“Coping”
“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose
one thought over another.” William James
I
recently helped with an open house at the counseling center I now work
with. A number of clinicians were there
and I kept hearing this one counselor saying to others, “People just don’t know how to cope.”
It
is so true. People don’t know how to cope because we don’t teach people how to cope. Maybe it is a sign of the times or maybe it
just isn’t the American way.
I know other countries and societies are better and incorporating
meditation and work-life balance than we are.
It seems to me the East is better with meditation and yoga practices and
the Scandinavian countries are better with work-life balance.
Portugal
is leading the way in terms of how they deal with addiction. They had one of the worst drug problems in
Europe until they changed the way they looked at the problem. They have now cut their addiction rates
basically in half. How did they do it? They de-criminalized drugs. They took the money they used to spend on
prosecuting and jailing the drug users and instead put it into getting the drug
users into holistic recovery. They
treated the users, taught them about the disease, helped them learn coping
skills and got them connected to communities again. They got them on their feet and gave them
purpose. Even those who radically
opposed this method in the beginning are now touting its success. I got this information from an article in Yes
Magazine but I had been hearing about it from many other sources.
I
recently read on Upworthy that there is a school in Baltimore that has gotten
rid of detention and instead they send the children to the “Mindful Meditation Room”.
They are taken through breathing exercises and meditations to get them
centered and then they talk through the problem and their feelings with a
teacher there in the room before returning to the classroom. The school incorporates mindfulness practices
and yoga as well and their suspension rate dropped to zero.
Dermot
has been struggling to concentrate lately and it stresses him out when it
surrounds homework. The other night I
was with him when he started to get upset over his homework. I had him stop and got him to sit with his
feet on the floor and his back again the back of the chair and I took him
through a 2 minute meditation using an app on my phone called Insight
Timer. When the meditation was over he
was able to calmly start working again and though it wasn’t perfect concentration, it was
improved.
What
does this tell you? We need to teach
coping skills so people don’t turn to addictive behaviors and substances. We need to be kinder, more mindful and more
connected so we as a society can cope.
