Silence Might Save Your Life

15 years ago this month I was diagnosed with an aggressive breast cancer which had started to spread. As well as being a founding partner in a growing management consultancy, I was also a young mum, pregnant again and juggling an oversized social diary. It looked like success, except I had failed to notice that I was living in a way not conducive to sticking around long enough to bring my children up.

At the time I was diagnosed I was inundated with advice, mostly from friends and family. Do this, try that, take this, avoid that; I was pretty ignorant about complementary medicine, although I had been seeing a homoeopath for a couple of years because of the eczema that covered my hands. When I turned inward for guidance, the strongest message in my head was to slow down and take it easy. That message had been there for a long time, I had simply been telling it I had no choice. I used to tearfully, and sometimes angrily, say the same to my husband when he pleaded with his grumpy and stressed wife to slow down.

Luckily for me, cancer served to take away my choices even more, it was a stark wake up call. I decided to listen and to rein my life in to parameters that would suit my body better.

In the years, the many years, that have followed I continued to struggle to cultivate quietness and silence and a sense of inner calm. It’s not my natural state – I’m noisy to the core – but my brain keeps prompting me to try.

Coincidentally, I was in Oxford last week and wandered into a shop on Broad Street called Innerspace where I was greeted by a wise and wonderful and quietly spoken man with time to talk who pointed me in the direction of some blissful guided meditation pieces on a CD called The Jewel. I’ve managed to listen to it 3 times since then, which is a record for me! Even as I’m writing this, I can feel the pull towards the peace of that experience.

Yesterday, by chance, I came across a ‘new’ publication by Dr David Servan-Schreiber whose book, Anticancer: A New Way of Life, has been a great inspiration to me and many of my clients. I read with great sadness that he died last year as a result of a powerfully malignant return of his original aggressive brain tumour. This amazing man – a psychiatrist and practitioner of integrated medicine – conducted one of the most comprehensive analyses of the cancer literature, looking at nutrition, exercise, psychology and physiology to help himself and his readers. HIs book was an enlightened and empowering plan to save your own life. I used it, along with millions of others.

He freely admits that, in the years following his diagnosis, driven by the enormous success of the book, he pushed his mind and body to the limit – and sometimes beyond, straying from the path of his own findings. In his last, short book, which I bought and read yesterday (Thank you, Kindle), he reflects on what he might have done differently to avoid a recurrence of this particularly aggressive form of cancer. His 18-year survival was remarkable but he mentions a fellow-sufferer and one-rem survivor, Molly, whose disease prompted her to live in almost total isolation. “Every day she takes long walks on the banks of a lake. When you ask her, ‘What is it that helps you most to keep the disease at bay?, she responds: ‘It’s the quiet, The quietness protects me.” Molly is still very much alive and free from recurrence.

In his final analysis of what is the most important element to ensure survival he simply says:

“In the light of my own ordeal, I’m tempted to emphasise the absolute necessity of finding and maintaining inner peace, notably through meditation, cardiac coherence exercises and a balance lifestyle that minimises sources of stress. Next, I would put physical exercise, whose importance cannot be overstated. And on a par with physical activity, I would put nutrition.”

We are in a phase of world development that seems to reward those with stamina and appetite and cast-iron constitutions (and consciences) so much more richly than the gentler members of our species. The temptation is to join them, to push ourselves to achieve in the way that seems to win. When you look at human metabolic typing, however, you realise that the go-getters of this world are just one of the ‘types’. There are at least 4 other metabolic types not designed to live at the limit. When we behave contrary to our type we experience psychological and physiological stress in our bodies that creates the conditions for disease: which explains why some people can live happily at G Force 8 and some of us fail. The trick is knowing which type you are and honouring that.

Like many other people, Dr Servan-Schreiber discovered that the time he managed to spend in quietness paid dividends for his energy and productivity in all the other areas of his life, underlining the fact that we don’t have to find more time to create a quietness practice. On the contrary, it will reward us with a feeling of more time in our lives. And, quite possibly, more years to enjoy.

