Tag: meditation

Collective Confusion

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“Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

I had a birthday party for my daughter and for the first time in ages was together with parents of kids my age. The kids ran around the park and enjoyed the fun of playing together outside, some kids not having seen each other since her pre-K program was abruptly shut in March of 2020. Talking to the other parents, all masked and vaccinated, I heard over and over again the worry that there are no good choices for our kids as they go into 1st grade this fall.

I think this is the first time I’ve experienced this kind of confusion affecting a group collectively but I certainly have faced it individually. So I sat this morning on the meditation cushion to try to muddle through it. When there are no good choices, where do I turn?

I come back again and again to the awareness that something has held me up and nourished me even as confusion swirls around me. When I think I’m an individual making choices, I feel alone but when I feel I am a part of a Universe that flows like a river, I start to relax and float.

Listening for the quiet in any given circumstance helps me to settle. Imagining a pond, I can only see to the bottom when the water is still. When a rock is thrown or the wind whips the surface, I can no longer see the depths. So I still myself as much as possible to find the transparency again.

When I settled myself and relaxed this morning, I felt the weariness and worry that I attribute to this pandemic although as I write this I realize it may have also just have come with parenting. There is a little bit of self-pity in that worry as if am begging for someone to give me a break. But none of this is personal. When I laugh it away, I feel lighter as if I’ve gotten of one thing that is no use to me.

As I come back to my center, I find that I just need to find the right next step and that the Divine is present to guide me to it. When I see it this way, I stop worrying about how all this will work out and just return to now. I can accept that the water will get muddy again and first grade for my daughter might not go how I think or want but try to settle out of my confusion. There is some comfort knowing that other parents are struggling with the same but at the very least I can return and again to stillness so as not add to the collective momentum of disquiet.

Listening, the Next Generation

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“The art of conversation lies in listening.” – Malcom Forbes

I’ve been discovering the joys of carpooling 6-year-olds this week. As we’ve driven the 25 minutes to camp, my daughter and her friend have been sitting in the back telling jokes and commentating on the things we see.

Her friend, a boy she went to both co-op preschool and now elementary school with, isn’t as quick with words as she is. So early in the week, we were playing a game where we were naming things in a category (like name how many places you’ve been to on vacation) and I found myself continually jumping into the conversation to remind him of words and answers he might have been searching for. I was afraid he wouldn’t ever get a fair chance given my daughter’s ability to rapidly pounce into any silence.

This phase of parenthood where I don’t always have to be the entertainer is both restful and fascinating to me. It seems so sudden that it’s upon us even though that’s probably just because we missed a good part of a year and a half being with other kids. As I pondered this, I realized I was struggling to just listen to my daughter figuring out how to listen.

It’s taken me a good part of 50 years to learn how to listen and I’m still working on it. To delay that part of myself that wants to jump in, ask questions, prove I’m listening, prove I’m worthy, or tell my story long enough to let my heart soak in what the other person is saying before responding. And also to find the quiet in myself so that I can hear the small insistent voice of the Divine when it speaks. Now, in the insidious nature of life taking lessons to the next level, I have to learn to just sit back and listen as my kids figure out the same knowing it could take them equally as long.

Yesterday as we drove, my daughter came up with this game where she put a ring in each of her hands and her friend had to guess which one was in which. After she’d done a couple of rounds, I so badly wanted to jump in and tell her to give her friend a turn but I stayed quiet. And a little while later her friend spoke up that he wanted to a chance to do the hiding. I’ve found a new delight in the art of listening: creating space for others to find their voice.

Let It Flow

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“The cure for anything is salt water – sweat, tears or the sea.” – Isak Dinesen

I’ve been listening to an On Being podcast where host Krista Tippett interviews humorist and story-teller Kevin Kling. He told the story about the moment that tears came after a terrible motorcycle accident. His wife had come to the hospital and brought him an apple. At first he refused to eat it because he had no taste at all since the accident but she insisted. He bit into the apple and it was the moment his taste came back to him. The juicy sweetness brought with it all this gratitude for being alive and he started crying. Tears, he insisted, are a great way to clean out the body’s toxins. And for anyone who can’t cry, he said that’s what sports movies are for.

