Marie Buda

Discovering the River Towards Inner Freedom

The Art of Humility

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In Japan, we are taught that everyone lies on a hierarchy. People are above or beneath you. This is reflected in the language. You change your speech depending on how you perceive their status. To not use the correct form of language is seen as disrespectful and a massive faux pas.

When people meet each other in Japan, they quickly go through a process of  trying to suss the other person out: How old is this person? What are their credentials? This is why business cards come out very quickly during interactions — so people can read their job titles. This way people can quickly work out where they lie in the spectrum of respect.

This was my reality until I was 21. Because we live in this box of being better or worse than other people, you need to consistently strive to be on top, so to speak.

And then I met a man who changed my world.

This person was a highly accomplished martial artist, with more than enough titles under his belt. Having won pretty much every fight that he has ever fought, this would mean he saw himself as being ‘above’ all other fighters right?

Far from it.

Let me put some context first. From experience, feeling like you are ‘above’ someone is a high. The embodied feeling is that you feel like you are looking down on others from a cliff. But like all highs, it’s not an expansive and peaceful sensation. It’s a drug. It’s a wall of energy that feels pleasurable but at the same time is hard and destructive. Physically you feel a fire throughout your body, tightness in the stomach with an overwhelming heaviness in your head (hence I presume the saying, “to be big-headed”).

Conversely, feeling ‘below’ someone can manifest as all sorts of emotions, depending on how you see the person ‘above’ you. If you respect the other person, then the emotional sensation can be quite tame. However, feeling ‘beneath’ other people can also make you feel sad, even depressed. And finally, if you feel low on the hierarchy and don’t agree with it, it can lead to feelings of anger and resentment.

It’s not just that you feel these sensations within yourself. You can intuitively pick up on what other people are feeling too – whether they are feeling ‘above’ or ‘below’ you. Over the years, a skill I’ve picked up having been brought up in Japan is to quickly pick up on these cues and to act accordingly. They think they’re above you? Ok, I’ll use my subservient language to please.

Having been very familiar with these sensations all my life, I was suddenly faced with a person who radiated neither of these energies. Here was a man who on paper had accomplished so much, yet he didn’t look down on others. At the same time, it didn’t feel like he felt like he saw himself as being beneath others either. He knew exactly what his skills were, and that was that. He just was.

Until then I used to think that to show humility was to downplay your achievements. It’s what the Japanese do masterfully. If someone compliments you, you immediately deny the comment, and proceed to put yourself down in some way. This I believed was what it meant to be humble. It was to secretly know how good you were, but to hide it on the surface.

However, this was not what I was feeling from this man. He wasn’t secretly hiding anything. As I mentioned, he just was. That was when I realised what humility was. It wasn’t to downplay your skills. Instead, it meant to not see yourself on a scale, whether it be better or worse, good or bad, high or low.

You just are.

Subjectively, his energy felt like nothing I had come across so far in my life. If you could put a sensation to transcending duality, it was that. You could call it an emptiness. You could call it a liberating sensation. It was the feeling of going beyond the box of hierarchies.Old habits die hard, and I am still trying to learn the art of humility. But as I do, I know it will bring me a freedom that I have never felt before. Freedom from the highs and lows that the illusion of hierarchy brings.

My Twitter Usage Manifesto

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In a previous post I described why I quit Facebook, and the addictive grip these mediums of social media can have on some people like me. When I decided to re-start Twitter,  I really didn’t want to fall into the same traps that I did with Facebook.

The result was this Twitter Usage Manifesto:

  • Thou shalt tweet with an open heart and in the spirit of unconditional giving.
  • Thou shalt only follow people who you are genuinely interested in following.
  • Thou shalt tweet only things that you genuinely think will be of interest to others.

1) Thou shalt tweet with an open heart and in the spirit of unconditional giving.

I wrote in the last post about the suffering that results from dependency in relationships. I think a similar thing can result with social media.

A lot of the time people post things because they want people to acknowledge their post in some way, whether this be through a ‘like’ or a comment.

