Perspective: Harness the Power of Your Mind to Reignite Your Spirit

By Sheryl Melanson

Wish you could get out of your own way? Ready to finally overcome your fears and inhibitions and grow the can-do mindset you need to be your best? If you're looking for a mental makeover, this book is for YOU.

 

Spending time and energy trying to influence the people and things around us feels exhausting. And it's rarely effective. "Happiness is an inside job" means the way we frame things in our minds can either help or hinder our quality of life. This book is your how-to manual for managing and shifting the key driver of happiness: your PERSPECTIVE.

 

Being human is hard, with no shortage of opinions on how to live well. We arrive wide-eyed and curious, then do our best to survive bumpy rides into adulthood. Thoughts, emotions, and judgments hijack our vulnerable unfolding, labels cast upon our developing egos. Sooner or later we wake up, only to discover we don't really know who we are. 

What if there were a way to make peace with your evolving self in an ego-driven world—to practice being in a world of doing? In this book, Health Coach Sheryl Melanson stitches together a collection of practices that help you to break through the illusion of control where so many get stuck. Learn to harness your mindset to reclaim the curiosity, adaptability, compassion, and agency that will reignite your spirit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bug Light Press
• Release date: Jun 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781734497601

Sheryl Melanson

Sheryl Melanson BA, CHC, NCTTP is a certified health and life coach who inspires people to transform limiting habits into mindful choices that express their values. Her career is shaped by an instinctive curiosity for what propels people toward potential and a sincere delight in partnering with extraordinary people on their path to self-discovery. Sheryl has coached thousands to embrace healthier living over the past seventeen years. A Boston College alum with a degree in mathematics and philosophy, she has lived and worked in London, Oregon, Kauai, and throughout New England. A graduate of Coach University, Palouse Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Training, and Dr. Rick Hanson’s Positive Neuroplasticity Training (PNT), she has pursued her own mindfulness practice for the past twenty-five years. In her free time, she loves to dance, kayak, listen to people’s stories, and explore the sights, sounds, and smells of her seaside town. Connect with Sheryl at [e-mail] or coastalcoaching.weebly.com.

Book preview

1

A Curious Mind

I feel LOST. This is the most common thing I hear from new clients. They may have goals to lose weight, be more organized, improve a relationship, or change a career. But beneath most of these desires for change lies a general disconnect from oneself.

We live in challenging times. The surging divide between us and them points of view are propelling many people to dwell in harmful, all-or-nothing thought patterns. And our precious relationships are fracturing under the weight of incendiary bias. I spend some part of every day wondering what we can do to heal our collective dis-ease.

As I see it, curiosity is the only way forward. As babies, we begin our lives innately curious, absorbing new experiences and information at lightning speed. We rely on our caregivers to meet our basic needs for food, water, shelter, security, and connection in some reasonable and consistent way. Making our way through childhood and adolescence, we seek verbal reassurances from our caregivers, backed up by supportive actions. Sometimes, these important adults are unable to consistently reinforce a bond of trust. Other times, conditions may occur that temporarily disrupt the healthy development of that bond. When this happens, some of the energy that could be invested in personal evolution is diverted by fear toward personal protection. Spending more energy on surviving leaves less energy for growth toward our potential and sustaining the curiosity of our earliest years.

Along my own personal path, and in my work as a health and life coach over the past seventeen years, I have noticed a recurring theme in my partnership with clients related to the loss of curiosity and the need to reacquire it. People come to me with a variety of struggles.

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Stress, anxiety, overwhelm, or mood imbalance

Relationship or parenting struggles, career dissatisfaction, or life transition

Lack of follow-through, consistency, accountability, or resilience

Inertia, confusion, negative self-talk, or low self-worth

Limited fitness, body-image dysfunction, or perfectionism

General sense of lost potential or feeling lost in one’s life

Beneath all of these themes is the cloaked absence of our once innate curiosity. When we are busy feeling distressed, we can’t be curious. Conversely, when we are open or playful, we cannot at the same time feel distressed. Feeling chronically dissatisfied makes it cumulatively harder to feel open and curious. When our self-worth or body image is depleted or devalued, being curious is the last thing on our minds. How much of our mental energy gets stuck in obsessing over comparisons? Comparing our achievements to others’ expectations, comparing our insides to someone else’s outsides, and even comparing ourselves to our own perfectionist narrative can lead to arrested curiosity.

Our achievement-driven culture is generally unsupportive of promoting self-care and mental hygiene practices. Many of us end up chronically burnt out from chasing ideals and become bankrupt of our effortless sense of childhood wonder. When was the last time you walked barefoot in the grass or laid beneath a tree and listened to the rustle of branches in the afternoon breeze? When did you last enjoy something childlike and silly, tip your head back on a swing, shoot hoops, play catch, or give yourself permission to lie still in a pure state of wonder?

In her poem Nostos, Poet Laureate Louise Glück observes: We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory. We did it effortlessly when we were children, but the capacity tends to go. Noticing that we're alive is a taste adults can reacquire. But where do we begin?

