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The art of beginning again (and again)

The truth is this: I don’t think I’ve written anything more serious than a journal entry in almost six months (not counting academic publications, that is).

And even that truth is something of a lie because I have written some things, I have an unfinished draft or two of a blog post hanging out on my computer that I never polished up and published and an even longer list of possible blog titles I liked enough to jot down, but never followed through on.

I haven’t written for a long list of reasons — among them, I’ve been focused on healing several chronic health issues (progress has been mixed, but there has been progress) and that lately the time has never felt right (hint: the time will never feel right).

All of which is to say that this blog post is about beginning again (and again). Because as much as I like to tell myself the story that it is enough to begin something once and then to keep going — the truth is always that I begin something once and then life derails me and I find myself needing to begin over and over again.

So today, I thought I’d share just a few tips for how to begin again with grace.

First, honor the truth that this is how life is.

Life is full of difficulties you failed to account for: a bad night’s sleep, an unexpectedly dead phone, a serious illness. These difficulties come in all shapes and sizes and their most important shared feature is that, no matter how carefully you planned or how diligently you agonized, you could not have accounted for them.

The important thing isn’t that these things happen — it’s how we choose to respond when they do.

If we sleep badly do we slack off because we’re exhausted and then feel guilty about how little we’re accomplishing? Or do we take a cold, hard look at our plans for the day and say, “Here’s the two key things that I have the energy to accomplish today. Everything else will have to wait for tomorrow” — and then we follow through on that: we do our two things and are done for the day.

The way to more forward with grace when life throws up an unexpected roadblock is to keep coming home to the truth of our reality in each moment.

Today my reality is that I am tired. Today my reality is that I have needed to scale back on some of the things I had hoped to accomplish.

But today my reality is also that I have managed to do many of the things that I intended to do — and that this is cause for celebration, not punishment. In my own way, I am triumphing despite adverse circumstances — should I choose to view my actions in this way.

Second, offer yourself compassion instead of judgement.

This is the one thing that has made the biggest difference in my life.

I used to have this terribly toxic inner dialogue where every missed deadline was a disaster and every broken promise (to myself, mostly, but sometimes to other people) proved what a terrible, unreliable person I was.

But the truth about living this way is it makes you feel hunted.

Your own scathing inner voices haunt you, until you are terrified to drop the ball on even one small thing for fear of the furious criticism that will issue from the bully that lives inside your mind.

Being constantly on the run from your own inner critic doesn’t work very well.

When you’re on the run, nothing you achieve feels like a victory — it feels like a commuted death sentence or a bullet dodged — a terror-tainted relief, unworthy of jubilation.

Happily, if you are also guilty of a toxic inner dialogue, this is a pattern that can be shifted with mindful awareness and the conscious development and regular practice of self-compassion.

It is possible to recognize that our terribly mean inner voices are fueled by nothing more than our fear: fear that we are not good enough, fear that we will be rejected, fear that others will shame or abandon us if we dare to let them down.

These fears are natural, normal, healthy human fears.

We’re afraid of being alone. We’re afraid of feeling vulnerable. And the fear centers of our brain are working overtime to try and keep us safe and out of danger.

But it is possible to honor our instincts and our fears without succumbing to them.

It is possible to hold our instincts and our fears with compassionate witness and to choose to take a different path. It is possible to choose to honor and navigate our fears with compassion. To offer the smallest, most frightened parts of ourselves our love and protection.

Third, safety is what makes change possible.

The strength needed to begin again (and again) is so much less when we feel safe.

In meditation we come back to the breath over and over again. And we become distracted over and over again — because it is the nature of the mind to wander.

But with practice, we learn that what matters the most is not preventing distraction. What matters the most is how we choose to come back to the breath.

When I first started meditating, years ago, I came back to the breath like this: “Oh, shoot, thinking… Thinking. Again! Argh!… Crap, still thinking…” Needless to say, I often finished my meditation frustrated with myself, my mind, and my own lack of concentration.

These days, I come back to the breath more like this: “Oh, hello thinking…. Planning, thank you for your concern… Past — how good to see you today…” And in between this friendly noticing of what my mind is up to, I generally experience calm and peace.

