Tag: inspiration

The Joy of Repetition

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“Your life is an occasion. Rise to it.” – Suzanne Weyn

Recently I was talking to my 2-year-old about potty training. His reply was “I already went to a toilet.” And it’s true – he has gone in the toilet once.  About a month ago he got lucky when he wanted to try to potty before getting in the bath.

I tried to explain that there are many things we have to do repeatedly in life. So often I want to declare something to be “DONE!” only to have to repeat the task so I understand my son’s irritation about having to go potty again and again and again!

Talking with my mom about this, she flipped the question and asked, “How many things do we only do once in our lives?” Which I thought was a great way to illustrate that most things in life are done repeatedly. Even our mistakes take work not to repeat.

In addition to school and work, there’s also sleeping, eating, exercising, bathing, trimming our nails and hair, doing the laundry, cleaning. The other day I thought I’d swept the entire house of dirty laundry and gotten it all done – only to discover 2 hours later a small pile of dirty clothes stashed away by my 6-year-old.

But since the ultimate “DONE” is death, I try to celebrate that doing things repeatedly is a gift. A gift of the ongoing nature of life, a poetic reminder that life is a cycle, an opportunity to find a new song in the repetition.

And in my favorite example, breathing, my life has been measurably improved once I started noticing that every breath brings renewal and fresh air. Even in this task that is regulated by the autonomic nervous system and takes no real talent to do, can be improved when done with intention.

So, yes, my darling son. We have to do things over and over again. And if we are paying attention, we can even find some extra joy in these precious cycles of life.

(featured photo from Pexels)

A Trick of Time

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“How simple it is to see that we can only be happy now, and there will never be a time that is not now.” – Gerald Jampolsky

I wake up between 5 and 5:30am every morning. I don’t use an alarm but I have a clock that projects the time and the temperature onto the ceiling of my bedroom. So I open my eyes, look at the ceiling to orient myself and then roll out of bed.

This clock, that I’ve had for about 15 years, never needs to be set. It synchronizes with something out in the ether, that I have nicknamed the mother ship since I’m unclear what it is, and so with every time change or when it restarts after it has lost power, it is automatically updated.

Every once in a while, like 4-6 times a year, it does a funny thing. It gets out of sync and then is 40 minutes early. It might display 5:10 am but it’s really 4:30am. When this happens, I glance at the ceiling, get out of bed and it isn’t until I’m feeding the cat that I realize “I have an extra 40 minutes!”

<cue the oohs and aahs>

Forty extra minutes for doing yoga, reading, meditating, and writing my daily post. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a weekday or weekend, it feels luxurious. I hold my yoga poses a few beats longer, I read an extra meditation passage or two, I linger longer on the words I write.

But it doesn’t mean that I get anything more done. Whether I have an hour and a half or two hours before I get my kids up, doesn’t produce any measurable difference in productivity. Perhaps my closing sentence on my post is more thought-out but largely the difference is that I start the day with a sense of abundance.

Of course I could train my body to get up at 4:30am every day but then I’d expand my list of things I think I could get done. The trick seems to be in granting myself the permission to linger and not hurry through these things that matter most for my self-care and connection to the pulse of life and community. Because I have not yet mastered bestowing that gift upon myself, I rely on my clock to remind me of that lesson every now and again.

After I mentioned this clock behavior to my brother a while back, he looked at me as if I was crazy not to get rid of it. But why would I dispose of something that gives me the gift of time?  

(featured photo from Pexels)

Home

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“Stay close to those who make you feel alive.” – unknown

In the recent parent-teacher conferences I’ve had for each of my kids, I’ve gotten a feel for how my kids behave when they aren’t with me. It seems they are “go along to get along” people. Generally speaking, they follow the rules, don’t make a fuss, they don’t cry and they don’t get in trouble. My 6-year-old might talk a little too much sometimes but she gets her work done.

That’s not a big revelation since that matches my general approach to life. Although I am surprised that my two-year-old can do it at such a young age, especially because he’s never been told to. But hearing this is reshaping how I think of what my home is.

