I've been writing about thoughts I've had while reading Blue Zones--9 Lessons for Living Longer from the people who've lived the longest. The last of the characteristics which centenarians in "blue zones"--those regions that have a disproportionate number of individuals who live to be over 100--shared across the globe was a "sense of purpose." I particularly liked the Okinawan's embrace of "ikigai"--the reason they get up in the morning.
While I've always felt like we have a reason that we are in the world, and I've also thought that it evolves over our lives, I've generally had the mental model of life purpose as a major contribution to the world. However, in the blue zones the reason that gets people up in the morning is a focus of activity that individuals take with them through life. For one, it is maintaining his ability to do certain physical exercises. For another, it is hiking to the top of a ridge he has scaled every day for 80 years to see the spectacular view. For still another, it is caring for her grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and sheer delight in holding her first great-great-grandchild.
Whatever it is for each of these, it is something that gets them out of bed in the morning.
I've actually been struggling with getting up in the morning during my transition period. Not in a depressed way. After a lifetime of bouncing up and hitting the day running, as the old commercial used to say, "My get-up-and-go got up and went." I have shifted to a night-owl schedule which is more natural to me. And, I really wanted not to have to b aroused by an alarm ever again. I used to wake after 7-1/2 or 8 hours of sleep, even without the alarm, so why should I need it? At first, when I slept long, I thought it was years of exhaustion accumulated and demanding rest.
Once I am up and moving, I can focus from activity to activity, and I get a reasonable amount accomplished. I've been ticking things off my to-do list, and I am pleased to say that a long Outlook task list was completed today. I've taken a number of webinars and am reading several books in parallel. When I start moving, I have plenty of focus and energy.
It's just getting started. About a week ago, I even started setting the alarm again, but except on the day when I had to report for surgery, I've shut it off and gone back to sleep. Then I read about ikigai. While I have lots to keep me busy once I am awake, I don't feel like I have a reason that compels me to get up in the morning. In large part, that is what this transition is about--finding that new purpose. But perhaps I've been aiming too high. Maybe my purpose could be as simple as living the best life to carry me to 100 or writing in this blog every day, even though there are many days when no one reads it.
What, I've been asking myself, will make me want to bound from bed the way serving my clients did when I had a regular job? (And when that was gone, it told me that it was time to find something different to focus on in my life.) I'm not there yet, but having the question will allow me to play around with some options when the alarm goes off in the morning.
Tuesday, February 28, 2017
Monday, February 27, 2017
Who's in Charge?
I finished reading Blue Zones--9 Lessons for Living Longer from the people who've lived the longest last night. It has left me pondering two questions. I will explore one today, and I'll save the other for tomorrow's post. I'd like to start with "locus of control." The textbook that I used to teach organizational behavior defines "locus of control" as "the degree to which people believe they are masters of their own fate."*
What the textbook says, and what I taught, is that if a person believes their success is internally driven, called "internal," they are more highly motivated and willing to take action to make things happen in their lives. They generally perform better on the job, demonstrating their belief that they are the ones that influence career success. Internals believe their health is largely in their hands, and they take steps to stay healthy. Consequently, they have lower rates of absenteeism.
By contrast, "externals" believe that some force outside of themselves determines their fate. In that case, they are not inclined to take steps to advance their careers or their lives. Why would they, since they don't believe that anything they do, for good or not, can change the course of their lives? They generally aren't engaged in their work and are less satisfied in their career and life in general.
Many externals believe that God or some other outside force is piloting the ship of their destiny, but many internals attribute God's desire for us to experience abundance to the reason they are in charge of their destiny. Prosperity gospel churches and Mastermind groups are examples of the latter group.
The uncomfortable juxtaposition of these ideas has been on my heart for decades. I am all about intention, which might lean to internal locus of control, but I clearly believe that God steers us, uses us as vessels to accomplish work, and stops us when we go astray. Many years ago I came to believe that God would guide us but we had the responsibility to execute The Plan. Furthermore, if we have spiritual lessons to learn, God won't intervene without being asked, forcing us to grapple with whatever lesson is at hand. In Choice Point, I wrote about this as the dance we do with God: God leads, we follow but we have to know how to do our part.
Now, you may ask, what does all this locus of control talk have to do with Blue Zones and living longer. It ends up that people to live to be 100 and beyond demonstrate the dichotomy with which I've wrestled. Most centenarians do have faith that something beyond themselves is steering them through life. But, contrary to what behavioral researchers have found in workplaces, those who live long are happy, they find joy in life, and they laugh off things that don't go as they might have liked--even in situations as trying as the death of a child. "There's a bigger plan," is what most would say. "Don't worry." And, clearly, the external orientation of their destiny has not had negative impact on their health.
Stress and worry are detrimental to our health. Those "externals," who just let go of things, rid their bodies of cortisol, the stress hormone which has significant deleterious impact on our bodies. Wherever Buettner and his team found high concentrations of people who live to 100 and beyond, Bob Marley's lyrics, "Don't worry. Be happy," echo prominently, but joyfully.
Once again I find myself in a gray zone, wishing to ask, "Is it internal?" or "Is it external?" Instead I am going to integrate the several lessons. While behavioral researchers have found that externals are less satisfied with their lives, it is because of a sense of resignation that whatever is controlling their lives has decided, "This is as good as it gets." Conversely, the centenarians who believe an external force controls their lives believe that it is a force for good which is watching out for them. "Things are going to be better; I just don't understand how." Rather than the source of control, I think satisfaction of life lies in a deep-seated optimism that whatever is going on--good or bad--it is destined to be better.
