This definition and experience of responsibility doesn’t just come from our personal and societal lineage, it also comes from our own experience and patterning. These assumptions and rules of engagement might just be the things that keep us from a successful and enjoyable life. 

Imagine that you have been taught your whole life to be kind and put others’ needs first. This condition can come with the assumption that if you’re kind enough and take care of others enough, one day you’ll get what you want. For example, let’s say you’re in a relationship that you’re starting to resent because you feel taken advantage of and neglected, and one morning your partner says to you, “Let me take care of the chores and cook you breakfast so you can relax and do something you enjoy.” Because of your conditioning of responsibility you reflexively deny this suggestion and carry on being “kind” and putting your partner’s needs first. Now in this moment this feels like the right thing to do because this conditioning has kept you safe in knowing who you are and how to act. But you are blind to the fact that your behaviors and patterning are creating the resentment you are starting to feel.  

How do you experience this moment for what it is and actually get to receive the reciprocal care-taking and enjoyment with your partner? 

Presence – It’s not just a trend, it’s a superpower. 

This is where presence comes into play. 

When you cultivate the ability to be in this moment you free yourself from the story that you carry with you, from the narrative that infects all of your experiences. 

Our ability to be present is a huge determining factor for the outcomes and experiences in our life. And presence isn’t only the Zen Buddhist master sitting on a rock at one with the universe. Presence is simply our ability to be with what is without all the meanings and stories we place upon the moment. 

In our culture, responsibility means doing what’s expected. To take the moment we’re living in and abstract it into an imagined construct that most often doesn’t even come from what we want, but comes from what we’ve been told is the responsible way to be. 

But when we do that we miss the moment, our heart, and our ability to feel fulfilled and expressed. We stay in the reactivity of our story and the expected reality we project, and it often leads to disappointment, suffering and limitations that harden and isolate us even more. 

True responsibility actually resides in the word itself. 

Response-ability. 

Your ability to respond instead of react. To see and hear clearly what is actually going on and take the appropriate action. 

And presence gives you this ability.   

Let’s take parenting as an example here. You were brought up to be polite and not make a fuss. When you did you experienced loss of love from your parents and that was painful, so you continued the behaviors that kept you in their good graces. 

Now you’re grown and are raising your own child. You’ve done some work on yourself and you don’t want to raise your kids the way you were raised. But then you’re in a grocery store with your kid, just trying to make a quick stop, and your kid starts bothering strangers and acting silly. 

You feel a well of worry and terror come up in your body because that was never safe for you as a kid. Those feelings in your body make you want to snatch your kid up, control their body and behavior and get out of that store immediately. And if you aren’t present, that’s exactly what you’ll do. 

But, if you are present, you get to witness those old stories coming through your body, take a breath,  and then choose a different path to acknowledge your child, meet their tiny developing body’s needs and redirect to get what you need done. And that’s truly the response-able thing to do, actually responding to the moment and not just reacting based on the old story you’ve carried with you of ‘how to be responsible’.

About the Author: Phannie has a long career of being a movement artist, movement and embodiment educator and creator. During her career as a professional dancer, studio owner, and company founder, she spent her time uncovering what is true and real in this world. Originally used as tools to create content for performances with strong messaging about the human experience, she created the embodiment teachings and methodology of the Radical Love Movement. 

Phannie has dedicated her life to authentic expression and understanding how consciousness works. She now has alchemical structure to support others in discovery and application of their authentic selves expressed through the body.

Certainty and Its Limits

First, let’s talk about certainty. We love certainty. It feels good. Certainty is the feeling of confidence when we’ve figured things out. “I’ve got it!” We smile. It feels like life is good and everything fits into place. However, certainty doesn’t mean we’re right, it just means we feel that we are right.

The feeling of certainty is our reward when we seek and successfully achieve. It’s the main motivator that drives us to take action in the first place. The feeling of certainty and confidence often follows when our seeking efforts find successful completion. We’ve arrived. We’re done. It signals that it’s time to rest. Ahhh…. time to take our reward.

The brain functions to delegate as much as possible to the subconscious. It takes a lot of energy to consciously hold ideas and calculate meaning and context and solve problems. Once we’ve done something once or twice, the brain says, “Got it.” and relegates the function to autopilot so the next time it’s a breeze! Thus, certainty is born.

A Harvard researcher, Ellen Langer, PhD, says certainty can lead to habitual behavior from thinking that we already know. That is how the brain works—it creates unconscious habits for routine activities that produce predictable results. However, the trade-off in the efficiency of habitual behavior is a state of mindlessness whereby the “certainty” puts the brain on autopilot.

Being on autopilot can be efficient for lots of activities like driving and washing dishes, but it can be deadening for most activities and relationships.

Power of Uncertainty

Langer studied certainty by measuring the impact of perception on physical outcomes. In an experiment with hotel maids, it was found they did not believe their work was exercise. In the experiment, however, a test group was told that their maid work was exercise. By convincing them of the exercise involved in their work, and making no other changes, the test subjects were found after four weeks to have lost
weight and inches. Changing their ‘certainty’ made all the difference in physical outcomes!

Simply by changing one’s attention, a different part of the brain is accessed that requires conscious thought. We instantly become mindful with powerful outcomes.

What we tell ourselves matters. Things are constantly changing and look different from different perspectives. If we recognize this, we stay tuned in. We start to appreciate uncertainty, which leads us to be more mindful. When we look for changes, we open possibilities. Research shows we live longer, people find mindful persons more attractive and trust-worthy, and their products are superior.

