good or bad in your life must appear in consciousness for it to matter.”

An untrained mind means things like stress, overthinking, worries, anxieties, and negative perceptions control us.  Mastering our mind gives us the ability to master our lives and gain our power back. 

Yet compared to where many of us put our best effort (for example, on our physical bodies or worldly achievements), we as a collective human race are very young in our practice of mastering and understanding our minds.

What I have begun to realize is, if we practice two skills for our mind, we will gain so much more agency and power over our day-to-day challenges.   These two skills are:

1.     Pause.

2.     Notice.

Pause and Notice.

Pausing is the ability to take a breath and create space; to step out of “reacting” and stop for a moment.  Viktor Fankl, a survivor of the holocaust, provided a most compelling description of the power of creating space:

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.  In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

How do we pause?  How do we grow that space between stimulus and response?

It requires becoming aware of when we are being hijacked by our thoughts and emotions and being able to extricate ourselves from that ride.  One way we can stop the cascade is by taking a breath, focusing on the sensations of that breath, and bringing ourselves back into our body to feel our feet grounded on the floor with a solid earth beneath us.  Once grounded, we start to create space by realizing we have thoughts, we experience emotions, but we are not our thoughts or emotions; we shift from being completely identified with those thoughts and emotions to realizing “we” exist separately from them. Recognizing this separateness from our thoughts and emotions puts us, our conscious presence, back into the driver’s seat.

Pausing allows us to take the next step:  Noticing.  When we notice, we take the point of view of the observer.  We can step back and notice the flow of thoughts instead of being identified with our thoughts. We notice our emotions without identifying with our emotions.  Total identification with a feeling of sadness, for example, would be “I am sad.”  Adding a bit of space would be stepping back to, “I am noticing I am feeling sad.”

It is just a slight shift, but that shift gives us all our power back, because that shift creates just enough space for us to move from reacting to “deciding” how we want to respond. 

A critical piece of noticing, however, is non-judgmental acceptance.  Acceptance is often misunderstood.  Acceptance is not (as I used to believe) resignation, helplessness, apathy, or defeat.  Acceptance is recognizing what is true without resisting that it is true.  Acceptance doesn’t mean liking what is, it just means seeing things as they are without resisting what is.  It is seeing things clearly.  Without resistance, without judgement, without defensiveness, we can start to see the whole picture.  The clarity, broadness of perspective, and non-reactive stance that comes from creating space, is what gives us back our power.   We go from reacting to choosing; from being controlled by our thoughts and emotions to leading from our values and goals. 

Pause & Notice (PAN) IRL.

The two-step strategy of PAN can be adapted to many spheres of our day to day struggles. 

PAN in Dealing with Negative Emotions:

For example, PAN can help us face negative emotions.  We often believe if we open ourselves up to our negative emotions, we will fall apart, become consumed by pain, or perhaps be unable to contain our reactions and behavior. Our impulse may be to distance ourselves from negative emotions in an attempt to gain “control”.  However, we are not truly in control if we are not dealing with the truth of what is, and no amount of avoidance or distancing will take away what is.  Pain will always re-emerge in other ways.  We gain power and control by facing our emotions head on, and the PAN technique gives us a way to do so. 

When we notice our emotions as a non-judgmental observer, we gain insight that can actually help us.  Susan David, a psychologist and leading authority on how our emotions can empower us, says emotions are “data”; they indicate to us what we value and need. Loneliness, for example, may indicate we value connection and perhaps that we need more of it in our lives.  In dealing with emotions, David suggests asking ourselves “WTF?”, i.e. What the FUNC?    We need to ask ourselves, “what are these emotions telling us about our needs and values?” What is the function of the emotion?  It is only possible to do this after we PAN what we are feeling.

What is also true is emotions, even negative emotions, naturally dissipate quickly unless they are kept alive by negative thoughts. Our thoughts fuel our emotions; for example, if we don't keep going over in our minds how badly we were mistreated, or keep bringing to mind each instance of disrespect, we would not stay angry.