*Stephen P. Robbins, Organizational Behavior, Prentice Hall, 2005, Glindex, P. 642.
What the textbook says, and what I taught, is that if a person believes their success is internally driven, called "internal," they are more highly motivated and willing to take action to make things happen in their lives. They generally perform better on the job, demonstrating their belief that they are the ones that influence career success. Internals believe their health is largely in their hands, and they take steps to stay healthy. Consequently, they have lower rates of absenteeism.
By contrast, "externals" believe that some force outside of themselves determines their fate. In that case, they are not inclined to take steps to advance their careers or their lives. Why would they, since they don't believe that anything they do, for good or not, can change the course of their lives? They generally aren't engaged in their work and are less satisfied in their career and life in general.
Many externals believe that God or some other outside force is piloting the ship of their destiny, but many internals attribute God's desire for us to experience abundance to the reason they are in charge of their destiny. Prosperity gospel churches and Mastermind groups are examples of the latter group.
The uncomfortable juxtaposition of these ideas has been on my heart for decades. I am all about intention, which might lean to internal locus of control, but I clearly believe that God steers us, uses us as vessels to accomplish work, and stops us when we go astray. Many years ago I came to believe that God would guide us but we had the responsibility to execute The Plan. Furthermore, if we have spiritual lessons to learn, God won't intervene without being asked, forcing us to grapple with whatever lesson is at hand. In Choice Point, I wrote about this as the dance we do with God: God leads, we follow but we have to know how to do our part.
Now, you may ask, what does all this locus of control talk have to do with Blue Zones and living longer. It ends up that people to live to be 100 and beyond demonstrate the dichotomy with which I've wrestled. Most centenarians do have faith that something beyond themselves is steering them through life. But, contrary to what behavioral researchers have found in workplaces, those who live long are happy, they find joy in life, and they laugh off things that don't go as they might have liked--even in situations as trying as the death of a child. "There's a bigger plan," is what most would say. "Don't worry." And, clearly, the external orientation of their destiny has not had negative impact on their health.
Stress and worry are detrimental to our health. Those "externals," who just let go of things, rid their bodies of cortisol, the stress hormone which has significant deleterious impact on our bodies. Wherever Buettner and his team found high concentrations of people who live to 100 and beyond, Bob Marley's lyrics, "Don't worry. Be happy," echo prominently, but joyfully.
Once again I find myself in a gray zone, wishing to ask, "Is it internal?" or "Is it external?" Instead I am going to integrate the several lessons. While behavioral researchers have found that externals are less satisfied with their lives, it is because of a sense of resignation that whatever is controlling their lives has decided, "This is as good as it gets." Conversely, the centenarians who believe an external force controls their lives believe that it is a force for good which is watching out for them. "Things are going to be better; I just don't understand how." Rather than the source of control, I think satisfaction of life lies in a deep-seated optimism that whatever is going on--good or bad--it is destined to be better.
*Stephen P. Robbins, Organizational Behavior, Prentice Hall, 2005, Glindex, P. 642.
Saturday, February 25, 2017
Health, Happiness, Wholeness
I had minor surgery a couple of days ago and after a day of pretty much sleeping it off, I've been up to my ears in exploration--watching videos on YouTube and reading. Spiritual teacher Caroline Myss has said that when we find what we believe to be a spiritual truth, we should seek to find it elsewhere. She generally has in mind other religious traditions: Myss says key truths of most religions can be found in some manidestation in others, often several others.
My frame of reference for spirituality extends beyond religion, but with that said, I believe that when we find what we believe to be truth anywhere in the world, we will find it multiple places. As those who have been reading recently know, I've just finished my certification as a health coach, and this little post-surgery respite has given me the opportunity to start reading the stack of health-related books that have accumulated by my desk over several years. There's at least 80 per cent congruence (maybe more) between the content in all of them, and yet each brings a different nuance or something new.
What has continued to astound me has been the intersection between health and happiness. It doesn't surprise me at all that we are happier when we are healthier, but it seems to me that the things that we do to be healthier are the same things that we do to be happier. The causality may not be between health and happiness, but rather between a set of behaviors that cause us to be both healthier and happier.
My old friend "laughter" shows up a lot. Today I've been reading Blue Zones--9 Lessons for Living Longer from the people who've lived the longest, by Dan Buettner. The book is based on research he did for National Geographic on regions of the world where a disproportionate percentage of the population lives past 100. There's even a subset of the "blue zones": semi-supercentenarians--referring to regions with a disproportionate percentage of the population over 110. As he did his research, Buettner and his team traveled to often-remote regions to interview those over 100. I was struck by how often the centenarians burst out in laughter.
Laughter is a characteristic of both health and happiness. A couple of years ago when completing my certification to be a laughter yoga teacher, we were given a full page of benefits of laughter, most of them were health enhancements. For instance, one minute of laughter has the aerobic impact of 10 minutes on a rowing machine.
Dr. Martin Seligman, father of positive psychology/psychology of happiness, has said that lack of laughter is a challenge to the happiness of those who live alone because they don't laugh enough.
Spiritually, laughter is often observed in those who are truly "light." If you've ever watched a video or interview of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, you know that he often bursts out in contagious belly laughter.
It has been said that the road to Hell is paved by good intentions. When I set out to live my life with intention and to share my journey with others, it was specifically so that my life's intentions would not be squandered. My intentions are to have a life of health, happiness, and wholeness that will grow me spiritually.
