Quietly Bringing the Weekend to an End

This has been a good weekend even though it did not look in any way like I had planned. The rain and clouds kept me from bike riding. I don’t like to ride in the rain. My glasses get fogged up, the brakes get wet, and I just don’t trust drivers. It is best if I find other things to do.

One thing I know for sure is that boredom is for people with no imagination. I can’t remember the last time I was bored. I always have something at hand to do. Read, knit, music, drawing, writing, cooking, brushing my cat, cleaning my house, and on and on. I also don’t mind a 30 minute nap.

Today Boo and I celebrated our 2^nd anniversary. She is such a great cat that I wanted to recognize the day. She, however, was not happy with the photo session and snubbed the grilled salmon. I guess I should have consulted with her about the plans.

I want to bring this weekend to a close by writing down a few things I learned through reading this weekend. I was listening to Pema Chodron in the car and reading the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Pema Chodron spoke of how we can find ourselves hooked by our reactions to other people. I have often heard that when we don’t like someone it is because they are mirroring back to us some aspect of our self that we don’t want to see. I have never really quite bought into that idea. Pema Chodron, however, explains it as follows in her talk on The Three Commitments. We often have a certain idea of who we are. We may believe we are kind, intelligent, open minded, tolerant and so on. Sometimes when we come across someone that irritates us it may be because there is something about them that causes us to react in a way that doesn’t fit with the idea we have of our self. We get really uncomfortable. For instance, there is a certain female political/celebrity that I just don’t like. I don’t think the reason I don’t like her is because she and I have something in common. What makes me uncomfortable is my reaction to her. She is not on my wavelength and I find her presence in the world to be irritating in the same way that the sound of heavy metal music would irritate me while I am listening to a Bach cello concerto. I am so uncomfortable with my reaction to her that I have decided to no longer read about anything she does. It is for the best. I am at my best if I don’t react to her. It is all about choice, too. I have a choice as to what I engage in and what my attitude is.

When I read the sutras of Patanjali I was reminded that it is the obstacles in life that help us grow. It is the recognition of this that can ease our minds in times of trouble. Both the sutras and Pema Chodron talked about how important it is to remember that no matter what we are going through, there is also someone else going through the same pain, the same joy, the same suffering, the same ecstasy. We are not alon e in anything. We are all connected. Knowing this can help us become less attached to outcomes. We know that things change anyway so there is no need to get attached to what is. It all passes eventually and our attitude toward attachment and change will determine our suffering. I once heard that suffering = our pain X our resistance to the pain. I try to remember this when I am hooked or caught up in some discomfort or dis-ease. If I don’t resist it, I am less likely to suffer and the discomfort will not last as long.

I spent some time doing a Zentangle this evening. I went to a craft/art store in the lovely village of Warner, NH today and found some great books on Zentangle by Sandy Steen Bartholomew. I highly recommend them to anyone interested in Zentangle. They are Totally Tangled and Yoga for the Brain. They help you take the Zentangle out of the box. I also found a small book of black paper on which to do white on black Zentangles. I did my first white on black while listening to the Eroica Trio, one of my favorite piano trios. The cellist, Sara Sant'Ambrogio , makes me cry with love for the music.

Good night and have a blessed week.

Namaste!

Riding the Waves

I woke up tired, achy and a little cranky this morning. Sunday morning is my writing time and I was ready to just toss it aside for a little pity party on the couch when I realized that this is what it is all about. It is doing what I always tell others to do when they are not feeling up to participating in the world – just take one step and see what happens.
So here I am, at the computer and writing again. It is already helping. In the rooms of Twelve Step programs they tell you to HALT. In other words, don’t get too hungry, angry, lonely or tired. I can certainly identify with all of those. There was an evening this week when I was tired. I was feeling a little lonely and I was hungry. Even though I had perfectly healthy food at home that just needed to be reheated I started to feel the pull to the convenience store. I think the “convenience” is that they conveniently keep a person from eating healthy and provide the convenience of plenty of beer available so a person doesn’t have to drive so far when they go get their second 12 pack of the evening. Fortunately I am long past the latter but the former still causes my car wheels to turn on too many occasions.
It was a fight to the finish. I wasn’t sure I was past the temptation until I was actually in my apartment, changing out of my work clothes and the left over stir-fry was heating in the microwave. Here is the dilemma, though. The healthy food helped with the hunger but there was still some angst going on in me that was hard to satisfy. If there had been chips and dip or ice cream or cookies in the house I probably would’ve eaten them. You see, for someone like me, food is not about filling the stomach and feeding the body. Unfortunately, it has a lot to do with filling the emotional emptiness and sometimes it is difficult to figure out what will do the filling in lieu of the sugar or the crunchy/salty.
I am in the process of learning more about depression and the darkness of the soul. One of the things that struck me during this process of growth and investigation is that we all experience it. It is a part of our human existence and we all have our own ways of dealing with the darkness. For some it is food, for others it may be drugs and alcohol, overwork, affairs, lying in bed for hours or manic creativity. It could be crossing the line of balance and over exercising or becoming compulsive about cleaning or keeping things we feel we may need in the future. I have seen all of these things in my own experience, in my family and in those people that have sat in the chair opposite of me in therapy. We all seem to be trying to find our way out of some emotion to the person, thing or action that will fill up that empty space.
I was listening to Pema Chodron’s talk on Unconditional Confidence the other day and heard her tell the story about how when she was first a nun her mentor, Trungpa Rinpoche, told her that life was a series of big waves. He told her that it was like standing in the water and having a big wave come and crash so hard you found yourself face down in the sand and struggling to stand up again. As soon as you stand and feel some balance, the next big wave came along and the whole process starts all over again. A lot of what we do in life has to do with trying to hold off that next big wave and that is impossible. The wave is coming. It is a part of life. The best we can do is to put our energy into taking care of ourselves during the time that the wave has gone back out to sea so that maybe we are stronger when it hits.
Depression comes in when we start to feel that we just want to stay down in the sand and not even bother to get back up. We want to pack up our bags and leave the beach. We want to bawl like a baby and scream at the waves. Some religions tell us that if we just ride out the waves with faith that we will eventually reach a glorious place where we can sit on the beach and bask in the sun and not have to deal with the waves any more. Since I have already self disclosed so much I might as well go ahead and say that I no longer can believe in a God that would be as cruel as to bounce us around in the surf with the promise that if we behave according to his will we will receive our reward. Instead I believe that we already have that peace within us that we can access at any time through meditation and breath work. I just have to remember to go there.
We know it exists. Other people have been able to access it in the midst of their pain. Without being able to rise above the waves of despair and find that holy place within Abraham Lincoln would never have been able to be president and take the country through the Civil War and write the Emancipation Proclamation. Great music would never have been written or played, poetry would have been lost, and books would never have reached the printed page. It gives me solace to know that the things that have given me the most comfort in my times of sorrow and pain have been created by people who have suffered their own pain and have found their spark within the darkness.
I know that I suffer the most when I am resisting that next wave. If I am future tripping by worrying about my son or his wife or my grandchildren getting sick, a friend dying, losing my job, or being diagnosed with a major illness, I am spending all my energy on fighting against the inevitable pain of life when I can be using that energy to enjoy the moment I am in and nurturing the light that will carry me through the darkness of that next wave. The key is to remember that the light exists. I was reminded just by sitting down and writing this morning.