A legacy of peace

Epigenetics is a fascinating area of research which investigates whether or not the experiences of a parent or grandparent can literally affect the genetic inheritance of offspring. Experiments with mice have shown that the grandchildren of mice who were trained to fear a certain chemical by exposure to shocks and the smell of the chemical exhibited fear of the chemical smell without having had any similar conditioning. Descendants of the original mice also had physical brain changes in the areas that recognized the smell. Studies have shown that the descendants of populations subjected to difficult conditions during wartime are at increased risk for a number of diseases including heart disease and diabetes.

Studies have also shown that anxious parents can create anxious children, both by passing on genes for anxiety and by exhibiting behaviors that affect the way a child perceives the world. Other research points to the changes wrought in a child's genetic makeup by chronic stress experienced by the child's mother while pregnant. 

So, essentially, if you have bad things happen to you - a bad car accident, an assault, the death of a loved one, serious illness, natural catastrophe, whatever - or if you are in the military, or a firefighter, or a police officer who regularly encounters life-threatening situations - you and your descendants may very well become sicker and more fearful. And that sickness and fearfulness can be passed on to future descendants. But what can be done about this? We can't control our lives and the world so that bad things won't happen to us, although we like to think we can. What can we do to try and ward off some of the cascade of debilitation that is engendered by our suffering?

The only thing we can control is our reaction to the events around us.  We can seek peace in our outlook on life, in our interpretation of these events, and we can do this by cultivating a habit of mindfulness and meditation. Mindfulness has been shown to reduce anxiety and post-traumatic stress syndrome. It allows us to detach from our thinking; it can make us more resilient. We can interrupt our rumination about the past, which we cannot change, and our worrying about the future, which is unwritten, and spend more time in the present moment, enjoying whatever life is currently bringing us.

If we can become more resilient, so that we can better tolerate "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" then we can perhaps avoid the kind of epigenetic changes that could not only make us sicker, but could also haunt our children and their children. We woul be in a sense passing our resilience down to them.  And that is a legacy that anyone would wish for.

Who is renting the space in your head?

In my work as a wellness coach, I frequently hear clients talk about how they see themselves. "I am a failure", they will say, or "I am not good at..." and then go on to share a long list of perceived inadequacies, everything from social interaction to athleticism to artistic endeavor. "I am a fraud, a joke, a mistake" go some of the worse refrains in these songs of existential woe.

We all have this voice in our heads that tells us things like this. It is known as the inner critic, the voice that seems to consolidate all of the unpleasant things we have ever heard or thought about ourselves. It has a great memory, this inner critic; it never forgets a mistake we made or a slight we received, no matter how slight (see what I did there?) In the echo chamber in our brains, these words reverberate, becoming louder and more persistent the more we indulge them. A feedback loop develops, and eventually these hurtful words become our truth. In reality, if someone who rented a room from us talked to us like this, we would evict them!

There is a way to stop this process. By practicing mindfulness, paying attention to the present moment and noticing the thought process, we can observe these thoughts as they come through our consciousness (e.g. I am unattractive, no one will ever want me) and choose to let them go, going back to focusing on the sensations in the present moment - the blue of the sky, the smell of strawberries, the warm softness of the cat's fur. The patterns of thought that we habitually engage in become apparent; we start to notice how many of these critical thoughts we have. We get faster at recognizing them and letting them go, which robs them of their power. They are just thoughts, after all, and thoughts aren't facts. We can choose to be in the moment, where we can experience all of the wonder and beauty around us.

Put your own mask on first

I chose the title of this post with the understanding that the phrase could be taken several different ways. Much could be said about the masks we all wear to some degree in public. Perhaps you, dear reader, immediately began thinking about your own mask, and how it might differ from "the real you". That would be an interesting road to go down, but not the one I will travel today.

I began the day as I usually do, by getting up and coming downstairs to the kitchen. My son was sleeping as usual on the sofa. He is supposed to go to work today, and needs help to get going, so I automatically went to the coffee maker to prepare a cup of coffee for him; then the phrase "put your own mask on first" came unbidden into my head. Any air traveler has heard this phrase many times; during the safety instruction before flight, when the flight attendant addresses an oxygen emergency: "Masks will descend; please affix your own mask before placing masks on those in your care" or words to that effect. I realized that I needed a cup of coffee as much as he did, and fixed my cup first.

When we care for others, it is tempting to forget ourselves, or forgo our own comfort, and focus on the needs of the other, especially when the needs are great. But by neglecting to care for ourselves first, we make ourselves vulnerable to depletion by exhaustion, lack of nutrition, lack of proper exercise, lack of spiritual self-care. We are as much in need of compassion and care as those we care for. Self-compassion is not a sign of narcissism; it is vital for caregivers, and indeed anyone who has relationships that need cultivating and tending, to stay healthy so that we may extend that compassion to others. If we become too selfless, we lose ourselves, and that doesn't help anyone. By exercising self-compassion, by putting our own masks on first, we can maintain the strength and composure that we need to meet the challenges we face.

Letting the garden be

There is a great deal to be said for sitting at a window every day. My laptop is positioned so that I can look out on my front lawn, bisected as it is by a stone wall that creates an embankment for my neighbors' driveway. Currently, the lawn, with semicircular garden, narrow strip of grass and lichen-covered bench fronting the wall, is a mass of weeds and wildflowers of many different kinds, some of which I recognize; for example, there are many violets abloom. Who knew that they could spread like this? They do not seem to deserve the sobriquet "shrinking violet", they are quite assertive.

The garden is a profusion of weeds due to the fact that it has been raining pretty much every day for a week. I have watched the weeds celebrate their existence by spreading over just about every inch of soil, unchecked by the violence I would have wrought upon them if it weren't so darn wet. So, I have been watching the rise of a garden populated by weeds, and wildflowers. The tulips I planted last fall, those that survived midnight raids by squirrels and deer, have been reduced to headless stalks. Gladioli and phlox, French lavender, and coneflowers have yet to make their appearance. And yet the garden is lush and green, and birds come and root through the motley vegetation  for last year's seeds, and bits of dried grass for nests. The birds see no problem at all with what is growing there. Sometimes a mockingbird will hop from the yew bush next to the window up to my window sill, and engage with me in mutual regard.

Mindfulness has taught me to look at the weeds, and grass, and birds, and appreciate them for what they are - examples of nature renewing itself, of life going about its daily routine. The scenery changes every day, if ever so slightly. I am grateful that I have such beauty to look at.  Of course, one of these days it will stop raining, and I will go out there and pull some of the ground-cover that is spreading, and dig up the violets, and plant pansies, or petunias, or zinnias. But for this week, I have been enjoying what is there, noticing and letting be the beauty that is there to be seen, every day, every day.