Curious About Meditation

A student of meditation for many years, I first learned Transcendental Meditation (TM) in 1993. The TM format is centered around mantra repetition, with eyes closed and slow, rhythmic, deep breathing. My teacher instructed me to meditate by silently repeating my secret Sanskrit mantra, a special word chosen just for me, and avoiding my thoughts. The aim of this Hindu meditation tradition is to transcend thought, whereas the focus of mindfulness meditation from the Buddhist tradition is to be in the present moment. I didn’t know about any other meditation styles at the time, so I decided to give TM a try. I was told it would help me to manage stress, and the college philosophy major part of me was curious to get under the hood of my demanding ego.

I repeated my assigned mantra quietly to myself, doing my best to block the abundance of thoughts in my mind. But whenever I settled in to meditate, my mind was quickly overtaken by my thought parade. Ironically, the harder I tried to avoid my thoughts, the more I found myself thinking. Even when I concentrated with laser focus, attending to my mantra eluded me. For many years, I mostly considered myself a meditation failure, my energy spent judging myself for not meditating correctly. I drifted in and out of my meditation practice, lacking any confidence in what I was doing or how I was doing it.

This more prescriptive form of meditation in my early adult years led to a preoccupation with rules and structure and to my eventually feeling like a meditation misfit. As I think back on that time, I realize now why present moment awareness felt impossible to attain. Setting an intention in my mind to avoid thoughts felt like telling myself not to scratch an itch. What we focus on grows stronger, right?

Crashing Down

While raising four young sons, I let my occasional meditation practice float in and out of my busy life. I didn’t know many people who meditated in the mid to late ’90s, so my practice lacked the reinforcement of supportive community. It’s not as though sitting quietly didn’t bring me some measure of comfort, but meditating still didn’t feel quite right. I wondered what I was missing.

Fast forward a decade to when I was making my way through a swift and challenging divorce. There’s no shortage of painful, world-upside-down feelings when a relationship falls apart. It felt like depression fiercely grabbed a hold of my fragile ego, moving in like an uninvited roommate. Sinking feelings of despair felt relentless. I woke up each day in a mental fog, barely summoning the energy to take care of myself, my kids, my house, and my job. Lost in the midst of one of the lowest points of my life, I felt extremely unwell.

Single parenting young children was a heavy load to carry, and yet it was also the driving force for my getting out of bed each day. Between the support of friends and family and other attempts to process my sorrow, I took up running while my four children were at school. It was a desperate attempt to outrun an avalanche of undermining thoughts: self-doubt, guilt, shame, and isolation. Not usually a distance runner, I felt a bit like Forrest Gump, running nowhere and unable to stop. And while physical activity did help to alleviate some of my accumulating stress and feelings of overwhelm, my sense of disconnect and discontent continued. I knew I needed more help, but quickly learned that finding a right-fit therapist wasn’t easy. Thankfully, my tidal wave of emotions and I found our way to a remarkable counselor in Portland, Maine.

It was quickly evident that Terry, a student of the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan teachers, was a gifted and mindful listener. From the first day I walked into his office, I felt both challenged and at ease. His voice and demeanor were soothing and nonjudgmental. He posed provocative questions like, How is it serving you to blame yourself? and Why does being perfect matter so much? He confronted my assumptions, igniting my curiosity about how my early formative experiences gave rise to a defensive posture and limiting belief system. I learned that the way I mentally framed or verbally labeled my experiences influenced my beliefs of self-worth and potential.

I purchased a copy of his book Cultivating Lasting Happiness: A 7-Step Guide to Mindfulness. In it, he explores the pitfalls of fleeting happiness and outlines strategies for living a balanced life and fostering a more stable sense of well-being. I was reminded that happiness is not an automatic state we fall into, but a mindset supported by carefully developed skills that minimize suffering and maximize optimism. I began to acknowledge that everyone has ups and downs, and I wasn’t alone in the pit of my discomfort. Normalizing mental, emotional, and physical disruptions of well-being helped me to feel less alone and plan for setbacks as an expected part of the process. Terry invited me to recognize that rebuilding a strong personal foundation would offer me the inner framework to restore my hope, free my spirit, and pursue my goals. Healing and softening inner tension began to rekindle my lost curiosity.

During this same period, I also became close friends with a group of down-to-earth Maine women who loved and supported me when I felt the overbearing weight of my unraveling life. We spent time together camping, walking, connecting, laughing, and co-parenting. They held me as I sobbed through the grief of my fractured self. I lived and worked side-by-side with a loving neighbor and an influential colleague—a psychotherapist and movement awareness educator—who both became dear and supportive friends. We bonded over shared values and parenting joys and struggles. Their appreciation of the value of mindfulness, along with their exceptionally judgment-free approach to friendship, enhanced the kind, accepting presence in my everyday life.

