BROTHER PHAP HUU: When I’m overwhelmed, it’s so easy to beat myself up and to say, “Oh my God, I’ve been a practitioner for so long, I should be able to handle this,” or, “I’m an adult, I should have my two feet on the ground. I should be solid.” When we hold positions of responsibility in the world, we may think, “I’m a leader, I’m a parent, I’m a teacher; I shouldn’t feel like this.” By feeling guilty about our inability to deal with a given situation, we’re adding layers to an already overwhelming sensation of chaos within us.
How do we stop this cycle of blaming, judging, and criticizing ourselves? With our mindful breathing, we can learn to identify and stop our unhelpful thinking. Stopping is the first wing of meditation, and in order to really stop, we must offer ourselves a very concrete practice. We can’t just say to ourselves, “Stop, don’t do anything,” because by saying this, we’re actually pushing down and stirring up our emotions even more.
When I practice stopping, I like to come back to my body as an indicator of how I am doing. When the sensation of stress manifests, tension arises in my shoulders, in my neck, maybe in my face—perhaps my jawline is really tense, or my gaze becomes intense. Coming back to my body, I scan the different parts to see where there is tension. Sometimes the tension is in my breath. When I’m overwhelmed, my breathing can be very heavy. My chest may be tight. Listening to my body, I say to myself, “Oh, Phap Huu, your breathing’s really, really tight. Why is that? What feeling are you experiencing?” And I gently allow myself to recognize the feeling; I call it by its name, I identify it.
Staying with the feeling, I start to unpack it to learn why I’m feeling overwhelmed. If we are already in touch with our feelings and our bodily sensations, this process of unpacking can happen very quickly. Sometimes it takes more time. As we start to unpack our feelings, we can ask ourselves, “Why am I overwhelmed? “What are the causes of this overwhelm?” And once I recognize the root of my emotions, I may start to feel freer already. I suddenly see what I need to address. A primary cause of my overwhelm may become clear.
This is the practice: we learn to embrace the sensation of being overwhelmed, instead of pushing it away; we may even learn to smile to ourselves and our overwhelm in recognition. We pay attention to the sensations in our body and use our breath to stay with them, and then we start to unpack the overwhelm and identify its cause.
When we cannot cope, it is easy to feel a sense of failure. By feeling guilty about our inability to deal with a given situation, we're adding layers to an already overwhelming sensation of chaos within us
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So, when I feel overwhelmed, first of all, I stop and take a breath. I breathe in to connect my mind to my body, to focus on something other than my nonstop thinking—the countless different stories of blaming, judging, and reacting that cause me to suffer. If I leave my nonstop thinking unattended,if I don’t take care of my overwhelm, it will create even more negative perceptions in my mind and tension in my body. So, the first practice, the key, is just to stop and breathe in and out with awareness.
You may like to try sitting quietly in a safe place and practice for yourself. Become aware of your breathing, and breathe with the following gatha or practice poem for a few moments.
Breathing in, I know I am overwhelmed.
Breathing out, I embrace the feeling of being overwhelmed.
With this simple practice of mindful breathing, I can recognize that I am overwhelmed and I can smile to that feeling of overwhelm. I don’t see the overwhelm as something negative, but as a sign that there is something I need to address.
Embracing Our Overwhelm
JO CONFINO: It’s important to be able to name the cause of our mental disturbance. My experience of overwhelm in the past is that it genuinely felt like it was filling my entire being and could quickly trigger a sense of hopelessness. This had the impact of squeezing out and neutralizing any space for a counterbalancing emotion to show up and come to my rescue.
But when I am able to name it, what I am actually doing is putting a border around the experience of overwhelm and thereby creating space around it. It’s a little like a parent embracing their child when they are hurt: it immediately helps the child to feel held, and from this place of support and care, to start feeling some agency. This practice also highlights the importance of being tender with our feelings.
As Brother Phap Huu says, when we cannot cope, it is easy to feel shame or a sense of failure because we can’t make things work in the way we would like. Often in this situation, we berate ourselves, sometimes even out loud. Feeling this way, we can easily touch into our childhood suffering around believing that we aren’t good enough. So, just like a mother embracing her child, we can learn to embrace our own pain and calm our fears.
Tenderness can also come from sharing our suffering with another person we trust. The saying, “A problem shared is a problem halved”, makes complete sense in my experience.
Excerpted with permission from Being with Busyness: Zen Ways to Transform Overwhelm and Burnout by Brother Phap Huu and Jo Confino, published by Aleph