Meditation In Motion

Recently I started making yoga and meditation a priority in my life again. I had let these interests go this past year, first as I adjusted to graduate school and then because life became increasingly filled with studying and pressure. I went from feeling centered and grounded at the beginning of the semesters to having moments of feeling completely chaotic in both my physical world and in my emotional state.

My yoga studio offers a free meditation group one night a week and I attended a session two weeks ago. The woman leading the meditation was wonderful in her peaceful and supportive energy and I spent some time talking with her after the group ended.

One of the topics we discussed was walking meditation. I have only done it once in a group and didn’t find that it worked for me at all. I was distracted with trying to keep enough distance between the people in front and behind me. The walk was slow, much slower than I anticipated, and my steps were unsteady trying to move that slowly. In the end, I was frustrated because it increased my stress and I was in no way able to relax, breathe or move inward for reflection.

Then we talked about what I like to refer to as “moving meditation”. I find that sometimes when I’m driving, or doing something repetitive, that I am very familiar with, I move into a meditative state. One of my favorite times to do this is in the morning while the coffee is brewing. If I’ve run the dishwasher the night before, I take this time to unload the dishwasher. I’ve arranged my kitchen so that the dishes are in cabinets right above the dishwasher. One by one, I grab the glasses and move them up into their spots in the cabinets, then the plates and finally, the bowls. Each dish with its own place, repetitive motion up and down, no thought or analysis involved. With this familiarity, my mind is free to wander a bit, moving from thought to thought, not holding on to any one of them, just letting them flow through my mind peacefully. The timing of the coffee brewing and of emptying the dishwasher is synchronized almost perfectly with each being done at just about the same time. I love those moments. I’ve gained a few minutes of absolute internal peace, free from stress or worry, and I’m always a little more grounded when they’re done.

Yesterday, I went rock and mineral collecting with a friend. I’ve never been before and I know very little about rocks or minerals, but over the past year, through my friend’s tutelag, I’ve begun to absorb some of that information as he’s shown me his collection and new finds. We stayed local and visited a new construction site and the site of an athletic field that happens to be right near a local fault line. We spent over five hours working our way through these two sites. The weather was perfect and no one else was around to disturb the sounds of the birds or leaves rustling nearby. My friend stayed closer by in the beginning, showing me some of the things to look for. As time went by, we moved apart, each caught up in our individual quests; each concentrating on what was in front of us, above us, or right near our feet. Rock and mineral hunting is a study in taking in the big picture and the minute at the same time. Sometimes you are searching for patterns in the boulders or the wall of rock to give you clues as to where to look, other times, you are looking at the much smaller rocks all around your feet, focusing your eyes to catch glints of color or light as the sun catches the edge of a crystal.

I have to say that those five hours were the most enjoyable I’ve spent in a good long time. I found that I entered a similar type of meditative state as I do when unloading the dishwasher. There was no need for me to worry about bills, or work or anything other than the activity at hand. I had no ego tied up in which minerals or rocks I found so it was an activity for the sake of pure experience and enjoyment. It was a moving meditation for five hours straight. In the end, I couldn’t believe how utterly relaxed and peaceful I felt. It was a wonderful experience.

I encourage all of you to find the time to let your mind go and relax into some meditation. Whether it is seated or in motion, you will find that it refreshes and rebuilds you in surprising ways.

Eat, Pray, Love~

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert is a wonderful autobiographical account of the author’s path toward personal growth and spiritual enlightenment.

The narrative begins a few months before her divorce and follows the author through the next several years. The reader is treated to rich, sensual and frank descriptions of the countries the author visits and the people she meets along the way.

Throughout the book, Ms. Gilbert deftly describes her own process of spiritual growth while avoiding preaching or proselytizing.

Critical reviews of the book are somewhat mixed; most are positive, with some criticizing her writing technique. While this is not the most sophisticated book I have ever read, it certainly kept me engaged and feeling full once I had completed it.

Spring weeding

Every Spring in New England is marked by a gradual warming of the weather, rain, and the sprouting of new growth.

Shortly after the perennials have made their way out of the soil, it becomes apparent that the weeds have also benefited from the improved conditions and they are quickly threatening to overtake the garden.

I love weeding. It’s a way for me to reconnect with the natural world after spending so many months holed up in my man made environment. I love the smell of the damp earth and seeing the worms wriggle when they are uncovered. I especially love the smell as I clean underneath and around my lavender plant; it’s like a sitting near a basket of potpourri, immediately soothing my soul.

