GOOD MORNING!
Welcome to THE PRACTICE, a weekly, first thing Monday-morning email that aims to both connect us to each other, and to provide ideas and inspiration to ground us into our individual practices.
Peruse at your leisure, revisit as you like, and be sure to register for upcoming events + add them to your calendar.
Let’s kick it off with logistics:
📞 CALLS: Please register below for the calls you would like to attend.
🌀 EVOLVE (Tuesday, 8/23 @ 6pm PST // 9pm EST): Register here.
🌀 EXPAND* (Wednesday, 8/24 @ 9am PST // 12pm EST: Register here.
🌀 EXPLORE (Thursday, 8/25 @ 12pm PST // 3pm EST): Register here.
*This call (Expand) features structured breakout groups of 3-4 people. THIS WEEK, we’ll be working on creating THOUGHT LADDERS (see below for what this means).
🔮 CREATIVE FRIDAY:
September CREATIVE FRIDAY: (September 16, 11am - 1pm PST // 2pm - 4pm EST):
Register here.
🪢 COMMUNITY
Have you joined us on Slack? Come say hi! It would be rad to hear from you.
For real though! Conversations happening over there have fast become a major highlight of my week. Come hang!
💡 <THIS WEEK!> MONTHLY WORKSHOP
This month's workshop is called “CHAOS IS A FRIEND OF MINE,” and I’ll be sharing how we can draw upon the principles of Chaos Theory as a guiding framework for a recovery practice.
It will be mystical and magical and maybe even practical!
Wednesday, 8/24 at 5:30pm PST // 8:30pm EST (yes, I will record it if you can’t make it live).
This week’s inspiration:
“That’s why I like to listen to Schubert while I’m driving. As I said, it’s because all the performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I’m driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D Major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of—that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally, I find that energizing.”
Haruki Murakami, from Kafka on the Shore
Most of us here at SELF MADE are on a sincere pursuit to transform our habits and patterns so we can create lives we are actively designing rather than only tolerating. I bear witness to our quests every single day: In 1:1 client sessions; in group calls; in your Slack comments, in emails, and in my own lived experience as someone inside of my own inquiry alongside you. We are here because we want to do better, to recover who we were before life did its life thing to us, to heal and evolve and become, and to hopefully make some dear friends along the way.
But what is the point of “doing better”—of checking boxes, hitting goals, and so on—if we don’t also start to feel better?
Every single one of us have brains that are quick to point out all the ways we fall short and don’t measure up. This is a normal functioning of a human brain: looking for what is wrong, scanning for potential pitfalls—or even actual danger—is how we keep ourselves safe. In addition, we have all been socialized to understand the world through extremes, rather than relationships: this vs that, good vs bad, up vs. down, etc. We are literally programmed to see the world in black-and-white, which in turn has us moving through our lives oblivious to the vast spectrum of color—which is to stay, oblivious to the vast web of relationships we are never not part of—available at any given moment.
There are occasions when our inherent negative bias is valuable—moments when we might actually be in danger, and we need that “scanning for bad” part of our brain to guide us. It’s also true that though these thoughts can have value, they are unhelpful when it comes to, oh, basically every thing else.
Por ejemplo:
We are kind and forgiving to the people we love, and terrible at extending ourselves the same slack.
We look at things as binary, foregoing the “messy middle” to be at the mercy of extremes, forgetting that it’s between these extremes where *real life* actually happens.
We hold ourselves to impossible standards, and when we inevitably fail, we stay mired in self-loathing and persistent lack.
The problem with most attempts at self-development is that it has us focus solely on changing our actions. When we change our actions but don’t change the thoughts and feelings behind those actions, a gap opens between any success we might be reaching, and an inner experience that despite all evidence to the contrary has us continuing to feel shitty. It becomes difficult, if not impossible, to see real change.
🤷🏽♀️ What’s the point of any of this if I still hate myself?
As mentioned in last week’s issue of THE PRACTICE, over the next three weeks, we’ll be exploring three different approaches toward how we might shift our inner experience so that the voice in our heads is more helpful than harmful.
As ever, my aim is to explore how we might create conditions inside of which transformation and evolution can occur, in a way that not only causes the least amount of harm, but also actively has us feeling as good as possible as we go.
This week, we start with a concept in the coaching world known—fittingly—as “thoughtwork" 1 (emphasis mine):
Thoughtwork refers to managing your mind, with the aim of feeling more empowered and in control of thoughts and feelings.
Thoughtwork involves raising awareness of limiting beliefs, [automatic negative thoughts] and understanding thought patterns, both detrimental and beneficial. This consciousness about the thoughts allows you to have more agency over your thinking, rather than allowing your mind to create anxiety loops, rumination cycles or unproductive overthinking.
Doing thoughtwork prevents reactivity and promotes intentional, confident responses. By understanding what goes on inside your own brain, you have better control over how you react to people and events. This will impact your further thinking and feelings.