And when I feel agitated, restless, bored, and uncomfortable  — when peace seems farther away than anything — I notice that with friendliness and compassion, too.

The critical thing that changed was this: I stopped judging myself for becoming distracted and, in doing so, I turned my meditation into an experience that was safe.

Safe to fail. Safe to forget. Safe to start over again.

Because truly, I believe that when make our lives safe for ourselves to live in anything is possible.

And the good news is, most of creating safety for yourself is an inside job.

It’s learning to listen to your fears and outrages and desires. It’s learning to separate your scary story and your insecurity from what is really happening. It’s learning to trust yourself to navigate change and hardship capably and with as much grace as is possible.

It’s the simple (and yet amazingly difficult) commitment to be the one person who will never abandon you. To stick with your body, your feelings, and your circumstances no matter how rough the seas or how fierce the winds.

And if you can do that, you can do anything.

Much love,
Jessica

Bringing your body back into balance

Here are two things I know to be true.

First, things have been unusually hard for those of us here in the US since the inauguration of the Trump presidency. It seems like every time I look at the news there’s some fresh heartbreak splashed across the front page.

Second, the body’s natural response to fear is ultimately counterproductive in situations like this.

The highest priority of body and brain are to protect you from danger and remove you from stressful situations.

Unfortunately, there is no way to remove yourself from the situation of the Trump presidency.

For better or worse, we’re stuck with him for the time being. Which means that the brain, left to its own devices, will try and remove you from the situation not by changing your circumstances, but by removing your experience of those circumstances through numbing and apathy.

The problem with this approach is that there is no way to selectively numb the body or the emotions. They only way to stop ourselves from feeling the bad things is to stop ourselves from feeling everything. And if this happens to us, we begin to lose touch with our joys alongside our sorrows, and our lives become leached of their vibrancy and vitality.

My point is not that you shouldn’t be afraid — I personally think you should be at least a little bit afraid. Your fear is there to help you pay attention. Your nervous system has correctly identified a possible threat to your well-being.

The problem is that the Trump presidency isn’t an immediate and present danger you can physically fight or flee from. And when the body’s fear response is triggered in an ongoing way and the danger can’t be fought or fled, it has only two last-ditch responses: freeze or shut down altogether.

As we move forward we need to pay attention to our fear — but we also need to recognize that if our nervous systems remain highly activated in response to an ongoing situation, we’re going to end up feeling emotionally wrecked, physically ill, and possibly even traumatized.

Because when the body is locked in fight, flight, or freeze in response to fear it turns off a lot of key functions. When our fear-response is a short-lived response, a natural reaction to a passing danger this works beautifully. But in the presence of an ongoing threat, the system starts to break down.

The good news is that if we are conscious of what is happening in our brains and in our bodies we can take proactive action to protect ourselves from stress and to create a more productive response to fear.

We can begin to do this by noticing that the threat isn’t immediate and allowing ourselves to return to the safety of the present moment. Yes, the Trump presidency is awful and many heartbreaking things will probably come to pass in the next four years. And yet, for most of us, we are as safe today as we were six months ago. The worst has not yet come to pass.

So for now we can take refuge in the recognition of this fact. We come back to our body, to our breath, in this moment in which we are still safe.

This isn’t about hiding from what’s happening and it’s not about burying our heads in the sand. It’s about returning our bodies to balance so that we can be strong enough to continue to fight.

When we return to safety in the present moment, it allows the nervous system to relax. The fight or flight response eases, the body returns to a healthy equilibrium, and we become more resilient and able to take constructive action in the future.

My preferred technique for bringing equilibrium back to the body is meditation, which is one of the most powerful tools I’ve found for reconnecting with my body and engaging with the present moment.

But here’s the thing most people don’t tell you about meditation: it’s really freaking hard! It’s sort like the black-belt of mindfulness practices — highly-effective, but not necessarily for beginners. It took me years of off-and-on practice to really see a benefit from it.

This isn’t necessarily a problem, but sometimes it means it’s best to try a different approach. If you’ve tried meditation before and feel like you “can’t meditate” or you’ve benefited from meditation before but now find yourself struggling, here are a few simple things to try.

