Pain and Mindfulness

I recently went through a painful experience in which, well, suffice it to say I had one set of expectation about how things were going to go and my superiors had another. You may have had a similar experience in losing a job or having gone through a painful break up, either of those examples would work for my situation. Part of my attempt to start a new blog was born of that experience. But new starts are hard, especially when you bring along old baggage. Is there ever really a new start? Perhaps a better way to view the new blog is that it is a new shuffle of the cards. The cards are the same, but the way they are dealt changes. I am still me. I come to the table with the same set of problems, the same hang-ups. But maybe this time I can look at them from a fresh perspective.

One thing that has really dogged me in the past is my propensity to replay certain events over and over in my head. I frequently find myself reliving certain events of the past in my thoughts. I used to think that this made me crazy some how. Mostly because the reliving of those thought often brought to bare painful memories that evoked bitter emotions. I would not only reminisce the past, I would relive it. I would replay the same conversation, I would experience the same emotions, I would undergo the same machinations.

Why would I think I was crazy? Well because usually as I experienced these memories I would try to alter outcomes. I would find myself arguing, pleading, doing just about anything to change the past. But the past is the past, and no matter how hard I tried the outcome was invariably the same.

I might add a note here and say that what I describe above might lead people to think that I was actively pursuing reliving these memories. But I want to assure you that I was not. These episodes, for lack of a better word, always come unbidden. I would be taking a shower, or driving the car, or fixing dinner and would suddenly find myself knee deep in thought and feeling that completely incongruous with reality, and that, more than anything, made me think I was crazy.

But I am not crazy, and no one that I have talked to about these experiences, not therapists, priests, friends, or family has ever suggested as much. In fact it has been quite the opposite. While the episodes may be crazy making, they are not the product of a crazy mind. They are the product of a mind that has been hurt. I was hurt. I was let down. I was devastated. Now my mind, ever my friend, is trying to make it all right. It is trying to help me make sense of the world that makes no sense. It has created a fantasy of familiar characters, situations and feelings that I can latch on to in the hopes that I can somehow make sense of the ridiculous.

Sadly there are times when my mind, ever my friend, is rather primitive and it is up to me to reign in on the insanity. I cannot allow myself the luxury of self-doubt, self-loathing and self-pity. Sadly, while I mourn the state of events that has transpired, the memory of them is driving me mad. Allow me to say this again. I am not crazy, but the memory of these event, however fresh, is crazy making.

So Dr. Me, what is the cure?

A few years ago I had a Jungian-like revelation that my fantasy character, the people I was thinking about, while based on real people, were not, themselves, real. In essence I am talking to myself. I can do one of two things with this revelation. I can begin to address these people for what they really are, figments of my memory, or if I am daring, I can choose to look at them as parts of myself. Either way The key here is to remember while the situation is real, what happened, happened, my memory of it is not. My memory is my memory and I can choose to remember or not.

The other day I was standing in the shower when the memory of some of these events came back to me. Before I knew it I found myself shouting at the principle players. See, even though I know what is happening, even though I am aware that reliving this painful memory is detrimental to my health, I still sometimes find myself doing it. So what do I do? I can roll with it, let it do its thing, and in the end nothing will change. The events will still have happened. Or I can stop it. I can shout “Stop it!” I can pinch myself.” I can turn the shower on “cold.” I can go for a walk. I can call a friend. I can walk away and in short, I can stop it.

It isn’t easy. The first forty times I wasn’t successful, but while I wasn’t able to stop my mind from driving me crazy, I could continue to practice, after all even if I wasn’t successful I was becoming more aware of myself, I was becoming more aware of the episodes, and awareness is key. Awareness is gold. Some people call it mindfulness or consciousness. Many religions consider it the key to liberation and in recent times it has been used in psychology to battle depression and obsessive/compulsive disorders. I don’t know much about those things, but I do know about this. I want to be free. I want to be free of this painful memory and more I want to be free to choose my own path to happiness. I don’t want my primitive mind making those decisions for me, because it never makes the right call. I have used mindfulness to battle physical back pain and emotional trauma and I am here to tell you that this works. This works. It doesn’t work all the time but it works.

It works because instead of thinking about all of the S.O.B.’s in my life I can be free to think about me. I can think clearly about my disappointing situation and instead of feeling the gravity of it burdening me, weighing me down, I can feel the possibilities of choice open up around me. When I am in the memory, the many faces, the ex-lover, the old boss speak for me, they speak collectively and they bring me down, but by being mindful I rid myself of the extraneous voices and I can finally find myself listening to just one voice, my own, and that voice says I am loved. I am successful, and I am free.

Life is calling

When I started the new blog I really had vision of a fresh start, I thought “this time I am going to do things differently.” Though in all honesty I have to admit that I didn’t really have a firm plan about what “different” was, so I suppose berating myself for not having done it different is really foolish; worse because instead of doing things differently, I haven’t done them at all. My blogging has fallen off dramatically. I was reading the blog of a friend of mine who is really going through the fire right now and I had this fleeting thought that maybe my blogging had fallen off because I wasn’t doing anything, or that my life wasn’t, well, inspiring me to any new thoughts and ideas.

That is a very depressing thought. Depressing more because I feel like I am working harder now than ever before. I don’t know if it is true, but there really doesn’t feel like any time for anything extra. I could blame my lack of blogging on all the therapy I have been in, that is, I am pouring out myself in therapy instead of here, but that isn’t the case. I could say that I am blogging less because I am painting more, but my painting is only slightly more sporadically successful than my blogging.

I am teaching right now four times a week from eight to noon and that is a huge time drain. I wake up at early and dash off to work hoping to get things done early in the morning before class, but usually this time is only marginally fruitful. When I get home it is lunchtime I feed myself or family and try to get into a working mindset but no sooner am I there then I have to go back out- take a class or deliver a child and by the time I am through it is dinner time or later and I begin to run out of steam. I feel like so much of my day is busy work, running from place to place, and really it probably is, but in the hurrying and scurrying to get things done, the truth is that nothing is getting done, or nothing that I want to get done is getting done.

So I take care of the essentials. I make time for feeding and for work and for kids and for everything else and if, in the odd moment I feel lucky enough to settle in and paint a little or jot a thought down here then I should try to feel extremely lucky, and I try to use thought moments for mindfulness and gratitude. Really this is the best use of my time, painting and blogging and all the extras that I pine for have become an exercise in feeling thankful for them, and while I haven’t figured out how to make that gratitude spill over into all areas of my waking life, I can’t help but wonder if it will.

They say fake it until you make it, or practice makes perfect or something along these lines. But I don’t know that I am faking anything or practicing anything I am just treading water trying to stay afloat when all around me the dams seem to burst and spill. I have had a lot of set backs lately and maybe this feeling of being busy all the time is really just the feeling of adjusting to the fact that life doesn’t always go my way. It is kind of like how time flies when you are having fun, when life seems very busy when it doesn’t go the way you expected. I am sure there is one more pithy aphorism I could squeeze in here but J. is leaving and the kids are hollering and life is feeling very busy all of a sudden. I want to remind myself to feel gratitude. Life is calling. I should feel thankful but somehow I just feel busy.