Meditation is an ideal practice one can apply in stress management, and has a host of other perks. Developing a regular meditation practice can reduce depression and anxiety levels, improve sleep functioning, and promote an overall sense of well-being and relaxation. Meditation improves the way we relate to ourselves, and others, as we can learn to experience and accept difficult thoughts and emotions that are inevitable functions of living.

Ronald Siegal, Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, recently came to Phoenix to deliver a weekend mindfulness training, and he summed up mindfulness in this way: mindfulness connotes awareness, attention and remembering. Mindfulness includes non-judgment (of our feelings, thoughts or experiences), as well as acceptance.

There are many forms of meditation out there, and some traditions include visualization practices, among other things, but mindfulness meditation is different. When we practice mindfulness, we practice sitting with what arises in the present moment in our inner experience. We’re not changing anything, or pushing out any unwanted thoughts; we’re simply tuning into our immediate experience, which happens to include our thought stream, emotions and everything else that’s happening. It’s not a ‘touchy-feely’ as one might think, and you don’t have to be a Buddhist monk to meditate. Anyone can do it, and plenty of guys find this really helpful in reducing their stress.

The old adage, “what we resist, persists”, is applicable to how we sometimes ineffectively deal with our problems. When we sit in meditation, we can greatly reduce the experience of suffering by letting that ‘which persists’ just be as it is. In mindfulness meditation, we learn to sit with what “is”, or the thoughts, feelings and sensations that unfold from moment-to-moment in our inner experience.

This is different from how most of us live our lives: we often are hurried, mindless, and sometimes reactive to others. We sometimes live on auto-pilot, and forget that our behaviors and actions are the products of thoughts and feelings that drive them.

Here’s what to do when starting a mindfulness meditation practice:

1. Start simply: try sitting for five minutes at a time in a quiet spot, either in your office or outside
2. Get comfortable, in a chair or on a cushion.
3. Close your eyes, and start to settle into your body.
4. Start with bringing your attention to your breath: slowly inhale, and let go of your breath on the exhale
5. Bring attention to other parts of your body, including your shoulders, neck, heart, stomach. Notice the tiny sensations each of these parts of your body produces.
6. When your mind pulls you away from the breath, let it. The mind will do this many times in the course of one sitting, so part of meditation is to allowing it to do that, and to step back out of the thought stream to observe it. We’re not changing, avoiding, or pushing away any thoughts, good or bad.
7. Use your breath as your anchor. Keep coming back to your breath each time you become aware of a thought.
8. Try this for five minutes for the first couple of days, and keep going if you can. Don’t make this such a big deal: making it a chore will make you not want to do it.

And here’s what not to do:

1. Think of pretty images, like sunsets or unicorns, that are more visualizations.
2. Relax the need to push away uncomfortable thoughts or difficult feelings; be aware of how you push those away in your experience
3. Try to “do” anything. This isn’t a test or a race, and when you’re meditating, you’re not “doing it wrong”.
4. Avoid distracting sounds and environments.
5. Fall asleep
6. Get yourself so uncomfortable that meditating becomes too difficult.
7. Think you’re doing it “wrong”. You’re not. You’re just sitting with whatever comes up.

Meditation is liking riding a bike. It takes a little time and practice to get started, and when you do, you’ll notice the benefits quickly. You’ll develop more peace of mind, overall well-being and happiness from your mindfulness meditation practice.

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Out of anxiety or fear, guys sometimes reside in this perpetual state of limbo when it comes to figuring out if they want to stay put in their intimate relationship or marriage. Men make excuses for staying in bad relationships, like, “I don’t want to hurt her,” or “We used to be so good – there must be a way to get back to that point.” Do these questions reflect the truth of the matter, or simply make for excuses to keep us from changing a bad deal in our lives?

Often times, fighting relationships have a happy ending. And sometimes they don’t. Then there’s other times where a weird combination of the two gets created. Guys find themselves staying in relationships that they otherwise would have gotten out of a long time ago. Then, they make up all sorts of things in their head to keep them stuck in their bad situations, like quicksand. Men tread water to cope, as to not swim away or drown, but sometimes tread for some time, not necessarily unhappy, but comfortable enough not to make a change.

