pronoia

But, but, but

There's an old saw in pagan circles about not praying for patience -- because you'll wait a long time to learn that lesson.

Well, I think I must have prayed to learn how to take time for myself, because I've been pretty much immersed in a life that requires me to actually, actively take time for myself -- I'm not getting it by default. And it's not going so well.

One of the necessities of spiritual practice is time alone. It's not a glorification of the hermitage -- after all, as one of my paper teachers wrote, there's nothing like marriage and rubbing up against another personality every day for the rest of your life to show you exactly how your ego is working and thus what you need to work on. But in order to see how your ego is working, in order to observe yourself and how you are, in order to focus attention on the Divine, a little solitude is helpful.

In other times and places, taking time for myself has been a chore, something I needed to do like I need to take vitamins and brush my teeth -- unpleasant, sometimes uncomfortable, and not very appealing when there were options like watching the same old television series on DVD again or repeatedly hitting refresh in Google Reader to see if anyone had updated their blogs. I have thrown myself against the need to take time for myself in determination, in fear, in righteousness, in anger. I have manhandled myself, written lists, talked to myself sternly, made promises.

Somewhere in the last few months, at a point I can't find, something changed. Maybe it was the retreat I went to in June, maybe it was reading the latest Enneagram book, maybe it was just everything finally coalescing, but right now I'm craving time alone to meditate, to read my spiritual books, to journal. Sure, I'm currently resisting morning pages, and sure, candle gazing is requiring serious force of will, but I'm craving solitude the way I crave sunlight in February -- as though I just might curl up and die without it. I'm grouchy when I don't get it, I'm resentful and mean.

And so finally, my desire and my motivation are going the same direction, and finally I'm being able to at least look forward to it. My skills at setting aside time, however, are, frankly, for shit.

The things that get in the way amaze me. There are days when I'm so hung up on housework that I can't take time to meditate until the kitchen is clean. There are days when I come home tired and restless, and somehow that translates into watching television instead of meditating. There are times when I desperately, cravenly want solitude, so I read a book instead of meditating.

Of course, there are complications right now. Ms. P has sprained her ankle, so instead of taking the train in to work, at least part of which was by myself and so a kind of solitude, I'm driving us both to work and spending that time swearing at other drivers. We've had visitors. My thyroid meds seemed off for a little while, and so my energy was everywhere but here. I'm busy processing some things that have come up about my family, and so I'm feeling aversive to journaling.

The combination of deep desire and "everything getting in the way" is leading to a kind of towering frustration, a prickly grouchiness that is really (and for good reason) upsetting my darling wife.

But the truth is that there will always be complications. There will always be housework and television and visitors and friends who want to see us and emotional things to process and the exhaustion that comes from a good and productive day at work. All of those things will always be there, and then some.

Making the shift to truly, honestly prioritizing spiritual work ahead of everything except perhaps my marriage and my work, well, that's proving very difficult, deep desire and the best of intentions aside. My habits run deep and strong. Spiritual work is scary and threatening, even as I want nothing but. This culture is not set up to privilege the life of the spirit, and I want things to talk to my colleagues about.

I am struggling to be gentle with myself. As our spiritual director said to Ms. P, if I could do something differently right now, I would be. So I'm continuing to stretch into solitude, to push myself to the place where it hurts, gently, so I don't injure my stiff muscles.

But man am I tired of this struggle. I want it to be easy. I want to float into solitude as though it is my birthright, and I want to float out again serene and able to deal with the world without being ruffled in the least. I want the schedules of my life to mesh and never conflict, and I want spirituality to be everywhere, everywhen. I want infinite time, and I want to need less sleep. I want spiritual community so I feel less like Ms. P and I are alone in this struggle.

Do you think the Dalai Lama ever has tantrums like this?

Right here. Right now.

I'm all in a jumble right now, mostly because last week ended up constituting a series of kicks to the gut. First was the email back from my sister (lunch is tomorrow); then was finding out that my mother hadn't told her sisters about our adoption plans; then was spending the whole day with my MIL, who was all about the smalltalk and who, whenever adoption came up, talked about her nephew, who was adopted out of foster care and who has ADHD and who was a challenge to her sister; then was hosting The Divine Ms. M, who is, as her name indicates, divine, but she was also another guest whose presence was interfering in my ability to pull the covers over my head.

