Saturday Night West Coast Re-Post: Continuing the Dialogue about Mindfulness

So, today I drove to Santa Monica with my friend Shannon to listen to the great Buddhist psychotherapist, Dr. Mark Epstein. I imagine many of you know his books -- there's Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart and there's Psychotherapy without the Self: A Buddhist Perspective, and also Thoughts Without a Thinker. His new book is called The Trauma of Everyday Life. After being introduced by the equally great Jack Kornfield, Epstein read many passages from his new book, told us stories and led us in a 10 minute sitting meditation that included turning ON our cell phones and then listening throughout those ten minutes. Mindful listening to the beeps and whirs and pings and rings from hundreds of people's cell phones was incredibly interesting and, at least for me, hilarious. It made me realize, again, that we are not our thoughts, that the values and judgments we impose on circumstances are just that: impositions. I'm not sure that I articulated that in the best way -- what struck me is that while we normally are highly irritated when we hear cell phones go off in quiet rooms, looking at them as intrusive, when instructed to do so, to just listen and almost welcome the sounds, the experience became light, easy, even funny.

So where's the re-post? I thought the following post from almost exactly a  year ago, that I found when I searched the blog for Mark Epstein, was perfect to post here, especially in light of the comment exchange that we had here the other day with a fellow blogger who wondered how some people "cope" better than others. I still maintain that "coping" -- particularly with trauma -- is not something done "well" or "better" than others, but that the practice of mindfulness meditation is profound and life-changing.

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Mindfulness

What arises in our experience is much less important than how we relate to what arises in our experience.

                               Mark Epstein 

I'm not sure I've ever written about the first mindfulness meditation class that I took about fourteen years ago when Henry was a newborn baby and Sophie, a screaming for unknown reason three year old with uncontrolled seizures. I look back on many phases of my life since my children were born and wonder how in the hell I got through them, but here I am. Through them and sort of, kind of, prepared for the next phase.

One of the things that helped me most, that didn't just help me, actually, but transformed me was a class called Mindfulness Meditation for Stress Reduction. Each week, I traveled to the deep, dark San Fernando Valley for a three hour class with a group of people whose problems included chronic pain, depression, severe illness, trauma and post-traumatic stress syndrome. We were taught the basics of mindfulness meditation and the practice of sitting, as well as the benefits of utilizing the principles throughout one's daily life.

I'm not a master at meditation, but I know that the practice enables me to cope in far better ways than the frantic pleading and praying I did previously. For me, there had been so much dread in the practice of a religion with no resonance, and when I began to meditate, I finally found a bit of the peace and connection with divine love that I had only read about. More importantly, though, the practice of meditation helps me to deal with nearly everything difficult and challenging -- it doesn't make anything not difficult or challenging, but  somehow, almost by stealth, the seemingly impossible becomes possible.

Saturday Night West Coast Re-post

From the archives:

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Yosemite - Part 2

Holiness comes wrapped in the ordinary. There are burning bushes all around you. Every tree is full of angels. Hidden beauty is waiting in every crumb.

Macrina Wiederkehr, O.S.B.

via Word for the Day

Saturday Night West Coast Re-Post

It's time to dig into the old posts and pull one out. I'm especially fond of this one and admit to periodically yearning to pack it up and go. Where would you go and what would you take?

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29, 2011

Go Bag

I have a very good friend who has what he calls a "go bag," a large backpack filled with all the items he deems necessary should he ever want to pick up and just go. Granted, he's single and middle-aged, unencumbered by small children, a spouse, family that lives nearby -- and the expression is one part fantasy and three parts how to stay sane when you're approaching the age of fifty and perhaps a little closer than you might imagine toward being utterly bored at your work and desirous of something different. For all my talk of living in the moment, and being grateful for what I have, etc. etc., I, too, fantasize about living a different life, starting over, picking up and going. Naturally, I don't wish to abandon my children but there's a frisson to be had imagining the release of all one's cares and possessions, hitting the open road, waking up to a truly different day. As I drive around Los Angeles, a city that I definitely love, as I stop at the post office to mail the catalog return, as I turn up the radio to drown out Sophie's constant humming, as I turn off the radio to better hear where the siren is coming from, as I watch my boys tumble out of the car and into the parking lot and on to sports camp, as I pull up my driveway, get Sophie out, bend down and pick up the circulars that litter the path to the house, step over the errant cleats and into the house -- well -- I imagine what might be in my go bag beyond the basic living necessities.

