Archives for posts with tag: meditation
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Sold As Is

May 6, 2013 //
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There are no guarantees, right? No promises carved in stone. No ‘happily ever after’. No Utopia. Only people, mostly doing their best, whatever that is at the time. Life doesn’t come with a warranty.

This morning manages to suck just about exactly as much as yesterday was awesome. 😦  Save the labels and bi-polar crap – it isn’t a good fit for me.  “We’ll get through this.” Yes, we will.  “We’ll figure this crap out.”  Probably.  Maybe not.  Maybe it is the attempt to understand, and caring enough to try, that matters more than succeeding at explaining the challenge of the moment, the hour, the relationship, the decade, or the lifetime?  “I love you.”  Well, that matters the most.  It matters a lot.  It will even be the important thing that lingers in my recollection long past this distress of right now.  Right now, however,  sucks.

Still a lovely morning, and flowers bloom without regard to my mood or experience.

Still a lovely morning, and flowers bloom without regard to my mood or experience.

Ok, ok. I know I could get my ass up from this office chair, and find a quiet space and take a few minutes for me… I probably will, too, once the routine of the morning is well underway.  During office hours work must come first…or so it seems. I resent the hell out of the perceived requirement to ‘put a good face on things and get on with work’, when more than anything I would like to take time for me.  I hurt.  I want to take all the time for me; every minute, every hour, every day, until my heart is healed, until I am unafraid, until I am whole and healthy, until love can always find me, and until I can always feel how loved I am.  I hear a bitter refrain from my own voice in another life … laughing angrily “how does it feel to want?”  It doesn’t matter what I want.  What matters is what can I do with what I have?

"Baby Love" blooms. Beauty exists and thrives.

“Baby Love” blooms. Beauty exists and thrives.

Mindfulness…how do I grasp  hold of that life raft right now?  What does it mean to feel discontent, dissatisfied, frustrated, hurt, anxious, sad, disconnected, or angry in a mindful way?  I know that the mindfulness practices and meditation improve my experience… and that’s completely been driven home this morning.  I woke, I showered, I made a latte…and I didn’t take time to meditate this morning. 😦  Stupid choice, apparently.  Stuck with it for now, I suppose.  Maybe a walk at lunch time… or something. I feel adrift and unhappy.  Shit. Welcome to Monday.

…I’m starting to feel like I’ve set myself up to make a series of shitty choices that I can already see are not going to be ideal for me if I go that direction… I feel a bit like I ‘got on the wrong bus this morning’.

All of the potential of spring...still doesn't count as 'roses in bloom'.

All of the potential of spring…still doesn’t count as ‘roses in bloom’.

Where’s the reset button?  How do I force myself to choose well, when I really just want to throw a tantrum? I could use some romance right now…or poetry…or something that lights me up from within and puts a smile on my face that can’t be denied or argued with.  Is that just a hurt soul looking for a distraction, or something more profound?  Oh well.  For now, I will set myself aside as ‘not my highest priority’ and go whore myself for a dollar get on with work.

Damn it…I can do better than this for myself…

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, gardening, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Menopause, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Roses, Spring, Turning 50, women, Words

Stillness and Solitude

May 5, 2013 //
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I woke gently, alone, wrapped in quiet luxury.  Spending a night in solitude, meditating mostly, writing some, finds me feeling content and balanced this morning, and centered in my own self.  It is a nice treat and I used the opportunity to figure some things out about me, about me now.

Luxurious solitude and a convenient work space.

Luxurious solitude and a convenient work space.

Sometimes I feel a little challenged beyond my challenges, a little encumbered beyond my baggage, as if I am at risk of ‘out growing what I know about myself’.  Last night I took an unexpected opportunity to spend some chill time alone, really focused on me. I came prepared to paint. Prepared to write. I brought an important book I am reading. I had only the loosest plan – start with meditation, make some written observations, and go with my sense of ‘taking care of me’ for the rest.  It’s been a lovely night. I spent a lot more of it in quiet meditation than I expected I would, and it was what I spent most of the last 16 hours doing. Meditating. Being. Allowing awareness to exist. I did take moments to step outside that gentle experience a few times to make a note about something that suddenly seemed very clear to me, but again and again I returned to meditating. It was very late before sleep caught my attention; I was neither tired nor sleepy before midnight. The earliest light of the new day woke me, and so gently that it was pure bliss to feel myself slowly wake to the day, and feel the sum of the evening’s calm, peace, and progress as a firm piece of who I am.