Yet, despite knowing the benefits of laughter to health, happiness, and my spirit and my pathetic moaning and groaning about lack of laughter in my life, at least 18 months after completing my Laughter Yoga certification, I have yet to teach a single class. As I've been leaning into my transition, teaching Laughter Yoga (LY) must be part of my health coaching practice. Laughter is clearly a component of both health and happiness; it would seem it would be neglectful of me to omit it. I've just drug out my LY textbook, and I am throwing it into this soup I am making called "My Life as a Health Coach."
My frame of reference for spirituality extends beyond religion, but with that said, I believe that when we find what we believe to be truth anywhere in the world, we will find it multiple places. As those who have been reading recently know, I've just finished my certification as a health coach, and this little post-surgery respite has given me the opportunity to start reading the stack of health-related books that have accumulated by my desk over several years. There's at least 80 per cent congruence (maybe more) between the content in all of them, and yet each brings a different nuance or something new.
What has continued to astound me has been the intersection between health and happiness. It doesn't surprise me at all that we are happier when we are healthier, but it seems to me that the things that we do to be healthier are the same things that we do to be happier. The causality may not be between health and happiness, but rather between a set of behaviors that cause us to be both healthier and happier.
My old friend "laughter" shows up a lot. Today I've been reading Blue Zones--9 Lessons for Living Longer from the people who've lived the longest, by Dan Buettner. The book is based on research he did for National Geographic on regions of the world where a disproportionate percentage of the population lives past 100. There's even a subset of the "blue zones": semi-supercentenarians--referring to regions with a disproportionate percentage of the population over 110. As he did his research, Buettner and his team traveled to often-remote regions to interview those over 100. I was struck by how often the centenarians burst out in laughter.
Laughter is a characteristic of both health and happiness. A couple of years ago when completing my certification to be a laughter yoga teacher, we were given a full page of benefits of laughter, most of them were health enhancements. For instance, one minute of laughter has the aerobic impact of 10 minutes on a rowing machine.
Dr. Martin Seligman, father of positive psychology/psychology of happiness, has said that lack of laughter is a challenge to the happiness of those who live alone because they don't laugh enough.
Spiritually, laughter is often observed in those who are truly "light." If you've ever watched a video or interview of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, you know that he often bursts out in contagious belly laughter.
It has been said that the road to Hell is paved by good intentions. When I set out to live my life with intention and to share my journey with others, it was specifically so that my life's intentions would not be squandered. My intentions are to have a life of health, happiness, and wholeness that will grow me spiritually.
Yet, despite knowing the benefits of laughter to health, happiness, and my spirit and my pathetic moaning and groaning about lack of laughter in my life, at least 18 months after completing my Laughter Yoga certification, I have yet to teach a single class. As I've been leaning into my transition, teaching Laughter Yoga (LY) must be part of my health coaching practice. Laughter is clearly a component of both health and happiness; it would seem it would be neglectful of me to omit it. I've just drug out my LY textbook, and I am throwing it into this soup I am making called "My Life as a Health Coach."
Tuesday, February 21, 2017
Synthesis
"When the student is ready, the teacher will appear." This much-quoted thought is most often credited to Buddha Siddhartha Gautama Shakyamuni, or to many of us, just "The Buddha."
I'd like to alter the line just a bit. "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear...and appear...and appear." So often, it seems that when I start working on a spiritual lesson, everywhere I turn I bump into a slightly nuanced version of the same lesson. Like a fine crystal, every way I turn it, I see unique impressions which describes a nuance of the lesson.
The last two evenings I've written about slightly different versions of seeing lessons through a lens of letting them support me in experiencing the beauty and wonder of spiritual growth as an endpoint but through which I must tiptoe through lessons. Today brought two very distinct, yet remarkably similar extensions of those lessons, or "teachers," if you prefer.
"People's Pharmacy" is one of my favorite sources of well-researched health information, and I've been a faithful listener for over 25 years (and an avid reader of their newspaper column for years before that.) When I moved to DC, I could no longer get the show. Since discovering the podcast about a month ago, I've been devouring many back episodes. As consequence, I am not sure when ones to which I listened today aired. The show's guest was Matthew Sanford, a yoga instructor and paraplegic. He lost use of his body from the chest down when he was 13, if I recall correctly 38 years ago.+
Because I've had significant body function/pain issues over the last 25 years, I listened carefully as he described the change he had experienced in his relationship with his body. (You might say he was rewriting his story.) His rehabilitation programs taught him how to overcome his disability by using parts of his body that were able to do so to facilitate movement through the world. But, Matthew missed his body and didn't like the image of dragging non-functioning parts of his body through the world. (My words, not his.) He began doing yoga to assist his experience of how his mind and body connected: his body is his body to be experienced not overcome.
As I listened, I drifted to the years I spent in rehab. At first, I wanted someone to make it better, and I spent years just doing with determination whatever I needed to "get back to normal." As soon as I'd experience a modicum of time with minimal pain, I'd stop doing my exercises, and soon I'd be in pain again. Ten or 12 years ago...maybe more...I had an aha! moment when I realized that if I was going to live with a minimal amount of pain, my physical therapy exercises were going to be an everyday part of life. I wouldn't like it but I would commit to doing them, day in and day out. It was a good decision. Although I do fall into periods of pain from time to time, if I faithfully do my exercises, most of the time I am relatively pain free.