It reminded me of my young daughter who once told me in a moment of pulling herself together, “I kept my eyes from dripping.” And on the other end of the spectrum, my dear father who’s eyes would leak so easily in his older years. I’m intrigued by all the work we do when we are young to gain composure and then at some point realize that we carry so much, we have to just let it go. Or let it flow, whichever is most apt.

Kevin Kling also described having three different phases of prayers in his life. When he was a kid, he prayed to get things. When we was a young adult, he prayed to get out of things (like the time he stowed away on a boat). Now, after the accident, all his prayers are of thankfulness.

I think about my own inflection points and the most recent is having kids. Before I had them, even as I was pregnant with my first, I worried about what everyone else would think and I assumed it was a story that I was not able to find a husband and so had to do it alone in my 40’s. Now that I’ve had them, I’m too smitten with them and too busy to worry about that. But what I notice most is that each period of growth has brought a new vibration so that it does change what I pray, think and talk about. I’m slowly discovering life seems to be as deep as I make it and the more I wade in, the richer it gets.

The What If Game

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“The real happiness of life is…to enjoy the present, without any anxious dependence on the future.” – Seneca

I was dropping my daughter off for an outdoor class the other day and she was already a little nervous because her friend that is also signed up for the class wasn’t coming. Then we arrived and she saw that there was a substitute coach that she didn’t know as well and he had an Eastern European accent that made him a little difficult to understand. The perfect storm. Her anxiety was real and she started with the what if questions: What if he asks me to do something and I don’t understand? What if I say something and he can’t hear me because of my mask? For each question I answered, there were at least two more.

When I awoke this morning, my mind was filled with it’s own what if’s. Questions because it’s August and as I mentioned in this post listing the lessons I learned over 20 years of owning my own business, my work is always slower in August. Questions because the school year is about to start for my daughter. Questions because the Delta variant is surging.

All valid questions and the anxiety is real. But as my mind raced through all the troublesome scenarios that could happen, each of them scarier than the previous because they were building, my foot started to itch. As I reached down to scratch it, I realized that it was the only thing that was happening at that moment that I needed to attend to. From there, I just needed to find the next thing to do which was to make a cup of tea and meditate. As I write this, I still have all the questions about what the future will bring but the awareness that in this moment right now, life is actually just fine. In a few minutes I will wake up the kids and keep finding my way through the day by identifying the next thing to do.

When I was dropping my daughter off and the questions kept coming, I said to her, “I’m not going to play the what if game. You are resourceful and capable of handling this class and no matter what, it only lasts one hour.” It worked and she had a great time. I’m finding it works when I give myself that speech too.

Recovery

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“It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.” – Agnes Repplier

I was sitting with a group of friends from high school at our 30th reunion and one guy starting talking about his marriage. They were hanging on because of their high-school aged kids and the money but it was a relationship of closed doors and “why can’t she just be?” and it sounded like from her side “please just leave me alone.”

It brought to mind a whole scrapbook of memories from the end of my marriage. I felt like I was suffocating and starving. Suffocated because he had a long list of his needs and entertainment that he pressured me daily to meet and starved because he had no interest in listening to or participating in what fed me. I stayed in that marriage because I didn’t know what the difference was between hard times and impossible to fix. My sense of responsibility kept me in a situation that was irresponsible to my own being. In the waning days, I just came home at the end of the day and drank wine, a lot of it. And while I drank, I smoked.

There was no doubt that I was headed for a recovery program but then my business partner told me of my husband’s infidelities and although it was many confusing months ahead as I’ve written in my post Projections, my life changed. As I see it now, the Universe plucked me out of a self-destructive situation and gave me another chance to figure out happiness. I found my way to my own recovery activities. I spent time each day meditating and the long, rhythmic breathing replaced smoking. I read, journaled and leaned towards the feelings I was having instead of trying to numb them with wine. The people that I hung out with changed. Instead I found trust in the Higher Power to walk with me through life. I lost my marriage but found myself again.

