5.13.17 Sometimes With Tough Stuff

     Sometimes when tough stuff is happening in our lives... internal tough stuff, or circumstantial tough stuff, we discover mindfulness and meditation out of necessity. We're looking for straws, for any port in a storm. We're struggling to sleep and have any chance of any moment of peace, and we're willing to give anything a chance.

     With mindfulness, whether we're tracking our inhale and exhale like someone treading water in a storm, or we're struggling to learn to imagine ourselves sitting by a steam, watching feelings and thoughts floating by, being perilously filled with the distress of those thoughts and feelings, and watching them recede, along with our distress, we often seek out these things in grave hopes we can feel better, if only for a bit.

     The funny thing is the way so many tools work, each a bit different, as we go round like he prince and the slipper, seeking out the foot that fits.

     Meditation and its increasing ease are cumulative, as is even the tiniest bit of stretchy exercise; we begin to wake better and sleep better and feel self congratulatory, if on a tough day, we still managed to do a little bit. 

     With mindfulness and EFT, the results are pretty immediate.

     With all of them, we gradually notice we are capable of controlling our thoughts. Amazing, huh? 

     The key is giving ourselves quality time to sit awarely with thoughts and feelings, identify them as such, and let them pass by. 

     In this way, they aren't building up, nor feared nor dreaded nor avoided. 

     They get to come out every day and be felt and heard. That is the key, and the big secret.

     And when we get good enough at it, we can search around for the skipped over moments that distressed us or reminded us of old distress, and rile. That we didn't even notice, but will mess with sleep and mood.

     But that's not even the coolest part.

     The coolest part is when you begin to make this part of your day, at first with little notes stuck around or reminders on your phone, so that you do it earlier in the day and not necessarily at a bad time, which certainly doesn't feel best. 

     But you get it cleared out and witnessed and settled down, so that when you go to bed and you're settling down into your subconscious material, it's up to you. You're more at ease. You have given good air time to those distresses.

     And then what happens, is that when something tough is happening in your life. Or a disagreement with someone or being very upset about something happening to you were in the world, you can give it airtime earlier in the day, and tell yourself, mentally or out loud, that after, say, 5 PM, it's not going to be something you think about. It's kind of like handling it, so that you give yourself time to have those thoughts and feelings, while identifying them clearly as a thought, or a feeling, and then you say to yourself "you know      I'm not going to obsess about this. That was just round me up and make me upset. I'm gonna do my Mindfulness with it, and then I'm not gonna think about it. And if it starts riling me up, I will do mindfulness with it again, let it settle, to have it be heard, in that organized fashion, and then I'm going to not think about it again. Till later, at a good time for me.

     Cool thing about supporting ourselves well enough with these tools is that then, we can have our cake and eat it too. 

     We can give ourselves time to a warily sit and let ourselves feel and think things, and then we can delineate the times in which we are not going to be wild up or distressed or have her sleep messed up or have thoughts go around around around and unproductive manners, and then that doesn't happen. 

     When you practice enough, you find that you were actually capable of enforcing that.

     Of course, the key is, that if you don't stretch your muscles and release your muscular tension and if you don't breathe deeply outside or inside somewhere to release stress, and if you don't do what you need to do to have a good enough sleep, and if you don't sit mindfully and let yourself have feelings and thoughts while identifying them, and if you don't spend some time meditating so that every part of you settles down for a little while, then you can't control your thoughts.

     Then they wreak havoc and then disturb your sleep and upset you and you keep thinking and thinking and it's not effective at all. It starts to impact your physiology and stress responses and immune function and it's all pretty lousy.

     I think the suffering helps most of all. Pretty funny, Ha? We'll do a whole lot of things to avoid suffering. I think the end result is really valuable.