Furthermore...

I just came across this quote from William James, the founding father of psychology research, which makes the point of my last post quite well (and with many, many fewer words):

“Wisdom is the art of knowing what to overlook.”

In this age of constant distractions and frighteningly long to do lists, James' words ring especially true.

Leave it alone

People who come to coaching are rarin’ to go. They’re often high achievers who have hit a bump in the road. Shortly after they call me, we’re off and running with new ideas and goals and plans to create change. And change happens. Only sometimes, I have come to realize, the most important thing that I help clients with, particularly the high-achieving ones, is learning to discern which things can be left unchanged, untouched, as they are.

Refraining from action can be very difficult for us results-focused Americans. But when our well being is too closely tied up with action and getting things done, we end up in a state of chronic, low-level agitation. Because, as we all know, it is impossible to get it all done or to manage everything. Hence the intelligence of the 12-Step Serenity Prayer, which I would amend slightly to “…accept the things I cannot [or should not] change, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Learning to discern which things are essential to do and which things are not is a practice that can also help us disconnect from the mistaken notion that we are what we accomplish or the roles that we play. We are simply who we are. Learning to be who we are, and not just how to accomplish more or how to be a better parent, employee, spouse, etc. is, I think, at the heart of living, and enables us to offer the most to the world. As the famous early Hassidic teacher, Rabbi Zusya, said: "When I reach the next world, God will not ask me, why weren’t you more like Moses. He will ask me why weren’t you more like Zusya?'"

So the next time you’re feeling that edgy buzz in your body and mind, maybe it’s time to stop, snuggle your dog, just be. Maybe it's time to check in to see who the being beneath the buzz really is. It's surprising how many disasters never actually happen when we trust in life enough to let go a little bit. It’s also surprising how much easier it is to do the things that we really need to do, like find a job, relocate, exercise, when we stop doing the things that we really don’t have to.

Aloe is GREAT for sun-induced rosacea

In the interest of making this blog as useful to others as possible, I've decided to give myself permission to move off topic occasionally if I've got a little helpful hint to share. Here it is: I just got back from a mini vacation to Sunset Beach, NC, which is a little strip of sand off the NC coast near its border with SC. No sooner had my toes hit the sand than my rosacea did its annual thing of flaring up, despite gobs of sunscreen and a hat. It happens to me every year, and until this year, I've found there's nothing I can do to prevent it other than stay indoors, which is simply out of the question. No potion my dermatologist has prescribed has either prevented the sun-induced flare or made it go away any sooner than 4-5 days. But, as luck would have it this year, I had a tube of aloe handy when the rash struck, and gave it a try. And it worked, wonderfully! After I got over feeling like a knucklehead for never having thought of aloe before, I jumped for joy. So I want to let anyone out there who wears fair, freckley, rosacea-prone skin like I do that the benefits of aloe are not, I repeat not, limited to sun-burned skin. TTFN.

Facing pain in order to reduce suffering

My computer remained on strike for longer than expected. I should have listened to my husband and those annoying commercials, and bought a Mac.

Now that I'm back, here's my homework report. I guess you could say I showed the coffee beans the ultimate love (thanks for asking, Christoper) since I stopped turning them into my morning brew. Yes, I'm going through coffee detox. The beans now remain blissfully unperturbed in their bag in my fridge. And I remain blissfully (ok, maybe just somewhat less) unperturbed thanks to reduced caffeine intake.

My other bit of homework involved paying more attention while paying bills. What I did was consciously choose not to run the usual financial gloom & doom tape in my head as I wrote out each check. Instead, I paid attention to the numbers, the act of writing, and the emerging sense of accomplishment as my bill pile grew smaller. And, yes, it do go by relatively quickly. Flow delivers again!

