Compassion for my left side

October 30, 2012October 30, 2012 / njmyers / 2 Comments

Today while I was meditating (and thus not supposed to be noticing anything) I noticed that every time I started pursuing a thought my left shoulder tensed up. Releasing the thought required releasing my left shoulder. What is this about? I wondered. And I released the thought, and my left shoulder.

After the meditation I began journaling, which I do on my computer. And I noticed, not for the first time, that my left arm and shoulder tensed up while I was typing while my right arm and shoulder stayed relaxed. My right hand danced over the keys. My left hand was not dancing. It was trying to but it felt clunky, as if it might step on its partner’s toes at any moment.

I am right handed. Everything is easier for my right hand. But certain tasks, like typing, which I do sometimes for hours every day, require equal performance from my left hand. My poor left hand has to scramble to keep up. The extra effort causes tension.

My left side is the not-so-talented twin trying to measure up to the standards of her more gifted sister. In so doing she acquires a residue of tension that never really goes away. It extends to my left leg, which currently carries the remains of a knee injury that happened months ago. Every time I do yoga balancing poses I am reminded of the inferiority of my left side. It is weaker, less coordinated. I topple over much more quickly when I am standing on my left leg.

This has been happening all my life. I have known it but I have never paid attention to it. I have been dismissive about it. I have not paid true attention, which requires receptive curiosity and even compassion.

This thought (which I have just pursued as the tension builds in my left shoulder) brought me to the question of whether something more than actual inferiority of function is involved. Could it be that my left side has an inferiority complex?

That is, the constant, inevitable comparison with my right side causes my left side to expect itself to fail to measure up. It expects to have to try harder and thus experiences a kind of neurotic desperation. It can’t relax because it is always ready to spring into action. Even when I am meditating, as the thought process starts up the left shoulder tenses in the expectation that it will have to perform in some way.

I know some people like that. Sometimes I am like that.

Poor, dear left side. I will try to pay compassionate attention to you for a while and make amends for criticizing you, dismissing you, expecting things of you without appreciating the extra effort they require. What do you require?

By the way, if you suspect that writing about my left side, boring car trips, and losing weight indicates that my life is pretty quiet right now, you are right. Not much happening. You could call these posts, How to Write a Blog out of Nothing, which may have a certain appeal, given that my most popular post of all time is one called How to Make a Meal out of Nothing.

But I would really like to know what my next big thing will be. I have some ideas but they haven’t come together yet.

The zen of a long drive

October 22, 2012 / njmyers / 1 Comment

Ohio is flat and dark.

The roofers are coming on Monday so you need to make the 700-mile drive home in a single day that has begun in early afternoon in the glorious Pennsylvania fall. The northern route has taken you through oak country, shades of brown, pink, and red, sun-dazzled. But the sun has set behind the Pennsylvania hills. You know when that happens because the GPS background switches to black.

Night falls on Ohio. In Ohio there is nothing to do but drive, drive, drive.

You and he are talked out. You’ve used your talking energies on other people on this long, sociable weekend. You find yourself checking mile markers. Your attention does a triangle: mile marker, clock, arrival time. Measuring time does not help it pass. Instead, time stretches out into a succession of tedious moments. You are bored out of your mind. Your mind has no room for anything but your own boredom. Boredom sits behind your eyes.

You eyes are getting sandy. You are trying to stay awake in case he doesn’t. Or should you nap so you can take over later? But you’ve had a long shift and you hate driving in the dark. You hate everything about the trip at this point. Nothing to look forward to but sleeping in your own bed, and that is still hours away.

Music would help but there is no music. The CDs got moved out of the car. The radio is annoying country and something New-Agey droney that threatens to put the driver in a trance so you switch it off. Nothing but silence and the road and the headlights and taillights and the mile markers and the half-moon dipping toward the horizon.

You remember that once on a trip when you were bored out of your mind you welcomed the boredom, the monotony, and the road. You watched them as if you had never seen them before. You ignored the clock. You banished thoughts of how far you had come and how far you had to go. You narrowed your attention to the present moment. Each mile marker was its own destination. And the road began to sing to you. Movement, speed, the harmony of traffic rules.

You try that now. Welcome, boredom. Welcome, road. You set aside the story of one mile after another and rest in the present. The road and the night move under the wheels. For a little while you lose track of time.

Finally, finally, Ohio comes to an end.

He turns off the heat to keep awake and you don’t complain although you are freezing. You massage his neck. You announce the passing of the Indiana communities you know so well. Lagrange. Middlebury. Goshen. Elkhart. You are in home territory.

It is okay to count the miles again because this time they will end at home.

