Essays

Thoughts of meditation and life

January 14, 2017 by Lisa Leave a Comment

I’ve practiced meditation for more than a decade as part of my ongoing quest to cultivate wellness, vitality and spiritual fulfillment. It has always kept me fairly balanced and calm. That being said, I haven’t practiced much since the middle of 2016. The past year has had some very stressful months and I didn’t do a good job of managing my life. When my husband’s best friend died suddenly in December, I knew it was time to make a concerted effort to focus on my own personal wellbeing and health.

I miss the days where I was meditating on regular basis and for an extended period of time. My meditation practice took a long time to develop and I forgot how hard it was to get myself to the point where I was meditating daily for extended periods. I thought restarting my practice would be as simple as getting my zafu out, lighting an incense cone and going straight into an hour-long session where my breath would flow gently and easily.

I thought wrong.

Thoughts on Meditation and Life

My meditation practice lacks focus. My mind jumps to and fro. I have had days where I feel like I won’t make it through 60 seconds let alone 60 minutes. Quite frankly, there have been times I’ve wanted to give up and turn my back on something that not only makes me feel good, but is also good for me.

I would say I don’t know why I stopped, but I think I do know why. I thought I was too busy to take time out of my day and spend it on me. If I look even more deeply, I’ve been doing that for a long time and this is about more than meditation.

Not only have I have fallen into the trap where I have stopped doing something I love, but if I’m being honest with myself, also never fully started doing things I love because I think I lack the time. Or I think it’s selfish to do those things I want to do. Or I let my own raging imposter syndrome prevent me from doing what I want to do. Or I compare myself to others and think that “well, they’re doing this well, so there is no way I can do this” and I don’t get to stop what I’m doing, because I never start. Sure there’ll be days where I can’t live my ideal day. In fact, most days aren’t going to resemble my vision of an ideal day. But I can find bits and pieces of that one ideal day in every day.

Part of this whole line of thinking might be me looking back to how I was raised. I’m not sure anyone in family actually takes time out of their day to do things they love. I’m talking about the things that fuels them emotionally, creatively, or spiritually. That makes me really sad. After all, we should do things that make us feel joy. That make us feel gratitude. That make us feel alive.

I feel selfish taking time to do the creative work that feeds my internal fire. Selfish and guilty. Never have I also felt more like a narcissitic martyr than when making that statement. When I work on the work that fuels me, the work no one sees, I am alive. My skin is electric and my scalp tingles. Yet, I deny myself the pleasure of this work.

What you do outside “paid” work is just as significant for your work-productivity as what you do while you are working. When we’re children, our parents make up games to teach us things we look back on as simple: learning our ABC’s or the parts of our body. Play in our everyday life as adults should be just as significant.

Taking time to do the things we love and immersing ourselves into them is just as important as hard work. It is hard work. Ignoring the things we love and that brings us immense joy is detrimental to our mental health and wellness.

I’ve had to learn that lesson the hard way and I struggle with it everyday. But, I’m working on it. The work is some of the most difficult I’ve ever done, this personal work in the quest to be a better person to the people I meet in daily life, the people I love and live with, but also to me. I’ll be working on it for the rest of my life.

My friend Allan says that you have to face your fears and it’s until you truly give yourself over to fear and embrace it that you can truly start living. It’s time I listen to my friend and take a chance on me by staring down failure and welcoming it into my life. I owe it to myself.

Books On Meditation:

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Disclosure: The above links are affiliate links.

Don’t Blink

June 8, 2016 by Lisa 2 Comments

There are so many firsts and lasts in parenting. Today is the last time I’ll pick my son up at his high school. He will turn 16 this summer and this fall will be driving himself to and from school. My emotions have been running high all morning — my everyday normal for the past 11 years has irrevocably changed forever.

I cherish our time in the car . Mornings are for light-hearted banter and the rock music he wants to listen to so he’s pumped up and ready to face the list of AP classes on his schedule. Afternoons are when he’s ready to talk. Some days we take a short drive around our small town, or we head to Starbucks for a coffee. We discuss his day, current events, and life. I have learned more about my son on those drives than he ever gives when we’re at home.

The time we spend in the car together is our safety zone. I am known for having intense direct eye contact when having discussions and there are many times he needs to be able to share his deep feelings or thoughts without eye contact. So the car is a bubble — we can have the conversations he needs without feeling discomfort. No topic is off limits.

In two short years, he’ll leave high school for good and go to college. Right now, I wish more than anything that I could slow time down, maybe even reverse it. Kids were never part of my life plan and I am so incredibly thankful my course changed and I have been able to spend the last 15+ years with this amazing human.

I think today we will take a longer than normal drive and go for a coffee. I’ll be the one wearing large sunglasses to hide the tears.

Don’t blink, friends. It all goes by so fast.