100 likes? You feel amazing! No one ‘likes’ your post? You feel sad and lonely.

Once you get into this cycle, whether consciously or unconsciously, social media becomes a game of manipulated posts, photos and tweets that are carefully engineered to ensure that you get the acknowledgement that you think you need: “This photo will get me more likes!” “This post is funny, people will ‘like’ it!”.

Once this happens you no longer post things that truly represent you. You are posting things that you hope other people will pay attention to. This attention becomes your energy source and without it you feel incomplete. It’s not a great place to be in. These ups and downs are partly the reason for social media addiction.

Therefore I wanted to approach Twitter differently. I thought that if I tweeted in the spirit of unconditional giving, I would be simply sharing what I wrote about without expecting anything in return. If no one reads my blog, that is absolutely fine. If someone does, cool. It’s just out there for people who are meant to read it, to read it.

If I am unattached to the outcome, there is no need to obsessively check back continuously whether someone has ‘liked’ my posts. I just let it be. I think this is a much more peaceful place to be in.

2) Thou shalt only follow people who you are genuinely interested in following. 

I know that some people follow others just to make them follow them back. Or follow people because they feel they have to, whether it be because of a) social obligation b) they feel they ‘should’ (e.g. “I’m a scientist so I really should follow the best scientists”).

Each to their own in this regard, but given that I have made a commitment to be as honest to myself as I can, I thought that the reasons stated above were not in line with whom I wanted to be. So I’ve decided that I will only follow people who I am genuinely interested in.

This did initially result it a Twitter cull of people I was following for the wrong reasons. But now I look at my feed and only see posts that pique my interest. It’s nice.

3) Thou shalt tweet only things that thou genuinely think will be of interest to others.

I didn’t want the tweets to serve the same function as photos/posts often do on Facebook. On Facebook, I feel that people are often posting things that are strategically there to mold a public image, instead of posting things in the spirit of true sharing.

If I find something interesting, that’s great. However, I don’t see any reason to post it publically unless I genuinely think other people will think it’s interesting. If I post it nonetheless, I feel like it’s simply saying, “Look what I like! This is who I am!”. This is all fine, but it isn’t in line with Manifesto Point 1: Unconditional Giving, so I am choosing not to do this.

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So that’s the manifesto. Since re-starting Twitter I have felt the urge to dwell from these points (and perhaps have broken them), but I am hoping that I can learn to use social media as an effective tool. I hope to be in control of social media, rather than allowing social media to control me.

How I Conquered Procrastination

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I know that I am not in the minority when I say I had a serious procrastination problem. For me, my wake up call was my PhD. You have three to four years to write a thesis. If you procrastinate, you’re royally screwed.

My procrastination habits were already pretty bad, and they were made even worse by my clinical depression. For months and months I was like an engine that couldn’t start up properly. My severe anxiety and stress would prevent me from even starting to read or write.

The good news is I eventually made a very significant breakthrough, and it didn’t involve any fancy techniques.

I simply used a pen and a notebook. 

After months of self-scrutiny, I managed to pin down the reason for my procrastination onto one main thing: the avoidance of anxiety.

Let me illustrate. You have a big deadline coming up. You sit down to try to start. But because there is so much to do, you can’t quite figure out what the next step is. And oh my gosh think about all the work you need to do. Think about how this task is far too big to start, and even worse, you can’t think of the perfect way to do it. AAAAAH!

Before you know it you are clicking on Facebook and are looking at photographs of people you don’t care about. This all happens at lightning speed. Each time you open up Microsoft Word to start working again, that wall of anxiety hits you, and your default mode becomes avoidance.

In order to escape this never ending spiral, you first need to understand the following: anxiety is caused by not being in the present.

If you are asked whether there is anything you are unhappy about in general, I’m sure you could produce an endless list of things from not getting a pay-rise to your partner not giving you the attention you need. But if you ask yourself whether there is anything you are unhappy about in this very moment in time, it is highly likely that the answer is no (unless you are, at this moment, being tortured brutally by some terrorist group…in which case why are you reading this blog?).

