I’ve just finished conducting a nine day residential training in Japanese Psychology at the ToDo Institute in Vermont. During portions of the training we put up a large piece of flip chart paper in order to create a Thank You – Sorry board. The image you see in front of you is an example of such a board after it’s been filled in. The process is really very simple. The top half of the board is reserved for notes of thanks from one person to another. The bottom half of the board is reserved for notes of apology. Throughout the day, people can walk up to the board and grab a marker and scribble a short note, either thanking someone or apologizing to them. As the board gets filled in, it becomes a record of some of the acts of kindness that have taken place that day.

Think about how often you engage in an activity with the goal of finishing. Washing dishes. Cleaning the bathroom. Mowing the Lawn. Eating breakfast. Getting a degree. We often engage in our life’s activities with the focus on finishing and while we’re working on the task our attention is on what we’re planning do to when we’re done. In essence, our mind is one step ahead of our life. The problem, as you can see, is that with our mind always a step ahead, we never really fully participate in our life at this very moment. We assume the point is to finish (and maybe finish first, or finish quickly) so we miss the actual experience of the activity itself. In this wonderful little animation, Alan Watts points out that the goal isn’t to get to the end of the composition. The goal is to sing and dance to the music. Of course we know this, but how often do we forget as we get overwhelmed with life and rush from one task to another, trying to check off all the items on our to-do list.

Charlotte Joko Beck died this past Spring at the age of 94. She was a wonderful Zen teacher. Her teachings were beautifully accessible and directly connected to our real lives, particularly our psychological and emotional suffering. At one of her dharma talks, she suggested asking the question,

“Am I really in contact with my life?”

Now most of us would answer immediately, without even thinking, “Yes, of course I’m in contact with my life. After all, I’m living that life 24 hours a day. How could I not be in contact with it?”

But what does it mean to be in contact with your life? It means to have direct contact with real life – to use our sensory experience to engage with life around us. To be in contact with your life is to notice that first sip of coffee and follow it as it meanders down your throat. To have the thought, “I think I’ll get myself some coffee” doesn’t involve contact with your life. You are simply thinking about your life – more specifically, about what you want from life.

If you are sitting down right now, are you aware of the firmness of your chair against the not-so-firmness of your butt? (I’m making an assumption, I know) That’s real contact with your life. When you take a shower, do you actually pay attention to the water gliding out of the shower head? Do you feel the wateriness of the water running down your skin as gravity pulls it towards its inevitable destination? That water has been living in darkness for so long. And it will return to darkness again as it enters the drain. Its brief experience of the world of light is the ride it takes on your body. Do you notice that ride or are you planning your meeting for later that morning?

To be in contact with our lives is not about the endless stream of thoughts that race onto, and off of, our mental projection screens. We could watch those thought-movies regardless of whether we were in a prison cell or at the county fair. And our feelings states – now I’m tired, now I’m feeling depressed, now I’m upset because the “yes” I had hoped for turned out to be a “no”. This preoccupation with our internal experience isn’t contact with our lives. It’s what distracts us from our lives.

We’re in touch with our life when we make contact with it through our senses and when we connect with it through our bodies. Kids know how to do that really well. When I ride my bicycle with my daughter Abbie, I go around the puddle, but she goes out of her way to go through the puddle. We have a cushioned swing in the living room that hangs from the wooden beam on the ceiling. When you walk through the door it’s one of the first things you see. Families come for a visit and the kids see that swing and they go right for it. They jump on it, swing on it, hang on it, twist on it. There’s nothing to think about. After all, it’s a SWING! But the adults mostly walk by it. They don’t even touch it with their little finger. Sometimes they ask about it: “Oh, that’s interesting. What is that for?” And I explain that it was a gift from our friend Jane and it was made as a kind of inversion bar so people could hang upside down and stretch. And then we sit down and talk about something profound or maybe just about how busy life is and that there’s never enough time. Think about what you could do with all the time you have spent discussing, reading, and complaining that there’s not enough time. You could have used that time to play on a swing.

Your mind is like a two year old that doesn’t want you to be in contact with your life. It wants all the attention for itself. It has all kinds of strategies for getting your attention: Hey, what about this idea? Hey, remember what happened last week at your mother’s? Hey, wouldn’t it be nice to go to France someday? Of course, if you went to France, your mind would be saying, Hey, I’ll bet it’s really nice over in Italy. Your friend Margaret went to Italy and she loved it.

We need to figure out how to be in France when we’re actually in France and how to be in Italy when we’re actually in Italy. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? Charlotte Joko Beck didn’t try to make it complicated. It’s just not that easy. That’s why making contact with our lives is a constant practice. So we just keep coming back to our life as it is – the swings and puddles and music and soup and coffee. It doesn’t always make us happy. But that’s not the point.

It’s real.
And it’s life.
And someday it will end.

“What we’re trying to learn is how to be in contact with the very fearsome, but the very precious thing which we have, which is our life.”
- Charlotte Joko Beck (1917-2011)

Video: Today, I would like to talk a little bit about acceptance. Acceptance is one of the four key skills I discuss in my book, A Natural Approach to Mental Wellness. But exactly what is acceptance? And why is it important? Many of us spend a great deal of time and energy trying to exert control over our lives. We want things to go according to what we think works best. So we try to get everything to fall into place according to our wishes. We try to control other people in our work and family situations. We try to control our health. We try to control our schedule. We even try to control or feeling state.

