For many of us, city life is crowded, busy, noisy and full of difficult emotions. We rush to work, along with all the other thousands of hurrying people. There’s traffic to negotiate, or crowded road crossings. All the time we are surrounded by adverts and billboards urging us to buy all kinds of things. There are countless pictures of glamorous models living perfect, wonderful lives that seem very distant from our daily routine. We might be aware of a vague longing for all kinds of things beyond our reach.
At the end of our working day we, have to do it all over again but now everyone is frantic to get home and in even more of a hurry. Perhaps we need to struggle through the supermarket crowds to pick up something for supper before we finally reach home. Even then, we cannot be sure of any peace and quiet. Maybe the neighbours are arguing, or someone across the road is playing loud music. One of my neighbours likes to do his washing late at night and everyone in the building can hear his ancient washing machine pounding away, as we get ready for bed. Once we are in bed, there is no guarantee things will settle down. We have a group of local teenagers who gather in the entrances of apartment buildings across the way and hang out until the small hours.
In the midst of all this our emotions can be pulled this way and that—irritations with things that go wrong, longing for things we cannot have and a vague, uncertain feeling of wanting things to be different. It’s exhausting and certainly adds to our stress.
So, what can we do? Here are three ways that I use to work with my difficult emotions as a city dweller.
1. Pay attention
When there are lots of things going on around you, it is all too easy to get pulled in all sorts of directions that have nothing to do with what you, yourself are doing at the present time. Have you ever walked along a familiar street and when you arrive at your destination, wondered how you got there? If you think about it, our lives are made up of many, many present moments—and it is important for us to notice this.
In 2010 two psychologists at Harvard University carried out some research into how we handle this moment-to-moment awareness. They discovered that for almost half of our waking hours we are thinking about something different to what we are doing, and that this does not make us happy. One of the times when they found most people’s minds were somewhere else was on their commute!
So, how do we pay attention? On a simple level—by trying to be mindful of what we are doing in each moment. If we are in a supermarket, we try to be present to walking up and down the aisles, choosing our goods and going to the checkout. If we find our minds drifting back to something else that happened in the day or anticipating what might happen later—then we just bring our attention back and let it rest.
The best way to learn how to make this part of your life is through meditation.Meditation is a reliable way of coming to know yourself and how you react. It helps us to calm our minds down and to be able to work with them more effectively.
How does this help in working with difficult emotions? It stops us from ruminating on something that might have annoyed us earlier or worrying about something challenging we need to do later. We tend to relive our upsets over and over again, which means that we draw out and exaggerate the emotions that go with them.
2. Don’t go there!
If we have been paying attention as we go through our day, there is more chance that we will notice if a difficult emotion is being triggered by something that is going on. When my neighbour’s washing machine starts up at 11.30pm, and I feel myself getting irritated I have a routine that I go through. I remember that there’s nothing that I can do about it; that he does not mean any harm (he’s actually a very nice guy), and if I get worked up then I won’t be able to sleep anyway. I call it, Don’t Go There!
You can try it anywhere for lots of different situations. You need to be familiar with the kinds of things that easily trigger your difficult emotions. Once you are aware of that, then you catch when a negative emotion is forming in your mind. Then you can look it in the eye and decide not to have anything to do with it.
Someone pushes you out of the way and instead of complaining about it, you just don’t engage. Another driver cuts you up on the dual carriageway—as you are about to curse, you just decide it is not worth it and let it go. Your boss shouts at you and instead of responding, you decide that to fight back will cost you more and get nowhere—so, you Don’t Go There!
3. Try to see things from another person’s point of view
This was brought home to me very strongly when I was out and about in Amsterdam recently. After a long bout of ‘flu, my partner and I were enjoying a trip into town for dinner and a movie. He went ahead to collect the cinema tickets and I made my way to the restaurant.
As someone who has rheumatoid arthritis, when I get tired my walking can get a bit unsteady. I came to a road junction and checked that it was all clear and began to step out into the road, when along the cycle track sped a young man on a scooter, with his girlfriend riding on the back. He saw me at the edge of the pavement and deliberating aimed his scooter towards me, making me wobble uncomfortably. He was delighted with my reaction and made a sort of ‘Ohhhh, ohhhh, ohhh!’ noise which he felt summed up my response.
He sped off laughing loudly, while I teetered on the edge of the pavement feeling a mixture of embarrassment, resentment and shame. It was too late to even think of trying, Don’t Go There! My difficult emotions had been triggered and were already too strong.
For a few moments I could only stand there but then I glanced up and just caught a glimpse of the girlfriend looking back at me. Her expression was concerned and a little embarrassed as well. It helped to bring me back. Instead of feeling abused, and sorry for myself, my attention went to the guy driving the scooter. It was a Saturday afternoon, he had a girl to impress and a chance to show his skill with the bike—after all, he never came near to hitting me.
When we are able to see things from another person’s point of view, even a little bit, it has a transformative effect. Instead of the situation being all about you and your reaction, suddenly there is room to see something about the other person. Much of the time, what we see helps us to feel more understanding. It can even touch our natural sense of warmth and kindness, so that the difficult emotions just fade away.
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There is a traditional Buddhist teachingabout the power of not reacting. It’s based on the image of being hit by an arrow. The first arrow is the difficult circumstance, disappointment or stress that we face. This arrow is unavoidable—challenging things are just part of life. The second arrow is how we react to whatever is happening—and here we have a choice. If we react by blaming ourselves, getting angry or complaining we are shooting ourselves all over again with a second arrow. That way we have the original pain to deal with plus the suffering of our reaction.
Recently I witnessed an incident that brought this home to me.
People gazing in the airport
Living in Amsterdam means that my local airport is Schiphol airport. It’s a great airport—spacious, light and airy. There are plenty of good cafes and places to sit. I always enjoy people gazingwhile sipping a hot chocolate. Recently I was waiting at the gate for my flight and had the opportunity to observe an interesting case of not reacting.
Cleaning the floor
It occurred to me that he must have swept this same expanse of floor many times. It’s most likely that he has never actually been thanked for the quality of his work. His pay was probably low, but he did the job thoroughly from a sense of self-respect. He was not looking for any outside acknowledgement. I found it restful to watch him but a bit sad also. He seemed to expect so little.
Me first
The next people to take part were a couple running towards a neighbouring gate where a flight to the States had just been called. There was no great rush, but they were obviously concerned to arrive well in time. All their attention was focused on getting to their gate. They were not mindfulof anything else.
Maybe you can guess what happened? They ran right through the pile of rubbish the cleaner had so painstakingly gathered, scattering it all over a wide expanse of floor. The woman checked her steps for a fraction of a second. I thought she would see the cleaner and apologize but instead she picked up her pace and quickly followed her companion towards their destination. There was an opportunity there for a moment of kindnessbut as so often happens, it passed by without being taken up.
Habitual patterns
I understood then the man’s attitude of not expecting to be seen—this must happen to him over and over again. It is so easy isn’t it, when you’re pressured to simply put your own agenda centre-stage and not even see that others may have an agenda of their own that needs your attention. There was a power imbalance in this incident too—the customer’s needs taking precedence over a mere cleaner getting on with his job. That kind of thing can happen so often in our working life. Maybe we have dealings with a manager, or team leader who may, or may not choose to see our contribution clearly, or as important as their own.
Choosing not to react
Perhaps it will not surprise you at all that the cleaner simply gathered up the scattered dirt and debris and continued with his work almost as if there had been no interruption. He did not reactin any way. He could have called out, or cursed under his breath. It would have been understandable if he had looked around for a sympathetic eye—I admit, I was ready to provide one—but he did none of those things. The cleaner simply continued with his job.
Managing our stress levels
It occurred to me that he considered dealing with that kind of lack of awareness from the people using the airport around him as part of his job. Rather than seeing it as an annoying incident to be stored up to take home and tell the wife about, he just got on with things. By having that attitude, he was keeping his own stresslevels under control. Imagine if he had reacted every time someone failed to see him working how tired and exhausted, he would be at the end of every day.
It brought home to me strongly the power of not reacting when irritating things happen. When we don’t shoot the second arrow it has a big benefit for yourself and everyone around you. Hans Seyle,was one of the first people to research the effects of stress on humans. In fact, he is sometimes called the grandfather of stress research. One of his most quoted opinions is,
It’s not stress that kills us; it is our reaction to it
Isn’t that worth a thought next time we have something happen to us that we didn’t want to happen?
How To Make Your Stress Benefit You
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We might look for connection, but it is not always easy to follow through
Just a few days ago I was sitting waiting for my partner in a square outside one of the major Amsterdam bookstores. I was enjoying people watching and feeling the connection with all the people passing by.
There was a guy leaning outside the bookstore. He must have been in his fifties, scruffy and not so well looking. All the time he stood there he was kind of grumbling out loud to himself. Sometimes if someone came too close, he upped the tempo of his grumbling into a snarl. He wasn’t a beggar. I don’t think he was drunk but he was not in a good way.
I sat for a good while—10, maybe 15 minutes. The guy was aware of me but did not make eye contact. I found myself thinking of him quite a bit and wondering where he lived, what had happened to him in his life. Then quite suddenly he took off his jacket and lunged over to where I was sitting. My immediate reaction was to get up and go into the bookstore. As I went, I heard him give a kind of sigh.
Once in the store, I realised that I had just walked away from this man without even trying to make eye contact—without even acknowledging his presence. I had been enjoying connection with the crowds, but I had turned away from him. Why did I do that? I guess I was afraid he would make a scene or accost me in some way, but I never gave him the chance.
I certainly did not give him the benefit of the doubt.
Our threat response is almost always on simmer
Human beings have evolved to defend ourselves against threat, to focus on staying alive so we can pass on our genes and ensure the continuation of the species. Although nowadays few of us live as hunter-gatherers facing daily danger, our threat response is still finely tuned to detect and act on any hint of menace. In fact, we live in a constant state of low-grade stress as we scan our surroundings for signs of threat.
Cities are usually big, sprawling places full of noise and crowded with people. We can easily feel accosted by events and circumstances not of our creation—being jostled in crowded shopping streets, being kept awake by noisy neighbours, or overwhelmed by sirens and traffic.
All of this can make us want to close in on ourselves, to protect ourselves from what we don’t like, things we find difficult. We tend to do this by avoiding connection rather than engaging—withdrawing from anything which looks threatening. So perhaps we don’t make eye contact with strangers, and we focus on getting from A to B without being drawn into other concerns.
A research study
In 1973 John Darley and Daniel Batson carried out a study called From Jerusalem to Jericho in which seminary students training to become priests were asked to give a talk on becoming a minister. Half of the students were asked to include reference to the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Some members of the group were warned that they were running late and needed to hurry. Others were simply told to walk across to where they would give their talk. As they walked from one building to another, they passed a man lying slumped on the ground is obvious discomfort. The study was to see how the students would react.
The results showed that those students in a hurry were much less likely to stop and offer help to the man on the ground—whether, or not, they had read the parable did not seem to make a difference. The key factor was that those people in a hurry were less likely to offer help.
The importance of connection
Yet as human beings we need to feel loved and to love others. We are social creatures, who thrive on a sense of connection. Without it we can become depressed and our health can suffer. Even when we suffer from serious illness, having a strong social network will help our chances of recovery. Connection is a basic human need.
Modern cities can be lonely places. The sheer size and volume of people can be overwhelming and, as we have seen, even trigger our threat response. Much of our instinct can be to protect ourselves from others. It takes patience, and practice to learn to stay open whatever the circumstances. What shocked me about my own behaviour that day was that I had been doing some compassion exercises and yet still my instinct was not to engage.
So, what can we do?
My first instinct on seeing what I had done was to give myself a hard time. I even went back out of the shop to see if the man was still there, but he had moved on and was nowhere to be seen. Slowly I realised that berating myself was not the answer. It was more important to notice how I had reacted and to take it on board—to learn from the lesson that my compassionate instinct still needs a lot of work. Instead of pushing the experience away, or drowning it out with remorse, I tried to lean into it to see clearly the sequence of what had happened.
Each of us can only deepen our compassion from where we are at any given moment. There are no rules. Much as we may wish to be open and generous toward others there will be occasions when we do not meet our own standards. However, each time we do manage to overcome our conditioning, our fears, our resistance we are making compassion a more habitual response. Human beings are hard-wired for kindness and compassion. Our challenge is to bring it out into our daily activities and to aim to feel it towards people we don’t know, or even don’t like as well as people we love and who are close to us. It’s an ongoing process and we can only start where we are, with what we have.
Awareness in Action is dedicated to building a community of people interested in living a life of meaning and purpose based on sustainable wellbeing. If you would like to join with us, you could make a start by sharing and commenting on the ideas you find in the blogs on these pages. Your story is part of our journey.
There is no problem to have thoughts going through your mind during a meditation session. The thing is not to follow after them. Just let them come and fade away. Our habit is when a thought comes, we pay attention to it, and get into it. We follow it through to see where it is going. This is what we are aiming to change in meditation. It’s not about stopping our thoughts but about changing our habit in relation to them.
There is nothing like sitting down to meditate to make you realise how busy your mind is. People often tell me that they are not very good at meditation because they can’t stop their thoughts. First of all, it is a misconception to think that meditation is about stopping thoughts. It is not. It is a way of seeing thoughts for what they are and developing a different relationship with them.
A helpful image is of the sky and the clouds. Our minds are like the sky—spacious, vast, sparkling. Our thoughts and emotions are like clouds—sometimes light and fluffy, sometimes dark and looming. Whichever they are, they don’t stay and moreover, they do not stain the sky. When they pass away the sky is still as spacious and limitless as before.
It is because our minds have this sky-like quality that we notice when we get distracted. The more we notice our thoughts, the better we get at working with them. If we let thoughts come and go without grasping at them, then we can use the thoughts themselves as a way of waking up our awareness.
So, we could imagine sitting on our meditation seat and a thought comes into our mind, Oh I need to buy vegetables. We can just notice the thought—we can even label it ‘thinking’, or ‘thought’ if it helps. Then we place our attention back on the method. That way, each time a thought, or feeling carries our attention away, we use it to strengthen our meditation by bringing our attention back.
2. You get sleepy
It’s very natural to get sleepy. Generally, we are so busy and doing all kinds of things all the time. We actually take so little time to rest and just simply be. In meditation we get to sit and relax, so it is not so surprising that drowsiness sometimes overcomes us.
One thing you can try is to raise your gaze. I always recommend meditating with your eyes open. If you feel sleepy, just look up a little. Keep your gaze soft and not too highly focused.
Just stay with your meditation method and if you fall asleep, just wake up again and continue. The thing is not to get anxious or frustrated about it. Just feel that you had a couple of moments of deep rest. If it continues for several weeks – make sure to do your session in the morning, rather than in the evening when you are more tired.
3. You are bored
This can get us in two ways. Firstly, the fear of being bored can stop us getting to the meditation seat at all. We like to stay entertained and engaged and the thought of sitting quietly by oneself can seem daunting. In fact, there is even research that shows that people will even give themselves electric shocks rather than sit alone in silence. College students were asked to sit for 15 minutes alone in a plain room, with nothing to entertain them. Most people reported feeling uncomfortable and distracted. In a follow up experiment, 67% of the men and 24% of the women opted to give themselves electric shocks.
In meditation we do not have anything outside of ourselves to entertainus, and sometimes this can feel confronting. We might feel some excitement at beginning with meditation, but we quickly become used to the method and then we can feel restless and bored. It’s not unusual to have stretches of memories, and things that worry you come up. Then we notice we are lost in thoughts and remember to come back to the method and try to settle.
The more we do this, the more we do settle. Then we may begin to find our stories slightly boring and not as compelling we previously thought. This is the beginning of the process of coming to know ourselves fully through meditation.
