Most New Year’s resolutions sound like…
I will exercise more. I will eat a better diet. I will be nicer to my loved ones. These kinds of resolutions don’t build awareness and almost never last.

I would like to suggest an alternative…
Our personality is made up of a range of qualities, some are wonderful…others, not so much. We tend to express these qualities unconsciously and habitually. What would it be like if you could intervene with conscious awareness and learn to express your finer qualities more of the time? This would be a New Year’s resolution worth making!

Here is a mindfulness exercise to hone in on a goal that will help you develop your best self.

Identifying a Quality of My Best Self Meditation

Preparation

1. Read through the instructions before you begin.
2. Allow at least 15 to 30 minutes of private uninterrupted time by yourself.
3. Take a piece of paper and pen/pencil to a quiet room where you won’t be disturbed.
4. Sit comfortably or lay down.

Mindful Exercise

1. Shut your eyes and take 3 long, slow, deep breaths.
2. Allow your body to come to stillness and relax as best you can.
3. Reflect on who you are when you are at your best. Picture yourself feeling really well, on top of your game, or any time when you knew you were really expressing your finest qualities.
4. Hold this picture for several minutes and try to experience it in as much detail as you can. Notice any sensations in your body. Notice how you feel about this experience. And notice any thoughts that come up. Really allow yourself to observe your experience. If you come up with more than one example, explore each one in detail.
5. Now hone in on ONE QUALITY about yourself that really defines your best self. This is not something that you “want” to be…this is a quality that you already have.
6. Form a resolution deep within you that prizes and affirms this quality of yours.
7. Say to yourself, “This year I will become more and more aware of how I express (insert your quality here) in my day-to-day relationships and activities.”
8. Take a few more deep breaths and gently open your eyes.
9. Now write down what you discovered.

Making it Stick

1. Making this experience stick involves staying conscious!
2. Practice watching for your “quality”. Notice when it emerges without effort. Notice when it’s not around. See if you can consciously turn on the tap and let it flow out of you. Nurture and develop your chosen “quality” to emerge in different situations. Track your progress by keeping a log of what you notice. This will help develop more and more awareness of how your “quality” exists within you.
3. You may find it helpful to repeat the exercise periodically.
4. If you want support in developing more consciousness, contact me for an appointment to explore this exercise in-depth.

My best wishes to you for a year filled with awareness and growth.

Your comments are welcome!

Please share your experience of making New Year’s Resolutions.

I wrote and produced the Mindful Enneagram CD because it combines two passions that inform my counselling practice. I’m passionate about understanding personality differences and I’m passionate about the benefits of mindfulness meditation. The CD is a collection of 9 guided meditations designed that help develop awareness and release the habitual patterns of our personality.

When people decide to come for counselling they generally want to feel better about something that’s going on in their life situation. This usually involves understanding themselves or others and becoming more conscious of their thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

After 30 years of counselling people of all ages I continue to be struck by two things.

1. The personality differences between people
2. The profound effect of conscious awareness in the present moment.

Finding ways to bring these elements together gets me excited to go to work every day.

The Enneagram (pronounced Enee a gram) is a system of understanding personality differences. It describes 9 different archetypal ways of experiencing and expressing oneself in life. I’m a passionate, sensitive and creative person. These qualities have been gifts and challenges in my life. Years ago when I first discovered the Enneagram, I was stunned at how this system of understanding personality described me. I regularly hear this from people when they first encounter the Enneagram. Somehow reading the descriptions that so match their experience both validates and explains it.

Most of us live quite unconsciously repeating habitual patterns over and over even when the results bring us pain. For me understanding the motivations and habits of my personality type was the first step in becoming truly conscious. And as I studied and learned more about the Enneagram, I began to see the differences between people with more understanding and compassion. This was a game changer for me in my counselling practice. I was able to better understand the underlying motivations behind different types of defensive and destructive behavior and develop a deeper compassion for people I previously didn’t work well with.

The key principle of the using the wisdom of the Enneagram for personal growth is to develop the “inner observer”. This is the part of the mind that is able to watch the other parts of the mind thinking, feeling and doing. When we pause and separate having an experience and watching our experiences we become more and more conscious. This is where mindfulness meditation comes in.

I have meditated on and off my whole adult life, from the early days of learning Transcendental Meditation at the University of Guelph to my regular mindfulness meditation practice today. Every form of meditation at its core has the principle of learning how to “watch” the mind’s activity. When we practice meditation we are developing the “inner observer”.  Here’s where it really gets exciting….because when I understand my chronic personality habits I understand more about what I’m watching.

