by Ruby Wax
Neuroscientist: A spider’s web is a great analogy, yes. When an insect gets trapped anywhere in the spider’s web, every single string of the web vibrates. The spider can feel that vibration from any point on the web. The brain and the body are like that, they’re totally interconnected, a single system. Anything that affects one part affects the whole system. It all vibrates together.
Ruby: So, if you stub your toe, how does your brain find out?
Neuroscientist: When you stub your toe, you activate pain-sensing neurons called A-delta fibres. Those send electrical signals up through the spinal cord and into the brain, but that in itself isn’t pain. The brain responds to those signals with a network of areas, the somatosensory cortex, insular cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex, and those areas together generate feelings of shock, threat and suffering. It’s those feelings that make up pain.
Monk: We talked about that before in the chapter on thoughts – the gap between perception and reaction, before you start judging the signals. This becomes interesting when working with pain. When you realize pain is an emotional reaction not just a physical one, you can do something about it.
Neuroscientist: That’s a key point about pain. I totally agree.
Ruby: Okay, I understand physical pain but how do you deal with emotional pain? If you’re scared, how does your body react?
Neuroscientist: Fear gives you an adrenaline surge – your muscles tense up, your digestion shuts down and you’re ready to fight or run. If you unclench your fists, drop your shoulders and slow down your breathing, you’ll feel a little less scared. The body and the emotion are one and the same. In fact, Darwin used the word ‘attitude’ to describe how animals hold their bodies. An animal could be in a defensive posture, or an aggressive one, or an approachable one. Darwin thought that the posture itself was the emotion, not just an expression of the emotion. So it’s a two-way street. Changing your emotions changes your body posture, and changing your body posture can change your emotions.
Ruby: So, if I’m hunching my back and baring my teeth, could I still like you?
Neuroscientist: Yeah, but when you fake a body posture like that, it won’t feel natural. Hunching your back and baring your teeth makes you more likely to be aggressive, but it isn’t a guarantee.
Monk: Our body never lies. Our mind can play all kinds of avoidance tricks on us, but the body will always tell us how we feel. It’s important to listen to that. Sickness, for example, is a messenger – it can be a wake-up call to get us to see what’s going on with our minds.
Ruby: What about with depression? I know when I’m depressed – I’m not skipping around in the petunias. I know my body is slow and my limbs feel like I’m lifting weights, but still I assume you can’t lift depression by smiling.
Neuroscientist: That’s right, it’s not that simple. When you’re feeling a bit down, not chronic depression but you’re just in a grump, then opening up your chest, lifting your head and going for a walk can really help. But real depression is different. Body posture can be a start but it’s not nearly enough.
Ruby: Okay, I get it. I always wanted to know, if you had a brain in a jar, could it feel emotion?
Neuroscientist: No, I don’t think so. The brain needs the body to function, and the body needs the brain. It’s a single system.
Ruby: But if I put your brain in a jar and sold it, would you be pissed off?
Neuroscientist: I would understand. I had the same idea for your brain. It’s my retirement plan.
Ruby: Okay, now let’s discuss exercise. I want to know why people are now beating themselves up for a six-pack, screaming like they’re in childbirth for a couple of bulges. I mean, do you need a six-pack to sit behind a desk? I’d understand if your job was to lift the desk, but having a six-pack … does that improve your health?
Neuroscientist: Yes, there’s no question that any exercise is good for cardiovascular health, and that’s also going to be helpful for brain function. But people go to the gym and, while there, they watch TV or listen to their headphones. They go there to tune out so they don’t have to think. That’s very different from yoga, t’ai chi or most martial-arts practices, which put a lot of emphasis on mental focus. I think that developing an awareness of your body and how it moves is more important for health and even for strength than mindlessly pumping up your muscles.
Monk: Exactly. We could be totally distracted in the gym, running on that treadmill to run away from our minds, and also, when we’re doing bench presses we might be unaware that we’re dislocating a shoulder.
Ruby: Yeah, I’ve done squats and didn’t realize I was giving myself a Caesarean.
Monk: Also, the idea of what’s considered attractive changes with history and culture. Ages ago, and also nowadays in some parts of the world, being a bit fat was seen as a sign of happiness and success, while being skinny meant misery. Now, in the West, people are torturing themselves to achieve the ultimate ‘thigh gap’.
Ruby: My mother always said, ‘For beauty, you have to suffer.’ That’s why she put me in braces for forty-seven years.
Neuroscientist: But if the goal isn’t just beauty but a healthy life and an active old age, bulking up without focusing on movement is a mistake.
Ruby: I know guys who did weights all their lives and, now they’re older, they’ve literally turned into gorillas. They’re all hunched, knuckles dragging on the ground. Who came up with the idea of the beefcake being the vision of health and virility? It doesn’t arouse me. It’s like a big slab of meat in trainers.
Neuroscientist: I don’t know where that idea came from, or when exercise became more about vanity than about health. Most doctors would say that exercise builds muscle and improves bone density, and those are definitely good things. Actually, focusing on bulk instead of flexibility can be really unhealthy. Men may go for big chest muscles but, if they don’t develop strong legs and core muscles to support the weight, they risk injury. Someone who has good flexibility and core strength may not look big, but they will be more fit. That leads to healthier ageing, fewer falls, more independence and less cognitive decline.
