When I first started to meditate, I'd been so tied-into my thinking process, I was kind of scared that I'd lose myself off in some mental place and end up not being able to find my way back. Yet I had enough faith in the process to try anyhow.
So I set a kitchen timer for 10 minutes, set my intentions, and settled in.
Each time I tried it, it became easier to trust the process, and before long I was rousing before the timer was due to go off, just like the alarm clock in the morning.
At first it can feel like we may be wandering into a dangerous place. But there's something in us, some inner awareness, that keeps track of things. And it can be trusted.
While sorting through his pills for the next week, I got a flashing image of the bottle tipping over. So I moved the bottle back. I knocked it over anyhow. The foretelling didn't prevent it from happening. It didn't make it any easier to clean up. But it did soften the blow. It's like life already told me what was going to happen. I scooped the few I could save and watched the rest waterfall off the back of the dresser, wondering how much dust there was underneath. By that time, it felt inevitable.
Chartreuse
The colour chartreuse repulses me. I don't know why. Maybe something in my childhood. I don't like strawberry ice cream either. It tastes fake. Nor do I like home decor in gold/beige/orange/brown, even when fashionable, as they were in 1976 when friends gifted me with a set of gold patterned unbreakable dishes.
Taught that it's impolite or worse to decline a gift, I sucked it up and moved on, while a little part of me mourned a bit.
It's not that I didn't appreciate these gifts. I did, with all my heart:
Mine was chartreuse.
And there we were again.
It wasn't just chartreuse, it was Meant To Be. The package with my name on it got mislaid when Sue was giving them out, so another in the group cheerfully passed hers along to me. My inner needy child mourned, my adult self felt like I was 7 again, while another part of me looked on with a smile and marvelled at how absurd it all was.
Preferences are fine, but when they spoil a gift they're not fine. I was going to have to deal with this for once and for all.
Of course I had good reason to feel the way I did. I understood the origins. I have history. What I wanted to explore though, was that fine line between want and need.
It's different for each of us, and different at different times in our lives. Sometimes, when people are not heard, wants can turn into needs. At the same time, most of us can accept something we don't like when what we want is taken into account.
When I got home, I placed the cloth at the top of the pile in the drawer so I'd use it. The first couple of times it cycled up to the top, I still felt a mild revulsion. But I'd decided to take that moment to linger in the energy of the gift - the pleasure, the kindness, the sharing - and let those tonal qualities take hold in my body. Just that little second changes everything.
I took it a bit farther too. You know how when you buy undies in a 4 pack of assorted colours, they always include one or two that are really awful? I let those mud-green ones cycle up to the top too. It's a bit of a shock when I see myself in the mirror, but I smile each time.
Oh, and the dishes? After 20 years, I gave them away and replaced them with a set I liked more.
When I was about 14, my twin sister (she's the good twin) had a sudden opportunity to go on a volunteer-holiday-something over some weeks that summer in New Jersey or something.
I was a bit jealous because I wasn't getting away during the summer. I couldn't save money as a kid no matter how hard I tried. I got my allowance and spent it on a chocolate bar. Every week. I babysat and earned a bit more. Spent it. I was that kid. My twin had something in her that could resist short term pain for long term gain. That made me a bit jealous too.
Anyhow she had already signed up for a school trip the following Autumn to go to Montreal for Expo 67. This was a big thing. I hadn't signed up for Expo. I couldn't save.
The first thing she did when she got the New Jersey news was give me her Montreal trip. No strings. Just happy to be able to do it. Really.
That taught me more about sharing than well, anything.
I saw my first earwig in 1976 when we moved to Dufferin County. It creeped me out. I just saw one in the kitchen. They still creep me out, but not as violently. I can pick them up now with a piece of toilet paper, and escort them outside. Most of the time.
My aversion escalated in 1977 when while rolling up sod to prepare for a driveway, the overturned earth squirmed with hundreds of them. It escalated again in 1978 when we put the basement in. They were getting in. Too many of them.