Coffee now. I listened to some tunes in the shower, and gave a moment afterward to the technology that connects me to so many people who are dear to me.  I found myself wondering where the greater value is with digital connections in our social lives – is it with the freedom to step outside who we believe we are, or who we are seen to be, to take on a new self, a new facade, to walk in new shoes? There’s a lot of that sort of thing on the internet – hell, there are songs about it, and it has its own internet rule. lol.  Is the greater value the ability to connect real beings to each other over great distances, mind to mind, and share what is, more directly with more people? Is it as simple as how honest we choose to be as a global society?  As individuals?  It’s a hard one.  Genuine, honest, open – these are amazing values to have; harder to live up to for a world that values deceit as a tool for control and advancement.

The quiet still morning unfolds, I write, and sip my coffee.  The still beautiful place I find in myself when I meditate for long periods is vast, but not empty.  It has a similar feel, after the fact, to that sensation of getting to know someone new and exciting, finding out their favorite color, or a place they like, or discovering that you share something amazing…except it is ‘all about me’ on a level I’ve never known how to allow myself before.  How many times have I cried out in frustration and rage that I didn’t feel important or valued, that I didn’t feel heard? I am discovering that the person I likely could have cried out to, with more helpful results, was me.  I wasn’t important to me, I wasn’t valuing myself, and I sure wasn’t taking time to be heard, by my own heart.  It was a brutally painful awaking of mind to reach that place where I was at least able to recognize how desperately I needed my own attention, and how urgently important my own needs are to my own happiness and balance.  More than once since that awakening, I’ve wonder how fair or reasonable it really is to be in romantic relationships at all, if I was unable to even attend to my own needs, emotionally? Love, fortunately for anyone experiencing it, doesn’t seem to be that sort of thing. Our lovers may be demanding people, we may, ourselves, be demanding.  Love seems different than that to me, more compassionate, and accepting, and nurturing – more like a homecoming than an award show.

I am learning to hear myself, whispers or shouts, tears or laughter. I am learning to accept this amazing woman I have become over the years, and to help myself along, and reach out for the help and wisdom of others, and to walk my path willfully with my eyes and heart open.  I feel more comfortable with my body and my mind than I have before, and I am no longer afraid of the relentless gaze of cameras or mirrors. I am no longer afraid of the question “who am I?”

A lovely morning is unfolding, and soon I’ll return home. For now, there is time to meditate and grow.

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Menopause, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, Turning 50, women, Words

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

Le Sacre Du Printemps

March 10, 2013 //
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Spring blossoms

Spring blossoms

This morning I woke with a headache and a snarl. Unpleasant. Very real. Very human. A quad latte and a couple hours later I’m over being snarly, at least. I still have a nasty headache. Not much to do about it besides treat myself well and with compassion and patience.

It was a sweet gesture that one of my partners put on Larry Coryell playing Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’. I love his version of that piece of music (so much that I’d have linked it, but couldn’t find a good YouTube video of it).  Chilling with coffee, talking about projects shared and individual…’making love’ on a level that isn’t about sex, and is about family and connection. In spite of the headache, I feel pretty good.

It’s been a very good weekend. I have been enjoying my experience so much that I didn’t realize I hadn’t written a post on either Friday or Saturday…there are so many people sharing so many moments and so many words, though, it seems unlikely that the world ran short on reading material. lol. It has been an interesting couple of days, existing in my now, and sharing time with my partners; love, Love, and practicing mindfulness. I figure I’ll be practicing indefinitely, too.  It doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing one can ‘achieve full proficiency’ at with the end result of stopping…it’s an ongoing thing…unless I am seriously misunderstanding the how/why of it.  It is interesting to see the small things I’ve misunderstood in life to the point of causing myself pain or confusion, or throwing weird roadblocks in my own path. Like…learning something; I’ve spent a long time thinking that the point is to ‘know it’ or become ‘good at it’ to the point of some level of expertise or ‘completion’ then stop, show my work, and get my grade, certificate, compliment, affirmation, acknowledgment, pat on the head, promotion, award, trophy…something that makes it an ‘achievement’ more than an experience or point of ongoing progress and growth. ‘Ongoing’. Life is ongoing. Even the noun is more a verb than a noun, because nothing about ‘life’ stands still.  Through the headache I can feel a glimmer of something I didn’t understand trying to peep through the fog of my filters and weirdness.

