Tag: self-care

Self-care

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“Sleep is the best meditation.” – Buddha

I had a moment this week when I felt unappreciated. In my exhaustion from the endless loads of laundry, the sudden need for spot cleaning and the excessive attentiveness that comes with potty training, I was running at 100% and no one seemed to notice. The way I remember it, my 6-year-old daughter asked me to get her something right after I sat down and my internal dialogue whined, “Can’t she see how hard I’ve been working?”

And then I had the inclination to be elusive, enigmatic and mysterious so that those around me would seek me out. Funny because I have never embodied mystery in my 52 years but somehow it seems viable as a strategy when I’m feeling tender. As if somehow retreating will make me feel more seen.

It’s a silly idea but thankfully I finally have come to have some sympathy for myself at this age. That I can recognize that as I sign that I need some self-care instead of calling it stupid or just powering through it is progress in my friendship with myself.

But the inclination to hide when I am exhausted and feeling unseen reminds me of something I heard in a podcast with Dr. Laurie Santos. She teaches the “Psychology of the Good Life” course at Yale which she described as:

“Evidence based strategies students can use to feel better. The problem is that it’s hard because our minds lie to us – like negative emotion, run away [from it]. Our minds lie to us about the kinds of things we are going to enjoy. When I’ve had an exhausting day, I just want to plop down and watch Netflix and never get off the couch. My mind doesn’t say, ‘Hey why don’t you go for a hard workout or why don’t you call a friend you haven’t talked to in a long time?’ The point is that we have intuitions about the kinds of things we need to do to promote our mental health and the kinds of things we need to do to live a happy life but often times those intuitions are wrong. They [the intuitions] are like – change your circumstances, get a lot of money, succeed, succeed, succeed at all costs. In practice those intuitions are leading us astray. We are putting in the work to become happier. But we are doing it wrong.”

And what are some of the right things that Dr. Santos has found that she has to remind the students in the course? To eat well and sleep.

And eating well and sleeping is what I’ve found cures my inner whine at least 98% of the time. I’m grateful that I can be friends with my mind. Even though I’ve learned not to listen to what it suggests, it often is telling me to take care of something and I appreciate that.

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)

Renewal

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“We are like someone in a very dark night over whom lightening flashes again and again.” – Maimonides

By the end of last week, I was feeling burnt out. My daughter stayed home from school for a couple of days, I was trying to start a new project with a new client and that’s scenario that causes me the most stress — when I try to parent and work at the same time. I end up feeling like a failure at both. Then I got the news that my favorite teacher from my son’s class is leaving, it added disappointment and worry to my heap. By Friday night, I was feeling disoriented – as if I was driving a dark road without the lights on.

So I took some advice about renewal that I’d recently heard a couple of places – maybe a podcast and the blogosphere and intentionally watched a movie after the kids went to bed instead of flipping through channels or surfing social media. It took me two nights to watch A Dog’s Purpose but I cried, I cheered and at the end, definitely felt better.

In two hours, it reminded me of perspective and faith. It all works out in the end. There is a beautiful design to this life. Once time and the Universe connect the threads, you can see how they all come together for good. I have come to know this in my bones and my Budheo-Christian beliefs (my made up combo name) have given my many examples.

And I’ve watched it work with my mom, especially after the death of her husband of 53 years. When my dad died suddenly in a bike accident, my mom has relied again on again on the verse from Romans 8:28. “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” She is an extraordinarily strong, independent, smart woman – but I’ve seen how she goes back and reconnects to that belief to renew her charge to be useful, kind and good.

I get disoriented and disconnected from time to time, I think we all do. What I’ve learned is that it’s a reminder to reconnect to my faith and beliefs and the faster I do it, the less I blunder about without the lights on. Whether it is just sitting still and meditating, watching a movie or hiking to the top of something, when I find the way to renewal, I’m always heartened by the experience. It strengthens my faith that I can find my way back to the Source. Once again, it all comes together, I see how the dots connect or relax into knowing that one day I will.

