Self-Care and the Green Smoothie Fast

I was standing in front of the mirror today and tilted my head to one side. I had to squint, since I wasn't wearing my glasses. I turned my body so that I was sideways to the mirror, rather than just facing it on an angle.

I pursed my lips together, my brow furrowed, as I strode quickly into my office, grabbed my glasses from atop the pile of assessment notes that I've been steadily cranking my way through, and went back in to look in the mirror again. Then I frowned. I hadn't been imagining it, after all. My abdomen was protruding past my breasts.

I know what this means, I thought, as I pulled my shirt up just to make extra sure. I wasn't making up that whole thing about my pants getting tighter.

At the beginning of the school year, I have the best of intentions. I am feeling good, rested, happy. My food is healthy. It's still sunny and reasonably warm outside. I'm drinking three cups of coffee a week, tops, and my water intake rivals my food intake. But then something happens -- usually work related -- that requires my attention and triggers my stress level into sky-high flight.

There are many levels to this pattern. I might deal with whatever is stressing me out on the emotional and spiritual levels, but by that point, I've somehow managed to forget that the way I stay out of the stress is strictly physical. Enough rest. Healthy food. Plenty of water. Not too much caffeine. Going to the gym and doing more than a 15-minute walk around the indoor track. My convenient forgetfulness -- combined with the sharp increase in the cost of produce, the fact that cold weather makes cold food less interesting, and the fact that I know the location of every Starbucks vendor within a 50-mile radius and how delicious whipped cream can sometimes be -- kind of sets me up to put on a few pounds.

I forget this, I swear, every single year.

It isn't really about the weight or the food for me. As a teenager, I was thin. I would have liked to have weighed a few pounds more, but I was generally fine with my appearance overall. I started to gain weight in college, and I was glad about this. But then it started to go too far the other way, thanks to intimate discourse with my Russian textbook and the Papa John's delivery guy at 2:30 a.m. on most nights of the week. Well, I take that back. It had to do with feeling most of the time like I was in way over my head at a private college 13 hours away from home, and believing that I did not have the emotional resources I needed to deal with such a huge life change.

There were several things I deeply understood about myself when I was 18 or 19, but I didn't realize that much of how I was thinking about my life at the time was contributing to my stress level, and that much of what I was worrying about wouldn't matter much in the long run. Like some new college students, I was terrified, and as badly as I had wanted to get away from home and try something new, I feared that my adjustment was going much more poorly than it had for my peers. I wasn't completely oblivious, but I didn't have a solid idea about how to comfort myself well through some of these major changes. I also didn't have a great sense of how prone my body was to chemical ups and downs depending on the food I ate.

I have learned a lot about this over the past 12 years or so, about my food, my body, and how I deal with my needs for comfort and care. Sometimes my strategies are effective, and other times, they aren't. When my belly extends past my breasts, I view it as my wake-up call that my self-care has somehow gone by the wayside, and probably not just physically.

I marched out of the bathroom, walked into the kitchen, and thought for a few moments before I told my Resident Partner-In-Crime that I was going to do a 7-day green smoothie fast so that he had fair warning. It wasn't urgent. It wasn't forced. It was simply an acknowledgment of the fact that it is time to step back from my habitual way of responding to life in the month of November and to pay closer attention to myself. This doesn't mean that I pay attention to the point of self-absorption, but rather that I notice how I'm feeling, how I'm thinking, and what things are in my power to address in a different way. I can't do this effectively if I'm distracting myself by knocking back a bag of smart puffs.

Stepping back to do something as simple as drink smoothies for seven days and get regular exercise feels like stepping into a minefield. I know it isn't, really, that I'll eventually feel much better like I have every other time I've set forth to interrupt an old pattern. It's also helpful to remember that I have the resources within and around me to deal with any emotional or spiritual fallout. I've acquired enough practice and experience with this over time to realize that I've done it before, and it didn't kill me. Quite to the contrary, it brought me to greater peace.

Born to be Wild!

My stepfather had been outside for what seemed like hours while I had been inside, dragging my camping stuff out of the closet and packing for the weekend. My younger sister and brother and I lugged our stuff downstairs to the kitchen, overtaken by mom, chaos in the form of coolers, and the classic rock station playing some song by Bad Company, which my sister switched to the R&B station on the way out, my brother switched to the Country station on the way in, and I switched to the Indie station as soon as he went the other way.

At some point, we began to drag our gear out to my stepfather's pickup truck, and I was startled at what I saw. He had taken the back seat out of the Dodge Caravan and was hard at work binding it to the back of the cab. He was using rope, bungee cords, and there may have even been some chains and padlocks involved.

"What are you doing?" One of us asked him.

"Well, you guys need a place to sit," he said, "and it's against the law to ride without seatbelts, but we've gotta take the truck to go four-wheelin'," he said. "So you're gonna sit back here."

The three of us looked at each other, and I thought I could see the same excitement in their eyes that I felt. Little brother, being only 8 or 9 at the time, actually expressed the excitement, while little sister and I, both well into our teens, exhibited mainly detached mild disinterest.

An hour later, we were strapped into the back of a Dodge Ranger without the cap, the little brother squeezed in between me and the little sister. We were doing at least 70 up I-91 into Vermont, so the fuel economy must have been lousy. The three of us were screaming along to 'Born to Be Wild' as we watched the cars approach in front of us, move into the next lane, and pass us by. I'm not sure why we chose that song. I don't remember if it was playing on the radio and we could hear it through the opened rear window. I don't know if it was the last song we had heard in between the time when mom had said, 'leave the radio alone!' and switched it back to the Classic rock station and when we left the house. My hair was whipping in my face and I was wishing that I had thought to stick an elastic in my pocket before we had left. The smell of late spring was in the air as we screamed at the tops of our lungs. For a little while, it was the three of us just having a good time together.