I was doing a light jog on the treadmill as I was listening to the interview with Matthew. Mirrors all around me showed that I was in pretty good shape. A personal trainer who had worked with me last week had pronounced my routine as pretty thorough and had little to suggest that I add. I was able to walk 65 minutes on a springlike day yesterday.
As I listened to Matthew talk about the change in his thinking about his body, I realized that, perhaps less consciously than Matthew, I too had changed. I've moved beyond having to do exercises every day to stay out of pain to being delighted with this machine which is carrying me through life so effectively. If I were able to stop the exercises without pain, I wouldn't want to do that now. That is how I've come to show my body love...as it is.
Less than an hour later, I bumped into another teacher: an article by Dr. Tim Lomas, Ph.D., in Psychology Today.* He wrote about the approaching 20th anniversary of the positive psychology movement, launched by Dr. Martin Seligman. The piece was both retrospective and prospective, attempting to point the way forward for the growing psychology of happiness movement. The article described three stages: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. For the first part of its history, psychology had been concerned with how to get us out of misery--the "thesis."
Then along came Seligman with the antithesis: the point of psychology should be to have us experience well-being and happiness. In so doing, all the miserable parts of our lives were castigated or discounted as negative or lacking in value. But, the article proclaimed, there is usefulness from fear: it allows us to assess risk. Lomas continues that "'anti-social' emotions like anger can impel one to resist injustice, and drive progressive social change."*
Finally, Lomas predicts the future of psychology as being a synthesis that values the downsides while supporting our individual quests for well-being. As he described this integration of resistance of the negative while supporting happiness and well-being, it seemed to me that what he was describing for our psyches was a parallel to what Matthew and I had come to in our relationship with our bodies and what I've been coming to over the last two days in this blog. There is value in the struggle with the parts of ourselves that we might not like, but as we learn to accept the richness of the whole, we enable our souls to reach their potentials.
This is not a new concept to me. In fact, I wrote about it in Leading from the Heart, which is also marking its 20th anniversary. I actually looked through the book this evening to get my exact quote, but I was unable to locate it; the gist is that we see the world in black and white when in truth it is a million shades of gray. (That was when shades of gray weren't X-rated.) When we only focus on what we perceive as bad--disability or misery--or good--overcoming and happiness, we lose the texture of the fullness of our existence. Wholeness lies in the synthesis--accepting the fullness of our possibilities.
+https://www.peoplespharmacy.com/2017/01/19/show-1065-how-can-yoga-benefit-everyone-fit-and-flexible-or-not/
*https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-light-in-the-darkness/201602/second-wave-positive-psychology-introduction
I'd like to alter the line just a bit. "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear...and appear...and appear." So often, it seems that when I start working on a spiritual lesson, everywhere I turn I bump into a slightly nuanced version of the same lesson. Like a fine crystal, every way I turn it, I see unique impressions which describes a nuance of the lesson.
The last two evenings I've written about slightly different versions of seeing lessons through a lens of letting them support me in experiencing the beauty and wonder of spiritual growth as an endpoint but through which I must tiptoe through lessons. Today brought two very distinct, yet remarkably similar extensions of those lessons, or "teachers," if you prefer.
"People's Pharmacy" is one of my favorite sources of well-researched health information, and I've been a faithful listener for over 25 years (and an avid reader of their newspaper column for years before that.) When I moved to DC, I could no longer get the show. Since discovering the podcast about a month ago, I've been devouring many back episodes. As consequence, I am not sure when ones to which I listened today aired. The show's guest was Matthew Sanford, a yoga instructor and paraplegic. He lost use of his body from the chest down when he was 13, if I recall correctly 38 years ago.+
Because I've had significant body function/pain issues over the last 25 years, I listened carefully as he described the change he had experienced in his relationship with his body. (You might say he was rewriting his story.) His rehabilitation programs taught him how to overcome his disability by using parts of his body that were able to do so to facilitate movement through the world. But, Matthew missed his body and didn't like the image of dragging non-functioning parts of his body through the world. (My words, not his.) He began doing yoga to assist his experience of how his mind and body connected: his body is his body to be experienced not overcome.
As I listened, I drifted to the years I spent in rehab. At first, I wanted someone to make it better, and I spent years just doing with determination whatever I needed to "get back to normal." As soon as I'd experience a modicum of time with minimal pain, I'd stop doing my exercises, and soon I'd be in pain again. Ten or 12 years ago...maybe more...I had an aha! moment when I realized that if I was going to live with a minimal amount of pain, my physical therapy exercises were going to be an everyday part of life. I wouldn't like it but I would commit to doing them, day in and day out. It was a good decision. Although I do fall into periods of pain from time to time, if I faithfully do my exercises, most of the time I am relatively pain free.
I was doing a light jog on the treadmill as I was listening to the interview with Matthew. Mirrors all around me showed that I was in pretty good shape. A personal trainer who had worked with me last week had pronounced my routine as pretty thorough and had little to suggest that I add. I was able to walk 65 minutes on a springlike day yesterday.
As I listened to Matthew talk about the change in his thinking about his body, I realized that, perhaps less consciously than Matthew, I too had changed. I've moved beyond having to do exercises every day to stay out of pain to being delighted with this machine which is carrying me through life so effectively. If I were able to stop the exercises without pain, I wouldn't want to do that now. That is how I've come to show my body love...as it is.
