Off-Guard At The Start

I’m three days into 2023 and I’m already behind. I’m already unhappy with myself for not having clear intentions written down, categorized, prioritized and color coded. Tsk tsk my shoulder-sitting ego whispers in my ear. It’s not even the second week of January and I’m already feeling overloaded with what’s ahead as I sit with Jeff to compare calendars and  contemplate future plans. I’m finding myself hoping that it rains so hard that I can’t go outside and I can allow myself the time to sit and reflect. As if one shall not dare sit and reflect under a shiny sun. I know this territory well; I’ve had this feeling more times than I care to count. The feeling of being a bit behind, not on schedule, a little late for the game. Luckily, I finally know better than to get bogged down with it. My practice teaches me to accept what is and have an openness for all situations.

I’ve made a decision to skip listing intentions, although I do have a few in mind, Iike writing more, eating less chocolate and working on my short game (for you golfers).  I’ve decided to think about this year with a broader brush. Sweep the canvas with a sense of gratitude rather than listing all that can be done within the new year. I do understand that mentioning gratitude as the year’s goal could be seen as grandiose, perhaps even a cop out. You may even shrug your shoulders, roll your eyes and mutter, “Duh. Isn’t gratitude supposed to be an intention every year?”

Before you start to worry, I have learned the importance of gratitude and the effects of practicing it, and I think I’m pretty good at practicing what I preach at about a B+ level. This year, I want to go deeper. I want to create a large gratitude lens and see everything through it. I want to keenly study how that changes my emotional states. As if gratitude is the medicine for feeling better.

This year’s project: I will wake up every morning with a ritual to appreciate the day. The ritual will include words that seem fitting for all days and I will say them to myself, no matter what. I want to start the day this way to set the tone for whatever occurs.

I could copy Thich Nhat Hanh and say:

Waking up this morning, I smile. Twenty four brand new hours are before me. I vow to live fully each moment and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.

Or, I could make up my own. Something like this:

I am fortunate to have woken up this morning. I am alive and able. I truly appreciate this day.

In a few weeks, I will be starting another decade, the sixth one. Perhaps it is causing this deeper research on gratitude. I’m letting go of taking things for granted. Little things like breathing, seeing, hearing, walking and talking. Suddenly, deciding how I want to live each day seems monumental because the number of days left could be less than ten thousand.

I’m embracing this idea of creating my gratitude lens and noticing when I’m not using it.  If I was an artist, I would draw someone struggling emotionally, unable to balance themselves, having a bad day. And then I would paint them holding a large gratitude lens to their eyes and suddenly their vision would be clear and bright.

May your 2023 be clear and bright. And may you know I appreciate you.

Am I A Mindful Parent?

A question provided for the Instagram Challenge I joined this summer is: What is your definition of Mindful Parenting?  I’ve been thinking about this for awhile, wondering if I am a Mindful Parent and how I would even know if I am a Mindful Parent.   

Being Mindful means to be present and aware of the given moment. To be truly present we need to be attentive to our thoughts and actions, aware of how they affect those around us and aware of how they affect ourselves. To be honest, it seems hard to imagine being able to be “aware” while tending to an infant’s basic needs such as: food, safety and love. It’s almost oxymoronic.  Who had time to reflect?  

Years later a parent is confronted with the wide range of emotions that the teenager experiences. These Middle and High School years are filled with change. It can be chaotic and worrisome. I remember wondering if I was doing my job well. My self-critic was never too far away.  In a short time, the child leaves the nest and is suddenly faced with navigating their own lives. All the while, a parent watches and hopes they’ve done enough.  There is suddenly time for reflection. 

Perhaps what I know most about Mindful Parenting during all the stages of childhood is that when my children are sad, I am sad. While they are happy, I am happy. My emotions are intertwined with their emotions. The challenge becomes how to let their life, their experiences, their emotions be theirs. In my opinion, this relationship that is indeed biologically connected, needs to begin a separation in order for everyone to individuate and grow.  Perhaps Mindful Parenting is working through this challenge: How to always be available, but not too available. How to offer advise, but not too much advise. How to be a parent that allows for the child to grow and experience their own successes and failures as theirs and not ours. I suppose in order to make these decisions, it would be helpful to trust the present moment rather than be trapped in the past or pondering the future. After all, the present moment is all that we can really know for certain.

