The Inside Press

Magazines serving the communities of Northern Westchester

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Becoming Mindful Through the Challenges of COVID-19

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By Sabra Staudenmaier

 “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, and a hell of heaven.” –John Milton

Jodi Baretz (right) & Sabra Staudenmaier (left) representing the Mindful Moms at a local event this past winter.

 So, what is mindfulness, anyway?

Mindfulness starts with slowing down, and paying attention to the present moment. The goal is to calmly acknowledge and accept one’s feelings, thoughts and body sensations. They say if your thoughts are stuck in the past you will suffer from depression. If they are racing around in the future, you will have anxiety. It’s all about bringing your brain into the now. Yes, COVID-19 has turned our world upside down, but mindfulness can help us regulate our thoughts and ease our racing mind. Peace, my friends, can be found in the here and now. If we are able to remind ourselves “I am safe today. I am ok today.” We can get through this with more serenity.

Sounds good…but how exactly do I practice mindfulness?

Come into the present moment on purpose. Find a nice, quiet and calm place to sit. Start noticing your breath. Yay! You’ve started meditating! During meditation, we strengthen the “muscle” of the mind. When we focus on something in the present, like our breath, our mind will inevitably start to wonder to the thoughts that we cannot control. This is normal. Once we realize that our mind has drifted, we can bring our attention back to the present. In doing this we have completed a “rep” of building the muscle of the mind. If we do this often enough, just as if we lift a weight often enough then the muscle in our body will strengthen, the muscle of our mind also strengthens. When we fortify the muscle of the mind, we can direct attention purposefully and use conscious awareness with more competency. This is what it means to be “mindful’. We can be attentive to and aware of our mind rather than living unconsciously in patterns that don’t serve us. This is a skill, like riding a bicycle, which improves with practice.

“Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment non-judgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment to moment.” – Jon Kabat-Zinn

 I’m struggling to make sense of current circumstances

Mindfulness advocates acceptance of what is happening in the moment without trying to change it. It is tempting to try to avoid unpleasant feelings but we are human beings and as such are meant to experience the full range of human emotions -happiness, sadness, joy, loss, ease and suffering. The human experience is not meant to be easy or perfect and it’s ok if it’s not pretty. Arguing with what is creates unnecessary stress.

We cannot change the fact that this pandemic happened. Instead of resisting it, lean into it. What can we learn from this as a country? What can we learn from this personally? What will we take with us when this is done? Can this be part of our personal evolution? Mindfulness is about perception. It’s about how you choose to look at things.

“Rather than being disheartened by the uncertainty of life, what if we accepted it and relaxed into it? What if we said Yes, this is the way it is: this is what it means to be human, and decided to sit down and enjoy the ride?” – Pema Chodron

Embracing the less-than-perfect

One of my favorite parts of mindfulness is the notion of embracing imperfection. After all, to be human is to be imperfect. This doctrine is coming in very handy these days as my laundry piles up, dessert becomes breakfast and makeup fades into a luxury of the past. Using boxed hair dye is not the same as going to a professional salon, but, in the grand scheme of things, it’s good enough.

“Imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we’re all in this together.” – Brene Brown

The Beginner’s Mind

The beginner’s mind is the Buddhist concept of approaching something without preconceived notions. When we get back to our old way of life, we will be much more adept at doing this (for a time anyway). We will eat at a restaurant, go to the gym, spend time with groups of friends as if it was for the first time. We will have a renewed sense of appreciation, a comforting and hopeful prospect from a “beginner’s mind” perspective.

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few” – Shunryu Suzuki

My Journey to Mindfulness

We can’t change our circumstances, but we can change our thoughts about them. Every so often something happens that shakes us and can wake us up. Ten years ago, my oldest son was diagnosed with Celiac Disease. I struggled to wrap my head around the changes needed to live with this diagnosis. My son’s doctor referred me to Jodi Baretz, a local psychotherapist with a specialty in mindfulness and health coaching. Not only did I learn how to mindfully manage my son’s new diet, but I was introduced to a whole new world. I realized that I had been living unconsciously, thinking by default and using old coping mechanisms that were no longer serving me. When I learned about mindfulness, everything changed. It was an awakening. This new way of thinking made future challenges easier to deal with, and gave me a joy and appreciation for life I had previously only imagined.

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves” – Viktor Frankl

The Mindful Moms

Jodi continues to be my life coach; having her support has proven invaluable. A few years ago, we began collaborating. We wanted to help others improve their quality of life through mindfulness. The result has been the development of a community of “Mindful Moms.” Individually, and through groups, we work together to support others on their personal mindfulness journeys (www.mindfulmomsgroup.com). Free zoom support calls, such as “Namaste in Bed” and “Meditation and Cocktails or Tea”, are being offered to support the community in this time of need and can be accessed via the Mindful Moms Facebook page.

When I asked Jodi what her advice was on dealing with this quarantine, she said, “Do what you can to stay safe, be there for others and be kind to yourself but let go of what you cannot control. It’s normal to have good and bad days, try and ride the wave and remember these experiences, just like your emotions, are temporary.” 

Covid-19 has shaken the world on a macro level. When circumstances shift, where do we go to find stability? Perhaps the answers lie in an unexpected place; conceivably navigating this new reality lies not in the world around us but rather within.  If ever there was a time to take charge of one’s mind and thoughts, that time has arrived.

Just like we can decide how to attend to our body with food and exercise – we can also manage our minds. With a managed mind, when circumstances change and stress arises, like the tsunami of stress Covid-19 has brought – we have tools to help make sense of it. We can think consciously and use deliberate thoughts to act with awareness. We live in the physical world, but we also live in our heads. It’s worthwhile to make both a pleasant place to be.

Sabra Staudenmaier became interested in thought management while majoring in Philosophy at Tufts University. She is the program director for the Mindful Moms Inner Circle Group and helps facilitate two Facebook Groups: @Mindful Moms www.facebook.com/groups/mindfulmoms and @Mindful Parents of New York www.facebook.com/groups/MindfulParentsofNY. She is currently training to become a life coach.

This article is a sponsored feature of The Mindful Moms Group. 

What Keeping a Gratitude Journal Taught Me

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The Dirty Mac Team
Front row (L-R): Barry Kratz, Mark Ametrano, Jon Nissman
Back row (L-R): Charlie Levitz, Jackson Spilka, Eric Kratz, Josh Lurie, The Author Dan Levitz, Len Meshberg
PHOTO COURTESY OF DAN LEVITZ

The assignment sounded easy enough. For one month I would keep a “gratitude” journal where I’d make note of things in my life that I feel grateful about. I’m a relatively positive person and I assumed this would be a walk in the park and now that I mention it, something like a walk in the park is the exact type of thing I should show gratitude towards! This was going to be fun and, perhaps, even enlightening. And then I started the actual journal.

The day I began the journal I was ending a summer trip with a few friends in the great American southwest. We were all going our separate ways and at the airport I found myself sitting alone in the terminal people-watching and taking in the mall-like environment. With the concept of gratitude on my mind, especially after a few days with long-time buddies, I took out the journal to, presumably, write about my good fortune in having these relationships. However, before I could jot down a single thankful syllable I saw something that explicitly made me feel gratitude. My first entry went like this: At this moment I am extremely grateful to not be a mid-western gentleman struggling to eat a slice of airport pizza with a plastic knife and fork.  This journal entry was simple, accurate and pathetically insubstantial. However, my first thought immediately was that I wished my just departed friends had seen this because they’d find it funny too.

A few days later I was with my family in Chinatown about to order a feast in our favorite restaurant there. Charlie was headed back to college the next day and hitting this restaurant pre-departure had become a nice tradition. I knew going in that it would be an admittedly lightweight no-brainer for me to write about my gratitude towards the remarkable crab/pork soup dumplings we were imminently going to devour. Yet after perusing the menu and making our choices, like the proverbial light bulb, a moment I was grateful to experience occurred: After ordering what we sincerely believed, was a reasonable amount of food the waiter looked me in the eye, paused and simply said “too much food.” I told him that we knew what we were doing and to please carry on. This humorous moment immediately made me think of my father, a great gourmand, and how proud he would have been of his very hungry family. What a sweet moment!

Later that night, journal in hand, I was thinking about the evening and considering how it was just filled with things I am thankful for. Just the mere fact of the four of us being together was now a special thing. Not even to mention my daughter’s stunning inner and outer beauty, my gorgeous wife’s remarkable intelligence along with my son’s ongoing evolution as a scholar and compassionate human being. However, the journal entry I ended up with was: Charlie drove us to Chinatown this evening and he was incredibly proud of his well-executed, under pressure, Manhattan parallel park. I re-read this entry and admittedly it may sound slight in the context of an exploration of personal gratitude. However, I felt fulfilled, grateful even, noting that my boy has embraced the ability to find beauty, meaning and humor in the mundane acts of daily existence.

Upon reviewing my journal entries, I was initially disappointed in how flimsy they seemed. I never considered myself shallow but there sure seemed to be a lot of entries that involved food, humor and way too many about playing softball on the newly crowned New Castle “B” league Champions, The Dirty Mac! OK, perhaps that one is just a tad shallow. So, I reviewed every journal entry and quickly realized, with some relief, that upon closer examination all the entries, even softball, were connected to those things one would assume they’d be thankful for: Family, health, love, relationships, etc.

I whole-heartedly recommend keeping a gratitude journal even if it’s a finite endeavor. A daily pause to consider what we are grateful for can be insightful and somehow just feels appropriate in these trying times.

Finding Gratitude During a Mental Health Crisis

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I really don’t know how it happened. I had some physical, hormonal and emotional stressors early in the summer, which apparently became the perfect storm for an emotional breakdown. My anxiety, which has been a part of me for decades, erupted full force and consumed all of me. It so consumed me that I was unable to function. I stopped eating, sleeping, engaging with the world and felt panicked almost constantly.

