Birding Your Brain: A Mindfulness Exercise

Mindflex: Mindfulness & Flexibility

To start this exercise, please find a comfortable position in your chair, on your deck, in bed, on your yoga or meditation mat, or wherever you find yourself reading this post. If that doesn’t feel like a place where you have space to yourself to just be for some moments, try to relocate to find a little sanctuary for yourself. 

Once you have settled in, start by noticing any sensations you are feeling in and around your body. How are you feeling supported by your chair? Bed? Mat? Are you in a position of openness and strength? Give yourself a little adjustment as needed to better support your core and open up your chest and posture. Take stock of aches, pains, discomforts, and draw your attention to parts of your body that might be feeling okay or even strong. 

As you welcome yourself into your space, what do you notice you are feeling and thinking? Do you notice a lot of thoughts tweeting about? Emotions flapping about? Catchy songs that are sticking with you? 

Pick out a thought, feeling, or sensation in your body or brain. Be with it for a moment. What is the quality of the thought, feeling, or sensation? Is it expansive? Warm/cold? Focused somewhere? Deep or surface level? Is it hard to locate or moving or static? 

 What color would it be if you were to give it a color? 

Taking stock of all of these qualities that you have noticed about your chosen internal experience to focus on, what bird do you think it would be? If you don’t feel like you know many birds that might relate to what you are feeling, release yourself from struggling to identify something. Choose something you know, even if it doesn’t feel perfect. (Our state bird is the Cardinal..try that out!) Think of this bird’s character or give it some character. Is this bird elusive? Spirited? Frenzied? Sluggish? Hungry? Flighty? Resting in its nest? Watchful on a branch? Soaring and scanning? Allow yourself to notice all these aspects of your bird. 

Imagine that your bird can be viewed from your window or deck with the naked eye. What can you notice about its coloring, its feathers and the way it interacts with the rest of nature? Notice the color patterns, the beak, the shape of its wings. As you pay attention…what song do you notice it is singing? Does it feel like it is calling to you? Alerting you of danger? Is it attracting other birds to join in? How does its song fit in with the rest of the songs you might be noticing around you? Let’s be with that for a moment. 

Using our same curious mind that is noticing that bird of our choosing, let’s take out our binoculars and go in for a little closer look. Let’s really focus on our bird. Does it feel like you are able to adjust your binoculars to see your bird clearly? Give yourself some time to see if you need to adjust your lens to fully locate your bird and see it in full detail. With the enhanced detail what do you pick up on? What is the color of its eyes? What are its facial features? Sharp and determined? Soft and relaxed? If you were to zoom in further on its beak, how do you notice that it calls out when singing its song? Is it distressed? Patient? Content? Hurried?

What is your experience zooming in on your bird? What do you notice about the other birds and songs around you? Maybe they fade a bit as you focus in…maybe they make it difficult to fully concentrate and locate your bird. Take as much time as you would like with your bird observing different qualities that it has. 

When you are ready, allow yourself to place your binoculars down and be with your surroundings again. Your bird, the other birds around you, the sounds, smells, and sights you’re seeing. What was it like noticing your bird(s)? What is it like for you noticing yourself as a birder? 

Allow yourself to carry that birder part of you with you as you continue to move through your day and observe your inner world. You have the capacity to observe your internal world with as much curiosity as you do your external world.

Bonus Activity: 

If you are so inclined, take this metaphor a step further and draw or write out your bird’s profile in your own field guide. What is the taxonomy of your bird? What are the descriptors you would include? How would you document your bird’s features? Is it part of a family of birds? Maybe the different birds within the family share characteristics but have their own subtle differences? (Think, the differences between grief and sadness, or guilt and shame, or how anger or frustration shows up for you). Here is my example.

Please use my audio recording if you would prefer to be able to close your eyes, hear my super therapeutic voice, or immerse yourself in this exercise in a different way. If this type of guided visual exercise isn’t up your alley, stay tuned because I will be posting other exercises and pieces that may feel better accessible if you have difficulty visualizing things in your head or are not sure if mindfulness is for you.

Birding Your Brain – Good Vibrations

This is a mindfulness exercise that accompanies a blog article that I wrote “Bird Brain”.

The Space Between…

Welcome to the Space Between, a blog that I will keep updated Sundays and Wednesdays. You will find a mixture of my thoughts about therapeutically relevant topics and exercises of my own creation. I will also have posts that are designated for other clinicians using more therapeutic jargon that you are also free to view as well. 

