“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and then they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.” (p.8)

“The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that’s really swell. In fact, that way of looking at things is what keeps us miserable. Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly.” (p.9)

-Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart

When I read those two passages, I felt every single cell in my body take a huge, deep breath and relax. Because what those words said to me was, “There’s no other place you’re supposed to be than exactly where you are right now, sickness, mess, low energy, uncertainty and all. So relax-you are just fine.”

Whenever I get into the story that being “enlightened” and “spiritual” means that I can only ever feel blissed out and peaceful all the time, besides making me want to gouge my eyes out with a very dull spatula (because seriously, how freaking boring would that be?!), it also makes me judge myself, my feelings, my thoughts, and my life as “wrong” on days like today when every muscle in my body hurts, I can only sit by and watch the undone housework pile up, and I just want to yell at Personal Growth and New Thought and tell them to SUCK IT! And so according to my old story of what “spiritual” looks like, this day is “wrong” and “doesn’t count”, and I have to figure out a way to get to some new, different place that is somehow “right” and “acceptable”.

But not anymore. Because if those paragraphs are true, and they certainly felt true for me when I read them, then the fact that I don’t have to hurry up and get somewhere else or try and measure up to some kind of external standard of “good enough” spirituality means that this moment right now is, in fact, enough, and good enough, and already contains infinite possibilities for lots of juicy goodness, even while I’m feeling miserable.

So I took a breath. And then I took a bath. I listened to a CD of Bach’s French Suites. And I felt sick as a dog. And-it was all good.

Edited To Add: No, I take that back. It wasn’t all good, but it was all okay. And it was all part of my spiritual life for today.

Every so often my life leads me to a place that I think of as The Wall, which I know are places within myself where I am not yet able to act from love. I can tell when I’ve reached another one, because I feel exactly like I’ve hurled myself headlong into an extremely solid brick wall at about 120 miles an hour. Then I pick myself up off the ground, dust myself off, and do it all over again.

I usually bash around quite a bit before I am able to find a more gentle, easier way to get past my latest wall. My first response is always to go for the sledgehammer, without even stopping to ask if there’s another tool that could possibly get the job done. I just get so frustrated whenever I am stuck in a pattern of thoughts, and I can’t find another way to see a given situation.

Sometimes the “sledgehammer method” does help me to release my frustration, but it is a pretty brutal method of navigating through life. So over the past few years I’ve started to ask if maybe there’s another way I could approach these situations in which I feel so stagnant and stuck.

Of course the Universe loves it when we ask questions like this, and so it was not long before I was inspired to pick up Martha Beck’s book on The Joy Diet. In addition to giving us 10 practices for creating a more joyful life, she also talks about Bill O’Hanlon and his suggestion to Do One Thing Differently. As in, if you find yourself having the same argument over and over again with your spouse, the next time you have the argument you have to Do One Thing Differently, like put on a hat, or have the argument while lying in the bathtub.

It sounds silly, but holy cow does it work! I guess committing to take some kind of action opens up a space for new thoughts to come in.

So I decided to apply this strategy to my latest wall, and over the weekend my inner guidance started talking to me about Pema Chodron. I saw a quote of hers on a blog I read, and suddenly she was all I could think about. Suddenly they were replaying Oprah’s radio interview with Pema Chodron on the afternoon I was listening to XM’s “Oprah and Friends” channel. Suddenly I found myself reading the descriptions of all her books on Amazon. And this whole time my inner guidance was chanting, “Get thee to a bookstore,” so I finally went, if only to get that little voice to shut up.

At the bookstore I found a little volume titled, When Things Fall Apart, which is perfect for me because that is exactly how I feel about my life right now. I feel like everything has broken open and spilled out, and maybe I can catch a few grains over here, and mop up a few drops over there, but I can’t change the fact that there’s a great big mess on the table in front of me, at least in my mind.

Pema Chodron describes her own “falling apart” in this way:

“What happened when I got to the abbey was that everything fell apart. All the ways I shield myself, all the ways I delude myself, all the ways I maintain my well-polished self-image-all of it fell apart. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t manipulate the situation. My style was driving everyone else crazy, and I couldn’t find anywhere to hide.

I had always thought of myself as a flexible, obliging person who was well liked by almost everyone. I’d been able to carry this illusion throughout most of my life. During my early years at the abbey, I discovered that I had been living in some kind of misunderstanding. It wasn’t that I didn’t have good qualities, it was just that I was not the ultimate golden girl. I had so much invested in that image of myself, and it just wasn’t holding together anymore. All my unfinished business was exposed vividly and accurately in living Technicolor, not only to myself, but to everyone else as well.” (p. 6,7).

What has come to light for me during these months of sickness and recovery is the issue of self-compassion. I can practice it up to a certain point, but then once I’ve decided that I “should” be better, and I “should” be running at 100%, and I “should” whatever, but I can’t, because I’m still physically rundown and need more time to heal, then I turn into a slave driver and constantly drive and abuse myself mentally. I would never treat another person as meanly as I’ve been treating myself. But I apparently have no problem tyrannizing myself internally to the point of despair.

So I guess it’s finally time for me to learn how to do this differently. I’m not happy about it, but I’ve reached the point where I don’t really have any other choice. Well, I guess I always have a choice, but I’m tired of repeating this same cycle of self-abuse. I guess that I have finally suffered enough. I would really like to start feeling better, and I’ve been doing this long enough now to know that in order to start feeling relief, I need to learn how to change my mind about this situation. So, okay Universe, I’m finally listening. I’m ready for a shift in perception so that I can see this situation differently. And if possible, I’d really like this new view to be sledgehammer-free.

Last night the writer’s strike forced us prime time viewers to watch a program featuring

-the man who holds the record for Most Watermelons Smashed With Head

-and the man who holds the record for Most Bubbles Blown With Live Tarantula In Mouth

Help.

So this day kind of started off badly at about 5:30 am when I had to get up and take some medicine because my migraine had come roaring back.

Unfortunately it was still in full swing when my tutoring client arrived for her session.

We were working on an exercise which required her to translate a conversation between Sara and José discussing what kind of movie they wanted to go and see, when she got to the following line:

“¿Adónde quiere ir Sara?”

which means, “Where does Sara want to go?”

So my student began translating the words aloud, and I heard her say,

“Where do…you want…to DO…Sara?”, with absolutely no realization of what she had just said.

And I, rising to the occasion as the mature, responsible adult I am, burst into peals of laughter and almost fell off my chair with glee.

And suddenly, my whole entire day just turned right around.

Today I am very grateful for my coach.

When she heard about my severe sleep apnea her first thought was, “Wow. Imagine the amazing things she’s gonna do when she’s rested!”

That was really nice to hear, because when I got the results of my sleep study, my first thought was

I

have

not

slept

for

thirty

five

years.

Thinking that thought was a lot like kicking a tiny pebble and accidentally dislodging an avalanche.

Suddenly it was as if I’d woken up one day, and everything was wrong with me.

If I could, just out of the blue, contract a serious intestinal bacteria, then what else could happen to me?

If suddenly my sleep is all wrong, then what else could go wrong with me?

If Heath Ledger could drop dead in the blink of an eye, then I could too.

Suddenly, all I could see was evidence for being weak and sickly. But that’s not what my coach saw.

She said, “Look at everything you’ve done, even though you’ve been completely exhausted!”

This is true. Even if I haven’t really slept for the past thirty-five years, I have done an awful lot of amazing things. I do have a pretty fantastic life.

She said, “You’ve had relatively good health over they years, given how impaired your sleep has been. To me, that is evidence of how strong your body is.”

Also true.

She said, “Once you get your sleep apnea treated, world domination is just around the corner!”

That sounds good to me.

Fifty.

Three.

53!!!!

53 times an hour x 8 hours a night x 35 years of being alive =

NO WONDER I’M SO DAMN TIRED ALL THE TIME!

Holy Crap.

It is interesting to me that we ask a question about the writing life that we do not ask about other professions. For example, we do not say, “What are your odds of making it as an investment banker? As an elementary-school teacher? As a chemist?”

In those, and most professions, we assume that an interest in pursuing the career implies a probably proclivity for it and a reasonable chance for success. Not so with writing. The truth is, when you want a writing career and are willing to do the work to get it, the odds work with you, not against you. This is a simple metaphysical law.

Julia Cameron, The Right To Write

Lately I’ve been thinking about taking piano lessons again. I played for a long time earlier in my life, from about the age of 5 until my senior year in college, about 14 years ago.

I got this same urge a few years back, and so I started looking around for a teacher. I asked my aunt, who is a professor of music at a college in a neighboring state, for a recommendation and she gave me the name of a good teacher here in Atlanta.

I was a pretty talented pianist back in my day, but when I started taking lessons with my new teacher I realized that I was not even in the same universe as her league. She is very, very good.

I gave the situation the old college try, but it was very hard because I was very intimidated. So one day, as is my wont, I tried to lighten the atmosphere with a little humor.

We were working on a movement of Bach’s French Suite V and she was explaining to me how to interpret some of the ornamentation (like trills) according to the rules of the Baroque period. So, me being me, I responded by saying, “Yeah, and doesn’t it make you wonder just who got to make those rules up, anyway?”

But no, if her blank face and stunned silence were any indication, never in life had it occurred to her to question the Sacred Scriptures Of Musical Interpretation. And furthermore, her horrified visage reproached me, the fact that you would even make such a flippant remark about something so precious and so holy just made kittens DIE!

She’s not my teacher anymore

I found this over at Zena Moon.

We have not come here to take prisoners,
But to surrender ever more deeply
To freedom and joy.

We have not come into this exquisite world
To hold ourselves hostage from love.

Run my dear,
From anything
That may not strengthen
Your precious budding wings.

Run like hell my dear,
From anyone likely
To put a sharp knife
Into the sacred, tender vision
Of your beautiful heart.

We have a duty to befriend
Those aspects of obedience
That stand outside of our house
And shout to our reason
“O please, O please,
Come out and play.”

For we have not come here to take prisoners
Or to confine our wondrous spirits,

But to experience ever and ever more deeply
Our divine courage, freedom and
Light.

~Hafiz