Meditation: The Mad-Morning Problem

I used to write a lot about meditative practice and it can look many different ways. Walking, yoga, transcendental meditation, washing the dishes, taking a bath—these are all meditative practices I have leaned on heavily to get through these past few years. 

I was facing my own dark night of the soul. I like Mark Nepo’s description of this best: That moment when it comes time to open the suitcase you’ve been carrying around, labeled Open in Case of Emergency and you realize it’s empty. 

It got pretty bleak in some of those moments. I reviewed some of my previous posts for a project I’m working on and I realized, I was much better back then at sinking into the moment. What I mean by that, is getting into my body—like what are my five senses picking up? Bird song, rain on my face, the look or feeling of leaves, the sound of wind, the sound of my breath, the beating of my heart. 

It reminded me that there is a lot of peace to be found in presence and this is something I want in my In Case of Emergency toolkit. 

So I’ve been trying to get into it more again. Partly, this is because R is in school now. I have him with me for the school days but the weeks go by with blinding speed. And still so much depends on the shoes and the teeth brushing and did you eat any breakfast or just watch TV and I know you want play and I know it feels like there is too much schedule, but there’s homework and now I’m getting external pressure from dad and teacher and that menacing crowd of parents waiting outside the kindergarten gate that I have yet to befriend. I can’t be cool! I can’t! It’s just too much. 

But then he goes away for the weekend. And the days that felt so cramped, stretch out in front of me, menacingly. Endless hours to fill where I am supposed to rest and recreate and create and catch up and clean up. There is so much to do and nothing that HAS to be done. I really enjoy some of that time but there are moments where I feel this emptiness of not having drank enough of the scent of your curly head or sunk deeply enough into play or presence. I’m not good a playing with kids so maybe just presence. Maybe that’s what I should shoot for. 

That’s where I was last weekend. The haunted look of a mother with no child but one who knows she is going to have to conjure the magic to do it all again in a few hours.

So this week, I set a gentle intention to be more present. I sat on the floor. I built ghosts out of Legos for the current Ghostbuster obsession. I read books and laid in bed with him as he succumbed to sleep. I tried not to be too upset about being late for work every. single. day. (Delayed by the panic about another school day, at the end of which, he will report he had a great day.) Repeat. Repeat. Repeat for five days followed by the crowning event of driving him 40 miles in Friday PM traffic to his dad’s house. Another thing, for which we are perpetually late.

And last night I arrived at the beach as the sun was setting. I was angry because every thing took too long and now my surf session would be cut short by the expanding night. But I told myself the water would be good for the anger. So I put on my wetsuit (brand new winter suit! btw—it was fantastic!) And I carried my board to the water. By the time my toes were wet the sun was down and the water reflected the incredible blue-gray color of the sky—not overcast but daylight fading. Sometimes I am so dazzled by the sky that I forget to look at the water as the sun disappears,  but being eye level at its surface, pulling my arms in strokes through its cool satin, made me surrender so completely to the water that I quite forgot about the sky. 

The ocean was friendly last night. It quenched my anger and pushed me gently toward the shore, like a kid on a swing, back and forth, back and forth. So much that I stayed out until only the very horizon was blue-gray and the rest of the sky began to reveal stars. 

It fixed something in me. 

And that’s what I want to show you. If you will let it work on you, presence (that skill of relying on the five senses to observe what is actually real) will fix so many things. Sometimes it takes a few days, or weeks or months and sometimes years and years. 

I don’t know how this goes for others, but for me, it eventually opens me so I can reach this place where I am lighthearted, even about the most difficult things. 

I was just considering this today at yoga because we did a kriya to release stress. This was a stressful week in a lot of ways. And at one point the teacher asked us to think of what made us the most angry, whether it be relationships, politics, physical problems—whatever. And I realized there are two times in my life I most consistently feel anger. One is the mornings getting R out the door and to school. He has so much resistance to this process and my brain tells me it’s ridiculous because he has a good time there and he knows that he must go so why all the drama!?!

And I observe myself reacting with my own drama. I blame him for making this harder than it needs to be. I blame myself that I didn’t wake up earlier so I could do my meditation and get my self together before he wakes up so I can float through his resistance like the ghost of Ghandi. It feels like I should be able to DO something about it! I have such high expectations of myself to be able to control this stuff. 

So when I was meditating in yoga and working on releasing this stored anger, I remembered one morning when I broke the pattern. It was about a month ago. And I had this moment of awareness with R in my incensed haze. I told him that I had been trying for years now, not to get mad when he gets mad about having to go to school. I’ve done the intellectual work—I know I’m just mirroring a little kid’s feelings back to him—I’ve tried the spiritual work of creating space and keeping my voice down—I’ve tried to be cool—I’ve tried to just get him in the door and then scream in my car as I drive to work. Maybe I haven’t tried everything but I have tried a lot. 

So I told him this, I have been doing my best and I can’t change this. If you get mad about going to school, more than likely, I am also going to get mad. So if you want this to change, maybe you need to try to change something too.

Obviously, that was a month ago and we still get the mad-morning problem so this was not a magic fix!

