If you’ve had enough of my zen podcast-related thoughts, you can skip today. I’ve been listening to them still and since I am working really long days lately, I am clinging to the peace they are bringing me. (My long hours of work and the lack of brain power I have leftover is the reason I’m behind in emails and comments, I apologize.)
In one of the episodes I listened to yesterday, Tara said “pain is inevitable but suffering is optional” (I wrote it down so I think it’s accurate but if not it was something really similar.) She went on to explain that our resistance to pain is what causes the suffering. This made me think a lot.
A lot of the meditation I’ve been learning in my class has been about raising awareness and not judging and not striving. For example, being aware that pain is there but not judging myself for it and not striving to make the pain go away. Ironically, I’ve had a lot of acute pain in my jaw in the last few weeks. So I’ve been thinking about the quote a lot and trying to figure out how it applies to me.
I can see that in some cases, especially emotional ones, I can interpret it as, bad things can happen to me, around me, but I don’t have to suffer. I can be aware of them, I can accept them and possibly learn to live with them. I can also try to set a path for change or shift. And I can do all of this without suffering or resisting. I can see how this might work. I can see how it might be beneficial. I can also see how it might be very hard. Very, very hard.
But then there’s physical pain. My jaw’s been hurting so much in the last few weeks that I’ve had to take a lot of Advil. I am not sure how suffering is optional there. Am I making the pain worse by resisting it? I do notice that when I am stressed it gets worse. But I still can’t really make the connection to suffering. Maybe it means that if I resist the pain more and push against it, it gets worse?
Either way, I still felt an immediate connection with the emotional pain side of things. I tend to compound my pain by resisting it. Especially if it’s a loved one’s pain. If my kids or my husband is in pain, all I can think of is how to fix it. How to make them feel better. How to undo. How to just not have the pain be there. My instinct is to want to resist it with all my being. I don’t want them to have pain.
Same goes for my pain. I don’t think “well ok, it’s here.” All I can think is “how can I make this go away?” Every part of my body wants to resist it. I only consider other options after fighting it for a long time and losing. After a lot of suffering.
What if I didn’t fight it? What if I just accepted it and worked with it. Or even possibly around it. Instead of resisting so hard. Would that work better? Would I suffer less? I am intrigued by this idea. I feel tempted to try it. It somehow feels like it would work. I love the idea of not having to suffer along with every pain that comes my way. (And I LOVE the idea of not suffering from my jaw pain if only there was a way….)
So next time something painful comes my way, I am going to step back and not resist. I will not try to solve it or fight it. I will acknowledge it and be aware of it. And then I will try to breathe and see if I can take a different path that doesn’t end in suffering.
And maybe it works…
Have you ever tried it? Did not resisting actually reduce suffering? I’d love to know.
This is a layout I made for Maya Road for CHA.
And the journaling says:
My little boy you are always so very cute and you try to imitate your brother all the time and be a big brave boy like he is. So when you saw him walk on the sidewalk ledge, you had to, too. You did great until you hit a crack and then you refused to move, you were all scared. So I held your hand and walked you over the ledge. and told you that the cracks are not scary. But i have to admit I felt relieved that you are as cautious as you are adventurous. I like my boys to be brave but not too brave. Here’s to hoping you always stay a little cautious. I love you so very much my little boy. You rock.
details:
As I mentioned, I plan to keep this project simple and fun for both of us. So, I did the same thing with this letter as I did for letter A and all the others. I cut them all up and then, Nathaniel and I glued them down together to create this simple page:
Like each time, we talked about each of the words and then differentiated between capitals and lowercase. Then we colored all the letters.
Here he is gluing:
and coloring
Yey! Nathaniel is still loving this project!
Letters with Nathaniel is a weekly project for 2012. You can read more about it here.
Another week light on photos, I’ve been working a lot and not snapping as much but alas such is life. Here are some snapshots from our week:
Nathaniel watching his movie while David watches Harry Potter.
Checking out my collage journal, look how big it is.
And then some laughter.
and the beloved blankie.
he can’t help but laugh.
nor can David.
this week they both had stuffed friends. David decided he wanted a “Hobbes” so of course Nathaniel, too. He told me his friends are helping him eat.
then there was sandcastle making.
which meant good light for mommy.
so I snapped of course.
a few new legos for the boys for being so so nice to me while I had to work so hard.
and there’s david with his buddy.
the light here was really bad but i love how Nathaniel is sitting with his daddy, both on their phones.
then it was family photo time and tickle time, of course.
and here we go. i hope your week was lovely, too.
