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Surrender

Have you ever had a major surgery, one that required a hospital stay and general anesthesia, one that opened up your body to hands and instruments?

I had laproscopic surgery on December 11, a partial hysterectomy to address increasingly incapacitating effects of large submucosal fibroids. Fibroids are benign growths that the majority of women develop in midlife. The location, placement and size of fibroids determine if they are undetectable and of no consequence, or if they create major problems such as pain, swelling, and extremely heavy bleeding, which mine did. After exhausting other treatment options that all stopped working, it was time for surgery. Read more

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Gratitude for Gray Days?

During the post-meditation discussion with my sangha (a community that meditates and studies together) recently, we discussed thankfulness in light of the coming holiday. A person said that he’d been reading about how we could learn to be grateful for everything – not just the things that feel good, or go our way, or make us happy, but everything.

It got me thinking. Read more

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No Escape

I stopped at my usual station to fill up my gas tank this weekend, getting ready for a week of out of town meetings at schools.  The pump was brand new, and I liked the crisp, clean display that was easy to read in the bright sunshine, and the new handle that felt clean instead of cruddy.  As soon as my gas started pumping, the display switched to show me the three-day weather forecast.  “That’s pretty cool,” I thought.  But then, the screen switched to “TV mode” and NFL highlights began playing at an ear-shattering volume.  Really? Read more

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Life Unplugged

Happiness on the Oregon Coast

My partner Doug and I loaded up the Subaru and pointed the car west.  We had fifteen days ahead of us, and a loose plan to spend time in the redwoods, on the Oregon coast, and in the Cascade mountains.

The only firm plans we had were to spend the last two days before the long drive home resting our trail-weary muscles in hot springs and taking time for yoga, meditation, and awesome vegetarian meals while camping at Breitenbush Hot Springs retreat center.

My intention for our trip?  Be completely present.  That’s really it.   I knew that if I could be present, I wouldn’t miss out on the trip I was actually on, if that makes sense.  I could get so much more out of each day, make the days seem much longer,  and create deeper experiences and memories.  I could be fully present to Doug, and to myself.

This turned out to be the case.  Both of us practiced being mindfully present, and we found that when we were in the mountains, our time in the redwoods seemed like a long time ago, even though only a week had passed.  Each day unraveled slowly, new delights and sensations unfolding luxuriously.How often in our regular routines of home, work, home, work do we find that another week has zipped by?  The time between Monday morning and the weekend zooms, months flutter past like the calendar pages in old-time movies when they want to show time passing.  Birthdays arrive ever more quickly, the older we get.

The antidote to all this zippiness is presence. Read more

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In Memory of Julie

With Julie in the gazebo at Zilber Hospice

I met Julie several years ago because of life coaching.  I was a guest presenter in a Coaches’ Group that met by phone and included people from all over the country.  When Julie heard that I was in Milwaukee, she got in touch and we started getting together in lovely settings from the Urban Ecology Center to her favorite restaurant, Casablanca.

What I remember most is walking to my car after we spent time together and feeling lighter on my feet and in my heart.  Julie lived her life with passion and vibrancy, her huge heart on her sleeve.  Even when people pissed her off, she did her best to respond with compassion and healing, and more often than not, succeeded.

The word that I most associate with Julie is generosity.  She gave freely of herself, her energy, her love, her friendship.  Even when she was dying, she made sure that everyone around her felt the full force of her love and did her best to help everyone feel okay, or as okay as we could in the circumstance.  Her generosity of spirit created a luminous glow of love around her, like a blanket that she drew around her for warmth and comfort that we were invited under, too.

She was still coaching and teaching, right until her last day, by the way she gracefully carried on.  Julie had her dark moments in this journey, of course, but she immediately accepted her diagnosis and the way things were.  Her acceptance freed her to experience and feel and love, instead of grasping and fighting with fear and anxiety.

Julie cracked jokes as she always had, filled notebooks with writing, gave long and deep hugs, and made sure each person felt treasured – all while she struggled for each breath against the cancer that was overtaking her.  She and her equally amazing and generous husband Joel created a welcoming space in her room or out in the gazebo on the hospice grounds, inviting friends and family to share time.  What a gift!  There was food, wine (only for Julie), lots of laughing, storytelling, hugs – they created community among people who were often meeting each other for the first time.

Julie, you taught us all how to live, and now you’ve taught us how to die.  You live on in our hearts, and in our lives as we do our best to live with the grace, love, humor and generosity that you showed us.  Go well, bright spirit.

