Meditation and giving myself a grade

As is often the case when I have several half finished posts, it seems completely reasonable to me to start a brand new one. Ha!

So, about 6 months ago, my therapist suggested I start a daily breathing practice for myself. He was very careful not to refer to it as meditation (smile) but was about the 5th person to recommend it to me including my endocrinologist, my trainer, a dear friend who I wish I had realized was a dear friend when we were in high school together, and several others. I suspect I appear a little . . . anxious, or that the signs of how thoroughly I work myself over show more than I pretend they do, and so people think, "it could help a LOT if she would just sit and appreciate what's good right now."

When I first tried to do this, a couple of years ago, it was on advice from my trainer and a friend, and it was so hard that I barely managed a few minutes each day. I would pull up a cushion, sit, and after a few breaths think, "Uggggggghhhh. That's good enough, right?" My blood pressure and sleep habits said otherwise, and then with two injured knees, that became my excuse to stop - sitting was a little complex then. I felt relieved, because, man had I not done well at implementing that, but still uneasy thinking, "Why can't I just breathe?"

Fast-forward to late 2011 when I found myself mired in dishonesty from a lot of corners of my life. Nothing sets my blood on fire like dishonesty, and ultimately, I wasn't coming clean with myself about what I could and couldn't do. It actually got to the point where I was sleeping only 2-3 hours at a stretch because my thoughts were so restless. My therapist not-so-gently pointed out that I take everything I come in contact with as my responsibility to right, and then judge myself harshly when it doesn't work. A terrible Midas touch that paints me, constantly, as a failure in my own eyes. He suggested that someday it might be possible to stop seeing the world as win-loss, success-failure, good-bad but that for now, the best thing I could do was gently acknowledge those moments that I was steeped in judgement (almost all the time, as it turns out) and then just breathe through them instead of letting them mount and gain momentum.

So, now, I try to sit every day. Here's the truth - it sounds so simple, but it's the hardest thing in the world for me. Given the choice of singing, naked, in front of strangers, and sitting on a cushion for an hour trying to empty myself out and just notice the moment I'm in, it would be a toss up. It's ironic, right? That I might rather be vulnerable to others, than be still and see if I can be vulnerable to myself? Of course, there is no requirement that I sit for an hour (and I don't) but I am very aware that when I am sitting, time goes by very slowly, painfully even. And I am always trying to get better at this.

Yesterday, I had to walk for 90 minutes before I could bring myself to sit. I was always within a mile of Boulder's amazing Shambhala Center but kept walking to get out some of the raw anxiety before trying. Then, of course, instead of heading to the big, beautiful rooms with air and light, I headed for the "practice" room. Translation: small, dark basement room. I don't even light any of the candles, I just sit there glad that it's everyone else's last choice and that I can wrestle with the idea of just. right. now. by myself.

On Tuesday, we talked about my practice (such as it is) in therapy. My therapist (who is still being careful not to talk about meditating or sitting, but instead about a daily practice, by the way) remarked that if I am constantly giving myself a grade on everything, then I am choosing always to judge myself, and worse, often not giving myself the grade I deserve. I told him that sitting felt like work, and that I really can't manage it for more than 10 - 20 minutes. Somewhere in the middle, if I've metered my breath and let go of some of what I carried in with me, there's a quiet moment where all I feel is my hands on my knees and my chest rising and falling, but very quickly, everything comes rushing back. He used the word "loud" in that all of my stuff gets very noisy in my head, as a pendulum swing off of things having gotten quiet.

He reminded me that it's a practice, and that that word is deliberate. That like a runner who practices every day, sometimes times will be longer, and sometimes shorter, but what matters is how they accumulate. Sitting isn't meant to get judged and graded each time - there is no good or bad. It just is whatever it is on that day. He also said that if I'm only sitting when I feel bad, it will take a long, long time for me to feel anything other than tired by it. Finally, he said, trying to get me to ease up and be a little less hard on myself, I suspect, "If you practice today, you can't expect it to solve everything! Just sit and breathe and let it be only that."

Grasping for control, trying to fix everything, and then (of course) not being able to succeed under that weight and thus kicking myself until I bleed is the lather, rinse, repeat I've set myself up on. And it's got to go. I have to evict it, even if I can't give it the boot all at once, because it's that treadmill that kept me in bad patterns and bad relationships. And when I say relationships, I mean all relationships, not just romantic ones. Friends, family, boyfriends, girlfriends, my relationship with my work, myself, my former employer, all of it.

So, I sit. I read this book and and this one. I listen to the beginning of "Joking" by Indigo Girls over and over and over trying to understand how it would feel to "Forget about your ego. Forget about your Pride. And you will never have to compromise." this is what I want - to live more out loud, and not compromise my happiness. I talk a good talk here, in this blog, but I admitted "on the couch" this week that right now, while everything is going so well (minus, you know, the obvious absence of a new job) for me, I find I have all this anxiety that I will mis-step and mess it all up in one swell foop.

So I sit. and I breathe in and out. And I try to grok the idea that the only thing I can do is nurture this moment. and in the next moment, and only when it arrives, then that one. But I can't plan, control, fix, heal, solve, berate, pre-ordain, judge, plot, arrange, engineer, project, steer, contrive or chart what happens in the next moment, the next day, the next month, the next year and expect to get it right, get what I want, get that A.

In the vein of Indigo Girls philosophy, I want to not just forget about my ego, and not compromise, but to sidle up on "Closer to fine" in that I understand the smart thing I said to someone yesterday. He said, "I don't always see the full scope of what needs to happen right away." I sounded, I'm sure, like I was assured of the high horse I was sitting on when I answered, "No one does. That's why we use the verb 'process' to describe thinking and coping - it's a process. It's not an event."

It's all fine and well for me to tell those things to other people, but I do a laughable job of reminding myself of them in the day to day. I can say this - I've done much better than I had predicted at keeping myself happy, grateful, calm, and productive in unemployment. This is why I'm doing well enough to fret about messing it all up. But, the choices I made before this frighteningly delicious free-fall of creating a new life for myself tell a less flattering story. It's hilarious to me, actually, how I sometimes lean into danger - I will move more than 2000 miles across the country knowing no one, I will spar men twice my size - but play things so safe and close to the vest when it comes to asking for and admitting what I really, really want and doing the work to arrive there.

"Darkness has a hunger that's insatiable, and lightness has a call that's hard to hear. I wrap my fear around me like a blanket. I sail my ship of safety 'til I sank it. And I'm crawling on your shore."

So, this girl, this one who had to hold one of her best friend's hands when plunged into 20 seconds of pitch black on the Cave of the Winds tour because she is so deeply afraid of the dark, sits in a small, quiet very dark room daily, knowing that everything scary in there is something I brought with me. And knowing, even more, that that means it's with me whether or not I go into that room and sit on that cushion. And I listen. Very hard. To the noisiness in my neurons, but also to that call that's hard to hear. Because I'm pretty sure I'm done signing up to crash ships of safety.