On this journey, I have discovered that mental health issues are far more difficult to get a handle on than physical issues, and far more painful. Answers and cures are elusive. But even as I wage this war against my own mind, I realize that I have much to be grateful for.

1. I am grateful and stunned by the number of people who contacted me privately to tell me of their own struggles. Mental health issues are ubiquitous, so much so that it is challenging to get appointments for help because doctors are so busy.

2. I am grateful for an absolutely incredible support system that starts, but does not end, with my family. There are actually no words for how incredible my husband has been. Holding my hand, reassuring me, driving me to appointments, staying up with me countless nights, finding patience for me again and again. My kids, mom and mother-in-law have also been amazing, and their compassion and love has sustained me. I am grateful to be able to rely on my sons, especially my 17-year-old, who has pitched in without complaint and become a man almost overnight. I know this hasn’t been easy for any of them, but they have risen to the challenge.

3. I am grateful for and overwhelmed by the love and support of my extended support system of friends and acquaintances. During this time, through my distress, I have been able to feel, if not always acknowledge, the help from friends and family. I thank everyone who has called, texted or written to inquire about me. I thank those friends who have driven me places when I have not been able to drive myself and been there for me without judgment. I appreciate every gesture, even if I haven’t been able to answer. I’ve had limited ability and energy to reach out but despite that the calls and messages keep coming.

4. I am grateful to have the resources to explore many different kinds of therapies. Here are some of the things I’ve tried thus far; medication, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Hypnosis (really), meditation, yoga, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), functional medicine, homeopathy and acupuncture. I will weigh in at some point on what helped me the most. Voodoo medicine is not out of the question. And I am mindful that I am extremely lucky to be able to pursue various remedies and to focus on getting well.

Trying to heal has been a full-time job. But just knowing people are out there and are willing to help is a comfort. If you have a friend who is going through something like this, please continue to reach out to them even if you get a tepid or no response. Even when I don’t acknowledge them, friends’ messages mean the world to me. Mental health issues really do take a village.

I hope that by discussing this openly, I can help someone else who is keeping their struggles to themselves. I hope to write at length about my experiences someday soon but I’m still in the middle of this journey I had no desire to take. I know that I can only reflect when I have some perspective and I’m not there yet. I am still battling to find my way back.

I have newfound compassion and respect for anyone who has ever struggled in a similar way. I hope to come out the other side stronger than I was before and be a voice and advocate for others. I hope someday people can openly say, “me too” about their mental health challenges.

Choosing a Necessary Focus

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Photo by Andrew Bordeaux

I was planning a personal reminisce about 15 years of publishing for this 15-year anniversary edition.* Instead, my mind has been squarely focused on the massacre that took 17 precious lives at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on Valentine’s Day. I’ll save going down memory lane for some other day.

In the week that followed, I visited a rally in White Plains quickly organized by Indivisible Westchester, Up2Us and Million Mom March, northern Westchester chapter. Erin Fuller, a 30-year-old survivor of the Oct. 1, 2017 Las Vegas massacre which killed 58 people, and injured nearly 500 more, spoke to hundreds gathered. Our story about the rally can be found online here.

More recently, I attended a roundtable of local teens (including ones from Greeley, Pleasantville, White Plains, among others) who joined several police officers to meet with Congresswoman Nita Lowey. To hear our kids grappling over what can be done was both heartening and heartbreaking.

 

Rep. Nita Lowey with a group of Westchester students and several law enforcement officers following a February roundtable.  https://www.theinsidepress.com/westchester-students-voice-their-ideas-to-tackle-the-challenge-of-gun-violence/

Heartening–in that we are giving our kids a platform to voice their concerns and ideas.

Heartbreaking–in that it was a poignant reminder that it is KIDS who are on the front-lines, and too often, the victims of these shootings.

I asked a reporter to contact a group of area Superintendents for statements about campus safety and to speak with some of our students too; our story will be here at theinsidepress.com too as I try to stay current and share info into social media. 

On March 14, high school students throughout the County will have an opportunity to express themselves–for 17 minutes to honor 17 lives. On March 24, many more will be advocating for overdue change too all around the county. Please visit marchforourlives.org for more info.

15 years ago, before Sandy Hook, before Las Vegas–before the reportedly 18 school shootings just this year–I was not, I must confess, preoccupied with these issues. I am now, however. So many are, including many who have not ‘stepped up’ before. A dear friend noted recently, “The winds are changing.” I believe that’s true, too.

The weather is turning soon. With more sun, comes more brightness and reason for optimism, too. Enjoy the edition! So much hard work went into it, and always appreciative of that.


P.S. A special congrats to our newly sworn-in town officials! At a historic and packed ceremony at the Chappaqua Performing Arts Center, President Bill Clinton presided, speaking of ‘A New Beginning,’ and the positive aspects of that.

*Fortunately, we have a terrific compilation of 15 major milestones in the community since 2003 on page 24 of this edition already, so do take a glance! The story is on our home page, and you can always download the entire magazine edition from there too.