Years later, I'm driving through central New England along a state highway, on my way home from work, and enjoying the beauty of fall. My fingers happen to land on the radio dial and I hear a familiar song. 'Born to be Wild,' plays on the radio in all of its Steppenwolf-ish glory. I smile, roll down the windows, and scream along for a little while. Now that my sister is a mother to six, my brother is reveling in the ups and downs of young adult life, and I spend much of my time driving all over creation, our times together are infrequent. There is no screaming in the back of a wannabe pick up truck. The three of us would never be able to fit together in that Dodge Caravan seat now. But it's still nice to be able to shift back to that time, a time when all that any of us really needed to do was sit and scream at the tops of our lungs.

Meditating and Thinking

I meditate twice a day. I do it when I first get up in the morning, and then again before I get ready for bed. Over the past few months, when mentioning this in conversations with friends, the most frequent comment I've heard has been something along the lines of, 'I've tried to meditate/I'm interested in meditating/I wish I could meditate, but I can't stop my mind from thinking.'

When I hear this, I say something like, 'that's kind of the point.' Then I get funny looks, which I've just had to get used to over the years for a number of reasons.

I want to talk about this comment in more detail, because it demonstrates that a lot of people don't know a whole lot about what meditation is, or what it's supposed to do.

Meditation, in the way I use it, is a type of brain training. There are many different ways in which to train one's brain. We train our brains in acquiring information, applying information, thinking critically, and comparing and contrasting, just to name a few. When I use meditation, I'm doing it to cultivate the ability to watch my thoughts and see how they affect my experience of the present moment, and of life in general. From that place of witnessing and knowing the thoughts, I can later work on understanding the role they play in my life and go about changing them or letting them go if that's what I want to do.

One of the most amazing things for me to discover, when I first sat down and began to meditate back in my teens, was that I was thinking all. the. time. I also thought that the point of meditating was to get your brain to stop thinking, and when I couldn't do it, I figured that meditating just wasn't for me and stopped doing it. This was untrue. All of those thoughts that I was having were the means through which I could acquire some awareness and insight into what I thought, how often I thought, and what happened if I shifted my focus. I started to investigate whether all of my thoughts were useful and were working for me, or if there were some thoughts that I could do without. Were there thoughts that were more persistent than others? Were there ones I didn't want to let go of because I enjoyed the emotional state into which they seemed to place me? Yes and yes. Part of meditation is experiencing the thoughts and their associated emotional states thoroughly, without getting stuck in the feelings or caught up in the thoughts, or mistaking it all for meaning something other than me being a person with a brain, and that my brain was just doing what it had learned to do over the years.

Through the process of meditation, I've learned that my thoughts have power. I've witnessed firsthand in myself how quickly I can get caught up in a spiral of negativity by thinking about situations in my life and drawing conclusions about how I have to act because of them. If I'm getting ready to do something new in my life, maybe I have thoughts like, 'I can't do this,' which cause me to feel afraid, or 'This is something I can learn,' which causes me to feel confident.

I have also learned that my thoughts are not all powerful, and am at the very beginning of understanding that my thoughts do not make me who I am as a person. I can think many things about myself, but the content of those thoughts isn't me, and not even the grouping together of those thoughts is 'me'. The part of me that's aware of what I'm thinking is as much 'me' as the thinking is, maybe even more so.

As I restarted my regular meditation practice a year and a half ago, I was initially unimpressed. I'm just sitting here and wasting time, I thought. I noticed I was thinking, and just watched the thought, feeling the restlessness and impatience that came with the thought, and it went away. Then it came back. It kept doing this for a week or two, every time I went to sit. Then something interesting started to happen in my day-to-day life. I noticed that I was going into situations that had previously been highly stressful and overwhelming but was no longer reacting so quickly to what was going on. I noticed how I was relating to challenging situations with a more balanced perspective. Joyful situations brought delight, but also the awareness that it would also pass. I noticed during meditation that I was sustaining chunks of time where I was not thinking...and then realize that I was thinking again. I began to feel calmer and more peaceful during the day as I kept this place of stillness in my life, this place where I could practice noticing thoughts and letting them move on through once I'd brought my full acceptance to them.

A few months ago, I decided to add a meditation session in the morning to my practice, and have learned a great deal about how old habits of negative thinking like to try to weasel their way in as early in the day as possible and take over. When I sit with them in silence, not judging them, not resisting them, but just realizing that brains are like computers and need to be re-programmed with new thoughts when an old program no longer works, I can become aware of the thoughts and then work on changing the ones that no longer serve a useful purpose. It is a process. It's not magic. But it brings me a great sense of calm, stability, and peace of mind that was not part of my life a few years ago.

So if there's anyone reading this, thinking they want to meditate but that they just can't because they think too much or don't have enough time, I encourage you to take 10 minutes a day (or whatever you can handle), sit down, and try it. Don't let the thinking stop you, because it's the thinking that will help you to learn how to meditate. From there, a new relationship to your thoughts, feelings, and life experience can form.

Taking Yourself Seriously. Or Not.

Making New Choices

The thing about teaching independent living skills is that, once the kid has the skills, they have a choice. If the kids never learn the skills, they don't have a choice. --My supervisor

If you're run by your mind, although you have no choice, you will still suffer the consequences of your unconsciousness, and you will create further suffering. You will bear the burden of fear, conflict, problems, and pain. The suffering thus created will therefore force you out of your unconscious state. --Eckhart Tolle

I heard the first of these quotes during day two of our two day start-of-the-year staff meeting and annual hazing ritual at work a few weeks ago. It was the end of the day, and the group was discussing the importance of independent living skills, especially for high school students with visual impairment. I won't say that I wasn't paying attention, but I will say that it was 2:45 in the afternoon and visions of lattes were dancing in my head when I heard my supervisor speak in such a way as to send me reeling out of my Whatever-Generation stupor. Hey, I realized, as my thoughts abruptly shifted from Grande Iced Caramel Macchiato-land, that's true, and not only for blind kids!

