humble beginnings | hopeful future

THAT I WOULD BE FREE

6/26/22 6/26/22

Attention

I smell the ocean on the warm breeze flowing steadily past the skin on my face and arms, which are slightly sticky from the drying salt water. The sun is headed down but the days are long and it will be hours before it sets. There is a seagull walking past, eyeing the abandoned beach blanket next to mine, likely considering if I pose a threat to her pillage of my neighbor’s lunch. Children fly toward the shore on boogie boards and frothy waves. It is summer in San Diego.

When I sit down to write, this is often how I start. I ground myself to what is in front of me, under me, around me and above me. My journal is full of descriptions of the plants, insects and animals in my backyard. It’s a way for me to shut off the constant flow of chatter in my mind and connect to the deeper things. So today, it’s the sand and the wooshing border of this vast ocean, the click of wooden paddles on balls, and the delighted screams of playing children, that will guide me to connection.

A couple of years ago I went back to the property that was purchased by my Great Grandma and Grandpa Whipple. It was a one acre lot in Quartzsite, Arizona, a town known for its bustling snowbird community and annual rock show. Quartzsite is the epitome of an Arizona desert with looming saguaro cacti and prickles on every living thing protruding from the earth. I was there in February but in the summer it bakes like an oven.

My great-grandparents were snowbirds. They started heading south to escape the Idaho winters when my Grandpa Whipple was there to tend to the farm in their place. At first they wandered like nomads through southern Utah, Arizona, Nevada and into Mexico with a travel trailer and a pickup truck. As they went, they collected shells, rocks, and fragments of iron wood which they turned into beautiful pieces of art. When they finally settled into Quartzsite they put a single-wide trailer on their acre lot, complete with miniature blush-pink appliances.

That trailer has since been replaced, but I visited it once when I was about ten years old. I remember my grandpa giving Grandma a pat on the bum as he squeezed behind her in the tiny kitchen, and smiling, as he said that was one of the good things about the small kitchen. I couldn’t go back there without remembering the quiet, peace of that place, when my grandparents wintered there.

My mom and dad were there to retrieve any wanted objects from the property before listing it to sell. We found a diary my great-grandma, Ruby, had kept one year as the moved around in the travel trailer. It was filled with short entries about the weather and the plants and the little chores they had done, like baking bread or giving my great-grandpa a haircut. It conveyed a sense of the rhythm of their life.

It reminded me of the visits I had with my grandparents, both my mom’s parents and my dad’s parents, on their farms in Idaho. We took joy in the land, the yards around their homes and the fields with cultivated crops. We admired the roses, even bigger than last year, and the trees with promising blossoms or ripening fruit. And were the pie cherries on? Or had the birds got to them already? And Grandma had rearranged the flowerbeds, with this one raised up on a little berm and that one reduced in a way that made everything slightly more suited to her vision. We talked about the rain and the cows and the frost and freeze. My grandparents were farmers and that connected them to the land in a way that I will never fully know. But I may carry something in my blood, in my bones, that I inherited from them, and that is attention.

“One of the great misconceptions about the artistic life is that it entails great swaths of aimlessness. The truth is the creative life involves great swaths of attention. Attention is a way to connect and survive,” Julia Cameron writes. Cameron and I have this in common, grandmothers who wrote letters and kept diaries and spoke of the “series of small miracles” unfolding in everyday life, in nature.

Camron writes, “My grandmother was gone before I learned the lesson her letters were teaching: survival lies in sanity, and sanity lies in paying attention….The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.”

Attention is how I got through the harrowing pain of my divorce. I wandered the neighborhood, watching the passion vine blossom before turning to fruit. I watched the morning doves nest and hatch and fly away. I saw the cactus bloom an incredible white starburst. I felt the quality of the air shift as the seasons passed. My son, before my eyes, began to speak full sentences and run and climb and race pieces of chalk, like cars, on the cement in front of our apartment. I was preoccupied a lot. My brain was a savage landscape of fear and anxieties, so it became necessary for me to find an escape in the world in front of me.

The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.

Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way

“The reward for attention is always healing. It may begin as the healing of a particular pain—the lost lover, the sickly child, the shattered dream. But what is healed finally, is the pain that underlies all pain: the pain that we are all, as Rilke phrases it, ‘unutterably alone.’ More than anything else, attention is an act of connection,” Camron says.

My Grandma Hurst’s fifth child, Brent, was born with a heart defect. He was not supposed to live two days, but he lived 18 years. After Brent passed away, Grandma Hurst took up painting. She started taking oil painting classes. She worked in chalk pastels, water color, and ceramics. She is one of the most prolific artists I know. We, all of her children and grandchildren, have her art in our homes and her basement is filled with canvases that have to be rotated because, even among all of us, there is not enough space to display her enormous collection.

In the last five years, I have come to see Grandma Hurst’s art as an enormous labor of feeling. I have never had to endure losing a child, but I have known heartache and I can imagine that art became for her what writing has become for me: a way to confront and process and heal the the things that cannot be worked out in any other way.

Pain is the place where so much art is born because pain demands our attention. The physical pain I endured with my first laparotomy was so intense that I laid, with closed eyes, focused only on each breath. Even speech was too much of a distraction. When I gave birth to my son, the last hour of labor I was told not to push because I was not yet dilated, yet every ounce of my flesh wanted me to push that baby out that very second, and to hold that back required every bit of the presence and focus I possessed.

Physical pain gives you something to hold onto but emotional pain has brought me to a similar place. I have crumpled to the floor, but once the wave passes I am left to feel my cheek against the hardwood, sticky with tears. I am left with the physicality of the present moment. When I see a bougainvillea I think of the hours I spent, lying in the hammock looking up at fuchsia petals backed by twilight sky, wondering how I would make it through the next minute, next hour, next day…what would save me from my suffering?

And it has mostly been art, the product of paying attention to the flashing fragments that make moonlight appear ductile, as Richard Adams must have when he described it so beautifully. Noticing the ache in my chest, the wonder of the sticky anemone closing around my finger, the beauty of the tracks chalk race cars leave on the sidewalk, the beauty wrought by my own hand.

Attention is conduit to aliveness. Please, please, please pay attention.

6/17/22 6/17/22

I am terrified of the silence.

As children of mothers with depression, we have to teach ourselves how to cry because there is danger in the sadness. It feels like giant cavern that could swallow me whole, a darkness that I might never escape. So I flitter around saying, I’m fine! I’m fine! and going to parties and talking and drinking the wine. But I am not fine. I am terrified of this sadness. I am terrified of the silence.

I have not learned to trust the silence. So every time I cry it feels like I am touching the hot stove, dropping into the underworld, but I always come back up. Why don’t we learn that lesson as kids? My mother came back up. I have watched her come back up over and over and over again. But I guess when you are twelve, eight years might as well be eternity without oxygen.

I think about River leaving for a couple of weeks and I am gutted. Even though I see we are both tired. We are both needing a change. It’s hard for me to trust it. It’s hard for me to trust that the times we sang, “I’ve got the Redstone in me!” at the top of our lungs will carry us through. How can a Minecraft parody hold us? The dinners we’ve eaten out on the back deck while we listened to the tinkle of the fountain and talked about aircraft carriers. He is getting more patient with me constantly bringing singing and dancing into our Lego war games. He is learning I am simply not a serious soldier. I, like Kermit T. Frog, am more likely to break out of a Russian gulag by putting on a musical than climbing through the sewer or stealing a gun and fighting my way out.

I don’t blame my depressed mother for my fear. She was doing her best. I do feel recklessly devoted to letting my son see my full range of emotion, because it’s silence I must protect him from. I see it’s silence that puts the big questions in his mind. So I get mad when I have to tell him ten times to put his shoes on. And he cries as he asks, “Why are you rushing me?” And we both see the madness of the rush. We absorb it together for a minute. That minute is everything because it connects us instead of pushing us apart. And then his shoes are on and I am full of frustration, because I’ve told him to put his shoes on 7547 times in the past year, but also wonder—that I get another day with him, that I get to be the exhausted one telling him to put his shoes on over and over again.

I’ve known for a while that if something happened to Rio, my feisty, loving, little purse dog, the thing I would miss the most is the little “cha cha cha” of his tiny claws on the wood floor. The sound he makes moving around the house. I cannot abide the silence.

So tonight I will drop my son off at his dad’s and say goodbye for a few weeks. And I will come home to sit with the silence. The thing I most fear. It's my work to do, that I've been doing these past five years. I am learning to transform the silence into quiet, which is much less menacing. Quiet is something I can live with. Quiet can hold the sadness.

5/8/22 5/8/22

Who is Heavenly Mother?

Now that I better understand the feminine divine, I see that, because of her nature, she doesn’t fit easily into organized religion. She is too big and complicated for that. There are no instructions for breathing! How would you teach someone to inhale? Yet, I notice very quickly when I am becoming oxygen-deprived.