Paying attention during frankly painful experiences, as opposed to merely annoying ones, is something I alluded to in my prior post. Buddhist teachers have talked about this as a way of gaining freedom and actually reducing suffering. It's an idea that interests me because it proved helpful when I was in labor many years ago with my first (very large, I might add) child. A few days before I went into labor my father-in-law, who is a Buddhist scholar, gave me a reading about staying attentive during physical pain. The gist of the reading was that if you do so, you discover that the pain experience changes and becomes not as bad. In other words, the actual experience is different from your idea of it. Needless to say, I was skeptical. But I ended up using the technique while I was laboring alone, in the middle of the night, abandoned by a cranky nurse who had also chased my husband home. I discovered that by staying completely attentive-- keeping my wits about me and my eyes wide open-- I became less afraid of each contraction, less scared that this one was going to be the one that really and truly killed me. This runs completely counter to the typical labor training that women receive which involves distracting yourself with a pleasant image or deep breathing during contractions. As a result of my focus on the pain itself, it was a strangely tolerable experience. Going through the worst part of labor without anesthesia wasn't what I planned to do, but thanks to my Buddhist prep, not nearly as bad as I would have guessed.

Since I've already gone on and on at this point, I'll share the reading on physical pain another day. What I will share now, however, is a brief illustration of the idea of being attentive to pain (in this case emotional pain) which I came across in John O'Donohue's book, Anam Cara. It makes the point that the Buddhists make about feeling pain (rather than grabbing a drink, flipping on the tv, browsing the internet) in order to reduce suffering. Here it is:

"Loneliness is exceptionally difficult. A friend who was living in Germany told me of his battle with homesickness. He found the temperament, the order, the structures, and the externality of Germany very difficult. He had the flu during the winter, and the loneliness he had repressed came out to haunt him. He got desperately lonely, but instead of avoiding it, he decided to allow the loneliness to have its way. He sat down in the armchair and gave himself permission to feel as lonely as he wanted. As soon as he gave that invitation to his soul, the loneliness just poured through him. He felt like the most abandoned orphan in the cosmos. He cried and cried. In a way, he was crying for all the loneliness in his life that he had kept hidden. Though it was painful, it was a wonderful experience for him. When he let his loneliness flow, let the dam burst within, something shifted in relation to his own loneliness. He was never again lonely in Germany. He became free once he had met the depth of his own loneliness, engaged and befriended it. It became a natural part of his life." (pp. 192-193)

Go with the flow

My computer has been crashing sporadically for several days now, so I am speed writing this post. Apologies for more than the usual number of awkward sentences and grammatical errors.

Now, to my homework report. I made the commitment to pay attention during two chores I dislike, i.e. coffee making and lunch making. First off, I must confess that I dodged a bit with coffee making. Several nights last week I enlisted my husband or older son to set up the coffee maker for the next morning's brew. On the other nights, I simply forgot to pay attention (picture my sheepish expression). So all I can report about this part of my homework is that my husband makes coffee better than I do, even though we follow the exact same ratio of scoops to water. Perhaps that’s the lesson: a bad attitude when making coffee makes the coffee taste bad. Over this week, I’ll try showing a little love to the coffee beans, and see if they reward me with better taste. Promise not to dodge this time.

As for lunch making, the only thing I can report is that paying attention made the chore go by quickly, which was a nice, unexpected outcome. It brings to mind the concept of "flow" that the psychologist, Csíkszentmihályi, has written about. Flow is the energized focus that occurs when you are completely engaged in an activity. Time passes quickly in the state of flow. Csíkszentmihályi says flow happens during activities that are inherently satisfying. But my little glimpse of lunch-making flow suggests that it might also be possible around activities that are neutral or even non-pleasurable (although I can't imagine this could include painful activities, but there is an interesting Buddhist commentary on that possibility which I'll share in another post). If paying attention can make unpleasant tasks go by more quickly, there might be useful applications for our workdays which seem to be increasingly filled with unpleasant, boring, and/or repetitive activities to perform. In his book, Anam Cara, John O’Donohue says that the excess of impersonal, repetitive activities in our work drains energy out of us. Until we remake our workplaces to be more life affirming (a process that O’Donohue viewed as in progress), perhaps the small step of paying attention during such activities could mitigate their negative impact. I think I will give myself a new homework assignment of exploring whether or not paying attention leads to a little flow around an unpleasant task. Perhaps I should choose one that demands a little more time than slapping sandwiches together....Bill paying springs to mind. My stack of bills is already overflowing (chuckle chuckle). Back soon with my report.

