Still Point Meditation for Stressful Times

Sometimes life hits us from multiple directions at once. It can be hard to know which front to deal with first and the stress can build to a point of overwhelm pretty quickly. No matter which issue we give our energy and attention, the others still pull and we get drained.

I have a meditation that I use for just such times that actually developed out of my love of storms when I was a kid. I still love them, probably because I live in So Cal! Some of my favorite times were spent snuggled down in bed, listening to a storm outside and feeling completely safe inside. It was like being in a protective bubble where I could see and hear the violent winds and rain around me, but remain safe and undisturbed where I was. I call the meditation Still Point, as in the still point in the center of a hurricane, or tornado. If you can imagine what it might be like to be sitting in the center of a tornado, legs curled up comfortably underneath you, while the wind whips things around you at hundreds of miles per hour with deafening noise, rain, and hail. There you are, in the center, where it is safe and calm. You are surrounded by drama, distress, disaster, violent change and everyone’s stuff. But in the center you are peaceful, you are grounded and you have the choice to reach out into the storm to connect to something or not. If you decide to connect to something in the storm, and you leave your still point to reach it, you risk getting sucked into the storm with it where you will be whipped around and around and end up some place in Kansas under a house. If you connect from the still point and stay sitting there, you can bring what you wish to connect to into the still point with you and deal with it there where it is calm, and where you know that you are safe.

Try it for yourself.

Get comfortable and imagine yourself sitting on a cushion. Your legs are crossed, you are comfortable and your body is relaxed. As you relax you start to hear the sound of a storm all around you but you are not disturbed. You can see and hear the storm, but where you sit it is calm and there is no storm. As you look into the swirling winds you see people, places and things that have been troubling you. Relationships, money, work, health issues, whipping past you as you watch from your still point. Pick one that has energy to it for you. Take a breath and exhale and then reach for it staying planted on your cushion inside your still point. Bring it to you and examine it closely. What does it hold for you? Sadness? Fear? Anxiety? Loss? Helplessness? Hurt? Longing? Is there something you need to do? Something you need to say? Or is this just about feeling and letting things be for now, or maybe letting go? Now let that one go back into the storm, reestablish yourself in your still point and then repeat this for any other ones you want to deal with for this meditation period.

When I do this meditation I am immediately hit with the feeling of the situation or the relationship that I have chosen from the storm. I am not distracted or defended which allows me to see much more clearly what is actually in front of me. We are constantly surrounded by the people, places and things of our life and it can begin to feel like we are being sucked into the swirl of it all. I find that this simple meditation can create a space where clarity and mindfulness become the ground of our engagement with our external lives. In this space, we can find equanimity in chaos and amazing change can take place.

Nobody thanks the doormat

I was out to dinner with my friend Lucy the other night. We were catching up and she was sharing about her feelings of being unsupported at home. She said that she had a wake-up call the other night when the family was playing a game and one of the questions was ‘what one word would you use to describe your mom?’. Her 13 year old daughter, Marissa, answered ‘maid’. She was hit by the realization that this is what her daughter really thinks of what she does for her. She said she was starting to feel resentful and angry and doesn’t want to just try to make her daughter appreciate her, but really wants to make a change. She gets that she somehow did this, but has no idea how or how to change it now.

The good news for my friend is that she gets that she is responsible for her daughter’s view of her. She has worked so hard to be a good mother that she created an environment where all of Marissa’s needs were met timely and competently that Marissa wasn’t required to meet many of them herself. This was ok when she was little, but Marissa is now an adolescent and has come to believe that her world is a world of low responsibility and high care. She is required to take care of her basic hygiene and schoolwork but Lucy admits to struggles with trying to make Marissa meet time schedules and needing to cue her to do simple things like brush her teeth. Marissa doesn’t have any other responsibilities as Lucy felt that she should concentrate on her schoolwork. She also said that things just went faster when she did them herself.

The fact is that we teach people how to treat us. This means everyone from our bosses to our children. What we bring to those encounters on a moment to moment basis teaches others about what we will and will not accept. It shows them how we feel about ourselves, our self-respect, our self value, our integrity, our yes’ and our no’s. We don’t even have to say much to communicate all of this, we carry it in our body language and in our presence.

