Archives for posts with tag: meditation
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Always Do Your Best

July 24, 2014 //
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It’s not a demand, really. “Always do your best” is the fourth of the Four Agreements. I keep coming back to it, however many learned tomes I immerse myself in, however many notes I take, or cross-references I make, however many relevant observations or light bulb moments come to me from hours of study, or therapy. I regularly find myself considering, again, the Four Agreements.  (My traveling partner had recommended The Four Agreements, a few weeks into our association, and before we were lovers. I often think of him with love when I am reading it.)

The basics, and a good starting point.

The basics, and a good starting point.

If I had truly mastered these, would I face so much struggle? Would I have hurt so much for so long? If they were nothing more than saccharine platitudes, would I find renewed relevance so frequently, or so often find myself thinking ‘yes, of course’ in contemplation of a missed opportunity to practice one or more of these simple ideas?

I have suggested, and shared, and gifted this small book so many times… As with anything else, there is a verb involved, and the will, choices, and actions of the individual. I think there is a relevant ‘old saying’… how about ‘you can lead a person to knowledge but you can’t make them think’? Oh that’s not it, is it? It’s ‘lead a horse to water…’, but not so very different, truly. 🙂 We don’t live each others lives, and ideally we don’t make each others choices, or undercut each others opportunities for growth; it’s nice to have help once in a while, but the life we live, the path we walk, the choices we choose belong to us alone. A person can read The Four Agreements as many times as they care to, and never benefit because they chose differently, or did not act on what they read. We have the amazing freedom to choose poorly, any time, to be short-sighted, to hold on to grievances, to struggle, to hold on to resentment; we choose who we are. We create our experience.

A rainy day flower. Beauty needs no excuse.

A rainy day flower. Beauty needs no excuse.

Yesterday, in spite of being ill, was a very pleasant day. It was a pleasant day in spite of one partner having to come home to work because construction noise in the office was so significant it was causing major stress. It was a pleasant day in spite of my traveling partner being very focused on preparing for the next trip away. It was pleasant in spite of the rain, and in spite of the headache. We made good choices, and treated each other well. Sure, I’d like not to be sick, but being sick did nothing to diminish the lovely day, yesterday.

Yesterday, maybe because I am ill, I also had a serious nightmare – terrifying enough to launch me from my bed, all my bed clothes in hand, body pillow clutched to me, cowering in the corner, against the back of the bedroom door when my nearest partner came to check on me, having heard the bang of my frightened self slam into the door, or the wall, whimpering. I don’t recall the dream now, only the sense of tremendous relief when my open eyes began to see, and I was safe in my room, my partner gently soothing my fear with tender touches, and soft words reminding me where I was in the moment, and that all was well.  As fatigued as I felt, it was hours before I could persuade myself to try sleep again, and strangely my bed just didn’t ‘feel right’ after that, until I woke this morning, quite comfortably and on time, a tad amused that I’d forgotten to set my alarm at all, and that it didn’t really matter.

There is a part of me that is curious what the nightmare was about. There is a wiser part of me who understands that doesn’t matter at all, and the kinder choice for my experience is to let it go.

What is 'enough'?

What is ‘enough’?

Today is a good day to listen well, really listen, without waiting to speak. Today is a good day to do my best, and understand with compassion that most people generally are doing their best, as well. Today is a good day to avoid making assumptions; assumptions are only stories we tell ourselves, and they have a lot of power to cause needless suffering. Today is a good day to ‘be impeccable’ with my words, using them well and with kindness, and understanding that clarity does not require callousness, or cruelty.

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Summer, The Big 5, Words

For Better, or Worse…

July 23, 2014 //
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…In sickness and in health…

Life's simple glory, complicated, simple, strange, wonderful, new or familiar; it matters every bit as much as it doesn't matter at all.

Life’s glory, complicated, simple, strange, wonderful, new or familiar; it matters every bit as much as it doesn’t matter at all.

This is a pretty fragile vessel I occupy. Backaches, tendonitis, headaches, sore feet, bumps, bruises, bad days, and…head colds; being human isn’t pain-free, convenient, or particularly easy some days. Today is one of those, and I do indeed have a head cold. Worse, I have a head cold on the handful of days that my traveling partner is visiting home. I have a cold instead of hugs and lovemaking, because I choose to take responsible steps to prevent the spread of illness, where I can. I find employment, generally, in call centers. It’s humble enough work for an analyst, and head colds go with the territory – in fact, I have numbers on that, and some trending. lol  Love isn’t hindered by a head cold, though, and I enjoy the companionship of my partner in spite of it.