Every year as I weed my way through the various flower beds and around the shrubs in my yard, I’m struck by the parallel processes of weeding and that of personal and spiritual growth.

When I first begin to tackle the flower beds, they are covered in the leaves that blew in from the previous fall, a few random scraps of paper, and the weeds that are quickly overtaking the space. Each spring, I have to remind myself not to feel overwhelmed. The trick to weeding is to start with the most obvious things and to work your way down to the detail.

First, I pick out the pieces of paper and debris, these are easy to remove and make a big difference in how the yard looks. Next, I rake, or gather out the leaves, doing this will uncover the weeds. As I take on the weeds I find the ones that vine out first, knowing that tugging on one will usually result in removing a large intertwined clump of growth. Next, I move down to the individual weeds, grab them at the roots, or dig down to grab the tubers and pull. Finally, I begin to lift up the edges of the perennial leaves, carefully picking between the stalks to grab only the weed stems and tug. By following this process, the job of weeding is broken up into manageable tasks and is much less overwhelming than it first appeared.

Personal growth works in much the same way. When you first approach, your mind is a jumble of thoughts and emotions. It’s difficult to sort through what the real problems are and what is just clutter that adds to and masks the deeper issues.

In order to get to those deeper issues, that clutter needs to be cleared away. I find that if I work on taking care of things that are nagging at me, things like catching up on laundry, putting dishes away and doing a quick sweep of the house with the vacuum, I am able to remove a huge amount of stress that was weighing me down and taking up space in my head. This is like pulling out the scraps of paper that blow into the garden over the winter.

Next, I try to keep up with the bills – finances are another thing that I’m happy to use as an excuse to avoid working on bigger issues. If I keep up with my bills and have a regular schedule to address them, finances don’t add to that mind clutter. For me, bills are like the leaves that cover everything else up. I need to handle them before I can make any progress.

Once the basic housekeeping is done, I take on the larger issues, like those vining plants. These are the things that are easily handled, but if left unattended to, grow into larger problems. So, I take care of the phone calls to friends or family members that have gone unanswered. In so doing, I can clear those nagging voices out of my head – my voices telling me that I’m being selfish and ungrateful to others in my life.

As a lot of the debris and easier tasks are handled, I’m now able to see more clearly where the problem “weeds” are. I can decipher the things that are within my realm of control and those things that need closer attention and care to deal with. Now I’m free to examine whether there are things that I’ve avoided or ignored that are now intertwining with my creativity and ability to form deeper connections with those around me. One by one, I tackle those issues – making a decision about whether or not to trade the car in, deciding whether or not I want to take on a volunteer commitment, or even, being honest with an acquaintance abut the fact that I have been out of touch because I’m not sure we have enough similar interests to continue a friendship.

Finally, I can get down to the more difficult things – the ones that are underneath those perennial leaves. These are the deeper, more involved issues that have the potential to choke out significant growth and development if they are allowed to fester for too long. Some of these I’m able to tackle in time and with guided thought and processing. Others of these are too difficult to tackle alone. Sometimes I need to pull in some extra help to work them out and separate them from the fertile soil in my mind. It isn’t always easy to work on these and it would be much easier to leave them covered up and ignored but I know that if choose not to address them, they will hold me back, stunting my growth eventually.

It is the process of clearing out these deeper, more intertwined issues that I can begin to experience personal or spiritual growth. By clearing away the clutter and weeds in my mind, I make space for the roots of more positive forces to take root and to grow.

Forgiving Ourselves

When I started thinking about this blog, I thought of it as a way to give back to the world around me.  I recognized that there are so many opportunities for the world to take its toll on all of us and we tend to let the events of our lives pile up, one on top of the other, until we wake up one day, weighted down to the point that we can’t fathom getting up.

I wanted to find a way to help people unburden themselves from those weights.  If one person feels better they have the power to change the world.  If one person has the energy to smile when they would normally frown, or wave someone ahead instead of taking the opening in traffic, the world has benefitted from this small act.  Many small acts add up to a much better world.

So, I designed this site – and it sat – and sat – and sat……..

Something wasn’t quite right about my thinking and I knew that I had to adjust my thoughts before I could put my blog out there~

In the past week or so, I’ve realized that this blog is as much about me finding the space to forgive myself as it is about helping others find forgiveness.