For many years I’ve been sprinkling in mindfulness practices into my clinical work. At some point in 2008, I started experimenting with leading individual clients through guided meditations that highlighted the habits of their Enneagram type. Clients continued to report how powerful this felt and many asked if we could record these sessions. I was struck by the connection between understanding personality and practicing mindfulness as a crucial tool for personal development.

To my surprise, I couldn’t find any recorded guided meditations that targeted the paths of growth for each type defined by the Enneagram. After attending the International Enneagram Association conference in 2009, it became clear to me that if I wanted this kind of application that I would have to produce it myself!

The Mindful Enneagram CD grew out of my commitment to bring a ready application for people who really want to develop conscious awareness. The project was all-consuming and one of the most creative times of my life.

I was blessed to work with a wonderful sound engineer, and a talented graphics and duplicating team. I am grateful to my dear friends and colleagues who gave me excellent feedback and vetted the wording of the meditations from the perspective of their own experience.

The Mindful Enneagram CD was released in March of 2010. I am thrilled that it is selling to Enneagram and meditation enthusiast all around the world. I continue to receive positive feedback about the tangible results people experience from using these meditations. I invite you to give the gift of mindfulness to yourself or your loved ones this year.

To hear audio samples or buy The Mindful Enneagram CD click here

To learn more about how I work with the Enneagram click here

To work with me in person or on Skype to understand your personality and begin a mindfulness practice click here to contact me.

If you have used The Mindful Enneagram meditations and want to share your experience please leave a comment.

I’m often surprised to hear how infrequently families eat meals together. With long commutes, a lengthening work day and involvement in sports and other activities, somehow eating on the run has become the norm.  What a missed opportunity to build skills and transmit healthy values to your kids! These days even weekends are spent on the go contributing to our fatigue and stress filled lives.

I’m writing this blog post to convince you to change your family eating habits. Here are some great reasons to make food preparation, eating and cleaning up together a priority. Hope they whet your appetite for having dinner at home with the family more often this year.

1. Eat Healthier  – You will likely be eating healthier meals if you make them yourself. Whenever possible focus on eating simple, fresh and local. Colourful foods pack the biggest nutrition and look good too.

2.  Togetherness – You and your children get to participate in doing something together that benefits all of you.  This builds teamwork, companionship, sharing and family cohesiveness.

3. Teaching Values & Skills - Your kids learn basic life skills such as food preparation, using appliances, multi-tasking and good table manners. Too many kids these days aren’t developing these basic skills.

Research tells us that just sharing dinner together is really healthy for our kids. There have been many studies conducted on the impact of the family meal on physical, social and emotional development in children and teens. All report findings that are hard to argue with. Better academic performance, less obesity, less cigarette smoking and drug use as well as healthier nutritional habits later in life. There is much written on this topic on the Internet if you feel like Googling around and finding resources in your local area. I found a wonderful website that you might enjoy sponsored by the BC Ministry of Health and the BC Dairy Foundation. Here’s the link …. http://bettertogetherbc.ca/pages/about-better-together

Tips for Togetherness

• Don’t be alone in the kitchen
• Ask young children to tear up lettuce, put cut up vegetables in bowls, and take small things to the table.
• Ask bigger kids to mix up sauces, get things out of the fridge, read out the recipe, check what’s going on in the oven and on the stove and help fill the dishwasher.
• Get your teenager to participate by asking them to research recipes that interest them, tell jokes and stories to younger kids, turn the TV off and select music to cook by. And most important – invite them to be Chef for a Night.
• Clean up is faster when everyone participates. Make this a habit when your kids are as young as 5 or 6 and you won’t get grief when they are teens.

Did I convince you?

Have dinner together tonight

Enjoy your family!

Here’s one of my favourite recipes for chicken. It’s super easy to prepare and kids love it.

Sticky Hoisin Chicken

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup (50 ml) each hoisin sauce and barbecue sauce
• 2 tbsp (30 ml) soy sauce
• 1 tsp (5 ml) each garlic and ginger (fresh is best but powdered works too)
• 4 bone-in chicken legs (with thighs attached) or skinless, bone-in breasts
• 1 green onion, chopped (optional)

Preparation Steps

• Preheat oven to 425F (220C).
• Line a baking sheet or pan with foil and oil it.
• Mix the 3 sauces together with the garlic and ginger.
• Remove skin from the chicken. Coat chicken with sauce and place meaty side down on foil lined pan.
• Bake uncovered for 20 min.
• Turn chicken over and spoon pan juices overtop. Continue baking, occasionally basting with sauce until chicken feels springy when pressed, 20 to 25 min.
• Sprinkle with green onion, if you like.

I like to serve this yummy chicken with roasted potatoes, rice or couscous and two different coloured vegetables…something green like beans, zucchini or bok choy and something orange like carrots, squash or peppers. If you are really busy why not just make a big salad while the chicken is baking.

