An anniversary and an encounter

December 7, 2012December 7, 2012 / njmyers / 1 Comment

looking at my CT scan last December with husband and Our Son the Radiologist

A year ago today I almost died in yoga class. Maybe that is why my back has been having severe spaz attacks for the past week, preventing me from going anywhere near yoga class. My health crisis last year had nothing to do with yoga but it is one of those association things. Like, I can never eat M&Ms since I got a terrible stomach upset, probably flu, after eating M&Ms as a kid.

Ah poor back, we have safely made it through the year with no more clots in the lungs so you can relax now.

It does feel better today, and I woke with a great dream this morning. I like this one a lot better than the rat dream I got on my birthday (which was, incidentally, about being kinder to my body).

A charismatic young man who is famous for his humanitarian work is featured in a grand convocation. His work, and perhaps mine as well, is to rescue people one by one. The image is of pulling people across a river with a cable strung from bank to bank. Among the crowds of people at this gathering he singles me out and we make an instant, deep connection. I become part of his inner circle. The dream ends when he puts his arm across my shoulder and says, “We will always be friends, we and our whole families.” I know this involves obligation in the African way but I gladly take it on.

For some reason this dream reminded me of an encounter I had last week with a neighbor.

He came up behind me on his bike as I was walking on the road just beyond the steepest slope of hill in front of our house. “Hello!” he said, and I jumped.

“You scared me. You snuck up on me!” I recognized him as the older man who farms a mile away and runs a stand that sells the region’s best sweetcorn.

“Yeah. I thought I was pretty quiet.” He pedaled ahead of me for a few yards and then turned around and headed back down the hill. “I am walking up Curran Hill for exercise,” he explained.

“Okay,” I said. “Good for you.”

He disappeared down the hill. I was puzzled. He was on a bike. He must have meant he was biking up the hill for exercise.

The hill we live on is the steepest one in the region and we often see bikers practicing on it. Slow, steady up and really fast down. When I bike I prefer to head downhill from our driveway, ending my ride with the gentler climb from the other direction and braking on the steep descent to our drive, which is 2/3 of the way down the hill. The steep side of the hill is a challenge for me to take on the rise. I was a bit surprised that Mr. Vite was up to climbing it repeatedly. But if so, indeed, good for him.

I was taking advantage of the sunny, mild late-November weather for a trash walk. (I could still walk and bend over then.) The roadside was nearly clean because I’d walked it just three days earlier. But in the 2.5-mile roundtrip to Red Bud Trail, I filled a small grocery bag with trash: beer cans, fast food wrappers, and a postcard from Myrtle Beach dated August 16. “Brady. Went golfing today. Saw 8 turtles. Miss you. Sheryl and Rick.” I gather trash out of anthropological curiosity as well as to keep up the neighborhood.

My bladder was calling me home by the time I approached the crest of Curran Hill from the gentle side and began the steep descent to our driveway. I was thus in a bit of a hurry. But there was Mr. Vite again and he was, indeed, walking up the hill, pushing his bike. The bike was apparently for a fast trip downhill to get the effect of a continuous hike uphill with the repeated climbs. Not a bad strategy.

He stopped. “Hello again,” he said. And then he added, “You seem like an outstanding person.”

I did not know how to respond to that but he clearly wanted to talk and I did my best, pinching my legs together. We talked for a minute about exercise and collecting trash and how long I have lived in the area. I was wearing a low-brimmed hat and he apparently didn’t recognize me as one of his customers. I told him I often come by his stand. And then he repeated, “Well, you seem like an outstanding person.”

I did not know what he meant by that or what, in our first encounter of only a few seconds, caused him to draw that conclusion about me (he didn’t recognize me and I didn’t even have the trash bag in my hand…). I wanted to ask but I really did have to go by then and so I just laughed and said goodbye and squirmed the last hundred yards to the house.

Now here is the dream connection. The young man in the dream was my inner Outstanding Person. Maybe he was shining through in that brief encounter.

May we, indeed, be friends forever, we and all our families. Happy anniversary.

Weight loss and violence

November 29, 2012 / njmyers / 1 Comment

The dream I’m going to report is not pretty. But it is instructive on a topic I’ve been thinking about for some time: my split food personality and how it relates to gaining and losing weight.

I have known that rats are in the house but I’d rather not think about them. Then I see one. It is slow and fat so Lalo-cat is able to pounce on it but I can see he isn’t going to kill it. So I stomp on it with my foot and hold it down, looking for something to kill it with. There is rubble around. I try whopping it with a stick but that isn’t going to work. Then I drop chunks of concrete on its head, my foot still holding down the fat body. That doesn’t work well either. But by the end of the dream the rat is looking sorrier and sorrier, maybe dying a slow death.

I was totally baffled by this dream until my spiritual director read it back to me and asked me to think about the rat as myself. Oh yeah. “Slow and fat.” “Fat body.” That’s the Fatty in me, the one I have been calling “Stuffer.” I had really been hoping to do away with Stuffer once and for all. This dream is about my latest effort to lose weight.

Over the years I have learned to know Stuffer quite well. Stuffer lives in my mouth, not in my stomach. Stuffer gets hungry but not the way the stomach gets hungry. She is tuned into my emotions, not my body. She gets hungry for stimulation when she is bored, company when she is lonely, consolation when she is upset, celebration when she is happy, calm when she is stressed, energy when she is tired. Stuffer tends to address all these needs with food (and drink), although most have nothing to do with food.

Certain foods are especially pleasing to Stuffer-in-the-Mouth. Although she enjoys a hit of carrot cake with cream cheese frosting now and then, she is basically a salty-fatty girl, not a sweets craver. Cheese and crackers, chips and dips, KFC—oh my.

