Category Archives: mindfulness

Live the Questions

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What question, if any, have you asked/chased for years with no semblance of a coherent answer? How have you carried it? Where does it weigh on you, and what does this cost you in energy and other ways?

I attached the quote below by Rainer Maria Rilke in my last post of 2025, as part of ‘what’s on my mind.’ I asked Shane and AJ to read and reflect on it, and they both responded so kindly and generously. I have listened to each of their messages repeatedly and shared them with friends when the concept of patience with unanswered questions arises. Rilke was only in his thirties when he wrote these Letters to a Young Poet–I think Franz Xaver Kappus was in his twenties–and already such deep and wise understanding of his own and our shared humanity! The often quoted ‘live the questions’ part has resonated with me for many years, and now hearing the reflections of people I admire, then inviting others to listen and ponder together, I gain exponentially more. Of course!

I had said for a while about my inner work: “I have done all I can do with shovels; now I need drills.” Patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior that recur lifelong, not necessarily negative, but interesting and somewhat perplexing, poke at my consciousness. I just want to figure it out, to understand. So I engage with books, thearpy, coaches, and of course my wise and thoughtful, loving friends. I’ve learned and grown so much along the way, and yet the mysteries persist. I feel impatience, frustration, and wonder in turns.

But last week, listening to AJ’s response once again, Rilke’s words sank another layer deeper: Live the questions. Live my way into the answer some distant day. My last post discussed weeks of hamster wheeling and distress, wondering about myself and the other person, our relationship, the wierd feelings and my reactions. What if I had just held it all more loosely and lived those questions, rather than chasing answers? Could I have suffered a little less? Gotten to peace or epiphany sooner? Living the questions is a mindfulness practice. Be with what is, with neither judgment nor resistance. Flow with it; let it show me in its own time. I like that. I can practice it.

My mantras for presenting my authentic self saved me at the last minute before meeting that person again. I can now add ‘live the questions’ and maybe pull on it more effectively in real time. It can center and ground me in ‘the magic in the in between,’ as AJ says, to maintain openness, wonder, and curiosity ahead of anxiety and insecurity about my innermost mysteries. Because despite those particular unknowings, I actually know myself well. I have clarity about my values, goals, boundaries, and integrity. I have all the support I need from loved ones to help me process and hold me accountable to all of these. So I can relax, breathe deeply and slowly, keep walking, and trust myself.

What passages, pieces of art or music, or other things do you visit often, that continue to nourish your being and help you grow each time? Our favorite books, movies, songs, poems, paintings, photographs, etc–they do this for us, no? When we share them with others, our perspective grows yet wider, we live bigger, and even if we don’t arrive at answers, the questions get sweeter, I think. How wonderful. So let’s just keep living them.

Worpswede, near Bremen,
16th July, 1903.
Here, where a mighty land is about me, here I feel that no human being can answer for you those questions and feelings which have a life of their own in the depth of your heart, for even the best use words wrongly when they want to give them the most delicate and almost inexpressible meaning…
If you attach yourself to Nature, to the simple and small in her, which hardly anyone sees, but which can so unexpectedly turn into the great and the immeasurable, if you have this love for what is slight and try quite simply as a servant to win the confidence of what appears to you poor, then everything will become easier for you, more uniform and somehow more reconciling, not perhaps in the understanding, which holds back in amazement, but in your innermost consciousness, watchfulness and knowledge. You are so young, all beginning is so far in front of you, and I should like to beg you earnestly to have patience with all unsolved problems in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, or books that are written in a foreign tongue. Do not search now for the answers, which cannot be given you, because you could not live them. That is the point, to live everything. Now you must live your problems. And perhaps gradually, without noticing it, you will live your way into the answer some distant day. Perhaps you actually have in you the possibility of moulding and shaping, as a particularly blessed and pure form of life; train yourself in it—but take what comes in complete trust, and, as long as it comes from your own will, from some need or other of your inner self, then take it for itself and hate nothing…
…All my good wishes are ready to accompany you, and my confidence is with you.
Yours,
RAINER MARIA RILKE.
Translated by K.W. Maurer
Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet. Trans. K.W. Maurer. London: Langley & Sons. The Euston Press, N.W.I., 1943 (public domain) https://rilkepoetry.com/bibliography/

DIY Pep Talk

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“Wait, I have mantras for this!”

How are you affected by anxiety, rumination, or otherwise tenacious yet counterproductive thoughts and feelings in life? Many of us lose sleep. We lie awake, before falling asleep or having awoken at night, or both. I talk with patients about this regularly, a common problem that manifests for each of us in our own unique way.

Recently a patient mentioned it to me during a routine visit. After decades of stress-induced insomnia of various causes, there was a sense of placid acceptance in his tone and posture, and also hope that he may still find a way to overcome. He listed some prior life stressors, none of which had turned out nearly as badly as he had ‘unncessarily worried.’ He said when he remembers this, he is able to de-escalate in general, but it doesn’t necessarily help him at night. Since meeting me he had also been practicing box breathing to relax and calm his nervous system, which sometimes helps him sleep. So we agreed he could try to combine the two when insomnia hits: Breathe intentionally and rhythmically while repeating a reassuring, de-escalating mantra of his choosing. I’m excited to hear how this goes for him.

