giving up our stories is hard to do

Can you notice when you are acting due to a thought or story you made up about your child, rather than acting in response to what is actually occurring? Particularly when we are at our limit, we can begin to believe the storyline over things as they really are. The more you can notice when you do this, then take a breath and reconnect to what is happening, actually happening, the easier things become. Even when they are hard.

My children were sick all weekend. My husband was working. He has been working every weekend the last month, as well as late nights. I am at my limit. And I was at my limit tonight when they both repeatedly asked me for comforting, at the breast and with snuggles. I just wanted to get dinner in the oven. I didn't have much to do, I hadn't been able to attend to anything else all day outside of playing with them and snuggling/nursing them, changing them, caring for them in the many ways we do when they are ill. I just needed five minutes to get one thing done. They needed me. They felt bad. They needed mama's touch, mama's milk, mama's lap. I didn't want to give it to them anymore. Their cries that they felt sick, that their tummies hurt, that they wanted me - it all felt like way too much. Instead of taking a breath, and acknowledging that indeed, this felt like too much, and working with the energy of that, I began to go off on a storyline, voicing my frustration and resentment. I began to exaggerate in my mind, project my own fears and sadnesses onto them. And I began to speak to them out of that muddled dream. Luckily, I noticed. I heard my words and saw my little ones' faces. But it took a few minutes.

It took a few minutes. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it takes a few days. With some storylines and emotions, it can take a few years, or more. The important thing is that at some point, you notice. You stop. You take a moment to look, and you see that what you thought was true, well, it really isn't. "Life is always kinder than the story we tell about it." I know I am always mentioning that Byron Katie quote, but my goodness, it is apt.

It is only when we can let the whole thing go, watch the shadow unravel, that we can actually stop perpetuating suffering, both our own and others'. The important thing is to notice. Then you can open back up to things as they are, really are. I always say to my meditation students that even if they just notice one time during a meditation session that their attention is not on the breath, and then bring their attention back to the breath, even just once, well - they have meditated. It just takes one time. Over and over and over again.

So. Tonight was one of those times. Noticing that I had allowed myself to be carried, once more, on the wave of story - carried away from the present moment, and into my projections. And behaving badly because of it. I noticed. I came back. I picked up my two crying boys, and I apologized to them. I got warm cloths, and laid them on their tummies. I held them. I nursed them. I hugged them. I asked my husband for help when he got home, even though I knew he was stressed and tired as well. I realized I couldn't attend a meeting I had been planning on going to this evening. That commitment, nagging at the back of mind, had also fed my little tirade. I let go of what I had planned and embraced what needed to occur.

The boys are sleeping now, as is my husband, who is also sick. My kitchen, no, my whole house, is a mess. The cats need to be fed. I need to wrap a birthday present for my youngest and finish a felt crown for him, as it's his second birthday tomorrow. I feel that I am about to come down with this illness too. But still so much to do here. It's ok. And it's hard. I can just acknowledge that, and not add any of the other stuff to it. I don't need to write a whole story of how it should or could be, or why it is hard or whatever. Just breathe. Just be here. Then it isn't hard, or at least, not so hard, anymore.

this takes practice

"For the warrior, rather than getting away from the constraints of ordinary life, letting go is going further into your life. You understand that your life, as it is, contains the means to unconditionally cheer you up."
- Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Letting go continues to be the theme of my practice. Letting go of my grasping to things as I wish them to be, and all the suffering that story entails. Practicing mindfulness means letting go again and again of our dream of the past and fantasy of the future, coming back to the present moment. Practicing mindfulness means letting go of our agenda to protect and enhance our own little self. It means being aware when we are holding on tight. When we are pushing our own projections onto things as they are. When we are closing up, rather than opening, just a little bit.

This takes practice. We can't just wake up one morning and say, "today, I am going to let go of this false sense of self and all the busy projects it has, and just be present." I mean, we have to start somewhere. Usually, we start by noticing how not letting go creates vast suffering for ourselves and others. How much harder it makes our lives. How much more hassled we feel by ordinary existence. And so yes, at some level, we do decide that we at least need to let go, that we would like to begin to let go, just a little bit. Dip our toes into the waters of things as they really are. But if we don't view letting go as a practice, as a daily, sometimes moment to moment work, then we are setting ourselves up to fail.

So, we need to hold the view that letting go is part of our fundamental practice of mindfulness. We have to set the intention to be aware of what we are up to in our daily lives. And we need to be gentle with ourselves, and hold ourselves in loving kindness when we notice we are hanging on tight. We can have compassion for that very human need to not let go. And if we can, it is helpful to have some form of meditation practice, no matter how brief it is, where we can just sit quietly, even for a few minutes, and work with our minds. Focus on our breath, notice when our mind is not on the breath, and gently bring it back. That is all. Really. The more we do that, the more we can let go of the thoughts that our minds wander off on, and bring it with deliberateness and gentleness back to the breath, the more we can let go in our daily lives when we have everything else going on.

So when, for instance, my18 month old and his three year old brother decide to pull all the new groceries out of their bags, even after being told many times not to, and pour their contents all over my apartment building's hallway, perhaps I won't totally lose my mind. Perhaps, instead of freaking out and feeling totally pissed off, I will be able to let go of being right, let go of my anger, my tiredness, and with firmness, pick them each up, bring them up the stairs to the apartment, sit them down at some crayons, and then go clean up the mess, without engaging in an internal or external tirade. I may, ahem, lose it for a moment, and raise my voice just a touch, or express some frustration, but I won't make an enormous deal over it, or scream or use it as evidence of how hard our daily life is or whatever. The letting go will allow the space for me to cheer up, as Chogyam Trungpa writes, and perhaps, just perhaps, laughter might occur, or at least some softening around what is, after all, just another bit of mess in a rather messy world.

It is so easy to feel overwhelmed and frustrated by the daily chaos of raising children. Any tools to help liberate ourselves from this sense of hassle and overwhelm are precious indeed. Letting go can feel like surrendering to groundlessness. And yes, ultimately, that is what we are doing. Letting go isn't sloppy though - it is occurring within enormous discipline and good heart. We can have confidence that each time we open and let go, we are building our courage, our resilience, our flexibility, and our good hearts. Wishing you all good luck this week in letting go with loving kindness and courage.

giving yourself space to be

When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it's bottomless, that it doesn't have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space. - Pema Chodron

So, I have just been terribly lax at blogging this summer. Something about the warm, open ended days has made me want to just do anything but write in any depth about any thing. My apologies about that. If given my choice, I would probably spend every day in the summer either lying on my back in the middle of a country meadow or just being at the beach, my feet submerged in water, while my husband fed me watermelon and my children played happily by themselves with the local flora and fauna. And I have actually had a couple of days this summer when such a scenario materialized, more or less. How lucky!

I have been contemplating my difficulty in giving myself and my family the space to just be, whether in the summer, fall, winter or spring. As a society and world, we seem hell bent on keeping ourselves as busy and productive as possible. It is one of the very disorienting things about being a new mother in fact - the sudden surrender of activity, or at least activity that outwardly manifests as such. Nursing or feeding your baby, changing diapers, comforting, bonding - it is actually incredibly demanding work, but much of it looks sedentary, still, and monotonous. Even amongst all this work, there is a lot of just sitting, just being there with your baby as he or she rests or feeds. And of course, with a newborn, you are usually confined to your home for the first few weeks, depending on different circumstances. A new baby forces us to take a long, deep in breath, perhaps for the first time in many years. As in sitting meditation, we can react with a hot, itchy boredom to this, or we can begin to relax, surrender to the present moment, and breathe in deeper, allowing ourselves to just be. In this space, our heart can be touched, deeper perhaps than it has ever been touched before. We can begin to really get to know that bottomless gentleness and love that it contains, as Ani Pema mentions above.

We can do this no matter how old our children are, no matter if we work outside our home or in it. We can find periods each day to breathe in, deeply, and ground ourselves fully in the now, before breathing back out into our busy lives. This can be an internal breath. A letting go of our constant inner activity, our planning, story telling, criticism, gossip, complaining and so on. We can notice our thoughts and let them go, leave ourselves alone for a bit. It can manifest as an external letting go as well. Letting go of a project, an agenda, an activity, even for a moment or two. It can be getting outside, as I often advise - just getting outside, even for a short time, no matter what the weather. You don't have to do anything in particular outdoors. Just open. If you have young children, let them guide you. They will lead you to many important discoveries - a large slug, inching its way along the wet grass. A collection of choke cherries lying on the sidewalk. An interesting crack in the sidewalk. A broken street lamp. A new stray cat on the street, who is so friendly she allows them to rub her tummy and follows us to the old church yard where we like to play. Try not to hurry them along. Linger with them. Allow yourselves the space to be open, curious, attentive to the magic of the world.

