Tag: meditation

The Art of Packing

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“Great things happen when men and mountains meet.” – William Blake

My daughter was looking in my drawer of kitchen accessories and asked about an open-ended tube I had in there. I explained it was a tube for mountain climbing so that you could fill it with something like hummus or peanut butter and then crimp the end to seal it up. They way you don’t have to carry more than you need. She asked, “Why not take the whole container of hummus?” And that sparked the muscle memory I have of loading a backpack for a 2 or 3 day climb and paring it down to just the essentials.

It seems to for every trip I’ve made an equipment list, packed more than necessary with me for the travel to the mountain and then at the base, sorted through to pack only what I need to feed me, keep me safe and warm and also my share of group gear for the team. It’s an art that I learned from experienced mountain guides and it very much affects how well the climb is going to go. Pack too much and you will wear yourself out on the lower reaches of the mountain getting to the first camp. And if you pack too little you will likely be uncomfortable or even worse, unsafe, on the upper part of the mountain when you need that extra layer or extra battery for your headlamp. If you forget to put in the group gear, you might just be the goat that didn’t bring the tent poles and jeopardized the trip for everyone. Many things can go wrong when packing. On one trip climbing some volcanoes in Mexico, a guy on the trip couldn’t find his Payday bar at a rest break. Then we stopped again at 16,000 feet on the side of the mountain waiting for the lead team to try to get some ice screws attached so we could cross an exposed part of the route and he found it in his boot.

Since I haven’t climbed any mountains since I got had kids, it’s been a least six years since I’ve done the packing but I still hold on to it as such a great metaphor for the journey through life. At some point, it helps if we empty out all that we are carrying in our pack and make sure we are ONLY carrying what feeds us and keeps us safe. If we carry too much baggage, like memories of all the times we’ve failed, it hampers our ability to go far.  And if we carry too little, like not figuring out our patterns of picking unhealthy partners or friends, we expose ourselves to the same dangers again. If we don’t carry our share of the group gear, like concern for the health of the community and planet we live in/on, the whole enterprise could fail. And if we can’t find what we need, sometimes it helps to sit down, take off the pack and find out what is making our metaphorical boot so uncomfortable before we continue on.

I get a chill when I think of how edifying it is each time I try to explain something to my kids. Which is good because my daughter’s next question was, “Why do people climb mountains anyway?”

The Journey of Obedience

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“When we do the best that we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or the life of another.” – Helen Keller

My daughter came home from school yesterday with a story about a kid in her class. She said, “Jimmy almost got kicked out of Hutton Hawks.” Hutton being the name of the school Hawks being the school mascot, it sounds way more serious with both together. I asked what Jimmy did. He drank water in the classroom and spit it out on his desk – twice. I assume that’s a no-go in regular times but in these coronavirus times where the kids are wearing masks, aren’t allowed any food or drink in the classroom and their primary activity is to wash their hands, that’s definitely not going to fly. In these first weeks of in-person Kindergarten, my daughter is fascinated by the behavior of other kids. Like Natalie didn’t do her work and pouted. Also Jimmy ran into the zone on the playground designated for 1st graders. And the big one – Jimmy almost had to go to the principal. (Names changed to protect the young).

This story reminds me of the word obedient. My dad used it frequently when talking about his journey through life. As in “I just knew I had to be obedient to what I saw as the Truth in God.” And slowly my understanding of obedience in the sense of the word that my dad used is developing. For much of my younger life, I thought of it in terms of Jimmy. The need to obey the school rules or else suffer the consequence of not being a Hutton Hawk. But now I see it as more of integrity – the integrity to marry myself and my values with the Divinely inspired path that I’m on. The act of listening to that small God voice within to find my way. The continual search for how to love and serve in my life and work. All of that pretty much boils down to my dad’s definition in my own words, a translation of wisdom between generations.

There is no chance I would have spit water on my desk like Jimmy when I was young. I feared the principal too much not to mention what my parents would have said. But now that I am middle-aged, there aren’t too many authority figures that influence my behavior. Trying to grow, learn and do the right thing have become part of my system and I suppose that’s one of the key parts of growing up. We are held externally accountable until we can develop our own internal accountability. Hopefully Jimmy can figure out obedience until he grows up too.

There is so much in my daughter’s story that is emblematic of how strange this last year has been. We haven’t had much chance to observe people that are strangers to us. Kids, especially those as young as my daughter who haven’t ever been in school, are having to re-learn how to socialize again after a year apart. Teachers are having to enforce COVID rules on top of all the usual school rules. Parents are having to help bridge the gap where all of these things come together. I have so much empathy for all the parties involved – this is hard. So I hope and pray we can use all our skills to listen to each other and obey while we navigate these choppy waters.