It’s hard to summon up the resources – courage, strength, intuition – to do a sea change in life, and negative relationships can truly be the hardest to break from. Even if we’ve gotten comfortable in our relationship suffering and misery, at least we’re familiar with it. It’s a security blanket. Change, on the other hand, is a whole separate thing. We’re not predisposed to change as human beings, and relationship adaptation is often times a  sea change that many guys are not willing to make. So, we grin and bear it, sometimes for several years or decades, and we hope for the best.

Time gets lost really quickly when we live in this state of relationship flux. When we live like this, we’re not listening to ourselves, or our true desires for intimacy and happiness. We deny both ourselves and our partner a chance to find happiness in another relationship, or just to simply to not be trapped in the current one.

Here’s some ways guys get stuck in bad relationships:

• Fear kicks in, and we think “I’ll never attract someone like her/another woman/anyone else again.”
• We “accept our fate in life” (victimization)
• Money fear kicks in (e.g. finding a new apt./condo, front bills alone, split up furniture, paying child support)
• We make excuses for ourselves and for her, and tell ourselves that our situation is better than it really is (we rationalize it)
• Head takes over (logic), and heart gets banished (gut, or intuition). The two simply aren’t talking.
• We “cope” with it, or avoid it altogether
• We wait for her to break up with us
• We tell ourselves that our partner won’t be o.k. on her own, or that we’ll devastate her if we break up the relationship.
• We tell ourselves that it will damage our children by leaving, that there will be irreparable damage to them, so how could leave then?

Strong messages take over, like:
(a) Staying a “stand-up guy”
(b) Being a good relationship partner
(c) Feeling guilty
(d) Worried you’ll “hurt her feelings” by leaving
(e) All the above

Relationships are designed for happiness, and if you feel like you’re subscribing to the message that all relationships do is bring misery upon you, you’ve committed yourself to being stuck. There is relationship happiness out there for you, believe it or not. You can surely create the right type of relationship if you’re miserable now and want to make a change for yourself. There is hope, and if it’s not in your current relationship, maybe it’s in another one. It’s dealing with ourselves first that’s the hardest part.

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It’s easy to see what a bad relationship looks like. You’re probably surrounded with plenty of anti-models everyday. But what about those really functional relationships that stick in your mind?

We all have severely idealized versions of what happy and healthy relationships and marriages look like. Sometimes, if we look closely, some people are more attracted to those fantasy relationships in their minds than they are to their actual partners. During our formative years, we are socialized in many ways (through schooling, religious institutions, friends, media) to come up with our private version of a good and healthy relationship. No one grows up thinking their marriage will grow cold and distant over time (at least I haven’t heard that in therapy).

But, what does make for a health relationship? What are the marks of a truly healthy relationship? What am I missing? I’m interested to hear your comments, and your perspectives on your version of a healthy relationship.

Here’s 15 of the most important (not necessarily in order of importance):

• Self-awareness
• Empathy
• Communication, and ability to have conflict within a safe “container”
• Love and fulfilling sex life
• Fun and laughter
• Respect of your partner
• Trust in your partner
• Shared and common interests
• Similar ideas about how to construct
• Shared power
• Understanding about money and how it’s managed in the relationship
• Supportive and nurturing; validating for both people
• Mutual willingness to work together on relationship/marriage problems
• Similar “worldviews”, or ways to create shared experiences together
• Good handoff of time together, and time apart (some couples need more, others less)

Creating a healthy relationship takes a lot of willingness, hard work and mutual love and respect, and each relationship could be optimized in its own way. There are myriad ways to relationship success, and many of the roads to relationship health are unique to each relationship, as is the uniqueness of each person. Finding what works – and what doesn’t – for your own relationship is part of the journey of awareness and growth for yourself, your partner, and your relationship.

