Category: meditation

Learning From Experience

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“Turn your wounds into wisdom.” – Oprah Winfrey

Ten years ago (I know because I found the picture), I was walking my dog on a busy neighborhood street and he found a stuffed animal. A cute little tiger with a soft white belly and my dog proudly picked it up and carried it all the way home until he could stow it away on one of his dog blankets.

While I didn’t think much of it at the time, I now realize with great horror that it likely was some child’s precious stuffy that got tossed out of a car in a moment of great emotion. I’ll never actually know if the family went to look for it but by allowing my dog to carry it home, we certainly made it unfindable.

Before bed, my 6-year-old daughter and I take turns reading. She practices her reading skills and then I read a few pages of something longer we are working on. We just finished J.K. Rowling’s The Christmas Pig in which a child loses his most precious friend, a stuffy that his step-sister throws out the window in a moment of rage. The child then takes a precarious Christmas Eve trip to the Land of the Lost to try to retrieve it. In J.K. Rowling’s incredibly imaginative tale, there are several places the things we lose go – Mislaid (think eyeglasses), Disposable (e.g. batteries), Bother-Its-Gone (that poem you penned on the back of a napkin), The Wastes of the Unlamented (the tchotchke you never wanted to buy in the first place), The City of the Missed (where we meet someone’s Principles) and The Island of the Beloved (where Santa lives).

In the story, she includes not only things that we lose like a diamond earring but also the intangibles – the bad habits, the tendency to bully, our pretenses, ambition, power and hope. It is so incredibly insightful that it is one of those books that was a pleasure for me to read as much as my daughter to listen to.

Which brings me back to the stuffy I let my dog take home. Often it’s only through experience that we can relate to someone else’s pain. This is the case now that I realize that stuffy was likely a well-loved object of a kid’s affection. Fortunately, my kids have not (yet) thrown a stuffy out the car window, but I have spent many fretful moments in a full sweat looking for the item that we just HAVE TO HAVE before going to sleep.

Suffering, as much as we might not like it, helps us to know each other.

Friendship Brownies

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“A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

I was talking to my friend, Doug, the other day. He is planning a climb of Mt. Adams with his son this summer. It’s a 12,280 foot mountain in Washington State – tall enough to be a challenge but not technical enough to need a lot of equipment and training. The last time we summitted this mountain was with his daughter about 10 years ago when she was 14 years old.

Doug wanted to know if I remembered what packs we carried between our camp at about 9,000 feet and the summit. He is a meticulous packer and doesn’t carry anything more on his back than necessary.

These questions reminded me of a time we were planning a climb on Mt. Rainier that would take place over Doug’s birthday. His wife asked me if I would carry some brownies up to celebrate Doug’s birthday. It was only after I happily agreed that she told me that Doug said he wouldn’t carry them because he didn’t want that unnecessary weight in his pack.

It is probably because of all this carrying of loads that makes one of my favorite meditations is one where I imagine I sit down, empty everything out of my pack, look carefully at each thing I’m carrying. When I’m done sorting through the worries, the presumptions, and fears as well as the love, the purpose, the nostalgia, the energy stored for digging deep, the vulnerability, I mentally load the pack again with only what I need. I always carry a lighter load after that meditation.

But in thinking about those brownies, I realize that friendship means we are willing to carry things for other people that they won’t carry for themselves.

We hold in our packs a version of our friends at their brightest and most creative that can be shown to them when they are in a slump. We carry memories of the times we laughed, did silly things, failed and succeeded. We store all the depth of the ways we have walked side by side on the path as well as the times we waited at an intersection while they took a detour and vice versa.

Then at just the right moment, we unpack the brownies we’ve carried so far and celebrate our friends. There are some things worth the extra weight and friendship is one of them.

(featured image from Pexels)

Learning Every Day

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“I am learning all the time. My tombstone will be my diploma.” – Eartha Kitt

I’d like to say that when I was growing up, it was a family tradition that we went around the table to say what we learned that day. I have a vague memory that we did in fact do that but as the third and youngest child, I think that maybe it fizzled out by the time it got to me.

Regardless, I’m happiest when I’m learning something every day. In fact I was happily driving alone in my car the other day to Costco, listening to a Brené Brown podcast and thinking in the back of my mind, my blog should be titled or subtitled “What I Learned Today.”

