“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Those were the words on the last slide of the last presentation of the Embodied Positive Psychology Summit I attended a few years ago at Kripalu in Lenox, MA. I didn’t know who Le Guin was and, to be honest, by that point in the week, I figured I’d learned enough that I didn’t need to write down what seemed like nothing more than a trite quote.
I filed those notes away and carried on. After surviving another St. Valentine’s Day (historically, a holiday of particularly horrific romantic blunders on my part), it seems like a good time to forage my emotional refrigerator for leftovers and revisit that quote– and thoughts from other speakers at that conference that I found in my notes– to see if there are some new ways to get bread from that stone.
Relationships are NOT Hard Work
We all know relationships can be confounding and that love can’t be taken for granted. Personally, I learned that stuff through my own, er, research. Which is to say, I found out the hard way through relationships that had ended in disarray– either from neglect (too little effort) or despite intense and well-intentioned attempts at repair (too much).
The notion that a relationship that is hard work has always seemed to me to be a losing proposition. I want to put in the effort and attention– but if it’s really “work,” it sounds mandatory. and, frankly, awful.
I prefer play.
So how can we acknowledging that love takes some effort, but what kind of effort? And how can we approach the work of relationships so it feels more like play and less like work?
I have had relationships that have worked well—effortlessly, actually. Relationships that didn’t seem like work at all—until they had a great fall. And then, all the work and all the king’s horses couldn’t put them back together again.
So what kind of effort was Le Guin talking about? What is this remaking and reconstituting the “bread of our love”? This artisan loaf of passion that can give us the sustenance of enduring love?
I looked over other notes from that session and given it some more thought. Which secret ingredients could be in this elusive delicacy?
Here’s my first attempt at putting them together into a recipe that I would like to cook up in my own relationships. Please feel free to try this at home and let me know how it tastes for you.
Try This At Home
RECIPE INGREDIENTS
1 growth heartset
Into this, mix generous amounts of intentional acts that:
Express our strengths Spot strengths in others
Sprinkle with micro-moments of positivity resonance.
Bake for as long as you can, stirring often.
Growth Heartset
The growth heartset is the ever-expanding bowl into which we knead all our other ingredients for love.
With a nod to the pioneering work of Carol Dweck’s growth mindset, Megan McDonough of Wholebeing Institute coined this phrase to help us to move toward the attitude that we can increase our capacity to love. As we act in awareness of this capacity to expand, we can see love as a force that can keep pace with our lives. There are complexities of life that can otherwise deaden the love that we notice ourselves feeling—and, if we don’t work to expand our love, we can shrink toward those limits.
Put on Your Loving Eyes to See and Acknowledge the Strengths of Others
Character Strengths: Expressing and Spotting
The two main ingredients that we mix into this growth heartset are intentional actions that complement each other perfectly: Expressing our strengths while spotting strengths in others.
Neil Mayerson, chairman/founder of the VIA Institute on Character, illuminates the fallacy of what he calls “scorecard love”—when we offer only as much love as we feel is being returned to us. That kind of relationship can’t break free and expand. It’s made small and petty through calculation and reciprocity. This limits how and when we can express our love—and our selves. Neal pointed out that research into the role of character strengths is clear: When we express our strengths, we witness an increase in health, positive relationships, and flourishing.
So where Megan assures us of our ability to grow, Neil gives us a way to do that: by expressing our strengths.
The complement to this comes from the work of Todd Kashdan, director of the Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University, who unveiled his first presentation on a multi-year research project into the role that characters strengths play in love relationships. His findings show that a central driver of relationship satisfaction is expressive appreciation for our partner’s strengths. How often and well you express this heartfelt appreciation actually shapes our partner toward their strengths—and fosters togetherness. Likewise, the more you choose to perceive and focus on the costs of your partner’s strengths (which I think is a nice way of saying “reminding them about all the crap that bugs you”), the more the relationship erodes and lessens the sense of belonging.
So while Neal is calling us to express our strengths, Todd is showing us the importance of recognizing the strengths of our partners, even in situations that may be otherwise frustrating to us.
To know and be known. This should sound familiar to CiPPsters and anyone who’s studied with Tal Ben-Shahar, as it is one of the fundamental tenets of his approach to his teaching and his life.
Rise with Positivity
The yeast for this recipe comes from Barbara Fredrickson, principal investigator for the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her presentation on micro-moments of positivity resonance (which contained the slide with Le Guin’s quote) summarized work that shows how love truly is the supreme positive emotion—the one that has the most influence in broadening and building waves of positivity that shape us, in tiny bursts of positive emotions.
With a foundation of safety and connection, these micro-moments appear among couples in the form of shared (although not necessarily mirrored) positive emotions, bio-behavioral synchronicity (that ripples back and forth between partners), and mutual care and concern. That broadened foundation allows us to build embodied rapport (“We clicked!”), social bonds, and commitment.
So that may be the recipe that I, and perhaps you, have been looking for—express our strengths, see and appreciate the strengths in our partners, tune in to the micro-moments of positivity that resonate between us.
When we can be aware of these ingredients for love, we are ready to fold this dough into the bread of love that can expand to sustain us throughout our lives. Which leaves just the baking—whether it be the burning fires of romantic love or the gentle warmth of the other kinds of love that give our lives meaning.
My running career began on a crisp autumn evening under the bright lights of completely-packed Hartwood Park stadium in the bucolic rural town of LeRoy in western New York.
You could describe my first endeavor as an “out and back.” The run itself was short—only about 40 yards—and I walked back. You see I wasn’t on a track, I was on the sidelines of a football field.