I'd bring a copy of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, I think, and a copy of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, maybe The Collected Poetry of William Butler Yeats and something by William Carlos Williams -- Asphodel, that Greeny Flower -- but then there's Emily Dickinson and William Blake, Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje -- my go bag would be too heavy -- and anyway, where would I go?

Love all that has been created by God, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf and every ray of light. Love the beasts and the birds, love the plants, love every separate fragment. If you love each separate fragment, you will understand the mystery of the whole resting in God.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, via Gratefulness.org

Saturday Night West Coast Re-Post

Me, taken by D in 1986

I can never write too much about my friendships -- those with women and the rare ones with men. There is one man who is, certainly, my dearest male friend, but he's also one of my best friends, ever. I met him before I turned 21, in a restaurant where we both waited tables. At some point, I read him aloud Eudora Welty's short story Why I Live at the P.O., and nearly thirty years later we've made a pact that we'll read the other the same story, whoever is on his or her deathbed first. Or maybe I suggested the idea and forced him to agree. We continue to argue over who's dying first and will probably do so until he takes his last breath, as I read the final paragraphs:

Of course, there's not much mail. My family are naturally the main people in China Grove, and if they prefer to vanish from the face of the earth, for all the mail they get or the mail they write, why, I'm not going to open my mouth. Some of the folks here in town are taking up for me and some turned against me. I know which is which. There are always people who will quit buying stamps just to get on the right side of Papa-Daddy.
But here I am, and here I'll stay. I want the world to know I'm happy.
And if Stella-Rondo should come to me this minute, on bended knees, and attempt  to explain the incidents of her life with Mr. Whitaker, I'd simply put my fingers in both my ears and refuse to listen.

Have you ever written about your friendships? Leave a link in the comments, if you want, and tell us about it. 

Here's mine, to D:

TUESDAY, JANUARY 24, 2012

Love letters to friends

A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious

daring starts from within.

Eudora Welty

We ate shrimp and grits at a small round table, and we drank a lot of wine. We drank so much wine that I drew stick figures on a napkin proving that I wasn't a prude, and you leaned so far back in your chair (you might have been laughing) that it tipped over. We might have been screaming with laughter, as far as I know, the rest of the people in the restaurant receding, their mouths open, silent. Years later, I picked you up from a Greyhound bus station in Nashville, Tennessee, trailing an enormous suitcase. You fixed my air-conditioner and swept out my apartment, and when I came home from my shift, I lay on the bed and you on a sleeping bag beside me and we talked in the darkness, and we talked through the years on the phone and in letters and now over polenta and eggs and no one makes me laugh harder.

Saturday Night West Coast Re-Post

So, today is the great James Joyce's birthday, and there's a nice biographical homage to him over on The Writer's Almanac this morning with tidbits like this:

Joyce liked to drink and he liked to dance; his daughter-in-law said that "liquor went to his feet, not head. "Joyce usually sat with his legs crossed with the toe of one crossed again under the calf of the other. He was kind and generous to strangers, and he was known to invite waiters to join him at his table for food and drink. 

There's also a nice nod to the Irish writer on Brain Pickings with excerpts from a little-known children's book, The Cats of Copenhagen.

I've written about him here and there, highlighting some of my favorite passages from his short stories and books, so today's re-post will be one of those with one of my favorite photos of Sophie and Henry from 2010.

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2010

A Portrait of the the Artist

as a Young Man is certainly not one of my favorite books, but I remember a certain passage inside of it so well that it feels like yesterday when I first read it, or savored it or hung, suspended, in it. Today, in 1916, James Joyce published it, his first novel.

He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and willful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the sea-harvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight and gayclad lightclad figures of children and girls and voices childish and girlish in the air.

A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.

She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither; and faint flame trembled on her cheek.

"Heavenly God!" cried Stephen's soul, in an outburst of profane joy.

Saturday Night West Coast Re-Post (I missed last week!)

Busy in South Carolina with my beloved college girlfriends, I completely forgot last week to continue my time-honored tradition of capping Saturday with a re-post from the old archives. I stumbled upon this one from that Link Within thingamajig below every post and just couldn't resist posting it. What strikes me as wild is how much Henry has grown in the past three years -- from little boy to man, really! On the other hand, Sophie seems nearly age-less -- she hasn't changed much in the last three or so years, and I don't actually know how I feel about that.

If you have a post that you'd like to re-post, please leave the link in the comments! I don't know how to do that linky thing, and when I looked up how to do it, I got agita, so let's just keep things unorthodox, shall we? I'd love to see what strikes your fancy on a Saturday afternoon (West Coast) or evening (East Coast) or beyond (the rest of the world).