At possibly the very same moment, fellow blogger Rosaliene Bacchus of the Three Worlds, One Vision blog typed a comment, “Wynne, it’s a joy to witness, through your reflections, the way in which you learn from even the smallest experiences in your day-to-day life.”

My kids were 4 ½ years old and 7 months when this pandemic started. I find them fascinating to watch and interact with and I learn from them every day something about what it means to be human. But the isolation of this time and the slower pace of our schedule of activities meant I had to find sources of adult conversation, inspiration and meaning. What I’m listening to and reading has helped me not only learn how I can grow but also process the tidbits of what I see about how my kids grow.

Podcasts, which I can listen to in the car, when I’m cleaning or late at night when I’m getting exercise by repeatedly climbing the 47 stairs I have in my house, have brought so many experts and depth right to my doorstep: Krista Tippet’s quiet and spiritual On Being, Brené Brown’s insightful and research driven Unlocking Us, Dan Harris’ urbane and slightly sardonic mindfulness podcast Ten Percent Happier.

I read as much as I can – sometimes thrillers and spy novels that take me completely away from my life for an hour or two. But mostly I read as many blogs as I can and I’ve loved the books penned by fellow bloggers than I’ve read or am reading: The Twisted Circle by Rosaliene Bacchus, How to Heal Your Life by Tamara Kulish, Voices: Who’s In Charge of the Committee In My Head by Julia Preston and Be a Happier Parent or Laugh Trying by Betsy Kerekes.

It was on the Unlocking Us podcast (I think) that I heard neuroscientist David Eagleman talk about the research that we are powerfully influenced by the 5 people we spend the most time with. I’m delighted because I’ve been spending time with you all – you’ve inspired me, taught me, made me laugh and made me think. What a joy!

So, if you have a moment, please leave a comment about where you get your inspiration.

I’ll close with a quote from an On Being interview I heard with Thich Nhat Hang, “You have the right to make mistakes but you don’t have the right to continue making mistakes, you have to learn from your mistakes.”

Here’s to always learning!

(featured photo by Pexels)

At the Core

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“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t — you’re right.” – Henry Ford

Last weekend we drove about 15 minutes down to Shilshole Bay on Puget Sound to see a dock where sea lions like to congregate. It was packed with sea lions – usually a dozen on the dock and I counted a least a dozen more swimming in the water.

Every once in a while, a sea lion would launch itself out of the water in an attempt to land on the dock. The new weight would make the dock roll one way or the other causing all the sea lions to bark. But there was one sea lion in the center who was doing most of the work to keep the dock level. It would lift its head high and shift its weight this way or that to stabilize the dock again.

It made me think of how impactful what is at the center is. As I was pondering what was at my core, Life, in that beautiful way that sometimes happens, delivered the answers to the question I’d just uncovered. In this case it was through the latest the Unlocking Us podcast about living into our values. In it, Brené Brown had an exercise to determine our core values.

Her research shows that when in a tight spot, most people call on their one or two go-to values. So on her site, there is a pdf of about 120 values. Her recommended approach was to circle the ones that called to you and then distill them to the two values that encompass what is central for you. It may change over time but this exercise was to identify what is key for right now.

Doing the exercise, I came up with faith and usefulness. Faith, which for me encapsulates confidence, courage, adventure, integrity, spirituality, openness, love, optimism and gratitude. Usefulness I thought did a good job of rolling up my other values of reliability, learning, kindness, growth, family, and independence,.

Over the years I’ve done a lot of work to strengthen my physical core. It has enabled me to carry heavy loads up mountains and I feel it most now when I hoist my toddler onto my shoulders. But thinking about my core values, faith and usefulness, I realize that they are what I go to again and again to power me when I have to dig deep. Like with the sea lions, when I am living into my values, they are the center that brings me back to level when the world is rocking.

Taking the Crust Off

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“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” – Albert Einstein

Around Christmas, my mom was helping my 6-year-old daughter with some Legos. Frustrated by something she tried many times, my mom turned to me and said, “Do they sometimes forget to put pieces in these kits?”

I laughed because I’ve thought that many times. When the instructions don’t work and everything seems to almost but not quite fit and I want to blame the instructions. But from my experience, it has never been the instructions that have been faulty. I’ve usually found an error in previous steps that once reversed, it works fine.