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(This article I wrote originally appeared in the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix, May 21st, 2010 edition)

In the movie “It’s Complicated,” Meryl Streep plays Jane, an ex-wife who falls prey to the seductive suggestions of her narcissistic ex-husband, Jake, played by (who else but) Alec Baldwin. The other suitor, Adam (Steve Martin), has only his nice-guy disposition to offer Jane, and is that enough? It’s her job to get her head straight and pick the right one. Of course, we all know who she chooses – this is Hollywood – but real dating is something else.

Considering the dating process, watching the movie got me thinking about how we sometimes say we want one thing, but we’re really feeling something quite different inside. Sometimes, we’re saying we want a good date, or a good man or woman, but we’re still holding onto our past pain and hurt in our hearts. Our dating behavior, and our hearts, then end up split. Going out into the dating world, we communicate mixed messages to the people we go out with. We become unpredictable and erratic, both to ourselves and to our potential partners when it comes to commitment or healthy decision-making. We don’t know what we want, or aren’t listening to ourselves, so how do we expect others to?

It’s hard to really be invested in the dating process when we’re closed off to love. If we take a step back and look objectively at our situation, it’s often our minds saying we want growth and a new partner, yet our hearts are filled with a lot of fear and pain about having been burned before. Sometimes we haven’t worked through the emotions and grief associated with a previous relationship’s heartbreak, and every new dating experience may then accumulate the thin residue of that broken heart.

Months or years can go by, and we can stay stuck where we are. Love is passing us by, and we feel helpless to stop it. We want the happiness associated with love and partnership, but still want to blame the opposite sex for being goofy or cruel. Not that they can’t be, but to keep the conversation stuck there is to not admit what we can do to change our current situation. We fail to take responsibility for ourselves, especially for clearing out the emotional blockage.

I’m not saying there aren’t certain negative truths about dating, because there certainly are. Frustration, confusion and anger are often byproducts of the crazy nature of dating, but we can work through those if we want love, and want to stay open to letting love in. Dating is not an easy process whatsoever, especially if you’re coming into the dating scene after many years of being committed. It can be scary and alienating, and might make you question what you got yourself into. It can leave us questioning many fundamental things about ourselves.

Clearing the emotional blocks to our happiness is a hard task. It requires introspection and a little hard work. It means letting go of some of the types of thoughts that have employed our misery. It’s easier said than done, of course, but sometimes we need to work through the grief that someone has left us, or worse, abandoned us for someone else. We have to work on our own well-being and worthiness, and boost our own dating self-esteem. Because for every stereotypical guy or girl – for every Jake – there is an Adam out there.

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In her challenging new book, “The Male Brain,” Louann Brizendine, M.D. seeks to understand men from a neurological point-of-view. She looks to the understanding of men’s brains to understand the differences between men and women from looking at the brain and hormonal differences between the sexes.

Dr. Brizendine first takes a look at the evolving boy’s brain, and how infant boys and girls differ in information processing through early development. She says that boys’ brains are wired to process information visually, as well as track and chase moving objects through action.

Biologically based, boys tend to focus less on eye contact with their parents in the bonding process than do girls. By the time they’re six months old, girls are bonding by mutual gazing. Girls are “inclined to look long and hard at faces,” whereas boys are looking away at faces to focus on more-visually stimulating objects.

As a result, women tend to be more effective at reading their partner’s faces later in life, and tend be more intuitively oriented towards understanding their mate’s facial expressions than men do.

In play time, boys will choose competitive play, whereas girls choose cooperative play and activities. Boys use play and competition to achieve “victory”, as they are setting and shaping social hierarchy early. It’s really interesting to see cutural messages enhance and develop what is developing neurologically for boys.

Dopamine levels in a boy’s brain – the neurotransmitter in the brain responsible for addiction – is enhanced with rough-and-tumble play, or simulating violence and fighting. Physical and social dominance, achieved by watching other boys and engaging in this play fighting, is a very important developmental activity to negotiate for young boys at this stage (up to age 6). The social determinations made here will affect a boy’s social standing later, in the teen years.

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