Less than an hour later, I bumped into another teacher: an article by Dr. Tim Lomas, Ph.D., in Psychology Today.* He wrote about the approaching 20th anniversary of the positive psychology movement, launched by Dr. Martin Seligman. The piece was both retrospective and prospective, attempting to point the way forward for the growing psychology of happiness movement. The article described three stages: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. For the first part of its history, psychology had been concerned with how to get us out of misery--the "thesis."
Then along came Seligman with the antithesis: the point of psychology should be to have us experience well-being and happiness. In so doing, all the miserable parts of our lives were castigated or discounted as negative or lacking in value. But, the article proclaimed, there is usefulness from fear: it allows us to assess risk. Lomas continues that "'anti-social' emotions like anger can impel one to resist injustice, and drive progressive social change."*
Finally, Lomas predicts the future of psychology as being a synthesis that values the downsides while supporting our individual quests for well-being. As he described this integration of resistance of the negative while supporting happiness and well-being, it seemed to me that what he was describing for our psyches was a parallel to what Matthew and I had come to in our relationship with our bodies and what I've been coming to over the last two days in this blog. There is value in the struggle with the parts of ourselves that we might not like, but as we learn to accept the richness of the whole, we enable our souls to reach their potentials.
This is not a new concept to me. In fact, I wrote about it in Leading from the Heart, which is also marking its 20th anniversary. I actually looked through the book this evening to get my exact quote, but I was unable to locate it; the gist is that we see the world in black and white when in truth it is a million shades of gray. (That was when shades of gray weren't X-rated.) When we only focus on what we perceive as bad--disability or misery--or good--overcoming and happiness, we lose the texture of the fullness of our existence. Wholeness lies in the synthesis--accepting the fullness of our possibilities.
+https://www.peoplespharmacy.com/2017/01/19/show-1065-how-can-yoga-benefit-everyone-fit-and-flexible-or-not/
*https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-light-in-the-darkness/201602/second-wave-positive-psychology-introduction
Monday, February 20, 2017
Rewriting Our Stories
For a long time, I've worked with coaching clients to "rewrite their stories." This language is certainly not unique to me and my coaching clients or even my own personal work. The idea is that whatever we've told ourselves about what is possible is a made-up story, so we can make up a different one...and then step into the one we prefer.
I didn't start dancing until I had literally hardly survived a personal health crisis. If I lived, there was a high likelihood that I would be a quadriplegic. I had always wanted to dance, but initially my mother didn't want me to dance and later circumstances always seemed to intervene. (Excuses.) When faced with the possibility that I might never walk again, I knew that the one thing I really wished I had done was dance.
By the grace of God and the hands of a remarkable surgeon, I am both alive and mobile, a fact that goes in my gratitude journal every day. As soon as I was finished with rehab, I went out and signed up for dance lessons. The rest is history. Thankfully, last night I danced almost every dance for three hours straight. Nothing makes me feel more alive or brings me more joy.
But, when I was learning something many learn in childhood or early adulthood, shall we say at a much later stage in life, I struggled. It felt to me like I took the same dance lesson over and over again. I was clumsy and certainly not the vision of grace that I dreamed of being. One day I heard that our brain needs to hear something 10,000 times before it believes it. Well, I thought, if that is my only problem, I will just start saying, "I am a dancer," until I've said it 10,000 times. Doing so became the soundtrack of my life. While I was driving in the car, while I was running, while I was swimming, and while I was bathing: "I am a dancer."
I said it different ways:
I didn't start dancing until I had literally hardly survived a personal health crisis. If I lived, there was a high likelihood that I would be a quadriplegic. I had always wanted to dance, but initially my mother didn't want me to dance and later circumstances always seemed to intervene. (Excuses.) When faced with the possibility that I might never walk again, I knew that the one thing I really wished I had done was dance.
By the grace of God and the hands of a remarkable surgeon, I am both alive and mobile, a fact that goes in my gratitude journal every day. As soon as I was finished with rehab, I went out and signed up for dance lessons. The rest is history. Thankfully, last night I danced almost every dance for three hours straight. Nothing makes me feel more alive or brings me more joy.
But, when I was learning something many learn in childhood or early adulthood, shall we say at a much later stage in life, I struggled. It felt to me like I took the same dance lesson over and over again. I was clumsy and certainly not the vision of grace that I dreamed of being. One day I heard that our brain needs to hear something 10,000 times before it believes it. Well, I thought, if that is my only problem, I will just start saying, "I am a dancer," until I've said it 10,000 times. Doing so became the soundtrack of my life. While I was driving in the car, while I was running, while I was swimming, and while I was bathing: "I am a dancer."
I said it different ways:
- I am a dancer
- I am a dancer
- I am a dancer
Then I added pizzazz, spinning about with my arms wide to the heavens: I am a dancer. One day it finally happened: in a split-second in the middle of a lesson I'd repeated over and again, the figure happened easily. Then I couldn't imagine how I hadn't been able to do it. By force of will, I had convinced my brain that I was a dancer, and now, humbly speaking, I am a pretty darned good one. I don't know if I said it exactly 10,000 times, but it must have been close. (I am sure that I hadn't put in the 10,000 hours that some people say is necessary for mastery.)
Today I was listening to a podcast interview with Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., the founder and medical director at the Trauma Center of Boston and a professor of psychiatry at Boston University medical School. He first worked with Holocaust survivors. More recently, he has worked with Iraqi and Afghan veterans and 9/11 and Boston Marathon survivors. He described one of the essentials in transforming a person's trauma experience is the ability to visualize a different ending. That prevents the individual from fearing a repeat experience.
