I should stop talking about things I'm unqualfied to talk about, so I will just update you on things we've talked about previously.
- A couple of months ago I told you I was going to try out a more intentional meditation practice. I did really well for about six weeks, at least in terms of keeping up with it. I'm sure I didn't meditate every single day, but I didn't miss many days, either. Then a couple of situations happened and things got stressful, and as I've said before, the more I "need" to meditate, the harder it seems to be to find the time.
But overall, this is going well-- the doing it part of it. I'm still terrible at meditation. I used to think it was because I had an unusually distractible mind, but now that I'm using this app (10% Happier) that is sort of a meditation community, I'm discovering that it's that way for everybody. So, I'm still doing it, I'm still terrible at it, and it's still helping with my sanity.
- Oh, Lord, remember the winter vegetables project? That has been a total fail. Partly because I haven't cooked much. We were gone, and then Dean was gone, and we've both had things going on in the evening, and a couple of times when I was planning on cooking dinner, we got a last minute invite to meet friends out for dinner, etc etc. You get the idea. But the intention is still floating around in my head, and since this is Montana, it's still winter no matter what the calendar says, so I may get back to this. After vacation (see below). Although by then, it really will be moving toward spring. I hope.
- Last week I told you I was halfway through The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead. Honestly, I picked it up because I knew I didn't have the stomach for the brutality I've heard about in his better known book Underground Railroad, but I'd heard he is an amazing writer, so I wanted to read something by him. And he is. A terrific writer, I mean. Intuitionist is crazy smart.
You could read it as just a standard plot-- young woman gets framed for an elevator accident and goes off on her own to find out what really happened-- but it is also an allegory? satire? alternate reality? with all kinds of stuff happening. It's fascinating. Highly recommended if you want your brain stretched, but if you just want to read a good plot (which is all I'm going to be reading on vacation next week)(see below), probably not the best choice. I will give it this-- unlike most allegories? satires? alternate realities? where the plot eventually falls apart under the weight of The Message Being Delivered, this one really does work as its own story.
- You know, I confess I've had the thought I don't have any friends a couple of times in the last few months. I've been surprised to hear two other people say the same thing recently. People who look as if they have plenty of friends. Which has me wondering, is this part and parcel of the larger changes we're going through? Is there something about the breaking up of cultural expectations that is also disrupting personal connections? I don't know. Have just been thinking about this.
- So here we are at below. I can't remember how much I've told you about our upcoming vacation that starts on Saturday, but I am really looking forward to it. We went to a little town north of Cabo for a week last spring with both kids and loved it. When they were able to finagle the same week off this year and I asked them where they wanted to go, the unanimous decision was the same place.
So off we go. I won't be writing anything new next week, but while poking around for some other stuff I ran across a couple of old posts that made me laugh, so if I have time I'll set them up to repost next week. Otherwise, I'll catch you when I get back. Hope spring is springing wherever you are.
Showing posts with label meditation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label meditation. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 12, 2019
Friday, January 4, 2019
7ToF: make it so, number one
1. We've all sometimes seen the disconnect between someone's online presentation and their real life. Some present a carefully curated front to the world, some seem to be genuinely themselves, although I suppose you can never really know how real it is. Here, in this blog, I hope you can tell that I make no claims that this is an accurate representation of my life-- it's just whatever I'm thinking about at the time I'm writing.
2. But in case it isn't obvious, I have bad days. Weeks. Dean and I have rough patches in our marriage, more often than we probably should after 34 years of marriage. I sometimes lose sleep worrying about my kids. I can drive myself to distraction obsessively trying to figure out what I'm doing next-- back to work? more volunteer work? three months in the UK? (you have no idea how much that last one tempts me). There are days when I have a hard time thinking of a reason to get out of bed.
3. Some people-- for example, the Bloggess-- can turn their bad days/weeks/childhood into hilarious, touching, meaningful posts, but when I try to do it, it turns out maudlin and boring. It bores me, so lord knows I'm not inflicting it on you. At least not very often. But in case you can't tell, it seems important to put it out there. I don't think I'm projecting an image of a perfect life here, but if I am, now you know. Things can be (and often are) a mess around here. So there. That's enough about that.
4. I don't do New Year's resolutions because I can never keep them, but having a theme, something I want to work on, has been a good thing in the past. My word/theme for 2019 is action. Be active. Take action. Participate. Engage rather than observe. Do instead of think. Or at least, don't just think. Maybe engage is a more succinct way of putting it, and it has the additional benefit of invoking Captain Picard, which is never a bad thing, right?
5. About this time last year, I read Dan Harris's book 10% Happier, where he describes how he has used meditation to cope with anxiety and stress. He talks about one of his mentors, Mark Epstein, in a way that intrigued me, and I just finished reading Epstein's book Advice Not Given. I'm gradually becoming convinced that a more serious meditation practice than my usual half-assed attempts would be a good thing for me, but I think I need a little more structure than just thinking, hey! I should meditate more often! So I've been poking around various meditation apps and I downloaded Dan's 10% Happier app a few days ago. So far, I like it. I'll let you know how it goes.
6. I think I told you awhile ago about hearing Whitney from the Unread Shelf Project on Anne Bogel's podcast What Should I Read Next. I think last year when I started on Bookstagram (a subset of Instagram found by following the hashtag #bookstagram), I became much more aware of new books that were being published, and pretty editions of old books, and instead of buying fewer books last year I think *cringe* I actually bought more. So inspired by Whitney, I'm renewing my intention from last year to not buy new books and instead read the ones I've got.
7. Because I have lots of good books sitting on my shelves that I want to read. Step one of the #unreadshelfproject2019 is to count the number of unread books you have. So I did this yesterday. I didn't count books that belong to other family members, and I didn't count ebooks. My number: 172, which is considerably fewer than I thought it would be. Which makes this seem like a much more doable project. I'm not going to get them all read this year, of course, but I can cross a few off the list. And I can use the money I would have spent on books to save for the trip to the UK, right?
What are your plans for the new year?
Previous posts about New Year's:
be forewarned that as long and wordy as my posts are now, they used to be worse.
New Year's Not Resolution (2010)
Six Days into 2014
Last year's offline experiment (2018)
2. But in case it isn't obvious, I have bad days. Weeks. Dean and I have rough patches in our marriage, more often than we probably should after 34 years of marriage. I sometimes lose sleep worrying about my kids. I can drive myself to distraction obsessively trying to figure out what I'm doing next-- back to work? more volunteer work? three months in the UK? (you have no idea how much that last one tempts me). There are days when I have a hard time thinking of a reason to get out of bed.
3. Some people-- for example, the Bloggess-- can turn their bad days/weeks/childhood into hilarious, touching, meaningful posts, but when I try to do it, it turns out maudlin and boring. It bores me, so lord knows I'm not inflicting it on you. At least not very often. But in case you can't tell, it seems important to put it out there. I don't think I'm projecting an image of a perfect life here, but if I am, now you know. Things can be (and often are) a mess around here. So there. That's enough about that.
4. I don't do New Year's resolutions because I can never keep them, but having a theme, something I want to work on, has been a good thing in the past. My word/theme for 2019 is action. Be active. Take action. Participate. Engage rather than observe. Do instead of think. Or at least, don't just think. Maybe engage is a more succinct way of putting it, and it has the additional benefit of invoking Captain Picard, which is never a bad thing, right?
5. About this time last year, I read Dan Harris's book 10% Happier, where he describes how he has used meditation to cope with anxiety and stress. He talks about one of his mentors, Mark Epstein, in a way that intrigued me, and I just finished reading Epstein's book Advice Not Given. I'm gradually becoming convinced that a more serious meditation practice than my usual half-assed attempts would be a good thing for me, but I think I need a little more structure than just thinking, hey! I should meditate more often! So I've been poking around various meditation apps and I downloaded Dan's 10% Happier app a few days ago. So far, I like it. I'll let you know how it goes.
6. I think I told you awhile ago about hearing Whitney from the Unread Shelf Project on Anne Bogel's podcast What Should I Read Next. I think last year when I started on Bookstagram (a subset of Instagram found by following the hashtag #bookstagram), I became much more aware of new books that were being published, and pretty editions of old books, and instead of buying fewer books last year I think *cringe* I actually bought more. So inspired by Whitney, I'm renewing my intention from last year to not buy new books and instead read the ones I've got.
