Sit With It

I get snippy when I'm under stress. I'll notice the dishwasher wasn't emptied when I come upstairs in the morning and be unable to stop a snarky thought from rising. I'm usually aware enough to catch it, but I can't always stop it.

The very fact that this is the kind of thought that's rising shows me that I need to take care of myself. Do less for others and more for myself, shed a tear or three, wear comfortable clothes, eat delicious food. These actions get me back to myself. Here I can sit with whatever emotional distresses I've been stuffing down with food, and see if I can stay with them for a while, so they can move through me.

Fear is a big one. This feels awful. Fear rose spectacularly a while back when in someone's car. The driving conditions were not great and I could not influence the way the driver handled things. I sat and tried not to feel scared and upset, but there was nothing I could do.

If I hadn't been willing to sit with the fear, I'd have been mentally blaming the driver, developing an elaborate drama about how I am the innocent victim -- generally making a tough situation worse. Instead, I asked my angels for help. Basically I told them "This feeling is awful. I hate it," without really expecting anything but a sense that I have quiet support. But this time, I got an answer. "It's okay to feel scared. The feeling won't last forever." It released the layer of "I hate this" stress and left me with the simple body sensations of fear: shaking, sharp tingles on my skin, heat and cold alternating. Sure enough, after a while the feelings subsided all by themselves.

Many mornings when I am doing my prayers, tears will rise as a result of a single thought. When that happens I get out my hanky, and just let myself feel the sadness. I don't need to know why. I stuffed down a lot of sorrow over the years and in sitting with it now, I get a chance to express it in a beneficial way.

Sometimes I can sit with difficult feelings and sometimes I can't. I guess the stars have to line up just right. But when I do feel brave enough to sit with fear or sadness it does me good. It loosens my rigid patterns (sometimes even rigid muscles) and if it's powerful enough, it breaks me open, empties me out and lets me start fresh.

First published February 2018 in my free monthly email newsletter, Starry Night. Sign up here.

Black and White World

When we were kids, our TV was black and white. Greyscale. We could often sense the colours on the screen by the tone and context. We never felt as though anything was missing. But then colour TV came along. The perceptual impact was huge.

Every now and then in meditation or when quiet, I get a glimpse of colours more brilliant than anything I have ever seen in this world. It's as though we are living in a faded world, not black and white, but not fully perceived either.

If we never glimpse the colours that exist outside our reality, how can we know they exist?

An Organized Arrangement of Energies

While walking across the lawn, I felt my feet landing solidly on the earth. We seemed separate. But we are made of less solid stuff.

We are an organized arrangement of energies that mingle and interact. Seeing the ground like that, and my feet like that make it all feel more like an ongoing story than a single solid event or thing.

The earth supports me, grows me (literally,) nurtures me, even buoys me up. So rather than thump thump thump across the earth, I can relax and know I am a part of something really big and wonderful.

Little Jots

I have little bits of paper everywhere. Reminders, grocery lists, to-do's, phrases from books or magazines. I like things organized, so I'm not living in a sea of them; they're all sitting in tidy piles or clipped to the fridge or pinned to bulletin boards or tucked into wallets.

But they're everywhere.

They are like odd little snapshots of my life from the time I jotted them down. The bit of paper that says, 'dish soap, butter, furnace filters', sits right next to, 'the world is won by letting things take their own course.' I jotted down 'Leeloo perfect' a week or two ago when I watched that sci fi movie - what was it called? the one with Bruce Willis? The Fifth Element? Anyhow I loved the woman who played Leeloo. Her name meant 'Perfection' in the movie. And I wanted to remember the name - might make a good name for a story or for a drawing or for a hamster or for a granddaughter. So 'Leeloo perfect' is in the pile of notes on my desk, at the top of the pile.

I really enjoy coming across a slip of paper that's been sitting in an old coat pocket. It's better than finding a dollar. Chances are it's just an old grocery list, but sometimes it says, 'childhood slights are painful because your goodness was questioned.' And it touches me again. '...your goodness was questioned....' Feels good to read it again.

Sometimes when they float to the surface, these little jots have meaning again, even if they are a snapshot of something from last week or last winter. Different meaning, maybe. Deeper meaning sometimes, given that I have lived more life since I jotted them down. Even the grocery list reminds me of who I was that day. But not all of them retain their value. Every now and then I have to sweep through them and toss a bunch out.

But when I do, I often come across another gem that I want to keep. Like the quote from Suzuki Roshi, '... when my talk is over your listening is over. There is no need to remember what I say... you have full understanding within yourself. There is no problem.' I laugh when I see this one, jotted down on a little slip of paper to remind me that I don't need to.