I used to think home was where our best-selves would shine through because of the love and nurturing there. I still think that – except that I’m realizing our best-selves are NOT our best-behaved selves, they are our most authentic, intimate selves.

Home is where we can take off our armor and practice speaking our truth. It is a place where it’s okay to have a soft underbelly and to let it all hang out. It’s where we can cry, have fits and let it fly (respectfully) when at home. Because, I figure, it’s the only way to get salve onto the sore spots and to receive sympathy for all the growing pains. It’s our place for practicing being leaders and followers and doing neither very well and learning.

Home is where we learn grace. We can cry when it hurts, express disappointment, find out what truly refreshes us, practice imaginative play, be bored and unscripted. Home is where we light our candles, pray for peace and then figure out how to find that in ourselves. It is where we can be held through it all.

While it seems that I’m writing this for my kids, the truth is, I’m finding great comfort in defining this for myself. Somehow typing out a list of place of where and how we will be received and held is making my slippers feel a little more comfortable. In the years of the pandemic where home became where we do everything, it seems I got a little disoriented about my purpose in this structure.

So, I’m setting this down for all of us. Home is not just where the heart is – it is where the heart feels safest to be open, glow and grow in all directions.

Changing Your Mind

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“Your imagination is a preview of life’s coming attractions.” – Albert Einstein

My toddler told me the other day that he wanted Mac ‘n cheese for dinner. As I was boiling the water, he discovered that he liked the food I already had on the table. He turned to me and said, “I changed mine mind.”

I was amused, not expecting such introspection and courtesy from a two-year-old. But of course, kids are constantly changing their minds. They like playing with dolls until they don’t. It’s fine to carry a lovey with you everywhere – until it isn’t.

I recently heard a fascinating podcast from Ten Percent Happier with Dr. Alison Gopnik, a psychologist at UC Berkeley and expert on cognitive development. She explained why it is that babies can change their mind – because their neural pathways are much less grooved than those of adults. In an analogy she gave, she said kid’s neural pathways are a lot like the streets of old Paris, with winding, interconnected little streets. By contrast with adults, our brains look like wider, efficient boulevards that can hold much more traffic that can go faster. The result is as Dr. Gopnik said, “Young brains are also much more plastic and flexible – they change much more easily.”

She also introduced me to the idea of the local optimum, a concept from AI (artificial intelligence). It describes a situation where you can’t really tune it because any small change would make it worse, but a big change might make it better. In her words:

“One of the challenges for intelligence is how do we kick ourselves out of these local optima when we’ve become really practiced and good at doing one particular thing for example, it becomes very easy and natural to think that’s the thing to do. And just doing something that we’re not good at, doing something really different than the things we do every day can be the sort of thing that will kick you out of that local optimum and give you a sense of other alternatives.”

What We Can Learn about Happiness from Babies Podcast with Alison Gopnik

This makes me think of the example provided by the podcast host, Dan Harris. He was a journalist for ABC News for many years. After experiencing an on-air panic attack in 2004, Dan turned to meditation. After practicing for many years and continuing his day job as a weekend anchor for GMA, he wrote the book 10 Percent Happier, published in 2014.

Still working for ABC News, he started a mindfulness company and published podcast content about meditation and mindfulness. Finally in the fall of 2021, he negotiated out of his contract with ABC News to focus on his life passion: bringing meditation and mindfulness to anyone interested.

Dan Harris is a parent of a 7-year-old son. I assume that part of his slow transition is providing that solid base for his family life. But I’m so heartened to see a live example of how grown-ups can make big changes, even slowly, while raising a young family.

My son really meant it when he “changed mine mind” the other night. He no longer wanted mac ‘n cheese. Hanging around with kids, traveling, meditation are all examples provided by Dr. Gopnik of ways that grown-ups can change their minds. I can confirm that my kids help me come unstuck and imagine life from different angles every day and that, as Albert Einstein says in the quote above, widens my view of life ahead.

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)

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…. 🙂