7. Because I have lots of good books sitting on my shelves that I want to read. Step one of the #unreadshelfproject2019 is to count the number of unread books you have. So I did this yesterday. I didn't count books that belong to other family members, and I didn't count ebooks. My number: 172, which is considerably fewer than I thought it would be. Which makes this seem like a much more doable project. I'm not going to get them all read this year, of course, but I can cross a few off the list. And I can use the money I would have spent on books to save for the trip to the UK, right?
What are your plans for the new year?
Previous posts about New Year's:
be forewarned that as long and wordy as my posts are now, they used to be worse.
New Year's Not Resolution (2010)
Six Days into 2014
Last year's offline experiment (2018)
Tuesday, November 13, 2018
thinking about meditation (again)
Things have been a bit stressful around here recently. It's odd to me that the moments when it would be most useful to meditate, when I am most in need of calmness and serenity, are the exact moments when it doesn't occur to me to meditate. At all. As in, days will go by while I am wound so tightly I can barely sleep before it occurs to me-- huh. Maybe I should try meditating.
Last week when things were finally starting to slow down a bit, then I started meditating again. I've told you before that I'm terrible at the actual act of meditating. I'm lucky if I can quiet my brain for 30 seconds, let alone five or ten minutes.
But there are two reasons I keep doing it: one is because even though meditating feels like a fail while I'm doing it, I often feel the effects later. It seems pointless at the time, but if I can just sit there and let whatever thoughts and feelings I have wash over me, later on in the day, I will feel a perceptible drop in my stress level.
And the other reason is that meditating has taught me the trick of stepping off the hamster wheel in my brain. I may not be able to get my brain to stop, but I can create a little bit of space between me and the non-stop activity. I can back away from it and watch. Wow, look at that thing go.
Because go it does, all the time. (That's one of the reasons I read-- I know I've heard other readers say this, too. A really absorbing book distracts my brain, tricks it into resting.) And that trick, that ability to step off the hamster wheel, has been a lifesaver for me. The more I do it, the more I practice, the easier it becomes.
Except, apparently not when I'm really stressed. Then I forget all about it.
Anyway. Thinking about this got me back into investigating meditation again, so I've been listening to podcasts and reading Mark Epstein and Pema Chodron, and as sometimes happens, I heard/read several times in the space of a week different meditation teachers reminding me that we are all human animals. And as animals, we are first and foremost, before anything else, creatures-- the same way that a giraffe or a spider or a trout is a creature.
One morning as I read something along those lines, I happened to look up and see our dog, who can be the most irritatingly manic canine on the planet when she has a tennis ball in her mouth, looking calm and alert as something caught her attention out the window.
She sat there, in that same pose, for five minutes or so, completely calm, but also completely focused on whatever she was looking at. I'm not sure I could do that. #goals
Last week when things were finally starting to slow down a bit, then I started meditating again. I've told you before that I'm terrible at the actual act of meditating. I'm lucky if I can quiet my brain for 30 seconds, let alone five or ten minutes.
But there are two reasons I keep doing it: one is because even though meditating feels like a fail while I'm doing it, I often feel the effects later. It seems pointless at the time, but if I can just sit there and let whatever thoughts and feelings I have wash over me, later on in the day, I will feel a perceptible drop in my stress level.
And the other reason is that meditating has taught me the trick of stepping off the hamster wheel in my brain. I may not be able to get my brain to stop, but I can create a little bit of space between me and the non-stop activity. I can back away from it and watch. Wow, look at that thing go.
Because go it does, all the time. (That's one of the reasons I read-- I know I've heard other readers say this, too. A really absorbing book distracts my brain, tricks it into resting.) And that trick, that ability to step off the hamster wheel, has been a lifesaver for me. The more I do it, the more I practice, the easier it becomes.
Except, apparently not when I'm really stressed. Then I forget all about it.
Anyway. Thinking about this got me back into investigating meditation again, so I've been listening to podcasts and reading Mark Epstein and Pema Chodron, and as sometimes happens, I heard/read several times in the space of a week different meditation teachers reminding me that we are all human animals. And as animals, we are first and foremost, before anything else, creatures-- the same way that a giraffe or a spider or a trout is a creature.
One morning as I read something along those lines, I happened to look up and see our dog, who can be the most irritatingly manic canine on the planet when she has a tennis ball in her mouth, looking calm and alert as something caught her attention out the window.
 |
| Calmly alert: Sadie, meditation teacher extraordinaire |
Tuesday, June 5, 2018
spiritual highs
I put this off till the last minute, so this is going to be more of a list of bullet points than a post.
I've been thinking about spiritual highs--the mind-altering experiences that some people have that seem to have some element of blissful hyper-awareness involved. These experiences become a kind of holy grail, an state of mind that people chase after, because they've heard it's so amazing. There's a lot to unpack here. The experience of transcendence or spiritual bliss or whatever your particular tradition encourages can be and often is life-changing.
But there are some things about the idea that are-- well, if not disturbing, at least troubling. For one thing, it's this kind of spiritual experience that tends to make people think they've found The Truth. If you're Buddhist or Christian or whatever, and you have a mind-blowing spiritual experience in the context of your faith, it convinces you that your tradition is Right. In future times of doubt or uncertainty, that moment of conversion or enlightenment or whatever will be the thing that you look back to convince yourself that you're on the right track.
The problem with that is that people of all religious traditions have mind-blowing experiences. There are Christians who have amazing conversion stories to tell-- addictions ended, diseases healed. Saint Theresa is famous for her exalted experience of God. Buddhists have enlightenment. Sufis have ecstatic whirling. I'm very quickly getting out of things I can knowledgeably discuss, but I've investigated enough spiritual traditions to be sure that every tradition offers a path to transcendence. So that confidence that your tradition is the Right Tradition because "look at these amazing experiences that we have!" is a false confidence. The fact that people experience spiritual highs in your tradition just means that yup, it's a legitimate spiritual tradition.
And then there's the whole element of spiritual snobbery. Oh, you haven't experienced enlightenment? Oh, you haven't spoken in tongues? Oh, you haven't (fill in the blank with whatever spiritual experience is the cool, popular experience of the moment)? It's a strong enough thing that people are known to lie about it, or to think they've experienced it when they really haven't, because surely someone who has been meditating faithfully for x number of years has experienced something that a newbie who sits down for the first time can experience.
The mainline church I attend (more on that another time) is full of people who have faithfully followed the teaching of their church for their entire lives, and yet have never had a conversion experience, because they've been attending our church since birth. Does that make them less Christian than the person whose remarkable conversion experience included coming back from the brink of death by addiction?
And can't the small, mini-mind-blowing experiences that all of us experience every time we learn something new add up over time to something more solid, more real than a one-time experience of "enlightenment" or "conversion" that peters out over the following years because it wasn't followed up by anything else?
Maybe this is just sour grapes on my part, because I've had plenty of the mini-mind-altering experiences, the a-ha! moment that changes perceptions and feelings and leads to small-scale but perceptible growth, but I've never experienced "enlightenment," full stop. Since I was raised Evangelical, I never experienced conversion (unless you count my reverse conversion away from Evangelicalism in my twenties, but that wasn't a one-time event).
I think it's typical of the American mindset, including my own, that we hear about the big bang, the WOW factor of a spiritual tradition, and that's what we want. We don't want the hours of practice, the days of grinding work to feed the poor or visit the sick, we don't want to give up our creature comforts, we just want the fireworks, and quickly.
I don't have much else to say about this, and obviously this isn't something I've got any answers to, beccause I'm not even sure this makes sense. But it's what I've been thinking about quite a bit after listening to a podcast last week. And since I'm so tired I can barely hold my eyes open, I may have to come back and edit this or write more on this topic another time.
I've been thinking about spiritual highs--the mind-altering experiences that some people have that seem to have some element of blissful hyper-awareness involved. These experiences become a kind of holy grail, an state of mind that people chase after, because they've heard it's so amazing. There's a lot to unpack here. The experience of transcendence or spiritual bliss or whatever your particular tradition encourages can be and often is life-changing.
