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Strange Quiet Morning

April 7, 2014 //
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I woke early, feeling rested and unconcerned. It’s a nice frame of mind to start off in. Still human, though, and within seconds self-doubt, hurt feelings, vague disappointments, and miscellaneous baggage dredged from my waking consciousness was launched at me as a barrage of discontented feelings. Seriously, Brain, was that at all necessary? First thing? Couldn’t wait until after meditation, yoga, a shower, a coffee? A bit less than two years ago, it would have been all that was required to kick-start a shitty morning, filled with misunderstandings, miscommunication, and moodiness. This morning wasn’t that.

Each attempt on my waking mind that my demons made was met, this morning, with the gentle observation “that’s not about me”. One by one the momentary feelings showed how momentary they are, by dissipating and leaving nothing behind as I reminded myself that first this bit of weirdness and suffering, then that one, were simply ‘not about me’. Turns out this is also a nice frame of mind with which to face the earliest bit of morning; taking care of me, comfortably.

The three biggest take-aways in my year+ of studying, so far, have been 1. Mindfulness, 2. Perspective, and now 3. Sufficiency.  Having all three tends to find me feeling contented, balanced, and enjoying my experience. Lacking any one of them and I find myself suffering, volatile, reactive, and often ‘unable to figure things out’.  It’s a pleasant change.  I’m grateful to have stayed around to experience it. 🙂

From this perspective it's all blue skies and spring time...

From this perspective it’s all blue skies and spring time…

It is, however, still a journey, and I still have a long one ahead of me. A lifetime, actually. As beautiful as my experience can be these days…

...looking beneath the surface is revealing.

…looking beneath the surface is revealing.

Even my generally-very-pleasant-mostly-pretty-balanced experience these days isn’t ‘everything there is’ to who I am. There’s more work to do. I am at long last perhaps well enough, whole enough, to face doing it. I am a trauma survivor. I am a domestic violence survivor. I am a rape survivor. I am a war veteran.  These are part of who I am. There was a time when enduring these experiences seemed an endless feature of my emotional landscape, continuously playing out again and again in my emotional background, coloring my here and now whether I was sleeping or awake. I suffered. I endured. I cried. I survived.

That’s an important detail. I’ll say it again. I survived.

So, I’m not without damage. I have some scars, both emotional and physical. Still, here I am. Life, generally, in my here and now is pleasant and comfortable. I find myself on the edge of wellness and faced with a decision… do I stand fast, in this pretty comfortable place – or do I continue to grow, develop, work on me, sort things out, and… do I follow through? That last isn’t so obvious and transparent.  It’s this – although crimes perpetrated against me in the past are likely beyond prosecution now, there’s the matter of military compensation. Do I submit paperwork on my military sexual trauma?  That’s the hard question. A yes answer means committing to telling the tale, on paper, with as much documentation as I can track down. It means being intimate with some very painful moments in my life and learning to be able to discuss them without tears, hysteria, or losing myself in the unpredictable outcome of real rage. I could just sooth myself and look away, couldn’t I? Enjoy where I am now, and let the past go… wherever the past goes. Couldn’t I?

Could I?

I often think the safer choice – emotionally safer – is to let it all go, let it somehow simply cease to be… but as soon as my body begins to relax into the awareness and comfort that I am safe here, now, I feel the awareness of those others, those younger versions of me, still crying in their sleep, still hurting, still so sad. Who takes up their cause? Who seeks redress for them? Who ‘makes it right’, if it can be made right at all, ever? There is no one to advocate for them, but me.  This, then, is ‘about me’, and more about telling the tale, respecting myself, and healing those hurt little girls still lurking in my ‘baggage claim area’, than the paperwork, itself, but it appears the paperwork may be how I get there.

I enjoy how far I have come. I know I have further to go. Today is a good day for a journey. Today is a good day to change the world.

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, grief, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Rape, Relationships, Spring, women, Words

Moved, Aware, Not Discouraged

March 27, 2014 //
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It’s been an interesting few days since my homecoming. Having returned home feeling focused, committed to specific goals, clear-headed and purposeful, serene and balanced, I was unsurprised to walk into an emotional hurricane at home; we are all having our own experience. We’re human, we have emotions, and life serves up hearty helpings of what drives them. They are no more unexpected than a hurricane, and nearly always visible on the horizon.  I’ve been in real hurricanes. Generally, savvy folks don’t stand around stunned letting everything around them go to hell, and they don’t seem unaware that there is gale force wind blowing them off course, or torrential rain on their parade.

