Being in Ontological Mode Means Fully Appreciating & Wanting What You Already Have & Where you Already Are!

In terms of my social scene, adjusting to the University of Georgia (UGA) and Athens has been a little bumpy. It's definitely a work in progress. Before I was exposed to mindfulness and Ontological Being, my mind's mindless tendency was to take most things others did or said to me personally. Like it was about me. Now I rarely do that because I know deeply that initially feeling somewhat lonely in a new state and place isn't personal at all. This is what happens when you move across the country. This is just a phase that I'll grow out of as I make more meaningful connections and establish a life for myself in Athens. I'm also grateful for it because it helped me realized how special and strong my family and friend support system is out of Athens. It also inspired me to write this blog post! In Ontological Mode, our struggles become sources of gratitude, strength and resilience. 

In the bigger scheme of things, when I reflect on ontological being, I deeply remember how badly I wanted to leave Marin County, where I was before moving to Athens, and get funding to do my PhD at a place like UGA, a top research institution. That was all I wanted. Now I got it and notice my Everyday-Mode mind doesn't naturally appreciate it. I need to consciously step into Ontological Being so I can appreciate where I am a lot more! It's too easy and automatic, especially in this competitive world, to never be satisfied, to just want more and more. In high school, all I wanted was to graduate! Then all I wanted was to get into a decent college! Then all I wanted was a Master's program! Then see clients and making a living for myself doing what I love to do. Then a PhD. Now I'm here and it's easy to overlook how much I've accomplished. I know that when I graduate, publish, present more, it may feel like it's not enough either. Ontological Being is about breaking this cycle of never feeling satisfied where I am and always wanting more by replacing it with fully taking in how far I've already come!

Here I’m confident that my clinical skills will improve, my research skills even more, and that I will graduate with a few publications and presentations. This is the type of program that makes a direct influence on the field. Instead of just doing therapy, I will ultimately be participating in how MFT is taught. This program was small and competitive. This way, when I want to be, (a deep wanting with a passion) where I already am, this is Ontological Being; appreciating and living fully every moment like it really matters, because it does!

Gratitude: Purposely Taking in the Good to Cultivate Ontological Mode of Being

From traveling, I've come to know that I have a great deal of privilege for one lifetime. I have many things to be grateful for, to be happy about but I usually just gloss over them. I don't think about them much. It's too easy to "forget" to appreciate them and just focus on what needs to be done or fixed. It turns out that my experience fits well into mindfulness literature and there are many viable solutions to changing this.

Our life experiences construct our mind's structure unconsciously. Even though most of our experiences tend to be actually positive, our brains have evolved to prefer, recall, react to, store and register unpleasant experiences over positive ones. This "negative bias" originated because, centuries ago, negative experiences signaled danger and paying attention to them as if our lives depended on it, facilitated our survival. That said, we don't live in jungles anymore; human civilization has advanced significantly. We still, however, have the same neural hard-wiring, so even when we experience many more pleasant moments than unpleasant ones, our network of implicit negative memories accumulates much faster. In his classic, Buddha's Brain, Rick Hanson assures us that we can rectify this by purposely cultivating positive experiences. We can correct this neural imbalance! I can correct my own.

Doing so implies that I actively looking for good news, especially those aspects of daily life that I tend to gloss over, like the fresh taste of an orange, a stranger's smile, great weather, etc, and then bringing mindful awareness around them, letting them really affect me, giving them sufficient attention. As Hanson states, it's like being at a buffet of quality food, "don't just look at; dig in!" This means that if someone treats me well, for example, I can let that feeling of warmth, feeling cared for permeate my being more than it normally would if I were in Everyday Mode of Being, and therefore strengthening its neural associations. This is where gratitude practice comes in, why some of my meditations need to be focused on gratitude; time reserved only let these good feelings sink into the sponge of my being. This will assist me to make positive experiences more prominent feel them more fully. As Hanson states, positive feelings strengthen the immune system.

What went well today for you that is worth more attention than it received?

Responding to the New Demands of Graduate School in Ontological Mode

Graduate school is getting busy. As you know from previous posts, when life feels overwhelming for me, I tend to consult mindfulness and or Buddhist literature. I came across this:

"Imagine walking along a sidewalk with your arms full of groceries, and someone roughly bumps into you so that you fall and your groceries are strewn over the ground. As you rise up from the puddle of broken eggs and tomato juice, you are ready to shout out, 'You idiot! What's wrong with you? Are you blind?' But just before you can catch your breath to speak, you see that the person who bumped into you is actually blind. He, too, is sprawled in the spilled groceries, and your anger vanishes in an instant, to be replaced by sympathetic concern: 'Are you hurt? Can I help you up?' Our situation is like that. When we clearly realize that the source of disharmony and misery in the world is ignorance, we can open the door of wisdom and compassion."

This is how I would like to treat myself and others. I have been blind to myself. As I have been mindful, something I've noticed is that when I have a lot on my plate, I tend to think about it too much. My favorite Buddhist monk Ajan Brahm, who I discovered on YouTube, says wisely, "Thinking about things is hard; doing them is easy." This has helped me live in Ontological Mode, interrupting obsessive, worrisome and ruminative thoughts from proliferating and instead arriving to this moment, putting my full attention to wants going on now, whether it's biking to class or washing the dishes. Single-tasking, hijacking the brain's default neural network I spoke of in the Mindfulness post below. This way I'm treating myself and my like like they really matter; like every action and breath are important.

When I do this, I notice that it actually increases my productivity because I do each task more carefully, with all my attention there instead of simeltanously as I am thinking about what else I have to do, which only slowed me down and fostered more, mental mindless "everyday mode" chaos.