Unplugging the Chain Reaction

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“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.” – Rainier Maria Rilke

Yesterday as I was meditating, my daughter came downstairs and interrupted me. She said she was scared about school. Given that it was only her 3rd Monday since in-person school started, it’s not a surprise. But my meditation time is sacred to me. I’ve found essential in helping me fill my pool of grace for the day so after I held her for a moment, I told her she could snuggle on the couch while I meditated. After a couple quiet minutes, she asked what I was reading. I didn’t answer. After a couple more quiet minutes, she said meditating reminded her about the small greenhouse they made at school. Instead of finding my calm, my whole system was on overdrive. I felt protective over my space and time that have so little of. I felt angry that I’d gotten up early and couldn’t even control my own experience for a few minutes. I couldn’t believe I let her be there in clear violation of the rule to wait until her clock turns yellow and then she made it about her.

And then when I reached that last feeling, the one about her making it all about her, I realized I had just lit up like a string of Christmas lights as my meditation teacher, Deirdre, likes to say. I connected a single experience with a whole chain reaction that had mostly to do with my ex-husband. He was a master of taking something that I wanted to do like hiking and make it all about him. He’d say “Let’s go!” But then he’d say we couldn’t drive to far so he could be back to watch a golf tournament on tv. And then he’d dilly dally getting ready because he couldn’t find his favorite socks. Then we’d finally get into the car and he’d need to stop so he could get a double-tall latte. When we finally get hiking, he’d go about half a mile and say he didn’t want to go much farther because he didn’t want to be sore the next day.

While I assume it’s completely natural for a 5-year-old to make things all about her, it was a tiring for a 30-something man to do the same. But what interested me about yesterday is that nine years after I ended that relationship and many years since lost its hold on my heart and mind space, that something simple could light me up like those proverbial Christmas lights. AND that it could do that while I was meditating to restore inner calm is the ironic icing on the cake.

The only fix I have is to unplug the string. To see the trigger and in recognizing it, steal its power. My daughter and I have been reading Harry Potter. They have an incantation, “riddikulus” that turns something scary into something funny. And maybe in doing that, I can reach a new level of meditation, one where I can do it when everything isn’t calm and quiet but even a little unsettled as well.

The Measure of My Love

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“A heart that loves is always young.” – Greek Proverb

Last Monday my five-year-old daughter handed me a dollar bill, a nickel and a dime and told me she was giving it to me because that’s how much she loves me. I was completely unprepared with a response other than “thank you” and “wow, that’s so kind!” Not to suggest that a response other than “thank you” in that moment was appropriate but it did make me think of telling her that my love doesn’t cost anything and that she should save her money.

At the time, she had $20 so it was about 5% of her liquid assets. Since I was going down that rabbit hole, I wondered if I give her 5% of my liquid assets. (What liquid assets? I don’t have any because I have children!) Isn’t it interesting how tempting it is to quantify? And once quantifying, the next question becomes “Do I have enough love?” When it comes to both love and money when asked any question with the word “enough” in it, the only thing my mind does is look for what it lacks.

When I check in with my heart though, it feels full. And I know because at the end of the day when both of the kids are in bed and I’m turning out the lights for the night, I have this feeling that my whole heart is in this house. And also in this year of having to operate in a pod, it has given me so much appreciation for the family and friends who are such a regular part of my life. And for the ones I haven’t gotten to see, I have gained the perspective of distance to cherish them and our shared history better.

So as my head is doing weights and measures, my heart is busy feeling the tender moments, like the one where my daughter is finding a way to express her love. How often do I let my head tell me what it thinks it knows without checking in with the key part that actually does know?

Once I work my way back to my heart, I find the quality of my life. And that is a feeling of wholeness and wealth which feels like the Truth of where I am and want to operate from. Which is good, because shortly after my daughter gave me $1.15 to show how much she loved me, my mom came over and my daughter gave her a dollar bill and two quarters to show her how much she loves her. 😊

The Advice We Give

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“A friend accepts us as we are yet helps us to be what we should.” – unknown

About five years ago when I was about 6 months into the parenting journey, a friend whose kids were high school aged casually threw out this line of advice, “Logic doesn’t work with kids between 2 ½ years old and 4 years old.” I had been around my nieces and my friends’ kids but hadn’t worked with kids well enough to know what that meant so I somehow internalized that line as if there would be a loss of logic when my daughter was 2 ½ years old. Like at age 2 I would be able to say to her “You can’t have that piece of candy because it has too much sugar and that’s not good for your body” but at age 2 ½, I’d no longer have that tool. I know all of you that have kids are laughing and now that I have lived through those years and have a 5 year old and a 1 ½ year old, I giggle too.  Who knows why my friend tacked on that lower age limit instead of saying “kids under 4” but it left me a small sense of loss at the time.

