Tag: transformation

Transforming Anger Into Something Life-Giving

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“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead

I witnessed a short, angry burst of aggression the other day. A driver pulled into an intersection as if to take a free right. A woman on foot with her dog in tow, crossed against the light, rapped on the car’s passenger window to tell the driver that it was “No turn on red.” Then she kept knocking on the window to continue angrily yelling the same thing over and over again.

The funny thing was that the driver had not yet taken a right turn but the woman was so incensed that it was likely to happen that she broke the rules to tell them not to. It would have been comical had she not been so apoplectic.

The light turned green, the car turned right and the interaction was over. But it stuck with me, so I went home and looked up anger in Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown:

Anger is a catalyst. Holding on to it will make us exhausted and sick. Internalizing anger will take away our joy and spirit; externalizing anger will make us less effective in our attempts to create change and forge connection. It’s an emotion that we need to transform into something life-giving: courage, love, change, compassion, justice.

Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown

I think this piqued my interest because the injustices of this world and our recent national politics make me angry. I need to remember to transform that into something life-giving in order to participate in creating change.

(featured photo from Pexels)

Awe Monsters

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“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.” – John Muir

I was backing out of the driveway the other night. Five-year-old Mr. D was in the back seat and we were on our way to pick up 9-year-old Miss O from a birthday party.

Mr. D exclaimed, “Mama, I saw the first star!”

Sure enough, out the back window was one really bright star. Mr. D’s excitement brought to mind a podcast series I’ve been listening to with Berkley professor Dacher Keltner on the 10 Percent Happier podcast.

Keltner is known for his courses on happiness. But his most recent book is about awe. He describes awe as part of the self-transcendent states, the emotions that help widen our perspective from inward and worried to the bigger picture. He writes:

“Awe is the emotion we experience when we encounter vast mysteries that we don’t understand. Why would I recommend that you find happiness in an emotion that is so fleeting and evanescent? A feeling so elusive that it resists simple description? That requires the unexpected, and moves us toward mystery and the unknown rather than what is certain and easy?

Because we can find awe anywhere.”

– Dacher Keltner in Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

I’m lucky to live with a couple of awe monsters. They experience it and share it on a regular basis.

But in case no awe monsters are handy, Dacher Keltner has many other suggestions. Here are some that draw from nature: look up at the sky, listen to bird song, be mindful of something that strikes you and take a picture of it.

(featured photo is Miss O (age 6) and Mr. D (age 2) looking at a sunrise)

Guides for Transformation

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‘‘Understand that the hardest times in life to go through are when you are transforming from one version of yourself to another.” – Mysticool

This post was originally published on 3/29/2023. Heads up – you may have already read this.

It’s something that I’ve found again and again in life – when I need to transform, someone or something shows up to be the catalyst. The Universe sends me a guide in some form or another. Here are some of my favorite examples:

When I was bored after a break-up with a boyfriend and I drove around a corner and Mt Rainier was squarely in my view. It started my amateur climbing career.

After I suffered from being stuck and closed down for a couple of years after my divorce, I received an invitation for a mediation class from my friend, Deirdre.

In my 40s when I was working out what was next in life, I would see images of the English Duchess Kate and start to cry. It totally unnerved me since I wasn’t much of a royal watcher and had eschewed having a family until then. And then I finally realized that I wanted to have kids.

I haven’t known all my guides. For example, researcher and author Brené Brown has been my guide towards being vulnerable and whole-hearted simply through the act of reading her books and listening to her.

As my meditation teacher, Deirdre says – transformation is what we need to be our best selves. Yes, it involves change but our spirits are wired to keep growing and finding the balance of all we can be when we need to evolve or simply have gone too far in one direction.

For me this goes in waves, I’ve changed my body to become a mountain climber only to find after years of doing that, my mind and soul needed to also get in shape through meditation. That change helped me open to understanding it was time for me to become a parent. And then I transformed almost completely to become a parent only to find as my kids age, it’s time to transform again to someone who remembers she has an individual, alive part that needs to dance too.

Perhaps this goes without saying, but the other part that I’ve noticed is that I don’t always get the message the first time. When I ignore the call, sometimes it builds into a crisis. In climbing terms, it goes from being a part of a team with a guide at the front to a rescue where I have to flail at the end of the rope.

Some of these changes are inspired from within and feel like evolution. Others come from the outside with disappointment and heart break and feel like erosion. However it comes, I’ve found it easier to take when I bow my head, put aside my opinion on whether I want it or not, and then look for guides.