But there are some things about the idea that are-- well, if not disturbing, at least troubling. For one thing, it's this kind of spiritual experience that tends to make people think they've found The Truth. If you're Buddhist or Christian or whatever, and you have a mind-blowing spiritual experience in the context of your faith, it convinces you that your tradition is Right. In future times of doubt or uncertainty, that moment of conversion or enlightenment or whatever will be the thing that you look back to convince yourself that you're on the right track.
The problem with that is that people of all religious traditions have mind-blowing experiences. There are Christians who have amazing conversion stories to tell-- addictions ended, diseases healed. Saint Theresa is famous for her exalted experience of God. Buddhists have enlightenment. Sufis have ecstatic whirling. I'm very quickly getting out of things I can knowledgeably discuss, but I've investigated enough spiritual traditions to be sure that every tradition offers a path to transcendence. So that confidence that your tradition is the Right Tradition because "look at these amazing experiences that we have!" is a false confidence. The fact that people experience spiritual highs in your tradition just means that yup, it's a legitimate spiritual tradition.
And then there's the whole element of spiritual snobbery. Oh, you haven't experienced enlightenment? Oh, you haven't spoken in tongues? Oh, you haven't (fill in the blank with whatever spiritual experience is the cool, popular experience of the moment)? It's a strong enough thing that people are known to lie about it, or to think they've experienced it when they really haven't, because surely someone who has been meditating faithfully for x number of years has experienced something that a newbie who sits down for the first time can experience.
The mainline church I attend (more on that another time) is full of people who have faithfully followed the teaching of their church for their entire lives, and yet have never had a conversion experience, because they've been attending our church since birth. Does that make them less Christian than the person whose remarkable conversion experience included coming back from the brink of death by addiction?
And can't the small, mini-mind-blowing experiences that all of us experience every time we learn something new add up over time to something more solid, more real than a one-time experience of "enlightenment" or "conversion" that peters out over the following years because it wasn't followed up by anything else?
Maybe this is just sour grapes on my part, because I've had plenty of the mini-mind-altering experiences, the a-ha! moment that changes perceptions and feelings and leads to small-scale but perceptible growth, but I've never experienced "enlightenment," full stop. Since I was raised Evangelical, I never experienced conversion (unless you count my reverse conversion away from Evangelicalism in my twenties, but that wasn't a one-time event).
I think it's typical of the American mindset, including my own, that we hear about the big bang, the WOW factor of a spiritual tradition, and that's what we want. We don't want the hours of practice, the days of grinding work to feed the poor or visit the sick, we don't want to give up our creature comforts, we just want the fireworks, and quickly.
I don't have much else to say about this, and obviously this isn't something I've got any answers to, beccause I'm not even sure this makes sense. But it's what I've been thinking about quite a bit after listening to a podcast last week. And since I'm so tired I can barely hold my eyes open, I may have to come back and edit this or write more on this topic another time.
Tuesday, May 22, 2018
More Types: meditation and maybe the most obvious type of all (edited)
(Edited 5/26/2018. I typed this out almost without editing on Monday night, but as I've thought about it over the past few days, I realized I was too negative toward the end. The only changes are to the last third.)
It occurred to me that maybe the most obvious type of all personality types is whether or not you find the idea of personality types useful/helpful. If you think the idea of personality types is right up there with astrology and magical thinking, then I can understand why you would find the topic so utterly uninteresting. It's like the punch line to a joke (a not very funny one): There are two types of people in the world, the people who like types and the people that don't.
But for me, figuring out my own personal framework has been unendingly helpful. That four tendencies thing I talked about a couple of months ago-- that has been great. Now when I see myself going into Obliger mode, I can notice it and sometimes I can choose to act differently if I need to. I love having the extra self-awareness it gives me.
Another one has occurred to me, and that is, for lack of a better way of stating it, what type of core self you have, or maybe your tendency to calmness or chaos. I have to back up to explain this one. For a long time, I had a really hard time with meditation because the teachers (even my favorite, Pema Chodron) would talk about finding the naturally spacious, calm place inside of you. The idea seemed to be that if you dig through all of your layers of fear and false expectations and whatever else, you'd get to this place of naturally-occurring peace and calm that was your True Self. (or not-Self, if you're Buddhist, but that's an entirely different discussion.)
The problem with that was that the further I dug, the more tangled things got. I could create a space of peace and calm in my head (for a few seconds anyway), but I never got the sense that it was the "real" me. Ever. Not even once. So for awhile I decided (because, you know, I know more than every single person who has ever meditated in the history of the world), that all those teachers were Wrong, and that really, the only way to get to this space of peace and calmness was to learn how to create it-- that our "real", "natural" selves were a maelstrom of chaotic thoughts and feelings.
But recently it has occurred to me that maybe-- *drum roll* --people are just different. Maybe there are some people who can dig through all their layers and they get to a place that feels like coming home to their true selves and it's all peaceful and calm in there. And maybe there are others of us who just keeping on coming up with more layers of muck the further we dig--in other words, at the core of true selves is a chaotic mess. Or, to put it more positively, a whirlwind of chaos and color.
If that's true, for those of us who are the second type, the purpose of meditation isn't to find an inner place of peace that already exists, but to create that peace, to learn how to observe the whirlwind without getting sucked into actually feeling chaotic.
What would we call this? People who are naturally calm vs people who are naturally chaotic? I don't know. But it would explain why some people, when they try meditation, just get more and more angry as they feel more and more like failures for not being able to find this mythical, supposedly natural, feeling of peace and calm, while other people take to it like the proverbial ducks to water.
Or maybe I just haven't dug through enough layers yet.
It occurred to me that maybe the most obvious type of all personality types is whether or not you find the idea of personality types useful/helpful. If you think the idea of personality types is right up there with astrology and magical thinking, then I can understand why you would find the topic so utterly uninteresting. It's like the punch line to a joke (a not very funny one): There are two types of people in the world, the people who like types and the people that don't.
But for me, figuring out my own personal framework has been unendingly helpful. That four tendencies thing I talked about a couple of months ago-- that has been great. Now when I see myself going into Obliger mode, I can notice it and sometimes I can choose to act differently if I need to. I love having the extra self-awareness it gives me.
Another one has occurred to me, and that is, for lack of a better way of stating it, what type of core self you have, or maybe your tendency to calmness or chaos. I have to back up to explain this one. For a long time, I had a really hard time with meditation because the teachers (even my favorite, Pema Chodron) would talk about finding the naturally spacious, calm place inside of you. The idea seemed to be that if you dig through all of your layers of fear and false expectations and whatever else, you'd get to this place of naturally-occurring peace and calm that was your True Self. (or not-Self, if you're Buddhist, but that's an entirely different discussion.)
The problem with that was that the further I dug, the more tangled things got. I could create a space of peace and calm in my head (for a few seconds anyway), but I never got the sense that it was the "real" me. Ever. Not even once. So for awhile I decided (because, you know, I know more than every single person who has ever meditated in the history of the world), that all those teachers were Wrong, and that really, the only way to get to this space of peace and calmness was to learn how to create it-- that our "real", "natural" selves were a maelstrom of chaotic thoughts and feelings.
But recently it has occurred to me that maybe-- *drum roll* --people are just different. Maybe there are some people who can dig through all their layers and they get to a place that feels like coming home to their true selves and it's all peaceful and calm in there. And maybe there are others of us who just keeping on coming up with more layers of muck the further we dig--in other words, at the core of true selves is a chaotic mess. Or, to put it more positively, a whirlwind of chaos and color.
If that's true, for those of us who are the second type, the purpose of meditation isn't to find an inner place of peace that already exists, but to create that peace, to learn how to observe the whirlwind without getting sucked into actually feeling chaotic.
What would we call this? People who are naturally calm vs people who are naturally chaotic? I don't know. But it would explain why some people, when they try meditation, just get more and more angry as they feel more and more like failures for not being able to find this mythical, supposedly natural, feeling of peace and calm, while other people take to it like the proverbial ducks to water.
Or maybe I just haven't dug through enough layers yet.