As I was thinking through all of this, the question had come up whether our friend should stay in his marriage and someone said, “Ask Wynne” as I must have been the only divorced person sitting there. Of course I can’t answer for anyone else, especially when there are kids involved. But my answer for myself was “Not if you can’t breathe.”

Cultivating Play and Rest

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“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” – Albert Einstein

Yesterday my sister-in-law took my daughter for the day and my son was in daycare, I had an entire day to myself. This is so rare, especially since COVID came and we have all been packed into the house on most days. I’ve had a few hours here and there but a whole day?? Of course I needed to work, the house was a mess and I had a to-do list as long as my arm so I was far from bored but the real question was, did I know what refills my cup?

Brené Brown has been doing this podcast series on The Gifts of Imperfection as it’s the 10 year anniversary of that book. And there is a particular guidepost in it “Cultivating Play and Rest – letting go of exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as self-worth.” It was a reference that Brené made in a podcast to this guidepost and the work of Dr. Stuart Brown, psychiatrist, clinical researcher and founder of the National Institute for Play, that got me interested to read the Gifts of Imperfection in the first place. That to be whole-hearted, that is to say, fully awake and involved in life, we need to play.

My first thought when hearing about cultivating play was that I am a mother of young children, I should be all about play. My second thought was I have no idea what play is for me anymore. When I got my first night off from parenting when my daughter was about two years-old, I went out to drink wine with a friend. It was fine but I ended up feeling like I wasted that precious time. The second time I had an overnight break from parenting was when my daughter was three years-old and I went on a meditation retreat. It was so lovely to eat organic food, do yoga, meditate and cut out pictures for my vision journal. It really worked to refill my cup but isn’t very practical to do very often. The same goes for hiking which is my all-time go-to for refilling my cup but often takes too much time driving to do on these rare days off.

Here’s what I’m slowly realizing about cultivating play and rest for me. I know I’m still learning because I’m trying to be the most productive at rest. 🙂 But with that said, rest for me always involves some combination of reading, writing and exercise. Being quiet including turning off extraneous noise like the tv in the background is important. I never clean my house when my kids are gone unless it’s part of tackling a project that is fun for me. I try to reach out to at least one person that is key to my health and sanity. And when I’m very lucky, I go to a rarely visited neighborhood and find a place to eat lunch with a book.

Last night when my kids were returned to me, I listened to their reports from the day and we galivanted around the neighborhood and talked with neighbors, I felt like a new (renewed?) person. Someone who had a refilled cup to share with everyone else.

Out in the Open

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“One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art in conducting oneself in lower regions by memory of what one has seen higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.” – Rene Daumal

Last night we sat on a picnic blanket eating our umpteenth meal outside and on the go, I marveled that my kids rarely fuss when we are outside. It reminds me of a story I once heard about a Hindu sage and his apprentice.

The apprentice was constantly complaining so the sage put a handful of salt in a glass of water and said, “drink the water.” The apprentice took a drink and when the master asked how it tasted, the apprentice said, “Bitter.” Then the master took a handful of salt and put it in a lake. He asked the apprentice to drink from the lake and when the master asked how it tasted the apprentice said, “Fresh.” The master then said, “Be the lake, not the glass.”

Sitting on the picnic blanket with my kids leaning against me, a gentle breeze keeping us cool, looking up at the vivid blue sky, it was easy to be the lake. Reminded me of Ella Fitzgerald singing, “Summertime and the livin’ is easy.” It must be why God made summer. Having these times to practice easy living and the expansive view makes it easier to remember being the lake for all the rest.

Opening the Door

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“We are rare, not perfect.” – Mark Nepo

As I walked down the stairs this morning to do my morning routine, I look at the security panel on the wall and felt a rush of regret for the incident yesterday when I set the house alarm off. Regardless that it worked out fine as I wrote in my post, I still feel this disgust at myself for doing it. Then I started doing yoga and felt the ache of the pinky toe on my right foot where I broke or dislocated it stubbing it at our friends lake cabin a couple of weekends ago. That pain triggered another round of self-recrimination for not wearing shoes at the lake. It’s not like I was thinking of either of these things or any of the other regrets I come across because I’ve compartmentalized them so I can go on with my “happy” day. But sooner or later, I’ll come across something that sparks the association and I’m chiding myself for these incidents again.

