About mindful mediation — A summary of “Search Inside Yourself” by Chade-Meng Tan (2/3)

In the first part of this book summary, I tried to convey the benefits of mindful meditation (i.e., attention training). I wrote about the clear and calm mind, how it forms the foundation of your cognitive and emotional abilities, and how it’s connected to emotional intelligence. In short, the first part covered all the basics and tried to answer why you should do it.

Conversely, the second part of the book, it’s all about self-knowledge and self-mastery and why how mindful meditation can also help with it.

Both are about looking into your own cognitive and emotional processes, which you would do to understand yourself before you understand others. More on that in the following sections

One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.
(Leonardo da Vinci)

How self-awareness leads to self-confidence

Self-awareness can be seen as clarity. This means that whenever you develop self-awareness, you develop clarity within yourself.

Knowing one’s internal state, preferences, resources, and intuitions.
(Daniel Goleman)

The definition by Daniel Goleman shows that self-awareness, or clarity, goes beyond moment-to-moment attention. The book shows us that it’s the key to emotional intelligence. For instance, when you feel the impulse to scream at someone, developing clarity makes the difference between doing so or stopping and not doing so.

The moment you see a raging river, it means you are already rising above it. (Mingyur Rinpoche)

Clarity or self-awareness also affects our self-motivation because when we're clear about ourselves, we can easily align our inner values, to which self-awareness gives us access to what we do. According to Daniel Goleman self-awareness competencies can be split into the following three areas that each built on top of the other:

1. Emotional awareness: Recognizing one’s emotions and their effects

2. Accurate self-assessment: knowing one’s strengths and weaknesses

3. Self-confidence: a strong sense of one’s self-worth and capabilities

While the book explains these concepts in more detail, one essential takeaway is that self-confidence isn’t something you always express with the same intensity.

Self-confidence, as Norman Fischer describes it, can be “picked up” whenever necessary. Therefore, genuine self-confidence is flexible about ego and learning something new by putting your ego aside and listening. And being genuinely self-confident, whenever you can’t put your ego down, then you at least know it, and you learn for the next time.

“It also takes profound self-confidence to be humble enough to recognize your limitations without self-blame.” (Norman Fischer)

Self-awareness and mindfulness

After introducing self-confidence, Chade-Meng compares the definition of self-awareness to mindfulness and concludes they’re the same:

• Self-awareness is a neutral mode that maintains self-reflectiveness even amid turbulent emotions. (Daniel Goleman)
• Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmental (Chade-Meng)

A great analogy provided in the book to both terms is a flagpole. Where the flag is the mind fluttering in the wind, and the pole is your self-awareness that keeps it steady and stabilizes it.

Journaling to be more self-aware

One approach to becoming more self-aware is to write to yourself. These days, one well-known version of this is Journaling. It helps you to find clarity by expressing your thoughts on paper, which mainly helps to discover unclear things to you.

The book suggests writing for a certain amount of time (e.g., 3min), in which you write down whatever comes to your mind without overthinking it while being honest with yourself.

The benefit of this is recorded by a scientific experiment, where unemployed people who journaled for 30 minutes a day got jobs at a much higher rate (68%) than the ones who did not (27%). Another study provided in the book showed that also only 4 minutes make a difference in your life.

For doing so, the book provides the following start of a sentence and encourages you to finish two of them each day:

• What I am feeling now is…
• I am aware that…
• What motivates me is…
• I am inspired by…
• Today, I aspire to…
• What hurts me is…
• I wish…
• Others are…
• I made a happy mistake…
• Love is…

How your emotions aren’t you

As one deepens self-awareness, one usually realizes there is a difference between what you experience, which are your emotions, and who you’re. Emotions, in this respect, are psychological phenomena that we experience in our bodies.

Emotions are like clouds, some beautiful some dark, while our core being in the sky. (Chade-Meng Tan)

Let’s look at an example to compare emotions and their experience of them:

• I am hungry (emotion)
• I experience anger in my body (experience of the emotion)

Self-regulation. Riding your emotions like a horse

This chapter of the book starts with the metaphor of a rider who doesn’t know where his horse might take him, which describes the situation when you feel compelled by your emotions. In this scenario, you can’t choose where to go, but you’re taken by them. To steer the horse, Daniel Goleman identified five competencies in respect of self-regulation:

1. Self-control: Keeping disruptive emotions and impulses in check
2. Trustworthiness: Maintaining standards of honesty and integrity
3. Conscientiousness: Taking responsibility for personal performance
4. Adaptability: Flexibility in handling change
5. Innovation: Being comfortable with new ideas, approaches, …

We don’t always live up to these five competencies, but whenever we turn compulsion into a choice, we enable them for us and choose to exercise them.

What self-regulation is not!

The book starts to explain self-regulation by telling what it’s not:

• Suppressing distressing emotions or avoiding them
• Denying or repressing true feelings.
• About having certain emotions

Self-regulation is more about becoming skillful with your emotions and feelings. For example, take the difference between anger and indignation. Anger arises out of powerlessness, while indignation arises out of power.
With the former, you feel out of control, while with the latter, you retain complete control of your mind and emotion.

In the book, Chade-Meng explains that you can’t stop an unwholesome thought or emotion from arising, but you can let go of it immediately.

It’s like writing on water. The moment it is written, it disappears.
(Chade-Meng Tan)

Pain and suffering, the practice of letting go

To further develop your self-regulatory competencies, the book stresses that it is essential to differentiate between pain and suffering.