Annoyingly enough, this is also an extraordinarily busy week at work; as much as I’d like to, taking the day off to be sick isn’t an option. From my perspective, neither is getting all my coworkers sick, however trivial the illness, so I am working from home today – for as long as I can bear to toil over numbers. Every choice we make matters, in some context or another, to our own experience, or to someone else’s. My sleep was disturbed and restless last night and I woke from some surreal dreaming meditation on this particular strange thought; it all matters so very much, and it’s so interconnected, I lose sight of how irrelevant and unimportant any one detail really is. Perspective, balance…and the strangeness of the observation that ‘the opposite of what you know is also true‘. Is it? Isn’t it? Certainly it is an idea, for me, that sparks contemplation on perspective.

What we face, what we turn away from; we choose the world we see.

What we face, what we turn away from; we choose the world we see.

I can focus on the head cold if I choose, certainly it tends to be in the forefront of my thoughts and awareness this morning, or I can choose to be aware, awake, and observant of other details. The taste of my coffee, the trickle of the aquarium in the stillness of dawn, behind me, the internal glow of being well-loved, the moody gray sky outside my window…being present and in the moment, for me, still involves choices; what do I attend to, and what do I turn away from? For a lot of my life, I have ‘turned away from’ myself, and anything else I could turn away from, that built on ancient pain. I didn’t understand that by ignoring myself and my own needs, by showing myself no compassion, by disregarding my hurts in life and treating myself callously I was teaching myself that this was an acceptable way to behave towards others, and that it was also acceptable for them to treat  me poorly. It set up a see-saw of emotional abuses over time, many of them self-inflicted through assumptions, thinking, and internal story-telling that have done a lot of damage to my relationships, and my own experience of life, and myself.

Lately, I am making it a point to treat myself well. I don’t mean lavishing myself with expensive trinkets, costly vacations, or inflating my ego; that doesn’t work for me, personally. I am learning better habits about treating my heart well, though, and studying the neuroscience of emotion, practicing nurturing behaviors, learning self-compassion…and the results are more valuable than sparkly jewels, by far.  As with meditation, there’s a verb involved and practicing requires actual practice. Having a head cold, I rather expected it would be pretty easy to treat myself well…but being human isn’t really different just because I am feeling ill, and the requirement to be aware, present, mindful, and making choices that meet my needs are over time still requires small, continuous acts of will. It is, admittedly, harder to care when I feel ill…but surely in that case it matters even more to make the effort?

We create beauty by seeing it, we create love by loving; so much of who we are is what we choose to be.

We create beauty by seeing it, we create love by loving; so much of who we are is what we choose to be.

So. Yeah. I have a head cold. I’ll try not to be cross or irritable. I’ll choose to treat myself and others well, in spite of feeling poorly. Today is a good day for choosing wisely. Today is a good day for kindness and consideration. Today is a good day to change the world.

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Summer, The Big 5, Words

Turn and Face the Strange

July 22, 2014 //
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It was wonderful to welcome a traveler home. I missed my partner while he was away. Interestingly, there was no real stress to it; I knew where he was, that he was safe and in the company of people who wish him well, and had I needed to reach him, I easily could have. “I need a chance to miss you once in awhile.”  He said it to me early in our relationship, and it resonated with me. We all need a chance to ‘miss each other’ now and then, perhaps…like a favorite food, or a favorite book, or a favorite movie; eventually it is necessary to do other things, if only for variety.

I like routine. I admit it. My life becomes emotionally and logistically incredibly chaotic without it, in part because of the TBI; it effects how my memory and thinking work. I work hard to build habits that care for me, that care for my environment, that keep things orderly and keep me ‘on time’; without them, I am all over the clock and all over the calendar without any particularly predictable result, and a lot of things just don’t get done.

On the other hand, creativity isn’t especially ‘routine’, and inspiration isn’t tied to a calendar event, and intimacy and connectedness don’t always follow through on an invitation. Routine can easily slip from ‘planned’ to ‘stale’. Routine can as easily halt growth as support it.  Change and choice and novel stimuli all contribute to being interesting, fun, engaging, and ‘having something to say’. Once again I am faced with a balancing act…

interrupted by an unexpected moment of clarity

interrupted by an unexpected moment of clarity

…And a poorly chosen metaphor. My consciousness is jarred by how often we dismiss what is important in our lives with a diminishing word. We express so much of our experience as ‘an act’, ‘a game’, ‘going through motions’, ‘measuring up’ or ‘checking a box’. How serious am I about who I am and what matters to me? Serious enough to be honest with myself? To be vulnerable with other people? Am I serious enough to look a coworker in the eyes and say “Actually, I’m having a terribly difficult time with life, these days, and I’m not sure I’m up to it” when that is what is true and real in the moment? If we can’t be honest with someone else, what supporting evidence is there that we are honest with ourselves? How honest are you with yourself about who you are, and where you are heading in life, and what you really want out of you? Every day.