Friday, March 30, 2018
7ToF: wind in the door, mental gymnastics, and (unsurprisingly) books
(I wrote the first 5 of these about a month ago and then ended up not posting it. Since we're going out of town this weekend, I'm pulling it out, dusting it off, and adding two more. So, for the record, the wind storms in #4 were awhile back, not recently, thank you, weather gods.)
(Since we're out of town for the next few days I probably won't post next week. You know what? I've lost my sense of humor. I'm counting on spring to bring it back. IF SPRING WOULD EVER FREAKING GET HERE.)
1. Among other things that I didn't tell you about that happened during my 14-month blogging break was our kitchen/living room renovation. Thank your stars I wasn't blogging while that was happening. I know what I like when it's done, but getting there involves a neurotic mess of insecurities about all the decisions. And you didn't have to read about any of it! *throws confetti*
2. The kitchen is done and I love it, but there were other bits and pieces, too, that we have just recently finished-- like replacing our ancient living room furniture, finding rugs to go over our new fake wood floor, etc etc etc. (yes. still.) At the moment, the only thing left on my list is a new coffee table and end tables. Sounds simple, right? But I've been looking off and on for months now and haven't found the right thing. It's starting to really irritate me.
3. Anyway. That was a side-track, what I was really going to tell you about is our 40-year old house. It wasn't very solidly built to begin with, so living here has been a fairly continuous round of fixing up and shoring up. We have not replaced the windows, because money, so we still have the same old ill-fitting drafty windows. Most of the time, this isn't a problem. New windows would be nice, but these are fine.
4. But when it's windy, the house is a bit, ummmm, chilly. Fortunately this doesn't happen very often, but we've had two major wind storms in the past three weeks, one with winds gusting over 50 mph. And when it's really windy we get a little extra special bonus, because the wind ends up blowing snow inside the sliding glass doors to the deck. (Not much, but still.) Solid as a rock, this house is. *rolls eyes*
5. Recommended: Dan Harris's book 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help that Actually Works. The title kind of says it all, doesn't it? It's a (mostly non-religious) story of how he learned to meditate. He's a great writer, with lots of entertaining stories to tell from his career in journalism. It's possibly the only book on meditation that I've read all the way through from beginning to end. Usually with non-fiction I read about the first third and then either quit or skim through the rest, but I made it all the way through this one.
6. But there are a couple of places where I disagree with him. He ends up doing specifically Buddhist meditation (not at first, but eventually he gets there). So he accepts the Buddhist theological explanation for what's going on when he meditates. I have ended up not accepting the Buddhist framework (although learning about it gave me some great insights). So I have a different theory about it.
He says at one point that meditation is not just a mental trick, but you know, I think it is. I mean, that's a shorthand way of describing it that ignores a lot of profound experience, but in the end, what meditation does for me is teaches me the mental trick of being able to separate myself (detach) from the maelstrom of thoughts and emotions that can threaten to bring me down. In fact, sometimes it does more than threaten, it does bring me down. Meditation has taught me that I have a self beyond that seething whirl of thoughts and emotions. It gives me the skill of stepping off the hamster wheel, even if briefly.
Hmmmm. This is a huge topic and maybe we can return to it sometime but for right now I think that's all I have to say.
7. The reading project-- to finally read some of the books that have been on my TBR list forever-- is going pretty well. So far I've read The Night Circus (good, but really needed about 50 pages cut from the middle), The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime (good), and Heartburn (quick read, surprisingly dated, but it did make me laugh out loud occasionally. Maybe you had to have been alive in the 70s). Am in the middle of Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (v. good). Also made it partway through Atonement and decided it wasn't for me. Although that one has been so highly recommended that I may go back to it at some point. I'm just not in the right place for something that intense at the moment.
that's all. I'm scheduling this one, hope you have a great weekend. And next week, too.
(Since we're out of town for the next few days I probably won't post next week. You know what? I've lost my sense of humor. I'm counting on spring to bring it back. IF SPRING WOULD EVER FREAKING GET HERE.)
1. Among other things that I didn't tell you about that happened during my 14-month blogging break was our kitchen/living room renovation. Thank your stars I wasn't blogging while that was happening. I know what I like when it's done, but getting there involves a neurotic mess of insecurities about all the decisions. And you didn't have to read about any of it! *throws confetti*
2. The kitchen is done and I love it, but there were other bits and pieces, too, that we have just recently finished-- like replacing our ancient living room furniture, finding rugs to go over our new fake wood floor, etc etc etc. (yes. still.) At the moment, the only thing left on my list is a new coffee table and end tables. Sounds simple, right? But I've been looking off and on for months now and haven't found the right thing. It's starting to really irritate me.
3. Anyway. That was a side-track, what I was really going to tell you about is our 40-year old house. It wasn't very solidly built to begin with, so living here has been a fairly continuous round of fixing up and shoring up. We have not replaced the windows, because money, so we still have the same old ill-fitting drafty windows. Most of the time, this isn't a problem. New windows would be nice, but these are fine.
4. But when it's windy, the house is a bit, ummmm, chilly. Fortunately this doesn't happen very often, but we've had two major wind storms in the past three weeks, one with winds gusting over 50 mph. And when it's really windy we get a little extra special bonus, because the wind ends up blowing snow inside the sliding glass doors to the deck. (Not much, but still.) Solid as a rock, this house is. *rolls eyes*
5. Recommended: Dan Harris's book 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help that Actually Works. The title kind of says it all, doesn't it? It's a (mostly non-religious) story of how he learned to meditate. He's a great writer, with lots of entertaining stories to tell from his career in journalism. It's possibly the only book on meditation that I've read all the way through from beginning to end. Usually with non-fiction I read about the first third and then either quit or skim through the rest, but I made it all the way through this one.
6. But there are a couple of places where I disagree with him. He ends up doing specifically Buddhist meditation (not at first, but eventually he gets there). So he accepts the Buddhist theological explanation for what's going on when he meditates. I have ended up not accepting the Buddhist framework (although learning about it gave me some great insights). So I have a different theory about it.
He says at one point that meditation is not just a mental trick, but you know, I think it is. I mean, that's a shorthand way of describing it that ignores a lot of profound experience, but in the end, what meditation does for me is teaches me the mental trick of being able to separate myself (detach) from the maelstrom of thoughts and emotions that can threaten to bring me down. In fact, sometimes it does more than threaten, it does bring me down. Meditation has taught me that I have a self beyond that seething whirl of thoughts and emotions. It gives me the skill of stepping off the hamster wheel, even if briefly.
Hmmmm. This is a huge topic and maybe we can return to it sometime but for right now I think that's all I have to say.
7. The reading project-- to finally read some of the books that have been on my TBR list forever-- is going pretty well. So far I've read The Night Circus (good, but really needed about 50 pages cut from the middle), The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime (good), and Heartburn (quick read, surprisingly dated, but it did make me laugh out loud occasionally. Maybe you had to have been alive in the 70s). Am in the middle of Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (v. good). Also made it partway through Atonement and decided it wasn't for me. Although that one has been so highly recommended that I may go back to it at some point. I'm just not in the right place for something that intense at the moment.
that's all. I'm scheduling this one, hope you have a great weekend. And next week, too.
Friday, April 15, 2016
7ToF: pain, forgiveness, and moving forward
(this got really long, apologies in advance. you've been warned.)
1. The surgery went well. Thank you to all of you who were thinking of MadMax. I did manage to keep it together. Dean was here for the surgery and the first day--and since he's not usually available during the day, I was really grateful for that. But he's been on a business trip since Wednesday, so the last couple of days (and nights) have gone by in a blur of timing meds, changing ice packs, and trying to get some sleep. MadMax is as usual being patient and stoic, but it's pretty painful. I have a hard time going back to sleep if I'm woken up (we've been setting alarms for meds), which has led to not much sleep, but even so I've slept considerably more than he has.
2. Said blur is the reason this post is late. About eleven last night, while I was lying on the other twin bed in MadMax's room keeping him company while watching Megamind, I remembered that it was Thursday and thus time for a blog post, and I just couldn't get up the energy to do it. Also, I was going to title this post Nurse Nancy after the old Golden Book, but fortunately I googled first. Oh, my. The times, they change.