In my friend’s case, what she hoped to teach her daughter through all of her care, attention and good-mothering, was that she is loved, and that she is capable of doing well in school and in life if she attends to things in the way she taught her to, i.e. meeting deadlines, finishing tasks, doing quality work, doing her best at everything, and being willing to go the extra mile. What she actually taught her was if you are loveable, and maybe a little helpless, those who love you will do for you and everything will be fine. Because Lucy was just as committed to feeling like a good mother and winning everyone’s love and respect as to being a good mother, her need for mirroring kept her from expecting more involvement by Marissa in her own care and work as her development progressed. She has never had to do chores, doesn’t have any responsibilities except to feed the cat, and most of the time forgets that.

Here are some tips I gave my friend to turn her train to martyrdom around:

1. Have a meeting with her family and come clean as the angry doormat that she has become. Show them the list of all the jobs involved with keeping the house and family running, and which ones she is doing. Let them know her feelings about them not stepping in during summer vacation, or while her husband hasn’t been working, etc. Be honest and openhearted about her desire for a more balanced family system that keeps things running but is shared more equally. Then allow the other family members to come forward with suggestions, ideas and discuss which things they would like to take on and set up a plan. Investment by all members is a key. She needs to step out of the Directors seat and allow for more input and less control on her part.

2. Seek support for her feelings along the way through groups, classes, etc.. Lucy needs to build tolerance to feeling frustrated and scared when she isn’t sure if Marissa is going to complete her tasks at home or school the way she would, or the way she thinks Marissa should. She will need to learn to find the right place in this developmental piece with her adolescent, so that Marissa can begin to learn self-discipline, self-manage and experience the joy of her own successes, as well as learn from her failures. There are many support groups available that can be very helpful in making changes in how we deal with the people in our life.

3. Marissa and her dad will need to form a different alliance as family members with voting rights, but also with responsibilities. At this point their biggest felt responsibility is to keep mom happy. That isn’t a skill set even if it is used by millions of people. Pleasing isn’t loving and it is never experienced as authentic. It is based in fear and manipulation and never in love and respect.

4. It would be very good if the family could do a few sessions of family therapy to learn better communication skills, team building and to help rebalance the power structure that is there right now. A family that wants to make a change like this often benefits from outside help. It is very hard to do it on their own with patterns that have become entrenched like these. More times than not the family just falls back into conditioned behaviors and ends up where they started.

5. Communicate, communicate, communicate. Have set family meetings and try and make sure that there are regular family dinners. My friend has the tendency to let her daughter occupy the conversation during dinners, and rarely talks about herself or her day. It isn’t up to others to draw us out into conversation. That is more about our own early history in our families. When we are treated like our feelings don’t matter, or are unwelcome, we learn to try and get them out through cuing. We might use body language, or silence, or looks that cue others to ask after our feelings. It is manipulative and based in fear and shouldn’t be a part of healthy communication.

Hearts are meant to be broken

Your pain

is the breaking of the shell

that encloses your understanding. ~K. Gibran

When I came out of my house the other day, my neighbor and his two little girls approached me. Dad was carrying a bird’s nest and I commented on it. Julia, who is 4 and precocious, piped right up “We are going to have a funeral.” Dad filled in that they had been watching a nesting Mourning Dove pair for a few weeks and were anxiously awaiting the baby birds. “It fell and the eggs got squished!” announced Julia’s older sister Tamara. “Oh no!” I said and immediately my mind went to who knocked it down, who do we need to talk to about, it etc. Julia brought me back though. “Yeah, we are going to go later and scoop the eggs up. They are all bloody.” At that she winced, and then teared up a little, “it’s sad” she said. Her older sister had moved away and dad was ready to talk about the ‘whodunits’ with me, but thank goodness for Julia. Her little heart was broken for these little squished eggs and brought the two adults back to theirs. “I think it is sad too.” I said. Dad adds, “we are going to have a little ceremony later on.” I nod looking at this beautiful open-hearted girl work through her grief at lightening speed. “Maybe we can bury them in our back yard so that we can visit them and they won’t miss their mommy and daddy.” She was sad, feeling the loss of the little birds that she was waiting for and now would never see, making sense of the bloody eggs and what they meant, and sorting out how to deal with the separation that loss brings by burying them close to her. “Maybe we can leave a note for their mommy and daddy birds so they know where to find them?” With that dad and the girls moved into the house talking about why birds can’t read.

