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.

5.14.17 Such abiding beauty

Life. Such abiding beauty. 

As each of us awakens or struggles into our new day. 

As I find my way to let out the dog, get dressed, and, if for no other reason other than a minuscule sense of valiance, and the satisfaction of the push and the stretch, off I return to my workout place.

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5.14.17 All Mothers

 

     All mothers have their own litany of  experiences. Of their hopes and disappointments and heart rendings and heartbreaks and filled hearts. 
     Of the unending struggles and disappointments and ways they fell down on the job or made grave mistakes or kept persevering for the good of the kid or blew out their own health as they did. 
     When we have partners, sometimes we have with us someone who understands to a certain extent, sometimes someone who is willing to share the responsibility, sometimes someone who even shoulders it more than we do.
     When we are single mothers, we are going it alone. We are holding up the kid and our lives and our livelihood and more than half the sky.
     And our culture rains down upon us. Any unawareness of a populace simply exacerbates any assumptions or discriminations or obstructions.
     But the one thing I do know is that we are not alone. As humans, as people, and as mothers.
     In some manner, we are held and strengthened by all of those who went before us.
     In some manner, we are held and strengthened by those we do not know the world over, who are determined each day to wake up and make the best of things, and love their kid the best they can.
     In some manner, we each do the best we can, cleaving to ourselves, in the midst of everything, whether the kid is grown or not, living with ourselves with compassion.
     Slowly learning, over a lifetime, to treat ourselves with kindness and patience and profound respect. With forgiveness for that which we did not do well, or those that we harmed. With delight at what we manage each day.
     These are the ways of the wise ones, since the beginnings of time. These are the ways that we can live and breathe and be comforted by and held in greatest esteem with.

5.15.17 Even so

Even when your heart has been broken
it is not an end.

5.10.17 The Way Things Were

     When I was 23, I was spiraling out. I'd worked, while getting a degree, while doing volunteer work while drinking and smoking cigarettes, and having fun with a big tight group of friends. 

     I'd had a big car accident, and had to be moved by friends to a new place til I got better, and started working at a sometimes pretty tough youth center.
     I mean, by then I was a bit tough too, and not afraid of much, the way you are when you've been raised by foolishness and you are young and foolish. A lot of things had come together in my life so beautifully , and then slowly exploded apart. 
     Like a lot of young people, I kept things together just enough to do a good job at my job, wigging out wild in off time.
     This 18 year old started following me around, happening to arrive at work when fights were brewing, and intimidating them out. Showing up with a pack of cigarettes when I was just about out. Wiggling his self slowly into my life.
     He was from poor, and his mom didn't like me, though she was nice and kind to me. I kind of shrugged my shoulders, like, how do you expect me to fend him off? 
     My exes looked on, crabby at my fun and games. But I was a big mess. Wondered why the kid stuck to me like glue . Me. A bad news bear.
     But he did, and came along with everything I did. Too fast driving in rows of cars, passing each other, testing each other, throwing stuff between windows, screeching down dark country roads far into dark nights.
     One night a cop chased us, while we were screeching along in two cars, chasing and challenging each other. The kid got caught and I got away.
     So I circled back and stopped, got out, and told the cop it was all my fault. Back in the day when being a young female got you almost everything worthless like evading tickets, he just let us go wobbling down the road. 
     I would try to talk him into leaving off seeing me, not knowing yet the way that draws people to you.      He'd scrabble together all kinds of things I needed ,through connections, as he worked the way every single person worked in that neighborhood, through the catch-as-catch-can small jobs.
     There I was, from a waspy middle class life of misery, connected up with his family, living in poverty, with good hearts and honesty. 
     Eventually I began to get better. And as I did, our class differences spread and exploded between us. 
     No one ever knew how to help him in school. To make sure he did homework or understood material.       No one had been taught that from the beginning, succeeding at school needed as much home parent help as in school teacher help. So it was normal for kid after kid in that neighborhood to eventually get so behind, it became humiliating, and they'd just drop out. 
     Parents with crap pay or two jobs or poor health because of lousy no-money diets have a tough time learning these skills for the next generation.
     No one in his neighborhood was wired for college either. They couldn't finish high school, there was no money, how would there be college?
     I watched and learned this. I was wired for college. Even when I supported myself, I had the drive to keep going to college. I had been taught I could do it, would do it. I'd had tutors and some good teachers who stayed with me til I learned what I needed to. 
In those days there was enough financial aid to pay for your college.
     So I got better and took classes part time, enough to be accepted full time, and moved and got a new job, and got busy and that was that. 
      He was still around sometimes, his sweet tough self, but I was way busy. Slowly he built another life for himself.

     Last I heard from him, I was 9 months pregnant with my first kid, four years later. He called for a ride. He was in trouble.
     So my husband and I crawled the car through the darkness, lights off, round Lake Pleasant, where the cops were trolling for him. He crawled out of the bushes, into the back seat, and we drove up 91 through the night, and dropped him over the border into Vermont , to cool his jets for awhile. Gave him what I had in my wallet. Some apples , some cheese and bread. 
     I remember hugging him goodbye, my big big belly in the way, as he grinned at me and shook my husband's hand. 
     He never expected to manage or live long or be able to have things. 
I shook him hard by the shoulders a bit, glaring at him, no words, and I know we both understood.