Keep it simple

I was standing in the post office yesterday, waiting to stock up on my Forever stamps before the rate hike, and started to think about a post. The whole notion of “simplicity” had been on my mind since my last post. Simplicity is at the heart of meditation practice, i.e. following your breath, noticing what arises in your mind without getting wrapped up in it, and simply returning to your breath when you realize you have gotten wrapped up. The main point of the practice is to make it easier to refrain from getting wrapped up in mental dramas during day-to-day living so you can actually see what's going on in your life. And one of the things that makes simple activities like laundry folding, dish washing, lawn mowing, etc. so nourishing, I think, is that they are opportunities for a kind of active meditation. It can be easier to drop down out of your head when you have a simple, repetitive action to focus on. Thinking about ordinary activities as opportunities for additional meditation practice might even take some of the uugh out of activities we dislike, such as setting up the coffee maker or packing lunches for the kids (my two personal uughs). For the next week, I am going to commit to focusing in and paying attention, a la mindfulness meditation, on both of these tiresome activities to see if I can learn something through it. How about you? Are there any domestic or other ordinary activities that you dislike which you’d be willing to use as an experiment in focusing? Who knows, maybe we'll discover that those irritating activities are not quite so irritating after all.

So now before I go, I did say that my simplicity reverie began in the post office and the reason why I included that detail is…yes here it comes…the synchronicity elves were apparently right by my side in said post office. Who knew?? Hmmm, come to think of there was a little toddler staring intently at me while I was in line. And anyone who has seen the Last Mimzy knows that kids see all sorts of things we grownups miss. Well, at the very moment I started to think about simplicity, as the little toddler was ogling away, the customer at the counter and the postal worker behind it together loudly guffawed “keep it simple.” In fact, it was said a total of three times in a row. Really loud. I had to chuckle. I have no idea what they were referring to but I thought, yes indeedy!

Folding laundry

I love folding laundry. I really do. For me, it’s a perfect antidote to a draining day. And it’s funny, or maybe even synchronous, that my own need for replenishment always aligns perfectly with my sock drawer’s need for the same. My favorite place to fold laundry is the bedroom. There’s something about the quiet room, the good smell and soft feel of clean clothing, and the easy, repetitive motions that never fail to bring me back to center. I especially like tucking the top of one sock inside of the top of other before placing the two in the drawer. So lightly secured to each other, yet they always stay together. Lovely. Just recently a client told me, in slightly embarrassed tones, that he cleans up his garage to unwind. He chuckled with relief when I said I completely understood.

Is there a simple activity that helps you unwind? Dish washing, sweeping, sorting recyclables, something else? What do you notice when you do it? I'd love to know.

Before I go, here's a poem from a fellow sock enthusiast.

Ode to Socks
by Pablo Neruda

Mara Mori brought me
a pair of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder's hands,
two socks as soft as rabbits.
I slipped my feet into them
as if they were two cases
knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin,
Violent socks,
my feet were two fish made of wool,
two long sharks
sea blue, shot through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons,
my feet were honored in this way
by these heavenly socks.
They were so handsome for the first time
my feet seemed to me unacceptable
like two decrepit firemen,
firemen unworthy of that woven fire,
of those glowing socks.

Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation
to save them somewhere as schoolboys
keep fireflies,
as learned men collect
sacred texts,
I resisted the mad impulse to put them
in a golden cage and each day give them
birdseed and pieces of pink melon.
Like explorers in the jungle
who hand over the very rare green deer
to the spit and eat it with remorse,
I stretched out my feet and pulled on
the magnificent socks and then my shoes.

The moral of my ode is this:
beauty is twice beauty
and what is good is doubly good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool in winter.