Fred Luskin: Yoga and Forgiveness

I know a little bit more about forgiveness well hi it's um always like coming to the Sivananda ashram there was there's just a lovely sense of yoga and the peacefulness of it and probably for five years now I've been going to the the center near me I guess the one in Grass Valley and give a talk during one of the satsang for the teacher training programs quite a thing that people commit themselves to for a month the first time I went there I thought not me thank you no thank you but anyway way too much work for me and I was thinking about how long ago it was that I started doing yoga because I don't think I've ever spoken where this is the title of what I'm speaking about I've spoken with all sorts of things but not forgiveness and yoga and I was trying to think about how long ago I stumbled upon yoga and I remembered that it was in high school and it's about 45 years ago nobody did yoga then nobody knew what it was if you told your parents you were doing that like they wanted that they thought you were in a cult of some kind and my high school girlfriend was interested in yoga and I saw her once meditating by watching a candle like trying to keep her concentration and she got sick for a couple of weeks got a flu and so we couldn't hang out and so I borrowed one of her books on yoga just to see what the heck this was it was weird to me and I started reading the book and I started doing some of the practices and it was it was just a fit I mean I'm sure that's happened to some of you where the philosophy of about life this made sense to me and up until that point I don't think I had had a philosophy about life that made any sense to me and this was close enough to the 1960s where the prevailing philosophy of the culture made no sense to me of just materialism and achievement and status and power and it just didn't it didn't work enough for me but I put after those two weeks I put yoga back into like a closet or whatever it was you put it and I took a class in college on yoga and this was an entirely secular class and it was one of the few colleges that offered yoga classes back then I mean so a long time ago and at that point I was very athletic basketball player and runner and just and so the guy leading the class like the first class like said to everybody well why don't you like bend over and see how far you can touch to the ground and I could barely bend over and every practice that they offered I was stiff and incompetent and I figured I need this and because of that because of an absolute personal inability I started a daily yoga practice probably kept that up for about 20 years maybe more 30 years and I mean this is how long ago this was I got a a yoga teacher certification a million years ago from the YMCA when they were first certifying yoga teachers I mean this is like you know from ancient history but the practice of yoga much less than the philosophy of yoga got into my skin and and got into my whatever the DNA is and hopefully we're getting into the DNA at lengthen my telomeres that's one of my hopes but I couldn't shake that practice of holding the possibility that I could quiet my mind that that is what I see as the essence of what this is about that the rampaging selfishness and worry that we have all the time dominates the mind and now that I've taught you know all these things that Stanford for the past 25 years I understand how much of that is biologically driven that we are hardwired to feel threatened that our minds adhere to negativity much more easily than they adhere to positiveness that we will do anything to keep ourselves safe and that the minds nervous system the the link of the nervous systems of the mind the nervous systems primary importance is simply safety in order to do that it has pathways throughout your brain that are remarkably like gilded so that any image of threat and danger and loss gets all over the brain activates all sorts of neuro chemicals and like this you're caught and it wants to make sure that you think about things that cause you danger all the time that is if that's not enough the left hemisphere of our brain which creates our stories mostly those are stories of threat because we don't recognize how deep the basic biology of our human existence is safety defense anxiety and worry and from that point of view I mean II didn't know this then but from that point of view I understood why empirically speaking like a few thousand years agos people worked within themselves to extricate themselves from that predicament and that's yoga is this was from what I understand I mean I'm not that old I wasn't there but um I feels like it's sometimes no but they they worked with their mind and they dealt with the exact same brain and nervous system that you're working with and they practiced and practiced and worked empirically using themselves as evidence as to how it is you can possibly still this maniac and get peaceful and for whatever reason generation after generation after generation after generation of human beings continues to practice mindlessness and selfishness and greed and all the things that help us lose our equilibrium all the things all the practices that keep us from a kind of centered self that's okay I mean it's amazing I mean the eric erickson who probably is the foremost thinker on human development puts our first task developmentally as whether or not we're safe that that's the the absolute primary processing of the infant the primary ingredient as to