But there is really something to be said for relaxing into your anger and for sharing some of the responsibility for a relationship dynamic with the other person in the relationship. Granted, he’s five, but still, giving myself the grace that I am not solely in charge of how the mornings go—maybe it’s more accurate to say that I let go of the illusion of control over that part of my life—gives me some relief. 

Maybe I could even laugh about it —we suck at mornings! It’s comical. It’s cathartic. It’s the moment of the day when we release all of our stored anger into the world within the safety of our own home. We get to rehearse our disappointment that our time is not our own, our grief at the toys that will be left with no one to play with them, the frustration that Oreos aren’t breakfast. Maybe this anger is precious and sacred. Maybe we need it to balance out the competing energies in our lives. 

So for now, I will stop trying to change anger. 

I will feel it when I need to feel it. 

And, if I regularly return to the position of the observer, by regularly practicing meditation (presence), I have power to turn it from something that feels dark, closed and sticky, into something that flickers, breathes, dances and creates light. 

Put your arms down!

I found yoga after I began to have trouble with tolerating cardiovascular exercise during my sophomore year at BYU.  I enrolled in an intramural class, probably at my sister's recommendation.  I didn’t know it at the time but I had several tumors growing in my body that were producing adrenal hormones.  One tumor was positioned behind my pancreas, in between my aorta and vena cava.  Knowing what I do now, I suspect that when my heart started pumping vigorously, the mechanical stimulation from the movement of these vessels triggered a dump of adrenal hormones into my system from the tumor.  This resulted in cold sweats, a severe headache and sometimes feeling faint.

So yoga was a way for me to exercise without ticking off my tumors.  And that’s really how I’ve looked at it all these years—exercise.  I found it incredibly helpful for back pain.  I was blessed with an ample bosom when I was young (nursing a baby and gravity have fixed that).  I suspected this contributed to constant pain and tension between my shoulder blades.  I also took a header off the top of the cheerleading pyramid as a high school senior.  I believe this was related to the aforementioned tumor as well. The fall resulted in a concussion and a bulging cervical disc (i.e. neck pain).  The gentle stretching and strengthening of yoga gave me relief that years of physical therapy and chiropractic work didn’t generate.  

I had lots of reasons to practice yoga and I have been doing it with varying levels of consistency since my class at BYU.  

Several weeks ago, I was talking to my therapist about cancer.  She asked me if I ever resented my body through this process.  I had to pause.  I don’t think I’m someone who is resentful of my body.  I guess I haven’t had to be.  After that first year of surgery and then a couple of years of acid reflux and irritable bowels, my body has been pretty okay.  It really has been able to do everything I’ve asked of it.  

A couple of weeks ago I felt drawn back to yoga and have re-entered the practice in a very different way this time.  The exercise benefit is secondary to me now.  I am there for the spiritual benefit.  I already wrote about my first experience in The Journey of the Warrior.  That class opened me up to the power of an intention.  I am familiar with the idea of setting an intention, but I think I rarely did it before because it felt like something I was going to be bad at.  Inevitably my mind would wander and then when I noticed this I would feel shame about it.  So maybe all this personal work I’ve been doing has helped my yoga practice!

The next few classes I attended resulted in me crying silently on my mat during savasana or before the class even started.  I found myself able to immerse into the practice more deeply than ever before.  

One day, as I sat cross-legged with my hands in prayer position, I set my intention to listen.  I remember thinking, I’ve already heard from my mind and my spirit today, now it’s time to hear from my body. (It seems I have become open to all of these woo-woo types of things now...still struggling with essential oils and dietary supplements...one step at a time, people!)

As we began the vinyasa practice the instructor guided us into warrior II.  This pose requires you to stand with arms outstretched in front of and behind you.  It’s a pose I’ve done thousands of times.  For some reason, on this day, those little tiny muscles on the front of my shoulders were on fire.  They screamed at me as I held the pose.  

I observed my brain say the following: You are young, you have well-developed shoulders!  There is no reason why you should need to put your arms down!  You can hold this pose!   I heard those tiny muscles scream back, Put your arms down!  This went back and forth a few times over the course of about twenty seconds.  Then I remembered my intention and I responded (of course I am in conversation with my brain and my shoulders—isn’t everybody?!?).  I told them, Today is about listening and I’m going to put my arms down.  And then I did.  

What is interesting is what followed.  As I stood in warrior II with my arms resting by my sides, I was overcome with respect and humility toward my body.  MY BODY!  Which is such an amazing tool for all the things I love.  My body! that has tolerated cancer for 14 years.  My body! that was inhabited by my son for nine months.  My body! That can paddle a surfboard, ride a bike, lift heavy weight, and walk long distances.  My body! That holds my son close, that can smell his hair and pat his thighs.  My body! That hears and tastes and sees and smells and touches. 

But that word—tool—clued me into the work I need to do in relation to my body.  Yes, my body is a tool but it’s more than that.  It has a voice—clearly, it was speaking to me that day.  It’s pretty used to me not listening but, I wonder, what would change in my life if I listened to her more.  It feels like an opening into another phase of growth.  When does your body speak? Namaste.