The second quote was channeled directly into my brain from Eckhart Tolle himself less than 24 hours later.

I'm kidding about this, of course, although I continue to marvel at how iPod earbuds feed sound into my ears in such a way as to occasionally confuse me into thinking that the contents of books such as The Power of Now are arising from my own brain. I will confess that I am loathe to jump aboard the Eckhart Tolle bandwagon on principle. I'm the kind of person who resisted Harry Potter forever, who didn't watch The West Wing until the series was over, who has never seen Pulp Fiction or Forrest Gump, except for maybe a few minutes here or there. I don't have cable television and I generally don't pick up the home phone (this means you can stop calling now, people who want my money). On one fateful day, however, I got curious, started listening, and found myself struck by much of what Tolle says, especially what he says about the concept of choice and how it relates to spiritual growth.

A lot of modern-day spiritual paths, especially those with something of a New Age or New Thought slant, examine how changing one's life for the better occurs through the knowledge and understanding that choosing one behavior over another is a matter of simply making a different choice, the idea being that a person's life can completely transform if they start to make different choices. We might be able to see very clearly that someone else we know and care about seems compelled to behave in a way that makes little sense to us. We may try to talk some sense into that person, try to get him or her to see it our way, and convince that person that they have a CHOICE, and if only they would decide to MAKE that choice, they would be able to lead a life filled with joy, peace, rainbows, and butterflies. We might also look at ourselves and doubt that we can change the fact that we're so judgmental, or that we just don't care about anything. We may wonder why the hell it's taking so damned long for us to notice the areas of our lives where we do not feel like we have choices and to see what new choices we could possibly make.

The problem with these ways of thinking, which I think both my supervisor and Eckhart Tolle allude to nicely, is that people are inclined to learn when they are children. It is second nature, and it is how they are able to grow so quickly and remember new information so well. If you have somehow learn along the way that you do not have a choice about something in your life, either through lack of exposure or active disapproval, you eventually come to firmly believe that you do NOT have a choice. As an adult, once this learning is ingrained, it takes some time to recognize that we have more opportunities for choice than we may have thought, and it takes more time to practice making the new choice.

I think this is all helpful to remember when dealing with the issue of making new choices in life. We're fighting old patterns of behavior and old conditioning, and it takes time to notice that, accept that, let go of that, and acquaint ourselves with a new way of being.

By treating ourselves with kindness for our perceived shortcomings and failures through all of this, we can gradually help this learning process along by making it all right to try something new, fail at it, keep trying, and move forward into a way of life we may have always longed for but haven't really thought could be possible.

Throwing Paint on Walls, and Other Creative Pursuits

Are you artistically inclined? Do you wish you were, but can't draw a straight line to save your life? Do you think that creativity is for people with loads of leisure time? It's my opinion that people can't really afford to avoid creative expression, regardless of how uncreative they may assume themselves to be. It is such a pleasure and a joy to get creative, and helps those of us who are inclined to stick around in our heads too much to shift out of that and loosen up a little.

I had decided that I wasn't really the artistic type up until about three years ago. I was decent at music, having played trombone since fifth grade and having participated in a variety of bands and ensembles. I knew that writing was a strength. For the short time that I was involved in the professional ballroom dance world, I expressed my creativity through movement. From time to time, I would even put together a scrapbook, but generally only did it for people who I was completely certain would not laugh at my use of fluorescent colors with light-reflecting stickers (I cannot help but think that my students with Cortical Visual Impairment would have a field day). Yet I didn't think of myself as particularly creative.

So when I stood in the middle of Michael's one day, wondering what on earth I could possibly do for a new project, I had the most peculiar impulse to buy a bunch of painting supplies. I got the cheapest oil paints I could find, some canvas, and the cheapest bunch of brushes. I figured that going cheap would make the purchase hurt less if I later decided that I wasn't that interested. Also, I was certain it was going to look like crap, and at the time, I couldn't see how I could possibly value a painting if it was going to look like crap in the end.

I found out later that oil paint takes an eternity to dry, but no bother. I had completed my first painting! I had managed to get completely lost in a creative activity for the first time in quite awhile, and it turned out that losing myself was beneficial, because the painting was beautiful. I think that this first painting is still my favorite.

Nowadays, I continue to paint when the mood strikes. Yet I also find it extremely soothing to paint when I am going through a stressful time or grappling with an issue that just won't let go.

Since I finally own my own house, I'm delighted by the prospect of painting the walls however I want to paint them. There is the possibility that Josh might veto paintings featuring monsters or other scary creatures, but he was excited to hear that I wanted to take each wall of our kitchen island and paint a different picture for each season.

Summer was inspired one evening not too long ago by an issue that just wouldn't let go. I put on some music, turned on the very cool decorative lights that line the edge of the kitchen island, and went to work. Several hours later, I had summer on my wall for year-round enjoyment.


A few days later, the weather had changed, and I was struck with an inspiration to paint for autumn. The leaf in the foreground was saved from last year's painting because the spouse really liked it. The rest of the painting is far superior to last year's, probably because I was just having a good time and not caring whether or not it looked crappy.

Creativity is so crucial in helping us all to shift our perspectives on life, especially when we can let go of the fruits of our creative energy as being something upon which to base our worth, success, or status. If we have something that we can pour creative energy into -- music, writing, sports, dance, art, theater, dress-up with the kids, building tree forts, whatever -- it can shake us back into the sense of wonder and delight that we had as kids when we got ourselves truly immersed in play.