Isn’t that the interesting thing about the advice we give each other? We say something to convey our experience and wisdom and also to help and sometimes it causes panic. I loved this advice column post that Real Life of an MSW blogged about the other day. The person writing in was asking whether they should correct the grammar of a person that they wanted to help who was seeking a job advancement. The answer was brilliant because timing is everything.

It makes me wonder whether we offer advice more for ourselves or for the other person. I remember my very wise dad, who as a retired pastor who counselled and mentored many people, saying “Mostly, I listened” about times he’d get together for coffee with people seeking his advice. That resonates with the trail ethic I’ve learned from hiking — to greet other hikers when I see them but I don’t offer any advice about the path ahead unless I’m asked because I learned early on that my need to provide unsolicited commentary came directly from my ego wanting to prove experience or status.  

Yet we can offer such great comfort and direction to others when we do advice well. Sometime about a year ago when the pandemic was just shutting everything down, a woman who is now a grandmother many times over said to me, “It gets less busy.” I think about that piece of advice a lot in these days of shepherding my little ones back into in-person activities and it gives me the stamina to push through when I’m tired because I know I won’t always have to.

This morning when my 1 ½ year old didn’t want to get dressed, I didn’t even try logic. But I held him and told him that I understood that sometimes we don’t feel like going to work or preschool. Then I buckled him into the car seat with his pj’s on, we changed when we got there and he was fine with it. It felt as if I worked for him like it does me when I get good advice – a softening that comes from a compassionate ear and then an opening into a shift of perspective.

Healing the Divide

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“In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity.” – Albert Einstein

There’s a divide that runs right down the middle of my family of origin – I call it tree people and forest people as inspired by the phrase “Can’t see the forest for the trees.” The tree people are so good at details that they are the ones you want to invite if you need help painting a room or weeding a patch of garden. The forest people are generally better at navigating the ups and downs of life and are the ones you want to invite when you need advice or help troubleshooting a systemic problem. Even with different perspectives, we managed okay until a tree person sued a forest person. Now it’s hard to see that we all stem from the same ground.

So I’ve thought a lot about the root cause (pun intended) about the pain in my family. And when I read the following passage about belonging in Brene Brown’s book Braving the Wilderness, it resonated as the real reason that my family is divided.  

“Even in the context of suffering – poverty, violence, human rights violations – not belong in our families is still one of the most dangerous hurts. That’s because it has the power to break our heart, our spirit, and our sense of self-worth. It broke all three for me. And when those things break, there are only three outcomes, something I’ve borne witness to in my life and in my work:

1. You live in constant pain and seek relief by numbing it and/or inflicting it on others;

2. You deny your pain, and your denial ensures that you pass it on to those around you and down to your children; or

3. You find the courage to own the pain and develop a level of empathy and compassion for yourself and others that allows you to spot hurt in the world in a unique way.

Brene Brown

My dad was a Presbyterian pastor and so the church defined our lives growing up. Amidst all the wonderful things that came with the church community – friendship, values, service and faith, came an unfortunate side effect of an expectation of conformity to an image of a good Christian kid. As the youngest kid, I think the inferred expectation of having to be a living example was much lower or it just didn’t phase me but I imagine that it was harder for my siblings. As such the feeling of not belonging because they didn’t fit the precise mold began early.

I think about this a lot with my kids. As a side effect of being at home together in this year of pandemic, although sometimes feeling cramped, we have enjoyed the luxury of more time building the base of belonging. Now with schools opening up and more activities available, I am both relieved to see my kids start to branch out and concerned with keeping that feeling of deep connection going. I saw some great advice posted by Tina Payne Bryson, co-author of The Yes Brain: How to Cultivate Courage, Curiosity and Resilience in Your Child: “If you are a parent of a baby or toddler, then I have two big tips for you: 1) Delight in your child. It doesn’t have to be all the time, but find time every day to truly delight in them. 2) Take care of yourself. You matter, too.” It’s great advice because when I delight in my kids, I’m present and celebrating who they are and it not only works for my toddler by also my 5-year-old.

I don’t yet know whether my kids are forest people or tree people. Seeing my family’s experience has taught me that I’m willing to work hard to ensure that my kids know that whichever they are, that we inhabit the same ground, stem from the same Earth and are fed from the same soil. We might not see things from the same perspective but I’m betting that if we know we belong together, we will be willing to share our experience, our lives and our delight. Here’s my hope – if I start with my kids then the goodness of healing will ripple out maybe to my family of origin and then beyond.