I used to keep a shoe by my bed to swat them when they showed up. That's when I discovered they eat anything, even their own kind. You can imagine how deeply I wanted them to go away. How desperately.
They seemed to come in, unfortunately, in the basement corner where I'd moved my home office. I looked for openings and found none. I sprayed with that awful insulating foam. That didn't slow them down a bit. I sprayed bug spray - the stuff that likely isn't legal any more. That slowed them down a bit but didn't stop them. I could hear them sometimes landing on the concrete floor under the window as I worked at the computer. I looked inside and outside to see if I could see any openings I'd overlooked. It all looked fine.
So this went on for SEVENTEEN years.
I'm a spiritual person and I knew it was a big lesson. I knew I'd have to find a way to make peace with them, that my aversion was just making things worse.
Over time, I gradually did. I never really warmed up to them - come on, the pincers - but over time my energy didn't rise in aversion any more.
One day, I caught a glimpse of one walking across the carpet in the office beside my foot. I didn't quite feel affection for it, but maybe a hint of friendliness. I got a kleenex and took it outside. While out there, I had an urge to look yet again at the window in that basement corner. We had bought two identical windows for that end of the house when we put in the basement. I took my time and compared them board for board. And I found a gap in one of them.
I wouldn't say I ran to find some putty to fill the gap, but I might have. After I filled that gap, the main earwig problem went away. We still get them inside now and then in the years when there are lots of them. This summer there are lots of them. My spiritual lesson in July on years like this is to make peace with them again. As much as I can. They still creep me out.
Bugs Bunny is standing under a waterfall, singing "April Showers" as he bathes, when suddenly the flow of water stops. (I remember this cartoon. It was released in 1962.) His first thought is that it is just that "pesky beaver" that stopped the flow of water. But then he imagines something worse. And then something even worse. He gets more and more frightened and panicky - not because of the waterfall, but because of the stories he's spinning about it. After letting it all escalate, he stops all the anxious mental chatter and goes back to his original thought. "Naw, it's probably just that pesky beaver."
Even as a kid I could see the wisdom.
Worry tricks us. When we worry we like to think we are "thinking through a problem," or "looking for ideas", or "asking ourselves if there isn't something more we could do". We like to think that all that mental activity is what we are doing to solve the problem.
It's not. It doesn't work. And we know that. Bright ideas and solutions don't come when we worry about them. They come in quiet moments, or they come when our minds are occupied with something else altogether.
I was awake through the night the other night with a thing. Worried. I knew worry wasn't going to solve things or get me back to sleep. So I rested there and let it feel kinda awful, knowing the feelings would pass, that the thing wasn't mine to solve, and that it would all look different in the morning. (It did.)
That isn't always possible. When worry becomes pathological, we may need medical help. When the discomfort is too much, we may need to deflect until we are ready to process it.
But we humans do worry.
Why? A lot of reasons.
Feeling helpless sucks. We'd rather spend mental energy on something we can't fix than let ourselves live with the discomfort of helplessness.
Worry is socially acceptable in my part of the world. Crying in public is not, even if tears might be a more honest response. Worry can even be encouraged. A neighbour was horrified that I wasn't as outraged as she was about the proposed local gravel pit.
Worry is exhausting. She was exhausted.
It escalates. The more we worry a problem, the worse it gets. Yet even still, we may convince ourselves that holding a problem in the back of our mind is a healthy thing to do. We wouldn't want to forget about the problem if an opportunity to assist came up, would we?
But really? If there was something we could do, we'd be doing it.
Yet we persist. It's a comfortable habit. It can feel like a familiar friend.
I heard a definition of worry a long time ago that stuck with me. "Worry is praying for what we don't want." It stops me in my tracks whenever I remember. But it also offers me a choice. Our thoughts creates our reality. Do I want to manifest more of the problem? Or put my precious energy somewhere better?