Off the Hook

The first few days of school this year have been filled with hectic pacing, meetings, scheduling, paperwork, challenging phone calls, difficult e-mails, and driving. Through the day-to-day reality of working in school districts, tension and anger have been creeping back into my life baring giant yellow teeth and smelly demon breath. I find myself back in old habits and patterns of thought, yet more deeply aware to them and present to them as I feel them inviting me to further release my grip on them.
I'd really like to write this post in a way that will meet everyone's approval so that I can look really good, really wise, really enlightened, really spiritual. It's not gonna happen. The truth is that I do great work of trying to shut certain feelings out of my conscious awareness with active resistance. I'm finding the process of getting the fact that separating from my felt experience of life from the rest of life gets me nowhere to be a really, really, reeeally slow one. Sometimes my feelings are overpowering in their negativity. Other times, I feel overcome with neediness and the longing for someone else to notice what I do. One moment, I'm singing along to David Bowie, the next minute I've flipped off and cursed out someone who's gradually easing their way in front of my car for the fifteenth time that day. In my attempts to grow and learn spiritually, I am sometimes harder on myself than anyone I know. I try to master it and get it right in the same way I used to practice times tables or shooting on goal or pulling off vibrato on the trombone that doesn't sound like a seizing elephant. I rarely let myself off the hook in the way that I do for others, and then I wonder what I am so angry about. I marvel at people who claim not to judge themselves. I figure they're either lying, oblivious, or nuts. I imagine that I would feel blissful if I were one of those lucky souls.

Since I've had an empty house this evening, I've been able to work with the tension and anger I feel around being in a helping profession where I sometimes feel like I'm helping absolutely nobody. How can I be supportive and helpful to others if I treat others as though they were more precious than gold, while discounting and dismissing my own value as a human being in the process? The answer I came up with this evening (like all the other times I've explored this) is that I simply can't. Maybe I can instead treat myself with just a little more kindness with my next thought, with maybe just a touch more compassion. Maybe I can accept that the transition into a new school year after summer vacation, minor as it may be, is still a transition and requires acceptance and surrender.

Plunking myself down in a chair in the living room, I wonder, now what the hell do I do? I glance out the window, where I can see the sun beginning to set over the hills in the distance. The birds are chirping and a cool breeze blows in through the open windows. One cat creeps delicately by my feet and jumps soundlessly into the window; another curls himself up at my feet. As the leaves rustle and the wind chimes ring, I find myself grateful for the beauty around me in the moment. While I'm not exactly happy or energized, a little wisp of peace rises in my heart. For right now, that's plenty good enough.

The Ocean!

--> Singing to an ocean, I can hear the ocean's roar.Play for free, play for me and play a whole lot more.Singing about the good things and the sun that lights the day.
I used to sing on the mountains, has the ocean lost its way.

--Led Zeppelin

The Spouse and I headed down to Misquamicut for our annual day-at-the-beach last Sunday. It's a pity we don't get to the ocean more often, living as close to the coast as we do. After driving and being pleasantly surprised at the lack of traffic, we got within 2 miles of the coast and were rudely awakened by the reality of end-of-summer beach traffic. Since The Spouse  loathes waiting in a non-moving vehicle and I loathe waiting in a non-moving vehicle with people who loathe waiting in non-moving vehicles, we decided for the sake of continued marital bliss that he should walk to the beach while I sought parking.

Once my fine luxury automobile (look, after having driven a 1992 Buick Century for most of my adult life, a Honda Civic is a luxury vehicle) was safely docked in some parking spot a zillion miles away from the bathhouse, I proceeded to track down His Spouseliness. He awaited my arrival in all of his sun-weary excitement at a picnic table. We headed down to what was supposed to be the beach but, due to high tide, a hot day, and it being the last beach-able weekend before the start of the school year, we were instead met with a gigantic people carpet.

Eventually we found a patch of sand maybe about 8x8 feet and planted our stuff. We didn’t fret too much about the insane numbers of people because, well, we were at the BEACH, baby! Yeah! There was pasty-bodied fist-pumping, followed by the two of us trotting eagerly (not running – way too crowded) to the water.

I got to the water and was met with…fear? I sighed and, yes, it’s true, I rolled my eyes with impatience at my own reluctance to ride the waves. Was this particularly compassionate? No, of course not. But I had come to have fun, not to watch The Spouse dive under 300-foot high surf and squint into the sun without my eyeglasses (basically rendering me temporarily blind) until I spotted him again. Since his hair these days is reminiscent of Fabio, it was easier than I would have expected. Men with long blond hair are sorely lacking in New England, and the particular dude with whom I keep company was gleefully frolicking in the surf as I dealt briefly with my inner worrywart.

Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely LOVE the ocean. I could body surf for the rest of my life if it weren’t for my day job and the fact that lousy surf happens. We had come on a perfect kind of day. Well, I mean, aside from the riptides, the intense undertow, and the waves, which seemed a lot bigger and more intimidating than I remembered them being. The lifeguard kept blowing his whistle. The kayakers kept yelling at people to move back toward shore. I wondered if there were going to be lots of jellyfish. I thought about several bad experiences I’ve had, and all of them have involved the following two things:

1. Being in a body of water.

2. Panic.

Even with these thoughts, it didn’t take me long to get into the water, and it’s because I kept on thinking of all of those metaphors about life that have to do with waves. You know, things like, “Life is like being in an ocean. You just have to let the waves take you where they’re going to take you.” Or whatever. I figured it would be an entertaining way to pass the time to see if I could just let the waves take me wherever they were going to take me.