PAN can help us step back from the rumination and become aware of the thoughts that are driving our negative emotions. The mental space created allows us the opportunity to replace negative thoughts with more positive ones, thereby changing our emotional experience.

PAN in Changing our Habits:

A habit is the result of a connection created between a certain trigger (i.e., stimuli) and a certain behavioral response. The connection, however, is often not in our conscious awareness. PAN allows us to make conscious the connection behind a stimulus and the habitual behavior we may want to change, thereby revealing strategies for effective change.

For example, say you want to break a habit of drinking a glass of wine every night; PAN may help you notice you tend to reach for a glass of wine when you are tired, needing comfort, and watching television a show in which the protagonist is always drinking wine. The stimuli trigging the desire to drink wine is feeling tired and watching certain shows. The understanding brought about by PAN can help you make changes that would mitigate your triggers - maybe you decide to go to bed earlier so you don't get too tired, and maybe you don't watch "Scandal" late in the evening when you are tired. Maybe you substitute a cup of green tea when you start to find yourself needing comfort, before you reach for wine.

The point is when we pause and notice what is going on in our environment, notice what we are feeling or thinking when we engage in habitual behaviors, we gain the power to break our automatic responses to those triggers and gain back our ability to choose alternate responses. 

PAN in Relationship Conflicts:

There are often two layers in most conflict: the surface layer, which is the manifest content of the conflict (i.e., what the argument seems to be about), and then there is the layer underneath, the latent content, the unspoken perhaps subconscious needs, fears, expectations, pain, and vulnerabilities beneath the surface argument. In her interview with Glennon Doyle, Esther Perel said what she found most useful was a statement by Howard Markman who said:

“[The hidden agenda in] most conflicts are about three things: power and control, whose priorities matter? Whose needs are the ones that we pay attention to and not? Two, care and closeness. Can I trust you? Do you have my back? And three, respect and recognition. Do you value me?”

So useful. When we PAN, especially when we notice without judgement, we create enough space to dip below the surface conflict to understand the deeper needs, hurts, wishes expectations underlying the conflict. This gives us power to address what is real and is a powerful way to create more meaningful resolutions and even connection.

An argument may be about loading the dishwasher, but the real issue may be, “Are my concerns and the things I care about important enough for you to notice and care about too?”  “Can I rely on you to care for me the way I need?”  Even deeper, the fear may be your needs don’t matter, you don’t matter, and if we continue to look deeper, we may discover the true root of those feelings.   It may seem silly to look that intensely into an argument about loading the dishwasher, but isn’t an argument about loading the dishwasher silly if we don’t look more deeply?

PAN in Being Present:

The ultimate form of power we gain from practicing the skills of PAN is the capacity to be truly present. I think I have spent a lot of my life distracted and a little disconnected from the present moment.  I also think a lot of us struggle with being truly present.  When we worry about the future or perseverate on incidents in the past, when we multitask, or our focus is disturbed by the pings on our phone, we are not present.  Without presence we cannot fully take in what is around us, we cannot fully experience, we cannot truly be with who, or what, is in front of us. 

I have an awful memory.  Truly dismal.  Sometimes I wonder if being unable to remember experiences I have had is as good as not having had them at all.  I guess that can be helpful when I do not remember the bad, but often I cannot remember the good, and that feels like a loss to me.  I’ve started to think of being present in a similar way; if we are not completely present in our lives, are we really living?  Being truly present allows us to take in our lives and all the gifts that are part of every moment.  Presence allows us to absorb it all fully.  Regardless of whether those moments contain joy or pain, or a mix of both, they are life. 

Conclusion:

For those of you who are familiar with the practice of mindfulness, you may have realized the two skills I have written about, pausing, and noticing without judgment, are two of the core practices of mindfulness.  Our power lies in our ability to know and work with our minds.  All that exists, our emotional life, our relationships, our perceptions, our growth, our habits, must exist in the mind. The practice of mindfulness can help us grow these two skills of pausing and noticing, and through that practice we regain our power to live not reactively, but with intention and purpose.  That is how we create to life we want.