Because I’ve found is that the Universe hasn’t left me to do this alone. It sends a guide or a catalyst to kick off the reaction. If you don’t believe in any Higher Power, I think that statement could also be cloaked in social learning theory – that all the people around us are walking advertisements for what we can be next. Whichever it is you believe, my experience has shown me that the guide may or may not be in our lives for the duration but they show up to help us over the threshold to what’s next.

(featured photo from Pexels)

Catalysts for Change

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“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” – Lao Tzu

I like to joke that any day that I have my kids yelling “run for your lives” by noon is a fun one. My most consistent tool in the bag is having them make baking soda “volcanoes” and then pour vinegar over the top to start the “lava.” Then we yell “run for your lives” and laugh ourselves silly.

I’ve been thinking about catalysts lately. Was the baking soda (Sodium Bicarbonate with a formula of NaHCO3) looking to be changed? Did the vinegar (formula CH 3 COOH) want to catalyze a reaction?  (By the way, I looked up why the reaction happens. According to Stem Mayhem, it is a very common acid-base reaction. The reaction releases carbon dioxide which bubbles up as gas.)

When I did my podcast with my meditation teacher, Deirdre, last week, she talked about transformation as exactly what we need to live our best lives – a process of continued growth into our best selves. In my experience, we aren’t left to do this all by ourselves. Often people (or things) show up to catalyze the change, walk us to the threshold of what we need to learn next, or maybe even join in as we yell “run for your lives.” It’s the topic of my Wise & Shine post this week: Guides for Transformation

High Expectations

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“Things are always in transition. Nothing ever sums itself up the way we dream about.” – Pema Chodron

Yesterday I delivered a presentation on mountain climbing to Miss O’s class at school. My friend, Doug, who I’ve done a lot of my climbing adventures with, joined me and we had a talk filled with pictures, a lot of equipment, and stories. We also had the most enthusiastic audience of second graders (Natalie, Chaya, Belle and all the other teachers out there, hats off to you for years of being teachers to these young and energetic minds).

Miss O had been so excited all week. She’d told me and her teacher that she’d written “best week ever” over her mood meter assignment. And then when Doug came to stay the night before the presentation and we started packing our climbing gear, she extended that to this was going to make 2nd grade the best grade ever!

So it surprised me when Miss O had to step out of the room to collect herself in the middle of the presentation. Through teary eyes, she told me that she felt that Doug was bypassing her when he handed out all the equipment. Which might have been true to some degree since she’d handled all the stuff the night before.

But I think it was more that her expectations were SO high. And I think she had a picture for a part that she’d play in the presentation or how it would reflect on her that didn’t quite match to reality. She modeled my climbing parka but mostly she was a participant.

This reminded me of every big occasion in my life – parties, birthdays, holidays, presentations – I’ve always felt a let down when they passed and I was still the same person afterwards. All that looking forward to something and then I’m still me with my same life when its done.

I’m projecting here because these aren’t the words Miss O used when we talked about it later but I think it’s a fairly common experience after we look forward to something. As Pema Chodron says in the quote for this post, “Nothing ever sums itself up the way we dream about.” There’s a mismatch between how we imagine in and how we experience it, and more than that, there’s an exhale after its done and before we find the next thing to look forward to.

At the end of the presentation, I told the story of friendship brownies. It was the climb that Doug and I were doing and we were climbing on Doug’s birthday. His wife asked him to carry some brownies to celebrate and he said “no” because he’s vigilant about only carrying what’s necessary. So she asked me and I said, “Sure” because we sometimes carry weight for our friends when they can’t or won’t do it themselves.

Miss O passed out the friendship brownies to the class and so it all ended well. Then she asked me to tell the story of the guy who was dancing with his toilet paper and I think those 2nd graders might have liked that one the most! Hard to tell whether ending with potty stories meant we ended on a high note or low one but the audience, including my delightful daughter, was pleased.

We Carry Them With Us

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“At some point, you have to realize that some people can stay in your heart but not in your life.” – Sandi Lynn

When I woke my daughter up last Friday for the last day of school, she had a frown. I thought perhaps it was just the fog of sleepiness still lifting but she told me otherwise.

“I was happy that it was the last week of school but I’m not happy that it is the last day. It’s not like you can ever go back.”

She didn’t want to leave her beloved 1st grade teacher. I thought the buildup and anticipation of summer would carry the day so I was caught off-guard, something fairly common for me as a parent.

The grief of the school year ending reminded me of a Ten Percent Happier podcast about the science of loss and grieving with Mary-Frances O’Connor, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Arizona. She talked about what happens when we bond with someone – it actually changes the brain so that we encode that person is special. In the brain imaging studies O’Connor recounted, yearning for someone lit up the part of the brain that is the reward center of the brain, the nucleus accumbens.

