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Who rescues the rescuers? On addiction, passivity, and power.

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Who rescues the rescuers? When there is a natural disaster there are always people who go rescue those who are trapped by the floodwaters or under the flattened building. Who takes care of them? What kind of lives do they live so that they are able to help others? Maybe we can learn from them so we don’t need to be rescued so often.

If you keep not looking out for yourself, you’ll keep needing to be rescued. Your problems will always be someone else’s problems to fix in your mind. The mark of an adult is the ability to take care of yourself. Adulthood has nothing to do with age. There are plenty of people in their fifties and older who still need to be rescued.

For some people, life is all about reacting to problems instead of planning ahead. For some people the same bad things keep happening over and over and they just don’t seem to notice the pattern. They are always late with their bills, late getting ready in the morning, just late late late. They find they have some incurable disease because they ignored the symptom or they didn’t take care of themselves for years. They barely have enough energy to take care of themselves, much less anyone else.

What do you do if you lock yourself out of your house? Wait till your parents or roommate come home? Call a locksmith? Or do you already have a spare key stored away in a safe spot? Do you have a ritual to make sure you always have your keys with you?

Then there is the idea that “you can always go home.” Plenty of people have their parents as a backup plan in case they get laid off or they get divorced. They will move back in with their parents. But what if you can’t? What if your parents are dead? What would you do differently about your life then to make sure you are OK? Would you move in with your friends, or would you have been saving money all along? Would you have had a backup plan?

Always thinking that someone else will take care of it will mean you always need someone to take care of it.

I knew a guy who was constantly running out of gas, locking his keys in his car, and forgetting his wallet. Every week one of these things would happen, and his parents would rescue him. How much of this was his attitude, and how much of this was their rescuing him? What would he have done if they were out of town? Be more mindful? Plan ahead?

When he got addicted to prescription pain pills that he was taking recreationally, he again blamed it on others. He was passive about it. “Why do bad things keep happening to me?” he wailed. Bad things don’t keep happening. He kept letting them happen.

Nobody forced him to take drugs recreationally. That was his choice. It didn’t happen to him. He did it to himself. And he kept doing it, until his wife left him and he’d pawned everything he had to get the next fix.

When does it become too painful to keep doing the same thoughtless things? When does it become easier to plan ahead? When do we wake up and take responsibility for our lives? When do we become people who don’t need to be rescued?

Maybe it has something to do with nobody is around to rescue us anymore, and we have to fly with our own wings for a change. Just like with baby birds, it is hard at first, but then we get strong.

Intention – goals, Alice, and English roundabouts.

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At the beginning of some yoga classes the teacher will invite you to set an intention. This is a prayer, or a hope, or a goal. It is a focus point. It is a way of aiming yourself in the right direction.

I offer you this insight from “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”

Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.
Alice: I don’t much care where…
The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.
Alice: …so long as I get somewhere.
The Cheshire Cat: Oh, you’re sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.

So you need to set an intention, otherwise you’ll end up just anywhere. You’ll wander off aimlessly and end up years later wondering how you got there. You got there because you drifted along with the stream.

Sometimes it isn’t planning to fail, but failing to plan that is the problem.

This is true mentally and physically. Where do you want to go? Do you have a business plan? Do you have a career plan? Do you have a spiritual plan? This isn’t about the “name it and claim it” trend – it is about being awake and intentional about life. I don’t believe in “wish-craft”. I do believe that everything worth having in life is made up of little tiny steps. You have to have a plan, and you have to work towards that.

Neil Gaiman in his “Make Good Art” book said that when he first started out he envisioned where he wanted to be as a mountain. He’d look at whatever job was offered him and measure it up as to whether it moved him closer to the mountain or further away. This seems like a good idea. Does this little thing get me closer to where I want to be?

Life is cumulative. A college degree is made up of many classes and many tests. It didn’t happen overnight. It took a lot of little steps, going towards a goal. Everything built on top of everything. If you took a class and read a book and attended a lecture on your own with no goal in mind, you might learn something but it wouldn’t add up to anything specific. You will have frittered away your time, aimlessly wandering. You’d end up nowhere, lost.

This reminds me of when I was on a trip in England with my aunt. She was driving and I was navigating. I’d give directions as to what leg of the roundabout to take and she’d sometimes pay attention. She’d take the third leg instead of the fourth and we’d be hurtling down, getting further and further away from where we wanted to be. English roundabouts aren’t like American interstates. If you get off on the wrong one you can’t turn around and right yourself anytime soon. You’ll be at least thirty minutes away down the wrong road before you get to another roundabout where you can reorient yourself. She could have stayed in the roundabout, going around again to aim at the correct leg, but she didn’t. This happened a lot.