So, I face the hurricane myself, moved by the experiences of others, aware of the destructive potential of the chaos, and not discouraged from my own goals or from seeing to my own needs. I am experienced with the weather we were having. lol.  I would find value in some sort of vast check list of experiences and circumstances that were once entirely outside my ability to endure, withstand, negotiate, enjoy, manage, cherish… and as each such occurs anew and I face it, experience it, with new tools, I could check it off the list. I like checking things off lists, actually. It gives me a sense of progress.

I’d still love to be able to share more about my beach experience and certain other bits and pieces; there is a lot of amazing stuff going on in my life as an individual, and I’m often frustrated that I lack the skills to really share them with my loves.  If I gave myself a chance at it, I could wallow in disappointment and discontent when I find that some wonderful bit of wonder ends up disregarded in favor of OPD.   Still, everyday life manages to keep my brain busy, my heart alive, and my calendar full.  Even what hurts or feels uncomfortable or seems inexplicable, is stuff to study, and to which I can bring mindfulness, and new practices very much worth practicing.  I am a student of life, not just visiting or passing through.

One view of the horizon.

One view of the horizon.

One very small thing I considered over the weekend at the beach was my health and fitness. What now seems a very long time ago I was much heavier than I wanted to be, and heavier than what feels comfortable on my frame. My weight was contributing to health problems, and even I could see that. It was also a significant driver of personal discontent and feelings of unworthiness.  I took matters in hand – and it’s an entirely other story than what I’m really on about this morning – and I dropped a lot of weight in a year.  It has stayed off. I’m much fitter, and healthier – but I haven’t reached my goal, and I’m still heavier than would be ideally healthy, and my fitness could still use improvement. I could moan about my weight loss progress being stalled for two years and launch a barrage of small contributing factors, but seriously? I wasn’t as committed as I needed to be to reach the goal I had set for myself.  I am accepted and loved by those who accept and love me, and mostly not very aware of haters moment-to-moment, and it was pretty easy to slow it down, relax, and lose focus. It doesn’t require more analysis than that. 🙂

I needed time to reflect.

I needed time to reflect.

So, I recommitted to my goal, with some study, and some celebration and waving good-bye to unhealthy favorite treats that had crept in over time to become pretty frequent. I took note that even a small glass of white wine with a meal didn’t treat me well emotionally or physically, and decided feeling good and being healthy is more important than wine with a meal – ever – and gave that up. I wasn’t exactly ‘a drinker’ at this point in my life, but I decided to give it up completely – although I’m not bragging or being smug about it, it’s just that it wasn’t hard to choose to give up empty calories (wine, gummy candies, sweets made primarily of butter, sugar, and flour) to keep my health.  It is, however, a choice. There’s a verb in there. Actions are involved and I am already taking them; strict about my caloric intake, the nutritive qualities of the food I eat, the amount and type of exercise I get each day.  I probably won’t say much about it day-to-day; this blog isn’t a diet, weight-loss, or fitness blog. For me the more important item is the goal>choice>action>outcome piece. There are always details, ups and downs, challenges to face, but generally it really is as simple has being sufficiently committed to a goal to enact the required verbs to reach it.  I’m wondering what will be different bringing mindfulness into the mix. Am I full of shit? I’ll check in, in September, and let you know. 😉

Planning to stay on course.

Planning to stay on course.

Other small things, well – small for the world, they loom large in my experience. Spring continues to unfold.  It’s lovely to see, and I enjoy the scents of spring without the agony of allergies; I make a point to be specifically mindfully grateful about it. Love, too, unfolds and grows and shows new facets of intimacy, connection, and delight. I still feel a moment of awkward discomfort when I’m aware of how dependent that has turned out to be on connecting with myself, treating my own heart well, and being intimate with my own emotional experience. The discomfort always passes, and the joy and contentment and deep meaningful connections that are within reach are certainly worth learning to accept how utterly necessary it is to nurture myself and treat myself well and with loving kindness.