If you are one of the many people living at a faster pace than you want to, then I can’t urge you enough to start listening to your body and taking some time for silence and renewal.

RIP David, and thanks for all the wisdom.

Dealing With Infinity

We are living in the age of infinity. Never before have we had so much: so much money, so much opportunity, so much leisure, so many ‘things’, so much to eat. It’s difficult to cope with such abundance. Most of us can’t handle it, we don’t know when we’ve had enough: whether it’s money, status, fun or food, many people feel hopelessly out of control, unaware of where the stop button is. We plan our lives around what we are going to have next rather than what we are going to do, or be, next. Some of us need to invent a feeling of scarcity so that we can feel better, more contained. While we watch the gap widening between the financiers, the celebs, the footballers and the rest of the world we know that there is no longer any reason why we couldn’t be living like that too.

We’re told that the only constraints are our own limitations, our own blinkered perspectives, our inability to think big. It can lead to a state of permanent dissonance, a gnawing discontent or restlessness that’s hard to define. We can always do more, think more, earn more, exercise more, spend more.

Maybe. Or maybe, if you take the time to look at what you want out of life, you’ll find that for you happiness lies in a different direction.

Much of the dissonance we feel is around the way we measure abundance. What does it mean to be fulfilled? We tend to believe that the answer is to have more but the state of our society, where people own and earn more than ever before, doesn’t bear that out. One reason people were happier and healthier during the war because there was an intrinsic comfort in being told what to do, what to eat and how to behave. Many of life’s big decisions were taken away. Self-discipline can be more comfortable than self-indulgence. Having it all may not be the answer we need.

Of course, it’s natural to want more; it’s deeply imbedded in our human nature. But more what?

There is a middle way between self-discipline and self-indulgence; let’s call it self-actualisation. It’s about deciding what you want out of life, working out what ‘more’ means to you. It’s not necessarily easy – you’ll have years of conditioning in seeing yourself through the eyes of others. You may be a complete novice in working out how you feel and how that relates to what you want. You might also have to deal with internal or external resistance as you set your sights elsewhere – higher or lower than people around you think you ‘should’ be aiming for. It’s certain that you will struggle to decide what enough means for you and it will be difficult to stay true to your own definition and ignore the messages all around you to live it larger.

Above all, it’s a decision to enjoy your life. To value your days as much as your holidays. To value your time and the work of your hands as much as the package you’re on. To swap mundane for meaning, to switch from effort to flow, to change from their agenda to your agenda. It’s a decision that silences the cacophony of the more, more, more society and allows you to achieve that rare feeling of ‘enough’ that is so elusive and yet infinitely more comforting than the alternative.

Tiredness kills

We have 2 ways of operating in our family: nice and horrid. The horrid happens when one, two or all three of us are more tired than we can handle. The definition of ‘more tired than we can handle’ differs for each person in our little team. It’s particularly obvious when I’m tired, because I’m the care-giver; the one who notices and fills the gaps and tries to lighten things up. So when I run out of juice it feels like Armageddon. You wouldn’t want to be there. Nor do I!

One of the most destructive and hard-wired habits of the Western world is to push ourselves beyond the point that feels like enough: by a long chalk. It’s ingrained – not only is it an evolutionary drive, it is also part of our Christian culture. The words of my childhood prayer drummed that in to me: Teach us, O Lord, this day… to give and not to count the cost, to fight and not to heed the wounds, to labour and not to ask for any reward… That stoical approach was what was expected of me growing up. And possibly you too.

As an adult,  I consciously rejected the idea that punitive service is the road to spiritual abundance, but there is a brownie-point addicted part of me that just won’t let it go. So I still have a nasty habit of pushing myself too hard and expecting the world to reward me for it. Turns out that the Bonus Scheme of life doesn’t work like that.