whether human personal evolution proceeds am i safe well almost no one gets through infancy with full feelings of safety and then you add that to the basic neural architecture and growing up in the wacky homes that everybody grew up in being safe is very very challenging and so most of us are engaged all the time in the outward-looking for safety you know of weather what we do in the world and what we accomplish or what we have or the things we build or all the things that we do outside of our own self most of them are for safety you know do I have enough from what I understood it the yoga practice is to redirect that attention inward you'll find that safety to find the quiet anchor where the world can be okay in its actual manifestation like you don't change the world with yoga you change the perceiver of that world that is entirely what the problem that forgiveness presents that am i safe in a world where people hurt me where people hurt each other where people do horrible things where I do horrible things to other people how can I possibly be safe in that and the unfortunate answer is if you look outward for safety it's not findable and so everyone at some level needs some kind of interior izing practice so that the constant threat and the alarms and even if even just the normal degradation of aging and sickness and death that the Buddhists describe it threats everywhere so we're all I mean certainly any of you called to this we're all practicing to help us deal with life and we're betting that the interior is a ssin of our attention and the quieting down of our body and our mind will open us to places in ourselves that aren't in such fear and don't have so many like attachment needs based on that fear and and one of the hardest to deal with this is where my work has been is when that fear is triggered because we've been hurt and unfortunately if you live this human life you're gonna be hurt there's no way around that that nobody has the same interests as we do so my self interest is not manifested by everyone else so their self interest is gonna cause them to do things that bumps up against my self-interest and within my self-interest I'm going to take that personally and I'm going to react by triggering adrenaline in my nervous system and if I remember at five years later and I haven't healed from it then I'm gonna trigger adrenaline again in my nervous system and if I haven't healed for a minute ten years I'm gonna trigger adrenaline again in my nervous system and every time I trigger that adrenaline I feel in danger that I'm not safe and that something's wrong in this world now I've dealt with situations about this which are culture which are religions which are country's families because that left hemisphere of the brain loves to create stories of shared threat that's one of the ways we bonds with other people but many bit years ago as a Yankee fan it was oh you hate the Boston Red Sox too and then all of a sudden we're good buddies because we can weave a story together of our solidarity is gonna put us to make us safer against this threat so we've done forgiveness work with family members who have had other family members killed in the violence in Northern Ireland we've done forgiveness work with people whose family members were murdered at 9/11 we've done forgiveness work with people who had their whole lives destroyed in the civil war in Sierra Leone we're now beginning some very nascent work in Libya but we have watched people and from the tiniest to the biggest creating a story to explain to the person telling the story why it is I'm not safe why it is I can't relax and why it is I can't love it's because I didn't have a good mother or I had an overbearing mother or I had a father who molested me or I had an aunt who lied and destroyed the family or I had a ex-husband who was a bum or I have a current husband who's a bum or whatever I'm gonna have a future husband who's above three generations and now my kids are gonna have a husband who's a bum whatever we create stories that explain why it is we're not safe enough to love why we're not safe enough to do the right thing all the time we do this we do it in traffic I do it in traffic we do it in traffic why we're not safe enough to be kind you know I live in Northern California I've taught at Stanford for decades the traffic has gotten worse and worse and worse in the almost 30 years that I've lived there and people get tenser and tenser and tenser around it and it's very interesting because traffic where I live is one of the leading ways that I teach forgiveness because I just remind people like if you can go into traffic and forgive the fact that twenty thousand other people want to go where you want to go you're good like you can forgive anything because it's the exact same process no matter what the provocation is people make you feel unsafe things make you feel unsafe things make it so you don't think again in your threat-based nervous system that you're gonna get what you need to be okay so I find my I found myself once and Anna again I always use myself as an example of how crazy like a human mind can get and one that's even tried for 40 years - quiet itself down a little bit but I taught on some Tuesday nights I would teach two classes one to undergraduate students from like three to five and then another class from seven to nine for adults in the community through the hospital and for whatever reason one night I got out of my five o'clock class like a few minutes late but I had to go to Whole Foods and I don't know why I had to go to foods and maybe I didn't really - but I put a lot of pressure in myself so I created threat around Whole Foods so I get in my car it's probably ten minutes after 5:00 when I'm leaving and whatever whatever reason they certainly weren't having a sale at Whole Foods because you know it's it's expensive but let's just say that was a good reason and the three miles from Stanford's campus to Whole Foods was completely backed up and it took about 40 minutes for me to get the three miles so I get to Whole Foods around 6:00 for class at 7:00 and one of the reasons it was hard was there's no key to the room that the class was being held in I have a little badge that allows me to open the door otherwise the people attending a class are stuck sitting outside in 60 degree weather but still they're not happy with it so I pushed myself to give back so I'm running through Whole Foods just literally running through whatever items that I need and I'm staring at my watch or actually probably staring at my cell phone and not happy just not happy which is an example of how the human mind creates threat because I'm in Whole Foods like I'm not gonna starve right I'm among the most abundant people who ever lived in this world if I can shop at Whole Foods I mean there's nobody richer really except the top top top top top top top percentage of this universe but I'm going into Whole Foods and I'm tense as can be so I'm running through Whole Foods to get stuff that I need and I'm you know I got my basket and I go and and I count my items and I see that I can make the Express line so I run over to express light and I think there's two people ahead of me and I'm just staring at my watch and I start counting how many items these people ahead of me have like god forbid they have 11 and it's a 10 item maximum so I'm not just tense I'm angry in Whole Foods at 6:15 put on a very nice Tuesday evening that's the way our minds work that mind finds forgiveness so hard really it but it finds forgiveness so hard it's it's a direct threat to the threat based intensity of your normal mind of the ego backed mind that is always looking for self-interest and always having that interest threatened so I'm in Whole Foods nothing's going on and I get back to campus and I'm like two minutes late and I tell the people about it was stressful experience I have and they're looking at me like what was stressful you went to Whole Foods came back but I turned it into a stress well we all do this all of us we turn our life into stories of stress like the left hemisphere is like that little thing on the side of your head speaking nasty to you remember when they did this remember when they didn't do that remember when you did this and they didn't do that and remember you told them don't do it again and they did it again remember that this is what your left hemisphere is doing to keep you safe from the world so this is why we practice is to cry to quiet that down you know some of the method the research on meditation which to me is fascinating and very in a complex in an interesting kind of way and I'm not an expert on it but I've studied some of it first of all meditation done with some regularity does shift activation in the prefrontal cortex just up here to be more active in the right hemisphere than the left which is a general sign of a happier disposition so regular practice of meditation creates the analog in the brain of a happier experience so like more depressed people have more activation here happier people more naturally have activation here it shifts a little bit from regular meditation practice but the things that make meditation practice so compelling to me are the two other things that they've been shown to do which is they lower the amount of processing that the threat part of your brain does so you do actually get a moment through some regular practice of not quite being so negatively aroused when things happen the other thing they do and this combined together which is how meditation helps is they lower the part of the brain that is constantly finding every person different than you are like we have such a threat seeking mechanism here to protect us that we look for differences primarily not similarities between us and others so we are always looking for differences we are always looking for who's not like us and so we find those people as the other and they are a threat to us in fact that's how families orient themselves that tell religions often orient themselves it's like how tribes and groups and Democrats and Republicans and just that's how they orient you're not me so you're not safe and the interesting thing is my understanding is human beings share somewhere between ninety-nine point eight and ninety-nine point nine DNA with all other human beings so it's like 0.1% or 0.2% that varies and we're locked into that variance they're not like me oh that person has red hair so at least I can talk to them well that person's this age so at least they're like me and they're safe meditation properly practiced lowers some of that arousal so that we don't quite see the world through the same lens of threat and were a little bit happier in being in the world this is phenomenal the knot is good news is meditation isn't necessarily that dramatically more effective than other forms of stress management practiced on a population that doesn't mean that as people go more deeply into meditation they don't continue to find Saluda stages but what it does mean is if you give people say meditation practice and you give other peoples you know something else like prayer and you give a third group of people maybe some positive imagery practiced for the most as simple as practice the results are pretty similar that the brain needs something to anchor itself to some object of focus to help it reduce that crazy agitation you know one of the reasons that cellphones are so difficult for the human nervous system is when they're on our brain what it does is hold a piece of its energy back so it can monitor the cell phone our biological warranty is that we will never relax our brain until we're safe but if the cell phone is on and like in your pocket or right next to you then part of your brain is always monitoring it because of its threat value that you can get an email or something that's not good for you and so your brain is monitoring it secondly the minute people make the decision to check email they get a spike of adrenaline every time you check email the thing that makes the cell phone so interesting is it pulls at both the serotonin and the dopamine systems the dopamine system mean the excitement something new it's actually the system in the brain that was designed to keep people going long distances for sex and food but it also works for new information on the cell phone the serotonin is the more threat based system and the cell phone attracts both so our brain gets very easily tied into that stimulation and has a harder time shutting down when we use it too much but what I'm getting at is we live in an internal nervous system universe of threat that has to be modulated the practice of yoga and meditation are among the best practices to modulator when we started teaching forgiveness this was 20 something years ago I had already had a 20-something year meditation practice and had done yoga for almost as long and I understood some part of this so I was and probably still am the only academic researcher in forgiveness whose work is based upon meditation and quieting the mind whose forgiveness work that I recognize that you could do this much more quickly if instead of fighting and arguing with your past or with people who are unkind to you you battled your own nervous system to quiet it down I got that it was a very central and simple understanding that we had and it informed the fact that I think our practice as the simplest has probably been used more than any of the other academic practices but let me let me do a very simple demonstration because I don't want to just talk for 45 minutes I'm gonna give you a very simple meditation practice to do so if you'd all please like you obviously know how to meditate they're enough to teach you but just sit still for a moment I mean I go into some groups we're sitting still is the first hour seriously like just just sitting still it's like that's that can take an hour or more but what I'd like you to do is sit still just drop down into your practice for a half a minute or so just anchor yourself in your breath or some awareness but what I want you to do is once you've anchored in that I want you to deliberately allow yourself to leave that space and I want you to bring an image to your mind of some human being that you're not happy with I'll bring you back to this place but what I want you to do is deliberately cultivate an image of some person and it can be yourself some aspect of some person or some experience or something in your life that's unresolved that when you image it and I want you to image it I want you to bring into your mind and see if you can see it and I want you to focus on the core of the offense whatever this person or yourself did that was not okay I want you to focus on that and I just want you to allow your mind to dwell there and observe the the bad behavior so to speak or the insult or whatever it is I want you to sit with it for 10 or 15 seconds and then I want you to just let that go just let that go and then what I'd like you to do is just take a couple of slow deep breaths so you let that Clete leave your body just take a couple of slow deep inhalations into and out of your belly where if you open the lower abdomen if you open the lower below your navel where they with a martial arts center about an inch below your navel if you allow that part of you to relax then you will allow the adrenalin that developed to be absorbed back into the tissues and just take a few breaths and then very gently allow your eyes to open so what I came to understand was what I just asked you to practice is at the heart of why forgiveness is so difficult because when somebody has heard us if we haven't healed from it then at stray moments we bring back an image of it to our mind and because the mind is greased to have negative images have impact those images don't take a huge number of repetitions to become embedded in pathways in the brain so that if you had a lover who really lied or you came in and they were cheating on somebody cheating on you that image Sears itself into your consciousness when you bring it back up the pathway of this is wrong and this hurts and I can't resolve this gets activated instantly just instantly and again your body is flooded with adrenaline because it's a threat under adrenaline the mind cannot have positive thoughts because there's danger it can't it just can't have them so we weave a story from these negative thoughts about how hopeless we are how vulnerable we are to this wound and offense we weave that over