FRIDAY, MAY 29, 2009

Sophie and Henry

Do we look alike? Henry asked tonight.

Yes, I said, you look like brother and sister.

I'm glad she's my sister, he added, and I say prayers that her seizures will stop and maybe she'll talk.

Saturday Night West Coast RePost, #2

In case you weren't here last week. I inaugurated a tradition of posting something from the old blog archives every Saturday night. Since I posted the following last year, I came upon this photo of myself (above) in the described bedroom. I was actually only ten or eleven in this photo, apparently still wearing Danskins and not yet a teenager, but the canopies had come off the bed, and the decor coming was only a twinkle in my eye.

Teenage Bedrooms
10/24/2011

Mine had green and white shag carpeting and two single beds, canopied, with green and white polka-dotted bedspreads. I hid racy books under the mattress that I found lying in my parents' room or den: copies of Jaws by Peter Benchley, books by Harold Robbins andLooking for Mr. Goodbar. I had a record player/stereo with a smoky plastic cover that sat on a low chest in the bay window (one of the perks of being the oldest of three daughters was getting the room with the bay), and I'd lie on the rug and play music for hours, The Carpenters and John Denver, the Beach Boys and the Mamas and the Papas -- later the Beatles and Van Morrison and Boston and Fleetwood Mac. I'd lie on my back with those huge squishy black headphones on.

Oh, the seventies.

I was powerfully awkward, a bookworm behind glasses, sweet and smoldering all at once. The photo above is around sixth grade, so I was on the edge of being a teenager, still confident, for the most part.  I think that's a Holly Hobbie necklace, and I must have taken off my aviator framed glasses for the picture and endured the giant blur.

On one wall was a giant cork bulletin board, filled with photos and awards, swimming ribbons and magazine covers from Teen and Seventeen. On the back of my door was a life-size poster of Clark Gable. Weird, right?I think it had something to do with living in Atlanta and being enamored of Gone with the Wind for a time. I had my own bathroom then which was also carpeted in shag. I had a bookshelf in the bathroom, and on top of that resided my owl collection. Over the bookshelf and all those owls, I hung a circular hook rug that I'd hooked myself -- a large owl. It was green and orange and spectacularly ugly. I wish I still had it -- I could probably find something similar, though, in Anthropology. On the bathroom sink lay an array of big, fat Bonne Bell Lipsmackers, a Clairol hot roller set, my rouge (that's what we called it, then) and mascara, Love's Baby Soft and Jean Nate.

I was reminded of all of this when I stumbled upon this website:

http://teenagebedroom.tumblr.com/

What did your teenage bedroom look like?

Saturday Night West Coast Re-Post

So, I'm going to institute a new ritual here on the old blog. It's called Saturday Night West Coast Re-Post, and every Saturday evening, I will post something old from the vast archives of a moon, worn as if it had been a shell. I hope you'll join me and post something from your archives on Saturday night, particularly if you're the type that doesn't go out on Saturday night but, rather, crawls home from a day of watching boy lacrosse and wonders if it will take too much effort to walk up the street with your three children and have dinner at a neighbor's house.

Here's my repost, from the medieval era, August of 2009:

Gallows Humor

I was trying to clean up my computer archives and found this email that I had sent to a friend over ten years ago and that he had saved and then sent back to me.

Dear David:

> >

> > I have been getting your various messages--telephone and email, etc.

> > Forgive me my delinquency in returning them. Things have been a bit

> > hectic here--even more hectic than usual. About a month ago, Michael

> > was hit by a truck while riding his bicycle to work. He was dragged

> > a little but escaped with a pretty messed up left arm. Eighty

> > stitches but no broken bones or head injuries.

> > About two weeks after it happened, the wound got infected so he was

> > hospitalized and had surgery--a skin graft, etc. He is fine now and

> > back at work, just not cooking until the thing heals. In any case,

> > he was lucky. So, on the day he was hospitalized for infection, I

> > set off for the hospital for a visit with Henry and Sophie. As we

> > were leaving the house, Sophie had one of her famous drop seizures

> > and cracked her head open on the floor. We landed up going to the

> > hospital in an ambulance and SHE got ten stitches in her forehead.

> > Needless to say, I've been a basket case.

> > Henry is fine.

> >

> > How has your life been of late? You know, everyone always says to

> > me, "It could have been worse." My silent reply is, "It could have been

> > a whole lot fucking better."

> >

> > Love,

> > Elizabeth