The other thing that helped was dropping the judgment and totally letting myself be afraid. Once that happened, I had the freedom and space inside of me to realize that I was creating worry and fear. I could feel myself being afraid, just for the sake of being afraid. It was abundantly clear that my mind was just trying to come up with a reason to be afraid. I remembered that, even though I’ve had bad experiences in the water in the past, I can swim now, and I’m even a fairly strong swimmer. I have more confidence in my swimming than I have ever had in my life. I’ve made many beach trips in my day, rode many waves, and lived to tell the tale. I knew that this was just an old habit of fearing everything worth doing that was trying to take the reins, wanting to keep me protected from experiencing new bad experiences in the water.

I feel pretty ridiculous talking about my brief hesitation before getting in the ocean. Yet I realize that it’s the brief moments of hesitation where I have a choice to either act out of my fear and old habits or to continue on with what it is that I originally wanted to do. I noticed that I had a total ball on the waves once I recognized that there was fear, and then was free to make a choice regarding what to do about it. Did I want it to overtake me, or did I want to ride the waves anyway? When I made the choice to go in, the fear quickly transformed itself into the pure bliss and excitement of flying toward shore on the top of a wave while slamming your thighs together so that the bottom of your bathing suit doesn’t disappear.

Of course, the waves had to test me a little bit. At one point, one of them totally bitch-slapped me on the back. That kind of hurt. I slapped it back, and then we were on okay terms. Another one tried to separate my lower body from my upper body, but I just did my Superman pose and I was fine.

So. Waves. Get in the ocean and ride them! And if they’re too big, just dive underneath them. If only all of life were so simple.

Acceptance, Resistance, and Judgment

I was having a conversation with a friend not too long ago and she mentioned something about how she liked talking with me because I was non-judgmental. It was high praise. As I suspect is the case for others, we rarely judge others as much as we judge ourselves, and when it comes to myself and my own perceived shortcomings, I am perhaps the harshest judge of all. With the passing of time, I find a little more compassion for myself, a little more willingness to drop something I've been telling myself for many years that I could have sworn was the truth but that my life experiences are showing me is not as true as I thought.

Earlier today, I thought about this as I drank tea and attempted to find something funny to watch on Netflix. I was thinking about the stuff I have to do to get ready for the school year, my concerns about being off on my triathlon training schedule, the trash needing to be taken out, the weather, and my slightly lower-than-normal energy level over the past few days. I wondered if I was at the very start of becoming sick, since there has been some kind of virus going around. My inner sense was that the low energy had to do with my body dealing with something and not quite falling over into full-blown illness. Then I wondered if I was just playing a game with myself and trying to get out of doing stuff that I haven't been feeling super psyched about doing lately. The reason I'm not feeling super psyched is because I've been feeling low on energy. It's fabulously circular reasoning, and until I wrote it out just now, I didn't realize it.

Something else that's going on beyond this surface level of thinking is that I have a tendency to become judgmental of myself when my energy drops. It took me a long time to be aware of what's going on when my energy drops. I started to notice that I would see the energy drop, and then I'd get curious about the drop and an answer would come to me. It's usually something like 'you're getting sick' or 'you've been staying up until 3 am the last four days' or 'you did just run five miles'. At this point, one of two things happens. Either I am able to accept what is going on and deal with it from there, or I start to resist it. In today's situation, the judgment hit as soon as I started resisting that I wasn't feeling well in the form of, 'you're just trying to get out of doing stuff that you have to do, and if you don't do it, it means you're failing at everything you're doing.'

Once I start resisting the way an experience is for me, things go downhill quickly. If I'm getting sick and I don't want to be sick, it takes me no time to start judging myself and berating myself in an attempt to rally and motivate myself into doing stuff even when I'm not feeling well and know that the best thing to do to care for myself is to just chill out. Sometimes the judging shows up when I'm taking a big ol' leap out of the status quo and trying to change something that is important to me and matters in my life. Over and over again, I find that the best thing to do in these situations is to let go of the judgments and the resistance. This lets me just be with however I'm feeling in a place of gentle acceptance.

Yeah. Not so easy to do. I know.

Part of the reason it's not so easy is if we're really good at judging ourselves and resisting ourselves, we might not even know we're doing it. The only way to deal with this, as far as I know, is to be willing to start noticing when we're judging ourselves, or to notice when we're feeling agitated, or when something is happening within our emotional or physical experience of ourselves that we just want to get the hell out and not come back. When we have the awareness, we have to just acknowledge that this is what is going on and not use it to beat ourselves up some more.

Another reason it's not so easy has to do with our understanding of what it means to accept something. Acceptance has nothing to do with rolling over and letting life batter you about while you submit resignedly to your fate. It has to do with being aware of what is happening in a situation and staying with it, without needing to change it right now and make it different right now. In order to accept difficult feelings or thoughts in a moment, it's helpful to realize that they all eventually pass, and when acceptance happens, a lot of the tension and struggle that surrounds something passes, too. If you resist that something is happening, you render yourself powerless to do anything to change it. Accepting something means that you are aware of it happening and that you are present with your felt experience of what is happening, rather than just observing it with intellectual distance.

So, as hard as it is to just kind of hang out and be generally non-productive without beating myself up for it, that's what I'm trying to do today. I can be all right with being tired. I can totally embrace the fact that I don't want to do something without getting caught up in the 'not wanting' part of it. The funny part is that, as I do just hang out and accept that I'm feeling resistant, or notice that I'm judging myself and handle it with a soft touch, it gets easier for me to treat myself with greater kindness. The judgment eases up, the resistance may or may not linger, and I find myself able to do what I absolutely must in that particular moment to care for myself.

My First Triathlon, Plus a Spiritual Triumph!

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“You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” –Eleanor Roosevelt

Triathlons? Wait, aren’t spiritual people supposed to be into yoga and tofu and deep breathing and meditation and snorting incense and chanting and floating away into Nirvana on magic carpets and…?