I was wearing full pads for the Notre Dame of Batavia Fighting Irish and was called on the field to grab a stretcher and carry off my, at the time very unconscious, friend Tommy. I was a third-string linebacker but felt more like a pall bearer than a football player. So by the time he woke up a few miles outside of town in the ambulance, I had already decided I was switching to cross country next fall. I was getting out while my head, and one of my thumbs, was still unbroken.
So it’s a touch ironic that, once again, football will launch my running career. Let me explain…
Thank you, football. You got me into running– and are helping me run the Boston Marathon!
After those two years of running cross country, I wrapped up that stage of my career by placing 23rd in Genesee County, good enough for a trophy I have to this day.
See if you can spot a pattern in the way I’ve chosen to train since…
I basically didn’t run at all for about 10 years, until I started working at Runners’ World and training for my next adventure: the New York Marathon, which I completed in 1991. I dialed down my running for a while, then ramped up and again to run New York in 2002.
Then, 10 years later, I returned to race in New York City, but this time I went to Central Park at the start of the race, not just the finish. I trained all out to try and break five minutes in the Fifth Avenue Mile in 2012. I recounted my transformative journey in Runners World, and as the focus of a memoir which is sitting idle (for now).
And now, again, 10 years later, I am training for The Boston Marathon on April 18, 2022 . I’m also fundraising for Boston Children’s Hospital. I launched my campaign with a Super Bowl football squares game that has contributed about 25% of my fundraising goal– so once again I am grateful for the role that football is playing in my running career.
I’m also feeling overwhelming gratitude for all the people who have helped bring me this far in all chapters of my running life I hope to share more stories and memories about them as my training continues.
Family week at Omega Institute not only launched me on a Great Endeavor, it emancipated hundreds of kids to roam the countryside in pursuit of summertime bliss.
Every stage of my running history has been anchored by a momentous goal. From the high school county championships to the Cross Country Club Nationals which I ran almost 35 years later– and the marathons and mile races in between (but decades apart!) I’ve been drawn to what author Matt Walker calls The Great Adventure.
I learned about the phenomenon at a workshop at Omega Institute several years ago. The concept stayed with me and reveals itself from time-to-time when my heart tells me it’s time to do something out-of-the-ordinary.
Here’s what distinguishes a Great Adventure:
High endeavor – something that has a goal that is currently beyond my reach.
Uncertain outcome – there is no guarantee of meeting that goal.
Total commitment – the work requires focus and putting aside other projects and distractions.
Tolerance for adversity – my commitment had to be deep enough to work through the inevitable obstacles and pitfalls I would encounter.
Great companionship – the work is so great and the outcome so uncertain that I can’t do it alone.
All those came into play in my other Great Adventure races. And I have already experienced all 5 Elements in my early training for Boston.
Please follow TakingMulligans and my social media posts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to stay in touch and witness my progress. I’m going to try and keep my feet on the ground and my eyes wide open to all the ups and downs of running my first marathon in 20 years.
To mark the 100th anniversary of my father’s birth on March 3, 1921, Taking Mulligans is establishing a special section dedicated to some of his favorite recipes, called Louie’s Cooking With Love.
Louie, as he was known to all, was an avid gardener and forager who took great delight in bringing his harvest into the kitchen. My mom Rita, who spent several years of her youth helping to run operations at the Eagle Hotel in town, was a marvel at cooking to feed. She kept us all happy with her homemade dishes, even though she claimed she actually liked doing laundry more than cooking. My dad, on the other hand, enjoyed the creativity and traditions of cooking. Mom cooked the meals, he cooked the delicacies like cardoon, puff balls, fried dough, and stuffed calamari. As Rita would often say, “I cooked to feed, but Louie. He cooked with love.”
That became the name of a spiral-bound notebook of handwritten notes and recipes put together to pass along his recipes. With these foods come the love of family that my parents both shared with gusto. Now these homemade recipes can be yours too right here in Louie’s Cooking With Love. (Thank you to Mark and Maria for all your care and work on that treasured keepsake, and to my siblings Mike, Anthony, and Liz for photos.)
To commemorate his 100th birthday, try one of these favorites. And come back for more. I’ll be adding more recipes as time goes on, so subscribe to the blog or follow Taking Mulligans Facebook page to see the full collection.
Four completely unrelated friends of mine told me they took up running for the first time, or for the first time in a long time this year. With the prospects of no gyms, no vacations, no offices, and no haircuts, running was what the pandemic offered: grow out our Steve Prefontaine and Flo Jo hairdos and find that road to nowhere.
As a certified Road Runners Club of America running coach (certifiable know-it-all), I felt compelled to pepper these unsuspecting friends with tips— even before they asked.
I was out for a walk with one of them recently and she asked me what to do now— specifically how to dress as the weather turns chilly here in the Northeast. She had no idea the pandora’s box of advice she had just opened. This time, since it was solicited, I was free to inundate her with my full and complete, never before published theory. After about 30 minutes, she jokingly asked for a chart to remember it all.
My friends, there are no jokes when it comes to dressing for the cold. So here, revealed for the first time anywhere in writing, is the definitive guide to dressing for (and learning to love) the fall and winter weather, aka The Cinquino Progression.
Origins of The Cinquino Progression
I am a lifelong runner who came of age in the lake effect snows of Lake Erie and near the winds and waves of Lake Ontario— and have spent every winter of my life in cold weather. As such, I have developed and refined this strategic sequence of increasingly warmer clothing adjustments meticulously, incorporating new fabrics and discoveries over the years.