What I was reminded of from all of this is that hearts are meant to be broken. Put another way, hearts are never meant to become unbreakable. We are supposed to feel the ordinary losses of our day to day lives and have it deepen our compassion for ourselves and for others. The goal has never been to live unscathed by our pain, even though you would never guess that by what we see all around us these days. It seems like every where we look, especially in the media, we see messages telling us all the ways we can move away from discomfort - physical, emotional and spiritual. We have been conditioned to believe that pain is unnatural, sadness is a problem and that we are supposed to be happy all the time. Not only is that impossible, it would be horrible for our culture if it were possible. The Narcissist would reign, and empathy and mercy would leave our world. It is through our experience of our own pain that we find our way to our humanity, and to letting go of our delusion of perfection.

We all start out like little Julia, openhearted children, vulnerable to our feelings, impacted by the world around us. Then we meet the world of the adults that have gone before us. We are taught, through word or deed, the consequences of having an open heart. Sometimes it is a positive thing, but most of the time it isn’t. We learn to protect our hearts from the world and the other people in it, believing that if we don’t it would not survive the pain of it all. We cover it with layer upon layer of protective batting, or we find a safe place to keep it, away from the world of others hearts. A lot of the time we just find ways to numb our selves to our feelings, period, removing the risk of vulnerability to them. We learn to shift from heart-centered to head-centered and think our way through our relationships and our lives.

There is really no such place as safe when it comes to our hearts, there is only alone. The distance we maintain from our pain translates into our distance from those we love. By risking a broken-heart, or an unprotected one, we allow our hearts to cover the distance to each other that our minds have created trying to keep us safe from feeling. As Stephen Levine said, “The mind creates the abyss but the heart crosses it.”

Letting Go of Personalizing and Reclaiming Your Self

“Don’t take it personally!” We have all heard it. We have all said it. But what on earth does it mean? How can it not be personal when it feels so personal?

Personalizing is one way we use to try and make sense of our experience. Most of us learned it at home when the adults were struggling with their own lives and creating confusion in ours. One of a child’s most useful survival mechanisms is to make it about them. It helps them make sense of the confusion and creates a false sense of control for them by letting them believe that it is about them and therefore they can do something about it. Much easier to sleep when dad’s anger can be calmed by good grades and helpfulness, or when mom’s sadness can be lifted by taking care of younger siblings and letting her sleep. We did it then because it worked. We do it now because we don’t know anything else.

The truth of our childhoods is that we were the children, they were the adults and in charge. As adults our parents were responsible and accountable for their choices. The fact that it impacted you is also on them, but, time isn’t negotiable and here you are now. You can’t change how you learned to personalize other’s stuff, but you can change it.

Childhood tools aren’t going to be very effective in our adult worlds. They may be useful in the same way they were in our childhoods, i.e. give us a good false sense of control, but they won’t contribute to our growth or our happiness. They also derail adult communication and leave us wondering what we did wrong or why the other person is such a jerk or both. The truth is that communication is only as adult as the people involved. You can assume that there is an emotional adult on the other end of the relationship string, but that doesn’t mean there is.

Some things to remember about personalizing that may help you steer clear of it:

1. When we personalize our experience we are not in our adult selves. We are in our vulnerable child selves and possessed by our unmet need to be valued and have our feelings matter. Not that those aren’t fine things, but, the adult version is more tolerant of disappointment and can allow for other people and their lives, their unavailability and their issues. Our child selves just get confused and hurt.

2. Feelings don’t determine behavior. I know that is hard to accept. We all want to believe that if someone loves us that they will make good choices when it comes to things that may impact us. That doesn’t mean feelings for us don’t factor in, they do, but they don’t always stop a bad idea.

3. People are people, good, kind, selfish, self-centered and chronically disappointing. They usually mean well but they mess up all the time. It is not a good idea to project an idealized parent on one of them as an adult. You are going to be very unhappy if you do.