We’re lucky in our family to have a very comfortable daily existence. Both my husband and I work from home and normally our working hours are very civilised. On purpose. Lately, for a variety of reasons, the balance has been disturbed and we are all being stretched too thin. At dinner the other night all 3 of use were crabby, scratchy, uncommunicative, unhelpful and just simply out of puff. It was uncomfortable and unpleasant (not to mention the adverse effects on digestion). And I thought to myself, ‘This is what some families go through every night.’

Tiredness is not just a lack of sleep, it’s a lack of energy, a lack of synapse activity, a lack of ATP in your cells. It can be caused by poor nutrition, too much stress, overwork, drugs and stimulants (legal or otherwise). It can be exacerbated by a lack of human interaction, a lack of hope, a lack of self-expression, and  a lack of respect for yourself and others. It interrupts your natural, survival-driven drive to get on with the people around you and be a valuable member of the pack. Its dampening effect on your life makes everything more difficult.

Far from being the inevitable result of a life well-lived, tiredness destroys the quality of your life. It takes its toll on your relationships, your decisions, your career, your holidays, your ideas, your future. It kills the life you are living today in order to propel you towards some imagined, brighter future.

Don’t fall for the hype. If there is something about your life that makes you permanently tired, give yourself a break. Let it go.

Dealing with overwhelm. What’s your style?

I wish I could stop the world for a month to catch up with the things I want to do and the people I care about and lose the feeling of overwhelm that accompanies being a busy person in a busy world with a busy to do lost. Sadly, I haven’t worked out how to do that.

When I worked as a lecturer at a well-known college for budding – or perhaps I should say sprouting - Nutritional Therapists, it became clear that many people who work in the caring professions have boundary issues. Being a caring person and the words ‘Go away, I’m busy’ don’t usually go hand in hand; with the result that people who care deeply about the world and the people in it often struggle to complete things and end up feeling put upon and frustrated.

The text-book answer is to man up and put some boundaries down: a great idea in theory but it takes a significant ideological shift  to learn how to keep needy people at bay. And, it must be said, creating boundaries is an art in itself: I noticed that people with clean, crisp boundaries were usually viewed by the students as cool, detached and not very caring. A ‘people person’ could wither and die behind ‘correct’ boundaries: finally able to dot all the ‘i’s and cross all the ‘t’s, they would be deprived of the connection that gives them their reason for showing up.

So it seems the problem is not so much poor boundaries as misaligned goals and poor coping methods.

Let me explain…

Some students at college had problems turning in work on time. They were so busy looking after other people and being pillars of society that work deadlines slipped and they had to rush to catch up or ask for extensions. Frequently, these were the students who performed best in the clinical work, establishing instant empathy and rapport and providing thoughtful, tailored protocols for clients who left feeling as though they had been seen and understood, and with confidence that the plan would suit them.

There were other students whose work was always on time, who never needed to extend a deadline, and who managed the coursework and all the other issues in their lives with an efficient flourish. Frequently these students could be dazzling in their coursework and efficient in clinic, coming up with highly technical and impressive protocols for clients who left with an excellent understanding of their health problems. But perhaps not feeling so well understood themselves.

Asking either student type to copy the behaviour of other one would have been fruitless. Both were successful in their own way. They just needed to find the sort of work, and set the sort of goals, that played to their strengths. Especially when living through demanding times.

You can apply the same argument to yourself when you feel overwhelmed. What are the things that get done while other things pile up? Usually, it’s the things that aren’t getting done that play on our minds more than the things we’re busy doing.

Are you an open-all hours, caring friend and confidante whose home and office door is always open and for whom the tasks of daily life fall lower on the priority list than the feelings of daily life? If so, you need people-oriented work and a set of targets and goals that fall in line with your tendency to achieve through relationships and listening and connecting. Your goals – even your work goals – need to be framed around meeting people’s needs and seeing smiles on faces. For you, the worst kind of overwhelm will happen when you get stuck on a work project that requires you to be task-oriented and leaves you short of time to connect with people. You will feel frustrated and disconnected and probably guilty. Deal with this by telling your friends and family what’s happening and clearly letting them know when you’ll be back in circulation. It won’t ease your workload but it will ease your guilt and distraction.