Ms. P and I, we have a tendency to get too busy, too scheduled, and then everything else falls apart: journaling, meditation, eating well. And when that happens, we end up unbalanced, literally and figuratively, less able to manage all of the things that are ours to manage.

And so we get up, dust ourselves off, and begin again. Right here. Right now.

We both did morning pages this morning, Ms. P made us all a lovely dairy-free egg scramble, I'm drinking tea (not coke!), and we're going to have family meeting tonight. I'm going to walk to Whole Foods for lunch, and I'm going to try to retain enough energy to take the dogs for a short walk when we get home, just to have some physicality in my day. I also need to squeeze in a little candle-gazing, as per my spiritual director's instructions. It's not the routine we want, yet, but it's a start.

Against Multitasking

Ever since I returned from my fabulous retreat, I've been more mindful (not mindful, mind you, just more mindful) of the ways in which I am not present to things.

I do all of the things you would suspect: perseverating on the past, spinning fantasies about the future, telling myself stories about things that are happening, distracting myself with worries and anxieties, checking out through various media. And I multitask.

It takes many forms -- interrupting myself editing a document to go check my email, checking to see if someone's turned in another rerun while putting together a spreadsheet, switching between multiple chat windows -- and I find that at times like that, I can't be present to any of it. Some part of me is still with the previous activity, some part of me is with the activity I'm about to switch to, and very little of me is right here, where I am.

Some of this is necessary at work. We use chat, and emails come through that need to be attended to with some speed. But too often, I'm talking on the phone while checking email, not attending to the person I'm talking to, nor attending to the emails I'm reading. Too often, I'm kind of half-assed at everything.

So I'm trying to reduce the multitasking. One thing at a time. If I open a document to edit it, I want to edit it the whole way through before I check email or my spreadsheet. If I'm on the phone, I want to really be on the phone. If I'm washing dishes (not that I've done that this week), I want to be washing dishes.

It's remarkable how much doing one thing at at time reduces my anxiety and tension. I'm certainly not present all the time, but I'm working on it, and this helps.

I've also downloaded a mindfulness clock to my computer that chimes at random intervals to call me back to myself. If only I could embed it in my brain.

Possibility

Those of you who've been listening to me whine for a while know that I've been struggling to find a spiritual community. I have callings to all kinds of places, including traditional Wicca, Buddhism, and Quakerism. At the end of the day, I want a spiritual community that will support my own personal development, as I support others. I want a community that challenges me, that holds me, that reminds me.

In February I went to an Enneagram workshop, which was itself transformative. In addition to lecture, we had a number of experiential pieces in order to integrate the whole -- and it was the first time in all of my spiritual seeking that I actually experienced something profound. When I found out the same group has a spiritual community that meets twice yearly, well, I sent in my application.

This past weekend was my first retreat with them, and it was hard. Ten hours of meditation and practice on Saturday alone, and me feeling disconnected and cut off from my own self. But, like before, I could feel things shifting in me, so I stayed, and Sunday was restorative and joyful and lovely. It felt like community.

And really, can a retreat that includes dancing to The Who in the rain really be bad?

Sweetness and Light

Nothing feels significant enough to write about right now, which is a sure sign that I've lost the connection to my breath and my body.

Sure, we're on a little bit of an emotional high right now, what with the sleeping and the eating well and the feeling good about our finances. Things feel possible right now that haven't felt possible in years -- serious landscaping, house projects, writing articles for money.

But it's not just contentment or relief that has me disconnected. It's something else, something more pervasive. It's habit.

In two weeks I'm going to a retreat at the same place and with the same people who ran the Enneagram retreat I found so transformative. I've lost the sense of centeredness and openness I left that retreat with, but I'm also not where I was before the retreat. There's been a net gain, however small, in my ability to be centered, to be present, to be open to the Divine. But there's a long way to go.

One of the biggest obstacles between me and the Divine is disconnection, my ability (tendency!) to detach, separate, avoid, and otherwise live in daydreams. The remedy is to return to the body, over and over, to return to this place and time, this now, this when.

