Archives for the month of: March, 2013
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All Too Human

March 16, 2013 //
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I’m home sick today, plans cancelled, wrapped in comfy clothes and a bathrobe, unconcerned with much of anything besides being comfortable. It’s no dire illness. It isn’t terminal. It won’t be chronic or particularly prolonged, I’m sure. It’s really just a cold virus of some sort. Miserable, irritating, fatiguing, but it isn’t a crisis. It is, however, very human.  So here I sit, pretending I am still drinking my tasty mocha, but it went cold a while ago, and started to become ‘decor’, poised on the coffee table, reminding me how nice being loved feels when I am not feeling well, myself.

Yesterday was a good day, and I spent it working on things that matter to me, heart and soul, mind and body, and I didn’t write at all. By the time I got to thinking the sorts of thoughts that inspire me to write, it was late, I was clearly already ill, and sleep seemed the more rational, nurturing choice. I did get my hair cut, and it was an incredibly fun experience, as it turned out, and I love the new look. Funny what we hesitate to do over our fears and insecurities.  I’m a little glad I’m sick this morning, in one respect, it tended to temper  my first sight of my short hair ‘first thing in the morning’. lol. Oh my… I did not really think ahead to ‘morning hair’!  Yeah, I admit, that first look, first thing, was far more startling that having my hair cut short in the first place, and being ill kept me from taking it at all seriously.

I find myself bouncing between amusement and annoyance that it took me so long to be in a place to heal my heart. Pain sucks. Meditation practices and mindfulness practices have been around for thousands of years and are the basis of multiple cultures and philosophies, and yet, somehow I got to be 49 years old before ‘mindfulness’ became a word in my vocabulary, or a concept for living well that was within reach for me…one day I will be well and whole enough to contemplate the meaning of my life’s experiences, trauma and all, and have a sense of the value it all has, to who I am in my here and now. For now, I am content with making progress, with learning new practices that bring me more balance than I had before, more peace than I understood I could experience, and the gentle warmth of love and compassion for this amazing vessel I am wrapped in, this loving heart contained within it, and this rich life I am privileged to experience.

I hope your Saturday is a good one, and if it sucks, I hope that has something of value for you as days go by.

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Categories Healthy Living, Menopause, Mindfulness, Perspective, Relationships, Turning 50, Uncategorized, women

Troubleshooting My Connectivity

March 14, 2013 //
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“Thank you for calling technical support…”

Today I am contemplating all the times in my life I have endeavored, with limited success, to ‘troubleshoot my connectivity’ in relationships.  This year I finally recognized I was not sufficiently skilled, knowledgeable, or experienced with what makes connecting emotionally with another human being work, to successfully complete troubleshooting my challenges with building healthy relationships.  I certainly didn’t have the right tools to fix glitches, programming errors, or resolve the issues I have regularly found myself facing. This year I ‘called technical support’.

Before I say more about that, I’d like to say something about the way our choices in language, even grammar, can influence our thinking.  Consider the sentence “I learned X about relationship building.” It implies, fairly specifically, that the learning is completed, and in the past, and that something is now known – and tends to limit change and additional growth, by expressing the gained knowledge as a static thing. On the other hand, the sentence “I am learning X about relationship building.” equally clearly implies that learning is ongoing, making it subject to additional potential for change and growth. I rather like change and growth; it is taking me new and wonderful places in life. I am discontinuing the practice of referring to learning in the past tense, since I don’t think I can conclusively show that any one thing I have learned is truly static and unchanging (except, perhaps, Euclidean geometry, but even there – I just don’t know everything!). So, onward to the future, hopefully always learning.