Note: This post is a throwback, originally published in June 2019, and it still feels true. Feels relevant to the LDS community right now. Feels relevant to the ongoing struggle for the sovereignty of women. But most of all it feels relevant to my role as mother at this point in my life, as co-creator and a witness to the life of my little one (as he become increasingly bigger!). Happy Mother's Day to the divine feminine in each of us.

I’ve been trying to understand, FOR ME, what is the most useful way to think about God. In the Mormon theology I was raised with, God is male and usually referred to as Heavenly Father. Mormonism has the beautiful, and added, benefit of a female counterpart to the male God, termed Heavenly Mother. The idea is that we are all part of a massive human family with Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother and all of humanity as our siblings. There’s a lot that I like about this model. It’s reflective of the family structure most of us have experienced so it’s familiar (it can also be fraught for the same reason).

Little is said of Heavenly Mother in Mormon doctrine and culture. This has usually been explained to me to be because she is so sacred that Heavenly Father protects her from the profanity of human conversation. From a feminist perspective, this explanation is infuriating and degrading. From the perspective one who views herself as a child with heavenly parents, it’s confusing. Kids need their mom. Why would you withhold that?

Maybe strangely, this issue has been of little bother to me for most of my life. My religious persona has been quite accepting of these sorts of problems and explanations, pushing them under the umbrella of, I’ll understand that better someday. Sometimes that umbrella is useful because some of these topics can only be explored with time and life experience. They live like little ghosts in the back of my psyche until an experience brings them to the foreground.

This past week, I was talking to my parents about a problem, I’ve been trying to figure out for months. I presented them with my current thinking about it and my dad said, “That seems really sensible.” To which I replied, “I’m not going for sensible! That’s not how I’m making decisions anymore. I want it to FEEL right.” And he, so humbly and happily said, “Oh! Well that’s your mother’s domain.” He’s so great! I can’t remember what my mom said to this, but I remember the energy of it, and it was something about self trust. And I’m going to come back to this in a minute.

I want to write a little about what I’ve observed in the nature of the feminine. And to use Elizabeth Gilbert’s term, I don’t want to get “gender-freaky” about this. I’m talking about the iconic feminine.

The feminine creates. This is the energy in the universe that calls to us to experiment and imagine. To me, the feminine creative energy feels like lying on my back looking at the clouds and seeing figures of airplanes and unicorns. It’s not overtly practical or directional. It might even feel superfluous, but, like air, its necessity is recognized mostly by its absence.

The feminine is the ether. I like to think about this from the perspective of a child in the womb. We are swimming in the feminine. She is all around. Think about the idea of mother earth. She is the rock, the water, the sky and everything in between all of it. Maybe this is why we feel close to the divine as we connect with the natural world. It’s like pressing a fetal hand into the wall of the womb, becoming slightly aware of the being that is carrying us. The problem is not locating the feminine, it’s becoming conscious that she is all around me.

The feminine nurtures. The feminine says, I will go on doing all of this, holding all of this, whether you notice or not, because I am doing it for my own purpose. This is the subtle strength of feminine care. All of this carrying and holding and love is not contingent upon outcomes and results, it is intrinsic.

I’m sure there is more that could be written about this, but maybe that’s enough to nudge your mind in the direction I’m intending. I’ve been thinking about these things in the context of Heavenly Mother. And I’ve realized that most of the spiritual practices I’ve adopted this past year are things that put me in the way of this divine, feminine energy.

Nature. I’ve noticed that one of the most universal ways of connecting with God or finding peace or hearing the inner voice is to be in nature. While some are getting dressed up for church, many are heading into the mountains or the sea. Church is sort of a masculine, direct pathway to God. It’s like following a map to the divine father. These are my office hours, so to speak. But nature is always open—curious and diverse and meandering. I believe this is where the divine mother lives.

My body. I feel super cool about my body these days, because I feel like it is this beautiful echo of my divine mother’s voice. I’ve come to experience this in several ways—child birth, exercise, meditation, sleep—but the yoga mat has been an excellent teacher. There are truths embedded in my flesh that are revealed only when I am paying very close attention and yoga has given me a way to notice them. Each time I get on the mat, I have to strip away all the expectations of myself for performance. My intention is usually to listen or to let go—surrender, release, acceptance. My mind becomes the servant of my body and my spirit becomes the quiet observer. Teach me, I say to my self—to the part of me that already knows—the divine feminine.

Honesty. Some of my most powerful connections with the divine, come during intimate conversations. Isn’t this how it’s always been with women? While men are hunting beasts and conquering legions, women are in the back room making dinner or folding clothes and talking about the heart of life. The feminine divine is in these quite conversations, in the quiet honesty. She is in the utterance of fear and uncertainty and the humble declaration of faith. The feminine divine can hold all of this—the ugly and the beautiful, the weak and the strong. It’s all safe with her.

Art. Honesty is the birthplace of art. The feminine divine cheers us on as we attempt to excavate those sacred jewels within and bring them into the world. She is in the music and the poetry. We do ourselves a disservice by relegating this category of expression to entertainment, because it is so much more than that. Heavenly Mother is constantly asking us to dance with her, to sing, to write, to draw, because that is the way we can come to know ourselves in the way SHE sees us. In the same way I encourage my son’s fledgling attempts at creativity, she is doting over my bad poetry, messy relationships and off-key singing with the hope that I will not let the world close my mouth.

Linger and rest. The iconic feminine meanders. My therapist taught me this months ago and it’s something that frequently comes to mind. The feminine is like the path along the cliff line that has amazing views but takes a little longer. I’m someone who naturally values efficiency, so it has taken a conscious effort to allow myself to walk the scenic path. The feminine suggests, maybe it’s okay to just sit here for a while and enjoy the beauty of this place or moment. Maybe it’s okay to linger. Maybe it’s okay to take a nap if you’re tired. There may be miles to go, but there is time and it’s okay to be kind to yourself.

So back to my story about the conversation with my mom and dad. I don’t feel bad that I can’t remember my mother’s exact words because the words were not as important as the feeling. And this is true to the feminine divine. She doesn’t write instruction booklets. She is unstructured and unshaped. And because of that she can fit into the spaces where other things can’t.

This is me in the flow: quiet mind, open heart. I think of these moments as glimpses. I just try to catch a peek of that feeling as often as I can. P.S.-- Heavenly Mother thinks SnapChat filters are fun too!

Heavenly Mother is the essence of self care. A while back, I realized that the only thing that REALLY qualified as self-care—that really worked—was the activities that cleared the crap off of my soul. The things that helped me to hear my inner voice. This is Heavenly Mother. So maybe you can pray to her. Maybe you can visualize a heavenly being with kind eyes and a loving embrace. If that’s helpful, then do it!

My advice on this topic is really DO ANYTHING. Reach out into the ether and you will find her because she is everywhere and all it takes to access her is a quiet mind and an open heart. The practices that will be most helpful are the ones that create those two things. And when you find her, tell me about it because I live for this stuff now! Namaste.

1/9/22 1/9/22

New Year! New You?

New Year! New You?The daylightbegins to spread slightly fatherinto the edges of the day.Still, it’s cold.I don’t like how my body looks,How it feels.I don’t like how my brain is moving,Either creeping in a carb-laden haze,Or ping-ponging between things that might lift me from misery:a home remodel,new budgeting software,a new job,a gardening service,a new gym,a new car,A complete Marie Kondo of the sum of things I have attempted to plug this hole with?

Do I need to completely change my life, or is it just January?!?

So far 2022 has been a 2.0 version of the question from my last post: Do I need to completely change my life, or is it just (now) January?

Turns out, it’s still me here! I did not get a new me in the new year. WTF.

I survived, even enjoyed, the holidays. I relaxed into the drama of coparenting with an angry man through the school break. I slept. I ate. I talked to friends and family. I opened beautiful gifts. I watched TV. I took time to rest. I remained attentive to my work. I left it behind when I could. I thought about this blog. I thought about my book. I mean, I think I checked a lot of the December boxes.

And still, I find myself limping into mid-January. Obviously still in need of some recovery. Today, I’ve had the day to myself to do this very recovery thing I’m writing about. But this is one of the tricky things about self care. What works one day, doesn’t always work the next. And sometimes, you don’t know if it worked until after the thing is done. I’ve taken whole trips where I wasn’t sure if I accomplished a damn thing in the realm of self care until I returned home and noticed that something had shifted back into place. I didn’t even feel it move...but now it’s there.