Where the river meets the sea.

Where the river meets the sea.

I thought I had more to say. Since it isn’t about a word count… well, enjoy Thursday! It’s a good day to love and be loved. It’s a good day to be considerate and to be kind. It’s a good day to change the world.

So much horizon...

So much horizon…

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

It’s Just a Suggestion

February 2, 2014 //
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It has been a lovely quiet Sunday. I’m enjoying it without reservations and finding it satisfying and tranquil. There have been opportunities to make choices that could take me in a very different direction. Choices and verbs. We have will, we have intentions, we make choices, we act… Or we don’t actually act, then wonder why our will is ineffective, our intentions lack value, and our choices don’t take us where we expected or hoped they would. There is no arguing with a verb.

The air plant on my desk at work, a metaphor for thriving under difficult circumstances. :-)

The air plant on my desk at work, a metaphor for thriving under difficult circumstances. 

 

Thinking about that, this morning, I wondered what I would say to myself, if I’d asked me ever so long ago, what I could be doing differently…to be ‘happy’? If I could have written myself a note, sent it back a couple of years, a few, or even decades, what would I have suggested I do, or change, to get here sooner? Something like this, maybe?

  • Please take care of you. I’d say more, but in the end the choices and will are yours.
  • Please also consider others, not because they do or don’t deserve that from you, and not out of obligation. Please consider others as a mark of your own good character, and because it has every day value in your experience.
  • Please be kind. Kindness isn’t weak, kindness isn’t costly, and however cynical you’ve grown over the years, you’re likely able to see that ‘kind’ feels better than ‘callous’ or ‘cruel’, so what harm is there in being kind? The harm in callousness and cruelty is easy to spot.
  • Please take a moment to pause in stillness and consider how unlikely it is just to have this one precious moment…
  • Please do your best. It’s not about competition, there’s no winner’s circle at the end of life, and the person most damaged by a half-assed effort on your part will generally be you. Your best may not be ‘good enough’ by someone else’s standard. It may not set records, or net huge bonuses or cash windfalls. Your best may not achieve all you hoped to achieve. Your best may not be what you expected it to be. Your best, though, is every bit of all that you can do…and that is enough. Always enough. There’s still a verb implied there… and… the bad news is that you don’t fool yourself if you do less than  your best, while insisting to someone else that you did do your best. Maybe there will be times when your very best effort turns out to be the humble admission that you didn’t do your best, when you could have, when it mattered, when someone is counting on you? Are you that strong? (Please, do your best.)
  • I’m not ‘telling you what to do’. It’s not about that. I’m learning some wonderful things about living a rich and pleasant experience, and it feels good – and I really want to share that.  It has taken so long to get this far. It’s been hard, more than ‘sometimes’. I’ve failed a lot. I expect to fail plenty more – I learn pretty fast that way, myself.  I’m pretty sure that more than one friend made some of these suggestions to me, along the way, and I wasn’t ready to hear them.  I am grateful that when I found myself ready, the words and ideas and experiences that have helped me find my way in the darkness were still there. So. I’m passing them along. In case you are ready. 
  • Good luck with your journey; there is no map, drink plenty of water.

So hey… Thank you for reading. Thank you for writing.  Thank you for being. Good luck with your journey.

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

Life Needs a Caution Sign

January 30, 2014 //
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Or two, or three, or hell – let’s just pave it into something comfortable, predictable, and mapped, settle into easy contentment, and call it a day?

I had a great day at work, yesterday. Sometimes I have the strange sensation that ‘work life balance’ may actually mean that when things at work suck, things at home are lovely, and of course…the inverse of that would then be true as well. That, thankfully, is fanciful bitterness with struggle, and with the simple ups and downs of life.  We’re each having our own experience. The experiences we have are not all uniformly pleasant, or comfortable. I guess I’ll keep practicing the practices that seem to build a life that is more up than down, more content than not, easier than hard, more pleasant than unpleasant, and see where all that goes.

This morning isn’t my best morning. I woke crying from dreams that contained content ripped from the most difficult moments of the prior evening. It was nearly an hour before my brain would even acknowledge that the evening had ended on a relatively positive note – or at least finished somewhat supportively. My heart feels heavy, and tears are queued up waiting for a reason to spill over. This is one of my least favorite emotional states.

The bottom-line is that I want more than I have in life, in love, emotionally, sexually, even financially (although that one is very low on my list, and exists more to bolster the likelihood of other things I value being attainable).  I think wanting is probably pretty commonplace.  It takes wanting to reach a sense of being without, after all.  I even understand the connection between craving and discontent, and how difficult life can become when we desire only those things that are out of reach, or when we lose sight of the wonders we already have in our life.  I started 2014 knowing that ‘sufficiency’ is a big deal for me, and that ‘contentment’ is an emotional experience I enjoy, and a quality I would like to develop and support.  What I don’t know is where the subtle distinction between genuine contentment and ‘settling’ for something is, and how to recognize it. Is there a difference?

I struggle to communicate with the people nearest to me. Setting boundaries, sharing needs, speaking calmly and explicitly about what I want, what supports my needs over time, being honest about how I feel in the moment, or in general, these are all very difficult for me to begin with. Doing them well is something I find myself working so hard at, and still not succeeding with any reliability. At least, if I am succeeding, the outcome is incredibly unpleasant much of the time. This morning I woke wishing I could just stop talking at all. No more words. No speaking. No writing. No.More.Words.  I seem to have a gift for saying too much, or phrasing something in the worst possible way.  I rarely feel actually understood, or even heard. (It makes it so much ‘worse’ that there was a time and a relationship in which I did feel understood and heard, making it something possible in life that I just don’t have now.)

This morning I have a lingering feeling that the things that matter most to me are simply things I can’t have, or will experience only very rarely. I want very much for that to just be okay, if it is true. If it isn’t true, I’d like that emotional cocktail to just go away. I would like to have a better understanding of ‘sufficiency’. Enough. What is ‘enough’. How to I get that? I have the nagging suspicion that even intimacy is easier/better when approached mindfully… but I’m not sure I ‘get’ how to approach it at all. I suspect I may not have correctly labeled whatever the hell I think the experience of intimacy feels like, and am chasing an unknown experience, or ‘shooting at the wrong target’.

I am grouchy and things suck this morning. I am very human, and even though my intellect politely reminds me that ‘this is a construct of your own thinking and you can choose differently’ and my recently-more-mindful-and-learning-more-all-the-time heart tells me ‘this too shall pass’, I’m hurting now, and it is hard to stop picking at it. Soon I’ll head to work, and the process of getting there will distract me for a time, and maybe it will be forgotten when I head home tonight?

Right now is right now. Right now I feel like giving up. I’m frustrated, hormonal, and cross. I spent the night with my fears and nightmares and woke feeling sad, tired, and crying. Right now is harder than it has to be, and right now I’m struggling. This too – quite inevitably – shall pass. Time runs out, moves on, and brings change. So. Yeah. (I hear myself laugh out loud, it sounds a little worn down and bitter, and I think about how lovely yesterday was – that passed, didn’t it? Yep. So…this will as well.)

Some lovely pictures from yesterday…

We can build serenity.

We can build serenity.

No matter how much I am hurting in the moment, there is more to life and the world than my pain.

No matter how much I am hurting in the moment, there is more to life and the world than my pain.

Things can seem so complicated and overwhelming...

Things can seem so complicated and overwhelming…

Getting right up close doesn't always simplify our view of things.

Getting right up close doesn’t always simplify our view of things.

I am grateful that my experience this morning is largely subjective and a construct of my brain. I can find my way to something different. Compassion first, then, this morning? I pause with a certain surprise to realize that as I typed those words, my internal critic was hurling invective at me, launching emotional weaponry, and rallying my demons… I’m not always fully aware of the nasty bits and pieces of old hurts and old programming ‘going live’ to defend themselves in the background. Grim. Definitely compassion first…well… sort of first. Okay, not even a little bit first – that would have been a more positive start. Still human. I tested me. lol

Compassion, then, this morning – now that I see how much I need it.

Today, I am human. Today I face my hurts with self-compassion, and my certainty that emotional states rely on choices, too, however inevitable or permanent they feel in the moment. Today I change the world.

 

 

 

 

 

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, grief, Love, Menopause, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, women, Words

One Year, One Journey, Many Moments

January 8, 2014 //
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Well…here we all are. Here I am, anyway. There are opportunities to wonder about the rest of it. It’s been a year, to the day, since I started this blog. I was somewhere very different as a person one year ago. My understanding of myself was – and remains – incomplete, but certainly I am in as different a place with that as a journey of 365 days could possibly make, for me. Very different, indeed. Change, as comical as it looks on the page, is a constant.

People do change, therefore they can change.  It is not a given that they will change. That last is rather dependent on their own desire to change, for their own reasons, succeeding based on their will and actions.  These seem obvious enough observations, but I did not have that understanding a year ago.

We are each having our own experience. That, too, seems damned obvious to me in 2014, but I have an understanding of myself that recognizes and acknowledges that this was not ‘always’ my understanding of things.  It’s difficult to be certain quite when I became really sold on that understanding – that we are each all having our own experience. It feels like I ‘always’ understood this – but I can prove in my own journals and past writing that I did not, and also that the lack of this understanding in prior years was something that really had an effect on my ability to learn compassion, to build intimacy, to provide emotional support – even impeded my ability to listen well to others and respect or value their perspective.

Every step I take illuminates another step to be taken – like walking with a flashlight in the dark. I can recall, at some past points, saying something casual or flippant about ‘being a work in progress’, generally to minimize some mishap, or the consequence of some poor decision. This past year I’ve spent a lot of time learning what a very active thing progress actually tends to be – there is so much more to it than being aware it needs to happen, or reading up on some process for getting it done.  ‘Work in progress’ is an incredibly active thing, with a lot of verbs involved, and a hearty helping of will and action, and practice doesn’t lead to mastery, it leads to good habits and improvements over time.  I do not always feel up to the task, and I am surprised and even satisfied with myself for how far I’ve come in a year.

I feel powerfully committed to myself (that’s very new), and to building a good life, good relationships, a good heart, a compassionate nature, and to leave when my time is up able to say the world is, in some small way, the better for having endured my humble efforts. This is the most concise statement I know how to make about ‘who I am’ at the end of this one year.  I doubt I’d have made such a statement in any earlier time in my life.

Words like ‘mindfulness’ and ‘compassion’ have become everyday parts of my vocabulary over the past year.  I am learning new things; listening, caring, understanding, empathizing, sharing – no strings, less baggage.  It still seems strange to me that so much of what I’ve needed all along has come from within… and that ‘taking care of me’ isn’t about being ‘selfish’, defensive, territorial, or confrontational, but is very much about living a contented life, and enjoying a sense of well-being, by ensuring I see to my own basic needs with as much commitment and skill as I do the needs of others.

I am spending time today contemplating this one year journey because, as journey’s go, it’s been it’s been one of the most meaningful I’ve ever taken, and one that I understand more clearly now to be both ongoing, and worthy of more active participation. It’s my life, after all.  Sure, had I understood some things more clearly earlier in life, I’d have made some different choices perhaps, or had some very different conversations, but there is still so much ahead – many more moments, opportunities to choose, to talk, to act – to change. My will is truly my own – when I use it.

So are my words. This year I’ve used this blog to explore my world of words in a more honest way, with greater vulnerability, learning to share my experience without using emotional weaponry, and with consideration of possible outcomes beyond words on a page. Using my words to understand my experience more clearly, myself, without endless rumination or becoming mired in some momentary drama, and without over-burdening the emotional resources of my loved ones has been eye-opening regarding the limitations of words and language, and how it can direct my experience – and how I can learn to use those words to direct my experience,  myself, from within.  (Thanks for helping with all that, by the way, I appreciate you, and the time you’ve taken to share this journey with me in some small way.)

Soft jazz in the background, a latte gone cold on the side table, a soft gray morning sky on the other side of the window, the household sleeping… just one year? The distance between where I was a year ago, and where I am this morning can’t really be measured in time or distance.  The journey isn’t even completed – there is so much more to learn, to do, to experience, to share, to understand, to contemplate, to enjoy… This is just one moment of many. 

There is a lot to enjoy. This has definitely been a year to explore how very true that is.  There is a lot to enjoy.  Enjoying life is also a choice.

Here's to free will and good choices!

Here’s to free will and good choices!

Today I…

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Menopause, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Uncategorized, Words
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