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"I look to the skies not to see the stars, but to watch for the
shoe about to drop." Moonlight Skinny-dip. Available on
products in the phylliswalter store's Colorful Mod collection:
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I've been stuck on vibrate for years and am wondering how to dislodge the battery in my vibrator.
My fight-or-flight instinct is hyper-vigilant. I look to the skies not to see the stars but to watch for the shoe about to drop. I've been dealing with chronic stress for a while, and finally it's easing up. But there's still that wary unease that any minute now a brick is going to plunge through the ceiling. That sense of artificial doom has got to stop. It's probably not accurate and it's definitely not healthy.
Hence: my quest for mindfulness.
Being mindful means slowing down and not careening off in every direction as if a Roman candle were strapped to your backside. It means doing one thing at a time and not multi-tasking, because the science is showing us that multi-tasking probably makes us less productive. It means not just eating the apple but looking at the apple, smelling the apple and chewing the apple - thoughtfully instead of swallowing it whole as if you were a horse. It means being kind to yourself, being kind to others and spending as much of your life as possible on your own little patch of peace.
It means breathing with purpose and presence. It means meditating knowing you haven't failed just because your mind wanders.
I'm not there yet, but I'm getting there. My freak-outs over lost keys, lost files, lost credit cards, and cell phones dropped in the toilet are far fewer now because I'm no longer locked in a constant struggle to outrun myself because now it's just semi-constant.
Last week I attended a seminar on mindfulness presented by a truly gifted instructor. At one point she passed out individual serving size boxes of raisins to each of us participants and told us to take one raisin out of the box. Then she told us to examine our raisins carefully, to notice the different surfaces and textures that make up one little raisin. Then we held our raisins to our noses and inhaled. After inhaling, we held our raisins to our ears and rolled them back and forth between finger and thumb and were surprised to hear our raisins making sounds. Next, we popped our raisins into our mouths and felt them with our tongues, rolled them around our mouths and sucked out a bit of the flavor.
At last, we were told we could eat our raisins.
We bit down on our raisins, chewed them thoroughly and swallowed. My neighbor, L was at the same seminar sitting right next to me. She leaned in and whispered:
"So, what were you thinking when you finally got to eat the raisin?"
"That I felt guilty eating something I'd gotten to know so well," I whispered back.
And honestly, I wasn't entirely joking. There was a tiny part of me that expected the raisin to scream, "NOOOooooo!" as it slid down my throat. I have always had a cattywampas view of things, and I know that. In the case of the raisin, it meant I haven't yet nailed mindfulness.
But Om wasn't built in a day. One sign that I'm beginning to master and internalize mindfulness is that I'm now seeing how it can apply to other people's struggles.
My son, Jon is working hard to prioritize his homework and chores. We were talking about it last night.
"Have you ever heard of something called mindfulness?" I asked him.
"Yes," he said.
"Wow, I'm impressed, Jon. Where did you learn about that?"
He looked at me, a little perplexed. "From you," he said.
"I talked to you about mindfulness?" I asked.
"Sure. Don't you remember?"
"No."
Anyway, I'm working to keep my eyes on the skies, not because I'm watching out for shoes, but because I'm falling in love with stars.