3. I'd better start typing about something else or I will start telling you way more than you want to know about MadMax's recovery. So, let's see. Ah, it is coming back to me what I was going to post about. I'm reading a memoir by Ken Wilber about his wife's journey through cancer treatment, Grace and Grit. I'm not quite done with it yet, but it has given me lots to think about. He is a philosopher with a gazillion books to his name about spirituality, mysticism, religion, theology, philosophy, psychology and who knows what else. One of the things that makes this book so fascinating is the vast reach of topics covered. It feels pretty dated--it was first published 25 years ago, and cancer treatments and public attitudes have changed since then. Also, he is annoyingly sure that everyone wants to know his opinion about everything. And occasionally he goes into way more detail than I want, so I start to skim. But other than those caveats, it is fascinating. Worthwhile read.
4. He alternates his version of what's happening with his wife's journals. (Even though I haven't finished yet, it says right on the cover of the book that she dies at the end, so no spoilers here.) They are wide open to alternative treatments, but there is none of the blatant disregard for science and reality that I was expecting because of that. They go with conventional treatment until the conventional treatments stop working. He is surprisingly honest about some of the things they go through--the near meltdown of their relationship at one point, the prosaic nature of his own major epiphany toward the end. I alternate between being thoroughly annoyed with him and cheering him on.
5. They (the two of them) are at their best when they are dismantling the belief--still so widespread even now--that you create your own reality, and its corollary, that you get cancer (or any sickness) because of something you did or didn't do, or because you chose to be sick. Treya (his wife) has a great essay (which he includes) about how this belief affected her personally. She points out that, regardless of whether or not it is true, when you tell someone who has cancer that they got it because they didn't express their anger toward their mother or whatever, it's not helpful. When you are the recipient of statements like that, it feels like you are being attacked, not supported. Also, because it happens so often, the person with cancer soon starts to realize that the person making these statements is trying to reassure themselves that they're not going to get cancer because they haven't done whatever it is. It's about control, not support. Then Wilber takes on the whole "you create your own reality" mindset and brings it down, beautifully. Since I spent quite a bit of time in my old blog trying (less successfully) to do the same thing -- this post, for example-- I was cheering in my seat.
6. So buried among the mountain of ideas in this book, including quite a bit about how to support someone who is chronically ill or dying, there are two things that have profoundly affected me. One is a discussion fairly early on about forgiveness. I've been involved in several discussions over the years about forgiving the big things--an abusive parent or spouse, a scout leader who raped you, the big things. But I hadn't really spent much time thinking about forgiveness of the little things, the little resentments and hurts that don't really amount to much but that pile up over time. Wilber has a theory about that-- as we develop from the undifferentiated awareness of infancy, the way we learn to define ourselves is because of the little bumps, bruises, and insults we receive as we realize that we are not the same person as our caretaker. Thus, the ego is in effect defined by its hurts. Some of us come to identify so thoroughly with the ego that we hold on tightly to every single little resentment, because without those little hurts, we are nothing. Forgiveness feels threatening, because if I let go of all those little hurts, who am I? I must have them! Forgiveness is the way we let go of our small self, the selfish, narcissistic, it's-all-about-me self, and expand into a larger consciousness. This should be an entire post (and in fact it was the post I was going to write on Monday when it got pre-empted by ACL repair), but I love this. Very helpful insight.
7. And the other thing that had a significant take-home message for me is his discussion of the "pre/trans fallacy." My interpretation of it is possibly not what he intends at all and is definitely a vast over-simplification. But in all the years that I've tried meditation, I've always understood that I was reaching back to some ideal state that I was in before-- I think I might even have defined it as that infant state of undifferentiated awareness. When I meditate, I've been trying to sift through all of the experiences, emotions, intellectual fallacies, cognitive dissonances, whatever and get back to some previous, deeply buried state of peace and bliss. And it never worked. It felt to me like the more I dug, the more tangled up in my own mess I became.
But I get the idea from reading Wilber's discussion of the pre/trans fallacy that an early (pre-personal) state of mind is not the goal. The goal is to move forward into an integrated (trans-personal) consciousness, bringing all that you have learned, all that you have experienced with you. It's not a return to a lower state of consciousness, it's growth into a higher state of consciousness. Hmmm. I'm pretty sure I'm not describing it very well, because I'm making it sound hierarchical. But the basic idea feels important to me. If it's something that interests you, you should definitely read this book, because he explains it better than I do.
So, wow, that was way too much stuff for a Friday, but it's all I've got. If you're still reading, thanks and have a great weekend.
1. The surgery went well. Thank you to all of you who were thinking of MadMax. I did manage to keep it together. Dean was here for the surgery and the first day--and since he's not usually available during the day, I was really grateful for that. But he's been on a business trip since Wednesday, so the last couple of days (and nights) have gone by in a blur of timing meds, changing ice packs, and trying to get some sleep. MadMax is as usual being patient and stoic, but it's pretty painful. I have a hard time going back to sleep if I'm woken up (we've been setting alarms for meds), which has led to not much sleep, but even so I've slept considerably more than he has.
2. Said blur is the reason this post is late. About eleven last night, while I was lying on the other twin bed in MadMax's room keeping him company while watching Megamind, I remembered that it was Thursday and thus time for a blog post, and I just couldn't get up the energy to do it. Also, I was going to title this post Nurse Nancy after the old Golden Book, but fortunately I googled first. Oh, my. The times, they change.
3. I'd better start typing about something else or I will start telling you way more than you want to know about MadMax's recovery. So, let's see. Ah, it is coming back to me what I was going to post about. I'm reading a memoir by Ken Wilber about his wife's journey through cancer treatment, Grace and Grit. I'm not quite done with it yet, but it has given me lots to think about. He is a philosopher with a gazillion books to his name about spirituality, mysticism, religion, theology, philosophy, psychology and who knows what else. One of the things that makes this book so fascinating is the vast reach of topics covered. It feels pretty dated--it was first published 25 years ago, and cancer treatments and public attitudes have changed since then. Also, he is annoyingly sure that everyone wants to know his opinion about everything. And occasionally he goes into way more detail than I want, so I start to skim. But other than those caveats, it is fascinating. Worthwhile read.
4. He alternates his version of what's happening with his wife's journals. (Even though I haven't finished yet, it says right on the cover of the book that she dies at the end, so no spoilers here.) They are wide open to alternative treatments, but there is none of the blatant disregard for science and reality that I was expecting because of that. They go with conventional treatment until the conventional treatments stop working. He is surprisingly honest about some of the things they go through--the near meltdown of their relationship at one point, the prosaic nature of his own major epiphany toward the end. I alternate between being thoroughly annoyed with him and cheering him on.
5. They (the two of them) are at their best when they are dismantling the belief--still so widespread even now--that you create your own reality, and its corollary, that you get cancer (or any sickness) because of something you did or didn't do, or because you chose to be sick. Treya (his wife) has a great essay (which he includes) about how this belief affected her personally. She points out that, regardless of whether or not it is true, when you tell someone who has cancer that they got it because they didn't express their anger toward their mother or whatever, it's not helpful. When you are the recipient of statements like that, it feels like you are being attacked, not supported. Also, because it happens so often, the person with cancer soon starts to realize that the person making these statements is trying to reassure themselves that they're not going to get cancer because they haven't done whatever it is. It's about control, not support. Then Wilber takes on the whole "you create your own reality" mindset and brings it down, beautifully. Since I spent quite a bit of time in my old blog trying (less successfully) to do the same thing -- this post, for example-- I was cheering in my seat.
6. So buried among the mountain of ideas in this book, including quite a bit about how to support someone who is chronically ill or dying, there are two things that have profoundly affected me. One is a discussion fairly early on about forgiveness. I've been involved in several discussions over the years about forgiving the big things--an abusive parent or spouse, a scout leader who raped you, the big things. But I hadn't really spent much time thinking about forgiveness of the little things, the little resentments and hurts that don't really amount to much but that pile up over time. Wilber has a theory about that-- as we develop from the undifferentiated awareness of infancy, the way we learn to define ourselves is because of the little bumps, bruises, and insults we receive as we realize that we are not the same person as our caretaker. Thus, the ego is in effect defined by its hurts. Some of us come to identify so thoroughly with the ego that we hold on tightly to every single little resentment, because without those little hurts, we are nothing. Forgiveness feels threatening, because if I let go of all those little hurts, who am I? I must have them! Forgiveness is the way we let go of our small self, the selfish, narcissistic, it's-all-about-me self, and expand into a larger consciousness. This should be an entire post (and in fact it was the post I was going to write on Monday when it got pre-empted by ACL repair), but I love this. Very helpful insight.
