Encouraging Conditions

It started a few winters ago. My hands begin to get dry and chapped around the middle of December. I’ll get small cuts next to my finger nails or along the backs of my hands, and those little cuts can hurt! I know that the cuts will heal themselves eventually, but by putting on some antibiotic healing cream, they seem to heal more quickly and, at least, less painfully.

The body has a remarkable self-healing capacity; it can heal, on its own, so many of the injuries we get. Not all of them, but many of them. The trick is to give the body the best possible conditions to heal itself. With the right conditions of cleanliness, circulation, pressure, air exposure, etc., the body is encouraged to do its dynamic and magical self-healing.

We see this self-healing with plants too. Old trees show their scars of healing up their trunks, house plants can bounce back from near death, and demolished ecosystems will regrow themselves. Give plants and earth some time, space, and cleanliness, and they heal themselves.

Under the right conditions, life is self-healing.

It probably shouldn’t have come as such a surprise to me to learn that the human mind is also quite capable of self-healing. Stress, fear, anxiety, tension, and even trauma, all of which have physiological as well as psychological impacts, can be self-healed. And just like with a scrape on the arm or a mower blade cut on a tree trunk, give the mind the right conditions and it will heal itself.

Some cuts do take longer to heal. Maybe they’re wider, maybe they’re deeper, maybe they’re infected. The same is true with psychological wounds. However, because we’re not typically providing the best conditions for psychological healing, including taking the physiological components of it seriously enough, I think that we’re capable of much faster and easier psychological healing than we expect.

The winter chapping of my hands, even the tiniest cuts it can produce on my fingers, can heal so well and so beautifully under the best conditions. However, I’ve also learned from my mom a great preventative trick: apply hand lotion throughout the winter. When I use lotion, the chapping develops less frequently.

Similarly, encouraging psychological healing includes post-injury and pre-injury treatment. The post-injury treatment is to provide the best possible conditions for healing, and this includes relaxation. The preventative pre-injury step is to develop understanding and resilience that makes psychological wounds, especially the deep ones, less likely to begin with.

Schools can play a valuable role in both the prevention and the treatment of our physiological, our psychological, and our spiritual injuries. We need this understanding and ability not only for ourselves individually, but also for our friends, our families, our communities, our societies, our nations, and our world.

I so appreciate your spending time with me on this journey. ❤️

---

Thanks for joining me on this exploration/reflection! If you'd like to receive blog updates via email twice weekly, be sure to subscribe here.

Getting Going

I went to the University of Maryland, and we had a 6-week winter holiday. Nearly all of my friends had just two weeks off for winter break, so there were four weeks I’d spend mostly on my own.

Each year I’d set goals for myself for break: exercise, instrument practice, writing, studying, whatever. And for four years of winter breaks, though I did read a bunch of books, I don’t think I accomplished any of those goals. So by the end of winter break, I was disappointed with myself, caught in self-judgment, and glad to return to the structure of a semester at school.

I was recently talking with a student who is caught in a similar spiral of habit-forming ineffectiveness. Fully capable of performing at a high level academically, he’s been having serious motivation issues since even before the pandemic shut-down began a year ago. His teachers see his capability, his parents see his capability, I see his capability, and he even sees it.

Yes, he sees his own capability to pull off a big win this year, but he also sees what we don’t see when we look at him: he’s tried and failed, countless times, to get himself together and get the work done. So he’s apprehensive, intimidated, and scared, and he’s anticipating another failure.

In our brief conversation between classes, I then offered him the best support I could think of in that moment. I offer these notes to you now, dear reader, in case you might also benefit from them:

First, I acknowledged his innate capacity for doing great work and coming out of this funk. We are all much more capable than we give ourselves credit for, and it’s really helpful to have another person around to remind us of that. Ask a friend or someone you trust to remind you of your strengths and capabilities.

Second, I suggested that he get grounded in the “what’s so,” or the reality, of the situation. Take 10 minutes and list out all the work he’s got to make up in each of his six classes. This step often doesn’t seem as valuable as just jumping into the work that needs to be done, but it almost always is. Personally, I clean my desk, make a list, then pick out the most important list item to jump into first.

Third, I recommended that he change his work environment. Our environment plays an often-unnoticed role in maintaining good and bad habits. If he shifts his work environment, he’s inevitably going to shift his work habit. Maybe work in a different room, sit at a different desk or table, or change the lighting during work time.

Fourth, I suggested that he reach out to someone along the way for support; it could be me, his parents, or a friend. Consistent communication with someone we trust and who cares about us can help us build new habits. A good friend of mine shared this insight with me: conversations are shared thoughts. And shared thoughts can be much more pliable, positive, inspiring, and fortifying than the typical, past-based, and self-critical thinking arising in our own minds.

Despite having a truly phenomenal academic preparation for college when I was in high school, such a fundamental and valuable skill as developing and fostering positive habits was a lesson I never learned until years after leaving the walls of my high school and university buildings.

How about we make sure no kid makes it through American schools without mastering the formation of positive habits?

Thanks for reading ❤️.

---

Thanks for joining me on this exploration/reflection! If you'd like to receive blog updates via email twice weekly, be sure to subscribe here.

Take a Couple Deep Breaths

I never thought I’d say this, but part of our Sunday evening routine as a family is to watch American Idol together. Throughout the show, we’re all taking turns making comments and jokes and wiping our eyes. It’s strange how things we find ourselves doing together as a family I’d never do on my own.

In this week’s episode, there were a few participants whose nerves were getting the better of them. “Take a deep breath” was Katy Perry’s coaching. So they took a deep breath.

Taking a couple deep breaths is one way to ground ourselves - stabilizing ourselves on solid ground, feeling our way down to planted feet, remembering that despite the feeling of dizziness and swirling up in our heads, we’re actually always firmly on Earth. In my last post, Get Grounded Before Taking Off, I described the process of checking in, which is also a practice of grounding ourselves.

Most of us probably have some intuitive sense of the value of getting grounded. We have this intuitive sense because we know what it’s like to be dizzy or to misstep or to trip physically. And most of us have an intuitive sense of what it is to be standing solidly on firm ground. Both of these intuitions demonstrate a physiological understanding.

Getting grounded, then, is really just becoming aware of our physiological state and settling down out of the seeming swirl of a stressed or preoccupied mental state. Integrating the physiological and the intellectual in schools, then, can drastically impact students’ long-term health and well-being, the physical, mental, and spiritual kind.

By getting good at getting grounded, we have more time before reacting, more space to heal, and more quiet in which to hear the whispers of our inner wisdom (or God, if you’re a believer).

In that American Idol episode the other night, we saw three different reactions to Katy’s “take a deep breath” suggestion. One singer took the breaths, calmed down, and sang even better - their true voice came through. A second singer took the breaths, didn’t calm down, and sang about the same as they had before. A third singer also couldn’t calm down, but they got more nervous and freaked out in a feedback circle of stress, frustration, and disappointment; they could barely finish their performance.

Developing a practice of getting grounded is a practice in relaxing into our inner wisdom and doing our best.

Thanks for reading ❤️.

---

Thanks for joining me on this exploration/reflection! If you'd like to receive blog updates via email twice weekly, be sure to subscribe here.