I had a relationship end suddenly five years ago.  It was a relationship I had put everything into.  I was certain that if I worked hard enough, I could make it work. (I can thank those Irish working class roots for that message.)  I found out when I was out of town on a business trip and through a phone call from someone that I barely knew.  I learned that my partner was leaving to be with someone she had met just two months before – someone that we had called a friend, who had even met my extended family.   When I called my partner to see what was going on, my questions were met with silence – long moments of silence that felt hours long.  In those minutes of silence, I contemplated jumping out of the window of my hotel room on the 32nd floor.  I remember looking out at the flashing lights of the marquees and thinking how strange it was that they went on blinking and flashing as if nothing was happening when my world was falling apart – it seemed so disjointed.  It is with good reason that hotel windows in cities don’t open~

The only way to describe what happened to me that day is to compare it to a train wreck.  One day I woke up and my life and my family was intact.  We had routines, and appointments, favorite foods, shared interests, plans, vacations, health insurance and pictures on the wall confirming our connection.  Within just a few minutes, from the time I took the first call, to the time I made the second and heard the pregnant silence on the end of the line, that world, as I knew it, ceased to exist.

As I write this I realize that I want to take care to speak only about my personal experience of this loss.  I can’t compare my loss to those that have been so much greater than mine – those losses that have happened in the public eye and that have received scrutiny from the world at large.  I know, and I have acknowledged to myself many times, that my loss was minute compared to the atrocities that occur in the world on a daily basis.  Still, it was a loss that shook the foundations of my world.

That year I can easily say that I was not sane.  I had always been a casual runner competing in 5k races regularly and one half-marathon.  The day after this loss, I decided to run a marathon 5 months later.  I threw myself into training and quickly dropped twenty pounds.  I became uber creative and efficient at work.  I changed my schedule to arrive earlier and skip lunch so I could make it to every single soccer game or basketball game that my daughter played.  I planted and mowed and raked.  I biked 20 – 40 miles with friends in addition to my marathon training and took a bike maintenance class just so I could manage that as well.  I met and flirted and slept with people who were equally as insane as I was – hoping one of them 
  

The next year was better and each year since I’ve grown stronger, saner, calmer and more grounded.  Yoga and meditation and self-guided study of buddhism have become a part of my life that I cherish.

Yet, in reading a book recently, I realized that there is still work ahead.  In Eat, Pray, Love the author talks about her experiences at an ashram in India.  She had struggled for several years to come to terms with the end of her marriage and the fact that she couldn’t find closure because her ex-husband wouldn’t speak with her.  When she disclosed this to one of the monks, he took her to a secluded part of the ashram and advised her to have a conversation with the universe and not to leave until she has found forgiveness.

As I read this account, the tears streamed down my face.  My circumstances are different; I could have a conversation with my former partner if I chose to.  It isn’t her forgiveness that I need.  I need to work on finding forgiveness for myself.  I need to let go of feeling that I failed, that I didn’t work hard enough;  that maybe I shouldn’t have been as quick to ask my partner to leave our home and if I had been more forgiving perhaps we could have worked it out. I need to let go of the fact that my daughter went through a loss that has impacted her ability to trust; that my nieces and nephews lost an auntie; my siblings and parents a family member.  I need to find forgiveness for myself for putting so much into that relationship that my entire world fell apart when it ended – for not keeping anything for myself to use as a reserve when I needed it.  Finally, I need to find forgiveness for not seeing my partner for who she was; for choosing not to see or to overlooking her weaknesses and for not anticipating her predictable exit.

I’m not beating myself up needlessly with this list of “wrongs”.  I’m simply acknowledging all of the negative thoughts that have haunted my for the past 5 years.  Whether these wrongs are based in fact or not is beside the point.  What matters is that these are the things I’ve used in self-flagellation since that fateful phone call.  

It has been nearly five years.  The anniversary of the end of my relationship happens to be Memorial Day.  Most years I let the day slip by trying to pretend that I don’t notice what day it is or what the day signifies.  I don’t know what I’ll do this year specifically, but I do know I will wake up that morning, acknowledge what day it is and try to breath in forgiveness so that I can begin to let all of this go.  

The other thing I’ve decided to do is to run the marathon again.  I’ve continued to run and have even begun to train for the marathon a few times, but I haven’t made it to the finish line again since that first time five years ago.  The need to keep one step ahead of my own personal demons was a strong motivator the first time around.  This time, I need to visualize that with each training run, with each step of each run I do, I will be coming one foot closer to the finish line of this train wreck and inching ever closer to that day when I can say I’ve forgiven myself.

Namaste~