Balance is a big deal for me, personally, and I’m suddenly irked with myself for allowing the trite figure of speech to diminish how important it actually is – in my own thinking! Words have immense power to guide us, and to mislead us. We quickly learn to continue to punish and hurt ourselves, furthering the damage done by others, through the use of language. It’s no wonder I still feel so much pain from events in the past; I continue to hurt myself through the use of language. Guilt, shame, social anxieties, fear, resentment, chronic anger, chronic frustration, a sense of being held down, held back, and diminished – all these things can be byproducts of the shitty way I sometimes treat myself…out of habit, having learned to do so from others who also treated me badly. I see it in others, too, and while it can be tempting to criticize or judge, or suffer the pain they inflict as intended; we’re all so incredibly human. Each doing what we think, in the moment, is ‘right’ or ‘good’ or ‘necessary’ or some other combination of still more words to justify the shitty way we’re treating that other human being. Very few people think of themselves as ‘the bad guy’, however heinous their actions.

What are your relationship values? Have you chosen them wisely? Do you practice them willfully? Can you state them in simple language? Are you ‘one of the good guys’ – or are you…not? If your relationships are generally contentious and unpleasant and fraught with anxiety, perhaps embracing and cultivating different values is something to consider? Choice. Change. It isn’t really likely you can control or change the behavior of another human being, unless they choose to allow it. Certainly you have no particular direct influence over their thinking, but no one out there has as much power over yours as you do. I’m just saying…make your choices for you.  Unhappy? Choose change, but choose it for you; you have no real right to force change on someone else.

Don’t forget Wheaton’s Law. “Don’t be a dick.”

Today is a good day to remember that other person over there is a human being, too, with all the rights I have myself. Today is a good day for kindness. Today is a good day to be who I am. Today is a good day to appreciate what I have to offer the world. Today is a good day to choose wisely. Today is a good day to change the world.

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Big 5, Words

An Entirely New Experience

July 21, 2014 //
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Here it is, another day. Another week. Another sequence of moments about to unfold, touched by choices, and circumstances, colored by coincidence and thinking. Today is an entirely new experience. It’s a lovely morning to contemplate that, it is a Monday.

I slept like hell last night. It hardly matters this morning; it has become routine during periods of prolonged wakefulness, to choose an appropriately comfortable supine pose, still in bed, and meditate. There’s no ‘goal’ and I’m not ‘trying to get back to sleep’, I’m simply taking advantage of the quiet night hours to meditate, because I’m awake, because it’s a quiet activity, because it feels good, because it creates a lovely state of relaxation. Sometimes the need is greater, and I sit up and take it quite seriously, meditating in that timeless time in the wee hours, before the alarm goes off. It’s a nice bonus that I am often able to return to sleep afterward. Meditation did nothing to help my sleep, when I tried meditation to help me sleep. Meditation has done a lot to help my sleep in general, now that I am not trying to make it improve my sleep. lol There is real insight somewhere in there.

It is enough this morning that the headache I woke with dissipated while I was meditating, and that I feel rested in spite of having relatively little sleep. ‘Enough’ is good with me; I am not looking for more than that.

Enough.

Enough.

On the subject of new experiences, I spent the weekend focused on study, self-work, contemplation, and yoga. I don’t have a clever portmanteau for it (like ‘stay-cation’ or something of that sort), but it was time I definitely needed after an emotionally difficult week. I am still learning how to take care of me, and a big piece of that is boundary setting, communicating limits, and honoring those boundaries and limits myself enough to remind others to honor them as well. It doesn’t come nearly as naturally to me as undercutting my needs and fostering resentment over time – I’m super good at those, but find they don’t suit my long-term needs, or build healthy relationships.

One choice. One change. One moment.

One choice. One change. One moment.

So…it’s back to work, another week, practical details, calendars, meetings, ‘getting it done’… I have a busy week ahead. I observe that I have both the experience of eagerness to get back to a job I love, as well as mild impatience – because what could be more important than investing my time in me? (Every Monday I face that dilemma, and wonder why our culture is not more advanced by now; we have the technology to provide greater leisure to all…why haven’t we done so? I’m good at being employed, but it isn’t what I want to be doing with my time, in general.)