I keep my laundry room door closed most of the time. In these hot summer days when I’m able to cool off the rest of the house at night with open windows, I often forget about the laundry room with its west facing window until I open the door and get blasted with hot, stale air. That is exactly what it feels like to me when I experience these pockets of regret or grief in my life.

This makes me think of when I first started meditating. I had finalized my divorce, thought I was fine and moving on with my life and then I went to Deirdre’s meditation class and spent 90 minutes doing light yoga and breathing. I spent the rest of the day leaking tears. At one point I was out walking my dog and the tears were just streaming down my face and he kept looking at me as if inquiring if I really was okay to be out walking. All those compartmentalized pockets of grief had started to open and I just had to flush them out before life could continue.

So I learned that when I encounter that twinge of regret or self-recrimination that the only thing to do is to breathe into it. Like my laundry room, the heat will eventually start seeping out of it into the rest of the house if it gets hot enough. But I can open the door, let the air flow and mixed with the cool air in the rest of the house it doesn’t raise the temperature much, if at all. I breathe and think of the Chinese Proverb, “He who blames others has a long way to go on his journey. He who blames himself is halfway there. He who blames no one has arrived.”

Living Life

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“Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans.” – John Lennon

This morning as I was enjoying my treasured quiet moments to do yoga, meditate and write, I saw that we still had the croquet wickets set up in the back yard. Before I sat down to write, I thought I’d better go pick them up. I went out the back yard, triggered the house security alarm, woke the kids up and caused the complete opposite of quiet.

So as I was cursing my stupidity and ruing that I had cut my own quiet time short, I picked up my toddler and we went into my daughter’s room and spent a delightful half hour, snuggling, calming down, telling stories, playing peek-a-boo, thumb wrestling. And once I forgave myself enough to accept the change of plans delivered directly from the Universe, I experienced a moment of pure truth that no experience is wasted.

It reminded me never to get too busy writing about life so that I miss living life.

Five Pieces of Writing That Inspired Me: #6 Beginning

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“Sleep is the best meditation.” – Buddha

I set out to find my top five pieces of writing that inspired me and in doing so, found so many more. I thought this one didn’t make the list but then I had a restless night last night and I thought so much about the renewal that comes each night for me when my load feels especially heavy. So, I’m calling this the 6th selection in my top five. <wink>

The Truth about Morning

There is a vastness that quiets the soul. But sometimes we are so squarely in the midst of life’s foreces that we can’t see what we’re a part of. – Mark Nepo

The truth about morning is that it is the small light of the beginning breaking through, again and again. It is a wisdom so large and clear, one which carries us through our lives so quietly and completely that we seldom see it.

Day after day, we are covered with the dust and grit of what we go through. It tends to weigh us down, and then we think and scheme and problem solve. Then we worry if it will all really work, and if it is the right thing to do. It all makes us so dark and cluttered.

But despite our stubbornness of concern, we tire and must turn what has happened over to the hammock of night. This is a good thing. For no matter how unfinished we seem, the letting go into sleep is nothing short of a quiet miracle.

This letting go into sleep is an innate, reflexive form of meditation, no different than a fly rubbing its face or a doe licking its fawn. Sooner or later, without discipline or devotion, despite our resolutions and mistakes, we each much sleep. We must surrender to the quieting of all intent and regret, so that the small light of the beginning can rise in us, again and again.

There is no escaping this profound simplicity: what happens covers us like dirt. It covers our hearts and minds, till, at the shore we call exhaustion, we slip into the waters of sleep in a daily sort of baptism, so we can begin again.

So whenever you feel urgent or overwhelmed, whenever you feel pressed to figure things out or to rethink the unthinkable…rest…so that the endless beginning – which some call the voice of God – might break through what has happened. And you will wake feeling like dawn.

The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo