Playing mood detective with insomnia.

Posted by | October 28, 2010 | 3 Comments

Hello, frustration! This morning it woke me up, coursing through my limbs at dark:thirty.

Hard to ignore. Certainly hard to sleep through. When I finally “cried Uncle” and got up, I was tapped ever so lovingly on the shoulder by this line:

tending as all things do, toward silence…

Ahhh. And then I remembered (with a little help from above Google) the poem by Mary Oliver from whence my love-line came:

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades;

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
I look on time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence.

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

~ * ~

Oh my dear body, I have been full of argument. And oh but I have been feeling frightened. Something to do with time and how it keeps passing at warp speed measured in days, even hours, when it used to be years. (Um, what year are we again?)

Something about how I’m doing too much of the wrong thing, and not enough of the love thing. And how the two are all tangled up and I can’t tease them apart. And in all this I need to support myself.

That last thought is so heavy it could crush rocks.

Playing Mood Detective

Sweet pea, shall we play? Want to invite your old pal and superhero Curiosity to play Mood Detective with you?

Yesss!

OK. What happens when you believe this thought? How do you live your life when you believe: “I need to support myself” ?

I worry. And then what I do is motivated by fear.
I feel alone. And I jump into the future and worry about dying alone.

Yikes!

And I wake up early and can’t sleep.
And I spin. Not like in a Sufi dance of joy, no. More like a piece that has sprung loose from a powerful moving machine… it’s still spinning like mad but on its own.

Oof! So hard!

And how does it feel in your body when you’re thinking that thought?

I feel the weight of the world on my shoulders.
It feels like there’s static on the screen of my mind.
Nothing is clear.
Sometimes my neck hurts.
And sometimes I feel it in my butt.

Ow! OK. Could something else be as true or truer than this pain-in-the-butt thought “I need to support myself”?

What do you mean?

Well, as I see it you are an adult and you are running a business and you need to pay bills and keep things moving. But when you are crushed with this thought you are usually only looking at things from one perspective, and, not to put too fine a point on it, that would be the perspective of doom.

Oh yes.

The thought “I need to support myself” really doesn’t seem to be serving you, does it?

Nah.

Because I know for a fact that you’d still work and do the things you love, even without that thought.

Yes, probably you’re right.

Can you tell me about those?

Those?

Those things that you love to do?

Read and write poems and essays and stories.
Connect with people… people I’ve met and people I’ve never met and people I’ve not yet met.
Sing and dance. Pretend I am Leonard Cohen’s female backup.
Be a Massage Therapist.
Play Mood Detective. Teach my clients to be mood detectives so their bodies don’t have to express their stress as pain.

Wow. That’s a lot of things to love! So, what else could be as true or truer than your original pain-in-the-ass thought: “I need to support myself” ?

I need to allow myself to be supported.

Can you tell me about that?

Well, truth is, I am not alone. Not really. I often think I am, but I’m not. Yesterday morning I called my friend at 6:30 a.m., crying. I woke him up and he listened and was there. It was 5:30 for him!

Oh yes. That is support. Not to mention love.

And I have other dears that love me. All over the world.

Yes, you do.

And I have clients whom I adore and by all accounts, they seem pretty much to like me too. They pay me and I get to help them.

Wow, yes.

You know, come to think, how I help them is all about this.

How so?

Sometimes I will hold parts of my clients’ bodies. Like their head, for example. I make a fulcrum with my fingers and place my finger pads and tips right where their head meets their neck, atlas on axis, at the crux of so much of the pressure in their neck and jaw… And I wait. And listen. And hold. All the while their head is resting in my hands.

I can tell how much their neck tension is easing by how fully they let me hold their head. Sometimes, for whatever reason, a client will keep holding the weight of their head. Mostly it’s not conscious at all. Maybe they are trying to help me. They simply can’t, for whatever reason, in that moment allow the full weight of her head to rest in my hands.

Often, just showing up and bringing awareness to how it all is is enough to change it. I can tell when a client rests because I feel the weight of their head–ironically heavier and lighter at once–in my hands. Often their jaw and face softens at the same time. It moves me in a way I can’t explain, to get to be there when that happens.

Oh my, Heidi! Do you have any openings today? I want you to hold my head! OK. Where were we?

We were playing with the thought “I need to support myself.” And I was noticing that when I believe that thought I am not allowing Life–by way of the ground, the bed, the pillow, the figurative or actual hands under my head–to support me.

Gravity comes to mind, too. That fantastic force of this our earth, not letting me up and float away into the la-la-land. When I am worrying, I have usually forgotten about the loving force of gravity pulling me ever back to the ground, back toward darkness, “tending as all music does, toward silence.”

~ * ~

Dear Mary Oliver, dear poetry, dear life, dear Byron Katie, dear ground, dear gravity, and oh dear client-of-mine,

Thank you.

Love,

Your Heidi

Categories: Massage Therapy, Mood detective, Poetry | Tagged: , , , , | 3 Comments

Going back for me-then

Posted by | April 27, 2010 | 6 Comments

You know how people might say something for some kind of forever and you just don’t hear it?

Maybe at some point you begin suspecting just how much you aren’t hearing. You get curious, and with that comes the teensiest opening to the possibility that there is a vast world of things you’ve closed yourself off to.

And then seemingly suddenly you find yourself able to hear some of the subtler pitches, you can see a bit wider, and then maybe your friend or teacher or lover, or maybe your mother, the president or Leonard Cohen (sorry, he just snuck in there!) says the same thing he or she has always said but today it gets past the wall of made-up mind: you know, past all the calcified assumptions and hardened beliefs.

Maybe life has changed you–what with its losses and joys, its earthquakes and hurricanes, the comings and goings of people and things, your loves and hopes and dreams–softening you up a bit here, toughening you up over there… And suddenly that thing that you could not ever hear before has a place to land. Or an itty bitty piece of it manages to fly through the crack in the window of you and now it’s in, Baby, IN!

When I first heard Byron Katie say, Everyone always does the best they can, I thought, yeah, right! It sounded nice and all, but what about in such and such? Surely you don’t mean that person over there… And what about that night when I was 26? Surely I could have done better. By “could have” I really meant “should have.” And with this string of surely’s came endless waves of shame. I was filled with argument.

But where there is argument there is doubt. And doubt can be a window. And windows can open.

So I asked: is it true I could I have done better when I was 26?

When all argument, excuse and defensiveness is seen through, I find that I can only answer no. Misguided though it was, it was me doing the best I could. Swallowing those pills was the best conclusion I could have come to in the equation of me on that night.

I needed help. I needed to wake up. I needed to not keep seeing the world and myself as I had been. After all, it wasn’t working, and I’d tried all I knew to try. I needed to give up. What I’d done so far, what and whom I’d turned to, hadn’t helped. Ultimately I’d have to meet myself, to look myself square in the eyes, in a way I had no idea how to do then.

Recognizing this now is sweet relief. It is me being a Morning Glory to myself. It’s me going back into the burning building of my life then, and pulling me out: “C’mon Sweetheart, this is no place for you to stay. There are aardvarks in your future! And kisses. And joy. You have no idea!”

Noticing the reality of the situation–that I did what I did and that I was doing the best I could–feels a whole lot like kindness. Like warm oil in the most loving of hands, rubbing old places of injury. And certainly me at 26 could use warm hands and oil and rubbing. Who couldn’t!

Something happens when I meet my hardest places with the kindness of understanding: I begin meeting fewer and fewer people I can’t understand. And when I do find some thing or person that leaves me shaking my head self-righteously muttering “they should know better!,” I can only ever look back inside myself at what I haven’t yet understood, at what might still be hanging from the hook of shame.

This being human is amazing, isn’t it? The hard, the wonderful, the baffling, the mysterious, the all of it…

Rilke comes to mind:

Quiet Friend

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be the bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself into wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water speak: I am.
——————
Rainer Maria Rilke
Sonnets to Orpheus, Part 2, XXIX

Categories: Poetry, Re-imagining, Self-care | Tagged: , , | 6 Comments

This is the German coastguard: What are you sinking about?

Posted by | May 7, 2009 | 9 Comments

Sometimes I believe that I should be spared of ever feeling badly. That there is something wrong with me when I feel certain things that don’t feel good: blah, scared, lonely, loopy…

Basically, it’s a setup, because, as life would have it, I do feel those things sometimes. Like today, in which I went the way of all happy meals and snowballs:

Down. Last night Scared started dredging up memories and then the whole thing started rolling down the hill, and this morning it picked up blah, and let’s not forget loopy, until the whole freaking ball crashed into a tree and melted into a puddle of lonely. Not pretty.

How to stay in a swampy bad place:

Step 1. Believe every thought that flits across the screen of your mind
Step 2. Don’t do anything differently.

Byron Katie says that thoughts are like raindrops. They appear. She asks: Would you argue with a raindrop?

Me to Byron Katie: Well, duh, of course not.

Enter curiosity, a.k.a: Playing Detective

But, truth be told, I do try to argue with raindrops. I glom on. As if!

It appears that I don’t let them just run down the window of my innocent mind, but rather I get all up in their face:

“you there! Yes you! How come you’re here today? Hunh, hunh? On no, not you! Something is wrong. What the hell is wrong! If you’re here there must be something terribly wrong.”

(What can I say. Panic is redundant.)

It’s like this: I lasso a thought and capture it. I don’t let it come and go freely anymore, as thoughts and raindrops, and anyone, really, would much prefer to do.

Right about now a bunch of stir-crazy thoughts are tied up in a corral: “I’ve ruined it… again… I always do… I’m too demanding… I’ll end up alone… I’m too fucked up to be with anyone… in any way…” And then, last but not least: “I’ll die old and alone, with nary a soul in sight. And loopy in the head to boot.” It’s getting a wee bit cramped in this thought-corral, not to mention the smell. Oh my.

This story? It’s been done. If I were a producer I’d be like: “Are you serious? Honey, I’ve read this screenplay a million times. You can’t really have thought this was original—”

Hmmmmm… could it be that I am onto it? Could it be that I don’t truly believe it anymore but that I’m so used to running that story and buckling under its weight that I’ve started believing that it’s the only story there is?

(The producer has now fallen asleep).

About Step 2. Don’t do anything differently.

On account of feeling trapped like some kind of Gulliver tied up with a million thought-threads, one of the hardest things to do in The Swamp of Same Old is Anything Different. So what’s a Gulliver-girl to do?

@TheGirlPie told me to write, so this is me writing to you:

Mayday, mayday…

But mind-in-a-panic has the attention span of a fruit fly. And now I am trailing off to write to my dear friend, the one I most want to be “gotten” by (as in “he gets me”):

“Can you throw me a life-line please, I’m sinking and just need a life-line.”

Enter a glimmer of insight:

I foresee in my magic 8 ball that by pressing “send” I will only worry him and make him feel helpless, because, if anyone knows this old story of mine mind, he does. And if anyone loves me, he does. And certainly I know and he knows he can’t save me from my thoughts. (Plus, he’s working. He’s in the middle of delivering a training. It wouldn’t be kind of me to send him a desperate note.)

Still writing, supposedly but not really to him: “Please give me simple direction.”

And supposedly but not really from him comes the wisest-ever, most-loving-ever, simplest-ever answer I can imagine, from my very own fingers:

Heidi, this is your simple direction:
1. Go outside. Get fresh air.
2. Run. Move. Make your heart beat hard.
P.S. I love you.

Willingness, the unexpected fruit of desperation.

I’m off to follow the simple direction of my wise fingers. But before I go, I leave you with this, just in case you, too, are having a trying–to-capture-raindrops kind of day:

Categories: Self-care | Tagged: | 9 Comments