He shared a story of a five-year-old who attended the childcare center at the Twin Towers and actually saw the planes fly into the skyscrapers. When van der Kolk had the boy draw a picture, as you might expect, it included the tall buildings with planes flying into them, and it also included a trampoline in the foreground. When van der Kolk asked about the trampoline, the boy said that was so people jumping from the towers would bounce with they landed. That boy experienced few traumatic after-effects that those who hadn't found an alternative resolution for the crisis did.
As I listened, I realized that what he had done was the same thing that I had done, as well as what my clients had done: the boy had rewritten the story. The scenario changed from people dive to their deaths to something vaguely resembling a game that most kids would enjoy: jump on the trampoline and dismount so the next person can use it.
Yesterday's blogpost about being hypercritical was fresh in my brain as I listened to this interview. What occurred to me was that in my shift from viewing spiritual lessons as drudgery to slog through, I had rewritten my story, visualizing a different ending this time. The slogging is now a passage way to something I want in my future. It seems to me that what works in goal setting for coaching clients and survival tactics for trauma survivors is also a good tactic for making our way successfully through our spiritual work. Visualizing what it will be like on the other side of the lesson and writing that ending for our story seems to be the key.
Yesterday's blogpost about being hypercritical was fresh in my brain as I listened to this interview. What occurred to me was that in my shift from viewing spiritual lessons as drudgery to slog through, I had rewritten my story, visualizing a different ending this time. The slogging is now a passage way to something I want in my future. It seems to me that what works in goal setting for coaching clients and survival tactics for trauma survivors is also a good tactic for making our way successfully through our spiritual work. Visualizing what it will be like on the other side of the lesson and writing that ending for our story seems to be the key.
Sunday, February 19, 2017
A Wall of Criticism
My book club chose Hillbilly Elegy this month, and consequently, I've been reading it. Although the book has been on the New York Times Bestsellers list for 29 weeks, it soared to Number One after the election and has been described as one of six books to help understand Trump's win of the U.S. presidency.
While I would like help getting my head around that victory, I've resisted the book since it came out early last year and began getting a lot of press coverage. I am not sure it has been a conscious resistance; it just hasn't appealed to me for some reason. I put off starting the read until I'd finished my final exam, so now with the club meeting just 10 days away, I finally sat down with it.
I was surprised to learn that the focal point for the book is Middletown, Ohio, a small city in which I worked for a couple years in my early twenties. At first, I thought its portrayal was inaccurate, but then I reminded myself that the author was writing about the city at least two decades after I left it. The more I read, the more uncomfortable I became.
What author J.D. Vance labels as "hillbillies" were what we called "back-homers" when I lived there. On Friday afternoons, all the bridges across the Ohio River from both Indiana and Ohio would be jammed for miles and miles with the Kentucky hill people, who had come to the industrial midwest for jobs, going home for the weekends. Then there was something called the Monday flu that they seemed to get in all four seasons, when they would call in sick on Monday morning to grab an extra day "back home;" thus, the name "back-homers."
My father's family were not hill people, but he did come from Kentucky, and I grew up amidst criticism of these "irresponsible" behaviors. While the behaviors that Vance describes were mostly arm's length from my own personal experience, at least in part because of the generation between my tenure in Middletown and the time about which Vance writes, I have become increasingly uncomfortable with some trickle-out effects that I did experience as a child, growing into adulthood in that part of the country.
Vance describes a distrust of "outsiders," and while he doesn't use the term, what I experienced that was similar was what I will call vigilant criticism. The distrust part is that for some unidentifiable reason, it was assumed that everyone outside the nuclear family not only didn't want us to succeed but intentionally set us up for failure. The consequence in my case was that I was taught the need to be hypercritical, allowing me to anticipate and compensate for any metaphorical landmine that might explode in my face.
My personality type is one that is prone to demonstrating competence, so when coupled with this hypervigilance, I became very good at anticipating any possible problem and finding every flaw. Those qualities served me well in my career. Every boss or client I have ever had knew that if they put me in charge, they would get an excellent event or product.
The downside, however, has been that I don't trust easily, and that I am always looking for a flaw, even when there may not been one, or, heaven forbid, that a flaw might be of no consequence.
Vance clawed his way up through poverty, drug and child abuse, and eventually made his way to Yale Law School, where he describes a secret code or barrier perceived by him to be designed by the upper crust almost with intention to stop those of us on the "outside" from getting in. The result as he described it, and I experienced it, is that we put up the barriers because we think others are "outsiders," not be be trusted.
While my ability to be critical served me well in my career, I am certain that it hasn't served me well in life, and I don't think I knew that until this afternoon. As I read Vance's description of not trusting outsiders, tears ran down my cheeks because it just felt too close to my own experience. I've used my criticism of others to build a wall between me and others. I think few have penetrated it.
I started out the year by pledging that the next stage of my spiritual growth would be the fun stuff, but today didn't feel much like fun. There was a lot of sadness about the people that I've probably shut out because I couldn't trust them, not because they weren't worthy of trust but I was literally incapable of trust. Others must have felt that they could never get things perfect enough to pass my scrutiny. In keeping with my pledge, I expect that this lesson, and possibly/probably more to come, has been one that will allow me knock down the wall of criticism and let others in, and that is a spiritual lesson to which I look forward.