Ruby: What about people who can’t stop pumping? They’re obsessed with fitness and bore you to death talking about it.
Neuroscientist: Addiction to the gym is considered cool but, in the end, it’s still an addiction. You’re still chasing a high, looking for that right combination of dopamine and endorphins.
Ruby: We have wearables like Fitbits that give you a great high. It pushes you to constantly push yourself harder, like having a nagging mother on your wrist. One day, it’s your best friend because you’ve done ten thousand steps and it congratulates you; the next, it’s not even going to speak to you unless you give it twenty thousand. Eventually, it sues you if you don’t climb Everest. You might be lying there passed out while it’s still blinking at you to run up and down Machu Picchu.
Monk: Years ago, I remember reading an article about Demi Moore which said that she gets up at 4 a.m. and does sit-ups constantly until breakfast. Me and the other monks were horrified and said if she’d spend half that time meditating …
Ruby: She’d be enlightened by now. And while we’re on Demi, where is she now?
Monk: I do think exercise is important, but there’s so much focus on how we look, instead of what’s inside.
Ruby: You don’t win any gold medals for inner peace.
Monk: Sometimes, when I explain mindfulness, people who do a lot of fitness training tell me they can get the same thing when they’re on the treadmill, so why would they need to meditate? I say to them, ‘But you can’t run all day. Or, when your boss is yelling at you, you can’t drag a treadmill into the room.’ If you’re training your mind through mindfulness, you’re learning how to lower your stress whatever the situation, you don’t need to always be at the gym. Exercise doesn’t train the mind. Yes, it will help you feel less stressed, but only while you’re doing it, and for a while after, but not in the long term.
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nbsp; Ruby: But they can do both at the same time if they do mindful movement.
Monk: Exactly, there are methods where you use the body to train the mind.
Ruby: So you’re getting enlightenment and a tight tush. Ha ha, Demi, who’s laughing now?
You’ll find the relevant mindfulness exercises for the body in Chapter 11.
5
Compassion
There’s an expression, ‘If you’re shot with an arrow, you just pull it out.’ It doesn’t help to worry about who shot it, why they shot it and whether they’ll shoot it again. Just take it out. (That’s self-compassion, in my book.)
It’s strange for me to be writing a chapter on … I have trouble saying the ‘C’ word, it’s always been a hard one for me to say out loud because of my depression and the feelings of shame and self-disgust that come with it. It’s probably because I stigmatize myself more than other people stigmatize me. I bring out the whip, thinking how self-indulgent I am, when other people have far bigger problems. I have to remind myself that these thoughts are symptoms of the disease. The biologist Lewis Wolpert writes, ‘Thoughts are to depression what a tumour is to cancer.’ But while I’m doing time in the darkness, those vicious thoughts seem so real and justified. This is why it’s difficult to feel self-compassion, let alone compassion for anyone else.
My Story
I’ve been working on this book while on my Frazzled tour over the last year. I love to write on long train journeys, where I can finally focus (if I get bored, I can look out the window and see the odd cow), unlike working in my home, which is the Piccadilly Circus of distraction.
At midnight on 7 February 2017, I was in a taxi coming back from Victoria Station, and writing in the back seat. Two hours later, at home, I realized that my computer was missing. Horrified, I remembered that, as I got out of the cab, my suitcase wasn’t completely zipped up and I realized that my computer must have slid out.
A small note here: during a few of my more severe bouts of depression – and it could be coincidence – my computers seem to break down along with me. Either they suddenly go blank, never to return to life, or, on more than one occasion, I’ve spilt water on them and, again, kaput. In A Mindfulness Guide for the Frazzled, I wrote about a whopper of a depression I had a few years ago in America and its accompanying computer breakdown. No button on earth could bring it back. All that happened was, every once in a while, there were flashes of passing lights on the screen, like a UFO.
At the time of our breakdowns, (the computer and I) were touring the States, publicising my previous book, Sane New World. It wasn’t going well, primarily because some publicity person who was supposed to be arranging my tour seemed to have a large number of screws missing. I ended up in the back of a vitamin store in a shopping mall two hours outside Los Angeles being interviewed by a bald person with three hairs glued to his forehead. His only question was, did I think green foods would cure cancer? (I don’t think he had read the book.) That was one of the three interviews this PR person set up. (I don’t think she had read my book either.) Another interview was with an eighty-year-old person who had never heard of me and asked if I knew a recipe for lamb chops. (She must have thought I was a chef.) There I was, in America, in a state of full-blown mental illness, wandering about with my lifeless computer. I spent my free time going from one Apple Genius bar to another, and not one ‘genius’ could bring it back to life.
So this time when I lost my computer in the taxi, it triggered the memory of depression and, once the monster awakens, he moves in. I called the black-cab lost-and-found helpline, which is the communications equivalent to a black hole. I went to the Apple Store Genius Bar in Westfield, begging them to please call iCloud and tell whoever’s up there that I’d pay big money if they could just find my unsaved documents. They looked at me with pity. I was starting to go under.
The next day I got an email from someone telling me she had found my computer. She said she had bought it the day before at a street market. She must have opened it and seen the screensaver of me posing with the Dalai Lama. (Obviously, it put the fear of Buddha into her.) Anyway, I asked if I could meet her and copy my documents, telling her she could keep the computer. We met at an art gallery where she worked, about six minutes from my house. I offered her some money but she said all she wanted was to give me back my computer, telling me it would be bad karma if she took the cash. I couldn’t believe it. I kept thinking, What’s the catch? I’m a natural-born cynic; in my mind, no one does something for nothing. There’s always a bill. She insisted on not just giving me the computer but giving me two works of art from the shop and asked whether I could say hello to her husband, the artist, on the phone. (I asked him if I could record our conversation.) He said, ‘Maybe this was supposed to happen – you were meant to drop that computer and I was meant to give this message to you. You’re honest and speak the truth. I adore you and what you’re doing. Now you go and have the best day.’
My depression retreated into its cave and I revised my pessimistic view of human nature: there isn’t always a price to pay when someone does something nice for you. So, with this mind-altering paradigm shift of an experience, I’ll start my chapter on compassion. I no longer need to talk about the ‘C’ word, I can now say it or, in this case, type it: compassion. (See?)
Compassion: What is It?
So, what does it mean and how long has it been hanging around? Answer: a long time, or thereabouts. Around 1 million years ago, our ancestors were far more touchy-feely than we are today. Yes, they’d spear you if you stole their wife, but they also looked after their old and sick and the whole community looked after the kids. (Isn’t that the dream … to have a village full of babysitters?)
Compassion comes from the Latin word compati, meaning ‘to suffer with’. It doesn’t just mean sending someone a Hallmark card with a baby pig wiping away a tear on the front and, inside, a message saying how sorry you are. That would go under ‘pity’ or ‘patronizing’. With compassion, step one is feeling the pain of another and the big step two is being motivated to relieve it. It’s the will to act that defines it rather than just ‘feeling someone else’s pain’. You feel you actually want to go out and do something about it. If I’m in pain and you just feel my pain, it’s not going to help the situation. How can you possibly help me if you’re in so much pain from my pain? Now I’ll need to help you cope with my problem. Also, we sometimes jump at the chance to feel someone else’s pain for the wrong reasons; we don’t want to feel our own so we distract ourselves with theirs.
The benefit of practising mindfulness for compassion is that you’ll be able to keep your mind stable in the fierce fires of someone else’s pain without getting pulled in or overwhelmed. You’ll be able to stand back, watching your thoughts and feelings, to make a clear, unbiased decision on how to help the other person by being aware when to say something and when to be quiet and just be nearby. Someone has to hold the boat steady when the storm comes in.
Empathy: What is It?
Empathy is a whole different ball game. It comes from the Greek word empatheia, meaning ‘to feel into’. It’s implanted in us from our mammalian forefathers, when we mimicked the facial expressions and gestures of each other, based on the monkey-see-monkey-do school of thought. When we mirror another’s facial expressions, we feel what they feel, because our faces and our feelings are intrinsically linked.
Compassion is the feeling you get when you see someone suffer and this motivates a desire to help. Empathy is resonating with someone’s pain but not getting it confused with your own. Empathy is unconditional, just as compassion is; we don’t have to like the person we have empathy for, we just need to imagine ourselves in their shoes. You can take this even further: if you can feel empathy for someone who’s harmed you, you’re in the big league.
Self-compassion Comes First
However, if we don’t learn to be compassionate to ourselves first, we can’t feel it for anyone else. A mother has to teach her c
hild to soothe themselves, but she can only do that if she can soothe herself; otherwise, there’ll be two people drowning.
My opinion is that we project our thoughts about ourselves on to people around us (for example, I know that I’m a great liar and so I don’t believe people are generally honest, and equally, if you have too much self-criticism in your head, you’re spreading that abusive virus on to others). Conversely, if you’re nice to yourself, you’re probably generous and kind to everyone around you.
Somehow, we’ve got this idea of self-compassion confused with selfishness. It’s far from being selfish because, if you can give yourself compassion, you won’t drain other people by expecting them to make you feel good or, when you’re beating yourself up, blame them for your bad feelings.
Learning to throw ourselves a bone of self-compassion increases our resilience and stability. When you have that security blanket of self-compassion, you feel like you can take more risks, come out of the box and be more creative.
Many of us judge ourselves by our accomplishments, ricocheting from feeling great when we succeed to sinking into misery when we fail. Our self-esteem goes up and down depending on what grade we’ve given ourselves. With self-compassion you learn that, if you do fail, it doesn’t mean you’re a complete failure as a human being, it means you screwed up on one thing. People who have more self-compassion find it easier to apologize and admit they’ve done something wrong when they’ve made a mistake. Their sense of self-respect isn’t threatened because they don’t intrinsically think of themselves as a bad person or a failure. If someone doesn’t have self-compassion, they’ll usually get furious if you point out an error because it stokes up their feelings of not being good enough.
