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.