For those of us who are chronic worriers, letting worry go can take practice. And persistence. And patience. But it's worth it. There's relief and release in letting go.
Here are a few things I try:
I like to be like Bugs when it comes to worry. His waterfall problem hadn't yet been solved, but when he noticed how he was letting the worry spin, he put a stop to it before it got ridiculous. This freed his energy up for him to plot his next step. Clever bunny.
One of the men of the group said, "In my experience, when someone introduces a new idea, women tend to believe other women before they'll believe men."
My immediate response was, "No, we don't."
And he said, "See?"
His challenge stopped me in my tracks. My immediate reaction was to dismiss this idea. Was this because he was a man or because I didn't feel the idea had merit? Or did I feel it lacked merit because as a man he may not understand the problems that impact women?
"It's the same with men," he said, letting me off the hook. "They'll believe men before they believe women."
It gave us all food for thought.
What struck me the most was not the theory, but my immediate "No, we don't." That wasn't just denial, it was rejection.
Strange how some days, things just open us up. We could be walking down the street and suddenly find ourselves struck by the play of light on the side of a building. Or stopped by the scent of coffee, freshly ground. Our energy just stops in those moments and our hearts open a crack. We become available to the joy of life.
Other days, not so much. These are the days when we scroll social media, or find our way to the fridge to try to feel better. We know strategies like this don't work, but what to do? Where do we find joy when we don't feel joyful?
In a newsletter years ago I made a list of some things can can soften the heart. Here are a few of them:
Notice how these are all actions. This is important:
We are taking it into the body, incorporating it and letting the energies infuse us. The heart may be sad when lighting the candle, but the softening and allowing opens us to a deeper underlying joy.
The "stopped" part of this is important too. While walking in the forest my mind was going a mile a minute. Knowing I was working on this story, I thought "Ok. A real world example." So I stopped. "How do I soften when the mind is just running on and on and on? And on?" I took a breath and relaxed. I listened. Not to specific sounds. I just listened to allow the sounds into my very cells and nerves and body processes.
In stopping, I let down my guard. I relaxed. My heart softened.
The way to live more joy is to, well, to live more joy. I might be all stressed out by something, but if you plunked a puppy into my lap, my world would right itself.
"Nothing's happened," Ajahn Sucitto said, when speaking about worry, "and I started to feel all crinkly about it all."
I like the word "crinkle" to describe energy.
The first few times I heard the phrase it just sounded poetic. But then one day, I realized it was literal.
I'd been scrolling on social media. I noticed how I got a bit juiced up to hit That Link about That Awful Thing, even though I knew it wasn't going to make things any better. As I watched the desire rise, I felt my energy actually crinkle. For real. The energy near my forehead, right hand side kind of crinkled up like a cotton shirt that had been slept on. I stayed with it while the impulse faded, and my energy smoothed out again.
Smooth is what we want. Crinkles are all right, and mostly inevitable, but smooth is what we are shooting for. In that smooth relaxed open state, we are at our best: our most creative, most open to insight or perception, most accepting. It feels good.
So it's worthwhile noticing what the energy is doing and finding fresh ways to describe it:
I wonder if they have better words to describe these sensations in other languages? English seems so limited at times.
I might feel a bit knocked around or crumpled, or feel sensations like heat or cool, pressure or weight. The energy could be bristling, sinking, lifting, pulling or expanding.
These are are worth our attention. As I was writing this paragraph and getting stuck on some of the wording, I could feel the tension rise in the back of my neck. I relaxed the muscles in my neck deliberately and then watched the crinkled energy follow suit. There was no point in pushing through the effort when my energy's all rumpled up.
How is it now? Well, at the moment, my energy seems pretty relaxed. Maybe a bit fluffy over there, in a nice way.
A mantra: "What does this feel like in my energy?"
Bonus: Following what the energy is doing rather than getting caught up in the drama or mental knots themselves can give a busy overactive intellect something more useful to do.
