Meditation and Mindfulness for person with long term health disability
Introduction
I am an advocate of people being given the tools to do their own research on the health disability they live with. One set of tools for investigation of long term health disability is meditation and mindfulness. Warning: There are a range of internet sites offering courses that give you a certificate. I am not recommending the following. I am just giving examples of the money involved. With the monies involved there is a push to make meditation and mindfulness sound wonderful. For example: "In 2019, the total module fees for the Masters in Teaching Mindfulness-Based courses - which includes gaining the Certificate of competence is £10,260" this is taken from bangor.ac.uk/mindfulness/di...
What is Meditation and Mindfulness
Meditation and mindfulness became popular when psychologists discovered that there was money to be made from it. This has created a lot of misinformation concerning how beneficial the practices of meditation and mindfulness are. I have engaged with meditation and mindfulness for 40 years. I know from experience that things can go very wrong and become problematic with these practices. This knowledge runs contrary to what a number of non religious sources on meditation and mindfulness say.
My knowledge of meditation and mindfulness comes from the religious traditions of Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. Meditation and mindfulness is also in the Jewish and Hindu religious traditions. My belief system in meditation and mindfulness has never been static. It constantly changes. There are Buddhist parables to give insight. There are Christian parables to give insight. There are Sufi parables to give insight. These insights interplay with each other together with the gathering of life experience to give varying viewpoints which can change very easily.
In meditation and mindfulness you are interacting with the mind and the mind can do all sorts of things to justify its belief system. It is very easy to create what we see to what we think should happen when what happens in reality can be something very different. For someone in good health with no experience of long term health disability meditation and mindfulness can be a pleasant experience. However, there are Buddhist monks who are of good health who have reported examples of very unpleasant experiences with meditation and mindfulness. For someone with a long term health disability or beginning to experience a health disability meditation and mindfulness can be a continual unpleasant and unsettling experience. I believe that one of the most important things when you engage with meditation and mindfulness is to be a member of a group of experienced meditators. When you run into difficulties there will be someone in the group who is likely to have experienced the particular type of difficulties you are facing and help you with these difficulties.
A quote I like is: "Great faith and great doubt, faith to do the work and doubt to check you are doing the work correctly." We come to do meditation and mindfulness with no previous experience. From the simple descriptions given we believe we know what it is about. We engage in meditation and mindfulness actions accordingly to our beliefs as to what we believe they should be. With a bit of experience we find there are subtle changes we can make in the practice and we make subtle changes with no idea if the subtle changes we make are going to be an improvement or worsening of quality of practice. Or sometimes we need to make changes because it is time to do so. A Buddhist monk I have met had this quote: "When you come to a river you need to build a raft to cross it. After you have crossed the river you leave the raft behind."
Meditation: A Way of Awakening by Ajahn Sucitto is a free download which can be found at: cittaviveka.org/index.php/t... I have read and re-read this a number of times.
What is Mindfulness? by Ajahn Sucitto is a free download which can be found at cittaviveka.org/files/artic...
Mindfulness has a referential quality; it connects present-moment experience to a frame of reference. Trying to navigate the problems of a chronic health disability requires many different frames of reference. My experience is that I can only consider one frame of reference at a time. However, I can easily change my frame of reference and it can be quite unpredictable what frame of reference may present itself. The conclusions I come to on a particular subject is dependent on the viewpoint with which I have at the time. This could create problems if there is no grounding in precepts. In the Buddhist religious tradition one observes what they think. Over time developing the practice of meditation and mindfulness one notices what thoughts can lead to problems and what thoughts can lead to more well being fulfilment and what thoughts you can leave alone to die on their own accord. Over time skills are developed often by trial and error to let go of rather than suppress bad thinking.
One needs the wisdom not to take any action that breaks certain ethical behaviour. This can create all sorts of stresses on occasion because life presents unpredictable events of a seemingly random nature. Meditation takes down the psychic barriers (for want of a better word) that we put between us and the world. If the barriers come down too fast we can get badly hurt. If we are kicking the environment the environment will kick back. This is why the precepts in the Buddhist tradition and the ten commandments in the Christian tradition are so important. They protect us from experiencing more hurt than necessarily when the psychic barriers come down through meditation practices. The less the psychic barrier the more subtlety you can observe.