After several days of this I relinquished my role as navigatrix. Why bother telling her where to go when she was going to ignore me anyway?

So, my point is to aim. Plan ahead. Have some idea of where you want to go, because either you’ll stay stuck where you are, or you’ll end up really far away from your goal. What do you want to be doing ten years from now? How are you going to get there? Sometimes it takes baby steps in that direction. Just keep aiming that way, keep walking.

And don’t get in a car with my aunt.

The quick fix versus the long haul.

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I had a dream last night that I was in the hospital. I was waiting on some procedure to be done and noticed that this hospital had a snack area for visitors. There was free food available for them while they were waiting. It was simple stuff – nothing that required cooking or plates or utensils. Purely grab and go.

I thought this was a very kind idea. Then I started studying the offerings. It was mostly cookies and chips. It was all simple carbs, with lots of salt and sugar thrown in for “flavor”. While it was nice that they were offering something, they weren’t offering anything healthy. There were no fresh fruit or protein offerings. All of it was quick-fix, not long-term.

Anybody who has ever been on a long hike before the advent of “energy bars” knows about gorp. Gorp is a strange name for a useful thing. It is a mix of M+Ms, raisins, and nuts. You’ve got something in there for quick, medium, and long-term energy, in that order. If you’ve ever been on a long road trip you’ve had to use something similar. If you try to last long on just caffeine and chips you’ll be crashing soon.

Then my thought was if the hospital offered good food, would people eat it? If the hospital staff follow the same parameters of stuff that is easy to store and prepare, then they could offer string cheese, nuts, and bananas and apples. The shelf life is shorter on these, so they might have some waste. And people when in stressful situations often go for the old standbys. They don’t think about what their body needs, they think about what they want. They want quick comfort, the quick fix. It would be better to not even offer chips and cookies at all.

I see so many people that when they take a break at work they grab a soda and cheese crackers. One of my basic rules is never eat anything that has an ingredient list longer than the “food” item itself. It has taken years of deprogramming, but I’ve learned that the best snack for me is an apple, some nuts (either sunflower or almonds) and some water. It is a middle of the road snack – nothing to rev me up.

Eating is like balancing with yoga. If you are trying to do tree pose and you start to wobble, overcompensating with a shift of weight or a wiggle of the ankle too far is going to make you fall. It is about little shifts, and finding the middle. If you try to overcompensate your feeling tired by drinking caffeine all the time and eating salty or sweet snacks that are full of simple carbs, you are going to crash soon. Then you have to have more. It is a horrible cycle of crash and burn.

Then I remember this dream was in a hospital. Western medicine does a laughable job at taking care of the person’s health. I’m not sure why Western medicine is seen as being superior. Sure, we have a lot of money invested in it. Sure, our doctors get paid a lot of money and our hospitals look like something out of a science-fiction set. But there is absolutely nothing long-term. There is nothing about health to be found in a hospital.

Western medicine treats the symptom and not the cause. Go in with a cough and you’ll get cough medicine. The doctor won’t even notice or care that you smoke two packs of cigarettes a day. Go in with diabetes and they will say “here’s your insulin”, not “here’s your nutritionist and exercise coach.”

Our medical industry is about reacting to the problem rather than preventing it. It is quick-fix. Its plan is to cut out the tumor, but let you keep eating junk food while sitting on the couch all day.

Now sure, you can’t make people be healthy. You can’t make someone eat well and exercise. You can’t make them be intentional about their lives. But how much of that is caused by our current American mindset? How much of that is just how we have been trained? We’ve been taught to take a pill to fix it. We’ve been taught to place our fate in the hands of “experts.” We are slowly starting to wake up to the fact that just because someone is an authority figure, it doesn’t mean that she or he is an expert. This applies to everyone – teachers, politicians, doctors, ministers – everyone who talks to you as a lesser-than, everyone who assumes you can’t handle your own life and won’t give you the tools to do it yourself.

This country was founded on the idea of freedom – freedom to practice religion as wished, freedom to self-govern, freedom of expression. Sure, it concerns me the amount of freedoms that are being taken away from us. The new information about how our every move and click of the mouse is being watched is deeply concerning. But I’m more concerned with how much we have given away. We’ve become passive consumers, rather than active participants in our own lives. We are allowing ourselves to be molded by advertising and by culture.