Bird Brain

Given that this is my first post, I want to thank you for taking the time to check this out! I appreciate any and all feedback as I tighten up my writing as I go along. I started up this post a couple weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic and stay at home orders in Virginia. While it has now been a few months into these orders, this post is still topical and has broad applications. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has ensured that virtually everyone on Earth is grappling with various forms of uncertainty, which I have been no exception to. The changes I have encountered are a part of a shared river of grief within my community and nation at large. I share concern for the health of my family, friends and neighbors, concern for our financial well being, furlough, 24/7 child care, and how all of this may change the way we communicate and relate to one another for a long time to come. I worry for those who have already been disenfranchised or marginalized long before this crisis. It is a flowing river of loss. Fear. 

In my subconscious scanning the world for stability in my first few days working from home in early Spring I noticed the birds called to me in a way I hadn’t heard before. Their songs sounded sharper, their colors brighter, and their daily activities seemed so…free. Is this the slippery slope of how people become amateur birders? My daughter gave me the nudge I needed to commit to this curiosity with our feathered friends. She was learning about Spring and plants, birds and bugs at the time.  She asked me about what birds ate, where their families were, and giggled about how they are gross to eat worms. It wasn’t lost on me that we were joined in the same exercise of curiosity and learning together. 

In my practice and in my life I try to make myself open to the universe through seeking out and acknowledging metaphors and analogies that pop up in daily life. I love how even chewing on the most simple analogies can be like that first bite into a croissant. Satisfying, buttery, sweet, but most notedly layered, messy, and imperfect. See what I did there? Metaphor about my love for analogies. Super meta. Anyway…

Bird Brain by Vivienne Strauss; https://www.viviennestrauss.com/

While I would say, at most, I appreciated the concept of birding, I never felt any gravitation to give it a try. During my moments of exhaustion, wondering if I am cutting it as a father, partner, and clinician working with an at risk population from afar, the birds found me. I heard and noticed them in ways that I have never before. The plump, happy Robins hopping around the yard. The large beautiful Blue Jays flying from tree to tree. Even the vultures doing their public service of cleaning our roadways of animal debris. In those moments I was offered a temporary sanctuary from all of the screams of my mind, anxieties about the future, and grief about what has been lost. In those moments it was just me and the birds. They were no longer background white noise of little import. Weirdly, they gave me hope. They just keep carrying on without any regard for the world as we know it shutting down. There was a profound strength in that, which I was witnessing from my own private confines. 

There they were, animals with a brain a small percentage of my own reminding me of what I try to help people discover in my own work, noticing all the parts of our much too complicated brain. All of those emotions and thoughts that flood us and are difficult to track. What if we could step back and observe how all the parts that make up our thoughts and feelings in the same way as I was observing these birds? 

Our grief is the vulture picking at the carcass of what could have been. The unexpected flashes of joy are the Blue Jays that surprise with their unassuming beauty as they bolt by. The Robins going on their worming expeditions is our resilience as we go on about life, seemingly undisturbed by cars racing at lethal speeds yards away. Chickadees, our masked anxiety as we try to sing uplifting tunes that sound all too much like the bird that doth protest too much. Yeah, I’m onto you Chickadee. 

These little birds of our brains come and go freely and persistently, despite any attempt to capture or contain them. So we sit back and be with them. Curious about their movements, their songs, and perhaps their beauty and characteristics. What would it look like if we were able to direct focus and attention to the different parts of us? Is it possible to be able to take a step back, take out our binoculars and look close up at our anger, our grief, our moments of joy, our anxieties, while also acknowledging that we are just observers within the safety of our home? 

Lots of therapists who study and practice mindfulness would tell you that this is exactly what they hope to train people to do. The intention of this process is not necessarily to find better ways of controlling, or changing our emotional experiences. It is to enhance the way we notice our internal and external worlds so that we can be with these experiences in a different way and not feel the pull to do something to change them. In other words, if I can name and notice that vulture over there, I also recognize that there may be little that I can do to influence or control it, but I can get to know what it looks like, feels like, and what its daily patterns might be. I can choose to focus on it, or let it be a part of my peripheral as I also scan for other birds or life experiences that I’m also interested in. So what happens when we put this birdy wisdom into practice? 

Stay tuned for a self-guided exercise based on this analogy. I find that mindfulness guided exercises that are a part of a larger metaphor have a different impact than simple deep breathing, or body scan exercises (not knocking those). Analogy guided exercises tend to go a little deeper into allowing us to understand ourselves.