4. You are uncomfortable
People often complain of back pain, knee pain, stiffness and pins and needles. We are not used to sitting still in a particular posture, so it is inevitable that some discomfort will arise. The thing is not to worry about and not to pay it too much attention.
If you feel slightly uncomfortable, then shift your posture slightly. If you feel very uncomfortable, stand up and stretch. Whatever you do to ease your discomfort, do it as part of your meditation—with mindfulness and awareness. Just pay attention to the discomfort lightly without reacting to it and making it into a big deal.
A traditional example
Often meditation teachers compare the early stages of learning to meditate as being like a waterfall. All our thoughts and emotions come crashing in with lots of noise and fuss. If we stay with it, this begins to settle, and the meditation becomes more like a mountain stream—active and bubbly but less chaotic. Eventually our meditation can become like a broad river flowing towards the sea—calm and serene.
This example goes to show that this is all natural, recognisable and simply part of learning to meditate.
What to take forward from all this
Getting used to meditation is so important for us. Most people do not have a habit of sitting still and being with their minds. It’s no wonder that all kinds of stuff come up. We just need to relax—it’s all fine. My meditation teacher always used to say to us that there is no such thing as a bad meditation. It’s all just meditation.
Awareness in Action is dedicated to building a community of people interested in living a life of meaning and purpose based on sustainable wellbeing. If you would like to join with us, you could make a start by sharing and commenting on the ideas you find in the blogs on these pages. Your story is part of our journey.
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We have all been there. Those moments when city life feels too full—too many people, too much noise, too much everything. We long for some peace and quiet and a chance to regroup.
For most of us the immediate answer is not a holiday. We have families to care for, and bills to pay. That means we need to be able to work with our feelings of being overwhelmed by the city from within ourselves—to find inner space even when there does not seem to be any on offer.
When we feel overwhelmed it’s easy to withdraw, to close in on ourselves and try to put up a wall. This tends to solidify our feelings and cut us off from managing our feelings. To cope with feeling overwhelmed in the city in the long term, we need to be more daring.
Here’s some things we can try.
1. Take a moment
Think about how you begin your day. You jump out of bed to get started on the list of things that need to be done—get ready for work, hurry the kids up for school. You rush into the shower but instead of being present in the running water and enjoying the moment, you are thinking of that conversation you had with your boss the day before or worrying about getting your son to the dentist after school.
Research carried out at Harvard University in 2010 showed that for almost half of our waking hours we are thinking about something different from what we are doing. In other words, we are not fully present for many of our actions. This means that we are neither bringing our full resources, or, appreciating the moment we are experiencing. As life is uncertain, the only moment we can be sure of is the present moment—so it is ironic that we so frequently miss it.
Try to break up your day by taking short moments to nourish yourself. City life offers many good times to do this are when you are on tram, or bus, waiting in the queue at the supermarket, or changing from one activity to another.
Pause in what you are doing
Bring your attention to your body
How do you feel?
What is your mood?
Take a few slow, deep breaths
Feel the richness of the moment you are living right now
Continue with what you were doing
2. Stay open and curious
City life offers many opportunities to be open and curious. When you are going about your day you pass all kinds of people, lots of different activities and situations. Perhaps there are buskers in the metro, maybe you see a mother struggling to get her small children on to a tram or a bunch of visiting students laughing and excited about their visit to your city.
Cities are usually vibrant places with lots of energy. When we are tired or stressed it can be hard to go with the flow. We want to shut ourselves off from the noise and bustle. Instead, if we are being present, we can simply see what is happening around us. It’s not necessary to get into all kinds of opinions and judgements—we can just notice. We can stay open to new experiences, to new ideas and let them unfold around us without resisting. That way the activity can nourish and engage us, instead of exhausting us.
Try taking the time to look about you.
Look up, rather than looking down at the sidewalk.
Do you remember when you were a child being told, ‘Patience is a virtue’? It sounded really boring, didn’t it? Certainly, not a way to get what you want and to cut through the crowd. It took me a long time to appreciate the value of patience and to recognise the extent to which it eases stress.
There are so many moments in an average day in a city life where impatience can flare up—standing in line in a shop, waiting your turn in a café only to have someone barge in ahead of you. When everyone is in a hurry there are so many moments where people can act thoughtlessly—walking in big groups on the sidewalk, pushing you out of their way to get past. An angry reaction can rear up even when we are in a good mood—if we are tired, or worried it happens even easier.
The thing is, going with our impatience is exhausting and the emotions that impatience stirs up, such as anger and resentment, are not good for us. They increase our stress levels and can lead to higher blood pressure and heart problems. Positive emotions like kindness and tolerance, on the other hand, do promote wellbeing.
Being able to respond to challenging situations with patience is not a passive activity. It requires self-awareness and a capacity for seeing things from other people’s point of view. It involves flexibility and a degree of openness.
Next time your patience is challenged:
Try taking a moment to come home to yourself
Open up your awareness to view the whole situation you are in
Be aware of the needs of other people around you
Don’t focus exclusively on your own agenda
Engage your sense of humour
4. Do something for someone else
A couple of weeks ago I was on my way home and feeling pretty tired. It was a relief when the tram showed up. As it happened, I had a lot on my mind. A work project I was working on was taking much longer to compete than I had anticipated, and it was causing me concern. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a young mother with two small children—a toddler and a baby. I didn’t pay so much attention because of the problem I was working with in my mind.
It turned out that we got off at the same stop and the mother had all the struggle of collecting her buggy and getting the baby into it. As they moved off, I noticed that one of the children had dropped a soft toy on the pavement. Everybody was too busy to see. Luckily, I could pick it up and return it before it got trampled. The toddler say the toy and grabbed for it joyfully—it must have been a favourite—and the mother gave me a grateful smile.
In those short moments, my mood changed completely. I went from being self-focused and worried to feeling a great sense of wellbeing. Taking a moment to help someone else lightened my mood and helped me to feel less oppressed by my own concerns.
5. Smile
It’s all too easy as you go through an average day in your city life to put your head down and carry on. We are busy and we want to get on with what we have to do.
Even if we don’t see an opportunity to do something for someone else, we can at least smile. There is more to smiling than we think. It helps us to feel more open and accessible and it is pleasant for other people too.
6. Be grateful
Research is showing that people who make gratitude an active part of their lives are happier. It’s relatively easy to feel grateful for big things like promotion or moving to a new house but it’s harder to feel grateful on a daily basis.
If we look around and pay attention there is plenty that we can find to be grateful for in city life. Noticing the richness that we have in our lives is nourishing and will help us to feel stronger and more able to cope.
Here’s some ideas:
Before you go to sleep think of something that happened in your day that you feel grateful for
Keep a gratitude journal
Have a gratitude jar in the kitchen where everyone can contribute
Hold a gratitude session once a week with your family, where each person shares something that they were grateful for during the week.
7. Remember common humanity
It helps to remember that all the people in your street, in your neighbourhood, in your city want to be happy and they don’t want pain. It’s a fact of life. Maybe some people have strange ways of trying to be happy, but they still do. The longing for happiness is part of being human. Yet we all know that life can be hard and difficult times come for all of us. When city life seems too much to handle, remember to see all the people as a collection of individuals—who will have a lot in common with you on a fundamental human level.
Here’s a simple exercise you could try.
Pay attention to the people you pass in the street
Notice if you make a comment in your mind about someone
Be aware of the people you feel drawn towards and the ones you do not like the look of
Try to imagine how they might see you as you pass them by
Take a moment to be aware that everyone you see wants their day to go well and to avoid any unpleasantness —just as you do
Then realize that inevitably for some people things will go wrong during the day —let that feeling touch you and help you to feel a common humanity with your fellow travellers.
Awareness in Action is dedicated to building a community of people interested in living a life of meaning and purpose based on sustainable wellbeing. If you would like to join with us, you could make a start by sharing and commenting on the ideas you find in the blogs on these pages. Your story is part of our journey.
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