Moving through bogs

October 15, 2012 / njmyers / Leave a comment

The Niles, MI Envirothon team at Dayton Wet Prairie

Yesterday we got to step into our local ecological treasure, a rare wet prairie. It was the prairie’s annual “open house,” when a botanist leads a tour into the fragile terrain. The conservation group doesn’t want the general public traipsing through just any day but that’s not much of a problem since the 40 acres of the preserve flank a little-used dirt road and the prairie itself is, well, wet. The ground is squishy. Jump on it in your rubber boots and it bounces.

We followed botanist Bob and a very well-informed group of high school students a little way into the wetland and were introduced to some of the more obscure members of the ecosystem, from sharp rice grass to the last blooming fringed gentian. The students are thrilled with a plan to close up a ditch that had been struck through the prairie years ago. The idea is to return more natural flooding to the area. Combined with an imminent burn, the project may restore the prairie to a more natural state. We can watch this happen in coming weeks and years. It was a good day.

It reminded me of this month in my personal life, a combination of treading carefully and taking decisive actions that feel like the equivalent of flooding and burning. Will these moves clear out the invasive fears and distractions? Will new growth be sturdy, natural, harmonious? There will be changes.

Last week, between making Earth First orchard’s last bushel of organic seconds into applesauce and hosting our annual fall party for city friends, I finished a book.

This is a book I thought I would never finish. I have been trying to tell this story, in one form after another, intermittently, for 14 years. That makes it sound monumental. It is not. It is a small story, fragile as a boggy ecosystem. The problem has been understanding it well enough to tell it. It has been a challenge of capturing, describing, defining something that defies linear storytelling conventions because it is all about connections.

I thought I had given up on it. I set it aside nearly two years ago, feeling utterly defeated. I did not want to look at the manuscript ever again, but I discovered several weeks ago that it was still wearing a hole in my heart. And so last week, on a warm, sunny day, I took the manuscript to the most beautiful place in the neighborhood, high up on a dune overlooking Lake Michigan, and dared myself to read it one last time. Dared. It took a lot of courage to face my own inadequacy as a writer.

The astonishing thing was, I began to love the story again, and the way I had told it. It stood up to the natural beauty around me. I saw that it was almost finished. It needed one last trim and some minor shifts, which I did in a few hours later in the week.

I will not say more about it now because releasing it into the world depends on a number of considerations, which I am wading through at the moment, jumping lightly on the bog to test the reverberations. But for the first time in all my attempts to tell this story, I have told it to my own satisfaction.

I feel cleaned out, flooded, burned, ready for the next creative project.

Breaking 160

October 8, 2012 / njmyers / 1 Comment

Last week, as the nation dipped below the symbolic 8% unemployment threshold, I crossed my own longtime statistical barrier, the 160 line.

My body has repeatedly resisted that 160-pound barrier and it did this time, too. It plateaued for a week in the current weight-loss project before giving in. It is as if going below that line means becoming someone else, and the body and subconscious are telling me to think twice before I go there. 160 is where I was for my two children’s weddings. I carried my infant granddaughter around at 160: it is my grandma weight. I biked a century at 160. 160 and above is my retirement weight, my aging elder weight. I was prepared to let this weight carry me through the rest of my life.

Who will I become as I continue on this apparently successful campaign? Weight loss is less about appearance than it was in the past for me, more about health and energy. I’d gone well above 160 and was feeling it. I realized the time had come to do something about it.

Already I have a lot more energy than I did a month ago. That begs the question, what can I do with all this energy? I can’t just slack off, sit back, and laze through my retirement years. I’m going to have to start acting like a younger person. This is not an unqualified bonus. With energy comes responsibility as well as possibility. The excuses fall away. I can no longer give the evenings over to TV and reading simply because I am tired. I am not so tired any more.

I don’t think the answer is to program more activities into my life. That is the mode of a younger person who isn’t aware of her energy supply—you just feel like doing things and so you do. I am aware that energy is a great gift because I have been without it. I am aware that health is a great gift because I went through my own health crisis a year ago. So I am looking for worthy ways to spend these precious commodities.

My current diet, the Weight Watchers daily point system, is a metaphor for that. You can eat anything you want but if you eat junk you have to sacrifice good food in order to stay within your points quota. The system is rigged toward healthy food. You quickly discover that junk points are far less satisfying than real-food points. Junk points take you way over the quota before they satisfy your appetite and then you feel bad afterward, physically and emotionally. You want to spend those points wisely, on food that tastes good, is good for you, and makes you feel good after you eat it. Faced with a tempting carby-fatty snack you ask yourself, is it worth spending points on that? Maybe it is, for a bite or two, and then you find it isn’t as satisfying as you imagined.