Reflections on Now, Vol. 5

These past six weeks have been a crash course on remembering life before the pandemic. Our vaccinations opened doors: We have traveled by an airplane,  we have eaten in several restaurants (inside and outside), we have visited many friends and family, we have attended a large birthday celebration with a rockin’  band and danced till our feet hurt, we’ve clinked many wine glasses cheering nothing more than just “being together” and we’ve hugged a whole bunch of people.  It’s been beyond wonderful, but it has happened rather quickly. Or so it seems. While I wouldn’t take any of it back, I am wondering if this was always the pace?  Is it just me or are we all launching out of the gates with some speed? Where the calendar pages used to look somewhat blank, they are suddenly filled with appointments, dinners, travel, events, and visitors.

I know this is a good thing returning to our lives as we knew them, but I want to make sure to incorporate what I learned during those months we stayed home and our lives became slower.  I want to take the time to walk by myself listening to music or a podcast or nothing. I want to write even if that writing goes nowhere. I want to remain closely connected to my garden and notice the new flowers, the new vegetables and when things die or bolt or become deciduous. I want to listen to the birds. I want to set up the “TV trays” and watch a movie over a dinner we prepared together like we did so many nights during quarantine. I want to remain creative.

Amongst it all, I found there were areas of growth. I strengthened teaching yoga in a way I wouldn’t have prior to Zoom. This new way to access students gave me an opportunity to reach people I couldn’t teach due to distance. That was a huge gift. Does that go on in perpetuity? Or do people tire of it as they go back to their lives? We are navigating re-entry in our own ways, at our own speed and there are things to consider. We pondered going into the pandemic, it may be a good idea to ponder coming out in an effort to not lose sight of what we learned.

We received a “life is precious” lesson in real time. I want to remember it.

I Could Have Been

Occasionally when I travel, something happens that leaves an indelible groove in my memory. I’m talking about an experience that haunts me, oddly surfacing to remind me of the quality of my life, like a sharp slap on the cheek. While walking down a narrow, thousand year old street with men sweeping cow dung and people starting to set up their commerce, a woman was sleeping in a bordering ditch with two small children nestled into her armpits, all their beautiful faces laying upward. I wanted to kneel down and swat the flies buzzing in the corner of the youngest’s eye.  I wanted to lay a soft blanket over them for comfort and privacy and to keep the flies and morning sun off of them. I wanted to cry. I frequently saw vivid examples of poverty during this particular trip, but the vision of this woman and her children burrowed into my memory like a tick going in deep, sucking a little something out of me. I could have been that woman.  

How is it that I was born in United States where a vaccine has been created and disseminated in close to one year? I know. There are problems, you say. It wasn’t that easy, you say.  There aren’t enough. There are too many. People can’t get appointments. People are having reactions. Dr Fauci is brilliant. Dr. Fauci is a farce. Yes, there are problems, but I’m not laying in a ditch  overnight clutching my children. 

I remember the exact moment when I realized a vaccine was going to be the only thing to resolve the horrible situation of rising deaths each day. It felt surreal and impossible. How in the world will someone be able to figure this out? I felt heavily loaded down with fear for my people and all peoples. And then the memory: How was the woman in Varanasi sleeping in a ditch going to get a vaccine? 

It feels odd to be on the other side of the vaccine now. I feel weepy thinking about the significance of my second shot. My nightmare is over, but there are many whose nightmare is far from over as they struggle to put back the pieces,  losing a loved one or their sources of income, or both. I understand that I am a lucky one, for reasons I can’t know. I could have been born into circumstances that I’ve seen around the world. I could have been that woman and her two children without even a blanket. I pray they are okay. 

Yoga on Skis

There’s no drifting off and noticing the birds while you’re careening down the mountain at a speed fast enough to stay with your people. You have to concentrate when you ski, absolutely, no doubt. Years of skiing  allows me to typically avoid fear.  I can manage my way down most terrain (some won’t look so pretty, but I’ll get down) and my record speed according to an App called Slopes, is 37.5 mph.  I am only telling you this because the fact that I know this data makes me laugh.  Bottom-line is that I am not a beginner skier. Now, let the story begin. 