Running Boom Trivia Question: What was the first great invention of the modern era of cool weather clothing, as recognized by inclusion in the original 1970s version of the Cinquino Progression?
If you are thinking “hat” you are not exactly wrong, but you are also not correct. People knew to put on a hat long before Frank Shorter won the 1972 Olympic Marathon.
Hint: This first true cold weather running innovation was invented for athletics by the Nelson Knitting Company of Rockford, Illinois in 1967, when it was used exclusively for another purpose.
Answer: Tube socks. Specifically, tube socks worn to keep the wind off your arms and your hands warm (but not too warm). Readily available and easily removed as you warmed up, tube socks on the arms were the Eureka moment of this runner’s cold weather life. I can only thank God that I survived their use, since they were made of 100% cotton. More on that later.
Pay Off #1: Run Longer, More Comfortably
Left to Right: You BEFORE the Cinquino Progression, You AFTER the Cinquino Progression
The goal of The Cinquino Progression is to keep you comfortable and keep you running right up until the bitter end known as The 3-Layer Maximum. (This is the cold weather threshold when you stay inside and watch Margaux Hemingway’s Personal Best again.)
The guiding principle of the Cinquino Progression is to prepare the runner way for winter by being be a little cold in the fall. The idea is that, by easing into the cool weather with minutely gradated additions to your winter clothing, your body will acclimate to the cooler temps and give you some natural tolerance and comfort when it becomes even colder. This is apparently the way chickens are cared for also— I’ve heard that if you give them too much warmth in their coop as the winter comes on, they are vulnerable to freezing if something happens to the heat supply during a cold snap. But when you let them acclimate, they can survive that same weather without difficulty. So think of The Cinquino Progression as the way you, too, can grow feathers to inoculate you against the colder temps that are on the way.
This orderly progression can also deliver a very specific payoff— your best run of the year. More on that later, too.
Let us start with the inviolable rule that could save your life.
COTTON KILLS.
Yes, for a moment forget about Covid-19, heart disease, smoking, medical errors, rabid dogs, lawn darts, a thousand cuts. America’s greatest killer may be cotton. I don’t need facts to back up this claim, because I choose to believe that it is true. Follow along. Cotton holds moisture, moisture traps cold, cold traps you. Then you die, frozen and alone like a Jack London Marathon. Stick with wicking fabrics in every season, but especially in the winter.
The other safety rule is less controversial: you may find yourself running in dawn or twilight hours as the days shorten, so wear a reflective strip or vest, headlamp, or strobe. Be seen, be safe. (ie. Cars kill, too.)
There is no specific timeline for applying The Cinquino Progression. Your personal cold tolerance will dictate what is the acceptable chill at each stage, as the days shrink toward winter.
The critical thing is that you go through each phase in sequence as temps drop. Of course, if winter hits all at once and the temps drop 30 degrees in one day, you may need to skip a stage or two for that day. But treat that like an emergency. When more moderate temps return, go back and pick up the progression where you left off. Same thing if the weather turns unseasonably warm, peel back as many stages as possible before resuming.
The rule of thumb at every stage is the same: you should be a little cold when you start out. Kind of like arriving at a nude beach for the first time: if you feel comfortable right away, you have overdressed.
One last edict about the weather at this time of year: there is nothing you can do with freezing rain. I cannot help you. No one can help you. Just don’t. Put on hot water for tea and dig out that pair of shorts with the drawstring that got stuck inside over the summer. That will be more fun than running in freezing rain. For extra fun, do a google translate of curse words in exotic languages to use while you stick yourself with the safety pin during extraction. Start with Alajaina!
With these ground rules understood and sworn to upon your Farmer’s Almanac, we can proceed.
When there is only set of footprints in the snow, it either means you are being carried toward your best run of the year by the Cinquino Progression, or it’s below 10 degrees and I stayed inside that day.
The Cinquino Progression: 10 Stages To Comfort in the Cold
Start with a base of shorts and a short-sleeved technical t-shirt, then add clothing as you progress through each numbered stage. This clothing stepladder is cumulative unless noted.
Stage 1: The Second T-Shirt The first adjustment to make is to add a second technical t-shirt. This keeps your torso from the damp winds of fall yet allows your arms to start their adaptation to the cold.
Stage 2:Gloves Fingers always get cold earlier in the fall than I expect. A pair of light, wicking gloves will make for much more pleasant runs in the fall on cooler days and throughout winter. Polyester, acrylic, and polypropylene won’t kill you.
Stage 3:Knit hat This not only gives you warmth but it’s the single best way to adjust your heat during a run. Put it on when you get started, take it off as you warm up, then put it back on again as you slow down at the end of your run. Make sure it’s not too heavy. Don’t use wool. Just a nice polyester or acrylic blend that isn’t holding onto moisture as you go. (Some do, and I can’t really explain why— so you may need to experiment with a few). For full effect, choose a Minnesota Vikings hat, then throw it off like Mary Tyler Moore when you are done.
Stage 4: Long-sleeved shirt as primary shirt Now that your arms have acclimated to the cold, we can ensconce them in some warmth. Switch to long sleeves in place of your short-sleeved base layer (rather than layering it quite yet).
