Elana Kirsh

Tag: mind

  • Working from Home is the Enemy of Mindfulness

    On the face of it, I have a fairly ideal work-from-home situation right now.

    For starters, I have a job – already going better than millions of people around the world. And I actually love my job. I feel like I’m doing good for the world, the people I work with and myself every day, which gives me a steady sense of purpose and meaning. Added to this, my husband isn’t working at the moment, so the bulk of childcare responsibilities – of which there are many – fall on him. This means that apart from feeling guilty about not spending more time with the kids, and not helping him out more, I’m able to work largely uninterrupted for hours on end. Not a luxury that most working parents with young families have right now.

    The cherry on top is my workspace – a granny-flat-turned-home-office on the roof of our apartment. It’s comfortable, quiet, and breezy, and our new dog (I’ll share musings on him in a separate post soon) keeps me company while demanding very little. He also never interrupts Zoom meetings and pulls faces behind me while I’m talking to potential clients, so that’s another win.

    My point is – I know I’ve got it pretty good. And I’m grateful for these circumstances every day…

    And yet.

    I’m finding it really fucking hard to ever finish work these days. To draw a line and switch over to family time, to time with my husband, or even *gasp* to me time. I’m constantly thinking about work, going over challenging conversations, mentally fiddling with budgets and ideas, planning future difficult conversations, building road maps. Writing back to texts and emails and Slack messages while the kids are in the bath.

    It’s better on the weekends. Even if I work for a few hours on Friday morning and a couple more on Saturday evening, in the time in between I’m largely able to enjoy time with the kids, meandering walks with the dog, a family dance party on the roof, maybe even a movie on Friday night. Well, the first 20 minutes of a movie before I pass out on the couch. Really I just stay awake for the ice cream.

    But on work days, mindfulness is eluding me.

    I realized yesterday that part of it is the absence of a commute. We bitch and moan about traffic jams and late trains and how much time we waste commuting, yet it serves a purpose other than just moving from us Point A to Point B. Being in physical transition facilitates a psychological transition, too. My drive to the office takes about half an hour, and gives me time to mentally go from home to work, from work to home. After getting everyone up and ready in the morning and dropping them off, the drive gives me time to switch from being “mama me” to “work me.” And even when I rush out of the office on my “short” days, to pick up GG and Little A from kindergarten and spend the evening with them, I’m usually able to process whatever I was working on, mentally leave work, and ultimately be present with the kids until they go to sleep.

    At home it takes me less than a minute to get to “the office,” and I’m usually carrying or dragging some combination of laundry, a whiny child, a dog, dishes and a computer with me, and often already on a work call, to boot. Half of my mind is still downstairs with the family when I’m up at work, and when I come down, say to have lunch with them, a good chunk of me is still in the last call and writing up an email summary and scanning and re-prioritizing my to-do list.

    It’s exhausting.

    And basically the opposite of mindfulness.

    I wish it was just affecting me, but it’s not. My husband told me yesterday that sometimes it feels like I’m not really here, and I couldn’t even argue with him. He’s right. I’m not here. Not all of me anyway. And if he feels like this the kids probably do, too.

    Trying to meditate
    Meditating together doesn’t work, just FYI

    As always my unexpected guru, he made a suggestion that I’m gonna try this week. Sounds silly but I believe in environmental reminders to trigger behavioral changes. He suggested that instead of coming “home” from work through the internal stairs, that I leave the building via the elevator, take a walk around the block – not on a work call – and then walk in the front door. Maybe this way, even in a few minutes, I’ll be able to trigger that transition that I usually get on the commute. To leave work behind, even for a couple of hours, and just be with the kids.

    I also know that – as is so often the case for me – meditation is part of the answer here. My practice has been rocky lately. I still meditate every morning, but so often I find that the bell dings after half an hour and I realize that I’ve basically just been sitting on my ass on a pretty cushion, legs crossed, back straight, face relaxed… thinking about work. When my mind is all over the place like this I find that a stricter, less spacious and all-encompassing technique is more effective at holding and cultivating my attention – so I think I’ll try some body scanning and super-zoomed in attention practices this week.

    None of this is going to change the fact that we’re all kind of going nuts with this social distancing, the kids need their routine, my husband needs to be able to focus on his work, and the extrovert in me is killing to see other people. But something tells me that a bit more mindfulness and presence might take the edge off the suffering. And shine a light on the beauty in every moment, too.

  • How to Make Your Mind ‘Body-Shaped’

    The resting pose at the end of pretty much every yoga sequence, Savasana (pronounced ‘Shavasana’ – the corpse pose), is surprisingly difficult to master. Far harder than a headstand, a complicated balance or an intricate bind.

    And yet it’s a crucial pose – said to allow the body to absorb the benefits of the yoga practice, restorative for the mind and body.

    Despite appearances, it’s more that just flopping on the ground like you’re dead. Yes, you need to relax your body. Unclench every muscle, let your feet flop out to the side, really become one with the floor. Surrender the weight of your physicality to the forces of gravity. But the key – as in most things – is in the mind.