Life has taught me that this just doesn’t happen with Legos. That when life feels blocked, often we spend a lot of energy trying to problem solve where we are at before realizing we go back a few steps to fix what is fundamentally causing the issue. It may be a wound we try to cover over instead of heal or a belief about ourselves, others or life that we never revisit to test if it is true.

Recently I was listening to an On Being podcast where writer Katherine May interviewed author Michael Pollan. He was talking about his research into using psychedelic drugs for therapeutic purposes. One of the benefits he said was “Recovering the profundity that we already know. Like ‘love is everything.’ We spend a lot of time encrusting these fundamental ideas about life and reality with irony and all these protective rhetorical devices to keep them at bay. And suddenly that crust comes off.”

While the chances of me doing a psychedelic trip are about zero, I was struck by the notion of uncovering what we already know. Or in Michael Pollan’s words, taking off the crust. Going back a few steps, in Lego speak.

Praying, meditating, writing, therapy, honest dialogue, vision journaling – all these tools remind me of a mediation retreat but I think they are our ways of discerning where in the directions we went wrong. To somehow reveal that thing that keeps bugging us but we can’t quite put a finger on.

In the On Being interview, Michael Pollan described why insightful experiences, however we come about them, have such power to create long term change in us. He brought up the work of William James who was talking about mystical experiences 100 years ago. Michael Pollan explained, “One of the characteristics of that [mystical experience] besides ego dissolution and transcendence of time and space was the Noetic quality. That is the quality that what you learned, the insights you had were not merely opinions but revealed truth. They have a stickiness and power that I think is central to people being able to change. The difference between knowing in your head and knowing in your heart and whole being.”

When my mom was having trouble with the Legos, I sat down with her (my daughter having wandered off long before) and we looked at the directions, the picture and our pieces. Then my eyes, new to the project, were able to spot the tiny extra red piece that made all the difference. I wouldn’t call it a mystical experience but we whooped with delight at fixing something. When we take off the crust and look inside, especially together, it’s fun to discover how it all works and put it together better.

(featured photo from Pexels)

Swimming In the Deep

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“The inner life of any great thing will be incomprehensible to me until I develop and deepen an inner life of my own.” – Parker J. Palmer

This weekend my friend Eric told me a story about a course that he took in college. He went to one of the Claremont Colleges in the mid-1980’s and this sounds like something that might have only been possible in that place and time.

The course was called Mind, Culture and Sports and it was held at the professor’s house, usually with drinks served and the professor encouraged everyone to take it pass/fail. The course content varied greatly – one week it might be a study of how hard it was to hit a baseball and the next week it was about meditation.

One weekend their field trip for this class was to spend a night at a Buddhist monastery. With great interest I asked how that went and Eric replied that he was terrible at mediation. Apparently the monk kept coming by to (gently) correct his posture. But, Eric brightened considerably when he reported that he was great at “sweep the path,” the chore he was assigned at the monastery.

It made me reflect on what we get out of our experiences. I’d have probably missed the whole point of a meditation retreat when I was 19 years old as well. But in contrast, can I name what I get out of meditation now?

If I didn’t meditate, I’d spend the day operating from my to-do list and getting a great deal done but swimming on the surface of the lake where the conditions of the weather affect the choppiness of the water a great deal.

By meditating, it feels like I spend at least a few minutes submerged in the deep. It’s where the quiet allows me both to read about and hear the bigger forces at work – the thread of the Divine in my life, find the echo of Love and Beauty in what I’m doing and touch the feeling of Peace that pervades regardless of the surface conditions.

I was also in college and about 19 years old, the same age as Eric when he took his college course, when someone who was trying to recruit students for the Church of Scientology stopped me on University Avenue and asked me “What about your life do you not want anyone to know?” At age 19, I was still blissfully naïve, untroubled and pretty uncomplicated. Perplexed by the question, I replied, “Nothing?”

Now, 33 years later, I’d answer a lot more assuredly “Nothing. Because after all those years I spent thrashing about on the surface, I’m finally submerged in the deep.”

(featured photo by Pexels)

Selective Hearing

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“The years teach much which the days never knew.” – unknown

Have you heard the advice that Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave to Jennifer Lopez about relationships? It was something like, “It’s good to be a little deaf sometimes.”

I’ve been working on practicing that lately. My daughter snapped at me yesterday first thing in the morning for waking her first or not getting her brother up first, I can’t remember which. Whichever it was, I’m quite certain it needed no response.

Here is the list of times that are usually the best candidates for being deaf in my house:

  • First thing in the morning
  • When anyone is hungry, cold or tired
  • Anytime someone is sick
  • When excitement because a friend has arrived is at its fevered pitch
  • Last thing at night

I’m working on my own balance of when things need to be addressed. Maybe it’s 10 days of being together with no interruption but I’m finding less retort and more love is more effective. It’s not that I’m abdicating in my role as a parent, just that I’m saving my breath for our quieter moments.

My beloved dog, Biscuit, went selectively deaf as he got older. Somehow he couldn’t hear me calling him when he was sniffing something with great interest. But he never failed to hear the sound of the food hitting his metal bowl. I’m starting to think that deafness might not an infirmity that comes with age. Instead it seems it’s a sign of wisdom.

Rebranding Exercise

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“Sometimes it’s okay if the only thing you remembered to do today was breathe.” – Unknown

Somewhere in the middle of yesterday morning, I realized that, although I was in the middle of a scenario that I dreaded, I was doing fine, in fact better than fine. The scenario: quarantined alone with two kids for days on end, no other grown-ups allowed in for help or distraction, not able to go outside which is both my and my kids’ happy place, feeling sick and trying to work.

It made me wonder – how much energy is wasted imagining dreaded scenarios? They may or may not happen. And this one has taught me, that even when they happen, they don’t feel like I feared they would. In fact, I felt so emboldened by the fact I was facing this nightmare down that I skipped through the rest of the morning.

This sparked a tidbit that I learned many years ago from someone who was researching how we RSVP events that are 1 month or 6 months out. They found that our minds have an image of who we’ll be and how we’ll feel in the future that isn’t accurate. When we respond based on that image, we often don’t predict well whether we’ll want to go. The trick, the research said, was to RSVP as if the event was tomorrow or next weekend. Because we just don’t know how we are going to feel about an event until we are facing it.

Also in my dread, I couldn’t imagine the beautiful difference that how other people would react would make. My friends, neighbors and colleagues have been so supportive and offered to drop off groceries, dinners and things for the kids. And in my imagining, I couldn’t factor in the great community of grown-ups that I’ve found in blogging. Reading other people’s blogs and writing through this has kept me in touch with the big picture reality in such a delightful way (thank you so much!). And finally, my kids have done pretty darn well in this break from normality. They’ve bickered and gotten grumpy but also taken it in stride.

And finally, the fear of the unknown made the idea of the quarantine much scarier than it is. When I fear things, it adds a patina to the image that doesn’t appear in the reality. Dealing with and dreading are two different things. Of course, that is also thankfully because our cases are mild, it gets better and more known each day and now the end is in sight.

The more often I face something I dread, the more I learn to return from that feeling. I think we all leave the present for someone imagined scenario but like just like blinking, we have the chance to clear our vision and return. No need to spend any time in the future – because how I think I will feel when I have to have a tooth drilled, hold a child that is hurt or face disappointment is not how I will actually feel.

And building on the other things I’ve learned this week, I sat my kids down to do a meditation last night after dinner. It worked wonderfully to settle us all into a fun evening routine. They loved it and my 6-year-old especially thought it was great.

So I’m rebranding this quarantine as a meditation retreat.

A Meditation on Evenings or Evening Meditation

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“Wear your ego like a loose fitting garment.” – Buddha

We all have Covid (mild, thankfully) and are on day 99 (feels like) of quarantine. The one household member that doesn’t have Covid, the cat, is on a diet because a recent trip to the vet for her check-up revealed that she’d gained a lot of weight under all that fluffy fur. On top of that, she has to put up with us all home and as you can see in featured photo, my daughter trying to shoot her with a water gun. So, I think it’s fair to say that we’re all a little grumpy.

In the midst of this, I’ve noticed something interesting. We do pretty well until right around 6pm. Then it turns into a scrum unless I can find a way to redirect the energy.

What I find fascinating is that corresponds with about the same time of day that the voice in my head turns self-critical. The other night I was getting ready for bed and thinking about a proposal that I needed to do the next day when my inner narrator popped up with “There’s no value you can add for them that they can’t already do themselves.”

What?? The voice was talking about what I have done for 20 years that I do day in and day out and I know based on my track record of doing it for happy clients that keep me employed that I do it very well.

This reminds me of the preface to Dan Harris’ book 10 Percent Happier in which he said the working title for his book was “The Voice in My Head is an Asshole.” My voice doesn’t usually stoop to that level until after about 6pm. And then it is always a JERK!

I am a congenital optimist. For example, when I gain weight, it usually makes me think, “Well, at least I don’t have one of those hard-to-detect cases on cancer where the primary symptom is unexpected weight loss.” There is nothing I have knowingly done to foster this optimism but life has largely worked out for me – or maybe it hasn’t and I just think it has because I’m an optimist?

That’s the problem with the voices in our heads, right? They are completely subjective, often influenced by food and sleep and given how much they change in a day, totally unreliable. But I like my optimistic voice, just not the self-critical voice that kicks in for the evenings.

This is where meditation has saved me by creating an awareness that these voices are not me. That if I sit with ideas, actions and my path for a little while, a way that rises above the fickle swings presents itself. As the quote from Buddha above suggests, wearing the ego like a loose fitting garment helps remove it more easily. Just a moment’s space between thought and speaking or action can allow peace to prevail.

This gives me an idea for the rest of our quarantine. Maybe tonight I’ll try to get the kids to sit and meditate with me after dinner and we’ll have a completely peaceful and cooperative transition to bed. As you can probably tell, I’m writing this in the morning when my optimist voice is strong…. 🙂

It’s Love Calling

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“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” – Lao Tzu

To some degree I always write about what I don’t understand in hopes that the words on the page will put some order to the giant gaping hole of the mysteries that I can’t comprehend.

But today I’m writing about a bigger mystery than usual. The best I can hope for with these words is just to describe the size and shape of something that I can’t fully grasp.

The other day my phone rang. I’m notorious for not answering my phone especially when, as was the case here, it’s just a number and not attached to anyone in my contact list. So I didn’t answer, there was no voice mail. It rang again, there was no voice mail. It rang again an hour later from the same number. I knew in my bones after the second call who it was so the third time I picked it up.

It was my friend Bill and he just said, “Wynne” in this deep voice that sounds like it could be the voice of God. And I replied, “I knew it was you calling.”

This friend only calls me about once every five years. When he calls, it’s always from a new number so it never comes up as a name. And yet, somehow I always know it’s him.

In the five years since he last called, I had another baby, my son. And he’s moved twice to different countries. Now he lives halfway around the world in Eastern Europe.  

I ask him about his parents who I’ve never met. He tells me through tears that he lost both of them 7 months apart a couple years back. He asks me about work and I tell him I’m doing the same thing — it doesn’t feed my soul but it feeds my kids. So I tell him that I’m writing.

In worldly terms, we don’t know each other that well.  We’ve maybe spent a dozen days together over 25 years. But we have this deep connection that was instantly apparent when we met.

It’s something I can only describe in metaphors. The connection is like plugging into a bolt of lightening when you only need a 200 amp current. The results are apt to blow a circuit and also are a little dangerous. It’s a mistake we made when we were younger and tried dating only to find it chaotic and unworkable. He’s a road sign, not a destination.

When he calls it’s always at a point when I’ve gotten so busy playing the roles I have in life that I’ve forgotten that there is a core, central “me” that is lovable.

The calls remind me to come alive in a way that is more than what I do. They speak to me of great love even though its quite clear that we will never be in each other’s lives on a daily basis. It’s more that we share the same core so when he calls it sparks some primal memory in me to remember to take care of that precious center of my life. The sacred space in me that touches the sacred space in others.

The connection we share is inexplicable in practical terms. There should be no way that we can speak so deeply to each other and be a reminder of anything. The only thing that rings true is that it’s a spiritual connection that affirms that God is Love and Love is God.

In the end, I said to him. “Thank you for calling until I picked up.” And he replied, “I will always call you until you pick up.”

I’ll close with the final text he sent me after the call. I had written to him, “I suspect possible in our comprehension is a small sample of what is truly possible in the Universe. And you are evidence of that gift.”

And he replied, “That I am the evidence that is closely related to the everything that you must give daily, is the best of compliments. You, Wynne, creator, inventor, leader and human are truly one of the most beautiful humans I know! Thank you for finding me.”

I bet that we won’t communicate again for another 5 years. And that will be enough. Because maybe what we remind each other of isn’t anything about the specifics in life, it’s the big picture Life where love reigns and we are all known in our core.