This is an interactive blog….please share what works in your family.

In his talk, the venerable meditation master reminded us that the past has already happened and the future is not here yet. The only aspect of our life that we really have access to is the present moment. This is such a simple concept and yet most of us would agree that it’s not so simple to accomplish! Our minds are often caught up in thoughts that review past events and still more thoughts that preview what’s coming in the future. Very rarely are we just attending to what’s happening right here, right now.

The Power of the Present Moment

Remember the last time you were fully present?

You know what I mean. A time when you were really there…in the moment…completely engaged. Perhaps you were in a beautiful place. Or having fun with a child or a good friend. Or maybe you were eating something delicious.

Try to remember what that experience was like. What were you seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, and thinking? There was something really PURE about it, right?

Being fully present in the moment is powerful because we are simply experiencing.

We’re not caught up in analyzing. We’re just having the experience. This is called “direct experience” and involves the suspending of judgement and reactivity. We aren’t thinking about what we are experiencing – we are simply experiencing it directly. When we are in this state of conscious awareness we are more likely to see the good around us and even feel good about the good around us.

Thich Nhat Hanh spoke about finding pleasure in the simplest of moments as being the path to cultivating happiness in our day to day life. When the mind is missing the “now” by searching the past or future for happiness, he says we move away from a state of mindfulness and the possibility of happiness into a state of forgetfulness.

The Purpose of Living Mindfully in the Present Moment

So what’s the big deal about this anyway? It’s a great question and one that comes up in counselling all the time. The big deal is, when your mind is caught up in review of the past; it’s usually judging and finding fault with yourself and others. Your mind can get caught here going over and over the past painful events causing even more pain and suffering. This kind of ruminating negative thinking can lead to depression.

Thich Nhat Hanh talked about the “two arrows”. The first arrow is the one that comes at us from the outside. The pain or suffering we feel from a negative life event. The second arrow is the one we shoot ourselves. When we amplify the the pain by focusing on and exaggerating it through endless judgement and review, we hurt ourselves with our own thinking. We can’t prevent life from offering us difficulties from time to time, but we can definitely prevent ourselves from furthering our own pain through negative rumination.

In the same way, when the mind is caught up in preview we can get stuck in worry and fear about life ahead. When this becomes an endless loop, we can lose confidence in ourselves and some sleep too! This kind of ruminating can lead to problems of chronic anxiety. Both depression and anxiety are common complaints in today’s fast paced and demanding lifestyle.

One of the most valuable purposes of practicing mindfulness is learning how to soothe ourselves.

We do this by setting aside self-recrimination and practicing self compassion. Thich Nhat Hanh described this practice by having us think about what happens when a baby cries. The caregiver typically reaches for and picks up the baby offering comfort by holding, rocking, and gently speaking to the infant. The goal is to soothe, not to question or judge. Learning how to attend to ourselves in the present moment helps break the habit of ruminating thinking and develop the habit of self-soothing.

Being more in contact with your direct experience in the present moment without judgement or reactivity will help you accept more about your life, let go of past hurts and feel less anxious about future events.

A Simple Mindfulness Practice

Thich Nhat Hanh told us to breathe mindfully. “When I breathe in I am aware of breathing in. When I breathe out I am aware of breathing out.” He teaches how to become aware of the present moment simply by becoming aware of the breath.

Try this Mindful Breath Awareness Exercise

If you are like most people, this exercise will show you how you can easily shift your attention to experience feeling a little more relaxed. In just a few moments you can have a mini experience of mindfulness. If you do this regularly you can help train your mind to be more present, more compassionate and alleviate the suffering attached to ruminating negative thinking.

• Take 1 or 2 minutes and sit down wherever you are
• Breathe in and out slowly and gently
• Shut your eyes
• Bring your attention to following the breath as it moves in and out
• Allow whatever sensations you may have, thoughts or feelings that are going on, to just be there – without judgment or commentary
• Take another few mindful breaths
• Then open your eyes and see how you feel

When we consciously shift our focus away from past or future thinking and place our attention on the breath in the present moment we are more available to gather energy from the small moments of pleasure and happiness in our lives. This is Thich Naht Hanh’s central message.

I have found the practice of mindfulness meditation most helpful in my own life. And I enjoy teaching mindfulness to clients in my counselling practice.

If you would like to find out more about how mindfulness can benefit you please contact me http://ruthshell.com/contact

If you would like to learn more about Thich Nhat Hanh’s ideas I found this interesting article… http://www.shambhalasun.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3490&Itemid=0

Your comments are welcome here. Were you also at this event or have you heard Thich Naht Hanh speak at another time? What are your thoughts regarding the power and purpose of living in the hear and now?