In the third chapter of the Book of Ecclesiastes of the Old Testament it says:
"For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace."
When we start engaging in mindfulness we can have no idea when it is the right time to do things and when we need not to do things. As we engage in mindfulness over a period of time we notice what happens when we do things at the wrong time, we notice what happens when we do things for too long, we notice that if we take certain mental approaches compared to others pain is reduced. For example I have learnt that if I try and put my pain on a scale of 1 to 10 my pain increases. I then had to learn how to tell medical professionals why I will not tell them my pain on a scale of 1 to 10.
The "a time to kill" in Ecclesiastes above can be interpreted as "a time to terminate" or "bring to an end". It can be viewed in the Buddhist context as "a time to let go". The time to let go of something we are hanging onto cannot be forced. It will happen when it is ready to. Many people with pain and discomfort from a health disability have an old life where they did not have pain and disability. Mindfulness practice can make a person on occasion very aware of the bereavement for the old life.
Experience of Reality's Chaos
Many things logically do not add up. This is the nature of reality. Many things are engineering compromises. A slight change in a variable could cause a massive change in the final result. This is something I have found from my practice of mindfulness. Time engaged in mindfulness allows one to experience of lot of varying values of the inputs that can make differences to the pain and discomfort of their health disability.
"Chaos theory is a branch of mathematics focusing on the behaviour of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. ... In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems docs not make them predictable.
This behaviour is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos." (using British spelling). Taken from:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos...
With issues that generate pain and discomfort little changes can end up with large effects. I often look at large effects as an "express train" and little effects as "an ant". It is easy to guide an ant to where you want it to go. It is impossible to try and stop an express train. The express train has to run its course before it can be brought to a stop. Like railway tracks with points you can only do things with express trains at appropriate points on a track.
Mindfulness over time
Mindfulness over time allows one to learn about multitude of little changes whose results are unpredictable and the timings and subtlety of events that can modify large events. We need to be able to learn how to handle the small and large changes. Pleasant and unpleasant mindfulness occasions need to be treated with no suppression of the feeling experience. To do this requires skills that need to be developed.
One is constantly changing and there is constant need to adapt to skill deficits that occur as the result of ageing or injury or life events. For example: the sudden intense muscle cramp can occur out of nowhere and requires instant response to prevent damage to the body. With no "mindfulness practice skills" the muscle cramp is made aware to your conscious when the muscle has cramped hard. With "mindfulness practice skills" the muscle cramp is made aware to your conscious when the muscle is beginning to start to cramp. The mindfulness practice skills enables one to stop an action at the start of the cramp rather than at the end. This difference can help prevent damage to the body occurring. One wonders how many discs in the back are damaged by the occurrence of sudden muscle cramps?
I use mindfulness as a tool to observe my body's engineering systems condition as it is both mentally and physically. This observation over a number of years has led me to believe that the movement and posture plays a part in our emotions. I have experimented with movement and posture to see how my emotions change. It takes time to develop better sensitivity in mindfulness to observe the events that lead to the development of different emotions. I have come to the belief that counselling can create intense emotions that can fix the body in problematic movement and posture. I have come to the belief that some counsellors can generate very uncomfortable destructive emotions in their clients that remain for a long time and even may never go away. The generation of these emotions is poor practice on the part of the counsellors who perhaps know no better.
Germaine Greer, Tina Turner and Oprah Winfrey have all experienced problematic life events. I believe they have overcome the effects of these life events by doing things in a particular way. Other people who have experienced similar life events claim that these life events lead to the destruction of the individual. Perhaps the difference between these two groups of people is in the way they move and the way their posture holds together. I believe that one can modify the mental effects of unpleasant events by working on movement and posture rather than engaging in counselling to handle unpleasant emotions. Counselling can cause people to get left stuck in some very unpleasant emotions. The only way to test the truth of this for each individual is to develop the skill of meditation and mindfulness and observe for themselves. Change the movement, change the posture and observe what happens while varying time scales. Learn to smile with the eyes and observe what happens using mindfulness.
I finish with an adaption of the "Serenity Prayer" which I have found useful in handling my health disability and is hopefully helpful to others in their adaptations of meditation and mindfulness
Grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And Wisdom to know the difference.
Grant me the peace to live one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to wisdom
Constant pain not bad enough for help
Today is a very bad day
Nerve pain in lower back
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