The Beautiful Answer

Scratch That Itch

Ever notice that the more you can’t do something, or you’re not supposed to, the more you want to do it? Take meditation. You’re meant to quiet your mind, watch your thoughts, maybe return to your breath every time you notice your attention straying. Hopefully, you’re spending some quality time turning your awareness inward. 

So why is it every time that happens, your nose starts to itch something fierce? Or your leg falls asleep, or you literally cannot stop thinking about what you’re going to have for lunch? A few minutes ago, you were fine. But now that things are quiet, the completely ridiculous thoughts are marching forward to take over your consciousnes. And that’s all there is to it. 

I thought a lot about the itch today. The need to keep scratching, even though that may not be the best thing for us in the long run. I thought about it as I was meditating, and again when I was standing behind a little kid on an escalator. He couldn’t stop his leg from moving, or his teeth grinding, or from pulling on his mom’s leg. He was like a little meth addict wanting … I don’t know, something other than what he had. 

I thought about it after I hung up the phone with a client who just wants what she wants, and isn’t about to be dissuaded from a reality that doesn’t serve her highest good. She just wants it, and will keep scratching until it bleeds.  My sadness and continued advice may or may not ever get her to see it in a different way. 

Maybe the itch never goes away. Maybe it’s not supposed to. We can reframe and meditate and chant all we want, and maybe that itch will keep being there until we’re savvy enough not to react to it. That would be a truly beautiful world, wouldn’t it? 

There is No Now

Most of the time, spiritual people are trained to stay in the present moment, or return to the present moment. And after 16 years of meditation, I’ve engaged in quite a few of those. Taking it into “real” life is a bit harder, though, and by doing it again and again and again, I’ve learned that there is no now. Not really. 

Even having the thought “present moment” means that it has already passed. It’s history, part of the fabric of your memories, and you can’t get it back unless someone invents a time machine in the near future. 

Today, I stopped trying. I stopped trying to get back to the present moment. I let it go completely, and then I could feel my shoulders dropping, and the stress leaving me. How could I spend 16 years trying to find something that was never there in the first place? Pretty trippy, but also very true. 

When I came back to the very next moment, whatever that one was, it was fine. My mind wandered again as I drove to a store and then the art museum to see the new Ellsworth Kelly exhibition. I brought it back, and then I brought it back again, along with my consciousness. I brought my awareness into the museum with me, and I brought it back as I drove home. And this tiny, very real revelation felt like a sonic boom in my life. I was in such a state of shock that my car veered into the yogurt shop before I knew it, and well, you just have to get some when that happens, right? 

The Space Between

Today’s been a bit of a breakthrough for me. One some days, I “get” other people’s stuff - their emotions and fears, their concerns and worries. I usually know it’s not applicable to my own life when I do a quick check through my body and emotions — there’s usually some separation there — and I know I’m picking up something out there in the universe. 

Today I started picking up some weird energy — a little sadness, coming in tiny waves, and then a thought chasing that through my mind, to not get ahead and leave everyone behind. To not outshine the pack. That’s strange, I thought. Not apart of my waking reality. Not really. 

I sat in meditation for a bit, just allowing the thoughts and sensations to arise in my mind and body. That felt a little better. I did some work, took a break and ate lunch. The feelings dissipated some. I did some more work and then checked in with the feelings again. Then, as chance would have it, I read an article about a guy who studied these seemingly “difficult” emotions that arise in our lives. Most of the time, we’re trained to ignore them at best, and push them away at worst. 

He found that if his test subjects just brought kind awareness to the issues, whether they were physical or emotion in nature, and just abided there, staying with them without judgement, that the pain went away over time. That’s right. Whether it’s physical pain or emotional trauma of some kind, just staying with the feelings without judging whether you or it is good or bad, you can make your own pain go away. 

Fascinating, as Spock would say. That proves what I’ve been wondering about for along time. That healing lies in the space between, hanging out and waiting for us to invite it in. Not easy, to be sure. But worth it? You bet. 

On Being Polite

Why is it that every time I go to Whole Foods, someone literally almost knocks me down trying to run to the conveyor belt at the check stand faster than me?  This has happened to me three times in a row, if you count today, and I’m not competing for anything. Really. This is just my regular speed, people. 

It got me thinking, when I was trying to figure out what could possibly make the person behind me, who shoved his stuff ahead of mine on the belt for some reason, want to rush that bad. On the streets of L.A., I expect this. We’re not the politest city in the world. But in Whole Foods? The bastion of awareness and enlightenment? Seriously? 

The thing is, being polite means being aware. It’s as simple as that. You need to be able to exchange your feelings for those of others, cultivate empathy, and get over yourself. Your needs can’t, by necessity, be more important than those of others. Unless you’re rushing to the hospital with a pregnant woman or a stab wound of some kind, I’m not sure why you’re acting that way. 

So to reframe this semi-permanent annoyance, I tried to tap into their needs. Maybe these people did feel that getting ahead of me, or someone else, was so important to their perceived arrival time (where, I wondered?) that they couldn’t risk the luxury of human interaction. It wasn’t working very well. 

Then I tried drawing an imaginary line between us, and meeting this guy halfway. I hung out like a neighbor at a fence, hoping to have a cup of tea and talk about it. In my mind’s eye, he kind of lolly-gagged over, thinking it was showing some kind of weakness to even engage with me. I saw in that moment that it wasn’t about being rude at all. It was about fear of connection, fear of looking someone else in the eye and dealing with them on that scary, vulnerable level. In essence, it was about social anxiety more than anything else. And even though it may not stop people from cutting me off in line at Whole Foods (I usually let them go ahead anyway), at least I understand it a little more, and that’s just polite. 

And I Thank You

So much of what each of us do on a daily basis is unconscious. I would ask if you ever noticed that but, chances are, you haven’t. Even the most aware, or trying to be aware, miss things. The look on their mate’s face when we say something the tiniest bit cutting, or the hug someone wanted to give us but decided against when we turned away. 

So today, the “last” day of the week (I love that common misconception, as if time stops on the weekend), I decided to not just practice a tad more gratitude, but look into the ways I may overlook things people try to give me, or to show me. I spent some time sitting quietly, just watching my thoughts move through my head. I replayed an email a friend had sent, and saw that I had left it in my in-box, unresponded to, in the rush to get to the next task — the next call, the next article, the next reading and healing session. 

I felt into this person’s energy and saw they were just trying to see how I was, catch up a bit, have the equivalent of a virtual cup of tea.  It’s not as if I had been rude, technically speaking, but I became aware in that moment that I do this sometimes. I push people away by not getting back to them, or not fast enough. And I know what that feels like, when someone does the same to me. 

Of course, it does no good to beat yourself up over it. Just noticing it sufficed for now. And in my head, I built a little shrine to everyone who bothers to notice other people each day. The ones who try to keep communication open, who reach out and catch up. I built one for the people who care about those they ‘ve never met, caught in conflicts across the globe, and those whose children lie in hospital beds, waiting to get better. 

I saw this and I felt it move through my body like a powerful wave. And when I bowed to finish my meditation, I said thank you with my heart instead of my head. 

I’m the One That I Want

OK, maybe I took the title of this blog post from Anna Deveare Smith’s most recent one-woman show. It’s a good title and well, steal from the best what I always say. I had some good news today, and it’s taking me some time to decide whether or not to take advantage of it, not do that, take advantage of some of it, wait a bit longer and see what else might transpire, or some combination of these.

Why is it that decisions are kind of harder when you’re aware? When you’re not you can kind of go with whatever sense most needs feeding. If you’re poor, you choose the one that bring the most money. if you’re emotionally needy, you do the one that brings the most attention and compliments. When you’re a little more aware, or are actually watching your reality, you notice the smaller things, and could subdivide a decision into a million component parts if you’re not careful. That could make decisions pretty arduous. 

So to reframe this unexpected condition of awareness, I decided to take a break from deciding. By giving myself the time and space to not really think about it but NOT think about it, I tried to see if this would rest my mind a little. And it did. My little experiment worked. And though I’m not any closer to figuring out what I want to do in this particular instance, I’m happy to know what probably no matter what choice I make, it will turn out pretty well. All things considered, that’s not a bad deal, and my mind gets to revel in all that space I created. 

So Much and Yet Absolutely, Perfectly Enough

I don’t know if other people have this happen to them. Sometimes, it’s hard to know if such a thing is discussed in polite society. But I have days when my heart is so full it feels like it’s going to overflow — not in a bad way, but in the “holy crap, I can’t believe I’m here, and this is my life, and all this other great stuff is happening for me as well.” 

Is it even possible? Yup, folks, it is. I’ve been keeping this blog called for a few months now, working on reframing my reality on a daily basis. I wanted to see how this experiment would change my inner and outer worlds, and wow, have I been surprised. Every day, I just kind of feel my way into things, without really trying to affect them in any way. If a day is stressful, I look for one beautiful thing that happened, even if that’s a ray of sunlight through a cloud. If it’s happy, I look for ways to cultivate deeper awareness, that this state of deep awe is possible in any single second of life, even if things are shitty, or a pain in the butt, or seemingly endlessly torturing. 

In that spirit, I’m going to be doing a lot more volunteer work, community stuff, and trying to find ways to help others in the coming months. Hope you’re thinking about doing a little of this, too, even if you’re a serial giver.  :) 

I’ve changed a lot over these months, and plan to keep investigating the concept of reframing. And though I don’t always suggest measuring your reality against someone else’s (not always healthy, since we all have our own rows to hoe) I want to share a video and an idea, that signing a petition from the One Campaign can help people without food to enjoy more abundance not just at Thanksgiving, but every day of their lives. The statistics are startling, and the idea that people we may well know are going hungry is intolerable to me. Check it out, and do what you can, OK?

Reframing your own life, or any difficulties you may be experiencing, may begin here. 

Searching, Finding, Searching Again

I love looking for things. Sometimes, they’re all big and lofty, like peace, or balance, or ways to save time on my freaking financial reporting. But other times, they can be tiny, like when I’m searching for ways to be more authentic, or present, or how to deepen my creativity. These are the times when searching becomes finding and then searching again, over and over.

Normally, this would drive me insane. The never landing anywhere, never having the sense of destination or achievement, of having arrived, would make me want to hurl something. But when I began to think about it, so much of our lives is like this. We strive to attain a goal, and may have to settle for a series of interim steps. We reach beyond our current limitations and find that we have to wait until our bodies and minds can adjust to another platform before we can push further.

So maybe instead of becoming frustrated when I can’t meet a goal in a prescribed amount of time, a better reframe would be to see this as a circle. Searching becomes finding, only to become searching again, not to annoy the living crap out of me but to ensure that I keep delving and growing. To be any other way would be to die on the vine, I suppose, to hand my life and awareness over to confusion.

Nah. There are too many other things I want to experience on this planet before it’s my time to go. I think I’ll stick with the cyclical nature of what I’m drawn toward, even if that means never getting there, or arriving in stages.