Bottomless Questions

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“Keep your feet on the ground and your thoughts at lofty heights.” – Peace Pilgrim

When I awaken every morning, I tiptoe past both the kids closed bedroom doors and walk downstairs with the cat winding her way around my ankles. After I feed her and do a little stretching or yoga, I meditate. I have three or four books that I keep next to my meditation cushion and I read these short meditations as I sip my tea. The thing I like best about this practice is that when I flip to the page for April 20th in the Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo for instance, what is written there is usually something different that whatever is on the top of my mind for the day. It takes me out of my life for a moment to ponder a bigger or deeper theme instead of the logistics of my day.

So today when I opened another of my books, A Year of Daily Joy by Jennifer Louden, I loved that what she proposed, “Try asking bottomless questions – the kind that tantalize and stretch you.” Her examples were “How can I love more?” and “What do I want to create today?”

I sat with this idea for a while, watching the sun start to play on the house across from me, the birds flitting in and out of my plum tree, the feeling of observation starting to warm up my engagement with life and came up with this question “How can I bring curiosity into what I see and do today?”

The feeling of that question matches with my mood when I awaken. Light and open — and curious. My morning routine helps me set the tone for the day so that even long after what I read gets forgotten in the bustle of the day, I am still sustained by the broader horizon that came with my morning moments. I love the idea of posing that bottomless question to intentionally lengthen that note throughout the busy-ness of the day.

Optimism in the Time of Covid

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“When you realize how perfect everything is, you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky.” – Buddha

My toddler dropped a plate the other day and it broke. I thought, “Well, at least it didn’t shatter.” And had it shattered, I would have thought, “At least we’re wearing shoes.” Because I’m an optimist. If that sounds like bragging I don’t mean it to – after all, I did nothing to create this attitude, I came this way.

But I have had to find out that optimism doesn’t work for everything. Dating for instance. Let’s just say that optimism that it will all work out might not be the best philosophy for carefully evaluating whether or not one should get married. All I can say about that one, is thank goodness I realized that before we had kids.

Oh, and optimism often doesn’t work well for planning art projects with kids. For instance the time I thought we could use neon paint to leave cute footprints over the back patio. Uh oh, the paint didn’t stay just on the feet.

And it turns out, optimism isn’t so good in a pandemic. I thought surely schools would only be closed for 2 weeks when Covid hit last March 11th. Then accepting that, I thought for sure summer camps would still happen. Okay so there were no summer camps but certainly school would open in the fall of 2020. Whoops! I definitely will never have a job as a prognosticator!

Acknowledging my limitations that come with my congenital point of view has come with an upside (of course!). Faith. I’ve come to see how flawed my thinking can be so that I follow the small, insistent God-whisper in my heart instead. That’s how I came to be a single parent at age 46 (and again at 50). It was a pull from my heart that was insistent. It’s why I write even though I don’t have two free minutes to rub together. It’s way deeper than sunny, bubbliness of my head.

My faith leads me to know that it will all be great. It takes me out of the game of prognostication and helps me rest in the ease of knowing what I take on in any given day is exactly what I need. Which sounds optimistic but in a more rooted and less controlling way. I still find my optimism quite useful though. Once I’m right where I’m supposed to be, it helps me see the fun of it. Like the upside of parenting chores – a lot of messy diapers means we’re eating well! Oh and I’m very good at parking. That’s right – you guessed it, “I can totally fit in that space” has given me a lot of practice. And yes, now I am bragging.

Renewal Isn’t Just for Spring

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“When you are finished changing, you are finished.” – Benjamin Franklin

I was talking with a friend who is having a hiccup in a long-standing relationship she has with some friends, a couple. We were talking about what was frustrating her and how she views them and their history and it seemed clear to me as an outsider that there was a different way to see it. She decided that there were two ways she could proceed, do nothing and trust that God would help work it out or to speak up and say something, though she wasn’t quite sure what. I asked her if she felt like the relationship needed to change even if it was her that had to change, maybe just by seeing them differently? She wasn’t sure.

Which I think was a fair answer but it made me wonder, when do we say “yes” to change? I think back to long before I had kids, when I was married and was dying in a relationship with someone who needed a lot of care but gave very little back. And still, I was hanging in there until someone told me of his infidelities and it all blew up. Best thing that ever happened to me. But, why was I unwilling or unable to make a change before then even though I knew I was unhappy was largely about not wanting to break my word.

Recently I read a blog post by Rebecca that told of her experience of being laid off after more than 30 years when COVID hit. She walked through the dismay and disbelief that this happened and then she did the work to reframe it as best thing that could have happened to her. Is it loyalty that keeps us from changing before it’s foisted on us?

