On Reconnecting

I whole-heartedly oppose New Years' resolutions.  To me, these scarcely sincere mutterings of promises and pledges feel equivalent to fad dieting: The intentions are great but nobody makes meaningful change because of socially-imposed choices.   We make these plans simply because ceremony (or the repercussions of New Years Eve ceremony) calls for them.  We've spent three weeks binge eating and toasting the nights away, after which our bodies are screaming for change.  We interpret this as motivation for our resolutions, but once our equilibrium returns, out goes said motivation.

This year, instead of coming up with grandiose plans of weight loss or financial frugality, I have found myself in these first frozen days of the burgeoning year reflecting on the state of affairs in my life.  Rather than setting myself up for failing on unrealistic resolutions, I'm choosing to spend this time of emotional and mental rebirth to reconnect with the plans and values that I already have.  Bear with me while I circle around the point.


When I began this wellness journey over four years ago, I didn't really have much of a plan.  I knew that I was 1) 320lbs., 2) depressed, and 3) physically and emotionally toxic to myself and those around me.  I found myself in a rather desperate position.  I had no idea how to climb out of the hole in which I'd found myself, but I knew that I had to start climbing.  The place I started was weight.  As I starting feeling better, the changes suddenly piled up and before I knew it, my life was nearly unrecognizable.

Since that very dark time in my life, I have spent a great deal of time trying to make sense of both how I got there and how I got out.  I came to see the driving force of the downward spiral not to be some self-destructive expression of deeply-seated self loathing.  Rather, I see it as the absence of the motivation not to continue spiraling, what I currently think of as a will to be well.  Staying alive matters, as silly as it sounds, and it didn't always.  This desire to stay alive, happily and healthfully, made decisions about dessert, beers, exercise, relationships, etc. much simpler.  If it is inconsistent with the stated goal, it needn't be part of my life.

Now, back to today.  As anyone who has made significant life changes can attest, the reinforcing power of external support wanes over time.  Where I was once thrilled simply to see numbers drop on a scale or run my first 8k, my routine has become so... well... routine that it's easy for things to slide.  I can excuse having one extra piece of cheese on my sandwich, or skipping one more yoga class, or having one (or three) more beers.  Like a ship at sea, incremental changes in navigation can lead to an entirely different course.  But that doesn't necessarily mean that an entirely new course must be plotted.  Radical changes in direction may lead to even worse outcomes.


This New Years, I am taking the "sliding on ice" approach.  When a car begins to slide, the best course of action is not to quickly and violently jerk the wheel back into traffic.  One need only recognize that the slide is occurring and then calmly and gently steer back with small adjustments in the intended direction.  This year I want to honestly a openly acknowledge the various slides in my life, not from a place of punishment or self deprecation.  I will work to respond with gentle adjustments to reconnect with that same spirit that got me out of the spiral to begin with.  Instead of a complete overhaul, I will deliberately and mindfully target the areas of my life that have become misaligned with the values that undergird them.

Finding Quiet in Chaos

It seems like the universe has woven another its themes into my daily awareness.  My yoga instructor shared this nugget with me this past week and I've spent a considerable amount of time with it sense.  She stated that a primary purpose of yoga is to "find the quiet in the chaos."

On first pass this seems like just another yoga-ism.  For those of you who have ever spent time with a yoga practitioner, you know that we're full of such seemingly empty platitudes.  I admit this was my first reaction.  As the week wore on, however, this phrase has hung with me and induced a significant amount of pondering.

Our days often brim with chaos.  Any graduate student will attest that the competing pulls of our various responsibilities do not often lend themselves to supporting a relaxing lifestyle.  Any working parent can share a similar story.  We justify that we must trudge through the tempest until we reach a "relaxing" weekend.  Then the weekends fill up with desperate attempts to recharge our mental and emotional batteries, a task that can be as exhausting as the chaotic week.  We live in the vicious cycle of anxiety and exhaustion with the promise that someday, eventually, we will get a break.

This seems ludicrous.  We never catch up.  What is the alternative?

Inhale.  Hold.  Exhale.  Repeat.


A small fraction of what we consider to be urgent in actuality is.  If we live our life at a sprinting pace, we simply fill the gaps with more work.  Our reward for working so diligently?  More work.  The work never ends.  So I offer an approach which instead embraces the journey instead of sprinting toward the finish line.  Our chaos, our obstacles, our challenges; these things constitute our life.  I get so much more from life when I slow down and view these things for what they are.  I am learning to find and appreciate the spaces in between the never-ending barrage that life offers.  She/he does not need an escape who can learn to detach from destination and embrace the chaos and avoid seeing it as a means to an end.  Avert your gaze from the fictitious end.  Watch mindfully for the quiet spaces in your day and embrace them with gratitude.