Weekly Diary is a project for 2012. You can read more about it here.
Page thirty-one:
This was all about washi tape fun and old old old rubons.
The quote says: Nature makes me want to spread my wings and fly free.
Here are some more shots of it:
Journey into Collage is a project for 2012. You can read more about it here.
Here are some more pages I did:
The full text reads: take time to rest. your body and soul need it.
And here’s the next page:
The full text reads: no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. (i believe it’s a quote by Eleanor Roosevelt.)
Well here we go. More coming next week.
I am creating multiple art journaling pages a week for now. You can read more about this project here. This set uses the Fabriano Roma papers.
I’ve been listening to more and more meditation talks in the morning as I sketch. I find that they start my day in an optimistic and grateful mental state. In one of the talks I listened to today, Tara mentioned “intentionally looking to see the goodness” and it made me think a lot. She went on to say how we’re wired to see the bad. We’re wired to protect ourselves. To see danger.
But it ends up getting to you.
We don’t look to see the good around us. The good in others. The good in words said. I know that I have a tendency to hug the bad. I believe it more easily. I hold it closer to my heart. I think I have two reasons why I do this.
One is because I think that if I can imagine the very worst, when the bad happens it won’t hurt as much. I’ve already imagined the worst, so how bad can it get, right? Except that it can get much worse. Cause imagining the worst doesn’t actually compare to having it happen. It doesn’t prepare you. If the worst doesn’t actually happen, you wasted all those minutes, days, months imagining something that never happens. And if it does happen, you’re totally blindsided any way. Your life is upside down and it’s terrible. Because even when you do imagine the very worst, there’s a little part of you that thinks it will never happen. So when it does happen, you’re still totally crushed and devastated. So there’s almost no upside and a huge downside to this way of thinking.
The other reason I hold the bad stuff near is because I feel that remembering these will help me make decisions more carefully next time. It will prevent me from more bad stuff in the future. It’s like if I have a constant movie reel of my biggest mistakes in my head, I won’t make any more of them.
We all know how that works right?
Yep. When I think of all my mistakes, I get nervous all the time and I make even more mistakes. I am constantly scared and worried so I get stressed and the fight and flight response kicks in and takes all the blood away from my brain. Prefrontal cortex doesn’t work and I literally cannot think. So, clearly, the decisions I make in that state aren’t going anywhere productive.
So neither of these reasons are useful. Holding the bad stuff near and dear isn’t really helping me. But even more importantly, there’s an incredible amount of data that says looking for the good in your life actually makes you happier. Creating a daily gratitude practice makes people more wholehearted. Intentionally looking for the good changes your life.
What if we extended that to the people around you. What if we always looked for the good in others? Especially in those who annoy us. Especially in the people who try our nerves a bit. The ones for whom we hold anger. The ones that seem to always wrong us, etc. It’s easy to see the best in the ones we love. But if we just intentionally looked for the good in every single person around us, I bet it would completely change our life and our relationships. I love this idea and I want to give it a try. For the next few weeks, I will intentionally look for the good in everyone around me. I will assume the best but also really look to see what good I can see in each person I interact with.
I will also look for the good in my day-to-day life. My gratitude practice has fallen sideways and I want to intentionally bring it back. Now that I am feeling a bit better, too, I want to hold on to this and not let it go.
So here’s to a few weeks of intentionally looking for the good. Maybe you can join me?
I decided to take a small break from the dystopian craze and read The Prophecy of Days. Still Young Adult genre which I absolutely seem to be stuck on these days. But as with most things I expect this phase to pass and I am enjoying it for now.
This novel is more of a mystery sort of like Incarceron but not dystopian at all. More ancient and related to the Mayans. It was quite a fast and interesting read and I enjoyed it a lot.
She, too, has a sequel but it’s not out on the Kindle yet and like the others, I tend to like to put some time and space between my books so it will have to wait for now.
And here’s the spread for week twenty-nine:
here’s a closer up of the left side:
The first story here is about watching the Avengers and the other one is about how much I love my boys.
And here’s the right side:
The first one here is about a new project David and I are doing and the second one is about the playground we went to and the closed slide that made me nervous.
Art along the bottom as usual.
Another great week. Happy Savoring.
The Savor Project was supposed to be a weekly project for 2012. You can read about my setup here.
I don’t really have a lot to say tonight because it’s already almost nine pm here and it’s close to my bed time. But it was a good day today. I’ve been working on getting Chrome 21 out the door for quite a few weeks now and today we finally pushed it. I don’t talk about work here but in the last few weeks I’ve seen once again what amazing people I work with and what a wonderful and inspiring company I work at. I think it’s easy to lose sight of these things in the hustle and bustle of everyday.
My kids were wonderful and played quietly so I could do what I needed to do to prepare everything. So I promised them that if they are patient, I will get them a nice surprise. I had to go to work this afternoon for a meeting and to thank some of the team members who’ve been working late nights and early mornings to get everything ready. After I came home, we all went out and each boy got to have a new lego set.
Bad days are easy to remember. Good days fade out of memory. So I wanted to note this wonderful day. A day when things came together. Tomorrow will bring its challenges. It might be better. It might be much worse.
But, for now, I just want to pause and acknowledge this good day.
Here are the sketches from last week:
Sunday:
Monday:
Tuesday:
Wednesday:
Thursday:
Friday:
Saturday:
that’s it for this week.
Daily Sketching is a weekly project for 2012. You can see a detailed post on my sketching journey here.
Ever since I decided this would be The Summer of Calm I’ve been putting up reminders everywhere. Trying to remember that calm is my goal and that I am at my best when I am calm and not reacting. I have them all over my computer so each time I type an email or respond to someone on instant message, I can see the reminder.
To honor my desire to be calm, I’ve been working quite hard. There are my own issues, of course, but the hardest part of staying calm is when interacting with other people. When people make offhand, mean remarks, I have to step back and tell myself that this is about them and not me. When the kids get really noisy or interrupt me in the middle of what’s clearly a stressful or busy moment, I have to take a breath, and remember that I chose to stay at home and I love being around them. I have to remember that they are young and don’t have good impulse-control just yet. I have to remember that they are angels 95% of the time. I have to remember all of this very quickly so that I don’t react.
And the biggest part is that I am learning not to be attached to things. At each moment of potential conflict, I am trying to pause for a moment and search inside myself. Listen to my true feelings. Do I really care about this issue or am I just trying to be right? Am I trying to win for the sake of winning? For the sake of looking good? Being important. I know there are cases where I find myself reacting cause it looks like it might be the right thing to do. Not because I am actually attached to either outcome. Sometimes I might even fight back for the sake of being contradictory. When the other person becomes aggressive and assertive, I try to outdo them. I can fight with the best of them. I’m no coward.
But the point is, it’s so stupid. If I don’t really, truly care, then I am not really attached to either outcome. I don’t want to fight battles for the sake of fighting them. Needlessly create a chasm between me and the other person. And, more terribly, spin myself into a frenzy of stress. If the end result isn’t important to me, I should just let it go.
But it’s hard.
Sometimes it’s really, really hard. Even being able to step back in that split second and realize that I don’t have a dog in this fight is hard. We’re so conditioned to respond to stimuli. I was listening to another Tara Bracht podcast this morning (I listen to them every morning now; they are excellent.) and she was saying how what meditation does is add to this delay. To the reaction time. So you can have extra seconds (or maybe only milliseconds) to become aware and think so you don’t react but you act. Those milliseconds are so precious. And if meditating will give them to me, I am on board. Just tell me where to sign up.
Because here’s what I know: when I can take the few extra (milli)seconds to realize that I don’t actually have a stake in the outcome, that I don’t really mind either outcome, then I can stop the fight before it starts. I can remember my list and I can let it go. Because once I remember that it doesn’t matter, it’s easy to let go.
It’s that precious pause that’s the hard part.
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projects for twenty twenty-six
projects for twenty twenty-five
projects for twenty twenty-four
projects for twenty twenty-three
projects for twenty twenty-two
projects for twenty twenty-one
projects for twenty nineteen
projects for twenty eighteen
projects from twenty seventeen
monthly projects from previous years
some of my previous projects
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