Moment of Mind February 2021 – Finding Mindful Now

Clouds moving behind snow covered trees. On land of Molalla, Clatskanie, Tenino, Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, and many more native communities… now called Mt. Hoo

Moment of Mind

This week I’m inviting you to notice any patterns of behavior that seem automatic and may not seem supportive to your human system. It could be eating junk food, doom scrolling, or saying yes to things when you really feel a ‘no’ about them. You don’t need to change them, just notice them for now – how often is it happening?
In this noticing I’m not asking you to judge these actions. And I know saying that is silly because the mind has learned to judge on autopilot. So if a judgment arises, notice that too. It’s a brain being protective just in case a judgment could be useful (usually they aren’t). If you want to try a little practice you could say “thank you brain for doing your job, I love you.” Or give yourself some gentle hand hugs of compassion for this very human, universal, experience you’re having. Or breathe into your heart.
In mindfulness we’re using our attention to notice our moment to moment experiences. Where attention rests is one of the ingredients the brain uses to create emotions like stress, along with internal sensory input, external sensory input from your physical environments, and stored experiences from the past.
What’s wild about this is that one of the internal inputs that the brain creates is internal self talk. And the self-talk can seem so real, so convincing, that a loop starts and can run in the unconscious – affecting the body.
Much of our self-talk is not ours. It’s stuff we’ve heard for years, from people around us. We often can’t tell that it’s an imposed limitation that’s not tangibly real, because it’s made of temporary mental static. Unconscious thought is still an input.
The tricksy thing about this is that the self-talk can become embedded in the subconscious, as part of this self-identity that the brain creates. One reason I started examining the self-concept is my teachers were inviting me to look at the bigger life that we are…an intelligence our brains can’t fathom that is breathing our lungs and beating our heart.
When looking at this life intelligence I realized that we don’t have a self concept the first three years of life when these little bodies still jumped, laughed, played and ate. If all these actions can happen without a self identity…it’s clear to me that the self concept is not the do-er. The self-concept is the representation the brain creates of the body as a way to orient in a relationship-based society. It’s like a character the brain creates and talks about – arising within the deeper you that you are: alive awareness. It’s an efficient mechanism for survival because someone can say our name and then we know they’re talking to us as in ‘hey Tia, bear coming!’
It seems to me that all actions emerge from a combination of conditioning and life intelligence moving through the body. The more the conditioning becomes visible through the light of attention, the more opportunities that conditioning has to change…or dissolve. Some conditioning is wonderful and part of living a full life – like learning to eat, avoid being hit by traffic, reading, writing, giving good hugs, and communicating. Our brains are sponges absorbing all this learning! And some conditioning limits life expression.
When I was a workaholic this brain-body system made choices from conditioned, unconscious beliefs. These beliefs were hidden forces guiding actions like: “you have to be liked at all costs” “you can control your thoughts and feelings and how others think about you” “if you don’t work tirelessly no one will like you” “if you don’t work tirelessly you will lose resources like money and connections” “you have to do everything yourself because you can’t trust those around you to do them” “you have no value outside of the work you do”
I could go on here as there were many more…and you can see what these quiet beliefs running in the background could lead to. It led to 60 hour workweeks. It led to self-centered aggression and a form of arrogance about work. To saying yes repeatedly to major projects where I effectively repeated a phd-scale project every year for six years. I’m not saying I didn’t do good work – I did. And that work happened in spite of these beliefs, not because of it. It led to a fear of going on vacation. It led to my partner looking at me a few years into our relationship and saying something to the effect of, “you’re miserable and our life is amazing, I don’t want you to feel miserable, I want you to look at this.”
For me, work was a compulsion that the brain-body used to hide away from the insecure mind chatter the brain also generated. This is a form of addiction, and I am convinced it’s where all addictions originate. When the mind says things like “you’re a terrible person, why would anyone like you” of course the brain and body will do things to shut that voice up. Never mind that both the internal chatter and the actions to avoid it are protective mechanisms in conflict with each other. All of this stems from misunderstandings we’ve learned about who we are, and are not, and how the brain functions.
I had been meditating for more than a decade at this point. And while the mind would quiet some during meditation, I couldn’t meditate all day long. That practice did condition this brain to focus attention though, and I could see patterns. I enrolled in a two year codependency peer therapy program on the recommendation of a friend. In that program I learned about some of the unconscious belief patterns my brain absorbed from a violent childhood environment. School is where I got important resources for survival – like food and non-violent social interactions (I know for some of you reading this that sounds like a stretch, critiques on public school aside, school was my ticket out of poverty). Of course my brain learned to behave in specific ways – this is how it kept the body alive.
In therapy I learned how to set boundaries – which frankly seemed like magic once I started using them. I can still remember the light bulb of insight this was. I could choose to say NO?!!! WHAT!!?? Boundaries were like a magic wand.
We aren’t taught how the brain works as a prediction system – that it’s always creating simulations of what is happening based on inputs. And we’ve also been taught that the only thing we are is this self-identity/body and the thoughts, feelings, sensations and emotions that move through it. This is why the mental chatter the mind makes can seem very personal, after all the mind is saying things about the self. Must be true.
Is it true??? I invite you to start inquiring.
This week I invite you to simply notice a pattern in one area of your life where it seems you keep doing something and you don’t understand why since it seems not helpful. Noticing sounds small and yet it’s incredibly powerful as a starting point to thawing out frozen patterns.
I’d love to hear what you notice!