We experienced a forced in breath just the other day, because of Hurricane Irene. We lost power for about 24 hours, and were unable to do the laundry, or use the computer, or stay up late doing chores. Instead, we lit our candles, gave the boys each a flashlight, and spent hours playing together in a large tent made up of sheets on our bed, exploring the play of light and shadow. It was a lovely pause, a gift. We could have chosen to be hassled by it, and there was some anxiety about the food warming up in the fridge, but what was there to do other than put it all (along with our ice trays) in the cooler and then let the anxiety go, so we could be with our littles? Hassle was replaced with warmth and laughter. Space.

Give yourself some space to be today. Engage in some aimless wandering outside with your children, or by yourself. Leave yourself alone. You don't always need to be so busy. We are always so afraid of things falling apart without our constant interference. I will let you in on a secret - they fall apart anyway, no matter what we do. So relax. Let go. Let your heart be touched. In that soft, tender spot of stillness, great power exists.

[NOTE: blogger is giving me lots of trouble in terms of formatting, so I apologize for the appearance of the blog, and if this posts appears as one big block of text. I will eventually figure it out when I don't have two nursing toddlers on my lap as I type.]

riding the rollercoaster

"As warriors, we try to rejoice whenever there is an obstacle, and we try to regard that as something that makes us smile. Each particular setback creates a further smile. We keep on going in that way, and we never give up or give in to any obstacles...It is like riding a rollercoaster: the more you go down and the more you go up, the more you smile each time." - Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

I have been riding the rollercoaster that is parenting the past couple of weeks. I have been so tired out by six weeks of almost continuous illness that my neurosis has been, shall we say, a bit heightened. The usual ups and downs have been more exaggerated as my defenses have fallen away, or maybe, it's that the defenses have gotten stronger. Working with my mind while my two year old and one year old go about their business of exploring the vividness of phenomena and their emotions has been challenging work.

My previously very gentle eldest has turned into the toddler that hits, pushes and kicks other children, usually without any obvious provocation. If I look deeper of course, I see that there is provocation- as in, the other child is in his immediate space, or looking at a toy he is interested in, or beginning to interact with him in some completely innocuous way. Babies and older children alike are targets. It has been quite the ride for me, indeed. On the other hand, he has also taken off in his speech, which for me is a real joy. He was a very late talker, so much so that we were beginning to get concerned and had him evaluated. Hearing him express himself in words, and describing his world is incredibly poignant and wonderful.

Meanwhile, his brother is in that 13 month old "newly walking, must climb onto everything, creep into everything, run and fall everywhere" mode, marked by ouches and bruises. So, I have been alternating between loving appreciation of their growth and fear, chagrin, and horror at the acting out and getting hurt - all perfectly normal developmentally, and all perfectly challenging for this mama.

Using my mindfulness to create some space around my reactions to them has given me some insight. One thing that keeps coming up for me is my own fear of looking bad, or being bad. When my eldest pushes another toddler down, or deliberately bounces a ball off the head of a young baby - along with the almost primal reaction of needing to intervene and protect, comes a deep feeling of shame and embarrassment. These are very old feelings for me, and are present often in many of my interactions with others. Now, there is nothing wrong with me having these emotions. What becomes problematic is that if I am not mindful, these strong, old emotions lead me to behave unskillfully or aggressively with my toddler.

The same is true with my youngest when he is exploring and/or getting hurt. Feelings of shame, embarrassment, of somehow being wrong or bad arise, whether or not others are around to witness. Again, not wrong, but problematic if I am not mindful in how I respond. In both situations, if there is enough space, if I can pause for a brief second and touch in to what I am adding to what has occurred, what I am projecting onto it, I can usually respond appropriately- redirecting, comforting, distracting, having a gentle teaching moment, etc. When I can't pause, and am just carried by the energy of these hot emotions, I tend to overreact - I get a little aggressive in how I respond to my little ones. I become unskillful. I get more punitive or more exasperated or freaked out. I get shrill. I get nervous. Edgy. Things escalate. The space narrows. Everyone is miserable.

So, I am working on smiling, as Chogyam Trungpa taught. Learning to ride the rollercoaster with my arms up, constantly touching into the fear, shame, anger, frustration, tiredness, whatever, and letting go and opening up - smiling. Pulling myself and them out of the situation, sometimes physically, sometimes just to the other side of the room. Smiling.