In Langer’s famous Counterclockwise Study, they took older men in their eighties on a week-long retreat where all the furnishings and topics looked like twenty years prior. During the retreat, they were told to act as their younger selves. They turned back the clock literally. In another control group, older men were only reminiscing at their retreat. After the week, tests found improvements in hearing, strength, memory, vision, joint flexibility, arthritis, IQ, height, gait and posture. Simply from changing their ‘certainty’ about their age. They were fooled into feeling twenty years younger.

Langer says it’s not hard to stay mindful, it simply means staying in a state of noticing new things. That’s it! Noticing new things helps you stay in the present, makes you sensitive to context and perspective. It’s the process of engagement so it feels good and is energy-creating rather than energy-consuming. Here are some ways to say mindful:

• Understand that everything is always new
• Actively notice new things
• Look for what you want and not what you don’t want
• Ask different questions
• Notice the positive

We have enormous control over our health and wellbeing. Changing mindsets is shown to result in physical changes that have lasting effects on us and everyone around us, and helps us to become more creative, healthier, happier, and less burned out.

Notes and sources:

1. Dr. Ellen Langer, Ph.D., has been a social psychologist at Harvard University for over 40 years. Her best-selling books include Mindfulness; The Power of Mindful Learning; On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity; and Counterclockwise. She has also edited the Wiley Mindfulness Handbook, an anthology on eastern/western mindfulness practices. Dr. Langer has researched and written extensively on the illusion of control, mindful aging, stress, decision making, and health.

About the author: Rev. Catherine Dockery, MA, is a People House minister and a conscious aging facilitator. She has an MA in Public Administration and BA in Communications both from the University of Colorado at Denver. Catherine started The Center for Conscious Aging in 2015 where she conducts workshops, personal coaching and support groups for older adults helping them to understand their developmental changes and transform their lives. She has 10 years of experience in individual and group facilitation and presents on aging topics throughout Colorado. To learn more about Catherine’s services please visit www.centerforconsciousaging.org or email consciousaging1@gmail.com

Dichotomous thinking, a thinking that we must either do this or that or we can only be this or that, forces us to choose between two or more different ends of an assumed spectrum, creating a division that implies superiority for the chosen and inferiority for the rejected. In all of the ways that we adhere to this thinking style, I’m going to focus on emotions and our relationship with them and offer an alternative style of thinking, which is called dialectical thinking.

We often label certain emotions as “bad” and others as “good”, and when we participate in this thinking, we culturally and individually invite shame and distance into our process of “bad” and our “good” emotions get placed on an unfair pedestal. 

When we hit layers of emotions that feel uncomfortable, we run.

We run and run and find distractions along the way to justify our reasons for running and even get culturally rewarded for doing so, and then sometimes we run head first into the desolate, dry lands of stigma and pathology when we haven’t listened to ourselves along the way. “I’m not supposed to feel this way.” “I’ve been working so hard in therapy to be happy, why am I still sad?” “Why am I angry at my partner? They’ve been so kind to me.” “What’s wrong with me?” The more we ask those questions of ourselves, the easier it becomes to think the same of others. We disconnect from our “bad” feeling because it’s terrifying and then we disconnect from others when they experience “bad” because they are too close to the thing we’re terrified of. 

What are we missing when that distance is activated with “bad” emotions? What would it be like to invite the “bad” emotions just as easily as we do with the “good”? What if we created and held space for ourselves to practice that and shared it in community with others? What if we chose not to label certain emotions as “bad” or “good” at all?

Emotions are messengers and they will keep carrying their message to us until we listen to them.

We can try to drown them out with whatever is accessible to us at the time, but we have to feel them to hear them and often they have something important to say. In dialectical thinking, we don’t need to choose one thing. We can be with the entirety. And guess what? We are capable of doing this. It’s the fear of what we think our emotions are telling us before even listening to and understanding them that lies to us and tells us we are not. And the more we understand that our emotions and bodies have a language all their own, the more we’ll be able to speak with them and expand our understanding of ourselves and those around us. 

Where do we start? With vulnerability. With our hearts. With our innate humanness that knows how to feel and listen and trust our deepest and most authentic, whole selves. We are human, first and always.

Resources on Cultivating Compassionate Presence

Meditations:

https://insighttimer.com/padmagordon/guided-meditations/reset-to-presence

https://insighttimer.com/dorakamau/guided-meditations/practicing-presence-2

https://insighttimer.com/meditationoasis/guided-meditations/simply-being-relaxation-and-presence

https://insighttimer.com/brotherlobsang/guided-meditations/queer-practice-trust-the-roots

Grounding Exercises:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e5e4a7d1ddf3d2088a1d90e/t/5e87a19dbfbd0c40d74563a4/1585947082450/Self-Regulation+Tools.pdf

Colleen Ladd is an Affordable Counseling Intern at People House. She enjoys reading cheesy thrillers, writing about her life, cooking vegan and vegetarian food, eating vegan and vegetarian food, traveling the world (when there’s not a pandemic), learning/expanding her scope, gazing at the stars, random dance parties, seizing opportunities of joy and weird, practicing presence, standing up with others in the fight for social equity, and making her friends and family laugh. Colleen can be reached at colleenladd@peoplehouse.org or (720) 295-3569.