much love, Tia

Love for your Inner Science Activist Nerd

It’s Black History month so I thought I’d share some of the Black climate change leaders making history now.

Rhiana Gunn-Wright is the Director of Climate Policy at the Roosevelt Institute. She’s one of the leaders developing and writing policy as part of what’s called the Green New Deal. Ms. Gunn-Wright has been writing policy in public health, environmental justice, education, law enforcement and welfare – she comes to climate change policy knowing the intersections of how climate affects jobs, health and justice. Her presence at the helm, in an organization named after FDR is especially impactful because many Black Americans were excluded from benefits from the New Deal after the Great Depression.
Adrienne Hollis is a biomedical scientist and environmental lawyer who is lead climate justice analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Beyond building the body of research about how communities are impacted by climate change and health effects, she is an advocate for including environmental justice communities at the decision making table. You can read an interview with her here.
Dr. Robert D. Bullard, called the Father of Environmental Justice, has written eighteen books on the intersections between sustainable development, land use, industrial facilities, environmental racism, equity and more. His work is how I learned about environmental justice, and after nearly 50 years he continues to research, organize, and advocate (successfully) for changing laws that protect people who are vulnerablized by industry and government decisions. Read more about his legacy fighting landfills and incinerators located primarily in Black neighborhoods in Houston here.

Mindfulness in Action

The Chinook Nation is asking for your support as they seek federal recognition from the U.S. Government. This recognition would enable federal funding, essential health services, supports for cultural heritage, and more protections. Please consider writing and sending a letter in the next week to elected officials in Congress, here is a sample template they provided. Please also send an original of copy of your letter to: Chinook Indian Nation P.O. Box 368, Bay Center, WA 98527. You can look up your congresspeople here. Some of the history on this ask is below.

Indigenous people were called “savages” in the Declaration of Independence. Native Americans were not granted actual citizenship – on land their ancestors tended for more than 10,000 years – until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. The U.S. government passed a series of laws in the 1800s and 1900s in its ongoing attempt to take land away from the original indigenous residents and destroy non-European cultures through assimilation.

For example, the Dawes Act of 1887 dissolved tribes as formal legal entities and distributed their land to individuals (which at the time was one way a Native American could become a citizen) as well as to non-Indian homesteaders. There were more than 90 million acres of land taken at the time. Can you imagine already living on land that fed you and then being told you could only have a smaller portion of land if you farmed it or grazed it with cattle (even if the land wasn’t usable in that way)? And if you say no you lose everything, including breaking up the tribal community? Things didn’t stop there. From the 1940s through the 1960s the U.S. had a policy of Indian Termination and Relocation where the government sought to end their obligations to tribal nations. Federal recognition of many tribal nations ended – including many smaller tribes in Oregon, California and Washington. This closed tribal rolls and liquidated and distributed assets – basically a form of enforced poverty.

If you want to get involved in supporting returning land to indigenous communities, one organization is the NDN Collective, an indigenous-led organization devoted to building indigenous power. Thanks for contributing to addressing these fractured relationships!