When the mind becomes so free that it is capable of letting go even of preferences, the Great Way is no longer difficult! (Chade-Meng Tan)

The key to mastering pain and suffering is to let go of grasping and aversion. Grasping is when the mind refuses to let something go, while aversion is when the mind desperately tries to keep something away. Mindfulness will help you see that pain is not followed by suffering. Pain creates grasping or aversion (suffering) but letting go of them might reduce the suffering. Or, as Marcus Aurelius puts it:

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it, and this you have the power to revoke at any time. (Chade-Meng Tan)

The same holds for pleasant experiences, which we don’t want to go away, or as a famous meditation main explains:

Wilting flowers do not cause suffering; it is the unrealistic desire that flowers do not wilt that causes suffering (Thich Nhat Hahn).

To deal with pain, the book provides the following principles:

• Know when you’re not in pain. Pain isn’t constant it ways and wanes, and there are times when a space opens up, and we’re free from pain.
• Don’t feel bad about feeling bad. Distress is a natural phenomenon. Feeling bad about feeling bad is an act of ego. Let the ego go!
• Don’t feed the monsters. They need us to stay alive. We can’t stop them from arising, but we have the power to stop feeding them. For example, tell yourself the stories of why you should be angry!
• Start every thought with kindness, compassion, and humor. For oneself and others.

Dealing with triggers

A trigger is when a seemingly small situations cause a disproportionally sizeable emotional response. For dealing with it, the first step is to realize when you’re triggered. This means having a rapid heartbeat, an emotional fight-or-flight response, or feeling like a victim. Triggers are often things from the past that are the source of pain to us.

One suggested way of overcoming triggers is to use the Siberian North Rail Road, or SBNRR for short:

1. Stop (the sacred pause, where you try to create space between the impulse and your reaction)
2. Breath (deep breaths calm the body and the mind)
3. Notice (experience your emotion by bringing attention to your body)
4. Reflect (where is the feeling coming from? Is it history? Put yourself into the other person — everybody wants to be happy, perspective without judging)
5. Respond (think about a response with a positive outcome. Think of the kindest response?)

From Self-Regulation to Self-Confidence

Through mindfulness, we see that externally directed negative thoughts often arise from our aversion to unpleasant emotions. With the capacity to experience our feelings, we might be able to tame our aversion and, by that, tame obsessive thoughts and ruminations. Once we manage to do this, we increase our self-confidence. To recover faster, you need to know your fail and recovery modes.

Pleasure, Passion, and Higher Purpose

According to Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos) there are three types of happiness:

• Pleasure: running after the next peak. The “rock star” happiness is hard to maintain
• Passion: known as “flow”, where peak performance meets peak engagement
• Higher Purpose: being part of something bigger, something that has meaning to you.

The further down these types of happiness, the more sustainable the happiness. While most run after pleasure, Tony suggests doing the reverse and trying to find a higher purpose at work because then the work itself is the reward.

Motivation in three steps

According to the book, getting motivated is a three-step process and requires the following:

1. Alignment
2. Envisioning
3. Resilience

Alignment

In this process, the first step is to align your work with your values and a higher purpose.

Thus, try to find work that is meaningful and fun to you, where you find yourself in a state of flow, which usually occurs when the task level of your work matches your skill level.

To reach this state more often, practicing meditation helps, and asking yourself simple questions such as “What are my core values?” or “What do I stand for?”.

Envisioning

The second step is as easy as visualizing your future, which according to Neuroscience, makes it easier and more likely to achieve it. Or, as Michael Jordan said: “You have to expect things from yourself before you can do them!”. For this, the book tells a story about a woman who thought about how she wanted to be remembered when she died and how this deep introspection completely changed her life. Therefore, the book suggests doing the same by asking yourselves questions like “Who are you, and what are you doing?”, “How do you feel?”, or “What do/should people say about you?”. Additionally, the more you talk about this ideal future to others, the more likely you will find people helping you with it.

Resilience

The third step is the ability to overcome obstacles in this way. Meaning while the first two tell you where to go, resilience helps you to get there. To be more resilient, the book mentions three kinds of resilience and how mindfulness helps you access them:

• Inner calm becomes the foundation of optimism and resilience. “Think of happiness as a deep ocean! The surface might be choppy, but the bottom is always calm.” (Matthieu Ricard). Meditation helps to access it.
• Emotional resilience: learn to be comfortable with emotions such as success and failure. This is, as mentioned in a previous section, about letting go of grasping and aversion, which helps to become emotionally resilient to success and failure.
• Cognitive resilience: understand how we explain our setbacks to ourselves and create beneficial mental habits that help us develop optimism E.g. An athlete looking back at his career and failures could say, “I missed 9000 shots,” and that’s why I succeeded! (Michael Jordan). Or Soichiro Honda said: “Success is 90% failure!”. Or Thomas Watson: “If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate!”.

Learning Optimism

Learning starts with being realistic and objective, which is hard because we pay more attention to bad things. The book teaches us that to overcome a bad experience, we must experience at least three good experiences. Being aware of this bias is the first step. To become more objective, you can bring mindfulness to your body (For example, better deal with successes and failures). To bring mindfulness to your thoughts, you can again ask yourself questions such as:

• Do you feel powerful?
• How are your thoughts related to your emotions?
• If you’re successful, do you accept credit, and are you humble about it?
• Or when you fail, do you realize it’s only temporary, and are you aware of the disproportionally emotional effect it has on you?

Personal Thoughts

Besides showing how mediation can help you to understand yourself better, this chapter particularly helped me to look at myself more critically or more objectively. It particularly acknowledged how essential and powerful questions are in life and how they can guide you through life, given you asked the right ones ;).

When you like it, stay tuned for part three.