Turn off the TV. Go for a walk. Disconnect yourself from your iPod, your Kindle, your Gameboy. They may be wireless, but there is a cord nonetheless, and that cord is around your throat and your mind. Don’t do anything unless you have examined it yourself and found it to be true and helpful. But most of all, take care of your body by eating well and exercising daily. That is the best tool for your kit.

On doorways – real and imagined.

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There were several exercises in the deacon discernment program that I went through that were useful. One is to imagine that you are facing a doorway. Do you go through it? What do you feel like once you have gone through? What is on the other side?

Stop and ponder this for a moment. Feel how this feels. What is your answer?

My answer was to imagine not that I was walking through a doorway, but that the doorway was coming towards me. It wasn’t a conscious action on my part. I was there, simply acknowledging that the transition was coming. When I was through it was as if I was bathed in light. It was warm and soothing and welcoming. It was a “finally I’m here” moment.

There are moments in our lives that when they finally happen you are relieved that you are there. You’ve waited a long time. You’ve arrived.

Doorways are simply transitions. They mark a difference between here and there. They don’t have to be physical to be doorways. There is a doorway between being a child and being an adult. There is a doorway you cross when you graduate college, or when you get married, or when your parents die.

I’ve always loved the Japanese idea of the torii gate. They aren’t doorways so much as markers. You can walk around them and still get to the other side. There is no door. It is three pieces of wood – two up, and one across. Anybody can walk through. But the torii gate indicates that something different is past this line. Often you are being informed that this is holy ground.

The Celts would say it is one of the thin places, where the worlds brush up against each other. You could call it Heaven and Earth, but in most cases with the Celts it is the idea of here and the otherworld, the world of the fae.

When you get to the thin places, the rules change. You change.

There is always a risk going through doorways. Who will you meet on the other side? Will you know what to do? Do you have the right equipment or training? You are in foreign territory.

Remember what it was like to finally graduate college or to get married? You were different. The rules changed. Everything that you had done up to that point lead you to that point, but now you were wondering if you could go backwards, go home, quit. Things are scary on the other sides of doorways.

Some doorways you can go back through. Some you can’t. When your parents die, you know you can never go home again. You can’t ask for a loan when you get short on cash. You can’t move back in with them when you get a divorce or a pink slip. You have to either look for other people to help you or you have to take care of yourself.

What if your image of a doorway in the exercise had included one with a lock, and you didn’t have the key? What if your image had included no lock, but a knocker, and nobody answered your knock? Both images imply that you need someone else to open that door.

Jesus tells us that the kingdom of heaven lies within us. The doorway is inside. It is within you. There is only you, and it. Ask and it shall be given unto you. Seek and ye shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened unto you. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

To shave, or not to shave…

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I waver back and forth on shaving my legs. I’ve been this way for years. For about two years while I was in college the only thing on my body I shaved was my head. I had an awesome Mohawk, and shaggy legs and pits. It was kind of the reverse of what I was supposed to be doing.

I’m interested in questioning and challenging the status quo. Why should women shave their legs? What is up with that? Women have no visible leg or armpit hair until they start puberty, then they start to shave it off. So for a woman to shave her legs and armpits is to reduce her appearance to that of a prepubescent girl. There is something deeply creepy about this.

Perhaps you haven’t thought about it like this. Perhaps this is just a little strange to consider. But work with me here. Adult women normally have hairy legs and armpits, just like adult men have beards. In American society, men are allowed the option of not shaving their faces. But women who don’t shave are seen as outcasts or as lesbians, which often translates to the same thing.

When I did start shaving my legs I only shaved up to my knees. I remember my Mom teaching me how to shave. She thought I needed to shave all of my legs, but I don’t usually show off that much skin anyway. Why would I shave some area that people don’t see? I don’t wear short shorts or skirts. So why bother shaving that far up?

I remember one time when I was in middle school and a girl passive-aggressively challenged me on this. She said “don’t you think it is strange for someone to only shave half of their legs?” I agreed it was strange, and kept on doing things my way. My legs, my choice. I can’t stand it when people ask questions that way anyway. Anybody who takes the tack of “don’t you think that…” doesn’t really care what you think.

When I was in college some guys were really turned off by my hairy legs. This was very helpful. It was a great filtering system. If you want a hairless woman, keep on moving. If you want a woman who thinks about things rather than following along with the crowd like a cow, then we have a chance.