Anxiety is caused by thinking about the past or the future, instead of embracing the present. Instead of focusing on the very next step that has to be done, you get swept away by all the things that you have to do in the future. You worry endlessly.

In step the pen and notebook.

Everyday I would sit down, open my notebook, and think only about what the very next step was. I really broke it down into the basics. Some days the first line was “Switch on the computer”, and once I’d done that, “Open Word document”. Once I got the ball rolling I could start making the next steps “Read first paragraph of journal paper” or “Type in first line of excel data”.

Essentially, it was a mindfulness technique that kept me focused on the present or the very, very near future at most. This prevented me from getting sucked into the tornado of anxiety. Because I was creating myself tiny baby steps that were guaranteed to be achievable, I wouldn’t panic. I could see how I was going to proceed. Plus I was constantly rewarding myself by ticking off all the things that I had finished. Tiny victories, but achieved nonetheless!

I also stopped worrying about whether I would finish in time, or whether the work was good enough (perfectionism is a common trait among those who procrastinate). I knew that using this notebook method I was working the best that I could at the fastest pace sensibly possible. So I just had to trust that so long as I kept this going, I was on the right track.

Thanks to this notebook technique for the rest of my PhD  I managed to work consistently, in a focused manner. Procrastination is manageable. The key is to admit that you have a problem, and then to discover the truth behind why it’s occurring in the first place. The most important thing is to not beat yourself up about it. To get angry at yourself for procrastinating is to only make your anxiety worse. Remember that you are a human being, and that we are not perfect. Accept that you feel anxious, take a deep breath, and pick up your pen and notebook. It’s never too late to start.

Why I Quit Facebook

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If I were to describe my relationship with Facebook using its own lingo I would say: ‘its complicated’.

In fact, it’s safe to stay I went through the “Four Stages of Relationships” with it.

Let me explain….

Stage 1: Infatuation

When I first started Facebook back in 2006, I was obsessed with it. For all my sins back then I a) loved attention and b) loved being nosy. “People are clicking ‘like’ on my posts! They must love me!”. I was very quickly drawn into Facebook’s sweet allure. It was infatuation from the beginning.

Stage 2: Love

Soon I couldn’t live without Facebook. I was in love, checking it almost every other minute when I was on the computer. If I were working I would have it open in another browser window as I did not want to miss a single notification. Facebook and I were inseparable. Till death do us part.

Stage 3: Reality-Check

After a few years on Facebook, slowly but surely the reality of the website as a social medium started to hit me.

First, I realised how it had become a shallow, addictive game of seeing how many friends I could acquire and how many likes I could get with my posts. How could I make it seem to all my friends like I was having tons of fun and having the best life in the world? This involved posting lots of photographs of drunk outings with vacuous, obnoxious statements such as, “Best night in the world!!”.

But it wasn’t just me who did this – it was a lot of other people too. Facebook was a place where people created and read about fake lives. You don’t know how many times I said to a friend after seeing countless lovey-dovey couple photos, “You and your partner seem so happy!”, to only then get the reply, “Actually, we’re pretty miserable”. In short, with Facebook you were swimming in a fantasy world.

Second, my view of Facebook started to significantly change when I started to think about what the real motivations were behind everyone’s posts, including mine. I may sound cynical here, but this is how I started to see things:

What they do: Post on someone’s public wall.

What they really mean: “I want the whole world to see our messaging, because it makes it seem like we have the best friendship/relationship!”

What they do: Post a selfie with a completely unrelated caption (E.g. “Can’t wait to go to fair!”)

What they really mean: “Please comment on how pretty I am!”

What they do: Post an album

What they really mean: “Look at the fabulous life I’m having!”

Don’t get me wrong, I always used to say I don’t mind publically posting things because I have nothing to hide. To a certain extent, I feel the same way (otherwise I wouldn’t blog!). However, whilst I’m absolutely behind sharing experiences, there was something disconcerting about feeling the need to shout things out to everyone.