I used to think stuff like this and get discouraged about my lack of spiritual fortitude. Sometimes I still do. Sometimes I think to myself, “This is wacked out. I can’t possibly be spiritual! I live in a suburb! I drive a car! I’m more likely to show up at the gym than at the yoga studio! I occasionally drink Gatorade and eat bagels after I work out! I drool over Agent Mulder, and even more over Agent Scully! I get mad at my cats! I don’t volunteer for a soup kitchen! When I eat tofu, I usually deep fry it! When I float away into Nirvana, it’s usually because ‘In Bloom’ is playing on the radio! How the hell can I possibly be truly spiritual?” Then I get over it and come to my senses, because I do enjoy snorting incense from time to time.

When I come down from my full-scale freak-out, I’m able to notice that my spirituality has to do with the way that I relate to the world (or the universe, or the greater whole, or Spirit/God, or some combination) and to myself. It has to do with responding to a deep level of inner knowing or recognition that doesn’t really have to do with analyzing stuff to death, nor does it have to do with making a completely impulsive and hedonistic decision. Sometimes it just has to do with following a gentle nudging in a certain direction, then following another, then another, until you find that your world is a completely different experience than it was just a few short months ago and that you locate abilities and resources within that you either didn't know you had or forgot you had. This nudging happened for me. One day, I was running to help myself deal with fear, and the next thing I knew, I was crossing the finish line at my first triathlon. Believe me, this is something I thought would never happen.

Last summer, when I was dealing with the surprisingly intense, stubborn fear I had of traveling to another continent on my own, I began to run. I had always thought of running as a great exercise but had always loathed it. One day, the fear had gotten to be so big that all I wanted to do was to find a space in which I didn’t have to be afraid of anything. Running turned out to be perfect, because all I had to do was put one foot in front of the other and breathe. There wasn’t anything frightening about that, as far as I could tell.

It quickly turned out to be the easiest part of my day and led to a multitude of epiphanies, not the least of which was that I was quickly becoming healthier than I had been in a long time. Shortly after that, boredom struck, and I stumbled upon another epiphany – I’m more likely to maintain an exercise program when I have something to work toward. Preferably something that involves the potential for me to embarrass myself in front of other people, so that I HAVE to really, truly work at it. This led me to keep running during the winter so that I could train for my first 5K, which I ran in April.

My friend S heard that I’d done a 5K and she suggested that I do a triathlon. I think I told her I’d do it, but felt really non-committal about it. I decided that I would just train and decide later if I was actually going to do it. I trained. My motivation flagged. I got back on the wagon, because if I did decide to do the triathlon, I didn’t want to come in dead last. I got sick. I got back on the wagon. I bought goggles. I briefly revisited Bikram Yoga, which helped me to remember that there were far more challenging things than trying to breathe in the water. Four weeks before the triathlon, I got a message from my friend saying something about the triathlon and I thought, “Oh, I guess I’d better decide if I’m going to do this or not.” So I registered.

At the end of July, I got up at some God-awful hour with The Spouse, our resident sleep-camel, and headed 30 minutes south to participate in my first triathlon. I got into the water and thought I was going to die. I got on my bike and thought I was going to die. I ran and was sure I was going to die. Oddly enough, I crossed the finish line without meeting the guy with the oppressive black cloak and scythe, although I did meet The Spouse and my friend L, who had driven out from Western Massachusetts with pipe-cleaner triathletes to catch part of the race.

It wasn’t until several hours later, while The Spouse was in the grocery store getting lunch ingredients and I was quietly sitting in the car with the air conditioning that what had happened settled fully into my awareness.

I cry about almost anything, and I cried at that moment, because a few months ago I had completely doubted my ability to do something that I realized in retrospect that I had passionately wanted to do but feared I couldn’t do. Being a triathlete hadn’t been part of my self-concept, but now it was. I had thought of my triathlon training as spiritual in some respects, but I hadn’t realized how much it was about me forming a relationship with parts of myself I had forgotten were there and thought I had lost for good. I was able to rediscover my athleticism, my competitiveness, my self-discipline, and my ability to acknowledge and work through challenges to the other side. I noticed that I was bigger than I had thought, and I don’t mean my waistline.

Some might say it’s too bad I couldn’t relearn these things about myself in a less physically laborious way. To all of you – you have a point. But I did manage to do them without snorting incense, and that has its benefits.

Loneliness and Disconnection, or Being Part of the Whole

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Rather than take a far-away trip or fill my days with projects and activities during the month of August, I decided to deliberately leave things unstructured this year. As a result, I’ve had a lot of opportunities to learn about loneliness and that adrift, disconnected feeling that can sometimes arise for a person who is spending a lot of time in his or her own company without others. Even when I’m not on vacation, I suspect that I find myself in solitude more often than the average person and this lends itself to presenting opportunities to see this disconnectedness arise. For work, I am alone in the car or in my home office, sometimes for several hours a day. At home, I am often alone for several hours after the end of my school day. Only recently have I begun to really start to see the blessings that arise from allowing myself to be lonely or to feel a sense of disconnection, rather than trying to avoid the feeling or distract myself from it.

A few weeks ago, I decided to experiment with being conscious of these feelings as they came up throughout the day, to bring my focused attention to noticing when I was feeling lonely or disconnected and letting myself lean into it. I would not exactly describe this as fun, but I’m kind of hardcore about my spiritual growth. I discovered that I felt these feelings on many occasions throughout the day, yet it wasn’t as intolerable to manage and deal with as I had thought. In fact, as I acknowledged to myself what I was feeling, as I named it and treated myself with kindness and generosity when I was feeling that way rather than trying to pretend I didn’t feel that way, I slowly started to glimpse a bit of freedom.