One guy got past the hairy legs, but then wondered if I was hard core enough to leave the pits. I was. He was impressed. We didn’t date, but he respected my choice.

It is kind of like how I like black women who don’t straighten their hair. I encourage people to leave things natural. Why do we feel a need to modify ourselves, to change our appearance other than the way that God made us? What else do we do to make others happy that is an alteration of our nature?

My husband is OK with whatever I do. He understands that it is my body and my choice. He is happy if I have hairy legs or shaved legs – he doesn’t care either way. I’m happy with however he wants to shave or not. If I was a guy I’d not shave my face. I can’t imagine how tedious it is to shave your face every day. I get by with shaving once a week, and that is partly because I wear long skirts.

But the pits? The pits are the pits. No more can I handle not shaving my pits. Maybe it has something to do with the Indian food I eat. Maybe it has something to do with “The Change” because I’m peri-menopausal now. I don’t know. I stink when I don’t shave. It offends me. So I shave my pits.

Shaving is weird. I don’t know why we think we have to do it. Some cultures make not shaving a religious tenant. Our culture makes shaving mandatory – if you don’t, you are marked as weird. I say be who you want to be. If you want to shave, do so, but do it because you want to, not because somebody told you to do it.

The elephant and the mahout.

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Consider the image of the mahout on the elephant. He is a small man on a large beast, directing it wherever he wants it to go.

The elephant is huge. The elephant is powerful. It could run and the man could fall off. It could shake him off and kill him. But it doesn’t. It lets the man on, and lets the man tell it where to go. It passively gives up its power. It lets him use its power for his own purposes, which may have no benefit for the elephant. All day long the elephant moves trees or clears brush. The elephant does not get to do elephant things. The elephant has been tamed.

Sometimes we are the elephant. We are unaware of how much of our power we give away. We’ve let others tell us how to do things. We’ve let others convince us that we need them.

How are you being directed? Who is leading you?
Is it a teacher, or a minister, or a boss?
Is it a spouse, or a friend, or a neighbor?

Or is it something harder to see? That mahout directs the elephant and the elephant can’t even see him. Sometimes what controls us is the same way.

Is it bad habits?
Is it cigarettes, or food, or alcohol?
Is it a family tradition that doesn’t serve you anymore? Maybe it never did, but you faked it. We all do.

You are more powerful than you could ever know.

I’m pretty sure the elephant wouldn’t ever imagine shaking off that mahout and walking into the jungle. I’m pretty sure that elephant thinks that he has to have that mahout. How will he ever get food? Where will he sleep? What will he do all day without that mahout?

We are the same way.
We can continue to be bystanders in our lives, or we can move on.

Sure, it is scary. But it is less scary than spending your whole life doing things the way someone else wants you to live it.

Thoughts about yoga.

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Yoga is like learning how to drive your body. Yes, I stole this from Dharma from the show “Dharma and Greg”. It is still true. We take our bodies for granted, but they require skill to learn how to use. Consider that your body is a biosuit for your soul. Look at a professional dancer or martial artist. They can do things normal people can’t. It is because of training. Yoga is training for the average person to be able to do amazing things.

Yoga unkinks your body and your mind. Sure, you are stretching your muscles and tendons. But somehow your brain gets stretched too. Things seem to flow better. Stresses are easier to deal with.

Yoga is like acupuncture for your whole body. It makes the energy flow.

Yoga is like getting a full-body massage, but nobody has to touch you and you don’t have to get naked.

Doing yoga daily is like taking a multivitamin for your soul. I enjoy it when we set an intention at the beginning of practice. It is where you make a prayer, or a goal. What do you want to focus on, mentally, physically, or spiritually? What area in you or in the world needs love and light and growth? That is where you place your intention. That way, the entire practice is a prayer.

Yoga teaches you acceptance. This is acceptance not only of where you are, but who you are. It is about learning to work with what is, instead of what you’d like it to be. It is important not to compare how you are doing with other people in the room. The practice is your practice, not theirs. They are different, and that is OK. There will be things that they can do easily, and that are hard for you. There will be things that you can do easily, and is hard for them. There will be things that were easy for you last week, but are hard today. Every day is different, just like every person is different.

It is yoga practice, not yoga perfect.

Yoga teaches balance in body and mind. Sure, you may learn finally how to do Warrior three, or Eagle without having to stand next to something to grab onto for support. But there is something subtle about yoga that it teaches balance to your mind too. It realigns things. I don’t know how it works, but that is OK. I don’t know how electricity works, but I still take advantage of it.

The hardest thing about yoga is showing up. You say you want to, but you’ve just never made it to a class. Or you’ve gone for years and it has gotten boring and you think that you’ll take some time off. A week becomes a month becomes a year.

Yoga teaches discipline, but not a rigid sort. It isn’t “do this, this way”. There is a lot of flexibility. You certainly don’t make up all the poses – you are learning things that have been done this way for thousands of years. But, you are submitting to this practice, this path. Somehow you find yourself there, and you’ve learned a lot by aligning yourself with it.

Yoga strengthens and tones. There will be muscles you’ve never seen before. It is amazing and beautiful and inspiring to see these muscles develop. Forearms? Abs? Gotcha. They will look stunning. So will everything else.

It is weightlifting, but the only weight is you. No equipment to misplace, and completely portable.

Lamed vav-niks, or your efforts matter.

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“There is a saying: The world is wicked, but in every generation there are thirty-six righteous souls, and for their sake, God lets the world exist. Thirty-six is written lamed (30) vav (6). These righteous are called lamed vav-niks, or 36ers. They are usually humble people, so one must be kind to everyone, because anyone might be a lamed vav-nik, one of the thirty-six.”
-From “Menorahs, Mezuzas, and Other Jewish Symbols” by Miriam Chaikin.

Related to this idea was if there were but 10 people in the town of Sodom who were righteous, the town would have been saved. Sadly, there weren’t ten good people. The town was burned to the ground with sulfur.

What about also trying to be a lamed vav-nik, or one of the 10? You never know when your town is being tested. Be good, so that the world is saved. This gives a whole new twist to “Be good for goodness sake.”

You may think that your efforts aren’t valuable. How do you know? Your effort might be all that saves the world. There might be 35 other people who are counting on you to make the cut.

Remember this proverb?
“For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail”

Your efforts matter.

Holding yourself hostage.

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I know a few people who carry guns with them everywhere they go. They are afraid they are going to get robbed or killed by some stranger. The odd thing is that they are getting attacked all the time, but it is by themselves.

They smoke. They eat poorly. They are afraid of some stranger coming up to them and harming them, but they are doing to themselves in slow motion.

The fear that they are going to be attacked permeates their lives. Their blood pressure is high. Their stomach is upset all the time. These are symptoms of fear.

This is the same issue I have with “preppers” Who cares if you have two years worth of canned food and water if you can’t enjoy it because you are feeble?

Instead of walking around with a gun, work on peace. Make the neighborhood safer. The first way to work on peace is to work on yourself. Eat better. Go exercise. These two things alone will reduce your anxiety and fear, and you’ll be in better shape to handle any eventuality.

Peace starts within.

Glass (half full? half empty?)

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The glass isn’t half empty, or half full. It is half a glass of water. Simple. See? No “positive” or “negative” spin. It just is, with no definition or judgment.

See how we are shaped to think in certain ways when we are given only certain choices? Our language frames us. We are shaped by it. When you are asked to decide whether the glass is half empty or half full, you aren’t actually being given a choice. It looks like it. But really, the smartest thing you can do is to step back from the question and wonder why the person is trying to get you to decide either way. Whoever is asking you wants to define you. Are you an optimist, or a pessimist?

In reality, the glass is half full and half empty at the same time. You can look at it however you want, and it has nothing to do with your perspective. There is only half a glass of water. Defining it as half-full or half-empty does nothing for the amount of water.

Sure, you can get excited that you have some water to drink, or you can get sad that you don’t have a full glass of water to drink. Or, far healthier for your head, you can just notice that there is half a glass of water. It isn’t full, and it isn’t empty. It is right in the middle.

A lot of our problems come from a need to define something as good or bad. Often we define it in relation to ourselves – does it benefit me, or harm me? Often we define it in relation to our experience at the moment. We don’t have the full picture, so we decide something is bad at the time, when later we think it is good, or vice versa. Situations change. We change.

But sometimes the issue is that we are tricked. We are asked to define something that doesn’t need defining. Someone points out something for us to notice, and by omission we don’t notice everything else. It is a pretty powerful trick. Look over here, meanwhile the real action is going over somewhere else.

If you ask a child if she wants to wear the blue jumper or the red jumper, you’ve deftly sidestepped the issue of maybe she doesn’t want to wear a jumper at all. Maybe she wants to wear a sarong or a sweater. And maybe she doesn’t want to get dressed to go out right now and wants to stay in her pajamas.

Be wary of how you are being directed and channeled. See what is there.