For some months I had been ruminating on and off about friction in a longstanding relationship. I journaled, spoke to multiple friends, and also lost sleep, which happens to me rarely. I entertained exiting the relationship altogether, but that was neither justified nor productive. I saw it as a personal challenge to walk my talk of showing up, sticking with it, and being my best relational self, despite feeling unappreciated and disrespected. What other story could I tell about this person and our relationship? The day before an upcoming encounter I felt almost squirelly from anticipation and ambivalence about how to approach the meeting. Then it hit me: I have mantras for this.

  1. I’d rather regret being too kind than not kind enough.
  2. Strong back, soft front.
  3. Do no harm, take no shit.

And just like that my conscience cleared, fight or flight turned off, and dread transformed into optimistic anticipation. I marvel still at how I recite my mantras everywhere to patients, on this blog, in social media posts and comments–I have even made stickers of them–and yet they escaped me when I needed them in a period of distress. I am all about relationships and yet this one flummoxed me–significantly. The mantras saved me–better late than never, and even better just in the nick of time!

I can neither prove nor disprove, but I tell the story that because I presented with honest equanimity and humbly confident professionalism, the encounter went smoothly. The relationship might even have improved? …I can’t say. I think I generally show up this way by nature and practice, but this time I had to talk myself into it. So I wonder, in all these years of friction (at least on my side) in this relationship, how much was actually mine to own, or in my imagination? This dynamic is definitely an outlier, so I don’t want to fixate on it; yet sometimes the exceptions point to areas of deeper potential insight and learning, no? Regardless, I’m grateful for how this episode has illuminated a new awareness for me and sharpened my attention to my own default attitudes and assumptions.

So what are your DIY pep talk methods? How did you come across them and why do they work so well? What mantras hold you up?

Happy Sunday, friends. Have a great week!

The Quadsection of Life Epiphany

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Chojun Textile & Quilt Art Museum, Seoul, Korea

FRIENDS! Don’t you just LOVE when you have a fun new idea that helps you think of life and humans more clearly?

This quadsection idea came to me completely fluidly and wholly about two or three weeks ago, a natural confluence and consequence of everything I have studied and learned in life to date. SO gratifying, I say! And as I share with friends and patients, It’s mostly validated so far. Now I look forward to seeing how it evolves in application and practice hereafter.
OK so:

We can frame life as an intersection of four things:

  1. DNA: Our inherited genetic predispositions. We can know much of these tendencies intuitively, and now objectively with advancing genetic testing. This influences possibly everything, but only in rare cases truly determines anything.
  2. Personal history: Our lived experience to date, including family of origin, culture, time in history, past traumas, world events in our lifetime, and all of our choices, actions, relationships–everything!
  3. The current moment: Environment, circumstances, mindset–down to this second or heartbeat, infinitely dynamic and fluid. This is the confluence of a multitude of factors; wow, it just occurred to me right now that this moment itself could be the multiverse convergence, no? Our perceptions and thus thoughts, feelings, words, and actions are formed in real time, in this moment, and depend, arguably, on the other three things.
  4. The innate human need for safety, security, connection, and belonging: In the end, what else do we live for?

What fascinates me about this framework is that we have no control over any but the second of the four–our own lived experience. We create it. And even then, all we have is agency, not actual control. In any given moment, depending on my mindset, physical state, and external circumstances, I have free will and choice, and yet much of my perception, response/reaction/action will be determined in advance by bias, pattern recognition (accurate or not), and automatic reflex before intentional cognition. And all of my past actions were the same–somewhat volitional, much not.

Additionally, each of us brings both totally unique and shared human experience to any given moment. Isn’t it a wonder, then, that we can actually agree on so much, and doesn’t this also explain how our experiences can and should be so wildly divergent?

If we accept this premise/framework, just for a moment, what do we then do with it? On one hand I can imagine responding with a victim mindset–seeing how little I actually control among these four determinants of life, I think of myself as simply an object of my genes, everything that has happened to me in life, and anything that will happen hereafter. I become passive and disengaged. On the other hand, also seeing how little I control, I exert disproportionate energy to achieve that control in those few domains. Personally, I land in the space of acceptance and agency (somewhere along this spectrum, no?): Recognize what I do not and cannot control, where I can act with influence toward my goals, in service of and in integrity with my values, and seek and/or create opportunities to maximize that agency and advance those goals.

Very soon after the framework occurred to me, I felt something akin to relief and elation. It was an epiphany, really. I had found the relationship between these four things–they intersect. So are they best drawn as lines? Vectors? Or could they be better represented by a Venn diagram? No, not Venn, because that would imply that some parts of life do not include one or more of the four aspects… But then again, is that true?

I still like the image/idea of intersection, but we could define the intersecting parts differently–ropes of variable size and thickness? Rope intersecting with light, with sound waves, and then with quantum energy? I imagine the intersection itself as dynamic, existing with an energy of itself, pulling on any of the four aspects more or less heavily in any given situation. We can intuitively imagine that genetics or past trauma may be more or less salient at this moment, in this enviornment, than in another. This ‘intersection’ is always at play, shifting and emerging in real time, influenced by infinite factors that still fall neatly into the four categories (or not?), creating our lives with each breath, each heartbeat, each quantum packet of spacetime. It’s a four dimensional configuration–I have no true understanding of relativity, but something like that image of the flexible spacetime grid fabric with indentations and protrusions comes to mind. Maybe a physicist reading this can confirm and/or refute the applicability of this image to my theory? Like I said, FUN!

So how does this all land on you, dear reader? Does it pique your interest in the slightest? Thank you for reading, as always. I have now documented my nascent idea, and if it grows into anything more interesting or significant, I can look back and see where and when it started.