First published February 2008 in my free monthly email newsletter, Starry Night. Sign up here.

A Watched Pot (Never Boils)

My favourite Star Trek episodes are the ones where time gets weird. Causality loops, time paradoxes, alternate timelines - I love them all. Years ago, when I was involved in a minor fender bender in a taxi, I was amazed at how time slowed during the event. I watched broken glass shatter in slow motion and then wash up over the hood like a wave of water, then wash back out towards the other car again. I was amazed at how much detail I picked up in what I knew was just a second or two of time - each individual bit of glass discernible. After a moment, time became normal again.

I suspect most of us have experienced time's inconstancy. When we were kids, the school holidays were endless, yet now, vacations zip by like shooting stars.

Time bends and changes according to our activities - each with its own rhythm and pace - different for each of us. In meditation we can speed up time or slow it down according to our needs. Some athletes use meditative disciplines that ask for intense focus to stretch time out when they are "in the zone" in competition. Other meditations may go by so quickly we wonder that half an hour has passed.

When under stress, time becomes much slower, just as it did for me in that minor accident. In dreams, time takes on dimensions we can't begin to fathom in waking life. I learned to ride a bicycle in a dream. I packed hours of learning into minutes of the dream and awakened to live the full value of what I'd learned.

There are many theories that try to answer the question of why time is so inconstant. Many of them agree that it's the quality of the experience that determines how long it lasts. Children pack new experiences into each hour of the day, laying down new neural pathways in their brains as they do. They are very awake to the world around them. They live with great intensity. Events have more meaning. As we get older, we tend to have less novelty, less intricacy, less intensity - life has less meaning.

So if we want any experience to last the way our school holidays did when we were little, we might act a bit more like kids and a bit less like adults: Take a deeper interest in what's in front of us. Cram new experiences into our days. Learn new stuff. Engage different areas of our brains. Practice meditations that let us shift out of our normal consciousness. Turn off the tv or put down the book and go for a walk instead.

Time may not get as weird as it does on Star Trek, but perhaps the more we play with time, the more time we may have to play.  

First published September 2009 in my free monthly email newsletter, Starry Night. Sign up here.

Link to the Eternal

For over 35 years I have noticed a stress pattern in my life. Every April and every October, for some reason, I feel more stressed than my daily life could explain. I used to call it 'my six-month-meltdown.' But after a while I realized it happens right when the seasons are changing. Just like squirrels rush to put away as many seeds as they can, just as mice rush to fluff their nests, I feel the urge to put things right, and so do the people around me. We're mammals, too. Yet even when I work with this change of season, some years I get stuck in a bit of a funk.

I found myself looking for something to watch on Netflix the other night. It took a while to choose. I tried something from 'my list' and watched for 5 minutes. Nope. And another. Nope. And another. Nope. You've got to understand that Netflix is fairly new to me. I live out in the sticks where internet has been slow and expensive; when I got Netflix I was like a like a kid stepping into an ice-cream parlour for the very first time. So what was this impatience with everything on offer?

Finally, I tuned to The Time Travellers Wife, an old favourite. I relaxed and let the time travel stuff be fun and interesting, let the love story be sweet. But it wasn't until Alba showed up that I realized she was what I needed the most. Alba was a kind, impossible being who reassured everyone - she was a link to the future, a link to the eternal. That was what I needed to break my funk - an impossible, reassuring voice that reaffirmed my faith and own connection with the Divine.

Who knew watching TV could link me to the eternal?

How Things are Phrased

Language is meaningful to me. How things are phrased, subtle nuance can have so much bearing on my emotional patterns as well as thinking patterns, it’s always nice when I suddenly see a new way of thinking about something, a new way of phrasing it, so that the results are kinder to everyone, yet still true.

“He may not care about this,” (or my feelings) may be accurate, but the way it is phrased seems to say more about the caring or not-caring part. It affects my feelings. Instead I can choose “He doesn’t think that way.” This states the facts in such a way that it doesn’t have to lead to emotional conflict or hurt feelings.

A simple change of phrase can change the whole mental, and then emotional landscape.

When an observation becomes personal, it slips into judgement.

Here's another: "I don't eat sugar" is different than "I can't eat sugar." The former implies that I'm on board with the choice. That latter suggests its's something imposed on me from outside against my will. When I consider a choice freely made, I don't fight it as much.

First published October 2017 in my free monthly email newsletter, Starry Night. Sign up here.