On Escaping (or Embracing) That Which Follows

A bell is ringing, a sleepy logging town is in mourning.  A Mother of Many has passed and all of us, her tended and mended, are crying.  Hurting and afraid, we have always found safety in her unconditional guidance, love, and support.  The recent past found those closest to her shifting into the uncomfortable and frightening roles of caretakers for she who has always taken care.  Now that time has passed, and without justice or understanding, the Mother of Many has gone.

I wish I had an escape.  It seems that the universe has given me this theme again.  I suppose there are many names for this phenomenon.  It seems like that from which we run, cower, hide, beg, bargain, or deny is in a state of perpetual pursuit.  It's the nightmare where no matter how fast we run, the snarling pit bull is simply too fast.

It seems fitting that at this place in my own journey, one filled with begrudging acceptance of my inability to control the universe in the way I prefer, I once again find myself and those around me in grief.  My own dark little companion, grief seems to find us and me despite my many years of skillful elusion.  In my therapy, I frequently guide clients through acceptance, point out that strategies of avoidance are never successful in the long run.  My clients often hear how, unless we accept our unwanted little bits, the parts that of us and our histories that scare us most, we continue to be haunted by them.  Sometimes the universe has a sick sense of humor.

Maybe I can try it differently this time.  I'm not yet sure how.  I already feel the emotional safety and familiar pull of escape, avoidance, denial.  I think I'll try feeling instead.  No promises.

Sorry for the melodramatic intro =/

Letting go

This interminable winter in the Intermountain West has found me pensive.  It seems that the more that this frozen wasteland forces me indoors, the more stuck in my own head I become.  Luckily (or regrettably?), that gives me plenty of time to ruminate.

I've been mentally chewing on a particularly troublesome issue recently, that of letting go.  Anyone who knows me knows I'm a hoarder.  I compulsively save receipts, old emails, cards, random documents, etc.  Most of the time, this compulsion serves only to irritate Kayley and provide me with a sense of relief when I will myself to purge the excess from the pockets, drawers, and closets of our home.  However, one thing that to which I've unrelentingly clenched is of the self that I'm supposed to be.

I moved to Utah with many expectations about the counselor I was, the strengths I felt I had honed on the reservation, the unique way I would be able to relate to the most difficult clients.  My years on the reservation had both hardened me and opened me up in ways that most first-year graduate students didn't know.  I was so eager to begin seeing clients and flex my interpersonal muscles.  I was ready to be an expert therapist the day before I began learning about therapy.

Needless to say, after one year of practicum, I'm not an expert.  I've not blossomed and flourished into the unique potential that I felt came with me from home.  Instead, I've been dealt one humbling blow after another that have left me reeling with doubt about what the hell I felt I knew before I started.  Clearly, as seems most obvious now, it was an absurd expectation from the beginning.  What has troubled me the most is not the feelings of insecurity or ineptitude that come with the experience of being a budding therapist.  Rather, what sucks the most is the loss of that sense of who I was.  It wasn't just that I felt like I had some skills that prepared me for grad school.  I felt like there was something about me that would allow me to reach and connect with the people others couldn't.  It seriously sucks to lose that image of myself.

Knowing completely that I am not a special flower, one of God's unique little snowflakes meant to live out my providentially-designed destiny, it seems clear that I would instead embrace that I will have to succeed as a psychologist by virtue of hard work and attentive training and supervision.  But the grief over the loss of myself is really hard to stomach.  Why do we cling so desperately to these imaginary realities, and why do they have so much influence on our daily lives?  My supervisor told me, ever so compassionately, that:

"It seems like you have this image in your head of who you ought to be and what you ought to be able to do.  And you are trying your best to take your reality and stuff it into your dream."  

Why is it so hard to accept reality as it is?  I am a student therapist with zero previous training in formal therapy skills or supervision.  What gets in the way of us seeing the reality of our daily lives and simply embracing it?  I think for myself, I'm the product of a 25 years of innately- and environmentally-driven self-improvement.  The skills that have pushed me academically and personally to improve myself, to see beyond the present and imagine a better future are now working against me.

I think we too often focus on what needs to be different, what parts of our bodies feel too flabby, the areas of our personalities that irritate us and compulsively work to change them.  Self-improvement is a great thing.  Ambition can be very powerful.  But I think we culturally value these ideas to a point of pathology.  Where does acceptance fit?  When is the time to step back and disengage from ambition to simply appreciate the place one finds oneself?  What do we sacrifice by hoarding our imagined selves and stuffing our real selves into them?