This week’s Ask Polly was behind a paywall so I can’t link the whole thing, but here’s a nice gem that hits the “why practice thoughtwork” nail on the head (again, emphasis mine):
Instead of scrutinizing your shortcomings the way you always have, pick up the very good habit of saying, “Everyone is fucked up and so am I.” Then shift your focus from self-scrutiny to belief. Remind yourself what you value, what you want to create, how you want to live, what connections you want to celebrate. Move away from your relentless intellectual search for answers and solutions (which can so easily become neurotic and self-hating) into a space of feeling more, of asking better questions, of cultivating your curiosity, of moving toward the deep connections that teach you more than that dark space inside your skull ever will.
Without further ado, I offer three concepts to help you begin to practice changing your thoughts:
🪜 1. Climb a THOUGHT LADDER
I’m going to go ahead and assume that every single one of you is familiar with the experience of knowing something but still not believing it.
For example: We all understand intellectually that shame is not a sustainable motivator, and that if shame worked, we’d all be the soberest most happiest people on the planet.
We know this, and yet. Knowing that shame doesn’t work doesn’t mean we stop feeling shame (alas!).
Understanding something does not automatically translate to believing it.
Which leads us to our first tool: the Thought Ladder.2
The Thought Ladder is an exercise to help you shift a negative thought to a more neutral—and eventually positive—one.
Changing our thoughts takes time and happens incrementally. We have to change our thoughts in stages. Think about how long you’ve held certain thoughts: Decades? Generations? Millennia? To think we’ll shift a shit thought to a positive one overnight is ridiculous. Instead, we employ a Thought Ladder to move us mindfully up the rungs from negative, to neutral, to positive.
Here’s a personal example: Post lightbulb shower moment, I got (even more) present to a profound self-loathing. I wanted to love myself, and intellectually understood that I was worthy of that. However, despite this understanding, when I said “I love myself,” it felt stupid and false, and my system rejected the suggestion entirely. Working with a Thought Ladder had me practice trying on new beliefs that actually rang true, rather than having me parrot back to myself an affirmation that just left me feeling as shitty as before, because there was such a chasm between knowing and believing. Thinking I could go from “I hate myself” to “I love myself” was another way I might gaslight myself. The new thought had to feel authentic, to ring true, in order for me to begin practicing it.
So: My initial thought was “I hate myself.” My goal thought was, “I love myself.” I used the Thought Ladder to brainstorm incremental shifts in thinking that might take me up the ladder to the goal.
The first new thought I practiced that rang true was “I believe it’s possible that one day I like myself.” This was enough of a shift that the window of possibility and curiosity cracked open in my brain, but neutral enough that the inner voice who would be waiting to roll her eyes and declare bitch, please stayed quiet instead.
A revelation!
Here’s an example of a few different ladders:3
This week, you are encouraged to create a Thought Ladder. Start with one thought. To try on some sample intermediate thoughts, you might start with the following openers:
I’m open to the idea of…
It’s possible that…
I can learn to…
I don’t yet know how to, but I can…
The most important part of this exercise is landing on an intermediate thought that you actually believe. This will not work if you fake it. So: when you try on an intermediate belief, check in with your body’s response. We are going for a sense of slightly positive; neutral; or even still bad, but slightly less bad than the starting thought. Try to get a felt sense of this in your body, rather than trying to *think* or *figure out* your way to the “right” answer with your brain.
Once you’ve landed on genuine intermediate thought…yeah, you guessed it. Next step is to practice. Just like with everything else (I know, I know. Would that this were sexy). Write it on a Post-it and put it somewhere visible; have it pop up as a reminder on your phone a couple times/day; say it aloud to a trusted pal (or in a trusted fSlack channel 🤓);have it tattooed behind your eyelids. Do whatever you can to reinforce it, to make it alive and present in your day-to-day.
On Wednesday’s EXPLORE call, we’ll be working on Thought Ladders together. So if you need the accountability…come on down.
👏🏽 Make a WHAT WENT WELL list
This concept comes from a beloved client and SELF MADE community member, Jen N. She casually dropped it in one of our sessions and I’ve been legit OBSESSED ever since.
At the end of your day, write down a list of, well, what went well that day. Write as much as you want, aiming for at least three things.
What I adore about this practice is that it presences us to what is already good in our lives. Our negative bias will never go away—as mentioned before, this is literally how human brains are wired. And, we can expand our capacities. We can develop our ability to witness when our negative biases are intruding unnecessarily, and counter them by practicing noticing the positive that already exists.
There will be days when what went well will be obvious—you did something fun, got some good news, ate a pizza:) But most days, what went well will be of a more humble variety: giggling at the dog when he does something playful and silly; a moment out on a walk when a hummingbird drops down to hover in front of your face for a moment or two, pink throat flashing iridescent and enchanting; eye contact and a smile with a stranger on the sidewalk.
We practice presencing ourselves to—and letting in—the good, so we can more readily notice it when it shows up. We become less quick to rush through these good moments, more able to be inside of and savor them. We remember that even when things are awful and hard, there are always glimmers of good, fleeting and small as they may be. We inhabit our lives instead of our heads.
When we recognize what went well, what feels good, we can more intentionally move toward those things. When this is where we place our attention, it follows that it will expand and grow and one day we’ll look around and yep, look at that, the scales have tipped: Life feels more good than bad, which is, I’d say, the point.
🔄 Consider THE SECOND ARROW
Some of y’all might be familiar with the Buddhist teaching known as “the second arrow.”
From a VOX article on “pandemic guilt”:
The Buddha taught that when we experience something painful — a physical illness, or the news that someone we love has died, or witnessing suffering all around us — it’s as if the world has shot an arrow into us. It hurts! That pain is totally normal, and it’s fine to acknowledge it. In fact, it’s good to acknowledge it, to let ourselves simply be with the experience of pain.
But often, what we then do is shoot a second arrow into ourselves. That second arrow is any thought we use to spin up a “story” around our pain, as a way of resisting simply being with the experience of pain. This can manifest in many different ways.
It can take the form of shame: “I’m such a weak person, to be crying out like this!” Or anger: “How dare the doctors not save my loved one’s life! They’re so incompetent!” Or ruminating: “If only I’d nudged my loved one to take this or that extra precaution, maybe they wouldn’t have died.” Or catastrophizing: “I’m going to die, too!” Or guilt: “I don’t deserve to live while other people are dying.”
We’ve all got our second arrow of choice. Whichever one you incline toward, the key thing to bear in mind is that it’s self-inflicted, which is to say, it’s optional. It might not seem that way, because it comes upon you so quickly that it seems automatic, but the Buddhist teaching insists this is a second arrow we shoot into ourselves. And doing so is what causes us suffering. As many Buddhist mindfulness teachers like to say: Suffering = Pain x Resistance.
Consider this third concept as an invitation to practice sitting with the discomfort of pain without assigning additional meaning to it. I know this is easier said than done. But consider giving it a try. I think about this as creating a bit of a cushion around my shit thoughts. A little bit of space between having the thought, and immediately identifying with it.
Anything we can do to disrupt the autopilot nature of our brains is a worthy undertaking. Because here’s the thing—even though noticing when we’re piercing ourselves with the second arrow isn’t going to make a difference overnight (sorry), practice has a cumulative effect. I return to that moment running up the hill where I shocked myself by calling myself “mi amor” instead of the other, ahem, choice names I was used to calling myself while exercising. That surprise, magical, stop-in-my-tracks moment wouldn’t have been possible if I hadn’t tried these practices on. We can’t intellectualize our way through any of this, you see. We have to take action. We have to practice. Even when the practices fall flat, or seem silly—especially then.
But don’t take ANY of this from me. Get out there and try it on for yourselves. Collect your own data. Open a lab, experiment. And then report back: I’ll be dying to hear.
What do y’all make of this? Would love to hear your thoughts/feelings/opinions/ideas/questions/comments and if this generated anything for you <3
🔗 Roundup:
✍🏽 Sometimes I like to pretend that George Saunders is my dad. Can you imagine the kind advice and curious reflections he must bring to parenting? Anyway this is him giving some writing advice but it corresponded so delightfully to this week’s topic about thoughtwork:
The trick, I think, given your sense that you are being too hard on yourself, is to strike a bargain with yourself: “Self, you have a tendency to edit me too hard. This is hurting us. I admire that quality and I think it is going to be very valuable in the right context. Can we talk about this? Might I persuade you to leave the room (i.e., my head) while I, admittedly, make a big mess of the kind we don’t like (because, reading it, we may feel that we are not, after all, a writer), on the condition that, soon, I will let you back in and give you free rein, to get in there and be as self-conscious as you like? Look: I wonder if we might want to get in cahoots here a bit. We’re in this together. Can we help each other out? I promise not to, in the future, identify you as a problem, but as a tendency, and, eventually, a strength.”
🎧 This podcast episode recommendation couldn’t have come at a better time: “What We Gain From Pain” from The Hidden Brain. There is very much a LINE between managing repetitive, negative thoughts, and coping with trauma. I appreciated how this conversation unpacked the oft heard phrase “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
🌆 Is New York City Boring Without Booze? An Illustrated Investigation (I posted this in Slack and I’m sharing again here because it was just delightful.
❣️(The following yes is easy, maybe? Or maybe simple, not easy?)
This week’s JUST FOR FUN: Many of y’all know I’m low-key obsessed with SPACE and PHYSICS and that the deep-space images make me cry and better yet help me shift my perspective to a more expansive one:
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That’s it for this week, everyone. Over on Slack, we’re having our Monday morning roll call - come check in, it is always great to hear from you.
In love,
xxoo
dani
SELF MADE is a rebellious recovery community that empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and step boldly into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, founder, writer, coach, and recovery advocate based in San Francisco, CA.
Click here to learn about working with me 1:1 and/or to sign up for a complimentary Alignment Session. Let’s talk!
Thank you.
Kara Lowentheil’s work was fundamental to any success I’ve had with shifting my thoughts. She developed the Thought Ladder, and I can’t recommend her podcast, Unfuck Your Brain, more highly.
I stumbled upon this person’s website and holy hell, she is a wealth of information.