Stage 5: Vest Nothing in my cold weather running life has vexed me more than the use of the vest. It’s incredibly versatile (perhaps second only to the knit hat.) I’ve answered koans more easily than questions related to proper use of the vest. (eg. “What is the color of wind? Answer: Tube socks!) I’ve come down to this. The vest basically serves the same role as the long-sleeved shirt. It’s paradoxical, I know, since by definition it has no arms. I have learned to live with that inconsistency. So that means you can add it here, or skip it and move right onto the next stage. Or substitute one for the other in any of this, up until the jacket comes into play. Don’t ever wear a vest with a jacket, no matter how good it looks on Chris Hemsworth. You are not Chris Hemsworth. It’s too much wind resistance and not enough warmth and wicking. My ideal vest is light, wind breaker type material that is bright colored with reflective strips for visibility. And a little big. That way, you can wear it here, primarily for its warming qualities, or over other layers as safety precaution in the twilight hours.
Stage 6: Long-sleeved shirt as second shirt Now you are back to layering. You can either ditch the vest, or ditch the t-shirt and use the vest on top of the long-sleeved shirt. Feel free to curse at that troublesome vest. Belegug siah!!
Stage 7: Tightsor (non-lethal, see COTTON KILLS above) sweatpants One caveat. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to feel the cold in my knees more and more after I run. Summer, they don’t bother me. But as the weather turns, they can. I think it’s probably both the legs being less warm and ground being harder as the temps come down. What’s more, the reality that you may need to now run more often on cement sidewalks (rather than softer asphalt in the roads) if you are out in the dark after work puts you on the hardest possible surface. So if that’s an experience you notice, move the tights up on the progression to wherever you start to feel sore knees after a run in the cold.
Stage 8 Light jacket as second shirt (t-shirt or long-sleeved shirt as primary). Getting serious now. This is mostly about keeping the increasingly cold winds and moist air off of you. Warning: The worst decision of the winter is to overdress under this jacket— wicking won’t happen very easily when you have on a wind layer, so you are prone to catching a chill as you go. Stick with one layer underneath whenever you can. A full front zipper on the jacket is ideal, so you can lower it and ventilate as you warm up.
Stage 9 Mittens Gloves are fine on most cold days— but they are not as warm as mittens. I thought the gloves with the mitten covers would be a great idea, but have been disappointed. Once your fingers are cold in the gloves, adding the mitten cover doesn’t do kecy (that’s Czech). When it’s coold, only mittens will do.
Stage 10: The 3-Layer Maximum And when it’s coooooold, you go to 3 layers— one t-shirt, one long-sleeve shirt, and the light jacket with hat, mittens, tights. There is no fourth layer. EVER. If it’s too cold for three layers (and it can be), then go watch Elf. Notice that Buddy is happy in just tights, a jacket and hat. However, you are not an elf— and I know, (spoiler alert) neither is he, but don’t be a klár rass— today is not a running day.
Temperatures, Your Chart, and Real Feel
While there is no set timeline of how long to dress according to the different stages, you may be able to use temperature as a general guide.
Start with the temperature where you put on the second T-shirt. That first inkling that ok, fall is arriving. You probably have already noticed that is happening now on some days. For me, personally, it’s around 55 degrees Fahrenheit.
Now, jump to the end of the Cinquino Progression at Stage 10, The 3-Layer Maximum. This is where you draw the line. Where if it’s below that, you stay in. I’d encourage you to not fix this arbitrarily right now. But maybe just come up with a number that sounds reasonable, then pay attention this winter and see if you can push that a little— or if you are uncomfortable and need to dial it back. With me, being a winter wonder boy, it’s around 10 degrees. So in my case, I plan to pass through the entire Cinquino Progression in 45 degrees, or 4 – 5 degrees per stage.
Now use the Cinquino Progression chart to connect these two points by gradually filling in temperatures, until you have kind of a rule of thumb about what to wear in a specific temperature. PLEASE NOTE: That kind of enormously oversimplified chart (of what to wear for any specific temperature) should ONLY be consulted after you’ve made it through a large chunk of the progression, and the temperature changes abruptly. Then, it can help you get a quick answer on what you might want to wear that specific day. Specific results will vary. So be judicious with the chart. The whole idea here is to move through each and every stage of the progression. That’s why it works.
Final note on temperature. I’ve come around on the use of Real Feel as a more accurate measure than temperature, after I examined Accu Weather’s patent filing, which you can find here. (https://patents.google.com/patent/US6768945B2/en). Spoiler alert #2: sunshine matters.
There’s no place like snow. There’s no place like snow. There’s no place like snow.
Payoff #2: The Best Run of the Year
By now, you realize, the winter is not something I want to escape from, it’s what I want to be in the middle of. I’m not a big skier or ice fisher. My favorite way to be one with the season is to run through it. To fly the coop. Strut my tail feather.
This yellow brick road of progression leads us to running’s Oz: the annual run that revives me, well, like the snow in The Wizard of Oz poppy field. (Maybe not the best simile since the reason our heroes were so doped up was because heroin comes from poppies and the filmmakers actually used industrial grade asbestos to make it snow. Sometimes, a know-it-all knows too much.)
Smack and mesothelioma aside, that day of the first snow is the best of the best. When I’ve properly worked my way through The Cinquino Progression, on this day, I can often ditch a few layers and be out in the snow and really be present with it. I am not hidden away, addled under too many layers. I am not trying to push the cold away to pretend it’s not there. Most years, I can do this run back at stage 4, without tights or maybe with tights but just a t-shirt or two. Or yes, a vest.
When you immerse yourself in that magic moment, when the first fluffy (real) snow is falling, and the winter is no longer coming, but actually upon us, like a gentle knock on the door, you arrive as a true winter runner. That is the day that the cold weather kid in me lives for— the silence, the calm, the old friend of a thousand winters come again to welcome me into its home. There’s no place like home.