 

 

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Be Kind – You Just Never Know

WaitressBack in my dating days, I followed the sound advice, “See how a person treats service professionals (waiters, clerks, etc) – that’s how they’ll treat you in time.”  If someone was rude, impatient, or simply didn’t acknowledge the person providing service as someone equally deserving of courtesy, then that was information about my date’s character.

This rule applied even if the service wasn’t great.  My stance has always been, “You just never know – they could be having a really bad day.”  People have to show up for work after all kinds of challenging events occur, from a death in the family to being abused at home or being served divorce papers that morning. Read more

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Wake Up Calls

I think we’ve all had moments when we felt our entire world shift in an instant.

“I don’t want to be in this relationship anymore.”

”Your pregnancy test is positive.”

“Congratulations!  You’ve been accepted.”

“I’m sorry to tell you that we found cancer.”

This last one is on my mind as I pray for a friend who is struggling with this diagnosis, waiting for the tests to reveal more information, and struggling for her very breath in the ICU. Just a few months ago, cancer was no more on her mind than winning the lottery. And now today, it is a mountain looming before her and her husband. Their world changed in the instant of her diagnosis. Read more

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Google Yourself – You Might End Up in Croatia

My friend Linda posted a fun idea on Facebook. Google your name and see what comes up. Are you a lead dancer with the San Antonio ballet?  An artisan cheesemaker in Idaho?  A retired music teacher in Miami?

To play:  go to Google, enter your first and last name in quotes, and that’s it. Example:  “Jennifer Wilson”

There are approximately 1,294,672 Jennifer Wilsons. Okay, I made that up, but there are a lot of us, so I took the very first entry that came up. Apparently, I wrote a book that was heralded as “Best Nonfiction Book of 2011” by the American Society of Journalists and Authors.  (Note: Please leave a comment below with your results!  A friend of mine discovered he was a 15 year old ping pong champion.)

Written by Jennifer Wilson, it chronicles the adventures she and her family had when they moved to Croatia for a year in search of her ancestral ties. She and her husband and two young children were living the American Dream in Iowa – a house they fixed up, soccer schedules, two careers, and frequent pilgrimages to Target. And, they felt they were missing something vital despite their privilege, primarily time together as a family and a simpler life that didn’t involve consuming, watching tv and playing video games crammed between errands. On the basis of a yearning and a late night of giddy dreaming (a bottle of wine was involved), they uprooted themselves and moved to Croatia for a year. As you can imagine, that year changed them all in deep and unexpected ways.

I was immediately intrigued by the book’s description because my partner and I have a similar ambition. Read more

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The Strange, Silent Pull

Image“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.”   – Rumi

There are many variations on this theme, such as Joseph Campbell’s famous injunction to “Follow your bliss.” Rumi’s wording has subtleties that make this one of my favorite quotes.

“Silently drawn”  –  Ah, silence. There is no shortage of advice out there from self-help books, tv shows, friends and family, business gurus, etc. I think all of these sources can provide sparks of insight and ideas to explore. Yet at the end of the day, we are responsible for making decisions based on our own values, on what we love.

When we become still and silent, our intuition can teach us what it knows. Our language places this inner knowing solidly in the quiet wisdom of our bodies.  We say we have a gut feeling or feel something tug at our hearts.  Insight arrives intact and without a surplus of words – we “just knew”, or “had a flash.” We are silently drawn to what is right for us.

“Strange pull”  –  Why does Rumi choose this word to describe being pulled toward what we love? Read more

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Mindfulness and Kitchen Knives

Two winters ago, I took a meditation class and learned more about mindfulness than I ever had before.  I learned how to experience it, and how to strive for mindfulness not just during an hour of sitting, but throughout my day no matter what I’m doing, from flossing my teeth to listening to a client.

One of our exercises was to be mindful of every doorway we went through, not for any esoteric reason but simply to practice being mindful.  I learned that I am exceedingly unmindful of doorways.   Another exercise was to be mindful in the kitchen while making food.  This exercise grabbed ahold of me, and since then, I enjoy cooking in a way I never have before.  I love feeling the texture of foods, savoring the variations in color and smell, and feeling my hands work.

Last week, I was grappling with a stressful situation in my professional life, trying to  sort out the dynamics and understand how I could elevate what was happening to a more productive and peaceful place.  The plainer truth is that I felt grumpy and angry, and hadn’t reached a place of resolution or peace for myself yet.  At 5:30, I ended my work day (always a conscious decision because I work at home) and went into the kitchen to cook. Read more

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