So…I called technical support, metaphorically speaking, and got some help with ‘troubleshooting my connectivity’. I am learning some important things about healthy relationships, and building and sustaining close connected relationships. I am learning:

  • that mindful listening is not about preparing a reply, waiting for my turn to talk, or ‘getting a word in edgewise’. Mindful listening requires my entire devoted attention to the person talking, hearing their words, and giving my attention to understanding their full intended meaning.
  • that hearing words is different than listening, and often results in urgent replies, or interruptions that are not relevant to the key point being communicated. Listening is about meaning, and may require clarifying questions before a response to the communicated points is appropriate. ‘Communication’ is about the meaning, not the words.
  • that when I am immersed in my own emotional experience, and stray from being mindful-in-the-moment, I find it difficult to listen to someone else, to be compassionate, and to connect with them.  (That experience is not about whether or not they – or I – want to connect, but more whether or not we each allow and accept that connection.)
  • that compassionate observation of others’ experiences with connecting with each other is a valuable ‘blackboard’ at the front of the classroom of life, and as with any other classroom, in front of any other teacher, if I am passing notes or daydreaming I may miss something important – and every day of life is a learning experience, but every day is also a pop quiz – being mindful results in a much better experience. 😀

Thursday… and it was a short night, but I woke in a good place in spite of that. I’m feeling a bit under the weather, but my health through the winter has been good, so I guess I’m overdue for a sore throat. lol. It’s hardly worth mentioning, although if I end up quite ill, I probably won’t write for a couple days. It still looks to be a lovely day.

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Categories Anxiety, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Menopause, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, Turning 50, women

Taking Time

March 13, 2013 //
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I am taking time to enjoy today. It’s a good one. A good night’s sleep, a lovely morning of music, lattes, and great conversation, and now headed to see one of my dearest friends (and a woman of great character and heart). It’s the connections that make this such a wonderful experience. I feel like a child staring in wonder and fascination at something new and surprising. My face feels tugged by the persistent pull of an irrepressible smile.

It’s only Wednesday. Seems a good day to tell someone they matter…to share a heartfelt moment, to be vulnerable – and ready for wonderful things to happen, not merely prepared to endure the day. 🙂

Riding the train, listening to Dave Matthews telling me what he knows about love…I want to remember today, forever…

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Categories Allegories, Anxiety, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Menopause, Perspective, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, Turning 50

Artificial Light and Illumination

March 12, 2013 //
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Artificial Light and Illumination

Artificial Light and Illumination

I didn’t sleep last night.  Well, to be more accurate, I slept deeply for about 90 minutes, sometime after 3am and woke abruptly to the alarm in the middle of vaguely distressing dreams.  I just wasn’t falling asleep. This time it wasn’t my anxiety; hormones were the cause of my sleepless night. I’m content with at least having been able to rest comfortably much of the night, without stress or anxiety. That’s an improvement, but I’m tired this morning.  I am weary and struggling with the headache that accompanied me to work this morning.  The headache is hormones, probably, although once I am this fatigued I often have a headache, and I guess it doesn’t matter why my head hurts – it is what it is.  Something to be mindful of.

Today will definitely put new mindfulness practices to a test. Damn I don’t feel ready for a test on this subject! Hormones, fatigue, a headache…I feel irritable, run down, and alone in my experience – and I know that last bit is an illusion. Half the world is female. I am so not alone in this. lol.

Life is an amazing teacher. Lately I am paying much closer attention to the lessons. My everyday commitment to being a student of life and love has me contemplating compassion this morning and taking note of how much more difficult it is to feel compassion for an experience we simply don’t or can’t share, perhaps because it is outside our own experience. More than anything when I’m struggling with my hormones, I really want to be comforted, treated gently, and with compassion – or at least sympathy.  It’s surprisingly hard to come by.  Thinking about what I mean when I say these are things I want got me around to the practical bits: hugs, kisses, kind words, sympathetic humor, and consideration above and beyond the everyday…which got me thinking about a younger me, dealing with other women, and what a phenomenally smug and annoying little bitch I must have seemed!  At that time in my life, I just didn’t have the difficulty with PMS and my hormones that I would later in life (and do now).  I was not kind to women who did.  I wasn’t sympathetic.  It wasn’t part of my experience, therefore it likely wasn’t ‘that big a deal’.  How cruel and dismissive. How inconsiderate. How heartlessly rude. Well, I get mine now, Ladies.  Fair is fair.  This week I am studying a lesson on compassion, and learning to be compassionate for experiences I am not yet able to share or identify with, and learning to treat people suffering their own journey and choices with respect and consideration.