7. And the other thing that had a significant take-home message for me is his discussion of the "pre/trans fallacy." My interpretation of it is possibly not what he intends at all and is definitely a vast over-simplification. But in all the years that I've tried meditation, I've always understood that I was reaching back to some ideal state that I was in before-- I think I might even have defined it as that infant state of undifferentiated awareness. When I meditate, I've been trying to sift through all of the experiences, emotions, intellectual fallacies, cognitive dissonances, whatever and get back to some previous, deeply buried state of peace and bliss. And it never worked. It felt to me like the more I dug, the more tangled up in my own mess I became.
But I get the idea from reading Wilber's discussion of the pre/trans fallacy that an early (pre-personal) state of mind is not the goal. The goal is to move forward into an integrated (trans-personal) consciousness, bringing all that you have learned, all that you have experienced with you. It's not a return to a lower state of consciousness, it's growth into a higher state of consciousness. Hmmm. I'm pretty sure I'm not describing it very well, because I'm making it sound hierarchical. But the basic idea feels important to me. If it's something that interests you, you should definitely read this book, because he explains it better than I do.
So, wow, that was way too much stuff for a Friday, but it's all I've got. If you're still reading, thanks and have a great weekend.
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
how not to meditate part 2
There was somewhere I was going with these meditation posts, and as is often the case, I can no longer remember where it was. Maybe it will come back to me later. But at the moment, I need a post for tomorrow and this one is already half-written, so here you go.
- Along the lines of mixing up my meditation practice a little, once or twice a week I do a guided meditation--i.e., someone has recorded meditation instructions, sometimes general, sometimes on a specific topic like reducing stress or dealing with anger, that you can play back while you're meditating. I have a couple I've downloaded from Audible, and there are thousands out there on YouTube (the Honest Guys have a bunch). If you want something specifically Christian, search for Guided Prayer.
- I have an app on my phone (go ahead and laugh) called the Insight Timer. There's a free version that just uses really nice bell/chime tones to start and end your session. I use it enough that I went ahead and paid for the full version, which gives you a wider variety of sounds and also allows sounds that play at an interval--say every two minutes. I like the interval sound, because if my mind has started to wander (and it always does), that reminds me to come back.
- When I first started, I would have a pen and paper next to me. If there was a thought I just couldn't let go of, I'd stop and write it down. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you hear you're supposed to sit utterly still and not move a muscle, but that's way less important than being able to let go of the hamster wheel. If your nose itches, scratch it. If your foot starts to fall asleep, move it. If there's something you're afraid you'll forget while you're relaxing, write it down.
- The Buddhists say that that the mind is innately spacious. All we need to do to experience that sense of spacious, calm ease is to clear away our thoughts. I'm not sure I agree with that. In my experience, that sense of inner spacious ease is something that has to be cultivated, there's nothing inborn about it. If it were innate, that would mean that there was some pre-ordained reason we should all be meditating to reach this pre-existing state. But if it's something that has to be cultivated, it's just another possible function of the human mind. It deepens and enriches my experience, so I think it's worth doing. But I don't know that there's any pre-existing significance to a meditation practice.
- The mental whirlpool that I sometimes experience--what I've been calling the hamster wheel--sometimes takes on a life of it's own. Sometimes when I get really stressed, the whirlpool starts looking for things to obsess about. There's no longer any connection to something real in my life that I really can do something about, it becomes all about the need to feed the brain spins. In grad school, I'd be frantically worrying about a paper that was due, and when it was finally finished and turned in, instead of getting a break from the mental stress, my brain would just grab onto the next thing it could obsess about. Meditation is the one of the few things I've found that breaks that cycle. (vacation is another, but vacations aren't always an option, darn it.)
I told you last week about one of my analogies for meditation--the blinking, flashing, busy helmet that you remove so that you can spend a few minutes away from all that mental chatter. I have a new analogy. I remember when I was a kid, one time when I was swimming with my sisters I got stuck with one of those plastic inflatable rings under my armpits. It was just a little bit too small, so I was flailing around trying to push myself up out of it and getting a little panicky, because I just kept feeling more and more stuck. My older sister called out to me to put my arms straight up over my head and let myself sink down through the middle. It worked perfectly.
Meditation is sort of like that. Your brain is flailing around with all kinds of pointless activity, but if you just relax and let yourself sink down in, you free yourself from the mental trap of the whatever you're stuck in, and down you go into the cool silence of the water. Nice analogy, right?
So give it try sometime this week, and eventually I'll remember where I was going with these posts. Maybe it will be something interesting.
- Along the lines of mixing up my meditation practice a little, once or twice a week I do a guided meditation--i.e., someone has recorded meditation instructions, sometimes general, sometimes on a specific topic like reducing stress or dealing with anger, that you can play back while you're meditating. I have a couple I've downloaded from Audible, and there are thousands out there on YouTube (the Honest Guys have a bunch). If you want something specifically Christian, search for Guided Prayer.
- I have an app on my phone (go ahead and laugh) called the Insight Timer. There's a free version that just uses really nice bell/chime tones to start and end your session. I use it enough that I went ahead and paid for the full version, which gives you a wider variety of sounds and also allows sounds that play at an interval--say every two minutes. I like the interval sound, because if my mind has started to wander (and it always does), that reminds me to come back.
- When I first started, I would have a pen and paper next to me. If there was a thought I just couldn't let go of, I'd stop and write it down. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you hear you're supposed to sit utterly still and not move a muscle, but that's way less important than being able to let go of the hamster wheel. If your nose itches, scratch it. If your foot starts to fall asleep, move it. If there's something you're afraid you'll forget while you're relaxing, write it down.
- The Buddhists say that that the mind is innately spacious. All we need to do to experience that sense of spacious, calm ease is to clear away our thoughts. I'm not sure I agree with that. In my experience, that sense of inner spacious ease is something that has to be cultivated, there's nothing inborn about it. If it were innate, that would mean that there was some pre-ordained reason we should all be meditating to reach this pre-existing state. But if it's something that has to be cultivated, it's just another possible function of the human mind. It deepens and enriches my experience, so I think it's worth doing. But I don't know that there's any pre-existing significance to a meditation practice.
- The mental whirlpool that I sometimes experience--what I've been calling the hamster wheel--sometimes takes on a life of it's own. Sometimes when I get really stressed, the whirlpool starts looking for things to obsess about. There's no longer any connection to something real in my life that I really can do something about, it becomes all about the need to feed the brain spins. In grad school, I'd be frantically worrying about a paper that was due, and when it was finally finished and turned in, instead of getting a break from the mental stress, my brain would just grab onto the next thing it could obsess about. Meditation is the one of the few things I've found that breaks that cycle. (vacation is another, but vacations aren't always an option, darn it.)
I told you last week about one of my analogies for meditation--the blinking, flashing, busy helmet that you remove so that you can spend a few minutes away from all that mental chatter. I have a new analogy. I remember when I was a kid, one time when I was swimming with my sisters I got stuck with one of those plastic inflatable rings under my armpits. It was just a little bit too small, so I was flailing around trying to push myself up out of it and getting a little panicky, because I just kept feeling more and more stuck. My older sister called out to me to put my arms straight up over my head and let myself sink down through the middle. It worked perfectly.
Meditation is sort of like that. Your brain is flailing around with all kinds of pointless activity, but if you just relax and let yourself sink down in, you free yourself from the mental trap of the whatever you're stuck in, and down you go into the cool silence of the water. Nice analogy, right?
So give it try sometime this week, and eventually I'll remember where I was going with these posts. Maybe it will be something interesting.