Her conclusion was that even when our memories tell us that something has changed – someone is gone, an experience has ended – even when we know all that, the part of our brain that was transformed when we bonded still lights up. In O’Connor’s example, when she goes to pick an Easter dress, she’s still impacted by her mother. She may pick the dress her mother would like or the one that her mother would hate, but either way her mother is still present.

This explanation resonated with me. It explains that warmth I get when I think of my dad putting his arm around me and saying “It’s going to be great, Kid!” Or the little skip in my step I experience when I hike a trail my beloved dog Biscuit liked and I think of how he’d run back and forth.

I’ve often said that the longer my dad is gone, the more that I feel him inside me as if I have to act out the parts that I used to rely on him playing. O’Connor’s research says that in a way, that is true because he lives on inside my brain. I’d say that same about my dog which is true but also I’ve always had a personality much like a golden retriever.

Knowing that I’ll always exist in my kid’s heads gives me a little perspective on what that voice should say. Is the soundtrack that wants them to pick up after themselves or the one that says that they are lovable, kind and capable of anything? I’m aiming for a little bit of the former but mostly the latter.

As we moved through this past weekend, my daughter kept asking, “what would I be doing at school now?” She was processing the experience of being done by remembering all her school activities and quoting her teacher to me. Knowing a little about the science of how we record things didn’t help me know what to say, but it did give me a lot of patience for her yearning.  

By the end of the weekend, my daughter said, “I’m so happy for the Kindergartners that will have my teacher next year.” To get to our new experience, we have to cross the threshold of leaving the old. But the bonds we formed in the old experience go with us.

Transforming to Just Being

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“Nothing has a stronger influence on their children than the unlived lives of their parents.” – Carl Jung

My 2-year-old cried in the car all the way to daycare yesterday. I cried all the way back. At issue for him was that after spending 3 ½ days out of school last week and then having to have a root canal to solve the problem, it’s hard to get back to the routine. Especially because his 6-year-old sister is now staying home from school with a sore throat.  At issue for me is this is the way the last three weeks of work days have gone – X’s denote a day that one of my two kids was home (placeholders for today, tomorrow and Friday because I haven’t woken the kids up yet):

Because I’m self-employed, there are many things I’m so lucky to be able to swing because I don’t have any corporate meetings, I don’t commute and my boss understands the situation. With all that said, here’s my question – does any parent with primary parenting responsibility actually get any work done? And has any parent gotten work done since the pandemic started?

It seems from my informal small survey of two kids, that the non-Covid illnesses are way more prevalent in these days of getting back to group activities. If that’s the case, I’d suspect that this will even out over time. But I’m not sure that I will even out after two+ years of feeling like the fulcrum on which I’ve tried to create balance in my kid’s lives no matter what’s happening in the world. Here’s how that feels:

Of course this is a little tongue in cheek and you must forgive the crude artwork. But with that said, the problem is that it is sometimes hard to get some perspective from down there. It brings to mind the quote for this post from Carl Jung, “Nothing has a stronger influence on their children than the unlived lives of their parents.”

Which I take to mean that when we sacrifice any aspect of ourselves – whether for our children, our parents, our partner or anyone else in our lives, that part haunts the remaining parts of our lives if we don’t make peace with it.  In my current situation, I’m having a hard time being successful at work. And aside from the monetary ramifications, it also impacts my ability to commit to things. Who am I if I’m not someone who can set deadlines?

In this process, I’m finding out that what’s getting squashed out is my self-conception. I’m becoming someone better at just being instead of being measured by my doing. I’ve said this before so I know I’m repeating myself but this is a process of transformation, so it’s taking some time. I still like to be reliable and productive. But I’m better at rescheduling something on my work calendar if I have to without it impacting my sense of who I am.

Dr. Gerald Stein quipped in a blog comment the other day, “”I wish I would have worked more’ said no one ever on their death bed.” But there is a wide crevasse to cross to understand how to put that into practice when we are in this middle part of our lives where we are responsible. I suspect parenting is one of the bridges that might help us get a leg over.

Has your conception of work changed during the pandemic or over time? Did parenting change it?

Growing and Blooming

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“What we love, others will love and we will show them how.” – Wordsworth

When I was 22-years-old and moving into my first post-college rental, my dad helped me find some used furniture. Some people he knew where moving into a retirement community so we looked at the items they were getting rid of and bought a kitchen table, two chairs and a Christmas cactus. I donated the table and chairs when I bought my first house a few years later but the Christmas cactus has been with me now for 30 years.

It was my first proof that I could keep something other than myself alive. Now I look at that cactus and see it as a reminder of my most important lessons.

It blooms beautifully once a year and then sheds all those flowers as it prepares for its next feat. It’s best to shed the past so you can work towards the next thing.

