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Meditation on mindlessness.

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Every now and then I get stuck in a loop. I find myself doing something that I don’t want to do, and I’ve been doing it far longer than I should. It doesn’t make any sense. I’m an adult. I’m in charge of my life, right?

It sure doesn’t feel like it to me sometimes, and I suspect you might know what I’m talking about.

There are habits that I fall into that don’t do me any good anymore, if they really ever did to start with. Doing the same thing over and over feels safer than trying something new, even if the old thing is a dead end.

This is how I’ll end up eating a whole bag of potato chips in one sitting. This is how I’ll spend two hours scrolling through Facebook to see if anything is happening. This is how I smoked clove cigarettes and pot for ten years.

Mindlessness. It’s all mindlessness. It’s being on auto pilot. It is worse than death because at least with death I don’t have control over my actions. I’d like to think when I’m alive, I do.

The bad part is that when I get in these loops I usually know it. I’m aware of how badly I don’t want to be doing this thing but I’m still doing it anyway. Ten minutes later I’m still doing it. Ten minutes more and I’m still there.

It’s how I end up plodding through books that I don’t really enjoy. They aren’t for a class. They aren’t assigned. Most of the books I read I got for free or really cheap too, so it isn’t like I’m wasting money if I stop reading a book that is going nowhere.

Sometimes when I am stuck in a loop, I start to think like this and it helps me so I offer it to you:

Would Jesus be spending his time like this? What if he were here with me? Would I be doing what I am doing?

It works for food too – would Jesus be eating this? Is it healthy? Would I serve it to him? Wouldn’t I serve him good food, something healthy and tasty?

As for the state of my house, would I be embarrassed to have him over? Is it welcoming, or a mess? And what would we do? Would we sit around watching tv or checking updates on Facebook?

So, if I wouldn’t treat Jesus like that, why am I treating myself like that? I need to show myself the love that Jesus showed.

I sometimes get Scott to let me do something nice for him by talking him into the idea that it benefits me. I’m trying the same trick on myself. Instead of thinking about my own needs, I’m imagining what if Jesus were here. Would I be doing this?

Would I be treating my body this way? Would I be spending my time this way? Would I be talking to myself this way? Would I be living this way?

Now, understand that I wasn’t raised with a guilt and gloom image of Jesus. Jesus enjoys a glass of wine and playing board games. But he also values doing the real work too. It isn’t all fun and games either. There is a balance there.

What would Jesus do, indeed. I always hated those rubber bracelets. They seem so cheap, so trivial. I felt that the people who wore them didn’t have a grasp on the real Jesus anyway, because their Jesus was anti everything. The Jesus I know is about love.

I feel like Jesus wouldn’t waste his time but then I remember that he spent a lot of time alone, hanging out talking with God. So there was certainly some down time, but I can’t compare that to surfing the internet mindlessly or reading boring books or ignoring things that need to be done around the house or eating junk food.

I think what I’m trying to do is use Jesus as a reminder to be mindful. I’m not giving Jesus control. That isn’t what it is at all. I’m not trying to guilt trip myself into doing or not doing anything. I’m trying to come up with a trick that helps me get unstuck from a groove, a rut.

So far, when I remember to do it, it works.

Thanks for chips and salsa

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I went to lunch at my favorite Mexican restaurant a few weeks ago. I’ve not been there for lunch in a while. Normally I eat lunch at work or at a buffet. I started to remember why I go to buffets.

The server was taking a long time to get to me to take my order. Then I’d have to wait for my food to be prepared. I started to get a little anxious. I don’t want to be late back to work. Well, I do want to be late, because I don’t really want to go back right away because I like luxuriating at lunch and not being ruled by the clock – but that wasn’t really an option. What I want and what I’m going to do are sometimes two different things.

So I started to freak out a little. We’ve got a new manager and I think it is important to get there on time. When is the server going to come? I started trying to spot him, or in fact any server. Somebody could take my order- it didn’t have to be my server. Things needed to start happening soon. Soon I wouldn’t have time to eat my meal in a calm fashion. Snarfed down food isn’t really great on your digestion.