  • Focus on your heartbeat. I do this lying in bed at night sometimes when I’m having trouble sleeping. Just lie down flat on your back somewhere comfortable and put your hands over your heart and feel it’s steady thump-thump-thumping. I’m convinced there’s something primally comforting about the rhythm of a heartbeat left over from our time spent in the womb.
  • Try a guided body scan. This is a mindfulness exercise that is similar to meditation but gives the mind a task to latch onto — bringing the attention to the physical sensations in the body. You can find a ton of these on the internet, so feel free to google for one you like. If you’re new to the practice I recommend starting with a ~10-minute recording such as this one, which is technically intended to help you sleep but could be used any time.
  • Express yourself creatively. If you have a lot of stress and emotions flying about doing something creative can be really helpful. I’m a writer, so I turn to my journal for this, but you might try painting, coloring, dancing, singing — whatever you love to do, really.
  • Practice yoga. I really like yoga because it is fundamentally an embodied practice that unites body and breath. It can be particularly helpful in situations where you might be feeling too unsettled to relax easily into meditation. Yoga encourages the body to relax into movement and into the rhythm of the breath. If you’re looking for resources, Yoga With Adriene is my favorite way to practice these days.

As we slowly and persistently practice bringing our attention back into the physical sensations in the body and to an awareness of the present moment, we accomplish two important things. We learn to find a visceral experience of safety in the body in any moment which allows the activated nervous system to relax, and we increase our tolerance for experiencing uncomfortable sensations.

We begin to teach ourselves that fear or sadness or pain are just sensations we experience in our physical bodies in response to stimulus. A lot of the struggle we experience around these emotions is our own resistance to feeling what we’re feeling.

When my chronic pain flares, I make it worse by believing that pain is something “bad” and that I shouldn’t be feeling it. The truth is that pain is just a sensation — a hot, stabbing, fire in my nerves.

When I drop my story about it and just feel the sensation in the present moment, I learn something that is obvious, but easy to overlook: I’m always able to handle my pain; I’m always already doing it. In each moment, I’m already feeling the full intensity of the sensation and I’m still breathing — I’m still fundamentally okay.

When I remember this, I find the pain eases — the sensation might remain but my resistance to feeling it diminishes and the pain becomes easier to bear.

This is what I mean by returning to a felt-sense of safety in the present moment: I might be scared or hurting, but if I sit down with myself in the moment, I realize that I can feel these things and still be okay. In fact, I’m always already doing it.

I believe that being able to return to this felt-sense of safety, to being grounded in our bodies, and aware of the present moment is the foundation from which all courage is born.

When we learn to see that we are always already handling our difficulties in the present moment, it becomes easier to see how safe we really are, to see that “bad” things can happen, that we can be hurting, and still be fundamentally okay.

It is this belief in our own safety, even in difficult situations, that makes it possible to act in ways that require our courage — because courage always requires taking the risk that things will end badly.

The coming years are going to ask each of us to be as brave as we have ever been.

The courage that we will need starts here: it starts with paying attention to our fear, returning to our safety in the present moment, and helping ourselves feel safe from the inside out, so that we can show up in the world with all the courage as we can possibly muster.

Much love,
Jessica

The willingness to suffer is… the secret to meditation

I started a new practice a few weeks back — on the surface it looks like meditation, but it’s really an exercise in what I’m calling radical discomfort.

I’ve written before about my struggle with meditation. It was a struggle I’d never satisfactorily resolved. I always meditated sporadically, doing it more because I felt like I “should” than because I really wanted to.

Until a few weeks ago, when I started reading Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching and the following passage caught my eye:

“If you let yourself be blown to and fro,
you lose touch with your root.
If you let restlessness move you,
you lose touch with who you are.”

Those few lines hit me really hard.

There have been so many times in my life when I’ve let restlessness move me — and in doing so I have often felt myself become disconnected from the truth of who I am.

Restlessness has shown up in so many ways in my life: as procrastination, as a short attention span, as physical fidgeting, as a kind of semi-permanent muscle tension that kept me braced against painful sensations and emotions I was unwilling to feel.

The contemplation of those lines lead me into deep inquiry as to what exactly restlessness is.

Here’s what I concluded:

Restlessness is the unwillingness to feel discomfort.

We feel restless when we’re bored or agitated or stressed or in physical discomfort.

But in avoiding the experience of our own discomfort we avoid the truth of who we are in that moment.