If you experience something wonderful and want to share it, great! Why not just share it with the people who you think will truly appreciate your experience? If you wanted to share photos with friends, why not just send them privately? Why also share it with hundreds of people who don’t care? The only reason I could think of was to use it as a tool to construct one’s artificial life on Facebook. All I started to hear in the recesses of my mind as I opened Facebook every day were squeals of “Look at me! Look at me!”.

It all started to get very depressing.

Stage 4:  Break-up

I soon stopped posting albums. In 2014 I posted 29 albums. This year I posted three. I decreased my status updates from several times a day to once every few weeks.

It still wasn’t enough. I hated the fact that I was constantly checking Facebook even though I saw it to be the empty medium that it was. It was the default website I would go to when I was bored. I would then waste significant amounts of time scrolling through the lives of people who, to put it brutally, I didn’t really care about.

I strongly felt I could be doing better things with my life. I wanted out.

Of course, there is always fear before a break-up. With Facebook, it was the fear of losing contact with a large proportion of the friends I had. What if I suddenly wanted to get back in touch with someone, or vice versa? My heart sunk at the thought of losing contact with some people forever.

I then realised that out of the 1800 “friends” that I had, I only had true, meaningful relationships with around 100 (Dunbar’s number?!). Those people already had my contact details anyways. Instead of spreading myself out thin focusing on the 1800 I didn’t really care much for, why not invest all that energy into further cultivating the 100 that I deeply cared about?

As one person mentioned on Facebook when I announced I was leaving, Facebook makes people lazy. It fools people into thinking that they have relationships with others through simply looking at their status updates and photos, when that is nowhere close to the quality of friendship that is created through face-to-face interaction.

I also strongly felt like I had to embrace the birth and death cycle of life. Why the need to desperately hold on to people that you met 10 years ago? Some relationships are meant to die. This is not necessarily a bad thing – to close one door is to open another one.

So it was time for me to close the door on Facebook. I’m excited to see what new avenue this opens. I’m already feeling the benefits. Since I’m not habitually checking Facebook anymore I have a lot more spare time. This time I can use for productive things like writing this blog. Also, in quitting Facebook I’ve suddenly managed to get in touch with old friends who I hadn’t talked to for awhile.

In sum, I feel like it’s one of best things I’ve done this year.

Just like any real relationship, even if it doesn’t turn out the way you wanted it to, you learn a lot from it. Facebook revealed a lot of my insecurities – my need for attention, my need to portray myself in a way that didn’t truly reflect who I am and how lonely I was inside. It also exacerbated my terrible procrastination habits. But because it was a mirror reflecting what was already there, it allowed me to eventually stare at them in the face and do something about them. So for that, I’m very grateful.

Thank you Facebook, and goodbye 🙂

 

Change is the Only Constant

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Very shortly, I will be changing the look and content of this website.

There is so much more to me than simply my academic background, and I wanted my website to reflect this. In the past there were so many things I wanted to blog about, but I didn’t because it wasn’t related to psychology or neuroscience. The result was writing only two blog posts within the last three years.

This is a shame, as I love writing with a passion. It’s one of the few activities where I feel like I can engage my heart. It’s one of those things where you ache to do more of it, but you leave it to ‘someday’.

But I’m going to be honest – I’m scared to bits about doing this. I’m scared about writing openly and publicly about things I truly and deeply care about, such as spirituality and life development. This is because it isn’t in line with the ‘professional’ image that I tried to create when I set-up this website three years ago.

Why not just create a new website, one for professional use, and the other for personal?

I actually have done this. I had a personal website that focused on my journey towards eating paleo. You’re welcome to read it here. However, somehow having two websites doesn’t feel right. I feel like to continue with two websites would be to continue creating a false image based on how I think people around me expect to see me. I will continue to hide who I actually am inside if I continue separating the two.

So I’m taking the plunge.

I will make the changes gradually, probably starting simply with new blog posts. Eventually I will start making changes to the website itself. Watch this space!