And then I looked right in front of me. I have something to eat right here. Here’s the chips and salsa. It’s hardly a meal, but certainly something. I gave thanks for it, and started eating it. I started to calm down immediately. As soon as I did this, the server came and apologized for the wait and took my order. The moment I appreciated what I had, I got more.

This is the way, I’m learning. Give thanks for what you have, not what you want. Whatever you have, enjoy it and appreciate it, even if it is small. Be thankful.

Strangely, then things seem to open up – but that isn’t the point. Don’t be thankful so that you’ll get the next thing. Be thankful for the current situation, as it is, whatever it is. If you’re not happy now, you’ll certainly not be happy then. If you’re constantly wanting more, then you’ll never be content. So foster a state of constant thankfulness, and you’re already there.

Frame

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If you want to miss the big picture, put a frame around it.

I’m learning that the more I decide what things are going to be, or how I should deal with them before I get to them, the less that I learn. The more I plan ahead, the less I’m able to experience what is really happening.

Instead of saying to God “This is what I want out of this experience”, it is me saying “God, what do You want me to get out of this”?

I want it all. I don’t want to miss anything.

I want to be open, like a child, to whatever is really there. I want to see with new eyes and hear with new ears.

I want to stop defining and start delighting.

I want to stop deciding what is “bad” or “good” and see things for what they really –are-, right then, and know that God is working through them to make them something else as well.

Nothing is constant. Everything is in the hands of God.

The more I expect to see things or people a certain way, the more I’ll see just that, and the less I’ll see what God has put right in front of me.

It rains on the just and the unjust alike.

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Instead of saying “Why does this keep happening to me”, turn it outward. “This” keeps happening to everybody. “This” is life, and it is normal.

Jesus tells us that “It rains on the just and the unjust alike” in Matthew 5. More later on that.

Bad things don’t just happen to bad people. They happen to everybody.

So how do you deal with it?

Thankfulness is a good start. Look at Jonah, praising God while in the belly of the whale.

Look at David, dancing and praising God, even after his son died.

Look at Job, saying that who was he to get angry at God for sending bad things and not to remember that God sends good things too.

Start a gratitude list. Look at the things that you like. Give them your energy, not the bad things. Look at all you have, not what you are missing.

Another idea is to not see things as “good” or “bad”. They just are what they are. The more you resist, the more you fight, the harder life will be. The more you define situations as “bad”, the more resistance you will give them.

Don’t give your energy to the wrong things

Pity parties only are parties of one.

While it is important to acknowledge pain and loss and occasionally say “This sucks!”, it is also important not to stay in that space.

Do what you can to help yourself. Start eating better. Go for a walk.
Feeling bad tends to make us close up and go inwards. That is the worst thing because it is self perpetuating.

Turn your energy outwards.

Go help out people who are worse off than you, not only so you get a sense of perspective, but also because the very action of helping others helps you.

Here’s the full verse of what Jesus said in Matthew 5:43-48
43 “You have heard that it was said, Love your neighbor and hate your enemy. 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be sons and daughters of your Father in heaven. For He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward will you have? Don’t even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing out of the ordinary? Don’t even the Gentiles do the same? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Don’t run away from the situation. Give it love.

Account balance

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The secret to saving money is to spend less or make more, or both. Likewise, the secret to losing weight is to burn more calories or take less in, or both.

Move more and eat better and you’ll lose weight. But the weight isn’t the goal. The goal is health. If you move more, you’ll have better mobility in your joints. Your heart will be stronger. If you eat better, you’ll be giving your body the fuel it needs. Both will make you feel better and live longer.

I’m not about a starvation diet. There is no reason you have to eat salads and feel miserable. But do cut out the fried foods. You think you want them. You don’t. They don’t taste of anything except salt and fat. You can’t taste the goodness in the food when it is fried.

Do eat less food in general. You don’t need to eat like a dog who just got adopted from the pound. Slow down. Chew everything at least 20 times. You’ll digest it better if you eat it more slowly. Because, you aren’t what you eat, you are what you digest. If nothing else, think of all the money you’ll save if you eat less.