So I wanted to make a little reminder list for myself of the things that work, not every day, but some of the days, to keep my soul intact and help to flick away the little bits of crap that tend to collect over the top of it. Here it is:

Acceptance. The fastest way to where you want to be is through where you are right now. I cannot kick my own ass into gear. Those days are over! It’s like the alcoholic say, You can’t hate yourself sober! I can’t hate myself into anything anymore. All there is for me now is acceptance, and what that looks like is this: Today is a day to feel tired. That’s okay. This is a day for sadness. That’s okay. This is a day for anger. That’s okay. All things are welcome and this means I have to welcome the days when I don’t feel great. That’s okay.
Kindness. First to myself. My internal dialogue is sooooo godammed demanding, pretty much all the time. I have to live with this person in my head telling me everything I should and shouldn’t do and how I’m so screwed! I have no control over her. But I have also learned that she has no control over me. What I mean is that she may speak, but I don’t have to listen. Still, it takes a concerted effort to ask myself what would be kind to me. So I try to do that. The answer changes and I have to practice listening in order to hear. Meditation helps me separate the mean voice from the kind one.
Honesty. Again first with myself. I do the morning pages practice (3 pages of stream-of-consciousness, handwritten journaling every morning) and I notice when they start to get hollow. The onset is insidious. They seem fine and then gradually I’m writing the same to-do list and captains log I’ve been writing for a week. It’s not helpful, except that I am still showing up on the page so I have a greater chance of noticing what’s happening. And it reminds me that I have to drop into a deeper place to access the real truth. I try to do that as often as I can.
Curiosity. I have a thousand questions a day about what I might want to do to change my life in small and large ways. Curiosity is a spiritual practice because it keeps these things light. I’ve been considering building a studio over my garage. Sounds expensive and that’s terrifying. Curiosity asks, how could this be affordable? What timeline would make this feel comfortable? Curiosity is not a task master. It’s light, and it’s comfortable with the answer, I don’t know. Being comfortable with not knowing, has produced some pretty amazing results.
Movement. Being stuck is one of my most uncomfortable sensations. For this reason, I move a lot. My feelings move, my body moves, my heart moves, my brain?….My brain is like the feet of a duck. I actually put on audiobooks and podcasts to slow its pace when I can’t sleep. Because I need so much movement, sometimes I believe this means I can’t rest. But what’s actually true is that I need the movement to rest. This includes physical exercise, but also exercise of all the other parts of me (brain, heart, mind, etc.) Movement is a very important part of my spiritual practice.
Elements. I’m gonna quote some unoriginal meme I’ve seen a few times now: I am effectively a glorified house plant. I do a lot better when I have enough water (both inside my body and out), sunlight, and earth. This time of year it can be hard to get those things. Today I made myself climb to the garage roof and lay in the sun for over an hour. Yesterday I forced myself into the freezing Pacific Ocean to surf (although with my 4-3 wetsuit and booties I was not a bit cold!). But I say forced because that’s how it FEELS a lot of times. I want to surf or garden or exercise or have a warm bath, AND there’s a big part of me that wants to be at home under a blanket. In the winter I have to force myself to be out! to take the dogs for a walk, or pull a few of the thousands of weeds that need pulling. But again, being in these elements of nature, it’s like medicine.
Car maintenance. Just a reminder to rotate your tires because I learned that lesson the hard way last month.

God speed. It’s January. We all need a prayer right now.

11/15/20 11/15/20

Happiness: The Basics

You know, Michelle’s not happy.

A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend who recently went through divorce. She mentioned that in the course of her separation process, someone we both know, pointed to me and my situation and said THAT.

First, WTF. How does someone in another state who I talk to extremely infrequently make a judgment on something so cryptic as my level of happiness?

Secondly, I turned inward. Am I happy?

If you’ve been following my blog you probably have sensed that this is a question I throw around, of my own accord, from time to time. I am very interested in what makes a good life. Time seems finite—how do I avoid wasting mine? And what’s the end goal? Is there an end goal?

My family calls this the Deep Michelle and I’ve always been a little embarrassed about it. There’s a voice in my head telling me to lighten up quite constantly. But also—it’s just who I am! I like deep existential questions. I also like dance parties and stupid jokes and rainbows and brightly colored nail polish.

So I guess I am writing this post to myself and any other reader who may have been tracking this journey of mine and wondering, Did any of this make her happy?

What is happy?

Happy is a feeling. It’s one of the things I ask about when I am screening a patient for PTSD: Are you able to feel positive emotions like happiness or love? Yes! I feel happy from time to time. It’s happening more and more lately. I notice it when I laugh out loud at something. I think laughing at myself feels the best—when I do something so brilliant it fills me with delight or so stupid that I can’t help but laugh. I felt it today when I smiled to no one as stood on my garage roof in pajamas and slippers trimming my overgrown palm tree. Yep! There’s happy again!

How often should one feel happy?

Psychiatry has taught me that no one lives on Planet Happy. Another thing I ask my patients to do is rate their mood from 0 to 10, where ten is best and 0 is rock bottom. Where do you live most days?

I raise an eyebrow to anyone who states they live at a 10. Delusional? Manic? Lack of self awareness? I think most of us want to live between six and eight. We want to hit a ten on occasion, maybe even three times a week, but to live there would be exhausting!

And we could get picky about which words we use to describe which number. Is ten ecstatic, euphoric, delirious? While nine would be delighted, enthralled, jovial? Eight we call happy, joyful, cheery. Seven is well-fed, content, open-hearted. Six—relaxed, engaged, straight-faced. And at five we're getting into mildly worried, barely hungry, and I’m-fine-but-my-neck-is-kinda-tight. It drops off from there all the way down to zero, which is either catatonic or suicidal.

What I’ve learned from asking this question over and over again is that the answer varies depending on the person. Some of us are pleased hitting a ten once a year. Some of us feel we are in a depression if we didn’t get there at all last week. So I think the answer is, You get to decide!

And I mean that literally—no shame however you choose. I purposely avoid writing about happy too much because we have this kind of hyper-pressure on getting it and keeping it. I remember when I was a BYU student there was this culture on campus of smiling and saying hello to people as you passed them on campus. I did this most all the time, because it was my duty as a fucking delightful person.

Did it help sometimes? Probably. Was there a cost to obligatory smiling? Most certainly.

So I say this with all sincerity. YOU get to decide what your personal goal is for how often you hit happy. And there’s not a wrong answer…unless you picked catatonic, in which case your family will be annoyed by having to feed and toilet you….

Which leads me to my next very basic question—

How do I feel happy more often?

If I knew the easy answer, I would not be revealing it here for free, I would be pointing you to my book for purchase on Amazon, or better yet, from some independent, ultra-kewl hippie bookstore in Portland.

There is no easy answer.

Boo!

Okay, but I will let you in on my strange inner life and you can glean from it what you will.

First thing is to stop chasing it so hard. I stopped looking away from the things in my life that were hard and terrible. It turned out I was putting a decent amount of energy into avoidance, convincing myself and the world that I’m fine fine fine! Fine is a state of detachment. Instead of trying to make life look easy, I started to sink into it. To let life be life.

And this brings me to my second experiment—start to pay attention. Open your eyes and look at what is in front of you. My journal is filled with passages about my postage stamp backyard. The orange tree. The tiny birds that come pick the bugs off of it. I still debate in my mind whether I should know what the birds are called. (Eckhart Tolle would say, No, just notice the being-ness of the birds! And my ego is like, You are looking at those birds every day and you don’t know what they are called?!? No winners here. If you care to help, please send a bird book!)

Paying attention puts me in the moment. And most moments are pretty okay if they aren’t being wrecked by my overly analytical, anxious brain. It also puts me in my body. Noticing the feeling of the sun on my skin, the breeze, the fountain chattering away, light coming through the bamboo.

I have a confession. All these years of yoga and I still never understood how breathing was such a freaking pleasure for these granola munchers. I think it’s because inside of me was a secret yoga competition. Who is the stretchiest, breathiest, zennist yogi in all the land? Sometimes I was competing with that one girl (you know her) or the guy in the back who I’m not really into but I still hope he’s checking out my ass… or even myself at my last yoga class or when I was 19. That’s right, I am fully capable of turning a sun salutation into a full-blown tryout for the 1996 women’s olympic gymnastics team. I’m coming for you, Dominique!

But I got over that. And here’s how: I started paying attention to it. I think that’s how it shifted. At first I noticed I didn’t like thinking about how everyone else in the class felt about me. So I shifted over into being competitive with myself. But still, what was this dark cloud over yoga?

It was me.

And the watching was the answer. Because if you can get competitive about yoga (which I clearly can), then you can get competitive about the very practices that should be liberating your mind (which I clearly can). I effectively took and take myself out of contention for the Olympic Zen team and put myself in the stands. My job was and is only to watch and listen.

I watched the competitive thoughts, meaning that they came up, I tried my best to not judge them and let them go. Bless and release those precious, little demons! And what I learned on the yoga mat became meaningful in the rest of my life.

I began to watch myself at work. While I interact with my son at home. With the dog. With my family. On a date. Watching became my practice.

This was a natural pathway into happy, because watching is fun! There’s a reason we like to watch shows and movies and sporting events.

