Psychology Month!

Week 3, Making Space; Taming the Tiger Within, Thich Nhat Han

Mindfulness has been getting a huge spotlight in medicine the last fifteen years but I often worry that it’s clouded by patients dismissively thinking of it as spiritualism. Thich Nhat Han, a Buddhist monk who sadly died last year, was a mindfulness teacher with a wide variety of accessible material who often managed not to fixate on mindfulness or awareness as a spiritual problem but as a human one. 

I was discussing with a friend at lunch recently another friend who has been recommended mindfulness again and again who always says it’s just too unappealing to her–and the friend at lunch burst out ‘but mindfulness is everything! You can’t do anything without doing mindfulness first!’

And, unfortunately, that’s pretty true. Mindfulness practices, like the ones I used to teach (Yep, I’m biased), are not about sitting in silence and not thinking, as the stereotype goes, but about learning to control your own nervous system. So much of mental health: addiction, anxiety, is rooted in not being able to engage in what we call non-striving behaviors. Sleep is a non-striving behaviors, the more you think about and force yourself to sleep, the less success you have switching effectively between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system activation, for which there is the helpful acronym RIP. Relaxation induced panic.

Not being able to effectively not-strive leads to a huge prediction toward addiction, anxiety, panic attacks, as well as myriad behavioral problems.

 I think Thich Nhat Han delivers a very good methodology of what Mindfulness really is–coming together with yourself, taking control of your own nervous system. Being able to sit with yourself without blotting it out with the noise of everyone else. I have talked to too many people who do not feel their sense of self is stable and who are amazed when nothing changes in their lives without addressing that first.

Making Space is dedicated to how to begin that practice of mindfulness, while Taming the Tiger Within deals specifically with addressing anger. In mindfulness, one of the greatest lessons is being able to sit with anger and embrace anger and appreciation of anger for what it is, without lashing out or causing harm. And it is, like my friend said, the start of everything.