Eating less meat and more vegetables is always good too. The meat portion, if you are going to have it at all, needs to be the size of a deck of cards. Really. It is often the size of half the plate. And that is just the first helping.

For vegetables, the more the merrier. The more variety you can have, the more different vitamins and minerals you are getting. Every plate of vegetables is a gift from you to your body. Aim for a lot of color and you can’t go wrong. If you think you don’t like a certain vegetable, try it another way – steamed or grilled or baked. Sometimes it isn’t the vegetable, it is the way it is cooked that is the problem. Texture is essential. Baked squash is totally different from boiled or steamed squash. Try it, you might like it.

I’m stunned at the number of people who saw my husband take his bike to work who still wondered how he lost all that weight. He lost nearly a hundred pounds in a year. Now, it wasn’t from just riding his bike. He walked at lunch. He worked out at the Y several times a week. He ate healthier. But his coworkers didn’t see all that. They did see the bike, and they still didn’t get it. They thought he had gotten stomach reduction surgery.

Perhaps that is the problem. People just don’t see the connection. Hard work equals results.

No, it isn’t easy to get healthy. No, there are no shortcuts. You just have to do it.

You’ll fail a lot at first. You’ll get started and then stall out. You’ll be doing well and hit a snag. You’ll come full stop. Just start again. It isn’t the stopping that is the point. It is the starting again. Know that failing is normal. You aren’t a failure for failing. You’re normal. You’re human. Just get going again.

Even when you finally get a good routine going and you are doing very well, you’ll start to slack off. You’ve gotten to your goal and you think you can ease up. Then your joints start hurting again, and your jeans start not fitting again, and you’ll realize there isn’t a stopping point.

This is for life. You can’t stop because if you stop you’re done. You have to see eating well and moving more as something you just do as part of being a human. It has to be part of your life, and not just a thing you do to lose a few pounds before your high school reunion.

This is for life, because otherwise, you don’t really have a life. Otherwise, you’ll end up, if you make it to old age at all, on so many pills you’ll need an assistant to sort them for you. You’ll need a cane, or a walker, or a wheelchair. You’ll spend your days sitting at home because you are too feeble to get out on your own. You’ll be dead before you are dead.

This is for life. This is so you’ll have a life.

Poem – Harvest yourself

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This may sound strange –
this line between
mental health
and problems
is through the field.

Go out there.
Go walking.
Find a field full of
ripe sunlight
and harvest yourself.

Remember what you think you can’t do
you can’t do.
Remember that in our childhoods
there are no rules.

Every day is broken.
Everyone needs a story
about how God has healed them.
Everything we are is a little
bit of energy,
and it is a little bit more than we ever thought.

——————————————————————

This started out as a predictive text poem, using the letters in the word “tree” to prompt the suggested words that I would choose. The meditation was about the Christmas tree, that it is a blend of pagan and Christian. Is it necessary? Is it honest? When something new comes along, does it have to steal bits from the old to get validity?

But then it became something else. It wasn’t about new traditions stealing old customs. It was about staying sane in an often insane world. It was about finding yourself when you are lost. I had to edit out quite a bit of ‘noise’ to make this make sense, but I like it this way.

This is part of the process – whatever you intend may not be what happens. Being creative sometimes means that you are just a vehicle for the Source. Sometimes you aren’t even that – you get carjacked and taken for a ride and then you get dropped off somewhere you’ve never been to and you don’t have a map.

But somehow, because of the beauty of it all, you still find yourself safe and well, in spite of the scary ride. It is scary only in that you don’t have control over it. But that is part of why anybody becomes an artist. To be an artist is to be a bit of a shaman, or an explorer. To be an artist is to go Out There with the hope that you’ll find something new to show to everybody. To be an artist isn’t to take a snapshot of what is – it is to discover something never before seen. It is to discover, uncover, recover. It is to boldly go where… wait, that’s been done before.

Fighting the Nothing.

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I went to yoga class today. This isn’t normally a big deal. But today was different because my wrist hurts.