Watch this Presentation in Full Screen

We are in the middle of our Natural Approach to Mental Wellness program, where we experiment with different ways of responding to and participating in life.  The exercise for one particular day was “no blocking”.   We were to say yes to life’s invitations as they came along (using good judgment, of course), rather than trying to orchestrate things based on our own preferences, interests, and tastes. That night Gregg and I went out to dinner at my new favorite restaurant, while our daughters were at a school dance. When we pulled into Middlebury, I was aware of being VERY hungry, and I was glad when we found a parking spot right near the restaurant. So I was not happy to hear Gregg say, “Let’s take Barley for a little walk before we go in. He’s been in the car for a while and would probably appreciate it.”

What I was thinking was, “Barley’s fine. He doesn’t need to go out again. He looks nice and comfortable just as he is.” But, no-blocker that I was, I said, “Sure.”

We walked Barley through the town and decided to go across a pedestrian bridge that provides a beautiful view of a waterfall, which is right in the center of town. The water was running hard and fast and I enjoyed the sight and feel of it. We then noticed a kayaker at the bottom of the falls. And then immediately spotted another up above, heading right for the falls!  Now although we are not talking about Niagara Falls here, we’ve never seen anyone go over those falls in all of the years we’ve lived here.  We stood with another couple on the bridge and watched, in amazement as yet another kayaker went over, making it look as easy as pie.

When we got to the end of the bridge, the adventurous trio were getting out with their boats. “We’re going to do it again!”, they told us. So Gregg and I found an even better position from which to watch and took in the show again.

Needless to say, if I had taken the reins, we would not have been witness to this exciting spectacle. We also got to hear more of the terrific live jazz trio at the restaurant because we came in a little later. It just worked out that way. Thanks, Gregg.

But sometimes things don’t work out in a way that we are pleased by. We say yes to life and we feel frustrated and inconvenienced as a result. There are no guarantees about the outcome or about our feelings.   But trying on intentional exercises can keep us nimble and awake.   This particular exercise of “no blocking” gives us practice at yielding to life.  Though the exercise is voluntary, we will all be faced with unavoidable situations which are not.  Practicing today can help us to bring more grace and wisdom to tomorrow’s challenge.

Marsha Linehan, Ph.D., recently made a rather startling personal announcement.   Linehan, the founder of  DBT, a radical and brilliant treatment for those with borderline personality disorder, announced at a public gathering that she had been diagnosed and treated as a borderline patient for many years in her past, beginning at the age of 17.

“So many people have begged me to come forward, and I just thought — well, I have to do this. I owe it to them. I cannot die a coward,” she said, as she revealed her deeply troubled past to her patients, colleagues and the public at large.

Linehan’s announcement helps to explain how she pioneered such a bold, innovative and effective treatment for “borderlines”, often considered to be the most challenging and resistant diagnostic group to treat.  Her own history of struggle informed the treatment she developed for this group, who are often chronically suicidal and self-destructive.   It lined the path, it filled the well, it fed the vision.

Many of us tend to view our challenges as obstacles to the life we were meant to live.   We would surely conduct ourselves with cheerfulness, poise, discipline and integrity if only life didn’t keep getting in the way!  This perspective may be our natural default mode, but that doesn’t mean we have to buy into it.  We can begin to adjust that setting with persistence and attention, introducing wisdom and courage into the equation.   How do we do this?  How do develop the ability to watch what we’re doing, rather than just tumbling blindly through our experience?

Ding! Ding! Ding!   Our complaints provide a big cue, whether they’re spoken out loud or just grumbling through our mind.   Our complaints alert us to an opportunity for growth, an area where we are resisting life as it is.  Developing  greater mindfulness, including the presence of mind to recognize these moments, is a lifelong practice that can open the door to fresh new possibilities.

Deliberate, mindful breathing can help us to step out of autopilot and to observe what’s actually happening.    It serves as a powerful reset, as we recognize the privilege, complexity and wonder of life.  It can pull us from our ideal vision of how it’s supposed to be, into our real living moment as it is.

According to Ilya Prigogine, a physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry, nothing grows without friction.  It is a fundamental property of nature that is essential to the growth of everything.   “It  is precisely this quality of fragility, the capacity for being shaken up, that is paradoxically the key to growth.”   If we were protected from challenge and adversity, our growth potential would be minimal.

Marsha Linehan was shaken up at the deepest level and she found a way to go beyond her challenges.  “I suppose it’s true that I developed a therapy that provides the things I needed for so many years and never got . . . I was in hell.   And I made a vow:  when I get out, I’m going to come back and get others out of here.”   

May we each discover the gifts that are inherent in our struggles.   May we look for the little sparkle from the center of our challenge that reflects the gifts that are contained within.

What’s that over there?   Ding! Ding! Ding!  I see something sparkling under my impatience with how slowly I write.  Taking a breath, I relax and smile.