If you find yourself in an ‘it’s about me’ moment, try the ‘Pause, Look and Listen” approach:

Pause. Just take a beat before you react. Don’t pick up the phone and call a friend, don’t collapse into to your hurt feelings. Pause, breathe and then,

Look. Most likely you know the people involved with this situation if it is getting to you. Look closely at what they did, why, who you know them to be, not to be, their history with you, their trustworthiness, etc. This is where you want ‘just the facts ma’am’ and no assumptions or projections. People are who they are and not who we need or want them to be, and they have usually been that way all along. Then,

Listen. Listen to your feelings, even the yucky, vulnerable ones. No one likes to feel disappointed but it is part of life and happens to each of us daily. All we really know when something doesn’t go our way, or the way we hoped, expected or thought it would, is that it didn’t and that we have feelings about it. Good! Feel them, get to know them, and learn from them. They are part of your internal feed-back system that keeps you on your own path, not just a follower of some one else’s.

When the going gets tough, the tough feel

Everyone who knows my friend Jane would say the same thing, she is an angel on earth. Jane is one of the last survivors of childhood polio, and at 60 something, has lived her life with hope, grace and a positive attitude even in the face of multiple surgeries, being wheelchair bound, eventually needing a respirator, developing breast cancer, bed sores, and horrible nerve pain. Not even being bed-bound on a trache for years at a time dented her ability to see the positive in her situation and never despair.

Several months ago Jane was diagnosed with kidney stones in both kidneys. She developed an infection that hospitalized her for over a month during which she found out that they are inoperable because of her physical situation and that she will have to be monitored closely to keep future infections from going septic. It was decided that Jane would need to be transferred to a sub-acute care facility instead of being released back home to home health care. Her family found her a wonderful place and she has gotten better, physically.

In the past 2 months this loving, cheerful, positive woman who had been able to live independently in her family home with her cats and her garden, lost everything but her life. One of her life long friends died. Her beloved cats went to live with family and bonded with them. She was informed that her kidneys were no longer working well and that eventually the stones would block them and they would fail. She was told that it wasn’t safe for her to live in her home even with care and that her care giver of 20 years was not going to be able to work for her any more. Through all of these losses Jane prevailed. Sick, sad, and frightened, but hopeful.

I saw Jane yesterday at her new home. I was impressed by its beauty and cleanliness. Lots of things going on, people awake and involved and the staff was available and pleasant. Jane looked healthier than I had seen her in a year while living at her home. This was great, I thought. Great place, she is in good shape, holding her own. They treated the recent infection quickly and well. All good in my mind.

Jane was sitting up and eating lunch when I came in and we chatted a bit . I mentioned to her that she looked sad and she started to cry. I asked her if she wanted to talk about it and she said ‘What’s the point.” And here it was, despair. I could have tried to sell the wonderful place she was in, or the great care she is receiving. I was tempted to remind her of how much safer she is here and I even may have for a second, but Jane didn’t need to hear any of that. Jane needed to be heard. Jane needed to know that if she wasn’t cheerful, if she wasn’t positive and good, that people would still want to visit. That if, as her lifetime experience of being dependent had taught her, she didn’t act pleasing, and make people like her, she wouldn’t get the care she needed to survive. At the same time, she was angry, and grieving the loss of her life as she knew it, and did not want to be cheerful. She wanted to be pissed off, unpleasant, protest, complain, bitch, moan and carry on for as long as she needed without fear of more loss, reprisal and/or abandonment.

Jane talked about not wanting to live. She said with her kidneys the way they are it is just a matter of time and that it would have been better if her family hadn’t intervened to keep her safe. In that moment I could feel my fear of the loss of her come up in me. I wanted her to live, selfishly maybe, and her despair was new to me and scared me a little. In that second or two I had to make a choice: avoid my feelings and distance from Jane, or feel my feelings and be there for Jane.

It would have been easy to avoid my fear of losing her by getting her to move away from her feelings of despair and anger. I could have pointed out that she was safer here, talk about the future, encourage her to be positive, etc. She would have shifted off her feelings and I would have left telling myself I had helped her , but in reality she just would have just stopped making me uncomfortable with her grief and loss. But that wouldn’t have been helping Jane. Helping Jane in this situation required that I set aside my need for her to make me less afraid of losing her, face that fear in the moment, and accept that it is there along with my love and deep respect for her and what she is going through. Jane needed me to be ok with her feelings and with her not being cheerful. She needed me to just be there, connected to her and letting her have her experience. She needed to know that even in her ‘uglies’, the feelings that she had suppressed all of her life, she would still be loved and cared for.

There are times in our lives when we are faced with our own Jane moments. We fear that if we aren’t pleasing, or accommodating, that we will lose love or the object of love in some form or another. I wish I could tell you that it wasn’t true, but, I don’t know that and neither do you. What I can tell you is that your need to know is important and that risking the displeasure of others to know the pleasure of being true to you is going to be worth it. Maybe not right away, but it will be worth it.

That evening I had dinner with Jane’s family and let them know what Jane and I had talked about that day. They were shocked to hear that she was afraid that if she wasn’t cheerful no one would visit. They all visited the next day and let Jane know in their own ways that she was free to be and feel and express herself to them without any fear of losing their love or attention. I heard from her niece today that Jane felt much better after our visit and able to share her feelings much more freely.

There are so many times in our lives that we run up against a situation that we feel we can neither survive nor change. By being present to the feelings of that place and meeting ourselves with kindness and compassion, we may find that a space opens up for change. Even if that change is just in how it feels to be in it. That by itself can mean the difference between peace and suffering.

The Courage to Feel

Lately I have been keenly aware of just how we as human beings handle unwanted feelings. The entire menu of addictions from food to sex is one way. It is a lot easier, or it seems a lot easier to pick something up than to let a feeling up. There is also busyness, distraction, avoidance through getting into other people's feelings, projection and its best friend co-dependency, that last one is always fun. It seems more and more that we, as a race not just a nation, are adapting and evolving our behavioral lives in an effort to avoid unwanted feelings.

What ones am I talking about? Well the top 3 would be fear, anger and sadness, not necessarily in that order. Wanting someone or something you can't have, having someone or something you don't want, fear of losing something or someone that you have, those are big too. When we feel our feelings, we are vulnerable to them. Not just that, when we are vulnerable to them then we have to connect to the truth of what we are doing, and whether or not it is right for us. We end up having to face the music of needing to change, which most of us hate worse than a bout of food poisoning. We might need to leave a relationship that is unhealthy or just over. We may need to tell the truth in a situation that will cause someone pain. We may need to let go of someone or something that has kept us feeling safe and comfortable but also stuck in our development. Change.

The reality of feelings is that they are not optional. The chemical piece is boring but just know that there is one and we can't change it. What we can change is how we choose to suffer in our lives by avoiding what happens when we allow the feelings to be, and we meet them as they are. Yes is true that we might have to face some facts and may have to make some decisions that might not be pleasant. But it is also true that the only way to be free of the prison of self-delusion is to live a life of accepting 'what is'. When 'what is' feels bad, we make 'what is' go away through some behavior even if that behavior is sleeping. Trouble is there is no 'away', and we repeat the process of feeling and avoiding feeling for years and years until we don't even know why we are so numb and can't stop buying stuff on QVC. At this point we have developed a strategy for dealing with unwanted feelings and it now runs on automatic.

Take a risk today and let yourself feel just one unwanted feeling. When you feel that uncomfortable stirring that signals 'don't feel this', just pause. You don't have to go after it, just don't do anything about it. Pause, take a beat, and see what happens. I promise you it will be ok. Feelings are there first before our defense against them so, you have already been living, and surviving whatever it is you think you need to avoid feeling. You are safe, your feelings can't hurt you but the avoidance of them can imprison you and steal the joy that was your birthright as a human.

Finding Your Way Back to You

"...Bring your self back in again
And allow yourself to blossom

Don’t worry about time
Don’t count minutes
Orient yourself to your truest north
And proceed..."

excerpted from Poem in Defense of Geraniums by Amy Shimshon-Santo

I was fortunate enough to hear Amy Shimshon-Santo read her poem, Poem in Defnse of Geraniums last week. An excerpt is above and the full poem is posted on her blogsite [ shimshona ]. I would highly recommend that you take a moment to go there and read it. She is an amazing poet and her words touched my soul and made me ponder the question: Just what does it mean to ‘orient yourself to your truest north?’

