FIND YOUR VIEW, FEEL YOUR FLOW

we often don’t know we are happy

until we are unhappy… discontented, anxious, restless

until we are unable to enjoy life, love, get things done

or decipher what is important and work towards it

until we begin to suffer and lose ourselves, begin to think less of ourselves

I found this quote by Shian online: When we forget the real reason we are living for, the worldliness of life becomes like quicksand that sucks you into a spiritual vacuum. When that happens, we live less and less; we merely stay alive. (TheDailyEnlightenment@yahoogroups.com)

My patients often tell me that their one wish is to have a moment of happiness or freedom from the clutches of anxiety and rumination. They actually don’t say rumination, of course, that is psycho-speak for not being able to stop their thoughts from looping around a nonproductive thought that doesn’t come to any fruitful conclusion. Kind of like a sticking your head in a toilet where the same water spins but doesn’t flush and not being able to get your head out of the toilet. It can also be imagined as looking into a 1 foot tunnel and watching circular logic eat its tail. The most lucrative time for rumination is of course between 1 and 5 a.m. Sadly, I hear this too often.

So as you can imagine, I have thought often about the nature of happiness. Happiness is often equated with a feeling of elation. I have come to think of elation as a surge of hormones activated for a distinct amount of time. Nice but impermanent. Constant elation would be akin to mania, which comes at a price and is altogether too draining. Happiness happens. When it happens, enjoy it, store it up and remember it. Lovely! But, wouldn’t it be enough to be CONTENT?

Buddhists maintain that we shouldn’t necessarily strive for happiness, but rather the lack of suffering by creating auspicious conditions. The instrument for this is our own minds, if our mind can create suffering, it can also create openness, change and freedom from conditioning. This is the strict Buddhist view. I would maintain that we can not only allow contentment, but create it through positive conditioning. And here we have the chiasm where Buddhist thought and psychoanalytic (depth psychology) thought meet. Early psychoanalytic theorists were perhaps a bit skeptical of the mind as a tool as you “can’t use the apparatus to study the apparatus” (hence the need for psychotherapists), but did define mental health as the capacity to love and work. Psychic energy can be tied to mechanisms for tying anxiety, for instance, or it can be free flowing. In the free flowing state we have just that, a feeling of flow, meaning and creativity. Said theorists maintain that our natural state is one of creating of ourselves, externalizing the internal, doing. For many adults, this doing is expressed through work. If work is our only arena for expressing ourselves, it may become overly important. If the work arena doesn’t mirror our self-emergence through doing, we feel we are not accepted, not a “right fit” or we may feel disappointed and frustrated. We suffer. The Buddhist practice of meditation in order to be free from suffering by becoming conscious of our thinking and doing may be of service here. In my work as an occupational health psychologist, I do this analysis of self vs. work, but another sphere is factored in, that of the “mind” of the organization and work practices. Once we see the meaning of our work, we have flow and can step into our next zone of development. As a bonus, we can stop discontentment and anxiety from developing into depression by supporting presence of mind, mind full ness.

This is another quote I found online from Andrew Solomon in his book 'Anatomy of Melancholy': "When you are depressed, the past and the future are absorbed entirely by the present, as in the world of a three-year-old. You can neither remember feeling better nor imagine that you will feel better. Being upset, even profoundly upset, is a temporal experience, whereas depression is atemporal. Depression means that you have no point of view."

FIND YOUR VIEW, FEEL YOUR FLOW