While I would like help getting my head around that victory, I've resisted the book since it came out early last year and began getting a lot of press coverage. I am not sure it has been a conscious resistance; it just hasn't appealed to me for some reason. I put off starting the read until I'd finished my final exam, so now with the club meeting just 10 days away, I finally sat down with it.
I was surprised to learn that the focal point for the book is Middletown, Ohio, a small city in which I worked for a couple years in my early twenties. At first, I thought its portrayal was inaccurate, but then I reminded myself that the author was writing about the city at least two decades after I left it. The more I read, the more uncomfortable I became.
What author J.D. Vance labels as "hillbillies" were what we called "back-homers" when I lived there. On Friday afternoons, all the bridges across the Ohio River from both Indiana and Ohio would be jammed for miles and miles with the Kentucky hill people, who had come to the industrial midwest for jobs, going home for the weekends. Then there was something called the Monday flu that they seemed to get in all four seasons, when they would call in sick on Monday morning to grab an extra day "back home;" thus, the name "back-homers."
My father's family were not hill people, but he did come from Kentucky, and I grew up amidst criticism of these "irresponsible" behaviors. While the behaviors that Vance describes were mostly arm's length from my own personal experience, at least in part because of the generation between my tenure in Middletown and the time about which Vance writes, I have become increasingly uncomfortable with some trickle-out effects that I did experience as a child, growing into adulthood in that part of the country.
Vance describes a distrust of "outsiders," and while he doesn't use the term, what I experienced that was similar was what I will call vigilant criticism. The distrust part is that for some unidentifiable reason, it was assumed that everyone outside the nuclear family not only didn't want us to succeed but intentionally set us up for failure. The consequence in my case was that I was taught the need to be hypercritical, allowing me to anticipate and compensate for any metaphorical landmine that might explode in my face.
My personality type is one that is prone to demonstrating competence, so when coupled with this hypervigilance, I became very good at anticipating any possible problem and finding every flaw. Those qualities served me well in my career. Every boss or client I have ever had knew that if they put me in charge, they would get an excellent event or product.
The downside, however, has been that I don't trust easily, and that I am always looking for a flaw, even when there may not been one, or, heaven forbid, that a flaw might be of no consequence.
Vance clawed his way up through poverty, drug and child abuse, and eventually made his way to Yale Law School, where he describes a secret code or barrier perceived by him to be designed by the upper crust almost with intention to stop those of us on the "outside" from getting in. The result as he described it, and I experienced it, is that we put up the barriers because we think others are "outsiders," not be be trusted.
While my ability to be critical served me well in my career, I am certain that it hasn't served me well in life, and I don't think I knew that until this afternoon. As I read Vance's description of not trusting outsiders, tears ran down my cheeks because it just felt too close to my own experience. I've used my criticism of others to build a wall between me and others. I think few have penetrated it.
I started out the year by pledging that the next stage of my spiritual growth would be the fun stuff, but today didn't feel much like fun. There was a lot of sadness about the people that I've probably shut out because I couldn't trust them, not because they weren't worthy of trust but I was literally incapable of trust. Others must have felt that they could never get things perfect enough to pass my scrutiny. In keeping with my pledge, I expect that this lesson, and possibly/probably more to come, has been one that will allow me knock down the wall of criticism and let others in, and that is a spiritual lesson to which I look forward.
Friday, February 17, 2017
My Set Point
I was listening to a podcast the other day about fat. I would say that it is an occupational hazard now that I am officially a certified health coach, but truthfully, I've always been interested in understanding our bodies. (And, yes, I did successfully complete my training.) The woman who had been researching the fat organ--yes, fat is an organ--said that we all had a "set-point" for our weight. Unless we were consciously engaged in practices to change the set-point, our bodies go back to their "normal," which for many is a few pounds heavier than we might like to be.
Now, this post really has nothing to do with fat, but more with the concept of a "set-point," as a state of mind with which we are familiar or comfortable in whatever we are doing. I am a reasonable neatnik, although I truly hate to clean. It takes about two weeks for my apartment to get cluttered enough that I am uncomfortable with it. I take 60 to 90 minutes to declutter and do some superficial cleaning, and then I can heave a sigh of relief and feel like my home is mine again. That point had arrived earlier this evening. There's something in my that becomes uncomfortable if I get too far from that neatnik/not cleanik zone.
About an hour ago, I had my kick-back moment when I reclaimed my home. It was in that delicious reverie that I realized I'd been struggling this week. My set point in life has been "on overdrive." When I first married, my husband described me as a mosquito on speed. We had lived three hours apart before marrying, and there are some things that we don't learn when we only see our intendeds on weekends and vacations. I hit the ground running in the morning, and I pretty much ran until we were finished cleaning the kitchen after dinner. Then, I would relax.
Since 2001, I've worked very long hours and had very little time to take care of me, until now. Yet, even in this transition time, I took only a week of meditation before driving head-first into the health coach training, which, along with refugee meetings, has pretty much consumed me. I have been getting a full eight hours of sleep each night and exercising most days. I have even written for this blog most days.
But, since my final exam on Wednesday afternoon, I've been struggling with what to do with myself. I have my lists of "things to do" and "things to explore," which I've been working. I did my taxes today. (Yeah for refunds!) I spent yesterday taking care of a lot of insurance paperwork. A friend had me over for wine and snacks last night. I worked with a personal trainer this morning for the first time since college. It's not like I have been bored. Yet all this "to-do list" activity feels like more of my overdrive set-point.