I slowly came to appreciate how spending consistent time in the gentle, grounding presence of kind humans could change the quality of how I lived. Integrating moments of kind attention into my life started dissolving the self-judgment that had been brewing a toxic inner environment. This deepening awareness began to dislodge years of self-inflicted suffering to make room for renewed curiosity and positive states of well-being. Day by day, my reactive energy was gradually shifting into more open, expansive thought patterns. I softened my inner dialogue and began to ease up on blaming myself or others for the pain in my life. I was learning a more joyful way forward.

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You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

Jim Rohn

Over time, as I gradually emerged from survival mode, I noticed more opportunities to feel curious. So much of my time during my twenties and thirties was directed toward some form of achievement that I neglected to distinguish the difference between human doing and human being. I had been allowing the busyness culture to predominate the way I spent energy and set goals. Discerning this nuance unlocked a door to slowly becoming less critical of myself and others, and toward developing and engaging with compassion.

Judging Myself

Practicing mindfulness—cultivation of nonjudgmental, moment to moment attention—spurred a growing capacity to relax and be curious. It also enabled me to identify the primary reason I’d felt like such a meditation failure twenty-five years earlier. My meditation practice had lacked a key ingredient: nonjudgment. I had been sitting and quieting my mind, but 100 percent judging myself for not doing it right. This realization, that my self-imposed expectation to do it right undermined the benefits of my practice, was a moment of awakening. It was as though trying too hard had been a logjam to the gentle joy of the practice.

Now when a thought enters my consciousness, rather than letting myself get consumed by it, I simply acknowledge it and then gently let it float away. Sometimes I imagine my thoughts as a series of clouds in the sky or as butterflies landing on my hand. I notice them and say to myself Oh look, a cloud—butterfly—thought. I can choose to get caught up in the thought, or I can gently release it. The quality of this and any given moment is my choice and no one else’s. The playful and kind Tibetan Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön has a wonderful metaphor to help release thought judgment: You are the sky, everything else is the weather. Brilliant! All this time I had operated as though the opposite were true—that I was like the weather bumping around in the sky.

Releasing judgment to make space for curiosity invited me back into a meditation practice of quieting my mind that felt warm and welcoming. Instead of spending energy trying to avoid my thoughts, I could drop into a more relaxed state of being. Whether I quieted my mind for twenty minutes or three minutes, my anxious and reactive energy started to soften. The duration of my mental pause seemed to matter far less than the consistency of the practice. If I didn’t have time for a longer meditation, I could pause and sit for a few minutes and simply BE. Ahhh . . . sweet release. Sprinkling these gentle moments of nonjudgment across my life translated into more freedom and relaxation of my perfectionist tendencies. Over time, I began to see that mental hygiene—allowing my mind to rest—was less about following a prescriptive instruction than it was about entering a momentary detachment from my thoughts to touch the skirt of something deeper.

It’s not easy to resist our societal addiction to constant doing—slowing down can feel passive and unproductive. However, allowing myself a few moments to pause and center has given me the antidote to the overdoing and hyper-achieving lifestyle that had been holding me back.

Learning to Be Mindful

In 2003, a friend approached me about a job opening where she worked. The Center for Tobacco Independence (CTI) at Maine Medical Center was looking for a new team member to help pregnant women quit smoking. As a trained birth and postpartum doula, the idea of assisting a pregnant woman to reduce toxic chemical exposure to both herself and her unborn child was an appealing proposition. I leaped at the chance! I studied that year to become an American Lung Association Certified Tobacco Treatment Specialist and went on to coach thousands of program participants at CTI for six years in support of their tobacco cessation and related health goals. I completed my life coach training in 2008, moved back to Massachusetts in 2009, and continued my work in tobacco treatment at JSI Boston until 2014.

The field of tobacco cessation was a terrific training ground for advancing my coaching skills. During our twelve-week coaching protocol, tobacco-dependent adults were guided toward a better understanding of why they smoked so they could learn to replace an addictive and risky coping tool with something healthier. Ingrained habits are hard to break. Embedded in them are years upon years of layered physical, psychological, and emotional dependence. A common theme emerged across our clients: the mindless, hypnotic quality of smoking. Helping people to quit required that they deprogram deeply entrenched behavior by paying more attention to what mentally triggered their desire to smoke. This work underscored the power of the mind in helping people to achieve the positive life change that they were seeking.

While working at JSI, I saw firsthand the significant role the mind plays in the success of habit change. I recall all the conversations and trainings with our team about how we could optimize client progress with effective tools and strategies like readiness assessment, stress management, and Motivational Interviewing (a client-directed counseling approach developed in part by William R. Miller and Stephen Rollnick). But without a strong platform of awareness building, client relapse risk remained high.

Mindfulness wasn’t as mainstream in 2014 as it is today, but I was curious to get under the hood of human potential. I found an online community called Palouse Mindfulness that offers a free eight-week training program in Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction or MBSR. Mindfulness-based stress reduction is a secular program developed in the 1970s by Professor Jon Kabat-Zinn that helps people with discomfort and other life struggles. It is based on the principles of acceptance, nonjudgment, letting go, patience, and openness. MBSR blends self-awareness, various forms of meditation (including yoga), and investigation of mental states and body sensations to help people develop skills to address stressful