The Bloggess Made Me Cry

April 1, 2016 by Lisa 3 Comments

The Bloggess made me cry. Twice. In twenty minutes. She wasn’t being mean to me. Instead, she sat on a stage directly across from me and spoke to my soul. It took everything I had in me to not lose my shit.

If you follow Jenny, you know that she draws as part of her coping mechanisms. Last night, she was drawing doors. Today, I sat and watched her before she started speaking and I understood with an alarming clarity these doors she draws and why she draws them. I saw her anxiety and watched it manifest in front of me. Most people wouldn’t have seen it, but I was looking for it. The doors hide her. They taunt her. They keep her safe.

I was looking for it, because I saw me mirrored like the outline of a tree on a glassy lake and needed to know I wasn’t alone in the auditorium.

The doors in our brain are stuck open or shut in some strange Victorian Edgar Allan Poe sequence, creaking open, flying open, staying stuck, always tapping.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.” ~ “The Raven” Edgar Allan Poe

You see, I have “generalized anxiety disorder,” GAD for short and clinical depression. It has been a defining part of my life since I was a child, except then everyone just told me I needed to stop being so sensitive, or to “get over myself.”

But there is no getting over it when you’re 43 and somedays the only thing you can do is leave the house to take your son to school and drive back home. I know that I am safe from the panic attacks. When I travel and lock myself in my hotel room, I know that I am okay from the prying eyes of the world trying to bore into my soul and suck me dry.

When you’re laying in bed at night the thoughts won’t stop racing through your mind of all the things you have done wrong, or imagined you’ve done wrong. You can’t be the friend, wife, family member, you’re supposed to be. There are days you don’t want to get out of the bed, and you don’t.

This is my normal and it sucks. Mine is currently being exacerbated by hormonal issues otherwise known as peri-menopause. This time of life makes any woman crazy, toss in GAD and depression and I’m a Kentucky Hot Brown sandwich dripping with gravy kind of mess.

I wanted to laugh in the most desperate way. Had I started, the laughing would have turned into the most ugly, raging cry that room has ever seen, culminating with me curled up fetal on the floor in front of you.

Thank you, Dear Jenny. Thank you for being you, for sharing you, for talking openly to the world about your brain. You were sitting on the stage, but you weren’t alone.

Some days you need more cowbell

February 29, 2016 by Lisa Leave a Comment

My good friend ran a marathon this weekend in Black Mountain, NC. He flew down from his home in New York and voluntarily paid to run 26.1 miles in the cold mountain air and on icy, snowy roads. We loaded up the car early Saturday morning to enjoy the brisk (i.e. frigid) air and do what all people do when supporting friends running a marathon — ring cowbells as he passed the finish line.

Half of those running signed up to run 40 miles — meaning they’d go to the top of Mt. Mitchell, the highest peak this side of the Mississippi and back to town. The same Mt. Mitchell that received 66 inches of show in January. Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond the race organizers control, the extra portion of the race had to be cancelled for the first time in 19 years.

I respect and admire my friends who run. If you ever see me running these days, it’s because someone is chasing me. Who am I kidding, I won’t run, I drop and play dead. You see, I used to run. Every evening from the time I was 11 until I was 16 or 17. Run, run, run. This was also the 80’s when Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan didn’t apply to me, or the other girls I knew, and Keds were the running shoe du jour. Looking back, I understand my knee issues much better.

Title IX was implemented in 1972, the same year I was born. It guaranteed gender equity for boys and girls in every educational program that received federal funding. Most people who know about Title IX think it applies only to sports, but athletics is only one of 10 key areas addressed by the law. These areas are: Access to Higher Education, Career Education, Education for Pregnant and Parenting Students, Employment, Learning Environment, Math and Science, Sexual Harassment, Standardized Testing and Technology.

As a young girl, living in the rural south, the only sport I had available to me was dance or cheerleading. Neither of those were considered a sport, but you spend hours per day in toe-shoes and tell me it isn’t a sport. I desperately wanted to play t-ball, but there were no other girls playing and since federal funding wasn’t being received, I wasn’t allowed to play. Many years of tap, jazz, ballet, baton with a few gymnastics classes were how I filled that time. I’m very thankful my Dad and Uncle taught me how to throw a baseball and kick a football. The baseball skills came in handy when I was old enough for softball and pitched.

But running, running was great. There wasn’t a team and I didn’t have to worry about acceptance. I could have tried out for the track team at school, but I was a slow runner. Besides, running is what I did to escape my teenage problems and clear my head.

I’d strap on my walkman when evening came, pop in some Black Sabbath and run. Iron Man and War Pigs were my favorite running tunes and I’d hit the rewind button in order to listen to them over and over. Even now, I can picture myself running down the length of my Grandmother’s gravel driveway, out to the road, and running from end of the road to other, back and forth. The throbbing of Geezer Butler’s bass with Ozzy powering through songs about a time traveling man and war kept me pushing. I preferred running Sabbath because it was hard, heavy and not the thrash/speed metal I listened to at any other time. I’m pretty sure my heart would have exploded had I tried to keep up with Nuclear Assault’s or Metallica’s “Whiplash.”