The cactus does not appear to be doing anything for 50 weeks but then bursts with color for 2 weeks. Most of our work happens on the inside.

Every now and then it’s drooped in the soil it is in and needs to be repotted as its roots grow deeper. We need some new perspective/work/material from time to time in order to stay vivid.

Sometimes it blooms closer to Thanksgiving rather than Christmas. As you get older, you learn to care less about expectations and more about flourishing in the way that works for you.

The growth on the side nearest the light blooms first but eventually, the darker side blooms too. If you water all of yourself, both your bright side and the shadow side will bear fruit.

 Although it’s a cactus, it has no prickly parts. It’s possible to live a long and beautiful life without thorns to protect you.

This weekend I came across my son picking up the dropped flowers with some tweezers and putting them on the stand. It made me think of my most important work. Trying to create a calm, loving space in which others treat things with kindness.

Friends for All Seasons

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

I hosted a birthday brunch for my friend this past weekend. It was all great – my kids worked super hard to color the wrapping paper for gifts, set the table and make signs, I cooked and cleaned for a day in order to have friends over to our house which doesn’t happen much in this COVID era. It was all great — except my friend didn’t show up.

She sent her husband to come alone because she was throwing up from a bad oyster that she’d eaten the night before at a wedding for someone she barely knows but felt like she had to go. She didn’t call or text because I’m guessing she thought it was sufficient that he would let us know. Which he did and the disappointment meant I spent the first five minutes of the party holding my daughter as she cried.

So, I’m upset with my friend. Obviously not for being sick but because this is about the 20th example (and most dramatic) of how she hasn’t shown up for us literally and figuratively since she took a new job 6 months ago. At first I was all grace and understanding but by now my grace pool has been diminished to the point that I’m out of empathy at the time when she really was sick. I’m tired of watching her seeming to try to be best friends with all of her new co-workers and in so doing, impacting her existing relationships and her ability to care for herself.

I spent the whole rest of the weekend brooding about this. I didn’t want to gossip so I kept it to myself and it simmered under the surface. Until I was finally ready to deal with it yesterday. As irked as I was, I couldn’t sit and meditate about this so I tried a walking meditation.

When I’d bled enough energy off so that I could get some space from the hurt of it, I realized this isn’t about me. My friend appears to be undergoing a transformation in her life and from my experience transformations are often messy, painful and not well communicated. From my experience, it’s like being in a washing machine just trying to find out which way is up while hopefully something gets clean.

I suppose we can all give up on each other as we transform and I’m sure we give each other plenty of excuses to bail. But that’s when we need each other most, even if just hold space for each other and occasionally shout “this way is up.” Perhaps my friend and I will end up on the other side of this with not enough common ground to be close and that will be okay. But I know that for my friends that have stood with me through the messy transformations, we have a deeper relationship as we’ve been friends through all seasons.

All of this makes me wonder – maybe the one small step in making the world a more peaceful place is holding space for others as they change?

The Lightening Rod for Big Feelings

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“The best way out is always through.” – Robert Frost

It’s my sister-in-law’s last day of nannying for me. The kids are aware of it but since they live so much in the now, it’s not as much that they focus on that information but the air is crackling with change and they sense it. It reminds me of the song my daughter sings about lightning: “Electricity gathers in a cloud, When frozen rain and bits of ice are bumping all around, Electricity leaping towards the ground, Lightning is the flash of light, Thunder is its sound.”

Just like with thunder storms, that energy has to go somewhere and in most cases, I find that I’m the lightening rod for my kids. They’ve bravely keep their little selves together until they see me and then it all comes bursting out. Lightning rods work because they draw the strike and then are wired to ground so that the energy is discharged safely into the earth. If a lightning rod is not wired to the ground, it provides no added protection to the structure.

I’m the conduit for my family’s emotion because my kids aren’t old enough to process many of the big feelings that come along with trying, getting hurt and having little control over the circumstances of life. And it’s not just kids that bleed off their pain and uncertainty. But to be the safe place for someone else’s emotions without endangering ourselves, we have to be connected to the ground. The danger of not being is that the electricity stays within us, causing damage to our organs, flashing out somewhere else unexpectedly or perhaps worst of all, building up until it’s a layer of charge that buffers our enjoyment of life. Completing the analogy, if we aren’t grounded we will not provide any added protection to the structure.

As with so much in parenting, I do much better with big feelings and changes if I take care of myself so I find myself continually working on my grounding. All week I have been getting up extra early, meditating to find that awareness that is bigger than my fear of the unknown, writing to process it all, and lying on the ground, ostensibly to stretch but even more to remind myself that there are many things that hold me up as life shifts. Leaning in towards the raw power of transformation and change, I find my center that is there through it all.