I assume that we aren’t in charge of the big seismic shifts that happen to us. They come along to blast us out of our ruts when we’re in too deep. So instead I’ve been working on recognizing that everything is seasonal. If I like something, perhaps the way my baby runs to me for reassurance when he hears a loud sound, that’s great but it’ll change. And if I don’t like something like how hard it is to clip the baby’s fingernails, that’s also okay because it’ll change. I look outside and watch my yard grow, bloom and shed and try to stay soft.

We can embrace renewal from within or be eroded by change from the outside. In my lifetime, both have and will continue to happen and what I’m finally realizing is that the benefit of embracing it is that it’s a lot more graceful. The flexibility that I am trying to practice on little changes helps keep me from stiffly falling over when the big changes come. Talking through this with my friend helped me see this in my experience of relationships as well. Planting that seed with her, the idea that change is always happening, helped her see it a little differently and she found the words she needed to say to be a part of where’s it’s going. That inspired me to see her differently and so the renewal grows and grows!

Loving the Bad Cat

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“It never hurts to see the good in someone. They often act better because of it.” Nelson Mandela

I used to have this cat, Simon. He was a Siamese mix that I inherited from a neighbor when she went to study in Hawaii for two years. She moved back from Hawaii but never returned for the cat. I suspect it was because he was a bad boy. He’d break into other people’s houses, he’d fight with other cats, he’d get locked in places like neighbor’s garages that he should have never been in the first place. A classic Simon story was that I had a neighbor, Steve, who hated Simon because he was always getting into his stuff. Steve lived in a duplex and when someone new moved into the other apartment, he was showing them around the basement with the washer/dryer the two units shared. As he was saying to them, “The most important thing is that you can never leave this door open because there is a cat that likes to come in here.” The new people asked what he looked like and as Steve replied they interrupted, “Like that cat right there?” And right behind Steve’s shoulder was Simon sitting up on a shelf smugly looking at them all.

Simon was so smart with such a big attitude that he was very amusing. He’d walk with me and my dog for 12 blocks, always looking around like he was the secret service agent keeping us safe. He was a snuggler too. Whenever he bothered to come home, he’d climb right into my lap and collapse there. But when push came to shove around his bad behavior, I’d always distance myself from him, “Oh yeah, that’s a cat that I inherited.” Like I did at the very top of this story. His bad behavior was disrespectful and rude, two things that I don’t see myself as so I think I just couldn’t own up to him.

I’m thinking of this because my five-year-old daughter this morning told me that she got in trouble yesterday when she and her friend were at the park with her friend’s caregiver. They went to an area that they were told not to go in order to climb trees. I assume that this was a pretty mild incident given that I heard about it from my child a day later and not the caregiver or the other parents. But it was notice that I’m crossing the threshold of parenting where my child can make choices outside of my control and supervision. And it raises the question about how to manage the myriad of feelings that come with it, specifically the judgment that comes with it – my judgment of my child and my fear of judgment by others.

There are two examples that come to mind about parental reactions to bad behavior. The first is a notable case from when I was growing up about a prominent family in the town. The dad was the editor of the newspaper, the son, who was then in his 30’s, got arrested for serial rape and the mom tried to bribe the judge and have the prosecutor killed.

The second story is on the other end of the parental spectrum and is a video that I saw a dad had posted online of his daughter running to school. He had posted it to shame his daughter for lying about what had happened to her bike.

Between those two examples is probably where most parents operate, I hope. I am finding that I am at my best when I let go of my judgment and instead choose discernment. When I am judging my child’s behavior, I feel the constriction of my viewpoint into not only what have they done but also who that means they are. Even when I don’t say half of what I’m thinking because I’ve declared that there will be no name calling in my house because the research that shows shame does not work, my thoughts jump to judgment. But when I am able to move through that into discernment, I can feel myself open back into curiosity. Both about how to best teach the values that I think will be most helpful and also about what conclusions/lessons my child has already learned before I even say anything. Crossing between judgment and discernment requires at least one deep breath.

So I asked my daughter why she thought that area of the park was out of bounds and what she might do differently the next time she’s invited. She had pretty good answers and we talked through the gray areas. It was better than anything I could have lectured on my own.

Postscript: After many different types of behavioral intervention for Simon and one time when he died and had to be resuscitated on the operating table as he was getting another cat’s tooth extracted from his back after fighting, the vet finally prescribed some kitty Prozac for him. He stopped fighting and breaking into other’s houses and he lived to 19 years of age. He lived with me for 14 of those years so I guess he was my cat after all.