Tag: healing

Room for More Learning

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“That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.” – Doris Lessing

The other day I went to help four-year-old Mr. D with his shoes, and he said, “I can do it. I’m an es-pert!”

It reminded me of a story I had just re-read in Mark Nepo’s Book of Awakening. He credits it to Leroy Little Bear:

“Two scientists traveled halfway round the world to ask a Hindu sage what he thought about their theories. When they arrived, he kindly brought them into his garden and poured them tea. Though the two small cups were full, the sage kept pouring.

Tea kept overflowing and the scientists politely but awkwardly said, ‘Your holiness, the cups can hold no more.’

The sage stopped pouring and said, ‘Your minds are like the cups. You know too much. Empty your minds and come back. Then we’ll talk.’”

Leroy Little Bear

This is my invitation when I think I know something, to stop, empty my mind, and fill my heart.

I went to the memorial service of the father of one of my childhood friends this weekend. He was a psychologist by vocation and long before I knew what that was, I understood that he had a healing presence.

One of the phrases that stuck out to me in the eulogies was one from his grandson. He said that this man “led by listening.” Ah yes, that’s it exactly.

Which brings me back to my four-year-old es-pert at shoes. I am so grateful for his help with the routine by getting his own shoes on. But anytime I’m feeling expert at anything, I remember that most of the time Mr. D, the es-pert, wears his shoes on the wrong feet. There’s always room for more listening and more learning.

For more about lifelong learning, please see my Heart of the Matter Post: Learning the Easy Way or the Hard Way

(featured photo from Pexels)

(quote from Reflections on Learning on the Real Life of an MSW blog)

Open the Doors, Let It Flow

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“Deep breathing is our nervous system’s love language.” – Dr. Lauren Fogel Mersy

There aren’t that many hot days in Seattle – maybe 10 or 12 a year so like most Seattleites, I don’t have air conditioning. When the days are hot, I close the blinds and try to open the outside doors early in the morning to let the cool morning air in.

But inevitably, there will be a room with a closed door like the laundry room that I’ll walk into after a few hot days in a row, and just get blasted by hot, fetid air.

When I first started meditating, it felt like I was doing the work to open up and cool off all those rooms inside myself that I’d closed down. It was like breathing through the airing of grief – and I had some big ones.

I had gotten divorced but because my marriage had imploded in this spectacular drama when my business partner told me of my husband’s infidelities, I hadn’t ever owned that I had wanted out of that marriage. I was far more comfortable having it all be my ex’s fault – comfortable but not honest.

When I was 18-years-old and came to study (well, that’s what we called it at least) at the University of Washington, I ran into a group of Scientologists trying to recruit new converts one afternoon. The guy who’d stopped me said, “What about yourself do you not want anyone to know?”

Miraculously, I’d gotten to 18 without having anything in that category – or so I thought. But as I got more years under my belt, I tried to maintain that same easy-breezy exterior by hiding anything that didn’t match with that persona. I was ambitious. I almost failed religious studies in college because I never went to class and it was just an elective, but I was a minister’s daughter. I drank a bottle of wine every day. I smoked when I drank. I still bore wounds from my mean older sister growing up.

Meditation changed my life when I started airing out those rooms. I was able to let go of all the energy I was using to keep those doors shut. I no longer felt the heat coming from those rooms affecting the rest of my “house.” The secrets that I thought were so explosive turned out to be way more manageable and easier to change or heal when they weren’t hidden away.

And meditation helps me maintain that baseline level of cool. Like this morning when I sat down on the meditation cushion, felt a cut on my index finger, and I thought about myself “that was stupid.” I had no idea I was still stuck on the fact that I’d taken a band-aid off my finger yesterday and then accidentally re-opened the cut when I washed and dried my hands. Such a simple thing and I was still kicking myself 12 hours later.

Open the doors, let it flow. Like with the body, it is so much easier for me to react calmly to life when I’m not over-heated. Meditation as the air conditioning for the soul.

