“We need to re-train ourselves to listen to the truth. When we make mistakes, we can pick ourselves up and make different choices from an educated standpoint or we can belittle ourselves and make excuses not to continue.
-Chris Leigh-Smith”
So by now, dear reader, I know that you know that I am starting off A Year At My Best with the light and simple concept of awareness. Let's say "light and easy" is the goal, but I am not there yet. Mostly because I am, at present, very gifted in the art of over-complicating things.
The terms mindfulness and awareness are, in my context, interchangeable. Mindfulness as defined by Jon Kabat-Zinn, a leading expert in the field, is "Paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally." The key to it is having the wherewithal to notice how your mental and physical actions affect outcomes in your life. As I’m learning, this takes a bit of skill, a lot of practice and the discipline to keep carrying on.
Awareness is the seed that helps mindfulness grow. Hence my task for the past month - practice the basic requirement for all habit-making – the being aware of what it is you’re actually doing. This is a skill that will be the foundation for all the work I do on this little project for the next year (and, likely, for the rest of my life.)
I want to be very clear (to you and myself,) that this project is not about me not being “good enough,” this is about me looking compassionately at my life experience through the lens of self-acceptance and developing the wisdom to see where I can improve.
Real-life footage of me practicing awareness. Specifically awareness of not falling off that plank.
One thing that has become glaringly apparent to me is that one really has to be motivated to change in order to put in the effort. Developing the motivation to improve your life relies a lot of having the self-esteem to think you’re worth the effort in the first place. If we’re lucky, we are raised with the notion of self-respect, which provides the foundation for a healthy body, mind, spirit, and the desire to keep it that way.
There are few who are able to serve as guides to the gift of self-esteem like Chris Leigh-Smith. Chris and I were able to sit down and chat a couple weeks ago and below is some highlights of our conversation.
Chris Leigh-Smith and his grandson, chillin' in awareness
Having spent many years in the school system working with kids from all kinds of backgrounds, Chris' interest in teaching came out of a desire to “help kids be happy, to develop character and to develop wisdom that would allow them to be good contributing people and to steer their own lives.” He’s carried this generosity into his work as the owner of Calgary-based martial arts studio, Tao of Peace where the focus is on both physical and mental fitness.
I met Chris a few years ago when my son began practicing martial arts at his studio. Chris and his wife Kathy were teaching a brilliant parenting seminar called “Peaceful Parents, Confident Children.” Part meditation, part therapy, part workshop, the dozen classes gave me such a solid foundation for my parenting life that I decided to start again from the beginning (repetition and slow integration is my jam.)
Chris talks in the class about behaviors having ‘above the line’ and ‘below the line’ implications: “Let’s look at the word love,” he says, “I could be loving toward someone, but the intention of my love toward them is really to control them. For example, a child is going through a difficult moment, is crying and upset and when they cry and are upset, it actually upsets me. And so I say, ‘It’s gonna be okay, everything is fine, stop crying, don’t worry,’ and I give them a hug and it looks very loving, but it may not be in the best interests of that child. It may be the best thing that I can do in that moment, taking into consideration my level of awareness, but as my level of awareness deepens, I may realize that that was more self-serving, that it was not a loving act, it was more manipulative and controlling. Maybe I could have done a more above the line kind of love which would be unconditional. This would be to allow the child to experience their emotions and support them in that space.”
The main concepts in Peaceful Parenting move beyond parenting and into all of our relationships including our relationship with ourselves. All of them include developing a deeper awareness of our own behavior patterns and our social conditioning. As Chris puts it, “your behaviors become your habits, your habits become your destiny; they become the life you create for yourself.”
For me, the motivation for deeper personal development, what Chris calls “advancing the soul,” came from a urgent desire to bring more meaning into my life and to model that behavior for my kids. If I’m honest, it also came from turning 40. I suddenly developed a healthy fear of dying before my “work” was complete, before I had made a “difference” in the world. (Naturally, this includes completely ignoring all the “differences” I have already made.) I always saw such great potential in myself, (likely a result of an over-fed ego with a side of narcissism, plus a childhood peppered with serious celebrity worship,) but I felt like that potential was vastly underutilized. Was it laziness? Was it confusion over what my real Oprah-styled “Purpose” was? Was it too many choices and not enough single-pointed focus? Talking to Chris, (like talking to all people wiser and more experienced than me,) was a gift in discovering the answers to some of those questions. Of course, the answers are not always so simple, but that’s the nature of existence, isn’t it? Not a lot of black and white, just a whole lot of gray.
These muddy waters are inherent in awareness too, as Chris so astutely explains: “Wisdom tends to be a paradoxical concept so you can have a habit that is both limiting and advancing your soul. So let’s say you’re trying to be very disciplined and doing a routine, you’re trying to meditate every day and whatever it is. That could be an ‘above the line’ habit. The same habit can also have ‘below the line’ implications in your life where you want to meditate every day and you put your meditation ahead of your other duties. You will drive by someone in need on the side of the road because you have to get home to meditate before supper! In your own mind and your own heart, logically you know that you are attending to your own ritual that you have set out for yourself, but you are also not being true to your own character. “
Awareness is a concept that requires a great deal of wisdom and discernment and the only way to really develop either is through experience, observation and loving kindness, especially towards ourselves. For Chris, the road to developing awareness has been rife with obstacles. He has found that getting to know ourselves comes from “peeling back all the layers that we create, all the filters and all the perspectives that we use to protect ourselves and to create a story around our lives that we can feel is acceptable and feel good about and yet, often that story and those filters and all those layers are just things that cover up our ability to be more aware.”
So why is it so difficult for us to practice awareness? Part of it is our conditioning – we generally tend to be critical of ourselves and others, in fact it’s the basis of most of our cultural humour! (For fun, notice how many times I've used self-criticism in this essay and how HILARIOUS it is.) Another obstacle to our awareness practice is time. I don’t know about you, but I feel like my schedule is so full that taking time for self-care and personal development is tricky business. Part of it is the unique beliefs that we each carry and which ironically, being aware of, would help to clarify and alter those ingrained patterns.
Chris reminds me that part of our hesitation for moving forward with personal growth is a misguided sense of self-preservation. As he so wisely observes, “There’s pain in learning, we tend to avoid it and yet, we are the architects of our own suffering! Pain is a natural part of life, but suffering is when we continue to wallow in it, when we stay in the story or habits or thinking patterns that are not in alignment with our true intentions.”
When we talked about how my own pace tends to be so slow in learning how to let go of what no longer serves, Chris suggests that: “Our mind is not just in our brain. Our ability to process life, to make decisions and to learn from our experiences is not only in our brain, it lives in the whole body, too. If you feel like your own personal development is going slower than you’d like, set the intention to speed it up. Typically, that’s a little scary because when you ask for that, you realize that that might involve some pain. We tend to go at the pace that we feel most comfortable and when the pain is too much, that’s when we typically change. They say masters change before the pain gets there. I think that takes a lot of awareness and a lot of confidence and it also takes a lot of faith that no matter what, things are going to be okay.” I would add that it also takes patience, as my own experience has shown me time and again. As Chris so eloquently reminded me, “I had to tell myself that every morning and every evening for a year before I had reprogrammed myself, but someone else could say it once and it’s done, it’s embedded. So there’s no time limit on this stuff. One person, a lifetime, another person, a moment - why that is, I don’t know. It might be that time is irrelevant.”
Chris Leigh-Smith's book Bully Proof, a must-read for anyone with kids in their lives, in my humble opinion.
A daily practice that anyone can do is engage in metacognition – the thinking about our own thinking, essentially awareness in itself. From there, Chris suggests we ask ourselves “Am I being honest? Am I in illusion or am I in reality? Next, how do I communicate with myself? Am I listening to that constant critical voice or am I listening to the loving aspect of myself? They’re both the same, they’re in me, but who am I going to listen to. Cherokee grandfather talks about two wolves fighting inside of us, the good and the evil, who wins? The one we feed, the one we pay attention to. After communication comes behaviors, how are we behaving? Am I anxious all the time, am I worried about my ego, am I insecure? Am I working on trying to let go, am I following my heart, am I listening? Are your behaviors matching your intentions?”
If we’re able to take time regularly, a few seconds or minutes at the beginning and end of the day to set intentions and look at our behaviors, “build pauses in,” as Chris puts it, we may find that our emotions and habits are no longer controlling us, but informing us and giving us a place to start to reduce our suffering.
Chris told me the story of The Monkey Trap, a story told to him by his mentor and how the allegory has helped to guide his choices: “My mentor talked about the monkey hunters, I can’t remember where, but the brains of the monkeys are a delicacy, unfortunately for the monkeys, and so they design and weave these special wicker baskets, tether them to a rope and place a banana inside the basket. When the monkey places their hand into the basket and grabs the banana, it can’t get its fist out and they pull on the tethered basket and start to get really angry thinking ‘why won’t life give me this banana! I just want this banana and I deserve this banana!’ All the belief systems that the monkey has that deceives it into thinking it’s entitled to this banana. The hunter, of course, hears all this and comes and gets the monkey. All the monkey had to do to be free was just to let go of the banana. The banana is, of course a metaphor for all the things in our lives that we’re too afraid to let go of.”
“When I look at all the poor choices I’ve made and I’ve made lots of them - I’m okay with that because it’s made me make better choices - All the poor choices I’ve made have been based in fear. I can be uncomfortable and I can still be very at peace with myself because I can be happy with the way I’m communicating, the way I’m loving, the way I’m behaving and that’s not fear-based. When I’m full of fear, I’m full of anxiety and doubt, I do not access my highest resources, I do not access my friends, I put up all sorts of walls and filters. I’m not dealing with reality, I’m caught up in my fear. And when I reflect on that, when I’m not comfortable in my body, I try to train myself to pause. To let go of my agenda, to let go of my insecurities, to let go of the banana and to proceed as best I can from an intention to be loving, rather than an intention to protect myself based on fear.”
Awareness Month Support System
Meditation, slower-paced exercises designed to connect the ol’ mind with body awareness, walking, check-ins, journaling (which generally involved writing my dreams down because that’s all I had time for this month.)
Resources:
· Dr. Dan Siegel’s Wheel of Awareness exercises and his beautiful book, ‘Mindsight,’
· Heart and Bones Yoga (the lovely Brea Johnson) and her online yoga studio,
· Tao of Peace Martial Arts class and Peaceful Parenting class,
· ‘Bullyproof’ by Chris Leigh-Smith,
· Friends and family who are awesome at triggering my below the line reactions and encouraging above the line behaviors AND pointing out my areas that need work. (Special mention to my beloved husband and children;)
· ‘Planting Seeds’ by Thich Nhat Hanh, used as a homeschool book for my son, it’s an awesome book for practicing mindfulness with kids.
· I also read Patti Smith’s books, ‘Just Kids’ and ‘M-Train,’ which didn’t have a lot to do with awareness practice, per se, but damn, she’s a good writer.
Recipes: