It’s incredible, really, how sometimes one concept, said slightly differently, can open your eyes…. or maybe circumstances need to be aligned just-so, so that the clouds part and you can finally see the sun.
My moment came early today when I was doing my morning meditation. On the Calm app, every day, a meditation is cued up waiting for you. There is also an entire organized library to search through and draw from, but often I just go to the one that’s been chosen for me (everyone). Today’s was entitled Firewood.
As we began, the narrator set a soothing aural environment and began, as always, with a cue to pay attention to the breath. So that I did. She encouraged me to notice where the inhale connects to the exhale and to appreciate that confluence of air as it mixes from hopeful air delivered to used air expelled. It is all connected. It made me think of the ocean and how waves are born far out in the depths, but then they float on and on and reach the very end of the waters edge before being pulled by the tide back out to sea, to become yet another wave. The space where us beach bathers splash. All of us, effectively existing, in this middle space of water movement, between becoming and reinventing, which can be be a metaphor for so much.
She went on to say, as she usually does, to be gentle with ourselves as thoughts come into our mind, while we are supposed to focus on the breath. To see the thoughts as they come, observe them like a meteorologist observes the clouds and storms as they blow by. Acknowledge them, learn from them, and let them go. Today, though, she challenged us to distance ourselves from whatever emotion is attached to those thoughts because the truth is: we are not that emotion, we are not that thought, we are not that story that *we* are building in our minds. She invited me to label whatever emotion was attached to that thought so that we could halt that runaway train from carrying us all over creation. I am envisioning myself sitting by the boiler in an old-timey coal powered locomotive from the 1800s (circa: Back to the Future 3), throwing firewood and coal onto the flames in the engine, sweating, coal-streaked face being wiped with a bandana, massive billowy black clouds erupting out of the blast pipe, just adding panache and extra fuel and weight to whatever the truth actually is. I feel like this is how these past many months have been. COVID, life, the news, social media, whatever…. I, like many of us, have been pummeled over and over and over again by a tsunami of different events that are wholly out of my control, and at times I have felt like I’m drowning in a sea of sadness or worry or stress… or all aboard, locked and loaded on this runaway train. But today I saw that all of that angst is really born from me throwing those logs on the fire. Fueling and emboldening the what-ifs with logs of emotion and story.
Last night, as I got the news that my husband got hit in the eye with a baseball and swept into motion of all the to-do’s, I had handled this new reality well. After initially cringing at the sound of my husbands voice saying he was going to the hospital and feeling like I was going to vomit while feeling lightning bolts through the core of my whole body upon seeing the picture of his eye, there was laughter with the other coaches and parents and “it’s okay”’s and “we’ll be fine”’s (before hearing the outcome of the CT scan). We said our good nights and I headed into my house with the kids, to do bedtime and clean up and to await his return home. My calmness turned to shortness with the kids, as I walked into our house and stepped over dropped baseball bags and strewn about cleats and flip flops and escaped bunnies and the laundry that I had asked them to put away (14 times) and and and…. (Does anyone CARE about anything ANYMORE? Do we need a lesson in RESPECT….AGAIN? GUYS!!).
In the meditation, she said to look at the emotion attached to the thought. Label it silently. If it’s a strong emotion, label it a few times to recognize its impact. Last night it would have been worry, worry, worry. That emotion was less connected to the mess, which on a normal night I likely would have handled better….but I was projecting that worry onto the kids by way of anger.
This morning as I was meditating and observing my mind’s wanderings, I found myself recounting the last week and a half realizing that last week’s hit and run rear-ender was my husbands second of the year, the first of which gave him a concussion, and the second of which I got whiplash and a mild concussion which caused crazy head pain triggering cell memory and pain receptors in my brain to fire crazy for days…. Then two days later my son hit the windshield of our other car with a baseball so that had to be replaced…. And then this baseball injury to the eye last night caused my husband to see stars and likely caused another mild concussion…which makes HIS third of the year (his first rear end accident, a giant wave this summer that he was body surfing on that threw him headfirst into the ground and he tasted blood and had a big bruise/rash on his head, and now this)…. like, God, what ELSE….
But hearing her voice I stopped my story. To that, I attach: frustration, frustration, frustration.
To my friends’ emotions and their own sadness and anxiety and struggle, I attach: empathy, empathy, empathy.
Concern, concern, concern.
Sadness, sadness, sadness.
These are events that are happening in my life, but these events and the story around them, are not me. The events that transpire exist, but it’s *me* who makes them into a story. That story can be positive or negative or long or short. But in the end, it isn’t me… and these stories don’t really define…me.
I’ve been dancing around this theme for months. It’s been about 14 month since I started meditating. And 20 days since I said enough of the drowning and the crazy train, and opted instead to lean into the good (which still, beautifully, exists by the bushel full). And today, the lights exploded and I got my aha.
I needed this aha. A lot. As an empath, I genuinely *feel* people and the emotions or anxiety or stress or anger they bring into a space. Have you ever been sitting somewhere and perhaps a colleague, friend, family member, stranger, comes near to you and…. they don’t say a word, but you can just *feel* the whir of worries buzzing through their brain and body? They are literally just doing their own thing, choosing strawberries at the grocery store, ordering off a menu at a table near to you (back when we went to restaurants anyway), sitting across from you at a doctors office…. and you can *feel* their worry. Sure, by observing their eyes dart, watching the rapidity of their movements, hearing them huff and sigh and they fly their cart onward… but sometimes even without laying eyes on them, I feel it. This lesson today hit me like a ton of bricks because I move through this world like a sponge and I soak up everyone else’s feels. Most deeply those of my closest loved ones, but also from everyone in my orbit. It’s so freeing now to feel some separateness from all of that. To cut the balloon and send it up to the sky. Exhale. To stop feeding the boiler on my own crazy train. To float for a while in that oceanic middle space of beginnings and endings, breaths in and breaths out. And just, for the love of God, be.
So when I was finishing yoga this morning and my husband flopped onto the couch with ice on his eye and was talking loudly to my son as I was drenched in sweat and finally reaching my savasana moment and when he heard the instructor, he exclaimed ha! I guess I’ll be in savasana for the next few days huh? Weeks even! I can just label the feels that I feel…. overwhelmed, overwhelmed, overwhelmed 😂. But this time I’ll know those feelings aren’t me. I’ll observe them, label them, learn from them, and let them freaking go.
Care to share your thoughts?