So I’m thrilled that I was able to do a podcast with my meditation teacher, Deirdre Wilcox. Deirdre introduced me to meditation more than 10 years ago and is my go-to person for helping me air out my hot pockets. Please listen to this wonderful woman with wisdom – I believe you will walk away from it just a little bit breezier as well.

Search for Sharing the Heart of the Matter on Apple, Amazon, Spotify or Pocket Casts or click here to listen to Episode 10: The Power of Intuition with Deirdre Wilcox on Anchor.

Then I hope you’ll leave any comments you have on the show notes page on Heart of the Matter.

(featured photo from Pexels)

Healing the Micro Wounds

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“The wound is the place where the light enters you.” – Rumi

When my best friend, Katie, came over to hang out with us yesterday morning she asked three-year-old Mr. D how he slept on the night of the time change. He answered, “I slept in Mama’s bed. It was big and hot.”

I was aiming for familial warmth but it seems I’ve overshot the target. Ha, ha!

There’s a picture of me as a three-year-old sleeping with my blanket on the wood floor outside my parent’s bedroom in the Philippines. The way I heard the story is that my parents didn’t want me coming in so they locked the door. My mom said my dad was firm about no kids in their bed so he could get his sleep.

I’ve always considered that a cute little story in what I think of as a happy childhood until I had kids and then I wondered how that went down. Did I just encounter a locked door and then lie down quietly? Or was there some kicking and screaming before accepting the fate? Something tells me it wasn’t the first option.

So even though I’m not aware of as any sort of trauma, I have to consider that some things we do as adults are healing the little wounds we got as children. Maybe we all do that a little – even when it’s not conscious.

How I’ve come to choose to let my kids sleep in my bed is the subject of my Heart of the Matter post today: Beds, Boundaries and Beyond. Check it out!

(featured photo from Pexels)

Depth and Breadth

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“The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has pearls too.” – Vincent Van Gogh

In my house when we have a fun announcement, we blow the imaginary trumpet in our hands and sing “Doot-doot-da-do!” So please, humor me and imagine a “doot-doot-da-do!”

Because I’m really excited to announce a new shared blog space that Vicki Atkinson (from the Victoria Ponders blog) and I have created with a team of incredibly talented group of contributors and thinkers. It’s called The Heart of the Matter – https://sharingtheheartofthematter.com. It’s intended to be a blog that digs into the depth of how we find what matters to us and keep our eyes focused on that horizon as we are swimming through our days.

This topic of what matters I something I believe to be different for every person and different every day but with a lot of common elements of experience, learning and love. Which is why it’s important for us all to be collaborating on this topic and space so that as we figure it out, we are contributing to the journeys of others. It’s found in what DOESN’T matter as what does. The other things we plan on diving into are:

  • What is fueling us to figure out what’s important
  • Celebrating who is helping us discover our own keys
  • How we get stuck thinking it’s one thing long after that one thing has ceased to be vital.
  • Linking to resources that help uncover what’s real
  • Heartening each other to have the faith and confidence to pursue what matters
  • Healing what is broken so that we can uncover what’s essential

This shared blog space is for surfacing our stories that help us discern what matters so that others are inspired and it pulls us all along.

So please follow us there – but more than that join us there. As we figure out how to make this a collaborative and supportive space of contents, comments and topics, I hope to see all my dear blog friends in a rich space of discussion around the Heart of the Matter. My first post in that space is The Small Decisions that Matter.

Which doesn’t mean that I won’t be also blogging here on Surprised by Joy. As I see it, my personal blog covers the breadth of life in all its glory and surprises while The Heart of the Matter digs into the depth of authenticity, inspiration, values and love found in what really matters.

Keep Small Things Small

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“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” – Toni Morrison

The other day Mr D was upset and Miss O shared the wisdom, “Keep small things small.” I was taken by the phrase and asked her to tell me more after we got past our speed bump.

“It’s something Ms. Park says,” she elaborated providing the example that her second grade teacher, Ms. Park, said it the other day when there was a fly in the classroom. All the kids in the first row were trying to “attack it,” in Miss O’s words and Ms. Park wanted them to settle down. “Keep small things small.”

I thought of the parking problem I had the other day when I was turning around to take the space and someone slid right in. I was on the verge of making it a bigger story about how tough life is when someone made me laugh and I let it go.

It also reminded me of when Mr. D punched his sister in the gut the other day as they were wrestling. She said it hurt and he said he was sorry and they moved on. If they continue to be able to do that, it seems less likely that they’ll create a pattern of feeling disrespected and hurt that has plagued my siblings’ relationship in adulthood.

Keeping small things small speaks to me of airing wounds before they fester, identifying patterns before they become bad habits, stopping the internal dialogue before it goes on a self-critical rampage. It helps nail me to the present before I pile on added layers of time and repetition until whatever it is that is bugging me becomes unrecognizable. It means don’t hurt myself trying to attack a fly, whatever the metaphorical fly may be.

So here’s a new note to self courtesy of classroom 219 and all our brilliant and dedicated teachers: “Keep small things small.”

(featured photo from Pexels)

Democratizing the Theater

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“Gotta move different when you want different.” – unknown

My friend, award winning playwright, Jack Canfora has been working with his theater company, New Normal Rep to democratize theater. That is to say, they are trying to bring a dramatic theater experience to everyone, no matter where we live and at a cost that isn’t a whole paycheck.

So recently New Normal Rep produced a theatrical podcast of Jack’s play, Step 9 and released it on all podcast platforms for free. Doing it this way means a completely different marketing paradigm than brick and mortar theaters and they are relying on social media and word of mouth to spread the word about this really great play.

I was lucky enough to be able to interview Jack about Step 9, apologies and healing on the latest Wise and Shine podcast. For anyone who does podcasts and is interested in a great conversation, you can listen to the podcast on Spotify or via this link: Wise and Shine Podcast Episode 10: Jack Canfora on Step 9

And if you’d like to see the podcast show notes, I’ve posted them on Wise & Shine: Episode 10: On Step 9, Apologies and Healing

Finally, I highly recommend checking out the audio drama, Step 9. You can find it by searching New Normal Rep Step 9 wherever you podcast or going to: https://tinyurl.com/Step-9-NNR

Step 9: Five Stars

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“The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes directly to the heart.” – Maya Angelou

I just finished listening to Step 9, a theatrical podcast based on a play written by Jack Canfora and produced by New Normal Rep. The description of the play includes these details,

“STEP 9 tells the story of Emily, a woman wrestling with the implications of prosecuting the man who raped her in college 30 years ago. Is she willing to relive the horror of that night in the pursuit of justice?”

I don’t think I’d normally select a drama where the description includes rape and prosecution but Step 9 is written by my friend Jack and I know from his other work that he deftly handles any topic with humor and insight.

And that is true with this theatrical drama, performed by an incredible group of actors. I’d say the two words I’d pick for this play (other than terrific and worthwhile) are resonant and healing. It speaks to our woundedness and with amazing dialogue walks us towards wholeness. A must listen.

 You can find Step 9 by searching New Normal Rep Step 9 wherever you podcast or go to: https://tinyurl.com/Step-9-NNR

Our Relationship With Pain

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“These pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.” – Rumi

About 15 years ago I was climbing Mt. Whitney in the winter with my friend Jill and about 7 other climbers and 2 guides. Though Mt Whitney claims the prize as the tallest mountain in the lower 48 states at 14,505 feet, by reputation it isn’t a hard climb in the summer.

But in the winter, our approach was a couple of miles longer because the parking lot was snowed in, we had to carry heavy 55 pound packs with all the gear we needed and the route was deep with crappy snow so that even in snowshoes, we were regularly sinking in to our thighs.

I started out feeling fine but by the time we were at about 10,000 feet, my left ear was incredibly painful. I kept trudging along, not listening to the pain because I figured there wasn’t anything I could do about it. By the time we made camp at 12,000 feet I was in tears. Fortunately I didn’t impact the teams plans to climb because a storm with 60 mile per hour winds came through and we all had to go back down the next morning.

Mountaineering books are filled with stories about people who ignored their pain – usually with more dire consequences than my ear on Mt. Whitney. And of course this seems to be a universal human experience to not listen to the signals we are receiving. It’s the topic of my latest Wise and Shine (formerly Pointless Overthinking) blog post: Do You Listen To Your Pain?

(featured photo from Pexels)

Finding What Hurts

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“I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.” – Haruki Murakami

Last week, 3-year-old Mr. D had a lot of objections as we were getting into the car to go to preschool. “I don’t like those boots.” And “I don’t want to watch that on my tablet.” And “This isn’t the arm I put into the seat belt.” And “It’s too sunny.”

As I responded to each of the objections, I finally got the a-ha – it wasn’t any of these things that was really wrong. It was that he didn’t want to go to school. He’d been having fun with his sister at home and didn’t want to stop.

It adds to my long list of how confusing it is to be human. First, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what is going on with us. In Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown cites a survey that she gave out in workshops asking people to list the emotions that they could name as they were having them. “Over the course of five years, we collected these surveys from more than seven thousand people. The average number of emotions named across the surveys was three. The emotions were happy, sad and angry.” Which is stunning that out of our nuanced ranged of emotions, we have trouble identifying many of them at the time we are having them. But I can affirm that it’s almost always on reflection after the fact that I have any emotional literacy.

Secondly, as friends, parents, partners, we try to respond to what our loved ones tell us that is wrong. And as I found with Mr. D, it’s an exercise in frustration as we solve problems that aren’t the problem. It’s like putting a band-aid on the knee that isn’t scraped – a little waste of resources that don’t stop the bleeding.

And finally, because accurately describing the wound is the key to healing, we have to keep unpacking the distractions and figure out what’s wrong. Only then can we hold ourselves and each other for what really hurts and matters. Only then can we find the meaning behind what is happening and as the quote for this post from writer Haruki Murakami suggests, it helps us to bear the pain.

So I left the boots off, turned off the tablet, got him settled in his car seat and we just talked on the way to school. About how sometimes we don’t feel like doing what we have to do and sometimes we just have to look forward to the next thing and it’ll carry us through. He wasn’t convinced but he wasn’t fussing. Then we were able to move forward into the day.

Sorry Your Head Hurts, Do You Want Something to Eat?

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“I am becoming water; I let everything rinse its grief in me and reflect as much light as I can.” – Mark Nepo

Last night we were having dinner on my brother’s World War II era tugboat. He has lovingly renovated it over more than 20 years so that it’s very comfortable for him and my sister-in-law to live on, but it still has a lot of steel edges to bump into. Which is what happened – my 2-year-old son was looking out a port hole, stood up quickly and bonked his head. My sister-in-law was standing there with me, saw him do it and as I picked him up, showered him with sympathy.

But 30 seconds later (maybe longer but not much), my sister-in-law said to my son, “What’s the matter, Buddy? Are you hungry?”

It struck me as a common thing we do as humans. It’s hard to witness someone else’s pain. So we express sympathy and then we are ready to move on. Three things strike me about this.

First, we often move to trying to solve the problem. I find this impulse, especially as a parent, to be so alluring.

Second, if things last longer than we expect, we try to conflate the pain with something else as my sister-in-law did. Is it not surprising that we grow up confused about what our feelings are if the grown-ups around us think that what is wrong is that we are hungry when really our head hurts?

Third, we compound the original pain with our discomfort at sitting with someone in pain. So that they often are moved to pretend the pain has stopped so that they don’t have to contend with both their own pain and the pain of the people who are witnessing it.

It’s hard but sometimes the best thing to do when someone is in pain, is just sit with them. As a mom, I want to reach for the ice pack, the bandage or the song but I’m working on just letting the tears fall onto my arms as I hold them. We have to clean our wounds before we bandage them and, in a way, letting the injured party cry for as long as necessary is the best first step.