For the past two weeks now I’ve been practicing a daily meditation that looks just like every other seated meditation I have ever done. I set my timer for 10-20 minutes, I seat myself cross-legged on my meditation cushion, I close my eyes, I place my palms on my thighs.

And then I remain still in the face of my own restlessness.

I stare my discomfort in the face.

I endure each aching and relentless second that fills the 10 minutes or 15 minutes or 20 minutes that I have committed myself to.

I used to think that the discomfort was a distraction from the point of meditation.

After all, wasn’t meditation about feeling calm and peaceful? Wasn’t meditation supposed to help me reduce anxiety?

And the answer to those questions is yes, and yes.

But I’m increasingly convinced that meditation doesn’t do this by turning down our experience of suffering — it does it by helping us to turn up our willingness to suffer.

In meditation we meet our pain on the floor.

We have the opportunity to observe, to witness our pain, our discomfort, our restlessness.

We have the opportunity to witness our resistance to the reality of things.

And we have the opportunity to choose a new path:

A path of willingness, a path that invites us to really ask ourselves “this hurt, is it so bad? is it a problem? is it really troubling me right now?”

When I asked these questions of myself I found, to my surprise, that the answer was no.

I noticed that when I chose to sit and witness my restlessness, my uncomfortable emotions, my physical pain — I found that none of these things were so bad as I had imagined them to be when I was trying not to look at them.

Therein lies the real secret to meditation, I think — the secret I’d been missing.

Meditation is an opportunity to meet our discomfort with open curiosity and warm friendliness and seek the truth of whether or not the discomfort we’ve been avoiding really is as bad as we’d thought. (In my experience it’s usually not.)

But in order for the process to work we have to be willing to really look at our discomfort.

We have to be willing to stare our suffering in the eyes.

—

Now it’s your turn! Do you meditate? If so, do you practice a radical willingness to witness your own discomfort? How do you interpret those lines from the Tao Te Ching? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

I hope you don’t mind that I’ve cancelled December…

I had big plans for December.

December was going to be the month I put myself out there in a big way and started coaching people outside of the Martha Beck Life Coach Training student group.

December was going to be the month I finally did all the things I’d been thinking about but avoiding and/or hadn’t gotten around to.during all of my travel in November.

December was going to be the month in which I finished strong in 2015.

Do you ever have months like this?

Months where you sit down on Day 1 and decide that *this* is going to be the month when you finally do that thing you’ve been meaning to do (you know the one!).

Because I do. If I’m being honest, more months than not I fall into this trap. The trap of thinking that this month is going to be the one month to rule them all.

It’s a dangerous line of thinking because it never works out.

The bigger you set your intention the harder it seems you fail. (Or at least, I do.)

So in December I’m trying something radical. I’m trying something new. I’m clearing the decks of tasks and to-do’s. I’m setting aside all of the things I didn’t get to in November.

Instead, I am allowing myself to expand into the wide-open stretch of December.

I am choosing to sit on the bus and not read — just ponder.

I am choosing to do just three push-ups a day and call it exercise. (Hey, it’s three more than I was doing!)

I am choosing to meditate.

I am choosing to dream.

I am choosing to sleep.

And for now, I am not looking ahead to January, to 2016, to New Year’s Resolutions.

For the moment I am looking no further than the span of my next breath — because for the moment I am waiting and waiting is always best done fully present.

And because I’m waiting and I’m present — I’m noticing things, too.

I’m noticing the woman on the street urgently tugging her tiny dog out of the path of an oncoming bicycle as I glide by in the bus on my way to work.

I’m noticing the tree on my walk to the bus stop that is still stubbornly holding on to beautiful, ruddy leaves when all the other trees have long since faded to patchy clumps of dismal brown.

I’m noticing myself speaking up in meetings when I would usually have held my tongue. I’m noticing myself being afraid and still doing it anyways.

I’m noticing myself becoming someone new.

And I’d like to invite you to notice yourself becoming, too. Because we’re all becoming in every moment — even in those when it seems certain that, for now at least, we’ve stopped.

And so before the next round of holidays hit and the exhilarating rush of New Year’s Resolutions I’d like to invite you to take a week and just slow down until you’d swear you’d stopped.