I think there are two truths about separateness from and connection with others: one is that I am inextricably connected to others, and what I do has some kind of influence on others, which impacts others, and so on. If you’ve ever had someone show you an unexpected kindness that has altered the course of your day, you know what I’m talking about. The other truth is that we are unquestionably separate from one another since we are in separate bodies. Of course we are going to be lonely and feel disconnected sometimes! How could we not be, with each of us housed in a separate physical body that has a specific biology, with completely different life experiences than those of anyone else?

The part about freedom comes in from knowing and accepting that we are, indeed, separate here in the ‘real world’ or the physical world: I am somehow not like others, or I am separate from them, and this can be lonely. Realizing and accepting this is what ultimately gives me the freedom to express the uniqueness that I may happen to carry. Loneliness and the sense of disconnection that comes with it teaches us about our separateness and how we can honor and act on the stuff within us that is unique and, on the surface, may be separate from the greater whole. It shows us how we can care about ourselves and we can be brave and courageous on our own behalf, and how the benefits of that extend beyond us, helping others to become more of who they deeply are.

When I fully embrace my loneliness and don’t automatically try to fill it up right away with people, activities, or distractions, it creates a space for me to be able to see myself as the person I am. Embracing this willingness to be separate by relaxing with myself and not being like others as a way to try to win their approval allows me to take my rightful place as an individual person on this planet, which paradoxically helps me to fit right in as a part of the greater whole. When I can honor and see my separateness and disconnection, it helps me to see the ways in which I am the same as others and the ways in which I am connected to them. I can then come to know myself more as a whole person, who sometimes happens to be solitary and sometimes happens to be connected with others, while being both solitary and connected with others at the same time.

I am beginning to think that feelings of connection, community, commonality, and solidarity with others just can’t exist without the experience of feelings of separateness, loneliness, and disconnection. How can someone know what it means to be connected and part of a community if they haven’t had the experience of disconnection and separateness? It can be easy to try to cast loneliness aside because it seems, on the face of it, like just another difficult feeling that we don’t really want to have to deal with. Yet like any other feeling, loneliness and disconnection have a lot to teach us about how we are a part of the greater whole. For me, this takes willingness to open to the feelings, cultivate kindness and friendliness toward myself, and allow them to take me deeper into my own experience of self.

Playing with Rocks and Dirt

A few weeks ago, The Spouse decided that the most important outdoor project to get out of the way this year was rebuilding the retaining wall that lines our driveway, since the wall wasn't exactly retaining anything anymore. I had promised him I would help, and I did. I took down exactly two rocks and I placed exactly two rocks, arbitrarily deciding that this constituted 'helping'. I may have thrown a shovelful or two of dirt, as well. Luckily for me, Josh was amused. He successfully managed to complete the wall in a weekend, and I think it came out nicely.

The Spouse has a bit more of an artist in him than I think he gives himself credit for. This artistry comes out not only in his voice, but in some of the interesting ways he works with our unusual backyard. (For those of you who are uninformed, his singing ability earned him the nickname "Sexy [The Spouse]" in college.) Given the high prices of fresh produce and dining out, we are desperately longing for a successful garden. We want a garden so badly that he is willing to dig out the top of a giant rock to place one, and he is working on creating a terraced garden for the second year in a row. It's a good thing he has the skills and willingness to work in the yard, as his semi-recurring reluctance to pick up dishes and place them in the sink can be infuriating.


While The Spouse is busy swinging a crowbar about on the top of our hill like an enraged Yeti, I'm down below in the yard, under a tree (where it's safe), spreading mulch around. I first stumbled across the therapeutic benefits of mulch-spreading last spring, when I was in the throes of finishing my Master's Capstone Portfolio and needed to do something that didn't involve sitting at a desk or driving somewhere. This year, I've emptied a few bags of red mulch under our pine in the backyard, and some less-red red mulch in our backyard beds around our flowers and ground cover. I love how it looks, and I think we are extraordinarily blessed that the landscaping in this yard maintains itself with so little of our effort. I'm so grateful for the fact that we have such a beautiful patch of land on which to enjoy our springs and summers.

She Swims. She Rides. She Runs. She Collapses.

For those of you who follow me on Facebook, you know that I recently completed my first 5K run and that I am in my first week of training for my first triathlon. A friend of mine told me that she did her first triathlon last year and loved it, and I was inspired. The triathlon I'm planning to complete is SheROX, an all-women's sprint triathlon that's happening nearby at the end of July. The good news is that starting this training has shown me that I'm in much better shape than I thought, indicating that all of the sporadic trips to the gym I've made over the past year have paid off in ways I couldn't have anticipated. However, I've learned a few things already about myself and about how I might approach my training, and I thought I would share them for the amusement of the general public.

How to Complete a 0.5 Mile Swim If You Don't Like Getting Your Face Wet.

I'm not sure why I didn't think about this sooner, but I don't like having my face wet. Something about not being able to breathe. I am not a natural swimmer. I didn't learn to swim adequately until I was 10 years old. The last time I attempted to dive, I was 13, and injured my back going in and was convinced for a few seconds that I could not move my legs. That ended diving for me. A few years ago, I took whitewater kayaking lessons over one weekend. I spent way more time in the water than I did in my boat. When I got out of the pool on Monday -- the first time I've done any serious swimming in, oh, 15 years -- I laughed aloud. I have no trouble staying afloat, propelling myself through the water, or completing strokes. In fact, I was able to maintain non-stop swimming for 20 minutes today. However, the not-wanting-to-get-my-face-wet thing is a little bit of an issue. I did a lot of sidestroke and backstroke, and I'm not sure how well this is going to serve me on an open water course. I am seriously considering getting someone to coach me for a few lessons to help me get comfortable with having my face in the water and to help me practice breathing. If all else fails, I have the sidestroke and backstroke, and I rock at floating.

I hear that goggles are a must. I'm totally on board with that, but I wonder if it would be too much to ask to swim in a waterless pool?