I have no idea who started Global Running Day or whey they did it. Doesn’t really matter at this point, because I’ve found a better use for it.
I know it’s better, because I’m using the day to express my gratitude to people who, in ways large and small, have contributed to my running life.
I believe that’s the best possible way to spend the day. That’s because I know from studying the science of happiness that the heartfelt expression of gratitude is the single most impactful practice we can perform to grow our own happiness.
Sure, go ahead and run. I’m going to do that as well. But it’s not enough. We can do that any day of the year. Today, join me in Global Running Day to reach out individually to people who have made running a better part of your life.
Gratitude from the Past: Thank you to my coaches and fellow runners at Notre Dame High School in Batavia, NY. And for still being able to (kinda) fit into my cross country jersey.
For me, it’s a wide ranging list, from those I run with regularly: the two knuckleheads I run with regularly during the week at lunchtime and the ultramarathoner who I idolize and who I can occasionally catch up with on some of her shorter runs.
To the folks I run with every once in a while: the Saturday morning group, the Sunday morning group, the trail runner / golfing buddy with the infectious laugh, the rogue group of trail runners who summit a local mountain with evening runs that end at the bar, the author and friend who swears he absolutely loved my running memoir, the guys I run a marathon relay with once a year, and my grad school buddy who assures me we are going to run Boston someday.
To those I can only run with vicariously: the yoga teacher/health coach/writer who whose tiny little instagram posts of her Washington DC runs always make me wish I was running next to her and the physician neighbor who joins me in vowing we will get out together one of these days.
These are just a few of the folks who are primary in my running life today, which means they are but the tip of the iceberg of people in my past who have helped make running a lifelong pursuit.
Who can you think of, past or present day, that has helped you? I encourage you to make Global Running Day the excuse to reach out and thank them for making running a part of your life. Let them know.
The greatest gift of our emotions is the awakening they provide us. When we can stay with our emotions, even our most difficult ones, they become stepping stones to being fully alive in our humanity.
In the third and final step of renowned Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön’s “Three Steps to Courage: Working Compassionately with Difficult Emotions,” I share with you my understanding of the teaching she provided to hundreds of students gathered earlier this year in Vermont at Pema Osel Do Ngak Choling, the East Coast study and practice center for the Mangala Shri Bhuti sangha.
In this post, we’ll look at:
Step Three: AWAKEN through being in direct experience of those emotions, which hold the wisdom of our shared humanity.
This is often taught as “letting go.” During some of the most troubling times in my life, using the idea of letting go of my emotions provided great relief.
I would imagine the feelings coming in through the front door of a house, and then breezing through the house. I would focus on opening the back door of the house and having the troubling emotions just whip themselves right out, leaving me calmly in peace.
I think Ani (Sister) Pema, as she’s known to her students, might say “Not so fast!” to that strategy.
She prefers to think of this stage not of letting go, but “letting be,” which immediately struck me as a more powerful way to approach this task.
To me, it’s not “letting go,” because by no means are we casting away our emotions. We are instead being kind to them, learning from them, turning them over in our bodies and minds in order to find the aspects of them that can inspire us to be the people we want to be. As we let our emotions be, they become our teachers, not our prison guards.
In other words, when we let them be, they let us go.
Think about it this way. What if I told you to let go of, or “get over,” all the positive emotions you feel in life? What if I tried to convince you that, to be happy, you must stop feeling love, compassion, understanding, ecstasy, and joy? I hope you’d think I was crazy! Those emotions are the good stuff—the parts of our life that we cherish the most. We feel them when we are at our best.
Pema Chödrön teaches us that the other emotions, the difficult ones, are also the good stuff when we understand them for what they are—seeds of wisdom nestled in the challenges of the human condition.
There is no more benefit from transcending our “negative” emotions than there would be from transcending our “positive” emotions. In these emotions, we find our humanity—and each other’s.
In terms of positive psychology, I would say the difference is in how we feel and cultivate the multitude of emotions we let be. While we benefit from feeling our loneliness, jealousy, anger, and other seemingly toxic emotions, we don’t necessarily benefit from cultivating those emotions or reaching deeply into them such that they crowd out the heartfelt positive emotions.
Instead, we acknowledge the difficult emotions and compassionately reflect on the circumstances and patterns that keep reintroducing these emotions into our life. In that way, we can transform those emotions into wisdom, while moving away from the storylines that keep bringing these emotions into our lives.
Ani Pema shared another way to think about this awakening to our difficult emotions.
When we try to stop feeling our emotions, it’s like we flash-freeze them. We bind them up and try to keep them from affecting the rest of our lives.
“But where will we find our water?” she asks. “Where will we find refreshment? Where we will find life itself? In the ice cube.”
When we thirst for wisdom, we don’t throw out the ice cube. We sit with it, we warm it, we melt the habitualness that hardens our perspectives and perpetuates our suffering. It may feel cold, but it is useful to stay with our “ice cube–ness” in order to understand the flow of water—our wisdom—within us.
Here’s an ice cube visualization that may help you in meditations that center around melting the ice within you.
Strong emotions can awaken the tenderness of our hearts and unite us with all others who are suffering. When we grow our feelings of love for our own unique set of emotions and “Me-ness,” we move along the path toward feeling love and compassion for others, even those we are in conflict with—toward a “We-ness.”
This also gives us access to the humanity of others. Or, as Ani Pema put it, “I use the frustration of feeling that emotion to know the experience of everyone who has felt this emotion.”