We spent two days with our friends at Squaw Valley Ski Resort.  Two days that contrasted like the Sahara Desert and the Atlantic Ocean. The first day was, in skier’s vocabulary, a “bluebird day”, sunny, cloudless with a dusting of fresh snow, easy to imagine happiness behind all the Covid masks. The second day,  clouds covered the sky creating what skier’s call, a “flat light” which makes fluctuations in the terrain difficult to see, like you’re skiing down an ironed, white bedsheet. By mid-morning conditions were worsening. We could see fog and feel wind. Nonetheless, we got into the Funitel, an enclosed passenger cabin that takes you quickly, standing with skis in-hand to higher altitudes. It is important to note: My intuition had already whispered to me that it wasn’t a smart idea, but I knowingly succumbed to peer pressure.  

When we disembarked, reassembled ourselves and started the descent,  we saw another ski lift that was able to take us even higher, or “further into the abyss”,  as someone jokingly said. As we got off this second lift and faced downhill,  all we could see, in every direction was white, the largest canvas of white possible.  Skiers call this a “white-out” yet again stemming from poor lighting conditions. There is no delineation between sky and mountain. There is no horizon. There are no irregularities in the terrain. It is very hard to know where you are in relation to anything else, a true sense of disorientation and an uncomfortable feeling atop a mountain on skis. This is where yoga comes in. When you find yourself in the aforementioned conditions, you need to  concentrate.  

The sixth limb of yoga as outlined by Patanjali’s eight-limb system is Dharana or concentration.  It is defined as focusing on one object  or holding one thought in a continuous stream.  It is taught as the step prior to meditation.  I like to think about Dharana in my daily life,  as a way to keep my attention focused on  whatever I am engaged in rather than the scattered, fragmented and typically less productive attention that has a tendency to surface. We spend much of our time juggling more than one activity, let alone the plethora of thoughts that make focusing a challenge. The glass half-full approach would point to the many opportunities we have to actually practice concentration throughout the day.

The experience  in the “white-out” was an interesting place to witness my ability to concentrate.  At the onset, my mind had a field day bouncing between “you are so stupid to have gotten yourself in this situation” to “you should have listened to your intuition” to “if you make one wrong turn you will go off the side of the mountain” to “its hard enough to see your friends in normal conditions, let alone  in a white out. You’re going to lose them.” I heard the rapid-fire dialogue going on in my own head. There was an inner party taking ahold and Ms. Fear was the main guest, loud and obnoxious, successfully making the situation worse than it really was. In time,  I was able to slowly discard the harming thoughts and exchange them with more useful and focused thoughts implementing what I know about skiing to make my way down to better lighting and safer terrain. I witnessed myself go through a process of total distraction (slight panic, who are we kidding here?) to concentration, a single focus on pointing the skis down. Yoga on skis.

Me & Hashimotos

Hashi who? Hashimotos is an autoimmune disease. Autoimmune is when a mishap occurs in the immune system and it mistakenly attacks its own body. In this case, my immune system attacks my own thyroid, which frankly, I find rather bizarre. It started when during a general check-up, the doctor was kneading the tender sides of my 40 year old throat when he noticed swelling. Questions ensued. I was tired, but who wasn’t?  No, my hair wasn’t falling out, what the hell? Yes, I already told you, I’m tired by mid-day. Aren’t you?

As he suspected, the culprit was my sluggish, behind-the eight-ball thyroid. Medication seemed to be the only answer. Off I went back into my very wonderful and active life with Levothyroxine in hand, hypothyroidism in body. Over time, the fatigue got worse and I noticed I was having trouble recovering from physical activity, which back in those days included gym workouts and a generous amount of tennis.  I knew something wasn’t right, but I assumed I had already figured it out. Eventually, a wise friend recommended a Naturopathic doctor, who quickly, like a first grader standing out of her seat  with her arm outstretched waving her hand eagerly shouting “Hashimotos”, successfully diagnosed my future. As we humans do well,  I shrugged it off, brushed it under, anything to just make it go away. I was too busy, too stubborn and too naive. Some years and some tears later,  I saw my third and final Naturopathic doctor and I woke up and dove in. Like it or not, I had hypothyroidism and Hashimotos just as much as I had a beautiful, beating heart. The message was as loud and bright as a bolt of lightening in an east coast thunderstorm. Time to take out the earplugs and do something about it. Note: In credit to myself (if you’ll allow me), no one talked  about autoimmune disease, even ten years ago, like they do today. I’d like to think that my naiveté  was not all mine. But that could be a coping mechanism, I’m not sure. 