A few days ago I had a wonderful conversation with a friend who retired last summer, and she goes to coffee and movies with friends on weekdays. What a delightful idea! I am not there yet. I have been looking forward to a matinee tomorrow--Saturday--after reclaiming my apartment and doing taxes.
Even in high school and college, I was an honor student, active in a lot of school activities and working a part-time job. Before that I had a healthy set of household chores that I had to do around school and church activities as a kid. I am not sure I can remember a time when I didn't need to be on overdrive.
I don't need to be on overdrive any more. I don't want to be on overdrive any more...but that is my set-point. Even as I look at my lists of activities, I realize they are to keep me moving and busy. I expect that some of this harkens back to the strong Protestant Work Ethic upbringing I had in the hard-working Midwest of my early years. Relaxation was a sin. Really. We were expected to be doing things. Play even had to be productive.
Breaking out of that early programming is a challenge, so I feel like I am in a bit of freefall now. I know that I'd like to slow down and enjoy life. I'd love to read the book that my book club has chosen for the first week of March, but there is something so uneasy for me about just sitting and reading a book. And, I've been struggling. I've actually been struggling all week, but I think I just finally recognized it this evening.
What comes to mind are the old wind-up dolls of my childhood. If you cranked a key on the doll's back, she would walk for awhile. At first she'd walk very fast, but eventually, she would wind down and stop walking. The overdrive me is like the doll on full-wind-up mode. I don't want to completely wind down, but I would like to crank my set-point back to somewhere in-between. Somewhere between the mosquito on speed and staying in bed all day would be perfect. I realize there is a lot of leeway there, and I am still figuring out what my sweet spot is. I am an active person, and I want to keep that. I would also like to read that book and go to a weekday matinee.
This feels very important to me because I think starting up a health-coaching practice could be a very slippery slope, if I haven't learned how to be more relaxed about life before I do so. I expect I was continue to struggle for a bit as I learn to reset.
Now, this post really has nothing to do with fat, but more with the concept of a "set-point," as a state of mind with which we are familiar or comfortable in whatever we are doing. I am a reasonable neatnik, although I truly hate to clean. It takes about two weeks for my apartment to get cluttered enough that I am uncomfortable with it. I take 60 to 90 minutes to declutter and do some superficial cleaning, and then I can heave a sigh of relief and feel like my home is mine again. That point had arrived earlier this evening. There's something in my that becomes uncomfortable if I get too far from that neatnik/not cleanik zone.
About an hour ago, I had my kick-back moment when I reclaimed my home. It was in that delicious reverie that I realized I'd been struggling this week. My set point in life has been "on overdrive." When I first married, my husband described me as a mosquito on speed. We had lived three hours apart before marrying, and there are some things that we don't learn when we only see our intendeds on weekends and vacations. I hit the ground running in the morning, and I pretty much ran until we were finished cleaning the kitchen after dinner. Then, I would relax.
Since 2001, I've worked very long hours and had very little time to take care of me, until now. Yet, even in this transition time, I took only a week of meditation before driving head-first into the health coach training, which, along with refugee meetings, has pretty much consumed me. I have been getting a full eight hours of sleep each night and exercising most days. I have even written for this blog most days.
But, since my final exam on Wednesday afternoon, I've been struggling with what to do with myself. I have my lists of "things to do" and "things to explore," which I've been working. I did my taxes today. (Yeah for refunds!) I spent yesterday taking care of a lot of insurance paperwork. A friend had me over for wine and snacks last night. I worked with a personal trainer this morning for the first time since college. It's not like I have been bored. Yet all this "to-do list" activity feels like more of my overdrive set-point.
A few days ago I had a wonderful conversation with a friend who retired last summer, and she goes to coffee and movies with friends on weekdays. What a delightful idea! I am not there yet. I have been looking forward to a matinee tomorrow--Saturday--after reclaiming my apartment and doing taxes.
Even in high school and college, I was an honor student, active in a lot of school activities and working a part-time job. Before that I had a healthy set of household chores that I had to do around school and church activities as a kid. I am not sure I can remember a time when I didn't need to be on overdrive.
I don't need to be on overdrive any more. I don't want to be on overdrive any more...but that is my set-point. Even as I look at my lists of activities, I realize they are to keep me moving and busy. I expect that some of this harkens back to the strong Protestant Work Ethic upbringing I had in the hard-working Midwest of my early years. Relaxation was a sin. Really. We were expected to be doing things. Play even had to be productive.
Breaking out of that early programming is a challenge, so I feel like I am in a bit of freefall now. I know that I'd like to slow down and enjoy life. I'd love to read the book that my book club has chosen for the first week of March, but there is something so uneasy for me about just sitting and reading a book. And, I've been struggling. I've actually been struggling all week, but I think I just finally recognized it this evening.
What comes to mind are the old wind-up dolls of my childhood. If you cranked a key on the doll's back, she would walk for awhile. At first she'd walk very fast, but eventually, she would wind down and stop walking. The overdrive me is like the doll on full-wind-up mode. I don't want to completely wind down, but I would like to crank my set-point back to somewhere in-between. Somewhere between the mosquito on speed and staying in bed all day would be perfect. I realize there is a lot of leeway there, and I am still figuring out what my sweet spot is. I am an active person, and I want to keep that. I would also like to read that book and go to a weekday matinee.
This feels very important to me because I think starting up a health-coaching practice could be a very slippery slope, if I haven't learned how to be more relaxed about life before I do so. I expect I was continue to struggle for a bit as I learn to reset.
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