I am considering what to do with a slimmer body, how to spend these bonus energy points. I shall have to behave a little differently, dress a little differently, plan my days and projects more expansively. I am enjoying the changes already happening and looking forward to more. My body is telling me, you won’t be the same.

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.

Biker chick August 2011

Lessons on wheels September 2011

Century plus September 2011

Health/food

How to make a meal out of nothing Mar 2011

A low-sadness diet Mar 2011

Saved by kale September 2011

Kale massage December 2011

The no-burp diet November 2011

A fossil fuel diet November 2011

Making maple syrup February 2012

Eating nettles April 2012

Juicing up a new practice September 2012

Feeling fat in Japan September 2012

Health/healing

How I almost died in yoga class December 2011

What happened next December 2011

Antiphospholipid syndrome December 2011

My energy healing January 2012

My Feldenkrais healing January 2012

Spirituality

What is practical mysticism February 2011

What I’m chain-reading February 2011

Think small Feb 2011

Dusting and blessing March 2011

Conversion June 2011

Politics in the beloved community July 2011

Falling in love with theology October 2011

Jesus October 2011

Community October 2011

Sister Tree January 2012

What I see with my eyes shut February 2012

Liminal time and Real Church March 2012

Finding Jesus in Congo May 2012

At peace with one’s nature August 2012

Centering Prayer

October 1, 2012October 8, 2012 / njmyers / 7 Comments

I am beginning a regular meditation practice. I have circled around meditation for a long time, like a cat looking for just the right napping position. Now I have settled on something. I should have asked for help before on doing this but perhaps not. The right teacher comes along at the right time.

My way of asking for help on this, not just meditation but spiritual practice in general, was to sign on with a spiritual director. Spiritual direction, too, is something I’ve considered before, but I wasn’t ready for it. I don’t know why. I wasn’t ready and now suddenly I am ready, with urgency and hunger. In our first session, my spiritual director, proving herself to be the right teacher at the right time, directed me to a meditation practice and a book that describes it. I sped through the book in a few sittings. Sometimes the right book comes along, like the right teacher. This week the book has also been my teacher.

The book is Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening by Cynthia Bourgeault (Cowley 2004). There is a whole Centering Prayer movement but I had only a vague notion of what Centering Prayer might be (wrong, it turned out).

I find that I already know much of this. I’ve learned it on my own, from other sources and my own experience. At the same time I have so much to learn and unlearn that it’s funny. I’ve tried to write about a lot of stuff that I have only vaguely understood and here I find Bourgeault calmly explaining everything and putting it together. The right book at the right time makes sense of something you recognize but haven’t fully understood.

Here is what I have experienced before.

There are different kinds of meditation but the only kind I have been drawn to has been a quest for the state of emptiness, a kind of dreamy state of not holding on to thoughts and feelings.
In dealing with psychological pain, anger, and fears—as well as the vicissitudes of life—I have experienced the profound power of letting go.
I have noticed a feeling in my body, right around the solar plexus, that signals that somehow I am on the right track, whether it is in meditation or my daily life.
I’m regrounding in Christianity and increasingly relating my spirituality to Jesus as well as the Christian community.

With these four kinds of experiences as background, I am taking to Centering Prayer like a duck to water because it puts them all together. The method is simple: 20 minutes of clearing your mind and opening to the Divine. You use a word to gently bring yourself back to center every time your attention gets hooked on a thought or emotion. It’s an exercise in repeatedly letting go.

Simple but not easy, but I won’t explain how or why just yet. I have, after all, done it (under that name) only half a dozen times! And really, Bourgeault is the very readable, scholarly authority.

If you are not familiar with Centering Prayer you may suspect, as I did, that it is called prayer instead of meditation so Christians will think it is ok, not borrowed from some other tradition. I don’t mind such borrowing at all but Bourgeault makes a good case that this particular form of meditation embodies the spirit of Jesus’s instructions on the self-emptying life, of being in God as God is in us. The theology is intriguing, a theology of the heart, not the head. That is, you don’t have to “believe” in Jesus or a “Christian God” in order to set out on this path. Just like you don’t have to be a Buddhist to practice Zen meditation. You just set out and see where Spirit takes you.

I may report now and then on what happens in my life as a result of this practice although—of course!—the practice is not oriented to results. Results are just another thing that you get to release.

Still. May I hope for transformation?

Archives for this blog February 2011–September 2012 are located here.

the practical mystic

spiritual adventures in the real world

Compassion for my left side

The zen of a long drive

Moving through bogs

Breaking 160

Download silence

Best of February 2011–September 2012

Congo

Current events

Dreams

Family life

Health/fitness

Health/food

Health/healing

Spirituality

Centering Prayer