The riot violence and destruction has caused a tide of emotion to be expressed locally and even nationally. People are trying to make sense of what happened here and what we can do now to restore the love and dignity that most of us have for our beautiful city.

Above all, what most people are doing is talking. I can’t remember the last time something has captured the attention of the public to this extent. People are asking questions like, How did this happen? How can we prevent it in the future? And most importantly, what can we learn from this, and how can we help our kids to not become involved in these kinds of events?

As a Family Therapist I encourage you to use this as an opportunity to talk to your kids about difficult situations and help them develop a process for clarifying their own values. You can give them a tool that I like to call “Who I am – What should I do?”

This kind of “rehearsal” will help your kids:

• Think about what they really believe in
• Be prepared for dealing with complex situations
• Understand the power of peer pressure
• Develop personal integrity

Here are some steps to having a discussion.

Start the discussion with some self-disclosure
Yes – we all have stories of experiences that were challenging. This would be a past event from when you were a youth or young adult that scared you and demanded a choice of responses. It’s really great for kids to hear tales from your past; especially events that made you feel vulnerable. Kids need to know that adults are just humans with more life experience and practice with figuring out who they are!

Introduce the “Who I am – What should I do?” tool
When you are in a dangerous, scary or otherwise complicated situation here is a process to help focus on yourself and your reactions.

Ask yourself these 4 questions. This will help you identify your own values and choose your response.

1. Outside - What do I see happening around me?
2. Inside – What am I feeling inside of myself?
3. Deep Down - What do I believe about this situation?
4. My Choice - What are my options and what action can I take that most reflects my values and beliefs?

Use an example of a difficult situation to practice the tool
Ask your kids to share an example of something that they have encountered already or something they heard a friend had to deal with. Or you could even use the example of being in downtown Vancouver when the riot erupted.

Here’s an important tip for a lively discussion Don’t tell them what to think – Ask them what they think.

This weekend Canadians are celebrating Canada Day. Our American neighbours are celebrating Independence Day. What a great opportunity to talk about the values and beliefs that make us who we are!

I’d love to hear from you. Please let me know how your discussions go…

From Session to Session – Therapy Take-Aways to Practice at Home

My blog posts will focus on the gems that arise commonly in therapy sessions and the practical exercises that you can work on in your everyday life.

As a therapist I believe in change. It would be pretty hard to do my work if I didn’t!

I believe that change is possible because I have seen it happen in my own life and with many clients that I have worked with over the years. I have watched people look at themselves honestly, discover aspects that cause problems in their life and then find the motivation to do things differently. Just read some of the Success Stories on my website and you’ll be inspired.

Current research in neuroscience has shown that the brain is plastic and can change. This is called neuro-plasticity and there has been much written on this topic. Simply put, we now know that the brain is capable of growing, healing and rewiring. In fact you can teach an old dog new tricks! We are all capable of altering our thinking, beliefs and behaviour. We are all capable of change.

Change may seem like a complicated process but it doesn’t have to be. To feel like we can access change in our lives I have found it useful to break it down and simplify the steps.

1. Awareness – first we need to be aware of what needs changing. What are you not comfortable with? What are the aspects of yourself that cause you recurring distress? What is it about yourself that you would really like to work on? Why do you often sabotage the changes that your really want in your life? We need to ask and answer these questions with honesty and compassion. Often this takes working with a skilled therapist.
2. Research – next we need to review what other options are available. What would you rather do? What are others with this issue doing? Explore ways to really change the way you think, feel and act.
3. Practice – now of course is the day to day work of catching yourself in the “old” pattern and replacing with the new. This can sometimes feel like moving a mountain…that’s the mind working hard to change the habitual patterns of your brain wiring. Practicing over and over is the only way to unlearn old habits and integrate new ways of being. The more we practice, the more we are conditioning our brain to develop new pathways of operating.
4. Evaluation – how is your practicing going? How is your awareness of yourself changing as you practice new ways of thinking, feeling and doing?

We can all agree that life is a challenge. Meeting challenge with a sense of courage and hope can result in lasting change and a deep sense of personal mastery.

Here are 10 useful tips to remember as you embark on personal change.

1. Keep your goals realistic and achievable
2. Focus on changing one thing at a time
3. Work with a therapist, mentor or other objective person who will give you honest feedback
4. Surround yourself with supportive people and environments
5. Stay focused on your goal
6. Keep track of your progress
7. Don’t be hard on yourself when it feels like you aren’t making progress
8. Change occurs over time – don’t give up on yourself
9. Patience, kindness and curiosity are the best strategies when we support others – remember to use these with yourself
10. Practice…practice…practice…and then practice some more.

Your thoughts on this topic are welcome. Please share them by leaving a reply below.