Gratuitous music break

These days, I walk and most of the time, I have in ear buds but no music playing. It’s so I can walk in peace and quiet and I’m not interrupted by people wanting to talk. I walk up the street to the elementary school in the afternoons where a lot of middle school girls teams practice lacrosse, soccer, and field hockey to name a few. At the high school my son attends I’m amazed at the athletic young women, knowing that when I was in school the only sports for girls were cross country, track, softball, basketball, volleyball and cheerleading. And cheer wasn’t considered a sport, but they were certainly athletes. I much preferred field hockey, but that wasn’t available and I’m pretty sure still isn’t.

That day on Black Mountain my friend crossed the finish line with tears in his eyes. He hit the wall at 24 miles in and slowed down to a crawl, but still made the run in under 4 hours and 30 minutes. He was six weeks post-op from shoulder surgery. My husband was there to greet him. We knew he had slowed down and I had went to the car to warm up, missing our chance to ring the cowbells when he crossed. But he got all the cowbell he needed in the form of hugs, local coffee, and time to soak in the hot tub, followed by dinner.

Sometimes, all the cowbell you need is that time with friends. At other times, it means something like Title IX to know that there have been others ringing that cowbell for you before you were even born. Knowing that you have that someone there ringing the cowbell pushes you further and faster than ever. We will be in same place next year, ringing our cowbells. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re at in life, you can always use more cowbell.

What I’ve Learned — Week 29 {Mind Over Matter}

February 26, 2016 by Lisa 1 Comment

This week is a different What I’ve Learned. You see, what you’re supposed to be reading is Week 28. That week is written, sitting in a Word document, waiting on me to publish it. It’s too raw and there might even be some meanness in there. Let me rephrase that, I know there is meanness. So I’m doing the best thing I can do:

I’m not clicking publish.

When writing something as deeply personal as I do on What I’ve Learned, it’s from a place deep inside me that few people see. I expose myself to the world in raw, unedited form. If there is one thing I’ve learned from many years of experience is that it’s often best to:

Not send that text
Not post that Facebook status
Not Tweet that thought
Not make that phone call
Not voice that opinion
Not react in a swift manner

But most of all, I’ve learned to:

Bite my tongue

What a difficult lesson. In our formative years, we hear parents repeat, over and over, to watch what we say and to think of other people’s feelings. In this day of easy, fast communication, it’s all too often that we act first, think later. In fact, that seems to be the norm for most due to easy access to social media, but that’s a different post for a different time.

I’m guilty of all of the above. After all, my mother has always told me I’d argue with a stop sign about my right to not stop and I’d win.

The great Marcus Aurelius said, “The soul becomes dyed with the colors of its thoughts.” If that’s true, the tendency to speak what is on my mind so quick and fierce has affected all of the other thoughts I have.

I prefer to treat my thoughts like a tough cut of meat. I let them sit in a bowl and marinate with all of the other thoughts. They’re tenderizing. Oh, I still have some of the same thoughts, don’t get me wrong, but I choose not to express them. Those thoughts are still there, but I’m just opting to manage them with tools I’ve used for decades.

“All thoughts, secret or spoken, belong in a coffee table book written in Braille, so you can really feel the emotions.”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not FOR SALE

People who deal with depression tend to confuse thoughts and emotions. This is something I work on in my over my two-decade meditation practice. A practice that has become much more intense. When I practice mindfulness, there is a clear distinction between thought (verbalization of the mind) and emotion (what I’m feeling in my body). Emotions give rise to thoughts. Thoughts give rise to emotions. I work to change my thoughts, thereby changing my emotions.

The post that’s not here today is a highly charged, emotional piece. One I wrote off-the-cuff, with little thought, fraught with emotion. That is not who I want to be. As I walk through this journey called life, I want people to remember me with kindness. Those harsh, painful words will color their perception of me for the rest of their lives, even when mine is long over.

“There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under the jurisdiction. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I can read and eat and study. I can choose how I’m going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life-whether I will see them as curses or opportunities. I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert

I can honestly say, that for the first time in many, many weeks, I feel peace. When I started writing this, I was an emotional mess, crying, and off-balance. I’m reminding myself of who I choose to be and have to remember that the best thing I can do is listen to my inner thoughts. My emotions will work themselves out.

Thoughts of meditation and life

Thoughts on Meditation and Life

Books On Meditation:

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Don’t Blink

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The Bloggess Made Me Cry

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Some days you need more cowbell

Gratuitous music break

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What I’ve Learned — Week 29 {Mind Over Matter}

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Thoughts on Meditation and Life

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Gratuitous music break

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