This viral video from Denmark, titled “All That We Share,” vividly and memorably makes this point. We have much more in common with others than we realize.
Keep in mind that our emotions are among the most ecstatic and significant beauties of being human. They drive our life energy, they fuel our creativity, they form our love and empathy. One can say that all the wisdom that we seek is found in our emotions. There lies our happiness.
To the degree that we can truly feel not only positive but also difficult emotions, and be patient with them, that’s the degree to which we can understand others. In this way, we stand in our own shoes and know that this is all a part of us, and we can now walk in the shoes of others who share our human condition. This gives us permission to explore our interdependence with others.
In other words, you are not isolated by your emotions. In fact, our emotions are EXACTLY what connect us to each other.
What emotions are most difficult for you? According to Pema Chödrön, it is in those emotions that we find the seeds of wisdom we most need in our lives.
Earlier this year, I attended a retreat with her entitled “Three Steps to Courage: Working Compassionately with Difficult Emotions.” I’m taking a few posts to explain what I learned in hopes that you can apply some of these lessons in your life and with your positive psychology clients.
In this post, we’ll look at
Step Two: TRANSFORM the emotions without judging them.
What do we do as we sit with the difficult emotions? The work is to recognize their inherent wisdom and explore their contours.
For example, consider the emotions that surround spending time by yourself.
Do you experience that as loneliness or as aloneness? Loneliness brings up feelings of sadness, maybe regret, isolation. Whereas aloneness can be a valuable, peaceful state, giving you the space to be yourself while still feeling connected to life and the living. The difference between the two might merely be the storyline that you’ve bought into about spending time alone—and whether you dive into that storyline or refrain from reacting to it.
When we refrain, we hit the pause button, interrupting the storylines that urge us to escape from the difficult emotion. In step two, we move on to transforming—kind of like hitting the slow-mo button. We connect with the emotion and examine it with tenderness.
Feel it. Accept it. This frees us from reactivity and makes our emotions more accessible to us. We’re not going to dwell inside the depth of the feeling, but we do need to acknowledge it to relieve our fear of it.
Going back to our example, when feelings of loneliness arise, we first catch the “hook” of the emotion by acknowledging the feeling. Then we interrupt the storyline of that emotion and refrain from acting to escape from—or go too deeply into—that emotion.
Instead, we stay with the emotion and increase the spaciousness around it, so we come to a cooler, more detached acceptance of it—rather than picking a fight with it. We safely acknowledge feeling lonely, then wrap that feeling in a blanket made of other aspects of our life where we feel connected, even when alone.
It can be frustrating to have difficult emotions come up time and time again, derailing us from more pleasant thoughts or activities. Yet that time spent simply being with the difficult feelings is necessary in order to gain access to the wisdom of that emotion.
Here are three ways to start extracting that wisdom in ways that blow away our preconceived notions of how we identify with our emotions.
1. Shift a nebulous feeling to a more physical, tangible, sensory one.
This can be done with a little game that Pema described, which could be called “Qualities.” Take the feeling and start to describe it using questions like:
If this feeling were a color, what color would it be?
If this feeling were a temperature, what temperature would it be?
If this feeling were music, what kind of music would it be?
Continue with other qualities, like sound, touch, a piece of art, a genre of movie, a pair of shoes, a famous person, food, etc. Don’t worry about being so precise about the description—just name what comes to mind when you start to hold it in these ways.
2. Shrink the difficult emotion by seeing it as something tiny that’s being consumed by an ever-expanding perspective.
This way, you’re not fighting to eliminate the emotion—you’re just understanding it as a small piece of a larger sense of your self and your place in the world. You can think of that difficult emotion as
A tiny drop of water being consumed by the oceans of the world
A single bead of sand losing itself in the beaches and deserts of our planet, among all the planets
A tiny speck of light disappearing among the stars of the galaxy, among all galaxies.
In this way, you blow away the notion that this emotion defines your identity—it is merely one of emotions you can safely experience in a rich and diverse life.
This is now my favorite meditation when difficult emotions arise. For me, it’s helpful to visualize how miniscule that emotion is within me, much like this video simulates the mind-blowing scale of our physical world and our place within it.
3. Work with the emotion through a guided Tonglen meditation—the lovingkindness meditations for which Pema Chödrön is well known.
Through these meditations, we expand our perspectives from ourselves to all beings, and with this expansion, we wish for happiness and love to come not only to us, but also to all.
Here’s a short excerpt from one of her guided Tonglen meditations.
Trying to repress a “bad” feeling doesn’t work, because that feeling gets so much attention that it ends up governing the rest of our emotions. It’s like trying to keep the emotion in a cage, where it rattles around and reminds us of its desire to break free and threaten us. Every day, we have to vigilantly check it to make sure the lock is in place and the cage is secure.
That emotion, as harmful as it may be to us, has a place in our lives—but it’s not healthy to have it stalking our minds day and night. It’s more useful to let that emotion roam wild on a wide and expansive terrain, where it can live on its own but not threaten and constantly bother us where we live.
When it is set free, there’s no need to kill that emotion or flee from it, for it is no longer an imminent threat to us. It’s a small animal roaming far and wide across the entire continent.
Next week, in my final post about the retreat, I’ll share with you my understanding of how refraining and reframing culminates in unlocking the wisdom of our emotions. That’s Step Three: AWAKEN through being in direct experience of those emotions, which hold the wisdom of our shared humanity.
I was fortunate to spend a weekend earlier this year listening to the teachings of Pema Chödrön at a retreat at Pema Osel Do Ngak Choling in eastern Vermont. Her talks, on the topic of “Three Steps to Courage: Working Compassionately with Difficult Emotions,” immediately helped me shape my responses to the emotional challenges in my life. I’m writing a few posts to explain what I learned, in hopes that you can apply some of these lessons in your life and/or with your positive psychology clients.
Your First Step to Courage: REFRAIN from escalating the storyline and acting on your emotional reactivity.
On the surface, this might seem like the old adage “Count to 10 before you say something you might later regret.” But the kind of refraining that Pema describes goes much deeper than a mere pause—with the result being that we don’t have to face those “count to 10” moments as often.
It’s not just refraining from an action, but also from the mental pattern underlying the reactivity that you’re trying to hold off.
For example, Pema calls on us to
● Refrain from escalating the anger that makes you want to shout or threatens to take over your mood
● Refrain from feeding the blame that makes you want to call out others or beat yourself up
● Refrain from self-degradation that leads you to treat yourself poorly or give up hope.
If there was anything approaching a mantra for this weekend, it was “Feel what you feel”—which isn’t so different from “permission to be human.” There is nothing imperfect about our difficult emotions, and we can let go of any urgent need to escape them.
The actions, words, and thoughts that we conjure up when we suffer difficult emotions are all different ways of exiting that emotion, and they tend to reinforce our storyline.
For example, shouting at someone isn’t really feeling our anger, it’s leaving our anger and rushing into blame or aggression. Being brusque or snippy with someone isn’t feeling our resentment or envy, it’s leaving those feelings to reinforce the internal storyline that we’ve created about who that person is or what injustice they’ve done to us.
Some of us have shorter fuses when it comes to this kind of refraining. We go right from the trigger to the action. We justify our shift in mood or aggression by throwing up our hands and saying, “It is what it is,” or “That’s just the way I am.” Ani (Sister) Pema suggests that’s actually not who we are. That rush to act or explain away is, in fact, a habit, a story that we have cultivated over time. Now we expect our hair trigger to go off whenever “they” provoke us. That reaction has become our normal.
Yet, when we work on these propensities through refraining, not only do we get better at holding our powder, but also an almost magical shift happens: “They” start to “change.” Or at least it seems that way. What’s really changing is our perceptions of them.
In Ani Pema’s words, “When you work with your anger, then people stop making you angry. When you work with your jealousy, it seems like there is no longer anyone to be jealous of.”
She laughed at how reminiscent this is of the words of the quintessential hippie, Wavy Gravy, who remarked, “If you don’t have a sense of humor, it isn’t funny.”
Pema Chödrön’s Four Stages of Refraining
Stage 1: Recognize That You Are Hooked
“Robots, activate,” is the computer-generated call to action in the TV series BattleBots. It’s the moment when the bout between two fighting robots is about to get real—the controllers are locked in and the robots are pointed toward the fight.
That is essentially what happens when someone or something flips the switch on our emotions and we are locked into a suddenly uneasy state of mind. There is no turning back; these emotions are now in control, steering us into battle.
Pema describes this feeling as “shenpa” (sometimes spelled shempa), an attachment to a habitual reaction. Here’s Tamara Levitt, head of content for the meditation app Calm, offering some suggestions on how to recognize these attachments and free ourselves from them.
Stage 2: Feel What You Feel
Now we shift out of the intellectual activity of recognition into the physical stage of sensory perception. We stop ourselves from exiting the emotion through action or bringing up the storyline that we assign to these emotions. Instead, we move toward these feelings through meditation or simple awareness exercises, like tuning in to our body:
● Where are you holding this emotion?
● How is that part of your body contorting to hold or resist the feeling? (Notice your chest tightening, arm going weak, brow wrinkling, etc.)
You can also stop to consider how your other senses shift:
● What sounds do you hear?
● What does your skin feel like?
● What kind of taste is in your mouth? What makes it subside?
● What is the difference between when it feels overwhelming and when it feels like you can handle it?
By focusing on these tangible manifestations of your shenpa, you ground it and give it contours and, as such, boundaries. It becomes something you are experiencing, not who you are. Now you have space to notice what storylines your reactions tie into.
With kindness and affection toward yourself, consider a few questions:
● Is it a familiar pattern?
● Is this an effective way to respond—has this reaction brought you success?
● Is your reaction masking something else that lies deeper?
● What kind of structure are you giving this feeling—how have you endorsed it, institutionalized it within you?
You might not get answers to all of these questions right away, but they help to put some perspective and distance between you and the trigger, so that you can get back your bearings more quickly.
Stage 3: Interrupt the Storyline
Release yourself from the narrative that there is something wrong here. There’s no need to hate or even reject the storyline, but there is no obligation to continue to dwell on it, either.
This is where Ani Pema emphasizes the role of meditation, for it is through meditation that we can train our minds to do this. When we meditate, we practice recognizing when our mind wanders and gently bringing it back to the object of our meditation.
It’s that coming back, that return to ourselves, that author and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg describes as “the magic moment.” Returning to our focus, again and again, is the true practice.
Here’s a body scan meditation from Sharon for bringing awareness to the sensations of your body.
Stage 4: Relax and Soften
This is where we open ourselves to the feeling without becoming overwhelmed by it. Rather than trying to destroy the feeling or even contain it, we let that feeling be as we expand the space within us to hold it, along with all the other emotions of our human experience.
In my upcoming posts, I’ll take you through my understanding of the next two steps for working compassionately with difficult emotions:
Your Second Step to Courage: TRANSFORM the emotions without judging them.
Your Third Step to Courage: AWAKEN through being in direct experience of those emotions, which hold the wisdom of our shared humanity.
A Facebook friend, remarkable health coach and yoga instructor Jessica Sandhu, had alerted me that Pema Chödrön, the revered American Buddhist nun and best-selling author of such works as When Things Fall Apart, would be teaching a weekend program in Vermont.
I didn’t even stop to see what the topic was—Ani Pema, as nuns in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition are referred to, is a meditation rock star, and I’ve wanted to sit with her since listening to her on cassette tapes in my first Subaru (I’m on my fourth now, and sadly, no cassette player).
When I realized that her talks would be on “Three Steps to Courage: Working Compassionately with Difficult Emotions,” I was even happier. This would be my big chance to summon the courage to step away from all the dark emotions that keep me from feeling and being my best.
Yet to my surprise, what I found is that real courage—and the source of true transformation—comes from stepping toward those difficult emotions.
The courage Ani Pema describes, and what I’d like to share with you in upcoming posts, is the courage to break from the habitual reactivity and burning cravings that we have surreptitiously integrated into our lives. We do this by moving our awareness toward those fires, not ignoring them or trying to stomp them out at the first sign of smoke.
Here’s how.
Step One: REFRAIN from escalating the storyline and acting upon your emotional reactivity.
Step Two: TRANSFORM the emotions without judging them.
Step Three: AWAKEN through being in direct experience of those emotions, which hold the wisdom of our shared humanity.
With these steps, Ani Pema teaches that we can expand our emotional range and develop the resilience to be true to our nature, even as circumstances roil around us. My upcoming posts will take us through each step and explore what we can learn from her perspectives.
As I’ve sat with her teaching in recent weeks, I’ve come to think of our capacity to be with difficult emotions as analogous to being with our own beating heart. Imagine what a healthy heartbeat looks like on a EKG machine: some scattered little ups and downs, then a huge jump up and drop down, signaling the heart’s pumping action. Compare that to what a failing heart looks like: little to no amplitude in the heartbeat, slower and slower beats. No ups, no downs, just flatlines.
So keep that in mind—being healthy isn’t about eliminating the ups and downs, it’s about embracing them. In fact, it’s about widening the range and variability of how our heart responds to the rigors of life.
That’s how I came to think of Ani Pema’s teaching: It’s not our goal to eliminate the emotional ups and downs of our life and face the world in a detached, unfeeling state. Those feelings are gold—they are what make us human and bind us to each other in compassion.
The goal of being human is to feel it all—without indulging too heavily in the emotions that keep us from being who we want to be.
In so doing, we expand our range of emotions, understand better how they affect us, and respond with clear thinking and kindness to ourselves—so we can use the transformative energy of those emotions to keep showing up at our best.
What’s more, like that heartbeat sending vitality to our bodies, the ripples of us being at our best expand like waves throughout our life, even to others who are suffering.
In keeping with her Buddhist traditions, Ani Pema referred to this work during her talks as “arousing bodhicitta”—the act of building our compassion and sending it out to the world to alleviate suffering.
Here’s an earlier teaching from Pema Chödrön on the nature of bodhicitta.
She emphasized this point within the first few minutes of her first talk at Pema Osel Do Ngak Choling, the East Coast study and practice center for the Mangala Shri Bhuti sangha in eastern Vermont. By working on ourselves, we can encourage others to live happier as well, she said—which, in turn, feeds our need for meaning in our lives.
I knew, right then and there, that she was on common ground with those of us in the field of positive psychology.
Seems to me that the ripple effect she describes is a key element of what’s considered the most famous and most succinct finding of positive psychology, coined by pioneering researcher and teacher Chris Peterson: “Other people matter.” Peterson’s mantra captures the heart of compassion and lovingkindness.
My next post will get us started on this common path by taking our first big step: refraining. If that sounds like just doing nothing, think again. Refraining is an active, deliberate process that requires our undivided attention—and makes all the difference as we learn to be with difficult emotions.
Last night, I was on the phone talking to potential voters. My final call of the night happened to be to an 83-year old woman named Ann, who was gripped with fear and outrage at the prospect of immigrants marching toward our nation’s border. Listening to her rant, I felt it all: sick to my stomach that this would drive her vote this November, anger at the media and government for manipulating her vulnerability, compassion for an elderly woman in a panic. So we each went to bed in fear. Ann, with those TV images blinking in her mind, and me, in fear of her fear and what that means for the election and decisions facing our nation.
How can we go this way? What can we do with the difficult emotions that controversies like these bring into our lives? What are these fears doing to us as we lie awake at night, or immobilized in the morning?
Our fears can teach us something important–if we have the courage to be with them.
Not just any nun, but Pema Chödrön, the meditation teacher and best-selling author of books like The Places That Scare You and When Things Fall Apart. I spent some time with her at a retreat earlier this year, and she very methodically and gracefully taught us her secret of moving forward in demanding times and through personal adversity. Her advice, “Three Steps to Courage: Working Compassionately with Difficult Emotions” will be helpful for all of us, no matter what we are going through that is challenging us.
My understanding of her teachings are being published in a series of posts on my blog at Wholebeing Institute, a leader in the field of positive psychology education and outreach.
Who can you think of, past or present day, that has helped you? I encourage you to make Global Running Day the excuse to reach out and thank them for making running a part of your life. Let them know.
Taking Mulligans 