It's been hard. Today was a challenging day. Painful. Trungpa continues:

"the experience of our day-to-day living situation consists of dissatisfaction, questioning, pain, depression, aggression, passion. All these are real, and we have to relate to them. Having a relationship with this may be extremely difficult. It's an organic operation without any anesthetics."

Today was like that. Raw. But I have found rawness to be more workable than just stuckness. Rawness has so much possibility and tenderness. Stuckness is so solid seeming and choking. So, I have had to keep touching that rawness, and just holding it.

"The present is worth looking at...Faith is that it's okay in the present situation, and we have some sense of trust in that."

Surrendering to the present moment

Our life is completely full even though we might be completely bored. Boredom creates aloneness and sadness, which are also beautiful. Beauty in this sense is the total experience of things as they are. It is very realistic. - Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

I feel that life is constantly offering us the opportunity to either open ourselves to what is, or to close the gates of our heart and mind tight against the present moment. My children are constantly pushing me to open wide to the world and the present moment, much wider maybe than I had ever planned on doing. I can either fight with the present moment, or I can relax into it, and find the beauty described by Chogyam Trungpa above. It can be so nuanced, the way we close ourselves off to what is actually going on, how much we can resist what is, because we are so afraid of ...of what exactly? Of space, and of boredom, which is what we seem to project onto our experience of simply being present. Whether in meditation or in our daily lives, we can become so afraid of boredom that we forget it is full of beauty.

For many months I have been eagerly awaiting the opening of a new library branch a mere three blocks from where we live, hoping that the librarian would offer a regular storytime for children. It was finally completed, and I trekked down one day with my two boys to check it out. The library was not yet open to the public but the kind librarian invited us in and gave us a tour of the facilities, which includes a lovely children's area. She was wonderful with my toddler, and he seemed excited to play with the toys and the books. And she informed me that yes, a weekly storytime for toddlers would be offered. I was thrilled, and left that day with much excitement and many promises to my toddler (who didn't want to leave) that we would return the following week for our first storytime.

The day and hour come, and we trek over once again, my toddler very excited. We enter the building and immediately, excitement turns into reluctance. I have to repeatedly coax him just to stay inside. We approach the story circle very slowly, very hesitantly. He backs off, and sits in the middle of the book aisle, refusing to budge. He is on the verge of tears. I continue to coax him, trying to entice him into the circle with the other children, who are happily interacting with one another and the librarian. He instead turns to the puzzle shelf, pulls out a puzzle and begins to point to it insistently, wanting to play with it. Story time begins, with the librarian singing with the children. I continue to try and push him verbally away from the puzzle, and into the cozy happy circle that I want to be in with him. I am beginning to feel the rising energy of frustration and the familiar tiredness that accompanies it. I begin to weave a mental storyline about my young son, about how cautious he is, and what a challenge it can be. How it worries me. How it must be bad, right?? And then I realize . . .that's just it, isn't it? I want to be in that circle. My son doesn't. Why isn't that ok with me? Why can't I just accept him for who he is in this moment? Why can't I accept what he wants to do? And so, I drop it. I drop my storyline, my frustration, my "but I want him to . . ." I stop trying to persuade him to join the others. I unzip the puzzle bag and take out the pieces, and hold my newborn as my eldest happily begins to play with the lovely new puzzle full of trains, trucks and airplanes - his favorite things! My energy returns and I can enjoy him, his baby brother, the sound of the other children singing, responding to the lovely story the librarian is reading. We are outside of the circle, but in our own cozy space.

Not that we must always surrender to our children's wishes - my son doesn't like to go to the doctor either, but obviously, he must do so, and I bring him to her willingly or no. But so often, we seem to hesitate or resist our children because we have a particular agenda for them that blinds us to what they actually need in that moment. When we are busy pursuing our agenda rather than just being with our children, friction occurs and drains us of energy. There is so much we would like to do, to busy ourselves with! And they would prefer to just sit there and read the same story a thousand times or watch that ant crawl up the leaf or do the same puzzle over and over again. We feel the subtle pull away from them, ignoring the incredible richness right there in front of us, that they continue to point out to us again and again. There is so much joy in surrendering to that fullness! Just as in meditation practice, the more we can relax into just being there, whether with our own minds or with our children, the more pure delight begins to inform our experience.

I continue to bring my son to story time, and he continues to prefer to play off to the side with a puzzle. Sometimes he will approach the circle and listen in, but for now he is happier outside of it. And I continue to accept that and delight in his individual exploration of the library. Eventually he will join the circle - or maybe he won't. As long as I continue to surrender to who he is and what he needs, it is all perfect.