First of all, orienting to true north implies that there is a compass involved, that it is working and that it belongs to us. There can be many ‘norths’ when the compass isn’t ours or when it is being magnetized by someone else either inside and outside of us. We can spend years thinking that we are heading due east only to end up heading south every time. As children we learn to orient to our own truest north by being allowed the space to locate ourselves in our Self rather than in our parents, our environment, our school, or our world. We need to be able to rest in our internal focus free from structured time and external demands long enough to show up on our own map. Without sounding too anachronistic, things were simpler before. There was always unstructured time in a child’s day where they could hang out with themselves and explore the far reaches of their inner worlds.

Even in normal, trauma-free childhood the tendency these days is to organize the child’s world from the moment they wake until the moment they go to sleep in alignment with some external norm, preference, goal or electronic distraction. The infant’s environment comes to bear on the newborn from the moment his skin registers temperature and eyes are forced to adjust to light. He meets his world like a car meeting a wall at 60 mph and learns quickly that adaptation is the way to survive. Protest is an option but adaptation is the path of least discomfort. Little by little the infant learns to focus externally and adjust internally to match their environment. This becomes a strategy that becomes a way of being and as an adult it is hard to even connect with our experience enough to know how we are when asked.

Orienting to YOUR truest north is not about knowing ‘who’ you are. Everyone asks that question at some point in their lives but it is a rather Alice in Wonderland question given that it is being posed to a Self that at the moment isn’t online enough to tell the asker, the self, that they don’t need to ask the question. ‘Who’ we are evolves from an experience of ‘that’ we are and to get there you need to ask yourself 3 things:

Where am I? Where are my feet, my legs, the house to my brain and my being located? Where am I in space and in time. Am I here? Am I present or am I a floating head using my eyes to try and know everything about my experience? Anxiety, insomnia, addictions, stress related digestive issues and obsessive thinking are what show up when we try to live our lives without ground, without our feet being planted and knowing where those feet are right here, right now.

How am I? How are things with me, with my body, with my mind, with my heart, with my soul? Am I recreating myself, am I resting, nourishing and caring for my Self in the ways I know, in the truest sense of ‘know’, my body-mind needs? We all know what we need. The knowledge is there, where you left it, in that inner safe that you haven’t opened in years and can’t exactly remember the combination to. You left it in your box of secret things; you left it in your 5th grade diary with ‘KEEP OUT’ written in glitter ink on the cover; you left it in the can that you filled with your special stuff and buried in the yard for safe keeping. It is not childish to have special things, or to need cookies and milk, or a hug from a soft and warm friend. It not selfish to know what we need and to give ourselves that even if it means someone else will have to wait for what they need from us. We give best from a place of fullness. When the cupboard is bare even the best Mother Hubbard can’t feed anyone else. A wonderful African American poet Nikki Giovanni said it best in her poem ‘The Women and The Men’ when she wrote, “Show me a person who is not full of themselves and I will show you a hungry person.” FEED YOURSELF FIRST!

What am I? Are you animal, vegetable or mineral? Remember that game from childhood where one person would pick an object and the others would guess what it was by asking about its qualities like animal, vegetable or mineral? You are your own object in that you have mass, exist in space and time and have certain defining qualities. That said, these qualities change and are subject to the experience of our Self meeting our worlds on a moment to moment basis. To know your truest north you need to know what you are. The belly of the lion is hungry for the hunt and for fresh meat and the feeling of satiety after gorging. The belly of the humming bird is sated by a few drops of the sweetest nectar and rarely lingers long at a feast. You are animal, that is a given but what animal on any given day and in any given moment is not. Ask yourself today ‘what am I today?’ Do my muscles need to move, do they feel restless and longing for a good chase? Am I feeling feline and languid and would be fed by a good stretch and a nap? Are you feeling your fins and longing for fluidity of movement and to be buoyed by the water of your world? Care isn’t care unless it meets the need. Tomatoes are all full and juicy but hate to have their feet wet. Know the plant that you are in this moment and water yourself appropriately!