Tuesday, June 23, 2015
how not to meditate
Usually if you're reading a how-to post, you can reasonably expect that the person writing it has some competence in the subject. That would not be the case with me and meditation. I do realize the absurdity of me expecting you to read a post about how to meditate from someone who is terrible at meditation.
However, despite my ineptitude, the older I get the more I get out of meditation, even though I'm terrible at it and even though I don't seem to get any "better" at it as time goes by. So rather than giving you a set of instructions, this is just a series of disconnected thoughts intended to get you to try it. The only rationale I have is that I learned more from a yoga teacher who was genetically inflexible than I ever did from the ones who could already put their foot behind their head before they ever tried yoga.
- Although meditation has been used as a spiritual practice in religious settings for millennia, it isn't inherently religious. Meditation is a mental skill that helps you reduce stress and get a better perspective on whatever burdens you're carrying. If you have a set of religious beliefs for context, that works, too.
- The type of Christianity I was raised in is wary of meditation because it seems vaguely Eastern. I wouldn't have been able to tell you anything about it, but it seemed suspicious. But actually there is a long history of Christian meditation going back centuries. For example, John of the Cross, Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, and many others.
- You will hear that meditation works best when you do it at the same time in the same place every day. That's probably true, but it doesn't work for me. I do best at staying with it when I mix it up a little. One day I'll actually sit and meditate the way you're "supposed" to, one day I'll try it while walking. I can't meditate immediately after I wake up because my brain is too foggy, so sometimes I do it after breakfast, sometimes in the afternoon, rarely in the evening. Sometimes I use music designed for meditation, sometimes something else (anything without words), sometimes no music at all. Three minutes, ten minutes, twenty. I have no standard practice.
- How not to meditate: Don't sit there with your jaw clenched trying to CONTROL YOUR THOUGHTS. That will just lead to anger and frustration. Meditation is mental relaxation--a chance to sit and watch your monkey mind jump through all its routines: worry, stress, all the responsibilities you're trying to juggle.
I'm not going to tell you that none of those things are important, because a lot of the things we worry about are important. But as I've practiced meditation, I've come to realize that there's an element of my worry and stress that is just a hamster on a wheel. It's not productive, it's not helping any, it's just my brain whizzing and whirring because it's in the habit of doing that.
Gah. I can't tell you how often I sit down to write a post thinking that it will only be 3-4 paragraphs because I don't have much to say. Then I start typing and I end up going on and on. Believe it or not, I'm only about halfway done. So I guess I'll split this into two. More later.
However, despite my ineptitude, the older I get the more I get out of meditation, even though I'm terrible at it and even though I don't seem to get any "better" at it as time goes by. So rather than giving you a set of instructions, this is just a series of disconnected thoughts intended to get you to try it. The only rationale I have is that I learned more from a yoga teacher who was genetically inflexible than I ever did from the ones who could already put their foot behind their head before they ever tried yoga.
- Although meditation has been used as a spiritual practice in religious settings for millennia, it isn't inherently religious. Meditation is a mental skill that helps you reduce stress and get a better perspective on whatever burdens you're carrying. If you have a set of religious beliefs for context, that works, too.
- The type of Christianity I was raised in is wary of meditation because it seems vaguely Eastern. I wouldn't have been able to tell you anything about it, but it seemed suspicious. But actually there is a long history of Christian meditation going back centuries. For example, John of the Cross, Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, and many others.
- You will hear that meditation works best when you do it at the same time in the same place every day. That's probably true, but it doesn't work for me. I do best at staying with it when I mix it up a little. One day I'll actually sit and meditate the way you're "supposed" to, one day I'll try it while walking. I can't meditate immediately after I wake up because my brain is too foggy, so sometimes I do it after breakfast, sometimes in the afternoon, rarely in the evening. Sometimes I use music designed for meditation, sometimes something else (anything without words), sometimes no music at all. Three minutes, ten minutes, twenty. I have no standard practice.
- How not to meditate: Don't sit there with your jaw clenched trying to CONTROL YOUR THOUGHTS. That will just lead to anger and frustration. Meditation is mental relaxation--a chance to sit and watch your monkey mind jump through all its routines: worry, stress, all the responsibilities you're trying to juggle.
I'm not going to tell you that none of those things are important, because a lot of the things we worry about are important. But as I've practiced meditation, I've come to realize that there's an element of my worry and stress that is just a hamster on a wheel. It's not productive, it's not helping any, it's just my brain whizzing and whirring because it's in the habit of doing that.
Gah. I can't tell you how often I sit down to write a post thinking that it will only be 3-4 paragraphs because I don't have much to say. Then I start typing and I end up going on and on. Believe it or not, I'm only about halfway done. So I guess I'll split this into two. More later.
Wednesday, June 17, 2015
TBW: the zen-ish moment
Throwback Wednesday. Here is another old one, this one from February 2014. I do have a few new things to say, we'll get to that eventually. There will be one more old one tomorrow, when it actually will be Throwback Thursday. :-)
-----------------------
Many years ago, I discovered what I think of as the travel mindset. Getting packed and ready to go may be a frantic mess, but once you get to the airport and get in line to check in, you let all the travel anxiety go. You just insert yourself into the travel system and let the system take care of you.
Like everybody, I have some travel horror stories to tell, like the time I got stuck in Salt Lake City for three days while trying to get back home from a weekend trip to California. But horror stories aside, for the most part, you get where you need to go. You just have to have a good book (or three) and some food (granola bars, bag of nuts, etc), and you're set. Well, if you're me, you also have to have dramamine, but you get the idea.
We live far enough away from a major airport that pretty much any time we fly, it takes a full day to get to wherever we're going. I used to dread the travel days, because TRAVEL STRESS. But now I look at them as a completely acceptable, valid excuse to sit and read all day, and how often do I get to do that? Over the years, this has worked out so well that now the travel days are one of my favorite parts of vacation.
(Of course it helps that I'm not travelling with toddlers anymore. Thank the saints and all the stars.)
I've discovered that something similar works at the post office. Not always, because standing in line at the post office is right up there with filing financial documents and having dental work done in my list of things I hate with irrational hatred. But usually I can just relax and stand in line and not worry about how long it's taking. Sometimes I even chat with complete and utter strangers (like many introverts, I find it easier to make small talk with strangers than with people I know).
I'm finding as I play with this idea that those moments of calm can occur anywhere, anytime. I think of it as zen calm, but since I've never seriously undertaken zen discipline, it may not be very close. Zen-ish, then. In the midst of traffic, waiting to pick up the kid at school, any time I'm in a situation that is out of my control, if I just give in to it, let go of the need to be in control, I can reach a sort of calm stillness. (I typed clam stillness first, which is different, but I bet clams live a pretty zen life.)
I've never experienced true enlightenment. When I think of capital-E Enlightenment, Elizabeth Gilchrist's phrase from Eat Pray Love comes to mind: she says she was "catapulted into the lap of God." Although I didn't care for that book, that phrase stuck in my head. A moment of perfect bliss, feeling like you are connected to everything and everything is connected to you, suffused by light and love-- I've never been there.
But sometimes these little pockets of zen-ish calm at an airport or in the post office lead to a kind of enlargement of consciousness, a feeling of accessing something beyond myself. Especially when I'm reading. And those moments .... oh, let's just say they make up for a lot of other moments of confusion, fear, anguish, etc.
I typed that much on Friday. Then last night I had one of those other moments where I get tangled up in a load of crap. I sent an e-mail to a family group and got back a bunch of very sneering, negative vibes--which may have been real, or may have been my projection of things I've felt in the past. I started to panic about my new class, which starts tonight. I had a strange experience at the grocery store yesterday afternoon which didn't really register at the time but came back full force.
So there I was about 12:30 a.m. last night, letting myself get buried under a load of self-contempt and self-criticism. It's a hell of a lot harder to try to find zen-ish calm under those circumstances than it is while you're reading a book in the Denver airport. But I've been thinking about this quite a bit recently, so I tried. And it helped. I don't think I got to zen calm, but I got back to the point where I could go to sleep.
Work in progress.
-----------------------
Many years ago, I discovered what I think of as the travel mindset. Getting packed and ready to go may be a frantic mess, but once you get to the airport and get in line to check in, you let all the travel anxiety go. You just insert yourself into the travel system and let the system take care of you.