I am eager, too, to welcome my traveling partner home. I haven’t had any particular stress over his absence, I guess because he doesn’t feel gone to me, aside from missing the experience of his touch. He needed some time away, and certainly I’ve benefited from that time myself. (He said something once about the value of an opportunity to miss each other, and I have observed the truth of it in my own experience.) Still, I enjoy the tales of travelers, the opportunity to sample something different from the experiences I’ve had myself, the newness and intimacy of the restored connection, the subtle differences in language brought home from faraway, and stories. I just love stories, and my partner is a good story-teller. I hope to listen well.

Something changed for me last week. It requires further consideration, acceptance, and understanding. Fewer words, less thinking, and more awareness seem useful on this one, and it may be some time before I write much more about it. I find that I have a more clear idea of what I want in life, what I need from and in my relationships, and the choices it may take to get there. That’s a very big deal, I suppose, although it rather gets in the way of other things just at the moment. The timing is peculiar. Last week sucked in a most extraordinary way, but I managed a good amount of emotional resilience, balance, and self-compassion, and greater ease and a feeling of naturalness to making room for my emotions, and being kind to myself. I had feared learning emotional self-sufficiency might result in … greater loneliness. That isn’t seeming to be the case, so far, instead I feel more whole as I learn skills that allow me to rely on myself as a sort of emotional ‘first responder’. So far, pretty awesome. There’s more to learn, of course, and I suspect that like mindfulness itself, emotional self-sufficiency is more a practice than a goal. 🙂

Finding love everywhere starts with how I feel about myself.

Finding love everywhere starts with how I feel about myself.

So, yeah. Here it is morning, again. Time to start a new day. Today is a good day to treat myself well, and to embrace my values – and my friends. Today is a good day to smile at small children. Today is a good day to remember most people are already doing their very best, much of the time. Today is a good day for kindness. Today is a good day to recognize that respecting my own boundaries and limits, and setting them clearly, and managing them well, is a very nice way to tell myself ‘I love you’. Today is a good day to change the world.

 

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, Summer, The Big 5, Words

Practices and Building Blocks

July 19, 2014 //
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It’s a quiet day of solitary practice. I have spent it on meditation, and study, mostly. I started the morning with yoga, and later interrupted it with a walk in the sunshine before the heat of the afternoon sets in. It has been supremely chill and I feel calm and balanced. I generally write quite early in the morning, as I sit down with my first – now, only – coffee of the day.  Today is different. It is a different day, so I guess there’s at least that explanation for it. 🙂

Every day an entirely new experience, a fresh start, a new opportunity to wonder, and to grow.

Every day an entirely new experience, a fresh start, a new opportunity to wonder, and to grow.

This morning I am building my joy on mindfulness, perspective, and sufficiency with compassionate acceptance that others are free to do what they will; their choices and their experiences are not mine. It is, so far, quite a lovely day.

Some of it is about choices...

Some of it is about choices…

Some of it is about perspective.

Some of it is about perspective.

What will I do with the remainder of the day? Well, hopefully more of whatever is delivering on this delightful experience of the moment. I doubt it is as simple as the tasks I am starting and finishing; the yoga, the meditation, the walking in the sun, the two loads of laundry, and the careful study and cross-referencing of more relevant material are not actually why I am enjoying such a lovely day. They are simply what I am doing, from moment to moment, as the day progresses. My limited understanding of things, as it exists now, suggests that it is the choices to do these things for me, in the way I am deciding to do so, and with what specific intent, and level of presence and engagement that is the why of my lovely day. As with most practices, I will have to do it some more to be certain, and to find it a reliably repeatable experience. I’m content with putting in the effort. What could be more worthwhile than learning to treat myself well, and enjoy my experience, unless it may be the later ability to extend that courtesy and general good treatment to others, because it is simply my day-to-day experience, and the way I behave ‘as a practice’?

I don’t have that much to say today. The day is mine, and I will return to it.

Today is a good day to be still for a moment.

Today is a good day to be still for a moment.

Today is a good day to practice what works. Today is a good day to deliver on the promises I have made to myself. Today is a good day to cherish the moment, and pause to be grateful for all such moments as these. Today is a good day for right now. Today is a good day for love, and emotional self-sufficiency. Today is a good day to change the world.

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Oregon Trails, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Summer, The Big 5, Words
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