I cooked dinner the other night…mindfully. That was…interesting. To be really committed to the processes and really focused and aware of the elements of the experience made a very simple meal a different experience in both preparation and enjoyment. I had the subjective experience that the food tasted better, although it was a very simple meal of fettuccine pesto with chicken and red peppers. My partners sure seemed to enjoy the flavors of it more than just about any other meal I’ve prepared for them.  I’ve been exploring a lot of every day experiences with more…I don’t know, call it ‘mindfulness’ or call it ‘self awareness’ or call it ‘commitment to the moment’, I’m not sure it matters what name I give it; it is the doing of it that seems to change things. I can’t help but wonder why I didn’t ‘get it’ sooner? I know it isn’t that no one mentioned it, or that there were no books about it, or that mindfulness practices didn’t exist…was it a lack of readiness on my part?  Did it fall into the set of ‘things the TBI put out of reach for a while’, like algebra in my teens and twenties? Was I unwilling to understand or unable? Does that matter? I’m getting more comfortable with questions, and less hung up on answering them; I find myself speculating whether there may be a correlation between the lack of impulse to answer all the questions, and my generally reduced anxiety level the last little while, then I let that go, too, and chill in this lovely quiet time and space.

Tonight I hope to be in the kitchen making a simple meal for my family, and enjoying love and family and making ready for another week of work and life.  I’ll be seeing an old friend on Wednesday, and I’m excited about it.  We’ll also have a house guest this week, and I feel relaxed and comfortable with that, which isn’t always the case with me. I have dreams and plans and goals, and a life to live with a smile. That feels awesome. 🙂

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Turning 50, women

Being and Becoming

February 28, 2013 //
2

I’m building a regular practice these days whereby the last thing I do each night is meditate. Initially, I contemplate my day compassionately, observing it without analyzing it. I note if/whether there is some event, outcome, or theme that seemed most challenging, or most relevant to my current needs and commit to focusing on a single practice, behavior, or cognitive function the next day,  that may be an improvement on what I am doing now.  Then I let all that go – and just focus on my breathing.  I’ve been sleeping more deeply and restfully since I started doing that… I don’t know that those experiences are correlated.

Today I am focusing on letting small things go.  The most challenging moment I had yesterday was when an associate [who matters to me] interrupted me to say something to me in an incredibly insulting and dismissive tone, rich with condescension and derision, and full of assumptions about my level of knowledge. I was… insulted, hurt, briefly even angry. I struggled with it for a few moments at the time, but the social environment didn’t really permit actually addressing it with my associate directly in a comfortable way [that I know yet].  It still lingered in my memory pretty vividly that evening when I finished my day, so – focusing on letting small things go, today. 🙂 Maybe you don’t agree that being insulted that way is a ‘small thing’? Was I, though?  My associate’s assumptions about me, and their own world view, was the foundation of their reaction – does that really have anything to do with me, other than alerting me that they don’t know me as well as I thought they did – or as well, perhaps, as they think they do? That seems a very different thing than ‘being insulted’ – and I’d deal with it differently.  In the moment, my understanding of events was the result of my emotional reaction to words that were the result of a potentially significant misunderstanding.  I’m glad circumstances gave me time to think it over.

I spent the walk to work happily thinking art thoughts. I contemplated my journey as an artist so far, and considered what I would like to accomplish artistically this year. I observed the bare branches of deciduous trees along the walk, and their contrast against the rainy gray sky. I took note of russet leaves that litter the sidewalk on the way, their many shapes, and shades. I smiled at the lichens on the tree branches, and the moss in the cracks of the sidewalk. Many of the trees are just beginning to bud, or unfurl delicate new leaves. Spring is coming. I enjoyed a feeling of just being, as I walked, and becoming – with the spring – as each day unfolds. I’m eager to get to work in watercolor, again. It’s been a very long time.

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Categories Anxiety, Art, Brain Injury, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Menopause, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Turning 50
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