And in that moment of stillness I invite you to notice who, exactly, it is that you might be becoming.

Because I think that the noticing is the preparation — the step that lets you know where it is you’re headed.

And so while everyone else is already busy dreaming up their 2016, I’m going to invite you to wait, to pause, to rest, to notice, and to take stock.

Because it’s not until you’ve done these things that you’ll have any idea where it is you’re going.

And only then will you be ready to tackle the journey.

 

When was the last time you gave yourself the luxury of living life slowly? Let me know in the comments!

 

Settling into the stillness

While I was a student at MIT I forgot how to be still.

I was so madly busy, so go-go-go that every time I came up for breath, I twitched restlessly, sure I must be missing or forgetting something.

I would go home for Christmas, and in the days that followed my arrival I was relentless. I fidgeted. I poked and prodded. I asked “What’s up?” over and over, helplessly, of anyone afflicted with my presence.

One year, in a fit of desperation I sat down to my mother’s piano (an instrument I do not play) and proceeded to teach myself Bach, one agonized note at a time. I played the same piece over and over and over for hours, for days until my fingers flew almost gracefully over the keys.

I played until every nerve in the house was frayed just like mine were and — in the moment when my sister finally yelled at me to stop — I thought that in their annoyance my family at last shared a trace of my pain.

This affliction was usually (thankfully) short-lived. Within a handful of days my anxiety dimmed from a pitched fervor to a disquieting buzz that settled in my bones and could be mistaken for “normal”. I could come to accept that for a few short weeks there might be nothing I needed to do — no imminent crisis that needed thwarting, no pending deadline I had somehow forgotten.

But I could not settle into stillness.

—

The first time I tried in earnest to meditate was the winter after I graduated with my Master’s degree.

I settled down on a cushion and dutifully crossed my legs. I set my timer for the recommended 20 minutes. I closed my eyes and focused my attention on my breathing. I pressed “start” on my cell phone timer.

I think I lasted all of 30 seconds before I was shifting again — my hand reaching instinctively to kill the timer as I rose to my feet and settled myself back at the computer.

Sitting in stillness with my thoughts was unbearable.

I tried again in the following days — setting my timer. I never made it the full 20 minutes, but sometimes I counted myself lucky to endure five as my thoughts raced in tight, anxious circles and I struggled to remember my breath.

I gave up eventually. I quit.

I decided meditation wasn’t for me; the way I’d decided it wasn’t at age 10 when I’d read about it in a book, sat down to try it out, and remained still for a (very patient) three minutes before deciding I must not be doing it right.

I guess I’d expected some kind of a mystical experience, but all I got was me — concentrated and intensified and uncomfortably near as I struggled to follow, not dictate, the rhythm of my breath.

—

But as we enter this particular winter — as we enter into the liminal space between winter’s first chill and the snowy onset of winter’s depths — I’ve noticed something in me has shifted.

No longer am I the girl who can’t sit still.

No longer am I the girl who found a 20 minute meditation stretched out like an infinite, bridgeless crevasse I was unable to cross.

No.

These days I find myself sitting in stillness more often than not, in vast stretches of empty hours spent on the bus to and from work or on airplanes as I criss-cross the country with the alacrity of a hockey puck.

I used to fill these spaces with noise, with words, with pages and pages of the books I voraciously consumed — stuffing my head to the brim with thoughts and ideas. But these days, more and more, I find I’d rather just sit down where I am and watch and breathe and contemplate the world as it slips silently by out my window.

On the eve of this particular winter I’m finding myself settling into a new and yet familiar stillness, settling into the moments of soft introspection as my attention draws inward even as the trees draw in their sap.

I find myself welcoming, not dreading, the impending cold that will keep me hunkered down. No longer does the threat of this seem anything other than delicious as I settle myself down for a kind of inward-turning hibernation.

I find myself feeling, for perhaps the first time since I arrived at MIT, like I’m incubating the seeds of something entirely new.

I find myself returning to the oft-quoted passage from T.S. Eliot:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

I’m sinking myself into the stillness now, I’m waiting into the winter.

Because I do not yet feel ready for thought as I settle, ever more deeply, into the person I find I’m busy becoming.

What about you — who might you be becoming? Let me know in the comments.