I went through the phase of questioning how it happened,  what did I do? Sad that Hashimotos and I were wed forever with no cure in sight. I learned that a healthy lifestyle is the answer to feeling good and therefore, what I eat and drink, how I sleep, how I address stress, how I recover from activity are directly linked to how I feel.  Period. Bottomline. I’ve spent years dutifully reading  the dos and don’ts, which continually change as new research surfaces. I do blood draws and track “my numbers” like a responsible patient trying to understand the opponent. Most importantly, I’ve learned how to do “healthy living” in a way that makes me feel involved in the quality of my life. The rest is proof that I don’t have full control. Life happens. 

Today, I live with Hashimotos as a life-long friend. Sometimes this friend lives in the background easily taken care of and sometimes, this friend screams loudly for my attention. We go back and forth between dancing freely, living our best lives together,  and then dancing like a fifty-eight year old break-dancer, not too well.  

Hashimotos is one of the reasons I dove deeply into yoga. Yoga is about inner and outer health, the physical body and the mental body, the whole enchilada. It is about learning to accept the situations we are given and growing from them. Hashimotos tapped me on the shoulder and said “wake up, live healthfully” and for that, I can find gratitude. 

If you have questions about living with hypothyroidism and/or Hashimotos, I’m here for you.

He Smiled At Me

There is an art to getting to the stage at a concert.  You must go it alone so as not to draw attention to the mission. You must weave your way in and out of the crowd finding small openings where you will create the least amount of disturbance.  You mustn’t look around or engage with anyone as you head to your destination, particularly the surrounding security guards who are paid to look for you and send you back to the drawing board.  It’s a head-down, high-courage, stealth operation. I’m not sure if this behavior is good or bad, sneaky or skilled, pushy or well-deserved, but it is something I am good at. I can get to the stage at a concert. 

There I was, mid-50s, sandwiched tightly between people one- to two-thirds my age, elbows nearly resting on the stage, doing what Bonnie Rait, the coolest of the cool, would never allow to happen at her concerts: watching the concert through my iPhone while standing six feet from the band. A solid member of society’s most ridiculous. 

There he was, traversing the stage back and forth, left and right when suddenly he stopped directly in front of my special section of stage huggers. He held ground, strumming his guitar, beaming at the crowd, flicking his golden sexy hair, chock-full of joy. Then it happened. Keith Urban looked at me and smiled. Well, he looked at my phone and smiled. He couldn’t see my eyes, but I sure as hell saw his. It wasn’t in a watch-out-Nicole kind of way.  No, it was a millisecond, which is one thousandth of a second, in case you’re wondering. Like a hummingbird stays in the center of a flower sucking nectar way longer than the amount of time Keith Urban smiled at me.  But, I captured that moment  and it was on my phone. 

I floated on cloud nine back to my more sensible and law-abiding friends, wondering if what happened really happened. After the concert, I scoured the plethora of videos like a detective searching for clues. All the obvious things you’d expect me to search for: facial twitches, lip muscle contractions, teeth exposures, eyelash movements, hair flickings. I studied the videos large, small, upright, sideways, light, dark and suddenly, as clear as a California sky, I found it. He looked at me and smiled. I was 98.5% sure. Next, I did what any of you would do if Keith Urban smiled at you. I posted it. Then I sat back and waited for confirmation. Did anyone else see it? 

The next time you think your smiles don’t matter, think again. Put your Keith Urban on, even if it’s for the smallest fraction of time known to man, and smile. Because the recipient will feel special and electrified, honored and exhilarated. They may even have a blast writing a blog about it. You just never know.