Our new eating plan is both helping and hindering that remedy. I notice my body so much less in some ways because it hurts less, on balance. But I'm also encountering my body in new ways as I experience my sinuses clearing, as I re-encounter food and hunger, as it shifts and changes in response to this new way of being.

Because I tend so dramatically to detach, to have a hard time accessing my own intensity, I wonder sometimes how much my bad eating (for MY body and health needs, not as a moral issue) was about creating a different kind of intensity, one of bodily pain, one of moods, to stand in for the intensity I sometimes can't access in myself?

So I'm breathing. I'm going to journal tonight. I'm going to try to have some few minutes of time in the morning to meditate. I'm going to continue to listen to the Shree Guru Gita. And we'll see where this takes me.

Notable Occurances Since Last We Spoke

On Thursday I took my camera lens in to see if it could be fixed or cleaned, because all of my pictures have had a muted, dimly-lit quality to them. The repair guy took one look through it and told me it was supporting a fungus and was irreparable. However, they did have a replacement lens, used, for $50. I suppose 17 years was plenty of life out of that old lens, and the new one is taking really amazing photographs. I also had dinner with friends from SchoolJob, and the ship is sinking even faster now than it was before. I felt a profound sense of relief that I wasn't still there, but it might have just been the margaritas talking.

On Friday, Ms. P took her first final in fifteen years. She rocked it. She had 100% going into the final, which tells you something right there. We also left for Beltaine camping. How is it that it takes an entire Civic full of stuff to keep two girls alive in the woods for two days? With friends? And free coffee? And showers and flushable toilets?

On Saturday, we watched the most beautiful Maypole ceremony I've ever seen. That new camera lens proved its worth, since I got some amazing photographs complete with ribbon-color detail. Later that night, Ms. P priestessed a Beltaine ceremony while the skies opened up and deluged the celebrants. At one point it was raining so hard I couldn't see the other side of the circle, and it wasn't that far away. I need to write a love letter to Timbuk2, since my lovely, wonderful camera was in my messenger bag outside the circle. After forty minutes of solid, unbelieveable rain, my camera was still bone-dry.

On Sunday, we came home to find that the dogs had had a huge fight that morning with the dogsitter present. They'd been growling over food for a few weeks (very unusual for them), and it finally manifested. Phoebe, as always, was afflicted only with the stiff and sticky fur that comes with Gracie having had mouthfuls of the stuff. Gracie, on the other hand, had a hole in her leg the size of a quarter and a ripped-up ear. We also found out that Ms. P's father is having additional health complications, and we won't know their real scope until we get the path lab results back in a few weeks.

On Monday, I dropped Gracie off at the vet, intending to work from home. But then the home internet went out. So I threw the laptop in my bag and headed for *bucks, where I paid an extortionate $10 for 24 hours of internet access and spent forty minutes in chat with a technie to get work's VPN and remote desktop established. Running a remote desktop across a VPN through a wireless hotspot means everything went veeeeeeeerrrrrrrrryyyyy slooooooowwwwwwwwlllllyyyyyyy, but I did get work done. The only highlight of the day is that the vet bill was lower than I thought it might be, but we got caught in Cinco de Mayo celebration crowds on our way to the dinner that was my reward for a shitty day.

It feels like Monday, but it isn't, and I'm dopey on antihistimanes, and Thursday and Friday are our company retreat, so this week is just hosed. I'm just getting through the next two days until I get to have a hot-stone massage courtesy of my lovely, lovely job.

Does everyone's life have this kind of texture, or only ours? Ms. P said last night (in reference to an acquaintence of hers), "I haven't had that kind of chaos in my life in years," but although we don't have the suicide / alcoholism / overdose / psychosis kind of chaos she was referring to, I feel like we have more than our fair share of crises and dramas. Or is that only because I like a crisis-free existence and any feels like a lot?

Right here, right now

My back and shoulders are notorious for being hard as rocks. I've stymied more than one suitor who offered me a backrub, dismissed my claims to tight muscles, then gave up ten minutes later when nothing they did made a damn bit of difference.

Here at NewJob, we get subsidized back massages--$5 for 20 minutes, and the company picks up the rest. I jumped in yesterday to claim my spot -- there are only 23 spots for a company of 180 people -- and was happy to put myself in the hands of a professional today. She rubbed and thwapped and poked and otherwise did what she could to make things let go.

It was lovely, but I can't quite tell that she did anything. This isn't to disparage her skill; she was really good. But my body is just that fucked up.

I really like getting massages, and I like going to the chiropractor, and I like sitting in hot tubs. But I need to come to terms with the fact that none of that is going to fix all of the tension and stress I've stored up.

I've got to come to terms with the fact that in this, as in everything else, I really do need to start with meditation and breathing. When I breathe deeply and mindfully, I can feel the tension in my jaw, in my head, in my stomach and let it go. When I breathe, I'm present to where I actually am. When I breathe, I nourish the self I am.

For something instinctual, breathing is really hard.

Are you bored yet with my coming to this place again and again? I am. It's interesting to me how many times I come to this point, how often I wriggle around until I know that I need to just sit on the damn cushion, but it's frustrating, too. I can blame time and work and my relationships and all those things I need to do, but really, I need to sit.

So tonight I'm going to go home and sit. Five minutes. That's all. I'm committing to five minutes. If I sit longer, I sit longer, but I'm committing to five minutes. And tomorrow I'm going to sit for five minutes. And the day after that. And the day after that.

And with any luck, sitting will bring me back to my center, because baby, I'm so far down I can't see up from here.

Countdown, day 5

Halfway to freedom, baby, and counting the minutes until I leave.

I did nothing productive today, I have to admit. In fifteen minutes I'm leaving for an Enneagram retreat about two hours north of here, and I'm so excited I could pop, so I've been watching the clock and catching up on my blog reading and not so much with the working. Oh well. It's Friday, right?

When I come back here on Monday, I'm going to start a series of lasts. The last time I have an event meeting. The last time I have a grant meeting. The last time my team goes out to lunch all together. The last time I think about fundraising any time soon. It will be bittersweet--a long time coming, and sad nonetheless.

In the meantime, however, I'm going to spend 24 very intensive hours on guided inner work. My spiritual life is something of a shambles, I don't have a therapist anymore, and my daily practice is for shit. If nothing else, this will jump-start that part of my life and give me some space to lean back into it. Is there anything better during a big transition than a little retreat at which you do nothing but focus on yourself? I didn't think so.

Resistance is Futile

I'm in my own way again.

This morning L&S called to see if we were willing to be references for their adoption application, which they're submitting this afternoon. Yes, folks, from unable to discuss adoption to putting in an application in two short months, and all because of us.

This is the part that really hurts. This is the part that makes me most sad, because we're staring at twelve long months of waiting before we can even begin the process of waiting.

And part of me wants to get really sarcastic and really mean, not just about them, but about a lot of things. About BIL and SIL not planning financially and getting all the family help, while we get punished for being responsible. About L&S applying to adopt when they've seemed on the verge of divorce repeatedly in the last six months. About J&N being bad at moving and bad at helping their kid go to sleep. About neither of our mothers being very interested in the fact that we're planning to adopt. About all of the people who are merrily going along on their family building way because we facilitated it somehow.

But it's not about them. It's about my being sad and angry that I've been actively planning to start a family since I was 28 and now I'm 34 and I'll be 35 when we apply and likely 36 or older when we actually get a kid. It's about being frustrated that we aren't in a position to do this responsibly yet, not when we've just gotten ourselves out of debt and have no desire to get back in. It's about feeling unseen and unattended to by the people who love us, people who don't seem to see past my attempts at centeredness to acknowledge the deep hurt that's behind it. It's about my fear that this will never happen for us, that we will always be the aunties and never the mommies. And when I get sarcastic and angry and mean, it's because I'm trying not to feel the feelings I really have: the fear, the despair, the sadness, the heartache.

The problem is that I'm making it worse, railing against what is. We have to wait another year, and there will be waiting after that, and this is not what we want. We envy our friends and family who have had it so easy, and we envy the friends who have all of the resources to throw at this adventure. We want a child desperately, but we can't have one right now. We're scared and sad and tired and feeling like this marathon will never, ever end. We want things to be different, and they aren't.

Our friends and family are not the problem, and they are not the enemy (except when making stupid comments about me, but that's another post for another time). But neither can they really understand where we are and what it feels like to be us right now. We need to take the time to grieve this process that isn't proceeding according to plan, and we need to find forums in which we can simply be present to our own experiences of it.

It's hard to make the space in our busy, people-filled lives to just sit with the pain of it. It's easy to put on the masks of being okay, of coping, of keeping on keeping on, but it's those masks that then turn around and come out as meanness and sarcasm. The flip side is that expressing the pain only makes people reassure us, and while I'm grateful for their love and concern, I don't want to be reassured. They don't know that everything will work out; none of us do. And that kind of sentiment glosses over what it's like to be right here, where we are: in the middle of a long stretch of desert, hoping that the oasis doesn't keep moving, that it's more than a mirage. What I want is a space to just lean in to, where the pain is acknowledged without being minimized. What I want is a witness. And maybe I have to be my own witness.

In the meantime we're painting the inside of our house a rainbow of colors. In the meantime we're making lists of the things we're doing in preparation. In the meantime we're having dates with each other. And in the meantime I need to keep going to the cushion, to my journal, to the trees, so that I can sit with myself in compassion and acknowledge what is really there.

Breathing In, I Smile. Breathing Out, I Release.

By the time we got to our spiritual exploration group last night, we didn't want to go. A group to support daily spiritual engagement is all well and good in August, but at dusk on a Sunday evening in February, it is tempting to throw in the towel.

Our spiritual practice is in something of a slump. We did morning pages last week for the first time in months; our ritual room is used more often for feeding cats than it is for prayer; and we keep missing meeting for reasons good and ill. It's hard to get started again.

We couldn't remember when it started, but no one was there at 5pm as we watched the squirrel scamper across the road on three legs. No one was there at 5:15. By 5:25 we were getting agitated, but first one person came and tried the door, then another stood on the porch next to her. We heaved ourselves out of the car, collected our potluck offering, and stood around in the cold while we figured out who had a key to let us in.

The group begins with dinner--crockpots and tins of cookies lined up on a plastic tablecloth. It's a carnivorous group, small this time. Not like the time, the story told again last night, that everyone managed to bring cornbread or corn pudding. Or the time it was all dessert. The conversation at my end of the table turned to television; most of my fellow explorers have no cable either, and it was an odd and validating experience to not be the only ones to disentangle from the advertising maelstrom.

Upstairs again, we started with silence, as Quakers so often do. The theme was spirituality in everyday life, and our facilitators had sent us short quotations to meditate upon, including part of a Mary Oliver poem I love: "When it's over, I want to say:  all my life I was a bride married to amazement.  I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms." I shared another favorite Oliver quotation: "You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."

We talked about what is it that gets in the way of daily spiritual life. Resentment, I said, the resentment of the now that gets in the way of being fully present. Wanting my job, my moment, my life to be different. One woman asked about Lenten discipline. Although I'm not Christian anymore, Lent is about sacrificing that which stands between you and God; consumption and distraction stand between me and the Divine, and I thought last night of consciously and mindfully limiting my spending and being more choiceful about how I spend my time.

I left centered and calm, inner anxiety quieted for a while. I started a happiness journal before bed, read a few pages of a Buddhist book on radical acceptance. This morning my morning pages pointed out that my relationship to food, and specifically using food as a comfort and a distraction, is one of the biggest obstacles to my relationship to the Divine and to staying present. So I pledged that from Imbolc to Ostara I will consume no dairy, wheat, or high-fructose corn syrup. I pledged to be present to my own feelings and not to drown them with substances I respond badly to.

It doesn't mean I didn't panic this afternoon when the caffeine headache hit and when I foresaw running out of the food I brought from home long before we get through my chiropractor appointment and return home. But I took a deep breath and ate another apple and asked my lovely wife to get me something that fit the bill from her much more well-stocked neighborhood.

Breathing in, I smile. Breathing out, I release. I am present in this moment.