and over and then that becomes part literally part of our identity and that things that trigger it in any way we bring it up because the pathway is established what I saw was that simple diaphragmatic breathing which is so simple can counter condition that pathway this is an essential yoga practice which for whatever reason had not been applied therapeutically at that point and it's so simple but if when you have an image come up of anything that is disturbing to you and you take two or three slow deep breaths where you open your lower abdomen because that's what you need to do to activate parasympathetic arousal which is the opposite or fight-or-flight you can quiet yourself down and if that is practice 10 or 20 times when you think about Grandma what will you think about anything you've done all of a sudden the conditioned response of adrenaline can dissipate and then people can talk to you and you can talk to people so let me just do one practice of that I'm not gonna have you do the negative image again but I'm gonna show you one of the simple meditation that we do if you'd again please just close your eyes I know it's like 9:30 you've been up since 3 o'clock in the morning but I promise this will be brief if you please close your eyes and what I'd like you to do is just follow my instructions for a couple of practices which is just see how well you can relax your abdominal and muscles and diaphragm so that when you inhale there's no impediment to slow full deep breathing that when you inhale your belly is soft and your breathing is full and then what I'd like you to do is after taking two or three breaths where you're centered about an inch below your navel so that the diaphragm opens fully so that when your diaphragm opens fully your brain knows you're not in danger that's actually what it takes your brain recognizes okay whoever's in command here feel safe and then what I'd like you to do is just bring an image to your mind of someone you absolutely adore so bring a clean clear loving image of someone you absolutely adore and feel how much you adore them feel it and and allow yourself to cultivate just a sense of heartfulness for just 15 or 20 seconds and then just take a breath and allow yourself to relax and then allow your eyes to open so some practice like that of just quieting and opening your heart back up works to shut down the reflexive adrenaline surge and allows people to practice on their nervous systems not to have to be fighting the world where we experimented with this and I'm gonna stop in just a few minutes I know I see everybody yawning occupational hazard of teaching at night but we were we experimented with this the first time we deeply experimented with this was we brought women from Northern Ireland from the Catholic and the Protestant sides each of whom had had their son murdered in their violence and so the two practices that we did just to allow them to take the training was first they came from Northern Ireland and we were at in Northern California so we brought them over to the window and we had each of them open their arms and allow the Sun to hit their chest in their face and everything and just say thank you and just recognize and this is probably what I'll talk about tomorrow night just recognize that the same world that kid you're killed your kid provides nourishment and sunshine every day and you don't want to so tightly hold the negative that you miss the beauty which is very simple just allow the Sun to hit you and then we practiced what I just had you practice but in shorter increments because most of you have already meditated we would just have them do this for 15 seconds and just learn that you could quiet down in the moment you could just quiet down in the moment I mean there's other ways to do that mindfulness works you know what am i feeling right now no no interpretation just what am i feeling right now but we had them practice and practice and practice and practice so every time they thought of something horrible like what happened to their kid we had them quiet their nervous system now that doesn't make it okay that just takes it out of the realm of crisis so then we could work with them but unfortunately most people who have real woundedness or have had bad childhoods who have had abusive relationships their nervous system is in the state of crisis and if you don't do something to work that crisis down it's very hard to cognitively hear and so it's very hard to adjust that story so we've been practicing for a decade I mean just how do you do this and like how do you help people like again use these simple practices from yoga and meditation to quiet them anyway I think tomorrow and the next day any of you who are interested I'm doing noon workshops with a little more practice and probably a little more intimate than this and then tomorrow night I'll be back to finish this and I will talk tomorrow night a little more about the brains need for positive nourishment like the gluttonous and the gratitude and the awe and the beauty and things like that because that and the opening of the abdomen to align the nervous system allow us to hold hold the things that have hurt us anyway have a lovely evening thank you you

Channel: Sivananda Ashram Yoga Retreat Bahamas

Views: 2,830

Keywords: fred luskin, frederic luskin, sivananda bahamas, yoga forgiveness, sivananda yoga bahamas, yoga retreat bahamas

Id: MdSxkLFPgHg

Length: 44min 53sec (2693 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 09 2017