I’ve skipped class for various reasons recently. It is too cold outside. I’m tired. I’m out of town. The last one is the only valid one. My wrist hurting seemed like a good reason as well, but I decided that I had to go anyway.

I think I’ve stretched a ligament at work. My work involves a lot twisting my wrist and picking up heavy books. My wrist is getting worn out from it. It would be great if we could replace body parts like we can with car parts. Some we can. Not always. Until then, rest is required.

There are several yoga classes at the Y that don’t do any moves that involve wrists. This is not one of them. Downward facing dog, plank, upward facing dog, fallen triangle – all wrist moves. This is the class I’ve committed to going to because this one is on my day off.

I haven’t been in the past three or so weeks. In part I’ve used the holidays as an excuse. But I’m starting to think that seasonal affective disorder doesn’t have so much to do with less sunlight and a lot to with less activity. Sure, they are connected. Less sunlight means it is colder outside, and it gets darker sooner. Thus, we are less inclined to go exercise outside, or at all. We think we’ll take a break, just like the Earth does. We’ll fly south for the winter, even if it is in our heads. We’ll hibernate as much as we are allowed. We still have to go to our jobs, but that is it as far as activity. Everything else can just wait.

This year of writing has taught me the danger of that. Slow down too much and the doldrums set in. We are dead in the water, going nowhere. There’s no wind in our sails.

Then depression comes for a visit.

And when depression comes to visit, it isn’t really interested in a quick stop. It stays, longer and longer, gathering energy while we lose it. Depression is self perpetuating. It feeds on itself and gets bigger and bigger while our control on our minds gets less and less.

Writing has taught me this. It has made me stop and see patterns that never made sense before. It has made me realize that the only way out of this funk is to pull out the paddles and start rowing for dear life.

So I went to class today. I went even though I could only do half the moves. I went even though it meant that I had to modify all the other ones. Downward facing dog became dolphin. Plank was done on my forearms as well. I’ve never looked forward to doing warrior one and two nearly so much as today. I took child’s pose a lot. I did some of my favorite twists at other times. I tried some moves on my fists instead. It wasn’t that great.

But I went. And I stayed. And I did what I could do and didn’t push myself today. Sometimes yoga is about pushing. Sometimes it is about backing off. You don’t ever want to hurt yourself. The motto “No pain, no gain” is not a healthy mantra.

But really, I did push myself. I pushed myself to get up out of bed, and showered, and dressed, and to the class on time. I know me. If I’d let the doldrums win, that horrible inertia, that nothing that just feeds on itself and gets bigger and bigger, then I would have stayed at home all day and done nothing. Then I’d feel worse. Then I’d do more nothing. And I’d use it as an excuse to not go next week.

And while I wrestle with the concept of stillness, I know that doing nothing is death.

Poem- being OK with silence

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It is about being OK with silence.
With not having words.
With not knowing how to fix it.

With being rooted where you are.
And not worrying about where you are headed.

It’s about celebrating the brokenness
because that is how the Light will get in.

It’s about making the broken bit
the centerpiece.

It’s about making the leftovers
the main course.

It’s about not holding on,
not hoarding
not being a homeless dog gobbling up all the food
for fear
there won’t be more.

And it is about being OK even when I do all these things wrong.

It’s about knowing that I am loved regardless,
not in spite of my brokenness,

but

because of it.

Because of my brokenness
Jesus came
to let me know
I’m not broken
I’m human
And it’s OK.

On process and pain – chewing the steak.

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We all have problems. Don’t identify with your problem.

You aren’t an addict. You aren’t an abuse survivor. You aren’t a cancer patient.

With the new guidelines for talking about children with disabilities, we are supposed to talk about the child first, and the disability second. He isn’t an autistic child. He is a child with autism. He is a person first. He isn’t defined by his diagnosis.

Apply the same rules to yourself. You are a person first. The diagnosis is second. It isn’t you. It isn’t who you are. It affects you, certainly. But you are so much more.

When you define yourself by your diagnosis, you are giving it power, and you are diminishing your own.

Now, you also aren’t going to win any friends if you are constantly talking about your terrible childhood or your abusive husband or your sciatica or how you have to take care of your Mom with Alzheimer’s.

We all have problems. We all have something we have struggled with. Sometimes we have overcome it. Sometimes not. Sometimes it seems we can’t ever catch a break. But if you only talk about this, you are going to be lonely. The only companion you will have will be your problems.

Buddhism has a story that speaks to this. A lady’s child had died, and she was unable to accept it. She carried her dead child around the village, going to every house asking for medicine. They were all horrified. One kind person suggested she go to the teacher and sent her to Buddha. Buddha told her to go to each house and ask if they had experienced a death in the family. If nobody had died in that family, she was to get a mustard seed from them. She was to collect all the mustard seeds and bring them back to Buddha, who would then make a medicine for her.

She went all over the village and wasn’t able to find a single family that had not experienced death. She came to realize that her experience wasn’t unique or special. She came to realize that death was part of life, and to hold onto it and identify with it was causing her more problems than the death itself.

Simply going to each person’s house, she created her own medicine. Buddha taught her to look outside of herself, and to not identify herself with her suffering.

How often do we hold on to our pains and sufferings, just like that lady carried around her dead child? How often do we think we are alone in our suffering, that we have it worse than anybody else?

We all suffer. That is just part of life. Holding onto it makes it worse. Accept your loss and your pain, but don’t identify with it. Accept it, because to not accept it means to not process it.

Pain, like a big steak, needs to be chewed thoroughly to be digested. Choke it down and you’ll get sick. Spit it out and you’ll miss the lessons it has to teach you.

Pain teaches us about holding on and letting go. It teaches us about what we think we have to have in our lives and what we really need. It teaches us to accept, and live in the now, rather than in the past or the future.

The past never was as awesome as we think it was. Even in the past we were looking back to “the good old days” and thinking about how great things will be “if only I get…if only I can have…when I finish…” In the future we will do the same thing.

The only island is now. When we aren’t on that island, we are drowning in the sea, stuck away from the solid stability of that island. The past isn’t real. The future isn’t real. The more we live there, the more we are missing out on the only real thing that is, and that is now.

How to get back to now? Start looking at it. Start being thankful for it. Make a gratitude list. Notice what you have, right now, and be thankful.

Pain teaches us about ourselves.

Once we are through chewing on it, we need to swallow it, and then digest it. Then it does its work and then we have to let it go. Holding into pain is just like holding onto poop. We get sick if we can’t eliminate our toxins. But it still has to go through us, all the way. Resist it, fight against it, and you’ll only hurt yourself. Just like a tree in a strong wind, if you don’t bend, you’ll break.

One reason why we eat too much.

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I believe that our bad relationship with food is taught to us as children. We are taught to deal with our emotions by eating. Food is offered instead of comfort. When bad feelings happen, food fills the gaps.

How often do you see a parent putting a pacifier in her child’s mouth when he cries? This is so normal that we don’t even think about it. The child has legitimate need that needs to be addressed, and instead of getting help for his problem, something is put in his mouth.

Every time he is hungry, or tired, or wet, or sad, or upset, or too cold or too hot – something is put in his mouth. After months of this, he learns that this is how you deal with problems. Something isn’t right? Put something in your mouth.

This child will internalize this. He’ll either learn to eat or smoke or drink whenever he feels any twinge or any anxiety. When things aren’t going right, don’t find the reason for the problem. Self soothe by putting something in your mouth.

This is so simple that it is overlooked. This is so obvious that nobody sees it.

We need to stop using a pacifier and actually pacify children who are upset. We need to find out what the problem is and address it. They can’t fix their own problems. They can’t change anything about their environment. They let parents know that something is wrong by crying. Crying is natural. Crying keeps them alive. Ignoring it is neglect.

Say they have had enough food, and their diaper has just been changed, and they are still crying. They might just need love. They certainly don’t need a piece of plastic shoved in their mouths.

We have to think about the deeper lessons we are teaching children, those lessons we don’t even realize we are teaching them.