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. 😉