    The mind must stay active, present, sharp. And yet restful. Whereas throughout the yoga practice you’ve been noticing your breath, your muscles, your alignment, in savasana you pay attention to the space in between, the resting, the tingling feeling of nothing – of the absence of movement. You seek out that delicate, exact concentration that sits between thinking and letting your mind drift, and hold it steady on the most subtle of sensations.

    So simple and yet so incredibly complicated.

    For many years, savasana was a battle in my mind. Without the active, dynamic flow of yoga on which to to pin my focus, the thoughts came flooding back. And as I ostensibly relaxed on my mat, inside my head I was taking up arms, a metaphorical sword and shield, bravely trying to fight off each thought as it arose. Convinced that this was the game – stopping my thoughts dead in their tracks.

    And then one day a few years ago, I just got it. My mind finally found where it was meant to be and somehow slipped into place.

    I should note that for others – perhaps less Type A than me – the tendency is to drift off to sleep in savasana, rather than to get lost in thought. It’s the same, really – just the other end of the spectrum. Sleep is just as far from the point of this posture as my warrior-like thought fighting.

    Yesterday I was settling into savasana at the end of a fantastic Ashtanga class, and I realized what it is: You need to make your mind “body-shaped.” Instead of letting your mind swish around in your head, where we tend to imagine it lives, you need to pull it down into your body, let it flow down your neck and spine, along your arms and your legs. Squish it into your fingers and toes and allow it to pool in your lower back and buttocks. And then let it settle there and observe.

    Because when it’s “body-shaped” rather than “head-shaped,” your mind can “think” about your body, rather than your thoughts. It can really notice the release in every muscle, the feeling of the body touching the floor, the slow, rhythmic rising and falling of the chest and abdomen. It can be totally aware of the physical relaxation.

    And now I realize – this is true for all mindfulness practice. If you want to be mindful of washing the dishes, you need to make your mind “hands-shaped.” You can’t feel the water on your skin with your head – you need to “think” with your fingers. Same goes for mindful walking, mindful showering – anything you want to do mindfully.

    It’s a mental shift that changes more than just change your “point of view” – it changes the very nature of your mind. From being primarily concerned with thoughts and other mental phenomena like emotions, to noticing the changing sensations of the body. As the father of quantum physics Max Planck is quoted as saying:

    When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. 

    It’s a small, conceptual change, but it has tremendous power.

    And in case you’re wondering, no – the irony of my mind imagining up blog posts while it’s meant to be down in my body, focusing on savasana is not lost on me.

    Stay tuned for natural (to me) continuation of this post: How to Make Your Mind “Baby-Shaped.”

  • Tricks of the Mindful, Part I

    There’s a personal, family situation that’s bothering me at the moment – swimming around and around in my head against my will, despite my having decided numerous times not to confront the issue. A few moments free to mull and my mind inevitably ends up there, rehashing an extremely uncomfortable conversation that took place a few months ago, drafting emails and SMSes that I will never send, scripting phone calls I will never make, and imagining responses that will never eventuate.

    With the dispute itself months in the past, it’s no longer my relative that’s making me feel bad; now it’s my mind – dredging up uncomfortable feelings over and over again in some sort of demented, hopeless effort to make me feel better. Such is the mind; we are largely powerless to control the thoughts it entertains. But I do believe we can nudge it in the right direction, and that’s what I’ve decided to do with this little battle.

    The first step – as is often the case – is awareness. Every time I notice the chatter in question – whether I catch it a second or a few minutes in – I note it. I mentally say to myself “thinking about Vanessa*” And surprisingly, the effects have been almost immediate. By naming the occurrence, I am straight away distanced. It becomes clear that it’s my mind – and not ‘me’ – which is going over and over things, and I am able to walk away from the noise in a way that I haven’t been even vaguely successful in doing so far. It totally, magically deflates the process, takes the pain out of the mental churning.

    The bottom line is that I do want my relationship with Vanessa to be better, to get back to normal. After literally hours of talking, thinking, and writing, I’ve decided not to do anything further about our disagreement and just get on with things, but my mind hasn’t caught up. So inevitably, thoughts of the conflict keep arising. Rinse and repeat – I note the self-chatter and it simmers down, again.

    But this noting alone won’t be enough to make things right. I still need to find a way to feel better about it all – to cultivate lovingkindness, rather than hurt and anger, into my thoughts and feelings about her.

    Here’s the plan: Every time the thoughts in question come up and I shine a light on them, I will add in a conscious, positive thought. Something about how much we care about each other, and about her good (though misguided) intentions. I’m hoping I can gradually take the sting out of the conflict by massaging my mind in this way, so that eventually the thoughts can just flicker by like the host of other crazy shit that goes through my head, without getting stuck on the big screen, so to speak. And in time, they’ll be gone, or at least barely noticeable in the babble of everyday life.

    Stay tuned for Part II to see how it goes.

     

    *I don’t know anyone called Vanessa; I totally made up that name. The rest of the post is true, though.