Biker Butt
Bike training is going okay so far. I have managed to surprise myself on my indoor bike, covering 4 miles today in 15 minutes. However, I'm quickly realizing that training on an indoor stationary bike isn't going to work for long. First of all, there are no downhills on which to coast. Second of all, I can set the bike to change resistance at random, but it's a very different experience than trying to ride up a hill in real life. Finally, stationary bikes are way more unpleasant for me to sit upon than regular bikes. Upon reflection, I'm realizing that I will need padded shorts for biking, but this concerns me because it seems like a slippery slope from padded shorts to padded cell.

On The Run
Since I just completed that 5K, I'm feeling pretty optimistic about the run, which will be a little less than 5K for the triathlon. I think it will be my easiest event, but ask me in four months because I may change my mind. Oddly, I find that I really like how my legs feel when I get off the bike and start to run. I swear I can feel my quadriceps bulk up. It makes me feel like the next incarnation of She-Ra.

Tri, Tri, Tri Some More
All of this stuff to learn! Once I officially sign up, I just may decide to request a mentor. It would be nice to meet someone who has done this before and get a few pointers.

But I'm On Vacation!

This week is school vacation week, but instead of hanging out on my back porch for hours on end, staring at the water that sometimes trickles off of what The Spouse and I refer to as our 'giant rock,' drinking tea, and reading one of the several books that I'm attempting to make progress on, I have instead found myself contending with job-related legal paperwork that must be dealt with this week, the fact that the bathroom needs cleaning, the kitchen needs cleaning, the floor needs vacuuming, and a few mice have made themselves all too welcome within our home.

While my brain understands that this is just part of life, I can't help but find myself annoyed.

There. I said it.

I stood in the trash can aisle at Target for way too long this afternoon, trying to decide on what cleaning products to buy, as well as whether or not to spend what I felt was a rather steep amount of money on trash cans with lids. I am tired of seeing and smelling the open trash can in the kitchen, I'm sure it's contributing to the mouse issue, and I've wanted one for a long time. I checked the price: $40.00. For a trash can? Sheesh. The New England miser in me came up, thinking about all of the other things I could spend $40.00 on. I found myself debating in the aisle about whether or not to buy the trash can. Would Josh be annoyed about this? Would I be annoyed if I didn't get the trash can? I paced back and forth. I looked for less expensive options, but could not find what I wanted. I sighed. I felt myself grow even more tense and agitated than I already was. I tried hard not to feel that way. I asked myself, rather unkindly, what is your problem? This is just a trash can.

As I lugged the trash can into my shopping cart under the watchful eyes of the nearby security guard, who probably thought I was some kind of lunatic (a person muttering to oneself for ten minutes in the trash can aisle at Target could be disturbing to some), it became clear that my irritation wasn't about the trash can. It couldn't have been, since it's been steadily growing since Saturday night, when I was notified by mail that I had urgent legal matters to attend to for work. The key was in what I thought in response to my own self-inquiry:

But I'm on VACATION! I shouldn't have to deal with this crap! My vacation is ruined!
All of a sudden, everything made sense. Of course I was angry! I kept on telling myself that all the stuff I was doing this week that I didn't really want to be doing was ruining my vacation! Instead of just letting myself be irritated and accept that this was what I had to do, I instead tried to get things done as quickly as possible, to make them all go away and to allow me to get back to what I really wanted to be doing with my time. As often happens for me when life decides to teach me something new about myself and I'm not quite getting it, I found events outside of me conspiring to point me toward my anger. I found myself stuck in traffic, being cut off by other vehicles on the road, in line behind the person paying with all pennies, and the irritation grew as the thought kept cycling around in my head: this is ruining my vacation. I don't want to be doing this.

Once I gave myself permission to feel angry, irritated, and helpless, and fully move into it, I had the freedom to discover what I was thinking that led to the feeling. And once I knew what I was thinking, it was clear that it was my own thinking -- rather than the events happening outside of me, as inconvenient as they were -- that was causing me to act like a cute, fluffy bunny had just stabbed me in the back.

So I've decided to do something called 'dropping the story' or 'reframing.' I stop telling myself that my vacation is ruined, dropping my crappy, anger-inducing story. I decide to shift my focus to the good things coming out of this vacation week: dinner with friends one day, brunch with another friend, bowling, guacamole, chocolate chip cookies, a clean kitchen and bathroom. I tell myself that my vacation has been productive, that I've been able to do a few things I really enjoy, and I still have plenty of time left -- three whole days! -- to hang out on the back porch and watch the water trickle across the rocks. This feels like a better story. It certainly helps me feel less pissed off. And maybe I'm starting to feel like I'm on vacation after all.

Do Not Blog While Baking Chocolate Chip Cookies

I am on vacation this week, and I am making chocolate chip cookies AND guacamole. They are intended to be separate dishes, for those of you who are not culinarily inclined.

The thing with both chocolate chip cookies and guacamole, in my experience, is that they're both disappearing foods. That's why I make them only when The Spouse is not home. I've already taken care of at least two cookies and a few forks of guacamole on my own (under the guise of 'taste-testing' to make sure the food is acceptable), and I am hoping that we will be able to bring to the people we are visiting tonight before they are consumed.

My penchant for multi-tasking has gotten me into trouble this evening, however. The guacamole was fine; I managed to make it, and chill it, and not spill it or damage it because the process of peeling, chopping, and slicing limits one's ability to multitask skillfully. Most of the cookies came out just fine; right shape, right color, right smell. However, for the first time in history, I managed to burn TWO SHEETS of chocolate chip cookies!

Why? Because I was trying to think of a good way to start my new blog, and lost track of what I was doing. Now I've burned cookies, and as a result, I have a blog post.

I guess everything has its purpose. Even burned cookies.