Because Stuffer lives in my mouth she tends to ignore the signals of the stomach until too late. Stuffer has a lot of problems with heartburn.

Stuffer is not only hungry in all these ways; she is also afraid of being hungry. She fears not getting enough to eat so she hesitates to share a restaurant meal. At home she always has seconds, on principle. She fears going to bed hungry. She snacks all evening.

After many months or years of this, Stuffer gets slow and fat, like that rat.

And I get fed up, literally.

I put my foot down (ouch).

And I switch into Healthy Eater mode: Calorie- or point-counting. Portion control. Lots of fruit and veggies. Yada yada. We all know the drill.

After a few weeks in full-time Healthy Eater mode I have all but forgotten about Stuffer. Gone are the cravings, gone the evening snacking, gone the heartburn. Healthy Eater is tuned into the whole digestive tract, not just the mouth. Healthy Eater is more afraid of feeling too full than of going to bed hungry. She looks with horror on large plates of foods glopped with cheesy fat. Because of body awareness, Healthy Eater does a pretty good job of separating emotional ups and downs from eating. She eats when she is hungry and is grateful to be satisfied and no more.

And thus, the Stuffer pounds begin to drop away.

What happens, of course, is a shift in body chemistry as well as body awareness. When you wean yourself off of carby-fatty excess you influence that complex set of hormone signals that suggests what you want to eat, how much, and when. Willpower is involved at the beginning but the need for willpower tapers off as the hormones do their thing. And sometimes the shift is sudden, like flipping a switch. That is very cool. This happened for me on that 3-day juice fast that launched this latest weight-loss campaign, which is progressing nicely and gradually as I continue in Healthy Eater mode, with the Weight Watcher point system keeping me honest.

But my dream was showing me something else that I hadn’t realized before. Which is that all of this involves quite a lot of self-loathing. And that includes both personalities.

While I like being Healthy Eater, I don’t much like her. She is a bit of a weenie, self-righteous and judgmental; a foodie know-it-all who can’t understand why anyone would want to eat those plates piled with cheesy fried stuff; a thinning person who feels superior to all the fatties she sees around her.

And I really don’t like Stuffer. I find her disgusting and pathetic. I want to get rid of her. I, in Healthy Eater mode, would like to hold her down and drop things on her head. Like that poor chubby rat.

Whew. The violent aspect of weight loss?

I resolved to try to make Healthy Eater a little kinder. Try a little tenderness with Stuffer, who is, after all, an emotional gal.

This week at a local restaurant Healthy Eater allowed Stuffer a piece of raspberry cream pie after choosing the chicken noodle soup for herself (both agreed that neither was that good). We have stocked up on treats: Hummus to glop on thin crackers. Dove Promises (dark chocolate, 1 point apiece). Mixed nuts (good protein with the salt and fat). Weight Watchers big latte bars. And Stuffer’s favorite, popcorn—nutrient-free but harmless.

Tonight, while the husband is still out of town, dinner will be a judicious, point-controlled assortment of snacks.

Download silence

October 6, 2012October 6, 2012 / njmyers / 1 Comment

It is hard to believe my meditation practice is only 10 days old. Already I can’t do without it. It is a necessary part of my day.

It is not easier and easier to do, however. In fact, it continues to be difficult to empty my mind of everything for more than a few seconds at a time. But the difficulty is also a delight, as Cynthia Bourgeault, author of Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, suggests, because each act of letting go brings a tiny tingling of the tummy, the opening-out of the solar plexus that signals rightness, ease, harmony. This is a way of knowing that the active mind can block out.

The catch is that if I focus on that reward or any other experience of the meditation—the swirling blues and greens that I eventually see when my eyes are shut and I have sunk to the place of no words; the ease of deep breath; or any other sense of myself—I am already back to nonmeditating mind. In Centering Prayer one must let go of these experiences, too. But the rhythm of experiencing and releasing is a kind of breathing; the knowing and the not-knowing, in and out like waves on the beach.

At the end, indeed, I feel washed, washed up like driftwood with all its rough edges worn away; smooth, easy, able to move through the day with fewer stops and starts and resistances and reactions.

Night is a different story, however. The practice has revved up my dream life, which had been literally dormant for some time. The dreams have not been poetic; they have been scatological. I have dreamed for several nights running about excrement. Maybe that, too, is about cleansing. It may also be, as the Jungians would suggest, about creativity. Shit is the human being’s first and most basic product. Whatever it signifies, I accept the Dreamgiver’s sense of humor.

Here is something I learned after my first few sessions of Centering Prayer: you need a timer. No sense guessing when 20 minutes might be up or depending on how you feel to decide when to stop. That invites normal-mind activity, which is what you want to get away from

I debated setting the microwave timer but that didn’t seem very spiritual. I thought, I need something that sounds like chimes or a Tibetan bowl. Surely some spiritual marketer has thought of this?

Enso Asari Meditation Timer/Travel Alarm, $59

Well of course they have. I went online and searched “meditation timer.” You can buy timers with chimes, gongs, and singing-bowl tones. You can spend a lot of money on timers shaped like pyramids, circles, spirals, and portable alarm clocks. Practical mystic that I am, I was taken with one of the cheaper ones—at $59!—that doubles as a travel clock and alarm. I’d like it in Sage Green, please.

But here is another option. You can go to a couple of sites and download timed silence. This one gives you a choice of audio files that consist of various lengths of silence. A bell is rung once at the start and three times at the end.

It’s free, as silence should be. Download some now for yourself.

Best of February 2011–September 2012

October 2, 2012October 8, 2012 / njmyers / Leave a comment

This is a reference post. Here are links in primary categories to posts I wrote at my old address, where it was impossible to assign categories. For future reference links to this post will appear in each category of the top menu bar.