(photo from Pexels)

Self-Care

Posted in meditation, ParenthoodTagged , , , ,

“You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.” – Buddha

Sitting on my meditation cushion today, I started to squirm because my right hip hurt. But I still stayed until finally it occurred to me that there was no honor in enduring the pain. I could meditate while lying on my back and stretching my hip. As I did that, I realized that I do this often – fail at self-care because I believe I am accomplishing something more important.

One of the reasons I’m thinking about this was another great podcast this week. The On Being podcast with Alex Elle. She talked about doing more than surviving this life. She wants to break the cycle in her family where the women just give until there is not one drop left for themselves. The line she said that really caught my attention was, “Choosing to do this work – it doesn’t just heal me, it heals my lineage.”

Wow, that rolls it all into one. If I believe that, and it rang true to me, then I can’t ignore my own care. I can’t martyr myself in the name of raising these two beautiful children because I would be teaching them, among other things, that motherhood is no fun. It makes me rethink my pattern of never going out at night so that I’m always here to put my kids to bed. I think there is a lot of goodness in that but always/never might be a little extreme.

As I stretched the right hip and then the left, I realized that the thing that I am good at is seeking out others stories to inspire me. In podcasts and blog posts, I find so much interesting and thought-provoking material that makes me grow. It gives me hope that I learn to take care of myself in other ways too!

Self Compassion

Posted in meditation, ParenthoodTagged , , , , , ,

“You must transform and transcend your unconscious habit of pitying yourself and having feelings of inferiority if you want to grow and feel the experience of your mind reaching into infinity.” – Yogi Bhajan

This past Sunday I loaded up my stroller with all the things we’d need for a morning outing – picnic blanket, food, coats, masks, map for a scavenger hunt we were doing and took my kids down to a local wading pool that is empty this time of year and a great place for my daughter to practice with the new roller skates we’d gotten at a garage sale. We’d been there a few minutes when a dad arrived with three kids, his stroller similarly loaded and all of them riding bikes/trikes. I was idly watching him as he engaged with his kids – 6 yrs, 3 yrs and 18 months. At one point the 3 year old was upset and the dad got down on the ground right in front of the strider bike the kid was riding and talked it out with him. Then the dad turned to me and started talking about being exhausted. The story almost just tumbled out of him – his wife is considerably younger, in grad school and he doesn’t want to spend what could be the last decade of his life exhausted. Although he didn’t look that old to me, I appreciated his candor and his quest to find a way to enjoy this phase of life.

For anyone that is living this part of life with young children or remembers it, you know there is a lot of caretaking to happen. Bathing, toileting, eating, cleaning, reading, planning, communicating, entertaining, regulating emotion – none of these happen for my little people very proficiently quite yet. I had these kids late in life and so intentionally, that there are many days I don’t even question why I spend an 13 straight hours of a weekend day so focused on someone else’s care. I remember the time before I had children when I just had myself and my dog, Biscuit, to care for and I was so incredibly tired of just thinking about myself. I’m delighted to have these bright lights in my life and when it’s so clear that their needs outweigh my own, doesn’t it just make sense to focus on them?

But the balance has possibly tipped too far towards the kids, sometimes just simply as a practical matter. Why wear clean clothes when they will be dirty in 10 minutes? How can I brush my hair properly with one hand while I hold the baby with the other? Do I bother to prepare myself food that I is good for me if no one else will eat? And finally there’s the question of how to work out for my own benefit when I’m already exhausted from exercising my patience.

In my determination to make sure my children are taken care of, I’ve lost regard for myself. That is to say, I don’t even make the list as one of the key people to take care of. I think there is a price to be paid for losing your self-regard, even if it happens only as a practical matter. The consequence of never thinking I am worthy of care is that I start to believe it. In holding them up, I’ve let myself down.

Listening to this dad last weekend, I felt so much compassion for everything on his plate and it was in having his story laid out before me that allowed me to see that I need to extend the same compassion for myself. I’ve been falsely believing that it’s a dichotomy of my kids needs or my needs instead of expanding my pool of compassion to see that we all need care and that includes me.

As we talked and our kids played, a van from the city’s parks and recreation department pulled up with a bunch of toys for the kids to play with – pogo sticks, balls, noodles, the corn hole game and more. It was such a gift to have an hour free from being the entertainment director and a good start to relaxing into compassion for myself. Now I just need a clean shirt and some healthy food.