Like everybody, I have some travel horror stories to tell, like the time I got stuck in Salt Lake City for three days while trying to get back home from a weekend trip to California. But horror stories aside, for the most part, you get where you need to go. You just have to have a good book (or three) and some food (granola bars, bag of nuts, etc), and you're set. Well, if you're me, you also have to have dramamine, but you get the idea.
We live far enough away from a major airport that pretty much any time we fly, it takes a full day to get to wherever we're going. I used to dread the travel days, because TRAVEL STRESS. But now I look at them as a completely acceptable, valid excuse to sit and read all day, and how often do I get to do that? Over the years, this has worked out so well that now the travel days are one of my favorite parts of vacation.
(Of course it helps that I'm not travelling with toddlers anymore. Thank the saints and all the stars.)
I've discovered that something similar works at the post office. Not always, because standing in line at the post office is right up there with filing financial documents and having dental work done in my list of things I hate with irrational hatred. But usually I can just relax and stand in line and not worry about how long it's taking. Sometimes I even chat with complete and utter strangers (like many introverts, I find it easier to make small talk with strangers than with people I know).
I'm finding as I play with this idea that those moments of calm can occur anywhere, anytime. I think of it as zen calm, but since I've never seriously undertaken zen discipline, it may not be very close. Zen-ish, then. In the midst of traffic, waiting to pick up the kid at school, any time I'm in a situation that is out of my control, if I just give in to it, let go of the need to be in control, I can reach a sort of calm stillness. (I typed clam stillness first, which is different, but I bet clams live a pretty zen life.)
I've never experienced true enlightenment. When I think of capital-E Enlightenment, Elizabeth Gilchrist's phrase from Eat Pray Love comes to mind: she says she was "catapulted into the lap of God." Although I didn't care for that book, that phrase stuck in my head. A moment of perfect bliss, feeling like you are connected to everything and everything is connected to you, suffused by light and love-- I've never been there.
But sometimes these little pockets of zen-ish calm at an airport or in the post office lead to a kind of enlargement of consciousness, a feeling of accessing something beyond myself. Especially when I'm reading. And those moments .... oh, let's just say they make up for a lot of other moments of confusion, fear, anguish, etc.
I typed that much on Friday. Then last night I had one of those other moments where I get tangled up in a load of crap. I sent an e-mail to a family group and got back a bunch of very sneering, negative vibes--which may have been real, or may have been my projection of things I've felt in the past. I started to panic about my new class, which starts tonight. I had a strange experience at the grocery store yesterday afternoon which didn't really register at the time but came back full force.
So there I was about 12:30 a.m. last night, letting myself get buried under a load of self-contempt and self-criticism. It's a hell of a lot harder to try to find zen-ish calm under those circumstances than it is while you're reading a book in the Denver airport. But I've been thinking about this quite a bit recently, so I tried. And it helped. I don't think I got to zen calm, but I got back to the point where I could go to sleep.
Work in progress.
Tuesday, June 16, 2015
TBT: meditate me home
A couple of weeks ago I told you I did a month-long yoga and meditation challenge. Then I proceeded to talk about yoga and didn't say anything about meditation.
So this week's topic was going to be meditation, but my brain doesn't seem to be functioning well enough today to write out what I want to say. hmmm. Maybe I should go meditate.
Anyway. I'm shamelessly modifying "Throwback Thursday" to "Throwback Tuesday" and starting the discussion with a (slightly edited) post from my old blog. I was originally drawn into meditation by reading Pema Chodron, a Buddhist teacher. I'm not really interested in the Buddhist aspect anymore, but this might still be a good place to start. Originally posted February 1, 2008.
------------------
When I first came in contact with Buddhism, it wasn't very appealing to me. The books I read and the Buddhists I knew back then made it sound like it was all about discipline-- having your thoughts under perfect control, being cool and emotionally detached. Then a few years ago I ran across the writings of Pema Chodron and met some different Buddhists, and my impression began to change.
The heart of Buddhist practice is meditation. But my early understanding of what that meant was wrong. I thought the idea was to completely shut down all thought in your brain and try to merge with the Great Nothing. I had no idea exactly what that meant, it was just my impression of Buddhist meditation.
When I sit down to meditate now, my goal isn't to stop thinking, or even to control my thoughts. What I want is to create a little space between me and my thoughts, to watch them, see them go by-- the classic example is like watching clouds float across the sky. (I especially like that example when it is the night sky, with clouds floating by in front of a vast starry expanse.)
The point isn't to be in control of your thoughts, but to let go of the idea that they have intrinsic importance. They're just thoughts, electrical impulses that have no meaning outside what I give them.
I confess that I am terrible at this. Like many (most?) people, I have Busy Brain Syndrome. In the space of a minute, I might think about what we're having for dinner, who's picking up my son from school, what responsibilities are "real" vs. ones that I've just picked up out of guilt, where my daughter is going to college next year, whether or not I'm over-involved in her decision, is that load of laundry done, and if evil starts small, how am I participating?
And honestly, I have rarely managed to stop this flow of constant mental chatter for more than a minute or two, although I've spent far longer than that sitting and working on it. What I'm slowly learning to do is to just observe all that constant stream of thought. Just sit and watch it.
I sometimes imagine that I have a helmet on that completely covers my head. The helmet is covered with lights and dials and wires that are constantly blinking and humming and clicking, representing all my mental activity. Then I slip out of the helmet and leave it sitting there, flashing and humming and clicking away, all by itself. It is such an enormous relief.
According to the Buddhist teachers I've read in the last few years, the mind is innately spacious. If we step away from the claustrophobic stream of thoughts that makes us feel stressed and anxious, we can experience that spacious, open feeling. I've only rarely experienced this; I'm not the most disciplined of practitioners. But I've experienced it enough to continue to work at it.
So this week's topic was going to be meditation, but my brain doesn't seem to be functioning well enough today to write out what I want to say. hmmm. Maybe I should go meditate.
Anyway. I'm shamelessly modifying "Throwback Thursday" to "Throwback Tuesday" and starting the discussion with a (slightly edited) post from my old blog. I was originally drawn into meditation by reading Pema Chodron, a Buddhist teacher. I'm not really interested in the Buddhist aspect anymore, but this might still be a good place to start. Originally posted February 1, 2008.
------------------
When I first came in contact with Buddhism, it wasn't very appealing to me. The books I read and the Buddhists I knew back then made it sound like it was all about discipline-- having your thoughts under perfect control, being cool and emotionally detached. Then a few years ago I ran across the writings of Pema Chodron and met some different Buddhists, and my impression began to change.
The heart of Buddhist practice is meditation. But my early understanding of what that meant was wrong. I thought the idea was to completely shut down all thought in your brain and try to merge with the Great Nothing. I had no idea exactly what that meant, it was just my impression of Buddhist meditation.
The point isn't to be in control of your thoughts, but to let go of the idea that they have intrinsic importance. They're just thoughts, electrical impulses that have no meaning outside what I give them.
I confess that I am terrible at this. Like many (most?) people, I have Busy Brain Syndrome. In the space of a minute, I might think about what we're having for dinner, who's picking up my son from school, what responsibilities are "real" vs. ones that I've just picked up out of guilt, where my daughter is going to college next year, whether or not I'm over-involved in her decision, is that load of laundry done, and if evil starts small, how am I participating?
And honestly, I have rarely managed to stop this flow of constant mental chatter for more than a minute or two, although I've spent far longer than that sitting and working on it. What I'm slowly learning to do is to just observe all that constant stream of thought. Just sit and watch it.
I sometimes imagine that I have a helmet on that completely covers my head. The helmet is covered with lights and dials and wires that are constantly blinking and humming and clicking, representing all my mental activity. Then I slip out of the helmet and leave it sitting there, flashing and humming and clicking away, all by itself. It is such an enormous relief.
According to the Buddhist teachers I've read in the last few years, the mind is innately spacious. If we step away from the claustrophobic stream of thoughts that makes us feel stressed and anxious, we can experience that spacious, open feeling. I've only rarely experienced this; I'm not the most disciplined of practitioners. But I've experienced it enough to continue to work at it.