Hormones are hard sometimes. My thinking feels foggy and my emotions feel volatile. I feel irritable and reactive, and finding ‘the sweet spot’ in my experience and some balance and contentment is a challenge that actually requires repeated choices to ‘take a moment and just breathe’ to pull myself back to being mindfully in-the-moment.  It does seem to work, in spite of my troubling tendency to take small things personally.  My body feels uncomfortable. My head aches. I feel tired and run down. The physical pieces of the experience I’m having today make the emotional or cognitive pieces feel more difficult. Simple frustrations – like the free pedometer app on my smartphone mysteriously not working this morning – result in a higher than ordinary stress-response.  I have new things to do for that – and each time my frustration level begins to rise, or I start feeling angry or irritated with something specific, I take that moment to get re-centered and just breathe.  I want it to be more helpful that I know the emotions are hormonal, not ‘real’… but I still feel them. I really need hugs, or a back rub, or… intimacy and a feeling of connection.  I need to feel connected more than just about anything right now, and the hormones that make me feel that need so strongly are also why I don’t feel that way in the first place.  It sucks.

It’s only Tuesday – the week stretches ahead of me, as does life.  Hormones change, and change again. Time passes. In a few days this stress and discontent, this fatigue, even the headache, will all be gone and the world will feel new and I’ll laugh this off and feel wonderfully wrapped in the loving connection of home and hearth, of love and Love… but now doesn’t feel very good, in spite of it being quite a decent day.  I’ll be making choices to stay mindful, compassionate, and kind, in spite of my experience. There lies the difference, I think,  between ‘illumination’ and ‘artificial light’… the soft dawn of illumination lights my entire experience as I learn and grow, and the ‘artificial light’ is my gift to myself – my choices to turn away from the darkness, and choose a path with my will as I learn new skills and build healthier practices,  and it is our gift to each other – sharing what we learn along the our journey with other people.  We achieve illumination, perhaps, when those things become who we ‘really are’?

Enjoy Tuesday – it’s the only one this week. 😉

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Categories Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Menopause, Mindfulness, Perspective, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, Turning 50, women

Cherishing the Dawn

March 11, 2013 //
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I don’t actually have any appreciation for the weirdness that is ‘Daylight Savings Time’. It makes no sense at all to arbitrarily change the clock back and forth bi-annually…unless of course it makes sense to force people and systems to change-up routines thus, for no valuable purpose aside from change itself. lol. I feel for all the people who take prescription medications that are timing sensitive, or whose experience relies heavily on routine.  Those things matter, and those people have an experience to deal with making this adjustment. Having said that, it was interesting to watch the dawn unfold slowly as I walked to work, having gotten used to some daylight before I even head to work in the morning. The walk was a pleasant one and I listened to birds sing and wondered why it had seemed there were whole years of life I do not remember hearing birdsong…and I felt a soft excuse for rain begin to tease my skin with tiny droplets of mist as my journey reached its end.

It’s an interesting experience, life.  Practicing a more mindful approach to the experience of life is pretty interesting, itself.  Yesterday went sideways for a little while, but I managed to enjoy my own experience pretty well in spite of that, aside from a very human moment or two or real irritation and taking something more personally than had benefit. I got past the tough bit with considerably more ease than has been my experience in the past.  The mindfulness practices seem to take those apparent mountains of issues and stress that appear on the horizon some days and render them harmless potholes on the residential road of life, instead of sinkholes on my autobahn. lol. Taking things a little slower, and being compassionate with myself is feeling pretty good.  The day and weekend ended wonderfully well, in spite of the brief bit of… less-than-awesomeness. Time, compassion, and love, Love, and fun are great connection builders!

Just in case I was on the verge of being too complacent with my progress, Mother Nature showed her humorous side this morning and reset the menopause counter to zero. Cruel prank or life lesson? I guess that’s up to me. LOL

Happy Monday! Today, I’m not taking out my issues on other people; they’ve got their own to deal with…for now I have a surplus of smiles to share. 😀

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Categories Anxiety, Healthy Living, Menopause, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Relationships, Turning 50, women
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