Well now my life is a big watch fest! So I can laugh out loud at the dog when he falls off the center console into the back seat because he wasn’t expecting me to make that left turn. I can notice that my nerves are fried—and this moment of reading bedtime stories is too much—and also absolutely perfect. And it can be both at the same time. All this is possible because I am the watcher.

It’s like slowing down and tasting your food. The central thought in my head has shifted from I know to I wonder. Wonder!!! What a fantastic feeling!

Instead of flailing my arms as I drown in life or militantly perfecting my backstroke, I’m sitting in a floaty with the water lapping up onto my legs and feet. The water analogy actually really works, because sometimes I get slammed by a big wave. I’m knocked off my floaty, gasping beneath the hair that’s all in my face when my head pops up above the water. But I remember that I HAVE a floaty. So I locate it and climb back on and continue to watch.

Is that happy? Feels pretty good to me.

Can we circle back to the initial WTF? You know, Michelle’s not happy…that one?

For years, I showed the world I was happy. I was really convincing—hell, I even convinced myself. I’m sure this is why some people were surprised when I jettisoned the husband. And I’m still a little sensitive about my life choices—I noticed that as I was writing this. They affect people who I love and have loved in a big way.

You know, I spend my days trying to assess patients for depression, happiness, well-being and I get it wrong. Because I’m not a psychic. All I have to work with is what the patient is showing me AND what I’m open to see. Maybe the most powerful lesson from becoming the watcher is this: life is experienced through a filter. We project, avoid, get defensive. We are coded to do this.

The practice of watching lets me glimpse the filter. My job is to wonder, not to know. And so all I will do is wonder about that WTF statement, [I’ll write a blog post about it] and then I’ll let it go. Because the only person I can really know is me and I feel pretty good about her.

9/13/20 9/13/20

I don't know.

Why fall feels hopeful.

Today when I got home, I walked into my backyard and heard a loud meow.

MEOW. MEOW. MEOW.

I was not expecting this. I don't own a cat.

I peeked around the side of the house and saw a GIANT, long-haired, charcoal cat. The cat had a blue collar, so I’m going to use male pronouns (but I recognized that female cats may choose blue as well).

I greeted the cat.

I asked him if he would like to follow me through the open garage door to the world outside my fenced backyard.

MEOW. MEOW. MEOW.

“Here, kitty, kitty!” I called in my sweetest cat lady voice. [See--I KNOW cats. Though I will admit I did not want to touch him. He was HUGE.]

“Here, kitty, kitty!” Over and over again until he followed me through the garage and out to the tall grass in my side yard. And the giant cat was gone as mysteriously as he came.

I did not expect that cat.

I was talking to my sister on the phone, relaxing on my new outdoor couch, when I looked down at the deck and saw Rio, sitting with a curious look on his face glancing from my face to the dead rat at his feet.

Now, I am proud of myself because I did NOT scream, which happened the last time he presented me with an entire rat carcass.

But this time, the rat was not completely dead. I could see a little rise and fall in its chest. Rio, seeming to read my mind, attempted to pick it up again. I stopped him. Obviously, I’m the adult here. I need to take action. I grabbed a stick from under the orange tree and returned to the rat. The rise and fall had ceased.

I poked. Nothing.

When R saw the rat, he said, “Now we get to look at rat bones!”

What?!? No!

Last week, we dissected owl pellets at our friend’s house. I did not know what an owl pellet was. In case you don’t know, I will describe. When an owl eats a mouse or rat or bird or whatever little creature, it is digested partially in the first stomach. What can’t be digested is held in the first stomach while the digestible material passes into the second stomach. The owl then vomits a tight packet made of the contents of the first stomach (hair and bones). This is what makes an owl pellet.

I knew none of this until Rachel presented me with a paper plate holding three clumps of matted hair. With the kids and me looking on, she pulled apart the pellets to reveal evidence of three rat skeletons. And I knew that her daughter was going to be just fine in online kindergarten this fall.

But back to the undigested rat on my deck.

Because this isn’t my first rodeo, I knowledgeably covered my hand in a poo bag, picked the deceased rat up by the tail and carried him to the trash can. He left a small pool of blood on the decking, which I doused in hydrogen peroxide and then rinsed with water. (I have a large supply of hydrogen peroxide now, after learning that is what’s needed to rid your dog of skunk smell).

My backyard is tiny.

The whole lot is 1/3 of a regular sized lot in my neighborhood.

And yet.

It is full of surprises.

This afternoon I was talking to my sister.

I’ve been going through another existential crisis following family court and my birthday marking another year. I didn’t really expect it. Not my first family court rodeo. Not my first birthday rodeo. I have been to lots of rodeos—duh!

My sisters are a good audience for my crazy moments. This past week, I made a recommendation that my sister moon her husband in response to a marital dispute. I was meaning to be silly but the more we talked about it, it seemed like the idea had real merit. If you want any free marriage advice, DM me, okay? I’m a secret genius on this stuff. Still waiting to hear if the mooning worked….

So I was talking to my other sister and she gave me the idea to write a blog post about why Fall feels hopeful. She said that was the article she wanted to read.

First I thought about the fall when I trained for the half marathon because my then-husband didn’t want to have a baby yet and I was bored with my career and making dinner and washing dishes. I am not a runner and it felt really cliche because so many people in medicine run out of ways to punish themselves after school ends, so they take up punishing habits like running. But the half marathon was a really good choice in that moment.

I ran three or four times a week under the massive oak trees in our historic Omaha neighborhood. My mom was so delighted with my decision to do this, that I flippantly said, “If you think it’s such good idea, why don’t you do it too?” And she did.

The race was on Thanksgiving day. In Omaha. It was FIFTEEN degrees when we started. It was EIGHTEEN degrees when we finished. The bagels and bananas they provided post-race were frozen solid. We had McDonald’s for Thanksgiving Dinner that year.

But the running put me in a really good place for the winter. Since I left my home on the range in Wyoming (aka—where the skies are not cloudy all day), I’ve struggled with mild depression in the winter—this is part of why I love living in San Diego. And the regular endorphin boost of that exercise made a big difference.

So there’s one idea. If you need a Fall boost—run a half marathon.

…I GUESS.

But it also seems unfair to ask anyone to train for a half marathon when they are working from home and home schooling kids and worried about the upcoming election and the health of their loved ones. And there’s also racism and terrorism and thieves and rapists and Facebook.

That’s a lot.

Already.

So if the half marathon’s not your thing, this is the one other idea I have.

Be open to being surprised.

Liz Gilbert talked about this in such a lovely way on her instagram stories last week. She called it a spiritual practice, to which cynicism is the opposite.

Cynicism is the voice inside that says, I know how this goes. I know who that person is. I know what’s coming. The writing is on the wall. I know. I know. OH—I know.

And we cling to that because we want to feel in control. And knowing feels like control.

But you know what?

I DON’T know.

I don’t know how this going to go.

I don’t know if Trump is going to get another four years. I don’t know if I’m spoiling my son or being too hard on him. I don’t know if the tumor in my neck has grown. I don’t know what that greasy stuff in my patient’s hair was today. I don’t know if I’ll catch any waves. I don’t know how to make sense of the COVID-19 news. I don’t know if I’ll sleep tonight. I don’t know if there will be a goat in my backyard tomorrow. (If there is it will certainly be a distinguished city goat with a neatly trimmed beard!)

i. don't. know.

Of course I have opinions and fears and anxieties about all of these things. But I’m willing to be surprised.

I’m willing to be wrong.

That’s the equivalent of faith to me. That’s accepting divine will. It’s not, I know how this goes. It’s not that I get what I pray for. It’s not that I have all the answers.

It’s that I don’t! And there’s some energy, some force, some goodness in the universe that is working it out for my specific growth. So let me leave it to said universe.

That’s hope.

That’s spirit.

Notice the cat and the rat and the owl pellets with wonder.

Anything is possible.

3/22/20 3/22/20

I Just Want to Feel Like My Old Self

My brain wants to tell me that when things go back to normal, then I can be my old self again. But my old self isn’t waiting in the wings. She’s here with me right now.

At my last job, most of my cases were people with ADHD, depression, anxiety and mild bipolar disorder. I saw lots of people for their first ever psychiatry appointment and this was a phrase that frequently came up: “ I just want to feel like my old self.”

At first I wasn’t sure what to say to this. It sounded like a really reasonable request. More reasonable for the 20 year old college student having his first bout of depression, than the 63 year old who was looking back on her 20s as the example of “old self,” but still…how do you go backwards?

I related to it. Some circumstances are temporary. School feels this way. There is always the end of the semester, a winter break, after that next test…maybe that’s part of what teaches us early on that we should just hold on until the other side of this thing. The thing being abnormal, so once it’s over we can go back to normal.

But what about the experiences that forever changed me? Or forever changed my circumstances? Things that it seems there is no “other side” to get to? Mark Nepo described this as going through a door and you turn around to go back through it but the door is gone. Where is my old self in all of this?

When I sat across the table from patients who had been clawing or pining for the old self for years, I wanted to yell, “SHE’S DEAD! YOU’LL NEVER FIND HER AGAIN! STOP LOOKING!” That’s not therapeutic—and it’s not true. What actually came out of my mouth was a nudging toward new self. Maybe that person you used to be, maybe she had never experienced the death of a child, twenty years in a loveless marriage, sexual assault, a major professional setback, or being diagnosed with a chronic illness.

Maybe that old self is irrelevant now. Maybe she doesn’t know enough of the reality of life. But irrelevant seems inaccurate too.

What I am hinting at is acceptance. Acceptance that the world may look completely different on the other side of a major life event. Things may shift in dramatic ways. And my brain wants to tell me that there will be a back-to-normal moment again. That is when I will feel like my old self.

But what I’ve realized is that on both sides and in the middle of all of these circumstances, it’s just me. There is no other side to get to. I am waiting there for myself already, just as I am here with me now.

I’ve been thinking about it with this COVID-19 noise. I’ve been in a lot of anxiety, mostly because I’m afraid life will look different for a long time. And I really liked my pre-pandemic life. I am not unique in that I have had to cancel travel plans, scramble for childcare, worry about toilet paper and canned goods and old people who seem to keep going out despite the warnings.

Normal day. R's "Grass Game" on the sidewalk outside preschool.

I worry about whether I (and we) are being careful enough with this or taking it too seriously. I worry because I’m not doing my regular fitness stuff and because I’m stress-eating more carbs. I worry about responsibly consuming all of the produce I’ve purchased. I worry I will fritter my time away watching TV or talking this all over for the fiftieth time on the phone with a friend or family member. I worry I won’t take advantage of the sunshine when it’s out. That’s right! I have FOMO for sunshine.

There is so much available to be worried about. And my brain wants to tell me that when things go back to normal, then I can be my old self again. But my old self isn’t waiting in the wings. She’s here with me right now. Along with the 75 other versions of my old self that I’ve been in the last 36 years. Along with the new self that is growing out of the worry and the sunshine and the produce and the yoga and conversation I am feeding her today.

All selfs are welcome on all sides of life's challenges. They’re all here to stay anyway.

I heard Tracy Ellis Ross say that her most frequent prayer was, “Gentle, gentle, Tracy. Give yourself a thousand breaks and a thousand more.” I think I will adopt this.

Gentle, gentle, Michelle. There is room for all of you, the old and the new, in this beautiful, chaotic world.

Sat nam.

1/12/20 1/12/20

"Embrace the incarnation."

It was shortly after this I realized that maybe I should just let myself be 36. Maybe I should let myself embrace the incarnation.

I’m not huge into new year’s resolutions. If I see a change I want to make in my life, I don’t wait until January to do it, or I'll procrastinate it for the same reasons I do during the rest of the year. But the new year does mark the passing of time and it has a way of forcing some reflection. So here’s my inventory for 2019.

I had some real growth in healing my relationship with the feminine. I learned the sensibility of rest. I learned to stop running from pain and running at things so hard. I learned how to sit alone and tolerate (even love) myself without having 7000 things to distract me. Maybe learned is too strong of a word—I GLIMPSED this on more than one occasion. And that was pretty powerful.

I finally finally finalized my divorce. It seems it’s never really over but I have a paper showing it’s done. There’s still a human in the world with a seemingly large amount of animosity toward me that I am going to raise a super fun little boy with. That animosity is a weight. It ties us together and will probably continue to do so for years to come. And I will live with it.

I tried dating. I did my best. I got my heart broken. I ended up confused. I realized I still have a lot of healing to do in my relationships with men. I carry very little judgment for how people behave during and after divorce. Marriages that don’t work are gnarly. Marriages that do work should probably be a little gnarly too if everyone’s being honest. No benefit from judging. Overall I learned that I like men. I probably can’t live my life out as a celibate monk or a lesbian (believe me—the thought has crossed my mind because it would be so much simpler… !?). So I will keep trying.

I learned four is way better than three. R is four now and he is FUN! There were so many hard feelings that lifted somewhere in the transition from three to four. I learned I really like building things with Legos—definitely my favorite of his toys. I learned pretend play with cars and jets is my least favorite. Jets on Navy Missions, as he loves to play, are doomed to missile attacks and death. Cars always crash. It’s a lot of carnage for my delicate soul. But let me build a house, car, car wash, desert buggy, phone, record player, elephant, airplane, gas station with Legos and I am in!

Puppies are no picnic. Even if they only way 2.7lb. Even if they are the most adorable thing anyone has ever seen. If you don’t like the idea of excrement everywhere or if you're not in the habit of going outside for two minutes 400 times a day—puppies are a great mental exercise.

R has been asking for a puppy (and a dog and a cat and a kitten and a baby sister) for a while. I realize that you don’t buy a dog for a four year old—that’s delusional. But if I’m being honest, the decision to get a puppy came out of grief from said masculine relationships. Something about swearing off men. It would have been seven cats except that I couldn’t tolerate the cat hair. If I’m REALLY honest, a part of me wanted to become that old woman that crochets with her ten cats by her side and drinks chardonnay while watching Dateline and soap operas. I saw the appeal for a minute.

But maybe this is where that masculine energy I’ve been working off of since my teens came in handy. I couldn’t do that. At least not now. So I have this sweet little ball of fur that absolutely loves me even though I’m not sure why. And we have a plan for potty training now so I am starting to love him too.

So there’s the update from 2019. Now what about 2020? First a little story.

I took R to the swimming pool at the rec center with his cousins when I was in Utah over the holidays. I was excited because he’s been doing swim school and has made such great progress. We arrived at the rec center full of anticipation. When we entered the pool area, everyone was out of the water for a swim break. R looked over the massive play structure in the wading pool and cried, “This pool is awesome!” We waited on the side. The jets of water began to spray throughout the play structure. The life guards blew their whistles signaling that we could enter the pool. This followed by an eruption of delighted screams as children charged the pool from all sides.

R screamed with terror. I spent the next 30 minutes trying to entice him into the water, trying to get him to relax and enjoy the pool. This concluded with me carrying my screaming child to the side where I dumped him into grandma’s capable arms. I was angry. As it was happening I saw how ridiculous it was. How many of my friends and family have I observed wanting their kids to participate in “fun” things and then get frustrated when their child responds with fear and anxiety? A lot. Maybe all. I should know better. Still here I was. Indignant thoughts about how much I had spent on swim lessons--“What are we even doing this for!?” I asked my sister. She has four kids and with a kind, been-there-done-that attitude, she listened to my rant.

It was shortly after this I realized that maybe I should just let myself be 36. Maybe I should let myself embrace the incarnation. I’ve done all this soul searching and learning about consciousness, spirituality and love. Part of this has been motivated by the hope that maybe it will help me skip some of the suffering. I’ve realized that my suffering is all of my own creation. So why can’t I stop creating it?

Elizabeth Gilbert wrote this of Ram Dass’ quote and I found it particularly helpful:

“Embrace the incarnation.” Essentially what he meant was this: He had spent enough time in meditation and transcendental and psychedelic states to understand that what we call “reality” is all an illusion. He knew that we are in fact not these bodies, nor are we these lives. He knew that consciousness is a divine dance—that it’s all projection, that none of this is actually TRUE. He knew that we are all ONE, all God. And yet, he also understood that on another plane we ARE here. We ARE separate beings in these weird meat bodies, with these particular personalities, dramas, and gifts, performing in this strange play.

The trick of life, he said, was to understand that none of this is real, but to embrace the incarnation, anyhow. Throw yourself into life, despite the fact that it’s all a dream. He knew that he was not really this guy named Ram Dass (he was actually God in disguise, just like you and I are) but he played that character beautifully—with big-hearted compassion, with endless curiosity, with love and humor, and with a mischievous wink that seemed to say, “It’s all just a game, but ain’t it Grand?”

Elizabeth Gilbert, Instagram 12/23/2019

So my resolution (if this can even be called that) for 2020 is to embrace the incarnation.

I’ll make all the mistakes that 36 year olds make.
I’ll hustle in the way that 36 year olds hustle.
I’ll spend money on stupid 36 year old things.
I’ll worry about vain things the way 36 year olds do.
I’ll mistake accomplishments and material things for happiness.
I’ll give the passionate speeches that 36 year olds give about political, religious, corporate and educational institutions.
I’ll make the parenting blunders that 36 year olds make.
I will worry too much about the cleanliness and furnishings of my house.
I’ll modify my diet in ways that probably don’t make sense.
I’ll read the books that 36 year olds read.
I’ll write the stories that 36 year olds write.
I’ll talk to god the way 36 year olds do, in moments of pain or as I relax into sleep.
I’ll let my heart bleed for the suffering in the world.
I’ll put on my big girl pants and go to work and make dinner and pay the electric bill.
I’ll waste time watching TV.
I’ll wash the dishes and wipe little boy bottoms and snuggle and kiss and yell…

…because I only get one year to be 36.

9/4/19 9/4/19

My most helpful thought

Last week I found myself rolling back and forth on the ground with a bunch of giggling asian women. I was in my kundalini yoga class at the YMCA. We were doing an exercise where we put our hands out in front of us, superman-style, while lying on our stomachs, then we turned to the right until we were on our backs, then back to center/stomach, then to the left. As I rolled back and forth on the floor with these giddy women, I thought, I live such a rich life!

One year ago I was entrapped in the agony of my thoughts. I was just beginning to question whether my thoughts were really true. But I still had so many to sort through. It felt like every waking moment was thought-thought-thought-thought, one after another. I was starting to question them but I still had so many. There were the thoughts, and then there were the thoughts that were judgments of the thoughts, and then there were some judgment thoughts of those thoughts. My brain and my ego were really running wild. And it became untenable. So I started some intense work on watching and then dismantling my thoughts.

This brought me into the most disorienting season of my life to date. I spent almost all of October separated from my son. He was traveling with his dad for two weeks. Then, the week I was supposed to have him was interrupted when I got a stomach flu that was so severe I couldn’t care for him. I had to ask his dad to come pick him up. I entertained him with TV for much of the day, while I laid in bed without any energy. I remember at dinnertime he asked me for something to eat. It took me about five minutes to raise myself from the bed and into the kitchen to pull something out of the fridge for him. I have experienced this kind of decimation before, but never as a mother and never alone.

After the stomach flu, I went to NIH for my ten days of testing. The writing saved me. I set a goal to blog every day and it pulled me through those days of isolation. For the first time I allowed myself some introspection on the NIH experience. I challenged myself to stay open and to find connection there. And I shared it on my blog which helped me feel slightly less alone during the cold October days.

The days between NIH and February run together in my memory. I remember early mornings, where I would wake before the sun, unable to remain in bed. I walked a lot. On the days I didn’t have R, I would put on my headphones and room my neighborhood early in the morning listening to Brandi Carlile and Oprah Super Soul podcasts. I lost weight. I felt excoriated. I heard Mark Nepo describe it that way and it felt precise to my condition. My physique and my spirit were polished away to the essential elements. And as Cheryl Strayed put it so eloquently, I floated like a rabid ghost through those days and weeks.

I learned that R would be going on vacation with his dad in February. With the ghost of the previous October breathing down my neck, I booked a trip to Hawaii to occupy most of R’s vacation days. I had been studying Mary Oliver’s work prior to the trip and I spent that my time in Hawaii focusing on the present moment. Nature has a way of pulling me into the present, and I let that heal me. I returned feeling revitalized. I vowed to reinvest in regular exercise. I was also eating a banana with Nutella every day to help with my stress calorie deficit.

After Hawaii, life kind of crashed back onto me. I clung fiercely to my commitment to stay open to the good that was available to me. I walked, I lifted weights, I played with R. I was trying to stay open at work, which made work increasingly heavy. I was losing patients to drug addiction and strange accidents. I was attempting to shepherd heroin addicts toward feeling their feelings. I was open to all of the pain and it almost swallowed me. Then I wandered into a kundalini yoga class by accident.

I had begun to seek out a more spiritual yoga practice. So when I saw the instructor with her colorful mandala scarf laid out on the floor and the battery-powered candles, I was open. In the first class I met the true version of myself. My therapist asked me to name her but all I could come up with was Michelle because she seemed like the purest version of me. I envisioned her as I went through the exercises, this open, playful, loving, interesting creature. I kept coming back to kundalini because I wanted to see her again. I wanted to know her better, this person who had been buried inside of me.

In kundalini, I saw metaphors for joy and pain and trial and play and boundaries and kindness. The practice opened me further but it also taught me to protect myself. I heard my voice in the chanting and singing. I felt myself in the movements. I finally located the sacred place inside of me, the part that god put there long ago, the part that is uniquely wise and kind.

My practice helped me understand my role at work. I wasn’t supposed be a repository for all of the pain my patients carry. My job was to identify those who were open and to shine some light their way. For the rest, medication management would be enough.

My yoga practice helped me find stillness. My mind became quieter. I began to watch my thoughts with curiosity. I got better at identifying the useful ones and noticing the useless ones. That’s how my original thought was born. I live such a rich life!

This thought has carried me through my faith transition, a divorce that is still incomplete, raising a little boy through the terrible two and threenager years, worries about tumors, and opening the part of me that is capable of loving deeply.

And I think rich is the word for it, because there is so much depth in my life. So many colors. So much vibrancy. Some of it has been penetrating darkness. But I am equally opening to joy. I am a rich woman, indeed.

I made this list of things that have changed in the past year and I’m sharing it with you, with the simple hope that you might reflect on your life in a similar way. Namaste and sat nam.

I’m better aquatinted with myself.
I have more trust in myself.
I’ve started dating.
I am getting my first glimpses of how to forgive.
I started a spiritual yoga practice.
My brain is so much quieter.
I opened myself up emotionally to my patients and then had to figure out how to shut that down somewhat.
Eight of my patients passed away.
I started to solo travel.
I was more honest with myself and the people around me than ever before.
I kept a toddler alive and relatively happy through the terrible two and threenager years.
I started painting and drawing again.
I picked up knitting again.
I started playing the piano and singing again.
I began to understand humility.
I began to see the part of god that lives in me.
I published 114 blog posts (that’s 112,505 words) and some of you have read every one!

8/5/19 8/5/19

Sit and smile

I’m going to pause here because THIS is mind-blowing for me. I’m not required to constantly shift and work and adjust and strain until perfection is obtained? Really? There is space in life for a moment’s pause to sit and smile?

I was reading tonight in Eat Pray Love and I came across a passage where Elizabeth Gilbert is learning from a Ketut, a Balinese medicine man. She writes:

He tells me that there are many ways to find God but most are too complicated for Westerners, so he will teach me an easy meditation. Which goes, essentially, like this: sit in silence and smile. I love it. He’s laughing even as he’s teaching it to me. Sit and smile. Perfect….

You make serious face like this, you scare away good energy. To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver.

Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love

When I read this it made me smile because it made me think of my own yoga experience. I used to be so annoyed when the instructor would tell us to smile in a particularly challenging pose. My brain didn’t know what to do with this request, so I would paste on a smile or roll my eyes and ignore the instruction. As Princess Buttercup said to the Dread Pirate Roberts, You mock my pain!

But there is power in this simple request: sit and smile. Actually I think this is one of the most important disciplines to master for one who is seeking happiness. Sit and smile. Let’s break it down.

Sit. This implies stillness. A quieting of the monkey brain, which, for me, initially feels like a wrestling match. And when it becomes clear that the monkey is going to win, then a release or surrender. It’s like the decision to relinquish control IS what ultimately grants it. So one must first learn to sit in stillness.

Smile. A smile is just a facial expression, but I love what Ketut instructs, Even smile in your liver. To really smile it has to come from deep inside—at least, to really mean it. It’s the letting go that really allows for this. It’s hard to have a genuine smile through your entire body when you are white-knuckling in anyway.

Thank you, yoga, for teaching me this. I’ve noticed this when I’ve continued to hold the pose, but understood that perfection is not required. And furthermore, constant shifting of the pose until theoretical perfection is obtained—also not required.

I’m not sure I was ever conscious enough to notice my constant shifting and adjusting, let alone to decide when/if it was necessary. The truth is, I do want to be better at the yoga pose and at life. I’m going to naturally shift and progress, but there is something to be said for holding the pose without adjustment.

This brings me to my main thought of the past month. I re-listened to Sue Monk Kidd on the Oprah Super Soul podcast while I was in Santa Cruz. She, so pleasantly, told Oprah,

“I remember thinking, It’s time to start finding things…There’s a hunger in you and I think it’s appropriate to follow that, but we should also be finders at the same time. It’s one of those paradoxes that I’m getting more comfortable living with. That we can be a seeker and a finder at the same time.

We have to acknowledge sometimes that this moment is enough, this place is enough, I am enough, it’s okay. And if I never seek another thing, it’s enough.”

Sue Monk Kidd on Oprah Super Soul Sunday

This is where I’m trying to live for the time being: This moment is enough. This place is enough. I’m enough.

I'm learning to sit and smile.

6/9/19 6/9/19

Who is Heavenly Mother?

3/17/19 3/17/19

The Marco Polo Prayer

Sometimes I can’t feel god. I used to think this was because of something I had done. That god had withdrawn from me. I learned in church that god cannot dwell in unholy places so I assumed if I couldn’t feel god then something unholy was going on inside of me. I felt shame about this. I thought it meant something bad about me. But I was wrong.

I am not sure exactly when I figured this out. It was sometime after I had given up on doing everything correctly. After I had shed another cage. I observed that there were good people—people that I knew to be truly good at their essence—that didn’t keep all of the commandments, that didn’t worry about all the things. I wondered if they felt god. I believed they did. I wondered if we could really distance ourselves from god. And why would a god, who truly loved us, want distance from us?

This didn’t make sense.

I thought about the times when bad things happen to good people. Like when I was diagnosed with cancer at age 21. Like when my friend’s babysitter was picked up for a DUI with her kids in the car the night she left for a trip across the country. Like when my sister’s daughter had her first seizure the night she left on vacation. Like when my grandmother’s oldest son was born with a heart defect. Like when my friend’s daughter developed leukemia and was maimed by the treatment. Like when my other friend gave birth and then broke her leg four days later at the same time as her dog was dying of cancer. Where is god in all of this? Where are you, god!?!

“I’m right here. I’m right here.”

God is always here. Right here.

I learned this in the midst of my own suffering. Mark Nepo related his experience with terrible sickness from chemotherapy to Oprah on her Supersoul podcast. After a night of vomiting to the point of vomiting blood, Mark’s wife asked, “Where is god?” And Mark, in a moment of excoriated clarity, declared the knowing, “He’s right here.”

This idea of suffering and god has formed a new kind of prayer for me. I find myself, in moments where god feels particularly distant, asking, Are you there, god? Then I answer for god, I’m right here. It's like a game of Marco Polo, where I call out and god responds. And it always feels true. God is right here, in the happy, in the suffering, in the mundane. God is here inside of me.

God is in the peace AND in the suffering. God is both. God is all.

So if god is in all of it, all of the human experience, then surely it is sacred. Sometimes we get this confused in our minds. We think god will preserve the righteous. The scriptures are filled with this sentiment. Yet bad things continue to happen to people we know and love and people we’ve never met that we only hear about in tragedy via the news. That voice in my head that wants to distance me from god would say, If you would have done this differently then this might have gone differently, or If you were really listening to God you might have avoided tragedy. Or prayed harder or been kinder or read more scriptures or donated more money or whatever things are on the to-do list of the "righteous."

Cheryl Strayed wrote this in a life-changing (for me) installment of her advice column, Dear Sugar. It was in response to a letter writer who was struggling with her belief in god after her infant daughter developed a brain tumor that required invasive surgery. Please visit this link for the full piece, as it is beautiful:

“Countless people have been devastated for reasons that cannot be explained or justified in spiritual terms. To do as you are doing in asking if there were a God why would he let my little girl have to have possibly life threatening surgery?—understandable as that question is—creates a false hierarchy of the blessed and the damned. To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for true compassion. It implies a pious quid pro quo that defies history, reality, ethics, and reason. It fails to acknowledge that the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having first been nailed to the cross.”

The Human Scale, Dear Sugar

The very half that makes rising necessary—is first having been nailed to the cross. Maybe we are all to be nailed to the cross in this life. We are meant to be set ablaze. And even as this is happening we are meant to reach out to each other and up to god. Maybe god is the love the burns between us in such moments of vulnerability and pain. Maybe that is a close as we get to understanding god’s love for us. Maybe that’s when we touch it.

What if you allowed your God to exist in the simple words of compassion others offer to you? What if faith is the way it feels to lay your hand on your daughter’s sacred body? What if the greatest beauty of the day is the shaft of sunlight through your window? What if the worst thing happened and you rose anyway? What if you trusted in the human scale? What if you listened harder to the story of the man on the cross who found a way to endure his suffering than to the one about the impossible magic of the Messiah? Would you see the miracle in that?

The Human Scale, Dear Sugar

What if god was here, right here, always?

Cover art for this piece: I saw this on display at The Broad museum in LA. It's by Edward Ruscha, The Right People and Those Other People, 2011.

3/5/19 3/5/19

How to start feeling

I grew up in a house with four women which meant there was a lot of estrogen going around. We were pretty adept at late-night sessions, hashing out the latest crises in our lives, letting our advice spill over into the wee hours when judgment for such things is waning and emotions are running high. I was always the more detached, cerebral unit in this group. I used humor as an escape and a facade to avoid these tell-all episodes when possible. For years, these sessions were the glue that held the women in my family together. They defined our get-togethers. Sometimes they left us feeling closer and sometimes they just left us feeling more crazy and isolated. The outcome was always a gamble.

Thankfully, these sessions have changed. My sisters came to San Diego for a getaway weekend this past week. We’ve become better at this over the years. It’s easier. For one thing, the facade is starting to come down. We’re not faking the always-clean house anymore. We’ve dropped the idea that we should have it all together.

Another change that is coming about is emotional autonomy. We aren’t perfect at it yet, but we’ve started to trust each other to take care of our own crap. We are adopting the philosophy of I’m going to assume you’re okay with whatever is happening unless you tell me it’s not okay. Maybe in some family dynamics this would be moving in the wrong direction, but in ours it’s magic. We have a history of being endlessly caretaking to the point that no one will say where they want to have dinner for fear that someone will be disappointed but go along with it anyway. It’s enough to make anyone bonkers.

The third things is that we’ve started to cool it on the advice. Advice, usually, just sucks. It’s not helpful and it often makes the advised person feel like an idiot. We probably suck at this one the most. We still relentlessly advise each other because how do you not try to help your sister when she is telling you about something in her life that is causing her pain!?! That’s why I said we’ve STARTED to cool it. No miraculous change here—just incremental.

So I was actually really honored when my sister opened up to me about avoiding her feelings. She realized she was doing this a lot and had been for years. Numbing out the negative emotion with food or TV or whatever. She said, with the bravest honesty, that she wondered what it would take to give that up--and if she even wanted to.

Her simple utterance rang all my truth alarms. I told her that that was a VERY valid question. It’s a lot to feel. It’s so much. And at first you won’t know how to get it out—how to unbury that stuff that’s been locked away under layers of food and TV and shopping and piles of subconscious. You’ll notice yourself binge eating or binge watching and, now because you’re slightly more conscious than before, you see it. You think, I’m just numbing—what am I numbing? And you won’t be able to figure it out at first.

And you’ll judge yourself because that’s what you’ve always done. Your brain will say things to you like, You’re weak. You always do this. And then you’ll feel some shame about the numbing behavior which will really only feed it and you’ll wonder if you will ever get off this cycle. But what you don’t realize is that your foot is already on the path to consciousness. Because you noticed the numbing! You identified it. So a few weeks or months or years will go by and sometimes you’ll notice the numbing and identify it as it’s happening and sometimes you’ll see it after the fact and sometimes you won’t see it at all.

Then one day, as you reach for your first handful of Cadbury Mini Eggs—or maybe it will happen because you’re surprisingly out of chocolate—you’ll stop yourself and decide to really drill down. What is the feeling I’m numbing? You’ll search for a word, the chocolate smell heavy in the air. Anger…fear…jealousy…tired…disappointment—DISAPPOINTMENT! That’s it! I’m disappointed.

You’ll retrace your feeling steps back through the events of the last ten minutes or ten hours or ten days or ten years to realize that what you’re feeling in this moment is disappointment. And then you will wonder what it feels like--without the chocolate.

You’ll picture a time when you felt disappointed. You might even have to reach back to childhood if you’ve been numbing for a while. You’ll lean into that memory as you lean into the current moment. The lean means that you are getting into your body. You will pull that feeling through your gut, to your fingertips and as you let go of the stoicism you will begin to cry. You might be driving down the freeway sobbing over your steering wheel. You might prostrate yourself on the kitchen floor as the disappointment takes over. You let it.

Part of you thinks this is completely ridiculous. Another part of you worries that now that you’ve started crying you might never stop. But you’ve already come this far so you continue to sob. Tears are now coming from the darkest corners of your psyche. DISAPPOINTMENT. It’s such a simple emotion, so familiar, so easy to bury under layers of chocolate or busy-ness or novels or TV. But now it’s racking you in full force. Your face is covered in snot and tears. You feel strange as the sobs start to slow—no wait, now they’re back again full-force—okay, now they are slowing.

That’s the thing about emotions—they can’t last forever. This is as equally true for the good ones as it is for the painful ones. You look in the mirror and see your swollen eyes and snotty face, but it’s not pathetic. There’s a little fire that’s started in your chest. It’s the fire of self-respect because you did the hard thing—the brave thing. You faced the disappointment dragon. You shouted and beat your chest at the mouth of his cave and he devoured you. Yet here you are on the other side of it, soggy but intact. And that simple fact is proof that you can do it again. Over and over and over again. You can be devoured by the dragon because you were born to do this. You were born to feel—not to numb, but TO FEEL.

The weeks and months and years will pass. Your emotional vocabulary will grow. You will begin to see the dragons on the horizon and the fear of being devoured will become less. Still, there will be times when you put on the sumo suit of chocolate or TV or exercise or podcast. You will check out and the dragon will pass by, but it will secretly be waiting.

Sometimes you will notice these moments and you will judge yourself for it. I should know better! I am enlightened! You really suck at this! But another voice will tell you, you are human and the balance is what it’s all about. Be kind to yourself. Be patient with yourself. Love yourself. That is the way to freedom. At first the shoulds will be loud in your ears. You will wonder if you will EVER be good at this.

The weeks and months and years will pass and you will realize that good is silly. Good is a box and no one is shaped like a box. We only come in human shapes. By then you will suck less at this enlightenment business. But that saying that goes something like, the more I learn the less I know will have come to pass.

You will be very brave about being devoured by the dragon then. For this reason, some people will think that you have too many feelings. You won’t worry too much about those people because you will understand that we all have dragons lurking on the horizon.

Sometimes you will succeed at standing firm while the dragon devours you and other times you will find yourself running to food or shopping or TV or drugs or incessant napping or alcohol or social media or sex or gambling. But because you are conscious more often than not, you notice when you do these things. And the reward of it becomes less because you see it for what it is—not an escape but a delay.

And you start to be kind to yourself, to understand that sometimes you NEED a delay. You aren’t yet ready to be devoured by the next dragon. But because you know you are someone who faces down dragons, you trust that you will eventually summon the courage to be devoured and you will love yourself as you wait for that day.

Here’s to the journey, sister. I'm on it too.

2/23/19 2/23/19

There is beauty in the wobble.

Saul was one of the first patients in San Diego to scream at me. I remember the first time seeing him. I went into the field with my nurse to see patients in their homes. We came to his independent living facility (ILF), which was house in a poorer neighborhood in San Diego. I followed my nurse, Annie, into the house, into the kitchen, down the hallway. She was calling out the patient’s name. He appeared from one of the bedrooms. There were other residents of the house watching us, not bothered by what is a very routine intrusion.

My patient, I’ll call him Saul, was angry about not having Artane, one of his medications. He spoke quickly, his eyes pried wide open; he was visibly dirty, his hair short but pushed up in strange directions. He was wearing an oversized camo jacket, a t-shirt and cargo pants. The conversation about medication changed course erratically. I tried to introduce myself but he looked at me with disdain and rambled on. Soon he was mumbling out threats about bombs, becoming more animated and difficult to understand. I followed Annie’s lead as we walked out of the house and Saul followed us. We got back into her car and Saul stood by Annie’s window gesturing wildly, now screaming about Artane and bombs. She offered him a bottle of water through her cracked window but he refused. She pulled forward carefully and we left Saul there standing in the street shouting. This was one version of Saul.

There was another version that appeared months later. I drove to a different ILF to see Saul. By this time I had begun seeing patients on my own in their homes. Saul emerged from a quiet house where I was not invited in. We sat in some lawn chairs on the driveway. He was silent, eerily so. I asked him all of my usual questions about sleep and mood and appetite and medication. His gesticulated quiet, one-word responses. He was losing weight. He complained of being hungry frequently. Since he appeared to have stopped using meth, I wondered if he was on too much antipsychotic medication and being dulled by that. I offered to reduce his medication and he agreed to this. I suggested supplementing with food from food banks but he quietly and hopelessly said the others in the house would eat it.

There was another version of Saul that was in my office only a few weeks ago. His hair was dyed jet black. He was wearing an ill-fitting sport jacket and a button down shirt. He was happy and relatively at ease. We went through the regular questions. His thoughts were linear and easy to follow. He wasn’t what anyone would describe as “normal” but he was good. Saul looked good and he felt well. A few days later he was dead from methamphetamine overdose.

I have other stories about my psychiatric patients that sound more like successes. I like telling those stories better. But what I’m really learning to appreciate is the wobble. The wobble is the the fluctuation between the ups and the downs, the victories and defeats, the moments when I feel my capability and the ones when I feel my weakness. I used to spend so much time focusing on those high points that I forgot about the beauty of the lower half of the curve. And there is beauty there.

Maybe we miss it because the cycle happens too quickly. A couple of days ago I got an upsetting text from my ex-husband. I responded reasonably, initially, but then I devolved. I felt justified. I probably was. That night was a bit of a tailspin. I chose to numb out the fear and pain rather than let it pass through me. I went to sleep early.

The next morning I woke to my alarm at 7am. There were broken rain clouds visible through my bedroom window. I could see the wind was blowing so there was a thought that I should stay in bed—a compelling, logical thought. I had another thought too: “You have R this weekend so this is the last morning for the next four days when you have the luxury of being able to walk to a coffee shop and sit and write.” This was enough to get me out from beneath the covers and on my way.

The morning air was crisp and the big clouds were more majestic than threatening. The little neighborhood coffee shop was buzzing with caffeine and good mornings. I sat down with my laptop to write and I pulled out what I had been reading the night before:

“Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be—if we are to experience long survival—a continuous “recurrence of birth” (palengenesia) to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death. For it is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence is a snare. When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified—and resurrected; dismembered totally, and then reborn.”

A Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell

I realized that I had been reborn in the morning. I shook off the night before and rose again. Maybe that is all we are asked to to. Rise again. Rise again. Rise again. The happy ending we dream of, we wait for, we anticipate with bated breath, maybe it’s just the transcendence of the rise. It’s the moment when I pop my head above the cloud cover and feel the warm sun on my face. Even as I know I will sink down under the gray layer again. It’s inevitable!

So the other night I was dismembered and the next morning I am reborn. The acceptance of this cycle/process feels free. It means that I don’t have to mire myself in shame, I can simply wake in the morning, wonder at my dismemberment for a moment, then shake it off and be born new. As I walked home from the coffee shop, I thought about the ways nature teaches this: the daily sunrise and sunset, the seasons, the lifecycles of plants, insects, animals. It’s like God was thinking, “I’ll just repeat this symbol absolutely everywhere I can so maybe they can get it.” There is beauty in the wobble. I see it, even in the life of my patient, Saul, who never freed himself from the numbing agents. I see it because I witnessed some of the occasions when he poked his head above the clouds and felt the sunshine on his face. And surly a God that teaches us to rise again in every iteration of nature, legend, scripture, folklore and fairytale, has made a way for us to rise again.

12/15/18 12/15/18

Hello, Anxiety. Who are you exactly?

I read an article recently that suggested that when anxiety appears, you have a conversation with it. Being the eager guinea pig that I am, I decided to give it a try and it was really helpful. At the risk of revealing my inner crazy, I’m sharing it here.

Me: I think there are two voices here. The first is the Judgmental Older Sister. You obviously need to go first.

Judgmental Older Sister: You know when all of this ends badly? I’m going to say I told you so. I’m going to look at you with disgust and remind you that you knew better. I’m going to be sorry for you that you are hurting, but I’ll remind you that you could have avoided the pain if you only did the smart thing.

Disclosure: I have two older sisters and, for the record, neither of them talk in the voice of the judgmental older sister. It’s just the way I picture this particular voice. Love you, sistas!

Me: I think what I am unsure about is how will I know when it’s time to REALLY let go? And will I be able to do it? That’s the deep essence of my hesitation. I am not sure about that. I guess I can say this. I knew when it was time to let go of my marriage. And I was able to do it. Why the hell would that not give me all kinds of confidence about this? I just made it through the divorce finalization which was hell. I did it. I made the decisions that got me through it. I did it with my eyes wide open. It wasn’t perfect but it was pretty damn good. So how can I be unqualified for this? I AM smart. It doesn’t mean I always do the smart thing, because who even knows what that is? Certainly not me. I spent a long time doing the “smart” things and it was totally stupid. It was my best, but if I had to do it over again, I would totally do it differently. So I’m not looking for the smart thing anymore. I’m looking for the precise thing. That’s all I can do. Because smart is too subjective. It’s too hard to call. So, Judgmental Older Sister—you are ego personified. Ego is the real fear—that I’m going to look or feel stupid. That’s the worst case scenario. I can handle that. I do stupid things all the time. Let it roll. I can get through that. Okay, let’s hear from the second voice.

Fear-of-Pain: I just don’t want us to hurt anymore. Haven’t we been through enough?

Me: You mean well. You really do. I get where you’re coming from. Pain sucks. It hurts. Sometimes it comes and stays a while. It makes me cry in front of people which can feel awkward. It makes doing little things seem hard. But it’s also where all the growth is. And avoiding the right thing or the true thing to avoid pain never works because pain is there either way. Pain shows up in the avoiding and it shows up in the embrace. Pain is on either side of the equation. It doesn’t matter how you solve it, pain will be there in some measure. So, my dear Fear-of-Pain voice, you can be present, because, you’re right—pain hurts. But you can’t drive the car. You can’t run the show because pain is coming along too, at least for part of the trip, and we have to make room.

Then I wondered… could I have a dance party with Judgmental Older Sister and Fear-of-Pain? Is that possible? Does Judgmental Older Sister dance? She can sit on the side and watch with mild loathing. Fear-of-Pain will probably only safely sway in the background. It’s okay—I will dance for all of us.

THAT I WOULD BE FREE

WILD OPEN