If, on the other hand, your sense of responsibility means that you don’t go out to play or answer your phone until your in-tray is empty and the list is all ticked off, then your goals will obviously be better set around tasks and projects and achievements. While you’ll be quite happy handling periods of intense work, overwhelm for you will be getting stuck in a family crisis (or other people-heavy situation) and watching the work pile up to an uncontrollable level: deadlines slipping, budgets unmanaged, goals receding and targets not being met. Deal with the sense of panic by negotiating the time you need to keep on top of things while delegating as much as you can. Be brutal about what must be done vs what should be done and explain to your loved ones that, for you, the family crisis would be made much worse if you ended up with a full-scale business crisis as well.

As ever, the trick is to recognise and accept yourself as you are, acknowledge what’s most important for you, and allow other people to experience you that way too.

If you struggle to find the balance in your work/home/social life balance then Prepare to Care is one of the modules in the Vocation Location programme designed to help you identify your personal style and create a way of working that supports your own wellbeing as well as helping you to achieve your goals.

What did you pay attention to in 2011?

It’s traditional at this time of year to look forward but I’d like to suggest you take a minute to look back… as I did the other day.

I’m not good at clearing my email inbox (mainly because I have a nifty system where unread mail pops into a folder all of its own and, once read, disappears never to be seen again) and I realised with a shock the other day that I had over 13 thousand emails in my ‘real’ inbox.

They act like a security blanket. All the time they’re still on the system I can always search for information I’ve missed, appointments I’ve half-remembered and phone numbers or invoice sums that have slipped through the net. So before I deleted them all with a keystroke I had a quick look through to make sure I wasn’t deleting anything I needed.

I say a quick look… by the time I had trawled through it all I had lost about 2 hours and deleted way over 12,000 emails. To make it quicker I ordered my inbox by sender name so I could delete whole blocks of emails at a time.

And then it struck me – this list was a guide to where I had directed my attention in 2011.

I could see blocks of people and organisations: my closest friends and colleagues, the college where I’m studying, my favourite inspirational blogs and email services, quite a few from my husband who only works upstairs :{ , and some from my lovely mum. As my eyes flicked through the lines I was reminded of parties and holidays and major events that were the landmarks of the year. Friends old and new who find writing easier than chatting, people looking for support and those warm, fuzzy emails that come in from clients whose lives have turned a corner.

As I also do most of my shopping online there was a reminder of what a ridiculous bookworm I am, and the weekly churn of the grocery shopping and the escalating bills as food prices have taken off this year.

This is the stuff that makes up my life: the merry-go-round that comprises my weekly, monthly routine, all there in black and white.

After I stripped out the reality emails I was still left with hoards of emails that had also – by their sheer persistence – secured a big chunk of my attention this year. Pressure groups and charities and software providers and hardware stores and shoe shops and clothes shops and department stores and supplement sellers and spurious gurus and miracle cure salesmen and online gift shops and interior design shops… my inbox was stuffed with people trying to get my attention and sell me something. Hundreds – thousands – of seconds, minutes even, of my attention wasted on things I didn’t need or want.

I was really surprised. I had no idea how much my private space had been infiltrated by the email high street and how much I had allowed that to happen. I must have unsubscribed myself from about 20 different lists before I felt my space was my own again.

The big lesson for me was to see how easily we can start a year with great intentions to do great things – but how easy it is to be distracted into paying attention to things that really don’t matter at all. I’m a great believer in supporting brands I love, looking at things that are uplifting, reading words that inspire – but somehow I was also allowing mediocre messages into my personal space and wasting precious time and awareness that could be spent on more productive things.

Next year, I’m going to rule my inbox with a firmer grip and make sure that my attention is directed only towards the messages that I want to give my time and support to.

What did you pay attention to in 2011? And how do you want that to change in 2012?