What is “Doing the Work”?
It’s not uncommon nowadays for easily impressionable young adults to stumble upon a self-proclaimed ‘mental health advocate' on Instagram and suddenly begin diagnosing themselves with a range of conditions and disorders from autism to adhd to the new “audhd”. There is a wonderful world of resources now at our fingertips, and with this a new wave of young people are discovering that they may not need to rely on external factors such as therapy appointments and doctor’s notes to receive the support they need. It’s a time of reclaiming identity as your own, finding the tools and lifestyle changes that help alleviate challenges that often come with psychoemotional conditions and mental health disorders, and establishing boundaries as a result.
This shift in mental health has begun influencing the New Age spiritual communities through what is referred to as “doing the work”. Similar to the reclaiming of identities that is happening in niche communities like #audhd, “doing the work” is young, New Age spiritual people’s way of saying that they are placing attention and care on the state of their mental health and taking real steps in their daily lives to improve symptoms (or even heal the root altogether when possible).
This isn’t just about “self-improvement” or having a “self-care moment”. It’s about taking radical self-responsibility for the way we respond and react to life. We as individuals cannot always directly change our circumstances. In other words, we can’t change what is happening TO us, but we may be able to change how RESPOND and REACT to any given situation. Most of us go about life operating through the part of our brain known as the Default Mode Network (DMN for short). Many of our thoughts are formed from the default mode network - and most thoughts that come from the DMN are negative. It is believed that 80-85% of our thoughts are negative.
The Default Mode Network can hijack the mind - and it is related to many mental conditions like depression, anxiety, addiction, and compulsive conditions like ADD/ADHD and OCD. Practicing “mindful awareness” is really a practice in becoming aware of those unconscious thoughts and beliefs that are “hijacking” our thoughts through the DMN. This may look like catching yourself when you notice you are heading down a negative rabbithole, like complaining too much or being overly judgemental of others.
Of course, practicing mindful awareness is just one piece in “doing the work”, but I would argue that it is a foundational step one must take in order to begin delving more deeply into their own internal landscape. It’s kind of like getting a feel for where you are at - getting the lay of the land - before you begin to do the work of excavating some of the more maladaptive beliefs, conditioning, habits, and behaviors that are contributing to the overall psychoemotional conditions or negative patterns that are currently driving your life. In each stage of ‘doing the work’, you will see this practice of mindful awareness threaded throughout. There is no one without the other, in a sense.
Mindful awareness is not to be confused with “over-analyzing” yourself. I’ve seen a lot of people go down this path of become overly self-aware to the point where they are beginning to become their own worst critic as they read into every little detail about themselves, their lives, and the choices they have made that have shaped the human they are today. The moment we begin to critique, judge, or pick ourselves apart like this is the moment that we form an attachment to how things “should” be. This may manifest as feeling like you are a failure, like you’re always doing something wrong, or like there’s always more work to do. In Buddhism, this is referred to as ‘dukkha’, which roughly translates to ‘suffering’.
Our cravings and aversions lead to dukkha because sometimes things happen in life that are beyond our control - like, for example, when a loved one unexpectedly passes away. Mindful awareness is a practice in nonattachment, a state of being in which we are able to observe our life from a hawk’s eye view, without having to get tangled in the dukkha - the desire or aversion to things being different than exactly as they are. This is the work.
What does this look like in practice? The ironic thing about ‘the work’ is that it requires no force, no laboring, no homework…in fact, quite the opposite. It is a state of beingness, of surrendering to and trusting the cyclical nature of life - embracing the inherent death and life cycles sprinkled throughout our short, human lives. And so a quite simple exercise you can do to begin to observe your relationship with change is to simply ask yourself: what am I most afraid of? Are you afraid of losing something or someone? Are you afraid of being laid off? Of not fulfilling a specific goal set forth by yourself or possibly others? Ultimately, each of these fears boil down to an aversion to change (more dukkha).
Practicing mindful awareness around your relationship to change is a great place to start, and can be as simple as answering the question above and holding non-judgemental space for your response. This is not to say that we don’t allow ourselves to process any emotions or somatic sensations associated with the dukkha. Like, for example, in the case of someone who just had a loved one pass away suddenly. It is not until that person has accepted the passing of that person that they are able to truly begin the grieving process - because acceptance creates spaciousness in our bodies, both emotionally and energetically. This space allows for the release - the surrender - of tension, grief, sadness, and all of the associated emotions that are stored up in the body as a result of the experience. Without a healthy way of releasing these emotions, they may begin to culminate into deeper issues like chronic fatigue, auto-immunity, and even disease. Even in moments of somatic release (crying, shaking, tapping, dancing, yelling), we can still practice nonattachment by simply observing the sensations rather than attaching thoughts to them. Something that has really helped me is incorporating Ram Dass’s mantra: “and this too”.
By the way, there is no end to ‘the work’. Mindful awareness is a daily practice we do for the rest of our lives. I guess it might be better if we renamed it “being a human” because, really, that’s what it is.