Today, I'm going to meditate on releasing the self of my imagination and work on accepting the self of my reality.  I'm a second-year grad student that has a shitload to learn.  I'm in a really great place that deserves both of my feet in the present moment.  I want to systematically and compassionately dig into the nightstands, drawers, and closets of my identity and unclench my fists.  Today I will balance my ambition with surrender and acceptance.  Namaste.

Castastrophe Catalyzing Change

I was inspired recently by a recent post of a friend and fellow blogger (as well as fellow Elma High School alumnus), Colin Thiel.  Please bear with me on this one, as this post will certainly take an indirect path to answering today's questions. 

In Colin's post, he describes the idea of forced renewal.  Through the metaphor of crashing a car, the reader is drawn to consider the cleansing power of complete destruction.  Now, the car crash fantasy, if it can be called that, is one that I've had very frequently through the years.  It isn't necessarily a wish to end my life or even inflict severe pain.  Rather, I interpret this fantasy much as my friend Colin, as a chance to renew.  


What I'd like to do is extend that idea a bit.  Those close to me know that over the past 3-4 years, I've done a complete 180 degree turn in my lifestyle.  I credit these changes to several significant losses and their profound impacts on my outlook on life and my control over it.  What I realized is that while I was miserable, day in and day out, the melancholy was familiar.  I stuck with the shitty parts of my life (almost entirely the results of my behaviors, mind you) because I was comfortable in them.  I knew my place in the lives of those around me, specifically, as a bystander, watching life go by without a clue as to how to engage in it.

Now, I won't drag on with my story of change.  Instead I'd like to explore that unproductive and disastrous complacency that I wallowed in.  I think we get into these patterns of being and acting that seem impenetrable.  We get locked into a routine, however unsatisfying, and get stuck in its familiarity.  I think the allure that Colin's crash provides is a method of busting out of that routine without being forced to choose.  I even find myself at times internally seeking disaster simply to compel myself to throw out the routine. We don't like acknowledging that we create the vast majority of the miseries from which we suffer as a direct result of our inaction.

When catastrophe strikes, we instinctively recognize that the status quo cannot be maintained.  It's a brief opportunity to reinvent ourselves and our lives with a "get-out-of-jail-free" card.  It's like a vacation from being you.  When we encounter a tragedy, we don't respond with cool, calculated, future-oriented decisions.  We respond with that which we know will serve our needs and keep us from hurting.  In other words, we do precisely what we want.  Wouldn't it be incredible to always interact with the world in this way?  If we could spend a bit more time focused on doing what we actually want to do and a bit less on what we feel we ought to want to do, can you imagine the freedom?

I think crashing appeals to me on several levels.  Primarily, however, I think it speaks to my desire to take risks, shake things up, and make decisions about my self-interest without respect to potential consequences.  I'm going to meditate today on taking such steps without catastrophic loss.  I'm going to spend some time evaluating 1) How much my daily life demonstrates my will for living, and 2) What steps I can take to increase that last thing.

Uncorking

The past few weeks have been a serious reminder for me of how difficult it can be for a man to feel. I don't mean to say that we don't have any feelings. Quite the contrary. In fact, these past few weeks have served to throw in my face just how much I do feel, and how difficult that is. Allow me to ramble a little.

This is Ozzie. He's been living with Kayley, Hank, and me since this past July. As you can clearly see, he's a really cute dog. He's just turned two years old, and as most of those around me know, Ozzie is dying. He was diagnosed with an aggressive lymphatic cancer two weeks ago and is really beyond effective intervention. Shitty, right?

The experience has obviously been difficult. Anyone who knows Kayley and me also knows that our dogs are our family. They get Christmas presents, sleep on our bed, and have never been to a kennel. Watching Ozzie fight against something we know he can't beat has dredged up many years of feelings buried deep in the sticky sediment of my emotional avoidance. Again... Shitty.

However, a interesting side-effect of this admittedly shitty situation is that I'm in a somewhat heightened emotional place, something new for me. As boys and men, society takes a clear stance about the role of emotions: Don't feel them. Feelings are for women and gay men. Any self-respecting straight man would not cry, especially not about a dog. Unfortunately, I apparently missed that memo, as I've had more crying sessions about this dog than I ever (and I mean ever) remember having.

This development seems to me a double-edged sword. On one hand, I am studying counseling psychology, so one could assume that having a visceral experience of a range of emotions would lead me to be a more empathic therapist. However, the shame that we're taught at any expression of feelings outside of anger is inseparably linked to my sense of masculinity. Do I know it's bullshit? Yes. That doesn't change the fact that I'm terrified that with this sense of affective awakening that I'm going to unexpectedly burst into tears around my friends and coworkers and thus lose any sense of control over myself, leaving me with unending work to prove that despite my "weakness," I'm still manly. (Please see William Pollack's Real Boys for more on the shame of male emotional socialization. I've only just started but it's really cool.)

In any case, I admit that it's been somewhat relieving to exhale and cry out some of my years of anger and frustration about sickness and death. Even if this uncorking has left me feeling at best unstable, I am on some level grateful that I'm getting to develop a more complete understanding of myself and the process we're going through with Ozzie. Maybe someday we men will cry without shame. Not today. But today I'll cry anyway.

Balance

Disclaimer: Many of the views expressed in the following blog will closely resemble the regurgitation of several hippie clichés and mindless platitudes.

Balance. Even the word itself is balanced, three letters equally hanging on each end of a nice, round vowel. Both noun and verb, you can almost feel the inherent harmony that exudes from every crevice of these seven letters. And yet, despite our instinctive knowledge of the importance of balance, it commands so little respect in contemporary mainstream American life.

Let me begin by openly acknowledging my own hypocrisy on this issue. I am, afterall, a budding therapist, and thus the ability to spew advice for others and ignore it in my own life comes naturally to me. Balance plays an interesting role in my life. As any graduate student can attest, some days there is simply no way to balance. After 14 hours in class, office hours, coffee, meetings, supervision, more coffee, sessions, homework, more meetings, and finally more homework, where would one find time for, say, sleep? Not only do we affect the balance of our own lives, but even the lives of those around us become unbalanced simply from being subject to our ridiculous schedules. And yet, despite knowing what consequences await us when we get out of balance, we "willingly" engage in these activities day in and day out.

This phenomenon is not unique to students. In fact, the American workday is impinging further and further into our home lives. Fifty to sixty hour work weeks are not uncommon. We all make little sacrifices, be it exercise, rest, reading a book, seeing a friend, or simply relaxing on the couch. At what cost do we accept these sacrifices? Therapists have a word for it: Burnout. The undeniable sense that resembles, as my friends at Lummi taught me, a case of the fuck-it's. We trudge through our days with the hope that at some point, we'll reach some ultimate point where we can finally put our feet up and declare that we've arrived. I believe such a place exists. Unfortunately, it's when we're dead.

I largely blame technology for this encroachment into our personal space. Remember about 15 years ago, it was an unbelievable technological feat to talk to someone on the phone while you were in the car? I remember at eight or nine years old riding with the Bolings and watching Tom talk on his car phone. How convenient that we could talk and drive! Now we of course know that we're not particularly good at either of those activities when combined, but the point is that with the expansion of technology into cell phones that took pictures, and then had instant messaging, and then could access email, and now I think they cook you breakfast, we accept every innovation at the cost of balance. My students are incensed when their Friday afternoon question isn't answered until Monday because I haven't checked my email. I like being helpful, and it sucks that they have to wait, but my space (my real space, not myspace) is becoming increasingly precious to me.

I'm reminded of a scene from American History X when Edward Norton, newly assigned to the prison laundry, hurries angrily through a pile of clean boxer shorts, folding and tossing them as he goes. This proceeds at the frustration of his work partner attempts to slow him down and get him to relax. He says something along the lines of, "It doesn't matter how fast you fold 'em, there's always gonna be more." No matter how long we labor, or how much work we get done on vacations, or how quickly we can respond with our iPhones, the work only ends when we're dead.

We must find a way to balance our lives. I covet the European sense of "holidays" that last a month. We take an extra Monday on a 3-day weekend (likely filled chores and catching up on more work) and delight ourselves in the freedom. But unless we actively create time for rest, relaxation, meditation, reflection, family time, or going outside, the work will continue to press into our 6 hours of daily life we spend away from our offices.

So I encourage you all to challenge your routines. How much of your life are you sacrificing at the hands of technology? How many games of Monopoly are you missing with your friends and family because you've got a few emails to answer? How many drives in the dark, movies on the couch, bowls of ice cream, or stories about life are you losing in the name of work that never ends? Put down the iPhone (after you finish reading this blog, of course) and go outside. Life is so much bigger than the next project. In the spirit of one of my favorite passages from the Tao Te Ching:

"Fill your bowl to the brim

and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people's approval
and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity."