Thankful

Thanksgiving came and went really fast this year didn't it?  I can't believe December is tomorrow.  Where did the summer go?  Thanksgiving is this time where we over eat, over drink, and generally live excessively.  As soon as the day has gone, preparations for the holidays begin.  The day after Thanksgiving I saw two cars with trees tied on top already and people have already started putting up Christmas lights.  What are we in a rush for?  I'm still trying to think about what I am thankful for.  

Let' see, this year I am thankful for:  a supportive family, a roof over my head, perspective, that despite the struggles I have been going through I know they are relatively small in the grander picture, that I have a job (that I like), I am thankful for time.  Time is always something I thought I didn't have enough of.  I rushed from one thing to the next, with the mantra in my subconscious go go go!  I liked the rushed feeling (I still do), but I am learning the importance of slowing down.  What am I rushing towards?  What are we all running around for?  We have commercials and the internet telling us to hurry up to get that present, to buy that food, to decorate our house quick or else....what?  We won't find happiness haha?

I will admit I love buying presents for others and I love walking around a mall around the holidays because there is this cheer of giving that you don't find on a regular basis.  I wish we had the mindset of going to do things for the sole purpose of making others happy and bringing more joy into their lives, but alas most of the time we're running around like chickens with our head's cut off.  Playing devil's advocate for a second though: one mustttt take care of themselves first before they can take care of anyone else.  Even the buddha taught that it is better to find inner enlightenment for yourself first before trying to teach anyone else how to find it.  We obtain wisdom and clarity by taking care of ourselves so that we can better understand other people's situations.  

So I guess the question I will leave you all with is how will you stay thankful throughout this entire holiday season?  And how will you try to incorporate slowing down in your every day life during a time when we are speeding up, yet biologically we're supposed to be slowing down and hibernating?

Speak up

I will announce my true dorkiness (yes I made that word up) right now.  I've read all four Twilight books.  I was addicted to them, but in my own defense, they got me through a very rough time.  I just went to go see the second movie New Moon and, while I know a lot of people will roll their eyes at this new trend of vampire love movies, it brought up a lot for me.  Ya know how some things are just connected to memories?  I was reading these books when my ex and I broke up.  I needed something light, something to make me laugh, and because I am a hopeless romantic, it suited all my needs.  I remember I was having such a hard time with the break up that I went to Borders and sat for hours reading the third book and buying it only for the sole reason of knowing that if I went home with nothing to do...I didn't think I'd make it through the night.  

I was so excited to see this movie.  But, I don't think I fully thought through what it would bring up for me.  I cried a little at various spots.  Not because the movie was that particularly moving, (although I did enjoy it greatly haha) but more because of remembering past moments.  How I watched the first movie on my birthday with my ex, how I read one of the books lying in bed with him only so he could make fun of me for reading such...well crap hah, how he also promised me he would always be there for me...and now...he's not.  I know he's with me in spirit; all that we learned from each other, and no one will understand what we had and what we went through together except for us and no one can take that away.  Yet, it still hurts. 

I am reading a book right now about the mind body connection and how our bodily symptoms tell us what is going on with us psychologically.  When I left the movie, my throat started to hurt and the only thing I could think of was that I needed to express this pain that I can't stuff this down and think it will go away on its own.  We all experience pain and suffering.  Just think of the four noble truths.  If we are a living and breathing creature we will experience pain.  I'm not afraid of it, but I certainly do have a hard time expressing it.  I get this idea in my head that I have to be strong and portray a facade of put togetherness (another made up word for ya) when really I just want to express how I really feel and I want others to feel comfortable around me to do the same.  When someone asks the question, "how are you today?"  Instead of just going through the motions of saying I'm fine how are you?  Next time, take a moment and actually ask yourself how am I really?  You might surprise yourself.  And answer honestly, who knows maybe you will strike up an interesting conversation with someone and find that connection we all are searching for so desperately on a constant basis to know we are not so alone.  

So that is really all I have to say right now.  I am feeling my pain, I am feeling the tears run down my cheeks, I am expressing my longing for old times, for the touch of someone no longer present in my life and I hope I can transform this feeling into something positive for myself.

Presence

I know I haven't been writing as much.  I have found myself both elated with my life at times and other times so frustrated I don't know what to do with all the emotions I am experiencing....which usually ends up in me crying and then I feel much better.  Yesterday by far topped off the most absurd week.  I worked from 7 in the morning until 8 at night.  By the end of the day I was exhausted, a little angry for some reason, I felt lost, disconnected, tense.  I had no idea what to do with all these emotions that just kept building and building within me as the day progressed.  I kept trying to find my breathe, practice yoga, release some tension, use all the mindfulness I have learned over the years to soften myself, but to no avail the frustration inside me kept arising.  

Finally at 8 p.m. I got on the road to go home after not seeing my house since 6:30 that morning. I got on the highway praying that there was no traffic, as there has been a lot of construction lately.  I saw a lot of cars on the road and, worrying I would hit traffic and be delayed getting home and making the cup of tea I so desperately wanted, I got off several exits early and thought, "O I'll just use the GPS on my phone and use the back roads to get home."  Now, I was not thinking about how I only had one blip of energy on my phone left because for some reason my phone did not charge last night (which I later found out was because the cord came out of the wall).  Are we seeing where this is going yet?

So in the back roads, in the pitch black, I have no idea where I am, my phone blinks that it is low battery and I knew that meant it was going to turn off and all I could hope was that I first got to a road with my GPS that I knew.  Well of course that didn't happen.  The first thing I did...I started to cry.  It was like the last straw of the whole day.  I felt completely and utterly alone and lost; both in the literal and figurative sense.  Traveling through the dark winding roads though it was a strange thing.  I heard my ex's voice in my head telling me to trust my instincts (plus this occurrence is something that would only happen with him).  I made several turns before getting totally freaked out over the darkness of the back roads and decided to pull off at some random person's house and ask for directions.  

I knocked on the door of  a quaint looking house and before answering the door they asked who I was.  I explained my predicament and then a cute older couple answered the door.  I of course found the one house that did not own a computer (yes these people do exist!).   The funny thing was, I was going the right way the whole time.  It was this one fork in the road that I suddenly became indecisive and gave up on my instincts.  I was so close.  I got back in the car, relieved to have directions in my head and made the rest of the way home.  

I think its interesting how much we can learn from such a small experience.  First, we have become too reliant on technology to tell us the "right" way.  We have it within us at all times, but in today's society we falter and start to mistrust ourselves because we have other means to find the answers externally.  Second, the rest of the way home I was laughing.  Laughing at how rushed I felt to get home, laughing at what just happened to me, laughing over past experiences and how nothing goes the way we expect it to.  This experience humbled me.  I felt so lost and alone; as if I were on a lone island.  But, stopping off to ask for directions I wondered why I felt so alone when there were a million houses around me.  We get so caught up in the moment we begin to generalize every thing we are feeling.  Instead of thinking I feel lost for this moment, I began to think I am so lost in my life.  This is a HUGE difference.  Remembering to take all the time we need to find our way both in small moments and in life is so important.  We only have this one life.  How do you want to spend it?

The mind is a powerful tool

I have slowly started to meditate again. First it started with five minutes here, five minutes there. A body scan in the afternoon to check in with myself. I worked my way back up to 20 minutes. Sometimes I was so agitated I continuously opened my eyes to see if the time was up yet. I tried not to beat myself up for what I considered a "bad" meditation and accepted that obviously I was a bit agitated that day and then it was up to me to look at why that was. Other times, I felt myself slowly bringing myself to the exact present. In these moments I never want my meditation to end. My mind is quiet and clear. A sense of calm and happiness comes over me. I can feel my palms on my knees, the blood coursing through my veins, the birds tweeting outside my window. I can feel the coldness of my fingers and toes. An itch surfaces on my skin and instead of finding myself struggling with not scratching I can investigate how it feels and how it appears and disappears just as fast as it came.

Meditation is a wonderful thing to engage in. Although for this morning it definitely brought out some intense emotions and frustrations. Everything is relatively going well in my life. After a rough period of depression I feel like the turbulent storm has calmed a bit and I can see a bit more still waters lately. I tried to sit for longer this morning. I recently obtained a meditation CD and thus I sat down with someone's voice in the background telling me to "relax." Considering that my eye is twitching now...I don't think it helped hahah. I sat for 40 minutes this morning. Not a particularly long time to sit, but for someone struggling with their mind on any particular day, it can seem like eternity. Any uncomfortable twinge that occurred in my back sent me into squirming around trying to get rid of it and cracking my back a million times in the process.

I tried a couple of times to let the uncomfortable sensations arise and ask myself why I needed to move? Why is it that when some unsettling sensation comes up in me I immediately feel as though I have to take action? I am sure I am not alone in this habit. Whenever we feel something is amiss or not right we engage in all sorts of weird actions to counteract the unsettling emotion/sensation/feeling/thought. We gorge ourselves with food, we over drink, we call a friend and gossip. The hardest task I think is facing our demons and being alright with them. Letting them sit there and linger instead of feeling as though they are "bad." My task for the day is to sit with all the uncomfortable sensations and thoughts that came up this morning and knowing today is still going to be a good day. How are you going to face your demons today?

Moving on

I am moving forward with my life.  It feels both liberating and petrifying.  I love the direction that I am going in, but I find myself flashing back to the weeks of depression and social anxiety I just encountered and I shudder.  Yet after reminding myself to breath through the sudden anxiety I just gave myself, I remember how brilliant the body and the mind are.  They have the capacity to adapt, to change, to renew.  We can cause ourselves to go in a downward spiral just by the thoughts in our brain or we can lift ourselves up and remind ourselves how resilient we are.  

Of course moving forward also means dealing with the original problems that got me to the place I was in.  It is amazing how much we can cover up and add on to a simple problem just so we can try and cheat at dealing with the main issue at hand.  So now that I have a smile back on my face and have become my conversationalist self again, I find myself dealing with all my little insecurities, about my need for acceptance, and wanting to be liked so badly that in the past I was willing to change who I was.  Well awareness and mindfulness can be both liberating and...well....a pain in the neck hah.  Now I watch the insecure thoughts go through my brain and I want to engage in the same actions I used to, but knowing that they are unhealthy, I try and just sit.

To be perfectly honest, I never realized what an emotional person I am!  It is so easy to ignore it all with television, or food, or the Internet.  We can make ourselves go numb; we can go get a drink, or get into drugs, or get obsessed with a relationship just to not deal with ourselves.  No wonder monks stay in isolation, they have enough to work with just with the imagination of the mind.  I think when people get into yoga and meditation at first they believe it will "cure" them.  But, the opposite happens.  I think at first things get worse.  All of a sudden you become more aware.  Aware of thoughts, sensations, smells, sights, sounds.  All these little things we take for granted every day that simply just pass us by.  It is overwhelming.  

And then we become aware of every thought going through our brain and there are so many! Suddenly things seem so much more complicated than before.  But, you are still you.  Nothing has changed except your awareness.  All this new input does not have to be perceived as overwhelming because as time goes on we see that life can be extremely simple.  I have learned what makes me happy and I am still learning how to follow this compass or path of new smiles.  I ask myself questions on a continual basis.  Why do I feel this way?  What is behind this emotion?  Where did this behavioral or thought pattern come from?  And how is it serving me now?  Sometimes we are so used to our patterns we have stopped questioning whether these actions are benefiting us anymore.  It is up to us....you can either make things very complicated or very simple.  You have the power, remember that. 

The only thing to fear is fear itself

I was sitting in front of my computer, staring at my blog, and knowing I wanted to write, but I was trying to find a theme. Contemplating over the events of my life right now the theme quickly came to me.

Fear.

It keeps creeping up from my toes all the way through my system, upsetting my stomach on the way, and interrupting the thoughts in my brain. Fear. Its a nasty little thing isn't it? Fear of moving, fear of moving forward, fear of looking back. Fear of failure, fear of letting go. Fearful of the confidence I feel I lack to do the things I know I want to do.

I have a close friend who is a certified meditation teacher. We would travel around for AmeriCorps workshops last year and thus many conversations would come up on these long drives. I think last year I realized what an emotional person I am and the main emotion I feel most of the time is fear. Fear of my own emotions even hah. She would constantly remind me to acknowledge the fear. That fear likes to play its own movie out in our head where fear is the dramatic main character. She would remind me to acknowledge my fear (her starting a conversation with fear, "o hello fear! There you are." as I sat laughing at her.) She had this amazing capacity to strip away what was fearful about fear.

The more we avoid something, the more power we give to that emotion, person, situation, you name it. Its like saying, "don't think of pink elephants." Well after someone says that the only thing you are going to think about is pink elephants. I am trying to realize my fear more and more and the more it comes up every time I put myself out there to pursue my dreams. It is an interesting experience to acknowledge how fearful I am about making movement in my career and thus I know how important this path is to me and thus I keep pushing myself forward. We all may lack in confidence at one time or another, but fear should never hold us back from pushing ourselves to grow as human beings. Perseverance and resiliency. We all have it; its just a matter of tapping into our own inner strength.